Climate Change

[__HRB__]

Originally Posted by __HRB__

Top ten reasons how Hopenhagen has benefited from this thread:

7. Zerging is teh pwnage!

[__HRB__]

Originally Posted by __HRB__

Top ten reasons how Hopenhagen has benefited from this thread:

6. Zerging is teh pwnage!

[__HRB__]

Originally Posted by __HRB__

Top ten reasons how Hopenhagen has benefited from this thread:

5. Zerging is teh pwnage!

[cheesehead]

One comment that was recently taken out of context and twisted by anti-AGWers, who spin it as being sinister, was "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

Francisco Valero, Director of the Atmospheric Research Laboratory at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography, says the statement is totally correct.

But it doesn't mean what the anti-AGWers would like you to believe it means.

From Friday, December 18, 2009 issue of "What's New by Bob Park":

("What's New by Bob Park" is published weekly, and archived at http://www.bobpark.org/ -- but the "current" issue there is last week's, and today's issue will probably not be up on the website until a few days from now. I quote from the e-mail copy I just received, but have broken a long run-on paragraph into separate paragraphs for easier reading -- no words have been changed/added/deleted.):

CERES: SO WHAT WAS IN THE CLIMATEGATE E-MAILS?

A hacked e-mail passage that was widely quoted in media accounts of climate-gate, begins: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." Francisco Valero, Director of the Atmospheric Research Laboratory at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography, says the statement is totally correct.

The problem began where most of our problems began: at the start of The Bush administration. Because Al Gore initiated it, the Bush administration postponed and eventually canceled the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), meant to continuously monitor Earth's radiance from the L1 point between Earth and Sun. Instead NASA began a program to get the information from low Earth orbit: CERES, Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES).

The problem is that the low-Earth orbit satellite is so close that it sees only a narrow swath on each pass around the planet. Climate models require accurate radiance measurements over the diurnal cycle, and those data are not at hand. DSCOVR was designed to provide what the low-Earth orbit satellites cannot.

An $18.7 billion NASA budget sent to the White House last Sunday includes only $5 million for continued refurbishing of DSCOVR. That is also a travesty.

See what selective out-of-context quoting can accomplish in the hands of those determined to discredit the AGW hypothesis? (And so carefully-timed, too!)

A sincere lament that the Bush administration blocked the acquisition of data that could have helped explain the current "pause" in global surface temperature rise has been twisted -- into a false accusation of sinister intent on the part of climate researchers.

Are the ordinary anti-AGWers who are being mis-led by the distorters cheered by this sort of (mis)achievement? Will they do anything to repair the intellectual corruption of their own movement, or at least have the grace to be embarrassed at having been so easily led astray?

This is what I mean when I say you're being led by a ring in your nose, Max -- the leaked e-mail quotes have been carefully selected to make an impression that is contrary to the truth (as revealed by the full context), but seductively attractive to those who have fears about change and want to believe that science is wrong. You _want_ to believe that there's a conspiracy, a hoax -- so you leap at any chance to confirm your desire without taking the time to find out the real story.

Notice the timing, too: just far enough ahead of the Copenhagen conference for emotional political pressure to be brought on it, but not nearly enough time for widespread dissemination of a rational determination of the whole truth in context. So you in the target audience got the quick emotional message, the oh-so-self-righteously-satisfying high that the e-mail leakers wanted you to get, but the not-nearly-so-interesting dull truth lags behind. Can you show me that you're as interested in the latter as in the former?

[xilman]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Regarding Evans, I did not intend to slight the very fine radiative-balance work of that study ... I meant "limited" in the sense that it only addresses radiative balance (the lowest-order effect), not the interaction of the resulting forcing with the climate system. The spectral signature clinches the case that most of the increase in radiative absorption is indeed due to man-made GG emissions, but is irrelevant to my ensuing point, namely that this increased forcing is necessary but not sufficient to prove AGW.

Ernst, please bear with me for I am only a simple chemist and have a simple question based on my imperfect and decades old classes in thermodynamics.

I think we both accept, from Evans if nothing else, that radiative absorption has increased by a reasonably well characterised amount. That is, the planet as a whole is acquiring heat somewhat more rapidly than it did, say, three hundred years ago.

When I add heat to a system, at least one of (at least) four things tend to occur.

First, it may increase in temperature. In the present case, this would be AGW.

Second, it may radiate more heat. We're considering the entire planet as "the system", so the amount of heat lost by convection and conduction to the interplanetary medium may be regarded as negligible.

