A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Global savings from global warming
At MasterResource, Chip Knappenberger has a provocative post entitled Global savings : Billion dollar weather events averted by global warming. Excerpts:
For every billion-dollar weather disaster identified as being ‘consistent with’ human-caused global warming, there are probably several other potential billion-dollar weather disasters that human-caused global warming averted.
I have begun to compile a list of averted billion-dollar weather events during the past year “consistent with” anthropogenic global warming. A full list is necessarily much greater because there are certainly many more events that we could never know about because they didn’t rise to the extreme to be recorded.
Hurricane Debby, June 2012. Hurricane Debby never formed. Increased vertical wind shear “consistent with” expectations from global warming prevented the development of tropical storm Debby into hurricane Debby. Damage estimates from tropical storm Debby have been estimated at $250 million with 5 direct and 3 indirect fatalities from the storm. Had global warming not helped to inhibit the growth of the storm system, these totals may well have been higher, exceeding a billion dollars. (For more information of the life of Debby, see here.)
Now that is a really novel angle on the global warming-disaster meme.
von Storch
Der Spiegel has an interview with Hans von Storch. Excerpts:
SPIEGEL: Would you say that people no longer reflexively attribute every severe weather event to global warming as much as they once did?
Storch: Yes, my impression is that there is less hysteria over the climate. There are certainly still people who almost ritualistically cry, “Stop thief! Climate change is at fault!” over any natural disaster. But people are now talking much more about the likely causes of flooding, such as land being paved over or the disappearance of natural flood zones — and that’s a good thing.
SPIEGEL: Yet it was climate researchers, with their apocalyptic warnings, who gave people these ideas in the first place.
Storch: Unfortunately, some scientists behave like preachers, delivering sermons to people. What this approach ignores is the fact that there are many threats in our world that must be weighed against one another. If I’m driving my car and find myself speeding toward an obstacle, I can’t simple yank the wheel to the side without first checking to see if I’ll instead be driving straight into a crowd of people. Climate researchers cannot and should not take this process of weighing different factors out of the hands of politics and society.
SPIEGEL: Just since the turn of the millennium, humanity has emitted another 400 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, yet temperatures haven’t risen in nearly 15 years. What can explain this?
Storch: So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break. We’re facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.
SPIEGEL: How long will it still be possible to reconcile such a pause in global warming with established climate forecasts?
Storch: If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.
Blackboard
Lucia has a very good post at the Blackboard, discussing a new paper entitled Strengthening of ocean heat uptake efficiency associated with the recent climate hiatus. Lucia summarizes the main points of the paper to be:
- There has been a hiatus in warming in the surface temperatures and this hiatus represents a statistically rare event in climate models.
- They suggest this hiatus can be explained as arising from the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
- They further suggest those (statistically rare) periods of ‘hiatus’ in surface warming seen in models also correspond to periods of enhanced heat uptake in models
Lucia provides some interesting commentary, and the discussion in the comments is also worth reading.
rgbatduke
WUWT has highlighted the previous comment by rgbatduke into a main post, and rgbatduke responds with an even longer, and more provocative comment. A few excerpts:
[T]here is no reason to think that the central limit theorem and by inheritance the error function or other normal-derived estimates of probability will have the slightest relevance to any of the climate models, let alone all of them together. One can at best take any given GCM run and compare it to the actual data, or take an ensemble of Monte Carlo inputs and develop many runs and look at the spread of results and compare THAT to the actual data.
In the latter case one is already stuck making a Bayesian analysis of the model results compared to the observational data (PER model, not collectively) because when one determines e.g. the permitted range of random variation of any given input one is basically inserting a Bayesian prior (the probability distribution of the variations) on TOP of the rest of the statistical analysis. Indeed, there are many Bayesian priors underlying the physics, the implementation, the approximations in the physics, the initial conditions, the values of the input parameters. Without wishing to address whether or not this sort of Bayesian analysis is the rule rather than the exception in climate science, one can derive a simple inequality that suggests that the uncertainty in each Bayesian prior on average increases the uncertainty in the predictions of the underlying model. I don’t want to say proves because the climate is nonlinear and chaotic, and chaotic systems can be surprising, but the intuitive order of things is that if the inputs are less certain and the outputs depend nontrivially on the inputs, so are the outputs less certain.
I therefore repeat to Nick the question I made on other threads. Is the near-neutral variation in global temperature for at least 1/8 of a century (since 2000, to avoid the issue of 13, 15, or 17 years of “no significant warming” given the 1997/1999 El Nino/La Nina one-two punch since we have no real idea of what “significant” means given observed natural variability in the global climate record that is almost indistinguishable from the variability of the last 50 years) strong evidence for warming of 2.5 C by the end of the century? Is it even weak evidence for? Or is it in fact evidence that ought to at least some extent decrease our degree of belief in aggressive warming over the rest of the century?
I make this point to put the writers of the Summary for Policy Makers for AR5 that if they repeat the egregious error made in AR4 and make any claims whatsoever for the predictive power of the spaghetti snarl of GCM computations, if they use the terms “mean and standard deviation” of an ensemble of GCM predictions, if they attempt to transform those terms into some sort of statement of probability of various future outcomes for the climate based on the collective behavior of the GCMs, there will be hell to pay, because GCM results are not samples drawn from a fixed distribution, thereby fail to satisfy the elementary axioms of statistics and render both mean behavior and standard deviation of mean behavior over the “space” of perturbations of model types and input data utterly meaningless as far as having any sort of theory-supported predictive force in the real world. Literally meaningless. Without meaning.
The probability ranges published in AR4′s summary for policy makers are utterly indefensible by means of the correct application of statistics to the output from the GCMs collectively or singly. When one assigns a probability such as “67%” to some outcome, in science one had better be able to defend that assignment from the correct application of axiomatic statistics right down to the number itself. Otherwise, one is indeed making a Ouija board prediction, which as Greg pointed out on the original thread, is an example deliberately chosen because we all know how Ouija boards work! They spell out whatever the sneakiest, strongest person playing the game wants them to spell.
And for the sake of all of us who have to pay for those sins in the form of misdirected resources, please, please do not repeat the mistake in AR5. Stop using phrases like “67% likely” or “95% certain” in reference to GCM predictions unless you can back them up within the confines of properly done statistical analysis and mere common wisdom in the field of predictive modeling — a field where I am moderately expert — where if anybody, ever claims that a predictive model of a chaotic nonlinear stochastic system with strong feedbacks is 95% certain to do anything I will indeed bitch slap them the minute they reach for my wallet as a consequence.
Predictive modeling is difficult. Using the normal distribution in predictive modeling of complex multivariate system is (as Taleb points out at great length in The Black Swan) easy but dumb. Using it in predictive modeling of the most complex system of nominally deterministic equations — a double set of coupled Navier Stokes equations with imperfectly known parameters on a rotating inhomogeneous ball in an erratic orbit around a variable star with an almost complete lack of predictive skill in any of the inputs (say, the probable state of the sun in fifteen years), let alone the output — is beyond dumb. Dumber than dumb. Dumb cubed. The exponential of dumb. The phase space filling exponential growth of probable error to the physically permitted boundaries dumb.
I assert — as a modest proposal indeed — that we do not know enough to build a good, working climate model. We will not know enough until we can build a working climate model that predicts the past — explains in some detail the last 2000 years of proxy derived data, including the Little Ice Age and Dalton Minimum, the Roman and Medieval warm periods, and all of the other significant decadal and century scale variations in the climate clearly visible in the proxies. Once we can predict and understand the gross motion of the climate, perhaps we can discern and measure the actual “warming signal”, if any, from CO_2. In the meantime, as the GCMs continue their extensive divergence from observation, they make it difficult to take their predictions seriously enough to condemn a substantial fraction of the world’s population to a life of continuing poverty on their unsupported basis.
Let me make this perfectly clear. WHO has been publishing absurdities such as the “number of people killed every year by global warming” (subject to a dizzying tower of Bayesian priors I will not attempt to deconstruct but that render the number utterly meaningless). We can easily add to this number the number of people a year who have died whose lives would have been saved if some of the half-trillion or so dollars spent to ameliorate a predicted disaster in 2100 had instead been spent to raise them up from poverty and build a truly global civilization.
That is why presenting numbers like “67% likely” on the basis of gaussian estimates of the variance of averaged GCM numbers as if it has some defensible predictive force to those who are utterly incapable of knowing better is not just incompetently dumb, it is at best incompetently dumb. The nicest interpretation of it is incompetence. The harshest is criminal malfeasance — deliberately misleading the entire world in such a way that millions have died unnecessarily, whole economies have been driven to the wall, and worldwide suffering is vastly greater than it might have been if we had spent the last twenty years building global civilization instead of trying to tear it down!
Even if the predictions of catastrophe in 2100 are true — and so far there is little reason to think that they will be based on observation as opposed to extrapolation of models that rather appear to be failing — it is still not clear that we shouldn’t have opted for civilization building first as the lesser of the two evils.
Head to WUWT and read the entire post.
rgbatduke states “I make this point to put the writers of the Summary for Policy Makers for AR5 that if they repeat the egregious error made in AR4 and make any claims whatsoever for the predictive power of the spaghetti snarl of GCM computations, if they use the terms “mean and standard deviation” of an ensemble of GCM predictions, if they attempt to transform those terms into some sort of statement of probability of various future outcomes for the climate based on the collective behavior of the GCMs, there will be hell to pay, ”
All I can add is Amen. This is the point I have been trying to get discussed on Climate Etc for months. How much do the uncertainties that our hostess talks about, impinge on the IPCC assertions of the probabilities that certain things are true, as claimed in the SPMs of the AR4? http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-7.html
Note, the SPM meeting for the AR5 is set for September this year. I hope some of the political delegates have competent scientists witrh them to challenge the sort of nonsense that went into the SPMs of the AR4.
Re Robert G. Brown’s (aka rgbatduke) “The phase space filling exponential growth of probable error to the physically permitted boundaries dumb.” Finally a scientist who begins to express how incredibly poor are the IPCC’s “projections” from a scientific perspective.
I affirm Brown’s comments (Amen to the power of angels!)
Even a little child can now see that ALL the IPCC’s much relied on Global Warming Model predictions are “nowhere close” (>95% > 2 sigma) to the actual global temperatures since 1979.
While not as colorful, Green, Armstrong & Soon conservatively quantify that the IPCC’s global warming projections remarkably violate most of the principles of scientific forecasting.
Kesten C. Green and J. Scott Armstrong (2007) Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts Energy & Environment Vol. 18 No. 7+8
Armstrong, Green & Soon, (2008) Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit
Green, Armstrong & Soon (2009) Validity of climate change forecasting for public policy decision making. International Journal of Forecasting 25 (2009) 826–832
Such conduct in medical research or financial IPOs would land the proponents in jail!
Restore “climate science” to the foundations of science where hypotheses are tested and found wanting. Per rgbatduke’s example of empirical models, Nicola Scafetta’s empirical global temperature model shows far better performance than the billion dollar GCMs.
On models vs evidence, see Dr. Roy Spencer’s STILL Epic Fail: 73 Climate Models vs. Measurements, Running 5-Year Means
Norman Rogers reviews Is Roy Spencer the world’s most important scientist?
Strange remark by Spencer. Natural climate change is the basis of paleoclimate. When volcanoes spew CO2 it warms. What is he talking about?
Jim D
On what reliable evidence do you state that?
There is evidence for 10C higher with today’s CO2 concentrations.
Paper: ‘Summer temperatures were about 10°C warmer than today, even though the concentration of atmospheric CO2 was similar’
Similarly, with CO2 ten times higher than today the temperature varied between 12 C and 22C.
See: CO2-levels in the course of 600 million years
i.e., climate is not obviously correlated with CO2 let alone directly driven by it.
Global temperatures do drive CO2 as a function of latitude.
See Fred Haynie The Future of Global Climate Change
If paleoclimate isn’t evidence of natural climate variations believed by the scientists, or Milankovitch cycles are not natural, then he would have been right, but actually his statement is completely wrong. The Eocene had lush vegetation into the Arctic circle and reptiles. These were natural climate variations that scientists always have accepted. It is not a new thing. When Spencer says “natural” he means something else, probably “unforced”, and then he would have a point. Few scientists think the climate can change without some forcing, whether it is CO2, volcanoes, meteors, plate tectonics, microbial, orbital or solar forcing. At least there is no evidence yet of that happening without these factors.
Oh, he found more mistakes in the models he and Christy use?
David Hagen, the paper you link from WUWT is about Arctic amplification. Sea ice is on its way out. When it is gone all year, as could happen with hardly any more CO2 added, it easily could be 10 C warmer on average. Open water doesn’t support temperatures much below freezing the way sea-ice surfaces can, so I would say plausible in the Arctic.
Jim D
Re: “When it is gone all year, . . . it easily could be 10 C warmer”
Note, ice melts at 0C. Temperatures in the Arctic in mid winter are -30C. Increasing 10C will only get to -20 C.
See: Sea Ice Page
JIm D., you write “Sea ice is on its way out.”
Then can you explain why, currently,, Antarctic sea ice is over 1msk above the recent average?
re:”Open water doesn’t support temperatures much below freezing the way sea-ice surfaces can, so I would say plausible in the Arctic.”
So the heat comes OUT of the ocean and heats the atmosphere?
Is this support for Kim’s theory?
Is this an explanation for multi-century ocean “cycles”? (heat builds in oceans till caps reduce enough to allow ocean to dump heat to atmosphere, oceans cool, cap re-forms, rinse and repeat)
Just askin’….
Were they talking about winter or annual average? I think 10 C is reasonable for an annual average.
Don’t forget the U.K. Met Office initiated “emergency” -> “crisis” ->”unprecedented” -> “day-to-day” one-day workshop which just happened to coincide with the U.K. hosted G8 meeting. “Climate change” was conspicuously absent from the agenda (although “tax*” was accorded a place of honour, with no less than 21 mentions in Cameron’s pre-meeting oration via WSJ Op Ed)
And “climate change” seems to be … uh … sustaining the same (alarming to some, perhaps?!) fate, according to results to date of a little-heralded UN sponsored “global survey” of the “people of the world”.
With the exception of those “voters” who fall within the “high” range of HDI, of 16 possible priorities for a post-2015 world, “Action taken on climate change” [which in UN-speak was clearly defined as “This means that governments should take on binding commitments to reduce carbon emissions to levels which can keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees, and invest in adaptation measures particularly involving vulnerable communities”] consistently ranked 16th. See:
NEWSFLASH! Action on climate change voted bottom of world’s priority heap
The public aren’t fools.
They’ve watched the wheels fall off the ‘climate change’ bandwagon over the last five years. It’s a sad (for some) tale of increasing decline from the high point just before Copenhagen.
Let’s review some of the high(low)lights:
Copenhagen’s frozen fiasco
Climategate – showed the public how the sausages are made – and ruined their appetite for such morsels
Cancun’s failure
In UK – credibility failure of ‘barbecue summer’ forecasts and disappearing snow
Arrest and imprisonment of Climate Change minister.
Globally – rise of sceptical voices in political sphere. Reducing influence of MSM on opinions.
Assorted misdemeanours (and worse) by leading climatologists and their acolytes. Credibility of the ‘science’ hits new low.
Bills for appeasing the Climate God now falling on doormats…and very unwelcome.
And of course – the stable temperature record. It is impossible to scare the public about climate change 100 years hence if you can’t get today’s effects right. Should have looked out of the window guys!
This is the history of a scam in terminal decline. No evidence of ‘climate change’ for 15+ years. Few practitioners with any credibility. Thirty years of failed propaganda.
It is no wonder that we aren’t worried about ‘climate change’. But the scammers should be…the money is drying up, the interest in your BS is draining away…and your future career opportunities look pretty limited.
The public aren’t fools.
Mmmm
Churchill once said that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” You could say the same about reading some of the comments by some of the knuckle-draggers on this blog too!
The public aren’t all fools. You’d have to think that Churchill was being slightly too pessimistic in thinking what he did about the average voter. Hopefully, he was really meaning the sub-average. Or sub-normal. There’s plenty of them around.
Oh, please, Peter, how then would it be an argument against democracy?
==========
I think he meant, and I would agree, that it was “the best argument” but not a decisive one.
temp –
Talk a look at the other items on the list: education, clean water and sanitation, healthcare, honest and responsive government, etc. All very proximal concerns,- particularly for people in countries with lower economic development – where solutions are more easily envisioned and which can be effectively targeted by regional entities as well as by global action
That climate change ranks lower is hardly an indication of foolishness, but an understandable reflection of how people tend to evaluate risk.
@tempterrain, @joshua
The public rate ‘climate change’ last out of 16 possible concerns.
They have detected the integrity-free zone and evidenceless void at the heart of alarmism and want nothing to do with it. What stronger case could there be that they are not fools?
Most of them aren’t too interested in astrology, homeopathy, millenarial cults, scientology or voodoo either.
My case rests.
It looks like the poll in question is from a highly partisan source. That is, if comments like “Cast your votes and spread the word, folks; so that we can keep ‘Action taken on climate change’ where it belongs: off the table (or at least at the bottom of the priority heap)!
are anything to go by!
Its true, that the world’s population aren’t as well educated as they might be. In fact there is a strong correlation between education generally, and awareness of the AGW problem in particular.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_on_climate_change
Your source actually says that in America as science literacy scores increase concern diminishes. This makes sense as space cadets are typical scientifically illiterate.
temp –
Well – Hilary is obviously partisan (as is Peter Lang who linked that poll a couple of days ago), but do you have any evidence of bias in the poll itself?
You might want to check out the work of Dan Kahan w/r/t the factors associated with belief about the potential of risk from climate change – at least in the States. He presents compelling evidence that at least here in the States, it has more to do with ideology than education – and that link (thanks, btw) also has some interesting information on that.
Fantastic – an expert on scientific illiteracy. Rather proves the point does it not.
You should try reading the original source for that – which is Kahan’s paper. His finding is that there is an insignificant negative correlation between “scientific literacy” and concern about climate change in the US.
The more more significant finding is that with increase in scientific literacy comes an increase in polarization. His main point is the influence of motivated reasoning.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2193133
I’ve read the paper – I like my version better. I am a trained scientist – you are a scientific illiterate with nothing of any interest to say.
@ Joshua,
You ask ” do you have any evidence of bias in the poll itself?
Yes, the bias is self evident. See comments about items which should have bee included but weren’t below.
Also false choices are presented. For instance, its not the case that action on climate comes at the expense of public health. If less fossil fuels are burned cities will be cleaner and healthier. Levels of airborne particulate matter in cities like Los Angeles are well above what should be considered acceptable.
Particulate Matter pollution is estimated to cause 22,000-52,000 deaths per year in the United States and contributed to ~370,000 premature deaths in Europe during 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particulates
Beautiful.
You like your version better. I couldn’t have described your brand of reasoning any better myself.
You take an analytical finding, and create [your] version because you “like [it] better.”
Just exactly what you do with scientists who speak, with acknowledgement of uncertainty, about a potential in the next couple of decades for a lack of warming.
You like your version (one where a lack of warming is certain) better.
Always the master of unintentional irony.
Have a nice night, chief – and please don’t forget how much entertainment you provide.
Again you prove my point Joshua – endless tendentious twaddle from a scientific pissant progressive with such a tedious line in psychobabble. I like my version better because it is better.
You are seriously a twit with nothing of any interest to say – yet you keep saying it over and over again. The irony is that you imagine that your twaddle is of any relevance.
@Joshua,
You might want to check out the work of Dan Kahan w/r/t the factors associated with belief about the potential of risk from climate change – at least in the States. He presents compelling evidence that at least here in the States, it has more to do with ideology than education
It is very difficult to separate ideology from education. To use my own experience as an illustration of what I mean: I would say my world view, my ideology if you prefer, is markedly quite different from previous generations of my family. Unlike most of them I’m not at all religious and unlike them I tend to be a bit leftish in my views as some of you may have noticed. So is that just me or is because I’m better educated than they were? Partly both but I don’t think I’m fundamentally any different. If I’d been less lucky with my educational opportunities, hadn’t been to uni and which did a profound effect, I probably would have been much more like them than I am.
Yes, it is. it’s from the UN. The same UN that wants to inflict Agenda21, global governance, global taxes, and climate scaremongering to achieve its ends.
However, even with UN being a highly partisan organisation, dominated by the ideological Left, the participants who completed the poll have overwhelmingly shown their disdain with the focus on climate change doomsaying. They have done so by voting “Action taken on climate change” as least important.
however, it is really telling to see how Australian’s voted. It shows the votes have been submitted by the rich, inner city elites, the young and the gullible, and the spoilt rotten younger generation. What shows how spoilt and ignorant of reality are the majority of the Australian;s who voted is that they believe “Action taken on climate change” is more important for the world than, amongst others, “reliable energy” and “phone and internet access”. here is what Australian’s voted as less important than “Action taken on Climate Change”
7. Freedom from discrimination and persecution
8. Protection against crime and violence
9. Better healthcare
10. Equality between men and women
11. Political freedoms
12. Better job opportunities
13. Support for people who can’t work
14. Reliable energy at home
15. Better transport and roads
16. Phone and internet access
“…. in America as science literacy scores increase concern diminishes.”
Well that might depend on how ‘science literacy’ is defined.
I’ve always argued that many of a right wing political persuasion have, when first hearing about the adverse effects of increasing CO2 emissions, come to to an instinctive snap decision that it must be some sort of left-wing hoax or conspiracy. They’ve subsequently looked into the scientific evidence, not to learn in an impartial way, but merely to bolster their own initial prejudice.
Are you including these as being scientifically literate?
Peter Lang,
Can you explain why it’s necessary to express any opinion on why , say, ‘equality between men and women’ is more important than action on climate change?
How does action on one adversely affect the other?
@tempterrain
The poll is run by the UN. Hardly a bastion of scepticism.
I’m not sure who actually wrote the poll but, whether or not its by UN employees, it’s quite flawed. As I’ve already explained there is no reason why the list should be limited to what most reasonable people would consider to be worthy causes when a large proportion of the world’s resources is wasted on unworthy ones.
Asking recipients to list them in order of priority is always going to hand an opportunity for opponents of any of those causes to use phrases like “bottom of the priority heap”. Never mind that they don’t support government intervention in the other 15 anyway. Never mind that they don’t agree with the “worthiness” of most of the others.
Can you explain to me how it all works again? Is it that the UN has been given the power to grant 15 wishes and the poll is to decide which one needs to be eliminated?
You gotta love this logic:
Really, how did they show that, exactly?
No motivated reasoning there. Nosireebub. Each and every one who voted climate change as being a lower priority than education or clear water said as they voted, precisely the words, “Much more important than that focus on climate change doomsaying, for which I have disdain.”
Yup. Each and every one. Peter knows because he was there when they voted.
Spectacular, Peter. Just spectacular.
temp –
Sure. Obviously there is cross-over in a general sense. But what I was really referring to was education, specifically, about climate change (or other “hot-button” issues).
