As for the science, I underestimated the maleficence of the AGW proponents who ran the IPCC (the main sections on modelling, paleo and instrument record). They conspired to thwart skeptical articles from being published, withheld data from skeptics, and generally behaved like spoiled 8 year olds. When I first read the emails the day after they were published, I thought they were fake. Nobody could be that stupid and juvenile. But I was wrong, they are real.

When Arrhenius put forward his carbonic acid theory, many denialists remained convinced of Croll’s “now discredited” hypothesis that when the northern hemisphere warmed, the southern hemisphere cooled and vice-versa. But hang on, isn’t that what’s happening now?

And so the argument rages on and on and on.

I find this attitude alarming in the extreme. “Who cares what the facts are once we get the policy implemented?!” Does this mean the policy is more important than the facts?

Do not forget the parables of Chicken Little, or of The Emperor’s New Clothes. The majority of congress does not decide what is fact. Empirical evidence decides what is fact. And the facts about the facts are there is insufficient empirical evidence to justify the policy outlined in the Global Warming Bill. Note I am not saying that the empirical evidence says there is no global warming or that it says it is not cause by human activity. I am pointing out that the EMPIRICAL evidence is ABSENT at the level where one can make far reaching and certainly economically detrimental policy. Yes many of the dissenters have an agenda. Their agenda is to prevent the Federal government from screwing us over with this loaded bill.

There is certainty that there is great political pressure to “toe the line” and “shut up if you don’t agree with the orthodoxy”. This makes the dissenters true Heritics = individuals who will be persecuted for their opposition to the orthodox view. I do wonder how long it will take before thumb screws and breaking on the rack will be used to quiet the dissenting voices. Of course burning at the stake is right out unless we can sequester the resulting CO2 produced.

Is it shocking that the remaining dissenters are all Republicans? They are the only ones who do not rely on DNC financing for their campaigns.

Cherry picking happens a lot, like talking about positive feedbacks (sea floor methane, permafrost methane) while ignoring evidence (methane is decreasing), and ignoring positive feedbacks (concentrated convection, e.g. stronger hurricanes, is a negative feedback), the greening of the Sahara will be a negative feedback, etc). Cherry picking is plentiful on the other side, for example 1998 peak warming. I think temperature has been flat from about 2002 or so, rising to 2005 and falling since. I don’t think that constitutes much of an argument for anything.

A quick note on CO2: without it the earth would be basically frozen, there would not be enough greenhouse effect to get water vapor in the air to cause the bulk of the warming. More CO2 will cause a bit more warming, the only serious question is the feedback.

A note on ice cores, they are extremely smoothed and out of sync. Each layer of ice has thousands of years of CO2 gas smoothed into it. Ice that is thousands of years old still has present-day CO2 leaking into it. OTOH the isotope-based temperature estimates come from the water itself so a lot less smoothing and no leakage. Conclusions of warming first then CO2 need to carefully checked for assumptions of accuracy. There is also little doubt that prior peaks of CO2 in the ice record far exceed the present day measurements but were smoothed out.

Note on the impending catastrophe. There is little science about how Greenland melts, just lots of anecdotes (lakes on the ice sheet, rivers emptying into tunnels, etc). Then a hand wave about how the water will lubricate the bottom of the ice sheet and cause it move faster. Faster where? The bottom is below sea level. The current fast glaciers are a tiny subset on the coast. They are not “holding back” the interior ice as if the interior ice is just slush ready to flow to the sea. It is quite solid, not slush.

Finally the most important point of all: the original author has it backwards. The current cap and trade is the last stand of the alarmist warmers and their cherry picked science and catastrophes. Warming, natural or not, is mostly a good thing and most people realize that. Most congressmen realize that most people realize that. If the current radical leadership and radical administration can’t pull this off, it is dead forever.

http://www.nzcpr.com/guest147.htm

The debate continues…

I’ve been away for the weekend, and have at last had a chance to review your last reply. I appreciate your lengthy response, but I have to say, it’s not a very good one. I know we come from similar political backgrounds, but scientifically, I’m just a lot more skeptical of authority than you are, simply because I know from experience that authority is often wrong.

