Goofy Theory of the Day
From NewKerala.com, via the Thin Green Line:
According to Prof McGuire, in Taiwan the lower air pressure created by typhoons was enough to “unload” the crust by a small amount and trigger earthquakes, reports the Scotsman.
Uh, right. We don’t know what triggers earthquakes in general, so we certainly don’t know the affect of atmospheric conditions on earthquakes. This is outrageous speculation from an all night session at the pub, breathlessly reported as actual news.
Let’s do a thought experiment. A strong typhoon might drop local atmospheric pressure by 0.2atm. The pressure at the bottom of the ocean averages 200-600atm, and under a few miles of rock is even higher. I would challenge someone with measurement instruments on a fault to even detect such an atmospheric change. Even on surface faults, we are talking about gigatons of force held in check by friction — this is roughly the equivalent of a feather landing on the Empire State Building and collapsing it.
I sometimes wonder if we will see a future SAT question whose answer is “climate studies are to science as alchemy is to chemistry”.
John:
This one’s almost as good:
“They added that global warming only increased the level of volcanic activity.
“At the end of the last ice age, the rate of eruption in Iceland was some 30 times higher than historic rates.
“This is because the reduction in the ice load reduced the pressure in the mantle, leading to decompression melting there.
“Since the late 19th century the ice caps in Iceland have been shrinking yet further, due to our changing climate.
“This will lead to additional magma generation, so we should expect more frequent or more voluminous eruptions in the future.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7611663/Volcano-ash-Threat-of-second-volcano-Katla-10-times-the-strength.html
April 21, 2010, 8:52 amGarry:
Wifey’s niece has lived in Taiwan for 5+ years and has always been spooked by the persistent and ongoing small to medium earthquakes in her town. She wants to leave Taiwan (with the family in tow) at the earliest opportunity, for that reason.
By the way, is Prof. McGuire’s “unloading” of the robust or the un-robust variety? Or is it just a robust tipping point?
April 21, 2010, 10:26 amGeorge:
If this hypothesis had any validity, there would be a demonstrated correlation between tropical storms (typhoons and hurricanes)and seismic activity. Has anyone seen a credible data suggesting such a relationship? Surely it would be easy to demonstrate such a correlation, should it in fact take place.
I have been a geologist for several decades, and I have never seen such data published.
April 21, 2010, 12:10 pmTobyw:
Could be something to that typhoon theory. I seem to recall reading about higher sea levels under low pressure cells, but I think it is considerably less than normal tidal changes. Still, it could trigger something that was about to go, especially in conjunction with tides. You could probably estimate by changing pressure from mm Hg to inches of H2O.
-T
April 21, 2010, 12:18 pmADiff:
This would be totally laughable, if it weren’t coming from someone lots of folks would view as a ‘reputable’ member of what’s perceived as an established academic community. I can’t think of a more telling indictment of ‘climate science’ as a discipline that it possesses members of its academic community who blandly would toss something this ludicrous out without even a single shred of evidence to support it. The ‘climate science’ community appears to be nothing more or less now than another one of those soft ‘social’ sciences (read: not really science at all) for which purely academic speculation is treated as if it were something more. Climate Science takes its proper place alongside ‘Political Science’, ‘Social Science’ and ‘Anthropology’ as just another of variety of academic vaporing.
April 21, 2010, 12:26 pmMetro Gnome:
It wasn’t the typhoon. Every man, woman and child in China climbed onto a table and simultaneously jumped off, while, at the same time, a butterfly flapped its wings in Argentina.
April 21, 2010, 12:29 pmnetdr:
“Climate alchemists” that says it well. I think I will borrow the term.
There is nothing bad which hasn’t been ascribed to global warming from volcanoes to freezing Peruvian villages.
These people have no shame and are oblivious to how silly they appear to someone of average intelligence.
April 21, 2010, 1:20 pmCurt:
The one I have used in the past is “Climate science is to real science as professional wrestling is to real sports.” I think others have used it as well.
April 21, 2010, 1:31 pmMetro Gnome:
“The question of whether a climate scientist does science is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine swims.”
(with apologies to Edsger Dijkstra).
April 21, 2010, 1:39 pmGeorge:
Climate science is to real science as drag racing is to Formula 1. Lots of money, lots of noise, and not much sophistication. (Says a real geologists and sometime racing driver.)
April 21, 2010, 3:05 pmRuss R.:
Typhoons trigger earthquakes? Doubtful.
Though I’m willing to bet money that lunar phases do.
April 21, 2010, 3:34 pmhunter:
I am always amused by your frequent statements that “we don’t know” various things. Why use this bizarre royal “we” when what you mean is “I”? Rather obviously, you haven’t actually read the papers mentioned in the article. Instead, you follow your normal approach of failing to understand, lacking the intellect even to realise that you don’t understand, and declaring that it must be nonsense without even having actually read the study.
You are too stupid to realise how stupid you are. You are too stupid to ever respond to criticism of your anti-intellectual ramblings. You are too stupid for words. Your stupidity is disgusting, and your public flaunting of it even more so.
April 21, 2010, 4:04 pmvimy100:
hunter ~ I’ve just come to this site and have already seen several of your posts. I have worked in climatology with the Meteorological Service of Canada for 31 years and have followed the climate change debate since 1974. In all those years I have seen the full range of exchange from incredibly astute, well-informed and highly intelligent to utterly devoid of value, a sort of compendium of fallacious reasoning. I thought I had seen the extremes of those poles but I had not yet encountered you.
Your entire communication is bald assertion without evidence combined with egregious name-calling. Why do you bother? You must find Warren attractive. Are you a stalker? Why don’t you ask him out on a date? Perhaps you needn’t live your life unfulfilled. Who knows?
April 21, 2010, 5:58 pmAndrew:
If true-So what? Typhoons aren’t caused by AGW. Look at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center’s (Uhoh! It’s the NAVY!) charts:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b370/gatemaster99/typhoons.png
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b370/gatemaster99/supertyphoons.png
There is no increase in the storms or strongest storms, even with improving technology!
http://www.usno.navy.mil/NOOC/nmfc-ph/RSS/jtwc/atcr/2008atcr/2008atcr.pdf
April 21, 2010, 6:52 pmAndrew:
Hm…On the off chance Warren is reading the comments, I tried to do a post which probably triggered your spam filter do to links. Since most of these comments devolve into arguments between trolls who attack you in a very personal level, I can understand if you don’t notice this. But if you do happen to see this, I would appreciate if you could dig that post out of your filter-I link to some images and a report by the JTWC.
April 21, 2010, 7:03 pmtroy:
Hehe…Nice post!
P.S. “affect” ==> “effect”
April 21, 2010, 7:25 pmP Gosselin:
A lot of kooky yet eerily similar predictions were made by doomsday sayers back then.
April 22, 2010, 4:20 amGuess what? We’re still here and doing better than ever!
P Gosselin:
I’m talking about Earth Day 1970.
April 22, 2010, 4:22 amnatex:
vimy100,
You’ve come off no better than hunter – actually, worse since you’ve stoked the fire of fallacious reasoning then thrown yourself into the flame.
1. Ad Verecundiam.
2. Ad Hominem.
Bravo, (not so) well done.
April 22, 2010, 8:53 amWaldatory:
I posted this over on the “Earth Day” thread. These are the papers in question:
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1919.toc
I’m just curious – has anybody actually read the papers, or are you going to rely on a one-sentence excerpt from a newspaper-style article and Mr. Meyer’s very balanced response to it? After all, we’d want to follow a “thought experiment” over empirical science, right? The apt analogy to a feather on the Empire State Building – that makes the case for sure
I see another poster claiming a deep science background (vimy100) – certainly you will be interested in reading the actual scholarship involved, yes? ADiff refused because the journal title has “Philosophical” in it – therefore it is not science. Personally, the whole theory sounds fairly unlikely to me, but so does the concept of uranium-235.
April 22, 2010, 10:54 amAndrew:
Alrighty, let’s see if it works with just the one link (posters here are smart enough to find two huge graphs anyway. There is no evidence that AGW has effected (or affected) typhoons anyway, so even if this story were true, it would be irrelevant (see page 12):
http://www.usno.navy.mil/NOOC/nmfc-ph/RSS/jtwc/atcr/2008atcr/2008atcr.pdf
GASP! Oh no! The NAVY! Better not believe them!
April 22, 2010, 12:40 pmThinkair:
Try this experment take plastic bag say about a foot square, make it air tight with a drink straw fitted to it. Now place a piece of board over the top and add weights on top. See how much weight you can lift just by blowing in the straw you will be amazed just how much you can lift !
April 22, 2010, 2:56 pmhunter:
vimy100,
April 22, 2010, 4:23 pmAnd just to help make things more confusing, the ‘hunter’ you are referring to is a roll who used to be call itself ‘scientist’ but decided to demonstrate how to reach new lows in trollhood and borrow my name.
MartinH:
More like… climate science is to science as homeopathy is to medicine.
April 22, 2010, 4:51 pmNEILC:
“The ‘climate science’ community appears to be nothing more or less now than another one of those soft ’social’ sciences (read: not really science at all) ”
To ADiff:
i don’t suppose you’ve read the IPCC’s fourth assessment report? and you probably haven’t wondered why governments around the world upon hearing evidence from this “soft social science” are now investing billions of pounds to avoid climate change.
Perhaps you can offer how ongoing sea-level rise, polar warming, intense coral bleaching, polar ice retreat, ocean acidity can be explained by ‘academic vaporing’?
Is there a reason why twenty of the warmest years since the 1800′s have occurred since 1980? or 11 of the warmest in the last 12 years? climate science has a sound scientific basis and is put into disrepute by people like you. Furthermore, many of the advancements in science have started out as outrageous theories and been panned by the scientific community – perhaps you have heard of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Im not saying Prof McGuire is correct in any way, but i am sure that you are ignorant in tarring the climate science community.
April 23, 2010, 2:44 amBadn:
Take a look at the scientific consensus mabe: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), The American Chemical Society (ACS), The American Geophysical Union (AGU), The American Meteorological Society (AMS),The Geological Society of America (GSA), G8 science academies, the Oregon Petition, NASA, The UK MET Office. Some clever minds in there, and all of them agree mankind is changing the climate. Maybe take a look at countries around the world, why would china be investing heavily in alternative forms of fuel when coal is the cheap and easy option?
And why do studies by Richard Lindzen continue to be published when his scientific method continues to be proven flawed?
Climate change is real, the time for skepticism is long past
April 23, 2010, 3:24 amhunter:
It is distressingly predictable that new true believers show up and make the same argument that since so much money and so many people who claim to know something agree that AGW is real, it must be.
Here is what one cliamte scientist says that helps to put skeptical thinking in context:
http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/04/23/an-inconvenient-provocateur/
I like this part of the interview:
“Corruptions to the IPCC process that I have seen discussed include:
• lead/contributing authors assessing their own work – (e.g. von Storch criticism in 2005), in some cases resulting in an overemphasis on their own papers written by themselves and their collaborators;
• tailoring graphics and not adequately describing uncertainties ostensibly to simplify and not to “dilute the message” that IPCC wanted to send;
• violations of publication (in press) deadlines for inclusions of papers in the IPCC report;
• inadequacies in the review process whereby lead/contributing authors don’t respond fairly to adverse criticism; this inadequacy arises in part to the authors themselves having ultimate authority and in part to cursory performance by the Review Editors;
• evasiveness and unresponsiveness by the IPCC regarding efforts to investigate alleged violations occurring in the review process;
• IPCC Review Editors and authors using the IPCC to avoid accountability under national FOI legislation.”
In particular.
Badn and NEILC, First the list of what NEILC claims as evidence of a climate catastrophe is simply counter factual. Badn, listing people who agree with you as proof of something is no proof. And since when did governments spending money on something mean the money is being spent well or effectively, much less on an actual problem?
April 23, 2010, 5:34 amIf you are simply here to assert that since people you agree with all agree that CO2 is causing a climate catastrophe, you are wasting your time.
hunter:
Badn,
April 23, 2010, 5:36 amBy the way, asserting that the time for skepticism is long since past is one of the more oxymoronic assertions one can make regarding a science issue.
hunter:
GCMs vs reality on preceptition:
April 23, 2010, 6:01 amhttp://www.climatedata.info/Precipitation/Precipitation/global_files/BIGwprc-02-simulation-of-global-precipitation.gif.gif
Waldollar:
You see, Neil and Badn, the good folks here are under the impression that the world governments and the global science community have been corrupted by the massive amounts of money and lust for power (which equates to some sort of socialist / Marxist “restructuring the economy”). They are very self-congratulatory and seem to believe that they are the avant-garde of a revolution to take down the evil world-wide conspiracy of scientists – the commentators here are somewhat self-aggrandizing in this respect.
In addition, the good folks here claim to understand the science better than the actual scientists, particularly after reading cross-postings of blogs and newspaper articles. The real research papers or the websites of actual scientific organizations…? Not so much.
April 23, 2010, 4:29 pmShills:
Agree Waldo. But the deniers’ll prob. argue against your marxist point, and then conclude that you are generally full o’ shit.
They will prob. also invoke the appeal to authority fallacy, as inappropriately as ever.
They might argue some insignificant semantics.
All up, not much will be agreed upon. But AGW theory will still stand solid because they can’t be bothered publishing their supposed refutations or flaws of AGW.
April 23, 2010, 5:05 pmWaldarhino:
Well remember, Shills, that peer-review is “not perfect,” and the fact that there has been the occasional error or a modicum of sloppy record-keeping obviously disproves the massive amount of information gathered over a 25 year period from the best trained, best equipped individuals from around the world.
But rather than actually reading the science (no one seems interested in the papers posted above which are the subject of this particular post), I suspect we are meant to focus on the occasional outlaying scientist or, at best case scenario, a parks-manager with a business degree. Throw in some personal vitriol and an unproven allegation or two about the scientists involved, and I think you’ve summed up the denialist case fairly well.
And yeah, I have noticed a distinct lack of publication for most denialist theory – oh wait, I forgot blog science. You know, I have a blog somewhere. Guess that makes me a scientist too…
April 23, 2010, 7:44 pmMichael Collard:
Waldo or Shills:
I don’t quite follow. How does the validity of the science imply that the politics is not corrupt? Shouldn’t that be a separate debate?
April 24, 2010, 5:27 amNEILC:
to HUNTER: “counter factual”.
Now lets talk about facts hunter – its strikes me that you argue with very little of them. The stats that i have cited are facts – not even a climate scientist who is anti-climate change would argue against them. Richard Lindzen, one of the most famous climate change critics himself worked with the IPCC producing the second report. The argument against climate change is not aimed at current observations but at future predictions. Perhaps you should bother to research this. And by you ‘listing things’ you think you know about the IPCC report, as evidence of some sort of climate cover-up, is hypocritical. You give yourself away by the mere nature of your posts: full of hot air but very little substance, just as i suspect your knowledge of the climate is.
Now, a few years down the line, when climate change, caused by anthropogenic activities has flooded your house, please come visit Scotland, which will benefit from a milder climate, and i will endeavor to welcome you with the last laugh.
April 24, 2010, 6:25 amNEILC:
And walldollar is right on the money: your knowledge that you believe gives you insight into the subject area, and thereby providing you with sound criticism of actual climate scientists – like myself – is based around websites such as collide-a-scape.com? Come and get off your high horse, you are an imbecile, but in your own words, “you are too stupid to realise how stupid you are”
April 24, 2010, 6:39 amBadn:
Hello Hunter: let me respond by me asking you questions and you attempting to answer them:
1) Why would the vast majority of climate scientists agree with anthropogenic global warming and the future predictions, while a small proportion do not?
2) Why would there be an attempted cover up and fudging of data by the IPCC? What would there be to gain from this? I doubt they are all guilty of sensationalism. So tell us all, why the desperation in depicting a ‘a global catastrophe’ without one being imminent?
3) Im sure you are right in pointing out that government spending is not always constructive or done for the correct reasons. So can you suggest any reason that the worlds governments may be spending this money, other than in avoidance of climate change?
Please try to respond without slander, earlier i noticed this ‘distressingly predictable’ comment from you:
“What is this weird compulsion you have about displaying in as many ways as possible how stupid you are? The more videos you produce, the less you seem to understand. And it’s not just that you don’t understand. You’re not even capable of understanding that you don’t understand. Dopy fucking cunt”
April 24, 2010, 8:09 amhunter:
Badn,
1) whatever the reason, it does make those who think we are experiencing a global climate catastrophe any less wrong.
2) Why not? Coverups and corrupt practices have happened in every area of human activity. Why is climate science immune?
3) because the people they like and respect tell them it is a great thing to do.
4) That answer should come from the troll who posts under my name. And who is by the way, a great true believer in AGW. I have no idea of the medicine or pathology behind that particular poster. I did not write what you are referring to. If you can gain some insights to her/him/it, please share them.
My working idea on AGW is that it is only marginally about science at all. It is a social mania, like the tulipomania of Dutch fame, or eugenics of the last century. The fact that tulips still bloom or that evolution and genetics are valid science, does not make the ideas about the importance or value tulips or genetics as they were manifested in the economy or government policies good or useful.
NEIL C,
Arctic ice pack is very close to the 30 year moving average, and you have no idea what the longer term moving averages are. Worldwide ice pack is up.
World temperatures, even if one accepts the GISS/CRU product as accurate, shows a change over ~130 years that is not remarkable.
Ocean levels are rising about as they were.
Your last characterization is not based on a quote of anything I have said. In fact that post was by an AGW believer troll insulting the host of this site for being a skeptic.
April 24, 2010, 8:30 amSee my post above.
You are not the first anonymous poster to claim to be a climate scientist. Perhaps you are the first to actually be one.
Waldwho:
Hi Mike,
****”How does the validity of the science imply that the politics is not corrupt? Shouldn’t that be a separate debate?”
I was a little confused by the wording of the first question, but I think you are asking, ‘Can’t the science be correct and the politics corrupt?’ And, of course, the answer would be “yes” – something that probably everyone can agree on.
What has not been proven, however, is that the “politics” (presumably of the scientists and world organizations) is “corrupt.” The CRU emails (the usual province of denialist theory) are anti-climactic when one actually reads them, and the CRU scientists have been officially cleared with some pretty believable explanations for many of the buzz-words and phrases (“trick,” “hide the decline”) that galvanized so many of the denialists.
And yes, I agree, these should be a “separate debate.” But that is what bothers me about places like CS. Read the blogs and the posts. It is pretty clear that Mr. Meyer and the people who follow him are politically motivated.
April 24, 2010, 9:27 amNEILC:
A brief summary of what you think is going on but is not:
The fact that Antarctic sea ice is growing is qualitatively consistent with the, agreeably, counterintuitive prediction of coupled ocean-atm models of increasing sea ice around Antarctica with climate warming, due to the stabilizing effects of increased snowfall on the Southern Ocean. This i believe will be where you find worldwide ice pack increasing. I really dont know how you could call 20th century and past 20-year warming unremarkable, considering long term, simple and accurate instrumental temperature trends from the last century alone, and regardless of palaeo-studies which further emphasise the remarkable sudden warming, that perfectly coincides with anthropogenically produced CO2. Were you to perhaps write a thesis and invest years of studying on palaeo-climate and modern change you would be convinced of this beyond all doubt, but im sure you have not. Please understand that this is not a form of gloating, only a simple point that investigation is far superior than speculation.
Eustatic rise is also consistent with physical models of a thermally expanding ocean. Thermal expansion, combined with pervasive, sustained and accelerating melting of ice caps, glaciers etc have been modeled to give a rise of say 60cm by 2100. This is without incorporating the effects of the greenland and major antarctic ice sheets, of which their dynamics are not fully understood, but should a large degree of melting occur, will likely add meters of rise on top of this.
Your lack of knowledge is outstanding. I expect this since the fact that you say AGW is only marginally based on science leads me to believe as i suspected, that your stance on this is largely based on ideology and not on fact. I am further convinced of this by your conspicuous inability to answer the questions set out by Badn with any competence, but rather more ridiculous conjecture and hear-say thieved from amateur blogs.
