The models had no bug relevant to the news to which you refer. The observational data processing had a bug. An embarassing one, but not a very consequential one. If it had been consequential, it would have been noticed earlier.
So...do the current climate models properly predict the entirety of the past climate performance? If not, then they are all invalid.
Models are not valid or invalid; they are useful or not useful. If they are useful, they still can be misused.
Lacking exact boundary conditions even a perfect model will not retrodict observations perfectly. To some extent your challenge confuses weather and climate.
Our models provide a usefully accurate representation of climate in past observations and paleoclimate records.
According to the fourth U.N. report, the environment is a coupled, chaotic, non-linear system and long term climate change is not predictable. That's what they (the U.N. IPCC) say.
Oh expletive deleted.
I used to post to Slashdot climate discussions, but they've gotten so bad it's hardly worth the trouble anymore. This one is over the top. It's just ignorantly wrong.
About every time, somebody has to wheel out the distinction between weather and climate. So here it is again. Weather is the part that is chaotic. Climate is the part that isn't. CLimate is predictable by definition. See, I can't tell you if it will snow at Christmas, that would be a weather prediction many weeks out. But I can tell you Christmas will be colder than today (in the US and Europe, say). That is a climate prediction? Catch the difference?
OK, here's another one. I have a goldfish swimming in an aquarium. I can't predict where it will go next. Now you come along and kick the table that the aquarium is sitting on, and I tell you to stop, because if you kick it too hard the table will tip over, the aquarium will shatter, and the fish will die. Are you telling me I can't make that kind of prediction about the fish?
I am burned out on fighting the waves of bullshit. I am really discouraged by this fantasy that science never reaches conclusions so consensus must be fascism. We have a really big problem, and all the specious arguments in the world won't make it go away.
I am sure there is no text in the IPCC reports to the effect that you quote. GO ahead and pull up the reports and prove me wrong.
Isaac Asimov's Nightfall (1941) (later expanded into a full length novel) was about a planet in a system with five suns where "night" was so rare that it was believed to be a myth.
One of the greatest early SF stories. Look for it.
Yeah, but you can vote on politicians, and so you affect policies.
If this were just a matter of science, there wouldn't be a controversy. The side of this trumped up debate (which side that is, I won't specify here) which is lying would not exist if a great deal weren't at stake. Then you could read your typical pop science sources and get a good picture without the sort of noise pollution that this issue is subject to.
The scientific community is healthy, friendly, and occupies a spectrum of opinion. The public is presented with a grotesquely inaccurate picture of a "debate" with two "sides". This is a consequence of vested interests trying (all too successfully) to inject uncertainty into policy by faking confrontation in science.
Many people think the safest thing to do is shrug and conclude "a pox on both their houses", and ignore the whole business. Unfortunately, the situation is not like that. At this point it is inescapably true that at least one side of the perceived debate is lying. (I suppose it's not excludable that both sides are lying, but you'd have to wonder where the real scientists are in that case.) The public is forced to determine which "side" is lying and which "side" is accurately representing the state of the science.
As a member of the scientific community I could tell you which "side" bears any resemblance to the underlying state of knowledge, but you'd still have to decide if I am real or astroturfing. You do actually have to do that in a sense, because abstaining is as a decision with consequences.
Is the basic question "are humans causing sufficient global warming to be dangerous?" settled?
William Connolley on realclimate parsed the question fairly, here:
The main points that most would agree on as "the consensus" are:
The earth is getting warmer (0.6 +/- 0.2 oC in the past century; 0.1 0.17 oC/decade over the last 30 years (see update))
People are causing this.
If GHG emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate.
(This will be a problem and we ought to do something about it)
I've put those four points in rough order of certainty. The last one is in brackets because whilst many would agree, many others (who agree with 1-3) would not, at least without qualification. It's probably not a part of the core consensus in the way 1-3 are.
I understand that I can either argue from authority (ask you to take my word for it as an expert) or provide someevidence.
You will see in these Slashdot discussions plenty of weaseling on the first three points, despite readers of this list presumably being better informed on science than the general public. The first three points are not open questions in science. Like anything in science they are open for revisiting, but they are not where the action or controversy lies within the research community.
