Global Warming - yes, no, maybe?

[HiLo]

GHillBilly says.... "Does this prove that it's imprudent -- at . this . time -- to bet trillions on AGW? Yes."

 

Yes, it's complicated alright. Trouble is, I'm not certain about betting trillions on it not happening. Is there any way we can have a bit each way?

 

(Note clever reference back to the last word in the Subject title!)(This message has been edited by HiLo)

[HICO_Eagle]

Beavah, I'll go further than vol_scouter on this. When you look at what exactly CRU, GISS and GHCN have done to the temperature measurements so many people are basing their judgment on, it DOES call into question whether AGW even exists.

 

The graph at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/05/december-uah-global-temperature-anomaly-down-by-almost-half/ only shows the last 30 years so one would almost be inclined to "see" an upward slope as claimed by the AGW proponents but if one looks carefully, you can see a leveling off and even a downward trend starting around 2006. You see this again in http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/cru-3b-urban-warm-bias-in-ghcn/ which also demonstrates the urban heat island skewing in the numbers GHCN has been releasing.

 

http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/04/difference-in-yamal-versions-not-insignificant/ shows how CRU misled the editors of Science on how they assembled tree core data and hid the fact that there were significant differences.

 

http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/01/sent-loads-of-station-data-to-scott/ shows how Jones freely shared with "friendly" colleagues that he claimed was confidential when requested by skeptics.

 

See

for Burt Rutan's take on AGW and the "analysis" behind it.

 

I have seen similar questions from Australians who've looked at the ABoM pronouncements and compared them to actual measurements at stations like Darwin. Will try later to locate them for direct quotation but I have to jet off to work right now.

 

 

[vol_scouter]

Beavah,

 

I disagree with you on the modelling of the climate. I am not aware of stock market programs that accurately predict the long term stock market changes. To say that you know that it will go up in the long run is like me saying that there will be warming and cooling cycles. My statement is more certain since it is dependent upon physical forces whereas a financial disaster or war could destroy the US (unlikely and not my prediction) and there would be no stock market to go up. The question of any model in science is can it accurately predict physical phenomena. In the case of climate models, the predictions are now quite good for 24-72 hours, good for ~10 days and only fair for several weeks. The farmer's almanac does about as well as sophisticated climate models at a year. So to extrapolate for 50-100 years and say that it is known what will happen is not being intellectually honest. As GaHillBilly said, this does not mean that the models are definitely wrong but it means that it cannot be concluded that they are correct either. I as tried to show in a clear and concise manner, the input temperature data is a significant issue to begin with. The models are solve simultaneous many couples nonlinear partial differential eqautions that require high performance computering. The models are sensitive to the initial conditions which are already full of errors. Estimates are made of the effect that the oceans play in buffering the CO2. Those estimates have been revised several times. In most models, water vapor is not accounted for beause it is so volatile and variable but it is a stronger greenhouse gas than is CO2. Once again, there has been global warming just as there has been global cooloing. These are driven by solar variability and will continue to happen no matter what we do. Could there be AGW? Yes, but it is far from certain and as others have pointed out, the problems with some of the most important scientists for the IPCC being questioned as to their scientific integrity , makes the whole subject questionable at the present.

[Beavah]

However, I gather the causes are too complex for anyone to be sure why it really happened -- otherwise more than one or two would have 'seen it coming'.

 

I think a lot of folks saw it coming, eh? Buffet called the things "financial weapons of mass destruction" way back in 2004. Lots of good folks were talkin' about it way before that. They were all just called chicken littles. Real conservatives get ignored when da cash is flowin' freely and everything seems fine.

 

Doesn't take much knowledge of history to know that when yeh remove all of the regulation against greed, and then indemnify bankers from any personal responsibility, and then dump liquidity into the system to really encourage people to go chasin' after fast cash that you'll get a crash. I made 40% in the market in 2008 just doin' my usual conservative thing.

 

That's not just "things go up, things go down" or whatever vol said. Timing when things go up or go down is hard. But knowin' that the average is goin' to get pushed one way or the other in the medium to longer term isn't as challenging.

 

Also, if there was a clearly identifiable cause and effect chain, one party or the other would have been all over it. They haven't been, and although the Democrats blame the collapse on GWB, I have never seen them associate that blame with an explanation. This too suggests to me that either (a) they aren't sure why it happened either, or (b) they do know, but it's as much on them as on the Republicans.