Kahan’s work is largely about looking at the “deficit model” w/r/t views on climate change. One of his basic theses is that “more education” about climate change is not correlated with views one way or the other in an environment where the issue has been politicized. Again, I think that his evidence is overwhelming.
In the last couple of posts at his blog he’s been examining beliefs about evolution and the creation of the universe from a similar angle – and like with climate change his thesis is that beliefs on those issues is a matter of identification (with those issues religiosity more specifically) more so than education. In other words, asking people about their beliefs on evolution serves as a very poor predictor for their level of scientific literacy. I agree with his thesis, and find it interesting that his thesis – particularly w/r/t climate change – is so unpalatable to those heavily engaged on both sides of the climate wars. People on both sides of these issues want to claim that their beliefs are a natural outgrowth of being better educated. The problem is, the data don’t support those views. Perhaps this dynamic with evolution would be very surprising to a lot of people – as we often see the argument made that rejection of “natural” evolution (as contrasted with “theistic evolution,” i.e., Intelligent Design) is an indicator for being un-educated.
Joshua,
I would have thought, almost by definition, that anyone who held the view that God created the universe in the last 10,000 years would be classed as scientifically illiterate. So the correlation would be 100%. I’m surprised that Kahan would think differently.
Apparently the majority of Republicans in the US are scientifically illiterate, as judged on this basis, too!
http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/Hold-Creationist-View-Human-Origins.aspx
tempterreain,
I could say that someone who linked to a poll and completely mischaracterized it was illiterate. But I won’t, because he isn’t illiterate, he is just blinded by ideology.
What you say:
“I would have thought, almost by definition, that anyone who held the view that God created the universe in the last 10,000 years would be classed as scientifically illiterate….
Apparently the majority of Republicans in the US are scientifically illiterate, as judged on this basis, too!”
What your own poll says:
“Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”
The question covered by the poll was “creation of humans in their present form.” Which even an illiterate should know is different from “creation of the universe.”
GaryM,
Are taking me to task for saying that Creationists mentioned in the poll (the sort who think humans are part of a 10, 000 year old creation) don’t think the Universe and humans in their present form were created simultaneously?
Yes you are quite right about that – and I should have been more precise. There is a six day difference between the two, as I understand their ‘theory’.
In the above, I think that should be “Are taking me to task for failing to say…..”
tempterrain,
I am taking you to task for saying the poll said anything at all about when people think the universe was created, because it doesn’t.
Yes I’ve already admitted that I shouldn’t have mixed up the age of the Universe and the length of time that modern humans have been around.
There is a big difference. I’d say that the first is about 13.7 billion years and the second is about 200,000 years.
I think I must have mistakenly thought that the YEC’s were under the impression that the time difference was just a few days and that therefore they were, to all intents and purposes, and as far as they were concerned, one and the same.
I’d make the point that most, if not nearly all, the other items for government action on the list in this poll, like “better healthcare”, “a good education”, “better job opportunities” etc aren’t opposed by those who are generally in favour of action on climate change.
They are opposed by those who are against it though. They would tend to make the case that governments should be involved far less than they are in what they would term ‘socialised medicine’, intervention to promote full employment etc.
Its also noticeable that the list didn’t contain the priorities of the Conservative right, the priorities of those who oppose action on climate change like “a more effective military with better weapons”, “better riot control equipment for the police” etc even though they consume orders of magnitude more resources than are needed for effective action on climate. Why not include them as well?
I would rank things like energy, water, food and ecology higher too. Ironically these are also impacted by climate change. Other things that ranked higher include jobs, education, healthcare and welfare. I am not going to disagree with that too, but then I am just a lefty.
We are starting to get data for the initial part of the melt of Arctic sea ice. Yes, it is early days yet, but, nevertheless, the results are “encouraging”, for those of us who hope there will be a lot of ice in the Arctic Ocean this year at minimum.
Let me note the URLs that I follow.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
http://www.ec.gc.ca/glaces-ice/default.asp?lang=En&n=CEC7AE99-1
On the latter site is http://www.ec.gc.ca/glaces-ice/default.asp?Lang=En&n=2D414464-1&wsdoc=61BCCE40-2248-11DF-9BC2-B9D43796A02E
and http://www.ec.gc.ca/glaces-ice/default.asp?Lang=En&n=2D414464-1&wsdoc=61B10B0A-2248-11DF-9AA8-C82C1EB3C1F4
and http://www.ec.gc.ca/glaces-ice/default.asp?Lang=En&n=2D414464-1&wsdoc=61A550B2-2248-11DF-A6D0-89B8A492EB6A
I wonder whether the people who are hoping to traverse the NWP this year are keeping a close eye on this data. I hope Bob Droege is interested as well
Hi Jim,
It doesn’t much matter til late in the season when the weather takes over.
I also frequent the cryosphere site and jaxa sometimes, neven’s blog is really good because there are several posters who do neat animations of satellite data. The sea ice page on WUmybutt is useful as well, especially the ice speed and drift page near the bottom, which can tell you how much ice is departing the fram straight or if ice is being pushed into places where it is likely to melt.
Counterpoint from Briggs:
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=8394
Briggs makes sense. don’t expect skeptics to quote him except when it suits their purpose.
Brown is wrong. maybe Springer will go straighten him out
And why would anyone quote anyone if it didn’t suit their purpose?
“And why would anyone quote anyone if it didn’t suit their purpose?”
I suppose in one sense this is true. you always quote for some purpose.
But the real point is that you will find WUWT relying on briggs expertise in an opportunistic manner. Matt has a consistent philosophy and consistent approach to statistics. Folks try to get away with just pulling the little bits they like and leaving the rest. It doesnt work that way.
Steven Mosher, “Briggs makes sense. don’t expect skeptics to quote him except when it suits their purpose.
Brown is wrong. maybe Springer will go straighten him out”
A lot of that is semantics. If the Ensemble contains biased models, then the usefulness of the ensemble method is reduced. With so much “sharing” between models, adding a different model to the ensemble shouldn’t be considered any different that another run of a single model. If the models are truly independent then the method makes more sense.
Thanks to the consensus range of comfort, all the models tend to be biased to that range. I imagine a few were tweaked with aerosol forcing for the TAR to get rid of pesky “pauses” :)
“it is we who say what it is.”
Mosher, nor Orwell, nor Humpty Dumpty could say it any better.
You know you are going down the rabbit hole when an article starts with “The gentleman takes too literally the language of classical, frequentist statistics, and this leads him astray.” And ends with “it means what we say it means.”
But I do find this part interesting.
“Now, are the original or adjusted ensemble forecasts any good? If so, then the models are probably getting the physics right. If not, then not. We have to check: do the validation and apply some proper score to them. Only that would tell us. We cannot, in any way, say they are wrong before we do the checking.”
I assume the author would agree that if we can’t know if the ensembles are “wrong,” in the sense of “any good,” without validation; then we also can’t possibly know if they’re right?
Then again, Matt’s a statistician, and Anthony’s not
Briggs does make sense.
“Update Although it is true ensemble forecasting makes sense,
I do NOT claim that they do well in practice for climate models.
I also dispute the notion that we have to act before we are able to verify the models.
That’s nuts.
If that logic held, then we would have to act on any bizarre notion that took our fancy as long as we perceived it might be a big enough threat.”
If Brown is wrong why are we even discussing this? Why was it even quoted in week in review? Is it a highlight of the week?
Steven Mosher June 21, 2013 at 2:58 pm
“Briggs makes sense.”
They both make sense. Of course you can create a forecast out other forecasts (Briggs), and of course such an assemble forecast only helps you make inferences about the models used in the individual forecasts under very particular circumstances (Brown).
Briggs makes no sense at all if the ensemble models members are arbitrary selected from an unknown range of plausible solutions – as I explain below. The statistics of an arbitrary ensemble is in itself arbitrary.
Steven Mosher,
You may have missed my reply to your comment here: http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/19/anatomy-of-dissent/#comment-334829
I asked if you could please provide a reference and link to support your statement:
Sure, ensembles of models can be averaged usefully, but not this ensemble of models.
============
Chief Hydrologist June 21, 2013 at 5:56 pm
Ah, but you can still make a forecast for the mean and sd via an ensemble, just as you can do this by throwing darts at a dart board. That’s all Briggs is saying.
They are having two different conversations.
er, H/t to commenters at the Bish’s and to the Chief, here. You don’t think I came up with that on my own, do you?
===============
Oh, Gad; HAS has it, too.
=============
Forget it alarmists, Briggs is no support for you. Now discuss the rest of Brown’s Famous Rant.
=================
“I asked if you could please provide a reference and link to support your statement:
because the costs of ECS are around 1 trillion per year per degree.”
I’ve pointed you at it before. you can claculate it for yourself using anybodies cost numbers for mitigation. just look at what they assume for ECS and vary that parametricly
Steven Mosher,
So you can’t provide a reference to support your statement, right? You just made it up, right?
I don’t recall you ever having provide a link to support such a statement. But, if you have, could you please provide it again.
“A lot of that is semantics. If the Ensemble contains biased models, then the usefulness of the ensemble method is reduced. With so much “sharing” between models, adding a different model to the ensemble shouldn’t be considered any different that another run of a single model. If the models are truly independent then the method makes more sense.”
Huh. look this is simple. You measure a models skill by calculating i’s deviance from the target. The best model is an average of all models.
why that is is practically unimportant. In the end pragmatics rule. If the average of all models works better than any single model, then the best model is an average of all models. That’s just fundamental. Its ugly, but true. only a dogmatic person would reject what worked better.
“Thanks to the consensus range of comfort, all the models tend to be biased to that range. I imagine a few were tweaked with aerosol forcing for the TAR to get rid of pesky “pauses” :)”
nice speculation. I speculate you were dropped on your head. meh.
see how speculation works?
Steven Mosher June 22, 2013 at 2:02 am
“only a dogmatic person would reject what worked better”
Yes, it all comes down to the betterer we are trying to work. That’s the angel on this pin we are chasing.
Steven Mosher,
Are you avoiding responding to my question? I asked for a credible source for your statement:
I am still seeking an answer to my question. What is the basis for your assertion? Can you provide a credible source for that statement and if so can you please provide a link (and page number etc.) to where it is stated?
This is a pretty incredible statement. It would be very important if true. I would expect it to be widely quoted, if it is from an authoritative source.
If I understand what you are saying correctly, it means that if, for example, ECS = 3 C, that would mean every year, on average, man’s GHG emissions are causing climate change damages of about $3 trillion per year.
Is that what you are saying?
There may be good reasons to believe that the ensemble is mathematically better as a prediction than any individual model, however this makes no statement about the absolute accuracy of either individual models or the ensemble.
What concerns me more is the claim that changes in GMST of, say, 3C are significant and will change weather significantly. Why? Because if weather changes “significantly”, then so does climate (eventually). And the ABSOLUTE value of GMST in the models is out by AT LEAST this much. How can they be producing meaningful (in terms of: compared to reality) results in this case? If they are getting it right NOW, based on something 3C higher in GMST, and 3C higher in GMST SIGNIFICANTLY changes the way weather and climate “work”, they needs must be wrong about the future, when reality makes the “change” to the “new mode”.
It probably makes no difference how you treat the output of the toy climate models.
It does if you base political decisions on them.
we have to base political decisions on something!
Yes, we used to base political decisions on things like chicken entrails – not much has changed then.
Hey, von Storch bases his near certainty of a 2 deg C temp rise by 2100 on ‘gut feelings’. This is a man with powerful supercomputers at his command, at the top of his profession for 20 years. And I admire the heck out of him, the closest thing Germany has to Judith Curry.
==================
Yeah, that was supposed to be 30 years and I forgot to mention all the entrail jokes @ the Bish’s.
========
Problem with models is not that they are wrong, or that they might be wrong, or that they have been wrong, or that they will be wrong.
Problem with models is that they HAVE to be wrong.
Problem with models is that some outwardly sane people can’t tell the difference between reality and model output.
And when the two disagree (as they nearly always do) they simply ignore reality.
Perhaps they prefer living in a virtual world that works the way they’d like it to – and that they can control. The Nintendo generation let loose on serious hardware.
But real scientists occasionally look out of the window and prefer to try to understand reality as it is, not as they program the computers to be.
.
thanks for the link, i am going to do a post tomorrow (hopefully) on my take re interpretation of an ensemble of models
Confirmation bias and anomalous anomalies at WUWT
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2013/06/confirmation-bias-and-anomalous.html
“What Anthony does is compare anomalies. What he fails to do is adjust those anomalies to reflect the different baselines.”
Wow. The best I can say is this is incompetence. The worst, which I won’t assume, is criminal fraud.
Nice try, lw. “Criminal fraud.” Oh God that’s rich. :-) If confirmation bias were a crime, you’d be sharing a cell with Bernie Madoff by now.
ah I copied the phrase from rgbatduke’s post wrong (must have been thinking of climategate), I didn’t mean ‘criminal fraud’, I meant criminal malfeasance which sounds more serious. rgbatduke colorfully describes it as: “misleading the entire world in such a way that MILLIONS have DIED unnecessarily (as opposed to what? millions dying necessarily?), WHOLE economies have been DRIVEN to the wall, and dragons now rule the earth”
Or something like that
We must endevour to litter comments with accusations to keep it interesting. or something.
As opposed to millions not dying from unintended consequences or callous calculation.
We’re getting quite close to that now with what’s happening in Singapore, thanks to the reckless headlong rush to renewable energy
What’s happening in Singapore is actually an example of what happens when the market doesn’t take into account externalities such as the environmental cost. Companies in Malaysia can only afford to burn off forests because they don’t have to pick up the environmental costs in Singapore.
Similarly fossil fuels are effectively subsidized because the environmental costs are not being paid.
lowlot, who’s really to blame here if not those who make it possible for companies to make loads of money from turning vast swathes of jungle into palm oil plantations? Isn’t it true that they’re the ones who aren’t considering externalities?
What if it was possible for companies to make loads of money from turning vast swathes of jungle into palm oil plantations anyway?
What if there was a sudden demand for palm oil because of a fashion trend in the west.
Are you saying it would be okay then?
Ah lowlot – the master of argumentum ad absurdum
Now what Western fashion trend can you possibly imagine in your wildest dreams that would demand multi-million barrels of palm oil?
The point is in the principle, not the example.
Only by forcing producers to pay the environmental costs do you avoid environmental impact.
Without that regulation, left to it’s own devices, the market will happily find solutions that involve causing environmental damage to subsidize a product.
Ah, so it’s the producers of biofuels who must pay the environmental costs, and the users of fossil fuels who must pay the environmental costs?
Thank you for clearing that up.
Well I’ve got some news for you – it’s always the end-user who ultimately pays all the costs – including, as taxpayers, all the subsidies which may be in play.
Is ‘confirmation bias’ the new hipster geek thang?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/20/a-geek-s-guide-to-the-nsa-scandal-what-you-don-t-get-about-data-collection.html
Just, like when facebook…
http://www.zdnet.com/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-shadow-profiles-leak-in-bug-7000017167/
bugs you?
“Now that is a really novel angle on the global warming-disaster meme.”
I think it’s brilliant. Like many great insights, one wonders “Of course, why didn’t I think of that?”
yeah it’s a bit like think of all those children jimmy saville molested.
But on the otherhand think of all the children he helped! (that makes up for it does it?)
wow, that’s actually a terrible argument. if the net benefits to all of humanity from AGW were massively positive, you would still call for urgent mitigation because someone somewhere was going to suffer?
@lolwot
They’re called the ‘scales of justice’ for a good reason. Go look at the figure on the top of the Old Bailey once again..
And you mayn’t have noticed but – whatever their crime – people are allowed to argue mitigation.
“if the net benefits to all of humanity from AGW were massively positive, you would still call for urgent mitigation because someone somewhere was going to suffer?”
So if liquidating third world children into oil would be a net benefit to humanity you are saying that makes it right?
@lolwot
‘So if liquidating third world children into oil would be a net benefit to humanity you are saying that makes it right?’
Is there such a proposition on the table? If not, let’s discuss real issues not hypothetical ones. This is not a Junior Common Room.
On second thoughts – if it were possible to liquidate climate activists instead of innocent third world children, then it’d be a slam dunk………..no contest. :-)
In 2009 the BBC took a truth pill and admitted it, that back then, “Average temperatures have not increased for over a decade.” We are at 16 years now and going on 20 with no end to the cooling in sight. The UN’s warming specialists never did anything but declare the entire time that something was warming the globe and humanity’s fingerprints were all over it; and, they predicted the warming would continue and get worse.
more like the BBC made a mistake…
a very common mistake…
Maybe it’s time the rest of the world just got back to the business of living since now we know: we may indeed be in a period of cooling, not warming. Back when the BBC had its come to Jesus moment, UN-IPCC member Mojib Latif’s concession to reality was that another 10-20 years of cooling was possible. Of course, nature couldn’t give two schitts about what the UN specialists believe.
Monckton’s worried we’ll get another big el nino and break the string, hence argues we should be talking about the failure of the models, rather than counting down each additional non-warming year. It won’t matter. Imagine the wild joy of the triiumphant warmists if that were to happen, indicating (in their tiny little minds) that the world might be going to hell after all…
Now that would be cause for celebration.
In other words Monckton knows deep down that the warming hasn’t stopped and is already getting his excuses lined up
Heh, lol, I suspect his sources of worry are a lot more nuuuuuaaaanced than that, but, of course, I don’t know any better than you do.
========
Arctic Sea Ice Extent. Closer to Maximum than Minimum.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/death-spiral-in-the-arctic-confusion-2013-is-1000000-sq-km-higher-than-2010/
I’m afraid you are confused about when it is a good time to make judgements on the state of the Arctic ice.
It’s just a late start but things up north are heating up and the melt rate is right where the death spiral says it should be.
I’m not confused at all. I’m ecstatic. We are saved. The end of the world has itself come to an end.
DMI says temps are below normal and have been for a month.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Your AGW cult is running out of scare stories.
See you in September . We’ll see how your ecstacy supply is holding up.
You actually want the so-called “death spiral” to continue, don’t you Bob? Why? Are you entertained by death & destruction? I’m sure there’s a clinical term for the personality disorder you have. Would you like me to look it up?
So Dave,
Now you are playing a pschiatrist in your spare time.
So an ice free arctic is going to cause death and destruction, now it’s you who is sounding like an alarmist.
Of course I do not want it to continue, that is why I want the world to take CO2 emmisions seriously. The death spiral is going to continue until we get the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases under control.
I am entertained by getting the science right, and poking those who have bizarre theories, do you have a clinical diagnosis for that Dr. Dave?
Poor Bob. So sad the Arctic Ice is at a 10 year high.
I look forward to taunting you for the next 3 months.
Oh I’ve given this little exchange a priority bookmark labelled “revisit”
Bob Droege | June 22, 2013 at 9:56 am |
“I am entertained by getting the science right, and poking those who have bizarre theories, do you have a clinical diagnosis for that Dr. Dave?”
I left my DSM-5 in my other jacket but I’m pretty your disorder is called “Delusions of Adequacy”.
Thanks for asking.
Delusions of adequacy doesn’t seem to score any google hits when paired with DSM-V, but with urban dictionary it scores, perhaps you are impersonating a psychiatrist?
It is time to add a new car to the train, and David gets a seat in the pront row.
We’ll call it the CC car, for closet catastrophist.
Could be confused with the clown car, but that OK with me.
Sunshine,
Sorry but you are so wrong, at least with respect to ice area by the pros at the same small midwestern liberal arts college that reluctantly granted me a degree.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
On this neat interactive chart you can erase all the years before 2003 and see where 2013 stacks up, middle of the pack, not highest.
Don’t forget, I am the 2012 average ice extent for september prediction champion. Nobody beat me.
Bob Droege | June 22, 2013 at 5:07 pm |
“Don’t forget, I am the 2012 average ice extent for september prediction champion. Nobody beat me.”
Perhaps you mean to say “nobody [sic] I know of beat me”?
This begs the question of how inclusive was the canvass. There are 7 billion people in the world. How many of those submitted a guess in the contest?
As far as I know I invented “Delusions of Adequacy”. It’s the obvious play on “Delusions of Grandeur” to make it more of an insult. The urban dictionary entry may be there because of me.
Don’t look now, but Bob may be blurring the distinction between ‘sea ice area’ and ‘sea ice extent’.
=====================
Kim,
Maybe, maybe not, I was responding to Sunshine, who wasn’t being specific.
Though area might be more important for climate implications, while extent more to navigation.
The ice extent is generally related to the sign of the Arctic Oscillation in winter. It was negative this year reducing the amount of ice leaving the Arctic.
Temperatures are not as high as last year and with La Nina rapidly evolving in the Pacific will lead to globally suppressed temperatures. Intense and frequent La Nina are – btw – a robust feature of the pause expected to last another decade or so.
Chief,
“A rapidly evolving” La Niña is not indicated in the latest ENSO report.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
What tea leaves are you basing your spew from?
Depends on what you mean by rapid. It is definitely evoloving towards a La Nina.
page 11
It’s almost the last page – Projections
MJJ 2013 = 17% chance of La Nina.
OND 2013 = 35% chance of La Nina.
Seems to me that meets the definition of evolving towards a La Nina. It doesn’t seem particularly rapid to me but I suppose it’s rapid to a Galapagos turtle.
‘Stay tuned for the next update by 9 July (hopefully earlier) to see where the MEI will be heading next. El Niño came and went last summer, not unlike 1953. We have just witnessed our first ENSO-neutral winter since 2003-04 (2005-06 was an ENSO-neutral winter, but much closer to La Niña, and dipped into La Niña rankings during March-April). Of the six such ENSO-neutral cases before 2012-13 shown here, two ended up as full-blown El Niño events by the end of the second year shown in this graph (1991 and 2002), while three remained more or less ENSO-neutral, and one drifted into weak La Niña territory (1967). However, during boreal spring four of these cases showed at least a brief foray into El Niño conditions, with two of them (1953 and 1981) quickly returning to ENSO-neutral later that year. Given a recent preference for La Niña, I would not be surprised if we see a gradual drift of the MEI into negative territory later this year.’ http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
Claus Wolter is the world’s leading ENSO expert – I’m a little more direct.
The La Nina preference is the cool mode of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation bringing more frequent and intense La Nina. It is probably related to the Southern Annular Mode pushing cold Southern Ocean water up the Peruvian coast rather than through Drake’s Passage.
