Climate Change

[__HRB__]

Data from: http://www.drroyspencer.com

Caveat 1: flashing your PhD means you probably didn't deserve one.
Caveat 1 caveat: royspencer.com was registered earlier.
Caveat 1 caveat caveat: rwspencer.com is available.

Caveat 2: According to his wikipedia entry, Prof. Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. h.c. Spencer also a proponent of ID.
Caveat 2 caveat 1: Otto Roessler thinks The LHC Can Create Black Holes And We're All Gonna Die, but the behavior of two raisins in taffy is still cool.
Caveat 2 caveat 2: It doesn't say whether he also believes in a god, but if he does he might also think he'll go to hell if he falsely witnesses bears in his neighbor's data.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by mdettweiler

I see that W/m² is a common unit used to measure insolation, but nonetheless it still doesn't answer my question: just how much will the temperature increase based on that amount of W/m²?

Oh, c'mon -- you've seen news reports of the temperature increases predicted.

The 2007 IPCC report says temperature rises by 2100 could, in the most extreme scenarios, range from 1.1°C and 6.4°C. The most likely range is 1.8°C to 4.0°C, with the report predicting that 4°C is most likely if the world continues to burn fossil-fuels at the same rate.

You say that's the models' job--then show me some models!

Cute - typical simplistic tactic: "Feed me everything, or else I'll know you're lying."

Go find them yourself. (They're millions of lines of computer code.)

What difference does breaking up the challenge make?

You tell me. You're the one who wrote, "As for the first challenge, ...".

It seemed quite logical to answer each part individually.

Fine. Then answer the second part.

How else is one supposed to respond?

I don't ask you to respond in any particular manner.

But if you ignore the second part, I'll accuse you of dodging.

Yes, I agree, the same standard of proof should be held to the hypotheses I proposed. However, there is a key difference. You are attempting to convince me that the AGW hypothesis is true, and that we should take preventative action based on that. I, on the other hand, was not attempting to necessarily convince you that my hypotheses were definitely true; rather, I was throwing them out as possible alternate explanations for the evidences you suggested as being in favor of AGW.

Do you think you are taking a superior position by disclaiming responsibility for defending your alternate hypotheses? No, you're just being an intelluctual coward.

Without any evidence to support them, your alternative hypotheses are just hot air.

Suppose we have 5 pieces of evidence for hypothesis A, but no piece of evidence for hypotheses B, C and D. Your position seems to be that as long as you can spout alternative hypotheses, that means hypothesis A is unsound.

No, Max -- proposing an alternative hypothesis is not the same as disproving some other hypothesis. It's just your tactic to avoid showing us any evidence for your side.

Believe me, if it was my intention to seriously present any of my previously stated hypotheses (such as, say, the one about subsurface ocean heat content increasing due to geological activity), then I'd be sure to be well-armed with scientific data and reasoning to support it. But that's wasn't my goal here;

Wow. Thank you for that straight-out admission.

it was merely to present other possibilities to show that crying AGW isn't the only conclusion to the data you've presented.

Max,

I know you just love to distort what I've written so as to make it seem ridiculous (it's called the "straw man" tactic), but I'm going to call you on it.

AGW isn't the only hypothesis; it's just the one that best fits the observed data so far. You're welcome to present some superior hypothesis that fits the data better -- but so far, neither you nor any other AGW-denier has done so! You've only spouted ideas without evidence. A hypothesis that fits observed data is superior to any hypothesis that doesn't even try to fit the observed data -- but the latter is all you spout here.

The hypothesis I referred to as the "null hypothesis" (a term I believe was used once before by Ernst earlier in this thread to similar effect) is that AGW is not occurring in significant enough quantities to affect life on the surface of the earth. The idea behind it being "null" is that it's implied, i.e. the counter to the argument you're presenting.

Right.

But since we have evidence that AGW is occurring in significant enough quantities to affect life on the surface of the earth, we have disproved the null hypothesis.

That argument doesn't hold much weight because I could easily say the same for you: that you would rather sit back and spout pro-AGW propaganda because it doesn't require you to change your mind.

... except that I actually present supporting data -- you don't!

I don't claim to know those facts,

Yes, you seem proud of know-nothingness.

though I might be able to dig some up if I had a few hours to spend digging around on the internet for them.

... which you do have: time, that is. You've proven it by the amount of posting you do.

But as I said above, the burden of proof is on you.

... and you're still wrong now, just as you were above.

We both have burdens of proof.

The difference is that I've presented evidence for my side, but you've presented no evidence for your side.

If the hypothesis in question right now was one that I was arguing for, then it would be on me, but right now we're discussing the AGW hypothesis, for which you are the advocate.

