Craig: skeptics won’t believe something unless there is enough evidence (and some say, they can be too picky or agenda-driven about getting enough but leave that aside) whereas a “denialist” doesn’t want to accept evidence already out there. Sure, it can be debatable how much or how good evidence is, but that’s the basic definition hyperdeath is pointing to. Actually, we need to add theoretical basis because the evidence per se for correlation of CO2 and climate change would be shakier (?) if not for the theoretical expectation that absorption of CO2 should trap heat.

For example, I don’t deny that the weather and climate on our little blue dot has changed significantly, but I don’t yet accept as fact that human kind is solely responsible for it. Does that make me a denialist or a skeptic.

As written (with “solely”), it makes you neither since as far as I am aware, no mainstream scientist claims that no non-human phenomena have effect on climate change. That would be a strawman (possibly one built for you by the denialists).

as far as the “Global Warming Denialists”
I take it from the arguments that they have a blind spot in thinking of “man could not possibly do that”.
So any evidence to the contrary is discounted.
It is as if they think that nothing we do have unforeseen undesirable consequences. I would bet that if you looked into their personal lives you would see other examples of similar thinking.
they also seem to have an inability to look at the whole picture of what we have been doing for centuries. There are other examples in the past of negative results to our activity none were so far reaching as the dilemma we find ourselves in at present most were more local in effect but there have never been this many of us before. If you start doing the numbers you begin to see that we are not heading in a very good direction.
It really is simple when we change things things change!

Mr Myers

For me, being not very educated, having not looked at the data, or having the ability to interpret it equitable if I would look at it, living in a country where greens are part of alot of local governments and have been in a coalition ruling the country, it is really hard not to take a skeptic approach towards man-made global warming. If I look at the public and governmental treatment of the topic here in Germany, then I see bigotry, blind faith and scare tactics, not science. And whenever someone takes a skeptic approach, this person is being bashed, not with arguments and data but rather by attacking the persons intellect or by comparing him with creationists or otherwise personal attacks.

I’m not saying that I doubt man-made global warming, I can’t and I won’t form an opnion until I actually read up on it, but I would like to suggest to not mix this topic up with what is going on about evolution where the enmity originates from religion and ignorance. Here I see the believers and anti-science folk rather on the side of the pro man-made global warming camp, which doesn’t mean that it is not the case of course. It just makes it look silly if people try to discredit GW skeptics by saying they are like creationists when there is not one day when I don’t see some hippie green folk protesting against people farting because it hurts the climate. Earlier it was genetically modified food, now it seems that global warming is another one of the four horsemen of the green apocalypse.

I admire your intellect, but not everyone in the world is as educated and can tell apart science from junk science and skeptism from ignorance. So please don’t take it for granted that it should be obvious to tell if man-made global warming is as much of a fact as evolution. I only know that climate science seems to be a very complex field and that it is not as easy to pinpoint the cause from the data as it is to decide upon evolution versus some creation myth.

Thank you everyone for your input and comments regarding my questions. I have a firm grasp on the denial versus skepticism thing now.

As to my comments regarding humankind being “solely” responsible for global warming, well, perhaps that thought has come from media that survives on blood and guts and scaremongering etc., in order to survive.

Believe me, I’m 100% behind supporting transformational ways of doing things. Me must do everything we can to mitigate our impacts and even reverse them were possible.

Again, thank you all for your thoughtful comments. It’s nice to be able to ask a question and not have to don flame-retardant clothing while you await answers.

Cheers to you all!

Has Hansen come out and said this guy is a kook and isn’t/wasn’t his boss? If not, why not? He could prove it easily and put an end to Theron’s contentions swiftly.

Bill Dauphin,

You don’t understand the market. The measures that are beneficial in their own right are already being persued. It is the central planners that are making things happen that aren’t beneficial in their own right that are the problem, e.g., banning incandescents, subsidizing turning food into ethanol, etc.

XiXi… from China?

Phil#34,

Theon does not appear to have claimed to be Hansen’s boss. Look at the source. His actual claim doesn’t appear to have been debunked. Theon makes valid points about models being unable to be validated to forcasting standards. We need the models anyway because they might be able to eventually shed some light on the recent warming, so work on the models should continue. The modelerers will just have to establishing their credentials some other way. It takes quite a bit of time to prove skill in decadal phenomena.

uncle froggy@28: I personally think you are “spot on”. My father has what many who know him consider to be a strong case of NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) and adamantly dismisses AGW.

Since he, by definition, cannot be in error, his decisions on the situation are, by definition, beyond reproach. And yes, he is a Creationist.

I guess never being all that rebellious in younger life, my Atheism can be considered a sort of rebellion :-)

JC

Steve C#41,

Your deceiving yourself. Unless there is full disclosure on the data and methods, the work can’t be replicated. Of course, journal articles couldn’t be burdened with reams of data, and sharing data with collegues was often expensive and required shared costs. But today with the economies of the internet and digital data storage, it is time to open the science up. There is a movement to get the journals to establish that standard as a requirement for publication.

Africangenesis:

You don’t understand the market. The measures that are beneficial in their own right are already being persued.

The truth of this assertion depends entirely on what range of values you assign to beneficial. If by that term, you really mean “beneficial to those who are already successful and are interested only in preserving their current privileged position,” I suppose you’re right; I, OTOH, am more interested in benefits to the world at large. The agile innovators the right claims to revere always prosper in the disrupted environment created by rapid regulatory and/or technological change; the fact that the right always resists these changes just exposes the hypocrisy of its pretended veneration of entrepreneurship and innovation.

In fact, usually even the “dinosaur” businesses actually flourish when forced to innovate, no matter how much they resist it before the fact… and if they don’t, the displaced workers are typically absorbed by the many jobs created as new technologies emerge.

That market that I “don’t understand”… the one that automagically selects all the best answers for the greater good? It doesn’t exist in real life; only in your (and your philosphical soulmates’) imagination.

Dale Husband#43,

I don’t think skeptics don’t have to be as skeptical as your definition. The “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard is from the law. A skeptic will also make judgements on “good evidence” for something, even if the case isn’t beyond reasonable doubt. They will just keep in mind the level of certainty, the evidence for competing hypotheses, and be open to new evidence that might change their assessment. Anthropogenic Global Warming is a good example, it is reasonable to expect some warming from the increase in GHGs, but there is not good evidence to support the level of certainty claimed by the “believers”. There is also are credible competing hypotheses to explain some of the recent warming: aerosols and solar forcing. It strikes some, that it might be more than a coincidence that the solar activity was at a higher than usual level for much of the 20th century. Since the models are the chief method of trying to resolve the competing hypotheses, the diagnostic studies showing significant problems with the models are troubling to any claims of certainty.

Why are they bothering to email you? Aren’t you a biologist? Aren’t they aware that there are at least two other blogs here at the Borg that focus mainly on climate science? (One of which already has a post about Theon.)

Theon makes valid points about models being unable to be validated to forcasting standards.

This is the first I’ve ever heard about standards for forecasting. Do they exist? Are the people who made them aware that models don’t make forecasts, that they’re projections and not predictions? It strikes me as being the kind of statement that just sounds so obviously right and gets heads nodding, until you really look at it and find it’s a combination of out-of-ass garbage based on a false premise. It’s a polished turd of an argument, if you will.

Bill Dauphin,

“That market that I “don’t understand”… the one that automagically selects all the best answers for the greater good?”

