Denying the Climate Catastrophe: 3. Feedbacks
This is the third chapter of an ongoing series. Other parts of the series are here:
- Introduction
- Greenhouse Gas Theory
- Feedbacks (this article)
- A) Actual Temperature Data; B) Problems with the Surface Temperature Record
- Attribution of Past Warming: A) Arguments for it being Man-Made; B) Natural Attribution
- Climate Models vs. Actual Temperatures
- Are We Already Seeing Climate Change
- The Lukewarmer Middle Ground
- A Low-Cost Insurance Policy
We ended the last chapter on the greenhouse gas theory with this:
So whence comes the catastrophe? As mentioned in the introduction, the catastrophe comes from a second, independent theory that the Earth's climate system is dominated by strong positive feedbacks that multiply greenhouse warming many times into a catastrophe.
In this chapter, we will discuss this second, independent theory: that the Earth's climate system is dominated by positive feedbacks. I suppose the first question is, "What do we mean by feedback?"
In a strict sense, feedback is the connection of the output of a system to its input, creating a process that is circular: A system creates an output based on some initial input, that output changes the system's input, which then changes its output, which then in turn changes its input, etc.
Typically, there are two types of feedback: negative and positive. Negative feedback is a bit like the ball in the trough in the illustration above. If we tap the ball, it moves, but that movement creates new forces (e.g. gravity and the walls of the trough) that tend to send the ball back where it started. Negative feedback tends to attenuate any input to a system -- meaning that for any given push on the system, the output will end up being less than one might have expected from the push.
Positive feedback is more like the ball sitting on top of the hill. Even a small tap will send it rolling very far away, because the shape of the hill and gravity tend to push the ball even further in the direction of the tap. Positive feedback amplifies or multiplies any input to a system, meaning that even small pushes can lead to very large results.
The climate temperature system has a mix of positive and negative feedbacks.
For example, consider cumulus clouds. If the Earth warms, more water tends to evaporate from the oceans, and some of that water will form big fluffy white clouds. These clouds act as an umbrella for the Earth, reflecting heat back into space. So as more clouds form due to warming, there is a net new cooling effect that offsets some of the original warming. The amount of warming we might have expected is smaller due to the negative feedback of cloud formation.
On the other side, consider ice and snow. Ice and snow reflect sunlight back into space and keep the Earth cooler than it would be without the ice and snow cover. As the world warms, ice and snow will melt and thus reflect less sunlight back into space, having the effect of warming the Earth even more. So an initial warming leads to more warming, amplifying the effect of the initial warming.
Since we know both types of feedback exist, what we care about is the net effect -- does negative or positive feedback dominate? In every catastrophic forecast you have seen for global warming, in nearly every climate model the IPCC uses, the authors have assumed that the climate is dominated by strong positive feedbacks that multiply incremental warming from greenhouse gasses many times.
This is the result:
As a reminder, the green line is the warming from increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration solely from the greenhouse gas effect, without any feedbacks taken into account. It is generally agreed to be a warming rate of about 1.2C per doubling of CO2 concentrations, with which I and many (or most) science-based skeptics agree. The other lines, then, are a variety of forecasts for warming after feedbacks are taken into account. You can see that all these forecasts assume positive feedback, as the effect is multiplicative of the initial greenhouse gas warming (the pink, purple, and orange lines are approximately 3x, 5x, and 10x the green line, implying very high levels of positive feedback).
The pink line is the mean forecast from the 4th IPCC, implying a temperature sensitivity to CO2 of about 3C. The purple line is the high end of the IPCC forecast band, implying a temperature sensitivity of 5C. And the highest is not from a mathematical model per se, but from the mouth of Bill McKibben (sorry for the misspelling in the chart) who has on several occasions threatened that we could see as much as 10C of warming from CO2 by the end of the century.
Skeptics have pointed out a myriad of issues with the climate computer models that develop these forecasts, but I will leave those aside for now. Suffice it to say that the models exclude many important aspects of the climate and are subject to hand tuning that allows modellers to produce pretty much any output they like.
But I do want to say a few words about computer models and scientific proof. Despite what you will hear from the media, and even from the mouths of prominent alarmist scientists, computer models do not and cannot constitute "proof" of any sort. Computer models are merely tools we use to derive the predicted values of physical parameters from complex hypotheses. They are no different than the pen and paper computations an 18th century researcher might have made for the position of Saturn from Newton's celestial mechanics equations. The "proof" comes when we take these predicted values and compare them against actual measurements over time and find that they are or are not accurate predictions. Newton's laws were proved as his equations' outputs for Saturn's position were compared to Saturn's actual measured position (and in fact they were disproved, to a small extent, when Mercury's position did not accurately match and Einstein has to fix things a bit). Similarly, hypotheses about global warming will be proved or disproved when the predictions of various models are compared to actual temperatures.
So we can't really get much further until we get to actual observations of the climate, which we will address in the next several chapters. But I want to make sure that the two-part theory that leads to catastrophic global warming is clear.
This is the portion of the warming due to greenhouse gas theory:
As you can see, the portion due to greenhouse gas theory is relatively small and likely not catastrophic. The catastrophe comes from the second independent theory that the Earth's climate system is dominated by strong (very strong!) positive feedbacks.
It is the positive feedback that causes the catastrophe, not greenhouse gas theory. So in debating catastrophic man-made global warming theory, we should be spending most of our time debating the theory that the climate is dominated by strong positive feedbacks, rather than debating the greenhouse gas theory.
But in fact, this does not happen in the mainstream media. If you are an average consumer of climate news, I will be you have never heard a discussion in the media about this second theory.
And this second theory is far from settled. If on the "settled" scale from 1-10, greenhouse gas theory is an 8 or 9, this theory of strong positive feedbacks dominating the climate is about a 2. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that not only are scientists estimating feedbacks incorrectly, but that they don't even have the sign right and that net feedbacks may be negative.
This is a bit hard to communicate to a layman, but the positive feedbacks assumed by the most alarmist and catastrophic climate forecasts are very, very high. Way higher than one might expect in advance upon encountering a new system. This assumption of strong positive feedbacks is one that might even offend the sensibilities of the natural scientist. Natural systems that are long-term stable (and certainly for all its variation the climate system has remained in a pretty narrow range for millions and millions of years) are typically not dominated by positive feedbacks, they are dominated by negative feedbacks.
If in fact our climate temperature system is dominated by negative feedbacks, the future warming forecast would actually be below the green line:
OK, without getting in and criticizing the details of these models (which would by the way be a pointless wack-a-mole game because there are dozens of them) the best way to assess the validity of these various forecasts is to now consult actual observations. Which we will begin to do in our next chapter, part 4a on actual temperature measurements.
You're not interested in learning. And you've demonstrated so repeatedly.
I'm interested in learning. I'm not interested in being called names in the process.
Why do you actually need this explained to you?
Prove it. Thus far, you've demonstrated the precise opposite, as well as offering a strong indication of what your starting point is.
First you can apologize for name-calling.
OK -- you're not interested. I thought so. Bye.
I'm interested, and interested in showing you why you're wrong about Hansen et al 1981.
But since you can't apologize for calling people names, I'm not interested in corresponding further with you.
Prove it.
“You're right -- NOAA's adjustments reduce the long-term warming trend.”
The graphs I uploaded show NOAA adjustments INCREASED the long-term warming trend (1945-2010) by lowering the temperatures from 1945 through 1970. Why does NOAA decline to make the same adjustments here that was done for the HadSST3 data? Do you expect the Hadley Centre to undo their corrections to match ERSSTv4 here? The NOAA adjustment eliminates the mid-20th century cooling shown on the chart you uploaded.
“Bob Tisdale thinks global warming is due to El Niño.”
I don’t know enough yet to make a cogent comment on Bob’s assertion. I just downloaded his ebook to take a look at his argument. But on the subject of El Niño and global warming, I’ve downloaded the graph below from http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2016/05/department-of-oops-judith-curry-edition.html
Observations, shown by the black line, end in an uptick. How much of that uptick is due, say to an El Niño event vice CO2 feedbacks?
Incidentally, I’d say this graph demonstrates quite nicely my point that the majority of climate models have run hot.