While I agree with the fourth point very strongly, and while a majority of participants in the relevant sciences probably do, it's not universally agreed. It's not really a scientific question, though; it's a question in economics, policies, values, and risk.
The broad scientific questions, the ones typically up for debate, are essentially settled.
What interests me here is why people continue to rant about questions that are part of the consensus, when the case is pretty much closed. They take offense when one has the temerity to suggest they are not only barking up the wrong tree, but that the tree they are barking up was chopped down for pulp years ago, but they don't seriously consider the possibility that while the policy is uncertain, the broad outlines of the facts are known well enough.
For those of you who think people like me are wrong, disingenuous, or even dishonest, consider how the situation looks to you vs how it would look if we were basically right. There would be organizations with substantial investments in resources (especially fossil fuels) whose long term value would be at risk. (There's ample precedent. Consider the history of the tobacco industry.) Their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders would be to minimize that risk. They would therefore inject the greatest possible doubt into the public's understanding of the science.
Consequently, there would be many arguments in the press, mostly appealing to the elements in the society who are generally most suspicious of regulation and taxation, that would cherry-pick evidence and spin tales that were scientifically incoherent and yet superficially convincing.
They would appeal to the fairness of the lay audience. They would claim that there are two sides to every issue. They would object to any presentation that was scientifically balanced on the grounds that their manufactured opinion was not represented. The echoes of this argument ring through every public discussion of the topic, on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Science and commerce do not deserve equal time on scientific questions. Cherry picked evidence does not deserve equal time with the totality of the evidence. The best policy is not a compromise between truth and fiction.
Capitalism is necessary for prosperity, and vigorous defense of private interests is part of the game. Cherry-picking evidence isn't illeg
There are some knobs that have to be twiddled to get the thing to work. But it does work. And the reason it is interesting is exactly because there aren't enough knobs to do the sort of overfitting you are talking about.
The models have perhaps a few hundred degrees of freedom in their design and millions of degrees of freedom in their output.
I'm not saying the enterprise is above reproach, but I am tired of blanket criticism from people who don't know anything about it. If you have something substantive to say, come out and say it.
If we didn't have a clue, friend, the climate models wouldn't work.
The climate wouldn't emerge from the primitive equations. Simulated rain wouldn't fall in wet places and would fall too much in dry places. The simulated jet stream wouldn't meander where the jet stream meanders. The simulated Gulf Stream wouldn't flow where the Gulf Stream flows. The simulated Antarctic Circumpolar Current would circumnavigate the Antarctic. etc.
The Japanese are even getting simulated hurricanes with simulated eyes forming on primitive equation global scale climate models and following hurricane tracks.
You have no business telling people what they don't understand and can't do when they can actually do it.
Sigh. Like sweeping sand off the beach. Here we go again...
Predicting climate is different from predicting weather. I cannot tell you whether Chicago will have a white Christmas (weather prediction), but I can tell you with a lot of confidence that Christmas will be colder than the 4th of July even a million years into the future (climate prediction).
Climate models are not tricks. The physics goes in. The climate comes out. It's not a trivial curve-fitting exercise the way you seem to think. We call them "primitive equation" models not because they are primitive, but because we *don't put the answer in* in any way. The model isn't told that Chicago winters are cold and Florida winters aren't. It *figures that out* from the physics.
Then why is there warming in the smokey Northern Hemisphere and none at all in the Southern Hemisphere?
We now wait for the traditional round of excuses.
We'll save the excused for actual facts, shall we? The Southern hemisphere is warming, despite recent assertions to the contrary from certain unreliable sources.
Any first course in physical oceanography goes through the derivation of western boundary currents like the Gulf Stream fairly early.
It's extremely robust. Unless the wind stops blowing from the east in the tropics and the west in the mid latitudes, you will have a Gulf Stream. It was qualitatively worked out by Henry Stommel around 1950, and the math was worked out in detail by Munk, Veronis, and other pioneers of physical oceanography in the 1950s. I don't have my library handy. I think Pond & Picard's Introduction to Dynamic Oceanography (or something like that title) would suffice, and should be understandable to anyone who got through undergraduate physics.
The CNN story is typical of the press's habit of confusing the Gulf Stream and the Thermohaline Circulation. I guess people just have an easier time pronouncing "Gulf Stream". It is conceivable that the Gulf Stream won't go as far north in the even of a massive meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, but recent evidence is shifting away from that.