Third, an isothermal physical phase change may take place. The latent heat of the phase change absorbs the added energy without any rise in temperature. For example, melting ice remains at (essentially) zero Celsius; a process which appears to be occurring at many places around the world.

Fourth, an endothermic chemical or mechanical reaction may occur. For example, the energy might go into convection currents such as storms or oceanic currents.


My question: what am I missing? If anthropogenic increased radiative absorption is an accepted phenomenon, where is that energy going if not into raising temperatures, melting ice and driving weather systems and oceanic currents?


Paul

[cheesehead]

Coincidentally, I came here this morning to revise my approach by concentrating on the thermodynamics, looking at the Evans study as a starting point, in a manner quite similar to Paul's!

Up through yesteray, I had been concentrating on a different method of using/presenting the chain of scientific evidence for AGW. But my subconscious must've worked on that while I slept, because I woke up with a clear idea of a different approach -- "follow the heat".

Imagine my surprise when, upon getting here, I find that Paul has preceded me, and made a better initial presentation than I would have!

- - -

Let me interject also another important data point: the stratosphere is cooling. Stratospheric temperature measurements are, of course, sparser than tropospheric temperature measurements, but in recent decades weather balloons, microwave sounding units, rocketsondes, LIDAR and satellites have provided readings (http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/20c.html).

It's complicated by the fact that ozone depletion used to be the main anthropogenic cause of stratospheric cooling. Now, ozone is recovering, thanks to -- ahem -- certain changes in human behavior, resulting in far fewer human-emitted CFCs being added to the atmosphere recently. (Some folks might prefer to describe this change from about twenty years ago -- see http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/CFC+ban -- as "totalitarian" bans on CFCs, but I think that would be a misleading abuse of the adjective.)

But the expected resultant stratospheric warming from ozone recovery is now being more than offset by the increasing presence of GHGs. In other words, direct temperature measurements of the stratosphere show the recently growing effect of anthropogenic GHGs.

For more explanation, see

http://www.wunderground.com/educatio...to_cooling.asp

or

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...ky-is-falling/

or

http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/20c.html

or

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2006/11/s...-its-ugly.html

or

http://capitalistimperialistpig.blog...rc-busted.html

[Batalov]

COPENHAGEN – A plan to protect the world's biologically rich tropical forests by paying poor nations to protect them was shelved Saturday after world leaders failed to agree on a binding deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Burning trees to clear land for plantations or cattle ranches and logging forests for wood is blamed for about 20 percent of the world's emissions. That's as much carbon dioxide as all the world's cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined.

About 32 million acres (13 million hectares) of forests are cut down each year — an area about the size of England or New York State — and the emissions generated are comparable to those of China and the United States, according to the Eliasch Review.

Deforestation for logging, cattle grazing and crops has made Indonesia and Brazil the world's third- and fourth-biggest carbon emitters, after China and the United States.

All that made the failure of the forest project even more stinging.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091219/...limate_forests

20%, that's a lot, man.

[__HRB__]

Originally Posted by Batalov

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091219/...limate_forests

20%, that's a lot, man.

How did I defeat the killbots carbon emmisions? Simple, I sent wave after wave of my own men lumberjacks knowing full well that eventually the killbots would reach there kill limit and shut down forests would be gone and could no longer be a source of carbon.

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Max,

I have time for only some brief responses now.

No, that's not a correct summary or application of the HUP.

What the HUP says is explained here: http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08a.htm

It says that the product of the position measurement's uncertainty and the momentum (speed and direction of motion) measurement's uncertainty is always at least as large as a certain number (Planck's constant divided by 4*pi).

I'm not quibbling about the Planck's constant or the 4*pi. What I'm trying to point out is that Heisenberg said the uncertainty in position is inversely proportional to the uncertainty in momentum. We can get very, very precise measurements of a particle's position as long as we are prepared to accept that we cannot simultaneously get a precise measurement of its direction of motion or its speed.

So, "the uncertainty in knowing an electron's position is greater than the diameter of the atom" is simply not true unless you also specify that the uncertainty in knowing its momentum may be as small as the atom's diameter divided by (Planck's constant divided by 4 pi). That is, if the positional uncertainty is very large, then the momentum uncertainty can be very small. HUP is about a tradeoff.

Your "we have no way of knowing where the electron actually is" is also part of your misunderstanding of what HUP actually says. Actually, we can determine where the electron is to high precision, but not simultaneously determine to high precision its speed and direction of motion.

No, it's not at all the same! The uncertainty in climate models arises from quite different reasons than the uncertainty referred to by the HUP.

