That argument would be similar to mine if only 97% of people agreed upon the basic tenants of their religion.
Oh, now you suddenly accept the opinion of the unwashed masses?
I stated my reference as historical. If you transplant yourself back in the dark ages beneath 'God' chosen Kings and under the teaching of the approved clergy you'd find an extremely high consensus on basic tenants of their religion. You'd find all the same appeals to authority you have made.
When somebody questions carbon taxation as really being valid or not, consensus is not an appropriate retort. When somebody questions the severity of future warming, consensus is not an appropriate retort. Heck, when somebody questions if CO2 contributes to warming, consensus is not an appropriate retort.
The appropriate response in every case is to point to the evidence first. If the evidence is beyond the questioner, then fair enough to ask them to take it on trust in authority or spend a few years studying up. Just don't start pushing for making that appeal to authority the first resort because your walking down a road where even 'being right' might still leave you doing more harm than good in the long run.
We can declare with confidence that CO2 contributes, and back it up with evidence, so much less risk there. On the other hand if you go about proclaiming with certainty that 2050 will see catastrophic death, science has spoken, that's worse. If you go about proclaiming we are all doomed to that heat death unless we adopt 'measure whatever', that's worse still.
The trouble is you not only risk guessing wrong on the things we are still uncertain about, you taint all of the science by having made these prophecies upon it. Stick to the actual science and representing results appropriately, including the error bars and uncertainties. Leaving those out for expediency is a recipe for disaster.
...and that Angels exist, and Elvis can get your wash whiter with this one weird trick.
Science is INTERESTING, chaos theory even more so, and it's easy to see the changes if you know what to look for. The increased energy in the system is already turning all of weather to a parade of freak outliers and unpredictable quirky events that occasionally spike off the charts, and that's exactly in line with the 'chaotic system' model.
I wouldn't have called the 'Earth turning to an alien planet that doesn't support life' thing in thirty years, but if you specify it's to happen in particular (unusual areas) then I'll believe that. Some areas of the planet are already close to uninhabitable and it doesn't take that much to push 'em over the brink. The thing to watch for is not places being rendered uninhabitable by weather extremes, it's more about masses of people/animals displaced because the change is a new thing that nobody's prepared for.
You can probably, right now, buy a 40-year lease on land that might as well be the Moon in 40 years. If you want a real picture of the plausibility of man-made global climate change, don't check scientists or Al Gore, consult actuaries and insurance companies. Pretty sure you'll find they're believers, because they have to actually pay for it if they choose wrong.
I continue to try and point out the very worrying uncertainty in climate models. The IPCC's fifth AR has a chapter on climate models. In assessing the state of the art, they have the following to say(Box 9.1 for those wanting to follow along: Model tuning aims to match observed climate system behaviour and so is connected to judgements as to what constitutes a skilful representation of the Earth’s climate. 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. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system
They then go on to cite a half dozen peer reviewed articles confirming this.
Now, it doesn't take much better than a layman understanding to know that the entirety of the greenhouse effect is about the energy balance. More energy entering the planet than leaving it will warm, and more leaving will cool it. The trouble is that if the energy imbalance is the driving force behind climate change, you really want to get to a point where the models can get that part right without being specifically tuned to correct it. When the models energy imbalance for hindcasting causes unrealistic drift until modellers tune and tweak things by hand to get the known 'right answer', it ain't good enough for predictions.
It's not wrong to tune models this way, nor are models not useful at this stage. The trick is that they are only useful for testing out how things work under a given energy imbalance or energy conditions. They are NOT useful for hindcasting energy imbalance, let alone for predicting it for the next 30-100 years.
New science is where everyone gets together and agrees that X is so, and henceforth X is so and no one is allowed to question X.
No one is asking for scientific debate to stop. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who wants scientists to stop investigating the causes of global climate change in order to better predict its effects. This is about unqualified people, myself included, debating science they know nothing about.
Science is never settled, but that does not mean you should never act upon scientific knowledge because it might someday change. When determining which science to act upon, consensus is very important. In fact it is basically the only important thing. Average citizens and even policy makers could never be expected to understand the science enough to join either side of the debate. Accepting the consensus is the only sane choice in these instances.
Your exact argument has been made before. Science was supposed to do away with appeals to authority, lest your argument look like this:
No one is asking for theological debate to stop. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who wants priests to stop investigating the scriptures in order to better interpret them. This is about unqualified people, myself included, debating religion they know nothing about.
Theology is never settled, but that does not mean you should never act upon theological understanding because it might someday change. When determining which theology to act upon, consensus is very important. In fact it is basically the only important thing. Average citizens and even policy makers could never be expected to understand religion enough to join either side of the debate. Accepting the consensus is the only sane choice in these instances.
Where do you guys come from? Are you a miner or rig worker? Whats your goal in this? You really think a rigorous CO2 mitigation scheme is going to fuck everyone when in at least 1/3 of the US solar is already cheaper than coal without subsidies?
The graph and the data sets you linked to all have the biggest numbers at the end. To prove your point next time you may want to find a graph with big numbers in the middle as well instead of closing with "the graph I cited to prove you wrong is wrong because it proves you right so just imagine its wrong in a way that proves you wrong".
You're right, I was reading things wrong and too quickly.
This really threw me because I swear when looking at the same paper awhile ago and at more length my summary was accurate. Mann's follow up a year later explains the data release more clearly: For each series, the years 1850-2006 are the PC-filtered instrumental data. That is, the instrumental data but retaining the first 7 PCs, the number that were retained in the 1800-1849 reconstruction step.
From my link up thread it is noted in the link to the raw data: Data series used in the above plot (1st column is Year, 2nd column is Reconstruction If you look closer at the labelling of the "above plot", you see that instrumental is all that is plotted from around 1850-1900 onward. This was suggestive so I look closer at the to linked datasets for with and without the 'troublesome' datasets. The temperatures listed from 2007 backwards are virtually identical, ?instrumental?.
I'm gonna look closer to try and confirm, but seems I was misleading in representing the linked graph prior as being entirely from reconstruction. In particular, the EIV graphed reconstructions(Fig 2) in Mann's paper don't match the raw data linked prior from the supplements.
Still looking for the pure reconstructed figures for 1900 onwards...
Well the linked raw data doesn't support your claim. The first big peak is 594 (it goes from 584-604) at 0.09. There's a warm period from 872-881. The next peak is 970 (from 962-991) at 0.16. Starting at 1981 (by the data set you recommend), the temperature starts going straight up, exceeding the last peak in 1993 and continuing to exceed it every year thereafter.
You're right, I was reading things wrong and too quickly.
This really threw me because I swear when looking at the same paper awhile ago and at more length my summary was accurate. Mann's follow up a year later explains the data release more clearly: For each series, the years 1850-2006 are the PC-filtered instrumental data. That is, the instrumental data but retaining the first 7 PCs, the number that were retained in the 1800-1849 reconstruction step.