Those aren't falsified predictions. Some of them are risks. Some of them are predictions for the future.
Coral reef decline is real enough, though the extent to which it depends on warming is unclear. A component may be through direct carbon toxicity rather than global warming; a separate mechanism from the same underlying cause of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
The Antarctic ice shelf/coastal inundation thing is, unfortunately, looking worse than it did recently; stay tuned for the fourth IPCC assessment next year. Drying out of the high plains ditto. But it will take 50 to 100 years to actually happen on current evidence, so it's in no way falsified.
The "dirsuption of the gulf stream" is pure journalistic gibberish. It is dynamically impossible according to basic theorems in physical oceanography. It is a torturing of the "deep freeze in Europe" scenario, which is on current evidence not going to happen. It was worth asking about, though, and was never a scientific prediction, just a hypothesis of interest.
Hurricanes: very great interannual variation so looking at a single year is invalid. The trends toward greater energy in tropical storms seem real. The frequency question is unclear.
The ozone impacts thing is off my turf, but consider that an averted crisis is not evidence that the crisis was impossible. We did stop the release of ozone depleting chemicals.
> Can you think of any prediction that has come true?
Strong predictions that have come true (made around 1990):
- Trend to increasing surface temperatures accelerates and exceeds typical natural variability by around 2000
- Trend to decreasing stratospheric temperatures accelerates
- Maximum surface heating impact in subpolar northern hemisphere regions.
Something that was, I think, argued around 1990 that seems to be coming true:
- Tendency to have an increasing proportion of middle latitude rainfall in severe events
Pretend you're a composer and you have just written the piece that is the pinnacle of your career. The New York Times says that your piece is the most musically perfect piece of classical music every played. Orchestras around the world want to perform your work. Do you have a right to charge them for it?
Of course you do.
So far so good. I have no problems with this up to this point.
If you didn't, then why would you write the music?
Suddenly my jaw hits the ground. Are people really this messed up about what life is about?
I don't trust any temperature data for dates prior to 1593.
Well, you don't know how earth science works, then. We have pretty clear measures of Greenland surface temperature going back 100,000 years, and Antarctic ones almost a million. It actually involves, hmm, a little science, though. We have pretty clear indications of global ice volume going back that far. We have geological evidence of previous ice ages and previous ice free ages.
It's called "evidence".
Isn't global warming better than another ice age?
Obviously it depends on how much global warming and how much ice age. Why?
glaciers change size seasonally.
Not noticeably, I believe. I'm afraid you're making that one up entirely. But here at least you are making a verifiable claim. So provide some evidence, would you?
There's also some discussion of it on a recent thread at RealClimate.
Monckton's rant is just the usual background noise. It's not hard to make up a story by selecting evidence carefully. The hard job is finding a story that is consistent with all the evidence. While we eagerly await the fourth IPCC assessment, the third IPCC assessment, the consensus of leading scientists in the relevant fields from 2001, is the best big picture we've got.
What some gadfly has to say should always be given due consideration, not less, but certainly not more. In the present case, not much.
I am an environmental scientist. As such I cannot be held responsible for what any political party does.
The word "environmentalist" makes me cringe, though not as much as the word "anti-environmentalist" does, I'll admit. I am just doing my part to explain the difference between the facts and the noise that is injected by people with many billions of dollars of fossil fuel assets that they are motivated to protect.
However, you are right that I do dismiss the contemporary crop of "global warming skeptics".
I dismiss "global warming skeptics" because they are incoherent and wrong and well-funded by non-scientific interests. If there weren't a lot of money at stake the skeptics would vanish. They don't have a coherent theory. If they did, they would get a hearing in scientific circles. They don't, so they are busy running around looking scientific for the press, and taking in people who are philosophically uncomfortable with the implications of the science.
Fifteen years ago there were interesting arguments against taking action. Now all the arguments are based on wishful thinking. I haven't seen an argument against restraining net carbon emissions with any "merits" for some considerable time, and it is not for want of looking.
I am sure you would not like some of my political opinions, but I am not discussing my politics in this thread. You are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts.