I appreciate the efforts of the NAS and IPCC to come to grips with the AGW situation, but trying to give authoritative answers when there is insufficient evidence to come to authoritative conclusions is a highly misleading way to go about these things. I understand the political pressure they are under to give some kind of rational explanation for these things. I also understand that their reputation and funding often depends on telling politicians something they want to hear. I understand that they would never consciously think they are shading their recommendations in the process – just as many in the intelligence community didn’t think they were telling the Bush administration what they wanted to hear when it came to WMDs and the Iraq war. I opposed that war not because I’m a leftist ideologue, (even though in some respects, I actually am) but because I examined the evidence carefully and found it severely lacking, regardless of what the “experts” claimed.

I find myself in a similar position in regard to the AGW. It would be very convenient, based on my politics, to support the AGW thesis. I just don’t find enough evidence available to support it, and the authorities who do don’t seem entirely credible in their approach to the evidence, but seem to be part of a political apparatus that has much more to gain than lose by supporting AGW measures. I do think the evaluation of the science has been corrupted by politics in the process, and that if there were no political pressure involved, and this were being examined in some purely abstract sense, as, say, a thesis about the climate of Mars or Jupiter, there’s no way the statements by the NAS or IPCC would be anywhere near as strongly in support of AGW as they are. Why? Simply because the evidence is nowhere near conclusive, and could really swing either way.

I would certainly agree that one should be skeptical of all sides in this debate. I’ve certainly encountered many anti-AGW dissenters who are emotional, even hysterical, right-wing conspiracy buffs who distort the science and misrepresent the evidence and the statements of scientists. But frankly, such people are pretty easy to spot and disregard. But as I’ve seen all too often, even these people can still be right, if for the wrong reasons. The fact that these people are my natural political opponents doesn’t make them wrong on this issue, even if its easy to think that way. I’ve come across a great many anti-AGW sources who are highly credible, with just as strong science and climate backgrounds as the supporters, and who are clearly not motivated by hysteria, conspiracy theories, politics, or incompetence. They are very sincere scientific skeptics who simply remain unconvinced by the actual evidence. I read Will’s column, and I agree, it was just ignorant, and testimony to how most media commentators on this subject just don’t understand the science. But that in no way means that his skeptical instincts were wrong, only that he doesn’t know enough about the subject to speak intelligently about it. Many who opposed the Iraq war (like Will himself) were similarly unable to give informed reasons for it, and merely spouted slogans that agreed with their own instincts. And yet, they turned out to be right.

As for your warning about finding sources on “the internet”, what world do you live in, for God’s sake? Need I remind you that you are on the internet? Are you warning me not to take your own opinions seriously, because you are on the internet? The NAS and IPCC reports are on the internet too. Should I disregard them? There are slews of pro-AGW sites, like Realclimate, that are on the internet. Are they all untrustworthy as well? Or is it only skeptics on the internet who are untrustworthy? Doesn’t that display an incredible bias on your part? You say that my sources have fed me untruths. And yet, you don’t cite a single untruth I’ve put forward to justify that remark. Am I just to take your word for this, because you’re on the internet?

Now, I agree that I should take an intellectually conservative approach. You seem not to understand that the word “conservative” in this context doesn’t mean “bowing to authority”, but it means using only what can be considered very certain evidence when trying to prove a new theory. AGW is a new theory, a rather radical one, not a conservative one, and so it requires some very credible and highly convincing evidence to support it. I am being quite conservative in examining the evidence, and I simply don’t think the NAS or IPCC are being conservative enough. There are many issues in every aspect of the case that I don’t think they are being conservative enough about, but the most prominent is their reliance on computer models that have not demonstrated any reliable predictive power. Computer modeling can be very effective when the models can be honed by running them through an experimental system over and over again to confirm their predictive power. The problem with climate is that we can’t do that. We can’t compare these climate models to multiple earth-experiments to show whether they are true or not. Anyone experienced in modelling knows that trying to create a chaotic system model on the run in real-time to predict the future of that system is almost impossible. I don’t fault the modelers for creating imperfect models – they are doing the best they can under the circumstances. But I do fault the evaluaters of the evidence for putting much credibility in them, because their best is far from good enough.

I don’t dismiss the official reports out of hand. But it’s simply true that many of the original participants in these reviews refused to sign the final drafts, or only partially agreed with the results. There is far from a consensus on these matters. I don’t think there’s some UN socialist conspiracy involved. There’s the usual mix of human fallibility and politics producing the all-too-common result of bad advice and bad policy. Mix in with that a media propaganda war on both sides that cares very little about the truth – Al Gore himself admits that he’s exagerted the threat of AGW in order to motivate people to act – and it’s a rather polluted atmosphere in which to carefully consider the evidence.