“He has no credibility whatsoever and no one who is serious about the subject takes him or his graphs the least bit seriously. He won't even allow debate on his blog.”
I obtained Bob Tisdale’s charts from his “guest post” on the blog of the former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a member of the National Research Council's Climate Research Committee - a working arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Last I checked there where 293 comments showing plenty of debate, including someone associated with Berkley Earth. Lots of back and forth, but I didn’t see anyone who questioned the veracity of Bob’s ability to put ERSST.v4 data next to HadSST3 data. Would the chart look different if you composed it?
I know! It's a great book. I'm glad you're enjoying it. =)
Yeah, I tend to think in mathematical terms. For two interrelated functions f(g) and g(f), if df(g)/dg is positive and dg(f)/df is positive, you have a positive feedback.
In any case, when the temperature increases, the outgoing radiation increases (i.e., heat transfer), which counters the rising temperature. This is a negative feedback, and a very strong one.
Plus there are observational datasets that are showing a *reduced* relative humidity, not constant.
Sure, but there are more datasets that show rising humidity. In reality, though, we just don't have very good measurements of humidity in the upper troposphere. It's very dry there, calibration is difficult, and most of the data comes from a sparse radiosonde network.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/humidity-global-warming.htm
While I had plenty of math and did well in it (except Calc 2, darn it ... one of the two college Cs I got after I went back - switching from Arts and Crafts night school while working to full time Engineering school was a much bigger jump than I expected), to me it's an analytical tool more than a way of thinking.
I would visualize your math as an undulating surface (with the intellectual proviso that it's actually n dimensional and n is, as yet, still unknown) with a lot of local minimas and maximas where the planar slope varies.
Datasets are often "he said, she said" in the real world. It's hard for people to really get a feel for just how big the Earth actually is and how little of it we really cover and know. I've been in all but one of the lower 48 plus coast to coast in Canada and the Bahamas and it's huge ... yet it's really a small fraction of the entire Earth. Plus that fraction is just a fraction of the surface, not including what's below and the fluidic volume of the oceans and atmosphere and the radiative spectrum.
For most people one of the hardest phrases to say is "I don't know." You can't control what you don't know and if you can't control things it's not safe. The need for safety and predictability is very basic to the human psyche. It's emotionally easier to believe that you (or the "experts" or some other sort of "higher power") actually *know* something, even if it's bad, than to admit what we don't know and can't control. That's not just in the hard sciences, but in all aspects of human life. We want predictable cause and effect. We crave fixed and final answers without nuances. Known limits. If A, then B, ad infinitum. Neither chaos nor spontaneous order.
If new facts or ideas come along that might change a person's already accepted answer, then those facts or ideas must be wrong. That's one of the biggest problems in the climate debate. There are actually at least three sides, the two biggest being that it's all a hoax or that we're going to destroy the Earth. Then there's the much smaller third that says, yes, the underlying theory seems valid, and is confirmed by laboratory experiment, but there's still a whole lot we don't know once we get out of the lab. Accepting the uncertainty. Seeing that the proposed cures may well be worse than the disease, which at this point could really only be called a syndrome.
Medicine knew that the cause of ulcers was stress. It took 20 years for them to accept that there really was a bacteria that caused them and even so, the average person still thinks it's just stress.
When I was 20 I was paralyzed by something called Guillain Barre Syndrome. It's an autoimmune disease where the body attacks its own nervous system. They treated me with massive doses of steroids to try to shut down my immune system. I made about a 95% recovery, but it left me with a lifelong weight problem. Later studies found that steroid treatment didn't actually work. So I recovered more or less spontaneously. They still, to this day, don't know what causes it or really how to treat it other than supportive therapy. But the consequences of all the steroids still plague me and have caused other medical problems.
I also suffer from a problem called Thoracic Outlet Syndrome as a result of a car accident. The pain and heat signals from the nerves in my right arm fire off without good cause. The doctor at the world renowned "expert" practice recommended that they remove my first rib. As I was considering it, I talked to a neighbor who was a pathologist. He told me it was this doctor's favorite operation but only had a 15% success rate, so if there was no evidence of an actual deformation, there wasn't much chance of it fixing anything. What finally convinced me not to do it was when I asked about long term consequences and he said there were none.
Sorry, but I'm an engineer. When you put unequal stresses (lopsided skeletal support) on a slender column (the spine), there are consequences. If he had said minimal I might have believed him, but not none. As it was, I did have surgery that nipped off the end of my shoulder blade and hollowed it out a bit to make more room for swelling, but it only helped for a year or so. That, at least, didn't have any consequences past recovery from the operation itself.
These were all "experts." They "knew" what to do. Except they didn't.
Scientific history (and history in general) is littered with facts that everyone knew that it turns out weren't true and problems that the "right" experts could solve that are still and may well remain unsolved.
I don't question the basic facts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, how a greenhouse gas functions or that human activity has put more CO2 in the air than there would have been otherwise. So I don't question that we *have* had an effect on the climate in the direction of increasing temperature. What I question is the net effect and, even more, the proposed "solutions."
When I see models that track a specific modeled time span exactly, but not before or after, I don't put much faith in those models. You know, since you think mathematically, that if you use enough terms you can precisely model any dataset. But that doesn't mean the models have any significant relation to reality, especially when they don't continue to relate outside the given dataset they were built from.
Scientists are as human as everyone else and have the same basic needs and drives. The same self- reinforcing desire for answers and control and for being right, no matter what. A few rise above them. Most don't.
The general populace wants to believe that their experts have the right answers and the right solutions. When those answers and solutions offer an opportunity for people who crave power (politicians and activists) to get more of it, they jump on the bandwagon and whip the horses even harder. What science there is gets lost in the shouting. The quiet voice of reason is drowned out. All we can do is to continue to question and speak out when we can.
Sorry for the slow reply! I've been traveling, and this one took some time. :-p
Gah. I wrote half a response and then my computer ate it. Let me try again.
My first love was nuclear physics too! Well, and math. But I got sucked into the logical rabbithole of programming in high school, which eventually led to a degree in computational science - basically a pure math degree with a computer science minor. Good for computational modeling.
I wanted to do research, so I went to grad school in materials science (computational stuff), and now I've come back full circle to software development of scientific models.
Alright, getting to the meat of it.
Would you happen to have a source for this? I'm curious and would like to understand better what you mean here. "Stratospheric cloud effects" is kinda vague.
Haha, okay, yes, fair enough.
Well... partly. There are really two things going on here:
1. There are two different ways in which the word 'climate' is used. The first is in the overall statistics of the weather over some time period, typically ~30 years. This is the more common usage.
The second is in the specific path that the global weather takes over that time period; i.e. the "state, including a statistical description, of the climate system". You can see both of these in the IPCC's glossary definition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate#Definition
The overall "average weather" description is considerably less chaotic than the specific-path description of climate. As it is for many chaotic systems! If you look at the statistics of chaotic systems, while the specific path of the system may not be deterministic, the statistics are. And, typically, the more strongly-damped the system, the less chaotic they are.
I've seen that quote from the IPCC re: climate and chaos before; it's a popular one. I assume you read the whole context?
The context is computer modeling of the climate, and it's clear pretty quickly upon reading that they are talking about the predicting the specific path of the climate. Since this isn't doable -- this state is chaotic -- they instead use ensembles to get the statistics of climate instead, which are indeed predictable. I mean, here's the line you quoted, plus the line directly following (emphasis added):
The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system's future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.
I have a bunch of links showing scientists using "climate" with either of these meanings, if you're curious. Don't take my word for it!
Okay, number two re: chaos in climate:
2. The degree of chaos in the system. Over short periods (a few centuries) and in the current climatic regime, the (statistical averge) climate is pretty stable; the degree of chaos is small. Stochastic internal variations in multi-decadal climate appears to be small.
However... there is the possibility of some abrupt, highly non-linear shifts in the climate. These may have happened in the past, when the planet was on the edge of going into / out of a glacial period. (Look up Dansgaard-Oeschger Events). But coming in/out of a glacial period is a time when the climate is already pretty unstable; undergoing a massive transition, so that doesn't seem like a big surprise to me. It's like pushing a ball that's on the top of a hill. Whereas now; the ball is at the bottom of a hill. It takes more to push around, and the path is more predictable.