ENSO intensifies as the sun moves over the equator. It peaks in the SH spring and continues through the Austral summer. This time of year is sometimes called the ENSO window of unpredictability. Prediction is unreliable at this time and prediction beyond 3 months is no better than a random walk. Difficult to know what is happening until the action steps up in the SH spring. However, this year the Nina 1+2 and Nino 3 regions are already in La Nina territory – and Nino 3.4 is weakly down and bouncing around in negative territory. Not quite the -0.5 degree C anomaly in the 3.4 region for three months that is one definition of a La Nina.
http://stateoftheocean.osmc.noaa.gov/all/
I have been watching the evolution of the cold tongue in the eastern Pacific for two months.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2013/anomnight.6.20.2013.gif
It seems very early and highly significant. The SOI has been positive for a couple of months – a predictor of ENSO events some months ahead – and it seems likely that the atmospheric conditions of intensified Walker circulation behind the positive SOI will continue to intensify as the sun moves south. I would be surprised if we didn’t we didn’t see a drift into ‘MEI into negative territory later this year’. It is already happening and can only intensify. Starting so early and in the cool Pacific mode – I’d lay odds on another super La Nina.
You are rapidly evolving into an irrational pest Gatesy – spew is hardly endearing but then it is what space cadets do. Springer delusionally imagines that he can become an instant expert on anything with 10 minutes on the interweb. Not sure which is more pathetic.
Say Chief, aka Captain Kangaroo,
I’m stayin’ primed
2 times
down
south
in
freezin’ Melbourne Town,
( OZ, ) fer
(1x) …
The – reso – lu – shun – of – the – political –
shenanigans – of – our – worst – BIG –
guv – uh -mint since – wa – aa-y back,
– leader – ship in – fighting – pre –
September – elect – shun and
(2x)
La Nina – cool – mode – exten -dead,
– and – so – globul – warming – ref – fut-ed
tipping – point – cat -ass -trophe!!
B – t – s
Oh Beth – I can neither confirm or deny the true identity of Captain Kangaroo. It is a secret of the climate war. Although I did hear he had been promoted to Generalissimo.
Might we not have an earlier election – once they shift back to Kevin Rudd?
‘Partly cloudy. Patchy morning fog. Patches of light morning frost in the northeast. Winds southeasterly 15 to 20 km/h becoming easterly and light in the evening.’ Temps 6 to 16 degrees C.
I’m not sure that Minnesotans would agree that it’s freezing. We don’t have 25 terms for snow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gg_vS1UzOs
I’m honing up on sonnets – http://www.sonnets.org/basicforms.htm –
“London, 1802”
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
‘Here, the octave develops the idea of the decline and corruption of the English race, while the sestet opposes to that loss the qualities Milton possessed which the race now desperately needs.’
Politics or science as the subject is the question. As long as I get in before Kim.
See ya.
CH and CK ) here the octave develops the idea of a present
hard season of frozen earth contrasted with the delights of
the awakening earth.
‘Lawrence of virtuous Father, virtuous Son,
Now that the Fields are dank, and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help wast a sullen day; what may be won
From the hard Season gaining : time will run
On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
The frozen earth : and cloth in fresh attire
The Lillie and Rose, that neither sow’d nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
Of Attick tast, with Wine, whence we may rise
To hear the Lute well touch’t, or artfull voice
Warble immortal Notes and Tuskan Ayre?
He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.
Milton.
‘He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.’
What I love about poetry is that you have to slow down and say the words – preferably aloud – to judge the delights.
Uncertainty in climate-change projections has traditionally been assessed using multi-model ensembles of the type shown in figure 9, essentially an ‘ensemble of opportunity’. The strength of this approach is that each model differs substantially in its structural assumptions and each has been extensively tested. The credibility of its projection is derived from evaluation of its simulation of the current climate against a wide range of observations. However, there are also significant limitations to this approach. The ensemble has not been designed to test the range of possible outcomes. Its size is too small (typically 10–20 members) to give robust estimates of the most likely changes and associated uncertainties and therefore it is hard to use in risk assessments…
The concept is to use a single-model framework to systematically perturb poorly constrained model parameters, related to key physical and biogeochemical (carbon cycle) processes, within expert-specified ranges. As in the multi-model approach, there is still the need to test each version of the model against the current climate before allowing it to enter the perturbed parameter ensemble. An obvious disadvantage of this approach is that it does not sample the structural uncertainty in models, such as resolution, grid structures and numerical methods because it relies on using a single-model framework.
As the ensemble sizes in the perturbed ensemble approach run to hundreds or even many thousands of members, the outcome is a probability distribution of climate change rather than an uncertainty range from a limited set of equally possible outcomes, as shown in figure 9. This means that decision-making on adaptation, for example, can now use a risk-based approach based on the probability of a particular outcome.
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full
Each of these models has a degree of ‘irreducible imprecision’ arising from feasible differences in data and in couplings. As the core of the models are the non-linear Navier-Stokes equations there is no guarantee that a small change in input will generate a small change in output. There are many feasible solutions. Absent a systematic exploration using a large number of model runs – something not widely possible – the range of potential solutions remains unknown. For each of the models a single solution is selected based – as James McWilliams puts it – on a posteriori solution behavior. Each of the members of an ensemble of opportunity is subjectively selected from a potential spread of solutions that is unknown.
In each of these model–ensemble comparison studies, there are important but difficult questions: How well selected are the models for their plausibility? How much of the ensemble spread is reducible by further model improvements? How well can the spread can be explained by analysis of model differences? How much is irreducible imprecision in an AOS?
Simplistically, despite the opportunistic assemblage of the various AOS model ensembles, we can view the spreads in their results as upper bounds on their irreducible imprecision. Optimistically, we might think this upper bound is a substantial overestimate because AOS models are evolving and improving. Pessimistically, we can worry that the ensembles contain insufficient samples of possible plausible models, so the spreads may underestimate the true level of irreducible imprecision (cf., ref. 23). Realistically, we do not yet know how to make this assessment with confidence…
The bases for judging (model plausibility) are a priori formulation, representing the relevant natural processes and choosing the discrete algorithms, and a posteriori solution behavior. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.long
Completeness of the models in accordance with the first criteria may be questionable and the second criteria seems entirely ad hoc with no possibility of the emergence of an adequate statistics.
The alternative approach of Julia Slingo and Tim Palmer seems more promising – but are both the models and the methods up to speed.
Has anyone considered that the climate may not recognize Bayesian statistics? We need to remember that this is a convenient tool, not necessarily an accurate one – and may be most unrepresentative of reality.
Does anyone know of any model that works well in a predictive way in any realm of the natural sciences ?
Have just read the textbook Ecology by Prof Krebs and come away with the impression that ecologists, like him, construct and use models frequently but are not surprised when a dish of bacteria contradict the model and large scale field trials almost always do.
Chas you ask “Does anyone know of any model that works well in a predictive way in any realm of the natural sciences ?”
Not quite sure what you mean by “natural sciences”, but there are various engineering models which have predictive capabilities. Probably the best known is the calculation of the wind loading of new structures; both when complete and during construction. There also the models used for placing explosives when imploding old buildings to bring them down. I am sure there are lots more.
Animal models of humans are used for all manner of things; they are grossly the same, but much different as you go down in scale.
Take drugs, you can treat a population of individuals with a drug, get a fantastic response in 20%, pretty good in 40%, little to no effect in 25%, illness in 10% and serious problems in the remainder.
The animal models are a reasonable guide, with different animals having different quirks, but they are a hell of a lot better than nothing.
Here is the thing. You can spends millions on a drug, but if it causes problems in the mice or the dogs, you throw it out, too dangerous to try in people. No matter how well you design your compound, if it fails it fails. You can’t say, lets try cats and elephants instead. Model drugs fail when they fail the animal model.
We do this, but it is dangerously close to looking for our keys under the lamppost. Lots of great drugs that came into use before animal testing would not be able to pass that screen today, e.g. aspirin.
It is an article of faith that Pr(drug good in animals|drug good in humans)
>> Pr(drug bad in animals|drug good in humans).
It is an even bigger leap of faith to suppose that
Pr(drug good in all plausible test animals|drug good in humans)
>>Pr(drug bad in some plausible test animal|drug good in humans).
So you are correct that that is how the game is played today, but the justification for these rules is questionable. And of course for symptoms like senile dementia no plausible animal models exist.
The standard model in particle physics has successfully predicted the discovery of several particles.
Comparing the standard model to a GCM?
Oooooooooooooooookay.
[pats R. Gates on the head and slowly backs away looking for an exit]
rgbatduke needs to add a summary for comment readers with his comments.
huh. lets see. he is wrong. what’s the point of a summary.
What’s he wrong about, in your opinion?
Exactly Steven. rgbatduke so grossly misstates and seems to ignore the entire foundation of why models can be useful in understanding dynamics of things even if they are wrong about specifics. Seems a refresher course for him in Chaos theory would be useful for him. Seems many on this site would do well to understand why an ensemble of model outputs can be very useful in gaining a greater understanding of climate dynamics, even if that ensemble will always be wrong as well, and if they are right it will only be by luck.
He’s usually not wrong but I didn’t read it. So what did you find that was wrong with it?
R Gates
I am not going to defend my namesake as I don’t necessarily disagree with the critical comments, but you said something intriguing;
“Seems many on this site would do well to understand why an ensemble of model outputs can be very useful in gaining a greater understanding of climate dynamics, even if that ensemble will always be wrong as well, and if they are right it will only be by luck.”
What if the models were ‘misleadingly’ wrong? Are they still useful or do they harm our understanding of climate dynamics?
tonyb
Tony,
Depends on what you mean by “misleadingly” wrong. If the basic dynamics in the model is wrong, then it is up to research to correct and refine that, and that’s precisely what is going on every day through the efforts of so many climate scientists. As long as people understand that the models are evolving dynamical tools, and also understand the nature of Chaotic systems, then the models can be seen as the useful tools they are, i.e., even if they are wrong about specifics, they can be very useful in understanding dynamics.
R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | June 22, 2013 at 8:46 am |
“Seems many on this site would do well to understand why an ensemble of model outputs can be very useful in gaining a greater understanding of climate dynamics, even if that ensemble will always be wrong as well”
Very perceptive. It takes a long time but eventually you get some information out of it. In this case we found out that after 22 years of always being a little wrong the model ensemble is wrong on the rate of warming. Now the question is why. But at least we know to look for something that makes all the models run hot, some worse than others. And we can breathe a sigh of relief that global warming isn’t at all likely to be a big problem. I mean we DO want there to not be a disaster and we don’t have a problem with it being all a big mistake to think disaster was a likely outcome, right?
For me, this issue is a litmus test for climate sanity. Brown is clearly correct.Those who think that the GCM ensemble has any scientific value are clearly deluded. As for Mosher, I am never sure if he actually actually believes what he posts or just likes to act the devil’s advocate or provocateur.
Gates said:
RGBatDuke went batty over the use of ensemble averaging.
The known skeptic and statistician William Briggs then launched into him asserting that an ensemble of models will reduce the variance of an estimate, and that part can’t be argued.
Read more here:
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=8394
AOS models are therefore to be judged by their degree of plausibility, not whether they are correct or best. This perspective extends to the component discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupling breadth: There are better or worse choices (some seemingly satisfactory for their purpose or others needing repair) but not correct or best ones. The bases for judging are a priori formulation, representing the relevant natural processes and choosing the discrete algorithms, and a posteriori solution behavior. Plausibility criteria are qualitative and loosely quantitative, because there are many relevant measures of plausibility that cannot all be specified or fit precisely. Results that are clearly discrepant with measurements or between different models provide a valid basis for model rejection or modification, but moderate levels of mismatch or misfit usually cannot disqualify a model. Often, a particular misfit can be tuned away by adjusting some model parameter, but this should not be viewed as certification of model correctness. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.long
Models are without doubt chaotic and this results in divergent solutions evolving as a result of a range of feasible inputs and couplings. Choosing a solution from 100’s or 1000’s of divergent solutions based on a posteriori solution behavior is the key to understanding where the solutions come from. They are pulled out of their arses from a unknown range of possible solutions. Pulling it out of your arse is the doo squared test of statistical validity.
If you are going to understand chaos – start with Edward Lorenz and his convection model.
Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic. The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change. http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full
As usual Mosher just ignores the pointed questions such as two people asking for precisely what he found wrong with Rob Brown’s missive. It appears that all we get on that score is just an empty assertion that RGB is wrong. Par for the course. Mosher is an empty vessel for the most part and shallow for the remainder.
I love the way progressives substitute language for logic.
Models have not been, and apparently cannot be any time soon, validated.
They are not accurate.
They are not precise.
They cannot predict.
They cannot project.
So what is the new buzz word of the left?
“Useful.”
Useful is the new “fairness,” or “for the children” or “social justice.” It is an absolutely contentless word that means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. kinda like climate change.
An engine with a cracked block is useful, as a huge door stop.
Climate models are as useful for deciding whether to decarbonize the global economy as teats on a bull.
The most interesting thing about Brown’s post was the hierarchy of models he talked about for computing molecular spectra. Of course solving the “correct” equations is impossible so choosing models becomes a question not of picking the one with the “most physics” but the one whose parameters can be best constrained by data.
Interesting statement. I’ve been wondering for a long time if the climate in a warmer world may not be less volatile than in a colder world [the world is currently in a coldhouse phase; the cooling began about 50 million years ago; the current cold house phase is only the third in the last half billion years; for 75% of this time there has been no ice caps at either pole; so for more the 75% of the past half billion years the planet has been warmer than now]. My question is: was the climate more or less volatile when the planet was warmer?
James Hansen’s Figure 1 here http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf suggests that the climate may have been less volatile (more placid) when the planet was warmer (notice the amplitude of the temperature variations increases as the planet cooled).
The explanation may be that the resolution (of time and temperature) was much less as we go back in time. But do we have geologic evidence that the climate was more placid in warmer times? I understand that the oil was laid down in calm seas that were thriving with life over a period of over 100 years. So, I wonder about the good old days when the planet was warmer and life thrived :)
Peter, conflicting theses; one that increased energy will increase volatility and the other that a smaller equatorial/polar temperature differential will decrease volatility.
Me, I sink we wait and see.
=================
Kim,
I suspect there is another factor that may increase climate volatility – it is the presence of ice caps at the poles. It seem to me, if the planet is cool enough to have ice at the poles then the areal extent can increase and decrease rapidly so the albedo changes rapidly and the planet can warm and cool more quickly than when it is at higher temperatures ….
[An important repercussion of ice at the poles is bursts of cold air comes down across the middle latitudes where the academics live and work and that results in the models giving cooler predictions.] :)
Both could be true. Blocking events, for example could be as a result of smaller equatorial/polar temperature differences, and these lead to weather that stays the same for weeks. The problem is this weather could be a wet low pressure with lots of rain, or a high pressure system with hot and dry. We have already seen strong signs of this. On the other hand, increasing GH gases lead to the Brewer-Dobson circulation strengthening, and this could cause increased volatility.
Peter,
The question should be what sort of climate is most conducive to us feeding 7+ billion humans, given that we evolved our civilization under a climate that was conducive to the grains that are so vital to our food supply.
How much more grain and other food are we now producing, compared to 100 or even 50 years ago, when the world was ‘cooler’?
R. Gates
I suggest the answer is as follows:
1. The land and resources can feed as many people as the population expands to as we improve governance and the wealth of nations. The limits are caused b y governance and poor infrastructure. All this is improving as economic growth progresses and countries become richer. We should do nothing that slows the rate of economic growth.
2. A warmer world (and wetter world with higher CO2 concentration) produces more food than a colder world all else equal.
Life has thrived when the world is warm and when it is in a warming period, and struggled when the world is cold and when in a cooling period.
Its strains credulity to suggest the world happens to be at the perfect temperature just because we are here now.
Peter Lang,
It does not that the world is perfect right now for humans, for our ancestors have survived much harsher climates both warm and cold, else we would not be here. What the current interglacial period, with our rise in the use of fossil fuels has allowed is the rise of the modern nation state because of intensive agriculture. Our species was primed to take full advantage of the current interglacial to rapidly expand our technology and energy use– allowing our numbers to skyrocket from millions to billions. Any change in the current rather docile interglacial climate, warm or cold, will strain our ability to keep feeding those billions.
R Gates,
That is an unsubstantiated assertion. I do not fond it at all persuasive. I suggest is is based on nothing more than belief.
Life thrived when the planet was warmer and thrived each time the planet warmed. The planet is currently well below its ‘normal’ temperature, and life did better when the planet was warmer. I see no reason to believe that any warming that does occur this century will be bad for life or bad for humans. I expect it will be more good than bad.
However, having said that, I will support policies that will reduce GHG emissions, reduce black carbon, improve the environment, but only if such policies make energy cheaper. The benefits of cheap energy for humanity overwhelm any disadvantages (if there are any) of any warming that might occur this century.
Therefore, if the CAGW doomsayers want action to reduce global GHG emissions, they need to support and strongly advocate policies that will reduce energy costs for all people on the planet, especially the poorest. If you are not prepared to support and strongly advocate that, then I am opposed to what you stand for.
Even if all the models were made to dance to the same tune, that tune is off key – there has been no global warming all the time the models were being run to predict it continuing. At what point does this become science fraud?
http://meteorologicalmusings.blogspot.ie/2013/06/how-well-are-ipccs-temperature.html
“Earth’s temperatures, as measured by HADCRUT, are approximately the same in 2013 as
they were in 1990, an interval of 23 years without net warming!
“Global warming advocates will undoubtedly accuse me of “cherrypicking” — choosing dates so as to make my point. But, these are not my dates, they are the dates chosen by the IPCC for their forecast. While ocean heat content is actually the more important metric, this is the metric the IPCC chose to emphasize.
“It is long past time for climate science to own up to this: If climate science cannot make an accurate 20 year forecast, there is absolutely no reason to believe their forecasts for 40 or 60 years would be any better.”
OK, back to Chip. What we really need are honest cost/benefit analyses of warming. The Stern Report was abysmal and the horrors it engendered strike Hitchcock like.
=====================
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/06/global-warming-alarmism-in-twilight.php?ModPagespeed=noscript
Why were they all so far off reality?
I have been learning that the GCMs don’t function the way I had assumed. As an outsider, I had supposed the models would start with observed and measured forcings from particular times in the past (necessarily from times with adequate observational inputs), be tweaked to reproduce the observed Ts, and then allowed to run forward and backward in time. This would be a sensible physical model.
But apparently that’s not how it’s done. Lucia at The Blackboard commented that the various models don’t attempt to reproduce the observed Ts for any year in the past; instead, the anomalies from any past year to any future year are computed.
I can accept that the use of anomalies rather than actual Ts is a defensible approach; but it does make me wonder how far from observed reality the actual Ts calculated in the models are. The fact that the models cannot reproduce actual Ts does not make me feel better about them.
So, does anyone have a link showing the discrepancies between observed T and calculated T for various GCMs over time?
And please, any of you with troll-like tendencies… this is an honest question, not a rhetorical one. If you know the answer, please reply; if you wish to flaunt your supercilious attitude and mystic access to Divine Wisdom which unfortunately cannot be revealed or explained to Unbelievers, feel free to stifle yourself.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1.png
A haku.
‘The Dream’ ( Feel free ter change ‘dream’ fer ‘model’)
Perchance ter dream is
ter delightfully inflate
the reality.
Bts
Thanks; I’ve seen that before, and although it is very revealing it’s different from what I was looking for. I probably didn’t phrase my question clearly enough; I was hoping to find the actual values for T calculated by each GCM, rather than the anomalies in T. For example, model XX calculated a global T of y deg C for the year 1900. I understand that the modelers prefer to report the results in terms of anomalies, but there must be an absolute value of T from which the anomaly is derived. I simply wonder how far that calculated absolute T differs for the actual T for a given year; to me that gives an implicit measure of how close to reality the models can come.
Barry, ” I understand that the modelers prefer to report the results in terms of anomalies, but there must be an absolute value of T from which the anomaly is derived. I simply wonder how far that calculated absolute T differs for the actual T for a given year; to me that gives an implicit measure of how close to reality the models can come.”
From discussion at Lucia’s the models don’t do well with absolute temperature. Mosher mentioned they are off by a couple degrees, but since it is confusing what absolute temperature they should produce, that is kind of up in the air, literally.
Chief
Whenever I see a spagetti graph I think of “meatball” as in follow the meatball for one’s crash landing on a carrier deck. If glide-path deviation is as large as in the Mid-Troposphere temperature graph with observation: wave-off. Otherwise: Splat.
How long before the modeling June Bug hits the windscreen?
“I can accept that the use of anomalies rather than actual Ts is a defensible approach; but it does make me wonder how far from observed reality the actual Ts calculated in the models are. The fact that the models cannot reproduce actual Ts does not make me feel better about them.”
The absolute T ranges about 3K or plus or minus 1.5K around the true Temp. This is a problem if you are trying to look at things like extreme events or ice melting or anything that depends on getting T exactly right.
The best way to look at models is that the represent the best we know.
we can characterize how good or bad that is. however bad it is it is superior ( less error ) than guesses about the future or empirical models which only produce one variable.
What role should they play in Policy? whatever policy makers decide, of course. They can be given great weight or no weight.
Thanks Steve; do you have any suggestion where I might look for graphs or tables of actual values? Sometimes the details are informative.
Picture the scene, 150 years ago.
Person A: Hello! What’s that?
Person B: It’s a motorcar. Cutting edge technology. Look, you put petrol in here, you sit there, and off you go! Broom boom broom.
Person A: Wow! How fast does it go?
Person B: Errr…. well…
Person A: So, it doesn’t work.
Person B: No. No. Not as such. But it’s the best we have! It encapsulates all our knowledge in this area!
Person A: Great. Let me know when you’ve got one that actually works.
Lucia made a graph of absolute temperatures a few years ago comparing 24 models with Gistemp.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/fact-6a-model-simulations-dont-match-average-surface-temperature-of-the-earth/
Click the graph to enlarge.
Given the disparity in modeled temperatures, how they keep changes in ice and snow coverage anywhere near accurate is a mystery to me. I suspect a large helping of fudge is involved. They certainly can’t be doing it using just physics. Inaccurate temperatures must have an effect on albedo change over the course of the year and that affects the amount of sunlight absorbed/reflected.
My comment at June 22, 2013 at 2:15 am was misplaced. It is in reply to
Barry Elledge | June 21, 2013 at 8:25 pm | and | June 21, 2013 at 11:01 pm.
Bob Koss, thank you! Exactly what I was looking for.
Interesting that the models range over about 3 deg C at any point in time; 1 or 2 of the 24 model simulations are pretty close to the observed 20th century T record. Makes me wonder why the ones that are way off are still included in the ensemble.
Barry Elledge,
A couple of those models may look pretty good, but you have to realize the modelers are aware of the first 90% of the observational data before they do their emulations. It seems they concentrate more on trying to match the slope of the observational data. Probably because matching both slope and temperature is just a happenstance occurrence. Of course none of the groups are going to publish emulations which are wildly off on the known part of the slope. Nobody wants to look foolish. They also don’t tell you how many emulations failed before getting one with a reasonable match that is suitable to publish.
Bob, your comment at 2:55 pm is cogent. A match of both slope and magnitude of a particular model with the T record may be merely fortuitous and might have no predictive value; but it would seem to have a better chance of being correct than the models which get the past wrong.
