Thats a pretty good example. I read that as a logical “composition argument” in the sense that the whole is not the same as the sum of the parts; the theory can be globally wrong even though parts of it may work, and the similarity to GR vs Newton is apparent.

This is a fun topic for me, but I don’t want to continue belaboring my points ad-infinitum. Thanks for a thought-provoking back-and-forth on this.

You make good points, but let me ask you this: consider the accelerating rate of the expansion of the universe. If you make a hubble diagram of type 1a supernovae, it’s only out at relatively high redshift that the acceleration becomes detectable. Hence the Nobel Prize this year. By your argument, we should not say that the constant rate of expansion model has been disproven, because it still matches the available data at small redshift. Is that right?

And as far as time delays between mountains and sea level, you should check out http://leapsecond.com/great2005/

Yours,

Don

Good points, all.

This is where I’m coming from: in the historic progression from the Ptolemaic solar system to Copernicus to Kepler to Newton’s Universal Gravity, I argue we can now rule out, disprove, or falsify the various geocentric models with parallax and doppler shift measurements showing the annual periodic motion of the Earth w.r.t. background stars. We can rule out Copernicus’ circular (plus a few epicycle) model on the bases of poor numeric performance. However, Kepler hit the jackpot. To this day, most ephemeris software still use his laws for detailed calculations, I think. Newton’s ideas superseded Kepler because they provide a fundamentally deeper understanding to answer the various questions unanswered by Kepler’s purely phenomenological ideas. In addition to that, Newtons UG predicted a host of other phenomenal not previously addressed (hyperbolic and parabolic orbits, center of mass at foci, etc). However, I argue that Newton did not actually disprove Kepler. In fact, part of his argument was to show that UG yielded Keplers’ laws. To justify, in part, his theory, he had to demonstrate that it actually supported the previous model! Thats hardly disproving it.

I was taught special relativity in a similar vein, that for small v/c, one gets back all the Newtonian and Galilean behavior, thus demonstrating that SR was supported by a few centuries of observational confirmations of Newton. Its hard for me to reconcile that kind of support as ‘disproof’. To be sure, Einstein himself played up the differences (of course, that was the whole point) as you do in the comments, but I think its not wrong to think of the new theory as adding refinements, “corrections” or perturbations as #81 pointed out (of course, the value of the new theory is to add whole new way of thinking, and most importantly, to give more predictions and more universal understandings).

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how its understood, just how well the predictions check out.
So you’re okay with my believing that there are fairies in my oven, as long as the cake turns out tasty.

No, at least I would not accept that as a theory myself; tastiness is a subjective measurement and we use Occam’s razor to rule out the ever-potentially-present fairy arguments (which have no predictive power. For example, I could counter-predict bad-tasting cake and search around for a snobby gourmet to claim bad taste as an outcome).

However, I am okay (but not happy) with things like “the actual slit the electron goes through cannot be known without destroying the interference pattern” and absolutely nebulous, poorly defined concepts of “wavefunction collapse when the measurement is made”, because every quantum calculation which has been tested that Im aware of has checked out to extreme precision. These are aspects of QM theory where it is often stated: there is no understanding here. Shut up and calculate. And QM a damn good theory; its been tested a hell of a lot more than GR.

That our understanding has changed doesn’t have any bearing on proof in this case.
I absolutely and utterly disagree. Since my entire point was about Newton’s *understanding* of what was going on, the fact that our understanding has changed *is* the proof in this case (although I would prefer to avoid the word “proof”).

This I do have to take exception with. As beautiful and seductive a theory as General Relativity is—and it is absolutely beautiful and one of the most wonderful achievements of humankind— all we can really assert about it is (1) its beauty & simplicity and (2) its contingent of testable phenomena and how well it performs in those tests. At no point can we argue that GR understanding is the real underlying reality. (2) is where the rubber meets the road. There’s a big difference between a new theoretical understanding that leads to new and more testable phenomena, verses a new, simpler theory that makes no new testable predictions. GR is superior to Newton’s UG because of (2) – a host of observed phenomena. Maybe we like it better because of (1) (at least I do), but (2) makes it the current winner. Thats different from something like Hamiltonian or Lagrangian formulations of mechanics— while they provide new understandings, as nice and useful as they are, we couldn’t really argue that the laws of nature were more Hamiltonian mechanics than classical.

Regarding GPS and gravitational redshift, the system relies on GR corrections for the timing difference between the Earth’s surface and the GPS satellites high in orbit, no? On the ground, the most a person could reasonably expect to see is a few nanoseconds/day difference between mountaintops and sea level. I’m not aware of a hand-held unit that is capable of displaying that small of a time difference (unless you wait around and integrate for years). Thats what I mean by outside our normal experience— while the GPS system uses GR corrections, it is difficult for us to personally tell if the redshift is even there, without using a couple of very fancy atomic clocks.

