So…my last post, “The Deniers’ Last Stand,” has had quite a lot of incoming traffic from ClimateDepot. I guess Mark Morano over there somehow thinks I help him make his point–which, presumably, is that journalists are biased against global warming skeptics, who are really just on a quest to uncover the truth and ask the hard questions.
Yet if Morano sees me as Exhibit A of his argument, I see him the same way in making one of mine–namely, that the Internet is just as hospitable a place for people who attack mainstream science as for those who defend it, and thus no salvation for science at a time when it is vanishing from the mainstream media. The army of climate skeptics descending here via Morano’s link, posting comments making claims that have been soundly refuted a gazillion times, amply underscore that fact.
Morano’s followers can post as may comments as they want, to be sure–I’m quite confident our own readers can and will refute them.
So Mark: Let’s keep linking to each other, and here’s to ya. Only one of us can be right about global warming–but on the web, we can both have lots of readers!
May 20th, 2009 at 11:20 am
If you’re so right about the ‘consensus,’ which you should have learned in third grade is not science, why do your posts drip with glee and fear? If so many people think the science is settled, why is so much traffic at climate depot coming your way? Using your logic, that means the consensus is that global warming is a fraud. Poll after poll shows more and more people don’t believe the hype that man is responsible and that the trace gas, CO2, which makes up .038% of the atmosphere, is causing any warming. By your logic, the consensus again says AGW is a fraud. You’d be well-suited by visiting skeptics sites to learn what the actual science is showing us instead of listening to the Inter-GOVERNMENTAL Panel on CC.
May 20th, 2009 at 11:28 am
“that the Internet is just as hospitable a place for people who attack mainstream science as for those who defend it’
How is mainstream media any better? It is less accessible to the average joe but doesn’t have any lower proportion of people attacking science. In fact, mainstream media does a rather poor job of representing science period. Take every health study being trumpeted as the cure to X in every media outlet, instead of treating it as just another piece of the bigger picture.
@Jacob – I think you have a serious misunderstanding of how consensus works. Oh and I think you better check those poll numbers again.
May 20th, 2009 at 11:40 am
That is exactly what I have experienced again and again. The internet is a great area to flog any idea, product, position and transfer the burden for intelligent thought to the consumer: caveat lector. I am continually amazed at the people who will equate any sort of challenge to majority opinion as the sign of intelligence and perception. Thus, people will believe anything as long as it includes the phrase “The mainstream, corporate media will not tell you this, but…”
May 20th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
I couldn’t resist sneaking over to peek at ClimateDepot, where a quote from Chris links back here. Maybe someone will come over and learn something!. This competes with a headline about solar panel theft fueling drug purchases, among other things. I think that to do more than collect already like minded people, this site would need work.
In my opinion, we appear to be reaching the end of a golden era in which the print media still survived but could be accessed online from anywhere. For most of us, this meant that a lot more great reporting was within our reach. For free, which is the part that is clearly needs reworking. Blogs also have had an impact. Which is how I heard of Chris (and was inspired to purchase the Republican War on Science book).
The past system, in which someone had to drive around outer suburbia delivering newspapers, even if recollected and recycled, is not sustainable. For many of us, the local newspapers obtained this way were not sources of fantastic reporting.
@Wes – Intelligent thought is not a burden to the consumer, intelligently thinking consumers are the goal, it is what we are trying to promote.
It’s complicated, but Democracy depends on it.
May 20th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Re Jacob
I am totally unimpressed with polls on the subject of global warming. Similar polls show that the majority of individuals polled reject the theory of evolution and that 25% believe the sun revolves around the earth, which belief is on a par with Mr. Jacobs’ belief that global warming isn’t happening.
May 20th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Jacob, a virus is much less than 0.038% compared to a human, by mass or length or any other measure. Call me next time you have a cold. I’ll tell you that something that small can’t possibly have an affect on you.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Ah, Science, we hardly knew ye… And now that Consensus is proudly wearing your suit, we are all supposed to clap loudly and ask no questions of the ‘guvmint man…
Ugh!
Hold tight to your cherished “man controlling the weather” belief system and enjoy the ride while it lasts ’cause REAL scientists are still out there, clobbering the daylights out of your bogus nonsense!
Real science is REAL complicated, but completely unprovable guesswork in the form of a computer program based on a ludicrous hockey stick is NOT science at all…
May 20th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Re Dave
Real scientists like James Inhofe, Joe Barton, and Michelle Bachmann,Lord Moncton, Jonathan Wells, the good folks at the George Marshall Institute, the Discovery Institute and the Heartland Institute.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
It is certainly astonishing why the United States, of all nations, has such a scientifically illiterate general population. We’ve got great universities that attract students and faculty from all over the world, more Nobel winners than any other country, and many high-tech companies which, with the government, have large research budgets. Yet when it comes to basic science issues like evolution and climate change, the public is embarrassingly stupid (hope that’s not too strong a word).
In reviewing some of the comments here and on the earlier posting, there even are ridiculous statements coming from people who really should know better. For example: water vapor is the major greenhouse gas, the earth is cooling since 2006 (or 2004, or 2002, or maybe last week), and, my favorite just a few posts above, carbon dioxide makes up only 0.038% of the atmosphere, so why should we worry?!?! (Potassium makes up 0.020% of your blood; increase it to 0.030% and you’re dead. Sometimes small concentrations matter). It takes just the least amount of effort to learn the foolishness of these and other arguments.
Much is made about how the press doesn’t emphasize enough the organized campaign by the forces opposed to scientific principles like evolution and climate change, but the opposition to science seems much stronger than that. The country is certainly more religious than others; perhaps the factors that convince people to believe in a particular religion also limit their ability to apply critical analysis (and just plain common sense) to these scientific issues.
There also is a strong anti-government, let-me-do-what-I-want-to-do attitude that permeates the deniers. (For this reason, I sometimes wonder if these deniers will next join up with the anti-vaccination bandwagon. After all, how can you trust those public health scientists?) There is a perception this is some sort of conspiracy to lower our standard of living, in spite of the fact that with improvements in energy efficiency and the proper planning it should do just the opposite.
May 20th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
“It is certainly astonishing why the United States, of all nations, has such a scientifically illiterate general population.”
It is precisely that illiteracy that makes them such an easy mark for junk science peddlers dealing in Global warming hysteria.
Please wake up and smell the science before Al Gore and his band of merry clergy impose his new religion on you.
Real science demands Skepticism, it never censors it.
Education is the answer.
CO2 is plant food.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:24 am
well okay i am going to stand up for the skeptics here.
and for the record (and Randys benefit) i believe in evolution, that the earth revolves around the sun and it is not flat, i also have a degree in science from university (not that makes me an expert but i don’t think i am a science illiterate) I also believe in preservation of the environment and efficiency.
Firstly, what is the natural variation of climate? and what has the natural variation of climate been over the last 100 years? (answer this and i believe you deserve a nobel peace prize)
Secondly, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, nobody is saying otherwise and increases CO2 will have an effect, but people who are skeptical believe this to be very small. What is not well understood is the feedback (positive or negative). This is probably where the debate should be.
Also other human activities have an effect on the climate and these should be studied further, but the IPCC seem to be under the opinion that anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are the only thing that matters.
I’m with Dave, that real science is real complicated, and it’s not something that can be resolved in the comments section of some blog. personally i believe if climate scientist were more open about their work and allowed everyone to critique their work, everyone would have a greater understanding of the science.
Enjoy!!
May 21st, 2009 at 12:41 am
LOL: Another AGW-freak “argues” without nary a fact of science, only bumper-sticker slogans. Just like the Democrats, eh?
May 21st, 2009 at 1:50 am
Gary,
Here is some education:
Look up Liebig’s Law of the Minimum and you will find out why CO2 is not plant food.
Isn’t it strange that the ‘real science’ you tout was superceded over 180 years ago?
To be a true sceptic you must desire to seek out facts – not just parrot fashionable nonsense.
May 21st, 2009 at 4:22 am
@SLC: Dang, you beat me to it. I had a long list of polls demonstrating that you can’t trust people to have a brain.
I think Chris is right though; the deniers who make money off of their position will eventually disappear. I’ve seen claims that “millions” (perhaps even tens of millions?) are spent by corporations to support the denialist camp, but over the past 6 years some corporations have been spending hundreds of millions per year to address CO2 issues (and some corporations had been working on issues since around 1992). Once governments pass serious laws to work on CO2 issues, corporations will quickly stop spending money on a denialist lobby simply because such a lobby moves from a position of hedging bets on the future to simply being a drain on the corporation’s resources.
May 21st, 2009 at 6:14 am
Chris,
Seems to me as though you don’t get the point of Climate Depot – it links to articles on both sides of the arguement and if there is anything scientifically compelling regarding climate change it is more likely to be found there than on other more polarized skeptical sites (in the same way you’ll NEVER see skeptical analysis on RealClimate). The whole problem is the polarization into factions and the inability to hold any sort of debate anymore. Stating the “science is settled” will just generate skeptics for the pure reason that people get suspicious when debate is stifled – they assume somebody has something to hide that would be unearthed by reasoned debate. We are supposed to be living in democracies not dictatorships, but to hear some politicians calling for skeptics to be locked up reminds you more of Hitler than JFK.
History keeps teaching us that science cannot be driven by consensus (as Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein et al had to fight to prove) and if conducted properly scientific analysis may disprove any theory, no matter how apparently water tight, in time. As Einstein said: “A thousand experiments will not prove me right, but one experiment may prove me wrong”.
A little more humility from the “science is settled” brigade might be in order, unless you really believe you are better scientists than Mr E.
Oh, and you can chalk this visit to Climate Depot as well – your gratitude accepted.
May 21st, 2009 at 6:24 am
Eamon,
A nice piece of misquoting to prove an arguement. Who is to say CO2 isn’t the minimum as we are in CO2 starvation compared to eons past where plant life was much more abundant? If CO2 doesn’t help plants grow why do commercial greenhouses pump the stuff in there at over 1000 ppmv? Why has the coverage of the Earth’s surface by plants as measured by satellites increased 6% as CO2 atmospheric concentration increased, despite deforestation? Why do plants stop growing when starved of CO2 below about 180 ppmv?
I wouldn’t attempt to refute Liebig’s Law of the Minimum, but that law cannot refute the role of CO2 in plant growth – you cherry pick methinks.
May 21st, 2009 at 7:28 am
Here’s the Majority Report from the only poll that counts.