... and for which I (more importantly, mainstream climatology) _have_ presented evidence. You, on the other hand, have shown neither a refutation of AGW, nor supporting evidence for an alternative hypothesis. Your evidentiary position is inferior to mine as long as you keep presenting only rhetoric but no facts to support your side (that AGW is wrong).

You have not shown us any evidence that AGW is wrong.

You have argued that your ignorance constitutes some sort of support for your side, but you are wrong about that.

Show us some evidence, Max. Quit dodging.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

From the extended abstract of the Evans 2006 paper (if you'd gone to the http://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006...per_100737.htm link, you'd have found the link to the extended abstract at http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/100737.pdf.):

(Now I'll suppose that someone will say that you don't see where it says "this is enough to have an impact of any sizeable effect on our planet's climate".)

It is potentially "enough", but you reading of Evans et al's own words is rather selective - see that bit about the "large uncertainty in the models"? Maybe now that I've underlined it for you, it`ll be easier to spot. If rising CO2 results in a forcing on the order of 3 W/m^2 that is indeed notable ... but if the models that then take that added radiative forcing have no good way to model the *effects* of the forcing on the coupled ocean/land/atmosphere system, then all you have is a *potentially* significant warming effect. Since water vapor is a more-potent per-molecule (and much more abundant) GG than CO2, its role is crucial - so warmer means more water vapor which traps more heat, leading to a positive feedback - except when it's (as is frequently the case) in the form of clouds, which are impossible to model currently with any fidelity whatsoever, and also interact in complex ways with other man-made aerosols. Right there is enough uncertainty-in-modeling to drive a metaphorical truck through, and "while all computer models have uncertainties, most point to a warming..." is unhelpful, because none of the models does even a halfway-decent job in simulating clouds.

[ewmayer]

By way of a general and seemingly-balanced reference regarding the fascinating history of the AGW hypothesis, I found this page from the American Institute of Physics.

Now, getting back to the "Climategate" controversy, a recent installment from NY Times science writer John Tierney, with lots of useful links:

E-Mail Fracas Shows Peril of Trying to Spin Science

Aarrggghhh!

That cry, in various spellings, is a motif throughout the log as Harry tries to fight off despair. "OH [EXPLETIVE] THIS!" he writes after struggling to reconcile readings from weather stations around the world. "It`s Sunday evening, I`ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I`m hitting yet another problem that`s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity. ..."

Harry, whoever he may be, comes off as the most sympathetic figure in the pilfered computer annals of East Anglia University, the British keeper of global temperature records. While Harry`s log shows him worrying about the integrity of the database, the climate scientists are e-mailing one another with strategies for blocking outsiders` legal requests to see their data.

While Harry is puzzling over temperatures -- "I have that familiar Twilight Zone sensation" -- the scientists are confidently making proclamations to journalists, jetting to conferences and plotting revenge against those who question the dangers of global warming. When a journal publishes a skeptic`s paper, the scientists e-mail one another to ignore it. They focus instead on retaliation against the journal and the editor, a project that is breezily added to the agenda of their next meeting: "Another thing to discuss in Nice!"

As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude -- and ultimately undermine their own cause.

Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: "hide the decline" used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university`s Climatic Research Unit. He was discussing the preparation of a graph for the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization showing that temperatures in the past several decades were the highest of the past millennium.

Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other "proxy" records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don`t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century -- in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.

Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.

But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn`t have realized that the scariest part of that graph -- the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium -- was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.

The story behind that graph certainly didn`t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim. (Go to nytimes.com/tierneylab for details.)

In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of "grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record," immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:

"No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, `grafted the thermometer record onto` any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum."

Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don`t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.

Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the "hockey stick" graph of temperatures over the past millennium.

It is not unreasonable to give outsiders a look at the historical readings and the adjustments made by experts like Harry. How exactly were the readings converted into what the English scientists describe as "quality controlled and homogenised" data?

Trying to prevent skeptics from seeing the raw data was always a questionable strategy, scientifically. Now it looks like dubious public relations, too.

In response to the furor over the climate e-mail messages, there will be more attention than ever paid to those British temperature records, and any inconsistencies or gaps will seem more suspicious simply because the researchers were so determined not to reveal them. Skeptical bloggers are already dissecting Harry`s work. As they relentlessly pore over other data, the British scientists will feel Harry`s pain:

Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.