 

(B). Remember, while Phil Gramm led the charge, Clinton & Gore signed off on the deregulation. I don't honestly think GWB had anything to do with it in a direct way. Just that he tended to appoint folks who either didn't take their jobs seriously or weren't qualified to do 'em. I suppose borrow-and-spend warfare and oil speculation did odd things to the bond markets and contributed to the thing.

 

Nah, the real issue at its core is bad business ethics by a lot of greedy people. But when people fail ethically or are tempted to do so, yeh want there to be regulation and consequences. Both of those were removed.

 

Second cause was the Federal Reserve chasin' the trend and tryin' to be political. Yeh don't want the central bank and the comptroller of the currency to be buyin' the bankers' kool-aid.

 

As GaHillBilly said, this does not mean that the models are definitely wrong but it means that it cannot be concluded that they are correct either.

 

Now I may not be understandin', vol, but I thought science was like most things, eh? Yeh can't conclude that anything is ever "correct." You can only falsify what is wrong.

 

When you choose to act on a theory that has some evidence behind it depends on your belief in the quality of the evidence, what your level of risk tolerance is, and what yeh stand to gain by waiting.

 

I hear yeh making claims about the quality of the evidence. I really don't have the expertise to evaluate those. I doubt most folks on this forum do either, since the few terms I do know and understand seem to be misused. I can accept that the science is hard and the amount of good evidence we have is limited and even that some in the field disagree.

 

I'm more a student of people in disputes, eh? And what rubs me wrong here is that this whole line sure feels to me like it's not about the evidence but about the human factors I mention - level of risk tolerance and what some people stand to gain by waiting. Feels like folks tryin' to assemble a litany of obscure reasons to object to somethin' rather than really being objective. To ridicule science and scientists for reasons of personal agenda. I'm not hearin' a lot of folks with real expertise raise anything more than the usual professional cautions about the limits of a study. What I'm hearin' is mostly folks who started by taking one side in the dispute lookin' for evidence to justify their bias by overblowing weaknesses of individual studies.

 

I know that everyone, including scientists, overestimate the precision of their conclusions. I could be all wrong about the science. But I'm not usually very far off in recognizin' how people behave during disputes.

 

So I'll stay where I am in the conservative camp, if it's all the same to you. The risks are high enough that I don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Preponderance of the evidence as viewed by the experts in the field is enough for me. Besides, like I said, the policy decision comes out in favor of carbon and oil taxes for other reasons like national and economic security. So there's no downside to sayin' that doing the right thing also may help ameliorate climate change. I'm happy to have those liberal fellas vote the right way on a national security issue .

 

Beavah

 

[vol_scouter]

Beavah,

 

I have based my criticisms on the merits of the science. My major concern is the damage that AGW us doing to science and scinetists. Research is now my career having left medicine. So from a personal and societal standpoint, it is important to me that science and scientists are viewed in a positive light with trust in our work. Science is based on trust that scholarly, peer reviewed articles have been performed in an honst manner. The AGW folks have pushed their claims and essentially telling the world that siginificant changes must be made at the same time that they appear to have worked to suppress conflicting results. This hurts all of science. Since you are a conservative by your statements, you know that at times no matter how hard the conservatives tired in the past to get their ideas to the public, the media chose not to report on the stories. The same thing is happening here. Researchers in climatology who have conflicting results to AGW have been supressed. I do not know which is true but I do know poor ways of doing science which is what we are saying. Also, we should not allow science to be damaged for the political goal of decreased dependence upon fossil fuels. That is a mis-use of science and I am frankly appalled that you would think that the ends justify the means.

[BrentAllen]

"All I know is that what the science is sayin' matches my experience. The snow lines are further north, the glaciers I remember as a lad out west are much smaller, forests I loved are now experiencin' blights from warm-weather insects that never used to be able to survive a winter."

 

Kind of reminds me about the robins in the arctic.

 

"Mosquitoes are finding their way to the Arctic Circle. And robins are being sighted in Canada's Northwest Territories. Scientists believe the presence of species, not previously seen in the region, is only one of the effects of climate change.

 

No Word For Robin: Climate Change In The Canadian Arctic examines some of the social and environmental consequences of climate change in Canada's Northwest.

 

Roger Kuptana, a bird enthusiast, spotted a red-breasted robin. He says:

'I don't know if there's a word in Sachs Harbour for robin. They're so rare here, we don't have names for them.'