It's dreadful journalism, but it's describing real science. The study breathlessly referred to by the confused journalist only confirms one step in the chain of evidence behind the snowball hypothesis.
No, you are right on target. That is one of the very big questions about the snowball.
Some people have suggested a slushball alternative, with some open water on the equator, but that hasn't panned out in model studies. That configuration appears to be unstable.
So, yeah, how life survived is a question. Probably some very local geothermal effect saved a few tiny critters.
> What they hell ever happened to science for the sake of actual knowledge?
How do you tell science and political bullshit apart, other than by whether you like the result?
It happens that the "report" you quote is scientifically incoherent. I don't know much about polar bears, but I am very familiar with sea ice trends.
Arctic sea ice summer extent minima are rapidly retreating, and the best evidence is that perennial ice has shrunk by 40% ion the last forty years. It is reasonable to expect that all the perennial Arctic sea ice will go away in this century, both by extrapolation and by careful consideration of the thermodynamics and radiation budgets involved.
Real scientists talk about one issue at a time, and their opinions have a logical consistency rather than a political one. No one who is an expert on polar bears is an expert on sea ice mechanics.
The statement about Antarctica is a particlar howler.
"Moreover, while sea ice has decreased in the Arctic, it has remained relatively constant (or even increased slightly) in the Antarctic since 1978."
It's true enough but completely irrelevant. Have a glance at a globe. It might be worth considering that Antarctic sea ice has completely different origins than Arctic sea ice. If Antarctica melts, what happens to southern summer sea ice extent?
And why should polar bears care about the Antarctic anyway?
The paper you quote comes from a group that invariably highlights evidence against global warming and minimizes evidence supporting it. I don't know who funds it, but I have run into it before. I promise you it is not considered a scientific source; but go ahead an check the citation index and prove me wrong.
So, as someone who knows some of the scientists, who seem to me to be very serious people, I would say you have your bullshit and your science swapped.
I'm sure you won't take my word for it, but consider this. How, exactly, would you know?
Actually, there is plenty of solar energy to be scooped up in space. No clouds, and if you go high enough, no nighttime either. Getting it shipped back to earth is the problem, of course, but it is a serious option.
Slashdot Mirror
The models had no bug relevant to the news to which you refer. The observational data processing had a bug. An embarassing one, but not a very consequential one. If it had been consequential, it would have been noticed earlier.
Models are not valid or invalid; they are useful or not useful. If they are useful, they still can be misused.
Lacking exact boundary conditions even a perfect model will not retrodict observations perfectly. To some extent your challenge confuses weather and climate.
Our models provide a usefully accurate representation of climate in past observations and paleoclimate records.
Yes, "long term"; that means long term as far as climate dynamics goes, i.e., millenium scale and longer.
According to the fourth U.N. report, the environment is a coupled, chaotic, non-linear system and long term climate change is not predictable. That's what they (the U.N. IPCC) say.
Oh expletive deleted.
I used to post to Slashdot climate discussions, but they've gotten so bad it's hardly worth the trouble anymore. This one is over the top. It's just ignorantly wrong.
About every time, somebody has to wheel out the distinction between weather and climate. So here it is again. Weather is the part that is chaotic. Climate is the part that isn't. CLimate is predictable by definition. See, I can't tell you if it will snow at Christmas, that would be a weather prediction many weeks out. But I can tell you Christmas will be colder than today (in the US and Europe, say). That is a climate prediction? Catch the difference?
OK, here's another one. I have a goldfish swimming in an aquarium. I can't predict where it will go next. Now you come along and kick the table that the aquarium is sitting on, and I tell you to stop, because if you kick it too hard the table will tip over, the aquarium will shatter, and the fish will die. Are you telling me I can't make that kind of prediction about the fish?
I am burned out on fighting the waves of bullshit. I am really discouraged by this fantasy that science never reaches conclusions so consensus must be fascism. We have a really big problem, and all the specious arguments in the world won't make it go away.
I am sure there is no text in the IPCC reports to the effect that you quote. GO ahead and pull up the reports and prove me wrong.
The reason you don't see a list of scientists on the other side on Wikipedia is because it is a cast of thousands.
Very few of the people on the list are statisticians or physical climatologists.
The set is certainly non empty, but that bunch are pretty much more prominent in the politics than in the science.
