I think we need more specific consequences. When the IPCC tried to come up with a list of specific consequences, the Doran survey indicates most scientists found at least one to disagree with.
Huh? Where does the Doran survey say that? As far as I can tell, the Doran survey ends with this conclusion:
It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long term climate processes. The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists.
Agreeing that too much CO2 is bad is one step, but considering the costs of reducing CO2 (possibly major economic damage) defining the magnitude of CO2's harm is very important. If we're doing it to avert widespread droughts/starvation/wars, cap and trade may be more palatable than if it turns out it's just to protect the habitat of a few species of tropical fish (hyperbole intended).
Thanks. This should be modded insightful, not funny. He even obliquely referred to the fact that not replanting the trees would reduce average global temperatures but wouldn't help with ocean acidification. Kudos.
The Doran study's survey question is phrased: 2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures? So I believe you injected the "dangerous" evaluation.
Notice that in the people-press.org survey, 70% of scientists call global warming a "very serious" problem. Only 6% call it "not too serious" or "not a problem".
jamstec.go.jp link says that overwhelmingly the most common response of those surveyed was to agree that AGW is real, but only "at least some of the forecast consequences of this change are based on robust evidence." So I don't think scientists are necessarily in agreement that we're headed for a cataclysmic disaster.
When have you ever seen the IPCC or any peer-reviewed paper discuss "cataclysmic disaster"? Note that in the jamstec.go.jp survey, 15-20% of scientists think the IPCC has understated the seriousness of the problem.
No, you haven't been talking only about issue #1. You were clearly implying that Watts has uncovered issues that Real Climate is "bullshitting" about. I've been trying to stress that this isn't true.
You know what? Forget it. This is too repetitive for me to bother. Have a nice day.
What data? His data on which stations match NOAA guidelines. Again, do you think this data is accurate or not? That is the only question that matters.
How many different ways should I explain this? Watts implied that his "good" stations would have a significantly smaller warming trend than the "bad" stations. Menne 2010 showed that any differences are negligible:
... Results indicate that there is a mean bias associated with poor exposure sites relative to good exposure sites; however, this bias is consistent with previously documented changes associated with the widespread conversion to electronic sensors in the USHCN during the last 25 years. Moreover, the sign of the bias is counterintuitive to photographic documentation of poor exposure because associated instrument changes have led to an artificial negative ("cool") bias in maximum temperatures and only a slight positive ("warm") bias in minimum temperatures. These results underscore the need to consider all changes in observation practice when determining the impacts of siting irregularities. Further, the influence of non-standard siting on temperature trends can only be quantified through an analysis of the data. Adjustments applied to USHCN Version 2 data largely account
for the impact of instrument and siting changes, although a small overall residual negative ("cool") bias appears to remain in the adjusted maximum temperature series. Nevertheless, the adjusted USHCN temperatures are extremely well aligned with recent measurements from instruments whose exposure characteristics meet the highest standards for climate monitoring. In summary, we find no evidence that the CONUS temperature trends are inflated due to poor
station siting.
Watts's response is incoherent, filled with healthy doses of a persecution complex:
Surely he didn't mention that he and Menne et al 'borrowed' my incomplete surfacestations rating data against my protests. Dr. Pielke Sr. and I, plus others on the surfacestations data analysis teams (two independent analyses have been done) see an entirely different picture, now that we have nearly 90% of USHCN surveyed. NCDC used data at 43%, and even though I told them they'd see little or nothing in the way of a signal then, they forged ahead anyway. Assuming we aren't blocked by journal politics, we'll have the surfacestations analysis results in public view soon. If we are blocked by journal politics, we'll have other ways.... After NCDC's unethical borrowing of my data and denying my right of first publication, don't ask to see the surfacestations analysis results here. I learned my lesson not to trust Karl et al the first time. Full disclosure comes in an SI with journal publication, not before.
He spent years posting pictures and implying incompetence/conspiracies on the part of NOAA/NASA scientists without ever bothering to redo NOAA's analysis on his subset of "good" stations. When someone actually did some science with his rankings, his claims ended up looking silly even to nonscientists who aren't familiar with previous studies like Parker 2004.