Nevertheless.. it's still possible that we could see large non-linear changes in response to large forcings. Even fast ones. That's out on the bleeding edge of climate science, and we don't really know.
I don't really see this^ as a positive thing.
Moving on!
Nope; it's right there. When temperature rises, the heat flow out of the Earth's system rises, and rapidly so. This is a strong restoring force to whatever caused the temperature to rise. It's a negative feedback.
No, globally these periods were not warmer than today. (See Marcott et al 2013). Moreover, climate is changing faster today than in those periods.
Chapter 3 of that book I pointed you towards, if I recall correctly.
The temperature at the surface is strongly controlled by greenhouse gases and albedo, by the basic radiative laws. I mean, sure, there are other things that matter: the length of the daily cycle, the conductivity and heat capacity of the surface, etc., but the Ideal Gas Law isn't that important. It's important for the lapse rate, but not so important for the surface temperature. We can talk about the physics behind that if you like, but the basic idea is that the Ideal Gas Law plays a huge role in setting how the temperature varies through the atmosphere, but radiative laws control the heat flow... and heat flow is the really important factor here.
I dunno: you're coming at this from a very emotional standpoint. (Not you personally, but your arguments, I mean).
When I'm doing science or math; I don't care about feelings. Feelings aren't relevant. Facts and logic and good arguments are relevant. I was taught not to get too attached to your premises; or rather, get as attached as the evidence warrants and don't get your emotions involved in that way. The emotions are for the thrill of discovery, for the wonder of finding out new things... and if you let them bias you, how can you make new discoveries? How can you do good science?
Quite some time ago (10-15 years), I was a climate skeptic. I hadn't looked into the subject very deeply; I'd just heard what I heard from blogs, conservative newspapers, etc. And then I dove into it, and found out that the climate scientists made much better arguments, did a better job of addressing the counterarguments, had more supporting data and evidence, etc. Most of the "skeptical" arguments were inconsistent, either internally or with each other, frequently went off-topic to rant about big government, or had conspiratorial tones.
When reading both sides, I found that the "skeptics" frequently made strawman arguments: they didn't address what the scientists were actually saying; they'd put words in the scientists' mouths. For example, if there was a skeptical post on WUWT about some new scientific article, you'd see accusations towards the article that had little to do with the actual paper, and many of the questions of "well, did they think of *this*?" were addressed in the scientific article. I mean, all they had to do was read the paper with an open mind, and try to understand it. That's kinda a minimum before writing a post about it, right? Can you really call yourself a skeptic if you're not being honestly skeptical?
And I still see this very frequently to this day. Most skeptical blogs are not a place where people go to learn and seriously discuss ideas; they're echo chambers where people go to feel affirmed in their beliefs. Which, to me, is sad. That's not science, or even a scientific attitude.
Yes! A million times yes. And not just "accept the uncertainty", but working to improve it, understanding where it's relevant and where it's not, etc.
This is what I see when I talk to scientists honestly about this, and it's what I see in the scientific literature, and it's what I see in scientific conferences. There doesn't seem to be any groupthink; the scientific discussion in climate science is as robust as it is in other fields of physical science. (Okay, not *no* groupthink, but it's a rather small amount).
The thing is, the IPCC range for temperature sensitivity is actually pretty wide. I mean, between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius per doubling. Mostly between 2 and 4 C, but we can't rule out those extremes quite yet. This range is much larger than we'd like, but... hey, this is what the state of the science is. Dems the facts.
Okay, I want your own opinion on this next part. In your experience, do "skeptics" seem more or less confident in their estimates of climate sensitivity? Equivalently, would they give a smaller range than the IPCC, or a greater one?
In my experience, they seem to be pretty confident that the climate sensitivity is low -- typically between 1 and 2 degrees -- rather than accepting the wider range of uncertainty that climate science presents. But.. I want to know what you think.
I mean, I don't really put much faith in someone being an "expert". I grew up in a very conservative, very religious setting, with pastoral "experts" who didn't really know theology that well. And much of what they said about the human condition was pretty bad, too, despite being called experts.
Similarly, there are plenty of expert astrologers and homeopaths. So what?
Nah, I care about your epistemology. I care about your methods, how you delve down to figure out what's true and what's not. And it's pretty clear that theology is, uhh, let's just say "hard" to ascertain the truth of. Economics, sociology, psychology: these have some science in them, but they're still quite difficult. Life sciences? Well, you're getting more rigorous, but medicine is very difficult and complex, and progress is slow. Research is expensive and progress usually comes via epidemiology and statistics instead of via actually understanding the underlying mechanisms.
Moving past, you get materials science, climate science, and astronomy -- either more complex or less controlled than "purer" fields like chemistry and physics. But we can generally get to the root of problems in these fields, and actually understand the physics behind them, which makes them a lot stronger.
(And then, over at the end of the spectrum you have math and logic, all alone and isolated. But that's the price of logical purity and rigor).
Back on point: I don't care if you're an "expert" - I care about your methods, and how strong they are. Observation is better than divine revelation. Controlled experiments are better than uncontrolled. And physics-based models are better than statistics-based models.
Scientific history (and history in general) is littered with facts that everyone knew that it turns out weren't true and problems that the "right" experts could solve that are still and may well remain unsolved.
Littered how? I mean, I don't see anyone proving that the Earth isn't round, that hydrogen is the simplest element, that Pi is an irrational number. I don't see anyone overturning the Theory of Relativity, or Germ Theory, or the Theory of Evolution. The Ideal Gas Law isn't going anywhere. Newtons' Law of Gravity is still damn accurate, as is Hooke's Law of Elasticity.
In natural science fields, how often has their been a consensus among scientists on some point, that has been overturned? What percent of the time does this happen? Maybe 1%, if that? You're not looking at great odds here. Well-established facts tend to stay well-established.
Scientists are as human as everyone else and have the same basic needs and drives. The same self- reinforcing desire for answers and control and for being right, no matter what. A few rise above them. Most don't.
This I'll disagree with. Some people are more rational; others are more emotional. There really is a spectrum across humanity.
And then, on top of that, you have scientific training. Speaking anecdotally, my math training had a huge influence on how I thought. (And I was already that nerd who read textbooks on logic during high school, while everyone else was playing basketball). My education in math literally reshaped my brain; it changed how I thought about things, it forced me to be much more rigorous. And then after that, I got a science education that again reshaped my perspective, teaching me how to form hypotheses, test them, look for alternative explanations, look for falsifications, etc.
Yes, scientists are still human, of course -- but the way you think about the world plays a huge part in your capacity to do science. And that perspective, that methodology for determining what's correct and what's not, hell even the amount of devotion to finding the truth... it really does differ from person to person. Science isn't a body of facts; it's a set of methods and a way of thinking.
Of course, that's not to say that scientists can't be wrong. It's just that if you take someone who's been producing good research in a field for 30 years, and put him up against Joe Schmoe who writes a blog and gets all of his info from press releases... well, I'd give the scientist 10:1 odds on any question within his field of expertise, and I'd get rich doing it. It's like pitting Michael Jordan against a high school basketball player. One of them has dmonstrated skills in this area, and the other does not.
But because of confirmation bias (and cherry-picking), we notice the cases where scientists were wrong, and ignore the many, many more times when they were right. We like to root for the underdog, I guess, even though they're usually gonna lose.
^This is why most scientific models are built off of physical laws, rather than being based on curve-fitting.
Because of this, there's a huge difference in macroeconomics models and climate science models. It's about as big as the difference between medicine and physics.
Eh, when you use the actual physical forcings we observed over the last 20 years, the models do just fine. (I speak conservatively: the models do well).
Moreover, I don't see anyone coming up with better models. I mean, we have other independent lines of evidence that show that CO2 causes significant warming, and even if the models failed, it wouldn't disprove those other lines of evidence, so...
Really, you need to come up with a good explanation for why CO2 wouldn't cause much warming, given the extremely well-verified basic physics behind CO2's warming potential. But all attempts thus far have failed -- and scientists have been attempting this for over half a century.
