Some experts have recalculated and say we have 20 years instead of 3 in the "carbon budget" (that is, how long it will take, at the current rate of emissions, to warm the earth to 2.7°F beyond what it was in the late 19th century — the "pre-industrial" time).
IN THE COMMENTS: Expat(ish) says:
Hate to be picky about a headline written by a non-STEM person, but the "calculations" don't give the "Earth some time."1. If you follow The Chicago Manual of Style, the word "the" determines whether you capitalize Earth/earth. So if they were hot to capitalize "Earth," they should have left out the "the." Notice that we always capitalize "Mars" and "Venus," but we never say "The Mars" or "The Venus" ... when we're talking about planets. One can imagine a museum curator saying "We need to relocate the Venus to the stairwell."
First, the *new* calculations predict that more time will pass before X.
Secondly, there will still be time for the "Earth" (why is that capitalized?) no matter the climate. Unless the SMOD breaks it to smithereens when Trump is re-elected.
2. Earth isn't in the market for time. That's a human desire. George Carlin said it best (NSFW):
Posts
102 comments:
Hate to be picky about a headline written by a non-STEM person, but the "calculations" don't give the "Earth some time."
First, the *new* calculations predict that more time will pass before X.
Secondly, there will still be time for the "Earth" (why is that capitalized?) no matter the climate. Unless the SMOD breaks it to smithereens when Trump is re-elected.
_XC
Should say ""New climate change calculations could buy the alarmists some time — if they’re right." because these assholes predictions continually are proven wrong. Better to have the end of times down the road a bit.
Climate science doesn't know what it claims to know, owing to no adult peer review.
It's a social group organized by a common conclusion rather than common equations.
The earth might be warming or mightt might not, we don't know and can't find out. It's too complicated for physics though not for astrology.
I thought the science was settled?
And this time we're completely serial! Honest!! Manbearpig!
Alternate headline:
Climate Scientists Wrong Again
This is not new at all. Many papers have been written on this subject by actual published climate scientists. What's new is that the mainstream press covered it. A decision was made in some war room somewhere to raise the profile of this particular paper as opposed to all of the others like it that have appeared.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that "95% of the models think that planet is wrong."
It's too complicated for physics though not for astrology.
Our own Pudd'n Head Wilson strikes another blow amidship!
Probably because they have looked at the data and it has become really clear that they are going to need to stretch out this scam by another 20 years. "Oh, it wasn't this comet the the aliens were coming on, it's another one out there in the middle distance!"
Amazing what gets uncovered when the threat of RICO indictment is off the table.
Time to round up Al Gore and the gang, try them at The Hague for crimes against humanity, and then put them up against the wall and shoot them.
Coming soon: Hate science is not protected by the First Amendment.
Here is another story that has kicked around the Samizdat climate media for a long time:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/09/14/some-good-news-about-global-warming-for-once-plants-are-speeding-up-their-use-of-carbon
Apparently it is top secret info that plants evolved at a time when carbon in the atmosphere was far far higher than today, and that the plants have basically starved themselves for carbon dioxide by sequestering so much carbon over billions of years as oil and coal. In fact, since plants are not gasping for carbon as much, they are able to close their stomata by a small amount, which allows them to use less water, makes them more drought tolerant.
There is no question that had somebody not come along and started to burn the carbon the plants locked up, that the planet was headed to another snowball phase. The plants were killing themselves.
Climate change is an ideology that is a tool of power and control. It's like islamophobia, racism, misogyny, any of these can be used to control people and divide people into groups instead of individuals. Climate change will not be abandoned because it's too useful it will just be pushed past the lifespan of most people on Earth. Wait. Very soon it's going to be 80 to 100 years where it's going to be a problem
The CAGW scam has been wrong from day one. Less than predicted? Try off by miles.
The EPA said that if Obama's Clean Power Plan was fully implemented, the US would avoid 0.053 warming by 2100. The EPA! Why wreck our economy over that?
I changed my mind on the seriousness of this problem when I read the chapter on global warming in Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist twenty years ago. Actually it wasn't the book itself so much as the hysterical reaction to it that first attracted my attention. Clearly there was something weird going on, given that Lomborg based his conclusions on a close reading of the very same research the alarmists cited in their own behalf.
The source of their ire was a series of four propositions Lomborg advanced: first, that all the proposed measures to "mitigate" (i.e. limit) the warming, no matter how costly, were predicted to have minimal effect; second, that the total warming was likely to be more moderate than the alarmists were predicting; third, that on balance the warming would probably be good for the planet (a larger temperate zone, greater agricultural productivity, fewer deaths by freezing, etc); and finally, that a strategy of adaptation made more sense from a cost/benefit point of view than largely fruitless attempts to effect the climate by artificially restricting CO2 emissions.