April 24, 2010, 9:29 amWaldomania:
Now, now Neil, you are actually talking science here. That’s going to make people mad! Plus it would appear that you have some actual qualifications in the field – and that’s going to make them madder still!
April 24, 2010, 9:36 amMichael Collard:
Waldo:
Sorry about the confusion. Perhaps I am confused as well.
The corruption I was referring to was not of the science or the scientists, but the corruption inherent to government and politics in general. Your defense of the science seemed to imply a defense of the politics as well. I see I was mistaken.
I don’t know enough about the science to argue with it. My objections are to the proposed solutions. And corruption is not the reason. I just don’t see how it is possible to accomplish anything on a global scale, or how anything less than a global effort would be effective.
The final outcome of all this will be decided by politicians, not scientists. So, my objections are purely political, and thus, by definition, “politically motivated”.
April 24, 2010, 1:31 pmWaldoarooo!:
Ah, got’cha, Mike.
Well I won’t necessarily argue that corruption is or isn’t inherent to government – personally I rather think some politicians are corrupt, but the majority are like the rest of us, simply trying to do their jobs as best they’re able (and screwing up a lot along the way). A portion of every population is going to be corrupt, after all, and a portion is going to be honest, hardworking, etc. (and a portion is simply going to screw-up along the way).
So sure, let’s debate the final outcome. I sure don’t have an answer and, as you seem to suggest, you believe there might be nothing to accomplish anyway.
But let’s take the scientists off the firing line and let them do their jobs. If you disagree with the politicians, take it to the politicians – although it is also possible that something can be done and, with that possibility in mind, perhaps we should let the politicians and political powers do their work?
People like the CS tribe here want to weigh in on the scientific conversation but it becomes rather apparent after any time spent here that they are very politically motivated, scientifically uninformed, opinionated, and frankly too lazy to actually check on the veracity of their own pontifications. Now that bothers me.
April 24, 2010, 2:32 pmhunter:
NEILC,
April 25, 2010, 8:02 amPerhaps your reading skills at this blog- which are lacking- contributes to your faith in AGW.
You could not tell the difference between my posts and a pro-AGW poster using my name.
My point, and you demonstrate it well, is that AGW is only marginally about climate science.
Climates change and CO2 is a ghg. That has never changed as long as the physical laws have existed. The only new thing is the sad case of group think and self-deception practiced on a large scale that convinces you and an ever shrinking number of people, that a climate apocalypse caused by CO2 is underway.
But you are just another anonymous self-declared climate expert spouting talking points about a catastrophe that is not occurring and is not going to occur.
Thermal expansion yields sea level changes unremarkably different from the rate of rise before thermal expansion was declared.
Your ability to parrot talking points is outstanding and I would offer that you are just another troll, with or without education, who is seeking to cling to the faith in AGW you are so committed to.
There is no climate crisis underway. There is nothing dramatic or dangerous in the lcimate we are experiencing. And you, no matter how much you wish otherwise, have any evidence of this not being the case.
NEILC:
Hunter,
Indeed i did mix up two posters with the same name, an easy mistake. However you have mistaken me for a ‘troll’, a fairly presumptuous allegation but one which does not phase me. Regardless, you are now in a position where you are blindly arguing against the science and the facts again and it shows:
thermal expansion, implies by name, that the oceans are responding to an increase in temperature. Put in other words, the 1-2 degree surface ocean warming that has occurred in the last century (and further again predicted in the next century) exceeds the total tropical SST variation from the previous 18,000 years. Unremarkable indeed. You fail to read and understand my points about projected and observed future sea-level: Sea level rise has occurred at a mean rate of 1.8 mm/yr for the past century, and more recently this has accelerated, probably between 2.5-3.5mm/yr, and though sea-level is notoriously difficult to determine due to a number of factors, it is highly probable that this is due to thermal expansion and increased ice melt. It is all about margins of error you see, that is why we do statistics, and not speculative google searches: I can picture the exact figure that you have googled and taken as an understanding of the subject.
Regardless of this minor debate, it is only small fraction of the combined evidence, all pointing towards human-induced warming. So i would question your reading skills, since you have read nothing of the science, bar a quick google search.
Now, disregarding your attempts to try and diminish my views, you have no defense. If you were to try and get some credibility to your argument, you would get evidence for it, rather than attempt to undermine me. You prove your vulnerability through use of words such as ‘faith’. Rather than an obtaining an abundance of evidence against climate change (of which there is none) to bolster your views, you have chosen blindly to disregard AGW evidence by clinging to shreds of malicious evidence about its corrupt conception.
I have shown no evidence that i cling to any dogma, AGW is not a deity that i revere. But you have shown considerable evidence of your complete lack of insight, and persistently illogical and sensationalist attitudes that have no place in a scientific discussion.
I guess in simple terms i mean:
I have a tonne of evidence for AGW and i can ‘spout’ it all day long, you have barely a shred of science to back yourself, that is why you turn to zealous hyperbole about cover-ups, corruption and attempts to undermine. The only case of self-deception taking place around here is near you. Someone get a taxi for this man because he is finished.
April 25, 2010, 9:56 amPaul Maynard:
Hmmm, seems like this site has been infected by trolls.
If anyone would like to see a presentation given by McGuire in London last year, let me know. You will then be able to decide how much of a scientist he is.
The IPCC admits to a direct warming caused by a doubling of CO2 of less than 1C. The rest of its alarmist projections as they are known are dependant on positive feedback of which it has no evidence or is yet to publish any.
It also relies on climate models. As on its own admission, we do not understand many climate processes, the models cannot work, which is why they all predict more warming than is happening.
Cheers
Paul
April 25, 2010, 11:49 amNEILC:
Well thats simply not true:
climate models have accurately simulated past events in climate very well using coupled feedback mechanisms between ocean, climate and vegetation, one example of MANY being the sudden drying out of the Sahel region 5500 years ago. Or the glacial cycles. Or the PETM. Accurately predicted using climate models, but of course, to you they cannot work. In fact short term (as in five years) warming has been underestimated by most climate models only a few years old, so what do you think will happen to long term projections?
Many climate feedbacks are well understood, and have been demonstrated to be changing, providing positive feedbacks already and due to be strengthening, such as the terrestrial forest feedback, ocean carbonate solubility feedback, soil carbon feedback, ice albedo…etc etc etc.
I really am fighting a losing battle on a skeptic website, and i don’t for one minute expect to convince you, but you certainly will not be changing my mind about human-induced warming, especially upon hearing your flaccid abstractions. At the end of the day (or decade), we shall see who was in the right either way.
April 25, 2010, 3:01 pmWaldingo:
The thing of it is, Neil, the people here want very badly to believe in a “global warming hoax” – science is entirely unnecessary to them for this purpose. You are a “troll” to them because you disagree and because you have specific, expert knowledge of the phenomena involved.
I think Laurent’s comment from the “Colorado Presentation” thread is most illuminating; Laurent is responding to my questions “Why, laurent, would you go listen to a layman when you could listen and learn from an expert?” and he/she/it responds:
******”When I was in school, we had a very good guy in Maths in my class. We had another guy that was definetly less good, but still better than the rest of the class. Guess whom we asked for help?
That was not that the best guy was not helpful, he was. But he was “too good” to be able to explain, he could not put himself at the place of somebody with difficulties, as for him math was “natural”. The second guy was the one helping. Good enough to discuss with the best guy if he did not understand something, but weak enough to know what it meant not to understand. He was the best teacher, simply.
****”So what I mean is that it is helpful to have people trying to simplify and sort the information if you don’t have time or capacity to do it yourself.”
In other words, Laurent gravitated not to the most accomplished or qualified person, but to the person who Laurent could understand (I wonder how Mr. Meyer likes his apparent analog to the “definitely less good” guy?). And I’m willing to bet that a lot of the people here gravitate to Mr. Meyer’s commentary simply because he is comprehensible, can be read in about a minute, and tells them what they want to hear; the actual science, on the other hand, is far too complex and takes far too long to learn about. I suspect that the people here very badly want to be involved in the climate debate but cannot in any medium except the blogosphere where they can make the sort of flaccid abstractions you comment upon and feel relatively safe doing so. That is, until someone like yourself shows up (the boards have been very quiet as of late…I also suspect that the hoax-trolls have gone into hiding).
So please, keep up the commentary. I find it interesting anyway, even if it is over my head. And remember, other people with open minds come to this site also and they very well may read your commentary: you might be doing a lot more good than you think.
Oh, and by the way, hunter is not the brightest guy and will continue to flaccidly abstract for as long as you are willing to post. I ignore him most of the time.
Cheers.
April 25, 2010, 4:27 pmhunter:
NEIL C,
April 25, 2010, 7:03 pmYou are fighting a losing battle because you are wrong.
No matter how many assertions of authority you make, there is still not apocalypse happening or due.
By the way it is a bit of a stretch to be able to say in your opening sentence that GCMs are good and then to say they are under estimating things.
Your closer- that we will see who is right at the end of the day or decade was used 20 years ago, and things are still bumbling along about as they were and well within normal climate and weather, and still no closer to an apocalypse or tipping point now than they were then.
But good try and better luck next time.
NEILC:
Hunter:
Thank-you for proving my point perfectly – you simply say i am wrong without any science to back yourself. again!
Noone has mentioned the phrases ‘climate apocalypse’ or ‘climate catastrophe’ here except you.
The GCM’s simulate the past well since humans are not involved, they underestimate short term, and therefore very likely the long term, since the time-scale of which humans are changing the atmosphere is unprecedented in the last 20 million years. Rate of change is the key.
If things are bumbling along as usual, why have the hottest years on record been nearly consecutively in the last 20 years? why are incidents of extreme weather higher than on record? Why are anomalously hot days and nights more frequent than on record, and anomalously cold days and nights fewer than on record?
Answer me those hunter without bullshitting. Bon chance
April 26, 2010, 12:43 amhunter:
NEILC,
April 26, 2010, 5:18 amAs I re-read your posts, you have only made assertions as well.
Mine happen to be based on reality, yours based on AGW talking points.
Your claim about hottest years is irrelevant, since the data used is highly questionable, the period of measuring is arbitrary and claimed ‘hottest’ is so trivial as to be transparent junk.
In terms of ‘bullshitting’, you have arrived claiming to be an active climate scientist, which you are not, asserted that you are referring to science, which you are not, and have admitted you are not winning anything being here.
So just who is spreading used cow food?
Why you. You are just a true believer hoping to spread your gospel to the wicked denialist scum. IOW, a troll.
NEILC:
Excellent work hunter, what reality is this? you are diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
I shall endeavor to make myself more precise: Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) at the time of IPCC4 were the warmest, in terms of average global surface temperature (measured easily and accurately for 150 years by non corrupt scientifically trained organisations). This temperature increase is widespread, global, and, as has been predicted by climate models is greater at higher latitudes, and almost twice the global average in the Arctic. This warming, initially unobserved, has now been observed in the upper and mid tropospheres (the initial satellite data has been corrected for diurnal effects and orbital variations, if you know what that means), and as has been predicted, is also accompanied by a cooling in the lower stratosphere.
This is said with highest confidence, meaning there is virtual consensus amongst the studies done – therefore the data is as conclusive as can be without being 100% certain. All the current laws of physics are not certain, but we used them to get men on the moon.
You have merely looked at another skeptic website and copied someone else’s crap without bothering to check yourself because you are a lazy ignoramus. Once again – HAVE A LOOK AT THE LITERATURE, if you are capable of higher brain function, you will now go and look at the literature. Maybe do a search for some key papers from the scientific community. But i know you will not.
In fact i challenge any skeptic on this site to now go and do your own research on temperature studies, with a broad spectrum of peer-assessed reviews. ‘Science blogs’ count for nothing. Then if you feel the need to comment, please do.
And i am a climate scientist, my training is in environmental geosciences, with honors in climate science, applied environmental geochemistry and global environmental change. My specific fields include Permo-triassic extinction from global warming and ocean acidification, hydrogeological modelling and anthropogenic climate science. This from one of the leading universities in climate and geology in the world – i.e. taught by the world leaders. What credentials do you have?
Now my reasoning behind continuing to post here is to perhaps INFORM the uninformed and reverse the misinformed about the science. Not to argue with you, a blatant idiot.
April 26, 2010, 6:21 amhunter:
NEILC,
Clearly you are sseeking full troll status in a hurry, so rather than slow you down, I will just hit a few points in your ridiculous spew.
Your assertion about land temperature accuracy is hotly disputed by climate scientists and statisticians who review them.
Gosh NEILC, I am wondering if the collegiate and respectful parts of scinece were also areas that you slept through?
My credentials are that I read carefully decline to fall for bogus crap written by the likes of you. Unlike AGW true believers, skeptics do not simply believe womething because neverwuzzers like you say it must be so.
April 26, 2010, 8:19 amIn ~150 years of record keeping all the AGW fear mongers have to show is ~1o of warming which is historically nothing out of the ordinary.
And the IPCC/GCM failure at precepitation predictions, storm predictions, etc. are there in the stats.
Since CRUgate and multiple sources confirms that the people you support are/were engaged in distorting peer review, you can keep harping on peer review all you want- and you will look no brighter.
All you are demonstrating for people with your posting here is that you are a derivative thinker who is practices true believer syndrome rather well.
NEILC:
Ah so you have no prior training at all, so you can easily differentiate between crap is non-crap. Please answer me this, have you read any scientific papers or publications? Have you?
Several points,
CRUgate: i knew you would bring it up, it is an obvious choice to cling to as proof of some sort of corruption within the system. The global temperature series tallies with those of almost every other, completely independent, groups of scientists working around the globe. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them. Once again you pick up only on scraps to back yourself.
GCM’s have difficulty at simulating precipitation, storms, etc, and by no means are they perfect. The main reason being the complex teleconnections that exist between land ocean and atmophere, see Bjerkness feedbacks and the role of Pacific Oscillators in the ENSO system. This illustrates my point well. Good references to read are those of McReary, Tudhope, Wang, Jin, Cane and Zebiak.
Climate models, need to be simplified versions of real climate and i expect they will never be able to fully simulate every aspect of climate perfectly.
But the simulations speak for themselves even if they are simplified. The modest warming at the moment will have little effect on climate, but climate feedbacks will amplify it. Now, you are thinking, ‘but these feedbacks are unproven!’. So why then, in past reconstructions, when models were combined with all the feedbacks that we understand well enough (and those we do not are positive feedbacks anyway), were past events modelled so accurately?
For example, the glacial cycles depend on climate feedbacks in order to switch between glacial and interglacial. Solar cycles (Milankovitch) do not present a big enough forcing to switch between climate regimes, it is the presence of feedbacks that shift the earth from one to the other.
These were modelled very accurately by coupled ocean-atmosphere models. In other words, we predicted the past with feedbacks, so logic dictates that future predictions will as well. There is no logic in assuming that models worked with feedbacks from the past, but they will not in the future.
It defies belief that you diminish the credibility of peer review, which is without doubt the foundation of scientific advance.
April 26, 2010, 9:01 amJP:
Neil,
Roger Pielke posted climate projections of all of the IPCC ARs, and in every case they overstated by at least .4 deg C/decade the amount of warming the globe would undergo. He began with the 1992 AR and ended with the 2002. So, I’m not sure where you are getting your verification information from. Yes, after the fact the climate models are adjusted to get them in line with current conditions. But never have the models had to be adjusted upwards -it’s always downwards. NOAA has the same problem with thier seasonal and annual climate projections. Never has NOAA had to adjust thier temps upward.
And, as far as modeling past climates -if those models cannot even capture decadal trends, how accurate are they? There are a thousand ways one can model past climate regimes and still “be wrong”. The future is the only thing that counts. If our climate modelers were areospace engineers, I would certainly not wish to fly in thier aircraft.
April 26, 2010, 11:23 amhunter:
NEILC,
April 26, 2010, 11:25 amYes, I have read and do read the papers.
Yes, I knew you would dismiss CRUgate as nothing here move along. which is the typical response for someone engaging in true believer syndrome.
GCM’s are not perfect, but we need to radically change our economies and lifestyles based on what those made those imperfect models demand.
Yeah, you want me to pull the other finger?
Yes, of course the fantasy that we have strong feedbacks is transubstantiation of AGW true belief. Or should it be renamed the immaculate feedback?
It is beyong belief that you call the bogus crap climate scientists engage in ‘peer review’. It is an insult to real science and peer review.
No what is the foundation of science, like all human endeavor, is something lacking in climate science: integrity. By skippig the integrity part, climate science has made peer review and every other aspect of what they are peddling a sham.
And by the way, it is clear you have nothing to offer except trolling.
Troll on, wannabe.
JP:
“GCM’s have difficulty at simulating precipitation, storms, etc, and by no means are they perfect. The main reason being the complex teleconnections that exist between land ocean and atmophere, see Bjerkness feedbacks and the role of Pacific Oscillators in the ENSO system.”
Actually the modelers got cloud cover 180 degrees backwards -especially tropical cloud cover. If climate models cannot model ENSO with any degree of precision then they are worthless.
April 26, 2010, 11:30 amNEILC:
JP,
that is exactly my point about trying to model weather and complex climate systems – ENSO modelling is really poor quality, and probably worthless at this time. But the models i am referring to run on a global scale and miss out this sort of complexity. This is of small consequence – the effect of leaving out systems such as ENSO will be minimal on projections of average global temperatures. Sure it will never be able to model interannual or interdecadal variability, but that is not the sort of resolution being attempted, nor is needed.
And i cant see how every projection by the IPCC was over the expected warming by .4 degrees, since every report includes a number of projections, based on economic progress and emissions etc, providing a range of projected warmings, not a single warming trend per report. But in any case, there will always be uncertainties, probably large ones, but the general trends from most model runs are the same, and even the IPCC most modest projections spell no good under the business as usual regime. Even warming of 2 degrees will displace millions of people around the globe alone – maybe that is worth avoiding.
Hunter, i can only laugh at your response. You do your side of the debate no justice because you have no place in a scientific debate. You dont even know the difference between a GCM (global circulation model) and a coupled model which is what my last post referred to.
April 26, 2010, 12:31 pmWally:
Neil,
But you’re forgetting errors compound over time. So you can’t accurately predict interdecadal variability, you have little hope at predicting decadal variability either. The basic idea is that while your error in year 1 might be +/- .5 degrees (just made up here for example), and you can’t predict a warming that grows outside of that error until 20 year later, but by year 20 your error has increased to +/- 2 degrees, which now obscures any predicted temp increase. This is the ultimate hack job of every IPCC predicted warming, they don’t show you the error. Or if they do, they pretend that the error in predicting 2020′s global average temp is the same as the error in predicting 2100′s global average temp. It should be pretty intuitive that those errors will not be the same in a system as poorly understood as global climate. Maybe if we were talking about the position of the Earth relative to the sun, but not in this case, not even close.
April 26, 2010, 12:53 pmNEILC:
Agreed, climate forecasts will become less accurate the further they project.
However, climate models in the newest IPCC do include errors:
“Advances in climate change modelling now enable best estimates and likely assessed uncertainty ranges to be given for projected warming for different emission scenarios. Results for different emission scenarios are provided explicitly in this report to avoid loss of this policy-relevant information”
Taken from http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html
April 26, 2010, 1:30 pmADiff:
Which is moot if the whole model’s fundamentally flawed anyway. Which appears the case.
April 26, 2010, 2:10 pmWally:
Neil,
But what exactly is a “likely” range? I don’t see anything pinned down to a strict confidence level. I realize these things are written for politicians (which is problem number one), but how hard is it to understand a confidence level? “Likely” just doesn’t mean anything. I could tell you its “likely” you die on your way home from work today, or are killed by a bee, or will likely see the sun set in the west. It just has ZERO meaning.
