by Tony Brown
Posts in the thread on uncertainty guidance for the IPCC have raised a basic question regarding the credibility of the IPCC as the world’s foremost source of information on climate, and hence its future relevance.
Unfortunately, the various post-Climategate discussions of the problem to date have framed the issue as one of the poor behavior or practices of a few over-enthusiastic individuals, thus skirting the question of whether or not the underlying problem could lie with the consensus process of the IPCC, itself.
Some critics have used the word “corrupt” in conjunction with this process, in suggesting that it has corrupted climate science by introducing bias to support a preconceived agenda or premise.
But regardless whether or not “corrupt” is too strong a word to use to describe this process, there is no question that in many people’s eyes the IPCC has suffered a massive loss of credibility and trust by the general public as a result of the many disclosures following the Climategate leaks. In turn this has followed through into greater scepticism by some parts of the media and created a greater awareness of the role and importance of the IPCC.
A report by the influential Times of London in February 2010 cited an opinion poll, which found that the “proportion of the population that believes that climate change is an established fact and largely man-made has fallen from 41 per cent in November to 26 per cent.”
IPCC supporters have been quick to close ranks in support of IPCC in spite of the revelations, in some cases couching the perceived problem as one of poor communication skills, or the inherent difficulty of explaining something as complex as climate science to policy makers looking for black and white answers or to a generally scientifically illiterate public unable to grasp the complexities.
These rationalizations miss the point, namely that there has been a loss of trust in IPCC in recent years and that their credibility and relevance has been called into question.
While the IPCC and its supporters had hoped that the independent inquiries following Climategate would re-establish public trust, this was not the case, as many saw these investigations as attempts at whitewashing rather than comprehensive, objective or diligent investigations.
As a result the questions arise:
- Can the IPCC regain the trust of the general public?
- If not, can the IPCC still maintain its relevance after this loss of credibility?
- Would climate science be better off if it were divorced from the IPCC?
- Should the IPCC, as is, be disbanded and replaced with something else and, if so, with what and how?
Nature solicited the views of 5 past IPCC contributors in an article entitled “IPCC: Cherish, Tweak or Scrap?” (unfortunately behind paywall). The article was discussed at Pielke Jr’s site andinsights from Mike Hulme were described at YaleClimateMediaForum.
Some introspection is required in order to arrive at suggested answers to these questions.
It has been said that trust is the hardest thing to gain and once it is lost it can never be regained. Roger Pielke, Jr. has raised the question of loss of trust, suggesting that IPCC needs major changes if it hopes to survive. This was written a short time after Climategate and the subsequent revelations of sloppy work and exaggerations in IPCC reports were revealed, but there have been no major changes to IPCC since then.
It is generally known that one can only change if one wants to do so. And it appears that the IPCC does not want to make the major changes that would be required in the hope of regaining the lost trust. If IPCC is unable or unwilling to make the drastic changes required in order to regain public trust, where does this leave us?
It seems very unlikely (to use IPCC parlance) that IPCC can maintain its relevance after this loss of credibility, so it is very likely that climate science would be better off if it were divorced from the IPCC, as painful as such a divorce would be.
In other words, the climate science community itself should look for post-IPCC alternates to re-establish the general public trust in climate science.
These could involve setting up some sort of a group of scientists as an objective review board for all climate studies, which (like IPCC in the past) issues periodic summary reports on the findings.
However, there must be one key difference: the group must not be a politically based or influenced committee under the auspices of the United Nations like IPCC, but rather a small group of theoretical scientists, applied scientists, engineers and economists, who are active in a related field and represent a variety of different viewpoints in the on-going scientific debate regarding our climate.
The group must also have the brief not to restrict itself to the investigation of human-induced climate change, as was the case for IPCC, but to include naturally induced changes as well.
And there needs to be an oversight committee of genuinely independent auditors who will ensure that there is no consensus process in place, which could lead to the introduction of bias, as was the case with IPCC.
Will IPCC disband and self-destruct automatically? Probably not without some shouting.
But it can be made redundant first by defunding it and second by setting up this alternate group which will have more credibility than the organisation it would replace.
This will be no easy task. But it will be a necessary one, if we want to rehabilitate climate science and turn it into a useful, neutral tool with which to investigate the causes for our ever changing climate.
The monstrous coupling of the WWF with the IPCC is a wild beast with two backs. Untangle that unnatural act, first.
===========
The underlying problem is the consensus process in the UN’s IPCC, the US NAS, the UK RS, Nature, Science, PNAS, MPRS, etc., etc.
That “unnatural act” eliminates dissent and prevents progress.
E.g., “New theories emerge to disprove OPERA faster-than-light neutrinos claim”
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-theories-emerge-opera-faster-than-light-neutrinos.html
In honest science, government-funded models and theories do NOT suddenly emerge to disprove experimental observations.
It can even get worse! When there is consensus, like was the case that it would rain more in Eastern Africa, you get a huge drought in return!
And if it was only the IPCC that got it wrong, it wouldn’t matter. But it seems that a lot of important organizations now rely on it. So what do you get in return?
Unfortunately, several tens of thousands of deaths!
Ecotretas
IPCC and Climategate are visible tips of a deep, dangerous iceberg that grew out of sight for 40 years [1].
The survival of our society and a return to the pre-1971 forms of government will be like the survival of rats that chased imaginary cheeses in a maze for 40 years.
Statesmanship and spiritual wisdom will be our greatest needs for save transition.
1. “Deep roots of the global climate scandal (1971-2011)”
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/20110722_Climategate_Roots.pdf
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
Another piece of the iceberg just emerged!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/middleeast/secret-us-memo-made-legal-case-to-kill-a-citizen.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2
Oops, . . . no constitution.
Regretfully,
Oliver K. Manuel
Oliver and Kim both point out different aspects of the problem. It is more than a simple problem, it covers many fallibilities that is inherent with any process of the UN.
The Problem with the IPCC is that is was founded as a political organization to promote the proposition that human-caused climate change, primarily increasing temperature caused by CO2 emissions, would cause serious problems in the future that needed to be addressed.
The goal should not be to “Understand Climate Change”
The goal should be to “Understand Climate”
That would include, but not be limited to “climate change”
I agree. Thinking about it, the very term “change” applied to an always changing, dynamic, very complex non-linear system forces our perceptions, and therefore research focus, into paths not justified for such a system. “Change” implies a “starting position” that is notionally static, which is almost certainly not true of climate, and most assuredly should not be the “default hypothesis”.
Herman Alexander Pope.
i think that is a very perceptive comment-
As Ak then remarks, including the word ‘change’ implies a starting position which then distorts the need to understand all the many nuances of climate.
tonyb
It’s called “framing”.
Another bit of framing is talking about “climate” in the singular. There are many climates – plural. There are polar climates, tropical climates, desert climates, temperate climates.
Good point , Jack. Chapter 3 of the Hewitt and Jackson (eds) 2003 reference tome ‘Handbook of atmospheric science’ is entitled ‘The earth’s climates’ (in the plural). There is no single global climate.
As Jack notes, “framing” is intentional, and serves to preclude unwanted conclusions and “beg the question”. In fact, the entire thrust and warrant of the IPCC is to beg the question. I.e., in practice it is trying to make the focus, “How fast is mankind ruining global climatological stability?”
Count the assumptions built into that! I makes “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” look soft and simplistic.
typo: It makes …
Herman Alexander Pope 10/06/11, 3:27 pm, IPCC discussion
HAP: The goal should be to “Understand Climate”. That would include, but not be limited to “climate change”.
What you ask is little more than having IPCC report temperature instead of temperature anomaly. Just add 14ºC to the anomalies. The key parameter, climate sensitivity, doesn’t change at all.
The charter problem is fundamental, but different. IPCC chose not to follow its original charter, which was
The IPCC was established by UNEP and WMO in 1988 to assess the state of existing knowledge about climate change: its science, the environmental, economic and social impacts and possible response strategies.
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=43&ArticleID=206&l=en
Instead, it revised its own charter to read,
The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. Bold added.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles.pdf
IPCC thus redirected itself away from the science of either climate or climate change, and instead (a) to the RISK in climate change, based on (b) the ASSUMPTION that AGW exists.
Accordingly, IPCC rejected science supporting natural causes and effects, while falsifying evidence exaggerating CO2 as a cause of global warming. Abundant examples available on request. Meanwhile its authors concealed evidence, and hid behind the peer review process it was manipulating in climate journals, all to reinforce its unethical (at a minimum) enterprise, and to suppress criticism.
So IPCC set about to create GCMs that showed AGW not so risky that it would be invalidated before several political cycles (a notable, expensive failure), but scary enough to show AGW to be an irreversible, life-threatening risk in the lifetime of our grandchildren, well worth dislodging the equivalent of the World’s GDP from the First World nations.
Spot on!
This comment exhibits a key misunderstanding of the IPCC that seems to be shared by many who frequent this blog.
IPCC reports are not meant to be a textbook about planetary climate. If you want one of those there are plenty around, but you are not the audience for the IPCC.
The purpose of the IPCC is to look at the relevant scientific literature in order to provide guidance to policymakers and other interested parties about a specific question: how will climate change over the next century and what effects will that have?
@Paul S…
Actually, my understanding (of the documents authorizing the IPCC’s formation) is that the question applies only to the anthropogenic component of “climate change”.
That may be the case, though in practice the particular formulation doesn’t make much of a difference:
1) For analysis of past climate change you have to quantify natural forcings to detect anthropogenic effects.
2) For projections of future climate change, anthropogenic forcings are the only relatively predictable variables, albeit with a range of potential scenarios. Whereas we really have no idea what might happen with the Sun, volcanoes, cosmic rays or anything like that, and there’s nothing we could do about them if we did (remember, this is guidance for policymakers)
Realistically a ‘climate change’ scope wouldn’t produce anything vastly different from an ‘anthropogenic climate change’ scope. There’s also the danger that widening the scope blurs the focus, leading to confusion and bloating of an already large document. Nevertheless in AR5 I suspect Working Group I may well look at some popular natural forcing scenarios, such as the effects of a Maunder Minimum return and other events (Supervolcanoes?).
@Paul S..
I get the impression you’re making the implicit assumption these “forcings” can be separated like the waves from different pebbles dropped into the same pond. AFAIK that’s not a valid assumption for non-linear systems.
Paul S. I think we know more about climate and what’s predictable than just the anthropogenic forcings. I think the problem is we don’t know enough about climate to tell the difference between natural and anthropogenic forcings on generational time scales.
Go Dr Judith Curry! It has to be time.
Right on!
Others are helping tear down the barriers to open communications!
Those barriers allowed tyrannical governments to come to power, using government science as a tool of government propaganda.
Proceedings of the 1999 ACS Symposium that Noble Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg and I organized on the “Origin of Elements in the Solar System: Implications of Post-1957 Observations” are now available free to all:
http://ebookee.org/Origin-of-Elements-in-the-Solar-System-Implications-of-Post-1957-Observations_202099.html
That is consistent with our plan for the Proceedings to “include all points of view and let history judge their validity.”
Not Judith. Guest post by Tony Brown.
Even so, I repeat, go Dr Judith Curry!
As a CLA for WG2, I see little appetite for change in the IPCC. The 0th order draft of AR5 makes many of the same mistake as AR4: Selective citation, gray literature, a tendency alarmism. The conflict of interest policy is a farce. Although there are forces in the IPCC that want to change this, there are other forces that do not.
The IPCC may have lost the trust of some or even many, it seems to continue to enjoy the confidence of the majority of its clients. Many of the IPCC member states are autocracies, who could not care less about what you write on a UK or US blog. Other member states are democracies, but the IPCC delegates are faceless bureaucrats, with a limited understanding of the new media.
At the end of the day, the IPCC is a UN bureaucracy serving the needs of national bureaucracies. Mutterings on the internet will not affect those needs and how they are served.
The only hope I see would be to provide both Red Team and Blue Team reports of climate skeptics and traditional IPCC perspectives.
I.e. for the IPCC to require a minority/skeptical section on each chapter where the skeptics have full reign to summarize the skeptical science typically ignored or excluded by the IPCC and the “consensus” editors.
Some examples are the NIPCC 2009, 2011 reports , and Don Easterbrook
Evidence-Based Climate Science: Data opposing CO2 emissions as the primary source of global warming
Listening to the Sec-Gen and Chu and assorted minions, it is clear that the response of the UN and US Administration to skepticism is to chant, “La-la-la-la-la-la—I can’t hear you!” Overandoverandover.
The IPCC is supposed to represent the gold standard. It appears with the many incidents of poor science, poor judgment and poor conclusions they have lost that position and probably are doing more harm than good to the on-going debate over climate change.
goodspkr,
The IPCC may represent the ‘gold standard’ (thanks for reminding me of that oft-used description of thee IPCC).
But the client states and political hacks sho use the IPCC to push their idiocratic policies are not on the gold standard.
More like the quartz (“fools’ gold”) standard.
Ah yes, “All that glitters is not gold!”
PS “Fools gold”: “The mineral pyrite, or iron pyrite, is an iron sulfide with the formula FeS2.”
One has to remember that the IPCC was formed 23 years ago with the single mandate of determining human contribution to observed global warming. So far they have failed to meet thisd mandate but with all five global temperature datasets showing no global warming since 2002 in spite of the 26% increase in CO2 emissions from fossil fuels mother nature has met their mandate for them.
As they are now without a mandate perhaps it is best that the IPCC disband
and we can send them off with our gratitude for wrecking the economy and creating the global food, crisis.
2002 was a solar max and an el nino. Ie you are cherrypicking
This is a best fit linear trend. If I was cherry picking I would use the el nino spike of 1998 and state no global warming since 1998.
The best fit linear trend ignores spikes and one year peaks like the la nino of 2008 and the el nino of 2010. Arguments such as yours only expose ignorance
Except the following statement is false.
all five global temperature datasets showing no global warming since 1998
because at least one of them show a warming trend since 1998
lolwot
You write to Norm Kalmanovitch:
There was also no warming if you take the full decade starting January 2011, lolwot.
And there was no warming of 0.2C per decade, as projected by IPCC, despite increase of CO2 to record levels.
That;s why Trenberth referred to this “lack of warming that cannot be accounted for” as a “travesty”.
Max
Sorry for typo. Should be January 2001, of course.
The amount of warming since 2001 is going to be determined roughly by:
greenhouse gas contribution + solar contribution + ENSO/PDO contribution = observed warming
If we assume an IPCC greenhouse gas contribution of 0.2C and put in the hadcrut observation of 0.05C cooling then we get:
0.2C + solar contribution + ENSO/PDO contribution = -0.05
You are arguing that the data proves greenhouse gases aren’t warming the Earth. Yet it’s not impossible. The equation clearly can be balanced if the solar and ENSO/PDO contribution provide enough cooling since 2001 (roughly 0.25C between them).
On what basis do you assume that ENSO/PDO and solar influence since 2001 hasn’t had a 0.25C cooling effect since 2001?
I could understand someone like Gavin Schmidt arguing against it based on theory (TSI changes x climate sensitivity), but I can’t understand how skeptics can argue against it. Skeptics have been the ones playing up the influence of the deep solar minimum and the PDO switch and expecting large cooling.
I would think you guys, if you were objective, would be the first ones to realize the warming trend continues given that you expected large cooling and yet it hasn’t happened.
Hey, lolwot, you are falling into the trap:
ENSO and the solar cycle cannot be forecast.
Fortunately though that doesn’t matter. In the longterm they have hardly any impact. But if you are going to look at a particular 10 years (eg 2001 onwards) then they can, and in fact 2001 onwards is a particularly bad 10 years to pick given solar activity drops over it and so does ENSO.
The IPCC didn’t make a prediction for 2001-2011 for this reason.
lolwot: I would think you guys, if you were objective, would be the first ones to realize the warming trend continues given that you expected large cooling and yet it hasn’t happened.
So what conclusion re: cloud feedbacks do you attribute to “you guys” ? Or are you doing the Team thing by just trying to pretend it isn’t an issue?
The question is why you assume less than 0.1C cooling due to the solar minimum
Richard Tol has said it clearly above: IPCC is a UN bureaucracy established at the behest of a set of governments, who are its ultimate clients. It is fundamentally a political organization and not a science organization. It must be given the same level of trust as other political organizations. In my opinion: very little trust.
Do you have some evidence that proves that claim of attribution?
“proportion of the population that believes that climate change is an established fact and largely man-made has fallen from 41 per cent in November to 26 per cent.”
It seems that there you have provided some evidence of correlation, but no evidence of causation. There may be any number of other variables that could be at play – for example, cold weather.
From the BBC write-up on the poll you referenced:
Do you have evidence of what % of the public that have changed in their view of climate change are familiar with the “many disclosures following the Climategate links?” Do you have evidence regarding what factors they attribute to their shift in position? Further, your statement refers to a condition in October of 2011. Do you have evidence about current public opinion on the relationship between “Climategate” and views as to whether climate change is an established fact and/or largely man-made?
Wouldn’t your statement of their being “no question” about causation, suggest that you have some direct evidence of causation?
BTW – it appears that your link to the poll is broken. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8500443.stm
Yeah it’s a myth.
The only people who have “lost trust in the IPCC” never had it in the first place. The whole thing is basically a tactic by deniers.
If they crow long enough that the public has lost trust maybe those darned scientists will just shut up the IPCC shop and go home.
Sorry – wrong dang nest.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/06/ipcc-discussion-thread/#comment-119003
Keep sticking your head in the sand, lolwot.
Max
I assume, then, you have evidence of the asserted causation?
Would you remind posting a link?
Sorry – mind, not remind.
I find it quite amazing that people who focus much of their time on examining whether claims of causation are sufficiently supported by the evidence make claims, repeatedly, of causation that aren’t supported by evidence.
It’s bizarre, actually. So since that wouldn’t apply to you, why don’t you provide some evidence?
Link posted below (TonyB also posts another link in his lead post, if you look).
Max
Tony’s link shows no evidence of causation.
What other link are you referring to?
causation is unobservable Joshua.
Joshua
This is becoming repetitive (and boring).
You keep asking for links, I keep posting them, you keep ignoring them…
I’ve already posted this to lolwot below, but will repeat for you one more time.
This analysis by the AMS starts off:
http://ams.confex.com/ams/91Annual/webprogram/Paper184847.html
A recent analysis of poll results by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication confirmed the expected: the controversy surrounding the CRU emails has resulted not only in a drop in belief in anthropogenic global warming, but also in a significant decline in trust in climate scientists.
The study cited by the AMS report is linked here
http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/images/files/Climategate_Public%20Opinion_and%20Loss%20of%20Trust(1).pdf
Hope this helps.
Max
The only people who have “lost trust in the IPCC” never had it in the first place. The whole thing is basically a tactic by deniers.
lolwot: YMMV. Not true of me.
Also, every time I see the term denier applied to people like myself, it strengthens my assessment that I’m not dealing with people who care about science or the planet or reason, but are simply advocates, and nasty ones at that, who have a political agenda and an axe to grind and don’t care how low they have to stoop.
Taking your explanation of your experience at face value (I have no reason not to), what do you think about people that make claims about attributing changes in general public opinion to “Climategate” without having evidence that shows causation?
Would it suggest to you that they have an axe to grind, or are arguing on the basis of motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, etc.? I wouldn’t make assumptions about how “low they have to stoop,” but it does give me pause. How about you?
Joshua, what would count as evidence of causation? think carefully, your argument might come back to bite you.
It seems the answer is……..silence!
Joshua: You are comparing a possibly mistaken argument with smearing a group of people with a heavily loaded term of abuse.
That’s a category error. It’s like one person claiming an arguable point about affirmative action and a second person using the N-word. Not the same.
This is the silliest of your equivalence arguments I’ve read so far.
whatever, I’ll describe things as I see them. Im not going to beat around the bush.
I’ve read enough skeptic blogs and the commenters of those blogs to know the “skeptics” are largely actually deniers. When they cheer along astounding incompetence and error on those blogs yet act (and act is the word) outraged at some scientist making a minor irrelevant error, tells me all I need to know about the “skeptics”.
Your problem is that you haven’t a clue as to what a scientist is. Those you cite as “scientists” are Lysenkosist frauds who blatantly and deliberately violate the Scientific Method.
Your “scientists” keep their raw data, computer codes, algorithms, etc., secret as POLICY – they are not scientists.
Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit for years – even before Climategate – exposed this policy by the leading lights of the CAGW movement: Michael Mann and the Hockey Team, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Lonnie Thompson, and all the core IPCC “lead authors”.
The reason for the policy of secret data and methods has become clear when they are discovered (like Mann’s “CENSORED” ftp directory) or forced out (like Briffa’s Yamal data by a Royal Society publication) – the raw data is cherry picked, then massaged with phony statistical methods, or just literally turned upside down. Phrases like ‘short-centered PCA’, ‘Yamal’, and ‘Upside Down Tijlander’ are infamous among those who have dared take an honest look behind the “climate science” curtain.
Keeping stuff secret . Everyone does it. Last time I checked Roy Spencer hadn’t released the UAH source code or raw data. Does that make him a “Lysenkosist fraud who blatantly and deliberately violates the Scientific Method”?
Perhaps you think so. I do not. I can understand that a scientist would perhaps not have the time to put it all together and release it and might weigh up the benefit of doing so given they have other work to get on with. For example it’s unlikely that releasing the UAH source code will provide much benefit given that we already have another team, RSS, doing the same work. But that’s a judgement call.
Yes there will be mistakes in any complicated work. It can take many versions to improve and there can be disagreements about what constitutes a mistake (eg Mann would disagree that an “upside down” proxy was a mistake). The science is driven forwards usually by multiple researchers producing their own results.
It’s possible to compare various reconstructions of temperature for the last 2000 years and I see the difference between them isn’t massive.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/recon_lj_with_others.png
Can’t see what all the fuss is about.
UAH source code? Last I saw Spencer and Dessler had released data to McIntyre. I’m sure he has it available somewhere.
Doesn’t mean AGW ain’t real.
Lolwot. I believe Spencer in fact did sit down with RSS and go over his source code. RSS, well they are commercial. In the end as a friend of mine went in search of the on board software for these vehicles we ran into that nasty beast known as ITAR.
Again, its good to get your facts right before you misinterpret them.
When it comes to code release I would say all of the requests ( save those made of spenser/rss and a couple others ) are made for code that funded by government dollars, or was code that supported findings in a journal that REQUIRED archiving this information.
lolwot
steven mosher has stated to Joshua (who has the same denial problem as you on loss of trust in IPCC resulting from Climategate:
This is generally true (at least in theory). But let me give you a practical exception.
You observe that someone is being hit squarely in the eye.
You then observe that this individual develops a “black eye”.
The causation of that “black eye” is (almost certainly) the hit in the eye, which you observed.
The world has observed the crooked behavior of :IPCC lead authors and key supporters in “Climategate” plus revelations of IPCC exaggerations and phony data. Following this, several independent polls observe and document that IPCC has ended up with a “black eye” in public opinion.
The causation of that “black eye” is (almost certainly) the hit in the eye from Climategate (as steven has written in a detailed blow-by-blow book on this subject) even though (as steven wrote) causation itself is never directly observable.
Max
whatever, I’ll describe things as I see them. Im not going to beat around the bush.
lolwot: As far as I’m concerned, you and your ilk are welcome to keep using the “denier” label. It makes you sound shrill, close-minded, and bigoted.– just the qualities you want when trying to persuade the majority of people in the middle that you are high-minded, rational types trying to protect the planet.
What the climate orthodox don’t seem to realize is that their efforts to consign the skeptics to the crackpot category have failed. Skeptics are everywhere at all levels of society and are making their voices heard. Calling them “deniers” won’t shut them up and won’t persuade others not to listen to skeptic positions.
Last night I was reading the comments to a Mother Jones article on climate change and noticed that about a third of the commenters were skeptics. When Rolling Stone printed that Al Gore polemic a few months ago, likewise.
Calling us deniers won’t fix that problem. My bet is that it will further alienate the people in the middle, who probably know a “denier” or two. So party on, Garth.
Re steven mosher:
“Lolwot. I believe Spencer in fact did sit down with RSS and go over his source code. RSS, well they are commercial. In the end as a friend of mine went in search of the on board software for these vehicles we ran into that nasty beast known as ITAR.”
That’s fine by me, what I draw attention to is the double standards of skeptics. Double standards which I believe expose unsavory motivations beneath their costume of “concern” for the science.
The double standard is that skeptics moaned loudly about GISTEMP and HadCRUT source code being released, but are content with UAH source code not being released.
Would Hansen have been allowed to just sit down with someone at NOAA and go over his source code? Ha no way.
Would he have been allowed to say he was in the process of releasing it, as Spencer is I believe, but that process takes over a year with no end in sight? No way.
Dare I say, skeptics exploited the period before source code was released to imply that the lack of release was evidence of something wrong with the source code and the record itself was in doubt because of it. I don’t think they really wanted the source code at all (at least the bright ones must have realized it wasn’t going to contain the fraud that the stupid ones were led to expect). It was just a convenient stick to bash Hansen and AGW with.
“I would say all of the requests ( save those made of spenser/rss and a couple others ) are made for code that funded by government dollars, or was code that supported findings in a journal that REQUIRED archiving this information.”
Personally I find such rules to be human whim. The question is whether we need the source code. As far as I am concerned we don’t need the UAH source code. But then I don’t think we needed the GISTEMP or HadCRUT source code either. That need doesn’t depend on what rules are in place at a journal. Can we take the GHCN data and follow Hansen’s methodology to check his results? Yes. Do we need his source code to do that. No.
Sensibly that’s all there is too it. But no skeptics had to go and play on the “scientist REFUSING to hand over source code” line.
lolwot acknowledges the facts of the situation, yet still claims there is a double standard: It’s very strange.
What is this double standard? Skeptics expect different things from government funded projects and scientific journals with stated archiving policies than they expect from private entities…I’ll paraphrase:
Joshua
To TonyB’s statement”
You ask:
I’ve already posted this to lolwot below, but will repeat for you.
This analysis by the AMS starts off:
http://ams.confex.com/ams/91Annual/webprogram/Paper184847.html
The study cited by the AMS report is linked here
http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/images/files/Climategate_Public%20Opinion_and%20Loss%20of%20Trust(1).pdf
Hope this helps.
Max
Thanks,
First, Goodwin’s abstract makes a claim about what can be concluded from the poll, but offers no explanation for the claim. An explanation is also not supplied in the linked manuscript: it mentions “Climategate” three times, twice in references and once in this sentence:
There is no quantification of how many Americans followed the story closely. There is no quantification of whether among that group, reaction to “Climategate” caused a change in their view of climate change, or a “loss” of credibility or trust. That’s the evidence for a “massive” in the general public as Tony asserts?
Really?
And this is from the other link you provided:
So – Americans continue to trust scientists more than other sources of information about global warming – and arguably a large % of scientists think that the evidence supports the notion that GW is 90% likely to be happening and more than 50% attributable to A CO2 emissions.
Yet “Climategate” caused a “massive” loss of trust and credibility?
Really?
Further, note – from the second link:
Their analysis found that 29% of Americans had followed the story of “Climategate” at least a little, and that 29% of that 29% that said they were “much more certain” that climate change was not happening as the result of “Climategate” – and most of them “individuals with a strongly individualistic worldview or politically conservative ideology.” A plurality of that 29% (41%) said the story did not affect their view of climate change and 11% said it made them somewhat more very much more convinced about climate change.
You consider that evidence of a “massive” lost of trust and credibility as the result of “Climategate?”
Please note – “much more certain” implies that those “conservatives” were already certain to begin with.
Would that be evidence for Tony’s conclusions about a “massive loss of trust and credibility” by the general public as the result of “Climategate?”
Really?
Denial is a wonderful thing, Joshua. It makes “bad facts” simply go away.
Faith-based denial (such as you are demonstrating here) is hard to beat.
Max
Joshua: it mentions “Climategate” three times …
The quote marks being symptomatic of Climategate Denial.
I seriously doubt whether climategate had any direct effect on people’s opinion. However, It has taken the team off message. It will continue to take them off message. That is hard to quantify, but the precautionary principle argues that you should attend to it
I’m not sure what the cause of it is, but there is a general opening of people’s minds on this subject. 2 examples:
1. The ACS meeting in Denver where there was a range of talks.
2. The upcoming Los Alamos conference.
I do suspect but can’t prove that climategate played a role. Scientists in other fields I think took it seriously and they are sometimes in charge of conference agendas, not the team. They also generally tend to be influential on a personal level with their friends and colleagues.