Your attempted application of HUP to show that "the climate models have too much uncertainty to tell us anything" or that "all of their predictions are therefore moot" is, once again, only a demonstration of your lack of scientific understanding. If you actually understood the HUP, you'd never have tried to apply it to a climate model. Your attempt to show that climate models are hopelessly uncertain only shows that you do not understand the real reasons for model uncertainty or their magnitude, and you have no basis for making any claim about climate model errors. You're welcome to come back to this issue when you can show that you actually understand what you're talking about (for example, show us that you understand some real reasons for model uncertainty). Please don't just parrot what you've read without understanding.

I do indeed understand all that you've said about the HUP. If I was trying to write on the subject of the HUP, I would have used it in a rather more rigorous way. All I was trying to do here was use it as a loose example of the magnitude of uncertainty I'm talking about. With the HUP, we can't determine an electron's position without making the momentum uncertainty so great that the measurement is useless. Similarly, the global climate models' uncertainty is too great for them to make any kind of long-term prediction about Earth's climate. That's the point I was trying to make, and I assumed that would be rather obvious. Apparently it wasn't, as you seemed to think I was trying to discuss the HUP and thus went off on a whole tangent about that. I apologize for the uncertainty of my wording.

He hasn't been! That you think so only demonstrates that you're taking Ernst's word uncritically without understand the real issues. Please don't claim knockdowns that haven't actually happened.

- - -

Oh, and ...

why is it that you keep criticizing AGW-supporting data, but never actually present any evidence to support the anti-AGW position?

Asking questions, presenting unsupported hypotheses, or repeating what someone else has said without understanding it is not the same as presenting evidence. I'm not asking you to refrain from asking questions, presenting hypotheses, or quoting someone else -- I'm saying that although I've asked you for evidence, all you've done is one of the former.

I'm not as personally familiar with the specific evidence supporting the anti-AGW position as of yet. However, I don't need to be; all that's needed to disprove the AGW hypothesis is reasoning showing that it's based on unsound assumptions. It's a sort of modus tollens argument; if you disprove a statement, then its negation must be true. That is, if you disprove the AGW hypothesis, then the reverse, the anti-AGW hypothesis, must be true, regardless of what positive evidence exists in direct favor of the anti-AGW hypothesis.

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Max, you seem to have amnesia.

Evans

Remember him? Remember that I've mentioned him more than once recently?

Remember his (and others') study that showed that the spectral signature of the downward flux increase matches the spectral signatures of human-produced GHGs?

Apparently, you do have trouble remembering that name and his study. Perhaps it's because you don't understand the significance of the Evans study -- is that it?

Are you having trouble understanding what the Evans study means? That the manmade GHGs have resulted in an increase in the amount of heat reaching the ground? And that this increase is about the same as would cause the observed rise in global average temperature?

Okay, I've looked through the Evans paper abstract you linked to. It does indeed give evidence that human-produced greenhouse gases have an affect on Earth's climate. It doesn't, however, quantify that effect in terms of temperature increase in and of itself. Rather, it points to global climate models--those very same models that I've repeatedly said the debate must focus on.

Once you boil the AGW hypothesis down to its reliance on global climate models, it falls apart. The uncertainty in the models is too great to tell us anything about the future of Earth's climate. How, then, can anyone seriously suggest that governments worldwide take drastic action to counter the "trends" they present?

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by mdettweiler

Similarly, the global climate models' uncertainty is too great for them to make any kind of long-term prediction about Earth's climate.

That's not true, Max. I've already pointed out counterexamples in the past -- did you just decide to ignore them because they were inconvenient for your argument?

That's the point I was trying to make, and I assumed that would be rather obvious. Apparently it wasn't, as you seemed to think I was trying to discuss the HUP and thus went off on a whole tangent about that. I apologize for the uncertainty of my wording.

Yes, your mis-analogy with HUP did reinforce the impression of your scientific misunderstanding. I think someone with an adequate understanding of science would've readily realized the inappropriateness.

I'm not as personally familiar with the specific evidence supporting the anti-AGW position as of yet. However, I don't need to be; all that's needed to disprove the AGW hypothesis is reasoning showing that it's based on unsound assumptions.

(* sigh *) Once again, you show your lack of science understanding.

What's needed is actual evidence, not mere reasoning. History shows that depending on reasoning without actual evidence has led people astray time after time after time. Your admiration of logical argument would be more appropriate to religion than to science. The most rigorous and logical reasoning in the world wouldn't be worth a dime in science if the evidence contradicted it. As I've said before, all you've just done was to illustrate your lack of science understanding.