All four of these conclusions still stand twenty years later, which raises an interesting question: what is actually driving the global warming hysteria? Is it peer pressure, the desire to be thought well of by one's friends and colleagues? The same animus against our capitalist consumer economy that made Marxism so popular among our university elites a generation before? Something else?
I like how the headline is about the Bad Camp of Badthinkers instead of about the information.
"Luke Lea said...
....which raises an interesting question: what is actually driving the global warming hysteria?"
See whitney above.
The climate changes - no denying it. Why is it warming/changing? ... Theories!
I'm skeptical of the left's theories because they lie about everything else, and their answer to climate change is to tax us all to death.
You don't have to a STEM student to know that the headline is bosh. It's not the recalculations that "bought time", it's the fact they screwed it up in the first place.
Considering that climate scientists refuse to release any of the raw data, it's impossible to see what's going on behind the curtain. Their science is based on "trust us."
I remember reading the email chain from the East Anglia email dump. The scientists had hired this programmer to help make sense of the temperature data, and the guy wrote back that it was such a complete mess as to be worthless. Didn't stop them from basing their theories on it.
PJ O'Rourke - All the Trouble in the World:
The bullying of citizens by means of dreads and fights has been going on since paleolithic times. Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than the tribal Wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. 'Oh no, Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out'.
Models are only models. How do they match up with observations? How do observations match up with other periods in the history of the planet?
Slowly things get sorted out.
I asked a friend this weekend how forty years of colder weather would impact her thinking about climate change. She said, "That's impossible." I said, "You're a member of a cult."
In the same vein. Professor Mann is still refusing to show his work in court. he may be held in contempt.
that a strategy of adaptation made more sense from a cost/benefit point of view than largely fruitless attempts to effect the climate by artificially restricting CO2 emissions.
And for that conclusion Lomborg was called a fascist and enabler of genocide because adaptation might mean that some people would have to move from islands and coastal areas.
When I read that a climate "scientist" refused to release data to someone because they felt the requester would use it to prove him wrong I knew that the "science" behind global warning was pseudoscience.
The global warming folks are nutty. But they monopolize all the research dollars, so the publish a lot of papers inside one big echo chamber.
Essentially, they don't like oil. They want to sue Big Oil, like they sued Big Tobacco. They want us all to drive a Prius.
I pretty much either ignore them or mock them.
Think of the cost.
Think of the waste.
All those climate scientists who are now having to repaint their sandwich boards with a new end date.
Control of the Peace Pavilion and breeding rights come with Climate Doom Knowledge.
This is enough to start chipping away at Rasta Dale.
I notice they reset their baseline to the late 1800s-early 1900s, still the end of the "Little Ice Age, instead of say, the 1930s, to exaggerate modern warming.
Think of those millions of people pointlessly scuttering all over Florida because of models. What a waste, and on a far smaller scale!
This latest round of hurricanes is all the fault of Obama's failed environmental policies. If he had lowered the seas as he promised during his campaign, we would be having less rain in Florida and Texas.
Many thousand years transpired prior to the industrial age, and apparently for the baseline they select one part of one century.
"One can imagine a museum curator saying "We need to relocate the Venus to the stairwell.""
And the Pluto to the dumpster.
I can't really see this affecting most people in Seattle very much.
There are many functions Climate Change serves, and the accurate modeling of complex dynamic systems is lower down the list.
It's a shared belief, lifestyle choice, social glue, totem, serious source of $$$, jobs, prestige, power and influence.
***You can't read Marx on Sundays (screw the Man, man) exactly, but you can be a virtuous green activist and live in the suburbs.
I await the enlightened insight of the usual suspects.
Ron Winkleheimer,
"When I read that a climate "scientist" refused to release data to someone because they felt the requester would use it to prove him wrong I knew that the "science" behind global warning was pseudoscience."
Oh, that's a great one. My other favorite is "Mike's Nature Trick," i.e. "Hide the Decline." This doesn't mean what some people thought. It's not that temperatures are declining, and they conspired to hide it. It's even better: The proxies we relied on for the past show a quite recent decline in temperatures that empirically has not happened - so let's just splice in the instrumental record before the trend goes wonky, and I don't think we need to call our readers' attention to that. Otherwise we might have people asking, If I can't trust the data from 1965 on, why should I trust it for 10,000 years ago?
My favorite Carlin bit.
**I should think if quite a bit of good evidence came out refuting much current climate data and science, there would be years of silence, denial, blame, anger etc. before a new cause were gradually adopted by many who share a deeper bedrock of principles from which they reason and understand the world.
And the people with political power and direct appointments would have to be dissolved or die out.
Just imagining out on what-if island over here in preparation for catastrophic events.
"“It goes to show, this carbon-budget approach is still much more, let’s say, immature scientifically than what we often assume,” Peters said."
No shit, Sherlock.