Well the scientists I have listened to got the message. they dont want to stick their tender parts in another light socket. If they listen to Joshua and Mann they will.
Well put, steven, but I would add for Joshua:
Caution! That hole in the sand you are about to stick your head in has got a buried hot light socket inside it.
As I see it, the problem with the IPCC is that it has got the fundamental physics of how the atmosphere works, just plain wrong. It is comparatively easy to show that as we add more CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels, this disturbs the radiative balance of the atmosphere. However, the physics presented by the IPCC that claims that one can estimate the change in surface temperature as a result of this change in radiative balance, is just plain wrong. Various people have looked at this issue from different angles, and have all come to the same conclusion.
So the IPCC has not established that adding more CO2 causes anything more that a negligible effect of surface temperatures. And the hard data that has been collected shows that there is no detectable signal from adding CO2, which can be distinguished from the noise of natural variations.
The IPCC doesn’t come up with any physics, they report on it.
No climate model backs up your claim. If the fundamental physics didn’t show significnat warming from a doubling of CO2 then climate models wouldn’t show it either.
I don’t know that it’s a “myth.”
But I do tend to question someone’s analysis of science when they make conclusions about causation without supplying evidence that proves their conclusion.
If it is a matter of simply not providing evidence of causation that exists, that’s one thing – easily remedied by providing the evidence.
But repeatedly making facile conclusions when there isn’t sufficient supporting evidence does not exactly qualify as a “skeptical” approach to science, IMO.
That doesn’t follow. If the assumption that CO2 causes warming is built into models, that’s what they’ll feed back. Is it? I dunno. I’ve actually read some of the papers describing how the models handle feedback parameters, and I still dunno.
Prof. Curry mentioned “circularities” in Curry & Webster (2011), perhaps this was one of those circularities they meant.
No such assumption is built into models.
@lolwot…
You haven’t exactly demonstrated an understanding of the GCM’s that justifies that assertion. If Professor Curry says it, I’ll believe it. If Michael Tobis says it, I’ll accept it provisionally, with a grain of salt. When you say it, I just blow it off. I don’t even ask for ref’s, because you’d probably just waste my time with something irrelevant.
I am just telling you a fact – no assumption that CO2 causes warming is built into models. There’s no code in there fudging it. The warming follows from the physics and theory, which are implemented to the best of available knowledge.
The reason why all models from simple to complex, to old to recent, show significant warming from CO2 is because any competent job implementing available knowledge into a model results in a model that exhibits that result.
Like the “fact” that humans are evolved from “ape like ancestors”? Spare me.
Australopithecus are ape-like.
Riiiiight. I doubt that’s what most people would think of when you say ape. I mistrust your semantic games, so I need to see proper peer-reviewed documentation behind your assertions. And even then, there’s plenty of peer-reviewed junk out there.
And just what are the parameters controlling cloud “feedbacks” in, for instance, CCSM4? Why does it fail to replicate the observed non-response to two volcanoes? (Gent et al. 2011)
Gent, P.R., G. Danabasoglu, L.J. Donner, M.M Holland, E.C. Hunke, S.R. Jayne, D.M. Lawrence, R.B. Neale, P.J. Rasch, M. Vertenstein, P.H. Worley, Z.L. Yang, M. Zhang (2011) The Community Climate System Model Version 4. J. Clim., doi: 10.1175/2011JCLI4083.1 Draft
lolwot, the climate models show what they are programmed to show. Nothing more, nothing less. GIGO.
Max
The modelers for the most part cannot control what the models end up showing. The models are built from knowledge about how the climate works on small scales. What emerges from that at large scales is largely out of the control of the modelers.
The output just happens to show a doubling of CO2 causes significant warming. And that’s a robust result. Doesn’t matter whether you use simple models or GCM level models, they all show that.
lolwat you write “The output just happens to show a doubling of CO2 causes significant warming. And that’s a robust result”
I challenge that. The climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 doe not come from the GCMs. It comes from an estimation, called the “Plank” method, which assumes that “the atmospheric structure and all other factors remain fixed”.. In other words it assumes the lapse rate does not change. There is no justification for this assumption anywhere in the peer reviewed literature, and so far as I can tell, it is just plain wrong. So there is no physics to support the idea that doubling CO2 will cause a change of 1.2 C in surface temperature, without feedbacks. That is the crucial estimation, and there is no proper physics to justify it..
The output just happens to show a doubling of CO2 causes significant warming.
So, models that were designed to examine climate based on the notion that Arrhenius was correct (and yet ignoring Svensmark) seem to presume CO2 as a primary modulated by feedback mechanisms and just happen to show warming as CO2 increases.
Astonishing.
Who knew?
climate sensitivity does come from GCMs.
Yes, feedbacks are built into the code.
“So, models that were designed to examine climate based on the notion that Arrhenius was correct (and yet ignoring Svensmark)”
The model is built up from small scale processes, which includes knowledge of how CO2 absorbs infrared. That knowledge is not dependent on Arrhenius being correct. It’s dependent on modern observations of CO2 absorption properties being correct.
A cosmic ray cloud affecting mechanism hasn’t been demonstrated yet so there’s no way it can go into climate models. If we didn’t understand anything about CO2 absorption that wouldn’t be able to go into models either.
Also cosmic rays would represent an additional forcing, not a feedback. So it wouldn’t affect climate sensitivity or the effects of doubling CO2.
climate sensitivity does come from GCMs.
Which of course have pinpointed cloud feedback effects to 99.99999’% certainty.
well no, but then that’s part of the reason why climate sensitivity from models is uncertain. There’s a range, not a specific value.
Which are full of fudge factors, mystery parameters, and who knows what external feeds representing “best guesses” of external forcings. The very act of parameterization builds in the assumption that these “parameters” are constants, when there’s not really any good reason to think they are. AFAIK.
“Which are full of fudge factors, mystery parameters, and who knows what external feeds representing “best guesses” of external forcings. The very act of parameterization builds in the assumption that these “parameters” are constants, when there’s not really any good reason to think they are. AFAIK.”
So do all the models by chance contain the same fudge factors and mystery parameters? What stops a modeling team from doing it right without fudging it?
@lolwot…
AFAIK (and I admit I haven’t been able to dig through the peer-reviewed literature to verify it), the parameters are chosen so as to make the model do what it’s expected to do. Different parameters working in different ways for different models, but even as late as IPCC AR4 the CCSM3, for instance, was trained on the 20th century. That is, it was set up with its parameters tweaked to duplicate the 20th century relationship between CO2 and climate (AFAIK). It was unable to duplicate 1870 without fudge factors. (Gent et al. 2011) CCSM4, hopefully to be used for IPCC AR5, was trained on 1850 and ended up unable to duplicate the 20th century, especially the period from 2000 – 2005. (Gent et al. 2011)
As for doing it without parameters (including fudge factors): The models can’t duplicate reality!
Ref:
Gent, P.R., G. Danabasoglu, L.J. Donner, M.M Holland, E.C. Hunke, S.R. Jayne, D.M. Lawrence, R.B. Neale, P.J. Rasch, M. Vertenstein, P.H. Worley, Z.L. Yang, M. Zhang (2011) The Community Climate System Model Version 4. J. Clim., doi: 10.1175/2011JCLI4083.1
I am using a data-driven approach and modeling from first principles to see how far I can get in duplicating changes in our environment. I made a start in the link on my handle, but I am working it again from scratch with everything documented in a series of blog posts at http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/
My initial thrust is getting the CO2 rise well explained. I use a first-principles derivation for the CO2 diffusional sequestration described here:
1. http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2011/09/derivation-of-maxent-diffusion-applied.html
2. http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2011/09/missing-carbon.html
of which I applied it to fossil fuel emissions and modeled the Mauna Loa rise here with a convolution-based approach:
3. http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2011/09/fat-tail-impulse-response-of-co2.html
The only adaptable parameters were baseline CO2, which I took as 290 PPM and a single parameter disordered diffusion coefficient.
What I also gather is that some of the CO2 rise is caused by a warming of the global temperatures, which I documented here with a control-systems-based proportional-derivative model:
4. http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2011/09/sensitivity-of-global-temperature-to.html
After identifying a convincing cross-correlation ent , I measured that the rate of change of CO2 concentration with temperature anomaly is about 1 PPM per degree change.
Since we have reliable temperature records from as far back as 1850, I could integrate the temperature anomaly and estimate the CO2 rise forcing function due to positive temperature feedback effects.
This time I modeled an impulse response function which matched the IPCC Bern CC/TAR standard (http://unfccc.int/resource/brazil/carbon.html) very accurately.
The results are documented in this post from last night:
5. http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2011/10/temperature-induced-co2-release-adds-to.html
So I used a single parameter that matches the standard IPCC impulse response and a single parameter for the baseline CO2, 290 PPM. Everything else is data driven or comes from solid first-principles physics modeling (i.e. Fokker-Planck, convolution, conservation of matter). The leap that I made in the latest model is that I assume that an elevated global temperature anomaly will cause a continuous outgassing of CO2, following Henry’s Law and until the ocean catches up with the temperature. Since the ocean is slow to respond, the CO2 releases corresponding to the temperature change and stays in the atmosphere for the adjustment time just as fossil fuel emissions do.
Climate sensitivity is estimated by various methods.
1. Long term paleo: LGM about 3C
2. Observations: volcano response, modern temperature record etc
3. models
4. Shorter term paleo
The spread is really big. but it aint lower than 1C.
You are missing the point. Steve Mosher has it right. Look a the Paul Williams presentation. There are large numerical errors in the models and there is some effort to address that, but I’d be careful about assuming that the models are within a factor of 2 of the real system.
I tried to get some responses on RC on this issue. I hate to say it, but I’m not sure they understood the issues. I saw that some people who do understand are trying to improve the models, but there was a reluctance to say what the literature clearly shows regarding the errors. Anyway, at that point, the hyenas moved in and started the attacks. I now know how it feels to be a sceptic in this community. It must be very discouraging to be in this field.
The IPCC is interesting: when they get caught making mistakes, they are never significant.
Even though there is obvious conflicts of interest at many levels, no one does anything about them, and the reports are somehow still credible.
The IPCC does no research, but they are cliamed to be the gold standard.
the IPCC is controlled by a very small number of people and is demonstrated to skew its results and work, but the AGw community holds it out as infallible.
The Catholics could learn how to rebrand the Church’s authority from this.
“The IPCC doesn’t come up with any physics, they report on it.”
Lets see.. wanna bet? its a climategate issue.. Jones and Trenberth invented stuff to counter Ross McKittricks paper out of whole cloth.
We can go down that rabbit hole if you like. You wont like the smell.
Guess the author.. no googling allowed
“These restrictions are, to some degree mutually exclusive, so trying to apply them
simultaneously leads to the very problems that have engendered criticism of IPCC
assessments. For example, it is logically impossible to avoid subjectivity when developing
conclusions from the deliberations of small groups of experts. The biases inherent in such
activities, and attempts to overcome them, are so well documented that, by ignoring this
literature (Morgan and Henrion 1990; see Morgan paper this issue), IPCC itself offends the
principles on which its work supposedly stands”
…
The restriction against original research is inherently impossible to uphold while at the
same time avoiding subjective judgments. The reality is that the literature is full of gaps and
it is simply not possible to provide a meaningful assessment without occasionally
attempting to fill those gaps. Even the very act of organizing an assessment frequently
creates a new conceptual framing of an important issue or topic; and so a new assessment
is, in itself, a new contribution to the literature. For example, recall the following examples:
…
The partial (and largely unsuccessful) attempt by WGI to estimate potential changes in the
dynamical ice sheet contribution to sea level rise in the AR4 (IPCC 2007d). The final result
has confused users and scientists alike and confounded the application of AR4 sea level
rise scenarios to subsequent assessments of risk to coastal zones around the world for
years. (Oppenheimer et al. 2007; Nicholls et al. 2011)
Exactly right. The problem is the politizatino of this issue by the likes of Mann, Trenberth, and Jones. I see Mann is giving a political talk at the meeting in Minneapolis this coming week asking who “has the back” of climate scientists. I think the answer to this question is “obvious to the most casual observer.”
I’m sorry, but “trust”? Why on earth would anyone trust a political organisation? You watch this sort of quango very carefully, and if they say “water is wet” you get it independently verified…
Trust, but verify; then stop trusting or be shamed.
========
The IPCC reports summarize well the state of knowledge in the field.
It’s that state of knowledge that deniers have a problem with.
This really is a case of shooting the messenger.
lolwot
If the “messenger” has been shown to “skew” the “state of knowledge” in order to get his personal “message” across, he deserves to be “shot”.
Max
AR4 is the best report out there conveying the recent state of knowledge about the climate. Skeptics don’t like that knowledge, so they go after the messenger. Scrapping the IPCC is really censoring the inconvenient science.
er, no. Some skeptics want both. Doesn’t mean it’s the same.
“AR4 is the best report out there conveying the recent state of knowledge about the climate.”
lolwot, what all of us non-Warmers understand is that you have no experience or knowledge that informs you of what the state of the science is. You can’t tell if any report is good, bad, or insignificant. Yet you act like you know something.
Andrew
Suggest you read the report of the IAC Review of IPCC’s processes and procedures. The body of this report is the most damning documentation of malfeasance I have seen in 25 years of government employment.
http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/report.html
AR4 is the best report out there conveying the recent state of knowledge about the climate
This would be the ‘state of knowedge’ based on hiding data, hiding declines, pal-review, refusal of FOI, all buttressed by phoney investigations of Climategate. Makes astrology seem rock-solid, and ponzi schemes pure innocence.
Those are just excuses. The fact is that AR4 WG1 is a fine document conveying current knowledge of different climate subjects in the field.
This is very educational for example:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-1-1.html
and this, all the recent changes in gases in the atmosphere:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-3.html
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Find me a report that goes into that much detail at a layman level to summarize the field. In fact find me a report that does that for *any* scientific field.
Right, so to get to the truth it is necesasry to ignore the following piffling se ‘excuses’
– hiding data
– hiding declines
– pal-review
– refusal of FOI
– phoney investigations of Climategate.
In that case. I have a not-to-be-missed special on snake oil, ends Friday.
Get a grip lolwot.
like I said those are excuses. Refusal of FOI has nothing to do with the IPCC report for example.
Here’s some more IPCC report, what’s so wrong with this that it must be scrapped:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-2-2-2.html
or this:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-2-2-3.html
Lolwot: So refusing to believe someone who has been shown to be lying to you, is just an ‘excuse’ now ? And to you, an ‘excuse’ is a rational reason you do not want to accept.
How can those reports you mentionbe trusted, if we know the authors have no moral scruples, and are just working towards some politically correct conclusion, no matter what the facts. Given their overall dishonesty, how can we know what inconvenient truths they have conveniently left out or hidden ?
I’d like to clear up some misinformation from lolwot:
One of the most famous e-mails found in the Climategate dossier is from Phil Jones where he requests the deletion of e-mails currently subject to an FOI request. That request was specifically tailored to cover secret communication between Keith Briffa and Eugene Wahl outside the official IPCC channels which was used to modify the IPCC AR4 to be more favorable to Wahl’s work.
Contrary to what lolwot would have you believe, the refusal to properly handle FOI requests does have something to do with the IPCC report.
The Climategate emails summarize the ethics of the IPCC far better than the IPCC summarizes the “state of knowledge”:
Michael Mann to Phil Jones: “it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back.”
– http://www.di2.nu/foia/1054736277.txt
Jones to Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (MBH) – “PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !”
http://www.di2.nu/foia/1109021312.txt
Yea, I suggest you look up Lindzen’s eye witness testimony about how the “summary” is arrived at. “Trenberth came around to the head of our chapter and started complaining. Ray PierreHumbert had to defend his environmental credentials and was shaking. And I believe he like me did not participate in the 4th.” This is not science!!
The IPCC is much, much more than messenger. As part of the UN its central mission is to push CAGW, which it does by carefully selecting what does and does not go into its reports.
So forget messeger of science. It deserves to shot as a traitor or deserter.
no it’s central mission is not to “push CAGW”.
It’s funny how you fellers just feel you can make stuff up while bemoaning gold standards of others.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. How about the scandals in AR4? The Himalayan glaciers will be gone in 30 years. That’s just totally wrong and if that’s the “summary” of the science, its rather strange.
No [the IPCC’s] central mission is not to “push CAGW”.
Oh, right – like the UN’s central mission isn’t to push central governance. Which CAGW doesn’t argue for anyway.
Is this going to be like how it’s impossible to win an argument with Alex Jones?
lolwot, what reason do I have to give your views any credance?
From the 14th meeting (of UNEP?) on 17 June 1987.
From WMO resolution 4, 1988 (?). My bolding. Make of it what you will, or better yet, do your own research, and provide links and excerpts, rather than just throwing “facts” around.
I found the links above at the IPCC site, here.
Rik Meucci
Well said, though you go not far enough, and no doubt lament much of the commentary of those souls who believe they are agreeing with you.
Trust is not a positive value in science. It is not earned, nor treasured, sought after nor useful.
Science advances by the funerals of the trusted.
The sooner any science body earns distrust, the better it has done the work of public relations that inspires independent verification and validation.
Skepticism — evenhanded, complete, plodding, eager ever to say “a plague on both your houses,” guided by reason, elements of mathematical understanding, and the humility to accept that some things may never be knowable — that is the right approach to all science.
As to political organizations.. why listen in the first place to what they say?
Listen to what is said of real things, and then in passing if you happen to come across political reaction, commentary or spin, take it into account if it is of any value, but if you don’t know water to be wet by the time you are hearing it from politicians, you’ve been leading a sheltered life of ignorance.
Which is pretty much the gauge of the sort of people who allow themselves to be led by their political organs.
Which would be why I tend to reject the assertion of a predominantly political nature of the IPCC — .the interpreters and critics, handlers and commentators, sure, they’re political, but the output of the IPCC includes statements I can independently verify and validate, and take or leave as I deem by objective measure based in science.
Since I already take nothing on trust, I — or any real skeptic — just can’t trust those who call anti-scientifically for a trusted authority of their choosing to replace the IPCC.
Exactly. Trust. Faith. Belief. These can be dirty words where science (or software) is concerned.
Every finding should be verified, tested to destruction (if possible). Doubt is your friend :-).
Given the IPCC’s dogged resistance to both integrity and change, it should without any doubt be summarily defunded and scrapped. This can be done independently of devising one or more replacements.
As a professional scientist but not a professional climatologist, my understanding of the field has come about through a grounding in basic sources combined with a dedicated following of the literature on a monthly basis. This has allowed me to become knowledgeable in the subject without reaching the expertise level of those who do climate science for a living. My education has been little based on the IPCC, whose reports I began to read only after I already knew something about the subject.
Viewing the IPCC from this perspective, my own conclusion is twofold. First, the IPCC has been an extraordinarily valuable resource to the international community that needs to be maintained and improved rather than marginalized or scrapped. Second, and probably more importantly, most of the reliable contributions have come from WG1, whereas WG2 and WG3 have suffered from significant problems that warrant a re-evaluation to determine how they can be recalibrated to more dependably serve public needs.
WG1 is of course the group reporting on the scientific basis underlying climate change. Having read its reports from a background of independent understanding, I have found them to be accurate and informative in almost all respects. This is not to say that no parts have been controversial. In AR4, for example, questions have been raised about the shape of pdfs chosen as Bayesian priors in probabilistic estimates of climate sensitivity, but these are judgment issues rather than examples of misinformation. A recent thread here also linked to an issue of Climatic Change discussing how uncertainty can be better addressed in AR5, but it would be a mistake to assert that uncertainty has been neglected in AR4. In my view, there have been some tendencies by critics to overstate uncertainty, but again these are judgments that can be dealt with professionally. (The TAR, of course, suffered from the hockey stick controversy and the failure of some of the leading participants to adhere to appropriate standards of professional conduct, but AR4 is not similarly tainted). All in all, the many thousands of individual conclusions that have emanated from WG1 provide an excellent overview of climate change science in my view. I believe that disagreements on WG1 conclusions should be devoted to individual items rather than sweeping generalizations. Equally important, such disagreements, to deserve serious attention, should come from individuals with detailed knowledge of the science. If that happens, I hope WG1 authors will pay heed.
I believe that WG2 and WG3 are where the main problems lie. If the IPCC is to be significantly changed rather than merely refined, it is here that the changes should be made. These include much better documentation of the basis for conclusions, particularly those not derivable from the peer-reviewed literature. They also include more scrupulous devotion to objectivity so as to balance findings in one direction with those of equal merit in a different direction. This has been particularly important for WG3 assessments of mitigation strategies that have often appeared to represent idealized rather than realistic scenarios. I make these statements about WG2 and WG3, however, based on comments from others who seem well informed in these areas, because my own understanding is much less here than it is on the scientific basis covered by WG1.
My overall suggestion then is that a discussion of IPCC reform should separate approaches to WG1 (which can be improved but needn’t be radically restructured) from those directed to WG2 and WG3, which may require a more severe revision.
Fred
It’s nice to know that there is still at least one loyal “believer” in the IPCC.
Max
Fred, you write “WG1 is of course the group reporting on the scientific basis underlying climate change. Having read its reports from a background of independent understanding, I have found them to be accurate and informative in almost all respects.”
I find this interesting. I have read the WG1 repors, and I find the physics to be absolute garbage in the really vital parts; e.g. the estimation of climate sensitivity from change in radiative forcing. I suppose that is what makes the ball game.
But Fred’s right about this part:
Whatever WG1 may be, it only goes downhill from there.
Fred Moolten, it would help if you didn’t make bold statements without having the knowledge to justify them. You say:
This is nonsense. In actuality, AR4 has more known issues of what you refer to than the TAR (whether because it is worse or the increased scrutiny I don’t know). For example, in the TAR, the hockeystick was given undue attention due to self-promotion by the authors of it, but at least one could argue the work wasn’t known to be wrong. That defense cannot be used for what happened with the hockeystick In the AR4. Again, self-promotion was a problem, but now reviewer comments were made which raised issues, and often were completely disregarded (or responded to with false claims). For example, when a reviewer (Steve McIntyre) said adverse data should not be omitted from a graph, his comment was rejected with nothing more than:
Adverse data was willfully withheld with no more explanation than it would be “inappropriate to show” it. For an issue not regarding reviewer comments, we can look at what I consider one of the most ridiculous issues regarding the IPCC, one which few people who support the IPCC (if any) have condemned. After the final round of reviews for the AR4, text discussing work by Steve McIntyre was significantly changed in order to be more favorable to the “Team,” a change not suggested by any reviewer comment. This change was based entirely upon the work of Wahl and Amman.
So how did the change happen? Keith Briffa, lead author of the chapter, was in secret communication with Eugene Wahl in direct subversion of IPCC guidelines, and he used the suggestions of Wahl to change the IPCC report to be more favorable to Wahl’s work. Later, when David Holland filed an FOI request which would cover this communication, Phil Jones sent his now infamous e-mail requesting the deletion of e-mails which were subject to a current FOI request, in direct violation of the law.
There is a lot more to that story, and there are other stories, but my point here is simple. I have no idea what makes you claim the AR4 “is not similarly tainted” by “the failure of some of the leading participants to adhere to appropriate standards,” but it is not any sort of actual knowledge. Even the slightest familiarity with the controversies surrounding the IPCC should be enough for anyone to know your claim is false.
If you want anyone to agree with your attempts to defend the IPCC, you are going to have to admit obvious truths rather than hand-wave them away.
Brandon – I don’t know what has happened to you in your personal life over the past few months, and it’s none of my business, except that it has affected your participation in this blog. At one time, it was my impression that you made substantive comments. In recent months, you have substituted disparaging remarks about others (many others, mostly not including me), the substance has disappeared, and many of your comments have simply been wrong or devoted to quibbles about peripheral issues. Your comment above isn’t really responsive to my earlier comments, which focused almost entirely on the scientific validity of WG1. Whether there were still issues about temperature records of the past millennium is peripheral to that point, but they were more of a TAR problem than an AR4 problem, because the the concept was more central. AR4 scientific validity was not significantly affected, regardless of what one thinks about judgments made by individuals about how the temperature record should be handled. Whether you approve or not, that is why I believe it’s reasonable to consider TAR more tainted by the hockey stick issue. In other words, it’s about whether the WG1 report offered an accurate picture of the science. The answer is yes, with minor exceptions.
I hope you reconsider the way you participate in this blog if you want once again to make useful contributions.
Fred Moolten, your response here is nonsensical. Before I get to that though, I want to address something. If you, or anyone else, is interested in my personal life, I’m happy to discuss it. However, it hasn’t affected (or at least, hasn’t changed) how I post on here at all. I am posting in the exact same manner as I ever would. Intentional or not, you are simply making things up. It’s peculiar, and I’d be interested in discussing it further. If that’s not acceptable to you, I have to ask you to stop saying these things. I don’t mind criticisms, but if you’re going to level criticisms against me, I deserve the opportunity to answer them. Otherwise, you’re just insulting me. I’ve directly disputed this same point when you’ve raised it before, and you refused to engage me on it then. I hope you won’t do the same now.
With that said, let’s turn to your response. You say:
This is a nonsensical remark. It doesn’t matter what your comment was “focused almost entirely on.” I responded to one specific thing you said in it. Whether or not it was part of the main thrust of your comment, it is something you said, and it was perfectly appropriate for me to respond to it. You also say:
Whether or not the AR4 WG1 “offered an accurate picture of the science” in general has no bearing on what I responded to, or what I said. I responded, very specifically, to this comment of yours:
I seem to be incapable of using blockquote tags properly, and I don’t know why. Sorry for messing that up.
Brandon – I think the tone of your recent postings has been altered by something – whether your personal life or something else I can’t know – and the comments are more combative but less credible than previously. Everything else I have to say is already stated in my earlier comment. If you have something useful to contribute about the scientific validity of AR4 WG1 beyond a repetition of how that particular temperature curve was handled, that would be of interest. I find the value of WG1 scientific assessments to be an important element of the IPCC process, and I have no reason not to repeat my conclusion that those scientific assessments are highly accurate, regardless of disagreements on individual points.
Fred Moolten, this exchange started when you made this comment:
I responded by discussing examples which showed a “failure of some of the leading participants [of the IPCC AR4] to adhere to appropriate standards of professional conduct.” I indicated these examples made your comment unsupportable. This was a clear and simple disagreement. You said one thing, and I directly responded by saying why (I felt) you were wrong.
Your response to me did not address this simple disagreement. You did not attempt to show my interpretation of your words was wrong. You did not indicate any errors in the logic I used within my comment. Instead, you said was my comment was non-responsive. You claimed my response to you did not address the main point of your comment, an irrelevant point as my response was directed at one specific remark you had made, not your comment as a whole. You also made a comment which seemed to indicate your initial remark did not say what you had meant it to say.
I responded again, explaining the above. After showing your response did not address the actual disagreement we were having, I showed how said disagreement could have stemmed from nothing but faulty wording on your part. Having made the situation quite clear, I offered to admit being wrong if you could show such.
You’ve now responded by ignoring what I said. Your latest response in no way addresses anything I said on the subject of our disagreement. Instead, you’ve chosen to avoid engaging me on an issue after making false claims. In doing so, you let those false claims stand. Given what I know of your intelligence, I can only see this as dishonesty on your part. Either you are somehow deluding yourself into thinking you’ve suitably addressed the disagreement we’re having, or you are knowingly refusing to retract false claims. I do not make claims of dishonesty lightly, but I do not see any explanation which is more favorable (if someone offers me one, I’d be happy to go with it instead).
If things are left as they stand, there is no point in continuing this exchange. The disagreement is simple for any readers to understand it, and you’ve indicated you won’t make any effort to resolve it. Given this, I can see no room for progress. As for the issue of me and my personal life, you’ve offered nothing but vague remarks completely unsupported by anything, and I’ve denied those. I find them offensive, and since you apparently won’t engage me in any real discussion, you’re doing nothing more than repeatedly attacking my credibility without any basis.
I think it’s unfortunate things have reached this point, but they have, and there is nothing I can do about it. I’m still open to a reasonable discussion about our disagreement, but unless you change your behavior, that won’t be possible.
there is no point in continuing this exchange
I’m glad we agree.
This non-exchange exemplifies the debate. Fred ducks. Brandon wins.