But there is at least some hope that the models are on a real learning curve. Some time ago -I have no idea where, when or by whom- someone commented that the models doing a better job of projecting current T were the ones which had better processes for treating ENSO events. I don’t know if that is true, but if it is then improvements in ENSO treatment should spread within the modeling community.
As you suggest some of the apparent correlation may be fudge-factoring unrelated to any improvement in understanding.
I think rgb is saying that just because the models tend to agree with each other within a range, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ignore them, or something like that.
The real problem is Leftist thinking and why they deny faith and hope and feel threatened by the successes of others. It is why global warming alarmists deny the sun and why the future of humanity they see are models of a world comprised only of black carbon.
The description of the models rgb envisions seem rather like what I had naively assumed had actually been done: models which were successively modified to be able to calculate T values close to what was actually observed in a given year, and which could be run both forward and backward from a given starting point.
If I am understanding current practice correctly – and I might not be – the climate modelers were unable to calculate accurate results for T, but rather than figure out how to overcome the errors they settled on using anomalies instead. The upside: results that could be used to drive policy despite built-in inaccuracies. The downside: less pressure to refine the models or adopt different types of models which could more accurately reflect the real world.
The current warming hiatus which none of the models “projected” correctly may be seen as an inevitable liability of a system of models which opted to forego actual accuracy.
The inherent problem in sticking with inaccurate models is that you don’t figure out what process is making them inaccurate. If some forcings are unrecognized or improperly measured then reality can diverge a long way from the models. The modelers tend to dismiss the deviations as “noise” or “weather”. This explanation inherently assumes that all real forcings are accounted for, and the deviations reflect energy moving around between tropics and poles, or air and ocean, but not altering the energy content of the whole earth.
However, the energy balance of the earth demonstrably has changed dramatically over time without human intervention. The present accounting of forcings appears to be inadequate to explain the medieval warm period or the little ice age; until the models can do so, they are clearly fundamentally flawed.
Barry, it is commonly said that unless we can explain the various MWPs or Maunder Minimum, we can’t explain climate change, disregarding that we had less observations back then. Just because we can’t explain poorly observed events, doesn’t mean explanations can be discounted when the observations are good enough. Same with hindcasting even the 20th century, we don’t know the forcing, especially the sun and CO2, due to lack of measurements making exact simulations difficult. The pause is a similar situation as it depends on slowly changing ocean circulations. To get this right we would need a full 3d understanding of the ocean flow, again beyond observations, but not only that, being a fluid there are divergences with small perturbations (Lorenz type). The best hope is the kind of thing Balmaseda did with a 3d ocean model constrained by data that can explain where the heat is going in more or less real time.
Jim D,
You may be correct that the current pause in warming is attributable to changes in ocean circulation. But the available evidence doesn’t demonstrate that the oceans are actually absorbing the presumed extra heat. Other explanations are equally plausible, but these are not embodied in the current models.
Your point about not knowing the forcings in the remote past is correct, but it is undermined by the fact that the existing models begin their calculations in the 19th century when actual forcings were equally unknown. If the models purport to calculate the T in 1800 with estimated forcings, why can’t they calculate the T in 1700? The real problem is that the currently recognized forcings do not account for the cooling in the 17th century or the warming in the 11th century.
Barry, they can only speculate that solar and volcanic forcing impacted the temperature over the last 1000 years, but they know neither the global surface temperature nor the forcings, so there is a lot of speculation and anecdotal evidence used instead. However, there doesn’t seem to be any unexplainable magnitude of change going back through the Ice Ages and into paleoclimate, just with current theories that also happen to explain AGW.
But you are guessing at those explanations, JD.
=========
kim, if physics is guessing, yes, it is just physics.
Gee, Jim D, of course physics is the foundation, but you are guessing at the explanatory mechanisms in action for each variation.
==================
kim, the evidence supports certain physical explanations. How about that?
Risky and foolish to ignore the models. Being right about the dynamics is far more important in the long run than being right about the Chaos-driven specifics.
What are you talking about when you use the term “dynamics” and how can you be right about these dynamics if the products of the models are no more than chaos-driven specifics?
Once chaos rears its ugly head I’d say forget the big picture, it’s toast.
R. Gates,
So are you arguing that global warming and cooling are chaotic processes? The current GCMs treat energy balance as a deterministic process, the result of known forcings. And if I understand correctly, the models don’t treat the forcings as chaotic variable inputs. For that matter, the current forcings are supposed to be measured, and the variations in measured forcings don’t account for the observed cooling.
Chaotic processes are often invoked to explain “weather”, with an implicit or explicit understanding that weather involves energy flowing to different sinks but not changing the overall energy balance. If this is what you mean when you talk about chaotic processes, then chaos cannot explain the little ice age cooling or medieval warming; these involved changes in energy balance.
But if the forcings are themselves chaotic, then the understanding of forcings embedded in the GCMs must be changed. Are there forcings not recognized in the models? Perhaps cloud changes tied to solar variation?
This is implicitly an argument that current GCMs are inadequate in a fundamental way.
Forcings are a key part of the GCM specified inputs. CO2 forcing is no small thing because doubling it is like adding 1% to solar forcing, so it is not surprising that this gives a clear signal above the chaos. The sun itself doesn’t change by more than a tenth of 1% during its variations in activity over centuries, which is why the climate has been so stable in this period, but these fluctuations are chaotic and not predictable far ahead, unlike CO2 forcing scenarios which can be estimated from energy usage scenarios.
Barry,
You might want to delve a bit deeper into DETERMINISTIC CHAOS theory. This is not about randomness at all. The Earth’s energy balance is basic physics at the fundamental level and can be confidently put into models, but the problem becomes one of actually knowing the smallest details of the climate system that can make big differences over relatively short periods of time. It is all deterministic, but involves complex interactions and feedbacks, of which the smallest change here or there leads to massive changes later on. Read up on Lorenz and his development of Chaos theory. It is NOT about randomness.
Basic thermodynamic science and the knowledge of GH gases make it quite clear that accumulating GH gases will increase the amount of energy being retained by the Earth system, and nothing that has happened in the past 10 years changing these fundamentals…indeed, quite the opposite.
R. Gates
Your reply at 11:45 am to my post at 11:16 am manages to set up 2 straw-man arguments while assiduously avoiding an answer to the question I posed.
First, my post concerned whether you believe that forcings are chaotic. Nowhere did I mention “randomness” and I have no idea why you thought that I was concerned with randomness. I tend to assume that all physical events larger than quantum-scale are deterministic if one simply could know enough about the system in question (presumably coin flips and dice rolls as well). Chaotic systems also are deterministic at bottom.
Second, I of course accept the effect of greenhouse gases including CO2 on atmospheric warming and decreasing radiative energy loss; that is not in question in my comments. More GHGs mean a warmer earth than we would experience without them.
Now that your strawmen are dismantled, perhaps you will be willing to confront the questions I posed. Do you think forcings are chaotic? If so, which ones? If some particular forcings are chaotic, how is their chaotic behavior accounted for in the GCMs? Do you think there are chaotic forcings (or even nonchaotic ones) which are not accounted for in current GCMs?
These questions are interesting because the actual energy content of the earth seems to be inadequately accounted for by the current GCMs. Additional forcings or modified values of current forcings appear to be necessary to explain past climate variation as well as the current pause in warming. I know you would like to wriggle out of that conundrum by asserting that the missing heat is passing into the ocean or melting polar ice, but the evidence for that is spotty at best.
So what do you think about chaotic forcings?
Barry,
I’m not sure I follow the notion of a forcing being chaotic, if by a forcing you mean some singular physical element such as solar input or the amount of aerosols put into the atmosphere by some specific volcanic event such as Mt. Pinatubo. Now the effects of forcings certainly can be chaotic over some specific short-term time horizon, but, as we’ve seen with the regular pulse of the climate displayed in the ice-core record, there is a very non-chaotic rhythm over the long-term.
It is the system itself that is chaotic – consisting of control variables and multiple feedbacks.
‘In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces climate change to the discernment of significant differences in the statistics of such ensembles. The generation of such model ensembles will require the dedication of greatly increased computer resources and the application of new methods of model diagnosis. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive, but such statistical information is essential.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm
Glacials and interglacials are certainly chaotic – perhaps driven by NH summer insolation triggering runaway ice sheet feedback. Earth systems include cloud, ice, dust and the biosphere. These interact to change albedo and therefore the energy budget of the planet. This happens even in the short term as the Earth system is chaotic at all scales both in time and space. For instance –
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=6
It is sometimes called abrupt climate change – http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10136 – which is defined as changes driven by Earth system processes that is out of proportion to the original forcing.
‘Researchers first became intrigued by abrupt climate change when they discovered striking evidence of large, abrupt, and widespread changes preserved in paleoclimatic archives. Interpretation of such proxy records of climate—for example, using tree rings to judge occurrence of droughts or gas bubbles in ice cores to study the atmosphere at the time the bubbles were trapped—is a well-established science that has grown much in recent years. This chapter summarizes techniques for studying paleoclimate and highlights research results. The chapter concludes with examples of modern climate change and techniques for observing it. Modern climate records include abrupt changes that are smaller and briefer than in paleoclimate records but show that abrupt climate change is not restricted to the distant past.’
R Gates,
I think Chief Hydrologist’s comment at 2 am is on point. Climate change often occurs in ways that suggest a regime change, and that may have a sudden onset. The special case of volcanic eruptions is pretty well understood, and the change in forcing can be measured independently of its effect on global T. Whether volcanic eruptions have a chaotic pattern or are simply random I don’t know (but it is an interesting test case:any math wizards have an answer?).
Other forcings do seem to have chaotic qualities. Whatever changes in forcings drove the MWP and LIA have some of the hallmarks of chaotic changes: the world moved between colder and warmer states, but within those states T varied considerably. My point here is that we don’t know what those changes in forcings were. The forcings embedded in current GCMs accommodate changes in aerosols (including volcanism) and small changes in total solar irradiation TSI, but other forcings are nearly constant or are slowly and regularly changing like CO2 . Nothing in the current forcings as embedded in GCMs seems to vary enough to account for these observed past climate changes.
I conclude the current forcings models are inadequate to explain past variation. Whatever process happened a thousand years ago in the MWP and 400-150 years ago in the LIA may well explain the current lapse in warming. And given the magnitude of the swings in T between MWP and LIA, these unaccounted forcings may well dwarf the effect of CO2.
Barry said:
“Whatever process happened a thousand years ago in the MWP and 400-150 years ago in the LIA may well explain the current lapse in warming. And given the magnitude of the swings in T between MWP and LIA, these unaccounted forcings may well dwarf the effect of CO2.”
———
The current “lapse in warming” is troposphere only, and is well accounted for by the cool phase of the PDO primarily, with secondarily a modest uptick in a series of moderate sized volcanic activity. The flow of energy from ocean to atmosphere has a definite chaotic component, especially the combined effect of the PDO and AMO. Certainly the models haven’t got this dynamic right.
The robust warming of the oceans, with the fairly steady transfer of that energy to the cryosphere as reflected in declines in Greenland and Antarctic glacial mass and declines in the Arctic sea ice, all are enough to refute the notion that the “globe” has been cooling. Though the troposphere is currently not receiving as much energy from the ocean, I am convinced by the basic physics behind increasing forcing from the continual increases in GH gases that the troposphere will get its full share of the additional joules of energy being stored in the Earth system in due course as the ocean cycles once more shift to release more of this continually building excess energy.
ARGO ain’t doin’ it, deep ‘missing heat’ is imaginary or staying there for awhile, so the ‘skeptical’ one turns to the glaciers, God’s rock, scissors, paper game.
===================
Simon,
A good example is the models that have indicated for quite some time that with increasing GH concentrations, we’d eventually see an ice free summer Arctic. Prior to 2007, most of those models put the date our at about 2100 or so- that’s what the dynamics of the models indicated– declining summer Arctic Sea ice. Now as it has turned out, the models were not taking into account all the various feedbacks (obviously), and so now that date is continually being moved forward…2070…2040…2030. This is how it is between models and the reality of a chaotic system. The models got the general direction of summer Arctic sea ice (as in declining), but the exact timing of the first ice-free summer Arctic will be based on internal natural variability as well as feedbacks that can’t be fully captured the models– at least not yet.
Naturally, warming or no warming, the lunatic cheerleaders of the global warming doomsday movement will continue to quote themselves and refuse to admit even simple facts and nothing will stop them from pushing their beliefs in public classrooms that America is bad for the world. How about we stop that?
What “simple” facts can we warmists not admit?
Check out Bart R comments about polar bears. Anyone can look up the facts. Failure to admit facts is one thing–e.g., not admitting MBH98/99/08 (aka, the ‘hockey stick’) is scientific Quatsch. But just making crap up unfortunately is not a rare thing to see among the global warming alarmists.
Wagathon | June 22, 2013 at 10:04 am |
Check out Bart R comments about polar bears. Anyone can look up the facts
Yeah. Check out Bart R comments about polar bears.
The comments were here:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/20/the-economist-on-the-new-republic-on-the-pause/#comment-335527
And look up the facts, which are not as cut and dried as some soundbites and short-attention-span media reports, or even science reports, suggest.
Official facts are summarized here:
http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/status/status-table.html
Despite treaty commitments, the facts remain highly uncertain and a few specialists contradict the official estimates.
But they can produce glossy animations (look up pbsg.npolar.no/en/dynamic/app/).
One point-missing examination of the recent disputed facts is available here:
http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/dec12/polar_bears.asp
The current scientific consensus places the worldwide polar bear population between 20,000 and 25,000 animals. Prior to the 1973 worldwide restriction on commerical polar bear hunting, that number was dramatically lower, so low that a meeting of polar bear specialists in 1965 concluded that extinction was a real possibility. Some reports even estimated the number of bears as low as 5,000 worldwide.
The estimates are controversial and wildly vary. One Syncrude-sponsored expert in the 1990’s claimed there were up to 40,000 polar bears, yet no polar bear census could produce evidence of more than 25,000. Some experts claim polar bear numbers are unchanged in two or three decades, yet every count and every method of actual bear health measurement suggests otherwise.. but can’t pin down reliable trends.
The facts are polar bears live in a vast area, camouflaged or buried or roaming huge distances, and no one has been very successful at much of a count, while the people who count polar bears are frequently known for strong political views that detractors suggest color their reporting either direction.
Except when the population was so huge or so tiny counting was easy. Around 1900, there were over 100,000 polar bears worldwide. In the 1960’s there were fewer than 10,000 polar bears, compellingly leading to national hunting bans and a 1973 international convention on limits to the hunt. Today, there are double to triple the 1960’s population, but still only about a quarter the century-ago number. And there is nothing about a decline in Arctic sea ice extent and condition that is good for polar bear population health.
So while the population overall had significant post-1960’s growth over 50 years, that followed a decline that was up to 20 times as fast for just as long, and it is prudent to consider habitat change for polar bears a high risk, high cost circumstance.
No amount of opinion pieces from university researchers funded by tarsands grants can change that. No amount of Greenpeace hankie-wringing has yet produced such detailed science that claims of confidence either way are warranted especially when the majority of signatories to international agreements committed to producing counts repeatedly fail amid repeated funding cuts, except when the order of magnitude of the numbers changes. Such as from over 100,000 to around 5,000 five decades later to somewhere on the low end between those two figures another five decades on.
Sheesh… how typical — the magic of giving a number or name to something to artificially inflate the gravity of something –e.g., a century ago or in the 1900s or in here or there, “there were 100,000” … wild tigers, cheetahs, Tibetan antelopes, elephants, polar bears, rhinos, Grizzlies, slaves…
There were a lot more cowboys carrying six guns on their hips in the 1900s… probably, 100000 of them.
Wagathon,
With proper statistical analysis, we can show there were actually precisely 978,842.87 cowboys carrying six guns on their hips in the 1900s.
Wagathon | June 23, 2013 at 10:30 am |
Seriously?
You think there were more guns in America in 1900 than today?
More six shooters?
More as a proportion of the population?
More cattle workers then than today?
More of them went armed as a proportion than today?
What kind of burning good books bad planet do you live on?
Or do you mean horsepowered drovers who deliver food to America? We call them truckers now. You think there’s less of them, or that they don’t go armed?
The magic of using numbers and analysis to understand something, rather than brushing it off with malarky and ignorance. We ought to expect GaryM’s three monkeys to object to that.
I guess my question under JCH below should be addressed to you since I said, ‘your ilk.’
BartR,
My monkey’s (and who says there are just three?) just read your comment and understood it better than you did Wagathon’s. And they, like, can’t read.
I swear, there is an epidemic of dyslexial delusion running amok among the warmists around here lately. I mean redefinition of language, straw men, and portable goal posts are you CAGWer’s bread and butter, go to arguments on a good day. But the inability of you clerics of climate catastrophe to just read the simple written word is becoming down right ubiquitous. (Don’t worry about looking it up, give Mosher five minutes and it will mean once in a blue moon.)
a society educated by hollyweird
What do you think about your ilk running commercials with polar bears falling from the sky, careening off and leaving streaks of blood on NY skyscrapers as they plummet into asphalt streets. Or, how about Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ graph?
Wagathon | June 24, 2013 at 11:07 am |
Ilk? Someone owes JCH an apology. Since when does he get tarred with the same ilk brush as me? What did he ever do to you?
I say about tv ads that if you can’t stand the heat, turn the channel. If you’re so weak-stomached that a bit of shock and gore is too much for you, perhaps you want to withdraw from gleaning an education from commercial television and internet advertising and retreat to a life of quiet contemplation of scripture in a monastic cell.
If you’re still afraid of hockey sticks you’ll be relieved to hear the season is over for another year, and you can watch the boys of summer play the great American pastime. What will you do when someone compares some graph to a baseball bat?
You are overly sensitive. Everything apparently profoundly offends you personally as an affront on decency and virtue. I have found in the past this is often associated with hypochondria.
Are you perhaps a sufferer?
We see the Leftists’ envirochondria burning hotter and smellier than rubber tires in a beach fire: so many rich old ladies to take advantage of with the impending death of polar bears and so little time…
according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit)
For the last 15 years from 1997 to 2012, here are the increases in temperature for the various datasets:
HadCRUT4 => 0.05 deg C
GISS => 0.08 deg C
RSS => -0.01 deg C
UAH => 0.09 deg C
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/to:2013/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1997/to:2013/trend/plot/rss/from:1997/to:2013/trend/plot/uah/from:1997/to:2013/trend
Conclusion:
The observed values are less than half the predicted value of 0.25 deg C.
lolwat
Here is a result in a published paper acknowledging the hiatus in global warming
The rate of increase of global-mean surface air
temperature (SATg) has apparently slowed during the last
decade.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50541/pdf
Don’t you still accept the hiatus in global warming?
Girma
There are numerous recent papers acknowledging some hiatus but lolwot is psychologically incapable of accepting the concept. If he does, it is the beginning of his recovery and for some that is too painful to contemplate. Eventually he will come around. He needs a support group like us to gently walk him back.
Id be interested in your comment on the following then.
When the paper Girma links to says: “it is puzzling that SATg increased little during the first decade of the 21st century”
It begs the question, how much did SATg increase during the first decade of the 21st century?
The SkS calculator yields a trend of 0.085 +- 0.239C/decade over the period 2000-2010 in Hadcrut4.
Seems to me that a trend of 0.085 +- 0.239C/decade doesn’t justify any conclusion that there was a haitus or standstill. The range is compatible with over 0.3C/decade warming during that period! The uncertainty is too large to conclude there had been no warming over that period. do you not agree?
It seems the paper is only looking at the 0.085C/decade mid-value and not at the uncertainty in the trend. Look at figure 2, no uncertainty bars on the hadcrut4 ticks.
Then the paper says about 20th century warming: “Global-mean surface air temperature … has been increasing continuously over the last century”
Okay lets see by how much. SkS calculator for the period 1900-2000 yeilds a trend of:
0.063 +- 0.011C/decade
Yep. So 0.063C/decade is “continuous warming”, but 0.085C/decade is a “hiatus”. Really? Can you justify that?
It’s just sloppy use of definitions, that’s all. To describe a short-term period of the temperature record a hiatus, or standstill, or pause is sloppy definitions. It probably doesn’t matter what you call it really, except that for climate skeptics and their propaganda they will abuse such terms to imply warming has stopped.
Thanks, lolwot, it’s clear you’ll accept no definition or naming of the phenomenon.
===========
I fully accept the current hiatus in tropospheric warming, and can trace directly a great part of it to less energy flowing from ocean to atmosphere specifically because of the current cool phase of the PDO, even though the Earth as a system has continued to accumulate energy at a very robust rate.
R Gates
Climate change is the natural state, a ‘hiatus’ is quite unusual
tonyb
Except there has been no hiatus in the overall accumulation of energy in the Earth system. The current period is unusual in that the accumulation of energy is quite robust and caused by the activities of one species.
That’s a religious conviction, not a scientific statement. The actual evidence can be interpreted that way, but is also consistent with no net average accumulation since sometime around 1998, and lower net average accumulations than usually assumed before that.
R gates
How long have we been able to measure the overall accumulation of energy to know this is unusual?
How does heat bypass the top layer of water and burrow down deep without being noticed?
How many hundred years would it take to raise the temperature of the abyssal oceans by any measurable amount?
How does the eventual release of this extra energy- expressed as a miniscule amount of warmth- affect our atmospheric temperature to any noticeable degree?
Why did the warming change from heating the atmosphere -where we all live- to the oceans?
There is a hiatus in the atmospheric temperature. That is unusual. Climate change is the ‘norm.’
tonyb
The last 10 years of ARGO float measurements, with now over 3000 samples covering the planet’s oceans, combined with the rapid decline in glacial mass on and and Arctic sea ice can be interpreted quite scientifically as showing the continual increase in additionally energy in the Earth system. In comparison, the lack of additional warming (though it remains the warmest decade on record) in the troposphere says more about the current cool phase of the PDO than about the underlying facts of GH gas warming of the Earth system.
tonyb, cold water from deeper upwelling zones can replace surface water, so this is why it can cool or not warm as fast as layers just below. You have to consider vertical circulations when looking at the ocean layers. It is not static layering.
@climatereason…
To be “noticed” it would have to warm the upper layers, which are generally warmer than the lower. This has
nothinglittle to do with the rate of transfer: more heat could be coming down from the mixing layer, while a similarly larger amount of heat could be crossing the 700m level (or whatever). This doesn’t mean the temp has to be higher between 700m and the bottom of the mixing layer.ARGO ain’t doin’ it, the deep ‘missing heat’ may be ephemeral, and R Gates turns to the glaciers, God’s rock, paper, scissors game.
========================
ARGO ain’t doing what Kim? Normally I can at least partially follow your metaphorical quasi-drug-induced ramblings, but what the hell are you talking about?