Now, as for your remarks about the specifics I mentioned, you state:

1. Something, you don’t know what, cause the earth’s temperature to fall during the Little Ice Age.
2. That something, for some unknown reason, went away around 1800, permitting the earth’s temperature to rise.
3. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions caused a small rise in temperature from 1970 to 2000.
4. But now something else, you don’t know what, is at work, bringing temperatures down.

My criticism of this model is that it has a lot of mysterious somethings in it. In fact, it’s not a model, because it does not purport to explain what has happened; in the end, the whole thing boils down to the assertion that temperatures change for unknown reasons. But the problem with that strategy is that, in order to be acceptable, you have to demonstrate that the conventional explanation, AGW, is implausible. And it most certainly is NOT implausible.

I agree that there are many mysterious things going on in climate. Are you saying there aren’t? Are you suggesting that my not being able to say what caused the Little Ice Age means that I’m somehow scientifically ignorant? Do you know what caused the Little Ice Age? Does anyone? Do you know why it ended? Does anyone?

This only reminds us how little scientists really know about climate change. They do know it happens, and it happens a lot, but they don’t know why it happens most of the time. They have various theories, but not many that are proven to a very high degree of certainty. They don’t even know for sure what causes the major Ice Ages. And yet, somehow you want us to believe that they DO know with a great deal of certainty that the current warming over the last 30+ years is caused by AGW? How exactly is that possible? It’s certain a valid hypothesis, something to consider and scrutinize for evidence, but how can you or they be anywhere near certain about this, when they don’t know very much about what causes all the other, far more major climate changes that have occurred in the last few hundred, thousand, and even hundreds of thousands of years?

I mean, there was global warming in the earlier part of this century, from about 1910-1945, which is every bit as strong as the warming trend of the last 30-35 years. And yet, that warming was not driven by AGW, since we didn’t have enough CO2 buildup to account for that. So do we know why the earth warmed during that time? Do you? Clearly, we don’t. Maybe it had to do with the PDO. In any case, if we don’t know what caused it, how do we know what caused the most recent warming trend? Yeah, it could be AGW. Or it could be something similar to what occurred in 1910-1945. It could be something else entirely. And when this current climate trend changes, we probably won’t know why that happened either. That’s the sad truth. It could well be that warming has peaked over the last ten years, and will now decline. If it does, no one will know why, and I bet the AGW theorists will claim that when this cycle is over, AGW will continue again, and even worse? Why can they do that? Beause when we don’t know what causes climate change, any theory can claim some credibility, and ones that carry a particular emotional and political impact will be the most attractive.

And yes, of course I don’t know why the temperature rise of 1970 -2000+ has leveled off, and possibly begun to reverse. Obviously there is a cause however, since all physical events have physical causes. Whether it is temporary, and warming will resume, is impossible to say for sure. As I said earlier, Hansen himself doesn’t know what caused it, nor does anyone. However, since the AGW models themselves all predicted a continuing rise in temperatures during this time that have not come about, either Hansen’s .15/decade increase or the IPCC’s .2+, it’s an important issue. Even if AGW is the driving force, this interruption needs an explanation for AGW to remain credible as the cause of the warming it interrupts. Hansen is the one who, in defending the AGW theory, hypothesizes that the explanation is some temporary sink that will soon abate, and AGW will resume its course. But even this is purely guesswork driven by the presumption that AGW was behind all the temperature increases of the last 100 years, something still not proven.

And yes, Hansen can be mistaken, as can all scientists, and as can all collective enterprises by scientists. In fact, collective efforts are more easily mistaken, as they can multiply the errors of individual scientists. That’s why there is no such thing as “scientific consensus”. Such political inventions only exagerate the errors within any scientific investigation, rather than minimize them. Genuine science steers awary from collectivism and sticks to evaluating the evidence itself. That’s the only way to minimize collective errors. For that reason one never argues from authority in genuine science, but only from the evidence.