David Wojick, all it takes to win an argument is to refuse to admit mistakes, refuse to address what your critics say, and level baseless criticisms at any who dare disagree with you. Fred Moolten is just taking his cues from the playbook of the IPCC and related parties.
Obviously it’s a good idea. I mean, it’s worked so well so far.
Brandon Shollenberger 10/07/11, 4:17 pm, IPCC discussion
Fred Moolten 10/7/11, 6:05 pm, wrote,
FM: Brandon – I don’t know what has happened to you in your personal life over the past few months, and it’s none of my business, except that it has affected your participation in this blog. At one time, it was my impression that you made substantive comments. In recent months, you have substituted disparaging remarks about others (many others, mostly not including me), the substance has disappeared, and many of your comments have simply been wrong or devoted to quibbles about peripheral issues. Your comment above isn’t really responsive to my earlier comments, which focused almost entirely on the scientific validity of WG1.
Here’s a second opinion. Nothing adverse can be deduced about your personal life from your writings. Your criticism of Fred’s post of 10/6/11 at 4:26 pm was accurate, and reserved. You might have gone even further. Specifically, IPCC neither retracted nor removed Mann’s Hockey Stick in AR4, as FM wrongly suggests.
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2010/03/_res/AR4_F6_10b.jpg
IPCC retained the original Hockey Stick, but buried it in a manufactured spaghetti graph. This was an unconscionable and unprofessional attempt by IPCC to make Mann’s Hockey Stick appear to be as good as any of the contemporary reductions, suitable for showing modern warming is unprecedented and caused by man.
Mann’s reduction is quantitatively different. The average of the other 11 reductions show a weak Medieval Warming Period and some signs of a weak, shortened, and delayed Little Ice Age. The signal-to-noise ratio in Mann’s reduction is so poor that he could not detect either of these major climatic events. The others do, tending to validate that the tree ring method actually contains some temperature signal.
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2010/03/_res/MUX11.jpg
IPCC failed to detect the weak signal in the data set, but it routinely fails to detect signals in its data (e.g., solubility effects in atmospheric CO2, and the puny climate signals in the El Niño/La Niña events, have a profound effect on humanity, and in Svensmark’s solar wind/GCR model.). IPCC authors fail to demonstrate the most rudimentary skills in signal analysis. Instead of using the other reductions constructively, IPCC shifted their means and scaled their variances to mask Mann’s work, and to justify retaining it.
These traces also show that IPCC blended data from its proxy sources into the modern instrument record. It created similar hockey sticks for methane, nitrous oxide, and sulphate.
http://rocketscientistsjournal.com/2010/03/_res/TAR%20SPM%20chem%20hockey%20F2p6.jpg
http://rocketscientistsjournal.com/2010/03/_res/AR4_FSPM_1_hockey_sticksp3.jpg
http://rocketscientistsjournal.com/2010/03/_res/AR4_F6_4p448_GHG_hockey.jpg
Expecting measurements of the same quantities from differing instruments and proxies to match is incompetent. To calibrate them to match is problematic, and deceitful if the calibrations are not made public and obvious to the reader. To show only the result of dry-labbing (arithmetically blending) data from different sources into a smooth result is fraud. These manufactured diagrams are not to solve the riddle of climate, but to fool the public into thinking the impossible: that man is dangerously altering climate. It is all directed to weaken economically successful nations, to dislodge grant money, and for personal power and recognition.
Such actions by a contractor for the US government are likely to result in jail time. No such restrictions burden government and university laboratories. Fred Moolten’s claim that AR4 is not similarly tainted is preposterous. Every IPCC author should recognize these methods as deceitful, unprofessional, and unethical.
What you attributed to me, Jeff, is inaccurate. There are also other factual inaccuracies in your statement regarding the science itself that have been addressed in response to previous comments in this blog.
Fred Moolten 10/08/11, 12:40 pm, IPCC discussion
FM: What you attributed to me, Jeff, is inaccurate. There are also other factual inaccuracies in your statement … .
For example?
Empty accusations suffice for nothing.
I’m not going to touch on most of what you discuss, but for the record, I don’t agree with your usage of “fraud” here. While you may have an argument for their approach being wrong, perhaps seriously so, there is nothing to support calling it a fraud.
As for the disagreement Fred and I had over the IPCC AR4, you are right to suggest there is much more I could have said. As your first link shows, the IPCC had no problem including MBH’s graph in the AR4, but it’s even worse in this figure. In that figure, one of the eight proxies displayed is MBH’s PC1, despite the fact it is known to be flawed. In fact, the NAS panel explicitly said it shouldn’t be used, but the IPCC used it anyway. It’s as though the IPCC just didn’t care what anyone thought. I remember reading Steve Mcintyre’s blog post about this when he first posted it, and it was then I gave up on the IPCC.
Anyway, this is all a sideshow (as are all the other things I didn’t discuss) if I’ve interpreted Fred Moolten’s contradictory comments correctly. It would seem his view is the hockey stick didn’t matter as much for the AR4, so therefore any corruption or misbehavior involved in it wouldn’t matter much. Of course, this isn’t what he originally said, at all, but that apparently doesn’t matter to him. As for me, I don’t see how one can seriously argue the flagrant dishonesty and stupidity shown in chapter six of the AR4 is unimportant. If the first section of the IPCC report which received much scrutiny had that many issues, why would anyone to believe the rest was fine?
In the same way, can anyone honestly tell me they read the exchange between Fred and I and came away thinking Fred was a trustworthy source? If he posts comments which are that irrational/dishonest/whatever, and he stands by them, doesn’t it make you pause and wonder every time you read anything from him?
Brandon Shollenberger 10/08/11, 4:31 pm, IPCC discussion
BS: I don’t agree with your usage of “fraud” here. While you may have an argument for their approach being wrong, perhaps seriously so, there is nothing to support calling it a fraud.
Fraud. An intentional perversion of truth for the purpose of inducing another in reliance upon it to part with some valuable thing belonging to him or to surrender a legal right. Black’s Law Dictionary, 6th Ed.
Human’s have had no measurable effect on climate, a truth IPCC perverted, for example, but not exclusively, with regard to human emissions of CO2, NO2, S2O, and CH4. It did so by calibrations, smoothing, shifting and scaling of data, and arithmetically altering data, all in secret and all intentional, so that different ancient sources for these gas concentrations in the atmosphere would blend together with modern instrument data, suggesting that the present concentrations were unprecedented, and hence attributable to humans since the industrial era and the introduction of modern instruments.
IPCC addressed their perversion to “PolicyMakers” in various governments so that they would cut back their use of fossil fuels, a thing of value, and to surrender their right to the prosperity gained from exploitation of those fuels.
You may not agree that human’s have no measurable effect on climate, but if so, that would be your lack of knowledge. Earth’s climate, as measured by IPCC’s best estimate of global surface temperature, follows IPCC’s best solar model with an accuracy comparable to IPCC’s best smoothed estimate for global surface temperature over the entire 140 year history of thermometers. Click on my name for the analysis. Human’s obviously have not affected the Sun very much.
On the other hand, perhaps you have an IPCC-friendly definition of fraud. Won’t you share it?
Oh, I forgot to mention something Jeff Glassman. You are wrong to say Fred Moolten suggested the IPCC “retracted [or] removed Mann’s Hockey Stick in AR4.” He didn’t do that.
I imagine this is what he was calling inaccurate about your comment, but since you attributed several things to him, and his response to you was rather oblique, it’s hard to be sure.
Brandon Shollenberger 10/08/11, 4:36 pm, IPCC discussion
BS: Oh, I forgot to mention something Jeff Glassman. You are wrong to say Fred Moolten suggested the IPCC “retracted [or] removed Mann’s Hockey Stick in AR4. He didn’t do that.
I imagine this is what he was calling inaccurate about your comment, but since you attributed several things to him, and his response to you was rather oblique, it’s hard to be sure.
FM: (The TAR, of course, suffered from the hockey stick controversy and the failure of some of the leading participants to adhere to appropriate standards of professional conduct, but AR4 is not similarly tainted). 10/6/11, 4:28 pm; quoted by Brandon Shollenberger! 10/7/11, 4:17 pm.
What exactly is Fred Moolten suggesting here? He says the TAR was tainted by A (the Mann’s Hockey Stick) AND B (professional misconduct), but not AR4. So AR4 has the property of either ~A OR ~B. It couldn’t be ~B because the same professionals, guilty of professional misconduct in time for the TAR, contributed again to AR4 (e.g., Phil Jones, Mann, Briffa appear for both Reports), and they could not be rehabilitated by anything said or done in AR4. Therefore, Fred Moolten SUGGESTS (he can’t quite be definite) AR4 was not tainted by the appearance of Mann’s Hockey Stick. IPCC must have removed or retracted it.
In fact, IPCC did neither. IPCC preserved it and falsely masked it, all to emphasize it.
Your imagination has run wild. Moolten’s suggestion is plain on its face.
Jeff – I doubt that too many people are paying attention to this, but as I already mentioned, you misrepresented me. My main point, made much earlier, is that AR4 WG1 is a valuable resource that provides an accurate picture of the state of climate science, despite a few areas of controversy, while WG2 and WG3 are less commendable. Of the few problem areas in WG1, the most significant in my view for accurate scientific interpretation is the choice of the shape of pdfs used as Bayesian priors for climate sensitivity estimates, but this is a judgment issue rather than a case of identifiable error. Any concerns about the hockey stick are trivial by comparison and were peripheral to the point I was making.
Regarding the hockey stick, AR4 has appropriately given it much less emphasis than the TAR – this is appropriate because a small Northern Hemisphere temperature difference between now and one thousand years ago is of very marginal scientific interest. This removed an important vulnerability that characterized the TAR. AR4 also conceded that because of the divergence between proxy and recent measured data, proxy data from earlier times could legitimately be questioned as well. This statement in AR4 has not always been acknowledged by critics, but it further reduced the significance of the issue – again appropriately. Those who claim that curve itself should have been redrawn are correct, in my view, but I also believe the entire controversy had been relegated to a low consequence event by then. Ironically, the significant overhyping of the HS associated with the TAR was matched by overhyping by critics later, when deficiencies in the process came to light along with evidence for inappropriate interference in the process by Phil Jones and a few others. All of these points are consistent with a view I have held for some time regarding WG1. You are welcome to a different view, but unless I see evidence that other readers want to see this argument continued, I probably won’t respond.
This is hilarious. Fred Moolten just told Jeff Glassman,
And again, I prove I am terrible with blockquotes. Sorry about that. I really don’t know why it keeps happening.
Jeff Glassman, Fred Moolten didn’t say the TAR was tainted because it included Mann’s hockey stick. He said the TAR was tainted by the hockey stick controversy. While related, these are two different things. A report could include Mann’s hockey stick while not being tainted by the controversy (by not supporting it’s results, but perhaps pointing to it as a historical reference). A report could also be tainted by the hockey stick controversy without including Mann’s hockey stick, perhaps by including other papers with the same flaws (such as Mann’s 2008 hockey stick). I know this distinction is small, but it is a real one, not just a product of my imagination.
Of course, given how small the distinction is, one could argue Fred Moolten did suggest what you claim he suggested simply because it would be unreasonable to expect people to catch the distinction. In that case, what you said could be considered accurate, but unclear. I’d have no problem with that position if it’s what you intend, though it isn’t the impression I got from your comment.
Brandon Shollenberger 10/08/11, 7:23 pm, IPCC discussion
BS: Fred Moolten didn’t say the TAR was tainted because it included Mann’s hockey stick. He said the TAR was tainted by the hockey stick controversy.
The TAR, Climate Change 2001, was indeed tainted as you describe, but after the fact. The controversy tainted the TAR only because the TAR not just published but prominently featured Mann’s Hockey Stick. McIntyre and McKitrick exposed and debunked Mann’s opus in November, 2003.
IPCC gave that HS construction top billing among all its work in the TAR. It appears as Figure 1(!) of its Summary for Policy Makers, page 3. It appears as Figure 5 of IPCC’s Technical Summary of WGI, page 29. It appears most completely as Figures 2.20 and 2.21 of TAR Chapter 2, page 134.
IPCC appeared to drop the hockey stick reconstruction, with some discussion in AR4, Climate Change 2007, where IPCC rehabilitated the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. AR4, ¶6.6.1.1 What Do Reconstructions Based on Palaeoclimatic Proxies Show?, page 466, and see Figure 6.10, p. 467. However, as described above, the HS still resides in AR4, validated by making it falsely appear to be unresolvable among 11 other such reconstructions, all of which surge into the modern temperature record, accompanied by the magical disappearance of instrument noise.
Jeff Glassman, I’m not I understand the point of your response here, but it sounds like you’re accepting the distinction I pointed to (and which you originally considered a figment of my imagination). If so, great. If not, I don’t think it’s worth pursuing the point.
For what it’s worth, I do largely agree with what you’ve said in this comment, and I vigorously disagree with what you said in this one. I don’t intend to pursue either issue though, largely because your attitude is obnoxious and the subjects of our disagreement bore me.
Tony Brown,
Before I launch into the discussion and questions you set up so nicely, I thank you for a well written kickoff post.
You made it easy to grab many essential points about the IPCC’s past, present and future.
John
I wrote in February about my thoughts on, how IPCC should change on my own blog.
I concluded that it’s not any more reasonable to publish WG1 material regularly in book form. The activity could be replaced by a web-based continuous process, which would cover literature more widely.
Of the WG2 and WG3 coverage a fraction could follow the same approach, while most should be taken totally off from an organization that has essentially the same nature that IPCC has now, because there’s too little actual science behind those activities. Instead there’s gray literature, which is highly biased, and direct conflicts of interest on many issues.
Pekka
Attempts to rehabilitate IPCC by changing the approach it uses in publishing its reports might once have been a good thing, but they miss the basic point, to which Judith has also alluded in her paper cited on the “uncertainty” thread.
The IPCC “consensus process” has introduced bias in the selection and presentation of the reported science..
Add to this the fact that it is the brief of the IPCC to report on human-induced climate change, its impacts and possible mitigation steps.
Quite logically, if there is no perceptible human effect and no potentially deleterious impact, then there is also no need for any mitigation steps and no need for IPCC to continue its existence.
IOW the premise of potentially alarming human-induced climate change is existential for IPCC.
This has spawned the need for the “consensus process” (i.e. groupthink) and for the bias in this process, which IMO has ultimately been a principal cause for the loss of confidence and trust in IPCC.
Max
Max,
IPCC didn’t initiate the worry about climate change. The basic evidence that led to the worry has a longer history. Nothing has reversed that evidence. People due argue on the strength of the evidence, but it’s most certainly stronger than it was, when IPCC was created. There’s no possibility that anybody could prove now or in foreseeable future that the risk is not real. Thus there’s neither any possibility that an unbiased IPCC would prove that it’s not needed due to that lack of risk. There are uncertainties, but the uncertainties are such that serious damage from AGW is a real possibility.
Political decision makers continue to need information about the climate change. So far IPCC has been the most central provider of that information. If IPCC is dismantled, the governments must find some other method for obtaining that information. That might proceed through several national bodies that collaborate with each other rather than one international IPCC.
My preferred solution would be a different IPCC, where the new continuous process of maintaining a data base on climate related scientific results would be built with a more flexible multilayer set of criteria for the papers to be included. That should be done in such a way that the critical views have a better channel for being voiced. What that would mean in practice requires further work.
The other change would be that areas where real science is seriously immature or totally lacking would be excluded from that model. Science gets mature, when several independent groups have published on closely related issues and in that provided independent verification of earlier work. One single paper that has somehow managed to get published in a peer reviewed journal doesn’t make that and gray literature even less. This means that much of the WG2 could not be written at all.
Similarly should such areas as the development of renewable energy solutions be excluded, because that area is throughout dominated by direct economic conflicts of interest.
Policy issues are very important and should be analyzed by several competent bodies, but that’s again an area that cannot be handled properly by the IPCC model that has been built to apply properly only to relatively mature fields of science not too directly connected to actual decision making. The declared IPCC principle: “policy relevant but not policy prescriptive” cannot be applied to work with a direct connection to policies.
Pekka,
If I understand you correctly, you think that analysis of the policy implications of renewables should not be part of the purview of the IPCC.
How, then, given that such analysis is inherently related to global manifestations of energy consumption, and inherently linked to the scientific analysis of climate change, do you think that such analysis should be organized?
Joshua even supporters of the IPCC have suggested different approches for the science ( WG1) and the other working groups. IN fact I would argue that the new RCPs are designed to divorce the “science” of emissions and energy consumption from the science of climate change. But you won’t know an SRES from an RCP if it hit you in the head. IDJT
Actually, steven, I largely agree with Pekka’s suggestions – and said so earlier in the thread. But don’t let that reality get in the way of your false conclusions about what I do and don’t think, based on your false categorizations of my viewpoint, and false interpretations of my motivations.
Why should you stop with any of that at this point?
My question to him was about how he suggested organizing analysis of the cost and benefits of renewables on a global scale. Try actually reading what I write, next time, before responding.
Joshua-
Pekka’s opinion is succinct and brilliant. Your response is noise pollution. It does not deserve Mosher’s faint praise of (CLVR) IDJT.
To re-cap my read. Pekka establishes that it is sufficient for the IPCC to concern itself with only solid climate science. He asks the speculative question of whether or not the biased claims of renewables companies and supporters qualify as solid science. You ask the rhetorical question: How then does he propose to deal with the scientific analysis of the policy implications concerning the biased claims of renewables companies and their supporters. And you weren’t joking.
Slow down. Your friend, BlueIce.
Pekka
Whoever is doing the publishing, it makes sense to have a continual online asessment process rather than publish a ‘book’ every few years .
tonyb
Right Joshua, just like Climate-gate didn’t weaken the alarmist position in the eyes of the public. Talk about denial.
As to the recommendation that we turn this over to independent scientists in related fields with no particular climate axe to grind, it’s a good idea but it ain’t gonna happen.
In any case, I’m troubled by the premise. In the last analysis I don’t want to be told what to think by some sort of designated science super-committee. When did the notion arise that the public has to be spoon fed information they can go out and get for themselves…?
It seems that you think that claims about causation re: the impact of “Climategate” on significant changes in public opinion are supported by evidence.
Would you mind supplying a link to your evidence?
Joshua has a point in that confidence in the IPCC was already disappearing before Climategate – due eg to comments like Jones’s “Why should I show you my data when I know you’ll just try and find something wrong with it”, ilustrating the the IPCC’s contempt for / ignorance of for the process of science
Actually, Punksta, there were changes in the public view of climate change prior to “Climategate,” and there appear to have been changes subsequent to “Climategate” – the most recent of which suggest greater belief that AGW is taking place. Which is why I”m asking for evidence of causation rather than facile conclusions based on correlation.
But back to the claim made by Tony in this post, and to the related question that I’ve asked that manacker and you have, apparently,m ducked.
Do you have any evidence for the claim of causation that, apparently, you think is supported by data? Maybe you aren’t ducking the question, and you do have evidence.
To show that’s the case, could you please supply a link or give an explanation of the evidence that you think exists?
Is that really so complicated?
Joshua,
Neo-Eve, the first humanist to feel the wind of Fall?
What’s next?
Leaves, many more yet to feel the clinch, that comes with the end of the growing season.
The Red Fall?
Eye for one, can hardly wait to see.
Here, again, is what Tony wrote:
So – there has been “massive” loss of trust and credibility as a result of “Climategate,” but it is only one cause – the rest of which Tony somehow neglects to mention?
lol!
So, where’s that evidence to support that “massive” change as the result of “Climategate?”
Still waiting….. You duck, manacker ducks, Tony ducks.
You guys are such die-hard “skeptics.”
That Climategate isn’t the only cause, doesn’t mean it isn’t a cause at all. Obviously.
>
Here, again, is what Tony wrote:
there is no question that in many people’s eyes the IPCC has suffered a massive loss of credibility and trust by the general public as a result of the many disclosures following the Climategate leaks.
Here, again, is the answer you duck : That Climategate isn’t the only cause, doesn’t mean it isn’t a cause at all. Simple matter of logic.
So, where’s that evidence to support that “massive” change as the result of “Climategate?”
Still waiting….. You duck, manacker ducks, Tony ducks.
So you really think confidence didn’t drop any faster when Climategate happened? What’s your evidence?
Joshua:
A present for you, as I know you love polls :)
http://www.gallup.com/poll/146606/Concerns-Global-Warming-Stable-Lower-Levels.aspx
http://www.gallup.com/poll/146810/Water-Issues-Worry-Americans-Global-Warming-Least.aspx
http://www.gallup.com/poll/147203/Fewer-Americans-Europeans-View-Global-Warming-Threat.aspx
http://www.gallup.com/poll/149207/World-Top-Emitters-No-Aware-Climate-Change-2010.aspx
http://www.gallup.com/poll/147242/Worldwide-Blame-Climate-Change-Falls-Humans.aspx
With these, plus your previous linked polls have a ball!!
Roy Weiler
P.S. Yep, still find polls to be nearly useless except if you want to support a particular position. I prefer science to polls.
Roy –
Mostly older polls – none of which have anything to do with measuring the impact of “Climategate.”
It really is interesting how when I ask for evidence for Tony’s statement about the “massive loss of credibility and trust by the general public as the result of Climategate,” what I get in response is not evidence of Tony’s conclusion.
It might make one think that “sketpics:” believe that no such evidence exists, and yet, they are unshaken in their belief that conclusions like ?Tony’s are justified.
Look – I don’t know what the impact of “Climategate” is – that’s why I”m asking for evidence. If you don’t have any, just say so.
And Roy,
Even further still, why would you offer polls that don’t give evidence to support Tony’s conclusions, even as you tell me that you place no confidence in polls?
I honestly don’t understand how that makes any sense, unless the explanation is that you feel a reflexive need to defend the conclusions of someone like Tony – so much so that in response to my questioning, you’d offer basically irrelevant data that you think is meaningless anyway.
It may be just me, but I see quite a difference between that statement, and the one that I’ve been questioning:
So when I agree with you that public confidence in th IPCC was NOT just caused by Climategate, you ask me to subtantiate thet public confidence WAS caused by Climategate. Eh ???
It (and belief in CAGW generally) has of course been steadily declining for years. I cannot see any reason for this other than the revelations of undeniable systemtic dishonesty in the CAGW camp. Can you?
OK – so you don’t think that “Climategate,” only, caused a change in general public opinion. Therefore, you agree that Tony’s claim of causation is facile, and not based on data, or at least not qualified as precisely as it should be. I am sorry for misinterpreting your opinion.
I think that there is too much noise in the data to discern an overriding trend. It depends, of course, on the start dates and end dates of your analysis. My sense is that there aren’t enough data to determine a trend with confidence. What will general opinion be in 15 years? I suspect it will have virtually nothing to do with “Climategate,” and much to do with the weather, as distinguished from climate, during that period of time.
Accordingly, if your assertion is true that an overall downward trend is discernible, then yes, I could think of another possible reason: After initially believing in the theory based on reports about climate change in the media, many people are doubtful about long term trends that run counter to their short-term experiences. As such, when we had a spate of clearly warmer summers, belief in the theory of AGW ran higher. After a period of colder winters, belief diminished. (That would be consistent with a recent spike in belief after a spate of extreme weather that received a lot of public attention.)
Another factor might be that people are largely not aware of the % of scientific experts who agree with, versus disagree with, the “consensus” view on climate change. This could also be largely attributable to media exposure – and efforts by the rightwing mainstream media (Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Ingraham, Bennett, Savage, Alex Jones, Fox News, Medved), and rightwing politicians (Inhofe, Perry, etc.) that have been very public in asserting that AGW theory is supported by only a minority of politically or financially driven scientists. That potential causality is supported by polls which show that a high % of the public thinks that support for AGW in the scientific community is lower than the available data show (although causation there remains to be proven).
OK – so you don’t think that “Climategate,” only, caused a change in general public opinion. Therefore, you agree that Tony’s claim of causation is facile
Eh?? No, your criticism is what is facile. That Climategate isn’t the only cause, doesn’t mean it isn’t a cause at all. Obviously.
And you think the public will slowly just forget what a buch of liars and crooks the IPCC are. Well I suppose that is what you precommitted alarmists hope for.
“I think that there is too much noise in the data to discern an overriding trend. It depends, of course, on the start dates and end dates of your analysis. My sense is that there aren’t enough data to determine a trend with confidence. What will general opinion be in 15 years?”
We’ll make an AGW skeptic of you yet Joshua, if you keep thinking like this!
Jim S.
I am a born skeptic, born into a long line of skeptics, and raised on skepticism.
Despite wrong being called a “believer” at this site many times, I am an “AGW skeptic.” I see reasons to doubt AGW theory. However, I am not well-versed enough in the science, nor intelligent enough, to evaluate the technical details. That’s why I look, to the best of my abilities, at the arguments on the different sides to see if I can find “motivated reasoning.” I have seen some evidence of motivated reasoning and tribalism on the “pro-consensus side.”
And when Tony Brown writes the kinds of statements that I read at the top of this post – saying that there is “no doubt” that
“massive” loss of trust and credibility in the general public about climate change can be attributed to “Climategate” – and then so-called “climate skeptics” sign on to defend such a claim of causation when neither he nor they are able to supply sufficient evidence to support such a claim, despite being asked repeatedly to do so, then I am “skeptical” about what motivates their reasoning as well.
Maybe we see how skeptics like it.
Wattsupwiththat recently made incorrect predictions about arctic sea ice recovery. As a result the public have lost trust in the skeptics.
What is Wattsupit going to do to regain trust with the public? Should it be reformed or scrapped?
got links?
Perhaps we should ask the governments who fund people to work on WUWT? opps.
You don’t make a good case for the IPCC by pointing out that there are worse cases. Joshua would call this telling mommy that they did it first or they did worse. where is the fairness cop? ah IDJT must of missed this
Joshua
This analysis by the AMS starts off:
http://ams.confex.com/ams/91Annual/webprogram/Paper184847.html
The study cited by the AMS report is linked here
http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/images/files/Climategate_Public%20Opinion_and%20Loss%20of%20Trust(1).pdf
Max
What would count as evidence? You keep demanding to see evidence of causation and causation is unobservable. There are lots of theories why trust plummeted in some surveys post climategate. What’s yours?
Something that would show causation, rather than correlation. In other words, data on why their beliefs changed, rather than simple measurements of their beliefs.
For example, polls where people are questioned about the factors that go into their beliefs, rather than simple observations about whether they think that the climate is changing anthropgenically. In fact, manacker offered a link to a poll that does look at causation, as opposed to the poll that Tony linked that only shows some uncontrolled variables that correlate.
In the poll that manacker linked, we see that 8% of the public (a minority of the minority that followed “Climategate” at least a little), say that they are more convinced that AGW isn’t happening as the result of “Climategate.” (In fact, a plurality of those who followed “Climategate” closely reported that it had no significant impact on their views. And surprise, surprise, the poll also shows that the majority of people who fit into that category are “conservatives.”
That hardly supports the assertions being made on this thread, among hundreds of threads in the “skeptical” blogosphere, about attributions (claims of causation) as to the impact of “Climategate” on public opinion.
As for other factors that correlate, and that might be explanatory for causation:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/06/ipcc-discussion-thread/#comment-119063
I have no problem with speculation about causation based on the observation of correlated variables. My problem is when scientifically literate people claim causation when the data are lacking. It makes me wonder about what would cause them to make such a basic error. Your comments about how causation is unobservable should not be directed at me, they should be directed at people who claim causation without supporting data, such as Judith.
As for trust “plummeting.” That description is hyperbolic, and not accurate.
I do not support continuation of the IPCC in any form.
However, for the IPCC to survive we need several steps to test its integrity.
Step 1 – The IPCC should indefinitely postpone AR5 for there to be any chance of the IPCC to prove integrity given its current rather untrustworthy and insufficiently credible stature. Before the AR5 preparation restarts, we must set up, in parallel, a double blind climate science assessment to verify its questionable integrity. Based on that double blind climate science assessment we could decide the fate of the IPCC.
More steps to follow.
John
Step 1 – censor the science. Make sure the public and politicians are kept in the dark.
IPCC says it does not do science. So, no science is censored.
John
That’s what your “climate scientists” do as policy.
“CENSORED” ftp directories, anyone?
“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”
– Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes, 18 February 2005
lolwot
You write:
Hey, IPCC is already doing that with its “consensus process”.
Max
Step 1 – censor the science.