Tony,
Where did I say the accumulation of energy in the ocean as measured by ARGO was unusual? I simply am pointing out the fact that is is a very misleading half-truth to say that the Earth has stopped warming over the past 10 years. The 3000+ ARGO floats have pretty robust evidence to the contrary. Whether or not this is unusual over some longer period of time is up to research to decide, but it is definitely consistent with the kinds of energy increases we’d expect from the continual increases in GH gases in the Earth’s atmopshere.
I fully accept that ARGO shows modest warming. CERES overlaps the ARGO period and shows that all of this warming is very modest changes in cloud cover – I am not sure I would count on it continuing.
You seek the missing heat in every nook and cranny, ever hopeful, but she’s probably fled at the speed of light. Regrets.
================
“.There has been a hiatus in warming in the surface temperatures and this hiatus represents a statistically rare event in climate models.”
That may be true but I doubt it. The excitable modes of the Co2 molecule eventually fall to a temperature in the troposphere which is stable. Once that state is reached it stays there, hence the currant and privious, 1940 to 1970 pause.. Co2 can only bea threat in its vibrational modes, but if photons are not powerful enough to excite those modes, then all it can do is increase its kinetic energy and is no more a threat than O2 or N2.
hence the currant and privious, 1940 to 1970 pause.
Shouldn’t that be “paws” ? :-)
stop opposing the burning of carbon for fuel while it is needed to sustain civilization, and recognize that if the world economy crashes, if civilization falls, it will be a disaster that easily rivals the worst of your fears from a warmer climate.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/18/the-ensemble-of-models-is-completely-meaningless-statistically/#comment-1342356
“Predictive modeling is difficult. we do not know enough to build a good, working climate model. We will not know enough until we can build a working climate model that predicts the past”
We cannot build a model that predicts the past , We can only ever fit a model to the past “precasting”.
The best we can do is build a more and more complete record [model] of the past to show us where we have been.
Due to the multitude of factors no model can correctly predict the future for 1, 100 or a 1000 years . But the climate is repetitive around a random walk and a guesstimate can be made 1-10 yearly with excellent hopes of modest approximation. All such models should be primable with yearly input changes to reflect the actual climate changes and improve the ongoing results from that new point in time.
All models [Mosher] should predict at worst 4 out of 10 years of falling temps in a year, practically 4.999 out of 10 If we are in an increasing warmth epoch. If the solar minimum reduced solar input occurs as predicted and temps are more likely to go down on average models should still predict nearly 5 warming years to 5.001 cooling years.
All models are wrong is a good fun line but when all models are uniformly wrong then there is an inbuilt warming error. We know what this is. It is accepting a 0.2 warming per decade CO2 induced with multiplications.
You can work it out by taking the average trend of the spaghetti graph average [Tamino and Lucia and Mosher].
So three cheers, the mean ensemble average is good [sorry RBG], as it’s rigid incorrectness proves its uselessness.
Models jest ain’t fit,
ain’t fit ter predict
fuchur climate,
ain’t fit ter fit past
varia-bi-litly,
weather the serfs
were out in,
ex-peer-ienc-‘in,
day by day and year
by year, weather cold
or hot.
B-t-s
Hi serfs, 2nd Edition of Serf Under_ground Journal herewith.
Beth the serf.
http://beththeserf.wordpress.com/
Beth
Yeah! You do have the two groats payment I sent you?
tonyb
Now I gotta go read Chaucer and figure out who Beth is.
===========
Thx, Tony, II’ve already spent them.
Bts
Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote, …
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al the night with open ye –
Thanne longen folk ter goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres fer to seeken straunge strondes
Ter ferne halwes, couthe in sondrey londes;
H/t Chaucer.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/20/the-economist-on-the-new-republic-on-the-pause/#comment-334948
kim | June 20, 2013 at 9:18 pm | Sorry David, calling for a number is ignorant bluster. I’d be inclined closer to 100% than 0%, but then there is Arrhenius.
What about Arrhenius?
I think he was a biologist who found a fungus growing in a Petri dish and his scientific successors thought the fungus grew that way everywhere in the world.
=====
Arrhenius thought we came from Mars,
Got himself elected to the Nobel committee and gave himself a prize.
“Arrhenius thought we came from Mars”
Nothing wrong with the Martian Panspermia hypothesis.
http://palaeo-electronica.org/2001_2/editor/mars.htm
Head to WUWT and read the entire post.
..because over half of everyone who ever headed to WUWT and read an entire post never, ever went back?
Who comes to Climate Etc. to hear about WUWT?
That’s like heading to a Buckwheat Zydeco concert because you’re a huge fan of Glam Rock. Or drinking coffee to warm up for your hit of crystal meth.
Well, okay, the similarities may be closer.
I’d still much rather hear what our host and denizens think here.
However, if prediction is your goal for a GCM, if prediction is the standard you measure success by, if prediction is something you expect, and you DARE utter the word Bayesian, you are so provocatively, brashly, perversely off your rocker as to beggar description. There is nothing intellectually consistent in upholding a standard of prediction on an intrinsically unpredictable system and castigating the statistical judgement of anyone else. So, perhaps your posts do belong on WUWT.
I have started to see WUWT as a cross between the absurdity of Weekly World News and the irrelevance of celebrity gossip magazines.
Whereas celebrity gossip magazines will strike up a fuss about how some celebrity dared to wear the wrong color shoes to the Oscars, WUWT will strike up a fuss about the letter C in GCM, elevating it to some scandalous importance.
“Where is circulation defined in the IPCC report?? Scandalous it’s not defined anywhere! As an engineer who has worked on air circulation in buildings let me tell you that circulation MUST be defined before any project is begun!!…how are these climate scientists getting away with it!! and Michael Mann wore the wrong color shoes to work last week blah blah blah. Look! INSECTS ARE CAUSING THE CO2!! (that’s the world weekly news bit)”
Iolwot
WUWT has a valuable role to play as educator and entertainment vehicle, which Anthony Watts suceeds in doing very well.
Personally I would like to see fewer articles each day so that those offered are dealt with in greater depth and any shortcomings or virtues of the paper can be exposed
tonyb
Tony,
I would argue that WUWT plays a role for entertainment, but in terms of education, absolutely not. The skewed information is actually mis-information and tends to create mis-informed individuals. In this way, half-truths are more dangerous than complete lies.
R Gates said;
‘In this way, half-truths are more dangerous than complete lies’
What, half truths like models, despite your arguing the opposite just above?
tonyb.
Tony,
Models are certainly partial-truths (the exact percentage a matter of future research). But expecting models to predict short-term natural variability is like trying to force a hammer to be a spanner. Models are always wrong, but those not understanding their usefulness, and then blaming them for not being right, are either being deceptive or are just plain ignorant.
But I would also add that it is dangerous to base short-term policy on models, but quite reasonable to build in long-term robustness of your infrastructure, food supply, etc. based on models, as over the long-run, the models will prove their usefulness as predictive tools. The Earth system is accumulating energy, and has been as GH gases increase. The models may be (and obviously are) wrong about where this energy will show up or be distributed in the Earth system, but the basic accumulation is spot on and based on robust physical theory. You can take that…as they say… to the energy bank.
R Gates
Yes but is this ‘half truth that models show ‘dangerous’ as you suggested above in a different context.
tonyb
R gates
You answered the half truth is dangerous query but it wasn’t up on the board. Thanks. Unlikely climate models have a partial use but not necessarily in the manner we might envisage
tonyb
Arrhenius is dead and buried but his CO2 contribution lives on. There is a molecule of his CO2 in every breathe we take, warming the world for the last 85 1/2 years. Just not very much.Perhaps his molecules are taking a pause.
Arrhenius is dead and buried but his CO2 contribution lives on. There is a molecule of his CO2 in every breathe we take, warming the world for the last 85 1/2 years. Just not very much.Perhaps his molecules are taking a pause.
Except of course that the World has continued to accumulate energy, with the past ten years being especially robust.
Benny Peiser, from the GWPF, wrote to Prof. Mitchell, FRS on the 20th May 2013, inviting the RS tream to brief the GWPF team on why it is certain that CAGW is an estbalished scientific fact; as the RS statement claims. That is over a month ago. What is happening?
Surely if the science is so solid, the RS tream ought to have accepted the invitation with alacrity, gone down to the GWPF with all the science behind CAGW, and shown that the CAGW is fact. If the claims of the warmists on CS are right, this should be a slamdunk.
But maybe Sir Paul Nurse has realised that, by accepting Nigel Lawson’s offer in principle, he has, in effect, put his head in a noose. If the RS team actually goes to the GWPF and discusses CAGW, they will be humiliated. And one can hardly descibe the GWPF team as anything other than very credible scientists. So maybe the RS is trying to wiggle out of the meeting. However, I am sure Nigel Lawson has a lot more cards that he can play.
Anyone got any news on this issue?
This is worth repeating, and rgbatduke would do well to understand why the current hiatus in tropospheric warming does not discredit the models (since they are always wrong about specifics anyway):
“I fully accept the current hiatus in tropospheric warming, and can trace directly a great part of it to less energy flowing from ocean to atmosphere specifically because of the current cool phase of the PDO, even though the Earth as a system has continued to accumulate energy at a very robust rate, exactly as the underlying dynamics of the climate models have shown it should.”
R. Gates, you write “This is worth repeating, and rgbatduke would do well to understand why the current hiatus in tropospheric warming does not discredit the models”
Fair enough, but when can we expect the rate of global warming to start, or resume if you wish, increasing to a value commensurate with CAGW?
Well, you must mean when can we expect to see the rate of tropospheric warming to resume, given that the Earth as a system has not shown any slowdown in warming over the past ten years, and perhaps even some acceleration.
As long as the oceans are slowing down their release of heat to the atmosphere (i.e. the current cool phase of the PDO), you can expect no big rises Tropospheric temperatures, and the end of this is as unpredictable as the beginning, which is exactly what Lorenz found in developing his Chaos theory.
But ll of this does not change the underlying fact of the energy inbalance caused by the continued accumulation of GH gases in the Atmosphere.
Hi Jim
Everyone is looking above their heads for more energy to come in, but those changes are minuscule. There is a plenty of heat in the oceans, but to resume warming, the energy has to move from the Equator towards the poles, where the anomaly is at its strongest.
That can be done only by ‘encouraging’ stronger warm currents flowing to high latitudes, but no man can do that.
For this ‘encouragement’ we have to look not above our heads, but below our feet, to the mother Earth. As anyone (but the most short-sighted warmist) can see from these illustrations:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GT-CI.htm
the mother Earth was strongly shaking off its shivering cold, all the way from the time of the LIA until the end of the 20th century, but recently has been moving more sedately. To return beck to the rapidly rising warming may take long time, and no one can tell when.
R. Gates, you write “and the end of this is as unpredictable as the beginning,”
Reductio ad absurdum, this pause could go on for 10,000 years, and it would still be consistent with CAGW? Clearly the climate models have no predictive capability whatsoever, and you and the rest of the warmists have absolutely no idea when the rate of rise of global temperatures is going to become commensurate with CAGW. You are just praying in the Church of CAGW that your God will restore a rapid rise in global temperatures.
vukcevik, you write “and no one can tell when.”
Thanks. All I can add is precisely. No-one has the slightest idea of what is going to happen to global temperatures. But he warmists have to pretend that what is currently happening is what they have always predicted, and “trust us, things will change in the future, and CAGW will be proven”. The trouble is, I dont trust ANY warmist.
Jim,
Your thinking the current pause in tropospheric warming could go on for 10,000 years clearly displays your lack of understanding of the nature of Chaotic systems. This would be akin to predicting exactly when and where a tornado will start and end. We know that a a tornado will last a certain period and then fade, and we understand pretty well the dynamics that go into forming a tornado (i.e. the theory and models developed from that theory is robust), but such models will never make it possible to say exactly when and where any specific tornado will begin and end. The PDO, though different in scale and nature, is no different from a Chaos theory standpoint. I highly suggest you read up on Chaos theory and Lorenz development of it.
Vuk,
Once more you seem to miss the big picture of the function of GH gases. No one is looking for more energy to “come in”, but rather, less energy to go out per unit of time (i.e. the thermal gradient is altered) as long as GH gases continue to accumulate. Once the accumulation stops or slows down greatly, some sort of new equilibrium will eventually be reached.
Yep, there is lot of that that now one knows why and when, and even more why and when precisely; e.g. why is North Atlantic shaking in a synchronism with solar output:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-NAPb.htm
R. Gates, you write “This would be akin to predicting exactly when and where a tornado will start and end.”
You are making the classic error, which is what a lot of warmists do. There is a huge amount of EMPIRICAL data on the behaviour of tornados. From this EMIPIRICAL data it is possible to predict all sorts of things that they might do. And any hypotheses we might make about the behaviour of tornados can be tested by observing future tornados. It is this plethnora of EMPIRICAL data that makes tornados completely and utterly different for CAGW.
With respect to CAGW, there is virtually NO empirical data. So any predicitons are based on very little more than faith. So that is why you and the rest of the warmists have no idea what is causing the present pause, or when it is likely to end. If you wish to quote an analogy, then please pick one where there is NO EMPIRICAL data
Gates says: Vuk, Once more you seem to miss the big picture of the function of GH gases.
Hi Gates
You call 0.0004 parts of 1.0 ‘big picture’; it’s good for a laugh.
Gates, to paraphrase ‘crocodile Dandy’
This is THE BIG PICTURE mate
http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/o4s/gl/c/img/current_transport.png
have a nice weekend.
v., so how did the nuclear tests change correlation?
============
Vuk
That’s a very striking representation of the big ocean currents.
Have you ever seen one of the various jet streams to complete the process of examining major climatic influences?
Tonyb
OK, I think I got it. So you fuse how much hydrogen in one a dose bomba and you fuse how much in the sun? Sure, don’t feel the shaking here. Mebbe telemagnetoconnectobobbly does it. Plenty of energy, plenty of unknown mechanisms conceivable.
=============
WUWT is a never-ending source of amusement:
From the first paragraph of the currently top post at WUWT:
So Judith, and of her “denizens,” and “skeptics” all over the “skept-o-sphere” now tell us (when they aren’t telling us that “skeptics” are not monolithic, so you cna’t say what they believe as a group) that “skeptics” don’t doubt that the planet is warming.
However, we are also told by prominent “skeptics” that “it is not possible to claim global warming.,”
Let’s see how many WUWT readers log in to the comments section to explain to Vincent Gray (another prominent “skeptic”) that what he wrote is inconsistent with what most “skeptics” believe.
It is to laugh.
You have to admit – such a blatant disregard for basic logic really is a spectacular display of motivated reasoning.
I’m getting a T-shirt printed up:
Or Judith –
Perhaps you could log on to explain why you say, over and over, that “skeptics” don’t doubt that the earth is warming – in light of that post at WUWT?
Give it a shot. Couldn’t hurt, right? How do you reconcile “…it is not possible to claim global warming,” by a prominent “skeptic” at a prominent “skeptic” blog – with no doubt what will be (a few hundred?) comments don’t don’t correct the misstatement of the beliefs of the vast majority of “skeptics,” – with your ‘oft repeated assessment that “skeptics” (outside of only those you call Sky Dragons – a tiny number of people indeed) don’t doubt that the Earth is warming, only the extent to which that warming is influenced by ACO2.
Give it a shot, Judith. Consider it a test.
Even better than I expected: One of the first comments:
Indeed. Oh. My sides.
Joshua
That was a somewhat convoluted comment of yours, but most sceptics believe it has been warming since the end of the LIA, just that the amount of warming caused by man is highly debatable and past warming events of an equal or greater amount seem to indicate that natural variability is a bigger factor than co2 changes.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/
tonyb
tony –
Convoluted indeed :-)
But the post at WUWT makes it clear that many of the characterizations of what “skeptics” believe are not taking in all the evidence.
Yes, many (I would argue about the relative numbers) “skeptics” say that they don’t doubt that the Earth has warmed – but many of those same “skeptics” then they turn around and say things like “it is not possible to claim global warming.”
My point is not particularly about what “skeptics” do or don’t believe, but about how people argue about the debate. Many “skeptics” mischaracterize “skeptics” for the purposes of advancing a partisan agenda. It happens on both sides – and it happens because people aren’t addressing a primary causal aspect of the debate: the biasing influences on reasoning that create such broadly illogical arguments.
In fact, I think that may “skeptic” simultaneously believe that the Earth has warmed and that “it is not possible to claim global warming.” People can well believe things that defy basic logic.
Yep, tony. My view is that climate IS change, and that humanity and all living things have never found it comfortable or stable. But examining authentic old records and testimonies of people living precariously from season to season, you’d be more aware than most of us of the real state of humans in relation to nature.
Maybe these odd notions of stable or acceptable climate are born in urban air-conditioned premises, where people are vaccinated, insured, fed…and seat-belted in air-conditioned conveyances when they do go outside. Being insulated from climate has made people silly about climate…and nobody can be made sillier through insulation than a silly intellectual.
Joshua
I think you ‘mischaracterize’ the term ‘global’ warming which is perhaps where the misunderstandings occur
As far as I am aware Britain is part of the Globe. Do you see any warming in the last decade in the link I provided earlier?
Here is a study we made a couple of years ago that identified other places that were cooling
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/in-search-of-cooling-trends/
Depending on whether, and how strongly,the numerous micro climates that make up that cobbled together ‘global’ temperature are mostly warming, mostly cooling, or in stasis will determine the general trend at any one time
tonyb
@Joshua…
Since my own skeptical opinions fall near this range, let me describe them:
I consider it fairly probable that the earth has “warmed” since 1970ish, subject to caveats regarding the meaning of “warmed”. (There’s a lot of semantic bait&switch going one WRT this word and its “synonyms”)
I consider it impossible to honestly claim certainty that the earth has “warmed”. At least for any well-informed scientist, or user of the scientific method. Not even “certainty” in the normal scientific sense of “not worth questioning at the moment”.
Belief has no place in Science. Of course, many here and at WUWT are actually using such absolute terms metaphorically.
tony –
My point is related the whole “global warming has paused” line of argumentation.
Judith has said that (paraphrasing) “global warming has paused,” and she has editorialized in support of that line of argumentation.
In response, I say that is exploiting a lack of definition of terms. If you want to say that the rising trend line of increase in near surface (land?) temps has flattened out in recent years, have at it. But don’t say that global warming has paused (unless you control for the different metrics as you describe), or unless you doubt the GHE (which, I will remind you, Judith says is only true of “Sky Dragons,” and their number is minuscule, indeed but the number of “skeptics” who argue from a logical premise that there is no GHE is larger, indeed).
I think that people need to be more careful in their terminology and not exploit ambiguity to pursue advocacy. I think that should be true of everyone, Judith included.
Anyway, gotta run. I’l catch up with you later.
It is not a scientifically accurate and supportable statement to say “global warming has paused”– this is a clear half-truth, and anyone making it is doing service to the spread of misinformation– ANYONE.
What can be said is that the that flow of energy from ocean to atmosphere has slowed, and a strong component of this is the current cool phase of the PDO. What can also be said is that the Earth, as a system, continues to accumulate energy at a steady to accelerating rate as measured by the broadest measures we have of energy in the Earth system.
Joshua
Here is Otto writing as a guest on the met office web site talking about the ‘ warming pause ‘ if either you or Iolwot want to complain about this being an incorrect use of the term just write what you would like to chastise them about, I will copy it onto paper and personally deliver it to the met office reception desk in Exeter. That will ensure they look at it. The only condition being that you then tell us what they say in reply
Deal?
Tonyb
R gates
My offer to Joshua extends to you and Jimd as regards the ‘ warming pause’ phrase as used in the met office website. I will personally deliver your letters to their reception telling them off.
Tonyb
tonyb, the globally averaged surface temperature rise has paused. Many other things haven’t, including land temperature, Arctic temperature and ocean heat content. So, if it is understood to be this narrow context, which is the usual context in the press that these scientists have to address, pause is a fine term to use, otherwise they can’t address this meme.
Jimd
Sorry, forgot to post the link to th met office ‘warming pause’ article
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/recent-climate-research-in-the-news/
Tonyb
Tony,
The Met office is clearly off on a great many things, and part of their problem is trying to predict climate like they do weather (and even the weather they can’t seem to get very right anymore). Please do tell them off for me, and suggest to them they begin their greater understanding of what the hell is going on with climate by looking more closely at all the great research being done about the strengthening of the Brewer-Dobson circulation.
R gates
Don’t forget the met office is one of the major players in the climate change game. I am delighted to agree with you therefore that they often don’t know what they are talking about.
Tonyb
tony –
Since you’re a stand-up guy, I’ll look past the “Mommymommy they do it toooouuuu” nature of your comment to respond to the content.
I don’t think it’s acceptable for anyone to use imprecise terms – particularly if in doing so people are exploiting ambiguity to serve a partisan advocacy.
For example, certainly some “realists” have essentially exploited ambiguity of terminology to create an impression that a trend of increase in land (near?) surface temps = global warming. Indeed, that lack of precision has come back to be exploited by “skeptics” also.
When people talk of a “pause,” they should be specific. That would be everyone, including Judith. When people talk about a lack of precision in quantifying uncertainty, they should then turn-around and increase confusion over uncertainty by supporting imprecise rhetoric such as that “global warming has paused” – particularly if they are then going to broadly characterize “skeptics” as not doubting the GHE,. If you don’t doubt the GHE, then it is illogical to say that global warming has paused (certainly if you haven’t isolated and quantified variables such as sea level rise, ocean warning, ice melting, etc., but even then as if you don’t doubt the GHE then you don’t doubt that more ACO2 = global warming (albeit you may very well question the magnitude of the contribution from ACO2).,
Joshua
Perhaps you don’t recognise irony. I was merely trying to make the point in a humorous manner that the imprecise term of ‘warming pause’ was used by the granddaddy of all climate establishments , the met office. I was obviously being facetious in suggesting you tell them off. Perhaps you ought to compile a little lexicon of climate terms and their proper usage. ( no snark)
It’s ‘family guy’ time then after that it’s bed time. Good night.
Tonyb
Tonyb, does that offer extend to me too? If so, I think I could manage a decent condemnatuon of them. To demonstrate the nature of it, a sample:
If they support this statement, there goes their whole pause mantra, or maybe they don’t see the inconsistency.
Not to mention their mantra that the early 20th century warming was just as fast as the late 20th century warming.
Or their mantra that the world cooled from 1940-1970 while CO2 rose.
How do they know these things if “it is impossible to measure the average temperature of the earth’s surface by any known technology”?
Ah they just don’t care about consistency do they. I am off to look for some quotes from Vincent Gray where he bases a conclusion off the surface temperature records.
To say nothing of Watts’ own station records work being in vain. Anyway, he doubled down by quoting Salby, so they are already well off the beaten path following that guy, who by his own admission doesn’t understand the carbon cycle.
Judith quoting these people is a lot like a history teacher inviting a holocaust denier into the classroom. They should know better than to think the kids will be educated by listening to nonsense.