From my link up thread it is noted in the link to the raw data: Data series used in the above plot (1st column is Year, 2nd column is Reconstruction If you look closer at the labelling of the "above plot", you see that instrumental is all that is plotted from around 1850-1900 onward. This was suggestive so I look closer at the to linked datasets for with and without the 'troublesome' datasets. The temperatures listed from 2007 backwards are virtually identical, ?instrumental?.
I'm gonna look closer to try and confirm, but seems I was misleading in representing the linked graph prior as being entirely from reconstruction. In particular, the EIV graphed reconstructions(Fig 2) in Mann's paper don't match the raw data linked prior from the supplements.
It is when there is such a statistically significant deviation from long term climate trends gathered from dozens of different methods at a rate never seen outside major global catastrophes while humanity happens to be dumping large amounts of a known greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
Think of it this way...
citations needed.
According to the latest proxy reconstructions by Michael Mann, the hockey stick author that alarmists love, the current 'record' warmth of the last couple decades was matched 2-3 times naturally over the last 2 thousand years. The links there are to his supplementary information page for his actual paper, and the last is to the raw data of his reconstruction right up to the year 2007. Check for yourself that his data finds that around 1000AD, 850AD and 550AD temperatures met or exceeded those since the year 2000AD.
If you want to contradict that record, please give me more than the waving of your hands that "dozens of different methods" show. The only different methods that paint a different picture is if you plot instrumental temperature against the reconstructed temperatures of something like Mann and others work. The part you would miss(and Mann has done this routinely) is noticing that not only is the instrumental record from say 1990-2010 higher than anything in the last 200 years. The instrumental temperatures from 1990-2010 are EQUALLY higher than the proxy record temperatures from 1990-2010!
I know right, its not like 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have come in the past 10 years. Only 7 of 10 have been in the past 10 years, to get the other two you'd have to go back a full 13 years ago! Clearly those predicting warming have failed because they underestimated how much everyone likes to split hairs.
Worse still, the 100 warmest years on record ALL occur after the industrial revolution. That's right,100% of the top 100 warm years on record are all due to global wa.....
Oh, just a second, this just in, the 'record' for temperatures only extends back for 100 years. That's not much of a sample set for analyzing processes like climate that operate over millennia is it?
You do realize that science isn't a matter of making pronouncements and engraving them into stone, right? This is a new study with new information. It's unexpected, but that's what happens in science every now and then.
Up until now, the best guess was that Antarctic ice was diminishing, and this study challenges that.
The myth listing was to address the claims that Antarctic sea ice is extensive, so the Antarctic is icing up. That is bad reasoning, even if it turns out that the ice is increasing.
Don't tell me that, tell SkepticalScience that. They declare Antarctic ice is increasing as a 'myth'. Your discussion and reasoning that it isn't a disproof of overall warming nor sea level rise is dead on. That is to say that Antarctic ice increase is not a valid argument or reason to reject the overall conclusion from all other evidence, it even fits into existing theory. However a "Myth" is different and SkepticalScience was and is just flat wrong to have called it that. There was always conflicting evidence on what Antarctic sea ice mass was doing, but it was unequivocal that Antarctic sea-ice extent was breaking records repeatedly. This NASA finding isn't coming out of a clear blue sky or something, and to have declared such a notion a "Myth" was and is irresponsible.
Forgive me if I believe we lack sufficient evidence and understanding to justify carbon taxations and other economic controls to try and rectify something we still can't even quantify,
Helllllloooooooooo Fred Singer.
No, I will not and cannot forgive you. Your insistence that pandering to your doubts is more important than restricting air pollution makes me want to punch you in the face, honestly. Your doubts really don't and shouldn't matter to anyone but you, yourself.
So put another way, you don't need to prove yourself and are willing, almost eager, to use violence to enforce your will on others. How reasonable.
I never said anything against restricting air pollution, I just have this crazy notion that CO2 is one of the least nasty things we are dumping into our environment. We might want to focus more on all the carcinogens and radioactive isotopes dumping out of coal plants than the CO2.
Honestly, if you want to promote massive economic and industrial changes targeting reductions of CO2 it's on you to show the danger. The most championed evidences(proxy records and modelling) simply don't cut it. If you think I'm wrong please show me the evidence you've found compelling, I've honestly looked and come back thoroughly disappointed. Just don't expect me to be cowed or persuaded by your name calling and threats of violence over the evidence I've provided from a group like the IPCC.
So we have a very abstracted estimate of future economics that is derived from already abstracted estimated models of temperature. Sounds compelling...
According the IPCC's 5th assessment report in Chapter 9 models have problems with the TOA energy balance. Specifically if you look in Box 9.1 they say: 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. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system They follow up with a half dozen citations verifying this.
Read that closely because it is telling. Read the cited articles, and it's even more so. Climate models still can NOT predict TOA energy imbalance. To even get hindcasts correct, requires manual corrections to unknown or poorly understood processes like clouds. Let me observe that long term climate change driven by the greenhouse effect works ENTIRELY through the TOA energy imbalance and trapping more or less energy as gas concentrations change.
Forgive me if I believe we lack sufficient evidence and understanding to justify carbon taxations and other economic controls to try and rectify something we still can't even quantify,
The only things this demonstrates is your lack of understanding. You then take that ignorance and formulate it into something that fits your rather obvious bias and hand-wave away any troubling things like "context".
In addition, you an others like you treat the model runs as the end all be all of climate science. They're not. Models are just one tool that is used, just like any other branch of science that you care to name. All models have errors since all models are imperfect representations of reality, and they never ever have perfect data. That's why any non-trivial scientific model has numerous parameters and settings that can be set and tweaked, and why a EXPERT is required to run them and analyze the results. Otherwise you'd have Joe Sixpack claiming he developed an infiniglider since he changed a parameter in an aerodynamic model and the airfoil generates lift even at rest.
You are the one using a waving of your hands to dismiss things. Providing anything like a concrete reason you or anyone else believes that the problems with projecting TOA energy imbalance is not a problem is ignored. Meanwhile I very specifically point out a summary of the current scientific literature that clearly states that hindcasting historic climate REQUIRES manual corrections for accurate TOA energy. My link even references more than a half dozen peer-review journals verifying this.
Heck, you couldn't even be bothered to explain in what context you think TOA energy errors of that scale aren't important to predictions.
Take your faith based chest thumping somewhere else and at least be willing to discuss the actual science and not just the fore gone conclusion your world view dictates.
If you want to see how well any given group or individual can predict events or outcomes 100 years into the future, just go 100 years into the past and ask yourself if anyone was predicting a future that looked even remotely like the one that actually happened.
Here is a hint, the answer is always "no".