Hey, IPCC is already doing that with its “consensus process”.
Perhaps we should now call it the climate concensorship
Nope, step 1 is – defund those known to be frauds. Let them tell future lies with their own money. This will help stop the public and politicians being kept in the dark.
Punkstat, I do not disagree. However, I am trying a step by step deconstruction based on offering very difficult thresholds needed for the IPCC to successfully cross before it would be allowed to continue. I do not expect it to meet the thresholds, but I am offering.
John
Again, as stated in Step 1 above, I do not support continuation of the IPCC in any form.
And again, however, for the IPCC to survive we need several steps to test its integrity.
Step 2 – Expose to the open unrestricted public all FAR, SAR, TAR, AR5 and AR5 emails, letters, meeting notes, assessment documents, reviews, conflict of interest forms, memorandums and anything else used for those assessments. This will at least show it is willing to come clean and begin with lessons learned from any possible past violations of its own processes.
Note: It has been suggested very recently that the IPCC, in response to its negative exposure from climategate, has requested its AR5 authors and reviewers not to use email for their assessment processes.
John
Errata,
I meant, “all FAR, SAR, TAR, AR4 and AR5”.
John
The Left has proven it handle the truth and feels impelled to hide it and from it and their Utopia has become pessimism of all humanity where there no longer is any care about the human condition. Unlike real scientists rather than sharing in the optimism of individuals transcending mediocrity government science authoritarians are obsessed with glorifying weakness.
Perhaps one of the issues is that there is just a single multi-national organization that is accepted as reporting factually on all things climate science.
Take economics for example, The Keynesians and the Austrians are permitted to publish their polar-opposite conjecture, modeling, analyzation, and the like in peer-review journals– there is no blackout.
However, it appears that thought/research/analysis that goest against the understanding of the IPCC is guarded and re-run through an inequitably higher standard filter for accuracy (but a standard that should, in fact exist, though for all). In some cases, it seems work that goes counter to the results of the IPCC is outrightly rejected for no other reason than that it conflicts with IPCC-supported results.
Why can the field of economics subsist properly, while climate science cannot? Is it because economics is not ‘science’? Economic models not sophisticated enough?
economic models depend on human psychology. I would imagine economics is a lot harder to model.
Economics is a lot easier to model, we have non-chaotic systems with many well-established relationships based on a wealth of data. The models don’t depend on pyschology but on revealed behaviour.
At the risk of being Captain Obvious…
The IPCC is an agency of the UN, and the UN is not without it’s own political orientation and agendas, so why would anyone expect them to be an honest broker?
P.E.
You should discuss that opinion with David W., who has asserted that viewpoints on the politics of the UN “have nothing to do with this,” and steven mosher, who seems to think that viewpoints about the functioning of a UN agency are unrelated to political perspectives about the UN.
P.E. (a.k.a. Cap’n Obvious)
IPCC is an agency of the UN (as you write), which has been specifically set up to investigate human-induced changes to our climate, their potential impacts and possible measures that should be taken.
No significant human-induced changes to our climate OR
No potential negative impacts MEAN
No need for possible measures AND
No need for IPCC to continue its existence.
IOW the premise that human-induced climate change is having a significant effect with significant potential negative impact for humanity and our environment is an existential prerequisite for IPCC.
Is there any wonder that the “consensus process” was formed and that “bias” was introduced, as tonyb writes?
Max
Salamano
There is another summary report with a different scientific viewpoint from that of the IPCC: the NIPCC report.
This document is published at a small fraction of the “all-in” cost of the IPCC report. It is still a much smaller report, but has become more comprehensive and impressive as time has gone on.
It has not gotten anywhere near the same amount of ballyhoo and hype in the media – nor has it enjoyed anywhere near the level of acceptance – as the IPCC report.
But it is out there as an alternate view.
Climate Etc. has run a thread on the most recent version:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/09/01/nipcc-discussion-thread/#more-4758
Max
Max,
I guess I was more talking about the existence of two polar-opposite, competing, yet scientifically substantiated frames of reference, each permitted cohabitation within the peer review literature (and the field in general).
There are many other examples of this (in medicine, for example), but the economics came to mind in light of the current state of affairs. The economics example is also a good example because of the policy implications based on the understanding.
The idea that one understanding must necessarily trump all others to the point where the others cannot be permitted entry into the high IF peer-review based on disagreement with that understanding is troubling. It doesn’t even have to be the ‘winner’ .. it at least should be an ‘also-ran’.
Who knows, within the field, decades from now, we might have another scientist story akin to the present Nobelaureate in Chemistry…Or perhaps like those currently researching in astrophysics that are generating ideas that ‘question all that we know’ without fear of being rejected from publication because it disagrees with ‘all that we know’.
I wonder if the IPCC would have attained their current position as the highly influential purveyor of climate infiormation to governments if it had not been for Dr Manns hockey stick?
I can not think of anything as lasting and iconic as this graphic device..
tonyb
tonyb
Following up to your question, the critical importance of Mann’s hockey stick to the IPCC notion that 20th century warming is unusual (and therefore largely anthropogenic) cannot be overstated.
That is certainly why IPCC embraced it so eagerly for the TAR (without doing much “due diligence” on its validity), giving it “centerfold” prominence in its “Summary Report for Policymakers” with an impressive add-on of model derived future warming projections shooting up to the top of the page, in order to make full impact.
Sure. It has since been comprehensively discredited by McIntyre and McKitrick, as confirmed by the Wegman report to US Congress and validated by the NAS panel under oath before the same congressional committee.
As a result, IPCC has taken it out of its latest AR4 Summary Report. Yet the conclusion reached by Mann that
lives on in AR4 SPM, as do several “copy hockey sticks” buried in the backup report.
Like the hydra, it keeps growing new heads as old ones get chopped off…
Max
Mann-made global warming!
I wonder if the IPCC would have attained their current position as the highly influential purveyor of climate infiormation to governments if it had not been for Dr Manns hockey stick?
Given that he IPCC attained that position before the “hockey stick” was published then the answer to that would be “yes”.
Judith writes in the post: “In other words, the climate science community itself should look for post-IPCC alternates to re-establish the general public trust in climate science.”
I don’t foresee this happening as long as the climate science community continues to rely on climate models that have little to no bases in reality. (Many of the CMIP5 hindcasts and scenario projections are available online at the KNMI Climate Explorer for those who wish to confirm it for themselves.) The models have been digitally crunching conjecture for a number of decades, and they’ve become more complex with time, but they still cannot reproduce many facets of the global surface temperature record since 1850, or 1900, or 1950, inclusive of many of the natural variables that have multiyear and decadal and multidecadal impacts on global and regional surface temperatures.
Oops. I just noticed that the post was written by Tony Brown. My comment above should obviously then start, Tony Brown writes in the post…
Not Judith. Guest post by Tony Brown.
First I would ask, “Who trusts the UN General Assembly to act in the best interests of the United States? If you can get enthusiastically behind the efforts and goals of the UN’s General Assembly, then you might think that the IPCC and its leadership will act in the best interests of the USA. Why does climate science need the UN anyway? Other technical fields of research have international professional organizations to guide their members and their ethics. I just don’t look to the UN for ethical or scientific leadership, and I don’t understand why US climate scientists would either…. Especially when the IPCC is first a political, and not scienitific, arm of the UN.
Personally, I am embarrased for US climate scientists who have been seduced by the special interest research grant funds available to make them focus a narrow theory of AGW, and who have allowed the IPCC to put a political agenda slant on the findings of their research. As a result, US climate scientists have given poor advice to our US political policy makers that could cause our nation great economic harm. Its time for US climate scientists to close ranks and focus on research that is in the best interests of the USA. If you don’t think we are in a global competition for climate understanding and technology that can best serve one’s own nation, then think again.
A recent post at Climate, Etc. reviewed the social and political upheavals of the last 1000 years related to climate change, and they were significant. I’m afraid our Chinese competitors are snickering at what has transpired in US climate science over the last 20 years, and are somewhat disappointed that we failed to pass the critical Cap and Trade legislation that would have given them a greater economic advantage than they have now. I am confident they are wisely charting their own course with more objective and truth seeking science. The nation that understands climate best, has an important political and economic advantage. That should be our goal, and the UN is the last organization I would pick to lead us in that endeavor. I trust the USA more than any other nation on earth to use its knowldege about climate to help the rest of the world.
The WWF has taken notice of the success of the Yakuza’s infiltration of Governments and done the same with the IPCC.
Donna has some of the details.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/
Joshua,
Be a little more disingenuous what don’t you? In light of the Himalayan glacier claim and all the rest of their by now well documented bogus predictions, , in combination with Pachauri’s pathetic response re voodoo science, it’s more than reasonable to suppose that the IPCC’s credibility has been damaged.
Now, concerning your relentless sophistry being tiresome in the extreme, I confess I don’t have any links. But we can take a poll if you’re really in doubt.
pokerguy
I have posted the links requested by both lolwot and Joshua (see above). (TonyB has posted some in the lead article, as well).
Joshua is simply hyperventilating.
Max
You’re straying from the topic again, pokerguy.
We could certainly examine the impact of the claims about the Himalayan glacier, or about Pachauri’s impact (what % of Americans do you think have any idea who he is?), but once again – my point has been all along that Tony has not provided evidence to support his claim that there is “no doubt” that there has been a “massive loss of credibility and trust” as the “result” of “Climategate.”
But thank you for acknowledging that you do not, in fact, have evidence to support his claims. I’m not exactly surprised.
But thank you for acknowledging that you do not, in fact, have evidence to support his claims. I’m not exactly surprised.
Me neither. But that’s because your demands are absurdity on stilts.
Basic polling data in the US showing decreasing public trust in climate science and increased skepticism in AGW have been presented in many places. This correlates to other studies on media reporting that has noted a changed tone since climategate.
Demanding peer reviewed studies of john q public having been convinced by climategate is just dumb. Doesn’t work that way and everyone but you seems to understand this. John q public is influenced by media and the cognescenti; Dr Curry when she started this blog seemed to be of the opinion that the degreed skeptical denizens herein were representative of this influence in that the degreed skeptics were often expert enough within their own circles to influence opinion within said circles.
That the influence of climategate is largely indirect hence not easily measured is taken as a given by most observers (at least those who are observing and not merely looking for new grindstones for their axes.)
OBVIOUSLY climategate had a measureable influence in the public opinion otherwise the poll data would reflect differently, even if the public had never heard the term.
Have there been any significant scientific breakthroughs since the last report?
Leaving aside the predictable ‘it’ll be even worse than we said last time’, have they anything worthwhile to say?
If not, why bother at all? Unless it will be to highlight the unanticipated lack of significant warming since last time?
Have there been any significant scientific breakthroughs since the last report?
Yes, the CERN study showing svensmark to be correct says that modelers are even more clueless regarding feedbacks than the most vocal skeptics would have imagined.
You underestimate our imaginations. We consider that they have medaciously and with malice aforethought reversed the signs of most feedbacks. Exhibit #1 is H20 and albedo feedback.
typo: mendaciously
Since 2004 the WWF has systematically recruited Climate Scientists into a Climate Witness Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP), some 78 of those recruits have been and/or are review editors, coordinating lead authors, lead authors, contributing authors and expert reviewers for the IPCC AR4 and upcoming AR5.
The draft for the Synthesis Report (the summary that busy people read) of the 2007 AR4 was produced by 40 IPCC ‘authors’, 8 of whom were non scientists (IPCC employees, a lawyer and a medical doctor) leaving 32 ‘scientists’. 11 had public links with environmental advocate groups such as Greenpeace & the WWF.
Source – http://bit.ly/q2efX6
Are individuals with such an obvious conflict of interest likely to be impartial when selecting/reviewing/contributing information for inclusion in ‘advisory’ reports?
Should individuals with employment/membership/association of/with such NGOs be prevented from contributing as authors to a supposedly independent report providing guidance to national governments?
Suspicion would rightly fall on any contributors with such links to the fossil fuel industry, are we supposed to believe that environmental activists are somehow likely to be less influenced by the source of the butter for their bread?
Albert Gras
Your analysis of the affiliations and qualifications of the contributors to the 2007 AR4 SPM report is very interesting. It confirms the “bias” in the IPCC “consensus process”, as pointed out by our host here on the earlier “uncertainty” thread.
You mention that “suspicion would rightly fall on any contributors with such links to the fossil fuel industry” (and you are correct), but the truth of the matter is that some members of this industry have hopped on the bandwagon and are actually financing a big-money campaign in support of taxpayer-supported “green energy” solutions, which they hope will generate profits for their shareholders.
And then there’s GE, who paid no US corporate taxes at all but has spent millions on “green energy” ads (to support its taxpayer-subsidized turbine business), as Steven Mosher points out in his book on Climategate.
Follow the money trail (as you write).
Max.
Joshua/Lolwot
What about a comment on this? You always have an interest in bias.
RobB –
I am “suspicious” of motivated reasoning in virtually everyone involved. What I find curious is that anyone would claim that motivated reasoning is inherently more characteristic of one side as opposed to the other.
For example of such – see manacker’s contention that “…some members of [the fossil fuel industry] have hopped on the bandwagon…”
Really now, what is that supposed to mean? Does that mean that the fossil fuel industry isn’t in line to reap hundreds of billion dollars in profits from continued use of (and growth of) fossil fuels? Does it mean that the fossil fuel industry spend tens of millions of dollars yearly to lobby politicians? Does it mean that the fossil fuel industry doesn’t receive tens of millions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies (such as hundreds of billions that go towards policies that lower end-user prices or access to under-priced resources)? Does it mean that the fossil fuel industry doesn’t spend huge sums on PR campaigns to promote the continued use of fossil fuels?
Yes, yes, all very interesting, but what do you think about the IPCC being infiltrated by environmental groups like WWF and Greenpeace? Does that increase your confidence in IPCC judgements?
Josh
LOL–Do you believe that those who run the major oil companies are worried for even a single second about loosing revenue due to cocerns over AGW? The answer is no. (and I have talked to the president of one of the companies recently on an aiplane)
They know that they will sell their product over the long term regardless. They have no reason to fight those who believe as you do at all.
RobB –
No. I think that there are valid reasons to separate the analysis of the science from influences of those who are policy-oriented advocates.
That said, I think that there does need to be a mechanism for evaluating the input of policy-oriented advocates (from various perspectives), on a global scale.
Rob Starkey –
Not particularly. I have also talked to people within the fossil fuel industry, and I am well-aware that they see concerns about AGW as a vehicle for revenue generation. On the other hand, they also see continuation and expansion of the burning of fossil fuels as a much more lucrative vehicle for revenue generation. That’s why I dismiss the notion that they’ve “jumped on the bandwagon.” They’ve got a finger or two on the “AGW bandwagon,” and two feet firmly planted on the “fossil fuel” bandwagon.
Joshua
“That said, I think that there does need to be a mechanism for evaluating the input of policy-oriented advocates (from various perspectives), on a global scale”
Now that is interesting and guaranteed to attract the attention of the libertarians like Rob Starkey. Do you have a model in mind? What global forum would sort through the policy? Presumably the UN? Would it have some kind of executive authority? How would you seperate the policy from the science?
No, I don’t really have a model in mind. I think that the Hartwell Paper represents an interesting approach – although I don’t know that it is sufficiently representative. As for a mechanism for how to implement policy recommendations of an entity like those contained in the Hartwell Paper – it really is a conundrum. There is obviously dysfunctionality in an organization like the UN – but I’m not a binary thinker, and so some disfunctionality does not, in and of itself IMO, rule out a UN-like organization. I don’t think separating the science from the policy is possible – but I do think it is possibly to do a better job of separating the science from areas of debate that are inherently more policy-oriented. I look to reasonable discussion about better ways forward.
The Hartwell paper can be found here.
From the Hartwell paper.
Joshua,
I find it hard to imagine any supranational organization that could unpick this and achieve a policy consensus, and to be honest, as I don’t recognize CAGW as a problem, I don’t see any need for centralized decsion making anyway. But setting aside ‘need’ for a moment, I think it is idealistic to imagine that any policy consensus could be achieved or even discussed sensibly (look at how the matter is discussed currently!). All discussions will be affected by national and vested interests. There are always going to be winners and losers and the losers will not lie down and take their medicine for the benefit of everyone else. The science will just be used as ammunition. That’s why the various UN climate conferences are pie in the sky. Just my (realist) thoughts.
From the Hartwell Paper.
Ref 31: E. Malone & S. Rayner, Human Choice & Climate Change, Vol. IV, ‘What have we learned?’, Battelle, 1998; M. Hulme, Why we Disagree about Climate Change, CUP, 2009, pp. 359-364.
From the Hartwell Paper. My bold
Ref 36 D. Sarewitz, ‘Curing climate backlash’, Nature, 3 March, 2010
whats the motivation in finding motivated reasoning? Pretty simple. you cannot assess the science. you refuse to learn. you dont even try. Because you are ignorant and refuse to learn, you fall back on analysis that is less scientific than the science you are asked to evaluate. You look for motivated reasoning because you think that will tell you something about the people and the science. It wont. It cant. In fact you are trying to use a tool that has never been tested, and only is useful to the extent that it keeps you from engaging on the science. Head meet sand.
@steven mosher…
MT told me to learn the subject a few years ago, but even though I’d already studied partial differential equations (a long time ago), and chaos theory, it was a bit of a stretch getting around even the basics. For most people, you’re talking about at least a 2-year college stint.
While I don’t agree, I can personally sympathize with those looking for a shortcut.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/06/ipcc-discussion-thread/#comment-119244
AK.
Ya its taken me about 4 years, so I have no patience for IDJT. If he is unwilling to devote the time to understand the science issues he should just shut up. Everything thing he says to defend the science is LESS CERTAIN than the science he tries to defend. It’s such an abysmally transparent epistemic fail.
AK.. let me demonstrate: here is Joshua
“However, I am not well-versed enough in the science, nor intelligent enough, to evaluate the technical details. That’s why I look, to the best of my abilities, at the arguments on the different sides to see if I can find “motivated reasoning.”
I don’t understand high school science and college math. I’m an IDJT. Therefore, I use that same broken brain to look at what I think I can understand. Even better, I cannot understand the physical world which is measurable so my solution is to try to plumb the motivations of people. I run away from a discipline governed by methods and rules and numbers for the comfort of my arm chair unfalsifiable clap trap about motivated reasoning.
I’m too dumb to understand subject A, so I’m to to focus on subject B, and nobody has even shown that.. “B” is related to A, that “B” can be addressed with out most powerful form of reasoning ( science) and that Im any better at B than I am at A.
IDJT.
I have a hammer ( motivated reasoning), your problem has to be a nail.
According to one view of information theory, when something becomes complex enough, instead of getting more complicated mathematically, it simplifies. This is one of the principle ideas behind statistical mechanics, and the scientist Murray Gell-Mann extended the concept when he wrote his book “The Quark and the Jaguar”. You might find this attitude surprising because Gell-Mann is also the co-founder of the Sante Fe Institute which is one of the prominent scientific labs devoted to chaos theory — which most people would think of as diametrically opposed to simple reduction. Not the case if you read their research papers, and they are finding that the key ideas are entropy, superstatistics, and information theory, interweaved with system constraints and mean values.
This is one of my main motivations to try to simplify the math of climate science. I have had good success elsewhere with the math and am making a push in this direction. You can always call it a shortcut, but everything that you can do with paper and pencil then classifies as a shortcut.
@WebHubTelescope…
Actually the shortcut I was talking about (and AFAIK Steven Mosher also) was one of judging the people giving the testimony rather than the testimony. This actually seems to work most of the time in face-to-face communication, perhaps because most people have a “built-in lie detector” that can give them a good “intuitive” guess whether the person telling them something believes what they’re saying. Somebody lying or BS’ing would raise a red flag in this “lie detector”, as a result of subliminal cues such as tone (and stress) of voice, body language facial features and sweat conditions, and perhaps pheromones.
I doubt such a process could be made to work over keyboard media like email and comment threads, but I can see how many people might try it. Questions about motivation would fit this category.
As for simplifying the math of climate science, or any other system showing spatio-temporal chaos, I’m certainly not going to rule the possibility out, but I’m going to be very skeptical of it. The biggest problem with such efforts at simplification is the enormous opportunity it offers to build in pre-conceptions based on linear systems. Which systems our brains were evolved to handle (e.g. the complex swaying of branches of a tree), and the early education most people get in our current culture reinforces.
I suspect a better idea for simple modeling of the climate would involve looking for “coherent” phenomena, like vortexes in turbulence. (Things such as ENSO, PDO, etc. might be examples.) IMO the best approach at this time to such a search would be using very large neural networks with complex learning capacities at each node. Train them on observed climate then go digging in to see how they do their calculations.
You’re not going to convince me, however, with any 0-dimensional model, or even 1-dimensional. Not unless the relationship between the variables involves very complex functions, and even then I’d be skeptical. Very skeptical.
Fair enough. But don’t forget that non-linear systems can easily enter trajectories that essentially map out the ergodic space. When that happens, bingo, you get something close to a weighted random number generator that will likely follow maximum entropy principles. You may not buy into this approach but that is the general tact that I am planning to apply.
Donna Laframboise pointed out in a recent blog that 34% of the IPCC’s core writing team for the 2007 report were publicly affiliated with the WWF and Greenpeace. According to Greenpeace’s 2010 annual report it raised €226 million in donations and WWF had revenues of $224 million. One has to wonder at how neutral the report really can be with so much riding on it both in terms of political influence and potential revenue for the environmental NGO’s
apologies to Gras Albert , I need to read the comments in their entirety in the future before posting
Doesn’t matter, it needs to be repeated regardless. Green NGOs are pulling the strings for their own reasons, and anyone who can’t see this isn’t paying attention. Disbanding the IPCC for inclusion of NGO grey literature alone would be reason enough for me; I don’t even have to go so far as to look at the unethical ties to scientists.
To all:
Really folks percentages and polls mean little in the real world of science. Either the science works or it doesn’t. We can find people from all sides that will create percentages that support your view, but once again, this is not science.
The real questions:
Is the IPCC useful? No, they have a conclusion which they are searching for facts to support.
Does CO2 cause an increase in temperature? Yes, all other things being equal.
Are all things equal in climate? No, the idea that there is one “climate sensitivity” is somewhat absurd in that when one thing changes, others change as well.
Are we warmer and/or will we get more warm then the Medieval Warm Period or Holocene Climatic Optimum? Unknown, but appears we are at or slightly below those periods.
Is warming bad for humans? Does not appear to be. During periods of increased warmth in the past we have thrived, not faltered as we seem to during cold periods.
Will increased CO2 end the world? Well no, humans are a small percentage of the life on this planet. She has survived extinctions before, and will likely continue to do so in the future.
Is increased CO2 the end of Human life? Seems quite unlikely. Warmer temperatures seem to moderate extreme weather and provide more stable growing seasons. If sea levels rises, we adapt as do the Dutch everyday. In point of fact, the UN believes the growth of human population will decrease as people have access to more resources, as they have in Western countries. This ‘should’ lead to a leveling off of human population growth as we enter the midpoint of this century. By all appearances plants grow larger, and provide more energy to life when the CO2 levels are higher. Where is the net loss of this? Dinosaurs grew so big because they had ample vegetation to subsist on. Are we afraid of having larger humans?
All else appears to be fantasy or ‘hopeful’ notions of failure.
Roy Weiler
Nicely summarized.
An interesting side comment on your mention of big dinos: there were also big pterosaurs and pteranodons. Which almost patently couldn’t fly and maneuver and feed themselves. WUWT? In a posting some time ago (will search and get back if I can find it*), an analysis of wing loadings and optimum design was done for various barometric assumptions. [*Got it: http://levenspiel.com/octave/dinosaurs.htm. Also explains how long dino necks could function without multi-ton hearts and Kevlar arteries.]
It seems that the pteros were flying in atmosphere at about 3.5X BAR. And I wouldn’t be at all surrounded if CO2 levels deduced from geochemistry weren’t even higher than the nearly 1% presently believed, if the thicker atmosphere was plugged in. Maybe even several percent (10,000 ppm = 1%). That would certainly explain much of the huge plant biosphere at the time.
Another side comment on plant/jungle biogenesis of fossil fuel beds: jungles actually have very thin soils, since turnover of organics is so fast-and-furious, at least in today’s atmospheric mix. Perhaps higher density, much of it CO2, would be sufficient for such buildup.
And a final speculation: what if one of the effects of the K-T asteroid were to blast significant portions of the atmosphere off the planet, thereby thinning it below the levels needed for the dino-ptero-jungle ecosystem?
Just sayin’.
Brian:
“And a final speculation: what if one of the effects of the K-T asteroid were to blast significant portions of the atmosphere off the planet, thereby thinning it below the levels needed for the dino-ptero-jungle ecosystem? ”
That is an interesting idea. We humans always seem to assume the nature of the Earth is consistency, but an examination of the past indicates this is not the case at all. Instead of adapting to changing conditions, we always want to ‘force’ them back to where we think they should be. Examples: building levees to ‘contain’ the Mississippi, beach replenishment of barrier islands on the East Coast of the USA (the barrier islands are supposed to move). I find the wisdom of the Ancient Egyptians superior to our own in this respect. They did not or could not force the Nile to do anything, so they lived with it. Plant food in the fertile flood plain, but do not build your house there!
There is a lesson to be learned there if the ideas about the effects of climate change are true. Stemming the tide of human progress, is a far cry less attractive then applying wisdom into how we deal with the possible effects. Do not try to change the course of the river, learn how to live with it’s changes.
Roy Weiler
@Brian H
The major coal depositions are usually attributed to the Carboniferous. No pterosaurs or such then, IIRC. They’re also usually attributed to swamp conditions rather than drained-soil rain forest.
OTOH, a higher atmospheric density wouldn’t have been needed for a larger concentration of CO2, which could have driven a much faster coal deposition. It’s been suggested that there was a higher (absolute) partial pressure of oxygen during the Triassic-Cretaceous, which could have driven the faster metabolisms of the dinosaurs. However, AFAIK their superior respiratory systems are really all it takes to explain their larger size relative to the largest land mammals.
In theorizing about things like this, don’t forget that there’s a specific driver of the ratio of O2 to CO2, depending on the details of how different plants do photosynthesis, and thus deal with photorespiration. AFAIK all the evidence points to C4 photosynthesis evolving after the early Miocene (~20MYA), with substantially higher ratios of CO2 to O2 prior. (The direction of causation of those two events remains a fascinating mystery.)
This will be no easy task. But it will be a necessary one, if we want to rehabilitate climate science and turn it into a useful, neutral tool with which to investigate the causes for our ever changing climate.
I expect that you are correct. What would work would be to scrap IPCC completely and form an entirely new and independent group in about 2020. With as many other groups as there are, with compendia and conventions of every stripe, IPCC is useless, because their reports add no value.
I read all of the posts by Willis Eschenbach on the previous threads: I think he was basically sound in his specific points and in his abrasive tone; that is, I think his abrasive tone represents well the disdain with which most American swing voters view the IPCC. If he is correct, as I think he is, then the only way forward with a governmental review panel is to start over.
I had a pertinent late post at the tail-end of an earlier thread:
The IPCC issue might only be resolved by a US Republican government telling it as it as and withdrawing all support, financial and otherwise. Given the burgeoning emissions in China and India, which will dominate total emissions over the next several decades, withdrawal of support by the US would render the IPCC irrelevant. It would be hard (but sadly not impossible) for countries such as Australia to persist with absurd emissions reductions in those circumstances.
Correct. The IPCC presumes that member governments are socialist (i.e. dictating terms to their subjects) by definition, else there would be no verbiage regarding central governance (e.g.) simply because in a republic like the US the concept itself is at odds with the founding documents. Sadly it appears that only the republicans can recall this aspect.
In a way, it would be good if the US did withdraw all support from the IPCC, and anyone else paid by the US government, who has dared say that allowing CO2 levels to increase in an uncontrolled fashion is a dangerous course of action. Judith may well be included! Better that, than to support scientific studies and yet do nothing about Co2 emissions.
It will show quite clearly that the US doesn’t like the message and therefore it’s shot messenger!
Quite justifiable if the messenger concocted the message en route, and continues to confabulate under questioning. As clearly appears to be the case.
>:)
TT: In a way, it would be good if the US did withdraw all support from the IPCC … It will show quite clearly that the US doesn’t like the message and therefore it’s shot messenger!,
Where the message in question emerges from from a process known to be fraudulent, and against which virtually no supposed climate ‘scientist’ is prepared to speak, what other course of action would you recommend? Just swallow the BS whole?