And ADiff is exactly right. Just because a model predicts some amount of warming and estimates a certain error, that model maybe full of crap. And without knowing more of the physics of our climate, we “likely” have a bunch of crappy models. One way to test this is drag out the time period they run for thousands of years. Do they ever predict cooling? Is it constant run away warming? If the models can’t predict any cooling forces that would take place over thousands of years, do they appropriately, or even at all, consider those forces acting now, or in the near future? I mean, people still debate the cause of the little ice age. And if we don’t understand the forces that caused that, how can we expect to predict future climate? Further, even if we understand some of those forces, we don’t understand what controls the timing of those forces.
Without knowing these things, can we even make a model, much less trust one to a certain degree of “likelihood?”
April 26, 2010, 3:04 pmNEILC:
Well its been established that the physical basis for the models is sound, but the climates response in the future in terms of feedback strengths of course is not certain. Nobody is arguing that there are not uncertainties, but the common them here is to use these to minimise and play down potential change. It must be remembered that it can swing both ways: if someone told you there was between 5-70% chance of death if you walked through a doorway would you automatically assume a 5% chance? How lucky do you feel?
April 26, 2010, 3:11 pmNEILC:
The terms ‘likely’ ‘very likely’ etc are set out by the IPCC at the start of the report, with confidence limits, if i remember correctly very likely was a greater than 90% probability. So it does has statistical meaning.
You really should investigate before commenting that the models are based on a load of crap. Many areas of climate are very well understood, and the models have been able to predict and reconstruct many aspects of past climate using the same understandings of what is happening at the moment. The little ice age was caused by natural forcings, this is not debated, and what do you mean by the ‘timing of those forcings’. Climate forcings are very well understood, do you in fact mean climate responses to forcings? these are still largely understood. There are exceptions such as the response of clouds to warming, but will this response be dwarfed by other climate feedbacks? ‘very likely’
April 26, 2010, 3:21 pmWally:
Neil,
“Well its been established that the physical basis for the models is sound, but the climates response in the future in terms of feedback strengths of course is not certain.”
Please, isn’t the feed back response part of this supposedly well established physical basis? If you knew the physical basis, you’d know the feed backs.
“It must be remembered that it can swing both ways: if someone told you there was between 5-70% chance of death if you walked through a doorway would you automatically assume a 5% chance? How lucky do you feel?”
Is this your way of responding to the question of just what they mean by “likely?” Of course error swings both ways, but if the error is so large as to engulf any trend did you actually learn anything? If I told you it was going to raise 2 degrees +/- 10 degrees by the year 2200, how much information did I just give you?
April 26, 2010, 3:25 pmADiff:
To me the most damning aspect isn’t within the models themselves (as serious as the divergence between predictions and observations are, going both forward and backward). It’s the associated “impacts” predicted that are not occurring, and in fact show no particular sign of incipient occurrence that’s at all observable. For example, sea level increases are static across periods of significant CO2 level changes, and are not observably accelerating. None of changes in incidences of drought or extreme weather events (hurricanes, tornadoes, & etc) are observable. All of these are dramatically stable. Irregardless the accuracy of the temperature predictive models (which looks rather poor), if there’s no real concomitant negative impacts of substantial magnitude, what’s the point? All the fuss and bother’s a waste of energy. Even worse, it makes all the attention an utter and tragic waste of attention and resources, at a time when circumstances dictate serious attention to many clearly legitimate and well demonstrated environmental issues which worsen, perhaps irretrievably, due to the completely unjustified and uncalled for myopia on the apocalyptic visions of catastrophic ‘global warming’. It seems to me more likely than anything else that the so-called ‘environmental community’ is writing its very own grandiose chapter based on Tuchman’s “The March of Folly”, in its blindered commitment to a belief,
April 26, 2010, 5:47 pmWally:
Neil,
“Many areas of climate are very well understood, and the models have been able to predict and reconstruct many aspects of past climate using the same understandings of what is happening at the moment.”
Predicting past events is usually a waste of time in modeling. All you need to do is create a set of equation that you believe describe the mechanism at work and then use those equations with the data to create a fit. Its a circle jerk. You have to use past data to create a model, there is just no way around that in a field that can’t experiment. So, you then want to say they can reconstruct past climate with these models. Well no shit. One way or another they used past climate to make the model in the first place. The trick is predicting the future, or what would be better, the outcome of a controlled experiment. But climate science doesn’t have those.
>Climate forcings are very well understood, do you in fact mean climate responses to forcings? these are still largely understood. There are exceptions such as the response of clouds to warming, but will this response be dwarfed by other climate feedbacks? ‘very likely’<
I again call BS. If you don't know how something responds to a given stimulus, you can't know how it will respond compared to other things you might understand. You can't even guess at some probability. As for knowing other forcings, that's another pill of BS. Do you know long range sun cycles (not talking about the roughly decade long cycles here, but ~100-1000 year variations)? No. Do you know of any mechanisms controlling volcanic activity? No. Do you know about our solar system's movement into or out of dirty or clean areas in our galaxy? No. Do you know how warming might change ocean current flows? No.
These models, as complex as they are, are not even close to accurately describing the system.
April 26, 2010, 6:32 pmWaldarino:
Wally: “These models, as complex as they are, are not even close to accurately describing the system.”
Neil: “You really should investigate before commenting that the models are based on a load of crap.”
I’m wondering, Wally and ADiff, if you could provide some specific examples of where the climate models have failed? I’m seeing a number of generalities in your comments. Let’s see what you are talking about and where your information comes from. I would be interested in what Neil has to say about your sources.
April 26, 2010, 8:56 pmADiff:
National Climatic Data Center, 2008, Drought in Northern Hemisphere 1900-2008, trends contradicting predictions of AGW (IPCC)
IPCC 2007, trend of Methane concentration 1983-2006, contrary to predictions of AGW (in fact, of IPCC itself!)
Douglass et al 2007, IGRA,HADAT2, RATPAC, RAOBCORE observed temperatures widely diverge from model predictions
NASA 25 Sept 2007 Press release on Greenland ice melt – observations clearly diverge from predictions
IPCC 2007 vs Observed temperatures, “Climate of Extremes” p 115, clear variation from AGW predictions (yup, all of them!)
Knutsen & Tuleya,, 2004 Sea Surface Temperatures and Hurricane Intensity, trends are opposite of predictions of catastrophic AGW
Unisys Weather, 2008, Number of Tropical Storms and Hurricanes 1930-2007, number shows no such trend as those predicted by catastrophic AGW
Woppelmann et al, 2007, measurements of sea level 70% below AGW predictions
McKitrick & Michaels, 2007 decadal temp. trends, clearly divergent from predcictions.
NY Times, 16 Jan. 2007, divergence of purported ‘evidence’ of warming, re: Greenland melting, vs historic observations.
IPCC 2001 extrapolated trend in temp. vs observed temps since (IPCC Mann, IPCC 2007)
Arctic Climate Assessment 2004, http://www.acia.uaf.edu
Climate of Extremes, p 122, Arctic Sea Ice extents from Johannessen, et al.
Alaska Climate Research Center, U of Alaska, – no significant warming on balance since 1977.
Journal of Climate, Hartmann & Wendler, 2005, No significant cooling trend on balance since 1977.
Velicogna & Wahr, 2006, no net Antarctic ice loss continent wide, contrary to AGW predictions
Cryosphere Today 2007, arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu – Southern sea ice anomaly, shows ice extent growing – contra to AGW predictions
Masiokas et al. 2006, Ice pack stability in Andes, no melt as predicted by AGW
Matulla, et al 2007, Daily Wind Strength Europe – No increased variations as predicted by AGW
Barring & Von Storch, 2004, Barometric variations contrary to AGW predicted behavior
1948-2006 Annual & Extreme Precipitation, National Climatic Data Center, trends contradict AGW predictions
National Climatic Data Center 2007, U.S. Precipitation by season 1948-2006, trend shows no significant change, contrary to AGW predictions
And I could go on and on and on….
But just pick up a copy of “Climate of Extremes” by Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Jr. which references example after example from many highly reputable sources clearly contradicting the apocalyptic predictions of catastrophic AGW of droughts, floods extreme weather and other trends not observed to actually be occurring at all…it;s well referenced and cited.
April 27, 2010, 12:27 ammarkm:
Badn:
“Take a look at the scientific consensus mabe: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), The American Chemical Society (ACS), The American Geophysical Union (AGU), The American Meteorological Society (AMS),The Geological Society of America (GSA), G8 science academies, the Oregon Petition, NASA, The UK MET Office.”
Thanks for the perfect illustration of how groupthink produces a false consensus. How many climate scientists in the ACS or the GSA? My best guess is none. Chemists and geologists aren’t climate scientists. Perhaps 1% of the AAAS and the G8 science academies might be climate scientists. So why did these organizations say anything on a subject of which they know little to nothing? Because they were told that conservative creationists are opposing science, and they rushed out to defend their fellow scientists, without first taking a good look at the alleged “science”.
As for the rest: corrupting the peer review process (CRU in the UK), hiding data (NASA and CRU), and writing sloppy reports to the satisfaction of corrupt UN politicians (IPCC) are not science.
April 27, 2010, 4:03 amhunter:
NEILC,
April 27, 2010, 5:40 amYou don’t get it.
Use all of the models you want. They are all crap.
The confidence levels never rise to scientific confidence.
The most important thing for you and other true believers to realize is that your pile of alleged stats and self-fulfilling models do not make your conclusion that we are facing a climate catastrophe any less wrong.
The science behind AGW is not relevant to the social movement that AGW is.
You have glommed on to modern popular delusion and are not yet ready to let go.
End of the world stories are fun and make good novels and movies and religions, but there was no world wide flood, and there will be no worldwide CO2 caused catastrophe, either.
I do like how you avoid anything of substance and, troll that you are, just repeat yourself endlessly.
Wally:
Waldingo,
Nice of you to stop by, take a quote from my message, and make an argument from that quote that is directly contradicted by other parts of my message. You say I gave only generalities, yet I listed several factors that are not understood and thus can’t be taken account for in models. Wasn’t it you that was saying I was cherry-picking? Well look in the mirror, hypocrite.
Oh and looky there, ADiff seems to have plenty of specifics for you besides.
Anything else your trollness would like to bring up?
April 27, 2010, 8:48 amNEILC:
ADiff,
some of these references are fine, it is good to see you have done some research but most of these references refer to poorly modelled weather, which, as we have already discussed is difficult to do, but frankly it is not relevant that such complex dynamics have not been modelled well. The eventual effect of warming on precipitation etc can only be a result of warming, therefore the focus should be on modelling the warming trend before trying to simulate trends in precipitation and storms etc.
I personally would not bother using with any confidence the modelled weather patterns. But again the point of modelling, in terms of climate change is to simulate global trends such as average temperature – on a large scale. It is well known that warmer climate will make more storms in some regions, this is a simple matter of physics, but the real uncertainty with modelling weather is on how warm the climate will get. Recently, a UK modelling centre published precipitation data on a 5km scale, this i believe, and many other climate centers believe goes too far. Greenland ice pack dynamics are not fully understood, that is why they have been left out of IPCC predictions, and antarctic ice pack has been discussed earlier in the thread.
Wally:
“Do you know long range sun cycles (not talking about the roughly decade long cycles here, but ~100-1000 year variations)? No. Do you know of any mechanisms controlling volcanic activity? No. Do you know about our solar system’s movement into or out of dirty or clean areas in our galaxy? No. Do you know how warming might change ocean current flows?”
Sun cycles really do occur on several timescales, but not on 100-1000 years.The 11/22 years solar spot cycles and Milankovitch cycles. Milankovitch cycles including the 41ky, 23ky and 100ky cycles are very well understood and their respective forcings known to a very high accuracy. So, yes!
April 27, 2010, 10:16 amMechanisms of volcanic activity are very well understood, we know exactly why they occur and why there are periods of higher volcanic activity. Predicting exactly when eruptions occur is a different story, but not needed in a climate model. So, yes!
Jesus you are not seriously talking about the solar system moving through ‘dirty or clean’ galaxy.
We know quite well how warming might affect ocean circulation, see heinrich events, or look through some glacial stratification papers, or how in the past warming has been seen to decrease pole-equator heat gradients and, by using proxy data have been shown to reduce upwelling etc. Exactly how much warming will be required to affect circulation is not fully known, but one thing is for sure is certainly will not strengthen global circulation, therefore the global ocean sink of carbon will not strengthen but can only either stay constant or decrease.
NEILC:
Hunter: nobody wants to read your tabloid crap, you weigh in with nothing and would fit in at Fox News.
April 27, 2010, 10:22 amWally:
Neil,
So you’ve resorted to lies?
“Sun cycles really do occur on several timescales, but not on 100-1000 years.The 11/22 years solar spot cycles and Milankovitch cycles. Milankovitch cycles including the 41ky, 23ky and 100ky cycles are very well understood and their respective forcings known to a very high accuracy.”
No cycles of 100-1000 years uh, just this 11/22 year and things in the 23-100ky range? How in the hell could oscillations with those kinds of periods be fit to explain a graph such as this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon14_with_activity_labels.svg?
“Mechanisms of volcanic activity are very well understood, we know exactly why they occur and why there are periods of higher volcanic activity. Predicting exactly when eruptions occur is a different story, but not needed in a climate model.”
That’s complete BS. There are theories as to what kind of predictable cycles controlling the timing of eruptions, but nothing that is very certain and when modeling climate on the scale of 10-100 years, you do need to know when they happen. You can’t just brush this off. If you knew “EXACTLY why they occur and why there are periods of higher volcanic activity” you also be able to predict “EXACTLY when eruptions occur.” Your logic is crap, for lack of nicer word, and you of course can’t/won’t actually support any of these bold statements. Such blatant disregard for backing up your opinion and even twisting to the truth to the extent of creating a lie, such as above, is just proof of an irrational bias toward your particular opinion on this matter.
“Jesus you are not seriously talking about the solar system moving through ‘dirty or clean’ galaxy.”
Yes, I am. Parts of our galaxy is known to have higher concentrations of dust in the spiral arms (that’s the whole reason you can see them against things that aren’t the spiral arms). So as we move in and out of the spiral arms the amount of energy coming to the planet from the sun obviously changes with it. Maybe you should educate yourself before brushing off such matters with these pathetic appeals to ridicule. Honestly, it would take about a 5 second google search to check and see if what I’m saying is actually backed up, but no, you make this lazy appeal to ridicule hoping it goes away. Just another sign of an irrational attachment to your side of the debate.
http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/news/expandnews.cfm?id=9252
http://www.nature.com/news/1998/030707/full/news030707-1.html
“Exactly how much warming will be required to affect circulation is not fully known, but one thing is for sure is certainly will not strengthen global circulation, therefore the global ocean sink of carbon will not strengthen but can only either stay constant or decrease.”
You pretend a decrease in ocean currents will increase warming by less carbon sink? What of the effects of a loss of heat transfer meaning expanding ice sheets, increased albedo, and how these things will effect the climate in combination? This is in deed one of the theories as to what caused the little ice age, and some folks might argue the current warming period could cause this to happen again. Ah how the feedbacks matter uh? Which factors will win out? The positive or negative….does anyone actually know, or are they just basically guessing while they set the parameters in their models so as to achieve a particular desired outcome?
As Waldo would likely point out, if only he did have an irrational bias, you are cherry-pick here sir. You talk only of CO2 sink, forget heat transfer effects, and at the same time wish to come of as the one in the debate with superior knowledge of matter. Sorry, this is yet another sign that you have an irrational bias toward supporting this particular side of the debate.
So after all four of your defenses, you’ve really only provided evidence towards one thing, you’ll support your opinion through lies, appeals to ridicule, and unsupported claims of fact. This leads to the nature question of why. Why do you behave in such an irrational manner yet attempt to pretend you’re so educated on the subject?
April 27, 2010, 11:12 amrbateman:
Volcanic Activity increases in frequency when the Sun goes into very low activity mode. Like the last few years.
April 27, 2010, 11:40 amSeismic Activity increases as a Delta in Solar Activity undergoes a marked shift. Makes little difference which way the metal is bent: when it is stressed enough, it breaks. There’s plenty of brittle/faulted crust out there just waiting for the final ‘bend’ in solar activity increase/decrease.
This makes a chaotic up & down roller-coaster Solar Cycle 24 ride a dangerous one.
And you were worried about the Climate?
NEILC:
Bateman, you have been misinformed somehow, none of these things are true in the slightest.
April 27, 2010, 12:38 pmWally:
Neil,
So you’ve resorted to lies?
“Sun cycles really do occur on several timescales, but not on 100-1000 years.The 11/22 years solar spot cycles and Milankovitch cycles. Milankovitch cycles including the 41ky, 23ky and 100ky cycles are very well understood and their respective forcings known to a very high accuracy.”
No cycles of 100-1000 years uh, just this 11/22 year and things in the 23-100ky range? How in the hell could oscillations with those kinds of periods be fit to explain a graph such as this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon14_with_activity_labels.svg?
“Mechanisms of volcanic activity are very well understood, we know exactly why they occur and why there are periods of higher volcanic activity. Predicting exactly when eruptions occur is a different story, but not needed in a climate model.”
That’s complete BS. There are theories as to what kind of predictable cycles controlling the timing of eruptions, but nothing that is very certain and when modeling climate on the scale of 10-100 years, you do need to know when they happen. You can’t just brush this off. If you knew “EXACTLY why they occur and why there are periods of higher volcanic activity” you also be able to predict “EXACTLY when eruptions occur.” Your logic is crap, for lack of nicer word, and you of course can’t/won’t actually support any of these bold statements. Such blatant disregard for backing up your opinion and even twisting to the truth to the extent of creating a lie, such as above, is just proof of an irrational bias toward your particular opinion on this matter.
“Jesus you are not seriously talking about the solar system moving through ‘dirty or clean’ galaxy.”
Yes, I am. Parts of our galaxy is known to have higher concentrations of dust in the spiral arms (that’s the whole reason you can see them against things that aren’t the spiral arms). So as we move in and out of the spiral arms the amount of energy coming to the planet from the sun obviously changes with it. Maybe you should educate yourself before brushing off such matters with these pathetic appeals to ridicule. Honestly, it would take about a 5 second google search to check and see if what I’m saying is actually backed up, but no, you make this lazy appeal to ridicule hoping it goes away. Just another sign of an irrational attachment to your side of the debate.
http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/news/expandnews.cfm?id=9252
http://www.nature.com/news/1998/030707/full/news030707-1.html
“Exactly how much warming will be required to affect circulation is not fully known, but one thing is for sure is certainly will not strengthen global circulation, therefore the global ocean sink of carbon will not strengthen but can only either stay constant or decrease.”
You pretend a decrease in ocean currents will increase warming by less carbon sink? What of the effects of a loss of heat transfer meaning expanding ice sheets, increased albedo, and how these things will effect the climate in combination? This is in deed one of the theories as to what caused the little ice age, and some folks might argue the current warming period could cause this to happen again. Ah how the feedbacks matter uh? Which factors will win out? The positive or negative….does anyone actually know, or are they just basically guessing while they set the parameters in their models so as to achieve a particular desired outcome?
As Waldo would likely point out, if only he did have an irrational bias, you are cherry-pick here sir. You talk only of CO2 sink, forget heat transfer effects, and at the same time wish to come of as the one in the debate with superior knowledge of matter. Sorry, this is yet another sign that you have an irrational bias toward supporting this particular side of the debate.
So after all four of your defenses, you’ve really only provided evidence towards one thing, you’ll support your opinion through lies, appeals to ridicule, and unsupported claims of fact. This leads to the nature question of why. Why do you behave in such an irrational manner yet attempt to pretend you’re so educated on the subject?
And now you further tell rbateman he’s wrong, but you again don’t say how/why, or even give a link.
April 27, 2010, 1:13 pmWally:
Neil,
April 27, 2010, 1:14 pmWally:
“Sun cycles really do occur on several timescales, but not on 100-1000 years.The 11/22 years solar spot cycles and Milankovitch cycles. Milankovitch cycles including the 41ky, 23ky and 100ky cycles are very well understood and their respective forcings known to a very high accuracy.”
No cycles of 100-1000 years uh, just this 11/22 year and things in the 23-100ky range? How in the hell could oscillations with those kinds of periods be fit to explain a graph such as this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon14_with_activity_labels.svg?