Followup on the WSJ climate denial OpEd

into the search box – published here October 7th, 2011 11:30 AM.

“That’s one hell of an R2.” Thank you for noticing. The methodology, equation, and links to all of the source data are provided so that anyone can check it. Please respond to any of the pdfs at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true if you find any error.

“…aren’t immediately obvious in the temperature record…” The planet is about 71% covered by oceans. The effective thermal capacitance of the oceans is about 30 times everything else. This huge thermal capacitance results in very slow changes to true average global temperature and reveals that reported temperature oscillations of a year or two are impossibly rapid and an artifact of the measurement. This is discussed further on page 3 of the pdf made public 9/24/11.

“…what physical mechanism are you proposing by which sunspot number drives global temperature…” It is not just sunspot numbers as others have looked at and found lacking but the time-integral of sunspot numbers appropriately reduced by the time-integral of radiation from the planet. No one else has done this. As widely reported, sunspot numbers alone do not correlate. However, the time-integral of sunspot numbers appropriately reduced by energy radiated from the planet is another matter as shown in the graph on page 14 of the pdf made public 4/10/10 at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true.

Two different mechanisms have been offered to explain what is observed. I favor that more sunspots are accompanied by more magnetic shielding from galactic cosmic rays which results in fewer low-level clouds and thus higher average cloud altitude, lower average cloud temperature, less radiation from the planet and thus higher average global temperature. Svensmark discovered that more sunspots correlated with fewer low-level clouds. The CERN CLOUD experiment, as discussed at http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/cern-experiment-confirms-cosmic-ray-action/, demonstrated that cosmic rays cause cloud nucleation. The pdf made public 6/21/11 shows that a change in average cloud altitude of only 73 meters would cause a change in average global temperature of 0.3°C.

The other mechanism that has been proposed is that sunspots influence the latitude of the jet stream. I have no insight on this. Stephan Wilde discusses it a bit at http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/dan-pangburn-cloud-altitude-change-causes-global-temperature-change/

“…claim that global temperature hasn’t increased since 2001…” There are five agencies that report temperature anomalies. I graph them all and average them to avoid bias. The average shows that average global temperature has been flat for a decade. They are graphed through August, 2011 in the pdf made public 9/22/11 at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true. Links to them are provided in the pdf made public 3/10/11.

“…didn’t waste more than a few seconds…” Your loss. I consider the rest of your comments as being ‘mired in the minutia’.

“…why CO2 isn’t warming the world…” Not understanding why something isn’t happening is not evidence that it is.

I wonder how much wider the separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising temperature will need to get for you to realize that you have been deceived.

This is a response to Sean, #100. This is offered in the spirit of friendly scientific debate. I’m not sure how to do quoting format in this forum, so I am going to try HTML tags and see if they work.

I’m going to weigh in on this on the side of our host, Phil. For me the issue is not what we mean by “wrong”, but what we mean by “prove”. Prove is a very strong word.

I agree with the last sentence. I should have written “disprove” instead of “proven wrong”. But I do think it’s critical what we mean by wrong. It *seems* to me that you think “wrong” means “can’t use, ever”. That’s not what I mean. If I have two theories that make indistinguishable predictions, I can’t tell which of them is wrong. If I want to find out which is wrong, I need to take data in a regime where I can distinguish between them. When I go to that regime, Newton’s gravity fails the test, and is therefore wrong. That doesn’t mean you can never use it, but you really should use it with the understanding that it’s only an approximation. I agree with #81, the underlying understanding of “action at a distance” has been supplanted by a field theory approach. #81 points out that this doesn’t affect celestial mechanical calculations, which is in complete agreement with what I said. I would point out though, that to make GPS work, you can’t use Newtonian gravity. That’s hardly “near a black hole”. If you have precise enough measurements here and now, you can tell the difference between Newton and Einstein, and Newton is wrong. You can only get away with using Newton if your error bars are big enough that you can’t tell the difference. Just because you can’t tell the difference doesn’t mean Newton isn’t wrong.

I believe there are very few cases in our everyday lives where a GR calculation will make a prediction that is even distinguishable at all from a Newtonian prediction.

Depends on whether GPS is a part of your everyday life or not.

Also, I may be very wrong about this, but I’m not aware of Newton making predictions of interaction of light with gravity—am I ignorant of any of his work along those lines? If so I apologize. If not, then the 1919 eclipse results don’t disprove Newton in any way that I can see.

If you try to predict the deflection of starlight with Newtonian gravity, you get about half the deflection observed by Eddington, which is consistent with GR. See Eddington’s original data. There’s a recreation of it here: http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/fair_tests_04
I used to have a link to the original data, but I can’t find it at the moment.

