The usual lies


The climate change denialists have been whooping it up in my email lately, crowing in triumph over the fact that James Hansen’s former “supervisor” has disavowed his work and claims there were no political efforts to suppress the scientific facts. I haven’t really cared — it’s an argument from imaginary authority, nothing more — but I was very amused to learn that this “fact” is in the same category as other denialist “facts”: it isn’t. This fellow, John Theron, is a cranky old gomer who retired 15 years ago, and was thus not even present in the oppressive Bush administration, and never had supervisory authority over Hansen at all.

I’m also sure that won’t matter at all. The myth of Hansen’s supervisor will be repeated forevermore.

Comments

  1. Matt Heath says

    According to the linked article at Deloid, “Theron” ought to read “Theon” (which sounds like it should be a comic book villain)

  2. Strider says

    OT but I’ve noticed something odd occurring with Scienceblogs that, I think, did not occur before the changes. When I am scrolling down the page and the cursor rolls over an embedded video the page stops scrolling. Is this idiosyncratic to my computer or have others noticed this?

  3. clinteas says

    The global warming denialists,funnily enough,use just the same mix of sciencey tidbits with added distorting and misrepresenting that the creationists do.
    And from that article,he actually wasnt the guy’s boss .Who cares,anyway? Isnt it rather revealing how those denialists would jump onto every ever so slight chance to see someone advocating man-made global warming allegedly refuted?

    As I just asked in the Wells thread,why though?

  4. Merkin Muffley says

    PK hears from a board range of the irrational. Any HIV/AIDs or Smoking/Lung Cancer denialists lately? What other ones have I forgotten?

  5. Nerd of Redhead says

    I’m always amused by what denialists consider evidence. Rather than citing a scientific journal article, they prefer a U-Tube link. Personal opinions of non-scientists outway the opinions of scientists working in the field. And they wonder why we mock them.

  6. co says

    That didn’t just start with the newest changes, Strider. The annoying stop-the-scroll behavior has always been present for me, here.

  7. Morgan says

    Strider @2: It’s Flash stealing mouse focus from your browser, so that the scrolling of the wheel never gets so far as the mechanism controlling page position once it’s over the video and being intercepted. Whenver I’ve noticed this behaviour, I’ve assumed it was universal and basically unavoidable; if there’s a way to prevent it on the page author’s part I’m curious how. I know I see it on YouTube, for example.

  8. Knockgoats says

    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.

  9. Runcible Brevard says

    Merkin Muffley (#7): Geo-sphericity denialists
    sometimes show up & there is the guy who denies
    that oxygen (or any other so-called ‘gaseous
    element’ from the Euro-centric paternalistic
    logico-rationalist periodic table) plays any
    role in biology.

  10. Knockgoats says

    As a bit of light relief, here’s parts of a comment from RealClimate:

    Firstly I am not a scientist,but what is bothering me is the boiled egg syndrome. As the water heats up the white of the egg hardens and as it pentrates deeper the yolk solidifies. My conclusion is that there will come a point in time when the core of the earth begins to manifest in increased volcanic activity, seismic events etc. Without the polar Ice Cap reflecting the heat away. and greenhouse gasses traping the heat, and the methane release already happening, how long before we are plunged into another ice age due to multiple volcanic clouds covering the planet.

    We have recently had a disasterous tusunami in the indian ocean and also the quakes in pakistan, and the current volcanic activity in the north.

    I live in South Africa and I am now almost 62 years old, I have four grand children , the eldest is almost 3 and the future looks very bleak for them.

    I run a Christian Debating forum , which I also use to promote climate change conciousness, and our God given responsibility to manage the planet.

    Wouldn’t you just know that when a godbot (he runs a website about something called “Christian Contextual Eschatology”) starts worrying about climate change, he’s going to pick something that couldn’t happen in a million years?

  11. Mena says

    Has Denialism been classified as a mental illness yet? It, like Creationism, moon hoaxers, and 9/11 conspiracy believers, seems to be a tad bit OCD. There is plenty of evidence for evolution, et al but these people get worked into a froth over this stuff. It’s really hard to tell where the lies end and the delusions begin. So many denialists, so little Prozac!

  12. Craig says

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

    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.

    Also, why do people debase REAL mental illnesses by asking if “denialism been classified as a mental illness yet?” That kind of talk belongs in the playground, and not on a blog that purports to speak to issues at a more rational and academic level.

  13. says

    I don’t understand your commenting policy PZ, have you turned on an approval requirement for all comments or just some comments or commenter (such as myself)? I even went to the trouble of getting a type pad account set up to make it easier for you and I to know that I’m a good boy and good netizen.

    Please let us know what your current comment policy is. Thanks.

  14. Watchman says

    Craig, I hear where you’re coming from, but FYI there is such as thing as “psychotic denial”. It’s the inability or to accept a fact even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

    As for you, you good-for-nothing skeptic…! Let me address one thing: While I applaud skepticism in general, it is not very useful to be skeptical about a straw-man version of the argument. When has anyone claimed that human activity is “solely responsible” for climate change? It’s human activity that has created this unprecedented spike in GHGs over the past 200 years, a spike that may exacerbate the effects of an interglacial warm phase to unprecedented levels.

  15. says

    I’m gratified there’s something (not the only, actually) thing I and the crowd here can agree on. There are so many fallacies from the AGW skeptics, one of which is noting short-term fluctuations etc. I try to tell them, imagine climate as being like the stock market with ups and downs but overall trends. Also, to imagine stimuli like CO2 being like reducing interest rates: not guaranteed to have effect, or immediate effect, and working in combination with other things.

    Many of them still work off the early-20th Century critiques of Svante Arrhenius’ 1896 paper (or, are amazed such a paper was even written back way before liberals decided to ruin capitalism with a green trojan horse.) They reference the similar absorption bands of H2O and CO2, but there is a fine structure so CO2 does capture extra rays the water didn’t (and you wouldn’t expect two different molecules to ever have exactly the same spectrum.) Also, CO2 gets into the outer layers of the atmosphere, where there is little relative humidity (REM temperature and average density) and absorbs IR from lower layers of the atmosphere (it isn’t just absorption of ground-emitted IR that matters and we can increasingly take intra-atmospheric effects into better account.)

    Craig – not a bad technical question, and you deserve a gentlemanly answer. First, it isn’t whether all the climate change is human caused or not, nor would it need to be in order to be a worry. Pumping a thermogenic stimulus like CO2 into the air is a risk factor. Sure, we just might get lucky and counteract what otherwise would be an ice age (we may have already done that, but now are over”correcting”), etc. But it’s like driving at high speed, or smoking (heh) etc. – you should reduce risky behavior, right? And finally, most of what we conservationists want to see done (reduced fossil energy use, more efficient cars and bulbs, etc.) is good for other reasons anyway like saving money long term and political independence.

  16. Mena says

    Craig, fair enough but how would you classify people who engage in behaviors that are not rational and they aren’t really very productive members of our society?
    As for the denialist/skeptic thing, I put the line at whether someone has looked at the evidence and made a decision based on that. I may or may not agree with it, but it looks like a lot of climate change people are motivated by global warming=Al Gore and he’s a democrat it must be wrong. It feeds into that weird anger thing seems to be going through a lot of the denialist circles, no matter what the issue. There really is something going on with these people, like it or not.