“Mechanisms of volcanic activity are very well understood, we know exactly why they occur and why there are periods of higher volcanic activity. Predicting exactly when eruptions occur is a different story, but not needed in a climate model.”
That’s complete BS. There are theories as to what kind of predictable cycles controlling the timing of eruptions, but nothing that is very certain and when modeling climate on the scale of 10-100 years, you do need to know when they happen. You can’t just brush this off. If you knew “EXACTLY why they occur and why there are periods of higher volcanic activity” you also be able to predict “EXACTLY when eruptions occur.” Your logic is crap, for lack of nicer word, and you of course can’t/won’t actually support any of these bold statements. Such blatant disregard for backing up your opinion and even twisting to the truth to the extent of creating a lie, such as above, is just proof of an irrational bias toward your particular opinion on this matter.
“Jesus you are not seriously talking about the solar system moving through ‘dirty or clean’ galaxy.”
Yes, I am. Parts of our galaxy is known to have higher concentrations of dust in the spiral arms (that’s the whole reason you can see them against things that aren’t the spiral arms). So as we move in and out of the spiral arms the amount of energy coming to the planet from the sun obviously changes with it. Maybe you should educate yourself before brushing off such matters with these pathetic appeals to ridicule. Honestly, it would take about a 5 second google search to check and see if what I’m saying is actually backed up, but no, you make this lazy appeal to ridicule hoping it goes away. Just another sign of an irrational attachment to your side of the debate.
http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/news/expandnews.cfm?id=9252
http://www.nature.com/news/1998/030707/full/news030707-1.html
“Exactly how much warming will be required to affect circulation is not fully known, but one thing is for sure is certainly will not strengthen global circulation, therefore the global ocean sink of carbon will not strengthen but can only either stay constant or decrease.”
You pretend a decrease in ocean currents will increase warming by less carbon sink? What of the effects of a loss of heat transfer meaning expanding ice sheets, increased albedo, and how these things will effect the climate in combination? This is in deed one of the theories as to what caused the little ice age, and some folks might argue the current warming period could cause this to happen again. Ah how the feedbacks matter uh? Which factors will win out? The positive or negative….does anyone actually know, or are they just basically guessing while they set the parameters in their models so as to achieve a particular desired outcome?
As Waldo would likely point out, if only he did have an irrational bias, you are cherry-pick here sir. You talk only of CO2 sink, forget heat transfer effects, and at the same time wish to come of as the one in the debate with superior knowledge of matter. Sorry, this is yet another sign that you have an irrational bias toward supporting this particular side of the debate.
So after all four of your defenses, you’ve really only provided evidence towards one thing, you’ll support your opinion through lies, appeals to ridicule, and unsupported claims of fact. This leads to the nature question of why. Why do you behave in such an irrational manner yet attempt to pretend you’re so educated on the subject?
April 27, 2010, 1:14 pmWally:
“Sun cycles really do occur on several timescales, but not on 100-1000 years.The 11/22 years solar spot cycles and Milankovitch cycles. Milankovitch cycles including the 41ky, 23ky and 100ky cycles are very well understood and their respective forcings known to a very high accuracy.”
No cycles of 100-1000 years uh, just this 11/22 year and things in the 23-100ky range? How could oscillations with those kinds of periods be fit to explain a graph such as this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon14_with_activity_labels.svg?
“Mechanisms of volcanic activity are very well understood, we know exactly why they occur and why there are periods of higher volcanic activity. Predicting exactly when eruptions occur is a different story, but not needed in a climate model.”
That’s complete BS. There are theories as to what kind of predictable cycles controlling the timing of eruptions, but nothing that is very certain and when modeling climate on the scale of 10-100 years, you do need to know when they happen. You can’t just brush this off. If you knew “EXACTLY why they occur and why there are periods of higher volcanic activity” you also be able to predict “EXACTLY when eruptions occur.” Your logic is terrible and you of course can’t/won’t actually support any of these bold statements. Such blatant disregard for backing up your opinion and even twisting to the truth to the extent of creating a lie, such as above, is just proof of an irrational bias toward your particular opinion on this matter.
April 27, 2010, 1:16 pmWally:
“Jesus you are not seriously talking about the solar system moving through ‘dirty or clean’ galaxy.”
Yes, I am. Parts of our galaxy is known to have higher concentrations of dust in the spiral arms (that’s the whole reason you can see them against things that aren’t the spiral arms). So as we move in and out of the spiral arms the amount of energy coming to the planet from the sun obviously changes with it. Maybe you should educate yourself before brushing off such matters with these pathetic appeals to ridicule. Honestly, it would take about a 5 second google search to check and see if what I’m saying is actually backed up, but no, you make this lazy appeal to ridicule hoping it goes away. Just another sign of an irrational attachment to your side of the debate.
http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/news/expandnews.cfm?id=9252
http://www.nature.com/news/1998/030707/full/news030707-1.html
“Exactly how much warming will be required to affect circulation is not fully known, but one thing is for sure is certainly will not strengthen global circulation, therefore the global ocean sink of carbon will not strengthen but can only either stay constant or decrease.”
You pretend a decrease in ocean currents will increase warming by less carbon sink? What of the effects of a loss of heat transfer meaning expanding ice sheets, increased albedo, and how these things will effect the climate in combination? This is in deed one of the theories as to what caused the little ice age, and some folks might argue the current warming period could cause this to happen again. Ah how the feedbacks matter uh? Which factors will win out? The positive or negative….does anyone actually know, or are they just basically guessing while they set the parameters in their models so as to achieve a particular desired outcome?
As Waldo would likely point out, if only he did have an irrational bias, you are cherry-pick here sir. You talk only of CO2 sink, forget heat transfer effects, and at the same time wish to come of as the one in the debate with superior knowledge of matter. Sorry, this is yet another sign that you have an irrational bias toward supporting this particular side of the debate.
So after all four of your defenses, you’ve really only provided evidence towards one thing, you’ll support your opinion through lies, appeals to ridicule, and unsupported claims of fact. This leads to the nature question of why. Why do you behave in such an irrational manner yet attempt to pretend you’re so educated on the subject?
April 27, 2010, 1:16 pmShills:
It makes me laugh when I read something like this:
(Wally says): ‘ …you’ll support your opinion through lies, appeals to ridicule, and unsupported claims of fact.’
Yeah right. Because you are so squeaky clean Wally.
You’ll prob. respond with a ‘show me where I said blah blah…!’ but there is no need. Everyone knows you can come off as a jerk.
Hey NeilC.
Being a climate scientist and all, you prob. have shit loads of extra cash so could probably spare some time to help these Meyer and Company get something in a publishable form fit for peer-review, so that they can show the scientific world their amazing truths. It would be really good to get it over and done with you know?
April 27, 2010, 4:34 pmWally:
Ah, now shills comes in with nothing more than an ad hominem attack.
Good to see you again too. How you been?
April 27, 2010, 5:33 pmNEILC:
Wally, well i guess it is because of your references to google, wikipedia, and the fact that you read somewhere in google that when he earth moves through a dirty spiral arm it will change climate? i ridicule because it is genuinely ridiculous, not because it is undeserved – bring this theory to any professional and you will get laughed at i guarantee.
And i deservedly should be picked up for being aggressive in debate, but because it is so irritating to read posts like yours i cant help it really: you have no understanding of the processes or how important they are related to climate, you speak about ocean dynamics as though you know better than all the professionals.
“You pretend a decrease in ocean currents will increase warming by less carbon sink? What of the effects of a loss of heat transfer meaning expanding ice sheets, increased albedo, and how these things will effect the climate in combination”
You have simply read this from google and pasted it here.
I do not pretend, it has been well documented in literature about the effects of increased ocean stratification (ie reduced circ.) and its effect of diminishing biological pump (primary production reduced via decreased nutrient availability via reduced oceanic upwelling, decreased aragonite supersaturation and possibly undersaturation – coral growth rate declines of up to 30% have been reported in the great barrier reef, a very well monitored reef which 1980-2000 i think, underwent no statistical change, but since then has undergone a 15-30% reduction in growth rate in large areas. Plus decreased solubility of CO2 in oceans with warming – maybe look these up they have been very well documented).
Now by heat transfer do you mean latent or sensible heat, and do you know what difference the two forms have on ice sheet growth? Loss from heat transfer (if i think you mean what you mean) will result in less heat being transported to the poles. Now you would intuitively think that this would be good for the growth of ice caps. Not so, decreased latent heat will result in less moisture content in the air around ice caps, reduce precipitation and therefore cap growth. Now even if this was the primary control on ice cap growth, which it is not, is would spell ice cap loss. Primary control on an annual basis is by summer temperatures among other things, which are projected to rise the most in the poles. However their dynamics are very complex, and, especially in greenland may have a lot to do with the effect of ice cap ‘plumbing’ or basically routes through which meltwater may travel to the ocean.
I have attempted not to cherry pick here but to give you as full a view as i can think of at 2 in the morning! Should you wish more info, go and look it up, but i would not focus on dirty galaxy spiral arms. Does that quench your thirst for some general science wally? you probably wont get this stuff from wikipedia i guess.
Shills: yes good point well made.
April 27, 2010, 5:53 pmWaldittle:
***”Yes, I am. Parts of our galaxy is known to have higher concentrations of dust in the spiral arms (that’s the whole reason you can see them against things that aren’t the spiral arms).”
Wally, I’m just curious. You reject entire books written by IPCC scientists, years of research by people like James Hansen, and virtually anything posted on Real Climate (if you are even willing to read them at all). But a couple of brief news articles on a new, intriguing, but controversial and unproven theory convince you enough to argue with Neil and even, in fact, to accuse him of being “irrational” in this instance while you find it perfectly rational to argue cosmic dust changes our climate from space.
The theory doesn’t strike me as the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard, mind you, and might be true for all I know – but I do have to ask how you decide what you believe, Wally? I hate to ask it (since you are obviously still stinging from our last conversation) but are you, um, ‘choosy’ in which information you argue? Rejecting information you dislike and fully endorsing information you do like? Is this what a scientist with your training reacts?
*****************************************************************************************************
ADiff, could you provide a little more information about the papers you’ve cited above – maybe the actual titles? – it is difficult to know what you are talking about, although I have found some which might make for an interesting conversation. Bit busy at the moment, so I’ll have to get back to you.
Quick question somewhat related to my question to Wally above: why do you focus so much on Alaska? Interesting, no doubt, but aren’t there other states with weather patterns? And, while you are correct that temperature in our northernmost state has been more or less steady since 1977, I did notice a marked and sudden increase in 1959. And aren’t we most worried about global not regional temperature increases?
Just curious.
April 27, 2010, 7:19 pmShills:
Wally says: ‘Ah, now shills comes in with nothing more than an ad hominem attack.’
Ah, wally. You sure that’s an ad hominem? Maybe you wanna double check?
April 27, 2010, 9:32 pmNEILC:
And wally, as for
“No cycles of 100-1000 years uh, just this 11/22 year and things in the 23-100ky range? How could oscillations with those kinds of periods be fit to explain a graph such as this…”
that d14C graph you have obtained from wikipedia – do you know what d14C is? The 22 year sun-spot cycle has been proposed to have varied over the past millenium, and is one of several theories as to why the little ice age occurred. There is no 23-100ky range, it is several distinct frequencies based around variations in axial precession, obliquity of axial tilt, and eccentricity of orbit, some of the forcings of which have been associated with glacial cycles.
April 28, 2010, 2:37 amhunter:
NEILC,
April 28, 2010, 5:26 amTabloid crap?
lol.
The tabloid crap is AGW promoters claiming the world is in a climate crisis. IOW, what you believe and claim to work at doing.
Pointing out the social context for how dupes like you and your pals fall for obvious garbage would of course be rejected by the dupe. After all, dupes are self-regulating idiots, well trained at keeping the idiocy alive no matter the lack of evidence.
You and Waldo, our recent trolls, are fun and predictable and pitiable.
Wally:
Neil,
“The 22 year sun-spot cycle has been proposed to have varied over the past millenium, and is one of several theories as to why the little ice age occurred.
So a 22 year cycle varies of ~1000 years, obviously a much sorter time peroid than 23ky and much longer than 22 years? But yet there are no cycles or variations on this 100-1000 year range? Again you logic is terrible. You try to tell me one second that you know with very high accuracy what kind of sun output we will see in the future, but none of the cycles you reference could have caused the last 100-1000 year sun output. Which is it? Do you know or not?
“There is no 23-100ky range, it is several distinct frequencies based around variations in axial precession, obliquity of axial tilt, and eccentricity of orbit, some of the forcings of which have been associated with glacial cycles.”
I was not saying that those peroids changed just used the 23-100ky as short hand for each cycle with a peroid in that range. Sorry you misunderstood.
April 28, 2010, 9:10 amWally:
Shills,
Yes, you’re attacking my argument because I “come off as jerk.”
April 28, 2010, 9:10 amWally:
Neil,
“Wally, well i guess it is because of your references to google, wikipedia, and the fact that you read somewhere in google that when he earth moves through a dirty spiral arm it will change climate? ”
Did you fail to click on the links to a nature article and nasa page? This is yet another fallacious argument from you. You’re attacking the source’s name not the argument/data.
“i ridicule because it is genuinely ridiculous, not because it is undeserved – bring this theory to any professional and you will get laughed at i guarantee.”
Yes because things that show up in Nature and Nasa will get me laughed at. And I’m still awaiting a rational and logical argument that this is not a factor. Thus far your only defense is “you’ll get laughed at?” Ok, I could blindly claim that about anything you say, does that make me right and you wrong? No. You do yourself a disservice by acting this way.
“you have no understanding of the processes or how important they are related to climate, you speak about ocean dynamics as though you know better than all the professionals.”
Exactly what? All the professionals? I’m getting this argument from them actually, I didn’t just pull it out of my ass. More bull shit from you.
“You have simply read this from google and pasted it here.”
Yes I read it on Google, because Google publishes SOOOO much information? Google is a search engine Neil. I might have read it on something I found through google, or maybe a different source, but I didn’t read it on Google.
“I do not pretend, it has been well documented in literature about the effects of increased ocean stratification (ie reduced circ.) and its effect of diminishing biological pump (primary production reduced via decreased nutrient availability via reduced oceanic upwelling, decreased aragonite supersaturation and possibly undersaturation – coral growth rate declines of up to 30% have been reported in the great barrier reef, a very well monitored reef which 1980-2000 i think, underwent no statistical change, but since then has undergone a 15-30% reduction in growth rate in large areas. Plus decreased solubility of CO2 in oceans with warming – maybe look these up they have been very well documented).”
Maybe you can give me a source? Maybe you could look up papers arguing loss of heat transfer leading to a colder temps in mid-high latatudes and causes ice sheet explansion? Since apperently you live in a world where one doesn’t have to site their information, I’ll leave it to you as you’ve left it to me. Sound fair? And man this will get us somewhere uh?
“Now even if this was the primary control on ice cap growth, which it is not, is would spell ice cap loss. ”
Except this all didn’t happen in the little ice age. Where are you getting your information exactly, Mr. Professional that doesn’t site a damned thing?
“I have attempted not to cherry pick here but to give you as full a view as i can think of at 2 in the morning! ”
The time of day is irrelevent. If you can’t back up your statements of fact, then those statements are meaningless. That goes for 2am or 2pm.
“Should you wish more info, go and look it up, but i would not focus on dirty galaxy spiral arms. Does that quench your thirst for some general science wally? you probably wont get this stuff from wikipedia i guess.”
Yes, because the graphs on wikipedia that are just pulled from various research articles or texts are such BS! More attacking names and arguments themselves. Oh well, what else should I expect from a climatologists I guess?
April 28, 2010, 9:24 amNEILC:
Well im not quite sure what you are getting at. The solar CYCLES are accepted as the 22 year and the milankovitch, if you are referring to the proposed sun-spot minimum during the little ice age as evidence of a ‘cycle’ then your logic is not quite there. im sure there has been nothing published on evidence of a cyclical nature of sun-spot minima such as the ‘maunder minimum’ – i may be wrong and would be willing to be corrected on that with evidence. So perhaps you misunderstood really.
You do have a point about there being the possibility of some non-cyclical (or as yet to be proven cyclical) nature of solar activity such as proposed in the LIA, and as we all know it is a subject of fierce debate with respect to current climate change.
April 28, 2010, 9:38 amWally:
Waldo,
“Rejecting information you dislike and fully endorsing information you do like? Is this what a scientist with your training reacts? ”
Can you ask that in a non-loaded way? I’m not rejecting or accepting information based on bias. What would be my ultimate motivation for doing so anyway? If the earth really were warming towards catastrophy, wouldn’t I want to attempt to stop it? Why would I sit back and deny something that adversly effect me or at least my childred?
Anyway, it ignore your idiocies, I’m attempt to make sense of every piece taken together. So when someone claims there are no cycles on 100-1000 year peroids, but data clearly shows large variations in those time scales, I think WHY? What is our gap in knowledge? Neil seem to want to pretend we already know what we need to know and ignores these gaps. And maybe we do know a lot about it, maybe we can explain 80% (just pulling numbers out of my ass, I don’t think that’s actually true) of climate science. But my point here is that not knowing that 20% is going to fuck every model you attempt to make to hell.
Neil seems to be arguing at every turn that either something doesn’t matter or we know something very accurately, or even exactly. But if that were true, our models would be nearly perfect. They are not.
April 28, 2010, 9:42 amWally:
Neil,
“The solar CYCLES are accepted as the 22 year and the milankovitch, if you are referring to the proposed sun-spot minimum during the little ice age as evidence of a ‘cycle’ then your logic is not quite there. im sure there has been nothing published on evidence of a cyclical nature of sun-spot minima such as the ‘maunder minimum’ – i may be wrong and would be willing to be corrected on that with evidence. So perhaps you misunderstood really.”
True one data point doesn’t prove a cycle, but its more than that right? We have a Sporer and Wolf mins at maybe 200 year distances. This suggests other forces outside of 11/22 year, 23Ky, 41Ky, and 100Ky year cycles. It may not be sinusoidal cycle, but obviously something is there, and we don’t understand yet what it is. And if this force is in large part responsible for the most recent swings from the MWP to the LIA to the current warming, then exactly how much do we really know about the next 100 years?
“You do have a point about there being the possibility of some non-cyclical (or as yet to be proven cyclical) nature of solar activity such as proposed in the LIA, and as we all know it is a subject of fierce debate with respect to current climate change.”
Gosh, it only took you 24 hours (or there abouts) of various appeals to ridicule and bald face lies, to admit to such a thing. Somehow you went from “Sun cycles really do occur on several timescales, but not on 100-1000 years.The 11/22 years solar spot cycles and Milankovitch cycles. Milankovitch cycles including the 41ky, 23ky and 100ky cycles are very well understood and their respective forcings known to a very high accuracy.” to that above. I congratulate you for ignoring your apparent bias and recognizing a gap in knowledge that could swing this entire climate debate one way or another once understood.
April 28, 2010, 9:55 amNEILC:
OK. for heat transfer and sea ice, try
Arctic climate change: observed and modelled temperature and sea-ice variability. Johannsenn et al, 2004.
Polar amplification of climate change in coupled models. Holland & Bitz, 2002
Good summary article for Cenozoic climate with solar pacing,
Trends, Rhythms, and aberrations in global climate 65Ma to present.Zachos et al 2001
Ice cap mass balance,
Oceanic gateways as a critical factor to initiate icehouse Earth. Smith & Pickering, 2003
For some ocean feedback basics like bio pump and upwelling,
Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model. Cox et al, 2000
The Southern Oceans biological pump during the last glacial maximum. Anderson et al 2002
The reason i wouldn’t cite for aspects of ocean dynamics such as the biological pump, is that a first year university student would be getting taught these, it is readily available in textbooks.