If you could come up with a model or mechanism that would explain our current climate, but didn't require the climate to be very sensitive to CO2, you'd win a frickin' Nobel Prize. It's a grand and lofty goal -- and worth exploring! But the repeated failure to find such a mechanism implies that it's probably not there. At some point you have to give up, and accept that CO2 does cause significant warming.
Clouds are made of liquid water, not water vapor.
So, yes, warmer air holds more water vapor, water in its gaseous, non-liquid form. Meaning that, for a parcel of air that's warming, it's harder for water to precipitate out and form clouds, not easier. Saying it again: warmer air holds more gaseous water, which makes it harder for water to precipitate out and form clouds.
Moreover, the positive effect from water vapor dominates the negative effect from clouds quite handily. That holds for both the total effect of all water vapor vs all clouds, and for the marginal effect of a small additional bit of water vapor.
I'm sorry, but can you provide citations for your claims here? It kinda feels like you just made this all up. It's contrary to what you'd find in any science textbook.
"At some point you have to give up, and accept that CO2 does cause significant warming."
But I'm not a totalitarian. I'd rather remain objective.
Hey, I'm a libertarian. But I don't find that it interferes with my ability to do science at all.
The thing is that the models do NOT accurately hindcast or forecast outside of the dataset they were built from. From 1960 to 1998 they are almost exact matches to observation (and keep in mind that's their adjusted observations and there's lots of questions about that accuracy as well). Prior to or after that time they aren't. Scientific laws don't vary based on dates. Chapter 8 of AR5 gives their models both with and without human forcings and you can see the big difference in accuracy.
No, the models do just fine since 1998, if you use the actual, real-world physical forcings since then.
https://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/warm-2015-and-model-data-comparisons/
But really, the models aren't expected to do a great job over short time periods (e.g., 15 years). "Climate" is defined as ~30 years, and I don't expect the models to capture short-term variations. Not when the dominant physics that creates climate operate over multidecadal timespans.
I do agree that the models did badly before 1950. But we have absolute crap for the natural forcing data before then. (Those would be necessary inputs to the models). Hehe, why would you even expect them to do well, if we don't know what the physical forcings were? And how can you call that a failure of the models?
It's ummm.. well, let me use an example from the Ideal Gas Law. PV=nRT, right? So say I want you to give me the pressure, but I won't tell you V or T. You take your best guess, plug the numbers in, and give me the resulting pressure. It's a bit off, and I laugh at you.
Would you call that a failure of the Ideal Gas Law, or did you just have insufficient information?
PS - that's a bit extreme; we don't know nothing about the conditions before 1950... but yeah, we don't know enough to test the models on that data. So, we don't. We test the models in other ways, and base them on physical laws.
Ack, that's the wrong picture. This one. The dotted lines are the model projections with the real-world forcings.
I don't have to "accept that CO2 does cause significant warming," since no one has proved that it does.
It causes some warming, but a lot? Enough to cause us problems? No one has come close to proving that.
They've theorized, they've made (amusingly bad) predictions, but they have yet to prove anything.
And if these so-called scientists had the truth on their side, they wouldn't try to destroy the careers of people who disagree with them, or get caught lying about their data, refusing to release their data, manipulating their data, constantly adjusting their data (always warmer, every time - that sure is a weird pattern), threatening lawsuits against others (like Brendan Schollenberger) who might release their data, and suing people for having opinions different than theirs as MMann is doing to Mark Steyn.
Honest people simply don't do these things, and this is a constant with these people.
I've done more than a bit of programming myself. It was about 1970 when I wrote my first one ... paper tape with a teletype hookup to a mainframe in another city back in Jr High. Material Science was fun too. My prof was one of the inventors of Nitinol (the first memory metal) and also did a lot of court appearances as an expert witness. He had some great stories to tell. He also has the unfortunate tendency to tuck his shirts into his boxers instead of just his pants. It did help keep us awake in an 8 AM summer class when he turned off the lights and turned on the overhead to see just how far they would ride up. :)
The stratospheric effects ... shoot, trying to dig it up. I'm pretty sure it was from the AR5 Summary. No luck there with a simple search - just too many places and ways it could have been written.
Statistics, even on chaotic systems, require a broad knowledge of the initial conditions and a pretty definitive modelling of the forces that contribute to the changes from that initial condition. We don't seem to have either to enough accuracy to actually model the real world. GIGO.
Mann's original hockey stick graph had to be the best (or worst) example. Once they got hold of the actual model almost any data they put into it, including random data, kept coming up with essentially the same graph.
I was going to use the Younger Dryas as an example of extremely rapid unexplained change, but as you said, it was fairly soon after the current interglacial began. It's still unexplained though.
Most paleoclimatologists do acknowledge the previous warm and cold extremes and can't explain them either. The MWP may have been stronger in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern, but there's no question it happened.
The Maunder Minimum could explain a relatively short part at the start of the LIA, but it wasn't a continuing condition. Why did the cold continue for so long? Why did it end? What caused the MWP and the Roman and Minoan and the Holocene Optimums and what ended them? There seems to be a cycle of about 1000 years between significant warmings and that's right about where we're at. But it could also be coincidence since there haven't been *that* many millennia since the start of this interglacial. There are a lot of shorter cycles that we are sure of. ENSO, AMO, solar cycles, thermohaline overturn, just to name a few of the bigger ones. Some of them are pretty recent discoveries. How many more do we not know about yet? When do their peaks converge and cancel each other out on a global basis?
Black body radiation isn't a limiting factor. It goes up with the temperature but it doesn't have any particular upper or lower bounds other than absolute zero. Since it's based on absolute temperature and the temperature variations we're talking about on Earth's surface are very small in absolute terms (a fraction of a percent), even at the 4th power, the difference really doesn't pose a major change. Bottom line is that while all of the heat energy that finally does leave the Earth's immediate environs does so radiatively, there's no limit to it.
I'm only up to chapter 2, so I'll have to see how he treats it when I get there :) Overall he seems to be pretty straightforward so far with what we know and what we don't.
The pressure at the surface of Venus is 90 times that of Earth with a temperature of about 470°C. The Ideal Gas Law is the driving factor there, not gaseous composition. To go from .04% CO2 to 98% CO2 is a hair over 11 doublings. Even if you used an outrageously high 5°C per doubling that would only account for a bit more than a 55°C difference. The IPCC median of 3°C gives a bit more than a 33°C difference. The actual difference is 455°C.
Ostensibly, human action didn't have much of an effect before 1950 or so. That means that almost all the forcings were natural. Therefore a model that understands and incorporates the underlying natural causes should be *more* accurate, not less, when you take away the uncertainties of how human actions affect the system. Natural forcings don't change based on a human calendar, only the underlying causes.
Here's the graph from the IPCC AR5 showing their models and observations (I added the green lines):
http://DianeMerriam.com/img/MyGauntlet/IPCC Combined.jpg
That's *their* graph, *their* models and *their* observational data.
Right on the money from 1960 to 1998. Not before and not after. That's from Chapter 8 of the full report, not even from the dumbed down summary.
I used to believe in peer review and pure science. My heros were scientists and those who pushed the limits of what was known and possible. After 40+ adult years in the real world, reality and experience has had plenty of time to sink in. Peer review is more often than not "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" or "go along to get along." Scientists are driven more by how to get the best funding than how to do the best work and get the best answers. Publish or perish. Writers write what their audiences want to hear.
You don't get grants or government or even private jobs or even recognition by saying well, yes, things are going to change a bit, but nothing we can't handle. You report major discoveries and crises that can be averted only if you follow my recommendations. You have to take everything with a grain of salt and then look at the data and then make sure you're looking at the actual data and then look still again to see what else you might have missed. Eliminate adjectives. Discount opinions and beliefs.
As my favorite author once wrote, "What are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history"--what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future, facts are your single clue."
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
What about where the models are now? What about what the literature since then says?
Best,
D
[citation needed] for the first sentence. I've never heard that before. Well, except at... you haven't been reading Judith Curry's blog, have you?
Yes, please provide a citation.
The link is dead. But I'm guessing that it still doesn't address the key point of using actual updated forcings from the last 10 years, nor does it address the issue of whether climate models can predict weather, and the potential confusion between the two. (If I'm wrong, please correct me!)