I think its much better to think of Relativity performing more accurately over a larger range of conditions—as an extension of kinematics to regimes not considered by Newton. If one qualifies Newton to speeds well below c and to not-so-extreme gravitational fields, he checks out perfectly. Thats hardly wrong.

There’s no such thing as “checking out perfectly”. There is always uncertainty. And let me stress again, my point is not whether you can use Newton’s Law of Gravitation to make reasonably precise calculations. Of course you can, depending on your required precision. The very fact that I need to say “depending on your required precision” means that it’s fundamentally wrong.

That our understanding has changed doesn’t have any bearing on proof in this case.

I absolutely and utterly disagree. Since my entire point was about Newton’s *understanding* of what was going on, the fact that our understanding has changed *is* the proof in this case (although I would prefer to avoid the word “proof”).

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how its understood, just how well the predictions check out.

So you’re okay with my believing that there are fairies in my oven, as long as the cake turns out tasty.

Yours,

Don

What this guy meant was not whether there was enough scientific evidence to prove or disprove climate change but that there is in fact a shoot to kill mentality that has swung so far left that it isn’t even a viable option to question Climate Change or any of the supposed sciences without getting shot in the head politically!

Simply put Climate Change has left the realm of science long ago and has had serious damage done to its validity though the falsification of data.

Unfortunately if in fact we end up being in real danger do to what we might have done to this planet you lefties just might have done us in by politically assassinating anyone that might question the validity of the science itself!

The problem with Climate Change is that there is solid evidence that shows that this planet has gone through many extreme changes over such very short periods of time that it make anything that has happened over the last few hundred years look like nothing more than slightly noises data…

Believe it or not there are many conservatives that are very concerned about what and how we might be effecting this planet….

Its awfully hard to get by the fact that our presence on this planet can be seen from orbit…

So why don’t you try some calm scientific discourse and debate the issuses instead of slinging mud everywhere you go and falsifing data???

Just a thought…

Try to read the words. He says “the science is not settled”. The science about the speed of light has suddenly become unsettled. The only connection between the two is whether or not “the science is settled”.

“When a scientist tells you ‘the science is settled’ in regard to any subject, he’s ceased to be a scientist, and he’s become an evangelist for one cult or another.”

Technically, technically you are correct about science never being settled. But at some point, when you’ve got hundreds of thousands of datapoints all pointing to the same conclusion, and no alternative hypothesis to explain what you’re seeing, then you’ve got a pretty safe bet that you’re looking at a very close approximation of reality. Of course, people like simple answers, so when they ask, you don’t say “Well, we’re 99.9999981% sure, plus or minus a few trillionths of a percentage point. Sooooooooooo we may be wrong.”
No, you say “Yes, it’s settled. For all intents and purposes, with far more certainty than we’ve ever mustered, by the standard of any sane and rational human being, it’s settled. Now, can we finally take our thumbs out of our butts and start figuring out what to do about it?”
The science may never be “settled”, but it’s damned well settled enough that idiot pundits with no scientific expertise have no chance in hell of “unsettling it” further.

AGW is perhaps the biggest, most harmful hoax ever foisted off on the public.

Foisted by who, exactly? A conspiracy of evil liberal scientists? Please explain.

A “far-right think tank”… is that sort of like “business ethics” or “jumbo shrimp” or “rap music”?

I’ve tried to picture what it would be like inside a think tank. You descend a ladder into the chamber, which is filled with an oxygen-rich, semiconducting fluid. One of the technicians tells you to relax. As the liquid enters your lungs, you struggle and gasp, but then, you find it’s breathable, like that stuff Ed Harris used in “The Abyss”. As the fluid enters your bloodstream and reaches your brain, you black out. Suddenly you find yourself in an all-white, sterile, empty room, where an attractive young lady appears and asks for your username and password. Once you provide these, she responds, “Admission granted.” The white room gives way to a vast chamber, where thousands of other users are already logged in, discussing the important issues of the day.

I want to live in your brain

Thanks. I posted because I read all the comments hoping someone would say it, but no one did. It was just 80-odd posts of mockery and willful misunderstanding.

Guys, you want to foster a more open, honest and productive debate on global warming? You do want that, right? Then stop. This. Right here. Stop.

Phil, that goes for you too.

Well put! This point can’t be made strongly enough, that if one is to argue that something else, not CO2, is causing the observed warming, one has to first come up with a mechanism which negates or counteracts the expected IR trapping of CO2—which all the physic we know tells us does occur—and replace it with the new mechanism in such a way that the good temporal correlation between temperature and CO2 is explained. Occam’s Razor favors the more simple CO2 increase (unless there’s a great deal of evidence for the more complicated mechanism).