 

The Inuit language for 10,000 years never had a word for robin, and now there are robins all over their villages.

 

The Inuit also speak of the thawing of permafrost, permanently frozen ground. They say warm temperatures are enabling new species, such as robins, barn swallows and salmon, to adapt to their habitat.

 

'In a report published by IISD, Rosemarie Kuptana, Sachs Harbour resident and former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, explains the significance of using the aboriginal perspective in understanding climate change in the Banks Island. She says:

Traditional Inuit knowledge about the world around us like the weather, the animals, the migration patterns, the changes that we've seen this is the knowledge that has been accumulated over many, many centuries. It's oral tradition: it's scientific knowledge. It's our scientific knowledge.' "

 

 

Problem with the story (and their "scientific knowledge"): My Life with the Eskimo by V. Stefansson published in 1913 gives a description of where robins have been sighted in the Canadian Arctic prior (obviously) to 1913, including along the far northern coast. Accompanying these location descriptions are the word for robin in several other Eskimo tongues, including (phonetically) Kre-ku-aktu-yok (Mackenzie Eskimo) and Shabwak (Alaskan Eskimo).

 

I could make the same observations here in Georgia about kudzu, coyotes and armadillos. Am I seeing them because of AGW? No.

 

There are so many variables affecting climate, it is silly to think that just one miniscule part of the atmosphere will control it. The only thing sillier is the arrogance of man, thinking he has solved the equation for earth's climate, and that he can control it.

[vol_scouter]

Beavah,

 

One other comment. To say that scientific theories can only be proved wrong is to not clearly understand science. Since the scientific method has been followed, there have not been revolutions in physics that overturn prior 'laws'. For instance, Newtonian mechanics still works well in most cricumstances. Special relativity and general relativity produced revolutions in our understanding of physics but only affects calculations when dealing with very massive bodies or mass that is moving at very high velocities. Quantum mechanics also changed our understanding but did not negate many classical experiments. For instance, throwing a baseball can be quite well described by classical physics although the same problem can be solved (with considerable more effort) by quantum mechanics - called complementarity. Clearly, until all experiments that are possible can be performed (will never occur), a theory is never 'proven', but a theory can be shown to be very good at explaining the physical phenomena is not likely to be shown to be false but there could be modifications that occur in particular circumstances. The models for climate change are very complex, require a lot of assumptions, and depend upon noisey data to measure small effects in the distant future. Climate models are not physical theories and should not be treated as such.

[HICO_Eagle]

Beavah --

 

I'm trying to locate my link to the original graphs but the original head and founder of the CRU was a profound skeptic of the GHG hypothesis until he died. His original reconstruction of ancient climates -- a reconstruction that was supported by historical and geologic records (which Jones, Mann et al seek to ignore or rewrite out of history) -- showed the MWP was roughly 8-10 C (15-20 F) degrees higher than today.

 

People want to talk about permafrost thawing now? There are Norse graves in Greenland which are STILL buried under ice. The ground sure wasn't frozen much less covered by ice when those graves were dug.

 

The real risks come from imposing dramatic punitive measures chasing scientific phantoms. That's not a conservative camp, it's a radical camp. Conserve energy and reduce waste but do them because we're conservationists, because there are national security risks from our dependence on foreign resources, etc. -- NOT because of junk science and con men. Mann and Jones don't seem to be expert at anything but media hype and milking public funds; software engineers analyzing Ian Harris's code are appalled at the sloppy code; the litany goes on.

 

 

Follow the money. This graph depicts Phil Jones' grant income. Notice the spike after he became a shrill proponent of AGW?

 

http://noconsensus.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/image1.jpg

 

Oh, and for what it's worth? GHB is right about how Dodds and Frank pushed the housing and mortgage markets into failure. Things started going south right after they pushed an expanded view of the Community Reinvestment Act and the Clinton administration started growing Fannie and Freddy to feed an artificial housing bubble. Go back and look at all the financial articles predicting problems in the housing market in '98 and '99 -- as well as the Bush administration warnings in 2002 and 2003 (which Frank pooh-poohed).

[GaHillBilly]

Beavuh, you seem to know more about economics than science.

 

Popper's ideas about falsification are all well and good, but much disputed. What's not really disputed is that functional science is about making useful predictions.

 

Newton's laws allow me to predict accurately where my bullet will go, given the angle and direction of the barrel and the muzzle velocity. Add in laws about fluid dynamics and aerodynamics and I can do even better.

