Google linked me to this story, with some astonishing quotations that show just how confused the Microsoft camp is about itself.
The main spin is whether "leaked source code" and "wide open to hacking" are pretty much the same thing. Imagine someone saying 'we are concerned if Linux source code has been leaked to the internet and gets into the wrong hands. A talented hacker with source code can wreak havoc and will cost our enterprise clients, consumers and businesses time, effort and money to combat it'
Just because a man is brilliant doesn't mean he isn't a crackpot.
Most crackpots develop in social isolation, but there's another breed that develop in situations of power where they isolate themselves from criticism.
Wolfram is, in my opinion, a very interesting crackpot. He paid for his circle of sycophants with his own hard work, technical and business skills. This gave him the isolation he needed to place himself in the league of Newton and Einstein without fear of contradiction.
I believe I gathered everything of value from his massive tome in an hour at a bookstore. I recommend you buy yourself a latte at Borders and do the same. It's an hour well spent, but basically if you have some solid math and CS, you'll find it a new kind of science whose depths can be plumbed in an hour.
Yes, it's a nice piece, but I am sure I read it in 1997 or earlier, based on the desk I remember sitting at when I read it. I had just discovered "feminist deconstruction of science" at the time. See Sandra Harding's "Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?" for an egregious example.
Read the article. It's about scientists, not zealots. Crichton claims that social pressure trumps the evidence of nature within the climatological sciences . (It's certainly a point one could argue in some corners of the humanities. In the case of physical science in general, and physical climatology in particular, however, it happens to be incorrect. This is because, well, of the scientific method. Perhaps you've heard of it.)
He appears to have no knowledge of the foundations of the scientific consensus regarding physical climatology and the evidence which supports it, though. On the other hand, unlike you, Crichton does acknowledge that such a consensus does exist. He posits this as a problem in and of itself.
Of course, sometimes truth does emerge from science, and consensus tends to follow rather quickly. People proposing a non-heliocentric solar system model, for instance, haven't gotten much scientific attention since Copernicus worked out the basics.
As always, anyone with a genuine interest in climate change on policy-relevant time scales should actually bother to look at the IPCC reports. Recently the American Geophysical Union has weighed in with an official position, unanimously approved by its governing council, if you'd like to see a brief overview.
Claimer/Disclaimer: I build computer models of climate dynamics and statistics. I am funded by NSF to keep doing so.
First of all, we didn't start from Kyoto, we started from global warming. My point is that the AGU has taken a position which is no longer controversial in the scientific community. There IS a consensus, and anyone arguing that the consensus is dramatically wrong has to do better than vaguely asserting that consensus is sometimes wrong.
Actually, a century happens to be a time scale very long compared to weather and very short compared to climate, which makes it a relatively easy time scale to predict. All the major climate mysteries cut in on longer time scales.
I am prepared to argue Kyoto, (I did favor it on the grounds that a small step in the right direction is far better than nothing), but that is, as you say, more a matter of politics than of science. It almost reads as if you believe that scientists should not hold opinions on matters of public interest, though, especially when the policy is relevant to their own expertise.
It is important that scientists speak as experts only when they are expert, and in the heat of debate that can be difficult, especially when parts of the issue do draw upon the relevant expertise. Please note in this context that you are the one who brought up Kyoto, not me.
I believe that the AGU statement essentially captures (in my opinion in a greatly understated way) the truth of the matter and makes no statements whatsoever that are in substantial doubt by the vast majority of relevant professionals. This and not Kyoto is what I was bringing up in answer to Crichton. It's necessary to get understanding on what is actually going on before moving on to what to do about it.
I brought F=ma into the discussion to show an obvious example that consensus is not always false. I make no claim that consensus is always true, and I explicitly agreed that there are social pressures towards consensus. Your summary of my position struck me as intemperate and dishonest.
Many of the questions you ask in this last posting (as opposed to the previous one) are good and interesting ones, though I believe that the "hockey stick" thing is some National Review contrivance. (I've never heard any real scientists speak of it.)
Clearly, somewhere between "CO2 has an effect toward warming" and Kyoto you do cross from science into politics. SO what? Kyoto is politics by definition. To imply that in some way constitutes proof that it is bad politics strikes me as sloppy thinking. Do you have an axiom that "all policies are bad policies", and do you expect me to accept this axiom?
Can I tell you the climate of 2100? As you point out, much is contingent on human behavior, so, no. Can I tell you what the climate of 2100 will be given a specific emissions and land use scenario? Well, yes I probably can, roughly speaking, though the larger the human inputs the larger the chance of a catastrophic failure of the models I am using, which will be the least of our problems in that case.