And, obviously, Watts doesn't see Menne's paper as verification of any sort. You appear to be alone in that opinion, and I don't understand why you're taking a position that even Watts is sensible enough not to make. He's saying that Menne is wrong, and pointing two non-peer-reviewed (heck, unlinked) analyses of "more complete" data which he's apparently not going to share.
Ok great. But his politics don't matter, unless he's lying about the surface station data. Are you saying his surface station data is wrong? That's the only thing that matters. I haven't seen anything that says it is, but I could be wrong. In regards to the verification, what I mean is that the fact that his good stations agree with the national average shows his selection process is probably a good one, since it matches satellite temps.
What surface station data? Anthony Watts has a blog filled with photos and a history of failed journal submissions. I'm not disputing his politics. I'm saying that he clearly implied that the "best" 10% of stations would show global cooling (or stagnation) whereas the "bad" 90% of stations contaminated by the UHI would show an even bigger increase. When someone actually checked this, it turns out he was wrong. Seriously, read Menne et al 2010, linked previously but I'll give it one more shot. Scientists hadn't ignored any of the issues Watts implies. They'd actually checked the time series in quite a few interesting ways. Watts simply didn't do a thorough literature search before making his wacky claims.
I'm not an AGW denier. By no means am I claiming that. I only take exception when people overstate a threat, or ascribe global warming to whatever news item of the week it is. Back when I was living in SF, pretty much everything was ascribed to global warming on the local news.
I've made a list of all the nonsense I'd seen from the Greens. What utter rubbish. I've still got things to add to that list, too, I just can't divert time away from school...
In terms of the error bars, I just find it amusing that they're so large you can basically never prove the predictions wrong. Being off by 30-50% over twenty years, for example, is considered acceptable. My own personal prediction is that by 2100, the temperature of the earth will be somewhere between the surface temperature of the sun, and absolute zero. Even though I'm confident this will play out, I'm still waiting to pick up my Nobel Prize, unfortunately.
They're smaller than the error bars you can get using the most sophisticated approach that can be solved using a paper and pencil. Decreasing the error bars further will require better understanding of cloud formation and aerosol interactions, faster computers, raw data at higher spatial and temporal densities, and a better theoretical understanding of the turbulence that is currently extremely difficult to model such as the oscillations ENSO, AO, AAO, NAO, PNA, AMO, PDO, MJO, etc.
Radtea already asked what would be necessary to convince me that our emissions aren't responsible for at least the majority of the warming since ~1970, as measured using 20 year smoothing to account for our current limitations.
Now, if you're claiming that Watt is a crackpot and making up all of his surface station data, that's another thing entirely, but since his results correlate with other datasets... it's weird form of verification for him.
I'd been reading Anthony Watts's websites for years before Kyle and I discussed surfacestations.org last year. He acts like a serious crackpot on his other site wattsupwiththat.com, but clearly tries to keep a lid on the crazy when writing surfacestations.org.
Taken together, both sites make it clear that Watts believes climatologists are incompetent and/or engaged in a massive conspiracy. He ignores the multiple independent proxies and wind studies which back up the instrumental temperature record. He implies that the urban heat island effect is responsible for the rise of instrumental temperature record because 90% of stations are "poor quality" according to him. So scientists take the 10% of stations that are "approved" by Watts, and its time series is very similar to the time series of all stations. Furthermore, the abstract of the Menne 2010 paper I've already linked pointed out that the bias was "counterintuitive" to Watts's preconceptions. This is not a verification of Watts in any sense.
James Annan claims that the date (1990) was cherry picked as a minimum.... Or to put it another way, because the article I linked to was accurate, there's very little reason in debunking a guy trying to debunk it. If you think I'm wrong, please let me know.... I just flipped through some of the other predictions from the impact report of AR1. I'll have to do some research to see how they've turned out....
That's not how I read James Annan's series of three articles. He seemed to mainly be criticizing Pielke's sloppy statistics. I've previously described this in many places, but the best I can find at the moment is here. Again, the analyses I've linked take proper ensembles of the AR1 models, updated with actual emissions and other forcings, and analyze the results with an understanding of the statistical limitations imposed by the need to average out weather noise. I don't see any evidence that Pielke actually did any of this, which is probably why he hasn't gotten any of these rants published in a reputable journal.