"What we can handle" is in the realm of economics. So... yeah? Scientists don't get funding for saying that? But neither do they get funding for saying the opposite. They get funding for doing good science.
It depends on the number of strange attractors. With the current set of forcings, there appears to be only one, which means that the statistics should be manageable.
[citation needed] again. My understanding of McIntyre's criticism of Mann's work is that he pre-selected about 1% of the "random" data that had hockey-stick-like characteristics. Which kinda kills the idea of it being random. However - I haven't actually looked at McIntyre's methodology for myself. I'd be happy to do that with you, if you're interested.
Nevertheless, Mann's work has been vetted by dozens of statisticians and replicated by over a dozen other independent groups, and that's where the rubber meets the road. There's really no way you can say that it was fundamentally flawed. Yes, the statistics had some issues, but they were minor and didn't have much of an effect on the final result.
Sure, though they've taken to calling it the Medieval Climate Anomaly to avoid the confusion that it was a global event, or that it was warmer than today. You claimed the latter earlier - would you agree with me that it wasn't warmer than today, or are you still standing by that? (If so, can you provide a citation?)
Sorry to ask so much for citations, but hey, we're not talking about our opinions here. We're trying to delve into what the evidence and facts are. :-p Please feel free to ask me for them, too!
And I agree that we can't explain some previous warming and cooling episodes. But hell, it's only recently that we even got good evidence that they existed. This is the cutting edge of science, and by definition such problems are still unsolved. Before we can explain why they happened, we have to demonstrate *that* they happened, and then we have to figure out what were the natural forcings at the time. Was the sun weaker? Were aerosols or greenhouse gases different? Was it the orbital eccentricity? Etc. We simply lack the data at this time to say the causal factors.
However, that says absolutely nothing about our ability to understand the current climate. We can go out and measure aerosols and solar irradiance and greenhouse gases today. We can't travel back in time and do that for the past.
Black body radiation isn't a limiting factor.
It's a soft limit, though... with the fourth power, not that soft. Really, a fourth power is an unusually strong feedback in the natural systems I've seen. Most damping is 2nd-order, not 4th-order.
The pressure at the surface of Venus is 90 times that of Earth with a temperature of about 470°C. The Ideal Gas Law is the driving factor there, not gaseous composition. To go from .04% CO2 to 98% CO2 is a hair over 11 doublings. Even if you used an outrageously high 5°C per doubling that would only account for a bit more than a 55°C difference. The IPCC median of 3°C gives a bit more than a 33°C difference. The actual difference is 455°C.
Gah, you've got several things wrong here:
1. The Venusian atmosphere is at a different pressure, so the doublings need to account for that. (Goes and checks the math). Okay, haha, I take it back - you caught that. Sorry! =D
2. The Venusian atmosphere has a different greenhouse gas composition, different albedo, distance from the Sun, etc., so the sensitivity to CO2 will be different. The 3C term is for the Earth, and encompasses an enormous amount of context, like how full different radiative bands are.
3. The Ideal Gas Law cannot generate heat. Right? You agree on that?
And, in the absence of greenhouse gases, all heat must flow in or out of the planet's surface (negligible heat is lost to conduction or convection, or gained from geothermal).
If the air at the planet's surface is hotter than the average radiative temperature, then it will transfer that heat to the surface. And more heat will flow out than in, and the atmosphere will cool until the surface is in equilibrium; until heat in == heat out. In other words, in the absence of greenhouse gasese, the surface will cool until its temperature is that set by the radiative laws.
This is why we say that the Ideal Gas Law doesn't control the temperature at the surface. It plays a role when greenhouse gases are present, but not when they aren't: they're the controlling factor.
No, it's pretty much proved. And hell, I shouldn't even say "pretty much", as it conveys a false sense of uncertainty.
The basic science is quite old, dating to the 1800s. That science gives a range of warming of 2-4 C. And it's stood the test of time. It's been tested in and out, back and forth, over and over again. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and warmer air holds more water vapor, which is also a greenhouse gas.
If you want to be really thorough, and include all the uncertainties that we can possibly think of, the climate sensitivity is something like 1.5 to 4.5 C per doubling. So, call it something like a 5% chance that CO2 does not cause enough warming to cause problems.
I should stop you there. Very little of what follows has to do with the scientific data or facts. It's a diversion away from the hard facts of the natural world. It's a non-sequitur.
Much of it is also untrue, but I suppose that's a secondary issue to whether it's relevant. Science doesn't care whether people think you're honest; it doesn't care about your personal problems; it cares whether your results are repeatible and your arguments are sound. Full stop.
When I see people make ad hominem arguments against scientists, I have to wonder what's going on. If I was conspiratorial, I might say that the people telling you this are trying to distract you. But really, I expect that they're just not that good at critical thinking; they have a hard time keeping their eye on the ball. They think science is about people rather than data. It's not.
But, hey, some of your jabs were about the science, so let's look at those. You say that climate scientists:
1. get caught lying about their data,
2. refusing to release their data,
3. manipulating their data,
4. constantly adjusting their data (always warmer, every time - that sure is a weird pattern)
Okay, #1 and #4 are plain false. These didn't happen.
#1: Climate scientists aren't lying about their data; not to any significant degree. (I'm sure there are a couple bad apples in the field, as in any field, so the caveat feels necessary).
#4: No, the adjustments aren't always warmer. Go actually look up the adjusted and unadjusted data for the NOAA or BEST temperature sets. Hint: the unadjusted is warmer. The total effect of the adjustments is to bring the temperatures down. Or here, look at the picture.
#2 is completely normal. Most scientists don't release their data. They normally publish their results and their methodology, but not code or the base data.
#3 is also normal. Scientists "manipulate" the data all the time, in the sense of processing it and removing known biases. But the key is that these aren't adjustments you do to get your preferred results; they're what you do to get more accurate results. And as such, the adjustments must be based in objective facts and arguments, and they must be tested. And they are, quite extensively. But I suppose that was left out, eh?
You've been sold a bill of goods. Someone is fearmongering, telling you that these corrupt scientists are trying to pull the wool over your eyes with shady and unscientific practices. They're painting normal data processing as "manipulation". But, no. These are just scientists doing science. Most of your criticisms are either incorrect, irrelevant, or they're just how science works normally, even in the hardest fields like physics.
And again, note that none of this refutes the basic facts about CO2 and water vapor, basic facts that have been unrefuted for over a century. It's just shade that people throw up when they don't have any good science to back them up.
Apparently you only know what Jon Stewart wanted you to know.
Michael Mann did indeed get caught lying about his data, which is why the IPCC stopped using the hockey stick as part of one of their logos.
Mann and friends magically made the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age statistically disappear. His now-discredited hockey stick graph relied on data from trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, but data from just 12 trees from the 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set were used.
A larger data set of 34 tree cores from the very same vicinity showed no significant warming, and they revealed warmer temps in the Middle Ages.
They weren't included.
Maybe you should ask yourself:
1. Why didn't he include the data that disproved his theory (a lie of omission) ?
2. Why didn't you know this, since you obviously pretend to follow this stuff closely . . .
3. Why are you going to pretend he didn't do anything wrong, as we both know you will. Sure, Mann was cleared by the PSU investigation, but that was run by Graham Spanier, PSU prez - a man in serious legal trouble (charged with perjury and obstruction of justice - just like Bill Clinton!) who also ran another investigation: the one into Jerry Sandusky, the pedophiIe coach for their football team. Sure he cleared Michael Mann. But he also cleared a known pedophiIe, simply telling him to quit his job and go away. He didn't call the police to protect other young boys in the area. Because liberalism.
Yes, there were other investigations, and many of his pals on the far-left of course saw nothing wrong. But you're not going to explain why he ignored all those data sets because you can't.
A lie of omission is a lie.
You call this a "normal" manipulation of data because, like your scientific brethren on the far-left, you're pretty dishonest.
Ignoring data that screws up your argument has nothing to do with credible science.
It certainly has nothing to do with the scientific method, with which you are obviously unfamiliar.
Did you really miss one of he funniest stories of the last few years - NOAA "revising" their data upwards (surprise! . . . and it's "normal," right?:) so they could pretend the so-called pause since the turn of the millennia didn't actually happen?
It was laughed out of the headlines quickly, but you people took it pretty seriously.