The market doesn’t optimize, it satisfices. It doesn’t find the global optimum, just lots of local optimum. Even so, its track record is much better than that of the central planners. Absent government distortion and in the presence of competition, prices are a good reflection of the materials, labor and energy required to produce a product. Some externalities such as that imposed by the toxic materials used in compact flourescent lights may not be represented in the prices, but the difference in price between CFLs and incandescent is a reasonably good measure of the resources that go into their production. The global optimum this price different would indicate would be wide use of CFSs in high use or hard to reach locations (due to longer life), and incandescents in low use locations such as closets and sheds, where the few minutes a year they are on cannot justify the extra expendature of resources required to produce a CFL. A ban on incandescents has no chance of reaching this global optimum. With the distripution of the proper information, the market does have a chance of approching it more closing. Now, some people don’t have the means or inclination to defer current consumption in order to reap the benefits of CFL energy savings. So perhaps a subsidy to adjust this within the market mechanism is in order. But then, not charging the purchaser for the environmental externalities present in the toxic materials is a kind of subidy.

Blue Fielder the only thing I deny is being a denier. I deny nothing related to the Hypothesis of Global Warming as Cause by Humans, I also accept nothing. I have no interest in taking on “beliefs” one way or the other which can’t be proven or disproven. Knowledge trumps belief all the time!

I require hard facts and an audit trail especially for extraordinary claims. That is the scientific method, it’s known as peer review. (See details in earlier post #47).

Show me the facts. Show me the RAW data and the steps of computation and the software used to get from data to conclusions. Then I’ll be able to ascertain the probability of the reliability of the hypothesis.

Also why do you think that I’m “required” to make a commitment on the topic either way? What is wrong with not committing? What is wrong with being a scientist using the scientific method? It’s inconvenient to your prematurely extremist lemming group think, is that why?

The thing is, there is evidence that can be seized upon by one camp or the other, and *both* camps tend to contain large numbers of very loud people who aren’t in the least familiar with the arguments.

CO2 from the fossil record: It lags warming (by many centuries), not leads it. Ergo, the CO2 fossil record is not a predictor for the behavior of warming WRT CO2 concentration; it’s the other way around (and it may no longer be valid because our current CO2 concentrations are not plant-based.)

Warming in general: Temperatures in the last century still fall well within the norms for the planet at large; we’ve been a lot warmer, we’ve been a lot cooler. Rates of change also have been higher. For instance, a moderate volcanic eruption will demonstrate cooling rates for extremely large regions that are orders of magnitude faster than anything we can point at right now.

CO2 as a static effect, precip cycle as dynamic effect: CO2 gets up there and hangs out; takes a while to change once established in the atmosphere. This, according to AGW proponents, will result in a warmer planet. But it will *also* result in an accelerated evap/precip cycle, which will carry more heat away from the planet, thus establishing a counter-force to the presumptive heating. It is also well worth pointing out that CO2 only accounts for a small fraction of the atmosphere’s heat retention, while the evap/precip cycle accounts for a *very* large amount of the heat carried away; it is truly the primary heat-transfer engine of the planet’s surface. Warm water evaporates, carrying heat up; cold water condenses and falls, cooling the surface. That effect absolutely *dwarfs* any predicted effect of CO2. You don’t hear much about it, though.

Busted data: The hockey stick; busted. Ten hottest years happening in the last two decades: busted.

Busted models: Some of the models fail at the poles, others fail just sort of generally. None of them predicted the current slump in world temperatures; Now, I don’t have a problem with this being a little downward glitch in an upward trend, but I *do* have a problem with the models not seeing it coming. They’re clearly busted: plainly put, stuff is happening they’re not accounting for. That’s not a formula for a model you want to bet on.

Busted presumptions: “Change is bad”… I submit that change is opportunity. And change is constant, too. Water levels change, we move the docks, the cities migrate, etc. Multi-century time spans are *very* long in terms of human building and settlement. Many 100 year old buildings of recent vintage need to be replaced anyway by virtue of old age, others simply because their utility is no longer appropriate to the times, insulation not up to par, etc. Change is all around us, and yep, change is opportunity. Slow change is not something to fear, unless it is *only* negative (increased poisons in your drinking water, for instance.) Rivers move and severely re-adjust their banks all the time. I refuse to panic over the idea that the ocean might do it a little more (and we really are talking about “a little.”)

Now — personally — I’m of the mind we should reduce emissions (of everything) because we evolved to breathe air w/o such additions, as did everything else around us, and I strongly suspect that if we breathe too much crud, we’ll pay for it somehow. Just a feeling, but I’m going with it.

But I am far from convinced that AGW is a factor in and of itself that we “must react to”; a lot of the rumbling is coming not from scientists, but from the public at large who has bought into the worldview (which is fine if it is correct, but they can’t tell you if it is or if it isn’t… it’s just another belief to them…. loudness / popularity is not an indicator of truth. Look at Christianity, for instance.)

Real climate scientists, when you can find them (are there any here?), tend to be a good deal more reticent about predicting flooding, significant movement, creation and loss of specific growth zones, and how much temperature in how much time AGW means to them. Blogs, the BBC and the NYT, not so much. A good scary article drives income. As does controversy. Always something to keep in mind.

At this point, it is my considered opinion that skepticism is exactly what is called for. That, and a little patience. And, as I said, during that time, we should work to control our emissions anyway, because they represent a new environmental factor that will probably bite us one way or another.

Jadehawk#53,

“If the Big Three hadn’t fought emission standards for the last 20 years, they wouldn’t be on the verge of bankrupcy now.”

You are over simplifying. If Big Three had actually WON their fight against emissions standards, many of us might also be driving diesels right now as they have been in europe for years. If the Big Three had WON their fight against safety standards, we might have something intermediate between motorcycles and automobiles that combined more of the economy of the former with some of the safety of the latter. Perhaps the Big Three appreciated some nuances you missed.

pwl refuses to look it up. He wants it done for him.

/r/ b& pwl.

Can someone help me understand the difference between “denialist” and “skeptic”?

My 2 cents: a skeptic is willing to change his or her opinion; a denialist is emotionally attached to his or her opinion and won’t let evidence get in the way.

“The things we need to do to address AGW — finding nonpolluting, renewable sources of energy and improving the efficiency of everything that uses energy — are beneficial in their own right, having the potential to improve everyone’s life, create millions of jobs, and make many smart entrepreneurs and businesses very rich.”

No no no, they’ll RUIN the economy. RUIN IT! You only deny this because you’ve been made rich from the AGW Illuminati!

XiXiDu: in the evolution-Creationism debate there are generally just two sides, the pro-science and the religious anti-science. With AGW and other environmental issues it is a little more complicated. The treehuggers (Greens)include a large segment of neo-pagan Gaia worshippers, who favor respecting our Mother Earth but typically have no science background and cannot easily assess which issues are critical, which can wait a while longer, and which are simply New Age woo.

I find myself in an uneasy alliance on this issue with folks who think that most humans should jump in the compost pile, will not discuss nuclear power as an option for energy independence and AGW reduction, and make statements like “We don’t let radiation or chemicals enter our garden.”

But you’ve already made up your mind pwl. AGW isn’t real.

What do you need data for? Going to write a paper and publish?

pwl, you obviously don’t know what you are demanding. Here, have some raw data:

19.3 40.8 20.5 78.2 p

Have fun!

Transparency is critical since Dr. Mann’s refusals to provide it give a strong hint that he’s hiding something for some secret agenda. The light of day does not hurt the scientific process as it’s essential for verification of those hypotheses. Reproducibility is critically important for all scientific theories. If you don’t have reproducibility it’s impossible to know for sure if the theory holds any water! (pun intended).

If Dr. Mann really has nothing to hide, let’s see his data and programs and the detailed thought process he used to get from data to conclusions (and yes including all the raw data in context along with the details of the context)!

Knockgoats#11,

Could I just point out before africangenesis
turns up that yes indeed, the direct effect of
anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2 and other
long-residence GHGs cannot account for all the
warming since 1970; but that the well-understood
positive feedback that warmer air holds more water
vapour means these anthropogenic changes in
atmospheric concentrations can indeed account for
all the warming. I’d also like his views on why, if
the warming is really a decades-delayed effect of
solar changes, the stratosphere has been cooling
even as the surface, troposphere and ocean have been
warming.