Punksta,
You ask “what other course of action” I would recommend.
Not just for you, but I would recommend to all those who are currently rejecting the scientific position on AGW, that they should at least consider the possibility of the scientific advice being correct.
Manacker,
On a previous thread I suggested that it may not be such a bad thing for the IPCC to be disbanded. The IPCC has done well so far but, it could be argued that it’s already made its point and if the world’s governments don’t want to listen there is little point in continued repetition. This sort of international organisation is not a normal part of science, and it is probably the right time for science to get back to normality, so why not look at what the world’s leading universities, and research institutes say about climate, and rely on them, instead ?
You replied;
“Ouch! The political leadership of these organizations (viz. Paul Nurse, etc.) has already sold out to the politically correct “consensus” position, so will be of no help in correcting the broken process.”
So, are you saying that there is no scientific organisation (university, research lab etc) that you’d trust on the climate question?
If so why pick on the IPCC? Your quarrel isn’t with them, is it? It’s with the whole of science. Shouldn’t you be advocating closing down all these organisations too?
If so why pick on the IPCC? Your quarrel isn’t with them, is it?
In the US we don’t want the DoE run by Texaco or DoD run by Walmart (who would be low bidder) and similarly we don’t want the EPA run by greenpeace. Here, the citizens decide; they are not simply dictated to. The IPCC is a political body with starting assumptions that are counter to US values.
The quarrel is the politics and corruption. It has always been thus.
Remove the politics and get to the science? Perfect. What is needed in the US is a revival of the Bell Labs concept, where Bell was at one time the R&D division of the human race.
randomengineer:
You obviously don’t know the history. If Bell Labs was still in place, they might have continued to put out instructive 8-mm films like the following:
http://vodpod.com/watch/2081166-1958-global-warming-its-not-newly-known
That film was from 1958 and I don’t remember that in particular, but I must have learned something watching Dr. Baxter years ago and it motivated me to eventually end up at Bell Labs much superior competitor across the Hudson :)
The point is that these organizations (IPCC, Bell Labs, etc) exist because groups of people decided to disseminate scientific research for the common good. If what they find out is unpalatable, that’s your problem and you can set up your own shop.
Skeptics already have – they have the “non-political” Heartland Institute.”
Joshua
As a Brit I am very uncomfortable with Heartland and its politics (which is not to say that some of the NIPCC stuff isnt interesting)
They certainly don’t speak for me, but perhaps they do for US sceptics
tonyb
Fair enough, Tony. But while skepticism about the political, or other partisan influences on the IPCC should be scrutinized, so should the political, or other partisan influences on the “skeptical” side of the debate. In that regard, I would suggest that the Heartland Institute is far from unique w.r.t. political or other partisan influences in the “skeptical” community.
As is often the case, IMO, Pekka nails it.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/06/ipcc-discussion-thread/#comment-119278
the political, or other partisan influences on the “skeptical” side of the debate
Merely a response to the obvious and overwhelming political nature of the alarmist side.
Ah yes, the old “Mommy, mommy, they did it first” gambit.
Now where have I seen that before?
‘Mommy’, the electorate and the poor, heard the ruckus start up and knows perfectly damn well who started it and who screamed the loudest.
=================
Ah yes, the old “Mommy, mommy, they did it first” gambit.
No, it’s the old “mommy look at what they’re doing”. Pointing out the blatantly obvious partisanship of the climate science establishment is not itself an act of partisanship.
Joshua asks, in a moment of self parody, “Ah yes, the old “Mommy, mommy, they did it first” gambit.
Now where have I seen that before?”
Hmmmm…..we see it nearly daily when Joshua runs out of things to say, that’s where.
No, they have an institution that agrees with them. They do not own it or dictate what it says. Big difference.
I have rarely heard of the Heartland Institute in UK. Nor the Cock Brothers. They mean nothng over here.
here joshua, go track down some other example of whining to mommy
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/06/ipcc-discussion-thread/#comment-119181
… they have the “non-political” Heartland Institute.
Outspent by the “non-political” politically-funded ‘consensus’ by how much – a factor of 10,000 100,000 ? More ?
I don’t get paid by anyone, punk. Why don’t you come after me?
Don’t follow, webby, what exactly would you like ?
WHT,
Are you a bit touchier than usual, or are you late to the pharmacy?
Maybe you heard about another big oil find?
Or perhaps you will think of how skeptics are so often falsely accused of being paid, and how it is as outrageously untrue for us as it is for you.
Outspent? I’m not sure that all the figures are available to be able to say that.
However, spending by scientific rejectionists is almost entirely on promoting their own interpretations, or misinterpretations, of the scientific data, whereas with scientific spending. it is almost the opposite. That is doing all the hard work in the first place.
So, even if the figures were available, would they make for a valid comparison?
If what they find out is unpalatable, that’s your problem and you can set up your own shop.
Do not presume to address me in a manner suggesting I have made a comment regarding the science, which appears to be the correct vector. My comment is limited to the politics and corruption.
Your commentary I think is “exhibit A” in the ongoing debate where you and those like you are wholly unable to distinguish between those who get the science and are against the IPCC politics and “deniers” (for want of a better term.) As such I think you’re self-disqualified from commenting because you have identified yourself as a sheeplike critter regurgitating team-speak on command regardless of external stimulus.
Thus me saying “The IPCC is corrupt” yields “Do your own science, denialist” which is utterly non-sequitor and little more than knee-jerk tribal idiocy as well as a useless thread contribution.
Next time, think first then type. If you have something useful to add I’ll pretend to listen.
OK, so you won’t be much of a source for my footnote material.
Well if you’ll promise to pretend to listen, we’ll promise to pretend to think you have the intelligence to understand it!
tempterrain
It looks like randomengineer has answered your (loaded) question from the standpoint of a US citizen.
But let me give you my answer.
My “quarrel isn’t with the whole of science” as you try to frame it..
It is with the corruption of science through politics, which has occurred as a direct result of the IPCC consensus process, which has unfortunately been corroborated by the politically correct hopping on board of the political leaders of many once-revered scientific organizations, such as Paul Nurse of the RS.
An independent, non-political, objective group of theoretical and applied scientists, engineers and economists engaged in a climate-related field, such as Tony suggests, would be a much better group for assembling new scientific studies on our climate from time to time.
Other bloggers here have opined that climate science would be better off without any such group, but I believe that something would be required to fill the vacuum now that IPCC has lost public trust for being too biased and alarmist.
Unlike IPCC, this group should be composed of an equal mix of those who have concluded that AGW could become a potential threat, those that have come to an opposite conclusion and those who are still undecided, with activists from either side excluded.
The group should not install a process whereby a “consensus” is desired, as IPCC has done; all scientifically based dissenting views should be given equal consideration.
This group should report on all climate studies without myopically focusing on anthropogenic climate change alone, as IPCC has done..
It should avoid publishing any model-based predictions for the long-range future, as IPCC has done, as these are far too imprecise to be meaningful (as the temperature lull of the past decade has shown) and, in the past, have simply served to foster fear-mongering.
The group should be under the oversight of an independent group of auditors (composed of individuals such as Steve McIntyre, who have shown that they can ferret out the truth), whose job it is to ensure that the “bias” problem, which occurred as a result of the IPCC “consensus process” does not creep in.
With such an approach, climatology can make a slow return to being a true “science”.
I would agree with Tony that under IPCC this will not be possible, for the reasons he cited and our host has alluded to in the “uncertainty” thread.
Hope this has answered your question..
Max
My “quarrel isn’t with the whole of science” as you try to frame it.. It is with the corruption of science through politics,
Yes, the issue essentially breaks down into those like temperrain, lolwot and Joshua who support the corruption of science, and those who oppose it.
It’s more than just ‘support’ – it is ‘actively defend’.
In the unlikley event that any of them were ever sceintists, I hope they enjoy spending their thrty pieces of silver.
Yes, the issue essentially breaks down into those like temperrain, lolwot and Joshua who support the corruption of science, and those who oppose it.
Jane Goodall hat is on…. it’s simpler than that. These people are simply convinced of their own mental superiority. If you question the science it’s not due to a valid point, it’s because they reckon you’re too stupid to understand it.
The ultimate example of enlightened types looking through their noses at simpletons is the invocation of Oreskes variations where she breathlessly reports that over 95% of the peer reviewed literature is in support of the “consensus” and is too flaming vapid to grasp the concept that funding dictates what is investigated (and found, assuming additional funding is to be sought.)
This is why you see the constant haranguing of “denialists” by these mental giants to the effect of “yeah well where’s YOUR peer review?” knowing that there’s very little — as if somehow this is the proof that what they reckon as correct is proven.
If you’re stupid enough you simply ignore funding magic and assume that paper counts indicate absolute Trvth, then you treat all other POV’s as benighted ignorance. Sooner or later you get to thinking you’re pretty damn smart. (i.e. you start believing your own press.)
And so it goes.
“If you question the science it’s not due to a valid point, it’s because they reckon you’re too stupid to understand it.”
Deniers don’t question the science though, they assert they know it’s all a myth. It’s not that they are too stupid to understand it, they don’t want to, hence when they do justify their position it’s with clueless arguments like “the planet warmed before and there were no SUVs back then!”
Oreskes … breathlessly reports that over 95% of the peer reviewed literature is in support of the “consensus” and is too flaming vapid to grasp the concept that funding dictates what is investigated (and found …
Vapid or disingenious ? You’d really need to have an IQ of about 80 to believe funding doesn’t shape science.
Vapid or disingenious ? You’d really need to have an IQ of about 80 to believe funding doesn’t shape science.
Vapid.
Historians are always crap where it concerns the effects of technology on politics and human intercourse. They tend to focus on everything but the technology and/or implementation thereof.
Libertarian bent historians (e.g. austrian economics school of thought) carp about Abraham Lincoln arrogating power during the civil war and don’t seem to grasp the concept that the laws of the day were incompatible with the use of the recently invented telegraph which allowed the commander in chief to react in comparative realtime. This had a major effect but do you think historians recognise this? No. They don’t know how technology works and don’t grasp the transformational nature.
Oreskes is just the latest example of a historian laser focused on a small aspect of something and isn’t seeing the big picture. The big picture would have included the nature of how funding is done, which influences papers. Rather than prove a “scientific consensus” Oreskes merely reflected the funding.
What’s more interesting to me is the number of people regurgitating her rubbish without thinking or understanding. After all this too is academic therefore real and true therefore uncontestable. They recite the papers funded to discover a problem (and finding it, unsurprisingly) and corroborate these with Oreskes (or similar) as if this comprises some sort of grand truth. Unfortunately it’s a vortex of predetermined conclusion papers and paper count feedbacks all swishing in a porcelain bowl.
Randomengineer,
You’d really need to have an IQ of about 80 to believe funding doesn’t shape science.
Yes, if you look at the way the private corporations fund their research. Someone mentioned Bell Labs recently, and that indeed was, in the 50’s and 60s, an honourable exception. You don’t get that degree of openness any longer from the large private corporations. You have to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they’ll give you the time of day!
Democracy isn’t perfect but it’s there to make sure that the results of taxpayer research are, outside of the military area, fully available. It seems to me that NASA, NOAA, the Australian CSIRO etc do a pretty good job. What you don’t like is the verdict on the AGW issue, not the methodology behind it.
In any case if your theory was correct Governments would never had funded, or released the finds of, research into smoking. They have at least as large a financial interest, through the taxes they collect, as the tobacco companies.
those like tempterrain, lolwot and Joshua who support the corruption of science
It’s part of the the whole “tribal” issue as Judith originally framed it. Classic Team-think, where incovenient truths are studiously ignored, and one never ever criticises any argument if it has the ‘right’ conclusion.
one never ever criticises any argument if it has the ‘right’ conclusion.
Unlike you guys! It would be so easy, wouldn’t it to embrace any and every argument against AGW! Even if they had been disproven many times over and were self-contradictory. Like any of the 171 in this list:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
But you guys wouldn’t do that would you? You’re such sticklers for scientific accuracy :-)
Max,
The reason of existence of any such body is to transmit best possible information to the decision makers on issues where the decisions may matter. The specific issue, where decisions may matter (but may also be powerless) is the human influence on climate and risks from climate change. Therefore at issue is not all climate science, but only human influence on climate.
The human influence cannot be studied without studying the climate processes more widely, but all of that is not policy relevant. The climate science in influenced also by other sciences like physics and chemistry, but nobody would propose that all of physics and chemistry should be included in the work. It’s totally logical to limit the work to issues that are most specifically relevant to the human influence on climate and its consequences.
The analysis didn’t start from the observation that climate is changing, it started from the observation that the CO2 concentration is rising, which was concluded to be caused human action, and which was judged to lead to the possibility of severe consequences through climate change. This was the historical starting point for the climate issue and this remains the logical basis for the climate issue. That means that it’s logical to define the task of IPCC or its replacement to be limited to the risk caused by human actions that affect climate.
@Pekka Pirilä…
As phrased, and AFAIK as interpreted by the IPCC, this seems to have a couple questionable built-in assumptions:
That the “climate” wouldn’t and/or won’t change to the same extent, or in the same general way, absent human CO2.
That the “human influence” can somehow be separated from what the “climate” would have done otherwise.
From a policy perspective, a much safer answer would be “the climate’s probably going to change sooner or later regardless, so why don’t we focus on adaptation and forget the IPCC”. It is the nature of bureaucratic organizations to put the highest priority on their own survival, prosperity, and growth (personal observation), so it’s easy to see how hiding the fact that adaptation is the best response is likely to be at the top of the IPPC’s agenda. All the bureaucratic activity, with meetings in popular vacation resorts wouldn’t be needed without the “justification” that “we” can somehow stop climate change by stopping anthropogenic CO2.
And if the most valid scientific conclusion was that human activity didn’t really make a difference to the risk of upcoming climate change, and governments were well advised to focus on adaptation, would the IPCC admit it, or hide it like they (some of them) tried to “hide the decline”? In view, that is, of their demonstrated corruption?
AK,
All your interpretations on implied assumptions are wrong at least as far as the assumptions are made consciously.
The only starting point is that the human influence may lead to severe consequences and that it’s not excluded that something can be done to improve the future outcome. That doesn’t imply anything specific about simultaneous natural variability.
The task of IPCC was and is to collect information on the possible role of human influence. The natural variability makes the task more difficult. If the human influence turns out to be much less than the natural variability, then the conclusion is naturally that nothing needs to be done.
The conclusion that the human influence may be large was based analyses that predate IPCC. That was only a possibility, which was considered significant enough for creating UNFCCC and IPCC. While the original task of these bodies was not to prove that the risk is serious, it’s certainly due that the internal logic of human organizations leads to some bias. People committed to certain views and approaches tend to gain influence and support each other, and that has happened.
A body like IPCC may be useful in transmitting scientific information, but it’s fundamentally problematic for the science itself. Finding out consensus views may be of value for decision makers, while scientists should not be influenced by the consensus, but remain open to all reasonable ideas. Even without bodies like the IPCC scientists are too much influenced by the prevailing views of other scientists, and a body that tells, what’s the consensus, is likely to make the situation worse. Now we have still a third layer, which is due to the politicization of the issues and the peer pressure related to the politicization.
@Pekka Pirilä…
I’ll provisionally agree. But IMO unconscious assumptions cause a great deal more trouble, because the implications aren’t really considered until somebody drags them into the light.
This goes multiply for linear assumptions WRT to a massively complex, massively non-linear system such as the climate (and associated marine and terrestrial ecologies). While climate experts may be well aware of the questionable nature of linear assumptions (such as the ability to separate human influence from internal variation), I suspect the majority of people working on even the technical IPCC reports aren’t. And as for the majority of their policy-maker custormers…
AK,
I had naturally something in mind, when I added the words “as far as the assumptions are made consciously” to my message.
The problems of IPCC are mainly due to normal human behavior rather than willful attempt to mislead.
There was a perceived and perhaps well justified need for IPCC, but many of the unavoidable problems of such an organization are not widely appreciated even now.
Peeka
I suggest that the IPCC is an organization that has taken on advocacy of a set of beliefs as its goal vs. the reporting of scientific data. I acknowledge that is my opinion only, but the IPCC acceptance of the outputs of the current GCMs seems to make such a conclusion reasonable. Can you think of any other precedent where models were accepted for the implementation of government policy when the models had not been validated by real world observations?
I ask you to re-look at what you have written.
You wrote:
“There’s no possibility that anybody could prove now or in foreseeable future that the risk is not real.”
Pekka- Would it EVER be possible to not have future risk from weather? Of course not. What is the actual evidence that shows that a world with higher atmospheric CO2 will have more severe weather that it has historically exhibited.
You also wrote-“If IPCC is dismantled, the governments must find some other method for obtaining that information.”
In the US there is an established means for our Congress to obtain information and it is certainly not necessary to have a political body such as the IPCC to provide information.
Rob,
I have always problems, when IPCC is discussed as an organization that has taken some action, because IPCC has a very special structure.
Pachauri may speak on behalf of IPCC, but he cannot really decide much as he’s only the chairman of the complex organization, not a boss, who can decide. All people paid by the IPCC have only little influence on the outcome, which is produced by the working groups. Which individuals finally are influential and in which ways is very complex and often difficult to judge.
Formally the decisions are made by the panel that consists of government representatives, but the decisions of such bodies are certainly influenced by people who are preparing the material for the meetings. Here again the real logic and the role of various individuals is difficult to know, and I believe that it’s difficult to know even to those involved in the process.
Looking at the working group reports carefully tells that each chapter is done differently, because the lead authors are different and they have most of the influence on that level. In some chapters other authors are more independent, while the role of lead authors may be stronger in others.
It’s really a mistake to think that IPCC is a centralized and uniformly behaving body.
Pekka,
So the IPCC produce the best possible scientific report, the politicians dutifully absorb the information, and design the best possible policy response accordingly. A total separation of science and policy. Dr Brian Schmidt, who’s just won the Nobel prize, was saying just this week that’s how it should all work.
It’s a nice idea. But, a politicians main priority is to win their next election and their second priority is to deliver policies their financial backers like. AGW isn’t going to change much between one election and the next. So, I’m just wondering if this might just be a slightly too idealistic view of the way our political systems actually work?
TT,
You are right. Democracy is terrible. But what are the alternatives.
I have noticed that the most vocal opposition to democratic decision making has often come from the ecological side. They seem to believe sincerely that they are the right elite that should be given dictatorial rights.
Is that your choice?
“dictatorial rights?” No
But I would say that democracy shouldn’t just be considered to be the marking of a cross every few years. After all, democracy itself wasn’t won through the democratic process. I sense that President Obama would like to do something about climate change but even if he wins the next election the non-democratic forces ranged against him will try to prevent that.
So he may need a bit of help at street level.
tt,
What lack of mental ability or character would let you confuse the skepticism people have with AGW with a problem with science as a whole?
That is such a mindless bit of drivel on your part. You typically do better.
Hunter,
So you’re saying that you don’t have any other problems with any science other than on climate research? You’re totally happy with everything else?
Somehow climate science has attracted a whole bunch of untrustworthy people? But all other scientific fields only attracted the honest types?
It has been interesting to watch the transitions this blog has taken. The IPCC is a government organization which claims to be scientific. There is no more use in this world for scientific governance than there was for Marxism. Of course we may need to experiment for some additional centuries to notice there is little difference.
huh? what’s scientific governance? if it’s any implementation of rules, regulations etc. that are based on any sort of science, that seems pretty extreme. The usual argument is we don’t want WORLD governance, and maybe the EPA overreaches, and regulations aren’t properly subjected to cost-benefit, and bureaucracies exist to make themselves bigger, etc. etc….
but you mean, like, Congress shouldn’t pass any safety laws based on testing or anything?
Bill-
“Scientific governance” – in the context of the prior comment – would seem to mean political control of the scientific process. That would be a tail wagging the dog situation, mostly useless, unless one defines political corruption as useful.
As a good example, see the Inspector General’s ruling on the EPA’s endangerment finding. The EPA was required to use science as justification for decisions, yet the process for evaluating the science was governed by politics. Result = useless.
BlueIce
Tony Brown
Thank you a million!
Defund the IPCC and save climate science and Science in general!
The Climategate emails have demonstrated the anti-scientific methods of the IPCC as described by Dr Costell below.
Why Climategate is so Distressing to Scientists
By John Costell, PhD (Physics)
The most difficult thing for a scientist in the era of Climategate is trying to explain to family and friends why it is so distressing to scientists. Most people don’t know how science really works: there are no popular television shows, movies or books that really depict the everyday lives of real scientists; it just isn’t exciting enough. I’m not talking here about the major discoveries of science—which are well-described in documentaries, popular science series, and magazines—but rather how the week-by-week process of science (often called the “scientific method”) actually works.
The best analogy that I have been able to come up with, in recent weeks, is the criminal justice system—which is often depicted in the popular media. Everyone knows what happens if the police obtain evidence by illegal means: the evidence is ruled inadmissible; and, if a case rests on that tainted evidence, it is thrown out of court. The justice system is not saying that the accused is necessarily innocent; rather, that determining the truth is impossible if evidence is not protected from tampering or fabrication.
The same is true in science: scientists assume that the rules of the scientific method have been followed, at least in any discipline that publishes its results for public consumption. It is that trust in the process that allows me, for example, to believe that the human genome has been mapped—despite my knowing nothing about that field of science at all. That same trust has allowed scientists at large to similarly believe in the results of climate science.
Until now.
So what are the “rules” of the scientific method? Actually, they are not all that different from those of the justice system. Just as it is a fundamental right of every affected party to be heard and fairly considered by the court, it is of crucial importance to science that all points of view be given a chance to be heard, and fairly debated. But, of course, it would be impossible to allow an “open slather” type of arrangement, like discussion forums on the Internet; so how do we admit all points of view, without descending into anarchy?
This question touches on something of a dark secret within science—one which most scientists, through the need for self-preservation, are scared to admit: most disciplines of science are, to a greater or lesser extent, controlled by fashions, biases and dogma. Why is this so? Because the mechanism by which scientific debate has been “regulated” to avoid anarchy—at least since the second half of the twentieth
century—has been the “peer review” process. The career of any professional scientist lives or dies on their success in achieving publication of their papers in “peer-reviewed” journals. So what, exactly, does “peer-reviewed” mean? Simply that other professional scientists in that discipline must agree that the paper is worthy of publication. And what is the criterion that determines who these “professional scientists” should be? Their success in achieving publication of their papers in peer-reviewed journals! Catch-22.
It may seem, on the surface, that this circular process is fundamentally flawed but, borrowing the words of Winston Churchill, it is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. Science is not, of course, alone in this respect; for example, in the justice system, judges are generally selected from the ranks of lawyers. So what is it that allows this form of system to work, despite its evident circularity?
The justice system again provides a clue: judges are not the ones who ultimately decide what occurs in a courtroom: they simply implement the laws passed or imposed by the government—and politicians are not, in general, selected solely from the ranks of the legal profession. This is the ultimate “reality check” that prevents the legal system from spiralling into navel-gazing irrelevance.
Equivalent “escape valves” for science are not as explicitly obvious, but they exist nonetheless.
First, a scientific discipline can maintain a “closed shop” mentality for a while, but eventually the institutions and funding agencies that provide the lifeblood of their work—the money that pays their wages and funds their research—will begin to question the relevance and usefulness of the discipline, particularly in relation to other disciplines that are competing for the same funds. This will generally be seen by the affected scientists as “political interference”, but it is a reflection of their descent into arrogance and delusions of self-importance for them to believe that only they themselves are worthy of judging their own merits.
Second, scientists who are capable and worthy, but unfairly “locked out” of a given discipline, will generally migrate to other disciplines in which the scientific process is working as it should. Dysfunctional disciplines will, in time, atrophy, in favour of those that are healthy and dynamic.
The Climategate emails show that these self-regulating mechanisms simply failed to work in the case of climate science—perhaps because “climate science” is itself an aggregation of many different and disparate scientific disciplines. Those component disciplines are extremely challenging. For example, it would be wonderful if NASA were able to invent a time machine, and go back over the past hundred thousand years and set up temperature and carbon dioxide measurement probes across the breadth of the globe. Unfortunately, we don’t have this. Instead, we need to infer these measurements, by counting tree rings, or digging up tubes of ice. The science of each of these disciplines is well-defined and rigorous, and there are many good scientists working in these fields. But the real difficulty is the “stitching together” of all of these results in a way that allows answers to the fundamental questions: How much effect has mankind had on the temperature of the planet? And how much difference would it make if we did things differently?
It is at this “stitching together” layer of science—one could call it a “meta-discipline” —that the principles of the scientific method have broken down. Reading through the Climategate emails, one can see members of that community—usually those with slightly different experience and wisdom than the power-brokers—questioning (as they should) this “stitching together” process, particularly with regard to the extremely subtle mathematical methods that need to be used to try to extract answers. Now, these mathematical and statistical methods are completely within my own domain of expertise; and I can testify that the criticisms are sensible, carefully thought-out, and completely valid; these are good scientists, asking the right questions.
So what reception do they get? Instead of embracing this diversity of knowledge—thanking them for their experience (no-one knows everything about everything) and using that knowledge to improve their own calculations—these power-brokers of climate science instead ignore, fob off, ridicule, threaten, and ultimately black-ball those who dare to question the methods that they—the power-brokers, the leaders—have used. And do not be confused: I am here talking about those scientists within their own camps, not the “skeptics” which they dismiss out of hand.
This is not “climate science”, it is climate ideology; it is the Church of Climatology.
It is this betrayal of the principles of science—in what is arguably the most important public application of science in our lifetime—that most distresses scientists.
http://bit.ly/qGdw23 (pdf)
Fine screed, but going from justice to the peer review process, you forgot to carry the idea that the climate-gate emails would be inadmissible in court.
Besides the fact that you are tarring an entire branch of science based on the behavior of a few, whose work has been verified by others not tainted by the climate-gate non scandal.
Besides the fact that you are tarring an entire branch of science based on the behavior of a few, whose work has been verified by others not tainted by the climate-gate non scandal.
That’s the non-scandal of hiding data, hiding declines, turning graphs upside-down, pal-review …
And it’s not merely the fraud of a few, it’s the deafening silence from virtually all the others, who are thereby also tainted.
“lolwot | October 6, 2011 at 5:10 pm |
climate sensitivity does come from GCMs.”
Reference please. So far as I am aware, the way the IPCC arrives at a change in surface temperature for a change in CO2 concentration is as follows.
1. Estimate the change in radiative forcing for a doubling of CO2.
2 Estimate the no-feedback climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 by using the “Plank” or some other method.
3. Estimate the total climate sensitivity by the use of GCMs.
GCMs cannot accept a change in radiative forcing as an input. Instead, the IPCC estimates the no-feedback climate sensitivity, and uses this as an input to the GCMs. If I am wrong, where am I wrong?
um, you’re completely wrong. the no-feedback sensitivity is a benchmark. you can use a GCM to get it if you disable all the feedbacks, a sh*t cr*p pile of work, but could be done. it is true like lolwot or someone said that the models develop the sensitivity. it is not input to them. doesn’t mean they’re right.
so to expand, a model takes a parcel of air with x ppm CO2 and uses radiative transfer codes to figure out how much of the outgoing IR is intercepted, based on surface emission profile (how much at what wavelength), where it’s at in the atmosphere, what is absorbed and emitted below, etc. etc.
this absorption/re-emission becomes the basis of the generation of the feedbacks (vis a vis increase in air temp).
doesn’t mean they’re right, I’m just saying.
OK, but how are clouds handled? Are there parameters that determine the proportion of cloud at each level in a cell, based on temperature, surface temp, surface type (land vs. sea), etc.? Then more parameters that determine the effect of x% cloud on radiation?
sounds about right but I have to punt that up to more knowledgeable peoples.
Yes, please.
Wrong.
“1. Estimate the change in radiative forcing for a doubling of CO2.
2 Estimate the no-feedback climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 by using the “Plank” or some other method.
3. Estimate the total climate sensitivity by the use of GCMs.
GCMs cannot accept a change in radiative forcing as an input. Instead, the IPCC estimates the no-feedback climate sensitivity, and uses this as an input to the GCMs. If I am wrong, where am I wrong?”