... Scroll down to the Hansen analysis. It's basically saying what I'm saying, that the prediction was wrong, statistically speaking, or at least on the outer edges of the lower boundary. Whereas I was probably a bit too harsh on it, RC.org is characteristically too weak.
Again, I think the stratospheric water vapor issues I've previously linked and the inherent unpredictability of turbulence like ENSO are enough to explain most or all of this difference.
Sure, if you make your error bars large enough, you can always be right. =)
Even the "large" uncertainties in current GCMs are small enough to show that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for the warming since 1970. Even though the two curves have wide error bars, they don't overlap. What other objective measure should we use to determine when the error bars get "small enough"?
Care to send me the link to your presentation?
I've recently been threatened with a lawsuit on Slashdot, so my commitment to anonymity is stronger than ever. I don't want to end up like the CRU scientists. But I've described my
Out of curiosity, what do you think half of climate science is? It's computer modeling. Of what? Of the atmosphere, land, and oceans.
As I've explained at length, the problem is that programmers think their Java skillz enable them to understand both halves of climate science. For example, a programmer might say something like this:
The problem is, if you don't know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That's why I called bullshit.
... without noticing that scientists perform many independent verifications of these stations. Just like evolutionary biologists face a deluge of engineers who disprove evolution using the 2nd law of thermodynamics (standard Salem hypothesis), climate scientists face a deluge of engineers and programmers who use their hacking skills to prove that CO2 is saturated, or that global warming is caused by sunspots, etc.
For example, they defended the mistakes Al Gore made in an Inconvenient Truth, saying in essence that it was more important to get people talking about global warming than it was to get the facts right. This is the kind of stuff that irritates me about the site, along side of their heavy handed censorship of posts.
I've already been very critical of Gore, so I'm tempted to agree with that small criticism. But I haven't yet censored any posts on my article, and I think that was a mistake. Two programmers (also creationists, incidentally) wasted ~50 pages on nonsense. I don't blame scientists who want to keep the conversation focused on the facts, and I've seen contrary viewpoints on Real Climate. They just don't devote hundreds of pages on each article to blather like "Water vapor is more important than CO2, so scientists are conspirators/incompetent/both!"
In other words, that graph that I linked to appears to be correct - that world temps are matching the lower bound of predictions, which is ~60% of their "best guess" for predictions. Perhaps "discrediting" is a bit too strong, but the data matches the graph and analysis that I linked to, so I think it's a reasonable accurate statement.
Considering that you haven't commented on James Annan's analyses, I guess there's no reason for me to mention Ambitwistor's links again. There's also probably no point in linking my analysis of this issue again, where I provided several links showing comparisons that show temperatures tracking well inside the 95% confidence level.
It's important to realize that climate models like those used in the IPCC reports are dynamical models, not empirical. They don't provide predictions of temperatures per se, rather they predict the climate response (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise) to changes in forcings like sunlight, CO2 concentration, stratospheric water vapor, etc.
All the analyses I've seen that have taken into account the actual history of these variables show that temperatures are well within the IPCC's error bars.
But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the r
Okay, good points. I vaguely remember Bush's plan, and I strongly disagree with the Democrats on the nuclear issue. But, oddly, I find Bush's plan to be require more "fine-tuned" government intervention. Without some way to account for the negative externalities of coal (i.e. carbon tax, cap-and-trade, whatever- for brevity's sake I'll just call it a carbon tax), nuclear stations would never get built by the "free" market because coal is much cheaper. Thus construction of nuclear plants would have to be subsidized mostly or entirely by the government. On the other hand, a carbon tax would push the "free" market to develop a new generation of nuclear plants purely to chase profits, the most capitalist reason imaginable.
Yes, in some abstract sense imposing a tax on carbon moves us further from laissez faire capitalism. But that seems awfully similar to fining companies who pour chemical waste into rivers. It's like a tax on pollution, and it provides incentive for companies to find ways to handle waste responsibly. Bush's global warming plan would be more analogous to the government creating an bureacratic agency to find ways to fix the waste issue, without bothering to stop (or even fine) the people who are dumping chemicals into rivers. That's probably not the best idea because government bureacracies are generally worse at innovation than the free market.