It is ridiculous to bring in the spiral arm theory into the debate, because i did in fact go and look up the papers about it, and to their own admission there is little convincing evidence that it has any impact on climate, since there are huge lag factors and timing issues involved with the palaeo-glacial formations that they needed to find as evidence. Therefore, with something that is as yet completely unproven as this, compared to say the proven impact of volcanic activity on climate, bringing it into the debate, interesting as it is, brings little to the issue. And not everything in wikipedia is sound, especially when folks such as yourself are editing it.
April 28, 2010, 10:00 amNEILC:
Well thats not really fair at all, all i said was the FORCINGS OF SOLAR CYCLES are very well known, and that they are, i never declined that there was no debate about solar activity forcing past climate such as in the LIA. So what i said was perfectly true.
April 28, 2010, 10:04 amADiff:
Neil, I believe your comment “most of these references refer to poorly modeled weather, which, as we have already discussed is difficult to do, but frankly it is not relevant that such complex dynamics have not been modeled well” rather misses my point. The references are relevant not with respect to modeling weather, but with respect to their character as measures of observations of weather trends actually occurring. The point isn’t whether or not the data bear out weather models as such, but that they dramatically contradict predictions made (with concrete conviction!) by catastrophic AGW theory advocates as rational for Policy actions. The argument runs: if we don’t do X, then we’ll pay price Y! But the evidence suggests that we have no real reason to believe the claim “we’ll pay price Y”. So regardless whatever other faults underlying theoretical models may or may not possess, incurring very real costs to avoid what increasingly appear to be purely speculative predicted costs is nonsensical…at face value. There’s not much point in getting into discussion here of possible ulterior motives and such. There’s plenty of that everywhere without adding to it here, and it’s not really my topic here at all. At the same time, with respect to the models underlying AGW, in general (not strictly those predicting dramatic change), these data surely argue for skepticism. As does Mr. Meyer (and the authors of “Climate of Extremes”), I view the data as clearly showing a current localized warming trend (localized within the context of even a historic time-frame, much less a rather policy irrelevant geologic one), some of which, as Mr. Meyer agrees and the cited authors support with scientific references, appears resulting from greenhouse gas effects. But the current AGW models do appear to come up very short in terms of accurately describing the magnitude or mechanisms of the nature and significance of that contribution, and appear to more or less grossly exaggerate this. I’m not at all suggesting ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’, so to speak. This area certainly merits much more attention and work (as does so many areas). But in this case it also seems pretty clear to me that this ‘baby’ definitely needs ‘to be changed’, and that badly. The worst damage of the diffusion and inbreeding between policy advocacy (a political and economic exercise) and Science, appears very much being inflicted, increasingly, on Science itself, both actually and perceptually. Politics is (as always) notoriously corrupt. What’s the profit to Science to pursue emulation of Politics in that regard?
April 28, 2010, 10:17 amNEILC:
This is without going into the actual debate about the little ice age, whether it was a ‘real’ and global event:
see Mann 2002: Little Ice age.
see Bradley and Jonest, 1993, ‘Little Ice Age’ summer temperature variations: their nature and relevance to recent global warming trends
The IPCC says thus about it:
Evidence from mountain glaciers does suggest increased glaciation in a number of widely spread regions outside Europe prior to the 20th century, including Alaska, New Zealand and Patagonia. However, the timing of maximum glacial advances in these regions differs considerably, suggesting that they may represent largely independent regional climate changes, not a globally-synchronous increased glaciation. Thus current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of “Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period” appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries… [Viewed] hemispherically, the “Little Ice Age” can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C relative to late 20th century levels
April 28, 2010, 10:22 amWally:
Neil,
“Well thats not really fair at all, all i said was the FORCINGS OF SOLAR CYCLES are very well known, and that they are, i never declined that there was no debate about solar activity forcing past climate such as in the LIA. So what i said was perfectly true.”
Umm, you also said there are no 100-1000 cycles. We’ve just established that we don’t know that, or we’ve just established that they is a lot more to it than the cycles we’ve mentioned. At the very least you’re guilty of obfuscating the issue and ignoring a valid criticism by bring up things we know more about. I can understand you feel the need to defend yourself as a climatologist, but sometimes the best way to answer a criticisms is “yes, that’s good point and something that requires further research.” No one expects you to know it all, but if you pretend like you do, that’s when you get into trouble and that’s what you did here.
April 28, 2010, 10:35 amNEILC:
ADIFF,
I rather agree with you on most of that, in my opinion new climate models can only predict more accurately and with greater confidence and so increasingly the cost Y will be claimed with more accuracy.
I am glad to read you would not throw the baby out with the bathwater, since i think it is inherently dangerous to do so: should it turn out that cost Y is high, the earlier action is taken the better. That is where you find increasing urgency for action from the scientific community.
April 28, 2010, 10:36 amNEILC:
No wally, you just established a 1000 solar cycle yourself.
“True one data point doesn’t prove a cycle, but its more than that right? We have a Sporer and Wolf mins at maybe 200 year distances”.
This is not evidence of a cycle, and you will not find any publications on another cycle, there have been proposed mechanisms such as decreases in the suns spin rate etc but nothing firm.
I am not guilty of anything except trying to explain to you that the 22y and milankovitch solar cycles have been modelled well and their forcings known accurately.
April 28, 2010, 10:43 amWaldarah:
*****”‘Rejecting information you dislike and fully endorsing information you do like? Is this what a scientist with your training reacts?’
****”Can you ask that in a non-loaded way?”
Okay, I’ll give it a shot –
I have noticed, Wally, that you are willing to argue a number of talking points from only one side of the ‘debate’ – a prime example is the very recent, very unstudied, very unproven theory that cosmic rays affect Earth’s atmosphere. Your tone in this particular post and its immediate ripostes would seem to indicate that you take the cosmic ray theory seriously.
At the same time, you appear to be very dismissive of the other side of the debate which is far more studied, has far more expert commentators, and has a global history of scientific investigation.
With AGW theories your tone and diction suggest a very dismissive attitude – I am waiting for you to tell Neil that he and / or the IPCC have “done away with the MWP” or something of this nature. I would expect an objective commentator to concede that the MWP was a media / cyberspace misrepresentation based on incomplete knowledge which, upon further investigation, appears to be a somewhat different phenomenon than was first thought. Perhaps the MWP is still important to how we judge current climate conditions, but is anyone really “doing away with it,” or do we just understand it better?
It would almost appear that you deliberately favor one side of the ‘debate’ to a fairly extreme measure, and this might cause someone, like myself for instance, to question your objectivity. To take it a step further, it almost appears that you want to disprove an entire scientific discipline, not critique it.
So when you post this -
****”I’m not rejecting or accepting information based on bias.”
- I’m pretty darn dubious. In fact, Wally, I disagree: you are rejecting or accepting information based on a pretty clearly formed bias.
As for this -
****”What would be my ultimate motivation for doing so anyway?”
- obviously I have no idea…I suspect a conservative personality and / or a Cold War mentality (someone accused me of being a Marxist, was that you?), but I will only conjecture. Perhaps a trip to a therapist would help?
And yes -
****”If the earth really were warming towards catastrophy, wouldn’t I want to attempt to stop it? Why would I sit back and deny something that adversly effect me or at least my childred?”
- one would certainly think you’d want to do something about it…
April 28, 2010, 10:53 amWally:
Neil
“to their own admission there is little convincing evidence that it has any impact on climate, since there are huge lag factors and timing issues involved with the palaeo-glacial formations that they needed to find as evidence. Therefore, with something that is as yet completely unproven as this, compared to say the proven impact of volcanic activity on climate, bringing it into the debate, interesting as it is, brings little to the issue.”
But my point wasn’t to point to cosmic dust and spiral arms and say it has some specific effect. It was to point out that you don’t know what it may or may not do. So, without knowing what its effect is or is not, leaves any models you make incomplete. That’s the thing with models, they are only as good as what you put into them. And the main way you test the model is through experiment. Climatoligists can’t do that. Ideally you’d be able to test this factor, but instead we just have to wait, using the models we have, and then when the predictions diverage from reality attempt to explain it when we have god knows how many factors changing at various rates.
So the point isn’t to compare the effect of volcanic activity to this dust, we can’t even do that. The point was to bring it up as one of many factors that are poorly understood which could have an effect on climate.
“And not everything in wikipedia is sound, especially when folks such as yourself are editing it.”
Which isn’t to say its a useless tool. If, as you say, these things are in 100 level college courses, wiki should be somewhat caught up and at least have useful references to start with.
And thanks for the sources, I’ll give them a look. But the idea that “a first year university student would be getting taught these” is not an adequate reason to omit citations, should something be questioned.
April 28, 2010, 10:58 amWally:
Waldo,
“Your tone in this particular post and its immediate ripostes would seem to indicate that you take the cosmic ray theory seriously.”
I take it as a serious possibility, that sounds very reasonable, and not something to laugh at, as Neil apperently believes or did.
“At the same time, you appear to be very dismissive of the other side of the debate which is far more studied, has far more expert commentators, and has a global history of scientific investigation. ”
Such as? In general I’m not dismissing factors that have been studied so much as I’m dismissing the GCM’s accuracy.
“I am waiting for you to tell Neil that he and / or the IPCC have “done away with the MWP” or something of this nature. I would expect an objective commentator to concede that the MWP was a media / cyberspace misrepresentation based on incomplete knowledge which, upon further investigation, appears to be a somewhat different phenomenon than was first thought. Perhaps the MWP is still important to how we judge current climate conditions, but is anyone really “doing away with it,” or do we just understand it better?”
So your argument depends on me hypothetically making this statement? And you wonder why people call you a troll?
“To take it a step further, it almost appears that you want to disprove an entire scientific discipline, not critique it.”
No, I’m bring up specific factors that are not explained and arguing that GCM predictions are incomplete without them.
“you are rejecting or accepting information based on a pretty clearly formed bias. ”
Yet you can’t even provide one clear example of this… You simple want to attack the creator of the argument and not the arguments themselves. You are a troll.
“I suspect a conservative personality and / or a Cold War mentality (someone accused me of being a Marxist, was that you?), but I will only conjecture. Perhaps a trip to a therapist would help? ”
I’m not a conservative. You clearly have no idea what you’re conjecturing about and your entire argument relies on just these “conjectures.”
“one would certainly think you’d want to do something about it…”
Yeah, I would, if only someone could prove to me it might actually happen.
April 28, 2010, 11:11 amCaraH:
NeilC is absolutely right.
There are no 10-100 year global temperature cycles. How can there possibly be a ‘global’ 10-100 year temperature or climate cycle when the deep ocean overturns every 1000 – 1500yrs.
Any large temperature variations on timescales this short (10-100yrs) would ultimately be buffered by the ocean system. There cannot thus be any climate changes that show up as 10 – 100 years cycles in any type of palaetemperature or instrumental records.
We are able to observe other short-timescale cycles, like solar cycles, since these are outside of the earth system and therefore not affected by the stochastic nature nature of the system, or by buffering effects of an already highly complex system.
The shortest timescales of climate change are the millenial (1000year) timescales. The arguement about 10-100 year cycles in climate is thus obsolete. They may be observed in local records but they would never be global simply due to the large buffering of the ocean.
It takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years to convert organic matter to fossil fuels and it takes us hours to release all of it back to the atmopshere. You cannot push a system that hard and not expect a dramatic result.
April 28, 2010, 11:58 amNEILC:
Right, and it is exactly this buffering effect of the oceans that is slowing down the observed effects of GHG forcings at this moment – but eventually the bill will have to be paid.
April 28, 2010, 1:48 pmWally:
Cara,
“NeilC is absolutely right.
There are no 10-100 year global temperature cycles. How can there possibly be a ‘global’ 10-100 year temperature or climate cycle when the deep ocean overturns every 1000 – 1500yrs.”
Regardless of the truth of this statement, that’s not what we’ve been discussing.
And while I’d definitely agree that the stochastic nature of the climate obscures many small scale cycles, I hardly believe that the ocean buffering system is strong enough to completely wipe out the effects of say that 11/22 year cycle Neil brought up, or the PDO. I suppose this where you may lean back on “large” or “global” changes, but I’d then argue that global averages surely change if one half of the globe goes up while the other half stays the same (as some might argue is the case for the MWP or little ice age if we replace “up” with “down”). I’d further argue that imposing that changes truly be “global” is a artificial limitation. Certainly there are micro climates that will respond to global changes, so at what point do you call something a global change? Do we have to see the global average go up because of changes in >50% of the globe in the same direction before we call it a global change?
“It takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years to convert organic matter to fossil fuels and it takes us hours to release all of it back to the atmopshere. You cannot push a system that hard and not expect a dramatic result.”
Where do you think that organic matter came from in the first place?
April 28, 2010, 2:43 pmADiff:
And in spite of increasing data indicating while there’s AGW, there’s no “Dangerous AGW”…and no reason to get our collective panties in a twist, at all…the MSM, Politicians and much (but by no means all) establishment Science community (not so paradoxically largely funded by the second group) persists in strident calls for ‘urgent’, even emergency, activity. Which from my perspective proves this advocacy isn’t scientific. It isn’t based on the Science, but is political, economically driven and ideological. Calls for urgent action increasingly are being revealed as creatures of the latter rather than the former.
It more and more seems properly filed under the Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds category….al la the Eugenics movement previously a creature of the same kind of blurring between ideology, self-interest and science seen early in the 20th Century. And, as has been mentioned….as in that case, there may well be a stiff price to pay.
Not from any global warming, but from our Folly about it.
April 28, 2010, 4:47 pmWaldoAllNightLong:
***”you can’t even provide one clear example of [Wally's biased reasoning]”
Well Wally, on a thread titled ironically enough “Goofy Theory of the Day,” you continue your attack on GCMs (which are actually successful if admittedly limited but improving) and denying virtually all AGW theory while forwarding the brand-spanking-new idea that cosmic dust and rays change the Earth’s atmosphere. This seems like at least one clear example to me. Yet to you -
****”I’m bring up specific factors that are not explained and arguing that GCM predictions are incomplete without them.”
Perhaps you honestly don’t see it, Wally, which is pretty interesting if one stops to think about it.
Then there’s this -
****”So your argument depends on me hypothetically making this statement [about scientists hiding the MWP]?”
Weeeeell, forgive me brother, but do either of these statements look familiar -
***”Who reproduced the lack of the MWP and little ice age?”
***”Like you know not missing the MWP or little ice age?”
Granted, these are taken from our April 11th “Signal to Noise” conversation, but they are very much in context with what is going on here and I hope you might understand why I expected you to say something to this effect (your understanding of the scientific position on the phenomena seems to have matured somewhat – congrats!…or perhaps you change your position when you are caught being a little, well, reactionary and can’t really deny it…maybe?)
****”And you wonder why people call you a troll?”
Nope. Never have. I’ve always figured name calling was a way signifying that, yeah, I was right in the first place. And your repeated unwillingness to recognize what I’ve been posting (and thus we have our repeated circular arguments) strikes me the same way.
I’ve posted it before, Wally, but you and ADiff, as intelligent as you both are, epitomize what I’ve found in the deniosphere. Why do you do this? I have no idea and said so upstairs. But neither do I particularly care.
April 28, 2010, 8:59 pmWaldo2BedNow:
****”Which from my perspective proves this advocacy isn’t scientific. It isn’t based on the Science, but is political, economically driven and ideological.”
You will forgive some of us, ADiff, if we doubt that your “perspective” is entirely clear sighted.
Which is why some of us doubt your anti-AGW reasoning and attend boards like this one.
April 28, 2010, 9:02 pmShills:
Wally says: ‘Yes, you’re attacking my argument because I “come off as jerk.”’
What argument exactly? You fling insults and bad-mouth peeps too. That’s all I’m sayin’ yo.
April 28, 2010, 10:24 pmNEILC:
We’ve gotten to “And in spite of increasing data indicating while there’s AGW, there’s no “Dangerous AGW” “.
Excellent, im glad to see someone has managed to recognise there is increasingly convincing data for global warming. Im pretty sure an even smaller majority of the scientific community would argue against that.
And again i agree with you that there are large uncertainties and a certain probability (i dont know how large or small) that warming will not be catastrophic. However with such large uncertainty going both ways and with most of the evidence playing in the one direction, don’t you think its rather playing the odds if nothing is done? The main problem being, if you wait until 2050 to find out it our predictions were correct, it will be too late and we would have to spend many many times more of our global GDP to deal with it than if we spend now to prevent it. Its game theory basically.
April 29, 2010, 1:53 amNEILC:
forgive me ‘playing against the odds’ i meant to type.
April 29, 2010, 3:17 amwally:
Neil,
I don’t know a lot of “skeptics” that would deny that the world has warmed in the last 30 or 100 years. I also don’t know anyone that would deny CO2 causes warming. The question really becomes how much warming will we see from CO2 and how will our up coming climate conditions outside of CO2 effect the temperature of the Earth. Now some of that is known. We have a pretty good idea what most of the sun cycles will look like, or CO2′s effect by itself, many other factors however we don’t know. Which leads to all this uncertainty. We basically know we’re increasing one factor that causes warming amoung an unknown set of other factors.
Now from there we bring up what to do about it. Even if we agree we might see a .5-1 degree C increase in GMT over the next 100 years, what actually changes and how much is that worth? Also how much can we actually do about it? Meaning if we, and I generally mean the western world here, agree to cut CO2 emissions to, say 1980 levels or something, what will GMT do in this case? And how much does that cost? This isn’t really game theory here, its simply cost benefit. The only way it turns into game theory is if you think our action/inaction may cause developing (India and China) nations to respond differently. So if we cut emissions and lessen the effects of GW, maybe we can pressure India and China to come a long, or maybe they will exploit that for their own economic gain. Or conversly if we do nothing, maybe our inaction will cause some of the effects of CO2 to hit these developing nations (as I understand we should expect poorer nations to be more greatly effected if GW is actually bad), and maybe then they will actually respond, at which time so could we. That’s really the only way I see game theory coming into play here.
But of course this is all assuming a warmer planet is a bad thing. Again, so far as I understand, no one can actually prove such a thing. Yes it will change a few things, leave some areas underwater, but people can move. We’re talking about what, maybe .5-1 meter over 100 years, in the worst case? And you take that trade off with longer growing seasons and warmer climate into the higher latitudes? Which all goes to ask, what’s the real cost of some mild amount of warming? So far as I know, it stands just as much of chance of being a net benefit to our culture instead of a hindrance. Which of course would screw you cost benefit analysis up completely. If we say the most likely warming is only 1 degree, and that it has only a 50% chance of being a hindrance at all, and may actually be a net benefit, exactly how much burden should we put on society now to avoid this fate?
April 29, 2010, 8:51 amNEILC:
Well…thats a pretty simple interpretation of how warming might affect us.
As we all know, the real impact of GHG will depend on the strength of feedbacks and sinks. Now most of the feedbacks are positive (some a re negative i know) and strong and have been shown to be in the past – see the switch from mid pliocene warmth to current icehouse:
‘Regional climate shifts caused by gradual global cooling in the pliocene epoch’ Ravelo et al, 2004 is a very interesting summary paper and well worth reading for a good grasp of a period that is analogous to what is going on today – GHG’s were approx 30% higher than today. Let me know what you think…
I dont really see the value of putting a most likely warming constraint on here since we have just established that there are errors in all scenarios, and the extent of warming will likely reflect the extent of our action or inaction. Likewise no real value in assigning an arbitrary percentage possibility in it being a hindrance.
The worst case scenario is not .5-1m, it is several meters. But regardless, take Bangladesh, where 50% of the land would be flooded by a 1m rise in sea level, now it has a population of around 150 million people most of which live around the ganges delta. Are you simply going to just ‘move them all’? And are you stating that you would be willing to let third world countries, who have not contributed to the warming take the hit for us, and then we will do something about it then, when its too late?