Stopped kidding yourself by repeating that invalid argument.  Yes, the
increase GHGs and positive water vapor feedback can account for all the warming. 
As we’ve already discussed, they can account for several times the recent
warming.  But that merely establishes plausibility.  Water vapor is a
feedback to any warming including solar.  The greater uncertainty in our
understanding of solar, combined with water vapor feedback is also more than
enough to account for the recent warming.   You know I’m familiar with
the diagnostic studies of the models.   The positive surface albedo
bias documented in ALL of the AR4 models resulting in the reflection of too much
solar energy, averages to approximately 4 times the recent warming, and you know
that is just the tip of the iceberg of model issues.

A contribution from AGW is not denied and may well be an explanation for the
stratospheric cooling, but that says nothing about whether the NET feedbacks to 
AGW are positive rather than negative and whether it accounts for more, or less
than the approximately 30% direct effect.    The decades long
delay to the effect of solar is attributable to the same thing that would cause
a decades long delay to the response to AGW, the mid century aerosol cooling
event and the thermal mass of the oceans.   In case you hadn’t noticed
GHGs were increasing before the 1980s arrived.

One good thing about this thread – it’s great for feeding my killfile.

Notice how the AGW denialists are using the same sort of arguments as creationists? It’s amazing.

Quiet Desperation: You’re probably thinking of Rasool & Schneider 1971, which was less of a prediction and more of a scenario, which hinged upon a climate sensitivity to CO2 of roughly half of what it’s now accepted to be AND a quadrupling of anthropogenic aerosols that didn’t happen. See Skeptical Science for more, along with direct links to all the papers in question.

I’m still voting ice age.
My reason? I just like going against the grain sometimes, and the bookies are giving up ridiculous odds. :-)

So am I but not just to be contrarian. It is entirely possible that a severe warming will dump so much fresh water into the Atlantic that it stalls the Gulf Stream and shuts down the whole thermal conveyor. This could result in making the poles very cold indeed and triggering a new ice age.

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
— Albert Einstein

So are you really sure that those that promote the hypothesis of global warming as caused by humans have it right?

The irony goggles! They do nothing!

So climate denialists, which of the following applies to you?

1. The climate experts are not in a general agreement over AGW.

2. The climate experts are in agreement but what they think is not really important, the dissenting voice on the net is much more convincing.

3. The climate experts are in agreement but they’re lying and it’s some sort of conspiracy like they are only saying this to justify and secure grants.

I love how pwl demands evidence… but then ignores it.

Marc Abian#84,

Really, you can only think of three choices?

I could argue that there are no climate experts because it is a multidisciplinary field. The modeling is crucial to any chance of attributing phenomena in the complex system, but very few of those in the field are modelers. The modelers have a vested interest in overemphasizing the skill of their models, while at the same time maintaining the case for continued investment, all in the name of justifying more funding. There are some Working Wroup I authors that are liars or at least are deceiving themselves. There are also some assumptions that the are failing to question, for instance they assume all the forcings are equivilent. This is a linear assumption that cannot be justified when they are coupled so differently to a nonlinear system. They have a pure mathmatical formula for converting climate sensitivity to one forcing to its CO2 doubling equivilent. The IPCC, as an international agency, has a large contingent of third world members who have a vested interest is playing the victim of 1st world excess and exploitation, whether they believe in it or not. The watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside), are opportunistically exploiting AGW as an excuse to force the world to take the economic koolaid of so-called “scientific” central planning. Somehow it all adds up to a new religion.

Me, I just want to see the evidence.

What’s next? Accept Newton on “faith” without ever trying to reproduce the results?

Don’t support the LHC in the quest for the theorized Higgs Field?

No point to replicating any prior experiments, right, since we know all there is to science!

Who cares if the climate changes again and the Earth self corrects? Not possible so don’t even bother with taking temperatures anymore.

No point in fixing the raw data sets of temperature readings.

No point in finding out what magic Dr. Mann has done when he manipulated the raw data without saying how.

No point.

You might as well have an invisible friend named science instead of god. Sheesh.

I don’t know enough about climatology to have an opinion if AGW is reasonable or not. However, I have noticed that many AGW denialists’ objections are economic and political in nature.

I love how africangenesis @88 reveals his true colours once more.
“The IPCC, as an international agency, has a large contingent of third world members who have a vested interest is playing the victim of 1st world excess and exploitation, whether they believe in it or not. The watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside), are opportunistically exploiting AGW as an excuse to force the world to take the economic koolaid of so-called “scientific” central planning. Somehow it all adds up to a new religion.

Me, I just want to see the evidence.”

Irony meter detonation!

Of course, it’s all a communist plot and those evil, powerful third-world countries are dominating those poor downtrodden industrialised countries, who never did anything wrong or exploited anybody, and intelligent thought can never beat the magic market.

Right.

We use basic physics, not fossil record, to understand why added CO2 would raise temperatures. Ben, you’re arguing with a misunderstanding.

CO2 from the fossil record: It lags warming (by many centuries), not leads it. Ergo, the CO2 fossil record is not a predictor for the behavior of warming WRT CO2 concentration; it’s the other way around

The difference between a denialist and a skeptic is the difference between rationalization and rationality. So the key factor that identifies somebody as a “denialist” rather than a skeptic is repeating obviously fallacious rationalizations as if they were serious arguments.

This one is a good example. CO2 has been known since the time of Arrhenius to slow the rate of re-radiation of solar energy from the earth. There is no meaningful scientific debate about this; it is basic physics. Similarly, it is basic physics that the solubility of CO2 in water declines as temperature increases. So we have an elementary positive feedback, in which increasing CO2 will increase the temperature, and increasing the temperature will increase CO2.

And when you have a positive feedback loop, one thing is perfectly clear–it is absolutely idiotic to insist that one particular part of the loop must lead and the other one must follow–it’s like debating which side of a wheel do you have to turn to get it rolling. You can start it going at any point, and appealing to history won’t change that fact. Talking about the fossil record is like arguing, “We know that in ancient waterwheels, the wheel drives the axle, not the other way around, so we all of that talk about modern car wheels being driven by motors is clearly nonsense.”

We use basic physics, not fossil record, to understand why added CO2 would raise temperatures. Ben, you’re arguing with a misunderstanding.

Yes, I know he misunderstood me. You too. (See how that feels?)

My point was that the AGW crowd in general (not climate scientists) likes to point to the fossil record as evidence of CO2 causing warming; this is an invalid thing to do. The data the fossil record has revealed – CO2 lags heating cycles – is wholly inapplicable to such duty. We clear on that now?

I am well aware that CO2 can remain, relatively stable, in the atmosphere. I am also aware that CO2 in the atmosphere affects heat retention in the atmosphere. Warming, however, is not a simple consequence of an additional measure of heat retention. There are other factors at work, such as the heat engine of the evap / precip cycle (which operates on a larger scale than the CO2 levels do, *and* can counter-respond dynamically [and very strongly] to changes in temperature, which the CO2 levels do not.)

I am also well aware that “basic physics” is not up to the job of predicting climate, nor of characterizing the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.

And in fact, if – and I’m giving you plenty of room here with that “if” – you think that’s the whole methodology underlying serious attempts at climate prediction, you might consider quitting while you’re (way, way) behind.

pwl… you’re about subverting the process.

Do the research. Do the actual science. Test your hypotheses. But don’t ask for OPEN science if you’re not going to follow the process of science.