Sensitivity is estimated by 3 or 4 lines of evidence. Paleo (LGM) observation, and finally models. The models give a range of 2.1 to 4.4C.
The observation work and paleo work ranges from ~1.5C to 6C+
GCMs work by taking in concentrations of emissions over time. The radiation codes calculate fluxes dependent on the constituents in the atmosphere. These codes are band model RTE. tested and verified agaist observation ( see ARM)
& to clarify w/r/t what I said and Mosher’s more intelligent explanation, I think we are in absolute agreement that sensitivity is NOT an input to the models, it is an outcome, but I failed to mention that yes it can be otherwise derived or estimated.
Also even the “no feedback” sensitivity as estimated by a model is still going to depend quite a bit on its handling of convection effects on the dry adiabatic lapse rate (DALR) which I am going to guess are not as ironclad as the treatment of band-level radiative transfer equations..
In the no-feedback case, the only assumption about convection would be that it maintains the lapse rate much as it is, which connects the troposphere temperature change to a surface temperature change.
I am with joshua and his fellow travelers on this one. I firmly believe that the IPCC should stay the course, just carry on with their dishonest and feckless efforts to peddle their hysterical alarmist propaganda. (Don’t tell joshua, et al, but It ain’t working.)
When your opponents are in a deep hole, it is bad strategy to advise them to stop digging. Let us encourage the IPCC go down as far as they like.
haha, ya. keep doing what they are doing.
The question is whether IPCC has outlived its usefulness.
The IAC Review made a number of recommendations for improving IPCC’s processes and procedures. If IPCC had any genuine desire for self-improvement it would have exhibited considerable effort and enthusiasm to achieve those reforms. Instead, what we see is tardy, reluctant, selective, partial movement, a tinkering at the edges to give the appearance of acknowledging its many problems. Its conflict of interest policy is farcical; instead of improving transparency it has embraced ‘confidentiality’. To date there seems to be no genuine effort to address selection bias. The whole attitude seems to reflect its reluctance to respond to critical review comments. Defunding would be a good first step.
IF the international community were serious about reducing CO2emissions we would see the likes of China, India, USA, Canada etc. rushing to ‘save the planet’. Instead, we see piecemeal endeavours (by a minority) which are not merely environmentally ineffective but also economically damaging and which thereby threaten to compromise our capacity to adapt to whatever climate change consequences are in the pipeline.
Well put. Just one correction: defunding would be the final step.
Tony Brown
Well done!
For those who lack Tony’s style, competence and good sense, look to what he posted here at the top of the thread for an example of the right way to defame in writing without exposing oneself to the charge of libel.
See how he uses allusion to others’ derogatory writings to say the same thing without the ugly resort to the clumsy words and kludgy reasoning.
Look how a specific, identifiable group, while clearly intended, is not actually named in such a way that a formal libel has been committed. A skilled circumlocution that stand shy of actually offending while getting the offense public in all its barely veiled glory.
See too how strings of nearly-related concepts are strung together to seem to form a logical premise without the premise actually being stated directly.
Bravo.
This is like a textbook for how to call people you don’t like nasty names without giving them any recourse to defense from the damages you do.
Takes notes, folks.
Some of you could use it.
Bart,
Think of that advice next time you look in a mirror, to find someone who really needs it.
And thank you for the great example of filibustering.
blather on, Bart!
The European economy is on the verge of a Lehman like collapse. The U.S. economy is taking on debt faster than the Titanic took on water. Both are “too big to fail”‘ But both are also too big to bail out. In this disastrous economic climate, the IPCC is still pushing for decarbonization, which could turn a potential global depression into a global economic collapse.
In the real world, there is now zero chance that the IPCC’s policy recommendations will be implemented (any more than they have to date) at any time in the foreseeable future. And unless there is a drastic change in the political tides, the idiotic attempt to regulate “carbon” will be rolled back, regardless of what any scientist or group of scientists says.
But as a conservative, I must say that I hope that the IPCC continues on its merry way because the only harm it is likely to do from now on is to the cause of progressivism and its drive toward centrally planning the energy economy. Changing the rules of the IPCC at this point would be like changing the sheet music of the dance band on the Titanic. It might sound a little better, but it’s not going to make the slightest difference in the outcome.
But what if the IPCC are right, but for whatever reasons their recomendations can’t be implemented?
So that’s just too bad is it?
Retired man, trying to convince his wife to let him invest all their assets with in the latest Ponzi scheme:
“What if Bernie Madoff is right, but for whatever reason I don’t invest all of our money according to his recommendations?
So that’s just too bad is it?”
Not a terribly convincing argument. A virtually guaranteed economic collapse, vs. Greenpeace generated scare scenarios with vastly inflated levels of certainty. Those of us not blinded by our politics will be glad to take our chances.
But, we know that you’re wrong. You probably are too old, so you yourself won’t suffer from the effects of advanced AGW. There’s no justice in the world is there?
tempterrain
Nor will my grandchildren (or yours), tempterrain, because the whole computer-fed, IPCC-led AGW scheme will have collapsed long before they are old.
The collapse has already started with the lack of warming over the first whole decade of the new millennium.
It is continuing as we “speak”, as pointed out by Tony Brown in the lead article.
Between now and 2100 the climate will continue to do exactly what it wants to do, regardless of anything we try to do about it.
Max
We’re getting awfully tired of the ‘grandchildren’ gambit. Our grandchildren will be better off in a warmer world however it happens, and far worse off in a colder world.
=============
“We know that you’re wrong.” Somebody didn’t get the memo. Absolute certainty hasn’t worked very well in pushing your agenda. You are supposed to pretend to recognize at least a miniscule possibility of error.
As for my future grandchildren, I will entrust their future to me, and my children (their future parents), rather than you, Michael Mann, James Hansen, Rajenda Pachauri, and Al Gore, thank you very much.
tt,
After all of this time, all of this evidence to the contrary, you stick to your noxious bit of sophistry that skeptics just don’t care?
What a shallow, derivative fact-free and ignorant position you take.
Are you even serious?
“After all of this time, all of this evidence to the contrary, you stick to your noxious bit of sophistry that skeptics just don’t care”
Climate skeptics certainly care about the price of gasoline, their right to carry guns and their ‘freedom’ to drive SUVs that’s for sure. But what else do they care about? In which other scientific topics do they, or have they ever shown, anywhere near the same level of interest as in the climate?
tt-
Ask yourself, if you are able, the same question regarding AGW believers:
Beyond posturing about ‘the climate’, what good has your community done?
Nothing at all.
The skeptics who post here- engineers, scientists from other fields, geologists, interested lay people, are all involved with building futures for their families and delivering goods and services that actually help people today.
The AGW community wants to stop much of that, and rob the future of cheap, abundant energy in the name of some model results which are agreed to be highly imperfect.
The sorry argument you lurch into over and over like some staggering drunk is the same disgusting argument the eugenicists used in their heyday, and just as empty.
“rob the future of cheap, abundant energy”
Not at all. There is abundant energy but not in the form of fossil fuels. Besides the CO2 emissions there’s lots of other nasties in there too.
http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/blogs/fossil-fuels-deadlier-than-nuclear-radiation
“Would climate science be better off if it were divorced from the IPCC? ”
A better question: is any area science better off by having an organization serve as a knowledge clearing house between scientists and policymakers? The answer to this question is no. These organizations thrive by exploiting ignorance among non-scientists of how science works. Many if not most people in the non-science world think that scientific knowledge is validated through consensus-finding as expressed by professional societies where members get to vote for the officers who make these pronoucements. It is a plausible way for many to think because it mirrors the democratic process in at least a superficial way, and it conjures pleasant fantasies of “ideal societies” governed by toga-clad learned elders. But scientists are people too, with political beliefs and as much a desire to “do well by doing good” as anyone else. Trying to hybridize science and politics as the IPCC has done ends up producing bad science and bad politics.
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/09/why-you-should-care-about-reproducible-research.html
IPCC
For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios. Even if the concentrations of all greenhouse gases and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1°C per decade would be expected.
OBSERVATION
http://bit.ly/pMHO76
Where is the acknowledgement by the IPCC for its wrong “accelerated warming” claim?
It must be disbanded, for causing needless worldwide panic.
First, it is misnamed. It is not an Inter-governmental panel, it is an extra-governmental panel, well beyond the influence of any people I elected. Its entwined interface with NGOs makes it, in my opinion, hopelessly compromised, especially after discovering their use of gray literature. Second, it is a tool of activists. The summary for policy makers of its reports being released prior to the conclusion of the scientific portion shows which is first, and it is not the horse. Third, it is completely hypocritical, enthusiastically embracing all the ‘bad’ behaviors it wants the hoi-polloi to be prohibited from. Its run by a railway engineer and NGO insider, and steered by a small number of gatekeepers. The one and only bright spot of the financial crisis is that it leaves no money to advance the IPCC’s agenda. The IPCC is hopelessly lost in my opinion and needs eliminating – and as quickly as possible.
Chip,
The people you elected signed off on every IPCC assessment report. Furthermore the “railway engineer and NGO insider” was the personal choice of your last president.
hastur,
Just more evidence that good people make msitakes.
Pretty clever of Dubya to put Pachauri Jones in the engineer’s seat, drivin’ that train. Is there no limit to his wickedness?
===============
Pachauri’s singular appeal at the time of his inauguration was that he was not Dr. Watson. And that’s it.
Also, you say elected officials signed off on the document. Can you name any who actually signed it?
I got bored again and did a little counting. Two separate sub-threads here, both diverted to discussion about the earth shattering issue of whether anyone can “prove” that climategate caused a change in public opinion, totaling 40 comments out of 178 at the time of writing this.
On a post directed to what if anything should be done about the IPCC.
Can you say filibuster? ….. I knew that you could.
Quick, someone write something about asymetry.
Joshua is like a skeptic who sees C02 go up and sees temperature go up and demands to “see” the causation.
Er… Which way was that causation going again?
“a skeptic who sees C02 go up and sees temperature go up and demands to “see” the causation”
I see the temperature go up and down all the time. And I’m still waiting for the evidence that C02 has anything whatsoever to do with it.
Andrew
Steven,
Isn’t causation essentially a question of probability? OK we consider that CO2, CH4 etc are GH gases, we then increase their concentrations, we see it get warmer and think its very likely that the situation is indeed one of cause and effect.
On another matter: I’ve just looked at the graphs on your website: http://stevemosher.wordpress.com/
Like the one right at the bottom of the first page:
You may be of the opinion that its not necessary to explain to people who are as smart as you are, just what the red, blue and black lines actually represent, but I’ve always thought it was good practice to indicate this information anyway.
@tempterrain…
No it isn’t, not in the sense you’re asking it. leaving aside the fact that cause/effect as we normally understand it is an artifact of how our brains work, GHG’s either do or do not “cause” warming, and warming either does or does not cause increased CO2. What’s a question of probability is our best guess about what’s actually happening.
I’m not just nit-picking here. It’s important when dealing with science to recognize that there’s a real world out there, presumably acting according to real “principles”, and science is about discovering those principles. But one of the fundamental assumptions of all real science is that those principles will operate the same way whether we understand them or not.
A second point to understand is that, to begin with, each of these “cause” relationships, if they exist, occur with a certain “strength”, which AFAIK we call “sensitivity”. Following on, causation is not necessarily an either/or situation. Each could cause the other, under appropriate circumstances, resulting in the potential for positive feedback relationships, including “runaway” conditions.
GaryM
I suggest that Joshua writes his own article and submits it to Judith on the subject of ;
‘ Everything in the IPCC garden is lovely-Climategate proven to restore trust in climate science.’
The object of my article was to determine what- if anything- should be done about the IPCC and it would be good if he focused on that.
The climate is important to us and perhaps there is a need for an objective central body to coordinate research into it by looking at the past and present natural and human influences.
This would include a more thorough look at the basic data and also the research that has gone before.
With regards to basic data there is no better example than SSTs that I wrote about here. It is scary to think our governments are partly taking decisions based on bored sailors throwing buckets over the side of a ship 130 years ago in order to extract sea water samples with which to measure temperatures .
With regards to the latter-research- we seem to be constantly reinventing the wheel-a good example is the last thread on climate 500 years ago which delivered us the news that crop prices change in relation to the prevailing climate-a subject that Hubert Lamb wrote about in great detail 40 years ago.
Over the years the IPCC has developed in ways that were probably never intended, just as the EU has developed way beyond what most of us had expected.
There is a politicisation of the process which has perhaps become more important than the science. I doubt if the IPCC can be rehabilitated as its inherent dysfunctional processes are so embedded, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some good practices that could be carried forward to a new organisation under different leadership..
tonyb
Occam’s Razor suggests a more robust presumption and conclusion: it was born deformed, and grew monstrous by design.
tonyb
“that doesn’t mean there aren’t some good practices that could be carried forward to a new organisation under different leadership.”
That part of your comment presents what is really the central issue of the question you raise. What type of organization is best able to carry out and improve on “good practices” over time?
WebHubTelescope inadvertently stumbles across the answer in a comment above.
“The point is that these organizations (IPCC, Bell Labs, etc) exist because groups of people decided to disseminate scientific research for the common good.”
The fact is that Bell Labs was not formed “to disseminate scientific research for the common good.” Nor was the IPCC. Bell Labs was formed to make a profit off of science and engineering, with the happy result of a great deal of research that redounded to the common good.
The IPCC was formed to further a political agenda (Which is why I disagree that it is dysfuntional or corrupted – it is working precisely as it was designed to work.), with the unhappy consequence of perpetuating bad science and bad scientific practices.
In Bell labs, when an idea or process failed, it had to be discarded because the goal was to turn a profit, and it was a waste of the owners’ money to keep alive something that doesn’t work. A line of research that ended in a dead end, or a researcher who refused to learn from his mistakes, was discarded.
In the IPCC, since the goal is the accumulation of political power (both for the IPCC itself and its political sponsors), the correctness of the science is irrelevant. That which supports the case for more control is supported, no matter how thoroughly debunked, because it doesn’t matter if the science works, what matters is whether it supports the agency’s true agenda. (Blatant errors like disappearing glaciers and Amazon forests are only corrected when the fallout from such debacles threatens the agency’s authority.) They are spending the money of tax payers, who have no say in how they go about their work.
When science follows a capitalist model, mistakes will still be made, but when they fail, they go away, either through the decision of the owners, or bankruptcy if they do not see the error of their ways. When the government controls the science, errors are perpetuated, like the East German Trabant.
If Michael Mann were working for a private company when he produced the shoddy work that gave us the hockey stick, he would have been fired. But since he works for, and is funded by, government, and because his work contributed (for a time) to advancing the progressive agenda, he has prospered.
The IPCC isn’t going anywhere any time soon, There is too much of our money already in the pipeline. The only thing we have to worry about is well intentioned moderates/independents/default progressives trying to reincarnate it as another government controlled arbiter of science.
The only problem was that only a few corporations out of thousands were willing to set up research labs that gave their scientists freedom. Contrary to your opinion, during the peak years, the scientists could work on stuff that had nothing to do with their products. Jeez, I just gave you a link to a Bell Labs film on global warming from 1958 — what does that have to do with the telephone system? Bell Labs, IBM Watson, Xerox PARC and a couple others were not the norm back in the day.
Nowadays, they aren’t what they were then either. Bell Labs is split up into several pieces and PARC split from Xerox.
Web,
The only reason those scientists had the luxury of following some of their own interested, was that their work for Bell Labs provided sufficient profit to do extraneous work.
But yes, private labs today just aren’t what they used to be. Innovation stopped decades ago. I can show you right here with a Google search on this nifty phone I have that can do more than the computers NASA had to send men to the moon. Let me move my Kindle out of the way first, as soon as I am done talking to people around the globe, virtually for free. And my flat screen TV might be a little too loud to hear you, so let me turn it down too. I’ll record our internet conference and post it on Youtube for the entire world to see. Here, have some chips while we talk, they’re made from the most abundant farms in the history of mankind. And don’t get me started on all the medical devices and medicines that will probably keep me alive til I reach 100 (perish the thought).
Ahhhh for the good old days before evil capitalist corporations got involved with research..
Yes, capitalist organisations do their own research but now it hardly ever gets released into the public domain. Ever heard of intellectual property? Ever heard of NDAs? Non disclosure agreements? Everyone has to sign those now even to be allowed access the most mundane of corporate information. The ethos of Bell Labs is well and truly a thing of the past.
tempterrain,
Oddly enough I have heard of intellectual property. Without it, you wouldn’t have most of the technology we have today.
Ahhh for the good old days when the altruistic progressives at Bell Labs rejected the evils of capitalist concepts like intellectual property – as demonstrated by their 26,000+ patents.
http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/corgs/bellabs.html
GaryM,
There is nothing wrong with patenting inventions. Yes, the scientists and engineers at Bell were allowed to do that, and they considered that to be enough protection. They were allowed much more freedom to write up their work in scientific journals than they would be now. Pick up any journal these days and you won’t find much if anything from the private sector which isn’t written as a marketing exercise.
Patenting inventions is one thing but I’m not sure about the patenting of human genes, 20% of which have been patented:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/1013_051013_gene_patent.html
In fact if it wasn’t for the intervention of President Clinton in 2000 the whole of the human genome would have been patented and now been in private possession.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project
Is that what you guys would have wanted?
Stop with the patronizing attitude. I worked at IBM Watson for awhile and know innovation. I shared an office with Bob Dennard, the inventor of DRAM and developer of the scaling theory that allowed most of the miniaturization that amuses you so. The indoctrination I got when I was there was to pick an interesting topic and plug away.
tempterrain,
You have now moved the goal post all the way to another stadium. The issues regarding patenting genes are much more complex than it is worth going into on a climate blog. I am ambivalent on the issue anyway.
Suffice it to say, your visceral antipathy for capitalism does not translate well into rational arguments regarding economic history. You and Web are so far off base a quadriplegic catcher could pick you off first. (No offense to quadripegic catchers intended of course.)
Antipathy for capitalism? Not at all. My view is that it is a necessary and even a desirable part of a modern liberal democracy. However, every company or corporation should be accountable to a wider section of that democracy than just its own shareholders. It’s also important that no particular one becomes too big – certainly not so big they can’t be allowed to fail.
Mann is satisfying his customer. Pretty simple, really.
As a former sailor tasked with taking regular sea water temperature readings, I take offense that one would suggest that sailors do not take their work seriously, even if it is quite boring.
Other than that, since the IPCC doesn’t do any science, why disband it.
Especially since they seem to be getting the right answer.
Claiming the IPCC is getting the ‘right answer’ is a nice illustratin of the golden rule for bureaucracies:
“He who has the gold writes the rules.”
It might be better if Judith invited people who were qualified in Climate science to write a blog or two occasionally. Chris Colose, perhaps?
tt,
Chris is not a qualified cliamte scientist.
Read his own bio.
This one? http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~colose/
OK we perhaps just need to give him a year or two.
GaryM is spot on.
This site continually raises interesting and challenging topics and issues in a reasoned and mature way, but often a few “contributors” take topics off down the line of – deniers blah blah, show me the proof blah blah, big oil blah blah, … After a short while, it gets a bit like the Monty Python argument sketch. – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y
I seems that every time an interesting topic is being discussed some people do not want the facts and challenges to get in the way of a good dogmatic status quo argument.
As for the subject of this thread – for me it is clear that the IPCC cannot be trusted to give unbiased and considered advise and any IPCC contributing scientist with a modicum of self respect would have to question the methods and means for obtaining the “it’s worse than we thought” propaganda that the IPCC is best known for. As an engineering graduate I worked this out all by myself based on simple application, investigation and common sense.
The climategate issue was only a small piece of a much larger story of deceit and statistical manipulation. It would be nice to see some of the key figures from the IPCC actually addressing the issues rather than ignoring them. I guess it is also fair to say that some of the posters on here are operating in the same way as the IPCC.
I am just amazed that with all of the big oil money on the side of the sceptics how more (or any) news space cannot be bought to promote the alternatives to the IPCC alleged truth, it sort of suggests that maybe the big oil story is yet another example of a flawed theory that some choose to accept without question or deviation from the one true way.
So to Dr Curry I’d like to say thanks for giving people the chance to understand the issue on both sides and to those few posters mentioned above I’d like to thank them for confirming what I already knew.
Shytot
Thanks for a nice post.
Not really, he/she is a phony. Girma at least you put some ridiculously naive little graph up, and sign your name to it.
Check this:
Shytot, If you are going to act like you are some great savior, you might actually want to point to your actual arguments. Otherwise, your arguments are self-servingly hollow. I suggest you do what I do, and try to build up a scientific chain of arguments, and make it available for anyone to try to refute. Just like I did elsewhere in this thread:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/06/ipcc-discussion-thread/#comment-119155
Climate research is a classic multi-physics domain and I am not expecting to finish it one big bite, rather to build up from a foundation of first-principles where I can properly propagate uncertainties and try to make sense in my own mind (and hope to get some feedback). For all I know, you can be doing this as well, but we all get kind of tired by these assertions of authority, in your case from “an engineering graduate” …. please, sheez.
Thanks for confirming what I already know
We have no idea what you know, that is the problem!
You are just like a lot of people that cast aspersions and deal with innuendo without really arguing the scientific evidence, apart from some line of fallacious reasoning, in your case, an assertion from authority.
This is a rude and unreasonable remark. Shytot seems to be a first-time commenter and you have no reason to regard him/her as a ‘phony’. Nor does he/she claim to be ‘some great savior’. I agree with Shytot’s comments.
I don’t think he/she is actually a “shy tot”. These people should be able to take it, once they cast aspersions of “deceit and statistical manipulation” on others.
Thanks PaulM
@ webhubtelescope – I guess that is your real name?
You seem to have interpreted my comments and jumped to some conclusions …. as you are entitled to.
I was merely giving an opinion on the quality and direction of some posts and also on what I believe wrt the IPCC which was the original purpose of this thread.
I used the engineering graduate part to confirm that I have some scientific abilities and am therefore happy to take in the various facts and think for myself or to put it another way I don’t like to be spoon fed fallacious arguments or innuendo or aspersions….
As for what I know – I know that a lot of shoddy data and statistics have been used to perpetrate a convenient lie. I know that several people have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and avoiding any open discussion on the quality of their data and calculations. If you don’t see that or believe it then that is your right but I don’t feel I have to justify it to you in minute detail.
Since I thought that most people participating on this thread will have some prior knowledge and will have various sources I am not going to resurrect all of the threads and all of the evidence supplied by much more capable people than me.
C’mon WHT
No need to get all excited and surly.
Shytot expressed a personal opinion, which many of us here may share but you obviously do not, namely
Instead of attacking shytot’s motives, why not simply list the factual reasons for your viewpoint to show that shytot’s viewpoint is not sound, namely why the IPCC can be trusted to give unbiased advice?
Emm..or do you not have any factual reasons for your viewpoint to present?
Max
Manacker, you aren’t helping either by putting data tables with bad data points out for people like me to wrestle with. You know what I am talking about.
The fact is when confronted with someone like me with some energy and clear logical thinking willing to wade through the data, then we have to wheel in the fainting couch.
Geez. I just linked to an analysis that I did which completely verified and validated (ooh, that will get some people excited) the standard IPCC CO2 impulse response curves. This is derived completely from first-principles and can be used by anyone to explain and rationalize the huge adjustment time of CO2 in the atmosphere. But obviously you don’t want to argue that, and instead you want to support someone with a bruised ego.
The perhaps sad fact is that I thrive in this kind of environment. You can throw stuff at me and tell me where I am totally wrong, and I will just adapt, learn from that and make some other advance. Doesn’t matter to me how it gets done, just that we move the sticks downfield. Science is a contact sport. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a footnote :)
WHT,
You mean if Shytot doesn’t buy into your Malthusia bs he/she is not entitled to an opinion?
You seem more rude than usual.
Are things OK on the home front? Is there an illness in the family?
Hi Joshua
My apologies-I am on a very flaky connection (which took a minute just to upload the ‘leave a reply’ form) so its been difficult to follow the discussions on the main point of the article- the future of the IPCC- as well as the sub thread you have been busily developing, which seems to be about climategate, which caused someone to refer to your ‘endless sophistry’.
With respect, I would remind you of what I wrote;
” But regardless whether or not “corrupt” is too strong a word to use to describe this process, there is no question that in many people’s eyes the IPCC has suffered a massive loss of credibility and trust by the general public as a result of the many disclosures following the Climategate leaks. In turn this has followed through into greater scepticism by some parts of the media and created a greater awareness of the role and importance of the IPCC.”
Some context here is important as I was in part qualifying my DEFENCE of the IPCC (see climatic change-special issue” thread) as regards a charge of ‘corruption,’ by pointing out that they are not the voice of authority or command the respect- that they perhaps once did.
I said that ‘in many peoples eyes’ the IPCC had suffered a massive loss of respect and credibility. MANY people is not ALL people Joshua . It means ‘great in number’ or ‘numerous.’ Obviously ‘Many’ people continue to hold them in great regard but not ALL people do.
Undoubtedly there are other causes for changes in perception about the IPCC and climate science, of which the nature of any severe weather in the previous year will undoubtedly play a part. Positive or negative coverage by the media will also have an impact.
The topic is not about climate gate but the IPCC. I am sure you have something interesting to say about that latter topic. If so I would be pleased to read it. (connection permitting)
tonyb
Hi Tony –
Thanks,
I did consider that your argument might not be that there has been a massive lost of trust and credibility on the part of the public, but that “many people” think that such has taken place. I had trouble parsing that sentence, and went with the alternative interpretation.
As such, now that you’ve clarified, I apologize for my confusion about the point that you were making. But given your clarification, I am now confused by this other statement:
Here, again, you seem to be conflating references to those who think that there is a “massive” loss of credibility among the general public, and there being a “massive” loss of credibility and trust among the general public.
Regardless, going with the idea that “many people” think that there has been a massive loss of trust and credibility among the general public, I still have to ask you what you feel qualifies as “many people?”
My guess is that a relatively tiny % of people think that “Climategate” has caused a massive lost of trust and credibility among the general public. Now, a tiny % of the planet’s population, or even a tiny % of people who live in countries and circumstances where they are likely to have access to information about climate change, could, in an absolute sense, be considered to be “many,” but I don’t think that “many people” is an accurate descriptor – given that it is likely a tiny % of people who live in countries and circumstances where they are likely to have access to information about climate change. Even in the U.S., according to the one poll that manacker linked, 29% of the 29% of the people who at least somewhat follow the debate about climate change are more skeptical about climate change as the result of “Climategate” – and most of them have “conservative” leanings. My guess is that many of that 8% of the public did not have trust in the credibility of the IPCC prior to “Climategate,” and so whether “Climategate” actually “resulted” in a “massive” loss of trust and credibility – even among that 8% – IMO, is highly questionable.
But even if it were, what do you think about the possibility that they would be holding that belief even though there is insufficient evidence to support their conclusion? I would say that those “many people” are more than likely driven by motivated reasoning in forming their views about climate change.
What say you?
As for the IPCC:
I think that the IPCC process has been flawed in many of the ways that we have seen discussed in these and other “skeptical” blogs. Not the least among them are insufficient processes for controlling for potential conflicts of interest, or motivated reasoning among the IPCC participants. I do not think, however, that the IPCC is particularly unique, as a large institution, in those regards. That doesn’t mean that I think that corrections should not be implemented, or that a slowness in implementing those corrections is not troubling. But at the same time, I find that the types of categorical denouncement of the IPCC that I have often read -often times infused throughout with political speculations and not infrequently infused with reasoning based on conspiratorial logic – to be worthy of a high level of “skeptical” scrutiny.
What say you about that?
As to whether I think that the IPCC should be disbanded, or has lost its usefulness: The existing problems notwithstanding, it is my belief that without a viable alternative in place, the IPCC plays an important function as a clearinghouse for existing expert input on climate change. That said, I think that “skeptical” scrutiny of their output – of the type that we have seen provided by our gracious host at Climate Etc., plays an important role as well. The problem for me is that unfortunately, IMO, the “skepticism” that we see sometimes is of dubious quality, because it is insufficiently controlled for political influences, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, etc. It is impossible to completely control for those influences, but when people reject the notion that such influences even need to be controlled for on one side of the debate (but that the other side of the debate is fatally flawed due to those influences), or when people argue that there is some inherent “vast asymmetry” in the influence of such biases – then there is no place to even start to control for the biases on both sides.
Joshua, a year ago my tire guy knew the scare was exaggerated, and knew it was ruining business. Maybe you should get out more.