  17. Watchman says

    Just to be clear, “psychotic denial” is not a diagnosable condition, it’s a recognized dysfunctional defense mechanism, an indication of ones inability to recognize or accept certain realities.

    Check out the Defensive Functioning Scale.

    Scroll down a bit and you’ll see “Defense Levels and Individual Defense Mechanisms”, which heads a listing of increasingly maladaptive defense levels and mechanisms. At the very bottom of the list, you’ll find the “Level of defensive dysregulation”, which includes psychotic denial:

    This level is characterized by failure of defensive regulation to contain the individual’s reaction to stressors, leading to a pronounced break with objective reality. Examples are

  18. • delusional projection

  19. • psychotic denial

  20. • psychotic distortion
  • Neil B ☺ says

    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.

  • azqaz says

    @16 Craig

    A skeptic is someone who questions the validity of a statement or research, a denialist is someone who says it can’t be true but doesn’t have any evidence so simply makes shit up or distorts actual research to bolster their cause.

    A skeptic would say, “I can’t imagine humans have a significant enough presence on earth to affect the climate.” A denialist would say something like, “Humans can’t cause global warming because one night when I was smoking meth, huffing glue, and eating Cheetos, the teletubbies told me that there isn’t enough snarfdodle in the atmosphere for global warming to be caused by humans. The teletubbies told me so, therfore all your sciencey stuff is wrong.” Of course I’m exagerating for effect, but for some of the denialists it isn’t too far off.

  • Matt Heath says

    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).

  • maddogdelta says

    @clinteas #3
    The global warming denialists,funnily enough,use just the same mix of sciencey tidbits with added distorting and misrepresenting that the creationists do.

    I got one of them really pissed at me on another board when I quoted his rant, then asked:
    “You’re a creationist, aren’t you?”

    He just went “full retard” with the exclamation points, question marks, calling me names, etc. Simply because I pointed out that he was using the exact same kinds of arguments that creationists use.

    It was quite humorous, really.

  • uncle frogy says

    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!

  • Bryson Brown says

    “A lie can travel halfway around the world before truth pulls on its shoes.” Mark Twain.

    Apparently apocryphal, but it still fits the occasion.

  • says

    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.

  • Fred Mounts says

    Matt Heath @ #1

    According to the linked article at Deloid, “Theron” ought to read “Theon” (which sounds like it should be a comic book villain)

    Try the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire: Theon Greyjoy is indeed something of a villain. Of course, you might already know that, hence leading to your comment.

    On topic: my brother-in-law is a libertarian, Rush-loving, tunnel vision Republican. I like him otherwise, but he can’t be reasoned with. Talking politics with him is stressful indeed. Just needed to vent!

  • Craig says

    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!

  • says

    strider @ #2:

    It’s entirely to do with the way that Flash works. If the mouse cursor is over a Flash player object, then keystrokes and mouse movements go to the Flash object, not the browser window.

    You could always edit the Source Code for Flash and recompile it ….. ;)

  • phil says

    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.

  • says

    What amuses me is that, even aside from being ignorant and dogmatic, AGW-denial is counterproductive: 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. (Since the right-wingers and libertarians always claim the market is a meritocracy, the businesses that get hurt because they’re not smart don’t deserve any sympathy, right?)

    Imagine we do what’s needed to fix AGW, and then (and this part takes a powerful lot of imagination) climate scientists collectively say, “oops, no problem really; our bad.” Well… so what? Will we really be angry that we’ve made our world cleaner, more efficient, and more technologically advanced… and more affluent and fully employed… for the “wrong” reasons? It is to laugh!

    It seems to me that when the fix is to do stuff we ought to be doing anyway, arguing over whether the problem really exists is extra-pointless.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • says

    “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?

    Really?

    There are some that are attempting to audit the data, facts and science behind the extreme claims but are finding that it’s not possible due to closed science policies, bad data, and more bad data, and well politics.

    Check out “climate audit dot org”. It’s actually got numbers, raw data numbers…

    I advocate Fully Open Source Science which one can verify and validate or invalidate based on the evidence and not on wild conclusions.

    If you support the GW Hypothesis then you must support Open Source Science on this important topic.

  • Pierce R. Butler says

    XiXiDu @ # 30: … I see the believers and anti-science folk rather on the side of the pro man-made global warming camp…

    You must be looking at a rather limited set of “believers and anti-science folk”, then. I follow the daily rants of those I call hyperchristians, and note that most of them (apparently as part of the deal which gives them major clout within the Republican Party) are reflexive global warming denialists and habitually hostile to environmentalists on just about every issue.

    Please allow me to recommend http://talk2action.org as a source of news and analysis of US politico-religous knavery.

    Perhaps you’ve been exposed to a few of the pseudo-contrarians among the televangelists, such as the endlessly publicity-seeking Rick Warren and others seeking to adapt their rhetoric to a (partially) better-educated generation. Regardless, the main current of the modern US “religious right” remains counterfactual about climate change, as about most other issues.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • Steve_C says

    pwl…

    yes there’s no denying the effects of burning fossil fuels, deforestation and large scale farming.

    Open Source science??? You mean have people who don’t understand the data or the methods question it? Sounds absolutely pointless.

    Science is OPEN,,, that’s why papers and data are published.

  • JackC says

    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

  • says

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

    Maybe this will help:
    http://circleh.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/a-real-skeptic-vs-a-denialist/

    {{{{A skeptic is defined as someone who reserves judgement on an issue until enough evidence is found to support a claim beyond a reasonable doubt and also clearly defines what would make him disbelieve a claim. This is scientific thinking.

    By contrast, a denialist has no such defined limits, either of belief or disbelief. The denialist starts from a position of dogma, asserting opposition to an idea by presenting a contrary idea as absolute truth and interpreting all evidence according to that unalterable dogma, rather than draw conclusions based only on the evidence. This is the opposite of scientific thinking, although denialists often use scientific terminology to make their positions seem legitimate to fool the ignorant.

    Denialism vs geuine skepticism is found in debates over evolution vs. Creationism, global warming, religion, and politics. If there were no denialists, most of those debates would have either ended long ago, or would be a lot more cordial than they tend to be.}}}}

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • says

    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.

  • says

    “Open Source science??? You mean have people who don’t understand the data or the methods question it? Sounds absolutely pointless. … Science is OPEN,,, that’s why papers and data are published.” Steve_C

    Yes, open source science with all the data. As you’ll find out when you read “Climate Audit dot org” the data used to back the extremist claims of Global Warming as caused by humans isn’t all that it’s made out to be.

    In fact when peer reviewing scientific papers the author of climate audit asked for the raw data and the calculations used, etc… and was told by the journal that he’s the first peer reviewer to have asked and that journal has now changed it’s tune and will start keeping data, software, etc… for each paper. You can read about it there in detail.

    Another discovered point is that the climate scientists don’t seem to be using the raw data and also that the sources of raw data conflict or have “corrections” that are not documented or properly listed. This is very disturbing to hear, especially when it’s the historical weather data that’s changing due to detected errors – long after the time of recording the data, and long after it’s been used in papers.