I want to clarify my interest in Climate Change since it’s such an important topic to the world. As a Systems Scientist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_science) with a long background in simulations, a number of major science and engineering based systems built I have a professional interest in the climate models that process the raw data and the “rules” that the climate modelers use. I am in a position to audit the simulation programs when working with experts in the field of climate science. I in no way assert that I’m an expert in climate science; far from it. However, the scientific process and method particularly with respect to the practical use of building in verification and auditing to the simulation models that I’ve built for clients has been very successful. A number of structures are standing with people’s lives at stake based upon the computations done with my software systems and software systems that I had a major role in. Auditing and verification were essential in providing the confidence of the engineers in “proving” their implementations of the proposed structures. In fact the validation features of the software simulations enabled the discovery of a range of input errors and other mistakes with the calculations. In addition I’m designing a new computer language for simulations that includes built in verification and auditing features so that all calculations can be “proven” or “falsified” along the path of computation. So yes, I have a professional interest with scientific process strategies that have been successful. I’ve learned from many excellent teachers – scientists as well as engineers and even managers and others.

Verification of numeric data and programs is a major problem in all areas of science and climate science is no exception. Due to the importance of climate science (or if you prefer AGW) to the future of our species I take adhering to the scientific method and process very seriously.

Please pardon me when I slice and dice the comments of those that I perceive are not taking a discussion of science seriously with their snide and off the cuff remarks. For that directness I apologize if it comes across gruffly to you.

If one is unwilling to adapt in science one likely isn’t doing science.

I never asserted that Climate Scientists aren’t being honest or precise. Most of them are likely honest and as precise as they can be. I don’t know how you got that from what I wrote. Others have raised the VALID questions about those two points though SINCE a number of climate scientists have refused to provide their data, software, assumptions, context, etc… when asked for it. Why are they keeping it a secret? Many of them are paid with public money after all… so it’s really public data, public software, etc…

If you think that computer software is precise all the time you don’t know anything about computers and software.

If you think that the data from the temperature sources are accurate all the time and that there are not anomalies and weirdness in the data than you know less than you should.

If you think that scientists couldn’t cheat, well…. It’s a possibility you’ll have to admit.

Open Source Climate Science will remove any and all concerns regarding the precision and honest issues and many other issues as well. It’s about time to raise the standards of the climate science field to be Fully Open Source – certainly for any scientists that receive public funding or that publish in peer review journals.

If you’re a serious scientist you can have no objection. If you don’t agree with that then please state your objection (assuming your a serious climate scientist).

Computer Models used to simulate climate are just that, computer programs with assumptions. Even if you put in really precise and accurate data you can still get garbage out due to the software rules used in the simulation or modeling program. Fact of life. Get used to it.

While I’ve been commenting here I’ve also been interacting via email with a friend who was suckered into the “Quantum Biofeedback Medical Device” nonsense and con game. It’s quite shocking the lack of even basic science illiteracy that is out there. She paid over $20,000 for the device and was completely conned and taken in. This is another reason that it’s so important to raise the science literacy.

I’d love to see the climate models running on Google Earth. In fact maybe it’s headed that way as today Google unveiled higher resolution Google Ocean views. It would be cool to see what the climate scientists are talking about visually.

Anyway I’m not here to smash anyone down but simply to raise awareness. Maybe I failed with you, maybe not.

And when you have a positive feedback loop, one thing is perfectly clear–it is absolutely idiotic to insist that one particular part of the loop must lead and the other one must follow

The lag in the CO2 record is typically ~800 years. Got that? eight centuries. Sometimes as much as 1000 years. Very occasionally as short as 200 years. Knowing that, if you want to call that lag evidence of a closed loop, AND you want to point to the fossil CO2 record as evidence for predictions you want to make for AGW, I’ll be happy to shoot you down. Just as soon as I stop ROTFL. :o)

If you want to talk about the ACTUAL effect CO2 buildup in the atmosphere has, then by all means do so, but don’t leave out other effects, especially those that are large enough to swamp the one you’re pimping, and which should be present at all times in any even vaguely sane model.

And for the record, there are many kinds of effects, some open loop, some closed, and some independent. When you postulate cause and effect, you need to be specific about what you think is happening. The fossil CO2 record appears to be open loop, based on the fact that as CO2 is manifesting as a very strong pulse of varying length, temperatures are FALLING. This is visible again and again in long term graphs, such as this one:

http://www.ideaspike.com/co2_temp.gif

Now, you can argue until you’re blue in the face, but the FACTS are that CO2 is crazy high there, LAGGING temperature rises, and once up, it hangs there, and TEMPERATURE DROPS like a stone. Look at that graph. Look at 400000, 300000, 275000 and 100000 years back; see it? Doesn’t support the contention that CO2 holds temperature. In fact, visibly, high CO2 is no impediment to dropping temperatures at all. That’s the record. The objective facts. I’m sorry they don’t fit with your preconceptions, but it isn’t my fault, and you’ll either have to deal with it or continue onwards with your act of faith.

You know what that graph says to me, by itself? It says that with a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, we can expect a precipitous (~6…8C) temperature drop over the course of, oh, 25k years or so. You know what it says to me in the context of AGW? It says that anyone who attempts to use that CO2 data to support *warming* is right out of their mind, and has no idea what they’re looking at, no sense of context, and CERTAINLY has no instinct for the fact that obviously something else dominates the cycle when CO2 gets high, because temperatures DROP, got that, **DROP**, when it is high. Data. Facts. Objective reality. Those things HATE you, man. :o)

Personally, my *guess* is that the culprit that has repeatedly swamped your postulated effect for CO2 in the fossil record is the evap/precip cycle, since that’s the obvious elephant in the room, the one that can pump the cycle up or down, and which is known to respond to TEMPERATURE as a primary driver for delta, and which operates at a leven far, far more intense in terms of heat manipulation than CO2 does.

Ben, the CO2 lag was predicted a decade before measurements were accurate enough to confirm it. It’s fair to say that if science predicts something, and then observes it, it doesn’t contradict the science.

“See also my forthcoming paper: “Chickens do not lay eggs, because they have been observed to hatch from them”.” –Z, from Deltoid, linked via Skeptical Science

trrll#110,

But if you want to argue that there are circumstances today that will cause the temperature to drop even as CO2 is rising, then you have to do what the real climatologists do–build a model, incorporating what is known about the fundamental physics, and show that it is both consistent with past history.

Well, the climate itself gave us the example of the temperature drop since the
el Nino of 1998.  CO2 was rising in the 1930s as well, and there were
temperature drops after that.  I would say that "there are circumstances
today that will cause the temperature to drop even as CO2 is rising".  
Of course there may be volcanic activity that can cause the temperature to drop. 
There is the recent publication based on a climate model that used, as far as
possible, the actual current ocean state.  That result predicted that there
would be no warming over the next decade due to "natural variation".  That
was before this solar minimum became intriguingly deep and long.   A
return to normal levels of solar activity may be enough to overwhelm any CO2
effect.   Solanki argued that there was a less than 8% chance the
unusually high level of solar activity could last past the year 2050.  If
this promising minimum leads to a unusually weak solar cycle, we may learn a lot
more about the solar coupling to the planet much sooner than that.  We do
need better models and better data to validate them with.

Africangenesis reveals his conspiracy-theorist colours@88 – most amusing. It is of course false that climate models have not been used predictively – see Hansen’s work in the late 1980s, and predictions made immediately after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo on the effect it would have among other examples. Work on ice age/interglacial climate swings indicates that net feedbacks are positive: the changes in Earth/sun relationships are insufficient to account for the temperature swings; only by including the effects of the CO2 released from the oceans by initial warming (and albedo changes) can these swings be explained. Incidentally, africangenesis claimed in another post that the higher sea-level of the last interglacial is unexplained. Wrong: the particualr Earth/sun relationship in the last interglacial meant that Greenland received far more summer sun than it does in the current interglacial – hence much more ice melt. Africangenesis relies both on a highly contested claim that the sun is cucrently exceptionally active, and on an implausible delay in the effect of solar warming (yes there is a delay due to oceanic mass, but no serious scientist believes this delay has the properties he needs), and even admits that this would apply to CO2-caused warming, yet fails to note that this would mean that the situation is far more serious than even Hansen has claimed, as almost all of the warming due to the CO2 already released would be still to come.