California Proposition 7 was a statewide ballot proposition that appeared on the November 4, 2008 ballot in California. It was defeated, earning 35.4% of the vote.[1]
Had Proposition 7 been approved, it would have required California utilities to procure half of their power from renewable resources by 2025. It also would have required California utilities to increase their purchase of electricity generated from renewable resources by 2% annually to meet Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) requirements of 40% in 2020 and 50% in 2025. It would also have allowed penalties for non-compliance to be waived. Under current law (AB32 – which was never put to a popular vote. The state legislature which routinely polls lower approval ratings then toe fungus sprang this in midterm, not a single soul of them ran for election based on fighting climate change), investor-owned utility companies must comply with an RPS of 20% by 2010 and there is no waiver for non-compliance.
California Proposition 10, also known as the California Alternative Fuels Initiative, is an initiated state statute that appeared on the November 2008 ballot in California. The measure failed, winning a 40.4% “yes” vote.[note - This is T (Bone) Pickens bill. It was heavily financed, out spending the opposition $20mil vs $125K ]
Proposition 10 was one of two ballot initiatives focusing on alternative fuels to appear on the November 4 ballot in California. The other was Proposition 7. Both failed.
Everytime Global Warming Legislation was put to popular vote it lost by wide margine in California.
Tuesday the good people of California had a chance to give a collective critique of California’s government and the legislature’s surprise focus on climate.
My vote had the force of five, due to low turnout. So much for consensus.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:04 am
You do know what Liebig’s Law of the Minimum is John?
May 21st, 2009 at 9:55 am
Re John Thorpe
Mr. Thorpe raises an interesting point. However, let’s expand it from the issue of climate science to other issues. By the logic of Mr. Thorpe, we should be encouraging debate on such topics as evolution vs creationism, heliocentric solar system vs geocentric solar system, whether HIV is a principal cause of AIDS, whether cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer, whether CFCs are a major contributor to ozone depletion, whether cold fusion is a real phenomena, etc.
Mr, Thorpe raises the Galileo gambit. Obviously, he is unfamiliar with the fact that the opposition to Galileo came not from the scientific community but from the Roman Catholic Church.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:19 pm
John Thorpe, you raise the point about scientific consensus and the role of debate in the scientific community. Let me explain how this process works.
Nothing in science is ever set in stone; everything is subject to revision. However, there’s a range of degrees of confidence in various scientific beliefs. For example, Newton’s Laws (outside of relativistic and quantum mechanical situations) have been applied zillions of times and they have worked very well, so we have great confidence in those conclusions. On the other hand, dark energy is a concept that is still quite young and only partly tested, so we have little confidence in that idea.
Every idea in science starts off as a wild, crazy theory with little support, and then goes through a maturational process as scientists poke around with it. In some cases, such as cold fusion, it gets blown out of the water and is tossed onto the scrap heap. In other cases, it undergoes modification and eventually becomes accepted in some modified form. In a few brilliant cases, such as special relativity, it works so well that it is eventually accepted without much modification at all.
Nowhere in this process do we draw a line and declare that “the debate is officially over”. However, as a hypothesis gets poked at and prodded by many different scientists, modified, and improved, we develop greater and greater confidence in it. The hypothesis is always open to rejection if some new discovery clobbers it — but if there have been many attempts to clobber it and all have failed, scientists’ confidence in it grows.
The basic AGW hypothesis was first cooked up more than a hundred years ago. Until recently, it was considered a hypothetical possibility unsupported by evidence. It was only 20 years ago that somebody seriously claimed that there was convincing evidence in support of the hypothesis. In other words, for more than 80 years, scientists regarded the hypothesis as devoid of convincing evidence. That in itself should indicate to you just how careful scientists are about these things.
But the earliest claims that AGW had supporting evidence were interesting enough to justify, in the minds of most scientists, further investigation. Not many scientists were willing to accept the AGW hypothesis in the 1990s because there wasn’t (in their view) enough evidence to support it. But lots of scientists began poking around, gathering data, testing facets of the idea. This was no small-scale effort; as evidence grew, hundreds of scientists got involved in the problem, poking at it from hundreds of different angles. By the turn of the millennium, a goodly amount of evidence in favor of the hypothesis had been put together.
However, scientists are a careful lot, and most scientists still didn’t buy into the AGW hypothesis. The transition took place during the period from 2000 to 2005. The evidence just kept piling up and more and more scientists came to the conclusion that the evidence was convincing. By 2005, a supermajority of scientists had come to accept the basic AGW hypothesis.
Since then, the evidence in favor of the hypothesis has continued to pile up. There has been intense debate, but most of it centers on detailed mechanisms, not the basic hypothesis. In other words, scientists are still arguing ferociously about AGW, but they’re not arguing about WHETHER it’s taking place; they’re arguing about exactly HOW it’s taking place and exactly HOW QUICKLY it will grow and HOW SERIOUS the effects will be.
Yes, there are respectable scientists who remain skeptical. There are always respectable skeptics. Science cherishes and honors skeptics, because it respects the role they play in keeping science honest. But the existence of skeptics does not mean that there are reasons for non-scientists to doubt the conclusions of the supermajority of scientists. You can still find plenty of people who think that the Holocaust never took place, but that doesn’t cast doubt on the question, does it? There are plenty of people who claim that 9/11 was an inside job, that the moon landings were staged, that vaccines cause autism, and that evolution is wrong — but the existence of these skeptics does not cause you to doubt these points, does it?
The science really has been gone over in great detail. No, the scientific debate is not over, and it never will be. But the degree of confidence that we have in the AGW hypothesis is now great enough to justify serious political discussion of what to do about it.
May 21st, 2009 at 1:58 pm
AGW is a hoax and has become the political agenda for the Democratic
Party and their environmental extremist supporters. There is no convincing
evidence for it. The originator of the AGW myth is the United
Nations. They have undiluted power to deceive the public. They are lawless,
corrupt, anti–God, and an utter fraud. They are using the delusion
that man’s use of fossil fuels causes global warming in order to frighten
people into allowing them to rule the world, because any group that
controls carbon, controls the world. AGW is a hoax, religion, junk science,
and is worthless in its predictions of future global temperatures. It is
as scientific as astrology!Edward F. Blick, Ph.D.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/GlobalWarmingMyth.pdf
May 21st, 2009 at 2:49 pm
My whole problem with so much of the AGW debate is this – Climate science has come to a much debated public consensus on the issue, which is as close to certainty as we’ll eve rget in a sceintific setting. The public debate has happened in the peer-reviewed sceintific literature for several decades, even if it appears to be “recent” in the larger public media realm.
The problem is, you can’t know with complete certainty beforehand what will happen as a result of AGW, so policies have to be developed and implemented within a construct that accepts risk – both the risk of uncertainty, and the risk of over reaction or reach. Put another way, if we wait until the science is “settled” enough to know absolutely whether AGW is real, we may well all be dying. That’s extremely risk tolerant behavior is one sense (keeping the economic and envrionmental status quo hoping AGW isn’t true) and extremely risk averse in another sense.
May 21st, 2009 at 2:50 pm
“The transition took place during the period from 2000 to 2005. The evidence just kept piling up and more and more scientists came to the conclusion that the evidence was convincing. By 2005, a supermajority of scientists had come to accept the basic AGW hypothesis.”
I take it you define a “supermajority” to be 60%, which is roughly the proportion of climate scientists supporting the IPCC consensus, as opposed to 20-30% sceptical. That’s according to actual surveys (e.g. von Storch), as opposed to unsupported assertions by activists.
Similarly, it is often asserted that the evidence for AGW keeps piling up, but I’ve yet to find where, or what the evidence actually is. Nobody seems to know.
When asked, most people offer argument from authority, citing “thousands of scientists”, or the IPCC reports. I’ve read the IPCC reports, and they don’t actually contain very much, if any. Mostly it’s argument from ignorance: the computer models we wrote (assuming it was CO2) can’t explain it by anything other than CO2, therefore it is not *possible* to explain it by anything other than CO2. Other people cite extensive (and often dubious) evidence of 20th century warming, without seeming to realise that this in no way demonstrates it to be anthropogenic. This includes all those citing the short-term warm weather events hyped by the media – especially the melting poles (seemingly unaware that one of the poles isn’t melting, and that NASA climatologists have said that the other is largely due to changed wind patterns driving ice south into warmer waters.). A few cite the physics of IR being “trapped” by CO2, without either understanding that sceptics generally don’t dispute this part, or being aware that this isn’t how the physics of the greenhouse effect works, even according to the IPCC. CO2 on its own would cause 1.1C/2xCO2, or about half a degree C per century, which would be undetectable in the background noise. The dispute is about the feedbacks that are predicted to magnify this tiny effect over the coming century, but mysteriously didn’t over the last one.
(Incidentally, the greenhouse effect works because of air pressure changing with altitude. Rising air expands and cools, descending air is compressed and warmed, like in a refrigerator. The temperature is controlled by air at the average altitude of IR radiating direct to space tending towards the grey-body equilibrium temperature of -24 C, but the reason the surface is warmer than that is down to pressure. See Soden and Held 2000, as referenced by the IPCC.)
So I’d be delighted if someone who knew what they were talking about were to refute all of us sceptical physicists and actually present the actual *evidence* of AGW that there are apparently such huge piles of. Please.
May 21st, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Re Harry L
Whackjobs like Mr. Harry L are all too typical of deniers. I note that Mr. Harry L, like his buddy, Mr. Edward F. Blick, is also an evolution denier.
Re A random passing physicist
I assume that Mr. random is referring to Hans von Storch. One should provide sufficient information in addition to someones’ last name, in particular as there appear to be several individuals named von Storch. At any rate, a link to a note on his survey is attached. It should be noted that there were actually 2 surveys done, one in 1996 and the other in 2003. The survey done in 2003 is highly suspect, as pointed out by several commentors in the note, as it was an internet survey and subject to distortion by deniers like Mr. random. In any case, the results of the 1996 survey in no way dispute Mr. Erasmassimos’ claim as he stated that skepticism was wide spread at that time.
Another issue is the identification of who is a climate scientist and their possible conflicts of interest. All too many of the skeptics are associated with energy funded institutes like the Heartland Institute and the George Marshall Foundation, or right wing think tanks like the Discovery Institute (also a purveyor of evolution denial, and Holocaust denial) . There is also a tendency to identify weathermen as climate scientists (e.g. Anthony Watts), when, in reality, they have not a shred of competence in the discipline. All too many of the commentors on various blogs are unable to discern the difference between climate and weather.
http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2007/08/climate_scientists_views_on_cl_1.html
May 21st, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Mr. AARP (please excuse the acronym; you’re welcome to reciprocate by calling me “Eras”), I’d be delighted to have a serious discussion of the science. Let’s see if we can’t start by establishing the basics on which we agree. I’ll offer four statements that I think you should have no problem agreeing with; they can provide a foundation for further discussion.