And even when a lucky prognosticator does get occasionally get something right, it's usually either something pretty obvious or they got its context completely wrong. For example, a lot of idiots cite the Star Trek communicators as a "prediction" of modern cellphones. But this is way off:
1) The communicators used in Star Trek were more akin to military walkie-talkies, which had been in use for some time by the 1960's, than cellphones. 2) They were only used by the military. There is no evidence that civilians carried them. 3) They were short range. You couldn't use a communicator to just "call" someone anywhere. 4) Like walkies-talkie transmissions, communicator transmissions were apparently overheard by everyone (it's why Kirk always had to announce who he was and who he was talking to at the beginning of each communication). There is no evidence of characters making actual private one-to-one "calls" with communicators.
How down voted do I get if I note that people like that used to call themselves prophets listening to god but today they call themselves climate activists listening to science.
You're whining about one "summary" graph? If it bothers you so much, why not graph the raw data yourself in separate graphs to show us this alleged "disparity"?
I referenced a heck of a lot more than that, but yes the summary graph is manipulative and not helpful to understanding or learning the actual proxy results. Look at the summary graph, the first impression it gives anyone and everyone looking at it is that the proxy data confirms that temperatures since 1900 are unprecedented. If you graph the actual data as you reference, it actually shows that the period 960-1000 was warmer than the last 40 years. The same higher temps are seen from 872-882, and again from 585-604.
That ties directly into the other point I made particularly with Mann and not RealClimate in general. When statisticians like McShane and Wyner pointed out that their take on the data and analysis shows VASTLY less confidence in the signal than Mann, Mann strikes back from his blog more than the actual academic record. The grossest example is McShane and Wyner's criticism of Manns absence of and frequent misapplication of error bars on his reconstructed data. Mann ignores this critique entirely, preferring to go on the offensive in critiquing their understanding of proxy data sources...
So yeah, I kinda stand behind my statements and opinion of Michael Mann.
So we have a very abstracted estimate of future economics that is derived from already abstracted estimated models of temperature. Sounds compelling...
According the IPCC's 5th assessment report in Chapter 9 models have problems with the TOA energy balance. Specifically if you look in Box 9.1 they say: 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. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system They follow up with a half dozen citations verifying this.
Read that closely because it is telling. Read the cited articles, and it's even more so. Climate models still can NOT predict TOA energy imbalance. To even get hindcasts correct, requires manual corrections to unknown or poorly understood processes like clouds. Let me observe that long term climate change driven by the greenhouse effect works ENTIRELY through the TOA energy imbalance and trapping more or less energy as gas concentrations change.
Forgive me if I believe we lack sufficient evidence and understanding to justify carbon taxations and other economic controls to try and rectify something we still can't even quantify,
> Sea ice and land ice are two separate phenomena. Antarctica is losing land ice at an accelerating rate. Sea ice around Antarctica is increasing. The reasons for sea ice increasing in a warming Southern Ocean are complex
You are right, SkepticalScience lists "Antarctica is gaining Ice" as number ten on their list of top Climate Myths. Either the crew at NASA are now foul mouthed deniers, or the blogger activists at SkepticalScience aren't as fair handed and open minded as they boast...
Anyone who genuinely wants to debunk global warming should start here, trust me, climate scientists will respond with collective sigh of releif should anyone succeed.
RealClimate.org maybe wouldn't be the best place to start. There's a lot of very aggressively close minded chaps dominating the forums. I know, who'd have thought that could happen on an internet forum?
Real climate is also co-founded by Michael Mann, whom I really take some issue with. Tell me I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, but his paleo reconstructions of temperature have really bothered me in the past. Nothing to do with the results, not as much to do even with his methodology now that his later work is addressing and correcting problems. The presentation and usage of the 'hide the decline' trick in graphs is just disgusting. When your paleo reconstruction ends around 1900, just end the graph there. If your paleo reconstruction doesn't show the same temperature rise since 1900 as instrumental, then show that too. What you DO NOT DO, is paste in the instrumental record with a thick enough line to hide the paleo reconstruction since 1900. Even further, don't point to the overlapped instrumental part of the graph as startling and clear evidence of an abrupt trend in the data starting at 1900.
If your wanting to have an open and honest discussion about the evidence, that's a difficult environment. Even scientists with a decent publishing record within the field like Lindzen are put under a microscope for criticism for not conforming to the 'consensus'. Even researchers widely embraced and accepted like Mauritsen have their results heavily disputed and interpreted there. When statisticians like McShane and Wyner take issue with the statistical methods in Mann and others work, Mann takes to his blog for the 'final' word while leaving out any response to their real and legitimate questions and arguments. I'm not anticipating that it's going to be a particularly receptive audience as you seem to believe.
People in the west don't understand that for most Chinese, the one child policy doesn't have effect. Because there are so many exceptions.
1) If you and your partner were single kids, you can have two kids. 2) Ethnic minorities have higher limits, and foreigners, including Hong Kong and Taiwan can have unlimited 3) Rich people just pay the tax and have another child, because they are so rich from corruption money is nothing for them. 4) Some provinces had already lifted the ban, or lessened it greatly. 5) Children born outside China, including HK and Taiwan, don't count. Hence the large amount of birth tourism.
So this is pretty much a symbolic act, but at least it's the communists admitting they can't control everything. I wonder how this will be spun off in China, since there the communists are still treated as nearly perfect, the thing everyone should aspire to be.
According to China's Health Ministry, the one child policy had forced 336 million abortions as of 2013. It also had forced the sterilization of 196 million men and women.
In the grand scheme of things, this is something it's worth making a big deal about. Certainly more worthy of a mention than female stereotypes in media and other injustices against women that get a lot more coverage. But yeah, they've been relaxing the restrictions for awhile now.
I know it's considered heresy in the church of CAGW to say this, but climate models are still very uncertain about trends for future warming. The 'consensus' within the modelling community is that the models are very good tools for testing out our understanding of how climate works. They're predictive reliability is another matter entirely.
The IPCC that the CAGW church heralds for it's Nobel Prize on climate change says the following on climate models. Go see for yourself here under Box 9.1 if you don't believe me.
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. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system.
The IPCC go on to reference more than a half dozen peer reviewed papers verifying this assessment. They later add:
Model tuning directly influences the evaluation of climate models, as the quantities that are tuned cannot be used in model evaluation. Quantities closely related to those tuned will provide only weak tests of model performance.
For an even more layman break down, climate models still have troubles modelling TOA energy balance. TOA energy balance is the ENTIRE driving force of climate change. The greenhouse effect is completely and entirely a function of energy entering and leaving our planet at the edge of space. That places virtually everything within our climate system as at least partially related to this quantity.
All the warming and cooling trends in climate models of the past and projections into the future are driven by TOA energy imbalance. And the scientific consensus is that our models still can not get it correct and require hand tuning and tweaking to manually correct it.
That doesn't seem strong enough evidence to me to warrant advocating for drastic taxation and economic cut backs...
Looks like a fairly linear increase when I hold a straight-edge up to the screen starting around 1970. No new surprises I guess?
Aside from all that though, a climate change religion doesn't sound so bad. Give a little money to the "church" and in return you get an insurance policy. The population is getting close to the estimated carrying capacity of the Earth. Once we get there, any major crop die-off would lead to starvation problems. Why should coffee drinkers spend money on bombing tea drinkers when we could instead invest that money to ensure that both coffee and tea keep growing?