Some have been arguing that the CO2 in the oceans will INCREASE not decrease, leading to acidification. – africangensis

*sigh* Of course it will. Trrll was talking about the shift from ice age to interglacial, not the current situation where we are pumping vast quantities of additional CO2 into the system.

I’m particularly amused by the idea that heat being carried to the upper troposphere by the evaporation-precipitation cycle could be a significant negative feedback. How is this heat supposed to escape to space? In any case, the evaporation-precipitation cycle is of course included in GCMs.

I’m also most amused by pwl’s attempt to appeal to authority: “I’m a simulation modeller” – yet (s)he has no problem dismissing the expertise of the vast majority of climate scientists. Africangenesis goes in for similar rubbish in his claim that the modellers are imposing on all the non-modelling climate scientists; I think the latter would have noticed if the models were misrepresenting what is known about the relevant physics – scientific simulation models are of course constructed in consultation with the relevant domain experts. Modellers are quite open about the limitations of the models – but it is a crass error to think that a model cannot be used, and used predictively, unless it is near-perfect. Africangenesis ignores the fact that if the vast majority of relevant experts are right, we simply don’t have time to wait for the absolute certainty he demands – even if that were in principle achievable. It will always remain conceivable that there is some unknown negative feedback that will kick in, or that the sun will drop its output by 10%, or that there will be massive volcanic eruptions, or that a cloud of interstellar dust will envelop us, or… Of course government action to contain the threat is against his religion, but those of us who don’t share his touching faith in markets prefer to listen to the relevant scientific experts and press our politicians to act now.

Finally a comment on “Open Source science”. Yes, I agree this is a good idea – but it has its own very considerable costs in terms of the time required to put data and software into the public domain in a useful way – as pwl says in a rare moment of honesty, raw data is useless without context – and putting it in context takes a lot of time and effort. If we want it, we’ll have to pay for it – or have much less actual science done.

Knockgoats#113 and #114,

I’m particularly amused by the idea that heat being
carried to the upper troposphere by the
evaporation-precipitation cycle could be a
significant negative feedback. How is this heat
supposed to escape to space? In any case, the
evaporation-precipitation cycle is of course
included in GCMs.

You’ve already corrected some of your mistake about heat being carried to the
upper troposphere.  It is one way for the heat to get above most of the CO2
and water vapor so it can be radiated into space.  No, the
evaporation-precipitation cycle is not included in the GCMs, unless you think
just ANY evaporation-precipitation cycle will do.  It should be THE
evaporation-precipitation cycle of the climate that is included.   The
AR4 models only were able to reproduce about a third of the increase in
precipitation associated with the recent warming.   That is a
significant missing negative feedback to the warming.  Since the GCMs are
claimed to "match" the recent warming, presumably there is more error elsewhere
to bring the energy budget back into balance.  This error and many others
add up to models that are useless for attributing the recent warming and
projecting the impact of CO2 scenerios.  Don’t get me wrong, the models are
remarkable achievements useful for gaining insights and generating hypotheses,
particularly about gross phenomena and major climate shifts.  The recent
warming doesn’t qualify.

Hansen made a projection at a particularly linear phase of the temperature
trend of the recent warming.  How has his projection fared since 1998?  

In regards to the Working Group I authors, to be more specific and name names
I would have to have access to more details. From the records I have seen, they
didn’t have to justify or defend their decisions in an iterative peer review
process.   As the WGI authors, they are the ones that should have
known better, the ones that the thousands who say they are in consensus relied
upon.   They have no scientific way they can claim model credibility
in attribution or projection in the face of errors documented in the diagnostic
studies, such as the results above and others we have discussed.  Their
claim is politically, not scientifically based.

Stephen Wells,

You haven’t noticed a surfeit of moveon.org and chomsky types among the believers in AGW, despite being no more familiar with the peer review literature than the general population? It suits their politics.

What I have been relying upon for my insights has already been published in the peer review literature. It is the literature that is disturbing the certitude of your faith. If your position on AGW is evidence based, you should be able to support it. Sorry the roulette wheel analogy doesn’t get you there.

Ben:

I am also aware that CO2 in the atmosphere affects heat retention in the atmosphere. Warming, however, is not a simple consequence of an additional measure of heat retention.

Atmospheric Science by Wallace and Hobbs, a text book used to teach geophysics students for many years points out on page 447 that in the absence of cloud feedback, the climate sensitivity from CO2 alone is doubled by water vapor feedback. The only feedback that *might* be negative is cloud feedback (i.e. cloud area increasing with global warming). Cloud feedback might not be a simple consequence of global warming, but assuming it is strongly negative is a stupid assumption considering the consequences of that assumption being wrong.

Chris O’Neill#119,

“The only feedback that *might* be negative is cloud feedback (i.e. cloud area increasing with global warming)… assuming it is strongly negative is a stupid assumption considering the consequences of that assumption being wrong.”

This must have been a pretty simple model, if it didn’t note that increased convection “might” be a negative feedback, that increased release of latent heat in the troposphere associated with increased precipitation might be a negative feedback, that increased polar heat transport might be a negative feedback, that increased CO2 storage into the oceans might be a negative feedback, increased sequestration of carbon by plant life might be a negative feedback, etc.

Ben#122,

“Please note that there are multiple Bens who comment on this site.”

Is that a threat?

africangenesis, every post you make here is time not spent writing up your definitive refutation of current climate modelling techniques. Go.

Given the properties of CO2, we _have_ to be concerned about AGW unless and until someone can produce definitive proof that it is _not_ an issue. Babbling about “faith” is not helping you, it just smells of projection.

Ben#123,

It was a bad attempt a humor, pretending that you intended to intimidate us with the number of Ben’s you could bring to bear. “Remember, there are multiple Bens”. Which one are you BTW?

Well, the climate itself gave us the example of the temperature drop since the el Nino of 1998. CO2 was rising in the 1930s as well, and there were temperature drops after that.

Since these relatively short term fluctuations constitute redistribution of heat on earth rather than a change in the overall energy balance, they are quite irrelevant. They are superimposed on the overall climate trend, but are unable to alter it. Another classic denialist trait: cherry-picking. Short term decreases in temperature (weather) are irrelevant to the overall trend (climate). All of the climate models exhibit these kinds of short term fluctuations, although they are much harder to predict than long term trends.

I would say that “there are circumstances today that will cause the temperature to drop even as CO2 is rising”. Of course there may be volcanic activity that can cause the temperature to drop.

I think this is particularly revealing of the kind of clutching of straws that one sees from denialists desperate for any kind of rationalization–as if there were some rational reason to expect a long-term increase in volcanic activity sufficient to counter the effect of CO2 on climate.

There is the recent publication based on a climate model that used, as far as possible, the actual current ocean state. That result predicted that there would be no warming over the next decade due to “natural variation”.

Cherry-picking again. I suppose that this might be relevant if the world were going to end in ten years. Climate models concern multi-decade trends. All of them exhibit such shorter-term variations, and all of the predict that such variations are superimposed upon, and do not alter, the long-term warming trend.

Stephen Wells#128,

You can worry about AGW if you want. But there is currently no reason to believe it won’t be swamped by natural variability. There is certainly no reason to drink economic koolaid yet. We should just continue to do the things that make sense economically.

For thsoe who haven’t been following africangenesis, “economic koolaid” is any form of informed collective action based on actual thought, rather than billions of panicky ignorant greedy people grabbing what looks good, AKA “markets”.

A clue.

Robinsrule, hey thanks, ModelE is really interesting.

Oh, it’s fun FORTRAN with goto statements – no bugs are possible in that. ;-)

Haven’t used FORTRAN in a few decades, oh, wait, I did a port from FORTRAN about eight years ago of an engineering calculation program. Sigh, FORTRAN, really guys? Not really state of the art. Sigh.