    If you can’t validate the science then it really does become a belief. The question is what is the probability that it’s true or false? I’d rather have the certainty of a validation proof spelled out in detailed steps showing how you get from the raw data measurements to the calculations and on to the conclusions – whatever they might be.

    I’m not interested in “agreement reality” but in the actual objective reality within which we exist. Political agreement or consensus realities have no place in science, especially not when it’s such an important topic to the future of the human race as the GW Extremists like Gore Presents.

    And no, I’m not a theist. I’m a hard core anti-theist, atheist, non-believer, rational thinking, free thinker.

    Gravity sucks is enough proof that no man named jesus ascended into the heavens (sky) unless he had an aircraft or spaceship.

    Biology provides indisputable proof that all men and women, including those named jesus, didn’t rise from the dead. The dead only rise in fiction and zombie movies.

    If you have an invisible friend you are a special needs person with delusional beliefs; there may be a way to save yourself by coming back to Nature with rationality and science. It’s up to you to choose evidence over belief, rationality over group think, life now over empty dreams of immortality.

    Science believed isn’t much better than religion. The key is to learn how to evaluate evidence and hypotheses (theories) with critical thinking skills so that you can be informed about the various theories in science and how accurate any hypothesis/theory might really be.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • pough says

    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.

  • says

    Steve_C, to answer your question, no. I’m a German living in Germany. It’s just a nickname.

    Pierce R. Butler, have you read my whole post? Trust me, in Germany we do not listen to the U.S. Republican Party. The people I was talking about are by far not as crazy as Republicans and much more liberal than U.S. Democrats. I’ve been talking about certain elements that have a strong bias towards environmentalism, especially the German Green Party, of which I believe most are actually atheists. They just tend towards a direction that deems human influence on nature generally bad.

    I take it as offense that you are saying that I might have been listening to televangelists, such as Rick Warren. I’m uneducated but not nuts.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • Jadehawk says

    What amuses me is that, even aside from being ignorant and dogmatic, AGW-denial is counterproductive: 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. (Since the right-wingers and libertarians always claim the market is a meritocracy, the businesses that get hurt because they’re not smart don’t deserve any sympathy, right?)

    Imagine we do what’s needed to fix AGW, and then (and this part takes a powerful lot of imagination) climate scientists collectively say, “oops, no problem really; our bad.” Well… so what? Will we really be angry that we’ve made our world cleaner, more efficient, and more technologically advanced… and more affluent and fully employed… for the “wrong” reasons? It is to laugh!

    It seems to me that when the fix is to do stuff we ought to be doing anyway, arguing over whether the problem really exists is extra-pointless.

    nothing to add, I just thought it was worth repeating :-p

    —-

    actually, I lied. I should at least respond to the ethanol thing by AG: ethanol was nothing but another nasty handout to the Agribusiness, and is an example of greenwashing. The stuff that would really make a difference has been fought by companies for decades. If the Big Three hadn’t fought emission standards for the last 20 years, they wouldn’t be on the verge of bankrupcy now. All drastic changes to industries that involved externalities have been brought on by Government action (car safety, ban of lead in fuel, caps on sulfur dioxide emissions, ban of CFCs, et cetera ad infinitum).

    The market is reactive. We need proactive measures, and not just politically convenient greenwashing.

  • says

    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?

  • says

    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.

  • says

    pwl, I will not respond to your garbage until you learn to look at facts and not your own perceptions. You’ve already been told the facts, learn to accept them.

    /r/ b& pwl.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • says

    Oh, and I’m not agnostic regarding it either, I’m not making any assessment other than that more assessment of the extraordinary and extreme claims of Global Warming as Caused By Humans is required. Much more ACCURATE data.

    Also as a Systems Scientist I know that simulations have limits. I write simulations. I’ve written software for over 30 years. Cutting edge stuff. In fact people’s lives depend upon the verified accuracy of my software! These applications, in civil engineering, used the principles of auditing and verifiability to PROVE with an AUDIT TRAIL for inspection at anytime – that the data and calculations were correct (or at least within acceptable margins of error).

    So I do know what I’m talking about when it comes to data and software “simulations” or “models”.

    Let’s see ALL the pro and con evidence put into Google Earth and watch the so called “climate models” do their thing. Let’s see the animations and failed models runs along with the simulation runs that are published! Show the process! Open up the climate science to the public for inspection!

    To do or advocate any less than Open Source Science for Climate Science is being an irresponsible scientist.

    Are you a scientist? If so in what field?

  • pwl says

    “pwl, I will not respond to your garbage until you learn to look at facts and not your own perceptions. You’ve already been told the facts, learn to accept them.” – Blue Fielder

    Obviously your statement above demonstrates that you are not a scientist or a person committed to the principles of science. Why? The point of view that you are advocating, that “You’ve already been told the facts, learn to accept them” is a shocking statement of intellectual coercion which seeks to have someone take what the “authorities” are saying on “faith”. You advocate no less than people taking science on faith. Your point of view is no different than advocating the existence of god.

    Provide the facts in raw data form along with the software used to “massage” the raw data into statistical info and conclusions derived thereof. That is what is needed. Open Source Climate Science.

  • robinsrule says

    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.

  • Rey Fox says

    “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!

  • says

    “pwl, I will not respond to your garbage until you learn to look at facts and not your own perceptions. You’ve already been told the facts, learn to accept them.” – Blue Fielder

    Obviously your statement above demonstrates that you are not a scientist or a person committed to the principles of science. Why? The point of view that you are advocating, that “You’ve already been told the facts, learn to accept them” is a shocking statement of intellectual coercion which seeks to have someone take what the “authorities” are saying on “faith”. You advocate no less than people taking science on faith. Your point of view is no different than advocating the existence of god.

    Provide the facts in raw data form along with the software used to “massage” the raw data into statistical info and conclusions derived thereof. That is what is needed. Open Source Climate Science.

  • kermit says

    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.”

  • says

    “pwl refuses to look it up. He wants it done for him.” – Blue Fielder

    That is the shocking attitude of scientists such as Dr. Mann who refuse to open up their data and software to open source peer review. All attempts to recreate Dr. Mann’s magical data from raw sources have failed. So much for peer review. So much for being able to determine the veracity of Dr. Mann’s et. al.’s analysis. So much for Dr. Mann’s reputation.

    BF, you don’t know what you are talking about.

  • Steve_C says

    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?

  • Kim says

    I agree with pwl (#47, 54), a little transparency from Hanson, et.al., as regards how raw temperature data is adjusted for the urban heat island effect would be nice. Secret mumbo-jumbo is more indicative of a religion than science.

  • Stephen Wells says

    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!

  • says

    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)!

  • says

    It’s not about skepticism or denialism or belief.

    It’s about the process of science being reproducible.

    It’s about the conclusions of science being audited so that the interpretations can be validated and adjusted as the raw data changes (and in the case of climate change the Earth-Moon-Sol system is a dynamic system thus the data is in constant flux).

    It’s about revealing the existing apparent contradictions in the various data and evidence that at times stretch the claims made – pro or con.