Are you seriously interested in considering this, or are you just being polemical? I suspect that you choose your science to fit your politics, much as many greenies do. The "hockey stick" thing is a bit of a giveaway. So is your strawman argument about my F=ma point.
I've wasted too much time arguing with people who think like lawyers. There's no point to it (unless I'm actually in court) and I have better ways to spend my time.
Your summary of the point I made with F=ma is a strawman. I made no such argument. Your other points are similarly rhetorical rather than logical. I suggest you become a lawyer and leave us scientists alone.
I think it's the journalistic pressures that predominate. Bad news sells papers. Scientists are as prone as the rest of us to getting the overall impression that things are getting worse, because bad news travels faster than good news and sells better.
Okay, then, I'll send my next grant proposal to Time Warner instead of NSF. Thanks.
The problem I have with this logic is that it does not follow. There's only three basic predictions to make on climate issues right now, "It'll get warmer", "It'll get cooler", or "It'll stay the same". Since the smart money is not on the third outcome, you really have a 50-50 chance of being right on this issue by sheer luck.
Clever, but wrong.
This isn't about a prediction of the sign of the change. It's about a prediction of unnaturally rapid change, mostly in high latitude continental interiors. Been to Alaska or Alberta lately?
Regarding the models, I know their limitations, probably better than you do. Skill is not an on/off proposition though.
As for climate change, any sufficiently rapid change is destructive, because infrastructure is built on a presumption of a relatively stable climate. What we are predicting, based not just on computer models but also on basic physical principles, is accelerating climate change, dominated in the short run by decreased snow cover and sea ice in continental interiors. How much longer does the acceleration need to go on before you believe in it? We are already changing at an extraordinary pace compared to natural variability.
we have no proof or evidence that the world will continue to warm
No, Feynman was saying that the nuclear winter scenarios were half baked. He certainly has as much right to such an opinion as Sagan, not a climatologist either.
The quote says nothing whatsoever about Feynman's opinion about greenhouse-gas mediated climate change.
Crichton's lecture is surprisingly interesting, but he is wrong about climate change. We already know with negligible remaining room for doubt that there is a human-caused warming and we expect larger human-caused changes in the future. This has nothing to do with economic predictions and little to do with weather forecasts. The predictability time scales are different for phenomena with different time scales. We can pretty much tell you where Jupiter will be in the sky a million years from today, even if we can't predict when the Great Red Spot will vanish.
It is difficult to quantify the physics of worst-case scenarios. It is vercy difficult to quantify the economic or environmental risk of the likely as well as the worst-case scenarios. On the other hand it is not difficult to show that the last fifteen years have followed the course of the predictions of 15 years ago. Nor is this surprising. The underlying physics of the anthropogenic greenhouse forcing is well understood and based on classical physics.
Consensus can be pernicious, but it's usually a better bet to go with the consensus than against it.
F = ma is a consensus opinion, for instance.
Global warming skeptics seem to think the political pressures are in the direction of exagerrating the problem. This may be true in some countries, but is hardly true in the present configuration of the United States. Keeping this context in mind, the official position of the American Geophysical Union on climate change is worth considering, perhaps even as much as the opinions of a science fiction writer.
This "republic" vs "democracy" nitpicking is some sort of wierd semantic quibble popular in certain right-wing circles in the United States. I think it leads to some core ideological point or other. Perhaps it is simply that "Republican" is a better name for a political party than "Democrat". Who knows? What's wierd about it is not that they make the distinction, but that they insist that everyone else make the same distinction.
Some advice to the nitpickers, then. Words mean what they mean. Saying "the dictionary is incorrect" is silly. If you insist on the distinction, you should say, instead, something like "many of the writers I am interested in make a finer distinction in using these words, specifically treating 'republic' and 'democracy' as mutually exclusive attributes of a social order, and it is in that sense that I use them as well." That would be more polite and reasonable, since most of us do not believe that anything prevents a republic from being a democracy.
If you try being more polite and reasonable, maybe the rest of us will pay more attention to your ideas.
I'm no Kazaa user - I'm elated with iTunes and think its DRM policy is reasonable, and I've never used any Napster-like anonymous P2P. So when I read that the kid said she had no idea she was sharing files, I was dubious. However, she and her attorneys should note that the RIAA prominently asserts exactly that file sharing companies trick kids into file sharing. From their website:
In his testimony, [to Congress, RIAA chairman/CEO Mitch] Bainwol urged peer-to-peer network operators to voluntarily implement the following reforms:
Change the default setting for their users so that American children, teenagers and others are not automatically - and often unknowingly - uploading music from their hard drive.