Set your plot of linear warming alongside global CO2 concentrations. CO2 concentrations have also been rising linearly that entire time. If even the more moderate projections of warming are true, warming should be accelerating as CO2 increases. The fact it is not is suggestion/evidence that our climate sensitivity to CO2 may not be as high as feared.
You can read the individual statements of the science academies. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) They go much further than simply stating that radiative physics is a real thing. Most state that the IPCC represents the consensus view and that most of the warming over the last 50 years is due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.
Thank you for confirming what I said. The IPCC's Fifth Assessment report is almost verbatim where my assessment of climate models came from. In Chapter 9, Box 9.1 the IPCC report states: 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. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
You'll note that the assessment is backed with a wealth of references to papers confirming that climate models almost universally hand tune clouds to prevent unrealistic energy imbalances. That's not a confidence booster in the predictive power of climate models for telling us what to expect the energy imbalance to do in the future, which is ENTIRELY what the greenhouse effect is.
On of the referenced papers(Golaz et al) goes into more depths of the challenges still presented by this: We have shown that there is sufficient ambiguity in the CM3 adjustable cloud parameters to construct alternate configurations (CM3w, CM3c) that achieve the desired radiation balance. These configurations exhibit only modest differences in their present-day climatology. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to select the “better” configuration solely based on present-day metrics such as those in Figure2. However, CM3w and CM3c differ significantly in the magnitude of their indirect effects. As a result, their predictions of the 20th century warming are strongly affected (Figures3 and 4).
CM3w predicts the most realistic 20th century warming. However, this is achieved with a small and less desirable threshold radius of 6.0 m for the onset of precipitation. Conversely, CM3c uses a more desirable value of 10.6 m but produces a very unrealistic 20th century temperature evolution.
All of which is to point out that the evidence is climate models still can't simulate the absolutely most fundamental and driving factor of future change, Top Of Atmosphere energy imbalance. But hey, don't let that stop you from lumping climate model results into the global consensus and claiming it as fact. I just ask you be more honest and start calling your belief religious consensus and not scientific.
It's probably a skewed result because half of the testimonies will have been selected by republicans because they are reject the mainstream science. This makes the finding even more surprising. For a more balanced view you can look to the statements made by scientific organizations.
over 50 organizations including the Royal Society, American Chemical Society, American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, Australian Institute of Physics, European Physical Society, etc, etc, etc.
Dissenting:
NONE
You are missing what parts scientists are well agreed upon: 1.The instrumental record, which spans about 100 years, shows a clear warming trend. 2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increasing it's concentration will increase heat storage. 3. CO2 concentrations as observed for about the last 60ish years have been increasing. 4. Humans have been steadily contributing CO2 to the atmosphere for about the last 100 years. 5. The above points clearly are strong evidence that the recent warming has been influenced by human behaviour.
That about encompasses the consensus. 90% of everything that everyone is talking about though does NOT have a broad consensus and is still being actively studied, things like: 1.What quantitative relationship do our CO2 emissions have to future temperature change? 2. What cost is there to us from future temperature change. 3. What cost is there to us for reducing our CO2 emissions by a set factor.
Climate models are one of the key parts to answering these questions, and they are getting better at helping us study our theories on how climate works. Regrettably, the reality is that climate models still do NOT accurately predict or model global Top Of Atmosphere energy imbalance. One of the key tuning processes in model development is still adjusting loosely bound or poorly understood parameters, like clouds, to force a reasonable behaviour of global TOA energy. I hate to have to point it out, but long term predictions of climate, are pretty much entirely driven by TOA energy imbalance as it IS the entirety of the greenhouse effect.
The cost of mitigating climate change are insignificant next to the costs of ignoring it.
You are missing what parts scientists are well agreed upon: 1.The instrumental record, which spans about 100 years, shows a clear warming trend. 2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increasing it's concentration will increase heat storage. 3. CO2 concentrations as observed for about the last 60ish years have been increasing. 4. Humans have been steadily contributing CO2 to the atmosphere for about the last 100 years. 5. The above points clearly are strong evidence that the recent warming has been influenced by human behaviour.
That about encompasses the consensus. 90% of everything that everyone is talking about though does NOT have a broad consensus and is still being actively studied, things like: 1.What quantitative relationship do our CO2 emissions have to future temperature change? 2. What cost is there to us from future temperature change. 3. What cost is there to us for reducing our CO2 emissions by a set factor.
Climate models are one of the key parts to answering these questions, and they are getting better at helping us study our theories on how climate works. Regrettably, the reality is that climate models still do NOT accurately predict or model global Top Of Atmosphere energy imbalance. One of the key tuning processes in model development is still adjusting loosely bound or poorly understood parameters, like clouds, to force a reasonable behaviour of global TOA energy. I hate to have to point it out, but long term predictions of climate, are pretty much entirely driven by TOA energy imbalance as it IS the entirety of the greenhouse effect.
Exactly. Science is not a democracy. We don't get to vote on the rules of physics, they are what they are even if we agree with them or not.
However we have no way of getting to know those rules except through a social process in which scientists read and argue about each others' research.
Trust me, if the majority of scientists hadn't agreed on Newton's laws of motions you'd never have heard of him.
What everybody relying on 'consensus' seems to be missing is what parts scientists are well agreed upon: 1.The instrumental record, which spans about 100 years, shows a clear warming trend. 2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increasing it's concentration will increase heat storage. 3. CO2 concentrations as observed for about the last 60ish years have been increasing. 4. Humans have been steadily contributing CO2 to the atmosphere for about the last 100 years. 5. The above points clearly are strong evidence that the recent warming has been influenced by human behaviour.
That about encompasses the consensus. 90% of everything that everyone is talking about though does NOT have a broad consensus and is still being actively studied, things like: 1.What quantitative relationship do our CO2 emissions have to future temperature change? 2. What cost is there to us from future temperature change. 3. What cost is there to us for reducing our CO2 emissions by a set factor.
Climate models are one of the key parts to answering these questions, and they are getting better at helping us study our theories on how climate works. Regrettably, the reality is that climate models still do NOT accurately predict or model global Top Of Atmosphere energy imbalance. One of the key tuning processes in model development is still adjusting loosely bound or poorly understood parameters, like clouds, to force a reasonable behaviour of global TOA energy. I hate to have to point it out, but long term predictions of climate, are pretty much entirely driven by TOA energy imbalance as it IS the entirety of the greenhouse effect.
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That argument would be similar to mine if only 97% of people agreed upon the basic tenants of their religion.
Oh, now you suddenly accept the opinion of the unwashed masses?
I stated my reference as historical. If you transplant yourself back in the dark ages beneath 'God' chosen Kings and under the teaching of the approved clergy you'd find an extremely high consensus on basic tenants of their religion. You'd find all the same appeals to authority you have made.