    It’s about how science is conducted and ensuring that that the science process is open.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • pwl says

    “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?” – Steve_C

    No, I have no intention of writing papers on GW whatever it’s cause.

    I simply don’t like “believing”. I require hard proof not merely words from people telling me to “believe” the “facts” are what they are.

    It exactly the same with invisible friends that believers in god have. I require proof that they actually exist.

    Why would I take on any beliefs at all? By definition a belief is something that you consider to be true (or untrue) without the evidence to back it up! Thus you don’t “know” if it’s true but you just think it is.

    It’s mentally unsound to take on new beliefs when you don’t need to and even when you need to it can be highly risky (if no more so in those cases).

    While I know that I parked by vehicle in the parking spot last night I don’t know that it’s there now. It might be. It most likely is there there but it could have been stolen or towed. The point is essential when being a scientist or a person committed in avoiding unnecessary beliefs in life.

  • says

    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 says

    I’m still voting ice age.

    My reason? I just like going against the grain sometimes, and the bookies are giving up ridiculous odds. :-) Wasn’t there some study that said you could fall into an ice age in half a century or something. Was that ever debunked or did I dream it?

    While I know that I parked by vehicle in the parking spot last night I don’t know that it’s there now. It might be. It most likely is there there but it could have been stolen or towed.

    Or maybe it was one of those new Heisenberg parking spaces they are trying out in the crowded inner cities. You know the car is parked (momentum = 0), so you can’t be sure where it is, thus any number of cars can occupy the same parking space.

    It’ll revolutionize transportation! Well, it’ll revolutionize parked transportation. Entire office blocks will require only one parking spot.

  • Brian D says

    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.

  • guthrie says

    Africangenesis #74- you do of course have evidence for your supposition of a solar lag?
    Can you say exactly what is unknown about solar effects upon our climate, effects which just happen to cancel out the known and physically demonstrable effects of increased CO2?
    Basically, you just spouted a lot of nice words, but nothing to put a hole in the FAR.

  • SteveM says

    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.

  • Pierce R. Butler says

    XiXiDu @ # 51: … I’ve been talking about certain elements that have a strong bias towards environmentalism, especially the German Green Party…

    Well then, that’s the “rather limited set of ‘believers and anti-science folk'” I was referring to. My apologies for being so US-centric, though it may well be that’s the proper focus for the study of (non-Islamic) True Believers.

    If the research at hand involves “the pro man-made global warming camp”, however, the US has only a minor share of that population, and deserves attention mostly for making so much global warming in the first place.

    My apologies for any implication that you were listening to Rick Warren &/or other bible-bangers, especially if you thought I meant you believed what they say. As someone who skims dozens of articles by/about that whole gang every day, I certainly can’t fault anyone who monitors what they say – but I think we agree there’s a deep-rooted problem with those who agree with it.

    Fwiw, I do agree with most of the US Green Party’s platform, but their organizers and political skills are so deficient that trying to work with them seems a total waste of the effort and time we’re running out of.

  • Marc Abian says

    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!

  • Africangenesis says

    guthrie#79,

    For the thermal inertial effects that delay solar and GHG warming, see the climate commitment studies of Meehl, et al, and Wigley, et al. No, I can’t way “exactly” what is unknown about the solar coupling to the climate, that is because they are “unknown”. The IPCC in both the AR4 and the TAR admit to uncertainty in our knowledge of solar variability. Solar couples to the the nonlinear climate system differently than GHGs, for instance through high UV variability, cosmic rays, penetration 10s of meters into the mixing layer of the ocean, etc. Note that part of the UV coupling is through chemistry, generating the GHG ozone in the stratosphere and troposphere. So it is not just direct radiative forcing that we need to consider.

    You are way off base, noone is claiming that solar effects cancel GHG effects, although they may in the future if activity decreases from its recent unusually high levels. What “cancels” GHG effects and solar effects are negative feedbacks, things like the latent heat release high in the troposphere associated with precipitation, polar transport of heat, increases in low clouds, etc. Solar may just account for its fair share or more of the recent warming. There are competing viable hypotheses and the models are not yet up to the task of attributing less than 1W/^2 of energy imbalance.

  • Marc Abian says

    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.

  • says

    About climate change in the past coming before CO2 change – yes, that can occur but it’s a fallacy to think because you find causation in one direction, it has to work that way. This is an interacting feedback situation, since increasing temperature can increase gassing of CO2 into the air from decay and oceans etc., but the CO2 stimulates warming in turn. This positive feedback actually makes the increase in CO2 scarier.

  • pwl says

    Ok, Steve_C, you’ve got ESP. Not very scientific of you Steve_C.

    What exactly did I demand?

    What exactly did I then ignore?

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • pwl says

    Marc Abian, the fact that you freak when someone questions the data and conclusions with an eye towards reproducing and auditing the results indicates that you’re not a serious scientific person committed to an open process of science.

    What are you afraid of? That the extreme claims or even the modest claims of the GW crowd won’t be true?

    If you are so certain in your convictions of your conclusions then open them up for all to see so that they can be step by step verified or refuted as the case may be. I don’t care which it is, pro or con, by the way as the data will lead where it does. If you are so convinced then you should support the open source climate science initiatives that are ongoing.

    To fail to do so means that you are against the scientific method and process.

  • pwl says

    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.

  • pwl says

    Just for completeness and neutrality with post #90.

    Who cares if the climate changes again and the Earth’s temperature rise accellerates? Don’t even bother with taking temperatures anymore.

    Why even bother with science at all?

    When you stifle questions asked about the science conclusions that are asserted you subvert the scientific process and the science education of the masses. You also undermine your own credibility.

  • 'Tis Himself says

    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.

  • Blue Fielder says

    Seriously, pwl needs to be banned. He spends all his time trying to expose everyone who isn’t him as some sort of fanatic, when he’s really just proving he’s ten times more fanatical than anyone else.

    His constant stream of “OMG U FREEKIN OWT U KANT ARGOO OMG GROOPTHEENK STYFLIN DISENT” is classic troll.

    /r/ b&.

  • Stephen Wells says

    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.

  • says

    Neil B sayeth:

    About climate change in the past coming before CO2 change – yes, that can occur

    It’s not a matter of “can occur”, it’s a matter of that is what is shown by the fossil record. Nothing else. AKA “did occur.” Heat first, CO2 rise later.

    What this does is unambiguously disqualifies the fossil record from characterizing CO2 as a precursor for warming. Doesn’t mean it isn’t one, but it does mean that the fossil record isn’t available as supporting proof for that assertion.

    it’s a fallacy to think because you find causation in one direction, it has to work that way.

    I never said otherwise, nor would I. The point is simply that the fossil record is not usable evidence in this particular case.

  • Stephen Wells says

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

  • Africangenesis says

    Stephen Wells,

    “We use basic physics, not fossil record, to understand why added CO2 would raise temperatures.”

    You forget an important caviat, “everything else being equal”, i.e., controlling for other variables. Of course, if natural variation or other anthropogenic influences overwelm the CO2 contribution, cooling might occur.

  • trrll says

    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.”