You base your notions of greatly increased temperatures beyond .2C/decade on exponential increases in CO2 output. But the numbers already take that into account, and the fact that there are diminishing returns on increased CO2 production. Past a certain point, the greenhouse effect of CO2 simply reaches a maximum level that it cannot increase beyond. Beyond about 600-700 PPM, there simply isn’t any more “warm” in AGW. And the pure warming due to CO2 alone, even at its max, can’t be more than 1.5C total. The rest of the estimates are due entirely to highly controversial claims of positive feedback forcings that will be driven by this small increase in temperature. The suggestion is that the earth’s climate is incredibly fragile and that very small changes in atmospheric concentrations of trace gases like CO2 can tip it into extremes. But we have no history of this to turn to. Instead, we get a highly stable “top” in all the interglacials. The only “tipping” seems to occur when the climate falls into an extended Ice Age, and none of that is at all indicated to be caused by changes in trace greenhouse gases. If the earth were prone to highly positive feedbacks, we would have many such instances over the last few million years of such runaway warming scenarios. Instead, we have none at all. Furthermore, we don’t have any solid evidence behind any of these positive feedbacks. Instead, we have good reasons to think that many of the feedbacks will actually be negative, that our climate has many mechanisms which negate greenhouse gas feedbacks and keep climate relatively stable.

So there doesn’t seem to be many good reasons to fear anything dramatic from increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Even if AGW is ocurring due to CO2 emissions, the rate of warming will fall, rather than rise, and it will peak at a low, rather than increase to some dramatic and dangerous level.

You also seem to think that scientists are rock-solid certain about all of this and lack intellectual humility. Again, I urge you, please don’t rely on the Internet for this information — read what the scientists themselves are actually saying. I think, when you do so, you’ll change your opinion.”

Actually, no, I don’t think real scientists are at all certain about AGW. I think a few very loud propagandists and environmentalists are certain, but scientists themselves simply feel pressured to make or sign political statements that stretch the envelope of their certainty. And that’s just the problem. There is very little genuine certainty going on in the scientific world, and yet the public is being led to think that there is, that it’s “case closed”. Scientists with doubts are reluctant to speak out because of this atmosphere, which has a serious effect on careers and funding.

“Another point you make is that there is some sort of emotional component driving the science. I’ll agree that there’s a strong emotional component among the peanut galleries on both sides of this issue. But not among the scientists as a group. Again, please, please, just read what the scientists themselves are saying, not the words that other people are putting into their mouths.”

Here I disagree strongly. Scientists are human beings, and very prone to emotion, despite the stereotypes. They emotionally promote their own theories, and emotionally attack theories they dislike. They use evidence in both cases, but they are not above employing the evidence with emotion. Often they let their emotions get the best of them in many debates, and they have to make great efforts to look at the evidence unemotionally. Careers and funding are often at stake, not just personal theories. We expect too much of science if we think it is some unbending, unemotional machine of evidence. We have to learn to untangle the emotion from the evidence at every step of the way. This AGW debate is highly emotional not just in the peanut galleries, but in the front ranks of science itself – as is every serious scientific debate. Pretending otherwise is to perpetuate a delusion and a stereotype about scientists as unemotional, purely objective creatures of some kind of Vulcan origin, rather than human beings with all their fallibilities and foibles. Read a biography of Newton some day.

I’m certain that, if you take the time to do some independent reading, if you dump the emotional nonsense from the advocates and go to the sources and find out what the scientists themselves are actually saying, you’ll come to the conclusion that there’s a serious issue here. What we do about it, that’s another matter entirely, and not one for the scientists to make. But we can’t make a reasonable decision about what to do if we don’t grasp what’s really happening.

I have no doubt there’s a serious issue here. But I have grave doubts that the issue will be decided by the evidence in favor of AGW catastrophism. In fact, I have almost no faith whatsoever in that conclusion. Anything is possible, of course, but the evidence to date simply doesn’t point in that direction. What I do feel certain is that if you actually examine the real evidence, and not merely invest your faith in convenient authorities who agree with your politics and policies, that you will one day see that your own faith in AGW catastrophism has been misplaced. And like the neocons who led us into war in Iraq, you will come to deeply regret that in the process you have perhaps fatally destroyed many ideas and goals you once held dear.

Similarly, you seem to think that the NAS should operate in the same fashion that a republic does. It in fact operates more carefully than that. It assembles teams consisting of eminent scientists whose expertise is most appropriate to the task. Those teams then work out their report. They do not require unanimity, but they do rely on more than a simple majority to make their determinations. The deliberations of any single group are done in secrecy, just as many of our democratic deliberative processes are done in secrecy. You are welcome to criticize their methodology but you cannot deny the established fact that it has produced excellent results for nearly 150 years.

Lastly, I observe that rejecting conclusions merely because you disagree with them is unreasonable.