Sadly for you, the study ignores six of the seven temperature sets used by climate scientists and uses the only one regarded as problematic, and indeed shunned by the UK’s own Met Office.
Where instrument readings don’t exist (such as in the Arctic), numbers were “infilled” or guesstimated. How quaint. Their guesses always seem to match their desired outcome, which is interesting since real scientists shouldn't even have a desired outcome. Past temps were changed to emphasize recent warming.
To sum up, they only used one data set (the "problematic" set, so sayeth the UK Met Office, and they're on your side), and they ignored 6 of 7 data sets in total.
Voila! No more pause! Two decades of data from around the world, from countless studies, erased by one small group of liars.
Laughing out loud, to put it mildly.
They also erased the very hot 1930s erased.
I'd wish you luck in explaining why they did any of that, but you can't.
All they did was say "The temps we've been yappin' about for 20 years were actually much higher, so there was no pause. The biggest and most annoying problem we on the far-left have - the freaking pause - has now been erased. We're using this one study to erase almost two decades of data, because we can. Nothing to see here, move on, sheep. Make sure Google, Zuckerberg, and Katie Couric get the word out."
Pitiful.
By the way, the head of the Royal Statistical Society investigated and found the hockey stick was created using 'inappropriate' methods
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7589897/Hockey-stick-graph-was-exaggerated.html
There's more to this than what Brian Williams and the NY Times tell you. Open your mind someday.
I'd say your "just not that good at critical thinking," but I know you people. You keep yourselves intentionally ignorant so you don't even know what the other side is up to.
I very much enjoyed your ad hominem, coming not 30 seconds after you whined about ad hominem attacks.
Priceless.
Chemists defer only to physicists, physicists defer only to mathematicians and mathematicians defer only to God. :) (got that from my ex- who was a PhD in catalytic chemistry)
I used to be far more skeptical than I am now as well. At first it just seemed to be part of the tree hugger (and I have nothing against trees, only those who value them more than human beings) fringe which I automatically discounted. Like you, as I did decide to look at it closer, I accepted the scientific basis for the underlying fact that we have had and continue to have an effect on the climate.
As to what "skeptics" think ... That's a hard question because they come in all shapes and sizes, just as "believers" do. You've got the flat out deniers who wouldn't accept a fact if it came up and bit them in the rear end. At the other end you have true believers who are convinced that the Earth is going to become uninhabitable in a matter of decades unless we immediately forswear all technology and CO2 creation in particular. They're just as unwilling to listen to any facts. What I am primarily skeptical of is the "Man made catastrophic climate change" hysteria.
I can't really answer for either end because, while I intellectually understand the psychological makeup of that sort of thinking, it's not something I'm capable of doing or being myself. Nor do they have a place in any sort of realistic discussion. Unfortunately, as you said, they tend to clog up the worthwhile discussion. I regularly get hit from all sides when I try to present the facts along the limits of our knowledge and the errors, from the intentional and deliberate misstatements to the unconsciously accepted logical fallacies.
My degrees are in Engineering (concurrent dual majors in Electrical and Mechanical to make my own degree in Energy Engineering, which didn't exist in the early 80's) so I am grounded in empirical facts and observations. I also developed a passion for the soft science intertwined fields of philosophy, political science and economics so I filter human actions and proposals through that background as well.
When it comes to any particular question, first, the facts have to be verified. That comes first and any proposed theories to explain them first have to fit the observed and verified facts. Then the human response to those facts and theories in both deed and motivation has to be looked at.
There have been several egregious deliberate attempts to hide inconvenient facts and to "adjust" them away. They range from the most common, cherry picking of data (and yes, I have to admit that I've caught myself doing the same when I'm responding to a particular line of argument just in order to refute it quickly), to manipulation of data in ways that fit a particular desired outcome rather than realistically, to outright deliberate falsifications such as Hansen's "hide the decline" and what the East Anglia email scandal uncovered.
If you want to compare the rationality of scientists to the average person, no question, the scientists win hands down, particularly when it comes to hard science itself.
But the claims of consensus are also manipulated. As you said, when you talk privately to everyday scientists, you find a lot more honest discussion. Unfortunately a lot of that honesty disappears when it comes to what is said or written for publication or public consumption. There are really only two points there is an actual consensus on. The Earth has warmed and our actions have had an effect on it. There is not any consensus on the catastrophic outlook, not by a long shot.
I find the arguments about the poor adjustments made to the temperature history convincing. Sensors and controls are an integral part of any engineering project. The urban heat island effect is quite real and substantial and shows up the most exactly where they say global warming will show the most ... at night. I don't believe it has been adequately compensated for. There is also no reason to adjust readings for stations where the characteristics have not changed, and yet those readings have been adjusted up to average in the heat island effect. Pristine station readings in isolation do not show the same trends as the urbanized ones do. That's bad engineering and bad science, yet that is what is being used as input and comparison data. We've got better and more dispersed data on the way, both land and sea, but that's not what we have now.
I've gone into detail on the comparisons between models and reality several times so I won't rehash all those here other than to say that the models just don't fit the observed reality outside of the subset of time they were developed to describe. The natural climate isn't hindcast and the affected future climate isn't matching either. The AR5 report acknowledges that, however grudgingly, at least in the actual report itself instead of the political summary.
Laboratory demonstrated, doubling CO2 results in an approximately 1.1°C increase in measured temperature, so that's the baseline. Doubling from 280 ppm would be 560 ppm and we're at about 400 ppm, less than halfway to a single doubling, but continuing to rise. CO2 equivalents of other emissions add to that total effect, minus offsetting particulates (which are going down) then add in land use changes. That's the net direct human contribution.
Let's say, as a rough estimate, putting it all in CO2 equivalents, we bump it up to a 1.3°C increase per doubling. We're only about 43% of the way to a first doubling, but greenhouse gas effects are logarithmic so, as an effect, we're about 65% of the way to what a full doubling would do. That accounts for a rise to date of about .85°C. Everything else is natural feedbacks, both positive and negative, and there are both.
Systemically, positive feedbacks enhance the effects of changes in the input. Negative feedbacks dampen out the effects of changes in the inputs. All natural systems have a net negative feedback or they would oscillate out of control. They may stabilize at a different point, but they do stabilize.
At some point new and improved technology and knowledge means we will no longer be putting the extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or at least not much. At that point, the system will stabilize and then the excess CO2 will begin to leave the atmosphere and it will return to non-anthropogenic conditions. The oceans take longer to change, but they will as well.
The questions are what happens between now and then and what should our responses be along the way. And they are both important questions to investigate.
But to bring it back full circle, we have to start with the facts, and the facts do not support the catastrophic viewpoint, the high multipliers of positive feedback components.
Me: It causes some warming, but a lot? Enough to cause us problems? No one has come close to proving that.
You: "No, it's pretty much proved."
So where's the crisis, aka the "proof"? You people have been saying it's a crisis for a looooong time.
A few islands losing some coastline? Miami sinking?
That's happened constantly since before man existed.
Let me know when the crisis begins. Until then, all you have is laughably off-base models . . . you have frightening predictions, nothing more.
We've been able to feed more people than ever before thanks to tech advances and thanks to the warming in the 20th C.
The Venusian atmosphere is about 96% CO2, 3.5% N2, (dang I wish there was an extended ASCII code for subscripts) and other trace gases along with sulfuric acid clouds. It has almost no H2O or CH4 or other halocarbons so CO2 alone is the only significant greenhouse gas. The other absorption bands are wide open to outgoing emissions, far more than in Earth's atmosphere.
It's completely cloud covered so almost no sunlight reaches the surface. Everything happens in the atmosphere.
The Ideal Gas law doesn't generate heat, it describes the relationship between pressure, volume and temperature. PV=nRT, where R is the universal constant and n is the number of mols in a given system and also doesn't change. There is a direct linear relationship between measured temperature and measured pressure that has nothing to do with the nature of the gas or how it interacts with electromagnetic radiation. The higher the pressure, the higher the temperature. The temperature it stabilizes at is determined by net black body radiation, but the temperature itself is not solely or even primarily due to the greenhouse gas effect.