See Oreskes 2004 for more.
Isaac Asimov's Nightfall (1941) (later expanded into a full length novel) was about a planet in a system with five suns where "night" was so rare that it was believed to be a myth.
One of the greatest early SF stories. Look for it.
> You can't vote on scientific truth.
Yeah, but you can vote on politicians, and so you affect policies.
If this were just a matter of science, there wouldn't be a controversy. The side of this trumped up debate (which side that is, I won't specify here) which is lying would not exist if a great deal weren't at stake. Then you could read your typical pop science sources and get a good picture without the sort of noise pollution that this issue is subject to.
The scientific community is healthy, friendly, and occupies a spectrum of opinion. The public is presented with a grotesquely inaccurate picture of a "debate" with two "sides". This is a consequence of vested interests trying (all too successfully) to inject uncertainty into policy by faking confrontation in science.
Many people think the safest thing to do is shrug and conclude "a pox on both their houses", and ignore the whole business. Unfortunately, the situation is not like that. At this point it is inescapably true that at least one side of the perceived debate is lying. (I suppose it's not excludable that both sides are lying, but you'd have to wonder where the real scientists are in that case.) The public is forced to determine which "side" is lying and which "side" is accurately representing the state of the science.
As a member of the scientific community I could tell you which "side" bears any resemblance to the underlying state of knowledge, but you'd still have to decide if I am real or astroturfing. You do actually have to do that in a sense, because abstaining is as a decision with consequences.
William Connolley on realclimate parsed the question fairly, here:
I understand that I can either argue from authority (ask you to take my word for it as an expert) or provide some evidence.
You will see in these Slashdot discussions plenty of weaseling on the first three points, despite readers of this list presumably being better informed on science than the general public. The first three points are not open questions in science. Like anything in science they are open for revisiting, but they are not where the action or controversy lies within the research community.
While I agree with the fourth point very strongly, and while a majority of participants in the relevant sciences probably do, it's not universally agreed. It's not really a scientific question, though; it's a question in economics, policies, values, and risk.
The broad scientific questions, the ones typically up for debate, are essentially settled.
What interests me here is why people continue to rant about questions that are part of the consensus, when the case is pretty much closed. They take offense when one has the temerity to suggest they are not only barking up the wrong tree, but that the tree they are barking up was chopped down for pulp years ago, but they don't seriously consider the possibility that while the policy is uncertain, the broad outlines of the facts are known well enough.
For those of you who think people like me are wrong, disingenuous, or even dishonest, consider how the situation looks to you vs how it would look if we were basically right. There would be organizations with substantial investments in resources (especially fossil fuels) whose long term value would be at risk. (There's ample precedent. Consider the history of the tobacco industry.) Their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders would be to minimize that risk. They would therefore inject the greatest possible doubt into the public's understanding of the science.
Consequently, there would be many arguments in the press, mostly appealing to the elements in the society who are generally most suspicious of regulation and taxation, that would cherry-pick evidence and spin tales that were scientifically incoherent and yet superficially convincing.
They would appeal to the fairness of the lay audience. They would claim that there are two sides to every issue. They would object to any presentation that was scientifically balanced on the grounds that their manufactured opinion was not represented. The echoes of this argument ring through every public discussion of the topic, on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Science and commerce do not deserve equal time on scientific questions. Cherry picked evidence does not deserve equal time with the totality of the evidence. The best policy is not a compromise between truth and fiction.
Capitalism is necessary for prosperity, and vigorous defense of private interests is part of the game. Cherry-picking evidence isn't illeg
There are some knobs that have to be twiddled to get the thing to work. But it does work. And the reason it is interesting is exactly because there aren't enough knobs to do the sort of overfitting you are talking about.
The models have perhaps a few hundred degrees of freedom in their design and millions of degrees of freedom in their output.
I'm not saying the enterprise is above reproach, but I am tired of blanket criticism from people who don't know anything about it. If you have something substantive to say, come out and say it.
If we didn't have a clue, friend, the climate models wouldn't work.
The climate wouldn't emerge from the primitive equations. Simulated rain wouldn't fall in wet places and would fall too much in dry places. The simulated jet stream wouldn't meander where the jet stream meanders. The simulated Gulf Stream wouldn't flow where the Gulf Stream flows. The simulated Antarctic Circumpolar Current would circumnavigate the Antarctic. etc.