Institute meaningful disclosure clearly notifying users that uploading and downloading copyrighted materials without permission is a violation of federal law.
...
"The law is clear. Yet the understanding of the law is hazy. Why? In large part it's because the file sharing networks like Kazaa deliberately induce people to break the law," testified Bainwol.
If this is true, the RIAA has a point. Such behavior on the part of the P2P services is hard to justify.
On the other hand, it means the kids using the service according to official RIAA testimony often lack intent to violate laws in general or to redistribute copyrighted material in particular ! The sort of random shakedown of well-intentioned end users (SCO anyone?) that we are now seeing is outrageous and enromously destructive, far worse than a total collapse of the recorded music industry would be.
If I can be assaulted by a squad of corporate attorneys when I think I am minding my own business, I will simply be inclined to avoid using any products whatsover that include any technology invented after about 1910.
If this kind of malicious attorney-goon-squad behavior is legal, it shouldn't be. Now here's a place for a federal law.
This guy has it figured out. It was already modded up to five on slashdot, so this
this is just a reminder.
My summary, slightly modified but same basic idea: 1) select candidate from touch screen; 2) computer prints barcoded ballot with your selections printed; 3) you verify and re-insert paper ballot; 4) ballot scanned to ensure match; 5) matching ballot saved. Voila - accurate counts and an audit trail.
I find your suggestion that a Nobel Peace Prize for Carter, Sadat and Begin amounts to evidence that the Chemistry committee would award its prize for invalid research ludicrous, at first glance, but I am openminded. Would you care to elaborate?
Failing that, I am happy to Appeal to Authority until you present a cohesive argument. I don't have time to argue with every airhead who thinks they know more chemistry than a Nobel winner.
What we need, and by definition cannot get, is an objective, non-biased, scientifically valid analysis of untainted data to determine what, if any, global impact greenhouse gases have had.
Why do you allege such a thing? Thermometers don't lie. There are well known ways to correct for human bias and scientists generally question each other pretty carefully about such things.
No one understands the natural variations in global temperatures.
The scientific community has many open questions, but no, to a first order cut we have quite a bit of confidence that we've figured out the main phenomena on the time scales that interest the policy sector.
You can't remove the other variables from the system (solar activity,
You can account for that one and measure it precisely.
global windfield changes, ocean current variations, etc.).
Um, those are what we are predicting (in an ensemble sense)... unless you mean something very different by climate than those of us in the business do
You can't establish a control (no second earth - darn!).
Fortunately the geological community has beenm working very hard on paleoclimate data and the modeling community has been working very hard to replicate paleoclimate from paleogeography, with quite good results.
We can't devise an experiment to perform any valid testing ("Let's release gigatons of CO2 this year, and then readsorb it all next, year, and study the results.").
Err, you can get a greenhouse effect in a lab, if you care to.
Even if you had these conditions covered, or cleverely circumvent the need for them, you can't get unbiased funding, and that taints the process unacceptably.
And which way do you suppose the funding is biased these days?
... Therefore, political statements like the Kyoto Accords are based on sketchy science at best, politics at worst, and shouldn't be considered to be solutions to a problem that may not even exist.
Just because you and your favorite political publications fail to understand it doesn't mean it's sketchy. Read this before you pretend to know what you are talking about.
Exactly right. We can't go off half-cocked because of some fringe allegations.
On the other hand, it would be nice if, on questions of substance like this one, people got their information from scientists, rather than the political press.
That is a kind way of saying "we have a limited amount of airtime and can't air every 'prize-winning' 'documentary'". Distinguishing between good and biased reporting is not a trivial task. Perhaps you think they erred. As it happens I don't.
Systematic observational biases are well-known and a great deal of effort goes into compensating for them in the instrumental record. Fortunately, there are multiple streams of evidence which greatly reduce the uncertainty.
The interglacial peaked about 6000 years ago, and there has been a small but consistent cooling trend since, until about 1900. Since about 1950 the rise appears to have been more rapid than at any time since the cooling trend began.
Actually it is quite clear that some of the warming is anthropogenic, and that all of it is anthropogenic is not excluded by the evidence. Often forgotten is that the natural background trend of the past 5,000 years was a gradual cooling, so in a sense over 100% of the observed temperature change may be a warming effect.