Also, it seems like Bush was proposing an underfunded plan (like practically everything else he and congress did during that period: Medicare increases, No Child Left Behind, Constellation, Iraq, etc). So he seems to be saying that the government should build nuclear power plants (because without a carbon tax the free market simply won't) but he doesn't want to hurt the economy so he's not going to raise any kind of taxes to build the nuclear power plants. That's a recipe for doing exactly nothing. At the very least he'd have to raise taxes for his government program to build nuclear power plants.
Did I mention it to begin with? No. So don't get angry when you bash on someone for not having graduate credentials in a related field, and they turn out to.
Don't mistake my disappointment in the (lack of) intellectual rigor of most non-scientists as anger. It's an emotion much more akin to sadness. And the point of my modified salem hypothesis was that computer science isn't really all that closely related to the radiative physics of the atmosphere. In my opinion, computer science should probably be called "algorithm engineering" in an attempt to emphasize the difference between it and the "natural sciences". The "standard" Salem hypothesis is similar and (as far as I can tell) very descriptive of reality; my only modification was that of generalizing the statement somewhat.
My current point is that a staggering number of crackpots stress the amount of time they've spent independently studying an idea, missing the fact that they have no objective way to determine if this "study" has actually enabled them to solve serious graduate physics problems because no one's ever graded their homework or exams. It's important to stress that this kind of independent verification is a critical part of the educational process.
I wasn't bragging, and if you read my original post, I'm encouraging people to do their own research instead of just reading what they should believe online. I can't believe anyone would disagree with that.
No, but I disagree with your assessment that Real Climate are bullshittingdeceitful hacks, for reasons that I've explained at length in my article.
FWIW, I believe in AGW, and think it's a serious problem. Does that sound like a crackpot creationist to you? No? Oh, I guess you don't fucking know what you're talking about, do you?
Indeed, I just remembered that I asked people to mod up one of your previous comments. But I also disagree that "the IPCC has done a good enough job discrediting themselves, with their predictions historically overstating global warming" for similar reasons as Ambitwistor in his reply to your comment.
But beyond that, I actually do my own research, and know how to eliminate crackpot theories better than Al Gore, who uncritically reported several false stories in an Inconvenient Truth.
Let me guess, the crackpot theories you've eliminated happen to be the ones that my previous comment showed are accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists who actually study these topics for a living?
Note that my article starts with the sentence "... this explains why some people who watch a documentary that exaggerates the science end up imitating that smugpolitician'salarmism."
Later in the article, during my conversation with Jane Q. Public: "... the thought of that smug, pompous politician accepting a Nobel prize for exaggerating the science makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon just to get the image out of my head.
So I've already listed several points that Al Gore got wrong in his silly little movie. I'm also amused by nonscientists who think Al Gore is relevant. He's not a scientist. He's a smug, pompous, washed up politician. If you seriously want to learn about the science behind abrupt climate change, stick to peer-reviewed journal articles and stay away from politicians like Al Gore.
That would actually result in people exhaling CO2 that wasn't already part of the biosphere.
Good point. That's why I've been toying with the idea that loggers can fix the CO2 problem. Send them out to harvest pine trees at the end of their fast-growing (and thus fast-CO2-absorbing) phase. Stack the wood in warehouses or use it to build houses, just as long as it's treated so it doesn't decompose. If we can do this on a large enough scale, loggers might be able to sequester CO2 by cutting down enough trees, then planting another set of trees to continue the process.
What a strange coincidence! That's the way I do my scientific research too. Whenever I talk about anthropogenic climate change, I like to bring up the very closely related topics of eugenics and lobotomies. I feel that helps to keep the conversation focused on the relevant scientific evidence.
Not sure why your reply was modded informative(possibly due to the methane formula otherwise it was anything but) anyways, that whole powerful vs stays in the atmosphere has been worked out thus you have the GWP(global warming potential here )Which states that methane is 25 times worse than CO2.
Yes, per kilogram, methane is ~25x more effective at trapping heat than CO2 on a time horizon of 100 years. But industrial processes release so much more CO2 that the total radiative forcing of CO2 is more than double that of methane.
Spend a few hundred hours researching the issue, and you can be qualified to comment, too.
When you say "research" do you mean enrolling in graduate physics courses at an accredited university to learn about the radiative physics of the atmosphere? (This would involve some kind of objective measure of your ability to construct and solve equations.)