For those unfamiliar with this Carlin piece, I urge them to watch it in its entirety on YouTube.
And you can't see my inputs and math, you'll just have to trust me we're headed for disaster unless we act together now.
The same animus against our capitalist consumer economy that made Marxism so popular among our university elites a generation before?
Bingo !
The EAU email leak is what convinced me it was a scam.
The AGW myth is the religion of the left.
"What happens to a doomsday cult when the world doesn't end?
A fringe religious group called the Seekers had made the papers by predicting that a flood was coming to destroy the West Coast. The group was led by an eccentric but earnest lady called Dorothy Martin, given the pseudonym Marian Keech in the book, who believed that superior beings from the planet Clarion were communicating to her through automatic writing. They told her they had been monitoring Earth and would arrive to rescue the Seekers in a flying saucer before the cataclysm struck.
After several uncomfortable hours on the appointed day, Martin received a "message" saying that the group "had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction." The group responded by proselytizing with a renewed vigour. According to Festinger, they resolved the intense conflict between reality and prophecy by seeking safety in numbers. "If more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly, it must, after all, be correct.
prophecies, per se, almost never fail. They are instead component parts of a complex and interwoven belief system which tends to be very resilient to challenge from outsiders. While the rest of us might focus on the accuracy of an isolated claim as a test of a group's legitimacy, those who are part of that group—and already accept its whole theology—may not be troubled by what seems to them like a minor mismatch. A few people might abandon the group, typically the newest or least-committed adherents, but the vast majority experience little cognitive dissonance and so make only minor adjustments to their beliefs. They carry on, often feeling more spiritually enriched as a result."
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2011/05/prophecy_fail.html
"will have to paint their sandwich boards with a new end date."
Beyond the Fringe had a sketch on end times. Note the sign "Proteins Cause Vice."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hJQ18S6aag
"My favorite Carlin bit."
Yes, it is good. It appears as if he's saying "Everything's OK!" when he's actually saying, "The earth will do fine, we're just killing ourselves!"
"I remember reading the email chain from the East Anglia email dump. The scientists had hired this programmer to help make sense of the temperature data, and the guy wrote back that it was such a complete mess as to be worthless. Didn't stop them from basing their theories on it."
Yeah, it's remarkable. They have data that they adjusted over the years, now can't reproduce what they did, but they still trust the "data".
I particularly liked the characterization of the late 19th century as preindustrial.
"and apparently for the baseline they select one part of one century."
It's all about assuming what they purport to be proving. One thing climate demonstrates is the limits of reason.
How many times has the WaPo added "if they are right" to climate change stories in the past? Now that their preferred narrative is being questioned, the science is less than settled. And who wants to bet that that little caveat disappears when another study 'confirms' "we're all gonna die!!!"
Since we have already passed a number of supposed tipping points, both true believers and cynical exploiters desperately needed a new timetable. The warming establishment will express puzzlement at the new findings for awhile, and then embrace them as not the new normal, but the normal that always was. It's a gift.
I think that the real debate on the issues ended when they went from anthropogenic global warming to Climate Change. Global Cooling and then Global Warming were theories that could be falsified - and essentially were. They set up the null hypothesis, and it won. Anthropogenic Global Climate Change is religion, and not science, because it can't be falsified. When more hurricanes and fewer, bigger and smaller, hotter temps and more mild ones all lead to the same conclusion, you have a cult, and if enough people believe in the cult, you have a religion. But you don't have science.
"Canada Now Investigates Climate Denial
Canada’s Competition Bureau, an arm’s length agency funded by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to the tune of almost $50 million annually, investigated three organizations accused of denying mainstream climate science for over a year, following a complaint from an environmental group.
The bureau discontinued its 14-month probe in June, citing “available evidence, the assessment of the facts in this case, and to ensure the effective allocation of limited resources”,
But it will re-open its investigation should it receive relevant new information from the public.
The complaint was filed by Ecojustice on behalf of six “prominent” Canadians, including former Ontario NDP leader and UN ambassador Stephen Lewis.
It accused three groups, Friends of Science, the International Climate Science Coalition, and the Heartland Institute of making false and misleading claims about climate change, including that the sun is the main driver of climate change, not carbon dioxide, and that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
When it launched its complaint in December, 2015, Ecojustice told the National Observer it would press the Commissioner of Competition to refer the matter to the Attorney-General of Canada for “criminal charges against the denier groups”."
http://www.torontosun.com/2017/09/13/canada-now-investigates-climate-denial
I can't put my finger on the term. If you are reasonably proficient in a field, and read something in the paper about that topic, you will note many errors. Nevertheless, when reading about some other field for which you have, say, just an advanced layman's knowledge, you will believe what you read.
This is what this article suggested to me. Also: Confirmation bias. Do not believe something you read because it conforms with your beliefs.