That is, if you disprove the AGW hypothesis, then the reverse, the anti-AGW hypothesis, must be true

No, that's not at all correct, for more than one reason!

First of all, if you're defining "the anti-AGW hypothesis" to be simply the statement that the AGW hyporthesis is not true, then you haven't even proposed an alternate hypothesis, because a hypothesis, in science, isn't simply a claim that some other hypothesis is false. An alternate hypothesis has to present some particular idea(s) that can be tested.

What you are attempting to dignify as "the anti-AGW hypothesis" is not a hypothesis at all; it's simply the trivial statement that another hypothesis is false. Gee, Matt, it's child's play to say that some hypothesis is false; it's quite another more difficult task to form another hypothesis that presents its own, separate explanation for observed data! You haven't done anything of that sort. You've ducked all my repeated requests that you present an alternate hypothesis that fits the observed data.

Your claim that "the anti-AGW hypothesis" is a hypothesis in its own right is just like a child trying to act adult by imitating an adult statement without actually understanding it.

Secondly, you clearly do not understand what can be logically derived from a disproof of a scientific hypothesis.

As a very elementary refutation of the logic you just used in that last quoted partial sentence, suppose there are three competing hypotheses. (Your simplistic assumption of only a two-sided possibility is very naive.) Disproving one of those three hypotheses not only fails to prove that one of the other two hypotheses is true; it even fails to show that any number of existing competing hypotheses are true -- they could all be false!

Even in the two-hypothesis scenario, disproof of one does not demonstrate that the other is true. The other one could also be false!

The real world is not restricted to the two-value simplicities of Aristotelian logic.

Okay, I've looked through the Evans paper abstract you linked to. It does indeed give evidence that human-produced greenhouse gases have an affect on Earth's climate.

Actually, it gives evidence for a much stronger statement than that -- try figuring out and telling us what that stronger statement is. (Hint: one is mentioned earlier in this thread. Refrain from scanning past posts if you want to avoid seeing it.)

It doesn't, however, quantify that effect in terms of temperature increase in and of itself.

It quantifies it in terms of heat flux, just as it says. Your claim of its "failure" to quantify an effect in terms of temperature is just a straw-man argument -- your attempt to try to impose an obligation on the paper that it does not bear, for your own rhetorical purposes.

The paper has no obligation to quantify anything in terms of temperature, because it's not concerned with temperature -- it's concerned with spectra and heat flux.

Rather, it points to global climate models--those very same models that I've repeatedly said the debate must focus on.

Yes, you'd like to dictate what the debate must focus on, wouldn't you? Once you could do that, you could "prove" anything you wanted, regardless of whether it had any relation to reality.

Sorry, Max, but you do not get to define what is and is not science -- it's already been defined, by people who understood what they were talking about.

Besides (getting back to your specific statement), "pointing" to something doesn't mean that any qualities of the "something" somehow adhere to the pointer. An elementary counterexample: When you point to another person, are you thereby contaminated with the sins and faults of that other person? Answer: No. C'mon, Max -- try to think clearly about what you claim.

Once you boil the AGW hypothesis down to its reliance on global climate models, it falls apart.

But since it does NOT rely on global climate models (and I already said why, earlier -- I'm beginning to get a bit miffed by your failures to recall what I've already explained) -- much though you want it to -- your argument is what falls apart. Just because you find some article that claims something you want to be true, doesn't make it so.

C'mon, Max -- suck it up, and adopt a less arrogant attitude about your understanding of AGW and science in general. Be willing to be educated. (Perhaps you should resume our PM discussion of the difference between science and not-science.)

[cheesehead]

Question for those more adept at statistics than I:

Suppose one has sets of samples A, B & C, with equal numbers of elements in each sample set n(A) = n(B) = n(C) from a population that is much larger than n(A), with sample means m(A), m(B) & m(C) and sample standard deviations of ssd(A), ssd(B) & ssd(C).

If one combines these three sets of samples, with equal weighting, into one sample set A+B+C with n(A+B+C) = 3*n(A), what is m(A+B+C) and ssd(A+B+C)?

If one combines these three sets of samples, with unequal weightings of 1/ssd(A), 1/ssd(B) and 1/ssd(C), into one sample set A+B+C with n(A+B+C) = 3*n(A), what is m(A+B+C) and ssd(A+B+C) of the weighted resultant set?

If 1/ssd(set) is not an appropriate weighting for the sample sets when combined, if what one wants is for each sample is that it have more weight if it has a smaller standard deviation, what would a more appropriate weighting be, and what would be the m(A+B+C) and ssd(A+B+C) of the resultant set weighted in this manner?