1. CO2 concentrations have increased from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution to about 380 ppm now.
2. Global temperatures have increased by about 1ºC during the same period, with most of the increase in the last 100 years.
3. The rate of change in global temperatures during this period is peculiarly high.
4. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere should lead to increasing temperatures (you’ve already noted this, and we can deal with the magnitude of the relationship next.)
Does that provide us with a solid foundation on which we can agree for starters?
May 21st, 2009 at 4:56 pm
SLC Says: Whackjobs like Mr. Harry L are all too typical of deniers. I note that Mr. Harry L, like his buddy, Mr. Edward F. Blick, is also an evolution denier.
I’m a whack job?Excuse me but the last time I checked the MAJORITY of humans believe in GOD as the CREATOR.Your evolutionism is nothing more than a theory.
Creation has the LIVING WORD OF GOD as testimony to our CREATION.
May 21st, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Americans Largely Silent as Their Nation is Systematically Destroyed
They watch Obamanation grow in unbridled power
Americans Largely Silent as Their Nation is Systematically Destroyed
By JB Williams Tuesday, March 24, 2009
After trillions in taxpayer debt has been foolishly poured into the bottomless black hole of leftist wealth redistribution programs, under the guise of economic “stimulus” or “stabilization” legislation, the new “ONE World” government running Washington DC announces; Geithner, Bernanke Call for New Wind-Down Powers After AIG… and the people still sit silent as they watch Obamanation grow in unbridled power.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/site/article/americans-largely-silent-as-their-nation-is-systematically-destroyed/
May 21st, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Well, there’s one thing we can say about HarryL: he has no qualms about mixing politics AND religion with his science!
But SLC, I disagree with you on the question of how representative of deniers HarryL is. I have corresponded with lots of deniers and HarryL is definitely an outlier.
May 21st, 2009 at 5:24 pm
@Erasmussimo: Nothing in science is ever set in stone? Huh? Science tells us the Earth orbits the Sun. It tells us how many miles it is at any given point in its orbit. It tells us the speed of light. Science tells us quite a few things and they ARE set in stone. GW is a theory. AGW is a hypothesis in search of a theory in search of facts. More and more IPCC scientists are turning skeptical as new science is actually conducted, studied, and researched.
You talk about increasing CO2 and temperatures and a correlation. Based on what? When record-keeping began? About 100 years ago and only in a few places? Are CO2 concentrations measured today by ice core samples, from a measuring station, from weather balloons, or from the troposphere?
The only reason the AGW fever has gripped the media so fervently is because the enviro-whackos have finally found a cause that will fix all the problems they’ve been railing against for the last few decades. It’s perfect, fits any scenario, and can be blamed for any problem. No questions asked. More and more, our so-called understanding of GW causing [insert catastrophe here] is being disproved by actual research and study. Computer models keep coming up short in their predictions, the earth has been in a cooling trend for the last decade (isn’t it supposed to trend upwards with all this new CO2?), and once again the hurricane season is expected to be….normal.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to believe in something so much it blinds you to universal truths. Unfortunately, we call that religion. Not science.
May 21st, 2009 at 5:40 pm
[...] and wholly un-necessary homophobic undertones) to Chris Mooney’s rather unusual “Thanks for the Traffic, Morano” [...]
May 21st, 2009 at 5:57 pm
1. CO2 concentrations have increased from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution to about 380 ppm now.
And at some point in the past, all of the world’s carbon would have been in the gaseous form. So how did the Earth escape the dreaded tipping point which would cause a runaway greenhouse effect?
2. Global temperatures have increased by about 1ºC during the same period, with most of the increase in the last 100 years. And global temperatures decreased by about 3ºC from the medieval optimum leading into the industrial revolution. Correlating with sunspot activity. Correlation isn’t causation.
3. The rate of change in global temperatures during this period is peculiarly high. No actually not. The global warming industry has been trying to fiddle with the record, using tree rings and fudge factors to pretend that today is hotter then any other. Who even uses that sort of language?
“Today is the hottest climate ever.”
What a piffle. The bubblegum is still stuck on the face of the adolecent self absorbed navel gazers who invented that phrase, which includes the entire roster of dendroclimatologists.
It belongs in the dustbin with the other historical conceits; the Earth revolves around the Sun, the Sun is the center of the galaxy, the Milky Way is the center of the universe, all variations on the immature theme that “the world revolves around me”.
4. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere should lead to increasing temperatures (you’ve already noted this, and we can deal with the magnitude of the relationship next.)
Or it could be that increased temperatures lead to increased co2 in the atmosphere.
Competing theories demand investigation of the evidence.
As I noted above, at some point the planet was much hotter, molten even, such that carbon and water would have had to be in the form of a gas. You agree yes?
Here we are, eons later, the waters condenced and carbon sequestered naturally through biological processes. The planet isn’t molten anymore. Atmospheric co2 levels dropped in response to cooling. CO2 didn’t cause that cooling.
So at least one line of evidence supports my contention. We are here.
What have you got to show that it works the other way around, that co2 controls the temperature, Eras?
May 21st, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Jacob, I re-assert that nothing in science is ever set in stone. Everything is subject to revision. Back in the 30s, when the quantum revolution got rolling, physicists ran into a nasty little problem: quantum mechanics invalidated EVERYTHING in physics. All the laws of physics as they were known were shown to be approximations rather than fundamental laws. Physicists developed a desideratum called the Correspondence Principle that asserted that all of their old laws (”classical physics”) had to have corresponding versions in quantum theory. They then spent years hammering out the correspondences. But don’t underestimate the fact that quantum mechanics did, in principle, invalidate the entirety of classical physics. And there continue to be new problems. For example, one of the great principles of physical science was the conservation of mass. Einstein destroyed that and replaced it with the conservation of mass-energy. Then black holes came along. They don’t destroy mass-energy, but they do pose all sorts of serious problems with other supposed invariants.
Furthermore, EVERY statement of causality in science is a hypothesis. Theories are not “more correct” than hypotheses — they are conglomerations of hypotheses, often involving shifts in scientific point of view. And facts — well, there are observations, but no absolute facts. So calling AGW a hypothesis is perfectly correct — but you must realize that special relativity is a hypothesis, too.
“More and more IPCC scientists are turning skeptical as new science is actually conducted, studied, and researched.”
I’d sure like to see a source for that statement.
CO2 concentrations are measured in a variety of ways. Are you challenging any particular methodology? If so, please present your challenge.
” More and more, our so-called understanding of GW causing [insert catastrophe here] is being disproved by actual research and study.”
Again, I’d like to see a source for that statement.
” the earth has been in a cooling trend for the last decade”
{sigh} Climate is not weather.
May 21st, 2009 at 6:09 pm
James, we crossposted, so I’m answering your comment here. I’ll suggest that you follow the discussion between AARP and myself as it develops — that should clear up some issues for you. However, your first point concerns what is called the Hadean Earth and is unlikely to be addressed in the discussion between AARP and myself. This is a difficult subject because we know little about the state of the earth 4 billion years ago. You might want to start by looking at the Wikipedia entry for the Hadean eon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadean
May 21st, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Re James Mayeau
1. What does the ambient temperature of the earth 4 billion years ago have to do with anything? 4 Bilion years ago, there wasn’t any life on earth.
2. Just for the information of Mr. Mayeau, I suggest he consider the conditions on the surface of the planet Venus, which has an atmosphere largely made up of CO(2). The ambient temperature on Venus is much higher then would be expected for a planet having a similar orbit around the sun. Venus is a perfect example of a runaway greenhouse effect.
3. Since Mr. Mayeau bad mouths climate scientists who accept the theory of global warming, it is quite appropriate to bad mouth some of the skeptics. Thus skeptic Fred Singer also has rejected the association of CFCs with ozone depletion (when he wasn’t denying that ozone was being depleted) and has also rejected the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Skeptic Roy Spencer is also an evolution denier. Skeptic Anthony Watts is also a CFCs/ozone denier. Many of the skeptics at the Discovery Institute are evolution deniers, HIVAIDS deniers, and, in the person of the director, John West, Holocaust deniers. Others, such as Pat Michaels are shills for the Heartland Institute, which was founded for the express purpose by tobacco companies to deny the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
Re Erasmussimo
Actually quantum mechanics is probably the most counter intuitive theory ever proposed in the history of science. A few quotes suffice to hammer home this point.
Richard Feynman: If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.
Steven Weinberg: Quantum mechanics is a totally preposterous theory which, unfortunately, appears to be corrrect.
Albert Einstein: I don’t think that god plays dice with the universe.
Lawrence Krauss: Nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Contemplation of quantum entanglement, the two slit problem and the mathematically invalid renormalization procedure of quantum electrodynamics should convince anyone that quantum mechanics is weird. The reason why physicists take this theory seriously is because of its enormous predictive and explanatory power (example: the computation of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron agrees with the observed value to 10 significant digits).
May 21st, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Erasmussimo,The problem with society today IS the fact that religion has givin way to the liberal revival which has wrought moral decay of our political system,i.e. the financial institutions stealing of the worlds wealth.
AGW is just another vehicle to continue the transfer of wealth to the left.
You see,it shouldn’t be this way,mixing science and politics.But our religous decay has brought us to this point.It’s all written in the Bible if you take the time to read it.
May 21st, 2009 at 8:25 pm
SLC,
Yes, that’s Hans von Storch, who is incidentally a believer in AGW. To my knowledge, all the surveys done so far are suspect. And are just as subject to distortion from supporters as sceptics, of course. But they do at least *attempt* to check whether the assertions are true. If you have a better source – especially a source of the prominent claims about ‘consensus’, I would welcome adding it to my list. My query/comment was over the definition of “supermajority”, which as I said and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, is presumably about 60%.
Rather than sink to the level of give a list of environmental/leftist interest groups funding pro-AGW advocacy, I would refer you to the definition of the ad hominem fallacy. I specifically asked for the scientific evidence, not for the affiliations and other beliefs of the researchers. Sir Isaac Newton was a Creationist, and a heretical one at that, but I judge the theory of gravity on the evidence, not the beliefs of the author. I’m pleased, however, that you continue to use this argument in place of any scientific evidence, because it is an easy win every time for my side.
The difference between climate and weather is a much more interesting question. The claim is that all the ‘noise’ has high frequencies, and that there is no ‘weather’ on decadal, centennial, or longer timescales. I have yet to see anyone exhibit the demonstration of this of the calculation of the threshold. There is no a priori reason to suppose that longer term variations, such as the 60 year Pacific Decadal Oscillations, are not “weather”.