There is really interesting research, btw, on how plants sequester nutrients in an atmosphere that suddenly has 130% more CO2 (link). (Exec Summary: They sequester them poorly) I haven't seen recent research on this lately -- most is from a couple years ago. Suddenly this all showed up again within the past month, it must've been remarked on somewhere as "new". I haven't found it, but I do recall reading an interesting discussion on this effect with respect to Goldenrod (the weed).
"Yeah, it's remarkable. They have data that they adjusted over the years, now can't reproduce what they did, but they still trust the "data"."
For me, the revelation there was the discovery that they were using the East Anglia climate database (the one that the programmer threw up his hands on reproducing, or even explaining) to calibrate the other four primary climate databases - including the two satellite based ones. GIGO, and then forcing the other databases to correspond to the Hadley CRUT Garbage Out.
@ Madison Man
The Gell-Mann Effect
Sounds like the Climate Experts finished reading Chicken Little and realized what happens when she gets all her friends to run into Foxey Loxey's den. Move the goalposts a bit and delay the inevitable.
After all, how will they continue to justify their grants and studies and programs and regulations if we've already gone over the cliff?
Alternate headline:
All those Doom and Gloom by Year XXXX predictions have come and gone. We need a reset button for the next round of dire predictions.
This "rethinking" of the data and conclusions, has all the earmarks of what Thomas Khun called jerry-rigging to keep the prevailing paradigm in tact.
The paradigm is that the increase in carbon is causing warming. That defines the experiments. That defines the science. That is the world view of the scientific group, outside of which the social (non scientific) mechanisms will either force consensus or force the heretics out.
When the routine science work starts to not support that paradigm, it gets jerry-rigged for a time.
Eventually, the explanations are all so jerry-rigged that the the paradigm falls. But this can only happen when there is another paradigm in sight to which all the scientists can go when they finally jump off the sinking old-paradigm ship.
See e.g. the Michelson Morley experiment, which finally broke the paradigm of pure Newtonean physics and ushered in Einsteinean physics.
Wikipedia says of which "[it] led to the creation of various new theories to explain the result. The most important was Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity." This explanation is wrong. It didn't lead to the creation of new theories. Einstein's special theory was already created. Rather, it led to the adoption of the new theories, which may not have ever been adopted were the pack of scientists not looking for a new place to set up shop.
You don't look for plants that your paradigm says don't exist. You don't look for new special theories that your paradigm says you don't need.
But when your paradigm is gone, then you are open to new theories.
As usual, I've never heard of any of them, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myles_Allen sounds like a legit _mainstream_ climate scientist. That is the definite impression the article itself gives me: otherwise, the quotes from the mainstream climate scientists would all be saying, "You can't take pseudo-science by deniers seriously!" Instead they say, Well, yeah, but there is science pointing in the other direction. Which is true.
Since we're here, I want to take issue with most of the commenters here. You are as wrong as the other side. (Probably wronger, as the considerable majority of climate scientists seem to be on the other side.) Just because you're generally conservative is no reason to become cheerleaders for politicized science trolls. And - just because politicized leftist science trolls have taken over the public face of climate science is not a good reason to put on your cheerleading clothes. There are plenty of climate scientist trying to get the facts straight. Some are skeptics (Judith Curry, Steve McIntyre...). Others are regular believers in AGW (Ed Hawkins, Zeke Hausfather,...), and the serious skeptics have _great respect for their work_. Some are in between (Richard Muller, Steve Mosher...) There are a lot of people out there doing science amidst all the political idiocy.
But people running around claiming fraud are just getting pulled into the non-science part of the science. Stay away.
The EPA said that if Obama's Clean Power Plan was fully implemented, the US would avoid 0.053 warming by 2100. The EPA! Why wreck our economy over that?
It is the third decimal place that really makes this sciency and scares away the deniers.
IMHO, the key to climate change is not science, but history....the history of the planet and humanity.
For instance, many alarmists talk of a "new ice age", which means that they don't know that we are currently in the middle of an ice age.
Any objective analysis of the effects of global warming on humanity would show a strong positive correlation, strong enough for me to indicate some causation.
1) The Earth is currently in an ice age called the Quaternary that began 2.5 million years ago.
2) The Earth is also in the middle of an interglacial (a period of global warming during an ice age) called the Holocene that began 12,000 - 10,000 years ago.
3) Modern man first appeared 200,000 years ago. All of our existence has occurred during an ice age.
4) For the first 195,000 or so years of our existence we wandered around in small bands of hunter-gatherers.
5) As the Holocene warmed the Earth, man discovered agriculture around 6,000 years ago. Agriculture led to surplus, surplus led to specialization, specialization led to civilization, civilization led to history. All of human civilization and history has occurred during global warming.
6) The coldest parts of Earth have few or no humans. The warmest parts of Earth have large human populations.