=============
They call this a filibuster. You are a trip joshua. Please stop the pedantic blubbering. You are not doing your cause any good. Thank you.
Thanks for reading, Don.
It’s nice to know that I can count on you.
I find you somewhat amusing, joshua. If only your type could harvest the energy in the surfeit of hot air that you generate. How did Copenhagen work out for you? You are right about Climategate. No problem for your team. You should have more of them.
The OCD/autism isn’t improving then? Shame.
Don –
For the most part, I don’t have a “cause.” I think that vast majority of the participants in this forum are largely fixed in their perspectives. I will admit that to the extent that isn’t the case, I hold on to the very remote possibility that discussing facile reasoning among “skeptics” will help to convince somebody that assumptions about “vast asymmetry” in the climate debate are ill-founded. But admittedly, I assume that at best, only the tiniest of fractions of the people reading this blog might be so persuaded.
Mostly, I participate on this blog to help develop my own perspective. The fact that my participation elicits so many insults is not the least bit unexpected to me. I’m a big boy. I can take it. And so comments such as yours have no discouraging effect – in case you thought that maybe they did.
I am not insulting you, joshua. I am ridiculing you. Just trying to help you develop your perspective, and I am starting with your distorted sense of your own worth.
Joshua
You are flogging a dead horse parsing sentences.
Tony has expressed himself very clearly on the general public loss of confidence in IPCC and its predictions..
He has cited references showing this loss of trust.
He has conceded that there might be several people who still have trust in ICC despite this trend.
If you are either unwilling or unable to understand what Tony and others here are telling you, so be it.
This all just makes you either appear like an obstinate idiot, even if you really aren’t one, or that you are trying to fog up the issue in a filibuster to distract from the painful facts, as another blogger has noted.
You are in the hole – stop digging..
Max
lol!
Joshua
As regards the first part of your reply to me Shytot posted this;
“GaryM is spot on.
This site continually raises interesting and challenging topics and issues in a reasoned and mature way, but often a few “contributors” take topics off down the line of – deniers blah blah, show me the proof blah blah, big oil blah blah, … After a short while, it gets a bit like the Monty Python argument sketch. – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y
It seems that every time an interesting topic is being discussed some people do not want the facts and challenges to get in the way of a good dogmatic status quo argument.”
It is worth watching Joshua.
As regards the second part of your post, I think there is a lot of sniping at- or defending of-the IPCC, because people have an entrenched position which might be political/ideological or for other reasons.
I do not like it when people accuse the IPCC of corruption or a hoax or a conspiracy (see the other thread) and am sure that most of those working within it have the pursuit of scientific excellence as their prime motivation.
However they pronounce a level of certainty that appears to be based on false assumptions. SSts are a good example of turning base metal to gold-the historic records are hopeless. Similarly Manns Hockey stick has proved to be (arguably) the single most iconic piece of work
iused by the IPCC but it is difficult to agree with its findings. My own view is that Dr Mann was over eager to release it-or the IPCC was over eager to use it-as it remains a flawed analysis of climate and the spaghetti derivatives can’t udo the harm the stick has dpme to reasoned discussion..
i think the IPCC has outlived their usefulness, they are too big, there are too many entrenched views and the process is dysfunctional.
Look forward to discussing your viewpoint on the IPCC but I don’t intend to have a £5 argument with you (see the link above) :)
All the best
tonyb
Not much to say in response to that, Tony – except that if that’s your conclusion about what I “want,” you are wrong. What I “want” is to discuss my perspective on the issues, and how it relates to the perspective of others. You wrote what I consider to be a facile conclusion into your post at the top of this thread. I questioned you about that conclusion, and after your response, I believe that your logic was still flawed. If your conclusion from that exchange is that I “don’t want the facts and challenges to get in the way of a good dogmaatic status quo argument,” you are certainly entitled.
That’s all well and good, and I take that statement at face value. However, my question to you was what do you think about people who reach conclusions about the impact of “Climategate,” despite the lack of supporting evidence. There’s nothing I can do to get you to answer that question if you don’t want to answer it. So be it. I will continue to look to see if you want to respond on that point.
I’m not sure that I disagree – which is why I linked you earlier to Pekka’s reasonable post on that point. I look forward to reading your response to Pekka’s post if you choose to do so.
Oh! Oh! Ask me! Ask me! I will help you, joshua. The impact of “Climategate” has been an outpouring of sympathy for the scientist victims of email theft, a much increased awareness that climate kills, and an almost universal recognition that action must and will be taken to save our planet from the evil, well-funded denialist conspiracy. However, there is absolutely no evidence to support my conclusion. But, I came up with the answer you want. Didn’t I, joshua ?
Hi joshua
You come over as a thoughtful and likeable person and if you are ever in the Southwest of England i would be pleased to have a drink with you and we can spend a pleasant few hours parsing each others meanings.
However, that is difficult to do through the interface of a nested blog and the subtleties and nuances of your highly parsed discourse, especially on climategate, are difficult to follow, let alone reply to so lets leave it for the pub.
I am interested in your views on the future of the IPCC and which post of Pekkas are you referring to?
tonyb
You obviously haven’t been talking to steven mosher.
lol!
Oh, and Tony –
Here’s the link to Pekka’s comment:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/06/ipcc-discussion-thread/#comment-119278
Supporting information:
Q161. How much do you trust or distrust the following as a source of information about global
warming?
Scientists May 2011 June 2010 Jan 2010 Nov 2008
Strongly trust 21 26 22 28
Somewhat trust 55 55 52 54
Somewhat distrust 19 15 19 14
Strongly distrust 5 4 7 4
Theory: after climategate “trust” declined. does the data above support
this theory?
1. strongly distrust jumped 2 months after climategate.
2. somewhat distrust jumped.
3. somewhat trust stayed about the same.
4. strongly trust dropped.
So, the data is consistent with the hypothesis. No casual link can be established, causal links require physical testable theories. The real question is “what other untestable explanation do you have to offer
tonyb: With respect, I would remind you of what I wrote;
Nice try.
Joshua
Thanks for the link to Pekkas post where he says;
“People due argue on the strength of the evidence, but it’s most certainly stronger than it was, when IPCC was created.”
I’m not sure I would agree with that-you surely must have asked him for the evidence that supports that contention?
We have learnt more about certain things but still have glaring gaps in our knowledge and what we do know is not necessarily robust-such as SSTs.
As for much of the rest of Pekkas very good post there’s little I would violently disagree with.
As for Mosh, he’s positively tame compared to what he used to be like, I think he must like you :)
tonyb
In my opinion, the IPCC has become too big. The reports are too long (the 1990 was 2cm thick). Based on the stolen CRU emails, contributing scientists seem to be spending too much time writing the reports, pondering whether something is “likely” or “more likely” to occur. The GCMs cannot give us more detail without further research and this is where the energy should be spent. The IPCC has served the purpose of assessing the science of climate change and making public the results. The program should be ended.
Rose
Can you show the evidence that the emails were “stolen”?
Girma and rmdobservations
I believe the accepted word now is “leaked”, rather than either “stolen” or “hacked”.
But ask steven mosher – he wrote a book on it.
Max
The investigation is still open. More shall be revealed.
Mosh 3.19
Here? Tonight? i’ll get the popcorn.
tonyb
no. sorry
I thought a while before I used the word “stolen”. My reasoning is, if I saw MY emails in published form without my permission, I would have considered them stolen.
What about the IPCC? I thought that was the topic.
Rose
Are they “yours”?
The emails that were leaked were the property of various institutions, including, for some of Michael Mann’s, the State of Virginia.
A 20+ year old rule of thumb is “Do not put into an email anything that you would not want the whole world to find out.” More recent rules are included in the terms of use that employees of an institution sign when they are permitted to use the IT system.
Yes, they are my emails because they contain my writing. I started email’ing in 1990 or so, probably before rules had been established, including your “rule of thumb”. At some point since then, I started seeing disclaimers in the emails I received from others, stating that the writers views did not necessarily reflect the views of the institution from which the email was sent. Some agreement must have been made about those emails. The rules and regulations have been evolving. Now, what do you think should be done with the IPCC?
“steven mosher | October 6, 2011 at 10:47 pm |
Climate sensitivity is estimated by various methods.
1. Long term paleo: LGM about 3C
2. Observations: volcano response, modern temperature record etc
3. models
4. Shorter term paleo
The spread is really big. but it aint lower than 1C.”
I simply do not believe your 2. What are any references? If you look at the numbers for total climate sensitivity that Girma routinely posts on Climate Etc., derived from recent hard measured data, the number is significantly less than 1 C. So far as I am concerned, it is simple Physics 101, that I was taught over 60 years ago in Cavendiash Labs; ALWAYS believe hard measured data when compared with hyypothetical estimates.
“the number is significantly less than 1 C. ”
Actually, the value is approximately 1C, the bugger is the water vapor response. The total sensitivity to all radiative forcing should 1.21C, Yes, I meant to add that last significant digit.
Dallas you say “Actually, the value is approximately 1C”
What reference are you using?
Unfortunately Jim, me. The devil is in the details
Actually, if I could find a translation of Arrhenius’ second estimate of climate sensitivity we could reference him. The values I get are very close to his. And the DW long wave estimate I have is very close to Angstrom’s, which is also very close to the Poisson equation estimate of potential temperature.
If you could substantiate that last significant digit, every major journal that publishes on climate would beat a path to your door.
Since you have not published that I can only assume you have zilch for data to back it up.
Got any?
Jim
“I simply do not believe your 2. What are any references?”
here is the deal. did you look? you start by disbelieving. that means you will not have an open mind when I show you the cites.
you CANNOT estimate the sensitivity using girmas method.
When you are open minded I will give you the links.
Can you change your mind in the face of evidence?
ready jimbo?? These are like Girma’s method, except done what we like to call “the right way”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzL10mgudaU
You accept his approach.. so you are stuck accepting the following.
make your way through the summary articles and then through all the source material
http://www.usclivar.org/Pubs/Hegerl042006.pdf
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-6.html
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/knuttir/papers/knutti08natgeo.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7087/abs/nature04679.html
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.167.859&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Here is a nice one that Monktopus cited.. then it was pointed out that in a subsequent paper the value was revised to 1.9C
http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCapacity.pdf
There are more, lots more.. GIYF
Note to all above (and below):
This is a guest posting by Tony Brown, not JC’s own words (or opinions).
WebHubTelescope
It is the case of the emperor has no cloth.
Definition:
“The Emperor Has No Clothes” is often used in political and social contexts for any obvious truth denied by the majority despite the evidence of their eyes, especially when proclaimed by the government.
http://yhoo.it/qnruy2
Did not the IPCC projected for a warming of about 0.2 deg C per decade?
Did not the IPCC projected for a warming of 0.1 deg C per decade had greenhouse was kept at the 2000 level?
If you have not seen the above claims, here they are:
“For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios. Even if the concentrations of all greenhouse gases and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1°C per decade would be expected.”
http://bit.ly/caEC9b
IPCC’s prediction graph:
http://bit.ly/cIeBz0
The correct interpretation of the data (like the child who said the emperor has no cloth) are the following:
Past Global Mean Temperature (GMT) Observation (A global warming of only 0.06 deg C per decade):
http://bit.ly/ocY95R
Current GMT Observation (A global cooling of 0.1 deg C per decade)
http://bit.ly/pMHO76
Yet another example of why the UN, and its evil step-child the IPCC, should go.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/279493/un-sticker-shock-new-building-will-cost-least-five-times-previous-estimates-brett-d-sc
Polar bears are drowning in the sweltering heat of the Arctic, and these geniuses want to spend between 1.97 and 2.42 billion dollars on a pretty new building.
Of course, these poor dear public servants need the new manse because there are only about 4,003,043 square feet of vacant office space available in New York City at the present time.
As many have said, it’s highly unlikely that the IPCC will reform.
What we have seen since Climategate and other controversies is that the climate orthodoxy has mostly doubled down across the board. Pachauri still heads the IPCC, the Team is still in place, orthodox blogs run still their comments in an authoritarian fashion, Climategate has been whitewashed, the climate change headlines have intensified (“Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates”), and the propaganda has become more strident (the 10:10:10 video, “The Inquisition of Climate Science”).
There have been a few constructive efforts. Dr. Curry’s blog and her work strike me as attempts to reform the orthodoxy and the IPCC. There was also Matthew Nisbet’s Climate Shift report in which he urged a deeper reconsideration of the climate debate from an orthodox position. Needless to say, the orthodox pilloried both Curry and Nisbet for their modest attempts at reform.
It looks more like war than policy debate and wars don’t end until one side gives up. I don’t see the IPCC giving up.
Jim Cripwell and steven mosher
“Paleo shmaleo”
Let’s look at historical records
Temperature increased by 0.7°C from 1850 to 2011 (HadCRUT3).
IPCC tells us that 93% of the past forcing was from anthopogenic components and that all other anthropogenic factors other than CO2 cancelled one another out
So warming from CO2 = 0.93 * 0.7 = 0.65°C
IPCC tells us that the atmospheric CO2 content in 1850 (C0) was around 290 ppmv (oops! This is not a measured value, but comes from an ice core).
Mauna Loa tells us it is 390 ppmv today (C1).
IPCC tells us the relation is logarithmic
C1/C0 = 1.3448
ln(C1/C0) =0.2963
ln2 = 0.6931
dT (2xCO2) = 0.65 * 0.6931 / 0.2963 = 1.5°C
IPCC concedes that its “level of scientific understanding” of “solar forcing” is “low”. Several solar studies have concluded that half of the past warming can be attributed to the unusually high level of 20th century solar activity.
If we use these estimates, instead of the one from IPCC we have.
DT (2xCO2) = 0.35 * 0.6931 / 0.2963 = 0.8°C
So the observed data tell us that a doubling of CO2 should cause between 0.8°C and 1.5°C warming.
Max
“DT (2xCO2) = 0.35 * 0.6931 / 0.2963 = 0.8°C
So the observed data tell us that a doubling of CO2 should cause between 0.8°C and 1.5°C warming.” I would say that statement is 100% correct.
The two cool things are that the CO2 increase is likely not the cause of much of the warming and the sun is the likely cause for more than half. Too cool, I mean.
======
*cough* thermal lag
*cough* thermal lead. The ocean data is pretty horrendous, but it appears, the ocean shift lead the atmospheric shift. Odd that :) Eh Kim?
“thermal lag”?
Do you mean the “hidden in the pipeline” saw?
Fuggidaboudit, lolwot. It’s a computer-generated myth based on circular logic.
Although the “pipeline” metaphor is not well chosen, the scientific rationale underlying it is impeccable. When it is challenged, I tend to think it is because the challenger has misunderstood what the “pipeline” refers to.
No the lag arises for a different reason entirely. Once you understand how GHGs raise surface temp, it’s apparent. Over time as you add more GHGs to the atmosphere the opacity to IR increases. The result of that is eventually the height at which the earth radiates back to space is raised.
as that height is raised to cooler regions, the surface warms. slowly over time admist hills and valleys of other variations the altitude of re redation to space is raised. The effect is not immediate. Its not large, but over time it amounts to enough to make a difference
This is a really good description of what is happening and readers here should try and understand it. It is difficult to find in undergraduate texts and journal papers skip over it, as something already known. I asked a modeller a similar question (about the statosphere) and,even though it cleared up my confusion, I have never seen his explanation in print.
Max, you write “IPCC tells us that 93% of the past forcing was from anthopogenic components and that all other anthropogenic factors other than CO2 cancelled one another out”
Thanks Max, but I have no idea where the IPCC gets the 93% from. I agree completely with what you are getting at, which seems to me is that EVEN IF WE BELIEVE WHAT THE IPCC IS SAYING, then the sensitivity MUSTbe less than 1C. Obviously if the 93% is wrong, then the sensitivity is even lower that 0.8 C. Until we know precisely what the contributions of the various natural variations are, all these calculations are little more than guesses.
I prefer Girma’s approach, of using the recent data that we really know what it means. During the past 10 years or so, CO2 concentrations have gone up, and global temperature anomalies have gone down, so the actual climate sensitivity would seem to be negative. I agree that this is impossible. Climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 must be positive. So all we can say is that there is no reason to believe that the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is signifantly different from zero.
Max
1. You have to look at total forcings. The climate is not driven C02. C02 plays a role, as does methane, TSI, aerosols, If you wanted to do the analysis your way you would FIRST have to subtract for the effects of about 14 other forcings. no cookie for you.
2. Its mots of the warming since mid century. ya screwed that part up.
3. you’d need to do a lagged regression since the response lags the cause by decades.
no cookie. If AGW were that easy, Joshua would understand it
steven mosher
I’m not looking for a cookie.
Just pointing out that we do not need to grasp into carefully selected periods of the far distant past for doubtful data which we can then subjectively analyze to give us the answer we were looking for in the first place.
We have a set of temperature and CO2 data since 1850. Let’s use that.
IPCC has given us the estimate a) that natural forcing represents only ~7% of the total past forcing and b) that all other anthropogenic forcings other than CO2 (other GHGs, aerosols, land use changes, etc.) cancel one another out.
So we have enough data points to make a ROUGH calculation of the observed temperature impact of CO2 and hence the temperature impact one could expect from a doubling of CO2. This comes out at 1.5C
Since IPCC has conceded that its “level of scientific understanding” of solar forcing is “low”, we should look elsewhere for this information. Several solar studies tell us that roughly half of the observed warming (rather than only 7% as assumed by IPCC) can be attributed to the unusually high level of 20th century solar activity.
If this is true then the 2xCO2 impact is only 0.8C.
So we can say that the physical observations on CO2 and temperature since 1850 would point to a a 2xCO2 warming effect between 0.8 and 1.5C, depending on how much of the warming is attributed to natural forcing components..
Realize that this is a very simple calculation, but often it is the simple things that make most sense, even in a very complicated system.
Occam, anyone? (I need a shave.)
Max
I think this is the “its the sun” argument
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm
Manacker. with 160 years of data you can at best estimate the TCR and not the ECR. If you dont understand the difference between those two quantities or what the terms stand for, then you cant continue the discussion. Further, If I tell you the speed of a car is due to
1. drag
2. horsepower
3. wind speed
4. wind direction
5. friction.
and I show you a curve of speed over time and focus only on the friction term, how good do you think that analysis is? similarly the climate is driven by many forcings. those forcings all change over time, you cannot diagnose ECR by SIMPLY looking at C02 and temperature. You need more variables, you need a model of the physical process, and in the end you get out the TCR.. from TCR to ECR is a whole other set of equations.. So you can get a wag at ECR .. but not the way you are doing it, not even close. your method is wrong.
Steve, who is dhogaza on RC? He’s being ignorant again.
David Young
Just to repeat, steve, you say “Max
1. You have to look at total forcings. The climate is not driven C02. C02 plays a role, as does methane, TSI, aerosols, If you wanted to do the analysis your way you would FIRST have to subtract for the effects of about 14 other forcings. no cookie for you.
2. Its mots of the warming since mid century. ya screwed that part up.
3. you’d need to do a lagged regression since the response lags the cause by decades.
no cookie. If AGW were that easy, Joshua would understand it”
Back earlier on this thread you wrote
“steven mosher | October 6, 2011 at 10:47 pm |
Climate sensitivity is estimated by various methods.
1. Long term paleo: LGM about 3C
2. Observations: volcano response, modern temperature record etc
3. models
4. Shorter term paleo
The spread is really big. but it aint lower than 1C.”
When I challenged you on your 2, I got no reaponse. Apparently you believe that it is possible to derive climate sensitivity from the “modern temperature record”, but when Max does precisely thi,s you claim he has done it wrong. Ok, let us call you out. You say it can be done but Max has done it wrong. What is the correct way of doing the calculation to get climate sensitivity from the modern temperature records?
Or are you going to do what you did when I tried to discuss Forbush Decreases with you? Just disappear. Are you going to put up this time, or are you one of these people who is all bluster, with no substance to support their wild claims?
Jim see the papers cites I left for you
“When I challenged you on your 2, I got no reaponse. Apparently you believe that it is possible to derive climate sensitivity from the “modern temperature record”, but when Max does precisely thi,s you claim he has done it wrong. Ok, let us call you out. You say it can be done but Max has done it wrong. What is the correct way of doing the calculation to get climate sensitivity from the modern temperature records?”
It is possible to get the TCR and from a TCR you can get to a range of ECRs. But you cannot do it the way Max tries. the reason you cant is there are other variables involved that you have to correct for, If you want an example of how it can be done, see schwartz, or see any of the papers I cited above for you when you asked the question.
“make your way through the summary articles and then through all the source material
http://www.usclivar.org/Pubs/Hegerl042006.pdf
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-6.html
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/knuttir/papers/knutti08natgeo.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7087/abs/nature04679.html
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.167.859&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Here is a nice one that Monktopus cited.. then it was pointed out that in a subsequent paper the value was revised to 1.9C
http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCapacity.pdf
There are more, lots more.. GIYF”
Finally, When I finish what Im working on I’ll return to the Forbush data. But you need to come up with a TESTABLE hypothesis and you need to agree to change your mind if your hypothesis fails
“It is possible to get the TCR and from a TCR you can get to a range of ECRs.”
Steve – I think this is a critically important point, particularly since TCR (transient climate response) estimates are both more reliable and more practical for estimating how the climate will behave during the rest of this century. In my view, a recent thread here on Probabilistic Estimates of Transient Climate Sensitivity was one of the most important in the recent history of this blog. It’s worth revisiting. I summarized some of the content in my Comment near the end of the thread. You might find it informative, but it’s the whole post and thread, including the referenced articles and the attention to uncertainty, that is particularly valuable.
When the IPCC set up shop as a purveyer of hockey sticks, what can you expect but hockey sticks all the way down?
I ran across a claim a while back that Michael Mann was the lead author on the chapter that first used the hockey stick. Anybody know it that’s true?
Michael Mann was one of eight lead authors of the Chapter 2 Observed Climate Variability and Change of the Third Assessment Report. The eight doesn’t include the two co-ordinating lead authors C.K. Folland and T.R. Karl. Another among the eight lead authors of that chapter was John Christy.
There were also roughly 150 contributing authors for that chapter.
Thanks, Pekka. Amazing how a meme can get distorted while being passed around isn’t it?
As a follow-up, it’s certainly true Michael Mann wasn’t the only lead author of the chapter, but that shouldn’t be taken as meaning any particular part of the chapter was 1/8th his responsibility. It’s common for a single author to write part of a chapter while the others just “look over” it. It’s a common way to divide labor, and it’s why the other lead authors are rarely mentioned in relation to the inclusion of his work in the IPCC TAR.
If one wants more insight on how Michael Mann’s position influenced the inclusion of his work, there’s a decent amount of information to be found in the Climategate e-mails.
I seem to remember reading that Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph was only one of a large number of similarly shaped graphs. Anyone know if that’s true?
It isn’t.
tempterrain
Read Montford’s book for more detail on the Mann hockey stick saga and followup, but here is a general answer to your question.
The original hockey stick was given “center fold” stature in the TAR Summary Report, even embellished with several lines of “future expected warming” grafted on and shooting up to the top of the chart (like in Al Gore’s scary AIT film).
After the HS was comprehensively discredited by McIntyre and McKitrick, confirmed before Congress by the Wegman committee and validated by a NAS panel under oath before the same committee, one would have thought that IPCC would drop it (and the conclusions of unusual 20th century warmth, which were based on it) like a hot rock.
Nope. Instead it got moved to oblivion inside the main report along with a whole bunch of newly sprouted “spaghetti copy hockey sticks” and the conclusion of unusual warmth remained in the new version of the Summary Report.
Check Montford’s book, tempterrain. It’s a good read, chock full of facts.
Max
It is true
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-the-hockey-stick-graph-has-been-proven-wrong.html
Looks like we have all italics again.
Makes me feel like I need a Xanax.
Damn it Girma. Pay attention.
Something amazing happened at CERN recently: Scientists asked other scientists to try to replicate their experiment, just in case they might have made an error. Tell that to the guys at IPCC and the Climate Science establishment!
wait what?
I thought the denier position on science was very simple: When observations disagree with theory you always throw away the theory. Yet here we have scientists at CERN looking for problems with the experiment rather than just tossing the theory out.
Wow I guess deniers don’t have a clue how science works afterall.
Since when did you start calling Michael Mann and Phil Jones deniers?
C’mon lolwot. You got it wrong again.
Validating experimental results by asking other scientists to replicate the results is part of the scientific process. That is how science is supposed to work.
Max
“Stirling English | October 7, 2011 at 11:35 am ”
Their name is pronounced Coke and spelled Koch. In case you hear something that does not fit the softdrink. ;)
The IPCC and its follower have become cult like. They do not work the way other scientists do. They are highly political. They abuse consensus, peer review, and uncertainty. They say the science is settled. Their followers encourage civil disobedience. They deny any mistakes. They vilify anyone with a dissenting opinion.
How cults apply to the IPCC followers
Most experts agree, though, that whether the joiner is young or old, certain predisposing factors may facilitate attraction to a cultic system, the success of recruitment and indoctrination efforts, and the length and depth of involvement. These factors include:
-A desire to belong
-Unassertiveness (the inability to say no or express criticism or doubt)
-Gullibility (impaired capacity to question critically what one is told, observes, thinks, and so forth)
-Low tolerance for ambiguity (need for absolute answers, impatience to obtain answers)
-Cultural disillusionment (alienation, dissatisfaction with the status quo)
Idealism
-Susceptibility to trance-like states (in some cases, perhaps, due to prior hallucinogenic drug experiences)
-A lack of self-confidence
-A desire for spiritual meaning
-Ignorance of how groups can manipulate individuals
from
http://www.apologeticsindex.org/265-who-joins-cults-and-why
Yes I’ve heard they all have pictures of Che Guevara on their wall and are all members of the Socialist Workers party. They start off the day with a rounding rendition of the Internationale. I guess we might be able to forgive that but they all eat yoghurt and meusli and then cycle to work too. How un-American is that?
Hey, tt, what are you smoking (or snorting)?
SETTLED SCIENCE
X) … to argue that the observed global mean temperature anomalies of the past decade falsifies the model projections of global mean temperature change, as contrarians have been fond of claiming, is clearly wrong. but that doesn’t mean we can explain exactly what’s going on. there is always the danger of falling a bit into the “we don’t know everything, so we know nothing” fallacy. hence, I wanted to try to clarify where we all agree, and where there may be disagreement,
Y) Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes? Where did the heat go? We know there is a build up of ocean heat prior to El Nino, and a discharge (and sfc T warming) during late stages of El Nino, but is the observing system sufficient to track it? Quite aside from the changes in the ocean, we know there are major changes in the storm tracks and teleconnections with ENSO, and there is a LOT more rain on land during La Nina (more drought in El Nino), so how does the albedo change overall (changes in cloud)? At the very least the extra rain on land means a lot more heat goes into evaporation rather than raising temperatures, and so that keeps land temps down: and should generate cloud. But the resulting evaporative cooling means the heat goes into atmosphere and should be radiated to space: so we should be able to track it with CERES data. The CERES data are unfortunately wonting and so too are the cloud data. The ocean data are also lacking although some of that may be related to the ocean current changes and burying heat at depth where it is not picked up. If it is sequestered at depth then it comes back to haunt us later and so we should know about it.
X) …we can easily account for the observed surface cooling [http://bit.ly/pMHO76
] in terms of the natural variability seen in the CMIP3 ensemble (i.e. the observed cold dip falls well within it). So in that sense, we can “explain” it. But this raises the interesting question, is there something going on here w/ the energy & radiation budget which is inconsistent with the modes of internal variability that leads to similar temporary cooling periods within the models. I’m not sure that this has been addressed–has it?
Y) How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
http://bit.ly/mSKXiF
With that settled science, they are destroying the world’s economy!
With that settled science, they are destroying the world’s economy!
It is a travesty!
Ya know, if the IPCC could get the value of the atmospheric effect correct, maybe more people would listen to them.
The effective temperature of the atmosphere due to greenhouse and solar absorption is equal to the sum of the total energy absorbed by the atmosphere, 195Wm-2. The surface fluxes, reguires correction for the 0.825 emissivity of the atmosphere, 24+79+51=154, the total combined surface flux absorbed per the NASA data, with 65 solar absorbed, 10 by the clouds at low altitude and 55 absorbed by the upper atmosphere.