When somebody questions carbon taxation as really being valid or not, consensus is not an appropriate retort.
When somebody questions the severity of future warming, consensus is not an appropriate retort.
Heck, when somebody questions if CO2 contributes to warming, consensus is not an appropriate retort.
The appropriate response in every case is to point to the evidence first. If the evidence is beyond the questioner, then fair enough to ask them to take it on trust in authority or spend a few years studying up. Just don't start pushing for making that appeal to authority the first resort because your walking down a road where even 'being right' might still leave you doing more harm than good in the long run.
We can declare with confidence that CO2 contributes, and back it up with evidence, so much less risk there. On the other hand if you go about proclaiming with certainty that 2050 will see catastrophic death, science has spoken, that's worse. If you go about proclaiming we are all doomed to that heat death unless we adopt 'measure whatever', that's worse still.
The trouble is you not only risk guessing wrong on the things we are still uncertain about, you taint all of the science by having made these prophecies upon it. Stick to the actual science and representing results appropriately, including the error bars and uncertainties. Leaving those out for expediency is a recipe for disaster.
...and that Angels exist, and Elvis can get your wash whiter with this one weird trick.
Science is INTERESTING, chaos theory even more so, and it's easy to see the changes if you know what to look for. The increased energy in the system is already turning all of weather to a parade of freak outliers and unpredictable quirky events that occasionally spike off the charts, and that's exactly in line with the 'chaotic system' model.
I wouldn't have called the 'Earth turning to an alien planet that doesn't support life' thing in thirty years, but if you specify it's to happen in particular (unusual areas) then I'll believe that. Some areas of the planet are already close to uninhabitable and it doesn't take that much to push 'em over the brink. The thing to watch for is not places being rendered uninhabitable by weather extremes, it's more about masses of people/animals displaced because the change is a new thing that nobody's prepared for.
You can probably, right now, buy a 40-year lease on land that might as well be the Moon in 40 years. If you want a real picture of the plausibility of man-made global climate change, don't check scientists or Al Gore, consult actuaries and insurance companies. Pretty sure you'll find they're believers, because they have to actually pay for it if they choose wrong.
I continue to try and point out the very worrying uncertainty in climate models. The IPCC's fifth AR has a chapter on climate models. In assessing the state of the art, they have the following to say(Box 9.1 for those wanting to follow along:
Model tuning aims to match observed climate system behaviour and so is connected to judgements as to what constitutes a skilful representation of the Earth’s climate. 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. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system
They then go on to cite a half dozen peer reviewed articles confirming this.
Now, it doesn't take much better than a layman understanding to know that the entirety of the greenhouse effect is about the energy balance. More energy entering the planet than leaving it will warm, and more leaving will cool it. The trouble is that if the energy imbalance is the driving force behind climate change, you really want to get to a point where the models can get that part right without being specifically tuned to correct it. When the models energy imbalance for hindcasting causes unrealistic drift until modellers tune and tweak things by hand to get the known 'right answer', it ain't good enough for predictions.
It's not wrong to tune models this way, nor are models not useful at this stage. The trick is that they are only useful for testing out how things work under a given energy imbalance or energy conditions. They are NOT useful for hindcasting energy imbalance, let alone for predicting it for the next 30-100 years.
New science is where everyone gets together and agrees that X is so, and henceforth X is so and no one is allowed to question X.
No one is asking for scientific debate to stop. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who wants scientists to stop investigating the causes of global climate change in order to better predict its effects. This is about unqualified people, myself included, debating science they know nothing about.
Science is never settled, but that does not mean you should never act upon scientific knowledge because it might someday change. When determining which science to act upon, consensus is very important. In fact it is basically the only important thing. Average citizens and even policy makers could never be expected to understand the science enough to join either side of the debate. Accepting the consensus is the only sane choice in these instances.
Your exact argument has been made before. Science was supposed to do away with appeals to authority, lest your argument look like this:
No one is asking for theological debate to stop. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who wants priests to stop investigating the scriptures in order to better interpret them. This is about unqualified people, myself included, debating religion they know nothing about.
Theology is never settled, but that does not mean you should never act upon theological understanding because it might someday change. When determining which theology to act upon, consensus is very important. In fact it is basically the only important thing. Average citizens and even policy makers could never be expected to understand religion enough to join either side of the debate. Accepting the consensus is the only sane choice in these instances.
Where do you guys come from? Are you a miner or rig worker? Whats your goal in this? You really think a rigorous CO2 mitigation scheme is going to fuck everyone when in at least 1/3 of the US solar is already cheaper than coal without subsidies?
The graph and the data sets you linked to all have the biggest numbers at the end. To prove your point next time you may want to find a graph with big numbers in the middle as well instead of closing with "the graph I cited to prove you wrong is wrong because it proves you right so just imagine its wrong in a way that proves you wrong".
You're right, I was reading things wrong and too quickly.
This really threw me because I swear when looking at the same paper awhile ago and at more length my summary was accurate. Mann's follow up a year later explains the data release more clearly:
For each series, the years 1850-2006 are the PC-filtered instrumental data. That is, the instrumental data but retaining the first 7 PCs, the number that were retained in the 1800-1849 reconstruction step.
From my link up thread it is noted in the link to the raw data:
Data series used in the above plot (1st column is Year, 2nd column is Reconstruction
If you look closer at the labelling of the "above plot", you see that instrumental is all that is plotted from around 1850-1900 onward. This was suggestive so I look closer at the to linked datasets for with and without the 'troublesome' datasets. The temperatures listed from 2007 backwards are virtually identical, ?instrumental?.
I'm gonna look closer to try and confirm, but seems I was misleading in representing the linked graph prior as being entirely from reconstruction. In particular, the EIV graphed reconstructions(Fig 2) in Mann's paper don't match the raw data linked prior from the supplements.
Still looking for the pure reconstructed figures for 1900 onwards...
matched 2-3 times naturally
Well the linked raw data doesn't support your claim. The first big peak is 594 (it goes from 584-604) at 0.09. There's a warm period from 872-881. The next peak is 970 (from 962-991) at 0.16.
Starting at 1981 (by the data set you recommend), the temperature starts going straight up, exceeding the last peak in 1993 and continuing to exceed it every year thereafter.
You're right, I was reading things wrong and too quickly.
This really threw me because I swear when looking at the same paper awhile ago and at more length my summary was accurate. Mann's follow up a year later explains the data release more clearly:
For each series, the years 1850-2006 are the PC-filtered instrumental data. That is, the instrumental data but retaining the first 7 PCs, the number that were retained in the 1800-1849 reconstruction step.
From my link up thread it is noted in the link to the raw data:
Data series used in the above plot (1st column is Year, 2nd column is Reconstruction
If you look closer at the labelling of the "above plot", you see that instrumental is all that is plotted from around 1850-1900 onward. This was suggestive so I look closer at the to linked datasets for with and without the 'troublesome' datasets. The temperatures listed from 2007 backwards are virtually identical, ?instrumental?.