April 29, 2010, 9:29 amADiff:
1 meter would be at the outside of predictions, and observations increasingly suggest even that figure’s likely an exaggeration. And there’s no need for “we” to do anything. People are pretty remarkable critters, and have managed to adjust remarkably well to far greater climatic changes than any we’re likely to see from AGW, without being protected by some ‘god like’ group of do-gooders (who’re far more likely to just ‘do the pooch’ completely in their effort)…
This is one of biggest knocks on IPCC and the Dangerous AGW (DAGW) community in general…a more or less total discounting of any adaptability on the part of individuals, communities or organizations. It results in a distinct collectivist, stateist, prejudice in every conclusion and recommendation…which seems fitting in a document developed by an organization dominated by a group of collectivist and stateist countries, with the support of NGOs and an advocacy community badly in need of jobs to provide for their own contracts, funding and importance. They’re like the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation and World Wildlife Fund, in whether or not they once were a group acting in the interests of the environment or wildlife, organizational evolution has clearly arrived at the point their 1st concern is organizational interests more than any stated agendas.
And yet humanity will do perfectly well (in fact, I’d argue a hell of lot better) without “we” taking charge and making the world safe for all life on Earth.
1) There’s no reason for any conviction any action we take can significantly modify climate change
2) The evidence strongly suggests most impacts predicted from climate change are at best exaggerated
3) There is no evidence indicating any action on ‘our’ part can mitigate most impacts as will occur from climate change
4) There is no reason to believe affected parties will not be able to adapt successfully within relevant time frames of such impacts without any exceptional action or organization
So-called “energy” bills, climate change legislation and carbon reduction schemes, are simply products of mass hysteria to the extent they address problems which almost certainly aren’t the problems they’re made out to be, won’t be mitigated in any meaningful way by these anyway, and will with almost absolute certainty entail high costs, both in economic terms to the developed world, and in suffering and death in the 3rd world.
So if one’s intentions are to inflict pointless economic losses on society at large, and maim, cripple and kill millions of persons in the developing world…then, by all means, continue to advocate drastic action to address climate change. That will be decided in the political arena, not by science, and almost certainly for agendas and to ends entirely unrelated to the purported intentions (to wit, Ethanol programs, with a bit of bitter sarcasm), but do not make the mistake the real character of the crusade can forever be denied even by those engaged most earnestly in it with the purest disengenuous integrity. That point where ignorance was an excuse is almost past us now.
April 29, 2010, 11:17 amWally:
Neil,
First, the net feedbacks can’t be positive. Positive feedback systems are not stable and we would have diverged away from a habital planet long ago if the Earth had a climate system dominated by positive feedback. Now, stable does not mean static. But I would expect you understand that.
As for the Ravelo paper, it illustrates the my point on feedbacks. Previous climate has been warmer and with higher GHGs, yet the climate was not undergoing positive feedback, but was stable. Then a few factors changed (tectonics, ocean flows, what have you) and pushed the system to a new equalibrum. So you saw a shifting of the location of the equalibrum, but one was still present thanks to a negative feedback dominated system. Positive feedback dominated systems simply can’t do this. Further, negative feedback systems that contain time delayed responces oscillate. And I would argue that this is what we see in the Earth’s climate.
To change gears, the predictions of several meters sea level rise are off on fringe of most studies or are fairly old. I generally see studies finding something on the .5-1.5 range. I guess I underestimated from memory.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010GL042947.shtml
Now, you seem to think we’ll need to move people. I would think they can move on their own. This 1m rise (to hit the mid point) is happening over a 100 years, people can adapt. And at this point it is not “too late.” The world does not end if we see 1m rise in sea level and some people have to move. It simply maybe a point when we know what is happening. Right now we don’t have enough information. And we may know better in 20 years, or less. But right now we simply don’t have the level of certainty I would prefer for me to willing negatively effect my lifestyle or to advocate that we force others to do the same.
April 29, 2010, 11:36 amNEILC:
ADiff i did not mean move them ourselves, by us acting i meant with emissions reductions – but where do you think people in bangladesh for instance would move to? it is already one of the most populated countries and most of their foodsource comes from the ganges delta – so any ideas?
i really dont think your four points laid out above are impartial, of course we can affect the outcome of the climate change, it is all being forced by GHG’s and therefore the less GHG’s we emit, the less the forcing is pushing the system out of equilibrium. If we were to increase the CO2 concentration to 1000ppm the earth will undergo warming – apart from any other evidence any palaeoenvironments with higher CO2 concentrations such as these have been considerably warmer – the pliocene cited above for instance was 3 degrees warmer with a CO2 concentration of only 30% higher than today. obviously this comes with certain caveats but i think my point is still valid – we are likely under the business as usual regime to bring concentrations a lot higher.
Wally, i understand fully that a climate equilibrium is held in place by negative feedbacks – in a general sense this explains phenomenon such as the faint young sun hypothesis, whereby despite the large shift in solar strength the earth has remained within a relatively narrow temp range – however this is true for climate with relatively little changes in forcing. However, the point of the paper was to show that you can shift systems from one state of equilibrium to another if you force it hard enough, exactly what happened from the pliocene ‘greenhouse’ shifting to the current ‘icehouse’ – the paper explicitly states that positive feedbacks enhanced the changes brought about by tectonics etc etc and then the earth became stable in the current icehouse state.
I was under the impression that sea level predictions were ~70cm by 2100, but that this excluded the effects of the greenland and antarctic ice sheets (since their dynamics are not well understood), but in the worst case scenario, these would undergo rapid melting and add meters onto this. Obviously this is worst case but anything between the extremes of no major melting and melting should be a possibility.
April 29, 2010, 2:30 pmNEILC:
(^^^^true for climates with relatively little changes in forcing on short timescales)
April 29, 2010, 2:31 pmWally:
Neil,
Ok, so why are we so worried about shifting to a new equilibrium? If some people have to move, so what? My job on this planet is not to attempt to make sure everyone gets to stay where they want. If the only change we can agree is going to happen is a degree of warming and a meter of sea level rise, I hardly see the “catastrophe” that requires me to pay tax, or to reduce my quality of life in anyway what so ever.
April 29, 2010, 5:13 pmWaldanger:
****”I hardly see the ‘catastrophe’ that requires me to pay tax, or to reduce my quality of life in anyway what so ever.”
Are you sure you’re not a conservative?
April 29, 2010, 6:11 pmADiff:
Yeah Neil, and we could explode about 10,000 nuclear devices too. It’s make just about as much sense as spending trillions on the wasted effort of trying to avoid things we probably couldn’t avoid anyway, even if they were really even remotely likely to happen, which it most certainly seems they’re not. So from my perspective it’s, at best, an almost entirely destructive endeavor, producing almost unmitigated negative results, which can only be characterized as Evil, whether consciously pursued (which I wouldn’t put one cm past people like Gore & Pachauri, for examples), or unconsciously, as by many persons who honestly believe themselves acting in everyone’s best interest. I, naturally, would have to question who appointed them our very own versions of Plato’s Guardians…..
BTW, there doesn’t appear to be, or ever have been, any real equilibrium, just extended periods of less dramatic change than in others. The system appears to oscillate all over the place in both the short and the long term…at least in terms of what we’d consider climatic optimimums…which are, after all, probably a bit warmer than it is at the moment in any event…
Anyway, in any ‘Worst Case’ it’s completely moot anyway, as all the vain ‘carbon reduction’ schemes on Earth won’t send that stray asteroid or comet back home, and we’re all dead anyway. And, of course, in the really long run (which is a purely academic matter), that’s exactly the kind of thing that eventually has to happen anyway. Worst cases might make good science fiction, but aren’t likely enough to spend more than entertainment money on in the real world. Of course if we really want to spend the ‘seed corn’ on our very own academic version of the Maginot Line, or Brilliant Peebles…well then there are always plenty of hosanna singers only too happy to provide accommodating choruses…for the odd million here and there, of course!
As always: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!
April 29, 2010, 6:56 pmNEILC:
You cannot just say climate change is not even remotely likely to happen. And of course there are periods of equillibrium, that is why climates may persist for millions of years. The Pliocene warm period persisted for several hundred thousand years, however our current holocene climate has only occurred in the last ten thousand. But there have been climates in the geological past that have persisted for millions of years.
As you said yourself equilibrium is held in place via negative feedbacks – on a geological timescale for instance the main negative feedback on atmospheric carbon dioxide would be the silicate weathering cycle, which consumes atmospheric carbon to erode continental rock. An increase in average temp, usually via increased CO2 in the atmosphere would result in intensification of the hydrological cycle and more acidic rain – producing the effect of increasing the weathering of rocks and drawing down atmospheric CO2 thereby stemming the warming trend and reversing it back to equilibrium.
Now this sort of timescale is far too large to factor into our century or so changes on climate and CO2 will not be buffered in the next few thousands of years by the silicate weathering cycle. We are shifting the climate out of equilibrium by the, on geological timescales, enormous rate of CO2 emission, coupled with the positive feedbacks that act on very short timescales geologically.
But in this case the worst case is not simply a random bolide impact is it? The potential for a major melting of the icecaps is there – we have all read the reports of calving ice shelves in antarctica and the increased meltwater off of the greenland coast. I am not going to argue that it will happen because i cannot with certainty, but you can not argue either that it will not happen with any certainty.
Wally -
“If some people have to move, so what? My job on this planet is not to attempt to make sure everyone gets to stay where they want. If the only change we can agree is going to happen is a degree of warming and a meter of sea level rise, I hardly see the “catastrophe” that requires me to pay tax, or to reduce my quality of life in anyway what so ever.”
That to me is a really worrying attitude, and im betting if it was your country (the states is it?) about to be inundated by the ocean by someone else’s doing then your views would be somewhat different.
April 30, 2010, 2:20 amShills:
Wally says:
‘If some people have to move, so what? My job on this planet is not to attempt to make sure everyone gets to stay where they want. If the only change we can agree is going to happen is a degree of warming and a meter of sea level rise, I hardly see the “catastrophe” that requires me to pay tax, or to reduce my quality of life in anyway what so ever.’
Wow. you really are a jerk. You don’t feel any sense of accountability for the way your lifestyle might seriously disrupt 150 million people? Sick.
Where’s Wally? He’s in his lab doing vivisections on puppy dogs.
April 30, 2010, 6:18 amWally:
Neil,
“That to me is a really worrying attitude, and im betting if it was your country (the states is it?) about to be inundated by the ocean by someone else’s doing then your views would be somewhat different.”
Maybe, but that doesn’t leave us with a right or wrong, just a perception difference. Things change, fairly or unfairly, and people have to adapt.
Shills,
“You don’t feel any sense of accountability for the way your lifestyle might seriously disrupt 150 million people? Sick.”
That might is key. Can you actually prove to me that my actions, or even the actions of all the western world will actually avert this possible disaster? No, you can’t. Until you can take that “might” out of your question, the answer will be “no.” And further from my perspective you attempting to force me to hinder my lifestyle to only maybe avert a possible problem is sick. Between those two “maybes” (the possible problem and uncertainty of the “solution” actually averting it) just what are the chances hindering my life style will actually do any good?
You don’t care that hindering other people’s lives will actually lead to some positive benefit? SICK!
April 30, 2010, 10:33 amWally:
Neil,
“We are shifting the climate out of equilibrium by the, on geological timescales, enormous rate of CO2 emission, coupled with the positive feedbacks that act on very short timescales geologically.”
No, we are not shifting the climate out of equilibrium. We’re at worst pushing the mean temp we oscillate around up. The equilibrium is not being destroyed. Its still there, always will be. We’re just moving inside the window created by the equilibrium, and CO2 alone is simply not strong enough to move us outside that window. Now you want to start royally F-ing with the H2O content of our planet or maybe move us a little closer to the sun, then you might be on to something.
April 30, 2010, 10:40 amADiff:
While it’s obviously always an hypothesis that must prove itself (of course not be assumed until dis-proven…this is Science, if not just simple logic!), I think it’s become abundantly clear the likelihood of Dangerous AGW is very, very remote, based on just about every observation coming in… Effects will occur, clearly, some not insignificant…but none especially dramatic and certainly not catastrophic…so that idea has to be put in the bin with every other remotely possible, but very unlikely, catastrophic possibility we actually do probably face, such as caldera eruptions, asteroid * comet impacts, large scale nuclear war, massive solar instability…and categorized similarly with respect our actual ability to influence its likelihood or occurrence. So massive investments into trying to reduce GHGs just makes no economic sense at all, and would amount to massive waste and misappropriation of resources, for which we all know there’s no shortage of other very real, if less sweeping, more prosaic, and thus far less psychologically (and financially) rewarding to those in the climate and ‘alternative’ energy fields…not to mention the politicians, who never saw a ‘crisis’ that wasn’t very useful……
Shills,
You propose policies that would impoverish billions, and actually cause serious harm and death to tens, even hundreds of millions….an you call Wally sick? Look in the mirror man! When it comes to morality, think about it…Wally’s opposing what he see’s as ineffective intervention into challenges the natural environment might impose on that “150 million people”, while you actively advocate policies that will almost beyond a doubt kill at least tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions. Who’s sick?
Neil,
You can’t have an advanced, materially affluent global civilization and not have some significant impacts on the environment, including (to at least some, rather unclear, degree)…but on balance one can pretty much assume the net impacts of such a civilization far, far less than the impacts of less advanced, less efficient communities. One doesn’t need electrical power generation and internal combustion engines to trash an eco-system and alter a climate: axes, fire and cows alone can do the job very thoroughly. The more efficient and materially affluent the community, the proportionally less its environmental impacts. So unless one has decided to advocate the destruction of advanced, materially affluent society, and desires the destruction of human civilization and advancement, one must accept some level of impacts, and simply address whether its possible, practical and advisable to mitigate such on a case-by-case basis…..
As far as massive efforts to curtail AGW are concerned, I view this as analogous to investments in preventing the deleterious impacts of Witchcraft which were the focus of so much consensual aggrement, attention and investment in the pretty much throughout the Middle Ages, right up the early Industrial Revolution…to the same effective ends as that notable academically driven crusade against a consensually agreed commonly perceived broad natural threat…..
April 30, 2010, 10:50 amNEILC:
your opening paragraph: again the word catastrophe is being used as though in response to my warning of a catastrophe. I have not mentioned the phrase, though i accept others have – i am not denying the existence of extreme views in favor of a global meltdown but i do not share those views, and further to this i am not denying the existence of extreme views in the other direction – those that think climate change either is not existent or is a conspiracy. Now the chances of climate changing are in fact, based on the overwhelming evidence very high. The extent is uncertain i recognise, this but also the extent will likely depend on our action to cut emissions since the future forcing on climate will in all likelihood mostly be derived from GHG’s.
I feel i have missed something here and would like clarification for all. Even slight climate changes, such as a modest 50cm eustatic rise will have profound impact on many nations not exclusively bangladesh, but any low lying country you can think of or areas of them, such as pacific island nations, parts of India, the netherlands – whos government has now given up on the nations heritage of defending against the coast via building dykes, and is preparing for sea level rise adjustments. Now the Netherlands happens to be an EU nation with the ability to cope with the effects of sea level rise, but many nations are not in this position. Furthermore this is only considering sea level, one projected impact of warming.
When you say “actively advocate policies that will almost beyond a doubt kill at least tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions. Who’s sick?”
What action would we take that will incur the loss of millions and the impoverishment of billions? Please enlighten me.
I also view your argument about more advanced civilisations having less of an environmental impact as completely flawed. What impact on the environment do the Inuit community, or (in the past) the native american, aboriginal peoples inflict that is comparable to what the Western World has had in the last 200 years? Did they create the ozone hole? Did they destroy global fish stocks to a reportedly unrecoverable level in certain species? Did the ancient samurai ever suffer from Minamata disease?
April 30, 2010, 11:17 amNEILC:
As far as witchhunting being analogous to AGW, this is farcical: witch-hunting was based around religion and not around science. So there is no analogy there, and it is irrelevant.
April 30, 2010, 11:37 amWally:
Neil,
“I also view your argument about more advanced civilisations having less of an environmental impact as completely flawed. What impact on the environment do the Inuit community, or (in the past) the native american, aboriginal peoples inflict that is comparable to what the Western World has had in the last 200 years? Did they create the ozone hole? Did they destroy global fish stocks to a reportedly unrecoverable level in certain species? Did the ancient samurai ever suffer from Minamata disease?”
I’m not entirely sure this is how far Adiff is going down the civilization scale. But think he’s talking more of countries going through industrial revolutions that create pollutants outside of simple CO2. And if we have to go back to Native American type technology to avert this 1m rise, it should be pretty clear we will impoverish and kill many billions of people. Our planet simply can’t support this many people without modern technology. Going back to pre-1900 technology would even kill millions. So weigh the pro’s and cons. How much do we need to cut out CO2 emissions, what will that do to modern civilization, and is it worth people moving from some low lying areas while also being able to benefit from a strong global economy? Given that you can’t tell me how much we need to cut CO2 to actually do any good, nor give me any sort of reasonable window of possibility on just what kind of effects we’d see from warming, let alone exactly how much warming we’d see, I don’t think you can even do this. So you’re ultimately suggesting we hinder our lives styles to some extent, though we don’t know exactly how much, largely in the absence of evidence that what we will be doing will even help anyway. If this were how you made your day to day choices, you’d be committed for insanity. Think, I’ll destroy this computer because it might be omitting light frequencies that might scramble my brain! I’ll stand in the middle of a highway stopping traffic because one driver might be drunk and he might kill someone! This is your logic.
April 30, 2010, 12:18 pmNEILC:
Not quite my logic i would argue.
Im talking about industrialised nations emitting the most co2 which is proof enough of my argument. The top 3 being China, US and the EU emitting more than half of the worlds emissions. Not proof enough that? I dont see any developing nations on the top of that list! And co2 is by far the most relevant pollutant here. So really at the moment the world is struggling to cope with the carbon intensive nations that are the “materially affluent” ones…
Surely your argument is based around your skewed ‘worth’ system, whereby you place maintaining your way of life above the livelihoods of millions because you are unwilling to change your lifestyle even slightly?
Have we finally gotten to the bottom of this, people like you stubbornly unable to budge from a comfortable lifestyle? Even though the relative adjustments you would have to make to make a difference would be minor. Infuriating.
The IPCC does tell you, according to model projections the levelling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere required to keep warming under a certain level.
And never has anyone suggested ‘going back to pre-industrial technology’.
April 30, 2010, 12:57 pmWally:
Neil,
It certainly is your argument and you display as much in this post as well.
“Surely your argument is based around your skewed ‘worth’ system, whereby you place maintaining your way of life above the livelihoods of millions because you are unwilling to change your lifestyle even slightly?”
If it were just “slightly” that would do the trick, yeah maybe. But you don’t know that. Will altering our way of life just slightly actually do anything to avert this problem?
“Have we finally gotten to the bottom of this, people like you stubbornly unable to budge from a comfortable lifestyle? Even though the relative adjustments you would have to make to make a difference would be minor. Infuriating.”
Only you can’t prove, nor have even tried, that we’d have to make just minor adjustments…
“The IPCC does tell you, according to model projections the levelling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere required to keep warming under a certain level.”
Ok, where? Does it show me what the cost of doing that would be? Does it actually know what its saying is true?
April 30, 2010, 1:36 pmChrisP:
Obviously reverting to the technology of the 1900s would kill millions of people. I can’t help feel this debate has digressed. Either way, that’s not been suggested, not an option and not worth discussing.
It is known how much we would have to cut emissions and reasonable estimations of the repercussions of climate change have been given, with consequences becoming worse in line with increased emission.
Yes, people are suggesting you alter your lifestyles (the use of hinder is debatable) and we do know by how much. Undoubtedly, the actions of one person will not change the world but if everyone makes small change it will aggregate to a significant effect. The three main emitting sectors are power generation, industry and domestic (primarily households and transport). It is the province of governments and industry leaders to deal with the emissions from power generation and industry but we can definitely take steps to mitigate our own contributions. Small steps such as better insulating our homes, using more efficient white goods and methods of transport and consciously reducing the amount of electricity we use (e.g. through installing smart meters in our homes, using energy-efficient light bulbs, etc.) will not only reduce our personal emissions but even save us money. Yes, you will have to pay initially for more insulation, efficient white goods, cars and smart meters but since these are all long-term purchases (or investments – e.g. houses that are well insulated will increase in value) they will pay off in the long run. (Here is a link to a diagram of the marginal abatement research these ideas are based on: http://www.dnv.com.au/binaries/marginal%20cost%20of%20abatement_tcm162-295645.jpg ). So these are all things we can do to help the cause that don’t significantly affect our lives – and may even improve them.