Eras,
Happy to oblige.
1. Yes, agreed. And no doubt you would also agree with me that CO2 has fallen irregularly from 7000 ppm in the Cambrian period, to around 1000 ppm through much of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, and is currently at an unusually low level, considered on geological timescales. You’ll agree that life managed just fine through almost all of the period.
2. The global temperature during the early part of the century is unknowable, as we only have data for a small subset of the world, of highly suspect quality. But I don’t have any reason to believe it hasn’t risen, either, and there is good evidence for warming, without necessarily being able to quantify it. The temperature anomaly locally certainly goes up and down over long intervals, and it is reasonable to suppose the global temperature anomaly does too. Correlation, of course, does not imply causation. Incidentally, the temperature goes up and down a lot more than a degree every summer/winter, every day/night. The smoothed temperature *anomaly* is a different quantity entirely.
3. No, I don’t think so. Not on a timescale of centuries and longer. I’d like to see some evidence of that, please.
If we struggle to accurately measure the global temperature now, with satellites, how can you imagine we can do so with a handful of trees? (And that’s besides the peculiarities of Bristlecones or the flaws in the Hockeystick maths.)
But what little data we have, what with Bond/Dansgard-Oeschger events, suggests that it is similarly variable at least locally.
4. There are many physical effects that would in principle contribute to temperatures, I’m happy to agree that CO2 is one of them.
SLC, (again)
2. Venus isn’t an example of a “runaway” greenhouse effect, it’s an example of a perfectly normal greenhouse effect appropriate to a planet with an atmosphere 92 times the mass (and hence pressure) of that on Earth. The fact that it is mostly CO2 is not particularly relevant. The other pertinent fact is that it has nearly opaque high level clouds roughly 80 km up from which IR radiates to space. The temperature up there is roughly what you would expect from the orbit/albedo, and indeed not dissimilar to Earth. (Because of the higher albedo, Venus is naturally a little cooler than the Earth.) Below that, the dry adiabatic lapse rate of roughly 10 C/km will increase the temperature of any lump of atmosphere descending to the surface by about 80*10 = 800 C to give a very hot surface temperature. So long as enough radiation gets through to the surface to drive convection, the atmosphere of Venus will work exactly the same way Earth’s does, or rather, would do if it was more than 90 times thicker. If it was thick clouds on top of pure oxygen/nitrogen, instead of CO2, it would behave the same way.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Well, rats, AARP. I was hoping we could proceed in a nice, step-by-step manner, but it appears that our agreement has already gone off the rails. Let’s see if we can’t sort out the precise nature of our differences.
Before we even get started, you raised a question about the difference between climate and weather:
“The claim is that all the ‘noise’ has high frequencies, and that there is no ‘weather’ on decadal, centennial, or longer timescales. I have yet to see anyone exhibit the demonstration of this of the calculation of the threshold.”
A simple basis for this is provided by the relaxation time for the earth’s temperature if we consider it as just a heat reservoir. The heat capacity of the hydrosphere is about 6 x 10**24 J/ºK; the earth radiates energy at a rate of about 1 x 10**17 W; hence it would take about 6 x 10**7 seconds (about two years) for the earth to cool by 1ºK if the sun stopped shining. Since we do not calculate perturbations to the system anywhere near so dramatic, we would expect much longer time periods to be required to adjust to new conditions. For example, a forcing of about 100 W/m**2 — still considered gigantic by any standard — would take about 20 years to manifest itself in temperature change. That’s why climatologists think in terms of decades when considering climate change.
We run into serious trouble when, in agreeing with me that CO2 concentrations have increased, you insert the additional statement that life has done just fine during changes in CO2 concentrations much greater than what we’re currently experiencing. You’re absolutely right, of course — but the point is irrelevant to any policy discussion regarding AGW. If we produce a policy that maintains life on this planet but reduces our standard of living to half its current value, life will be just fine, but I don’t think we’ll be. Let’s defer that discussion until we have gotten more the foundation in place, shall we?
2. You raise a lot of quibbles about the second point, but I think we’re still in overall agreement on the basic point.
3. You disagree that the rate of change of temperatures in this century is peculiarly high. But we have the fact that the current rate of change is at least 1ºC per century, and we have pretty good temperature estimates going back through the Holocene, and nothing during that time comes close — except for the Younger Dryas warming, which *may* have been as rapid as the current temperature rise. Let’s stipulate that it was just as rapid. So we have just two events in the last 10K years — I’d call that pretty peculiar. You mention the Bond/Dansgard-Oeschger events, but those are warmings from glacial conditions. It might well be that ice ages have short, rapid warmings, but we’re not in an ice age so I don’t think that the Bond/Dansgard-Oeschger events are relevant to our current situation.
4. We agree that CO2 *could* cause warming, and that there can be other causes of warming as well.
I’ll also take a moment to query your comment about Venus that ” If it was thick clouds on top of pure oxygen/nitrogen, instead of CO2, it would behave the same way.” I assume that you are basing this on the assumption that it’s the thick clouds that provide the selective transmission of different wavelengths of radiation, and if so, I agree. That is, if you had a thick upper atmosphere layer of water vapor, CO2, methane, or some other greenhouse gas, then it wouldn’t matter what gases were at the surface. Where we might disagree is if you maintain that the upper atmosphere clouds are optically insensitive to wavelength.
Anyway, so let’s look at what we’ve got that we can agree on: we agree that CO2 concentrations are increasing, and that CO2 *could* be causing an increase in atmospheric temperature. We agree that the temperature is in fact rising. You disagree that the rate of temperature increase is peculiarly high — we need to sort that out. I will concede that the theoretical rate of temperature increase due solely to CO2 greenhouse effect is less than half what we’re actually seeing — that is, there is more going on here than just the direct effects of the CO2 increase.
I’ll pause at this point and let you respond before proceeding to the next point, which addresses the discrepancy between the theoretical increase in temperature and the larger observed increase in temperature.
May 22nd, 2009 at 2:10 am
This is a difficult subject because we know little about the state of the earth 4 billion years ago. You might want to start by looking at the Wikipedia entry for the Hadean eon:
For the purposes of refuting AGW we know all we need to know about the state of the Earth 4 billion years ago.
We know the proportions of atoms making up the Earth’s crust, oceans, and atmosphere, today. We know the proportions of meteorites and solar dust, how much nickle or ice, that is swept up by Earth’s gravity field over a certain amount of time. Since there is no mechanism for evacuating carbon from the planet, we can deduce that these constituent amounts of material, percenages of oxygen, carbon, silicon, iron and the like, haven’t changed appreciably since the era of bombardment.
Which brings us to SLC question 1 & 2, which I will answer together.
1. What does the ambient temperature of the earth 4 billion years ago have to do with anything? 4 Billion years ago, there wasn’t any life on earth.
2. Just for the information of Mr. Mayeau, I suggest he consider the conditions on the surface of the planet Venus, which has an atmosphere largely made up of CO(2). The ambient temperature on Venus is much higher then would be expected for a planet having a similar orbit around the sun. Venus is a perfect example of a runaway greenhouse effect.
If co2 were the cause of warming instead of the result of warming, then all of the Hadean Earth’s atmospheric Carbon would still be hanging in a thick fog, maintaining Hadean Earth’s scalding temperature into perpetuity, just like Venus.
The fact it is not tells us one or two things, either the combined carbon content of the Earth in a gaseous state is too low to reach a runaway greenhouse tipping point, or co2 isn’t the driver. Take your pick.
The ozone hole/CFC connection has math problems. The numbers don’t add up.
Roy Spencer can’t do anything about Greenpeace and the ecoscientists who worked up the ozone depletion theory (many of whom are now working the global warming) not knowing math.
May 22nd, 2009 at 2:41 am
@Philip H:
What would constitute ‘overreacting’ (aside from cutting most power production in a single day and shutting down cities)? One way or another, sensible moves to curb CO2 emissions will have positive effects – one of which ideally would be a reduction in fossil fuel dependence; this is a good thing because fossil fuels are a limited resource. I cannot imagine fossil fuels being completely removed, but decreasing usage of fossil fuels in the long term can only be a good thing.
May 22nd, 2009 at 8:34 am
Re James Mayeau
Relative to CFCs and ozone depletion, Mr. Mayeau is apparently a little behind the curve.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2009/05/10/2003443214
As for what happened to the CO(2) in the primordial earth, the answer is obvious. Early plant life cleansed the atmosphere of CO(2) through photosynthesis, replacing it with O(2). Apparently, plant life never arose on Venus, probably due to the absence of H(2)O.
Re A random passing physicist
1. One really has to laugh at Mr. random invoking Issac Newton as a creationist. Mr. Newton lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and did not have the benefit of the 19th century findings of Darwin and Wallace, amongst others. In fact, in his day, the discipline of biology barely existed. Mr. Spencer lives in the 21th century with 150 years of the accumulation of evidence for evolution. I would be willing to wager a sizable sum that, if Mr. Newton returned today, he would have no problem whatever accepting the evidence for evolution. The fact that Dr. Spencer rejects the theory puts him in the same category as William Dembski and Kurt Wise. The fact is that, like them, he rejects the theory because of his religious views, which also strongly affect his view of global warming. Mr. random will have to do better then that.
2. As for Mr. Erasmussimos’ claim of preponderant support in the climate science community for the global warming theory, the presence of articles in peer reviewed journals is a far better measure then internet surveys. It is my understanding that the number of such articles that support the theory outnumbers the number of articles that express skepticism of the theory by at least 10 to 1.
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Eras,
Step by step is the right approach. We just need to take smaller steps in places.
Regarding the relaxation time if we consider the oceans as just a heat reservoir – the problem with this approach is that the time constant is frequency-dependent. Just to point out the most obvious objection, the average surface temperature of the Earth varies by several degrees every year, and locally varies by tens of degrees as a result of weather through the seasons. (This is one of the problems with plotting temperature anomaly all the time, instead of temperature.) The time lag as the oceans cool down for the winter is a matter of a couple of months, as evident from the annual variation of sea ice for example. Your hypothetical case of the sun stopping shining describes the Antarctic winter rather nicely.
You are talking about a rather more complicated and less obvious mechanism involving things like deep mixing and cold water formation at high latitudes. Such mechanisms exist, but are more dynamic and complex than the simple passive heat sink you describe. Yes, it would take thousands of years to freeze the oceans to the bottom, but not nearly so long for us to be able to measure the temperature change at the surface.