I'm gonna look closer to try and confirm, but seems I was misleading in representing the linked graph prior as being entirely from reconstruction. In particular, the EIV graphed reconstructions(Fig 2) in Mann's paper don't match the raw data linked prior from the supplements.
It is when there is such a statistically significant deviation from long term climate trends gathered from dozens of different methods at a rate never seen outside major global catastrophes while humanity happens to be dumping large amounts of a known greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
Think of it this way...
citations needed.
According to the latest proxy reconstructions by Michael Mann, the hockey stick author that alarmists love, the current 'record' warmth of the last couple decades was matched 2-3 times naturally over the last 2 thousand years. The links there are to his supplementary information page for his actual paper, and the last is to the raw data of his reconstruction right up to the year 2007. Check for yourself that his data finds that around 1000AD, 850AD and 550AD temperatures met or exceeded those since the year 2000AD.
If you want to contradict that record, please give me more than the waving of your hands that "dozens of different methods" show. The only different methods that paint a different picture is if you plot instrumental temperature against the reconstructed temperatures of something like Mann and others work. The part you would miss(and Mann has done this routinely) is noticing that not only is the instrumental record from say 1990-2010 higher than anything in the last 200 years. The instrumental temperatures from 1990-2010 are EQUALLY higher than the proxy record temperatures from 1990-2010!
I know right, its not like 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have come in the past 10 years. Only 7 of 10 have been in the past 10 years, to get the other two you'd have to go back a full 13 years ago! Clearly those predicting warming have failed because they underestimated how much everyone likes to split hairs.
Worse still, the 100 warmest years on record ALL occur after the industrial revolution. That's right,100% of the top 100 warm years on record are all due to global wa.....
Oh, just a second, this just in, the 'record' for temperatures only extends back for 100 years. That's not much of a sample set for analyzing processes like climate that operate over millennia is it?
You do realize that science isn't a matter of making pronouncements and engraving them into stone, right? This is a new study with new information. It's unexpected, but that's what happens in science every now and then.
Up until now, the best guess was that Antarctic ice was diminishing, and this study challenges that.
The myth listing was to address the claims that Antarctic sea ice is extensive, so the Antarctic is icing up. That is bad reasoning, even if it turns out that the ice is increasing.
Don't tell me that, tell SkepticalScience that. They declare Antarctic ice is increasing as a 'myth'. Your discussion and reasoning that it isn't a disproof of overall warming nor sea level rise is dead on. That is to say that Antarctic ice increase is not a valid argument or reason to reject the overall conclusion from all other evidence, it even fits into existing theory. However a "Myth" is different and SkepticalScience was and is just flat wrong to have called it that. There was always conflicting evidence on what Antarctic sea ice mass was doing, but it was unequivocal that Antarctic sea-ice extent was breaking records repeatedly. This NASA finding isn't coming out of a clear blue sky or something, and to have declared such a notion a "Myth" was and is irresponsible.
Helllllloooooooooo Fred Singer.
No, I will not and cannot forgive you. Your insistence that pandering to your doubts is more important than restricting air pollution makes me want to punch you in the face, honestly. Your doubts really don't and shouldn't matter to anyone but you, yourself.
So put another way, you don't need to prove yourself and are willing, almost eager, to use violence to enforce your will on others. How reasonable.
I never said anything against restricting air pollution, I just have this crazy notion that CO2 is one of the least nasty things we are dumping into our environment. We might want to focus more on all the carcinogens and radioactive isotopes dumping out of coal plants than the CO2.
Honestly, if you want to promote massive economic and industrial changes targeting reductions of CO2 it's on you to show the danger. The most championed evidences(proxy records and modelling) simply don't cut it. If you think I'm wrong please show me the evidence you've found compelling, I've honestly looked and come back thoroughly disappointed. Just don't expect me to be cowed or persuaded by your name calling and threats of violence over the evidence I've provided from a group like the IPCC.
So we have a very abstracted estimate of future economics that is derived from already abstracted estimated models of temperature. Sounds compelling...
According the IPCC's 5th assessment report in Chapter 9 models have problems with the TOA energy balance. Specifically if you look in Box 9.1 they say:
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. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters
in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system
They follow up with a half dozen citations verifying this.
Read that closely because it is telling. Read the cited articles, and it's even more so. Climate models still can NOT predict TOA energy imbalance. To even get hindcasts correct, requires manual corrections to unknown or poorly understood processes like clouds. Let me observe that long term climate change driven by the greenhouse effect works ENTIRELY through the TOA energy imbalance and trapping more or less energy as gas concentrations change.
Forgive me if I believe we lack sufficient evidence and understanding to justify carbon taxations and other economic controls to try and rectify something we still can't even quantify,
The only things this demonstrates is your lack of understanding. You then take that ignorance and formulate it into something that fits your rather obvious bias and hand-wave away any troubling things like "context".
In addition, you an others like you treat the model runs as the end all be all of climate science. They're not. Models are just one tool that is used, just like any other branch of science that you care to name. All models have errors since all models are imperfect representations of reality, and they never ever have perfect data. That's why any non-trivial scientific model has numerous parameters and settings that can be set and tweaked, and why a EXPERT is required to run them and analyze the results. Otherwise you'd have Joe Sixpack claiming he developed an infiniglider since he changed a parameter in an aerodynamic model and the airfoil generates lift even at rest.
You are the one using a waving of your hands to dismiss things. Providing anything like a concrete reason you or anyone else believes that the problems with projecting TOA energy imbalance is not a problem is ignored. Meanwhile I very specifically point out a summary of the current scientific literature that clearly states that hindcasting historic climate REQUIRES manual corrections for accurate TOA energy. My link even references more than a half dozen peer-review journals verifying this.
Heck, you couldn't even be bothered to explain in what context you think TOA energy errors of that scale aren't important to predictions.
Take your faith based chest thumping somewhere else and at least be willing to discuss the actual science and not just the fore gone conclusion your world view dictates.
If you want to see how well any given group or individual can predict events or outcomes 100 years into the future, just go 100 years into the past and ask yourself if anyone was predicting a future that looked even remotely like the one that actually happened.
Here is a hint, the answer is always "no".
And even when a lucky prognosticator does get occasionally get something right, it's usually either something pretty obvious or they got its context completely wrong. For example, a lot of idiots cite the Star Trek communicators as a "prediction" of modern cellphones. But this is way off:
1) The communicators used in Star Trek were more akin to military walkie-talkies, which had been in use for some time by the 1960's, than cellphones.
2) They were only used by the military. There is no evidence that civilians carried them.
3) They were short range. You couldn't use a communicator to just "call" someone anywhere.
4) Like walkies-talkie transmissions, communicator transmissions were apparently overheard by everyone (it's why Kirk always had to announce who he was and who he was talking to at the beginning of each communication). There is no evidence of characters making actual private one-to-one "calls" with communicators.
How down voted do I get if I note that people like that used to call themselves prophets listening to god but today they call themselves climate activists listening to science.