 

Of course, science being what it is, and the real world being what IT is, I still have to actually FIRE the gun to make final determinations. But, the ESTABLISHED scientific principles made it possible to predict rather well even before test firing.

 

And, prediction is precisely where the AGW models have fallen down on the job. This was one of the juiciest tidbits from the released CRSS emails: scientists complaining that what was happening was actually OPPOSITE what was predicted.

 

(QUESTION: In your world Beavuh, doesn't this mean that the AGW models have been FALSIFIED?)

 

Beavuh, you may not know much about science, but you know enough about reasoning to realize -- if you think about it for a moment -- how silly it is to say that science is all about falsification. If it were, all I could do is fire my gun, inside a white radar dome, find the bullet hole, and then say, "Darn, another trajectory theory shot down!".

 

Engineering (which is a combination of applied science and common sense) DEPENDS on the predictive power of real science.

 

However, there is one sense in which you are right, Beavuh. Much 'science' with no predictive power is being pursued today, squandering enormous resources that could be spent learning something about something, instead of something about nothing, or nothing about something. String theory, SETI, abiogenesis all lack any prospect of producing useful predictions. String theory appears to lack even any hope of EVER producing useful (or testable) predictions.

 

Most so-called 'social sciences' are a miserable mix of a little real science with a whole lot of gussied up personal philosophy and politics -- and thus also usually lack the ability to make useful predictions.

 

I suspect that AGW, like global cooling before it (remember "nuclear winter"?), will in the end prove to have been more about politics and philosophy than science.

 

GaHillBilly

 

 

[Merlyn_LeRoy]

vol_scouter, you apparently have nothing you can cite for how you use terms, not even an example of someone else using the terms the same way you do. Given your ridiculous claim that I've been a "parrot to ideologues whose work you do not understand" when I've only quoted people in this thread and I haven't even taken any position on AGW in this thread, your tendency to just make up crap instead of actually reading what I write means your insistence on being right has zero weight with me, which is why I'm not going to accept just your word. Since you can't provide a shred of evidence, I'll lump that to be as accurate as your statement about my non-existent "parroting" of unnamed "ideologues." I'll just file that with your past incorrect, unsupported statements like your claim that Philadelphia actually violated their agreement with the Cradle of Liberty council, when in fact the city gave one year's notice as the agreement required.

[vol_scouter]

merlyn,

 

I have given my credentials and tried to help you to understand science. I will not spend my time looking up English language references because that is what you are asking me to do. The other scientists on the forum understand what I have said and have not indicated anything other than agreement. The reason is that I have discussed how science is performed. I have helped to form a consensus opinion along with ~15 other scientists in a prior area of endeavor. You do not understand science and I refuse to stoop to the level of defining words for you. Quit embarrassing yourself.

[Merlyn_LeRoy]

vol_scouter, given some of your past remarks that were false (and fairly easily shown to be false), I have no reason to take anything you say at face value. Since you have no references of any kind outside your own insistence that you're right, that's simply won't convince me, which is why I keep asking for some kind of cite or link that I can check.

[vol_scouter]

merlyn,

 

As a Scouter on this forum, I try to live by the Scout Oath and Law. You are not a Scouter and are impugning my veracity. I have demonstrated my knowledge of science here which you cannot do. I will not teach you English despite your insults. Science is learned by being mentored so much is learned that is some written tome. I have the credentials and you have demonstrated no understanding. I leave to members of the forum to judge for themselves.

[Merlyn_LeRoy]

vol_scouter writes:

You are not a Scouter and are impugning my veracity.

 

I am not a scouter, but I have not impugned your veracity; you have written statements in this forum that are false and demonstrably false. I've already listed two (your statement about my nonexistent "parroting" of "ideologues", and your statement on how Philly violated the terms of the CofL agreement).

 

Consequently, I won't take any statements of yours at face value.

 

I have demonstrated my knowledge of science here which you cannot do.

 

Correct, I certainly can't demonstrate that you have any knowledge of science.

[vol_scouter]

merlyn,

 

As I recall, I used popular sources for the Cradle of Liberty Council and the city of Philadelphia dispute. When you pointed out that you had read the actual contract and that contract laid out a method to get out of the contract, I acceded to what you had to say. I am certain that you cannot judge the science that I have discussed. You have shown yourself to be uneducated in the area of science and unwilling to learn so I should not have expected you to be able to judge scientific discussions.