For the surface, 154/.825=187Wm-2 plus 10 absorb by clouds plus approximatey 50% of the upper atmosphere absorbtion, 27.5, felt in the lower atmosphere, yields 187+10+27.5=224Wm-2, the equivalent greenhouse radiative effect. The effective temperature of the greenhouse radiative effect is 250.7K at 3800 meters, based on the dry adiabative lapse rate. Per the Poisson ralationship, a parcel of air at 250 and ~600mb(equivalent to 4Km) is equal to 289.7K. Considering the approximation of 4Km instead of 3.8Km, rounding errors in the data and the approximation that 50% of the upper atmospheric absorption, that is pretty close. Kinda neat :)
Dallas,
Your concepts don’t make sense. You may think that this is nitpicking, but you cannot really make any correct statements before you get this kind of details right.
What means: The effective temperature of the atmosphere due to greenhouse and solar absorption is equal to the sum of the total energy absorbed by the atmosphere, 195Wm-2. How is the temperature equivalent to that energy?
You use sometimes 0.825 as a dimensionless coefficient, but you have also stated that 0.825 = 3.3/4 where 3.3. is W/m^2 and 4 dimensionless. Thus 0.825 has the unit W/m^2. Which is correct: dimensionless or W/m^2?
Similarly little that you discuss in your second paragraph has been defined clearly. Thus they are essentially numbers without well specified meaning. That means that also the equations lack real meaning.
If you want to get something out of that, you must define the concepts accurately. When you have done that, it’s possible to discuss the equations. Until that’s done your message doesn’t mean anything.
I believe that 0.825 should be dimensionless. The 3.3Wm-2 was used by SoD which he called called it but 3.3Wm-2 /4Wm-2 is the value I am using, Sorry, I did not include the units to show they cancel.
Effective temperature is a new term, It really should end up being effective temperature and altitude. Months ago, I was trying to describe it as the average location of all the energy in the atmosphere in order to make a ball to ball model. If you take a column of air from the surface to TOA, the altitude where the average energy can be approximated is the effective altitude and the temperature due to that energy, the effective temperature. Still working on that.
Dallas,
Trying to describe the atmosphere by some average or effective temperature is very likely to lead to errors. The properties of the atmosphere are in an essential way dependent on the wide range of temperatures and trying to use just one temperature for any purpose is very not likely to give correct results. When it’s done for one effect at the time it can be done, but the effective temperature would be different for each effect. Thus the effective temperature cannot be used in any formula that relates two different variables to each other.
For a dynamic system you are correct, this only provides an estimate at assumed equilibrium. However, being able to model the dynamic system with a sum of points could be useful.
Even for the equilibrium the use of an effective temperature is questionable or worse. We have seen so many papers where that approach has been used to obtain false results. Some specific calculations may turn out to be right, but that’s of no value, because the correctness has to be verified by a more complete calculation.
True, I have no idea how effective it maybe. It does look like a good approximation if properly handled. Satellite monitoring of that that approximate level should be much better in determining changes due to GHE, since they have a very large range of pressures to average. This may be the reason I was getting a much better correlation of the mid-trop with strat that the upper trop with strat. Interestingly, the mid-tropo to strat appears to indicate the climate shift started in 1994-1995, not 1998. That analysis is way over my head, but just eyeballing it plus this latest stuff, it may be worth a look.
Dallas,
One problem with an effective temperature is that it may weigh various altitudes differently, when the conditions change. That applies to changing the CO2 concentration, as an example. When the definition has such ambiguities, it’s difficult to use the value in any meaningful formulas.
The effective blackbody temperature of the Earth as seen from space is well defined, but that’s nothing more than one way of expressing the total IR radiation emitted by the Earth system. It’s not the temperature of any particular level of the atmosphere or an average or effective temperature in any other sense than in specifying the total power of OLR.
The other potentially well defined concept is the average surface temperature, when we have defined, what we mean by surface temperature under various conditions. Determining that average accurately may be difficult, but it can certainly be defined.
Defining average atmospheric temperatures is more difficult. The satellites produce some values, but these values are strictly speaking defined by the detailed procedure that’s used in calculating them from the raw data. The definition tells only in rough terms, how the value is related to the actual temperatures of lower troposphere or some other concept used to name the calculated value.
The satellites are calibrated to the surface, so while the absolute value may be off the anomalies should reasonably accurate. this is also not in my job description, but the 250K temperature relative to the 4Km height should be a region of interest. If I am right, the 250K altitude is the general transition from mainly conductive and latent to significant radiative. No all, radiative, just significant, I have been trying to find that point for a year or two.
Why should that altitude be of particular interest. It’s true that the net IR heat transfer becomes larger than convection and latent heat transfer at some altitude in the troposphere, but that’s a smooth transition and there’s nothing special at that altitude, whatever that is. The first real change is at troposphere, where the convection stops.
Tropopause.
=======
Right
I’m not sure any altitude would be particularly meaningful, but if you want to analogize with the “mean radiating altitude” corresponding to a temperature of 255 K and an OLR of 239 W/m^2, it would be an altitude with a temperature corresponding to a downwelling longwave IR flux of about 330 W/m^2 – this temperature can easily be calculated via SB, and an altitude assigned, approximately, via lapse rates. I’m not sure what value this would have, however.
Its complicated. The current understand of the greenhouse effect is a touch off. CO2 actually increases surface heat loss by enhancing conduction., but increases heat retention in the atmosphere. Where the conductive heat flux transitions into radiative is the point of interest, not the latent boundary. That is why CO2 lags temperature drop in the transition to glacial and leads the transition into interglacial. Basically, it is an iso-conductive boundary, I know this is way too theoretical, but that is what the equation indicates, with of course, the coefficients I had to add.
It would be nice if someone would drop their preconceived notions of the GHE and take a look at the equation.
Fred, you are absolutely right only on small thing, K&T blew a sign in their calculation. The boundary is at -23C currently.
With the right value for downwelling it all makes sense.
Dallas – It’s you who has referred to yourself as a “crackpot”. I haven’t said it – yet – but don’t tempt me and others. Why don’t you actually try to learn something about the greenhouse effect? I say this sincerely, not sarcastically, because it’s clear you’re interested, and equally clear that you don’t have the foggiest notion of what you’re talking about.
The radiative heat transfer, convection and latent heat transfer operate in parallel. The strength of radiative heat transfer is determined by the temperature gradient and GHG concentrations. The sum of all is determined by the OLR from the top of atmosphere (the solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere has also influence on that). The adiabatic lapse rate (applicable moist rate) is also important, because the net radiative transfer depends on the temperature gradient.
When we know the sum and radiative components the rest can be calculated as the difference and that’s the way its strength is indeed determined in the atmosphere. The share of latent heat in that depends on the moisture level.
There’s no particular transition from one form to another, only the basic trend that increases the share of IR until it’s 100%.
My precondition is that physical processes are explained by physics, not by some meaningless equations. The full physical explanation exists, and there’s is nothing, which would contradict it. Of cause there’s still much to be learned about cloud formation, but that’s another issue.
Pekka, so CO2 would not increase the conductivity of a mixed gas?
“Amongst
molecular gases, carbon dioxide (CO2) mixed with
hydrocarbons, such as CH4, have a number of
advantages over argon based gas mixtures. The
enthalpy and thermal conductivity of CO2/CH4
plasma is considerably larger than argon plasma
(Figure 1). This is due to the fact that molecular
gases must dissociate before ionization. Thus, they
require much higher energy to become partially
ionized. The larger energy input translates into”
http://mpserver.pst.qub.ac.uk/sites/icpig2011/511_TOP_Mostaghimi.pdf
That is what the equation says. I didn’t know that until I complete the equation, Kimoto is a whack job too.
The concentration of CO2 is so low that it has practically no effect on thermal conductivity. The absorptivity/emissivity of CO2 is large enough to have a major effect, but the difference between conductivities of various gases is so small that only main components matter (N2, O2 and H2O, when moisture is high).
Your reference is on plasmas and considering temperatures of more than 2000 K. That’s totally irrelevant for troposphere (some effects typical for very high temperatures can be important also in ionosphere, where the density of gas is so low that ion lifetimes are long).
It’s amazing, how far you can err in your random picking of papers that have nothing to do with atmosphere.
Pekka, Since you speak several languages, have you ever seen the second Arrhenius estimate of climate sensitivity paper? I am nearly positive he discover this a hundred years ago, but since it didn’t cause the ice ages, in his opinion, blew it off.
If he and Angstrom had mot been in a cat fight, this would have been finished a century ago, with slide rules :)
Dallas 3.06
Are you referring to the Arrhenius 1907 paper in which he substantially lowered his original estimates? The 1907 paper which never gets quoted?
tonyb
I know, I have been searching for years, no luck. But he did issue a retraction so to speak of 1.6 (2.3) with water vapor which is nearly dead on. I can’t use what I have without doing a lot of nasty, time consuming and boring research and proofs. With all the nonsense in the AGW debate, it would be easier to modify the Milankovitch theory than tackle the team. Not in my job description!
I have a copy of Arrhenius’ 1906 paper ‘Die vermutliche Ursache der Klimaschwankungen’ (The probable causes of climate changes). On p 4 he writes ‘…I estimate that a halving or doubling of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere would correspond respectively to a temperature decrease of 1.5 degrees C or a temperature increase of 1.6 degrees C. In these calculations I have totally disregarded the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere. ‘ (my translation).
Arrhenius goes on to point out ( if I understand him correctly) that disregarding water vapour works in 2 ways: on the one hand water vapour reduces the outgoing radiation in a similar manner to carbon dioxide, so that a larger fraction of the earth’s radiation would be absorbed by carbon dioxide if the water vapour was removed from the atmosphere, while on the other hand the temperature increase consequent on an increase in carbon dioxide (itself) causes an increase in the water vapour content which further increases the temperature.
Inertial changes in CO2, water vapor, and snow/ice albedo all reinforce a temperature increase or decrease to first order. That was the original thinking that has prevailed over all these years.
Actually, web, you may want to look at this, I have to start from square one.
http://ourhydrogeneconomy.blogspot.com/2011/10/beginning-of-proving-trenberth-is-wrong.html
Dallas,
I haven’t searched for his papers (there are more than two), but in any case he didn’t have sufficient data for making reliable quantitative estimates. The temperature profile of the atmosphere was understood much later. The usual reference for that is the 1966 Manabe and Wetherald paper, and that’s not the only important detail that Arrhenius didn’t know. The range of his results of various papers and its near overlap with the present IPCC range is evidence on the fact that the final result is not very sensitive on the details, but I think that there was also luck involved in the fact that he got that close to the same values as the present scientists.
It’s interesting to note that he concluded correctly that the dependence is approximately logarithmic over the relevant range although that’s not at all obvious without detailed knowledge of the absorption spectrum.
It is very interesting. When did Poisson publish his work? If Arrhenius had that, he may have made the connection.
To expand on why he may have made the connection. At the surface, conductive heat flow dominates. I know I know, too much at one time. But the reason the e is so ridiculously high, is that CO2 and H2O absorb great but emit poorly at the surface. It is like putting mixed gas conductivity on steroids. that is an effect that Arrhenius may have been able to deduce.
I was going to save this for later, but since I can’t write for crap anyway, one of the most interesting things in the modified equation, is the relationship between the e coefficient and the a coefficient for conduction. Added greenhouse gases increase both coefficients, not decrease one and increase the other. So more GHGs actually improves conductive heat lost from the ocean to the atmosphere. If you use the correct value for DWLR you should see that relationship. I haven’t checked that, it is only predicted by the equation.
a,e IOU
sometimes why, don’t doubt UU.
===================
What’s so interesting in e?
Why is 0.825 ridiculously high?
What’s the theory that gives any real meaning for that number?
Pekka said,
“What’s so interesting in e?’ e is a function of both a and b the atmospheric window. Very complex relationship so far.
Why is 0.825 ridiculously high?
As CO2 increases, e approaches 1, If I am interpreting things right, 1 is the upper limit, However, the atmospheric window should keep e from ever reaching 1. That appears to limit warming to 1.21C or make the sensitivity non linear. So 0.825 appears to be close to saturation. I would love for someone else to do some what if’s to make sure I don’t have a common mistake somewhere.
What’s the theory that gives any real meaning for that number?
There is the rub. Only the initial value is implied from the S-B relationship. and somewhat verified by the “benchmark” value of 3.3 per 1. It makes sense once you consider the ratio of greenhouse flux to green house temperature and include average surface emissivity. For steady state at surface 288K and for a doubling of CO2 it implies ~1K warming, close to the estimate of 1.2.
What all this implies is just a small decrease in sensitivity which is a good match for most of the estimates. I have to double check my calculations, but instead of 3C it was ~2.55C, but that was not considering the atmospheric window which may limit the sensitivity.
Since I am not sure how to attack the equation for e, I have been looking at other relationships, the Poisson is the most interesting and the flat lining of OHC is remarkable considering the relationship to conductive flux. So far, everything seems to confirm that 0.825 is the correct initial value. I keep expecting something to blow the equation out of the water, but nothing so far, other than I am supposed to assume that 321 is the correct figure for down welling.
321 is probably a slight underestimate for DLR. The TFK 2008 paper discusses the many sources of information on this in detail, but one additional interesting reference is at Surface radiation. The annual mean at this one German site varied from 315 to 328 W/m^2, but since the air temperature at this site – 10.8 C – was less than the global average of about 15 C, the recorded values probably underestimate the global average.
Thanks Fred, I have looked at few of the ground measurements. A lot a fluctuations. I am trying to set up a spread sheet using the full S-B to make sure that is not part of the difference, however, the 24Wm-2 difference between NASA and K&T seems to be it. They could both have errors, so maybe splitting the difference?
Fred, there is a pretty good change in emissivity looking up and looking down, that inflates the down welling depending on the source, i.e 155Wn-2 TOA Yields 33C, but 220Wm-2 at 3800 meters yields 33 because the emissivity increases from 0.61 TOA to 0.825 surface. I was trying to get an estimate of the emissivity looking down from the tropopause which would help verify one or the other.
Fred, If K&T used TOA emissivity that would be most of the problem. The average altitude of the DWRL should be used not the TOA. 321 TOA times 0.61=195 and with the ~24Wm-2 missing in the atmosphere that brings it back to 220. They should have shown the DWLR toa with the reduction for emissivity. Surface DWLR have to be calibrate for ambient temperature, so if they are calibrating for TOA as well, that would explain everything.
In other words, a TOA balance inflates the effective DWLR.at the surface.
Dallas – That is complete nonsense. Why don’t you think before you click on submit? Your comments are bizarre.
Dallas – I’m beginning to feel uncomfortable responding to you. I’ve done so because you appear more interested in understanding the greenhouse effect than some other participants, but at the same time you are hopelessly confused and your calculations amount to little more than gibberish. If you want to understand something, you have to consult reliable sources rather than throw arithmetic around. Have you tried any of these? If you made only one or a few errors in what was otherwise a rational argument, it would be easy to identify the problems, but when there is nothing rational in the argument, the only thing I can advise is for you to scrap the argument, start with learning some basics, and work from there. I truly wish you luck, as I would with anyone struggling to understand something.
Fred, I am sorry you fell uncomfortable.
There are several ways to describe the greenhouse effect, The simplest is just show a line up and a line down at the surface each valued at 155, Second is to show two huge lines up and down from the TOA to the surface at 321Wm-2 The best why in my opinion is to show a broad line in the atmosphere narrowing at the surface and a broad line up narrowing at the atmosphere. The third option shows the impact of the greenhouse effect. The net is zero in all three cases. The calculations I have been doing are based on the points of origin of the fluxes. Not a cartoon version to scare little kids.
While K&T shows 321Wm-2, the impact is still zero, it is a balanced flow. The interaction between the surface and the lower level of the atmosphere is the green house effect. Every method I have used shows the impact. 155Wm-2 impact from the sky is initiated as a 220Wm-2 source. The effect is a reduction in air density, the dry adiabatic lapse rate. This corresponds with the Poisson equation, that is a verification of the effect.
The 55 Wm-2 absorbed in the upper atmosphere only has 50% impact at the surface because some of it is lost as cooling and the rest is attenuated by the emissivity, warming the atmosphere increasingly as it descends.
I am sorry this is so confusing, but to determine the impact, the amount of the source, location of the source and the emissivity from the source to the sink need to be understood. I think far too abstractly for many to follow, but it is the only way to visualize the inner workings of the system, it is complex.
Now that I realize what K&T were doing, I think it is a travesty. This is exactly why most engineers work in net fluxes, not gross fluxes. You see 321 Wm-2 actually warming something, physically warming the surface. It is not warming the surface, it is maintaining balance with the surface which is a warming effect. It does have a real effect, it increases the altitude of the tropopause.
If you work with the large nets like on the K&T,
“if the IPCC could get the value of the atmospheric effect correct, maybe more people would listen to them.”
Well maybe it would be worth a try. Maybe you could help them and we’ll hear people like Wagathon then make posts along the lines of:
Finally the IPCC have got something right. Previously, I must admit that I was firmly convinced the IPCC was part of an internationally led Marxist, New World order conspiracy to implement World government and subvert the US constitution. But now thanks to these new figures I’m now completely convinced they have been right all along. Thanks IPCC. Thanks Dallas!
Dallas: The effective temperature of the atmosphere due to greenhouse and solar absorption is equal to the sum of the total energy absorbed by the atmosphere, 195Wm-2.
Either you are wrong or you meant something different from what you wrote. It might be time for you to disengage from the pointilistic approach of blogging and write out your ideas in detail and at length, and submit them for publication to see what the reviewers think.
I believe that atmospheric science is too full of inaccurate approximations and cavities, but after reading your exchange with Pekka Pirila, I think that your presentation is incoherent. If you are correct, approximate, have a good idea, or other wise on to something, you need to rework your presentation. Amateurs are making important contributions to the climate change debate. Perhaps yours is an important contribution, but you need to rework it.
Thanks Mattstat, I am trying to do that now, the situation is pretty overwhelming, but I honestly believe I am on to something.
A quick follow-on to my earlier post, after reading what has followed. I do not expect the IPCC to be disbanded. I expect it to “adopt reforms”, and then to continue to make the mistakes and biased reporting that have lost it credibility. I am put in mind of a producer who loses its reputation for quality (anybody remember Schlitz), and then tries to rescue its declining market share by advertising. IPCC will not lose its share of funding. But it will continue to lose its share in the “marketplace of ideas”.
Who says there is anything wrong with the IPCC? Only a bunch of vainglorious Koch-heads running around pretending there is something wrong in the hope they might be taken seriously. I doubt they will be taken seriously and the IPCC will remain the leading authority on AGW in the same conservative and plodding way it always has.
Alas (for you) we are taken seriously. Try again.
Who says there is anything wrong with the IPCC?
Only those naive, outdated souls who think fraud shouldn’t be part of science.
Only a bunch of vainglorious Koch-heads running around pretending there is something wrong in the hope they might be taken seriously.
Yes, the Aussie contingent of skeptics and the downward spiral in IPCC confidence as per Aus poll data is — drum roll — the Koch brothers, natch.
Where’s the “this is so dumb it needs an eyeroll” icon when you need it?
You must be kidding.
This is somewhat off topic, but not really. The US clone of the IPCC, the USGCRP (with a budget of $2 billion/year, compared to the IPCC’s $9 million) is asking for comments on its pro-AGW Strategic Plan: http://strategicplancomments.globalchange.gov/
Have fun. Research into natural variability would be nice. Be sure to read between the lines.
Interesting. You know what word doesn’t appear anywhere on that page? Wonder what they’re running away from?
Dallas
Do you need a copy? I think I might have one in my archives.
tonyb
Heck yeah! This equation is very enlightening and Arrhenius could very well have predicted what he did and changed his prediction due to the counter intuitive relationship of conduction and radiation at the surface. The old guy was right for the wrong reason.
Dallas
As regards Arrhenius and what he did and didn’t write, it all gets very complicated, especially as much of the documentation appears to be in German. Its best described on Hans Errens’ site here;
http://members.casema.nl/errenwijlens/cooling.htm
There are a variety of links and explanations, including one to a discussion on the subject with William Connelly. Hope this helps.
tonyb
Thanks Tony,
I have seen that site before, still amazing how much Arrhenius did get right.
How can the IPCC reform or be reformed?
Within the IPCC and aside from the Working Groups there are the IPCC Panel, the IPCC Bureau and the IPCC Secretariat, which appear to steer the ship, although from the IPCC website, I’m not entirely clear how. Nor am I clear how members are selected.
If the IPCC were to reform, where would that process start and how it would such decisions be made?
It is interesting to examine the theme of this post in light of the results of Gallup Polls cited by Roy Weiler above.
Globally, most respondents who have heard of global warming believe there is a human contribution. Of these, almost half consider it at least somewhat of a threat. More interestingly, the number who see a human influence in the warming has increased by 5 percentage points between the 2007-2008 and 2010 surveys. The number of those who perceive a threat has been stable (up 1 percentage point).
From these numbers, it’s clear that worldwide, public acceptance of anthropogenic climate change has not declined, and in fact has probably increased slightly, although the change is not large enough to demonstrate an unequivocal effect. On the other hand, the increases have occurred principally in less developed regions of the world, while acceptance has declined in the U.S., Europe, and other developed regions. Global warming receives a lower priority than other environmental issues in the views of most Americans.
I find it hard to assign any single cause to either the change over the time, or the regional disparities. Presumably, the multinational economic recession has played a role in discouraging the view that global warming should be worried about right now, and it would be hard to conclude that Climategate has been totally irrelevant. On the other hand, it is also likely that the IPCC has been instrumental in shaping attitudes, and so the global increase in acceptance of anthropogenic warming is difficult to reconcile with a conclusion that the IPCC has been widely discredited on a global basis. I don’t know of global polling results on the IPCC per se, however, so this must remain speculative.
Based on the above, I see as unlikely a mass movement to disband the IPCC if it as seen as still an importance force in international opinion. – at least until some comparable process emerges on an international level. Reasons for reforming the IPCC have been described here and elsewhere, and I expect and hope they will proceed. AR5 will also proceed, and I expect the same will be true for either AR6 or some improved alternative of similar magnitude
It’s the difference between going from having no opinion to having one compared with having one and changing it.
There’s math involved if you like.
===============
Fred M: Just to be clear about those polls you are referring to:
In U.S., Concerns About Global Warming Stable at Lower Levels
Water Issues Worry Americans Most, Global Warming Least
Fewer Americans, Europeans View Global Warming as a Threat
World’s Top-Emitters No More Aware of Climate Change in 2010
Worldwide, Blame for Climate Change Falls on Humans
The first three polls show drops in concerns about global warming among Americans and Europeans. The fourth shows statistically significant drops among Japanese and Americans, and statistically significant increases among Russians and Indians. The fifth shows a modest increase in acceptance of AGW worldwide.
So I’d agree that on an international level it’s unlikely that there will be a call to reform the IPCC, especially since the developing world stands to benefit from climate mitigation measures.
However, I would say that the drops in concern about AGW in America and Europe ought to be worrisome to those hoping to have more impact than the regular issuance of IPCC reports. Without the cooperation of America and Europe there can be no successful treaties or programs for climate change. Since these are democratic countries, climate change will go nowhere without more popular support.
Arguably, reforming the IPCC would be one way to increase support for climate change in America and Europe. One could also argue that if climate change were such a serious threat, then the science ought to be done impeccably so its results were as solid as possible for policy decisions and to head off criticism.
But that’s not what we see from the climate orthodoxy or the IPCC, which leads me to question their priorities. Is it really to save the planet or is it to maintain their privileged status quo?
Huxley:
You win the prize for succinctly summarizing my thoughts! Though I still think the change in the approach of governments to ‘fighting’ climate change is more telling then polls. Cap and Trade dead in the USA, CO2 market dead in the USA, CO2 market in the EU in it’s last death throes, etc.
Roy Weiler
Fred Moolten: On the other hand, the increases have occurred principally in less developed regions of the world, while acceptance has declined in the U.S., Europe, and other developed regions.
That is intriguing. I can guess at least 2 things at work: 1. The developed nations have a higher percentage of their populations who are technically trained and capable of independent critical scrutiny of the evidence — people like Steve McIntyre. These are the people leading the charge; 2 everybody expects that CO2 remediation will result in net flows of wealth from developed to non-developed nations — you might expect more of a challenge from the people who are charged with paying.
I expect that you are right about the eventual appearance of AR5 and AR6.
Matt:
You may be correct. That is like a cost benefit analysis!
Roy Weiler
Two points, MattStatt. First, I think your surmise may be largely correct about developed nations, but there are certainly exceptions. Notably, Canada remains far above the U.S. in its acceptance of the reality of global warming and its threat potential. Why requires an explanation beyond technical expertise.
Second, and speaking of Canada, you mentioned Steve McIntyre as “leading a charge”, but against what? He can correct me if I’m wrong, but if I’ve interpreted his past statements correctly, he accepts as highly probable the reality of anthropogenic global warming and at least the possibility that it may constitute a threat. This would put him among the majority worldwide who hold those views. His skepticism has been directed to individual claims rather than basic principles or some of the important generalizations derived from them.
Fred M: Canada has about 1/25 the population of the US and EU. It may be an exception but it’s not a substantial.one. I’m not sure why you bring it up.
As to what Steve McIntyre might lead a charge against…My rough guess is that at least 1/3 of the skeptics posting at CE, including myself, accept the reality of AGW as probable, and consider it possibly a threat. That’s not a high bar. You would be mistaken if you believe such skeptics are on-board with the IPCC.
Speaking for myself, I am pushing for scientific integrity and open societal debate on climate change.
My rough guess is that at least 1/3 of the skeptics posting at CE, including myself, accept the reality of AGW as probable, and consider it possibly a threat.
My rough guess would be that you’d be lucky to count 1/10. 1/3 seems far too high.
What do you think, Wagathon?
Like you, Steve has issues with WG3. I think you’re going to find that when you get past the posturing, that’s what really motivates most people. Everybody has their ideas about what the energy economy of the world should/will look like in 2100, and most such opinionated people are not just wrong, but in Pauli’s words, not even wrong.
There’s a reason why so many critics of the climate establishment are engineers, and I tend to believe that even if they don’t realize it, the real fundamental objections are policy ideas that are technologically and economically naive.
Sounds about right to me. But they should challenge the policy ideas, and stop polluting the science.
Bart
My problem (as one of those silly engineers) is pretty simple to explain.
1. I do not believe we really understand the rate of warming that additional human released CO2 might cause. The are several issues that make this not resolved.
2. I do not believe the results of the GCMs that have been used to predict atmospheric conditions many years into the future. The models used to date have failed the most critical test-demonstrating the ability to accurately predict the criteria important to policy development (temperature and rainfall)
3. I do not trust the forecasts of the future worldwide conditions that were based upon the fundamentally flawed GCM’s. As bad as these models are, many have taken the results of these models to predict a future that is worse for humanity overall. When you read through these papers almost all of the analysis looks at potential harms and do not include an analysis assuming basic planning and construction of infrastructure.
I could write a paper showing the tremendous harms of the automobile and if presented in 1900, without a reasonable analysis of benefits; reasonable people reading my paper would conclude that the automobile should be banned. When it comes to global warming the analysis seems based upon bad models and deeply flawed analysis.
That stated-some people still support the IPCC conclusions in spite of knowing that the models from which the conclusions are based are almost without merit. (they are good to learn from for future models)
PE
It’s not just the “policy ideas” (which are totally screwy, futile and self-destructive in themselves), but it is the “science” leading to these “policy ideas” (both in WG2 and WG1).
That is where the problem starts.
http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/ipcc
Max
Fred Moolton: Second, and speaking of Canada, you mentioned Steve McIntyre as “leading a charge”, but against what?
Not against, but for greater accuracy, transparency and accountability in climate science. His critiques have been directed against poorly substantiated exaggerated claims, and against blatant selection of favorable cases in high dimensional multivariate modeling. He has also pointed to disparities between what writers have put into “supporting online material” and what they have written in subsequent papers and blog entries.
Canada is increasing its production of oil and coal about as rapidly as any nation on Earth. Only a few Canadians oppose that. It is incorrect to say that “Canada … and its threat potential”. Most Canadians actively or passively support increased fossil fuel use.
The really large and important exception to my generalization is China: much industrial development in China was financed by European carbon credits because it is a “developing” country; yet few Chinese, few Chinese scientists, and few Chinese environment ministers support the idea of AGW.