Ok, so how is ModelE used in Climate Science? Anyone? Any real data sets to work with?

The UK Government’s Met Office added one imagined version of predicted temperature rises to Google Earth here: http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1659/

Looks like Canada gets warmed up a lot, maybe it’s not all bad. Time to buy land in the Great White North.

There’s probably no global warming.
Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

Stephen Wells,

For thsoe who haven’t been following africangenesis, “economic koolaid” is any form of informed collective action based on actual thought, rather than billions of panicky ignorant greedy people grabbing what looks good, AKA “markets”.

Wrong again Stephen,  by confusing productivity with greed you betray
your bias.  Economic "koolaid"  is sacrificing hundreds of billions of
dollars of economic growth and wealth, that might come in handy later when we
know what the real problems are.  If you were truly interested in the
environment rather than a  social agenda, then you would be interested in
the science.

I notice that you fear the science so much that you focus on ad hominem
attacks.

Trrll#132,

You can worry about AGW if you want. But there is currently no reason to believe it won’t be swamped by natural variability.

You mean, aside from the fact that it is predicted by all climate models?

As for reasons to think it will be swamped by “natural variability”? — there seems to be only one: denialist wishful thinking.

When somebody manages to construct a climate model based upon known physics that fits the past climate data as well as existing models do and does not predict significant global warming in response to continued release of CO2, give us a call.

Yes, I mean aside from the fact that it is predicted by all climate
models.  One key point against thinking "all climate models"
somehow have more weight that just "one" climate model, is that the models
have been documented to have correlated biases in the same direction. 
ALL of the models have a positive surface albedo bias.  NONE of the
models represent the amplitude of the signature of the solar cycle seen in
the observations.   ALL of the models under represent the increase
in precipitation associated with the recent warming, on average they
reproduce less than a third.

I never said it WILL be swamped by natural variability, just that it HAS
been so far, with the mid-century cooling, a couple volcanic eruptions and
since the 1998 el Nino.  We need better models to distinguish how AGW
will fare against solar variability in the future and which will swamp or
moderate which.  There is no reason to believe that AGW won’t be
swamped by natural variability, YET.

If you know what you are talking about then  you are being deceptive
when you glom onto the idea that the climate models are "based upon known
physics".  Physics credibility doesn’t apply here.  The models
are not just straight forward solving of  physics equations. The type
of parameterizations and the different time scales that are used are several
approximations removed from the "known physics", and there is a lot
of uncertainty not only in the how well or poorly these parameterizations
serve their purposes, but there is a lot of uncertainty in  our
knowledge of the actual climate processes they represent.

There should never exist a model which does not project (rather than
predict) significant global warming in response to scenarios of continued
release of CO2.   The question is not whether the warming is
significant, but rather whether it is significant enough to be larger than
the natural variation.   Without significant NET positive
feedbacks, it won’t be significant enough  outweigh natural variation,
and its moderation of future cooling events and its benefits for plant
productivity may just be a welcome benefit.   You shouldn’t be
satisfied with fitting "the past climate data as well as the existing
models do", because they are not doing they job anywhere near well
enough yet.   Give them another development and diagnostic cycle
or two, maybe another decade.   You best hope for an earlier
resolution that you can actually defend rather than just evangelize, would
be an  interestingly weak solar cycle, so that some of the uncertainty
in natural variability can be better understood. 

wowbanger: “No-one doubts global warming; it’s a fact.”

Well you can actually read people doubting global warming due to the fact that the so called factual temperatures are constantly being adjusted along with the suitability of the sensors themselves.

At least get the facts straight. There are doubters out there who question the warming. That is a fact.

There are also people out there who question whether or not it’s caused by man.

Science isn’t science when all you say is “these are the facts”. You must be prepared to demonstrate and prove the facts with data, preferably open source science.

That is why when I tell faith stricken delusional believers in invisible men about how they can test the universe themselves to prove that their guy doesn’t and can’t possibly exist. Newton comes in handy. Einstein is a bit harder to prove at home.

The “it’s the facts” argument is simply an appeal to authority. Give some meat! Empower people with the ability to see the science themselves. At least to see the steps of how the scientists who advocate AGW get from A to B.

Now most people might not care, and that’s fine as they will accept the appeal to authority – heck they do it all the time as belief stricken individuals. It’s for those that want to learn more and those that want to verify the facts rather than taking on mind poo pablum from the likes of Al Gore who can’t even get facts right for his movie.

Weird- people propose massive public and private investment in new technologies and industries to deal with the threat of climate change, and africangenesis thinks we’re sacrificing growth and wealth. In Bizarro World, maybe.

Trrll#148,

You don’t seem to understand that the models don’t do natural variation well, remember, they underrepresent the solar influence, precipitation, snow and ice melts, etc. You also don’t seem to understand that they aren’t converging on one climate sensitivity, but actually vary by more than a factor of two. You also don’t seem to understand that converging in presence of CORRELATED bias would not be meaningful anyway. The hope is that the errors are uncorrelated and independent so that they will cancel and result in ensemble results that are more robust. You also don’t seem to understand that with a correlated bias against solar shared by all AR4 models, there is not a good reason to assume that their wide range of climate sensitivites bracket the actual climate sensitivity to CO2.

Trrll,

“Errors, after all, tend by their very nature to be uncorrelated”

So one usually expects correlated errors to have an explanation, perhaps reliance upon the same papers proposing parameterizations that do poorly in practice or overlook some important component, perhaps the frequent practice of validating models against each other because of the lack of a long record of good climate data, accepted estimates of certain forcings such as aerosols may be wrong, etc. Whatever the cause, the result is models that don’t represent some of the climate well, have correlated errors in important feedbacks and unfortunately, fail to represent the response to variation in the solar forcing that is seen in the observations.

The “natural variation” I was referring to was the response to solar, not the internal weather statistics.

You seem to assume that only the skeptics want models that perform well on the diagnostic studies. All the modelers should want to perform well. When you say “the hoped for bias”, you are in denial. You should be saying “the documented bias”, or “the reported bias”. The biases is reported in IPCC diagnostic studies and in more recent studies in the peer review literature.

Knockgoats,

“In other words, the Tung and Camp paper argues that a climate sensitivity bang on that deduced from the models […] can be deduced from observations.”

Except that if Lean, et al, are right then the models are wrong in a different way, the models over emphasize the effect at higher latitudes, and the Camp and Tung are a factor of two too high. That would put their model independent estimate of climate sensitivity well below the model range.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL034864.shtml

Although Lean is highly respected, the HadCrut3 data that is used does a questionable job of eliminating the heat island effect. This can explain both the different result than Camp and Tung and the finding that the latitudes where the most heat islands are where the strongest effect is. I’d like to see this analysis done with better data.

That said, what Camp and Tung did independent of the models was a model independent estimate of climate sensitivity to SOLAR forcing. The translation to CO2 sensitivity is purely mathmatical and is based on the assumption that sensitivities to both are the same. That assumption is not justified in a complex nonlinear system where the forcings are coupled to the climate in a quite different way.

Knockgoats,

“Glaciers have lost mass for the 17th year running. Phenologists have continued to note earlier springs. You really do need to distinguish climatic trends from single-year outliers.”

It is interesting that you single out some ofthe very evidence I have been pointing to that shows how wrong the models are. The models are so far behind the earlier temperate zone snow melts, that retaining the highly reflective snow for too long is giving them a positive surface albedo bias around 4 times larger than the energy imbalance thought responsible for the recent warming. Matching a warming trend over the short term is no great achievement if they aren’t matching the climate, and if they are matching the warming trend in a way that will go wrong when they finally catch up with the spring snow melt. Their temperature projections will have this 4 times the warming energy imbalance added in. This happens within the time frame that is used to estimate climate sensitivity.