But even if I suppose the analysis to be valid, the presence of such slow processes would tend to argue *against* the idea that the weather cannot show any longer-than-decadal randomness. The climate/weather claim is that without changes in external forcing, averages over longer than 30 years should come out flat (so that any variation seen there must be signal and not noise). But if there are cummulative reservoirs of heat that take 20 years to fill up or empty, the heat might “slosh” between them naturally.
2. I expect the quibbles will become more important as we progress with the argument, but yes.
3. I don’t think we can be confident that the current rate of change is at least 1 C per century, and I *definitely* don’t think we have temperature estimates accurate to fractions of a degree going back through the Holocene. Local temperatures are very noisy, and the noise is very lumpy. We can pick up certain events where large areas were significantly warmer or cooler, and try to extrapolate to the globe, but the uncertainty is going to be very large.
Dansgaard-Oeschger were glacial, but Bond events were interglacial. And my intent was just to offer an example showing that you can get natural variations on longer timescales, rather than to assert that the current warming might be a Bond event specifically. What other sorts of variations might there be that the ice cores don’t pick up?
Regarding Venus, it’s not about selective transmission, it’s about the altitude from which energy radiates to space. If you could see in IR, where would the top of the atmosphere appear to be? It does require the clouds to be fairly opaque to IR. But it is possible to work the effect even if the clouds are partially but equally opaque to both IR and visible light. You need enough heat flux to get through to the surface to drive convection, but if 5% of the light was sufficient to do that, and if the cloud layer let through 5% of light of all wavelengths equally, then the clouds would settle close to the black-body temperature and convection would drive the compression/expansion cycle to warm the transparent atmosphere below.
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:34 pm
ARPP, first, I’d like to present a general comment: you seem to rely heavily on the “we just don’t know” argument, and you’re certainly correct that our knowledge of many crucial factors is thin. But that’s a different argument. We have the AGW hypothesis and arguments for and against it. The “we don’t know” argument weighs neither for nor against the AGW hypothesis. It’s neutral. It can be applied to the decision about what we’re going to do about AGW — as in “Yes, the AGW hypothesis appears to be correct, but the information supporting it is not reliable enough to justify expending large resources to cope with it.” You appear to be arguing both cases simultaneously.
In particular, with respect to imperfect mixing in the oceans, this has the effect of slowing the oceans’ response to perturbations — which in turn means that we must rely on even longer periods of time in order to identify any change as intrinsically climatic. In other words, poor mixing implies that we need to look at periods even longer than the 30-year period that is commonly taken to be the minimum period for evaluating perturbations. The observed rise in temperature embraces about a century, so that can be identified as a genuine response to a perturbation — but the shorter fluctuations must be written off as transitory phenomena.
You argue that we could get oscillatory behavior from heat transfers between various reservoirs. However, the oceans are far and away the biggest thermal reservoir on the planet. There’s nothing else for them to slosh with. It might be possible to construct a model in which heat oscillates between various thermal regions of the oceans, such as deep versus surface or polar versus equatorial — but if you want to argue that case, I think you need to come up with a model for it.
“I expect the quibbles will become more important as we progress with the argument,”
That’s fair.
On my “peculiarly fast rate of change” argument, you counter that the data aren’t reliable enough to place much confidence in the high value. I’ll grant you that our global temperature data prior to the satellite observations does have a lot of holes in it, and our calculations of average global temperatures prior to the satellite era are therefore suspect. I’ll concede that the evidence is not reliable enough to be compelling. As with all other aspects of this question, it’s a matter of judgement, and if you don’t see this data as particularly strong, I’ll respect our difference of judgement. I do think it fair for me to expect you to concede that this does provide at least a weak argument in favor of the AGW hypothesis.
Re your point about other sudden temperature changes: I concede that the ice core data don’t have the temporal resolution to definitively discriminate the current rapid increase of temperature from other possible similar events. They strongly suggest that, but the fact that this data is confined to polar regions limits its utility to our problem. There are lots of other proxies, of course: lake sediments, tree ring isotopic ratios, coral, and so forth. And those proxies do show solid agreement on the general course of Holocene temperatures. They are particularly impressive in their results regarding the onset of the Medieval Warming period as well as the Little Ice Age. I think it’s safe to say (and in fact the NAS does say) that the current warming is unlike anything in the last thousand years.
I’ve been much confused by your comments on the greenhouse effect. You argue that the upper cloud layer on Venus could produce the observed temperatures even if its albedo were 0.95 and was the same for all frequencies. I agree that in such a case those upper cloud layers would behave like a blackbody. But those layers would be in thermal equilibrium with the surface — which they most definitely are not. The problem with Venus is not to explain the temperature of the topmost cloud layers, but to explain the high temperature of the surface. You seem to be thinking in terms of some sort of adiabatic process. Could you expand on that?
May 22nd, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Eras,
You are correct to say that I am not arguing to say that the AGW hypothesis has been shown to be false, here. There are arguments around that attempt to do so, but I agree with you that getting the basics clearly agreed and understood is more important. Before we can say whether the AGW hypothesis has been falsified, we first need to determine what the evidence and chain of reasoning for it actually is. If there isn’t good reason to believe it, the problem for the science is larger than simply whether radical action to stop it is justified.
The imperfect mixing in the oceans both speeds up and slows down the response, depending on the frequency of the perturbation. I strongly suspect that 30 years is too short, but I wonder if there may be natural variations on *every* timescale? (That’s certainly *mathematically* possible; I don’t know whether it’s physically plausible, though.) You state that rise for a century identifies it as a genuine response to something external, but how do you know? On what objective basis can the threshold be calculated?
Your suggestion that any ’sloshing’ would be between one part of the oceans and another was indeed what I was thinking. There has been a lot of interest along these lines in the PDO, and the correlation of the warm and cold phases of PDO with rate of change of temperature. The PDO appears to be partly a residual of ENSO, and partly a slower oscillation linked to the Aleutian low and hence polar Pacific waters. But I’m not pushing any particular alternative theory to say that it is, I’m asking how does the AGW hypothesis know that it isn’t? By means of what evidence or reasoning did it exclude any such alternative? My reading of the IPCC arguments is that it is because their computer models don’t model such oscillations, but I may be being uncharitable.
Does it provide at least a weak argument in favour of AGW? Well, maybe you would like to expand on the details of that argument, but at first glance I’d say not to any significant extent for AGW *specifically*. Even assuming that one *could* show that it was unusual, CO2 emissions are not necessarily the only thing unique to the 20th century. This is a “correlation implies causation” argument.
Consider for a moment the case of the Central England Temperature series (HadCET) from 1690 to 1735. In the 1690s, the average annual temperature was roughly 8 C, plus or minus 0.5 C. At the start of the century it rose sharply, then levelled off for a bit, and then rose again. In the early 1730s it was about 10 C plus or minus 0.5. If you take this section, and plot it on its own, the 40-year ‘trend’ is unmistakable. In comparison, the 20th century average rose from about 9 C to 10 C (rising slightly to about 10.5 C in the early 21st century), again a clearly observable trend, but slower, slightly smaller in magnitude and with almost the same peak.
This is, as I’m sure you’re about to tell me, only local. But my point is that from the point of view of somebody living in England, the actual change experienced so far is not unusual, and looking at a 30 year period doesn’t show otherwise. Maybe the 20th century is unusual in that it is happening not just in one place but over most of the Northern hemisphere; but on the other hand, do we really know that it wasn’t in 1730? Or that if it wasn’t, this is more than a coincidence?
Where we have data, modern times don’t look so unusual, and in most of the world we don’t have the data. At best, the current climate would be only barely beyond the edge of the natural spread of behaviours. On the current evidence, I don’t see how anyone can express very much confidence.
Regarding the proxies – there’s a lot I could say here, but I would prefer to keep the discussion focussed. Suffice to say, I’ve looked at a lot of the proxies, and I am not so impressed. The differences between the estimates are generally comparable to or larger than the trends supposedly being observed, and they agree poorly with the instrumental record, except where forced to match it by their construction. And sadly, the practices of certain scientists regarding archiving, transparency, and statistical competence cast doubt over much of the enterprise. What of the divergence problem? What of the Briffa truncation? How did the problems with the Hockeystick evade detection by the scientific community for so long?
By the way, I think the North (NAS) report said that evidence only supported saying the warming was unlike anything in 400 years, which is not a surprise because of the LIA. You have presumably read the Wegman report, too?
[Quotes: "For periods prior to the 16th century, the Mann et al. (1999) reconstruction that uses this particular principal component analysis technique is strongly dependent on data from the Great Basin region in the western United States. Such issues of robustness need to be taken into account in estimates of statistical uncertainties." "Large-scale surface temperature reconstructions demonstrate very limited statistical skill (e.g., using the CE statistic) for proxy sets before the 19th century (Rutherford et al. 2005, Wahl and Ammann in press)." "Temperature reconstructions for periods before about A.D. 1600 are based on proxies from a limited number of geographic regions, and some reconstructions are not robust with respect to the removal of proxy records from individual regions (see, e.g., Wahl and Ammann in press). Because the data are so limited, different large-scale reconstructions are sometimes based on the same datasets, and thus cannot be considered as completely independent." "Published information, although limited, also suggests that these statistics are sensitive to the inclusion of small subsets of the data. Some of the more regionally focused reconstructions (D'Arrigo et al. 2006) have better demonstrated skill back to the 16th century or so, and possibly earlier. To improve the skill of reconstructions, more data need to be collected and possibly new assimilation methods developed."]
Venus again: Not the albedo – that’s reflection, not absorption.
Why do you say the clouds would be in thermal equillibrium with the surface? Are you thinking of radiative equillibrium?
Imagine for a moment that I set up in my lab a refrigerator-like heat pump between two big blocks of metal, and turn it on. Even though each metal block can see the other, and exchange radiation with it, one block stays colder than the other. The temperatures stop changing when the heat being pumped one way equals the heat being radiated back the other, and to the surroundings. It requires a power input to maintain the difference.
In the case of a planetary atmosphere, the power input is surface heating driving convection. As gas rises, the pressure drops and it expands. It does work on its surroundings, but little heat can be conducted in or out because the neighbouring packets of gas are all doing the same. So the energy must come from the internal energy, and the temperature drops. Later, the circulating gas descends, pressure rises, work is done on the gas to compress it, and the temperature rises.
A convecting atmosphere tends towards a certain vertical temperature gradient, called the adiabatic lapse rate. Hotter gas near the surface rises until it has expanded to neutral buoyancy. Colder gas at altitude descends in the same way.