The current accelerated warming is comfortably in the range predicted 15 years ago when physics-based climate models first became plausible and is quite outside the range of the null hypothesis.
Glaciers are certainly retreating rapidly, worldwide. There are very few growing glaciers. Sea ice is also retreating in both hemispheres.
Looking at a glacier in rapid retreat is striking evidence at least of local warming. If like me you're too lazy, try this or google for 'glacier retreat'. (Note the mountain summit is over a mile square and the image shows ancient ice, not snow.)
When you keep in mind that this is happening everywhere, you have a global warming at high altitudes at least to account for.
For direct evidence of my assertion I can direct you to http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/244.htm
As for refuting the theory you propose I can offer the following off the top of my head. To attribute warming to solar variability you not only have to account for why the relatively large greenhouse forcing was ineffective but also why the relatively small solar forcing was effective. Occam comes clearly down on the side of greenhouse forcing.
In fact, solar forcing does provide (through orbital effects) the clock for natural ice age cycles, but no one has any idea how to make this forcing sufficient to trigger climate variation of the size we see without invoking an amplification through greenhouse forcing.
So the effect you propose (opr something like it) is real enough, but it doesn't mean the greenhouse gases aren't involved. On the contrary, greeenhouse effect changes are the only way we know to understand the big changes in temperature, even though radiative changes seem important in setting the timing.
The world is a complicated system, but the basic physical principles are known.We count watts in. We count watts out. They equilibrate. Watts in are effected by the sun. watts out are effected by the atmosphere. Both effects are first order important.
It's hard to refute your theory in more detail because as you quote it it's a bit vague.If you could find someone asserting it in a peer reviewed publication I could help you track down any debate it engendered. I'm guessing that if you find this in print it will be in advocacy press, not in a real science journal.
Slashdot Mirror
The main spin is whether "leaked source code" and "wide open to hacking" are pretty much the same thing. Imagine someone saying 'we are concerned if Linux source code has been leaked to the internet and gets into the wrong hands. A talented hacker with source code can wreak havoc and will cost our enterprise clients, consumers and businesses time, effort and money to combat it'
here
Most crackpots develop in social isolation, but there's another breed that develop in situations of power where they isolate themselves from criticism.
Wolfram is, in my opinion, a very interesting crackpot. He paid for his circle of sycophants with his own hard work, technical and business skills. This gave him the isolation he needed to place himself in the league of Newton and Einstein without fear of contradiction.
I believe I gathered everything of value from his massive tome in an hour at a bookstore. I recommend you buy yourself a latte at Borders and do the same. It's an hour well spent, but basically if you have some solid math and CS, you'll find it a new kind of science whose depths can be plumbed in an hour.
Advantages: real email stays free, spam costs, microtransaction standards emerge.
Disadvantages: Microsoft and Yahoo don't make as much money. Sorry.
Yes, it's a nice piece, but I am sure I read it in 1997 or earlier, based on the desk I remember sitting at when I read it. I had just discovered "feminist deconstruction of science" at the time. See Sandra Harding's "Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?" for an egregious example.
He appears to have no knowledge of the foundations of the scientific consensus regarding physical climatology and the evidence which supports it, though. On the other hand, unlike you, Crichton does acknowledge that such a consensus does exist. He posits this as a problem in and of itself.
Of course, sometimes truth does emerge from science, and consensus tends to follow rather quickly. People proposing a non-heliocentric solar system model, for instance, haven't gotten much scientific attention since Copernicus worked out the basics.
As always, anyone with a genuine interest in climate change on policy-relevant time scales should actually bother to look at the IPCC reports. Recently the American Geophysical Union has weighed in with an official position, unanimously approved by its governing council, if you'd like to see a brief overview.
Claimer/Disclaimer: I build computer models of climate dynamics and statistics. I am funded by NSF to keep doing so.
Referenced Nielsen article: 76% of browser users have used a streaming data client or an instant messaging client. (dull)
Hmm.
Actually, a century happens to be a time scale very long compared to weather and very short compared to climate, which makes it a relatively easy time scale to predict. All the major climate mysteries cut in on longer time scales.
I am prepared to argue Kyoto, (I did favor it on the grounds that a small step in the right direction is far better than nothing), but that is, as you say, more a matter of politics than of science. It almost reads as if you believe that scientists should not hold opinions on matters of public interest, though, especially when the policy is relevant to their own expertise. It is important that scientists speak as experts only when they are expert, and in the heat of debate that can be difficult, especially when parts of the issue do draw upon the relevant expertise. Please note in this context that you are the one who brought up Kyoto, not me.