“Judith quoting these people is a lot like a history teacher inviting a holocaust denier into the classroom. ”
All pretense is pretty much gone, isn’t lolwot? Welcome to full fledged troll status. You only make yourself more and more ridiculous.
I’m tellin’ ya, lowlot is as useful as Max_OK. Be thankful.
=============================
how could I possibly be trolling climate etc?
On that note I haven’t seen OManuel’s theories lately. he used to post right at the top of the thread.
Not disagreein’, Which makes me ask myself, why bother calling them to account. It’s like trying to chase away the fish at the poker table (who are often too stupid to live)… entirely irrational of course, but feels good in the short term.
Joshua, here is an older WUWT article from 2011 acting indignant at how Muller had painted BEST as a death blow against climate skeptics.
World is warming. Pope is Catholic.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/22/world-is-warming-pope-is-catholic/
Now as you point out we have a WUWT article by Vincent Gray claiming “the inconvenient truth that it is impossible to measure the average temperature of the earth’s surface by any known technology. Without this information it is not possible to claim global warming.”
So much for the Pope being Catholic!
These tossers will say anything to to advance their slimy denial and then will pretend they never said it at all.
Joshua, could you tell me the summer and winter temperatures of the South Pole, at sea level.
Doc –
I assume you mean average temp? At any rate, I suppose I could look it up, but off the top of my head certainly not.
Could you explain the relevance of your question?
(Oh, and btw, I have a test for you: http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/20/the-economist-on-the-new-republic-on-the-pause/#comment-335611)
Tom Scharf | June 21, 2013 at 2:31 pm | Reply
>Counterpoint from Briggs: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=8394
Thanks for link. Briggs is quite reasonable. I like that. Comment I left on Briggs’ blog:
There’s really only one reason for using model ensembles – none of the individual models are trustworthy and you hope they all fail at different times and/or in different ways. So you’re kind of trading spectacularly wrong once in a while for a little wrong all the time.
It looks like wishes are fulfilled and its taken 22 years for constant small error to make the actual GAT slowly but surely drift outside the 95% confidence bound of ensemble prediction.
Significantly it drifted outside the lower bound of modeled temperature. I think all but the brain-dead and truly fanatic amongst the usual suspects are acknowledging something is happening that isn’t being modeled well in any ensemble members or something isn’t being measured well. My guess would be a combination of both.
There are at least a few good candidates for source of error and it could be some of each as they generally aren’t mutually exclusive.
A few more years of observation should help a lot.
The irony is that even if the nattering nabobs of negativity are right and fertilization of the atmosphere with CO2 is a very bad idea there is no practical political way to slow CO2 emission enough to make any difference. This should be evident by the fact that it has remained business-as-usual despite 25 years of global warming hyperbole. The answer to this problem, if it is indeed a problem, is on the shoulders of the science and engineering to come up with not better climate models but rather renewable energy that’s less expensive than fossil.
I believe synthetic biology is the go-to science and is the next transformative technology but that’s a different rant.
Worth repeating:
“It is not a scientifically accurate and supportable statement to say “global warming has paused”– this is a clear half-truth, and anyone making it is doing service to the spread of misinformation– ANYONE.
What can be said is that the that flow of energy from ocean to atmosphere has slowed, and a strong component of this is the current cool phase of the PDO. What can also be said is that the Earth, as a system, continues to accumulate energy at a steady to accelerating rate as measured by the broadest measures we have of energy in the Earth system.”
A lot of things can be said. For instance it can be said the model ensemble is running consistently hot and after 22 years of cumulative error running hot actual GAT has slowly but surely drifted outside the 95% confidence bound of the ensemble PDF to the low side.
I’m not at all sure that R.Gates can say that but it’s perfectly true nonetheless.
We could go a long way towards a better climate model ensemble inasmuch as surface temperature prediction by simply subtracting the average error over the last 25 years without understanding what’s causing the error.
David
The models hindcasting the past to 1000AD seem to show periods of it as cooler than they really were.
Presumably you are referring to those models predicting the future or those made a few years ago trying to do the same job?
tonyb
R gates
Well, instead of repeating stuff why don’t you answer ALL the questions I posed above instead of always the same one/
tonyb
Worth challenging:
Got some ref’s with error bars for that assertion? And do those error bars take account of the probability of circularity in the models involved?
Note that I’m not challenging the idea that there’s a higher probability it “continues to accumulate energy at a steady to accelerating rate” than otherwise (not at the moment, anyway), but the measurement process itself should have error bars and sufficient documentation that the external probabilities (e.g. circularity) can be assessed.
AK,
You are free to go to the ARGO website, the GRACE website, the Ocean Heat Content & Sea Level website, and the numerous sites documenting the decline in Arctic sea ice over the past 10+ years and figure out the “error bars” for yourself. All these tell you all you need to know about the continued accumulation of Energy in the Earth system. The currently slowdown in temperatures increases in the Troposphere is very interesting, but in no way compares to the the large increases in energy in the rest of the system, and in no way refutes the fundamental facts and physics behind GH gas increase induced energy gains in the Earth system.
What the models fail at is predicting natural variability, and this natural variability dictates a lot of the flow within the system between the various spheres.
R Gates: +1000
No mater how much heat goes into the ocean, the TOA energy balance still remails, so eventually the global-mean surface temperature must increase – it’s the only mechanism by which energy balance can be re-established. It is true that variations in O-A heat transfer coupling may slow this down, but it will happen.
It is also true that to the extent that heat transfer to the oceans occurs, feedback mechanisms based on increasing temperature also stall and the entire process can become very slow. This tends to make alarmism much less credible.
The ocean may stall, but the land warms quite quickly. I think people will notice this before long. They haven’t yet for sure with all the ‘pause’ talk.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vgl/from:1945/mean:120/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1945/mean:120
As opposed to the circularity of the argument?
‘The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’
Unless we understand how the complex Earth system mechanisms interact with global energy dynamics – we are just p_ssing in the wind.
Any surface heat going into the deep ocean is no longer effective at surface heating. The law of entropy precludes heat diluted into the bulk of the ocean basin from concentrating on the surface again.
Assuming the 0.5W/m2 imbalance is correct that’s enough to warm the ocean basin less than 0.2C in 100 years. Thereafter it cannot raise the temperature of the atmosphere more than 0.2C.
This is an incontrovertable (unless you’re physically illiterate and do not understand the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics). Both Judith Curry and Gaven Schmidt have confirmed it. If both those cats plus me agree on something you can take it to the bank.
Contrary to what Gates wants you to think about ARGO’s spatial coverage the fact of the matter remains that ARGO dives to a maximum of 2000 meters. The average depth of the ocean is 4000 meters. ARGO does measure the temperature of the lower half of the ocean. ARGO also misses any ocean covered by sea ice as well as some other large expanses of ocean. For all we know for every Joule ARGO finds accumulating between 700 and 2000 meters there’s a Joule gone missing between 2000 and 4000 meters depth.
David Springer:
Wrong. It can raise the temperature of the atmosphere by any amount, provided the atmosphere is at a lower temperature.
If the ocean surface was, say, 10 degrees and the atmosphere was -10 degrees, the ocean would warm the atmosphere by 20 degrees – regardless of how little or much temperature it had previously gained.
David Springer said:
“Assuming the 0.5W/m2 imbalance is correct that’s enough to warm the ocean basin less than 0.2C in 100 years. Thereafter it cannot raise the temperature of the atmosphere more than 0.2C.”
———
Are you serious? Do you really think that you can equate ocean heat content or temperature directly in a one to one fashion with atmospheric temperature?
Oh my….
As usual, it’s frames of reference.
======
A frame of reference that disregards the basic laws of physics related to differences in heat capacity between water and air apparently.
Gates said:
This is so true. The way that we can analyze this via a careful comparison between ocean and land temperatures.
The recent results of Watanabe at al claim that the ocean has been adjusting its heat uptake in the last few years as a result of transient changes in the large-scale hydrodynamics. This has the effect of suppressing the warming in terms of temperature, although the heat uptake from the AGW forcing still exists. So the implication is that what is lacking in a temperature rise is made up for by the heat sinking of the ocean.
The ocean heat uptake efficiency measure of Watanabe is related to the ratio f between ocean and land temperature defined on my blog post
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/05/proportional-landsea-global-warming.html
The idea is that — similar to the aim of Watanabe’s group — to see if we can detect changes in f over the last few years.
To do this we need to take great care with the numbers. Instead of using the WoofForTrees data, I used the CRU data directly. The sets were CRUTEM4 (Tl=land), HadCRUT4 (TG=global), and HadSST3 (To=ocean). The composed set looks like the following chart for a value of f = 0.5, which is the nominal fraction assumed for the original proportional land/sea analysis.
http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/1622/5vj.gif
The composed temperature lies on top of the HadCRUT4 global temperature
If we look at the error residual between the HadCRUT4 global temperature and the fractionally composed model, we get the following chart. Note that as an absolute error, the value is obviously decreasing over time, likely attributed to better and more accurate record keeping with current temperature measurement techniques.
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/5863/uvt.gif
The absolute error decreases with more recent records.
(The last data point is 2012, which often undergoes corrections for the next update.)
The high resolution and low error in recent years indicates that perhaps we can try to more accurately fit the fraction f. So essentially, we want to zero out the error by solving the proportional land/sea warming model for a continuously varying value of f.
0=TG-1/2(f*po+pl )Tl+ 1/2(po+pl*f)To
This turns into a quadratic equation for f, which we can solve by the quadratic formula. The set of value calculated by minimizing the error is shown below. Note that the average remains around f = 0.5, but it shows a distinct decreasing trend in recent years.
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/4509/n5t.gif
The fraction ratio of ocean to land temperature appears to be decreasing in recent years, leading to an apparent flattening in global temperature rise. Lower values of f cause the global temperature signal to appear cooler for a given AGW forcing.
If this is a real trend (as opposed to some type of accumulating systemic error or noise) it is telling us that more of the heat is accumulating in the ocean, consistent with the claims of Watanabe et al. It is possible that the fraction is actually decreasing from a past value of around 0.6 to a current value of 0.4. Although this is a subtle effect in terms of the fit (probably the not most robust metric one can imagine), it has significant effect in terms of the global surface temperature signal.
This is seen if we deconstruct the proportional model in terms of the land temperature alone, assuming the area land/ocean split as po/pl=0.71/0.29 :
TG = (0.71*f+0.29)Tl
Note that with a slowly increasing land temperature signal Tl , the declining f can compensate for this value and actually cause the global temperature value TG to flatten.
To take an example, reducing the value of f from 0.6 to 0.4 causes the global temperature to decline from 0.716*Tl to 0.574*Tl. If the land temperature is held constant, the global temperature will decline, while if the land temperature rises by 25%, the global temperature rise will look flat.
That is exactly what Watanabe et al are claiming. Moreover, they assert that this decline can’t remain in place for the long term, and eventually the ocean hydrodynamics will stabilize or even reverse, with a concomitant rebound in global temperature.
To review, the essential premise of the proportional land/ocean model is:
1. The land surface reaches the steady-state temperature quickly
2. The ocean sinks excess heat, thus moderating the sea surface temperature rise.
3. The fractional ratio of ocean temperature to land temperature is given by f.
4. The global surface temperature is determined as combination of land and sea surface temperatures prorated according to the land/sea areal split.
From this set of premises, we can algebraically estimate the amount of ocean heat sinking from global temperature records as gleaned from the Climatic Research Unit.
It’s just algebra ….
WHT,
Correct as a basic exercise, but the big, BIG unknowns are the effects of a seasonally ice-free Arctic (an effect of warmer oceans more than a warmer troposphere), and the observed strengthening of the Brewer-Dobson circulation, also related of course to increased GH gases. Expect some surprises, and in a complex chaotic system changing faster than natural feedbacks can respond to, some of those surprises could be a tad “inconvenient” for the current biosphere.
You’re making climate catastrophism (in the sense of René Thom) disreputable. You can make up any scenario you like – but it is based on pure invention and not science.
As for webby – you have to be joking. He specializes in misguided and simplistic global algebra and fantasy physics.
It is becoming more and more clear that the land-based temperature anomalies track very closely by a multiplying factor of two over the ocean temperature anomalies.
The following chart is a reconstruction of the global temperature created by composing the land and SST temperature records assuming proportional area and Land=2*SST.
http://imageshack.us/a/img534/1622/5vj.gif
The only intervals that the two do not track are over the early parts of the historical record.
What is most fascinating is that we can try to estimate even more accurately the land vs ocean warming rate. By zeroing out the error in the composition, we can determine the T(ocean)/T(land) fraction exactly.
This is what it looks like:
http://imageshack.us/a/img442/4509/n5t.gif
Note that over the last 10 years or so that the ocean rate of warming has been decreasing over the land temperature rate. This can only imply that the ocean uptake of excess heat has increased.
The message of Watanabe et al is that this increasing uptake behavior cannot continue indefinitely. When it stops, the warming of the surface layers of the ocean will resume. If it reverts to original levels, the warming will resume and accelerate until it achieves a steady state with a fixed value of the uptake factor.
What is amazing about this analysis is that anybody can do it. All it takes is a spreadsheet. The Chef is calling it “simplistic global algebra and fantasy physics” because he is an angry larrikin neo-Luddite and will lash out at anyone that deems to make any progress in understanding climate science.
kim | June 22, 2013 at 12:53 pm |
v., so how did the nuclear tests change correlation?
============
Hi Kim
– Atmospheric pressure axis Darwin-Tahiti disturbed
– Pacific Equatorial surface current affected
– Ionosphere distortion (Van-Allen belts saturated with charged particles) lasted for about 5 years (equatorial electrojet-Pacific storms NASA’s link)
– None of the above, simply coincidence, but it is worth recording since there was no correlation drop in the Atlantic at the time
If any of the above top 3 , than atmospheric tests ban in1963, prevented onset of the ‘nuclear winter’, there was lot of talk about return of the ice Age in the late 1960’s & 70’s.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Starfish.htm
Thanks a lot, v; I’d guessed wrong above thinking it was the physical shaking and couldn’t understand how such a small amount of energy could be so effective. Your leads look richer.
=========
I am of Mediterranean stock, and to be honest we not only do lot of gesticulating or if you wish ‘arm waving’ and are prone just to a tincy-vincy bit of exaggerating, which is nothing compared to the AGWs; but as at any tournament one has to match the armaments.
Gotcha, ::grin::
=====
Tonyb | June 22, 2013 at 1:07 pm |
Vuk , That’s a very striking representation of the big ocean currents……
I think that in the N. Hemisphere exists strong link between ocean currents and the polar jet stream. Lobes of the polar jet stream become more meridionaly pronounced by change in the events associated with strong ocean – atmospheric interaction in the two semi-permanent low pressure systems:
a) Icelandic Low in the N. Atlantic caused by warm currents down-welling
b) Aleutian Low in the N. Pacific caused by cold currents up-welling.
both of the above have coincidental correlation with the pronounced tectonics in both areas.
I don’t make any claims to understanding the depth of GCMs. I do, however, have a solid background in climatology, and taught it for many years in a Canadian university. I have long wondered about why someone hasn’t pulled out the best few models (closest to observations) and inspected the input parameters to adjust the rest. Maybe they have, or are in the process of doing so. To me the whole game is to question every input, and the basic underlying assumptions. I keep hearing about how everything is based on the “physics”. Obviously, either the physics is wrong on somethings, or the use of the theory is not applied properly. To the extent that whole parameters are missing (e.g.. cloud effects), isn’t it time to slow down until more basic information is attained?
There is no problem with “playing” with computers. There are huge problems with assuming that the results are accurate enough with current knowledge to change the entire eco-political systems of humankind. Much of this debate is far more political than scientific. Arguing over results that we now have is a mental game that can only engender divisiveness in society. It actually is a shame that science has been hijacked by politics- this would be a lot more fun on its own.
The only part of the current scenario that really bothers me is the obvious data fudging (adjustments) that has occurred. I have no respect for Mann, Hansen and Trenberth owing to this manipulation (climategate devastated this old scholar). The sad part is that the adjusters may have obviated any chance of getting their models to work because they now are stuck with their own manipulations. How can any model backcast to reality when historical data has been changed. There no longer is an historical reality in that data. Unintended consequences?
I am wondering if anyone has an explanation for the divergence between the Northern Hemisphere temperatures and the Southern Hemisphere temperatures that has become apparent in the last 10 years.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958
Sorry wrong plot.
I am wondering if anyone has an explanation for the divergence between the Northern Hemisphere temperatures and the Southern Hemisphere temperatures that has become apparent in the last 10 years.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1945/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1945
Looks like much of the pause might be attributable to the Southern Hemisphere.
Not so interested in the difference, but the divergence and the fact that it has come into existence in ~ last 10 years
I believe it is a land-water difference.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vgl/from:1945/mean:12/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1945/mean:12
Sorry seem to be having a problem with my web skill today.
Not so interested in the difference, but the divergence and the fact that it has come into existence in ~ last 10 years
This makes the divergence clearer (red=land, green=ocean)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vgl/from:1945/mean:120/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1945/mean:120
I think it starts around 1980, but the last ten years increased it.
Based on Crutem NH land to SH land comparison, it is still there and almost as strong. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vnh/from:1945/mean:12/plot/crutem4vsh/from:1945/mean:12
That could be because of the smaller land areas in the SH, so water tends to influence them more.
And yet the sea surface temperature difference is not as pronounced. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3nh/from:1945/mean:12/plot/hadsst3sh/from:1945/mean:12
Sorry but I am really think think this is an interesting question.
The NH ocean could be warming faster because it is influenced by the land more. The NH land is warming fastest of all for sure.
Jim D said:
True, see the explanation elsewhere in this comment thread:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/21/week-in-review-62213/#comment-335887
It is remarkably easy to algebraically compose the global temperature by proportionally combining the land and ocean according to the areal differences and a fractional retention of excess heat by the ocean.
JimD, Yes, the land water difference and where the water is different.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-uEdwPFb9kVk/UcYRVG8RSzI/AAAAAAAAIwE/qbUuVIn3mMg/s997/seasonal%2520cycle%2520shift.png
Every latitude band of the globe has a different seasonal cycle. 45N has the largest seasonal variance. If you have a standing wave, you can get a nifty plateau. It may have a real impact on heat content or in may just have an impact on “global mean surface temperature”. If you look at BEST, their data retains a fairly large seasonal signal and has a larger variance than GISS and CRUT because they have smaller seasonal signals. So there is a big difference between land and water, not only the specific heat and heat transfer part, but the measurements (Tmax +TMin)/2 with baseline specific seasonal signal removed and altitude adjusted.)
BTW – it is remarkably stupid to use algebra and fantasy physics.
This provides even more evidence that whatever leveling of temperature rise we observe is not due to abatement of heat forcing.
BTW, concerning the BTW, The Chef is always so insanely jealous of my mathematical abilities, or what the deniers from Commonwealth countries call “maths”.
What is the difference between The Chef and Myrrrhh? Chef uses the term fantasy physics whenever he sees something he doesn’t like while Myrrrhhh (his Aussie buddy) uses the soundalike fantasy fisics.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 22, 2013 at 8:25 pm | ”
Chef uses the term fantasy physics whenever he sees something he doesn’t like while Myrrrhhh (his Aussie buddy) uses the soundalike fantasy fisics.
I usually use fictional fisics, fantasy fisics for variety.
What else can I call it? It doesn’t deserve to be called physics, because that is defined as:
COD: “Science dealing with properties and interactions of matter and energy.”
AGWScienceFiction fantasy fisics does not have interactions of matter and energy because its matter and energy has no properties. What I usually call properties and processes.
I’ve been through this.. your AGWSF “electromagnetic energy is all the same and all create heat on being absorbed”, has taken out all the properties and so all the processes, interactions, of energy with matter, and created something unknown in real physics.
Claiming this fantasy “AGW elecromagnetic energy creates heat on being absorbed” is nonsense in the real world of physics.
In real physics the electromagnetic energy is divided into different wavelengths which have their own properties and interactions with matter, and I have given examples where these do not create heat.
Visible light from the Sun for example converts to chemical energy in photosynthesis, this is not creating heat but sugars, and visible light through chemical energy converts to nerve impulses, these are not conversion to heat energy. In the real world of physics about real physical properties and processes, visible light from the Sun is not big enough, not powerful enough, to cause matter to go into vibrational states which is what it takes to heat matter. Visible light works on the electronic transition level, much, much, much, much, tinier than the powerful heat energy of longwave infrared which does heat matter, by bashing it into vibrational states.
So, fantasy fisics or fictional fisics it is for AGW’s Greenhouse Effect – set in world with a cold Sun of 6000°C which gets no real heat energy from the real Sun which is longwave infrared from the real world’s millions of degrees hot real Star.
Fantasy fiscis of AGWSF just uses the same names but, has completely different descriptions of them, not known in real world physics.
You do not have any real radiant heat from the Real Sun, your models are a joke, your comic cartoon of “shortwave in longwave out” is the stuff of fantasy novels, not of real physics.
And you can add your fantasy massless ideal gas so not subject to gravity without the real physics properties and processes of real gases. So you have no volume just empty space for your atmosphere, your oxygen and nitrogen do not expand and condense so you have no convection – which even if they did you could not get because you have no heat from the Sun in your fantasy world – and no weight so your fictional ideal gas cannot separate out anyway to give convection, and no attraction between your fictional ideal gas, so no rain..
Your AGWSF Comic Cartoon Greenhouse Effect fantasy world does not have the real world’s Water Cycle, you have no rain in your Carbon Cycle, you do not have real physics.
Stop using the term which does not apply to your fantasy AGW Greenhouse Effect world.
You would not get so confused if you understood enough to see the differences…
The ocean heat uptake definitely appears to be increasing, suppressing an SST increase due to energy conservation. Warming is warming, it just gets reflected as a variable temperature increase, quantitatively dependent on the heat capacity of the medium.
This is what the effective global temperature would look like if the ocean rejected its excess heat uptake. (mapped against a 3C ECS)
http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/2369/we5.gif
This is a very important graph as it shows little flattening in the actual warming. The land is warming at this rate, and the SST is warming at this rate if the ocean heat uptake is transformed into an equivalent surface temperature.
What remains to be discussed is what is more worrisome, an SST that is slightly cooler than land, or the ocean gaining heat without being able to shed the excess.
Surface temperature over oceans are measured from surface water intakes – and the assumption is that these are equivalent. I am inclined to think that the divergence is an artifact caused by cold water upwelling.
Right, that is probably a reasonable assumption if you are looking for a +/- 0.25 C or so confidence interval, but not much good for locating a 0.5 Wm-2 imbalance. Since the “radiant” temperature of the ocean is what is hoped to be determined, you are stuck at square one. Better to start over with the satellite data and work backwards IMHO.
Changes in SST are 4 or 5 degrees C in places.