The Japanese are even getting simulated hurricanes with simulated eyes forming on primitive equation global scale climate models and following hurricane tracks.
You have no business telling people what they don't understand and can't do when they can actually do it.
Predicting climate is different from predicting weather. I cannot tell you whether Chicago will have a white Christmas (weather prediction), but I can tell you with a lot of confidence that Christmas will be colder than the 4th of July even a million years into the future (climate prediction).
Climate models are not tricks. The physics goes in. The climate comes out. It's not a trivial curve-fitting exercise the way you seem to think. We call them "primitive equation" models not because they are primitive, but because we *don't put the answer in* in any way. The model isn't told that Chicago winters are cold and Florida winters aren't. It *figures that out* from the physics.
We now wait for the traditional round of excuses.
We'll save the excused for actual facts, shall we? The Southern hemisphere is warming, despite recent assertions to the contrary from certain unreliable sources.
graph
context
You are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts.
Any first course in physical oceanography goes through the derivation of western boundary currents like the Gulf Stream fairly early.
6 /10/ocean-circulation-new-evidence-yes-slowdown-no /
It's extremely robust. Unless the wind stops blowing from the east in the tropics and the west in the mid latitudes, you will have a Gulf Stream. It was qualitatively worked out by Henry Stommel around 1950, and the math was worked out in detail by Munk, Veronis, and other pioneers of physical oceanography in the 1950s. I don't have my library handy. I think Pond & Picard's Introduction to Dynamic Oceanography (or something like that title) would suffice, and should be understandable to anyone who got through undergraduate physics.
The CNN story is typical of the press's habit of confusing the Gulf Stream and the Thermohaline Circulation. I guess people just have an easier time pronouncing "Gulf Stream". It is conceivable that the Gulf Stream won't go as far north in the even of a massive meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, but recent evidence is shifting away from that.
See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
Those aren't falsified predictions. Some of them are risks. Some of them are predictions for the future.
Coral reef decline is real enough, though the extent to which it depends on warming is unclear. A component may be through direct carbon toxicity rather than global warming; a separate mechanism from the same underlying cause of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
The Antarctic ice shelf/coastal inundation thing is, unfortunately, looking worse than it did recently; stay tuned for the fourth IPCC assessment next year. Drying out of the high plains ditto. But it will take 50 to 100 years to actually happen on current evidence, so it's in no way falsified.
The "dirsuption of the gulf stream" is pure journalistic gibberish. It is dynamically impossible according to basic theorems in physical oceanography. It is a torturing of the "deep freeze in Europe" scenario, which is on current evidence not going to happen. It was worth asking about, though, and was never a scientific prediction, just a hypothesis of interest.
Hurricanes: very great interannual variation so looking at a single year is invalid. The trends toward greater energy in tropical storms seem real. The frequency question is unclear.
The ozone impacts thing is off my turf, but consider that an averted crisis is not evidence that the crisis was impossible. We did stop the release of ozone depleting chemicals.
> Can you think of any prediction that has come true?
Strong predictions that have come true (made around 1990):
- Trend to increasing surface temperatures accelerates and exceeds typical natural variability by around 2000
- Trend to decreasing stratospheric temperatures accelerates
- Maximum surface heating impact in subpolar northern hemisphere regions.
Something that was, I think, argued around 1990 that seems to be coming true:
- Tendency to have an increasing proportion of middle latitude rainfall in severe events
Check the first round of IPCC reports.
Of course you do.
So far so good. I have no problems with this up to this point.
If you didn't, then why would you write the music?
Suddenly my jaw hits the ground. Are people really this messed up about what life is about?
Well, you don't know how earth science works, then. We have pretty clear measures of Greenland surface temperature going back 100,000 years, and Antarctic ones almost a million. It actually involves, hmm, a little science, though. We have pretty clear indications of global ice volume going back that far. We have geological evidence of previous ice ages and previous ice free ages.
It's called "evidence".
Isn't global warming better than another ice age?
Obviously it depends on how much global warming and how much ice age. Why?
glaciers change size seasonally.
Not noticeably, I believe. I'm afraid you're making that one up entirely. But here at least you are making a verifiable claim. So provide some evidence, would you?