I believe that the AGU statement essentially captures (in my opinion in a greatly understated way) the truth of the matter and makes no statements whatsoever that are in substantial doubt by the vast majority of relevant professionals. This and not Kyoto is what I was bringing up in answer to Crichton. It's necessary to get understanding on what is actually going on before moving on to what to do about it.
Many of the questions you ask in this last posting (as opposed to the previous one) are good and interesting ones, though I believe that the "hockey stick" thing is some National Review contrivance. (I've never heard any real scientists speak of it.)
Clearly, somewhere between "CO2 has an effect toward warming" and Kyoto you do cross from science into politics. SO what? Kyoto is politics by definition. To imply that in some way constitutes proof that it is bad politics strikes me as sloppy thinking. Do you have an axiom that "all policies are bad policies", and do you expect me to accept this axiom?
Can I tell you the climate of 2100? As you point out, much is contingent on human behavior, so, no. Can I tell you what the climate of 2100 will be given a specific emissions and land use scenario? Well, yes I probably can, roughly speaking, though the larger the human inputs the larger the chance of a catastrophic failure of the models I am using, which will be the least of our problems in that case.
Are you seriously interested in considering this, or are you just being polemical? I suspect that you choose your science to fit your politics, much as many greenies do. The "hockey stick" thing is a bit of a giveaway. So is your strawman argument about my F=ma point.
I've wasted too much time arguing with people who think like lawyers. There's no point to it (unless I'm actually in court) and I have better ways to spend my time.
Your summary of the point I made with F=ma is a strawman. I made no such argument. Your other points are similarly rhetorical rather than logical. I suggest you become a lawyer and leave us scientists alone.
Okay, then, I'll send my next grant proposal to Time Warner instead of NSF. Thanks.
Clever, but wrong.
This isn't about a prediction of the sign of the change. It's about a prediction of unnaturally rapid change, mostly in high latitude continental interiors. Been to Alaska or Alberta lately?
Regarding the models, I know their limitations, probably better than you do. Skill is not an on/off proposition though.
As for climate change, any sufficiently rapid change is destructive, because infrastructure is built on a presumption of a relatively stable climate. What we are predicting, based not just on computer models but also on basic physical principles, is accelerating climate change, dominated in the short run by decreased snow cover and sea ice in continental interiors. How much longer does the acceleration need to go on before you believe in it? We are already changing at an extraordinary pace compared to natural variability.
we have no proof or evidence that the world will continue to warm
Maybe you don't. The scientific community does.
The quote says nothing whatsoever about Feynman's opinion about greenhouse-gas mediated climate change.
It is difficult to quantify the physics of worst-case scenarios. It is vercy difficult to quantify the economic or environmental risk of the likely as well as the worst-case scenarios. On the other hand it is not difficult to show that the last fifteen years have followed the course of the predictions of 15 years ago. Nor is this surprising. The underlying physics of the anthropogenic greenhouse forcing is well understood and based on classical physics.
Consensus can be pernicious, but it's usually a better bet to go with the consensus than against it.
F = ma is a consensus opinion, for instance.
Global warming skeptics seem to think the political pressures are in the direction of exagerrating the problem. This may be true in some countries, but is hardly true in the present configuration of the United States. Keeping this context in mind, the official position of the American Geophysical Union on climate change is worth considering, perhaps even as much as the opinions of a science fiction writer.
Some advice to the nitpickers, then. Words mean what they mean. Saying "the dictionary is incorrect" is silly. If you insist on the distinction, you should say, instead, something like "many of the writers I am interested in make a finer distinction in using these words, specifically treating 'republic' and 'democracy' as mutually exclusive attributes of a social order, and it is in that sense that I use them as well." That would be more polite and reasonable, since most of us do not believe that anything prevents a republic from being a democracy.
If you try being more polite and reasonable, maybe the rest of us will pay more attention to your ideas.
In his testimony, [to Congress, RIAA chairman/CEO Mitch] Bainwol urged peer-to-peer network operators to voluntarily implement the following reforms:
...
"The law is clear. Yet the understanding of the law is hazy. Why? In large part it's because the file sharing networks like Kazaa deliberately induce people to break the law," testified Bainwol.
If this is true, the RIAA has a point. Such behavior on the part of the P2P services is hard to justify.
On the other hand, it means the kids using the service according to official RIAA testimony often lack intent to violate laws in general or to redistribute copyrighted material in particular ! The sort of random shakedown of well-intentioned end users (SCO anyone?) that we are now seeing is outrageous and enromously destructive, far worse than a total collapse of the recorded music industry would be.