  • Africangenesis says

    Trll,

    Do you have an citations that attempt to quantify the size of this feedback which I appears to assume saturation. Some have been arguing that the CO2 in the oceans will INCREASE not decrease, leading to acidification. This would be a negative feedback, although perhaps less efficient than it would have been at lower temperatures. There also might be a fertilization effect from the increase CO2 in the oceans. I’m well aware of the mechanisms, if you have a quantitative reference, it will speed my inquiry.

  • says

    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 says

    Blue Fielder, you just can’t handle the fire when you meet someone dedicated to the scientific process. Usually I’m in here (and elsewhere) educating people that their invisible friends don’t exist, yet today I find myself educating some of you about the scientific process and how important it is to have open science and reproducible and verifiable results. Yet you, for some reason, protest a very reasonable approach to science. It leaves me mystified. My science teachers would be aghast at what I’ve heard here today. A very big sigh.

  • Steve_C says

    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.

  • DavidONE says

    Re. ‘denier v. skeptic’ – here’s a fairly comprehensive description – http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/denier-vs-skeptic/

    Ben @ 100:

    > …the AGW crowd in general (not climate scientists) likes to point to the fossil record as evidence of CO2 causing warming…

    Bullshit and straw. I’ve never seen anyone claim that, and I’ve spent a lot of time in many places arguing with the Denial Gang.

    http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

    @ pwl:

    I see you’re getting your climate ‘science’ from Climateaudit.org – that explains, at least partially, why you are so confused. It’s analogous to getting your evolutionary science from the Discovery Institute.

    * http://www.realclimate.org/ for the science.

    * http://climateprogress.org/ for the social commentary.

    * http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/ for a combo.

  • pwl says

    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.

  • Steve_C says

    Just as I thought. So you just assert that the Climate Scientists aren’t being honest or precise… and you want to check their work?

    Sounds like you need to get yourself a job working on it with the scientists.

  • pwl says

    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.

  • pwl says

    However, in science the scientific method and process isn’t meant to only root out the blatant nonsense (like quantum biofeedback) it is there to validate the science, and to correct any errors discovered along the way. Discovered corrections and errors need not be intentional misconduct. I don’t know if anyone has studied the honest and accuracy of scientific results but I’d be curious.

  • says

    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.

  • Neil B ☺ says

    First, talking about all the subtleties and uncertainties of of correlations avoids the theoretical causal issue of IR absorption bands, as I explained above are not just resaturating those from water. Second, just a reminder that CO2 is a risk factor even if (for the sake of argument at least) not clear just how much or certain of climate change has to be derived from it, and reducing risky behavior is a good thing anyway. In any case interesting to see the natives here having a tough-(?)-looking-at-least battle with invaders!

  • trrll says

    Knowing that, if you want to call that lag evidence of a closed loop….

    You don’t have to try to deduce information about temperature and CO2 from an uncertain geological record to figure out whether there is a positive feedback loop between CO2 rise and warming–it is an inescapable consequence of the basic physics. And that means that either one can lead and the other follow, depending upon the specific circumstances.

    In fact, visibly, high CO2 is no impediment to dropping temperatures at all.

    And now we see hauled out the best friend of every denialist, from evolution to HIV to climate, the straw man–as though anybody has ever claimed that high CO2 is invariably “an impediment” to dropping temperatures. For example, if the sun happens to go out, you can bet that the temperature will drop, no matter how high the CO2 happens to be.

    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. If you can do this and your model predicts that global temperatures will fall as humans put more and more CO2 into the atmosphere, then you might have some credibility (as well as a publication in Nature). So far, nobody has done this–all we hear is denialist straw men, cherry-picking, character assassination, nitpicking (they call it “auditing”), and handwaving.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • Quiet Desperation says

    You’re probably thinking of Rasool & Schneider 1971,

    Nah, it was more recent than that. Late 90’s or early 00’s. I googled a bit, but nothing useful came up. Oh well.

  • Knockgoats says

    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 says

    To clarify my comment on the evaporation-precipitation cycle, some of the heat released by condensation in the upper troposphere will indeed escape, but to a first approximation the troposphere warms or cools as a whole (this is known from measurement, not modelling), and the net effect of warming the atmosphere is to increase the water vapour content of the upper troposphere and hence its opaqueness to infrared, so radiation to space is shifted upward to colder regions – this is the water vapour enhancement to the greenhouse effect. GCMs appear to deal with water vapour effects well, see:

    A busy week for water vapour
    . Clouds and aerosols are the major areas in which atmospheric modelling needs improvement, as all climate modellers admit.

    One more note: africangenesis claims modellers need to claim that AGW is happening to attract funding – yet he himself says we need more work on modelling! Whatever the source of recent warming, we need to understand it better, and modelling is an essential part of that. In other words, africangenesis is bullshitting again – and most unpleasantly on this occasion, accusing scientists of lying without having the guts to name those he claims are liars.

  • Africangenesis says

    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 says

    africangenesis, if you wanted anyone to listen to you, you really shouldn’t have bust out the “watermelon” stuff. Just a hint.

    I do love how much effort you’re willing to put into insisting that just because we’ve put an extra zero on the roulette wheel, we can’t assume that the house will make more money. But I think your efforts would be better spent on preparing your insights for publication in the literature. Off you go.

    Oh, I forget- you’ll just be censored by the ecocommunist incarboxyati.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • John Morales says

    AG, you’re so focused on global average temperatures, you seem to forget that climate change is evident, at least in my neck of the woods.

  • Chris O'Neill says

    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.

  • Africangenesis says

    John Morales,

    This is from Rind, D., J. Lean, J. Lerner, P. Lonergan, and A. Leboissitier (2008), Exploring the stratospheric/tropospheric response to solar forcing, J. Geophys. Res., 113, D24103, doi:10.1029/2008JD010114.

    [67] In this paper we use a suite of modeling experiments to address a range of aspects of solar cycle forcing of the troposphere/stratosphere system reported in the literature. The results in general show that the stratospheric response is highly repeatable and significant. The tropospheric response is weaker, often not significant, but at times fairly robust among the different simulations for both temperature and precipitation. Warming in the troposphere occurs in most of the simulations, with greater magnitude when historical SST are used (of relevance to reanalysis studies). It generally accounts for < 5% of the interannual variability near the surface (on a zonal average), reaching in some simulations ~15–20% of the variability in the midtroposphere and upper troposphere. However, the warming arises even when climatological SST are used, although it is not as large. These results suggest that both proposed mechanisms for solar influence on the troposphere are operative: dynamical changes in the troposphere due to warming of the lower stratosphere from the solar UV effect on stratospheric ozone; and heating of the surface by increased total solar irradiance, especially in the subtropics.

    [68] This effect can be seen in the precipitation response as well. Precipitation tends to decrease south of the equator during solar maximum conditions relative to solar minimum, although the result occurs only 60–70% of the time, and is generally not significant; locally, the effect can account for up to 15% of interannual variability, especially in southern Asia.
    It appears to be the result of both increased stabilization due to a warmer lower stratosphere, and a sea surface temperature forcing featuring somewhat greater warming north of the equator (with both the historical and calculated SST) during June–August.