Or does "research" mean reading crackpot websites, then using trick #11: "10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it. (10 more for emphasizing that you worked on your own.)"
Considering your other comment (which is wrong), it's probably not necessary for you to answer this question.
Keep in mind that all the creationists I've seen are convinced that they understand evolution better than 97% of evolutionary biologists. Just like you seem to be convinced that you understand radiative physics better than 97% of climatologists, and the overwhelming majority of scientists in all fields.
My impression is that "clean coal" is expensive because of the specialized techniques needed to separate the CO2 from the rest of the emissions (which would kill the plants or at least make them foul-tasting.) I haven't seen any proof that clean coal is economically viable on the kinds of scales we'd need to fix the CO2 problem. Once it gets more expensive than nuclear, why not just build nuclear plants and have a much smaller quantity of solid waste that can be dropped down a borehole, sealed and forgotten?
Notice that they're meteorologists. In other words, they study short term trends and don't have PhD-level understanding of ensemble averages and other techniques necessary to analyze long term trends. (Heck, they're TV personalities. They might not know more than how to wave their hands around a green screen.)
But sqrt(2) is right to say that mostscientists agree that anthropogenic CO2 is causing a dangerous temperature increase. The percentage of scientists who agree with this statement increases with increasing relevance of the scientist's field.
The real question is, if Xenu dropped a hydrogen bomb in after them, would their deaths release thetans? Or is it true that IRS employees and lawyers really are soulless creatures belched from the underworld?
I didn't notice scientists telling President Bush that it was perfectly okay to burn fossil fuels. In fact, it seems like scientists have been saying pretty much the same thing for decades, but the last head of government never listened.
What a strange coincidence! I also got my education in atmospheric radiative physics from George Carlin. And I enjoy stand-up comedy by the National Academy of Sciences.
Methane's lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter than CO2's, so it's less of a long-term problem. You're right to say that methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and we need to stop emitting it too. But as soon as we stop emitting methane, concentrations will decrease in a few years. Not so with CO2. (Also, methane is CH4, so technically methane has more carbon by mass than CO2...)
Hmm, I think I misinterpreted your comment. At first I thought you were yet another armchair physicist who "discovered" that people breathe CO2, thus exposing the international conspiracy of scientists. My bad.
That's because breathing CO2 just recycles CO2 that's already in the biosphere. Digging miles into the earth to burn fossil fuels releases CO2 that hasn't been part of the biosphere for tens of millions of years. As I've repeatedly explained, fossil fuel use can be causally linked to the skyrocketing CO2 concentration through the C-12/C-13 isotope ratio (among other techniques).
Oddly enough, the National Academy of Sciences is aware that humans exhale CO2. Imagine that.
Oops. I meant to say "mirrored box filled with light". Also, next time you're being interrogated in a room with a "one-way mirror", just put your eye right up against the glass and block out ambient light using your hands. You'll probably be able to see into the viewing room unless the viewing room is very dim and/or the interrogation room is very bright.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Where does the Doran survey say that? As far as I can tell, the Doran survey ends with this conclusion:
It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long term climate processes. The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists.
Feeling lucky?
Thanks. This should be modded insightful, not funny. He even obliquely referred to the fact that not replanting the trees would reduce average global temperatures but wouldn't help with ocean acidification. Kudos.
Notice that in the people-press.org survey, 70% of scientists call global warming a "very serious" problem. Only 6% call it "not too serious" or "not a problem".
When have you ever seen the IPCC or any peer-reviewed paper discuss "cataclysmic disaster"? Note that in the jamstec.go.jp survey, 15-20% of scientists think the IPCC has understated the seriousness of the problem.
No, you haven't been talking only about issue #1. You were clearly implying that Watts has uncovered issues that Real Climate is "bullshitting" about. I've been trying to stress that this isn't true.
You know what? Forget it. This is too repetitive for me to bother. Have a nice day.
Yes, but thetans are only troublesome because Xenu brainwashed them while they were still alive before he detonated the nuke in the volcano. Duh.