Furthermore, as companies across the globe seek to reduce their emissions through energy efficiency they are also reducing their operating costs. As production costs fall so do prices offered to consumers which will also put more money in your pocket.
It is also worth noting the often used cliché that it is not a sprint but a marathon and that the intergovernmental talks on climate change mitigation and adaptation are discussing strategy to be implemented over the next 10-40 years culminating in 2050 with, hopefully, the achievement of our emission reduction goals. No one is saying there is an imminent catastrophe or that if we don’t meet the target of 450ppm the world will end. We are just trying to limit the negative consequences of our current path of development.
April 30, 2010, 1:53 pmWally:
Chris,
“Yes, people are suggesting you alter your lifestyles (the use of hinder is debatable) and we do know by how much. ”
Got a reference for that?
April 30, 2010, 2:09 pmNEILC:
Wally, yes, the IPCC has several SRES projections based on different emission scenarios and the estimated warming with uncertainties. You will find this in the summary for policy makers along with references.
I think it is fair to say that all someone like you or i can do in terms of emissions cuts require a small degree of change – make yourself less carbon intensive. Action en masse will accumulate into major cuts and cost you relatively little.
April 30, 2010, 2:51 pmChrisP:
While there is no established way to quantify a change in lifestyle these sources detail how individuals and companies can make changes to their daily routines that will put money back into their pocket in the long-run and reduce their emissions. A key point is that these strategies (in particular, the use of more efficient technologies) will save you money regardless of your feelings about the anthropogenic nature of climate change. You may also note that the second reference is the full paper outlining the diagram I linked to above.
Walker, G. & King, D., 2009, The Hot Topic, London, Bloomsbury Publishing. [Available from: http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Topic-About-Global-Warming/dp/0156033186/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272664333&sr=1-1
Enkvist,P. Naucler, T. and Rosander, J,(2007) A Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction, The McKinsey Quarterly, 1, 35-45. [Available from: http://www.epa.gov/oar/caaac/coaltech/2007_05_mckinsey.pdf
This third reference is a more advanced report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers about more advanced steps companies can take towards developing a carbon strategy:
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, (2008) Carbon Value: Robust Carbon Management, PriceWaterhouseCoopers Australia. [Available from: http://download.pwc.com/ie/pubs/robust_carbon_management.pdf
April 30, 2010, 3:07 pmChrisP:
While there is no established way to quantify a change in lifestyle these sources detail how individuals and companies can make changes to their daily routines that will put money back into their pocket in the long-run and reduce their emissions. A key point is that these strategies (in particular, the use of more efficient technologies) will save you money regardless of your feelings about the anthropogenic nature of climate change. You may also note that the second reference is the full paper outlining the diagram I linked to above.
Walker, G. & King, D., 2009, The Hot Topic, London, Bloomsbury Publishing. [Available from: http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Topic-About-Global-Warming/dp/0156033186/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272664333&sr=1-1
Enkvist,P. Naucler, T. and Rosander, J,(2007) A Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction, The McKinsey Quarterly, 1, 35-45. [Available from: http://www.epa.gov/oar/caaac/coaltech/2007_05_mckinsey.pdf
This third reference is a more advanced report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers about more advanced steps companies can take towards developing a carbon management strategy:
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, (2008) Carbon Value: Robust Carbon Management, PriceWaterhouseCoopers Australia. [Available from: http://download.pwc.com/ie/pubs/robust_carbon_management.pdf
April 30, 2010, 3:08 pmADiff:
Achieving the IPCC goals will kill tens of millions. Just banning DDT has resulted in tens of millions of deaths. It’s time these facts were no longer ignored. Our arrogance in thinking we have the right to (and ability) to ‘fix’ what we believe is broken has costs that should no longer be denied.
The examples Neil cites (of relatively non-impactful communities) are examples of very low technology (however masterful at that low level) societies, with very limited (essentially at long-term survival minimums) material affluence, but most importantly, extremely low populations. Using those examples as guideposts could be inferred as a suggestion on your part for elimination of most human lives. Is that a goal you think desirable? Are you seriously suggesting Science can recommend a retreat back to the Stone-age and survive as a respected (or even tolerated!) paradigm? If Science really does go that way (and I think that fad much more likely just a passing fit of madness than anything else) then it really will end up in the dust-bin of history, along with miasma and witchcraft. If things were (remarkably) to actually turn out that way, you’d see the idea of Science, as we understand it, abandoned rapidly, and if history’s any guide, with a great deal of bloodshed. I find the idea somehow we can’t screw up our culture bad enough to kill it interesting, since it’s been repeatedly done by other cultures in the past.
As the purportedly catastrophic impacts all this suffering and sacrifice are supposed to avoid appear largely fictitious or exaggerated, they’re based on something other than reason (and real Science)…and there’s really no better term for such a faith-based commitment than ‘Religion’ even if the ‘Green’ ideology broadly substitutes a secular Moloch for a deity.
If carbon really did seem a major problem, then you’d have a point (although far from a conclusive one even then). But it increasingly seems carbon’s a chimera, a false diagnosis. The U.S. is an excellent example. As it has become more wealthy, it’s also become more efficient, reducing pollution and negative environmental impacts, both in proportional and absolute terms, while less developed nations, such as China and India, behind the curve and playing ‘catch-up’ are becoming more impactful, at least for now. It’s generally accepted we can reasonably expect them, when (and if) they become sufficiently materially affluent, to more closely resemble the developed nations in terms of reduction in externalities and lower population growth rates. I think it’s a fair bet whatever the process, their actions will wind up being driven by market economics, and not more than in passing by environmental mythology or even real demonstrated externality costs. Regimes there that attempt otherwise as more than passing fad, or in appearance only, will be replace, either more or less peacefully, or not…but replaced all the same.
Whether some of us think it unconscionably or not on the part of others, it seems almost everyone wants to be able to realistically expect to live to 70 with all their teeth intact, and not live with the real specter of perhaps having to watch their children die of preventable disease or starve.
April 30, 2010, 3:10 pmNEILC:
Fascinating rhetoric but irrelevant to the argument.
“But it increasingly seems carbon’s a chimera, a false diagnosis” – a fictional statement.
“The U.S. is an excellent example. As it has become more wealthy, it’s also become more efficient, reducing pollution and negative environmental impacts, both in proportional and absolute terms”.
In absolute terms, the US is still the second biggest emitter of CO2 and yearly emissions have been growing since the industrial revolution. It also has one of the highest CO2 footprints per capita in the world. Go and look up the figures.
“Achieving the IPCC goals will kill tens of millions” – What reason do you have to believe that?
April 30, 2010, 3:31 pmChrisP:
ADiff, you seem to have gone way off topic. I also don’t fully understand the point you’re trying to make.
Why do you say that the ban of DDT caused tens of millions of deaths?
What is the point of your question “Are you seriously suggesting Science can recommend a retreat back to the Stone-age and survive as a respected (or even tolerated!) paradigm?”?
Are you suggesting that someone has claimed that “a retreat back to the Stone-age” is what is being called for to prevent climate change?
With this comment “Regimes there that attempt otherwise as more than passing fad, or in appearance only, will be replace, either more or less peacefully, or not…but replaced all the same”, are you suggesting that if the Chinese government does not comply with the climate change “fad” there will be a revolt in China?
What do you think the developed worlds’ role should be in aiding the development of the developing world?
Finally I would like to point out that you assertions about the millions of deaths and you polarization of any comment made on this forum is stifling constructive debate.
April 30, 2010, 3:32 pmChrisP:
While there is no established way to quantify a change in lifestyle these sources detail how individuals and companies can make changes to their daily routines that will put money back into their pocket in the long-run and reduce their emissions. A key point is that these strategies (in particular, the use of more efficient technologies) will save you money regardless of your feelings about the anthropogenic nature of climate change. You may also note that the second reference is the full paper outlining the diagram I linked to above.
Walker, G. & King, D., 2009, The Hot Topic, London, Bloomsbury Publishing. [Available from: http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Topic-About-Global-Warming/dp/0156033186/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272664333&sr=1-1
Enkvist,P. Naucler, T. and Rosander, J,(2007) A Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction, The McKinsey Quarterly, 1, 35-45. [Available from: http://www.epa.gov/oar/caaac/coaltech/2007_05_mckinsey.pdf
This third reference is a more advanced report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers about more advanced steps companies can take towards developing a carbon management strategy:
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, (2008) Carbon Value: Robust Carbon Management, PriceWaterhouseCoopers Australia. [Available from: http://download.pwc.com/ie/pubs/robust_carbon_management.pdf
April 30, 2010, 3:33 pmWally:
Neil,
I know those projections are there, but I do not believe they have much grounding in reality. Nor do I believe me simply buying CFLs or turning my AC up to 80 degrees (I already have that nice efficient AC and good insulation, I like to save money as much as the next guy) is going to come any where close to off setting the further development of India and China. The western world is responsible for only about 15% of the world’s population. As the remaining 85% go through their industrial revolution, any cuts in our own emissions will be completely wiped out. So, any changes we make are futile. We simply control too little of the long term CO2 emissions to make much difference. Second, if we attempt to place CO2 restrictions on developing countries we risk war and/or harming the lives of those we intended to help in the first place, all while hindering our own growth. There is simply no reason to place artificial restrictions on our economic development until we are certain of negative consequences. At which time, we better be damn ready to enforce these limitations world wide. Otherwise, what’s the point? Are you up for that? This could amount to a third world war, and with the proliferation of nuclear weapons…how many could end up dead? How much does CO2 matter then?
Of course the other option, still assuming this is real, we simply let innovation take care of itself, as ADiff alludes to. By that I simply mean, let our innovations in efficiency and power generation happen naturally. If one day, we can build a solar array so as to please all the different kinds of liberals and collect all the power we need, GREAT! Maybe we’ll be able to engineer a microbe to make oil out of CO2, H20 and sunlight, what ever. Until that day however, any action we take is likely, maybe even more so, going to do more harm then good.
April 30, 2010, 3:38 pmChrisP:
[Sorry if this is a repost, I can't see it showing up on the page so I removed the links to the sources and am trying again. You can easily find them all if you google their names though]
While there is no established way to quantify a change in lifestyle these sources detail how individuals and companies can make changes to their daily routines that will put money back into their pocket in the long-run and reduce their emissions. A key point is that these strategies (in particular, the use of more efficient technologies) will save you money regardless of your feelings about the anthropogenic nature of climate change. You may also note that the second reference is the full paper outlining the diagram I linked to above.
Walker, G. & King, D., 2009, The Hot Topic, London, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Enkvist,P. Naucler, T. and Rosander, J,(2007) A Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction, The McKinsey Quarterly, 1, 35-45.
This third reference is a more advanced report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers about more advanced steps companies can take towards developing a carbon management strategy:
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, (2008) Carbon Value: Robust Carbon Management, PriceWaterhouseCoopers Australia.
April 30, 2010, 3:39 pmADiff:
Chris, because the evidence compellingly supports it’s being true. Malaria’s made a big comeback, and it’s largely result of that ban. Here’s a case example: Al Gore claimed in his movie that because of Global Warming malaria had migrated to Nairobi. Even a cursory review of the historical literature makes it clear that malaria was indigenous there far in advance of any possible human induced Global Warming, but that there was a period in the 20th Century when it was almost eradicated there…a period that ended when DDT was banned. Malaria is one of the great killers today. Without arguing for the indiscriminate use of any technology, it’s pretty obvious the largely blanket ban effect of ‘banning DDT’ in wake of Carson’s emotionally compelling, but very scientifically questionable ‘Silent Spring’ has resulted in tens of millions of otherwise preventable deaths, and continues to maim and kill even as we speak……
And yes, I’ve digressed from topical specifics very much toward the fundamental bases of those here. But it can be a bit difficult to respond to a conversation between several blind men about whether an elephant is a snake, or a house or a tree without drifting toward more sweeping generalizations!
April 30, 2010, 4:02 pmWally:
Chris, I fail to see how those references support what you are claiming. They are more dealing with implementation of “green tech.” That’s hardly the kind of data I was looking for.
April 30, 2010, 4:21 pmChrisP:
Okay, for brevity (and to sort the points in my head) I will use bullet points:
- I understand that one man installing CFLs wont off-set the emissions of China and India. That is true. But my point was relating to what an individual can do and if that strategy is adopted on a large scale it will impact the overall emissions from a country’s households, a key source of emissions. Furthermore, an increase in the purchase of energy efficient products will send a signal to companies that consumers are thinking more about their impact on the environment and will pursue strategies to make their products more efficient and, therefore, more attractive to the environmentally conscious consumers.
- You are correct about the divide of the world population between the developed and developing world. However, the proportions of emissions are nowhere near a 15:85 split. Different sources give different estimates but you can be sure that the developed world is responsible for more than 15% of the world’s emissions.
- The idea that there is no point in acting on climate change unless others do makes a lot of sense. However, since the developed world is responsible for the most emissions historically and the developing nations are the ones who are most likely to pay the price of any negative repercussions of climate change it seems a good act of faith for the developed nations to take the first step. Moreover, through international agreements like those sought through conferences like Copenhagen, countries are seeking solutions that they can all agree on. The Kyoto Protocol was an international agreement whereby all nations in the world agreed on a plan of action, all nations apart from America. So, ironically, it is the rest of the world’s efforts that are futile because America won’t join in. Any steps by America to get the ball rolling will be seen as a positive step toward an international agreement by the rest of the world.
- There is no risk of a war as a result of mitigation and adaptation of AGW. CO2 restrictions are not placed onto any members of an international agreement. Targets are agreed to by all members so no one will be forced into a situation they do not agree to, they can simply not ratify the agreement (such as America did with the Kyoto Protocol). Similarly, the threat of nuclear attack by any nation on another is very low. Countries develop nuclear weapons to give themselves weight on the global political scene but the logic of mutually assured destruction ensures that no government would attack another with nuclear weapons. Either way, a discussion of nuclear proliferation is a topic for another forum all together.
- It seems that you would be in favour of taking action were negative consequences to manifest themselves. Through the lag associated with the science of climate change by the time negative environmental impact occurs it would already be too late to prevent further detrimental outcomes. There is also the argument, which I’m sure you’ve heard a thousand times, that given the possible futures we face, the outcomes of taking action logically outweigh inaction regardless of the effects of AGW.
- Also, as demonstrated by the Copenhagen negotiations, it is very difficult to develop strategies to deal with AWG. It would considerably harder to draw up and implement a set of actions once negative environmental impacts had begun to occur.
- As for waiting for science and technology to come up with a solution to the global warming problem. For starters, it seems fairly short sighted not to act. But aside from that, in the hypothetical situation that a scientific breakthrough did solve the problems, it is much more likely that such a breakthrough will occur through research and development spurred on by the environmental movement. To restate, it is more likely that the breakthrough would occur as a result of the climate cause.
April 30, 2010, 4:44 pmShills:
Wally says: ‘Maybe, but that doesn’t leave us with a right or wrong, just a perception difference. Things change, fairly or unfairly, and people have to adapt.
No because the dev. world emitters are the cause of the harm done to the non-emitters. There is an obvious wrong-doing there.
Wally says: ‘Can you actually prove to me that my actions, or even the actions of all the western world will actually avert this possible disaster? No, you cant’
BUt assuming that emissions are the cause of the warming, then you would feel accountable? Of course you would.
ADiff says: ‘You propose policies that would impoverish billions, and actually cause serious harm and death to tens, even hundreds of millions….an you call Wally sick?’
Pfff. Well that does seem kinda counterproductive! No one is advocating policies like that. What are you talking about?
Wally says: ‘There is simply no reason to place artificial restrictions on our economic development until we are certain of negative consequences.’
Waiting ’till we are ‘certain’? You serious?
What evidence to Wally and ADiff have that the issue is still too uncertain, and the costs of action too great, to advocate global emissions reductions?
April 30, 2010, 6:10 pmWally:
Chris,
Bullet points 1 and 2 go together pretty naturally so I’ll address them as one.
It is true that while population is split roughly 15:85 that the emissions ratio is very different, and not surprisingly the developed world output more than the developing world…for now. What happens 10 years from now, or 50? Our own economic actions are only being discussed to phase in over a number of decades. So, what happens when China and India are no longer the developing world, but more or less part of the developed world. That will roughly triple the population of the developed world, just assuming today’s populations. And in 50 years? Currently, most of these nations are growing at ~2% annual rate. That’s a doubling in 35 years. How in the hell are we going reduce overall CO2 emissions when 2/3 of that population is still developing, and its going to double in just 35 years? This is what I mean when I say CFL light bulbs and a little extra insulation isn’t going to solve a thing. We need large scale technological improvements to make a serious dent.
“Moreover, through international agreements like those sought through conferences like Copenhagen, countries are seeking solutions that they can all agree on.”
I’m sorry, what came out of Copenhagen exactly?
“So, ironically, it is the rest of the world’s efforts that are futile because America won’t join in. Any steps by America to get the ball rolling will be seen as a positive step toward an international agreement by the rest of the world.”
So far, I don’t believe anyone is actually living up to the Kyoto protocol, and the US has set its own standards anyway. Also the Kyoto protocol is pretty much completely toothless. Then of course there is China and India, reduced emissions from 1990 levels? Ha, that’s a laugh. You try to get something like this agreed on which actually has some teeth on it, and lets see what kind of response you get?
Which leads into the war aspect. If you can’t get the everyone to agree to a meaningful and toothed program, just what do you do? What do you do when one, or several countries are in non-compliance, if you do get a agreement? When it comes to tough economic sanctions, you will absolutely risk war. Look at the oil and rubber embargos with Japan before we entered WWII for example. All it takes is one relatively powerful country that doesn’t want to play by your rules.
“Countries develop nuclear weapons to give themselves weight on the global political scene but the logic of mutually assured destruction ensures that no government would attack another with nuclear weapons.”
This assumes that the leaders of all countries with nucs in the future think logically…
As for when to take action against AGW: I would recommend taking action when it is known, and I do mean KNOWN, not guessed at, that the bad will out weigh the good with global climate change. Until that is certain, there is no logical reason to harm ourselves now.
“It would considerably harder to draw up and implement a set of actions once negative environmental impacts had begun to occur.”
What about the positive ones? Maybe we’ll like them…
“For starters, it seems fairly short sighted not to act.”
Its hardly short sighted, I just don’t support this fire, aim, ready approach that you are advocating. You want action, mostly just for the that reason. You can’t actually prove climate change is likely to be a net negative for our global society, nor can you prove any actions we take would even significantly effect climate change in the first place. Even look at those IPCC reports with various assumptions about CO2 emissions, notice how those error bars overlap (almost entirely!)? And even those models can’t and don’t account for everything, so they are likely, ok certainly, underestimating the error, or are even completely worthless.
“it is much more likely that such a breakthrough will occur through research and development spurred on by the environmental movement.”
Not really. You can’t force innovation. We don’t know where the next big break through will come from. Solar has been largely stalled out for years. Wind power has been very incremental. Dams are nice, but they seem to be tearing those down more than building them. No one likes nucs it seems, even though they are the only rational choice if we really don’t like CO2. Sure, we need to publicly fund research, and if private investors what to explore ideas and extract profits if they hit, great. But we don’t need many, many billion dollar research efforts to attempt to force it. Science and technology don’t work that way.
Recently in my field the huge amounts of public money has been spent on the 1000 genome project, and its just terrible quality because of previous costs associated with that large of scale sequencing. But if they only waited a few years for the next generation technology, they could have had 10x better results for 1/10th the cost. And now they are likely going to just redo it, or at least they should, on the new technology. Plus, you have the opportunity costs of programs like that. What if we could have used that money to, say, cure AIDS?