7) The Earth currently has a record high of humans living on it, with record lows in hunger and absolute poverty.
Global warming began long before humans could have possibly effected it, and is in fact good for humanity. There was once a pile of ice a mile high on top of Chicago, and one day there will be again.
If the average temperature has risen 1 degree (approx.) in the last seventy--according to the IPCC (and that could be 150 years if they looked further,) and the rate of increase hasn't changed (if you exclude the single year 1998,) what makes anyone think that we only have twenty years left? The 3-7 degrees/year estimates are ridiculous--and always have been. Recapping: Last 150 years? 1/150 degrees/year (observed.) You want to see that it is now three times faster? Then, 3/150=1/50 degrees per year. So it would take 150 years to reach your 3 degree target increase.
We will adapt. Climate is always changing and there is no such thing as a stable climate on this Earth. You want stable? Go to the moon. Now that is a stable environment!
0.053 degrees in a universe which is rapidly expanding from a high temperature/high density condition, creating a field of mass (and therefore energy) difficult to calculate.
Nobody can explain why our solar system is so stable as to keep us perfectly positioned in relation to the sun for our hemispheric changes in seasonal temperature, but "climate scientists" and their acolytes are certain that they've accounted for all possible factors (including an implicit attestation that there are no other factors undetected or unseen - an un-provable assertion) in determining that the carbon is the sole cause of what they claim is temporary warming.
Sorry, it doesn't pass even the simple significant digits test.
Data point: when I was in college studying economics at least 2 classes had a couple of in-depth discussion about peak oil and what that would mean for world markets. The consensus was that peak oil had probably been reached already and that if it hadn't it was only a few years away. This was a little more than 10 years ago, understand.
So, understandably, when I hear people talking about how certain they are of their long-term projections and those projections are almost entirely based on large, complex models with a large number of variables that have essentially been guessed at...well, I'm skeptical.
Even if they have the direction of every variable correct, the magnitude matters quite a lot. When mistakes are uncovered and it looks like people deliberately mid those mistakes (because they would have resulted in "wrong" answers, in terms of the result the people wanted to get) I have even less confidence.
Anyway, just my personal experience; just an anecdote.
I can't put my finger on the term. If you are reasonably proficient in a field, and read something in the paper about that topic, you will note many errors. Nevertheless, when reading about some other field for which you have, say, just an advanced layman's knowledge, you will believe what you read.
This is true and why non-scientists are more eager than scientists to accept that human activity is responsible for climate change. [BTW, who were those ecologically-clueless morons who brought about the Ice Age?]
One reason for pushing Global Warming as a mcguffin is because there are limited opportunities for lending money in the traditional energy fields. There isnt enough money in it, anymore, its not sufficiently capital-intensive. Its too efficient, in capital$/kilowatt or btu.
Alternative energy requires far more $/kilowatt.
If the economy is so advanced that it depends more on increasing debt than on making and distributing physical things, then this makes sense, for a few people anyway.
The Gell-Mann Effect
Thank you! I can stop wracking my brain now.
The consensus was that peak oil had probably been reached already and that if it hadn't it was only a few years away.
Not only have we not reached peak oil, there is increasing evidence that oil is in fact a renewable energy source, and that it is produced within the mantle.
Peak oil is a really good example of this. Someone above brought it up. When I was in school for geochemistry 20 years ago we were talking about peak oil. I was convinced and so we're the majority of the other grad students and professors. We were all wrong. And the other thing that we all ignored despite thousands of years of example was human ingenuity
MadisonMan said...
I can't put my finger on the term. If you are reasonably proficient in a field, and read something in the paper about that topic, you will note many errors. Nevertheless, when reading about some other field for which you have, say, just an advanced layman's knowledge, you will believe what you read.
Gell-Mann amnesia.
Michael Crichton: Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
But people running around claiming fraud are just getting pulled into the non-science part of the science. Stay away.
So the EAU emails and program comments are not real ?
"Not only have we not reached peak oil, there is increasing evidence that oil is in fact a renewable energy source, and that it is produced within the mantle."
That's an old theory, but I am not aware of the "increasing evidence".
MikeR,
"But people running around claiming fraud are just getting pulled into the non-science part of the science."
For the record, and I'm not assuming you were addressing me, I do think that the majority of climate scientists are working in good faith, trying honestly and hard to answer some incredibly difficult questions. I do not think it's a scam to state that the world is warming or that human activities very probably have contributed to that warming.
I do think too many climate scientists have become too wedded to the theory that CO2 buildup is not just a contributor but the main driver - and that the feeling of being under attack from the outside has led those with doubts about that (who are way, way more than 3%) to either keep their mouths shut or be very cagey and circumspect in their criticisms, lest they be seen as attacking their colleagues, or enabling those attacking their colleagues.