You're whining about one "summary" graph? If it bothers you so much, why not graph the raw data yourself in separate graphs to show us this alleged "disparity"?
I referenced a heck of a lot more than that, but yes the summary graph is manipulative and not helpful to understanding or learning the actual proxy results. Look at the summary graph, the first impression it gives anyone and everyone looking at it is that the proxy data confirms that temperatures since 1900 are unprecedented. If you graph the actual data as you reference, it actually shows that the period 960-1000 was warmer than the last 40 years. The same higher temps are seen from 872-882, and again from 585-604.
That ties directly into the other point I made particularly with Mann and not RealClimate in general. When statisticians like McShane and Wyner pointed out that their take on the data and analysis shows VASTLY less confidence in the signal than Mann, Mann strikes back from his blog more than the actual academic record. The grossest example is McShane and Wyner's criticism of Manns absence of and frequent misapplication of error bars on his reconstructed data. Mann ignores this critique entirely, preferring to go on the offensive in critiquing their understanding of proxy data sources...
So yeah, I kinda stand behind my statements and opinion of Michael Mann.
So we have a very abstracted estimate of future economics that is derived from already abstracted estimated models of temperature. Sounds compelling...
According the IPCC's 5th assessment report in Chapter 9 models have problems with the TOA energy balance. Specifically if you look in Box 9.1 they say:
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. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters
in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system
They follow up with a half dozen citations verifying this.
Read that closely because it is telling. Read the cited articles, and it's even more so. Climate models still can NOT predict TOA energy imbalance. To even get hindcasts correct, requires manual corrections to unknown or poorly understood processes like clouds. Let me observe that long term climate change driven by the greenhouse effect works ENTIRELY through the TOA energy imbalance and trapping more or less energy as gas concentrations change.
Forgive me if I believe we lack sufficient evidence and understanding to justify carbon taxations and other economic controls to try and rectify something we still can't even quantify,
According to this skepticalscience.com:
> Sea ice and land ice are two separate phenomena. Antarctica is losing land ice at an accelerating rate. Sea ice around Antarctica is increasing. The reasons for sea ice increasing in a warming Southern Ocean are complex
http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm
You are right, SkepticalScience lists "Antarctica is gaining Ice" as number ten on their list of top Climate Myths. Either the crew at NASA are now foul mouthed deniers, or the blogger activists at SkepticalScience aren't as fair handed and open minded as they boast...
Anyone who genuinely wants to debunk global warming should start here, trust me, climate scientists will respond with collective sigh of releif should anyone succeed.
RealClimate.org maybe wouldn't be the best place to start. There's a lot of very aggressively close minded chaps dominating the forums. I know, who'd have thought that could happen on an internet forum?
Real climate is also co-founded by Michael Mann, whom I really take some issue with. Tell me I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, but his paleo reconstructions of temperature have really bothered me in the past. Nothing to do with the results, not as much to do even with his methodology now that his later work is addressing and correcting problems. The presentation and usage of the 'hide the decline' trick in graphs is just disgusting. When your paleo reconstruction ends around 1900, just end the graph there. If your paleo reconstruction doesn't show the same temperature rise since 1900 as instrumental, then show that too. What you DO NOT DO, is paste in the instrumental record with a thick enough line to hide the paleo reconstruction since 1900. Even further, don't point to the overlapped instrumental part of the graph as startling and clear evidence of an abrupt trend in the data starting at 1900.
If your wanting to have an open and honest discussion about the evidence, that's a difficult environment. Even scientists with a decent publishing record within the field like Lindzen are put under a microscope for criticism for not conforming to the 'consensus'. Even researchers widely embraced and accepted like Mauritsen have their results heavily disputed and interpreted there. When statisticians like McShane and Wyner take issue with the statistical methods in Mann and others work, Mann takes to his blog for the 'final' word while leaving out any response to their real and legitimate questions and arguments. I'm not anticipating that it's going to be a particularly receptive audience as you seem to believe.
Forced abortion seems to be one of the ways they enforce the law (though probably not so publicly): http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012...
I understand that to be an isolated incident. Horrible, no doubt, but hardly the 'regular' action taken. I'm asking what the usual, regular action is.
336 million abortions and 196 million sterilizations according to China's own Ministry of health.
So not so much what one might class as 'isolated incidents'.
Forced abortion seems to be one of the ways they enforce the law (though probably not so publicly): http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012...
And after repeated forced abortions you get sterilized...
It still is especially when you consider actual results.
The actual result was matching the population to the food supply and eliminating famine.
336 million forced abortions and 196 forced sterilizations according to China's own Ministry of health.
People in the west don't understand that for most Chinese, the one child policy doesn't have effect. Because there are so many exceptions.
1) If you and your partner were single kids, you can have two kids.
2) Ethnic minorities have higher limits, and foreigners, including Hong Kong and Taiwan can have unlimited
3) Rich people just pay the tax and have another child, because they are so rich from corruption money is nothing for them.
4) Some provinces had already lifted the ban, or lessened it greatly.
5) Children born outside China, including HK and Taiwan, don't count. Hence the large amount of birth tourism.
So this is pretty much a symbolic act, but at least it's the communists admitting they can't control everything. I wonder how this will be spun off in China, since there the communists are still treated as nearly perfect, the thing everyone should aspire to be.
According to China's Health Ministry, the one child policy had forced 336 million abortions as of 2013. It also had forced the sterilization of 196 million men and women.
In the grand scheme of things, this is something it's worth making a big deal about. Certainly more worthy of a mention than female stereotypes in media and other injustices against women that get a lot more coverage. But yeah, they've been relaxing the restrictions for awhile now.
I know it's considered heresy in the church of CAGW to say this, but climate models are still very uncertain about trends for future warming. The 'consensus' within the modelling community is that the models are very good tools for testing out our understanding of how climate works. They're predictive reliability is another matter entirely.
The IPCC that the CAGW church heralds for it's Nobel Prize on climate change says the following on climate models. Go see for yourself here under Box 9.1 if you don't believe me.
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. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters
in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system.
The IPCC go on to reference more than a half dozen peer reviewed papers verifying this assessment. They later add:
Model tuning directly influences the evaluation of climate models, as the quantities that are tuned cannot be used in model evaluation.
Quantities closely related to those tuned will provide only weak tests of model performance.
For an even more layman break down, climate models still have troubles modelling TOA energy balance. TOA energy balance is the ENTIRE driving force of climate change. The greenhouse effect is completely and entirely a function of energy entering and leaving our planet at the edge of space. That places virtually everything within our climate system as at least partially related to this quantity.
All the warming and cooling trends in climate models of the past and projections into the future are driven by TOA energy imbalance. And the scientific consensus is that our models still can not get it correct and require hand tuning and tweaking to manually correct it.
That doesn't seem strong enough evidence to me to warrant advocating for drastic taxation and economic cut backs...
Evidence from weather satellites has shown no new warming for almost 18 years.