Chief right, but big changes are easier to measure, I would think the 1 to 2 degrees changes would cause more uncertainty as far as SST record goes since they could bias buckets versus intakes etc. If the errors are random, the anomaly trick works and you can estimate a rational confidence interval. There is of course greater uncertainty with less spacial coverage, but most of the records show that larger uncertainty, the SH for example is about useless prior to 1915 and it would probably be better to limit the oceans to 55S to 55N for a baseline.
In the last 10 years we have the argo buoys which seem to have pretty good coverage in the South as well as in the North. I do not know if they show the same divergence. But 10 years of cold water upwelling in the Southern Hemisphere is not an artifact it is a change. And I guess if you define cold water upwelling broadly enough it would cover it.
The questions of bucket measurements, intake measurements, argo, etc have all been explored ad infinitum. And a rehash is always fun. But the real question was, why for both land and sea temperature data for the Northern and Southern Hemisphere are diverging in the last ~10 years. The assumption has been that the temperature difference were well mixed between the hemispheres in a fairly short time. I noted in the previous links that the differences had become dramatically different about 10 years ago. Not one of these responses address the question of the new and very large difference that currently present themselves. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vnh/from:1945/mean:12/plot/crutem4vsh/from:1945/mean:12 or if you prefer HadCrut4 http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1970/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1970 You will note in the previous links that this was true for both land only and ocean only data. Yes the Southern hemisphere has a higher water to land ratio, but that was true in 1950, 1960, 1970 etc and there was no divergence then. Something seems to have changed
Obama will lay out his climate plan on Tuesday. Look for renewable energy, clean energy and energy efficiency as a focus.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/22/obama-climate-plan_n_3483918.html
Jim D
What do you think of those emphases?
I think this is a no-regrets solution. That is, good to do anyway for the long-term energy needs, creating American green jobs and industries, with the added bonus for climate. We’ll see what he says.
I agree.
Look up the meaning of no regrets. Many of us already regret the billions wasted on solar and wind, not to mention biofuels.
That is a pretty ridiculous thing to say considering the term was defined by climate science policy. They realized that we would never have as efficient and dense a liquid fuel as crude oil ever again, and only suggested that we start looking for something else.
This was in the context of risk mitigation for global warming, and so that is why they called it a “no regrets” policy.
If you were REALLY cynical, even more than jim2, you would say that we should regret building up the entire global economy on something as finite as crude oil, with nothing ready to take its place.
Naughten et. al. (1993) explains what ‘No Regrets’ policy meant when applied to GHG emissions reductions policies in 1990.
In 1990 the Australian Government adopted an interim planning target which involves, first, stabilising non-CFC greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2000 at the 1988 levels and second, reducing the emissions of these gases by 20% relative to the 1988 levels by the year 2005. An important condition was that actions would not be taken that would ‘have net adverse economic impacts nationally or on Australia’s trade competitiveness in the absence of similar action by major green-house gas producing countries’ (Kelly and Kerin, 1990). This interim planning target currently remains in place, although it does involve larger cuts in emissions than is implied in the recently completed U.N. Convention on Climate Change.
At the same time, the Government referred to the need to explore the scope for immediate, low cost reductions in emissions by such means as increased energy efficiency and energy conservation and the use of new technology. It has been argued that some of the actions which could be taken in these areas would be ‘no regrets’ options – that is, they would not only help to moderate emissions of greenhouse gases, but would at the same time also result in net economic benefits (or at least no economic cost) to the economy. In other words, it would make good economic sense to undertake these actions irrespective of the benefits of lower green-house gas emissions.
http://www.academia.edu/1643821/Market_failure_in_road_transport
It’s interesting to review the Australian Government policy and consider how much we have and have not progressed in twenty three years. It’s also interesting to consider how unrealistic the goals for GHG emission reductions in 1990 were, and consider whether the goals and policies being advocated by CAGW doomsayers now are any more realistic than those being advocated 23 years ago. By the way, back in 1990 we were being told we had only a decade to fix the GHG problem or life as we know it on planet Earth would be doomed, according to the young and the gullible of the time, who are the predecessors of the new young and the gullible now.
[Repost with corrected formatting]
Naughten et. al. (1993) explains what ‘No Regrets’ policy meant when applied to GHG emissions reductions policies in 1990.
http://www.academia.edu/1643821/Market_failure_in_road_transport
It’s interesting to review the Australian Government policy and consider how much we have and have not progressed in twenty three years. It’s also interesting to consider how unrealistic the goals for GHG emission reductions in 1990 were, and consider whether the goals and policies being advocated by CAGW doomsayers now are any more realistic than those being advocated 23 years ago. By the way, back in 1990 we were being told we had only a decade to fix the GHG problem or life as we know it on planet Earth would be doomed, according to the young and the gullible of the time, who are the predecessors of the new young and the gullible now.
Abiotic oil? You are reaching WHT.
Sinking is probably more accurate.
Then you must not have issues with the analysis that I have done for tight oil such as exists on the Bakken formation?
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/09/bakken-approaching-diffusion-limited.html
All wells are converging to this rapid depletion mode portending a transient boom-and-bust cycle for the region. Same with Eagle Ford in Texas, which I will blog about shortly.
http://imageshack.us/a/img441/8193/p8w.gif
A bit out of your element here, eh?
@WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 22, 2013 at 11:45 pm |
“Then you must not have issues with the analysis that I have done for tight oil such as exists on the Bakken formation?”
At this point, WHT, I can only conclude that you are either knowingly disingenuous or stupid. Progress of technology in the oil field is something you can’t model. It improves all the time as does productivity of shale wells. I think you need to take up deferential equations. You are embarrassing yourself.
jim2 said
I guess I will have to defer to the genius that is jim2. ha ha.
Seriously, the flow out of a hydraulically fractured well such as exists on the Bakken is predicted by the solution to the partial differential equation known as the diffusion equation. I place a stochastic uncertainty quantification on the result to achieve the excellent fit.
In contrast, jim2 thinks everything happens by “magic”.
“But when it comes to the world we leave our children, we owe it to them to do what we can.”
Like I said before ‘the save the Earth and the children’ greenies.
Right WHT – I just hate cheap energy. It’s a bane to our existence. Right.
jim2, I forget. Are you the jim that believes in abiotic oil?
Web, when you inhale some stale, deoxygenated, air is left in the lungs. The next breath also leaves a stale air pocket. By your logic we will all die of suffocation.
WHT says “… the flow out of a hydraulically fractured well such as exists on the Bakken is predicted by the solution to the partial differential equation known as the diffusion equation.”
This is total bunk. In order to apply the diffusion equation you have to first characterize the matrix in which the diffusion occurs. The matrix is what is being modified, among other things, by new technology. I can’t believe this, but you seem think your equations are magic, that they can model things you don’t even know or understand. Again, your take on this is pure and totally bunk.
jim2 said:
You have got to be kidding. This is what the “matrix” as modeled looks like:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/13/diffusionalflow.gif/
I made this picture up to illustrate the diffusional flow as it follows the random fractures of the underlying shale. The shale fractures are random and the diffusional flow is a random walk along the fracture paths as it nears the extraction region.
Unless jim2 thinks that the “modified” shale is carefully altered by some robotic mechanism to create clear-cut paths to the extraction points, he is just unaware of the underlying mechanism. The fracturing process is essentially a large blast perturbation and the fractures go wherever they want.
We are lucky to get what we can from the fractures. The only real bit of technology is the spherical types of sand that they inject along with the fracturing liquid to keep the fractures and fissures open after the hydraulic blast is applied. This type of sand is available from a few locations in Minnesota and Nebraska, and there is a regular convoy of trucks and rail cars that deliver the sand to NoDak.
Web, you just don’t get it. Techniques are being applied that modify the FRACTURES!! Even if the fractures propagate randomly, what happens after that is important. If the fracture closes, it no longer provides a path for the oil to drain from the rock. Some newer techniques keep the fracture open. There are other technologies that ARE ACTUALLY getting more oil out of the shale.
You remind me of the climate scientists. They say more CO2 –> more back radiation –> implies lapse rate will guarantee higher temperature … AS IF that modeled the entire complex climate.
You have simplified yourself out of relevance.
jim2, you don’t get the fact that someone can actually model the flow coming out of an ensemble of wells and then use it to estimate future production levels.
There are three of us that are doing this
myself : http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com
Coyne : http://oilpeakclimate.blogspot.com/
Likvern : http://theoildrum.com and http://fractionalflow.wordpress.com/
DC and myself have been sharing many of our ideas and Likvern coined the phrase Red Queen to describe the production boom.
Ha, I anticipated this statement when I discussed the use of spherical sand particles. What’s next, are you proposing nanobots to crawl in there to keep the fractures open?
You are living in a dream world, WHT.
When it comes to oil production, you and your kin are continually looking in the rear view mirror and modeling what you see. The fatal flaw in that approach is that you can’t see the future.
jim2, So what do you do when you write a business plan or proposal?
Do you sketch out future opportunities and schedules and estimated costs?
Or do you tell your boss to trust me because “you can’t see the future” ?
If he questions you, do you then tell him that he is “living in a dream world” because once you start working on the project, technology will save us?
I understand that you have no comeback for the mathematics, so you are left to the rhetorical argument.
Math shares at least one thing with programming: Garbage in, garbage out.
Making money based on small margins is about math. Not clear whether the Bakken is more a loser than a winner when all is said and done.
So apart from catastrophies avoided by warming, what about global deaths caused by AGW-triggered policies??? I’m thinking policies which would not have gotten traction without grave concern for global warming.
For instance, deaths from Legionella breeding in lowered-temperature hot water systems. According to the WHO http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/emerging/legionella.pdf, cases in europe have grown from 1161 in 1994 to 4546 in 2004, death rate typically 28%. Global trend is for deaths from most infectious diseases to decline. Recent case reports show definite link to hot water systems http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/legionnaires-probe-looks-at-past-case-20130619-2ohsw.html
blouis79,
I’ve received an email from a friend regarding my point 3 in previous comment. I’ll post it in full:
NBN = National Broadband Network
Leviathan clears its throat.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/23/obama-gives-details-on-plan-to-cut-carbon-pollution-expected-to-target-coal/
“’If someone wants to build a new coal-fired power plant they can, but it will bankrupt them because they will be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted,’ he said.
Obama also says in the video that no single step can reverse climate change and that workers must prepare for a clean energy economy.
White House aides have suggested the plan, to be announced at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., will include calls for renewable energy and energy-efficient appliances and buildings.”
GaryM,
Good to see you back. You’ve been quiet for a while, or writing comments when the wise part of the world is sleeping :)
Have you seen any economic analysis of the costs and benefits of Obama’s policy.
The net cost of the Australian ETS to 2050 is $390 billion if the projected benefits of reduced climate damages are achieved, and $430 billion if the projected reduction in climate damages is not achieved (in 2012 AUD at Nordhaus’s discount rate).
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2012/06/what-the-carbon-tax-and-ets-will-really-cost-peter-lang/
What is the estimated net benefit for the USA to 2050? (Note that most net benefit figures are achieved by totaling the expected benefits over hundreds of years)
With luck, the carbon tax will be gone in a few months. But how do you calculate the corrosive effect of quadrupling of prices of refrigerant gases alone? Refrigeration: that’s a less visible but lethal thorn among the many other thorns among the doubtful roses of our “clean energy future”. Like toilets that don’t flush well, like hot water that isn’t hot enough, overpriced refrigeration will have all kinds of costs we can’t calculate.
And this is so Australia will avoid another Cyclone Mahina? Porpoises stranded 40 feet up cliffs weren’t helped by the lack of refrigeration or coal power in 1899. The great monsoon failures of past centuries, the horror El Nino conditions which ravaged India in the 1790s and were clearly recorded in the tiny settlements at Sydney Cove and Rose Hill? They can avert that? The inland sea the size of England and Wales which formed to the west of Sydney in 1955? They’ll control that? The Federation Drought which peaked in 1903 but ushered in half a century of rain deficit in Eastern Australia? The world’s greatest known inferno, in Victoria in 1851? They’re going to prevent that? By eliminating things which weren’t around when these things happened? If they are going to fix climate, just what good old climate will they be restoring? Personally, and just for my part of the world, the best years were between 2007 and 2012. So what are we fixing or stablising exactly?
My local food business is putting off re-gassing its fridges because of a theory that can be disproved by glancing for five minutes at a crumbling Everyman’s Encyclopaedia from 1900.
mosomoso,
I suspect you are not from the “Entitlement Generation” – the young and gullible. :)
Mosmoso,
I was going to write that you seem to be seriously deficient in gullibility. But realising that North Americans seem to be deficient in our type of educated humour, I thought better of it.
But then I started thinking how is gullibility measured/ We had IQ (Intelligence quotient) and EQ (emotional intelligence quotient), but I am not aware of a GQ (Gullibility Quotient). Are you?
Perhaps the reason is because it is psychologists and social scientists (like Lewandowski) who would develop such tests and perhaps having tried they find the tests show that the young, impressionable, idealistic and the ‘Progressives’, Left, Socialists (of all ages) tend to show up as gullible, so they stopped developing the tests. Any thoughts?
Peter, the brightest man I ever knew was a physicist whose IQ thingy nudged the chandelier. (I know and care nothing about IQ, but this guy was seriously smart with numbers and such things.) He was a merry type, and I was very fond of him. Nonetheless, he extracted the coat-hanger after he put his coat on. He had some reason for this and was fairly sure post-extraction would catch on.
The only good thing about the cumbersome thing called democracy is that it is resistant to technocracy, which would have us post-extracting our coat-hangers, and trying to manipulate climate by taxing CO2 or dumping iron filings in the ocean or…well, you get the picture.
I’m not a libertarian or a right-winger. (Don’t mind being called conservative.) However, I know that there is no greater gullibility than the belief that elites know best. Humans only decide well when they are bombarded with reality, with all its twists and contradictions and compromises, every moment of the day. Insulate us, and our IQs do indeed become our GQs. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a Haydn or a Gauss. It means that if you want to trade horses you need horse-traders, not symphonists or mathematicians.
mosomoso,
A lot of good common sense and wisdom in that comment. Thank you.
I’m reminded of the little Emperor in the cartoon who suspended his trousers from the bedposts and jumped through both legs at once in the morning so it couldn’t be said about him that he put his pants on one leg at a time like everybody else.
======================
He must live in Atlanta,…
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/irs-sent-46378040-refunds-23994-unauthorized-aliens-1-atlanta-address
according to the NSA.
Peter Lang,
No, no cost estimates, because all Obama has been doing is announcing his plans to announce his plans. The new paradigm for “leadership” in the U.S. is to wait until the last minute, and introduce a 2000 page piece of legislation, the contents of which no one knows (see “immigration reform” coming soon to a congress near you). Then force a vote within a week or so, and “pass the bill so we can learn what is in it.” Or in Obama’s case, issue new diktats, sorry executive orders, that clearly exceed his executive authority, to impose policies that he cannot pass through the legislature.
That way they don’t have to deal with explaining nettlesome issues like where the extra trillion dollars or so will come from to pay for it all, until it’s too late.
Since Obama never has to run for election again, I expect him to try to really enact something radical on the decarbonization front through executive order and proposals for new regulations. All those who think the CAGW train was derailed, stay tuned. For true believers like Obama, it’s “pause? what pause? uncertainty? what uncertainty?” The science be damned, full speed ahead.
If he can both put the U.S. on a hard path to socialized medicine, and deconstruct the energy economy during his two terms, he will have done more damage to the capitalist system and weaken America than all the wannabe revolutionaries in the 60s combined. Talk about dreams of his father….
Give Obama this, when he’s not in front of a teleprompter, he is every bit the progressive ideologue he claimed to be in his books, speeches and legislative history before deciding to run for president. Too bad none of the feckless “moderates” and “independents” (not a few of whom were Republicans) who voted for him in the U.S. bothered to learn about who he really was before voting for him.
GaryM,
Thank you for your comment, getting to the heart of the real issues, as you always do.
This is very scary for us in Australia. What USA does has enormous influence on what Australia does. USA is much more influential than Europe.
We are lucky in one way that we have a federal election on 14 September (83 days to go), and we should get rid of what has been the worst government Australia has had in over 60 years, and possible the worst ever. The government and the Prime Minister are so unpopular they may be out of government for decades. Only locked in socialist ideologues like Tempterrain and Michael are blind to how bad they are. Clearly T and M are a members of the 29% (today’s Newspoll) who still support the ‘Progressive’ government. ‘Progressive’ parties in Australia are determined to block all genuine progress, committed to carbon tax, mining taxes and a whole host of other tax increases to pay for more spending and to pay bribes to the unions. Their policies are very similar to the Obama agenda you have described.
The Unions run the ‘Progressive’ parties even though they represent just 13% of the workforce.
Say Gary –
Since you’re once again making predictions….
Just curious – have you ever written about how you could have been so completely wrong in your analysis of the polling data in the presidential election?
You remember, don’t you? Remember how you said that the pollsters were “skewing” the data in a deliberate attempt to aid Obama’s chances at victory? Remember how you said that the polls were rigged to make Obama look like he was doing better than he was in reality?
Did you notice how, after the election, it became apparent that actually, reality was exactly the opposite as your asserted in your analysis? Did you notice how in reality, Obama did better than the polls were indicating, not worse which would have been the case if your analysis was anything close to being correct?
So Gary – maybe you have written some comments to explain how you could have so completely wrong, and so completely confident in an analysis that was so completely wrong; if so, could you provide link to that explanation, and if not, could you provide us with one now?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
@…
Looks to me more as though he’s “picking a winner”: natural gas over coal:
Obama’s Fracking Frenzy: Caving In To Industry, “Giving Polluters A Free Ride”
Obama Bankrupts Coal, Boosts Fracking
Despite hysterical protests, the actual impact on energy prices will probably be pretty small:
Coal Recovers Lost Ground As Natural Gas Prices Rise
AK,
One of Obama’s stated goals, before deciding to run for president, was to radically change the energy economy. Even he admitted that as a result, prices would “necessarily skyrocket.” Not necessarily edge upward, or necessarily rise a bit. But skyrocket.
You have to learn to look past the current days announcement and look to the long term strategy. He was crystal clear about his ideology and plans for decades. Sometimes you just have to accept that when people say things over and over again over a period of decades, they actually mean what they say.
I could mention an historical precedent of someone saying that he was going to do something outrageous, and then following through, but I’d be accused of violating Godwin’s law.
Gary M, 23’06 11.55am, refers ter guvuhmint ‘Diktats’
‘that exceed executive authority.’ Referring ter me study
in 1st edit of The Serf Under-ground Journal, re Karl
Popper’s ‘The Open Society and its Enemies,’ the book’s
take home message is that if the open society is ter
survive we must break the habit of uncritical deference ter
the great leader. Fer its in this cult, propounded by Plato
in The Republic and influencing later thinkers, that Popper
traces the evulution of modern totalitarian thinking.
Both the US and Australia are burdened with leaders who
have this syndrome, to the detriment of the productivity of
the nations they’re supposed ter serve. As Peter Lang
notes, in Oz we have an election in September. Hope
some of the disastrous diktats of our misguided and
authoritarian guvuhnint can be undone. -(
Bts .
“Now that is a really novel angle on the global warming-disaster meme.”
Not really. I have been harping on the benefits of global warming and of fertilization of the atmosphere with CO2 since the word go.
For instance I’ve written that global warming, which mostly comes at night and in the winter in higher latitudes lengthens growing seasons and diminishes the number of unpredictable killer frosts that can ruin an entire crop. A single killer frost averted is worth up to hundreds of millions of dollars in crops.
It is estimated that agricultural output is 15% higher from CO2 fertilization. That’s famine averted innit? Even if it isn’t famine averted it’s probably a trillion dollar per year windfall. Agriculture is probably the most pervasive human enterprise of all time.
Higher partial pressure of CO2 makes crops more drought resistant. Again major crop loss averted and/or time and money saved by needing less irrigation.
Now that is a really novel angle on the global warming-disaster meme.
The competition in town also has another take on the law of unintended consequences ..
The 1970 Clean Air Act and termination of rainfall suppression in a U.S. urban area
Highlights
There was a major decrease in particulate emissions after the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970.
The reduction in emissions caused a rapid rebound in summer rainfall in the Atlanta region in the late 1970s.
There was a decrease in summer rainfall of at least 40 mm at affected locales prior to the passage of act.
The rainfall suppression involved a decrease of heavy-rainfall days.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231013002951
Rud Istvan,
In your discussion of the theory of LENR, you say that surface plasmons can result in >0.78MeV hydrogen that collapses to a neutron. I don’t understand how the system physically focuses that kind of energy in one or two particles when the ambient energy is orders of magnitude smaller than that?
Hey TCF,
If you are into LENR – check this out:
“BlackLight has achieved a proprietary breakthrough power-producing system continuously operating that converts ubiquitous H2O vapor directly into electricity as confirmed by six separate independent individual or groups of leading scientists from academia and industry with Ph.D.s from prestigious universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology [validation reports].”
http://www.blacklightpower.com/
Jim2,
Thanks, that’s great fun. Here’s one for you…
http://www.generalfusion.com/index.html
Well, when I have one of those running the water heater in the basement … yada yada yada …
My book The Arts of Truth goes into this at a laymans level. You might also like the chapter on climate change.
The simple answer is variously termed collective effect, or overlapping wave amplification (bathtub effect), and was precisely mathematically described by Schwinger for cavitation induced sonoluminsecence (where the resonant energy coupling is to electrons.) The nuclear physics is described by Widom Larsen theory, a consequence of the weak nuclear force.
In essence, resonant (hence sometimes amplified where peaks overlap) energy stimulation can amplify mechanical or electromagnetic/mechanical forces by more than sufficient orders of magnitude to reach nuclear force levels. This was first shown by Lord Raleigh for true mechanical cavitation of ships propellers. And then by Schwinger for cavitational sonoluminsecence. Widom and Larson propose using surface plasmons (surface EM waves) induced by lasers. Overlapping amplification occurs around surface defects which can be MEMS patterned (the NASA approach). Brillouin proposes using bulk/ sheer waves induced by ultra high frequency AC current, concentrated via the well known EM AC skin effect, amplified in the Brillouin zones inside the ‘crystalline’ metal lattice of the wire skin.
The LENR quantum interpretation can either be direct energy coupling, or Heisenberg momentum confinement of the Proton in the compressed lattice such that its energy must become more uncertain. In either case, WL states that if >0.76 MeV is ‘locally’ instantaneously present, the heavy proton/electron pair collapse to a ‘cold’ neutron, whose capture cross section is therefore so large that it combines with the nearest nucleus. In nickel wire lattice, the most probable combination is with an absorbed hydrogen proton. Hence the heavy hydrogen cascade. The Iwamura transmutation experiments show that in other lattices, the capture is more likely to be by a lattice nucleus, hence the various experimentally shown transmutation cascades.
In all this, a basic question remains whether what now seems to be a fairly well established weak nuclear force lab effect can be scaled somehow to produce net useful energy in an economic fashion. Jury is out.