Greatest Carlin bit ever.
Greatest Carlin bit was how you need to give your immune system a workout or it gets weak.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=george+carlin+immune+system&bext=msl&atb=v76-6_q&ia=videos&iax=1&iai=X29lF43mUlo
Intro great too.
Not all computer models are created equally. Consider the hurricane models that have been in the news so often lately. These models are based on historical and real-time data. They're based on decades of accurate observations. They're compared to recurring hurricanes and refined as the modelers gain more knowledge based on real world events. Those are serious, scientifically sound computer models, and yet they still have a hard time predicting with any precision where a hurricane will make landfall more than a few days in advance.
Climate models don't have any of the scientific or engineering rigor of hurricane models. Their inputs are often based on proxy data such as tree rings. They can't be tested scientifically other than to run them and see how well they compare with real world measurements. They aren't validated, which would require you to start at some known time and climate conditions from the past, let the model run, and see how well it compares to what actually happened. It turns out that the previous predictions aren't accurate at all. When your model disagrees with the real world, it isn't the real world that's wrong.
What's driving the climate hysteria? Money and power. Under the guise of preventing "climate change", international bureaucracies are seeking to redistribute wealth on a scale never seen. To comply with their mandates, our economy will be weakened. At the same time, they hope to defer the hopes of the world's dark skinned people for a higher standard of living. Since poverty is one of the world's leading causes of death, keeping people poor and technologically backwards should be considered a crime against humanity. However, getting rid of a lot of the earth's population is considered a feature, not a bug among quite a few on the left.
There was a terrible Peter Fonda movie called "Supernova" in which he plays a scientist who has calculated that the sun is going unstable and is about to destroy the earth. He gets chased around by government goons trying to suppress this info. Eventually the sun does start to destroy the earth (apparently, this will happen with cheesy little gasoline bombs being flung onto tropical beaches where Our Hero is hiding out from the feds). Somehow or other Fonda is induced to take another look at his calculations, and Lo & Behold: he finds a math mistake!
That SAME DAY the sun calms down and stops flinging cheesy gasoline bombs. Cause and Effect, see, folks? All is well. Fonda (or maybe Luke Perry) gets the Girl.
I think the headline writer must have seen this flick and thought it was a documentary.
MikeR,
"But people running around claiming fraud are just getting pulled into the non-science part of the science."
Anyone claiming that computer climate models are sufficiently advanced to make useful predictions about periods more than a few days away is a fraud. Period. The fact that some of the people working with those models do not make that claim does not in any way absolve those who do. You might as well be saying you don't rob banks, so there are no bank robbers.
One of the issues with the data input is that it is just plain wrong. The Hockey Stick is an exercise in assuming what it purported to prove. It claimed that the climate was stable up until CO2 as one of the assumptions, and that year on year correlation in climate only started once CO2 to significant, therefore he could say with confidence that his algorithm didn't produce hockey sticks, no matter what kind of randomized input you put in, as skeptics claimed, just the climate. But of course Mann was wrong.
The reason that is important is that Mann gave climate modelers a false confidence in the pre-industrial climate stability, so they were taken aback by "The Pause" because they had discounted natural variability. If anybody should be mad at Michael Mann, not the director of The Last of the Mohicans, but the climate polemicist, it should be the modelers who were made fools of over the past couple decades.
BTW, if you think that it is a sure thing that the temps today are the highest that have been in the past thousand years, take out the two lines on the graph that hide the underlying data, instrumental temperature readings were not available a thousand years ago, so that is not apples to apples, and the CO2 line seems like it was only added to obfuscate the actual underlying data. But the IPCC does provide us with the third graph, which shows us pretty clearly that climate has not been stable and it is not unusually warm at this time.
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-6-10.html
Oooh look, the link goes to the IPCC!!! What a bunch of deniers they are!!!!
I do think that the majority of climate scientists are working in good faith, trying honestly and hard to answer some incredibly difficult questions.
I don't and the EAU fiasco is a big part of my doubts. I have been around science enough to know that not all motivations are on the up and up. The global warming theme got the grants flowing and the "Hobgoblins" of HL Mencken took over.
It's not the climate scientists that are the problem, it's the press lens through which we see their work that is the problem. The press has far more of an agenda than do most of the climate scientists.
BTW, if you take the Hockey Stick as gospel, and the theories about why the temperatures started to rise as gospel, then we were on a glide path into a new ice age, which would be catastrophic.
They lost me as a scientific critique (and this is the alarmists and popularizers and Al Gore types, not the scientists, who are almost always more responsible) when they conflated "the Earth being over!!!" with "things getting hotter enough that it would be quite expensive to remediate* and quite awkward for a lot of people".
The world won't literally or figuratively end with a 3 degree C increase in average temperature.