If I can be assaulted by a squad of corporate attorneys when I think I am minding my own business, I will simply be inclined to avoid using any products whatsover that include any technology invented after about 1910.
If this kind of malicious attorney-goon-squad behavior is legal, it shouldn't be. Now here's a place for a federal law.
My summary, slightly modified but same basic idea: 1) select candidate from touch screen; 2) computer prints barcoded ballot with your selections printed; 3) you verify and re-insert paper ballot; 4) ballot scanned to ensure match; 5) matching ballot saved. Voila - accurate counts and an audit trail.
Failing that, I am happy to Appeal to Authority until you present a cohesive argument. I don't have time to argue with every airhead who thinks they know more chemistry than a Nobel winner.
Why do you allege such a thing? Thermometers don't lie. There are well known ways to correct for human bias and scientists generally question each other pretty carefully about such things.
No one understands the natural variations in global temperatures.
The scientific community has many open questions, but no, to a first order cut we have quite a bit of confidence that we've figured out the main phenomena on the time scales that interest the policy sector.
You can't remove the other variables from the system (solar activity,
You can account for that one and measure it precisely.
global windfield changes, ocean current variations, etc.).
Um, those are what we are predicting (in an ensemble sense)... unless you mean something very different by climate than those of us in the business do
You can't establish a control (no second earth - darn!).
Fortunately the geological community has beenm working very hard on paleoclimate data and the modeling community has been working very hard to replicate paleoclimate from paleogeography, with quite good results.
We can't devise an experiment to perform any valid testing ("Let's release gigatons of CO2 this year, and then readsorb it all next, year, and study the results.").
Err, you can get a greenhouse effect in a lab, if you care to.
Even if you had these conditions covered, or cleverely circumvent the need for them, you can't get unbiased funding, and that taints the process unacceptably.
And which way do you suppose the funding is biased these days?
Just because you and your favorite political publications fail to understand it doesn't mean it's sketchy. Read this before you pretend to know what you are talking about.
On the other hand, it would be nice if, on questions of substance like this one, people got their information from scientists, rather than the political press.
In the present case, the place to go is not some loony newspaper reporting on some fringe journal. The place to go is to the relevant professional community .
Systematic observational biases are well-known and a great deal of effort goes into compensating for them in the instrumental record. Fortunately, there are multiple streams of evidence which greatly reduce the uncertainty.
Which is why Rowland and Molina got the Nobel Prize in chemistry, right, for helping fabricate the hoax? Here is Molina's Nobel Lecture.
The interglacial peaked about 6000 years ago, and there has been a small but consistent cooling trend since, until about 1900. Since about 1950 the rise appears to have been more rapid than at any time since the cooling trend began.
The current accelerated warming is comfortably in the range predicted 15 years ago when physics-based climate models first became plausible and is quite outside the range of the null hypothesis.
Glaciers are certainly retreating rapidly, worldwide. There are very few growing glaciers. Sea ice is also retreating in both hemispheres.
Looking at a glacier in rapid retreat is striking evidence at least of local warming. If like me you're too lazy, try this or google for 'glacier retreat'. (Note the mountain summit is over a mile square and the image shows ancient ice, not snow.)
When you keep in mind that this is happening everywhere, you have a global warming at high altitudes at least to account for.
As for refuting the theory you propose I can offer the following off the top of my head. To attribute warming to solar variability you not only have to account for why the relatively large greenhouse forcing was ineffective but also why the relatively small solar forcing was effective. Occam comes clearly down on the side of greenhouse forcing.
In fact, solar forcing does provide (through orbital effects) the clock for natural ice age cycles, but no one has any idea how to make this forcing sufficient to trigger climate variation of the size we see without invoking an amplification through greenhouse forcing.
So the effect you propose (opr something like it) is real enough, but it doesn't mean the greenhouse gases aren't involved. On the contrary, greeenhouse effect changes are the only way we know to understand the big changes in temperature, even though radiative changes seem important in setting the timing.
The world is a complicated system, but the basic physical principles are known.We count watts in. We count watts out. They equilibrate. Watts in are effected by the sun. watts out are effected by the atmosphere. Both effects are first order important.
It's hard to refute your theory in more detail because as you quote it it's a bit vague.If you could find someone asserting it in a peer reviewed publication I could help you track down any debate it engendered. I'm guessing that if you find this in print it will be in advocacy press, not in a real science journal.