In the absence of greenhouse gases the average temperature of the Earth would be around 0°C. That's 270°K, a far cry from absolute zero and only 15°C (5%) less than what it is now. That base temperature is due to causes other than greenhouse gases and one of the primary ones is the relationship between pressure and temperature in any given amount of any gas held in by the container called gravity.
It's easy to forget the difference between absolute temperatures in °K and the range we're used to thinking in because it's what we directly experience, but the physics is controlled by the absolute temperature, not °C or °F.
Sorry, left out a space in the image link:
http://dianemerriam.com/img/MyGauntlet/IPCC%20Combined.jpg
As to natural vs man made, this is what they say is natural ...
http://DianeMerriam.com/img/MyGauntlet/IPCCNatural.jpg
Weather is transient and, in and of itself, has nothing to do with long term climactic trends. No argument there :).
Money *is* an economic good. Money is paid for investigating what the givers of that money want to investigate and is guided to those investigators most likely to prove the points that the givers want proven. It doesn't grow on trees and it isn't distributed randomly. Those who give the money control where it goes and define what they think is or isn't good science. I wish it wasn't so, but wishing doesn't change anything.
So where's the crisis, aka the "proof"? You people have been saying it's a crisis for a looooong time.
The proof is in the science that shows that CO2 causes warming. CO2 has been rising. Warming has been happening, pretty closely in line with expectations. Plus, there's literally tens of millions of man-hours of research on this. Thousands of research papers, looking into every aspect we can.
Are you disputing the warming, or the fact that this much warming will cause problems?
For reference, we're talking about 3-6 C here, if we keep burning fossil fuels the way we are. That's comparable to the amount that the Earth warmed when we came out of the last glacial period, when ice sheets a mile thick covered Chicago. It's a big change.
It's revealing that you ignored all that I wrote about Michael Mann and the laughable NOAA study.
Please don't think that's the end of the list.
Peter Gleick and his Heartland fraud/apology? Another classic.
The Obama admin ius, with the left's approval, considering pressing charges against skeptics. Adorable little fascists, aren't they?
Prof. Richard Parncutt of the University of Graz, Austria: deniers should get the death penalty.
He's not the only one.
27% of Democrats favor prosecuting those who don’t agree with global warming. Because they're not fascists.
I guess we'll just agree to disagree.
I don't watch Jon Stewart. I read the literature and scientific textbooks, and I look at the evidence and data. Hopefully, you do, too. This is how science is learned and done. This isn't politics, son.
No, the last IPCC report still includes Mann's work, which has been reproduced by a dozen other groups at this point. And said work still shows a "hockey stick" - sharply accelerated warming in the last century, as compared to the previous millennium. Your response is fully incorrect.
I don't really care that much about the investigations. I care about whether the science is solid.
You don't know me. You literally just started talking to me... but already you're convinced that I'm dishonest, simply because I have a different view from you.
Hey, why don't we drop the combativeness? If you doubt something I say, ask me for evidence. And then judge my arguments on their merits, rather than on whether I agree with you or not. This isn't a fight between you and me.. this is a discussion.
Ayep; I'm familiar with these adjustments. But the net effect of all the adjustments is still downwards, not upwards, which means your claim to the contrary is incorrect. Flat out wrong. Again, you can download the data and check for yourself; you don't need to rely on what other people tell you, even me.
And why do these last NOAA adjustments bother you? Do you think these last NOAA adjustments are unjustified, that the methodology is wrong? Or are you just bothered because they were upwards?
A scientific mindset means that you judge a piece of work on the strength of the methodology, not based on whether you like the results or not. You go for the best methodology you can, and you accept the results. You don't work backwards from the results to deciding whether you like the methodology.
Yes; this is called "interpolation". Again, it's perfectly normal; you can learn about the strengths and weaknesses of such a mathematical method in any class on numerical methods. It's incredibly widely used, in practically every field.
Realize that nearly every point on Earth does not have a thermometer. Thermometers are quite small, a square inch at most. Even if we had a million of them, you'd only cover 0.0000000001% of the Earth's surface. How do you think we figure out what the temperature is between those?
Or are you saying that we can't know the temperature somewhere unless we measure it at every single point? Is that what happens when the doctor takes your temperature? Does he insert a thermometer under your skin, and inside your blood vessels, and put one inside your head? Obviously not! But.. how does he know what your core temperature is, then? (Think it through).
I'm not trying to belittle you, I'm just trying to get you to think about how we actually measure and calculate things. To understand how it works, in the real world, and hopefully to approach it with a curious and scientific mindset.
You lost me here. Are you talking about Mann's hockey stick, or the recent NOAA adjustments? And which data sets are you referring to? Source?
This conversation is also bouncing around pretty quickly. I mean, I'm surprised that we got off on Mann, when his work is an absolutely tiny piece of the total picture. Miniscule. (For whatever reason, it's become a popular thing to attack).
Even if we threw out Mann's work, which has been reproduced independently in a dozen other studies now, and even if we threw out those independent replications, the case for CO2-induced warming would remain incredibly strong. There are multiple independent lines of evidence, all very well-examined, that all point to the same conclusion. It's not just Mann's proxy data, it's the other paleoclimate data, it's the basic physics, it's the observational data -- all pointing to the same conclusion, even after a century of work by thousands of independent researchers. This would have to be a conspiracy on an unprecedented scale, stretching back a century.
Literally none of this is about the science. It's about people and social circles and your degree of trust. Which... I guess, yeah, a lot of people form their scientific beliefs in that manner. But it's not very scientific, and leads to tribalism. It means that if you hear enough times that pharmaceuticals are lying to you, then you'll believe it.
Whereas, a scientific mindset would mean you go and actually test the claims in the real world. That's the beauty of science! You don't have to take anyone's word for it. You can check for yourself.
Regarding Yamal and Briffa and Mann's work there, have you actually checked the paper for yourself? Have you read what the scientists said, and thought about their methodology, whether it's sound or not? Or are you just relying on what other people tell you?
You keep making cracks about me listening to Stewart (who?) or Obama (I don't). I go to the science. I try to understand it. I judge it for myself as best as I can, particularly where it overlaps with my own field. If it appeared unsound, I'd call it thus. Why would I want to hold a wrong belief?
Do you dig into the science like that?
Let me put it this way: how do you know that the people you're listening to are telling the truth?
Hopefully you're checking their claims... rather than, say, believing that the temperature adjustments are all upwards even though that's the kind of thing you could refute with a couple hours of reading and examining the data for yourself.
I missed the part where you explained why Mann ignored all the data that hurt his desired outcome.
Or why NOAA "adjusted" their data so they could lie about the pause never happening.
Let me check your post again, maybe it's buried in there somewhere...
"And why do these last NOAA adjustments bother you?"
Why did it make people laugh to see NOAA try to erase the pause, biggest problem the alarmists have - and erase almost two decades of evidence from countless studies - with one study that was quickly shredded?
You're ok with them fraudulently trying to erase 18 years worth of data with one study?
Why would that bother anyone?
You need to come on out of your bubble someday.
Just because your preferred sources still take Mann seriously doesn't mean he's not an absolute joke for those who prefer to remain objective.
We had roughly 30 yrs of cooling followed by 20 years of warming (till the end of the century) and now, almost 18 years of flat-line temps.
Run for the hills!
Cooling ... then warming ... then nothing!
And please, don't whine about combativeness right after taking shots at someone's capacity for critical thinking.
It makes you look like an angry, petulant child. Cya.
Hmm. Welllll.. eyeballing it at the green vertical line at 1950, it looks like the models with anthropogenic forcings more closely track the observations than the models with just natural forcings. Do you disagree? The black line is more in the middle of the blue/yellow in the top picture, compared to the bottom one?
Really, though, I'd argue that it's just hard to say how strong of an effect we were having at 1950. The divergence between human-forced and naturally-forced temperatures was still pretty small, and moreover we don't have great data from back then to run the models on. Any analysis will necessarily have pretty large error bars.
Oh, Diane, I'm sorry, but this is laughably wrong. Like, I actually had to try not to laugh out loud. I'm sorry, but this is conspiratorial thinking with very little basis in reality.
Have you dealt with the academic/research grant process before?