    It appears that there are specific trends in solar impact on precipitation in
    the southern hemisphere that can be inferred from the solar cycle.  Solar
    activity increased during the 20th century to an unusually high plateau for the
    latter half of the century.  The online brochure you site is several levels
    removed from the peer review literature.  If you are concerned about your
    regional climate, hopefully we will learn more over the next few years.

     

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • Africangenesis says

    Ben#122,

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

    Is that a threat?

  • Stephen Wells says

    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.

  • Africangenesis says

    Stephen Wells#125,

    “Write it up” wise cracks are no substitute for evidence. You know darn well the refutation is in the literature already, in nearly every diagnostic study although only occasionally as explicit as this:

    “Currently no GCM has succeeded in simulating a solar-cycle response of the observed amplitude near the surface. Clearly a correct simulation of a global-scale warming on decadal time scale is needed before predictions into the future on multi-decadal scale can be accepted with confidence.”

    http://www.amath.washington.edu/research/articles/Tung/journals/solar-jgr.pdf

    The thing is, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen this posted before, so it was rather dishonest of you to use your trite attempt at dismissal.

  • Africangenesis says

    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?

  • Stephen Wells says

    @126: That is supposed to be a reason not to worry about AGW? Wow, you’re easily reassured.

    If I can’t predict whether the heart failure, the liver damage or the diabetes will get you first, _that doesn’t mean it’s safe to eat nothing but fast food_.

  • trrll says

    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.

  • Africangenesis says

    trrll#129,

    The models should show a long term warming trend to AR4 GHG scenerios. They don’t vary the solar activity or aerosol forcings, because they don’t know what those will be in the future. However, if they don’t represent the solar well, if the get the precipitation, clouds, snow melt and ice cap melts wrong over the 20th century they were “validated” on, then they won’t have their climate sensitivity right. The models don’t agree with each other, and they don’t agree with the climate.

    Particularly concerning is the model failure to represent the earlier temperate zone spring snow melts that was occurring in the 90s. Somehow they “matched” the warming while reflecting over 3W/m^2 to much solar energy from the surface (globally and annually averaged). The models will eventually catch up with this snow melt as they simulate further warming, adding this energy to whatever they already had. This probably explains the temperature excursions the models take in the middle of the century. “Models Gone Wild”.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • trrll says

    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.

  • Stephen Wells says

    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”.

  • luminous beauty says

    Those who propose that the latent heat/convection cycle will somehow magically increase its efficiency in some unknown non-linear fashion under additional forcing, should also consider what this portends in terms of climate disruption.

    Big fluffy clouds? Reaching into the upper troposphere? What do we call them?

    Africangenesis? Got a clue?

  • robinsrule says

    pwl:

    I am in a position to audit the simulation programs when working with experts in the field of climate science.

    Great, you can start with ModelE.

  • pwl says

    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?

  • pwl says

    “The GISS Model E is an update of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) atmospheric General Circulation Model (GCM). It is one of the coupled GCMs employed by the IPCC in their 2007 report, AR4, on climate change. It is also the basis for many papers by GISS employees and others that predict the catastrophic results of Anthropogenic Global Warming.”

    Cool, er, hot, er, awesome! I’ll review this puppy and see where that leads.

  • Marc Abian says

    Marc Abian, the fact that you freak

    Never did.

    when someone questions the data and conclusions with an eye towards reproducing and auditing the results indicates that you’re not a serious scientific person committed to an open process of science.

    I LOVE when that happens, but only when it happens in the relevant arena i.e. scientific journals. Otherwise I view it with suspicion.

    What are you afraid of? That the extreme claims or even the modest claims of the GW crowd won’t be true?

    No, I’m afraid that they will be true.

    If you are so certain in your convictions of your conclusions then open them up for all to see so that they can be step by step verified or refuted as the case may be

    You don’t understand the basis for my stance at all. It isn’t anything to do with things I know about climate science. The process is as follows,

    1. Determine the consensus of relevant experts.
    2. Accept it as probably true.

    If you want me to change my mind, change the scientific consensus. Do research, publish it in a peer-reviewed journal.

  • Wowbagger says

    Pilty,

    Did you take one too many obtuse pills this morning? No-one doubts global warming; it’s a fact. What’s contentious is the cause and the impact.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • sundevil says

    Well, again, that pesky thing called reality is getting in the way of a perfectly good (or in this case bad) theory.

    AGW Theory is a house of cards that is crumbling on a daily basis. What truth there is has been obscured by bad science with an agenda to procure financial and political gains, mainly the latter.

    The good news is that it is no longer polically incorrect to speak out against this dishonest theory, and more and more scientists are doing so.

    If you are truly interested in this subject, I would suggest reading the latest news from both sides of the argument and see who is actually discovering new things and who is holding on to old ideas regardless of their flaws.

  • Africangenesis says

    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. 

  • Africangenesis says

    Darn, for some reason a blockquote was ignored when the system posted my last post. All the text up though “continued release of CO2, give us a call.” should have been in the block quote and is from Trrll’s post.

  • pwl says

    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.

  • trrll says

    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.

    So where can we run your model that demonstrates that a climate model with the modification that you advocate does a better job of modeling historical climate, and also predicts that global warming in the future will be “swamped by natural variation.”

    Or is this just more of the kind of hand-waving so favored by denialists of all stripes, whether of evolution, HIV, germ theory, or climate change?

    Give them another development and diagnostic cycle or two, maybe another decade.

    So even though the various climate models have all been converging on similar predictions of dangerous global warming that goes well beyond the range of “natural variation,” you maintain the faith that they are going to start to agree with you “real soon now.” Just like the evolution denialists are convinced that “darwinism” is just about to collapse, and HIV denialists are convinced that latest results in medical science will soon convince everybody that that HIV is harmless and that AIDS is caused by antiretroviral therapy.

  • Stephen Wells says

    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 says

    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.

    This has to be the single most ridiculous complaint of the global warming deniers. The degree of openness in climate research is at a level that I don’t think that I have ever seen in science. The data is available online. Climate models–even source code–are available online. And for those without the knowledge to do real science, there are detailed summaries and reviews by high-level scientific review panels such as the IPCC, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society.

    But of course, it will never be enough for the true denialist, who will always be convinced that if all of the publicly available data supports the reality and threat of global warming, it just proves that those rascally climate scientists must be keeping to themselves the real data, which will demonstrate that the greenhouse effect and global warming is all a crock.

  • Africangenesis says

    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 says

    You don’t seem to understand that the models don’t do natural variation well

    None of the models are particularly good at predicting short-term weather variation, but they do exhibit it. But that is now what they are designed to do–they are designed to project long-term trends. We have a good historical record of short-term variation, so it is quite clear that the projected warming is outside the reasonable range of natural variation from other sources.

    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.

    The fact remains that the predictions of multiple models developed by independent researchers have converged to the extent that all predict substantial warming, sufficient to be a serious global problem.

    The hope is that the errors are uncorrelated and independent so that they will cancel and result in ensemble results that are more robust.