My Comment: [Editorial note: It mow appears that the "Harry" mentioned in the article is a CRU staffer, Ian (Harry) Harris.] Now we just need the mainstream media to get their heads around the whole "pretending one can with confidence model an incredibly complex dynamically interacting sun/earth/atmosphere/land/ocean/ice/human nonlinear dynamical system known to be metastable, chaotic and containing important forcing and response timescales ranging from days to hundreds of thousands of years, over simulation timescales of decades, centuries and even millennia" issue. Maybe we should just simplify the issue and ask "How far out to you trust your local weather forecast? How about the big-iron ones made e.g. by NCAR? Can you say 'extreme sensitivity' to initial conditions, and by extension to model assumptions and lack of sufficient spatiotemporal resolution'?"

[ewmayer]

Tierney has an accompanying post-with-reader-comments on his NYTimes blog, which captures my view of the matter nicely:

I’ve long thought that the biggest danger in climate research is the temptation for scientists to lose their skepticism and go along with the “consensus” about global warming. That’s partly because it’s easy for everyone to get caught up in “informational cascades”, and partly because there are so many psychic and financial rewards for working on a problem that seems to be a crisis. We all like to think that our work is vitally useful in solving a major social problem — and the more major the problem seems, the more money society is liable to spend on it.

I’m not trying to suggest that climate change isn’t a real threat, or that scientists are deliberately hyping it. But when they look at evidence of the threat, they may be subject to the confirmation bias — seeing trends that accord with their preconceptions and desires. Given the huge stakes in this debate — the trillions of dollars that might be spent to reduce greenhouse emissions — it’s important to keep taking skeptical looks at the data. How open do you think climate scientists are to skeptical views, and to letting outsiders double-check their data and calculations?

My Comment: The other thing which is greatly concerning (or should be) for any scientist: It appears that the more closely one looks at some of the raw data (in cases where they are available) used for some of the key temperature-proxy results underpinning the claim of extraordinary warming in the past 5-years, the more dubious the "reconstructions" look. Grafting an instrument proxy onto the last 50 years of a long-term tree-ring-based record because of the alleged "problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts" (might the real problem with the tree-ring proxies be that they weren't "cooperating" recently?) is dubious enough, but then to actually omit the last 50-years of tree-ring data from the published graph, thus deleting the evidence of the large recent divergence between the 2 different proxies? That just flat-out fraud there, folks. And instances like the case of the magically disappearing data don`t help, either.

[__HRB__]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...ay-danish-text

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by __HRB__

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...ay-danish-text

The PBS website confirms the story, though the "this is just one of many circulating draft documents ... nothing to see here, folks" damage-control machinery is apparently in full swing.

-------------------

Woman Who Invented Credit Default Swaps is One of the Key Architects of Carbon Derivatives

The gaming-the-carbon-credits-market theme jibes with numerous other reports I've seen (e.g. the now-famous Goldman Sachs "Vampire Squid" story by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi) indicating that there is a very good reason Big Finance is keenly interested in the Carbon Credits market, and it has nothing to do with (allegedly) helping to fight global warming.

I found the quote from George Soros particularly telling:"Even George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator, says money managers would find ways to manipulate cap-and-trade markets. “The system can be gamed,” Soros, 79, remarked at a London School of Economics seminar in July. “That’s why financial types like me like it -- because there are financial opportunities”."

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

It is potentially "enough", but you reading of Evans et al's own words is rather selective

Ernst, this is, yet again, a declarative statement for which you have no evidence.

see that bit about the "large uncertainty in the models"?

Of course I saw, and understood, it.

Maybe now that I've underlined it for you, it`ll be easier to spot.

All you're doing is showing us your mistaken projections upon my words, projections that may be interfering with your ability to understand what I wrote.

If rising CO2 results in a forcing on the order of 3 W/m^2 that is indeed notable ... but if the models that then take that added radiative forcing have no good way to model the *effects* of the forcing on the coupled ocean/land/atmosphere system, then all you have is a *potentially* significant warming effect. Since water vapor is a more-potent per-molecule (and much more abundant) GG than CO2, its role is crucial

Of course it's crucial, so that's why climatologists have always taken water vapor into effect.

- so warmer means more water vapor which traps more heat, leading to a positive feedback

Didn't you read the article I pointed out to Max, about how one difference between water vapor and CO₂ is that the latter is forcing because of its long residence time, but the former is not (on any but a few-days short timescale) because its residence time is so short?

- except when it's (as is frequently the case) in the form of clouds, which are impossible to model currently with any fidelity whatsoever, and also interact in complex ways with other man-made aerosols. Right there is enough uncertainty-in-modeling to drive a metaphorical truck through, and "while all computer models have uncertainties, most point to a warming..." is unhelpful, because none of the models does even a halfway-decent job in simulating clouds.