Knockgoats,

“You made an accusation of lying, without evidence. Back it up properly or withdraw it. Even if it were true, “they should have known better” does not justify such an accusation.”

Wait a second, I thought “they should have none better” was the justification for calling GW a liar on the WMD in Iraq? The difference in this case, is that we know that the Working Group I authors had the diagnostic evidence in the very papers that were submitted to them. You accused me of not having the guts to name names. It doesn’t take guts to name names from an avatar. There are several different specialties represented among the authors. If the ones with the knowledge to bear the responsility aren’t liars, then they should be able to demonstrate how they get the confidence they express from models with the problems these have, and why they haven’t constructed any error estimates for the models reflecting the issues raised by the diagnostic literature.

Africangenesis:

“The only feedback that *might* be negative is cloud feedback (i.e. cloud area increasing with global warming)… assuming it is strongly negative is a stupid assumption considering the consequences of that assumption being wrong.”

This must have been a pretty simple model, if it didn’t note that increased convection “might” be a negative feedback,

I haven’t been able to get hold of a complete copy of that book so it probably mentions lapse rate feedback (sometimes called convection feedback) later in the book. However, Soden and Held, Journal of Climate 2006 point out that water vapor + lapse rate feedback is always strongly positive.

that increased release of latent heat in the troposphere associated with increased precipitation might be a negative feedback,

Regardless of whether it’s positive or negative, feedback from increased precipitation is generally considered to be much smaller than the feedbacks stated in Soden and Held, unless someone can come up with a credible citation to the contrary.

that increased polar heat transport might be a negative feedback,

Citation of significance?

that increased CO2 storage into the oceans might be a negative feedback,

The increased storage of CO2 in the oceans is a consequence of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, not a consequence of a warming atmosphere. A warming ocean reduces the solubility of CO2 of in the ocean which would help keep CO2 in the atmosphere. Thus it would be a positive feedback.

increased sequestration of carbon by plant life might be a negative feedback, etc.

Increased sequestration of carbon by plant life might result from increased atmospheric CO2 (although it’s not slowing down the accumulation much these days) but the issue here is radiation feedback from increased temperature with a given level of CO2 forcing thus the sequestration issue is not relevant to this particular issue.

The bottom line is that there is no evidence of any substantial negative feedback from temperature to radiation (as long as water vapor feedback and lapse rate feedback are considered as summed together) while the water vapor + lapse rate feedback is strongly positive, the albedo feedback is significantly positive and the cloud feedback is probably between the the water vapor + lapse rate feedback and the albedo feedback. Of course, this is apart from the Planck, or radiation to space, feedback.

Africangenesis:

You can worry about AGW if you want. But there is currently no reason to believe it won’t be swamped by natural variability.

That depends on the sizes of AGW and natural variability. If, say, we get to 3 deg C of AGW does that mean there is no reason that natural variability won’t be greater than 3 deg C?

Chris O’Neill,

Let me add, that I honor your effort to learn this stuff. — regards,

Africangenesis:

The lapse rate is reduced with warming,

in the tropics

this means that the temperature doesn’t decline as much with altitude. The parcels of air up higher in the troposphere are warmer and radiate away more energy into space. Thus the reduction in lapse rate is a negative feedback.

The overall effect of lapse rate feedback is a negative feedback, but I should point out that lapse rate feedback is negative in the tropics and positive outside the tropics with the effect from the tropics being stronger and thus negative overall. However, as I pointed out earlier, no matter what happens to the lapse rate feedback, Soden and Held point out that the summed feedback of water vapor and lapse rate is always strongly positive.

The heat transport to high latitudes (polar amplification)

The climate scientists think that polar amplification is primarily caused by positive feedback from retreat of ice and snow (i.e. albedo feedback), not heat transport from lower latitudes.

is important because the temperatures actually increase more at higher lattitudes than in the tropics, plus more of the atmosphere is radiating more efficiently into space.

I’d prefer to just go by what the climate scientists say about polar feedback but I’ll just point out that your argument is very insubstantial because moving heat from a hot object to a cold object of the same color does not increase radiation, it reduces it because of the non-linearity of radiation. So unless you can come up why some reason why the cold object is a much better radiator than the warm object, e.g. the cold object is black while the warm object is white, then I won’t be paying too much attention to your argument.

Tropical convection is one of the problem areas in models. If you think that convection and latent heat release associated with precipitation are not important,

I said the lapse rate feedback, though substantial on its own, is always much less than the water vapor feedback. It’s not me who thinks precipitation feedback is not significant, it’s the climate scientists. Do you know any climate scientists working on the issue who do think precipitation feedback is significant?

We are only talking about less than 1 Watt/meter^2 globally and annually averaged (actually 0.75W per Hansen if I recall correctly). A slight correction in the tropical cloud cover can easily mean several times this value, in either direction.

Not true. Look at figure 1 and table 1 in Soden and Held. It is very unlikely that cloud feedback is negative at all and extremely unlikely that it could be negative and comparable in magnitude to the sum of water vapor and lapse rate feedback. It is fairly likely that it could be positive and as large as the sum of water vapor and lapse rate feedback however.

Trrll,

“The solar variation is periodic, so unless you have a scientific reason to expect a long-term reduction in solar output, it is irrelevant–such variation will ride on top of the effect of CO2.”

Based on the statistics of past levels of solar activity the current unusually high level of solar activity has only about an 8% chance of lasting until 2050, per Solanki, et al, (2004) in the journal Nature.

Abreu, at al, predict the current grand maximum of solar activity will decline in the next two or three cycles.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL035442.shtml

“It is characteristic of denialists that they will seize upon any imperfection or error, no matter how small or irrelevant, and use it as a rationalization for rejecting conclusions that they find unpalatable. Suppose, for example, that there is an error in forecasting the impact of CO2.”

Why are you bringing up denialists? I’m sticking to errors that are significant compared to the energy imbalance responsible for the recent warming. Even if you assume the whole energy imbalance should be attributed to CO2, that impact of CO2 is less than a quarter of the size of the average error in surface albedo for the AR4 models. Sometimes I think you don’t appreciate how small the impact of CO2 has been.

BS,

That is depressing, to think that economics is behind climate science. Hopefully most of the economists don’t have the hubris to project 100 years out.

I don’t favor the bankers BTW, I oppose the tax favored status they’ve been granted by the Democrats in Congress, and I think printing money through the banks as a pyramid of credit is what caused the economy to be unstable in the first place, and unable to reflate in the second place. The banks don’t want to lend in a failing economy and the consumers don’t want to borrow. So expanding the money suppy via credit expansion has been likened to “pushing on a string”. We have a central government, that in effect, doesn’t know how to print money. We’ve had 4 to 7 trillion dollars of money supply disappear through deleveraging, and a federal reserve unable to replace it. Just like in the depression, we have unemployment, under utilized capacity and consumers that would more goods. The answer is printing money, and instead we have a government picking winners and losers, mortgaging our future, and a “stimulus” package that looks like earmarks gone wild.

My plan is to issue debit card accounts for every man, woman and child in the country, and have the federal reserve “print” money by direct deposit into every one of them. It should manage the system to a target of 2 to 3% inflation just as usual. But because it is creating money this way, it no longer has to lower interest rates so much that there is no incentive to save. A trillion dollars would be abot $4000, for every man, woman and child. Consumers would be picking the winners and losers, families with this kind of cash won’t be defaulting on mortgages, and businesses seeing this kind of money supply, won’t think the next few quarters are looking so bad. The federal reserve has done a pretty good job in recent decades, it will have a learning curve, but having an economy based on equity instead of a pyramid of debt should be a lot more stable and easier to manage, and should be no more inflationary than printing money through credit creation. The fractional reserve banking system could simultaneously be reigned in some, and Americans savings rate should no longer be one of the lowest in the world.