Here are some fun graphs: http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs11...
Looks like a fairly linear increase when I hold a straight-edge up to the screen starting around 1970. No new surprises I guess?
Aside from all that though, a climate change religion doesn't sound so bad. Give a little money to the "church" and in return you get an insurance policy. The population is getting close to the estimated carrying capacity of the Earth. Once we get there, any major crop die-off would lead to starvation problems. Why should coffee drinkers spend money on bombing tea drinkers when we could instead invest that money to ensure that both coffee and tea keep growing?
Set your plot of linear warming alongside global CO2 concentrations. CO2 concentrations have also been rising linearly that entire time. If even the more moderate projections of warming are true, warming should be accelerating as CO2 increases. The fact it is not is suggestion/evidence that our climate sensitivity to CO2 may not be as high as feared.
You can read the individual statements of the science academies. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) They go much further than simply stating that radiative physics is a real thing. Most state that the IPCC represents the consensus view and that most of the warming over the last 50 years is due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.
Thank you for confirming what I said. The IPCC's Fifth Assessment report is almost verbatim where my assessment of climate models came from. In Chapter 9, Box 9.1 the IPCC report states:
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. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
You'll note that the assessment is backed with a wealth of references to papers confirming that climate models almost universally hand tune clouds to prevent unrealistic energy imbalances. That's not a confidence booster in the predictive power of climate models for telling us what to expect the energy imbalance to do in the future, which is ENTIRELY what the greenhouse effect is.
On of the referenced papers(Golaz et al) goes into more depths of the challenges still presented by this:
We have shown that there is sufficient ambiguity in the CM3 adjustable cloud parameters to construct alternate configurations (CM3w, CM3c) that achieve the desired radiation balance. These configurations exhibit only modest differences in their present-day climatology. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to select the “better” configuration solely based on present-day metrics such as those in Figure2. However, CM3w and CM3c differ significantly in the magnitude of their indirect effects. As a result, their predictions of the 20th century warming are strongly affected (Figures3 and 4).
CM3w predicts the most realistic 20th century warming. However, this is achieved with a small and less desirable threshold radius of 6.0 m for the onset of precipitation. Conversely, CM3c uses a more desirable value of 10.6 m but produces a very unrealistic 20th century temperature evolution.
All of which is to point out that the evidence is climate models still can't simulate the absolutely most fundamental and driving factor of future change, Top Of Atmosphere energy imbalance. But hey, don't let that stop you from lumping climate model results into the global consensus and claiming it as fact. I just ask you be more honest and start calling your belief religious consensus and not scientific.
It's probably a skewed result because half of the testimonies will have been selected by republicans because they are reject the mainstream science. This makes the finding even more surprising. For a more balanced view you can look to the statements made by scientific organizations.
Statements by scientific organizations of national or international standing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Concurring:
over 50 organizations including the Royal Society, American Chemical Society, American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, Australian Institute of Physics, European Physical Society, etc, etc, etc.
Dissenting:
NONE
You are missing what parts scientists are well agreed upon:
1.The instrumental record, which spans about 100 years, shows a clear warming trend.
2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increasing it's concentration will increase heat storage.
3. CO2 concentrations as observed for about the last 60ish years have been increasing.
4. Humans have been steadily contributing CO2 to the atmosphere for about the last 100 years.
5. The above points clearly are strong evidence that the recent warming has been influenced by human behaviour.
That about encompasses the consensus. 90% of everything that everyone is talking about though does NOT have a broad consensus and is still being actively studied, things like:
1.What quantitative relationship do our CO2 emissions have to future temperature change?
2. What cost is there to us from future temperature change.
3. What cost is there to us for reducing our CO2 emissions by a set factor.
Climate models are one of the key parts to answering these questions, and they are getting better at helping us study our theories on how climate works. Regrettably, the reality is that climate models still do NOT accurately predict or model global Top Of Atmosphere energy imbalance. One of the key tuning processes in model development is still adjusting loosely bound or poorly understood parameters, like clouds, to force a reasonable behaviour of global TOA energy. I hate to have to point it out, but long term predictions of climate, are pretty much entirely driven by TOA energy imbalance as it IS the entirety of the greenhouse effect.
The cost of mitigating climate change are insignificant next to the costs of ignoring it.
You are missing what parts scientists are well agreed upon:
1.The instrumental record, which spans about 100 years, shows a clear warming trend.
2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increasing it's concentration will increase heat storage.
3. CO2 concentrations as observed for about the last 60ish years have been increasing.
4. Humans have been steadily contributing CO2 to the atmosphere for about the last 100 years.
5. The above points clearly are strong evidence that the recent warming has been influenced by human behaviour.
That about encompasses the consensus. 90% of everything that everyone is talking about though does NOT have a broad consensus and is still being actively studied, things like:
1.What quantitative relationship do our CO2 emissions have to future temperature change?
2. What cost is there to us from future temperature change.
3. What cost is there to us for reducing our CO2 emissions by a set factor.
Climate models are one of the key parts to answering these questions, and they are getting better at helping us study our theories on how climate works. Regrettably, the reality is that climate models still do NOT accurately predict or model global Top Of Atmosphere energy imbalance. One of the key tuning processes in model development is still adjusting loosely bound or poorly understood parameters, like clouds, to force a reasonable behaviour of global TOA energy. I hate to have to point it out, but long term predictions of climate, are pretty much entirely driven by TOA energy imbalance as it IS the entirety of the greenhouse effect.
Exactly. Science is not a democracy. We don't get to vote on the rules of physics, they are what they are even if we agree with them or not.
However we have no way of getting to know those rules except through a social process in which scientists read and argue about each others' research.
Trust me, if the majority of scientists hadn't agreed on Newton's laws of motions you'd never have heard of him.
What everybody relying on 'consensus' seems to be missing is what parts scientists are well agreed upon:
1.The instrumental record, which spans about 100 years, shows a clear warming trend.
2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increasing it's concentration will increase heat storage.
3. CO2 concentrations as observed for about the last 60ish years have been increasing.
4. Humans have been steadily contributing CO2 to the atmosphere for about the last 100 years.
5. The above points clearly are strong evidence that the recent warming has been influenced by human behaviour.
That about encompasses the consensus. 90% of everything that everyone is talking about though does NOT have a broad consensus and is still being actively studied, things like:
1.What quantitative relationship do our CO2 emissions have to future temperature change?
2. What cost is there to us from future temperature change.
3. What cost is there to us for reducing our CO2 emissions by a set factor.
Climate models are one of the key parts to answering these questions, and they are getting better at helping us study our theories on how climate works. Regrettably, the reality is that climate models still do NOT accurately predict or model global Top Of Atmosphere energy imbalance. One of the key tuning processes in model development is still adjusting loosely bound or poorly understood parameters, like clouds, to force a reasonable behaviour of global TOA energy. I hate to have to point it out, but long term predictions of climate, are pretty much entirely driven by TOA energy imbalance as it IS the entirety of the greenhouse effect.