A gas can of course be stable with warm air on top of cold, but it can also be stable with cold gas on top of warm so long as the temperature gradient is less than the adiabatic lapse rate. If the lapse rate is exceeded, convection starts up until it is met again. Below this gradient, heat flow is mainly by radiation. (On windless nights, with the heat supply cut off, radiation can come to dominate and the air can eventually revert to warm on top of cold – called an inversion layer. Sun-driven convection is needed to maintain the lapse rate.)
A refrigerator works in much the same way. Gas is expanded to lower the temperature, so that it can absorb heat from the ice box, and then compressed to raise it’s temperature, so that it can radiate the heat out the back.
Convection in the atmosphere works like a refrigerator to pump heat down to the surface, to offset/balance the temperature difference-driven flow of heat upwards. Like my two blocks of metal, a temperature difference is maintained by dint of continual effort.
You might like to ask yourself why the top of Earth’s troposphere is at -54 C, when the predicted grey body radiative temperature is only -24 C? What keeps it so cold? Yes, that’s the greenhouse effect.
May 22nd, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Re A random passing physicist
Mr. random claims that the high temperature on the surface of Venus is little related to the 97% of the atmosphere that is CO(2). Apparently, this is an outlier claim. The consensus seems to be that it is due to greenhouse effects. In fact, there seems to be a considerable overlap between earth global warming deniers and Venus greenhouse warming deniers (e.g. Mr. Moribitos’ blog).
http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/venus/facts.html
May 22nd, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Great stuff, ARPP. Let’s keep this going.
I’m still confused by your basic approach with regard to uncertainty. There’s a discrimination to be made between the scientific conclusions and the political conclusions. The absence of certainly for a hypothesis does not reduce its scientific utility; in science, we put our money on whatever hypothesis does the best job of explaining the facts, regardless of how much uncertainty we still have in that model. Of course, HOW MUCH money we put down DOES depend on our confidence factor.
The arguments you raise do not serve to falsify the AGW hypothesis (I think you’ve already said this). They serve instead to raise questions about the reliability of the conclusions we might draw from the AGW hypothesis. For example, you are right to raise objections involving the problems of dendrochronological proxies. There are certainly lots of problems, and the Briffa controversy really demonstrates those problems. And there are problems with everything else. None of the proxies are rock-solid; none are bullet-proof.
However, when it comes to drawing a final judgement regarding the overall reliability of these numbers, we simply have to resort to judgement. I don’t believe that one man’s judgement on this matter is as good as any other man’s — I’m happy to accept the judgement of the people who are intimately knowledgeable of the details. I of course apply my own judgement in a “sniff test” — do their conclusions really make sense? I was initially rather wary of the hydrated methane feedback mechanism because I found it hard to believe that there was so much hydrated methane in ocean sediments. In this case, my sniff test turned out to be wrong.
If you put all the factors together and judge that the confidence level of the results is not sufficient to merit action, I can respect that judgement because it’s a personal matter. I put the results together and conclude that the results *are* reliable enough to justify taking some action. However, I would not seek to impose my judgement on the public, or accept your judgement for public guidance. For that matter, I defer to the institution that was explicitly set up to tackle this kind of problem. If you wish to declare that your own judgement differs from that of the NAS, I can respect that. But I’ll still maintain that their judgement is what should be applied for public policy decisions.
Re: the various reports on the hockey stick controversy. The corrected version of the Mann reconstruction has been supported by at least ten other studies. The NAS and the NRC issued separate reports for Congress confirming the conclusion that the last decades of the 20th century were the hottest of any comparable time period in the last 400 years, and possibly the last 1000 years. They were more restrained in their tone but they overall rejected the claims of McIntyre et al. The Wegman report — hoo boy, is THAT a can of worms! Basically, that one has everybody screaming at each other. My own impression is that it was more a matter of professional pride than scientific judgement; that is, Wegner seemed more miffed about the fact that Mann and his co-authors weren’t statisticians. In any case, I don’t think that the Wegner report deserve pride of place when we have the NAS and NRC reports.
Now for Venus, where I’m really confused by your reasoning. You seem to be basing your thinking on the the lapse rate. But I see the lapse rate as a result, not a causal factor. I ask, why is the surface of Venus so much hotter than the blackbody equilibrium temperature? Your answer seems to be that convection is the source of the temperature difference. But convection doesn’t increase temperature differences, it decreases them. (Unless it’s forced by an external power source)
Yes, parcels of gas moving down will undergo heating and parcels moving up will cool. That transfers energy from the surface to the clouds. That *cools* the surface. But our problem is that the surface is too hot! So how do we explain the high surface temperature?
By the way, I thought that the sudden reversal in the lapse rate at the tropopause was due to ozone absorption of UV. I doubt that it matters to this discussion, though.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:30 am
I am soundly in the denialist’s camp
You pay my salary (I work for the Government)
No one else pays me to say a thing (and the Government certainly doesn’t pay me to be a denier)
Despite the bloated statements coming from the global warmers writing in this column, there isn’t a single one that I cannot tear apart as “evidence” of AGW.
The problems that exist with the statements claimed as AGW evidence are simply, the thinking does not go deeply enough.
AGW lovers: Your case is DOA.
Rant and rave and condescend, there is nothing you can do about it
Nothing, absolutely nothing at all.
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:00 am
Eras,
Yes, it’s a good discussion. A lot more civilised than some I’ve faced, and you’re asking the right sort of challenging questions. You have my respect and thanks.
On uncertainty: if you’re *forced* to make an immediate decision, and “we don’t know yet” is for some reason an unacceptable answer, then it makes pragmatic sense to bet on whatever you’ve got. But in any scientific test, “we don’t know yet” is always an alternative hypothesis. It is saying something about the experimenter rather than the experiment, but it is still a hypothesis about the state of the world. And unless you have a good *positive* reason for believing something – one better than “we can’t think of anything else” – I would say that “we don’t know yet” does the better job of explaining the observations.
But if the generally presented AGW position was as tentative as you describe, I wouldn’t have any great objection to that. Supporters of the AGW hypothesis are entitled to their view, and I’d fully support their continued efforts to knock down competitors to it by test and observation.
My concern is about claims of high confidence, near-total consensus, and an ever-mounting pile of evidence. I am alarmed at the attitude commonly shown to criticism of it.
To the extent that scientific matters are ever “decided”, it is by a theory reliably withstanding all attempts to falsify it unscathed, by scientists honest in their intention to do so and open and willing to accept such falsification, with data that could reasonably be expected to falsify it if it was in fact false, over such a period and with such an effort made that we can conclude that it would take an extraordinary new body of scientific evidence to overturn it.
How can that happen, if scepticism is treated the way it is?
On NAS and Wegman: the North report had to be politically acceptable, and it has been said that it was as direct as it could be in the current political climate. I think that if examined closely, they don’t reject any of the claims that M&M *actually made*, but they did say that Hockeystick-like past temperatures were still a possibility, and had not been ruled out by the M&M analysis, which is something that I think McIntyre at least would agree with.
Without knowing which ten other studies you’re referring to, I can’t really comment. I am aware of a number of studies that have been *said* to do so, but which turned out to use the same sort of flawed data and/or the same sort of flawed methods. How many of those other studies used foxtails and bristlecones? It seems hard to believe that people would seriously try to put forward other bristlecone analyses as alternatives after the flaws in them were known, but some did. Wegman had a diagram showing the overlap of sources.
But there is a difference between other studies coming to the same *conclusion*, and other studies supporting the methods and sources that Mann et al. used. While the conclusion is not unimportant, in this case I see what it says about the *process* as being far more significant.
The diagram managed to achieve pride of place in the IPCC reports and at all their press conferences, was presented to policymakers to be used in their decisions, splashed across the press and countless leaflets calling for action. It wasn’t some obscure result buried away in the body of the report, it was widely seen as the single most eye-catching and convincing headline. And we were told it was so credible because it was the consensus of thousands of scientists.
And yet, the difficulties M&M had in getting hold of the data and algorithms, and the flaws they found, indicate that it had never before been independently examined. How is it *possible* that it could have passed the famed IPCC scrutiny and stood at the pinnacle of scientific orthodoxy for *years*, and for nobody to have noticed?!
And on what we are told is the most serious issue facing us this century; a question on which trillions of dollars and the prosperity of billions of people rides?
And that raises a far more important question than the actual shape of past temperatures: – what *else* have they passed?
On Venus: Yes, I’m saying that the lapse rate is the source of the temperature difference.
Convection as such is not the cause of the lapse rate as a piece of physics. Convection is what drives the motion of air until the lapse rate is met, and is therefore the cause of the lapse rate as a piece of observed meteorology. A bit subtle, that one.
“Yes, parcels of gas moving down will undergo heating and parcels moving up will cool.” – We need to be careful about the difference between heat and temperature. Parcels of gas moving down will increase in temperature, but they are not being heated! That’s what ‘adiabatic’ means.
(Sorry, that’s my fault. I was talking about adding up partial flows to get a net flow – heat pumped down plus heat being carried up to maintain a fixed temperature difference. But the partial flows are imaginary, the result of taking little bits of the physics in isolation.)
If the atmospheric temperature profile follows the adiabatic lapse rate, the heat content of a given mass of gas is the same at every altitude, but the temperature changes, because the pressure changes.
In a convecting atmosphere at the adiabatic lapse rate, net heat still flows upwards, even as the temperature of the rising gas falls. If the atmosphere exceeds the adiabatic lapse rate, heat will rise faster. If the atmosphere falls short of the adiabatic lapse rate, then convection stops and heat starts to build up at the surface until it is met again. For any system, so long as the input is even a fraction of a Watt greater than the output, the temperature will rise without limit.
And yes, the tropopause reversal is related to ozone. My question was why does it reverse at around -54 C (that’s from the International Standard Atmosphere), rather than -24 C or higher? If the air both below *and* above it is warmer, and radiation to space would only get it down to -24 C, what keeps it so cold?
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:11 am
Brian @ 46,
a few comments on your post:
1) “You pay my salary (I work for the Government)”
And which government would that be? The Internet isn’t called the World Wide Web for nothing.
I’ll also not that that’s a pretty childish comment of yours too, all it needed was a ‘na-na-nah-na-na!’ at the end to complete it.
2) “No one else pays me to say a thing”
Sorry, I’m not sure what your point is here. Are you trying to say that your government pays you to say certain things?
3) “(and the Government certainly doesn’t pay me to be a denier) ”
So, what does your government pay you to be?
4)” Despite the bloated statements coming from the global warmers writing in this column, there isn’t a single one that I cannot tear apart as “evidence” of AGW.”
Go ahead! Better still – write a paper or two, I’m sure you can get the info out. However – you may find that once you’ve committed all your insights to paper that all that knowledge is voluminous – i.e. bloated.