Wait, let me back up. Without going and looking it up, could you tell me how money gets from Congress down to the scientists? How they decide who gets what money, from top to bottom? Because that's a pretty damn important part of this sub-argument. (Please just give it your best shot even if you don't know).
Did you actually look at the adjustments? They were pretty small. Shifted the trend by a minor amount. With or without them, 2015 busted "the pause" anyway, and 2016 will be a bit higher yet.
But I don't think "the pause" was ever a real thing -- not in the sense of actually meaning that warming had stopped and you could show it. People confused "no statistically significant warming" - which is to say, the error bars on the linear trend are large - with "no warming". That's a pretty important distinction! Incredibly important. And it really felt like the conservative papers and blogs were preying on people who'd simply had the misfortune to never take a class on statistics.
...And certainly you couldn't show the surface temperature trends had changed during "the pause". Which is pretty easy to check; grab Excel and run some breakpoint analyses; check whether the error bars of the trends before and after 1998 diverge to 95% significance or not. (They don't). Use whichever surface dataset you like.
I'm not asking you to take my word for it. Again, you can and should check this for yourself. Literally, you can go right now and see whether I'm lying. You should!
And on top of that, the oceans were still warming, quite robustly. They're the biggest heat sink in the Earth's climatic system; the place where 90-95% of the heat from global warming goes.
So you have a ton of different data which really showed "the pause" to be an exercise in obfuscation and misdirection. No, you couldn't say the trends had changed, no, you couldn't actually say surface warming had stopped, and yes, the oceans were still quite robustly warming, which shows that CO2 was still working its magic. Again multiple lines of evidence point to a conclusion, and it's that the science is still quite sound.
But hey, let's set that aside.
You're still assuming that the NOAA adjustments were fraudulent. Can you actually defend that point? Or are you throwing out this study simply because you don't like the results?
What's wrong with the methodology NOAA uses? Not just their results, but what is wrong about how they got those results? Why do you think their results are faulty?
My apologies, the bit about critical thinking was directed at the people who were telling you these ad hominem arguments; not at you.
[With or without them, 2015 busted "the pause" anyway, and 2016 will be a bit higher yet.But I don't think "the pause" was ever a real thing.]
It wasn't a "real thing" because of one year at the end?
Don't ever say such a thing in public. I wouldn't want you to be embarrassed.
I've accumulated a lot of my references in general notes that, unfortunately weren't attributed for a long time which makes it hard for me to find the specific citations. Since I got Evernote it's a lot easier to clip whole pages so I have the complete context. I'm pulling as much as I can out of the AR5 so it can't be called biased at all since it's the source for most of the proposals these days.
One big issue on citations is that there's often a big difference between what's in the actual report vs what is written in the "climate for dummies" executive summary. The summary is written by and for political hacks rather than scientists, but remains the primary source material for most people talking about it.
So - on to current research ...
2000 year reconstructions from paleoclimatology is covered in section 5.3.5 (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter05_FINAL.pdf)
At least one of the reconstructions is higher than current and many of them show equivalent to mid 20th century temperatures. It also shows that the MWP was stronger in the Northern Hemisphere, but not absent in the Southern (Figure 5.7). Not surprising since there's a lot more water in the south than the north and oceans moderate climate (as opposed to weather) a lot in both directions.
We've got fairly (in human terms) long term records of sunspot activity which correlates to solar output. Aerosols and greenhouse gases were supposedly all natural until very recently. Milankovitch cycles run about 25,000 years and there's no evidence of any significant orbital or axial changes I'm aware of outside of that. Have you run across anything?
If we're going to attribute the changes due to human causes then the natural causes of fluctuations have to be understood so they can be subtracted out. How else can you come up with any reasonable allocations?
No argument. Their models do an excellent job of tracking the combined natural/human combination ... for the 1960 to 1998 time span, which is my point.
There is more than enough empirical data from the first half of the 20th century to make a reasonable comparison to, yet the warming from the 20's to the 40s (which was almost identical in magnitude to the warming of the latter half of the century) and the subsequent cooling from there to the mid 70s is almost flat in their models. From 1915 to 1960 it's less than one tenth of a degree min to max variation while the real world differential even using their "corrected" readings is seven tenths. That's a huge difference that just disappears.
As to the money flow, yes. I was working on both public and private based grant projects from my sophomore year on. Shoot, the ChemEng department tried to get me to switch my major for a PhD to fulfill a merit grant availability need that none of their own students could meet, willing to waive all sorts of requirements to get me. I went ahead and started the process while I was considering it, but wound up deciding against it because academia was never my goal.
Government money goes through all sorts of channels. Congress itself doesn't determine precisely who gets what (aside from a little more precision on earmark projects), the various agencies do that. The many layers of bureaucrats take over the process from there. The agencies each have their own priorities and belief structures and the bureaucrats inside of them also know what is going to get them ahead - increase their budgets at every opportunity, increase personnel levels and give their higher ups the answers they want.
I'm still looking for the best venue to pitch my guaranteed perpetual motion machine. All I need is a cat, some buttered toast, a priceless carpet and a crank. Everyone knows that a cat always lands on its feet and that the probability of a piece of bread landing buttered side down is directly proportional to the value of the carpet. Strap the toast to the back of the cat, buttered side up, attach the crank, toss the cat in the air over the carpet and let it go. Nothing will ever touch ground from there on out. No pollutants generated. Makes as much sense as a lot of other proposals I've read. }:-)
No, it wasn't a real thing because of the other three things: the oceans were still warming quite robustly, because there wasn't solid evidence that the trend ever changed, and because it was mostly people confusing "no statistically significant warming" with "no warming".
Basically, it was short-term fluctuations in the surface temperature overlaid on the long-term warming trend from CO2.
Y'know, you may have heard this before, but CO2 isn't the only thing that controls the temperature...
You're right.
Your opinion erases 18 years worth of data collected by people on all sides of this debate for God knows how many studies.
You can stop pretending to be objective now. That ship sailed, and tragically sank, long ago.
I'm referring to the huge amount of research showing that the oceans were warming robustly the whole time, and that the trend hasn't changed to any statistically significant degree. Do you dispute those studies? You do? Great! Why don't you explain why.
(I really, honestly do like getting into the nitty-gritty of things. It's how you figure stuff out! And in case you hadn't figured it out, I'm a big nerd. :-p )
For my last point, all you need to do is just see any statistics textbook. I'm sorry, but that one is just pretty plain. It's a basic part of the concept of statistical significance. It's just the way it is.
If you like, you might explain why you believe that "the pause" is real, and what you believe its significance is.
Thank God it's your last point.
Aye, I agree that a large amount of detail is lost. Which is impressive, as there's already a large amount of detail lost just in going from the scientific literature to the IPCC full reports. And those full reports still come together to be over 1200 pages long. I really find the IPCC reports a bit awe-inspiring; it's a compendium of knowledge on a subject like rarely compiled in human history.
I feel like the summaries for policymakers are still pretty good, though. But at that level, you're just getting the conclusions, the summaries, you're not understanding any of the "how". And for me, that's kinda boring, even sad. All of the magic of the science is gone.
Do you know how strong the correlation between solar activity and sunspots is? I'm trying to find a source. I thought it still left some wiggle room; at least, enough to contribute to making hindcasts difficult.
There's some question about greenhouse gases, from what I hear. Have you heard of the Ruddiman Hypothesis? The idea is that mankind has been influencing the climate in more minor ways since we started clearing land (changing the albedo) and planting marshy crops like rice (which produce a lot of methane, another greenhouse gas). So, I'd say this is an open question.
But really, the clear confunder is aerosols. When we started burning large amounts of wood, or particularly, coal, we changed the atmosphere's reflective properties as well as its propensity to form rain. And our understanding of aerosols still leaves some things to be desired. Add that to the uncertainty in what the aerosol levels actually were before 1950, and you can't do much more than shrug. This is an area that still needs research.
Side note: man, it is so annoying that we only have about 50 years of good aerosol measurements. And hell, even now we're trying to get better measurements; trying to get satellites up there that can give us a clearer picture of what's going on. If we had another 50 years of data of the sort that we're getting now, these questions about the effects of aerosols would be done. We'd have the data we needed to pin them down.
PS. There are a couple of different Milankovitch cycles, each with its own frequency.