None of this has to do with Rossi’s ECat, which is almost certainly a scam for reasons given in the book.
Rud,
Thanks for taking the time for that detailed answer. Lots to check out and to think about. (I’ve read the climate chapter and am still thinking about that too.)
Well, well, well. I bet the greenies were thinking the government would only go after conservatives, but here we have a government type going after SOCM. I know some people in this organization and conservative they ain’t. Liberals don’t like the government behaving like jack-booted thugs either. They had better think hard about what the government in the US is becoming.
“A Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation deputy director warned a group of Maury County residents that unfounded complaints about water quality could be considered an “act of terrorism.”
“We take water quality very seriously. Very, very seriously,” said Sherwin Smith, deputy director of TDEC’s Division of Water Resources, according to audio recorded by attendees. “But you need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints you have a basis, because federally, if there’s no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism.”
“Can you say that again, please?” an audience member can be heard asking on the audio.”
…
““I was sitting there with my mouth open,” she said. “I couldn’t believe he was saying that.” The message she took away was: “Leave us alone. Don’t come back anymore. We’re not going to continue on dealing with whatever problem you may have.”
Rep. Butt, who organized the meeting, also was shocked.
“I think that we need to be very careful with how we use the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism,’ ” she said. “I thought it was out of context. That did not apply to anything that we were discussing at the meeting.””
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20130621/NEWS02/306210110/Official-Water-complaints-could-act-terrorism-?gcheck=1&nclick_check=1
Some thoughts for my much beloved “skeptics.”
Now many of you react quite angrily to Lew’s paper that attempts to show correlation between climate “skepticism” and conspiracy ideation.
I can understand that reaction – as it certainly requires a high bar of proof. to support such a theory – and certainly the logical implication that all “skeptics” are conspiracy-mongers, or that conspiratorial ideation underlies all climate “skepticism,” is fallacious.
On the other hand…
There does seem to be a high level of correlation between climate “skepticism” and hardcore libertarianism. I don’t have scientifically validated evidence and certainly I’m a biased observer, but can anyone really read the comments here or at WUWT and doubt that the prevalence of hardcore libertarians is not significantly higher than among the general population?
Now I’d say that there is also quite a bit of overlap between hardcore libertarianism and conspiratorial ideation. Consider Alex Jones, as one example. Or, consider Ron Paul – probably the single most powerful libertarian on the planet.
Consider this as evidence:
http://www.infowars.com/ron-paul-korea-conflict-may-be-orchestrated-crisis-to-boost-dollar/
Or given the “week in review” theme, consider this gem from just the other day:
Please, watch the video – and think of it the next time you read Gary or one of our other much beloved “skeptics” on one of their rants about “statists.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=i4NCCeUpLZg
And please, consider this video the next time you read a “skeptic” on a rant about fear-mongering and “alarmists.”
“There does seem to be a high level of correlation between climate “skepticism” and hardcore libertarianism. ”
Yes. I would say that nearly 100% of the progressive leftist’s I have met are believers in CAGW. The only exception being Tom Fuller.
And, almost the same fraction of libertarians I know are skeptics.. with the exception of me and a selection of think tank libertarians.
It’s clear that people’s political standpoint can color their view of the science, but that fact is neither universal nor informative. In short it tells us nothing about the science and nothing about the debate.
It certainly tells us nothing about the science.
I disagree that it tells us nothing about the debate.
It’s dirt simple that people with interests and values at stake are more likely to interrogate a theory being used to threaten those interests and values. We see this in the US all the time. Choomers’ groups pick apart NIDA studies on the dangers of marijuana. The organic food people went berserk over the recent meta-analysis saying that it’s no healthier than the regular industrial stuff. Gun owners in the US are highly critical of studies published in the NEJM saying that firearms are a public health plague.
It likewise isn’t shocking that a group of people who value economic growth and dynamism, and who distrust control of society by the state, might be skeptical about a theory used to justify banning the use of our highest-quality power sources. Especially since they know that there long has been an ideological green movement wanting to coercively shut down industry for reasons having nothing to do with the greenhouse effect.
One argument in favor of interest-group pluralism as a political system is precisely that concentrated interests have more of an incentive to invest in developing and communicating information than a diffusely interested public. That argument could be extended to ideological interests as well. As an opponent of agricultural subsidies I’ve found the spade work of certain environmental groups pretty interesting at times. Were they not extremists in their beliefs and values, they wouldn’t have bothered to do that digging.
stevepostrel,
+1000.
I don’t understand why the ‘Progressives’ don’t understand this. Actually, I think it is the ‘Progressives’ who are the real ‘deniers’ … i.e. deniers of the bleeding obvious.
This is what I love about you guys. You call yourselves “skeptics” and you fail to apply any skeptical scrutiny to the opinions you express. It’s just black and white., It’s binary. This is a debate between those who value economic growth and those who don’t. Between those who distrust control of society by the state and those who do.,….
Black and white.,
Binary.
And it just so happens that the folks you agree are wearing the white hats and the folks you disagree with are wearing the black hats – almost as if it were coincidence.
Yes. Indeed. We are but a step away from the time when
Conspiratorial ideation? What conspiratorial ideation?
Ain’t nobody here but us non-conspiratorial chickens.
Yeah, that Ron Paul is crazy alright. Here is an article from the New York Times that verifies what he is saying. Joahua – you REALLY need to read everything Hayek has ever written. You are naive about socialism and how it creeps like a amoeba into every corner of our lives.
“WASHINGTON — Driver’s license photographs and biographic information of most Americans would be accessible through an expanded Department of Homeland Security nationwide computer network if the immigration legislation pending before the Senate becomes law. ”
…
“But the proposal already faces objections from some civil liberties lawyers and certain members of Congress, who worry about the potential for another sprawling data network that could ultimately be the equivalent of a national ID system. ”
…
” But several civil liberties lawyers and lawmakers have said they were concerned that an expanded E-Verify — if it had access to all 212 million driver’s license records in the United States — would soon be tapped by other federal agencies, like the Transportation Security Administration at airport checkpoints or the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a search for suspects.
Just as Social Security numbers became adopted for identification uses never intended, E-Verify, they say, would draw many unexpected uses. ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/us/politics/as-immigration-bill-moves-forward-fear-of-an-id-system.html?_r=0
jim2 –
If you listen to/watch the video, you will see a distinct difference between what Paul says and what is written in the NYT article. The difference is that Paul’s video is full of conspiratorial ideation, fear-mongering, and alarmism.
The thing about libertarians like Paul is that they take legitimate concerns about civil liberties (at least sometimes) and distort them into extremist ideology – mostly as the result of binary thinking.
Of course there are legitimate concerns w/r/t civil liberties and the balance between privacy, ID cards, government collection of personal information, etc. Reasonable people will engage in reasonable discussions about those concerns, about creating a balance. Extremists go on and on about
And that’s only from the first half of the video.
No amount of reading Hayek will make that any less conspiratorial.
It isn’t conspiratorial, it is an observation that government power breeds more government power – the slippery slope. It is happening now in the US. It is no long just a crazy idea.
He says:
and you say:
Oh. OK. My bad. I don’t know how I go that.
Too funny.
‘From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.’ Many seem to have made that step – although the pissant progressives seem more an annoyance and a distraction than an actual threat.
Joshua – Are you aware Bloomberg in NYC is trying to limit food choices there? When Obamacare comes into fruition, do you really believe the government will hesitate to regulate the food that is available to us? If you believe it won’t, you have a lot to learn about government.
Sorry, Chief – this is for you not Steve.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/21/week-in-review-62213/#comment-336381
As I say – more trivial pests than an actual threat.
Like I said before, I think it is probably true that skeptics tend to be libertarian and/or conservative. The reason is this: Skeptics realize that too much, too powerful a government can be hazardous to your freedom, liberty, and happiness; so they don’t just go “Hey, let’s save the Earth, that’s a great idea no matter what has to be done to do it.” They say instead, “Are you sure this problem is so huge that we have to multiply the power of the government by 100 to solve it?”
You really need to understand this because right now you are clueless.
Jim2,
I agree with you. The ‘Progressives’ really need to understand the issues and recognise the real reasons why Conservatives are skeptical. They don’t (or, more likely, they don’t want to acknowledge that Conservatives skepticism is well founded and rational).
The progressives don’t seem to be capable of understanding the total picture. They don’t seem to be capable of even seriously considering the downside consequences of the policies they advocate. They seem incapable of realising that the policies they advocate for controlling the climate won’t work but will do enormous damage (see for example my comments here about the fatalities that the ETS would cause in Australia: http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/21/week-in-review-62213/#comment-336034).
jim2 and Peter Lang,
The question is always why skeptics are conservatives and libertarians. The question is rarely asked why virtually all CAGW supporters are progressives.
Skepticism should in fact be the default position of any thinking, educated adult. It should take strong evidence and argument to convince anyone that the successful economic system that developed in the west over centuries should be jettisoned in favor of centrally planned decarbonization of the global energy economy.
There are many conservatives who first were accepting of what was presented as a scientific consensus, but changed their minds as the political agenda, and exaggerations of the advocates became known. Margaret Thatcher being one good example.
Yet the progressive CAGW advocates have accepted warmist dogma from the start, without question. In fact, there was never even a debate among the scientists themselves before the decarbonization agenda became a “scientific” cause celebre.
So let’s not buy into the attempt to turn skepticism into an aberration that has to be puzzled out to be understood. It is the blind acceptance/group think of the “consensus” that should be studied by our fine, progressive social scientists to determine what in their childhood made them all turn into such intellectual sheep.
Say, Gary –
I see that you’re engaged in this thread.
Since I’ve got your attention, I was wondering if you might take the time to explain how you could have been so possibly wrong about the election.
You remember, don’t you? You know, how you went on and on about how the pollsters were “skewing” the polls, in a conspiracy to make the election look closer than it was – to enhance Obama’s chances of a victory.
Remember how your rational, non-progressive, true-conservative analysis showed that the pollsters were rigging their analysis to over-sample some of the demographics, and that because of that they were not accurately representing the voting public?
Did you notice how the election results showed that you were completely wrong even though you were completely confident in your analysis? Did you notice how, in fact, the polls underestimated Obama’s support, not overestimated?
Given that you’re such a rational, true-conservative, non-progressive, and given how folks like you are always so much more accurate in your analysis than those dang progressives, I’m wondering how you incorporated your complete failure of an analysis into your viewpoints going forward. Especially since, as we know, those pollsters were all progressives.
I’m sure that an explanation would be absolutely fascinating. I imagine you must have already written one – but I seem to have missed it. Perhaps you could explain once again?
Too funny.,
Joshua – I’m not speaking for Gary. Karl Rove’s polling showed that Romney was ahead – it wasn’t someone’s imagination. Obama had Google analytics which were consistently showing Obama would win.
In short, Obama had better intelligence. So, it wasn’t just Gary that had it wrong, it was a lot of people – but it was NOT based on imagination or wishful thinking as you seem to think (and seem to desire to be true.)
“During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama’s reelection team had an underappreciated asset: Google’s (GOOG) executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. He helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization. “On election night he was in our boiler room in Chicago,” says David Plouffe, then a senior White House adviser. Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as “the Cave.” The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama’s surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory.”
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-30/googles-eric-schmidt-invests-in-obamas-big-data-brains
jim2,
Don’t waste your time. I responded to that troll’s questions about polling twice. I stopped responding to him directly when he lied over and over again, about even the most trivial things, including about that. It is a waste of time engaging in discussion with someone who has no integrity. So I don’t.
GaryM,
+1000
jim –
You’re talking about something else entirely.
Gary was on here talking nonsense about how the pollsters were working in cahoots with the press and the Obama administration to over-sample likely Obama supporters to make it appear that Obama was doing better than he was.
Even staunch libertarians, such as J. Scott Armstrong (also a climate “skeptic,” btw) did sophisticated analysis that showed Obama ahead and the “analysis” like Gary’s and that of Republican political operatives and fringe pollsters was completely wrong. They looked at the sophisticated Bayesian analysis and sophisticated statistical modeling and created their own reality out of the numbers because they were biased by what they wanted to believe. I tried to tell Gary at the time that he was likely not correct, but he, like other “conservatives” were absolutely sure that they had discovered some analytical flaw in the work of the pollsters – and that the pollsters were merely trying to rig the election. The parallels to the “hoax” perspective among many “skeptics” on climate change were quite striking.
Well – in the end the actual voting proved quite convincingly that the “analysis” of Gary and a few fringe voting analysts was completely wrong. In fact, there was no over-sampling of Democratic-favorable voters as shown by the mere fact that in reality, Obama actually did better than the average polls (that Gary was so certain were over-sampling) were indicating.
Of course people can be wrong about these things. What is important is the reasons why they were wrong. What is important is why they were so certain about their analysis, and about their conspiracy theories that formed the foundation for their analysis.
Gary has continued to duck accountability. He has failed to explain why he was so wrong, and he has failed to explain how he was going to incorporate the indisputable bias in his analysis into his reasoning going forward.
Go ahead – ask him why he was so completely wrong, and why he was so completely confident about a completely wrong analysis. See if he shows any accountability.
jim –
Read this (representative of Gary’s “analysis”):
http://www.policymic.com/articles/15476/obama-vs-romney-polls-the-media-is-oversampling-democrats-and-it-skews-the-data-in-favor-of-obama
And then read this:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/poll-averages-have-no-history-of-consistent-partisan-bias/
and this:
http://election.princeton.edu/2012/09/26/vast-liberal-conspiracies/
Jim –
For a good chuckle, read this:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/09/24/u-s-climate-change-policy-news/#comment-245473
And this:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/09/24/u-s-climate-change-policy-news/#comment-245480
As for his accountability, jim – he never answered this question that I asked him at the time:
I wonder why he never answered, eh?
Joshua, yes, often they make the step without realizing it. “I don’t like this possible climate policy, therefore the science must be wrong”. The way they make this step is to assume “This policy is bad therefore it must be designed by bad people who have corrupted the science in order to impose this policy”. They don’t start from the science at all. They start from the policy and work backwards, and assume the scientists are all doing the same. For someone who is much more interested in the science and climate-change effects than the possible range of policies that could be enacted, I find this whole-thing backwards attitude very eye-opening.
I don’t think it is explainable just by a matter of deliberative sequencing quite like you describe, Jim.
I don’t think there is really a starting point as you describe. We are all affected by our identifications. As such, we filter information in ways that confirm those identifications. It isn’t that we assess the policy implications first and then work from there as we evaluate the science. It is that we are selectively “skeptical” and trusting of information depending on how it resonates with our identifications – and that would apply to how we filter the scientific information as well as how we filter information about the policy implications.
This happens with issues that are not directly policy related – say views on evolution or the BIg Bang. (Knowing more about evolution does not correlate with “belief” about evolution). It happens on a lesser scale with issues like GMOs and HPV vaccination and other vaccinations because they are less resonant with identifications – but it happens with them also. There are millions of people who are wholly convinced one way or the other about climate change but who know nothing much of anything at all about the science.
And Jim –
I’d say that no matter how it works mechanistically, the mechanism isn’t partisan-based – it is bilateral. It isn’t an “us” and “them” thing. Such a unilateral perspective (that it’s only “them” and isn’t “us”) does not pass skeptical scrutiny, IMO, although it is wholly accepted by those who call themselves skeptics. That is why I call them “skeptics.”
OK, a big piece here is this “policy” that they think is going to happen. That part does come from their ideation about the “big bad government”, and usually they take their own pessimistic extreme as though that policy will happen unless they can stop it at its source, which in this case is the science. The big question when they think about climate is why they can’t help jumping to policy and stick with the science instead, while also proposing their own solutions. Scott Denning (a rare conservative warmist) berated the Heartland Institute in his talk there a couple years ago for giving the policy upper hand to the lefties by not even proposing an alternative. Unfortunately his own solution consisted of only two words “Free Market”.
I think you are a space cadet Jim and Joshua is a scientific illiterate. Space cadet is shorthand for a groupthink psychopathology. Someone who is incapable of processing information that is inconsistent with the groupthink memes.
This one for instance – http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=6 – or this one – http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/PDO_zps89a7b4c1.jpg.html?sort=3&o=22 – ot this one – http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=44
There is such a wealth of science that shows a larger role for natural variability than has been assumed – yet this doesn’t scratch the space cadet armor.
I think that your supposed concern with science alone is delusional.
‘Although it has failed to produce its intended impact nevertheless the Kyoto Protocol has performed an important role. That role has been allegorical. Kyoto has permitted different groups to tell different stories about themselves to themselves and to others, often in superficially scientific language. But, as we are increasingly coming to understand, it is often not questions about science that are at stake in these discussions. The culturally potent idiom of the dispassionate scientific narrative is being employed to fight culture wars over competing social and ethical values. Nor is that to be seen as a defect. Of course choices between competing values are not made by relying upon scientific knowledge alone. What is wrong is to pretend that they are.’ http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/mackinder/pdf/mackinder_Wrong%20Trousers.pdf
I would also say that not all “skeptics” fall into this policy trap. There are some like CH, manacker and captdallas who don’t keep dragging the conversation that way, but they have their own doubts in the science area. They are motivated towards lower sensitivity than the consensus science, but it is not clear why they have such certainty that the IPCC range is wrong.
Interesting. I see it quite differently.
From what I’ve seen, I’d agree about the Cap’n. He has a strong orientation on the policy aspects, but he doesn’t keep dragging the convo that way. Max and CH? I respect your opinion and you can obviously evaluate their scientific analysis in ways I can’t, but from what I see I couldn’t disagree more.
They both seem like hardcore “skeptics” to me. max more overtly on the scientific side, perhaps, then Chief – but then Chief also does things like say it is certain that there will be no warming and likely cooling for the next couple of decades. IMO, only a “skeptic” could make a statement like that with certainty. But from what I see, both Chief and max drag the science into the policy domain quite frequently.
‘Using a new measure of coupling strength, this update shows that these climate modes have recently synchronized, with synchronization peaking in the year 2001/02. This synchronization has been followed by an
increase in coupling. This suggests that the climate system may well have shifted again, with a consequent break in the global mean temperature trend from the post 1976/77 warming to a new period (indeterminate length) of roughly constant global mean temperature.’
Take it as a given.
‘In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces climate change to the discernment of significant differences in the statistics of such ensembles. The generation of such model ensembles will require the dedication of greatly increased computer resources and the application of new methods of model diagnosis. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive, but such statistical information is essential.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm
Here of course we are talking about perturbed model families – Jim – a work in progress. It is still quite impossible to predict the future – but we are in a cool decadal mode. As I say space cadets have problems processing information.
So, the walk-back begins:
Shall I repost the many claims of complete certainty, Chief? You know, where in contrast to what you just wrote, you did “predict the future?”
I posted at least four or five the other night, and that was only from the top of the first page of Google hits.
But it is good to see that you aren’t impervious to correcting your sloppy treatment of uncertainty. I had feared that you would be. Maybe you’ll turn into a skeptic and not a “skeptic” after all. Unfortunately, after we straighten you out on the science side, we’re going to have to deconstruct your “skepticism” on the policy side. I fear that may be a much tougher task.
Anyway, like I said – it’s good to see you walk it back. Let’s see if you can remain consistent.
Joshua, I was distinguishing the policy-first “skeptics” from the science-first “skeptics”. Yes, they are “skeptics” but don’t seem to get there by working backwards from policy, at least they are not admitting to that.
Again you fail to understand the simplest of English and substitute your own reality of tendentious twaddle.
The decadal cool mode is certainly with us. This is not a prediction. This is based on current conditions primarily in the Pacific. It lasts for 20 to 40 years. Beyond that comes another chaotic shift of the coupled non-linear system which is certainly unpredictable almost by definition.
As for policy – there are a couple of statements here – http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/22/the-coming-arctic-boom/#comment-335922
Actually – here are the statements
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/20/the-economist-on-the-new-republic-on-the-pause/#comment-334813
… ‘while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.’
H’t Yeats.
Climate science screams!
No really.
“…the science of climate change is screaming at us for action,”
But it is also apparently stupid.
“The good news is that if we do this right, it won’t hurt our economies – it will grow them.”
http://www.france24.com/en/20130623-climate-change-screaming-more-global-action-kerry
John Kerry, marryer of a millionaire heiress, lecturing the Indian people (per capita GDP approximately $1,500) on why they have to give up affordable energy and live in poverty in perpetuity so he can feel less guilty about living like a greedy CO2 spewing pig.
I swear today’s progressives remind me more and more of the courtiers of Louis XVI. Which I guess would make John Kerry their Marie Antoinette. Let them eat windmills.
John Kerry’s preaching the wonders of decarbonization to the poverty stricken Indians raises a few questions perhaps one or more of the consensus advocates could answer.
First, take as a given for the sake of argument that skeptics like me are all wrong, there are no politics involved, and the consensus drive for decarbonization is all about the science. Take also as a given that the consensus warnings are all correct that we are near a tipping point, and action must be taken in the next few years to drastically reduce, if not eliminate, the burning of fossil fuels.
(1) Other than John Kerry jetting in for a speech, before jetting out to go back to his CO2 spewing mansion(s), what precisely is being done to curtail the emissions of China, Russia and India?
(2) More to the point, what are your plans to see that those emissions are curtailed on the timescale that you claim is so essential to avoid the at least potentially catastrophic warming that is inevitable if we don’t drastically reduce emissions now?
(3) Finally, what good will reducing western emissions do if China, Russia and India do not follow suit in the very short term?
Against Environmental Panic
http://chronicle.com/article/Against-Environmental-Panic/139733/
So, what’s going on? Government is funding a disinformation campaign and academia is beating the drum, warning us all of a non-problem. Why are they lying about global warming? Who is trying to extinguish the torch of individual liberty in America? Who is using global warming to sabotage capitalism and to take over the free enterprise economy to save the world?
“The layman, perhaps, is not fully aware to what extent even the popular reputations of scientists and scholars are made by that class and are inevitably affected by its views on subjects which have little to do with the merits of the real achievements. And it is specially significant for our problem that every scholar can probably name several instances from his field of men who have undeservedly achieved a popular reputation as great scientists solely because they hold what the intellectuals regard as “progressive” political views; but I have yet to come across a single instance where such a scientific pseudo-reputation has been bestowed for political reason on a scholar of more conservative leanings. This creation of reputations by the intellectuals is particularly important in the fields where the results of expert studies are not used by other specialists but depend on the political decision of the public at large. ”
F. A. Hayek
http://mises.org/daily/2984
Jim 2 +14
Bts
Two things. The first is that constantly telling others to ignore me is not ignoring me. The second is that if you really want me to stop, then give a solid explanation for why you were so completely wrong in your determination of how the election models were “skewed.”
All should see what is one of the most important articles ever on climate … see the graph in that article after reading my comment here …
http://climatechange90.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html?showComment=1372194152890#c9064275824131276707
testing