There's also some discussion of it on a recent thread at RealClimate.
Monckton's rant is just the usual background noise. It's not hard to make up a story by selecting evidence carefully. The hard job is finding a story that is consistent with all the evidence. While we eagerly await the fourth IPCC assessment, the third IPCC assessment, the consensus of leading scientists in the relevant fields from 2001, is the best big picture we've got.
What some gadfly has to say should always be given due consideration, not less, but certainly not more. In the present case, not much.
iTunes? Google Earth? the Flickr upload tool?
I use at least three such (mass-market) applications regularly.
I am an environmental scientist. As such I cannot be held responsible for what any political party does.
The word "environmentalist" makes me cringe, though not as much as the word "anti-environmentalist" does, I'll admit. I am just doing my part to explain the difference between the facts and the noise that is injected by people with many billions of dollars of fossil fuel assets that they are motivated to protect.
However, you are right that I do dismiss the contemporary crop of "global warming skeptics".
I dismiss "global warming skeptics" because they are incoherent and wrong and well-funded by non-scientific interests. If there weren't a lot of money at stake the skeptics would vanish. They don't have a coherent theory. If they did, they would get a hearing in scientific circles. They don't, so they are busy running around looking scientific for the press, and taking in people who are philosophically uncomfortable with the implications of the science.
Fifteen years ago there were interesting arguments against taking action. Now all the arguments are based on wishful thinking. I haven't seen an argument against restraining net carbon emissions with any "merits" for some considerable time, and it is not for want of looking.
I am sure you would not like some of my political opinions, but I am not discussing my politics in this thread. You are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts.
The snowball itself pretty much a done deal in the geophysics community. A slightly exagerrated but entertaining and accessible popularization of the story is available and I highly recommend it: Snowball Earth: The Story of a Maverick Scientist and His Theory of the Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life As We Know It by Gabrielle Walker
No, you are right on target. That is one of the very big questions about the snowball. Some people have suggested a slushball alternative, with some open water on the equator, but that hasn't panned out in model studies. That configuration appears to be unstable. So, yeah, how life survived is a question. Probably some very local geothermal effect saved a few tiny critters.
Are you saying that polar bears, who live on ice, have zero problems with the surface they live on melting?
I said I don't know anything about polar bears. I expect it is true that they are in decline.
Are you denying that ice of all kinds is melting world wide?
I am not denying that ice is melting worldwide. I am asserting it.
Try to read more carefully next time. Thanks.
> What they hell ever happened to science for the sake of actual knowledge?
How do you tell science and political bullshit apart, other than by whether you like the result?
It happens that the "report" you quote is scientifically incoherent. I don't know much about polar bears, but I am very familiar with sea ice trends.
Arctic sea ice summer extent minima are rapidly retreating, and the best evidence is that perennial ice has shrunk by 40% ion the last forty years. It is reasonable to expect that all the perennial Arctic sea ice will go away in this century, both by extrapolation and by careful consideration of the thermodynamics and radiation budgets involved.
Real scientists talk about one issue at a time, and their opinions have a logical consistency rather than a political one. No one who is an expert on polar bears is an expert on sea ice mechanics.
The statement about Antarctica is a particlar howler.
"Moreover, while sea ice has decreased in the Arctic, it has remained relatively constant (or even increased slightly) in the Antarctic since 1978."
It's true enough but completely irrelevant. Have a glance at a globe. It might be worth considering that Antarctic sea ice has completely different origins than Arctic sea ice. If Antarctica melts, what happens to southern summer sea ice extent?
And why should polar bears care about the Antarctic anyway?
The paper you quote comes from a group that invariably highlights evidence against global warming and minimizes evidence supporting it. I don't know who funds it, but I have run into it before. I promise you it is not considered a scientific source; but go ahead an check the citation index and prove me wrong.
So, as someone who knows some of the scientists, who seem to me to be very serious people, I would say you have your bullshit and your science swapped.
I'm sure you won't take my word for it, but consider this. How, exactly, would you know?
Is it?
Actually, there is plenty of solar energy to be scooped up in space. No clouds, and if you go high enough, no nighttime either. Getting it shipped back to earth is the problem, of course, but it is a serious option.