    More accurately, the hope of the denialists is that all of the climate models developed by different researchers, using a variety of ways of modeling the physical mechanisms that control climate, will all happen to have errors that are correlated such that they cause them to grossly overestimate the extent of global warming. Of course there is no evidence for this, or even any good reason to expect it. Errors, after all, tend by their very nature to be uncorrelated. And of course, no denialist has been able to come up with a physically reasonable model that eliminates the hoped-for “bias,” remains consistent with the known record of global temperatures, and does not predict serious future warming, even though all of the tools, even the model source code, are publicly available.

  • Africangenesis says

    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 says

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

    Very well. See: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/langswitch_lang/bg

    In regards to the Working Group I authors [africangenesis accused them of lying], to be more specific and name names
    I would have to have access to more details.
    – africangenesis

    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.

    Well, the climate itself gave us the example of the temperature drop since the el Nino of 1998. – africangenesis

    There hasn’t been one. See for example:
    http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/what-if/.
    Ten-year averages have continued to increase – even, IIRC, five-year averages. 2008 was warmer than any 20th century year apart from the exceptional 1998. 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.

    “Currently no GCM has succeeded in simulating a solar-cycle response of the observed amplitude near the surface. Clearly a correct simulation of a global-scale warming on decadal time scale is needed before predictions into the future on multi-decadal scale can be accepted with confidence.”

    http://www.amath.washington.edu/research/articles/Tung/journals/solar-jgr.pdf

    he thing is, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen this posted before, so it was rather dishonest of you to use your trite attempt at dismissal. Africangenesis

    It is rather dishonest of you to cherry-pick that sentence without the conclusion of the Tung and Camp paper (emphasis added):

    “Since the equilibrium response should be larger than the periodic response measured, the periodic solar-cycle response measurements yields a lower bound on the equilibrium climate sensitivity that is equivalent to a global warming of 2.3 °K at doubled CO2. A 95% confidence interval is estimated to be 2.3-4.1 °K. This range is established independent of models.

    In other words, the Tung and Camp paper argues that a climate sensitivity bang on that deduced from the models (and any real modeller knows that “All models are wrong. Some models are useful”) can be deduced from observations.
    This is absolutely typical of africangenesis’s approach: statements and quotations that are not outright false, but are intentionally misleading.

    If you were truly interested in the environment rather than a social agenda, then you would be interested in the science. africangenesis

    Says the man who claims the vast majority of the relevant experts are liars or fools, because their conclusions are politically unpalatable to him.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • Africangenesis says

    Knockgoats,

    2008 is the coldest year in a decade. The site you pointed to didn’t use 5 year averages, it used lowess smoothing, apparently with a poor choice of parameters, since as the writer notes:

    “It’s evident that the residual for 2008 is negative, but it’s equally evident that the 2008 residual is not at all extraordinary.”

    What the writer does not note is that many of the years that make the residual not appear extraordinary are years with major volanic eruptions.

    The point of mentioning these instances of natural variability overwelming the trend is not to claim it wasn’t warming in the latter part of the 20th century. If the models are wrong, the attribution is not credible, and errors in the attribution to CO2 will be magnified in scenerios when CO2 values are larger.

    You should keep in mind that just as there was thermal inertia slowing the response of the climate system during the warming, there will also be moderation of any cooling trend.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • Neil B ☺ says

    Africangenesis, et al: You may have some point nibbling around the edges or questioning how sure such and such correlation can be, but: the basic fact remains, it is risky to pump more and more of something with IR absorption bands into the atmosphere. And no it isn’t just superimposed on H20, there are extra, fine bands and also the absorption high in the atmosphere.
    (Ironic, here I am fighting on the side of the Pharyngulite consensus …But no surprise really since this is more directly “science”.)

  • Africangenesis says

    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 says

    Neil B#158,

    The different partially overlapping spectra of CO2 and H2O are not news. Saying pumping out CO2 is “risky” without quantification of the extent of the risk is meaningless. We can just as easily say that pumping out CO2 is beneficial. The natural variability of the climate is risky. Society is facing far more immediate risks than the climate.

  • Chris O'Neill says

    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.

  • Chris O'Neill says

    Africangenesis:

    Saying pumping out CO2 is “risky” without quantification of the extent of the risk is meaningless.

    IOW, what we don’t know can’t hurt us.

  • Chris O'Neill says

    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?

  • Africangenesis says

    Chris O’Neil,

    The lapse rate is reduced with warming, 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 heat transport to high latitudes (polar amplification) 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. 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, you have to ask compared to what? 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.

  • Africangenesis says

    Chris O’Neill,

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

  • trrll says

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

    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.

    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.

    There are no documented biases or sources of long term “natural variation” sufficient to overwhelm the effect of CO2. Limitations in modeling the fine details of the pattern of temperature change in response to these comparatively short term, periodic, and modest changes in solar output are unlikely to be relevant to modeling the global effect of CO2 on a much longer time scale, so it is a pretty flimsy straw that you are clutching at.

    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. A rational person might conclude that the error could go in either direction, and that they should be concerned about a possibility that the impact could be even larger and more rapid than projected. But the denialist invariably assumes that the errors must be correlated in such a way as to exaggerate the impact.

  • Chris O'Neill says

    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.

  • Africangenesis says

    Chris O’Neill,

    “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.”

    That table is about the models, not about the climate. Where do you get any “unlikely” and “extremely unlikely” from? There still is not good evidence that net cloud feedbacks are positive rather than negative. For an example of observations showing negative cloud feedback in the tropics where the models show a positive feedback:

    “The sum of SW CRF (≈−SWall) and LW CRF(= −[LWall − LWclr]) plotted against the tropospheric temperature anomalies for the middle 41 days of the fifteen-ISO composite (Figure 4) reveals a strongly negative relationship. A linear regression yields a sensitivity factor (slope) of −6.1 W m−2 K−1, with an explained variance of 85.0%. This indicates that the net (SW + LW) radiative effect of clouds during the evolution of the composite ISO is to cool the ocean-atmosphere system during its tropospheric warm phase, and to warm it during its cool phase.”

    http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL029698.shtml

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • says

    africangenesis:
    “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.”

    “There is certainly no reason to drink economic koolaid yet. We should just continue to do the things that make sense economically.”

    i find it totally ironic that you would suggest our understanding of economics surpasses our understanding of climate. over and over, you reject the work of hundreds, even thousands of people (seemingly, for a mysterious kind of paranoia) and weirdly, you endorse the work of hundreds, even thousands of other people WHO WE KNOW ARE USUALLY WRONG.

    really, have you seen the stock market recently? all those american bankers were gaming the system for decades for their own personal gain, and those are the guys you want us to listen to? that made a ton of economic sense to them at the time! tell you what, i’ll put your assertion to the same test you’ve so cleverly developed for the IPCC. earlier, you claimed:

    “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.”

    let’s see some data from this incredible free market that will prove it’s worth deferring to. which society has economic data to identify sweeping trends, AND no central planning? got any contenders?

    hey, how about narrowing it down for us? do you have a school of economics you prefer? do you like adam smith or malthus? even marx was an economist… what flavor kool-aid are you into?

    you might have some totally valid objections to climate models and research: i don’t know, because it’s not my field and i’ve realized how unintuitive much of it is.

    but it’s a hundred years ahead of economics, at least. the only one drinking “economic kool-aid” here is you, when you presume that it’s a waste of money to listen to scientists, simply because they agree with the hippies you abhor. you haven’t begun to prove that: you just expect others to accept it on faith.