... except for the little point that the models can be, and are extensively, run against real climate records of the past, for verification. If the models were so hopelessly inadequate as you seem to be maintaining that they are, how could it ever be possible for them to come up with results reasonably matching known climate data of the past?

Why don't you mention such verification runs? Is it because that'd blunt your argument?

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Of course it's crucial, so that's why climatologists have always taken water vapor into effect.

...except for the fact that they can't model clouds, you mean?

Didn't you read the article I pointed out to Max, about how one difference between water vapor and CO₂ is that the latter is forcing because of its long residence time, but the former is not (on any but a few-days short timescale) because its residence time is so short?

Residence time? For H20? WTF? RT is important for CO2 because of the "If we stopped all man-made CO2 emissions today, how long would it take for CO2 levels to fall back to preindustrial levels?" issue, but it's completely *irrelevant* for water vapor because of the hydrological cycle: All that matters for H20 is whether the net average amount in the atmosphere is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same, and that of course depends crucially on ocean temps, land use changes and aerosol/cloud interactions. Whether your average H2O molecule stays in the air for a few hours, days, weeks or years matters not one bit, since so much is continually cycling in and out.

... except for the little point that the models can be, and are extensively, run against real climate records of the past, for verification. If the models were so hopelessly inadequate as you seem to be maintaining that they are, how could it ever be possible for them to come up with results reasonably matching known climate data of the past?

For one thing because if you give me a *known* past climate record I can do oodles of runs with my favorite GCM and twiddle the various fudge-factor parameters until I get a "match" - much like picking stock market winners is a lot easier in reverse.

I'll have much more to say on this topic moving forward, but let me throw this out for starters: Are you familiar wit the "Lorenz attractor" of chaos theory? Remember what kind of modeling Ed Lorenz was doing at MIT when he stumbled across his famous discovery of "extreme sensitivity of model results to initial conditions"?

[__HRB__]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

[...]
I'll have much more to say on this topic moving forward, but let me throw this out for starters: Are you familiar wit the "Lorenz attractor" of chaos theory? Remember what kind of modeling Ed Lorenz was doing at MIT when he stumbled across his famous discovery of "extreme sensitivity of model results to initial conditions"?

Care to criticize the following?

Originally Posted by __HRB__

If one must use non-linear models, then accurate prediction isn't a good measure of reliability. I believe any reasonable policy would have to be designed to a) switch attractors and b) reduce the lyapunov exponent of the result. That way, one cannot find optimal policies, but one might at least be able to identify dominated ones, i.e. where there is no trade-off between model variance and model bias.

So, two questions are: is a) possible and how do we validate b)?
[...]

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Oh, c'mon -- you've seen news reports of the temperature increases predicted.

News reports are often exaggerated for sensationality. I've learned to take them with a grain of salt.

The 2007 IPCC report says temperature rises by 2100 could, in the most extreme scenarios, range from 1.1°C and 6.4°C. The most likely range is 1.8°C to 4.0°C, with the report predicting that 4°C is most likely if the world continues to burn fossil-fuels at the same rate.

Thank you, now we have some actual data.

However, given the recent findings about extensive "fudging" of major climate models, we are therefore forced to take this with a grain of salt as well. Even if you assume that the scientists involved aren't intentionally skewing the data, as Ernst said in post #575, the scientists themselves admit there's "large uncertainty in the models".

Therefore, it would seem that we're not going to resolve this debate by means of climate models or "scientific data"; there's too much uncertainty as to the reliability of the presentation of the data. If it was a less controversial (and easier to model) field, say zoology, then perhaps we wouldn't have to worry so much about the veracity of the data, but here, it's key.

It seems, then, that this debate must leave the realm of science and enter the realm of politics. Did the scientists involved in producing the data lie, and if they did, to what extent? That's the real debate here. I think everyone here will agree that all the highly-publicized climate models are greatly in favor of AGW; the question is rather whether they're painting an accurate picture of the planet's climate, or rather just what their creators want them to paint for political reasons.

BTW, a couple things I'd like to say in regard to the "alternative hypotheses" I presented earlier, so you don't start ranting more about me "dodging": I presented those as possible "pretty good guesses" (post #486), not as evidentially backed up scientific hypotheses. And I wasn't claiming that those "guesses" were sufficient to disprove global warming; rather, I was trying to show how a little armchair reasoning throws the data you presented into doubt. If those potential responses to that data are so easy to formulate, then how come we haven't seen the pro-AGW crowd even attempt to shut them down scientifically? Again, this is not sufficient to disprove AGW, but it does present another area that pro-AGW scientists need to address in order for their argument to be as airtight as they claim it to be.