How many different ways should I explain this? Watts implied that his "good" stations would have a significantly smaller warming trend than the "bad" stations. Menne 2010 showed that any differences are negligible:
Watts's response is incoherent, filled with healthy doses of a persecution complex:
He spent years posting pictures and implying incompetence/conspiracies on the part of NOAA/NASA scientists without ever bothering to redo NOAA's analysis on his subset of "good" stations. When someone actually did some science with his rankings, his claims ended up looking silly even to nonscientists who aren't familiar with previous studies like Parker 2004.
And, obviously, Watts doesn't see Menne's paper as verification of any sort. You appear to be alone in that opinion, and I don't understand why you're taking a position that even Watts is sensible enough not to make. He's saying that Menne is wrong, and pointing two non-peer-reviewed (heck, unlinked) analyses of "more complete" data which he's apparently not going to share.
What surface station data? Anthony Watts has a blog filled with photos and a history of failed journal submissions. I'm not disputing his politics. I'm saying that he clearly implied that the "best" 10% of stations would show global cooling (or stagnation) whereas the "bad" 90% of stations contaminated by the UHI would show an even bigger increase. When someone actually checked this, it turns out he was wrong. Seriously, read Menne et al 2010, linked previously but I'll give it one more shot. Scientists hadn't ignored any of the issues Watts implies. They'd actually checked the time series in quite a few interesting ways. Watts simply didn't do a thorough literature search before making his wacky claims.
I've made a list of all the nonsense I'd seen from the Greens. What utter rubbish. I've still got things to add to that list, too, I just can't divert time away from school...
They're smaller than the error bars you can get using the most sophisticated approach that can be solved using a paper and pencil. Decreasing the error bars further will require better understanding of cloud formation and aerosol interactions, faster computers, raw data at higher spatial and temporal densities, and a better theoretical understanding of the turbulence that is currently extremely difficult to model such as the oscillations ENSO, AO, AAO, NAO, PNA, AMO, PDO, MJO, etc.
Radtea already asked what would be necessary to convince me that our emissions aren't responsible for at least the majority of the warming since ~1970, as measured using 20 year smoothing to account for our current limitations.
I'd been reading Anthony Watts's websites for years before Kyle and I discussed surfacestations.org last year. He acts like a serious crackpot on his other site wattsupwiththat.com, but clearly tries to keep a lid on the crazy when writing surfacestations.org.
Taken together, both sites make it clear that Watts believes climatologists are incompetent and/or engaged in a massive conspiracy. He ignores the multiple independent proxies and wind studies which back up the instrumental temperature record. He implies that the urban heat island effect is responsible for the rise of instrumental temperature record because 90% of stations are "poor quality" according to him. So scientists take the 10% of stations that are "approved" by Watts, and its time series is very similar to the time series of all stations. Furthermore, the abstract of the Menne 2010 paper I've already linked pointed out that the bias was "counterintuitive" to Watts's preconceptions. This is not a verification of Watts in any sense.
That's not how I read James Annan's series of three articles. He seemed to mainly be criticizing Pielke's sloppy statistics. I've previously described this in many places, but the best I can find at the moment is here. Again, the analyses I've linked take proper ensembles of the AR1 models, updated with actual emissions and other forcings, and analyze the results with an understanding of the statistical limitations imposed by the need to average out weather noise. I don't see any evidence that Pielke actually did any of this, which is probably why he hasn't gotten any of these rants published in a reputable journal.
Again, I think the stratospheric water vapor issues I've previously linked and the inherent unpredictability of turbulence like ENSO are enough to explain most or all of this difference.
Even the "large" uncertainties in current GCMs are small enough to show that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for the warming since 1970. Even though the two curves have wide error bars, they don't overlap. What other objective measure should we use to determine when the error bars get "small enough"?
I've recently been threatened with a lawsuit on Slashdot, so my commitment to anonymity is stronger than ever. I don't want to end up like the CRU scientists. But I've described my
As I've explained at length, the problem is that programmers think their Java skillz enable them to understand both halves of climate science. For example, a programmer might say something like this:
... without noticing that scientists perform many independent verifications of these stations. Just like evolutionary biologists face a deluge of engineers who disprove evolution using the 2nd law of thermodynamics (standard Salem hypothesis), climate scientists face a deluge of engineers and programmers who use their hacking skills to prove that CO2 is saturated, or that global warming is caused by sunspots, etc.
The same one I've been linking for a while now.