So its just not worth it dump huge amounts of public money chasing some dream. Because it just might be some guy in his basement that figures it out without a penny of our money, or maybe it will come from a completely unexpected area that does have an obvious tie in to energy research that was more poorly funded thanks to the emphasis elsewhere. Or you may just never get what you want (see curing cancer). So despite what you may believe about AGW, we need a pretty balanced approach towards funding.
April 30, 2010, 6:58 pmWally:
Shills,
“No because the dev. world emitters are the cause of the harm done to the non-emitters. There is an obvious wrong-doing there. ”
If only you could establish that increasing CO2 was actually going to harm people, or even harm more than it helps.
“BUt assuming that emissions are the cause of the warming, then you would feel accountable? Of course you would. ”
Hard to feel accountable for something you didn’t know about…
“Waiting ’till we are ‘certain’? You serious?
What evidence to Wally and ADiff have that the issue is still too uncertain, and the costs of action too great, to advocate global emissions reductions?”
False burden of proof. You want something done, you’re making the claim, you need to prove it.
April 30, 2010, 7:04 pmShills:
‘False burden of proof. You want something done, you’re making the claim, you need to prove it.’
The IPCC is my evidence. What do you have?
‘You can’t force innovation.’
Yes you can. Happens all the time. War forces innovations, space race forced innovation, free-market forces innovation…
And, in relation to the huge task of dealing with China and India, isn’t technology our only hope? I think that with enough ‘forcing’ we will come up with a solution otherwise we have no other option.
April 30, 2010, 7:40 pmNEILC:
The global population is supposed to tail off not double in the next 35yrs, since as the developing world develops, and women become enfranchised etc and begin to hold jobs the average number of children born will decrease, especially in places like India. China has already set laws around single child birth. So the population will not simply double in the next thirty-five years as has been the rule in the past.
“As for when to take action against AGW: I would recommend taking action when it is known, and I do mean KNOWN, not guessed at, that the bad will out weigh the good with global climate change. Until that is certain, there is no logical reason to harm ourselves now.”
THIS is not logic. Global warming is not a guess, it is a best estimate using a wealth of available evidence, and training of thousands – there is a large difference between the two. YOU are guessing that it is false, not based on the available evidence but consistently choosing to err on the side of skepticism despite evidence telling us not too. Therefore the logical action, in view of the best estimate of the scientific community would be to act now when it would be (relatively) cheap to avert the effects, rather than act later, when we would be positive but when it would be too late and the relative cost much higher. You keep missing this point.
Nobody in Britain could prove that Nazi Germany was going to go to war in Europe but many called for action to remobilise and re-arm the country, since it was obvious to many that he did not have peaceful intentions. As it was, Neville Chamberlain was reluctant to do so, and as a result it took us several years to get war-ready, by which time Europe had been invaded. In hindsight, it would have been better to get war-ready before war started, since everybody’s best guess envisioned Hitler with militaristic aims and despite there being hard proof.
If we are to play the waiting game as you would do, at what stage of climate change would you then take action?
May 1, 2010, 1:59 amNEILC:
‘^there being no hard proof’
May 1, 2010, 2:01 amShills:
Someone mentioned war in relation to climate. There is a book ‘Climate Wars’ which looks at these possibilities, written by some security expert. Not read it. Don’t know if it is reasonable. A bit of a cash-in somewhat, for sure.
May 1, 2010, 5:24 pmphat shantz:
As a chemist I was taught that alchemy — however laughable today — is one of our roots to modern inorganic chemistry.
“Climate Studies,” on the other hand, are to science as Jell-O is to thermonuclear physics. Except that I can demonstrate the existence of Jell-O and show that it remains coherent under infinitesimal examination.
May 2, 2010, 1:33 pmNEILC:
Unfortunately, despite your chemical knowledge, your post is more polarised than a water molecule.
May 2, 2010, 3:36 pmChrisP:
ADiff and Wally,
Just wondering, for the sake of fairness, can you provide some reading for us so that we can understand your point of view.
Cheers
May 2, 2010, 3:48 pmADiff:
I’ve already provided extensive references in previous posts. Please refer to these for starters.
It’s become pretty clear that AGW has been over-stated and exaggerated to a great extent, and that the trend is neither unprecedented, nor in any way likely to produce catastrophic or disastrous impacts. AGW is real, but not dramatic or unprecedented and there’s no evidence of any likelihood it’s “dangerous” on any broad scale and won’t produce any changes normal adaptive processes can’t handle (with the exception of some special cases involving wildlife populations with specific limitations imposed by conditions on their mobility and adaptability where geographically very isolated populations are at risk…such cases are common for many other reasons than current climate trends, too).
May 3, 2010, 2:17 pmADiff:
For the DDT issue (for which alone I’ve provided no refs yet) start with http://junkscience.com/malaria_clock.html … It’s polemical as hell…but hey!…it’s easy to understand outrage at something arguably contributing to over 100 million otherwise avoidable human deaths! No doubt one can actually do one’s own research starting from there, I would hope.
As for the rest, start with ‘Climate of Extremes’ and review some of the other sources I listed in a prior post in this thread…. The evidence AGW is NOT DANGEROUS & urgent action to address it is just not needed at all grows day by day…..
There are tons of sources and references, articles, books, and lots of web sites with large numbers of these.
May 3, 2010, 2:55 pmWally:
Shills,
“The IPCC is my evidence. What do you have?”
The IPCC is organization, not evidence. And if you actually looked at those reports did you notice the heavily over lapping error bars in their models (http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-spm-5.html)? Those are just +/- 1 SD, not even 95% CI. So despite different inputs on assumed CO2 emission increases, all those projections are not significantly different. Thus, you don’t actually know that anything we try to do will help (say comparing B1 to A2), even if we assume these models are correct.
“Yes you can. Happens all the time. War forces innovations, space race forced innovation, free-market forces innovation… ”
Hardly. Could WWII have forced the innovation of the atomic bomb without the unforced discovery of E=mc^2? What forced the innovation of aircraft? Throwing money at something can only help so much. You can’t just pay someone to come up with things like E=mc^2. You can pay people to make more incremental improvements, such as many of things seen in the engineering field (slightly better processors, smaller hard drives, etc), but the big discovers come when they come. X amount of dollars isn’t going to find a cure for cancer, nor will Y amount give us the next generation of solar power.
May 3, 2010, 6:02 pmWally:
Neil,
“The global population is supposed to tail off not double in the next 35yrs”
Isn’t that what they’ve been saying for almost 100 years now? Those kind of projections are almost always wrong. And much like AGW models, these models have a ranges between growth at logarithmic rates, to actual decreases. To push only the peak then decline model clearly illustrates your bias towards particular conclusions as you ignore evidence to the contrary likely present in the same reports you’re getting your desired information from…
“and women become enfranchised etc and begin to hold jobs the average number of children born will decrease, especially in places like India. ”
This is to a large extent already happened, and I was using 2% growth which is similar to most of the western world.
“Global warming is not a guess, it is a best estimate using a wealth of available evidence, and training of thousands”
Neil, are you a modeler by chance? I am, and in that business best estimate = guess. They can’t experiment. Thus, they can’t actually PROVE the value of most of their parameters. This leads them to guess. They even have to guess at the which interactions are present, not only the parameters. This could lead to not only incorrect parameters, but missing interactions in individual equations, to missing equations entirely. Its a guess, pure and simple.
“YOU are guessing that it is false, not based on the available evidence but consistently choosing to err on the side of skepticism despite evidence telling us not too.”
But you can’t actually point me towards ANY evidence that we could significantly alter the result even if we take the IPCC models at their word. But of course we can dismantle those models six ways from Sunday.
“Therefore the logical action, in view of the best estimate of the scientific community would be to act now when it would be (relatively) cheap to avert the effects, rather than act later, when we would be positive but when it would be too late and the relative cost much higher. You keep missing this point.”
No. Your point is to assume that these things are actually “best estimates” and not blind guesses by people creating models to spit out a desired result. Plus you regularly ignore evidence against your point, such as overlapping +/- 1 SD error bars on our climate models. The worst of those models gives a 4 degree window at just +/- 1 SD. And the case of reducing our emissions after some peak in the relatively near future still has an over lapping error at just 1 standard dev. Its ridiculous to base billions to trillions of dollars in possible economic growth on these half cooked mathematical models. So your “logic” relies on a false premise, sir.
“If we are to play the waiting game as you would do, at what stage of climate change would you then take action?”
I’ve already answered that question.
May 3, 2010, 6:22 pmWally:
Neil,
“Just wondering, for the sake of fairness, can you provide some reading for us so that we can understand your point of view.”
You’ll have to be more specific. Just what parts of our conversation do feel the need to read up on.
May 3, 2010, 6:28 pmWally:
Wait a second, those gray bars are actually -40% to +60%, yet they claim them to be the ‘likely’ range that Neil told us meant 90% CI? This whole report is such crap. Exactly who puts any kind of error bar on a graph that is just -40% and +60% of the mean? Take a look: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-10-29.html
These are their models individual models they pull this AOGCM composite “model.” They are all over the place. And they just simply take a mean of them? These are “best estimates?” Good lord. So, what they have done is get the mean of a set of models, and made a SD of those model’s results. But what of each model’s uncertainty as well? What of selection bias towards of which models they choose to include in this “meta-analysis?” What are the assumptions of all these models, and why should we treat them as one?
I knew these things where crap, but man it only gets worse with closer inspection.
May 3, 2010, 6:52 pmShills:
Wally says: ‘The IPCC is organization, not evidence’
Well of course I mean the referenced reports don’t I?
And I should prob. clarify that it is not ‘my evidence’ because I don’t have a an understanding of all the evidence, but rather I am interested in this argument with Neil and Chris who understand it, and I’m pretty sure would say the IPCC is the evidence (apart from the stuff post-AR4). Sorry for any confusion.
So Re. you graph. I would have thought the SD would give you some idea of the confidence intervals? But I really dunno. Why don’t you ask a climate scientist or something?
Wally says: ‘X amount of dollars isn’t going to find a cure for cancer, nor will Y amount give us the next generation of solar power.’
So you think we should just leave it to chance/fate? No one is saying that there is any guaranteed recipe for innovation. But money, policy, any soughta motivation, will get peeps focusing on the issue. The more heads on an issue the better. There is no doubt that certain environments are more conducive to innovation than others.
May 3, 2010, 7:13 pmWally:
Shills,
“I would have thought the SD would give you some idea of the confidence intervals? But I really dunno. Why don’t you ask a climate scientist or something?”
Ask a climate scientist about a statistics question? I’d rather not. And while the SD is a judge of the variation pressent in the data, it isn’t a good one. The SEM or a CI is a much better judge. When you are just looking at a bar chart (for example) showing SD, those error bars tell you pretty much nothing. If the error bars do or do not over lap, that doesn’t necissarly mean the two samples are significantly different. With CI you can know that.
“No one is saying that there is any guaranteed recipe for innovation. But money, policy, any soughta motivation, will get peeps focusing on the issue. The more heads on an issue the better. There is no doubt that certain environments are more conducive to innovation than others.”
But what’s the opportunity cost? How much are you willing to spend knowing you may not find anything, or that you may have found it without spending as much or even nothing? This is why it doesn’t need any more emphasis than anything else. Is it not possible that someone working on a jet engine could make the next big discovery in energy generation, for example? What if you pull money away from aeronautical engineering and kill that possibility.
Anyway, that’s the problem. We need to fund basic research evenly, because you don’t know what will truly be useful. That’s why its basic research. And if history is any guide it should prove to us that we can’t decide when and where the really game changing discovers and ideas come from.
May 3, 2010, 8:33 pmNEILC:
Wally, if you had in fact taken a closer look like you said you had you would realised the -40-60% mean was averaging out several models, this large range is expected when you average out several models, and to be honest i would not use it as evidence myself.
However, upon real closer inspection you would see individual models plotted against these with means and 5 to 95% ranges of their outputs. Take another look – the AOGCMS are the red dots. Im betting you haven’t read much of the IPCC report very carefully if at all.
Now it is not particularly useful saying all the scenarios overlap in error bars and so there are no statistically valuable trends. This is not a continuous variable we are measuring when we test different emissions scenarios. Each scenario should be taken separately with their own error bars. There is one model only on that chart who’s minimum range lies within 1 degree warming.
May 4, 2010, 2:48 amWally:
Neil,
“if you had in fact taken a closer look like you said you had you would realised the -40-60% mean was averaging out several models, this large range is expected when you average out several models”
That’s what I said no? That it was -40% to +60% of this multi-model mean? And while we do expect a large range, who exactly said -40% to +60% of the mean means anything at all? What statistical method of error approximation is that? Its complete crap Neil. They pulled that out of their ass. Probably because they don’t know how to create a measure of error when doing a meta-analysis on various models with their own error. Or maybe they do, and they didn’t like what they saw… I don’t know…
I gathered that about the AOGCMs, and I’ve read parts of the report more closely than others. None of that really matters though does it? We’re discussing this part now. What you’d bet is completely irrelevent. And seeing as you thought “likely” meant 90% CI, when it was actually +/- 1 SD, means we could probably say the same thing about you.
“Now it is not particularly useful saying all the scenarios overlap in error bars and so there are no statistically valuable trends.”
I question your scientific training if you actually believe this. If you create a model, input different assumptions, and can’t get significantly different results from those different assumptions, you can’t tell me to 95% degree of certainty that those changing assumptions matter. Now you can interpret that a number of different ways, one way is that it shows you that your models suck.
“This is not a continuous variable we are measuring when we test different emissions scenarios. ”
It is actually a continuous variable, you’ve just made several discreate assumptions. You could have just as easily made plot with a continuously changing set of assumptions and responce from them.
“Each scenario should be taken separately with their own error bars. ”
Depending on what point you are trying to make at the time. But if you’re attempting to tell me that we need to reduce our emissions, then you have to point to the set of graphs and a comparison between them, not just each one individually. And of course the set show no statistically significant different result from various different assumptions on future emissions, thus you can’t actually support your argument, even if we accept these models.
May 4, 2010, 9:00 amNEILC:
If you look at the reports introduction it does tell you what they mean when they say likely, very likely etc, and it does specifically tell you that ‘very likely’ is greater than 90% confidence.
I dont see anywhere in your figure reference that uses the term likely or very likely so i am not sure how you think i have tried to mislead you here. And it is very important that the ranges of the individual models mostly fall above the 1 degree warming part, you cannot just ignore that.
You are misinterpreting me on the overlapping error aspect – of course, if you were measuring a continuous variable, say a concentration of a chemical, then any trends with overlapping error bars would be statistically insignificant, but in this case, where emissions scenarios represent discontinuous variables, it does not quite work the same way: We are not attempting to find any relationship or trend between emissions scenarios and temperature, merely seeing how different scenarios pan out. Does that clarify what i am trying to convey?
May 4, 2010, 10:58 amWally:
Neil,
In table SPM.3 they claim the “likely” range is 1.1-2.9 for scenario B1, for example. This is nothing more than .6*mean to 1.6*mean and rounded. I’m not sure if you attempting to mislead me or not, but I find it rather lazy, disingenuous, and suspect that this IPCC report calls this a “likely” window. This is not a statistical measure of the variance in any way what so ever, nor a measure of the confidence in the mean. Its somebody’s stupid idea, nothing more. Later the colored shadings in figure SPM.5 are +/- 1 standard deviation of the set of models’ means (which is meaningless, but we’ll get to that in a second), and gray shadings are this -40%, +60% thing, which of course is prominently displayed in that figure.
“And it is very important that the ranges of the individual models mostly fall above the 1 degree warming part, you cannot just ignore that.”
Which ranges? The +/- standard deviation of the means from the different models? Who cares? Firstly, +/- 1 standard deviation only shows where ~68% of your data falls relative to the mean, assuming we have a sample of normally distributed data and all that. It doesn’t give you a measure of confidence in the actual location of the mean. In short, people really shouldn’t be using SD as much as they do, it doesn’t tell you much. We need to be using SEM or CIs. Secondly, the SD of the mean of a handful of models is a meaningless error measurement. Those models come with their own errors. You need a much different analysis to give an accurate measure of the error when doing this kind of meta-analysis.
These are the kinds of things that are taught in a 200-300 level stats course, maybe even 100 level. I understand that the politicians that are supposed to read these things are not expected to understand such things, but that’s exactly the point. They create these error bars largely knowing the audience they are writing them for won’t know the difference. Thus, the authors should be held to a very high standard, by themselves, as well as you and me. Its too easy to confuse politicians and laymen by throwing up some gray lines and calling it a “likely” window, when how they actually defined that is a meaningless or irrelevant statistic. Its disingenuous and just further proves these people were not trying to be completely honest, but trying to create some ammo for their pet cause. Well, either that or they are completely incompetent.
“We are not attempting to find any relationship or trend between emissions scenarios and temperature, merely seeing how different scenarios pan out. Does that clarify what i am trying to convey?”
I don’t think you yourself are completely clear on what you are saying. The vary nature of coming up with a set of predictions based on different assumptions is to compare what happens under those different assumptions. But if your point is to want to say a set of models predicts some range for X amount of emissions great (assuming for a second their error actually means something), that is pretty trivial, right? The idea now is to be able to do something about it, right? So if we do nothing, and this is largely hypothetical to illustrate a point, and a model predicts 4 degrees of warming +/- 2 degrees at 95% confidence. Then the models using emissions predictions under say Cap and trade, or world wide compliance with the Kyoto protocol (or something similar), and predicts 2 degrees of warming +/- 1.5 at a 95% confidence interval. So then the idea is to see how much difference these changes will make in the world temp. And as we can see the range at 95% CI in one case is 2-6 degrees, and the other is .5-3.5. So, and I’ll guess a little again for illustrative purposes, say there is 40% chance doing nothing will be 2-3.5 degrees, and then doing something will be a 50% chance at 2-3.5 degrees. So these models predict a 20% chance that doing nothing will lead to the same window of result as doing something. Now this isn’t the perfect way to do this, but its the basic idea, and why those error bars need to be correct. This is because doing something is going to likely cost us trillions of dollars. And our models can’t even tell us that it will matter. They can only tell us its might matter some, it might matter a lot, or it might not matter at all. There is just way to much error currently present to justify these kinds of costs.
Now I’m not sure what exactly you’re arguing, but this is the correct way to think about these models’ results and how they should inform our choices. We need to understand what kind of cost is likely to make what kind of difference, and how much that difference will actually matter. I think we can both agree that spending trillions to save tenths of a degree over a century is probably not worth it, but if it is going to save 5 degrees, it maybe is. Its a strict probabilistic cost benefit analysis. And I haven’t seen anyone pin down the likely costs and benefits enough to support any kind of climate legislation.
And finally, those models are likely to be underestimating the error for the simple fact that they don’t know what they don’t know. So they are only able to estimate the error in the processes they attempt to account for. And again the lack of experimentation leads to a very small confidence in at least establishing that what they don’t know is fairly small. Much less to actually test the validity of their model in the first place.
May 4, 2010, 12:17 pmNEILC:
Wally,
the individual models were plotted with “a mean and 5 to 95% range (red line and circle) from a fitted normal distribution”. So they are not sigma-1 error bars. I am merely trying to correct what you seem to not be reading about this figure.
And you are also misinterpreting again concerning overlap of error (regardless of the errors), you cannot find any trend (as in a gradient) using discontinuous variables. The figure is not plotting CO2 against temperature but temp with certain CO2 concentrations.
May 4, 2010, 2:25 pmWally:
Neil,
I know that individual models had that, the AOGCMs did not.
“And you are also misinterpreting again concerning overlap of error (regardless of the errors), you cannot find any trend (as in a gradient) using discontinuous variables.”
I’m sorry, but that is complete BS. It is done all the time in every field you can think of.
May 4, 2010, 5:17 pmBruce:
Neil,
I know that individual models had that, the AOGCMs did not.
“And you are also misinterpreting again concerning overlap of error (regardless of the errors), you cannot find any trend (as in a gradient) using discontinuous variables.”
I’m sorry, but that is complete BS. It is done all the time in every field you can think of.
May 19, 2010, 2:00 am