It might be very bad for a fair number of people (millions, perhaps many many millions), assuming - plausibly - rising oceans, because they'd have to move and rebuild lots of expensive infrastructure, and food supply would change comparatively rapidly.
But ... there is about zero threat to "life on Earth" or "the planet" from that; we know this because it's been hotter more than once, for long periods of time, and life continued perfectly happily.
Until people will discuss risks and costs and costs of remediation or prevention, rather than pretending Earth Will Just Die, they're not serious, and I won't take them seriously.
(* But note, per Lomborg's analysis**, that "expensive to remediate" is still orders of magnitude cheaper than the cost of "prevention".
** It's super ironic that people keep calling him a "climate denier" or the like ... because to the best of my knowledge he's never once denied what we used to call Global Warming, of that it's largely man-made, exactly the premises they demand he accept.
They're angry because he doesn't back the desired solution.)
Luke Lea said...
...Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist . Actually it wasn't the book itself so much as the hysterical reaction to it that first attracted my attention.
The "Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty" stuff was quite a reaction, the sort of reaction caused by exposure to unpleasant truths.
But Lomborg does say:
"Global warming is real - it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world.
...
I have been sceptical all along, but about the solution. Our current solution - the Kyoto approach - doesn't work.
...
I would say 90 per cent of what the [IPCC] panel tells us is right, which is pretty good for a very complex subject. But the UN-led policy solutions are incredibly poor."
You can't calculate weather because of the difference between two dimensions and three dimensions.
In 2D, something called vocticity is conserved, which means that the fluid motion stays at about the same size in its motions. That makes it easy to calculate. In fact conservation of vorticity gives one way to calculate the fluid motion numerically.
In 3D, fluid motion goes to shorter and shorter scales, and no grid resolution can calculate the motion. You need the short scale motions because they affect the large scale motions through a sort of ersatz viscosity, but you can't calculate them.
The difference is that in 3D vortices can kink and break up, and in 2D they can't.
The validity time of a weather forecast is roughly the amount of time it takes a large vortex to kink so the computation breaks down.
What kills hurricanes is that same kinking. They talk about it as wind shear killing it, but it's the kinking that causes that does it. The vortex breaks up.
Fernandinande, is that a lemur in your avatar?
I would say 90 per cent of what the [IPCC] panel tells us is right, which is pretty good for a very complex subject. But the UN-led policy solutions are incredibly poor.
I like Lomborg as well. It's revealing about the hysteria surrounding climate policy advocates when Lomborg can say things like this and is still vilified.
Maue is vilified for pointing out NOAAs position on the lack of correlation between severe weather and climate change
The IPCC says the same thing. Pielke is vilified for pointing it out.
People used to burn witches, too.
"Yes, BUT, the rate of warming is accelerating dramatically because of human behavior. At least, that is what our own Toothless Revolutionary hollers- er, I mean, explains.."
And, of course, it hasn't. We have mostly been in a lull for much of the last two decades.
BTW, if you take the Hockey Stick as gospel, and the theories about why the temperatures started to rise as gospel, then we were on a glide path into a new ice age, which would be catastrophic.
1) We are currently in an ice age, and have been for 2.5 million years. It's called the Quaternary.
2) However it is true that one day the current interglacial, the Holocene, will end and the Earth will significantly cool down. This will indeed be a significant problem.
What a joke! 1268 words and 7887 bytes to say: "The science is not settled." The article is heavily larded with dead-wood and weasel words. Paid by the word, indeed!
mockturtle said...Fernandinande, is that a lemur in your avatar?
Not just "a lemur", but a graceful, intelligent, uniquely odored and possibly toilet-trained ring-tailed lemur at Lincoln Children's Zoo in Nebraska.
"However it is true that one day the current interglacial, the Holocene, will end and the Earth will significantly cool down. This will indeed be a significant problem."
Well, there's the rub. It is fairly clear from ice core data that in its current configuration, the Earth (earth = dirt, duh) is a bistable system. It has a hot state and a cold state, and it switches between them. The question is, what causes it to switch? There are numerous proposed answers, none of them persuasive. Obviously, human industrial activity cannot be the cause of a phenomenon that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years. But yeah, unless we can do something about it, we can be pretty sure that the cold state is what's for dessert. And it does not look very tasty.
"what is actually driving the global warming hysteria?"
Control.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
Control.
Obviously, human industrial activity cannot be the cause of a phenomenon that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years.
Billions of years.
The climate models are a statistical correlation between CO2 and temperature for a very short period in geological times. They are not a scientific theory like Newton's gravity or Einstein's relativity. If indeed, CO2 was 100% responsible for the warming we've seen, you won't need a statistical model, a simple formula would track the temperature to the CO2 level. (Well, maybe a partial differential equation so you could deal with time lags, etc.)