I've already been very critical of Gore, so I'm tempted to agree with that small criticism. But I haven't yet censored any posts on my article, and I think that was a mistake. Two programmers (also creationists, incidentally) wasted ~50 pages on nonsense. I don't blame scientists who want to keep the conversation focused on the facts, and I've seen contrary viewpoints on Real Climate. They just don't devote hundreds of pages on each article to blather like "Water vapor is more important than CO2, so scientists are conspirators/incompetent/both!"
Considering that you haven't commented on James Annan's analyses, I guess there's no reason for me to mention Ambitwistor's links again. There's also probably no point in linking my analysis of this issue again, where I provided several links showing comparisons that show temperatures tracking well inside the 95% confidence level.
It's important to realize that climate models like those used in the IPCC reports are dynamical models, not empirical. They don't provide predictions of temperatures per se, rather they predict the climate response (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise) to changes in forcings like sunlight, CO2 concentration, stratospheric water vapor, etc.
All the analyses I've seen that have taken into account the actual history of these variables show that temperatures are well within the IPCC's error bars.
Okay, good points. I vaguely remember Bush's plan, and I strongly disagree with the Democrats on the nuclear issue. But, oddly, I find Bush's plan to be require more "fine-tuned" government intervention. Without some way to account for the negative externalities of coal (i.e. carbon tax, cap-and-trade, whatever- for brevity's sake I'll just call it a carbon tax), nuclear stations would never get built by the "free" market because coal is much cheaper. Thus construction of nuclear plants would have to be subsidized mostly or entirely by the government. On the other hand, a carbon tax would push the "free" market to develop a new generation of nuclear plants purely to chase profits, the most capitalist reason imaginable.
Yes, in some abstract sense imposing a tax on carbon moves us further from laissez faire capitalism. But that seems awfully similar to fining companies who pour chemical waste into rivers. It's like a tax on pollution, and it provides incentive for companies to find ways to handle waste responsibly. Bush's global warming plan would be more analogous to the government creating an bureacratic agency to find ways to fix the waste issue, without bothering to stop (or even fine) the people who are dumping chemicals into rivers. That's probably not the best idea because government bureacracies are generally worse at innovation than the free market.
Also, it seems like Bush was proposing an underfunded plan (like practically everything else he and congress did during that period: Medicare increases, No Child Left Behind, Constellation, Iraq, etc). So he seems to be saying that the government should build nuclear power plants (because without a carbon tax the free market simply won't) but he doesn't want to hurt the economy so he's not going to raise any kind of taxes to build the nuclear power plants. That's a recipe for doing exactly nothing. At the very least he'd have to raise taxes for his government program to build nuclear power plants.
Don't mistake my disappointment in the (lack of) intellectual rigor of most non-scientists as anger. It's an emotion much more akin to sadness. And the point of my modified salem hypothesis was that computer science isn't really all that closely related to the radiative physics of the atmosphere. In my opinion, computer science should probably be called "algorithm engineering" in an attempt to emphasize the difference between it and the "natural sciences". The "standard" Salem hypothesis is similar and (as far as I can tell) very descriptive of reality; my only modification was that of generalizing the statement somewhat.
My current point is that a staggering number of crackpots stress the amount of time they've spent independently studying an idea, missing the fact that they have no objective way to determine if this "study" has actually enabled them to solve serious graduate physics problems because no one's ever graded their homework or exams. It's important to stress that this kind of independent verification is a critical part of the educational process.
No, but I disagree with your assessment that Real Climate are bullshitting deceitful hacks, for reasons that I've explained at length in my article.
Indeed, I just remembered that I asked people to mod up one of your previous comments. But I also disagree that "the IPCC has done a good enough job discrediting themselves, with their predictions historically overstating global warming" for similar reasons as Ambitwistor in his reply to your comment.
Another example of the modified salem hypothesis.
Let me guess, the crackpot theories you've eliminated happen to be the ones that my previous comment showed are accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists who actually study these topics for a living?
Note that my article starts with the sentence "... this explains why some people who watch a documentary that exaggerates the science end up imitating that smug politician's alarmism."
Later in the article, during my conversation with Jane Q. Public: "... the thought of that smug, pompous politician accepting a Nobel prize for exaggerating the science makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon just to get the image out of my head.