Obama, instead of being diverted by the crisis and the stimulous, could get on with his original program and tax system.

I explain this to you, so that perhaps you can assist in categorizing my school of economics. I think I am straight out of the Austrian and Chicagoan schools, but none of them would own up to a plan like this. They both tend to prefer hard currencies to a fiat money system and I can see their point, but I can’t think of a commodity large and stable enough to back the money supply, and if a fiat money system will work, I’m willing to go with it.

Perhaps the difference between economics and climate science, is that in climate science we know more about how wrong the models are.

Chris O’Neill,

These are computationally based climate models, not physically based. The “cherry picked localized evidence”, happens to be localized in the tropics, which is the area where Lindzen’s Iris effect is hypothesized to exist.

What makes you think I “accept” the evidence that the cloud feedback in the tropics is negative rather than positive as it is in the models? I think it is a difficult issue that is still unresolved. The paper is a peer reviewed analysis of observations. It shouldn’t be a matter of climate observations versus climate models. The models must come to the observations. Problems may be found in the observations or the analysis of the observations, or the observations may be found to be solid but not representitive or complete.

You are correct that I don’t consider the models “evidence” yet, but that is based upon the evidence that they aren’t evidence yet. I hardly call that bias. I do consider the models valuable for insight and hypothesis generation, and worth further investment.

Chris O’Neill,

Physically based models are things like wind tunnels and wave tanks. Computational models vary greatly in the degree to which they implement the actual physics of the climate. Mass balance and fluid dynamics equations will be discretized and solved at one time scales, while faster and slower processes such as radiative transfer and albedo feedback will have to be parameterized, in a way that they hope will represent their coupling to the climate. For instance AR4 WG1 Ch 8 “Cloud parametrizations are based on physical theories that aim to describe the statistics of the cloud field (e.g., the fractional cloudiness or the reaaveraged precipitation rate) without describing the individual cloud elements.”

Our models for predicting spacecraft paths using general relativity have proven skill. Climate models don’t have proven skill at prediction or projection.

On the importance of tropical clouds from WG1 ch 8 “Outside the polar regions, relatively large errors are evident in the eastern parts of the tropical ocean basins, a likely symptom of problems in the simulation of low clouds. The extent to which these systematic model errors affect a model’s response to external perturbations is unknown, but may be significant. … Therefore, understanding of the physical processes that control the response of boundary-layer clouds and their radiative properties to a change in climate remains very limited. … The sign of the climate change radiative feedback associated with the combined effects of dynamical and temperature changes on extratropical clouds is still unknown. … Recent analyses suggest that the response of boundary-layer clouds constitutes the largest contributor to the range of climate change cloud feedbacks among current GCMs (Bony and Dufresne, 2005; Webb et al., 2006; Wyant et al., 2006). It is due both to large discrepancies in the radiative response simulated by models in regions dominated by lowlevel cloud cover (Figure 8.15), and to the large areas of the globe covered by these regions”

So the tropical clouds are important enough to account for a large part of the differences in climate sensitivity between the models. The sign of the cloud feedback outside the tropics is uncertain, yet all the models have positive feedbacks for their tropical clouds. Of course it makes physical sense as well, solar insolation is most intense in the tropics and the large percentage of cloud cover, means that small percentage errors have have impacts on the global average.

I’ve provided plenty of cites for diagnostic studies showing issues with the models that are larger than the energy imbalance and even worse are correlated among them and biased against the competing solar hypothesis. Correlated errors can’t be eliminated by combining the models in ensembles. You should search this site for recent discussions of model errors in surface albedo, precipitation, representing the climate response to solar variation, etc.

Wow, I stand corrected. Climate models don’t quite fit this definition though, do they. Many parts are data and statistically driven rather than the solving of equations, as I referenced above. But you aren’t quite addressing Chris’s reason for mentioning it, he was trying to claim that if they are based on the physics then they must be right.

Wow, I stand corrected.

You stand revealed as a cherry-picking ignoramus. This is absolutely basic terminology: your error is like someone criticising economic modelling, then you find out they think “inflation” means blowing up balloons. You have an apparent familiarity with parts of the literature, but things like this, and the errors Chris O’Neill lists in his last comment, make clear that you have simply been combing it for anything which you can use as a way to discredit climate science. You clearly do not have the knowledge necessary to make an integrated judgement of the state of the field. Neither, I should say, do I – but I’m not the one claiming a whole field of science is dominated by liars and fools.

pwl,

A libertarian anti-AGW website doesn’t approve of Michael Mann’s work? What a surprise!!!1!eleventy-one!1! As the French would say: Quell surprise!

Lawrence Solomon is a professional AGW denialist. That he disagrees with Mann (and he and Mann apparently have had a spat or two) is hardly amazing. Solomon quotes the NAS about Mann but neglects to give the context of the NAS committee’s apparently scolding of Mann. In short, Solomon’s article is neither interesting nor persuasive.

Chris O’Neill,

“Ho-humm” isn’t addressing substance. “I said the lapse rate feedback, though substantial on its own, is always much less than the water vapor feedback. It’s not me who thinks precipitation feedback is not significant, it’s the climate scientists.”

Gee, can we really use the “I said” argument here? If the models manage to reproduces two to three times less increase in precipitation associated with the recent warming, then they aren’t getting the lapse rate feedback right are they? Lapse rate and water vaper feedbacks are acknowledged to be an area of significant divergences among the models, it is only when they are combined that there is some convergence, and even there, based upon their shared precipitation short fall, the “convergence” is just wrong agreement. In a world which already has shortages of fresh water, model based fearmongering about some kind of increased risk of droughts, is irresponsible. Obviously the fear mongerers consider it significant. The climate scientists acknowledge that the “wet” lapse rate based partially the latent heat release associated with precipitation and clouds is one of the most significant feedbacks.

Lambert of the Hadley Center and Stine, Krakauer and Chiang of UC Berkely write: “Thus if GCMs do underestimate global precipitation changes, the simulation of other climate variables will be effected.” Eos Vol 28 No. 21

In the same issue of Eos, Previdi and Liepert explain: “This non-radiative energy transfer takes primarily the form of latent and sensible heat fluxes with the latent heat flux being about 5 times larger than the sensible heat flux in the global mean. The latent heat flux from the surface to the troposphere is associated mainly with the evaporation of surface water. When this water condenses in the troposphere to form clouds and eventually precipitation, the troposphere heats up and then radiates this energy gain out to space. The radiative energy loss from the troposhere is equal to the energy heat gain at the surface. The global water cycle is therefore fundamentally a part of the global energy cycle and any changes in global mean precipitation and evaporation are consequently constrained by the energy budgets of the troposhere and surface.”

As Wentz stated in the journal Science: “The difference between a subdued increase in rainfall and a C-C increase has enormous impact, with respect to the consequences of global warming. Can the total water in the atmosphere increase by 15% with CO2 doubling but precipitation only increase by 4% (1)? Will warming really bring a decrease in global winds? The observations reported here suggest otherwise, but clearly these questions are far from being settled.”

http://www.remss.com/papers/wentz_science_2007.pdf

Climate scientists evidently do take the failure of the GCMs to reproduce the increase in precipitation seriously.

Wait a second, I thought “they should have none better” was the justification for calling GW a liar on the WMD in Iraq? – africangenesis

No. The evidence is abundantly clear that he did not believe there were any effective WMDs: if he had, troops would not have been gathered in Kuwait and Cyprus, where they would have been extremely vulnerable to chemical attack. It is also quite clear that he was eager to attack before the UN inspectors could complete their work and prove his claims wrong. Aside from this, there is clear evidence that WMDs were not, as claimed, the motive for the invasion – in the statements of Wolfowitz and Greenspan, and the PNAC report.

I repeat, withdraw your lying accusation of lying against the WG I authors.