5)” The problems that exist with the statements claimed as AGW evidence are simply, the thinking does not go deeply enough.”
That really implies new, revolutionary insights. You must tell us!
6)”AGW lovers: Your case is DOA. ”
Your insights are that definitive? Oh ghu! Please, please, pretty please – tell us!!!
7)”Rant and rave and condescend, there is nothing you can do about it
Nothing, absolutely nothing at all.”
Oh please, please enlighten this lowly one, oh government employee! I dearly wish to tell my grandchildren that I was there at the dawning on the third age of Mankind…
May 23rd, 2009 at 10:17 am
I don’t converse with nicknames or first names or anything but your full name.
If you would like to have a discussion, say your entire name out loud so that everybody can hear!
Real people with real things to say
use real manes
May 23rd, 2009 at 11:06 am
Ok. Watters.
May 23rd, 2009 at 11:08 am
“Real people with real things to say use real names”
I would think that would depend on whether what you were saying could get you maimed or killed.
May 23rd, 2009 at 11:58 am
ARPP, I will readily concede that the science behind AGW is nowhere near as solid as that of broadly accepted science. There are, as you point out, lots of uncertainties in crucial areas. So I won’t claim that AGW theory is ready for the textbooks. In law, they have a number of terms describing the various degrees of proof. At one end is “beyond a reasonable doubt” — the standard used for conviction of serious crimes. That’s the standard we apply in science to hypotheses that we want to put into textbooks. At the other end is “supported by the preponderance of evidence”. That’s the standard we use when we have to make a choice between two contending parties. I think that’s what we’ve got with AGW. The preponderance of evidence supports the hypothesis. There’s still lots of uncertainty, but if we had to make a simple black-and-white choice between accepting AGW and rejecting AGW, we’re more likely to be right accepting it.
But this is only the scientific conclusion. When we come to the part about deciding how to translated the scientific conclusion into policy action, things get a lot messier. I think that the real debate is not about the science, but about what to do about the science given the level of uncertainty. Yes, I still believe that the level of uncertainty is low enough that we should definitely do something. But, as you point out, should we be committing trillions of dollars of resources to this?
I see it as a conventional problem in cost/benefit trade-offs with uncertainties in future benefits. We can get a fairly good idea of the current costs of implementing various carbon reduction policies. We have to compare these costs against the present value of future benefits — and calculating the present value of future benefits is REALLY hard. Indeed, we just don’t have any reliable procedures for calculating future benefits that extend more than about 30 years into the future. In other words, at this point, we’re in the hand-waving stage.
The problem is that we can’t just throw up our hands and ignore the problem. If AGW is real and we ignore it, the worst-case scenario is catastrophic (although the most likely scenario is merely hugely expensive). If AGW is wrong and we expend trillions on it, we’ve thrown all that money down a rathole.
This is why I would prefer to start with a gasoline tax so as to reduce our dependence on foreign oil — a definite plus. Keep it small at first and guarantee that it will ramp up over the course of about twenty years. That gives people time to adjust their vehicle purchases and their commute distances. As for coal, I’d rely on the torpid pace of international negotiations to give us time to gather more data and reduce the uncertainties. I really want to get rid of coal, not just because of its CO2 emissions but because it has all sorts of other nasty problems. Put coal on the table now and immediately implement a perfunctory carbon tax on coal. Nothing serious, just enough to get the ball rolling and create some geopolitical credibility. We say to China “We’re taxing coal at $X per ton — will you match us?” China refuses, we keep our offer on the table, and we end up smelling like roses while China ends up smelling like coal ash.
So I’m willing to respect the uncertainty you point to. The political process is slow and we can afford to tie it to progress in reducing the uncertainties. If those uncertainties are reduced, then we’ll have a more solid basis to expend more resources — although as I pointed out earlier, there’s not much chance that humanity as a whole will do much to avert AGW. Because of that, I’m REALLY hoping that AGW turns out to be overblown. Hope springs eternal.
I’m still confused as to your explanations about Venus. My first problem is with this statement:
“the heat content of a given mass of gas is the same at every altitude, but the temperature changes, because the pressure changes.”
OK, so we’ve got a million gas molecules at altitude Y1. They’re at temperature T1, so they have average kinetic energy K1. Now we compare those million molecules with another group of a million molecules at altitude Y2. You say that they’re at a different temperature T2, so they have average kinetic energy K2 != K1. Yet you also say that they have the same heat content. Huh?
Here’s another one that bothers me: “If the atmosphere falls short of the adiabatic lapse rate, then convection stops and heat starts to build up at the surface until it is met again.”
What’s the source of heat that’s building up at the surface? Are you saying that the surface of Venus is hot because there’s heat reaching the surface from the core? Where’s that heat coming from?
May 23rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
“Are you saying that the surface of Venus is hot because there’s heat reaching the surface from the core? Where’s that heat coming from?”
A good deal of heat is coming from the heat of solution of sulphur trioxide in water to form the ubiquitous sulphuric acid cloudes that are continuously formed in Venus’s atmosphere.
@Eamon Watters “Real people with real things to say use real names”
“I would think that would depend on whether what you were saying could get you maimed or killed.”
Eamon could you elaborate just a bit on what you mean by that?
May 23rd, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Woops! I just realized my mistake on the heat content issue: the high-pressure million molecules can still do work that the low-pressure million molecules couldn’t do. My mistake.
May 23rd, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Brian, you write: “A good deal of heat is coming from the heat of solution of sulphur trioxide in water to form the ubiquitous sulphuric acid cloudes that are continuously formed in Venus’s atmosphere.”
Are you saying that this reaction is an ongoing process? If so, why hasn’t it used up all the sulphur trioxide after 4 billion years?
May 23rd, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Sure Brian,
where I’m from if you expressed you opinion too openly you could end up maimed or dead. If you were particularly unlucky members of your family could also pay the price for you openness.
Now things are changing back home (Northern Ireland), but habits acquired in youth are hard to drop.
May 23rd, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Are you saying that this reaction is an ongoing process? If so, why hasn’t it used up all the sulphur trioxide after 4 billion years?
Huh? Do you think clouds are a permanent feature, somewhat like rocks?
As far as I am concerned, Eamon, if one DOESN’T speak out and say who they are any say it out loud, then bad laws get foisted upon them for being a coward and saying nothing.
May 23rd, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Brian,
pardon me if I get a bit – peeved.
Until you experience your neighbours getting shot for being who they are – or those you love being beaten for being one ofthem your opinions on the subject don’t matter one jot to me.
When terrorists were bombing the hell out of the centre of Belfast that did not stop me going down to the city centre and going about my daily business. And when terrorists were abducting people from the streets at night and murdering them that did not stop me heading out at night.
So please, take your opinion and stick it where the does not shine.
May 23rd, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Brian, I don’t understand your answer. You’re saying that a good deal of heat is coming from a chemical reaction. Why haven’t the inputs to that chemical reaction been used up?
May 23rd, 2009 at 12:52 pm
I worked in Baghdad from 2004-2006 and I disguised as an American from no one and other Americans and innocent Iraqis too pieces of shell and car bomb that were intended for me and died in the process and their lives were not meaningless to me and any criticism of me for your backgound is.
May 23rd, 2009 at 12:58 pm
The clouds are contiuously formed, condense to liquid on the surface, are catalysed to suluphur trioxide and water again via oxides of transition metals and the vapours condense again in the atmosphere as sulphuric acid releasing an immense amount of heat in the process
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:11 pm
OK, Brian, so the vapors release heat when they condense. That means that they’re getting energy from somewhere. I assume that they’re getting that energy in the form of chemical energy from the materials on the surface. You’ve still got to balance your energy accounts. Are you saying that the materials on the surface are the source of the energy? If so, why hasn’t it been used up after four billion years?
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Why hasn’t geothermal heat of the Earth been used up four billion years ago
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:25 pm
OK, so is it geothermal heat that is the source of the high surface temperature of Venus? You’ve been talking about chemical energy. Now you’re talking geothermal energy. Which is it?
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Moving it from one place to the other, the Sun assists
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Brian @ 60,
was that response directed at my post, number 58?
If it is, and I assume so (correct me if I’m wrong) – what risk was there that Iraqis would have come to whatever neighbourhood of whatever country you’re from and tried to kill or maim your family?
You are an ignoramus.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:32 pm
I have to get back to work now, rather than just blogging, be back later
I really do salute you, Eamon, and I should think you were as aware as anyone could be about the despicable sickness of tyrrany, and would fight for the freedom from hideous laws to regulate lives such as greenhouse laws and you would be a virulent and vitriolic climate sceptic in the process.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Brian your answer (”Moving it from one place to the other, the Sun assists”) makes no sense. I think we still have a serious problem explaining the high surface temperature of Venus. The conventional — and I mean ‘conventional’ in the sense of ‘that’s what the textbooks have been saying for at least 50 years’) answer is that Venus has a very large greenhouse effect because of the large amounts of CO2 in its atmosphere. That explanation has been challenged here by both Brian and ARPP. So far, their explanations don’t make any sense to me. Perhaps ARPP can provide some answers.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:42 pm
I don’t give a damn what the conventional theory or Jim Hansen or anybody else says.
Why don’t you use your real name? Why lurk behind a pseudonym?
That kind of crap is just plain pld punk Internet behaviour and nothing else.
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Brian, let me tell you a story. I’ve been corresponding electronically with other people since the mid-1980s (via CompuServe, BBSs, GEnie, BIX, etc) One thing I learned is that there are a lot of, shall we say, odd people out there. People with strange ideas of propriety. People who get very upset. I once had a fellow barrage me with threatening emails. It was rather like threatening phone calls. This was before email programs had blacklist capabilities, so I couldn’t simply block the guy out. It was all rather disconcerting. Most people are aware of these possibilities, and so they use a pseudonym. As it happens, I do use my real name in a number of places where I discuss matters with others. However, these are places that I happen to know are populated only by reasonable people. You never know what kind of nutcases will show up on an open board like this one.
But the more interesting question is, why do you care what my real name is? What do you intend to do with it?
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:49 pm
blah blah blah
da ta dah ta da
blah blah blah blah blog blah
It isn’t what I entend to do with it it is what you DON’T do with your own neame – which is to use it to sign what you write and and stand up for it like a man or worman or anything else but a weenie
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:04 pm
I just don’r have any respect for pseudonymic bloggers, that’s all.
That’s because they have none for themselves.
I respect Eamon, for his brave commitment to stay in his homeland amidst unspeakable violence and terrorism despite the threats to him and his family,
and for the simple fact that he simply stated his name.