So I've already listed several points that Al Gore got wrong in his silly little movie. I'm also amused by nonscientists who think Al Gore is relevant. He's not a scientist. He's a smug, pompous, washed up politician. If you seriously want to learn about the science behind abrupt climate change, stick to peer-reviewed journal articles and stay away from politicians like Al Gore.
Good point. That's why I've been toying with the idea that loggers can fix the CO2 problem. Send them out to harvest pine trees at the end of their fast-growing (and thus fast-CO2-absorbing) phase. Stack the wood in warehouses or use it to build houses, just as long as it's treated so it doesn't decompose. If we can do this on a large enough scale, loggers might be able to sequester CO2 by cutting down enough trees, then planting another set of trees to continue the process.
What a strange coincidence! That's the way I do my scientific research too. Whenever I talk about anthropogenic climate change, I like to bring up the very closely related topics of eugenics and lobotomies. I feel that helps to keep the conversation focused on the relevant scientific evidence.
Yes, per kilogram, methane is ~25x more effective at trapping heat than CO2 on a time horizon of 100 years. But industrial processes release so much more CO2 that the total radiative forcing of CO2 is more than double that of methane.
When you say "research" do you mean enrolling in graduate physics courses at an accredited university to learn about the radiative physics of the atmosphere? (This would involve some kind of objective measure of your ability to construct and solve equations.)
Or does "research" mean reading crackpot websites, then using trick #11: "10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it. (10 more for emphasizing that you worked on your own.)"
Considering your other comment (which is wrong), it's probably not necessary for you to answer this question.
Keep in mind that all the creationists I've seen are convinced that they understand evolution better than 97% of evolutionary biologists. Just like you seem to be convinced that you understand radiative physics better than 97% of climatologists, and the overwhelming majority of scientists in all fields.
My impression is that "clean coal" is expensive because of the specialized techniques needed to separate the CO2 from the rest of the emissions (which would kill the plants or at least make them foul-tasting.) I haven't seen any proof that clean coal is economically viable on the kinds of scales we'd need to fix the CO2 problem. Once it gets more expensive than nuclear, why not just build nuclear plants and have a much smaller quantity of solid waste that can be dropped down a borehole, sealed and forgotten?
Notice that they're meteorologists. In other words, they study short term trends and don't have PhD-level understanding of ensemble averages and other techniques necessary to analyze long term trends. (Heck, they're TV personalities. They might not know more than how to wave their hands around a green screen.)
But sqrt(2) is right to say that most scientists agree that anthropogenic CO2 is causing a dangerous temperature increase. The percentage of scientists who agree with this statement increases with increasing relevance of the scientist's field.
The real question is, if Xenu dropped a hydrogen bomb in after them, would their deaths release thetans? Or is it true that IRS employees and lawyers really are soulless creatures belched from the underworld?
I didn't notice scientists telling President Bush that it was perfectly okay to burn fossil fuels. In fact, it seems like scientists have been saying pretty much the same thing for decades, but the last head of government never listened.
What a strange coincidence! I also got my education in atmospheric radiative physics from George Carlin. And I enjoy stand-up comedy by the National Academy of Sciences.
Methane's lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter than CO2's, so it's less of a long-term problem. You're right to say that methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and we need to stop emitting it too. But as soon as we stop emitting methane, concentrations will decrease in a few years. Not so with CO2. (Also, methane is CH4, so technically methane has more carbon by mass than CO2...)
Hmm, I think I misinterpreted your comment. At first I thought you were yet another armchair physicist who "discovered" that people breathe CO2, thus exposing the international conspiracy of scientists. My bad.
That's because breathing CO2 just recycles CO2 that's already in the biosphere. Digging miles into the earth to burn fossil fuels releases CO2 that hasn't been part of the biosphere for tens of millions of years. As I've repeatedly explained, fossil fuel use can be causally linked to the skyrocketing CO2 concentration through the C-12/C-13 isotope ratio (among other techniques).
Oddly enough, the National Academy of Sciences is aware that humans exhale CO2. Imagine that.
Oops. I meant to say "mirrored box filled with light". Also, next time you're being interrogated in a room with a "one-way mirror", just put your eye right up against the glass and block out ambient light using your hands. You'll probably be able to see into the viewing room unless the viewing room is very dim and/or the interrogation room is very bright.