Laboratory experiments show that if you double the CO2 in the atmosphere, you get a rise of about 1 degree C. The statistical models show more so its assumed that the CO2 is a catalyst for some other activity that generates more warming. The usual explanation is the extra heat adds more water vapor to the air which captures heat much better than CO2. I see no effort being spent to verify this hypothesis.
The problem is we don't know what are the data series input to the models. If it's just CO2 level and temperature and they both have been rising over the last 50 to 100 years, of course you're going to get a correlation. Classical statement about statistics is Correlation is not causation.
Are the differences in solar radiation modeled? The variation in solar output is about 0.1%. From 1950 to 2000+ we've had six of the twelve most active solar cycles in recorded history. The Maunder Minimum corresponds to the little ice age and the Dalton Minimum corresponds to the cold winters of the early 1800's. We technically exited the little ice age in the late 1800's so of course the temperature is climbing.
Is the H2O content modeled or even measurable? Given that when humidity gets high, it rains and the humidity varies wildly across time and across the globe, it is possible to get a decent history over the last 50 years? (This is one of the reasons the catalyst hypothesis is difficult if not impossible to verify.)
I have a background in math and statistics from a major tech school. I don't know enough about what is modeled to trust the models. I don't know how many models were tried that failed, leaving a survivor bias to the published models. The modelers all hide behind the "proprietary" wall. I do know that statistical economic models are notoriously unreliable for predicting the future. I do know that lab results would predict much less warming than the models. I know that the models did not predict the "pause" which happens to correspond to the least active sunspot cycles in 100 years. There is good reason for skepticism. If we can be skeptical about Einstein, or dark matter, or any other scientific theory, then we can be skeptical about the global warming models.
"I'd rather have questions that we cannot answer than answers we cannot question." I saw this comment on another blog discussing global warming. It is right on. Questions we can not answer are the realm of science; answers we cannot question are the realm of religion.
"I'd rather have questions that we cannot answer than answers we cannot question."
Turns out that this is a Richard Feynman quote that was not given attribution on the other blog!
"Some experts have recalculated and say we have 20 years instead of 3 in the "carbon budget" (that is, how long it will take, at the current rate of emissions, to warm the earth to 2.7°F beyond what it was in the late 19th century — the "pre-industrial" time)."
Hmmmmm....I clearly remember having discussions about global warming over 15 years ago, when it emerged in public consciousness. We were "twenty years out" from catastrophic warming according to the general scientific forecasts of the time and that's what my acquaintances were really upset about and convinced of. I said that I hoped that we would be able to examine the issue again when that time came (i.e., around NOW) and my prediction was that we would not see the predicted catastrophic warming. I promised--and meant it--that I would admit and repent if I was wrong.
So now it's "twenty years out" again.
"experiments show that if you double the CO2 in the atmosphere, you get a rise of about 1 degree C. The statistical models show more so its assumed that the CO2 is a catalyst for some other activity that generates more warming. The usual explanation is the extra heat adds more water vapor to the air which captures heat much better than CO2. I see no effort being spent to verify this hypothesis. "
Instead of "catalyst", I think that it is usually termed as feedback. It is assumed by a lot of these models that there is significant positive feedback, but the problem remains that we have had a significantly higher level of CO2 at points in our planet's past, and the Earth didn't end up like Venus, with, essentially runaway warming, which is what you get with significant positive feedback. Empirically, of course, we really don't know if the feedback is positive or negative, which would damp out the rise in CO2.
And, yes, the assumption is that the feedback is a result of interaction with water vapor. And that is where it gets really, really complicated. H2O apparently has a lot more energy states than CO2 (which my kid pointed out last year - they are working with laser spectroscopy of both with their PhD research), thanks at least partially to their different shapes H2O is more a 'v", while CO2 is more linear). Water also changes phase, from solid to liquid, and then to gaseous, at temperatures that humans live at, and that are common on Earth. Which means that it is constantly doing such, with large amounts of water in all 3 phases present at all times somewhere on the planet. Biggest concentrations of liquid H2O are, of course, the oceans, which coincidentally provide massive heat retention, which we do not fully understand yet. Plus, there are huge deep currents in the oceans that move this retained heat around the globe. Meanwhile water very often moves from gaseous to liquid in clouds, which affect the planet's albedo, as well as working as a heat blanket, depending on what type of clouds you have, and how high. And, as we all know, move large distances (as I listen to a steady rain from clouds coming off the Pacific maybe 500 miles west of here). How do you model all that accurately? We really can't come close yet, as evidenced by our inability to accurately predict weather. Which means that any attempt to model the effects of CO2 on the H2O cycle require massive assumptions and simplifications.
MadMan,
To be more specific: it's the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. The term itself was coined by Michael Crichton.
"which is what you get with significant positive feedback"
Yeah, but most people reading that, including no doubt 99.99999% of journalists, think that "positive" == "good".
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