  • Africangenesis says

    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 says

    Africangenesis:

    “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.”

    That table is about the models, not about the climate.

    Physical models of climate actually.

    Where do you get any “unlikely” and “extremely unlikely” from? There still is not good evidence that net cloud feedbacks are positive rather than negative. For an example of observations showing negative cloud feedback in the tropics where the models show a positive feedback:

    I find your attitude to the evidence to be extremely hypocritcal. On the one hand you will accept cherry=picked localized evidence that “‘potentially’ supports Lindzen’s ‘infrared iris’ hypothesis”, a hypothesis which has failed to pass any significant test and on the other you want to assume the vast majority of physically-based climate models, from the simplest to the most complex, are consistently wrong. The bias in your acceptance of evidence, like the bias in your misunderstandings, is patently obvious.

  • Africangenesis says

    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 says

    These are computationally based climate models, not physically based.

    I don’t understand your point about being “computationally based”. Computing the path of spacecraft is “computationally based”. Does being “computationally based” mean we shouldn’t bother trying to predict the path of spacecraft simply because it is “computationally based”? I don’t think so. “Computationally based” is not a reason for rejecting results. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using computation to calculate the results of physically or empirically-physically based models.

    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.

    Failed hypothesis I should point out. The issue was global cloud feedback. Picking part of the globe and saying the feedback might be negative there is just a cherry-pick.

    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?

    Because you say things like: “We should just continue to do the things that make sense economically.” A statement like that requires justifying evidence to contradict the evidence of AGW.

    I think it is a difficult issue that is still unresolved.

    The only thing that’s unresolved is a value for cloud feedback that is as accurate as the values for other feedbacks. This doesn’t mean there is much likelihood of a significant negative value for cloud feedback, just that a small part of the distribution for probable values falls in small negative values.

    The paper is a

    lightly

    peer reviewed analysis of observations. It shouldn’t be a matter of climate observations versus climate models. The models must come to the observations.

    The statement you quoted from the paper earlier doesn’t necessarily have much bearing on global cloud sensitivity. If you can come up with a paper that establishes some global sensitivity figure I’ll have a look at it.

    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.

    And what evidence is that?

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • Knockgoats says

    Physically based models are things like wind tunnels and wave tanks. – africangenesis

    Crap. Those are physical models. Physically based models are computational models based on physical principles – as opposed to data-driven models.

    From
    Data-driven and Physically-based Models for Characterization of Processes in Hydrology, Hydraulics, Oceanography and Climate Change
    :
    “Physically based modeling maps natural phenomena to a computer simulation program. There are two basic processes in this mapping: mathematical modeling and numerical solution. The mathematical modeling concerns the description of the natural phenomena by mathematical equations. The numerical solution involves computing an efficient and accurate solution of the mathematical equations.”

    – but just try googling “physically based models” for literally thousands of web-pages contradicting your ignorance. I think we now have all the information we need concenring your knowledge of modelling.

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • Chris O'Neill says

    Physically based models are things like wind tunnels and wave tanks.

    No, physically based models are not just things based on empirically derived laws from observations in things like wind tunnels and wave tanks. They are based on the laws of physics and also empirically derived laws from any observations available.

    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

    Ho hum.

    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.”

    What a shock.

    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).

    Yes and we know the limits of that range do not include a large negative feedback as I keep pointing out.

    I’ve provided plenty of cites for diagnostic studies showing issues with the models that are larger than the energy imbalance

    Such as Spencer et al? Sure it makes a big difference to global models. Pity they haven’t come up with a global model themselves showing what a profound difference their hypothesis makes to a such a model.

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

    Oh, so now you start talking about skill demonstration once you realize your previous objection (computational requirement) didn’t make sense. I’ve had enough of chasing your tediously moving goalposts. You’ve provided enough boredom from these and your misunderstandings (which you nearly always fail to acknowledge) that when biassed are always biassed towards negative feedback (e.g. thinking polar amplification is caused by transport of heat to the poles, thinking transfer of heat to the poles will increase radiation contrary to what radiation theory implies, thinking that warming produces a negative feedback by causing increased dissolution of CO2 when it actually does the opposite) to last a long time. I’ll leave you to your advice that we should just assume, contrary to the evidence that we actually have, that cloud feedback is large and negative and that we should just keep doing more of what we’re doing based on this assumption. You have been so convincing. Good-bye and good luck.

  • Knockgoats says

    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.

  • says

    “Mann-made science does not support the hypothesis that global warming is man-made”
    http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/02/06/mann-s-conclusions-not-to-be-believed.aspx

    I particularly like how the National Academy of Sciences chastised Dr. Mann: “Our view is that all research benefits from full and open access to published data-sets and that a clear explanation of analytical methods is mandatory. Peers should have access to the information needed to reproduce published results, so that increased confidence in the outcome of the study can be generated inside and outside the scientific community.”

    This is exactly the point that I’ve been making!!! Open science is the best science! So to all those who objected to the notion of “Open Source Science”, it’s what the NAS actually advocates, particularly in science relating to Global Warming.

  • 'Tis Himself says

    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.

  • pwl says

    Actually it was the National Academy of Sciences that was officially chastising Dr. Mann (in addition to those that are critics of his game of hockey). Not surprising considering his blatant anti-scientific approaches.

    The article does provide some context. What part of the context do you assert is missing?

    Lawrence Solomon seems to be a reasonable scientist attempting to determine the veracity of the science but is obstructed by folks like Dr. Mann who have a vested interest in promoting and providing evidence that keeps his grants flowing. It’s excellent that Dr. Mann was publicly reprimanded by the NAS and it should raise a serious red flag for “believers” in “soothed futures” – Dr. Mann, a modern day Nostradamus?

  • Africangenesis says

    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.

  • pwl says

    It’s weird ‘Tis Himself that you attack the web site rather than discuss the contents of the disapproval, typical of someone who is avoiding the criticisms of their belief stricken views. If you actually had confidence in your views or Dr. Mann’s views you could discuss the actual issues.

    We have yet to hear the “neglected context” that you refer to – out with it, or are ad hominem attacks against Lawrence Solomon all you’ve got?

  • Knockgoats says

    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.

  • Africangenesis says

    Knockgoats,

    Those are weak inferences, easily countered. Given that the troops had chemical protection gear and chemical detection equipment and frequent drills and wore the unconfortably gear during the invasion, it can be inferred that Bush actually thought there were chemical weapons. You have to get to the border for a threat of invasion to be immediate enough for Saddam to think it credible. The assessment was that the inspectors could not complete their work and prove any claims wrong, with the lack of cooperation they were getting from Saddam. The inspectors had no more luck accounting for the missing chemical weapons than Saddam did. The PNAC report didn’t have a motive for an invasion. The Greenspan statement about oil doesn’t contradict the WMD reason, because WMD was never the only reason.

    Sorry, no withdrawal. You don’t recall your claims of deceit even when you’ve been shown your wrong or can’t prove that you are right.

    Why do you believe in AGW, when you haven’t been able to find any evidence that the models can do good attribution in the face of errors several times larger than the energy imbalance?