A simple equation based on the physical phenomena involved, with inputs of only sunspot number and ppmv CO2, calculates the average global temperatures (agt) since 1895 with 88.4% accuracy (87.9% if CO2 is assumed to have no influence).

That’s one hell of an R2! Most scientists would kill to get such a high value, even for simple systems, which immediately throws up a red flag. Such a high R2 also implies that global temperature is extremely sensitive to sunspot cycles, which raises the question of why the cycles aren’t immediately obvious in the temperature record and why the greatest temperature increase would occur over a period with no secular trend in sunspot number.

So, precisely what physical mechanism are you proposing by which sunspot number drives global temperature and how are you constraining the values of that effect in your equation?

Based on your grasp of trend analysis demonstrated by the claim that global temperature hasn’t increased since 2001 I have to admit that I didn’t waste more than a few seconds trying to decipher what you actually did in your equation. However, without even checking for methodological errors, there’s physical evidence that strongly suggests your result is unrealistic. For one, if the warming observed is due to the sun rather than an enhanced greenhouse effect it’s hard to explain why nights are warming faster than days. There also has to be an additional explanation for why CO2 isn’t warming the world given the measured changes in outgoing and downwelling LW in the spectrum absorbed by CO2 (i.e. direct evidence that CO2 is changing the energy balance of the planet).

If you’re talking about the recent OPERA results, the experimenters are quite right in being cautious about making claims of superluminal neutrinos: a single measurement is flying in the face of a century of evidence to the contrary, that c is an asymptotic, limiting parameter of spacetime.

Quite the opposite for CO2-induced global warming, which is based on physics thats been established for at least a century: radiative transfer, spectroscopy, thermodynamics, etc., and a great deal of supporting evidence. All the physics we know supports the case for AGW.

There are multiple lines of measurements that provide evidence for global warming; a couple of centuries of temperature records, more recent satellite temperature observations, glacier & icecap reduction, even biological evidence such as longer growing seasons, northward migrations of many species. There are also natural proxy “records” to infer temperatures before the days of records. If you don’t trust tree-rings, there are measurements of trapped gas in glaciers, borehole heat, and stalagmite growth that all yield similar “hockey sticks” temperature profiles.

An increase in CO2 will case more trapping of re-radiated IR from the Earth. Thats just physics. That the atmospheric fraction of CO2 is increasing and is man made is a relatively easy case to make based on CO2 measurements from Mauna Loa and historic records of mined fossil fuels. Furthermore, the observed warming (previous paragraph) is roughly about what is expected from the observed increase in CO2, and the CO2 and temperature time profiles correlate very well.

No computer models are needed to make the case. And none of this is flying in the face of or is countering any established physics results.

Lastly, its a mistake to think of experimental physicists (so-called “hard scientists”) as being better scientists than climate scientists. Thats just arrogance.

the charge Muller basically makes is one [by] misrepresentation

There, I fixed that for you.

Why is it that Muller, who claims to be so disgusted by scientific misrepresentation, beats up a strawman regarding the divergence problem? The divergence problem only affects one subset of one type of proxy for part of it’s period of coverage. Corals, lake and ocean sediments, ice cores, speliothems, etc. are all unaffected by the problem and it’s the agreement between those proxies and with dendrochronologies outside of high northern latitudes that allows us to say that the divergence problem is isolated. However, Muller leads his audience to believe that the divergence problem affects all proxies (or at the very least those used by Mann and Jones) and that Briffa’s work was published in a vacuum where no other proxies validated his pre-1961 reconstruction. He asserts that it was just assumed to be so- “Is this unreliable? No. How do we know? Well, we don’t know… This justification would not have survived peer review in any journal that I’m willing to publish in.”

It’s also puzzling why he would claim that the post-1961 data came out following a refusal for the data under FOIA and the hacking (which he asserts without evidence was NOT hacking, but a leak by a member of “the team”) when the data had already been publicly available online since at least 2000. He says “Now we have the data. Now it’s been released. [showing a graph of Briffa's data] That’s the data as any Berkeley scientist would have published it.” Now to me, there’s a strong implication in that statement that Briffa didn’t publish the data like that- that it was hidden (which he explicitly states later). That, despite the fact that he did publish the data which was truncated in the WMO graph- not just once, but in multiple papers which specifically address the divergence problem and online for anyone to download.

Based on this presentation I’m forced to assume that Muller includes himself in his list of dishonest scientists whose papers he will no longer read.

‘I just usually end up puking. I don’t ever “want” to puke.”

Lol! Good point! I should have said “almost makes me feel like puking.” I don’t really ever want to puke either!