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Eras,
Conceding *any* uncertainty in the science behind AGW is more than a lot of its supporters would do, and I respect that. We can agree to differ on the *degree* of certainty, if necessary, but it’s a healthier framework for the debate in my opinion.
I think that with your black-and-white choice, you might be thinking in Pascal’s wager terms – of thinking that with two alternatives and no information, that the default should take them to be of roughly equal probability.
Let’s take a trivial example of throwing 2 normal six-sided dice, and guessing the total. This is subject to uncertainty, but the hypothesis that the total will be 7 has the greatest support for it. If we are asked to choose between the hypotheses 2, 3, 4, …, 11, 12, then 7 is the best bet. However, if we are asked to choose between the hypotheses ‘7′ or ‘not 7′, then the first hypothesis has probability 1/6, and the second 5/6. It is far more likely to be something other than 7. Picking 7 when we have the opportunity to pick “We don’t know” is the wrong choice.
Whether or not you agree that scientific confidence in AGW might be so low, would you agree that simply being the best of the hypotheses available isn’t *necessarily* sufficient to justify believing it?
On your tax proposal, how would you feel about a carbon tax linked to sea level or something like that? We pay 1% for every centimetre the sea rises past 50 centimetres. Then anyone who doesn’t believe a word of it can happily sign up, and if you’re right, it ought to kick in with a vengeance within a few decades. Not as good as you wanted, perhaps, but better than nothing, yes?
Or if you want to raise money for your measures faster, then how about climate bonds, that mature with a good interest rate in 40 years only if there is no sign of catastrophe? Sceptics can buy them from you, you can build windmills with the proceeds, and if we’re wrong, we end up paying for them. Good deal, right?
Sorry, slightly confusing thermodynamics usage: in thermodynamics, heating is a process, it has symbol Q. It’s different from the internal energy U which is proprtional to temperature.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat)
The source of heat at the surface is incoming sunlight. You may recall I said: “You need enough heat flux to get through to the surface to drive convection, but if 5% of the light was sufficient to do that,…”
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
bgvalentine@verizon.net at home
brian.valentine@hq.doe.gov at work
if anyone cares to write to me
And saying Good-Bye! for now on Chris’s web log
(hey – want to have some fun? Read Chris’s Storm World. It’s a trip and a half.)
May 23rd, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Your little blogging stunt against Morano kind of took a belly flop, didn’t it, Chris.
Too bad, punk.
Better luck next time.
May 23rd, 2009 at 6:51 pm
“would you agree that simply being the best of the hypotheses available isn’t *necessarily* sufficient to justify believing it?”
Yes, I would. I don’t think that reasoning applies to the AGW problem, though, because we don’t have multiple and similarly likely hypotheses competing. I see AGW as easily our best explanation, bad data as a distant second, solar variability as an even more distant third, and so on. I perceive the likelihood of all the other hypotheses added up as STILL being less than the likelihood of AGW. That’s the position of the NAS, too. But again, I recognize this as a matter of judgement.
I think that your first funding idea, the after-the-fact tax, seems like a generational heads-I-win-tales-you-lose deal. It says, “Hey, grandkids, have we got a deal for you! We’re going to release all sorts of carbon, and IF it turns out that it causes damages, YOU’LL have to pay a tax for it!” That doesn’t seem very fair to me. My guess is, if we pursue that line of thinking, the kids will just throw out the idea when it comes due.
The second idea (bonds) is much more intriguing. I like the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is aspect of it. But there are a couple of nasty gotchas. First, there won’t be enough skeptics to buy all the bonds we need to sell. Second, bonds with lifetimes that long won’t appeal to many people — most people with money to invest will be dead before the bonds mature. (This, BTW, is a serious problem with all long-term capitalization issues; it puts a real kink into present-value calculations.)
Let’s apply that idea, for example, to the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Suppose that Mr. Bush had said, “OK, all you nitwits who think that Mr. Hussein doesn’t pose a threat to us, put your money where your mouth is. We’ll forego invading Iraq if you guys post a bond of $1 trillion to cover the losses incurred by an Iraqi attack. If there’s no Iraqi attack in 20 years, we’ll pay back your bond at 10% interest rate. But if there is and Iraqi attack, all your money goes to cover the costs incurred by it.” Boy, I would have signed up for that one. But there’s no way we could have found enough underwriters to pay for that bond. And yet the bond you propose would last longer and require lots more money. Although in principle it’s a splendid idea (I *REALLY* like the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is aspect), it just wouldn’t work in practice. But I’m going to mull that one over. It might be possible to come up with some variation that might work.
On the Venus problem, I don’t think we’re making any progress on explaining the difference between the surface temperature and the cloudtop temperature. I still think it’s due to greenhouse effect, but I’m not going to press the issue.
I was going to start discussing that matter of climate feedback effects, but while checking some facts I ran into a surprise that I need to sort out before making my claims. I’ll have to defer that until tomorrow.
May 24th, 2009 at 4:49 am
Eras,
You would put ‘bad data’ second? Interesting.
I’m not going to give a complete discussion, it would take too long. But just for the sake of experiment, try this in a spreadsheet or something.
Set the first cell to a Normally distributed random number with standard deviation 7. In Excel, this is =7*NORMSINV(RAND()).
Next set the following cells to each be 0.99 times the previous cell, plus a unit Normally distributed random number. In Excel, this would look something like =0.99*A1+NORMSINV(RAND()). You need to extend the sequence for a few thousand terms to tell what is going on, but if you start off with a few hundred, that would be fine.
Finally, plot a graph of the data.
This is called an AR(1) stochastic process, and is a member of the ARIMA processes family. There’s lots of theory on these. Box and Jenkins is probably the best textbook on the subject. The ARIMA processes model cummulative quantities. If the heat added or subtracted in a given year is random, then the temperature will be close to last year’s temperature, plus or minus a small random change. That’s not to say that this model is right, (it isn’t,) but it’s not totally without plausibility either.
If you look at the graph, you’ll see that over the short term, it appears to show significant trends. The line goes steadily up, or steadily down, for 50 steps or more. And yet it is pretty easy to calculate the actual mean of the distribution at every point, because it’s the sum of two distributions for which the mean is zero. Yes, the mean is zero at every point, and there is no trend. Extend it a few thousand terms and you can see that directly, but if you have only a couple of hundred, it doesn’t look obvious.
Now AR(1) is not the only sort of sequence with this property, I picked it only because it’s simple to implement. It’s valuable because playing around with it can give a better feel for some of the possibilities that are out there.
On bonds: yes, the idea needs a lot of work, it was thrown together quickly. My point was simply that whenever people have different expectations about the future, or assign different values to something, you can make money. Incidentally, you can solve the long-term aspect by selling the bonds on to somebody younger. As they get nearer maturity, their price converges gradually on their estimated final value. That estimate will depend on the weather, of course.
On Venus: the difference in temperature between clouds and ground *is* due to the greenhouse effect. The problem is, the greenhouse effect doesn’t work the way most people think it does. (Like the same can be said of greenhouses.)
It’s the same reason you see snow on top of mountains. If you think hot air rises, this would seem the wrong way round. Why doesn’t the air from around the base of the mountain rise up the slopes and melt the snow? Why doesn’t the IR radiation from the land around it come into equillibrium with it?
The adiabatic lapse rate, and the fact that it results in a vertical temperature gradient, is a *very* standard bit of meteorology. It explains mountains and clouds being cold.
(Please do look it up. Maybe somebody else could explain it better than I could.)
And on Venus, if you know that the cloud tops are 70 km above the surface and the atmosphere is turbulent, then the lapse rate is easily calculated to be 10 C/km and a temperature difference between the two of about 700 C is expected.
That still leaves open the question of whether the surface will be cold and the clouds even colder, or the surface hot and the clouds cool, but the temperature *difference* is just a matter of basic gas thermodynamics.
I shall look forward to your discussion of feedbacks.
May 24th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
OK, I have figured out my problem. All along I had been accepting without question the claim that CO2 by itself is not sufficient to produce the observed warming. I thought it would be nice to double-check that claim, and discovered that in fact it does not appear to be supported. That is, I had assumed that the feedback mechanisms were more important than the CO2 itself, and my assumption is incorrect. The nasty predictions are all based on models predicting increase in CO2 emissions, leading to high cumulative concentrations of CO2. Annual emissions of CO2 have doubled since 1970, and CO2 concentrations have increased from 325 ppm to 380 ppm during the same period. A simple-minded extrapolation of these trends shows us breaking 500 ppm before 2050 and reaching the 1000 ppm limit early in the next century. At these concentrations, the increment in temperature can readily exceed the 2ºC that is now being taken as the threshold for serious damage. There was a recent paper in Nature addressing this question:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7242/full/nature08019.html
This is just the abstract, but the conclusions are that a total of a trillion tons of carbon emissions (half of which humanity has already emitted) will put us at the 2ºC limit — but the uncertainty band is fairly wide. The 5% to 95% confidence interval is from 1.3ºC to 3.9ºC. Note that the upper end of the confidence interval is extended.
Yes, maintaining an open market for bonds would readily address the long-term problem. I wonder if we couldn’t implement a real-world version of the various prediction markets that are currently used to predict election results and other highly uncertain events? In other words, use the market mechanism not merely to determine probabilities of various events, but to actually fund our responses to them. This is a very interesting concept.
May 24th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Eras,
Yes. SRES A1F1 has projected about 600 ppm by 2050 and 1000 ppm by 2100.
1000 ppm is about 2.6x the current level, so taking the theorised logarithmic relationship into account, one would expect about 1.4 times the 2xCO2 climate sensitivity figure, whatever you think that might be.
There’s a lot of “if’s” in that, though.
Of course, if you extrapolate things a different way, you get a different answer. In 1960 the CO2 level was rising at about 1 ppm/yr, and by 2000 it had risen to 2 ppm/yr. The rise is irregular (there’s a drop in the 90s because of the collapse of Soviet Communism) but fairly linear. If you project that to the end of the century, you get about 4 ppm/yr, or if you edit out the Communist collapse, 6 ppm/yr in 2100. That gives a 21st century average of either 3 ppm/yr or 4 ppm/yr, about 300-400 ppm per century. That would put the final level around 680-780 ppm, a factor of 1.8 to 2.1 over present, about 0.85 to 1.1 times the 2xCO2 sensitivity.
You can play endless games. But of course, all of this numerology is akin to the Victorians of 1894 trying to calculate how many horses we would need to power civilisation in 50 years time, and how much dung they would generate. (London would be 9 foot deep in it, it was said.) Oh, how right they were…