by Judith Curry
[W]e have a field of sort-of-science in which hypotheses are treated as facts because they’re too hard or expensive to test, and there are so many hypotheses that what journalists like to call “leading authorities” disagree with one another daily. – Gary Taubes
Why nutrition science is so confusing
Gary Taubes has an article in the NYTimes Why nutrition is so confusing, which has some interesting parallels with climate science. Excerpts:
Since the 1960s, nutrition science has been dominated by two conflicting observations. One is that we know how to eat healthy and maintain a healthy weight. The other is that the rapidly increasing rates of obesity and diabetes suggest that something about the conventional thinking is simply wrong.
In total, over 600,000 articles have been published purporting to convey some meaningful information on these conditions. It would be nice to think that this deluge of research has brought clarity to the issue. The trend data argue otherwise. The more we learn, the more we need to know.
Because the nutrition research community has failed to establish reliable, unambiguous knowledge about the environmental triggers of obesity and diabetes, it has opened the door to a diversity of opinions on the subject, of hypotheses about cause, cure and prevention, many of which cannot be refuted by the existing evidence. Everyone has a theory. The evidence doesn’t exist to say unequivocally who’s wrong.
In nutrition, the hypotheses are speculations about what foods or dietary patterns help or hinder our pursuit of a long and healthy life. The ingenious and severe attempts to refute the hypotheses are the experimental tests — the clinical trials and, to be specific, randomized controlled trials. Because the hypotheses are ultimately about what happens to us over decades, meaningful trials are prohibitively expensive and exceedingly difficult. And before any of this can even be attempted, someone’s got to pay for it. Without such trials, though, we’re only guessing whether we know the truth. [A]dvice to restrict fat or avoid saturated fat has been based on suppositions about what would have happened had such trials been done, not on the studies themselves.
Nutritionists have adjusted to this reality by accepting a lower standard of evidence on what they’ll believe to be true. The associations that emerge from these studies used to be known as “hypothesis-generating data,” based on the fact that an association tells us only that two things changed together in time, not that one caused the other. So associations generate hypotheses of causality that then have to be tested. But this hypothesis-generating caveat has been dropped over the years as researchers studying nutrition have decided that this is the best they can do.
One lesson of science, though, is that if the best you can do isn’t good enough to establish reliable knowledge, first acknowledge it — relentless honesty about what can and cannot be extrapolated from data is another core principle of science — and then do more, or do something else.
Obesity and diabetes are epidemic, and yet the only relevant fact on which relatively unambiguous data exist to support a consensus is that most of us are surely eating too much of something. We’re going to have to stop believing we know the answer, and challenge ourselves to come up with trials that do a better job of testing our beliefs.
A truly magical theory
Melanie Phillips as a post at the Electric Media Blog entitled A truly magical theory, that provides some climate science examples of what Taubes discussed in the preceding article. Excerpts:
Dame Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist at the UK Met Office, says that while there is ‘not yet definitive proof’, nevertheless ‘all the evidence’ suggests that ‘climate change’ is a contributory factor to the storms and heavy rainfall now causing the devastating floods in southern England.
Just how does Dame Julia arrive at this ‘significant’ conclusion?
The Met Office paper also says that, for various reasons (UK weather notoriously volatile, appropriate computer modelling systems not yet in place to ‘prove’ what they already know to be unarguably true) attributing changes in rainfall, regional climate and weather extremes to ‘climate change’ is, uh, ‘challenging’.
By which Dame Julia et al mean these changes cannot be attributed to AGW. But does that dent their certainty that AGW is the cause? Of course not!
‘There is no evidence to counter the premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly heavy rain events.’
And so the evidence to support the theory that ‘climate change’ has caused the storms is… that there’s no evidence to falsify what is merely a supposition.
Truly, AGW is a magical theory that explains absolutely everything – including diametrically contradictory phenomena, lack of logic and absence of evidence – whenever people observe profoundly, ‘Something funny’s happening to the weather’.
I have another theory to explain the current deluge. It is Galileo, Newton and Einstein weeping uncontrollably from above.
Severe testing of hypotheses
Taubes’ article mentions ‘severe testing.’ Joel Katzav has a very interesting article ‘Severe testing of climate change hypotheses’ published in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics [link] to complete manuscript. This is a very interesting paper; I provide here only some brief excerpts:
On the severe testing epistemology of science, scientific hypotheses’ truth should be assessed in light of how well they have withstood severe tests. According to Mayo’s version of the severe testing epistemology, an experimental result, e, counts as good evidence for an hypothesis h to the extent that the test that yielded e severely passes h with e. h passes a severe test with e if, and to the extent that, h fits e and it would have been very unlikely that h would have fitted test results as well as it does had h been false. Mayo’s definition makes, in accord with the severe testing approach, how good evidence is depend on the test procedure that produces the evidence. But she also wants to make sure that good evidence is strong indeed, and thus adopts a demanding version of the severe testing approach.On her view, we need a definition of ‘successful severe test’ that guarantees that (successful) severe tests are reliable indicators of the absence of error in tested hypotheses. As to evidence that is less than good evidence for acclaim, Mayo allows it an important role in identifying aspects of the claim that remain to be tested. On her view,such evidence thus helps us to see how far the claim is from the truth and what alternatives to it remain to be explored. Attaching probabilities to claims is, supposedly, neither needed nor desired in science.
From the conclusions:
As to OUR FAULT, IPCC-AR4 does not appear to have severely tested it. From Mayo’s perspective, then, IPCC-AR4 does not appear to provide good evidence for OUR FAULT. Mayo’s approach does indicate that the evidence may nevertheless provide guidance as to how far this claim may be from the truth and about what assumptions need further testing if it is to be well supported. But OUR FAULT is itself a broad estimate of where the truth may be with respect to a certain possible cause of global warming. There is no further error range estimate attached to it. Indeed, attaching such a further estimate would just amount to making another, weaker claim such as that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for more than a third of the post-1950 warming.
JC note: This is a very rich paper, I have invited Katzav to do a guest post.
JC reflections
Nutrition science and climate science share some common challenges: complex system(s) and many confounding factors. Severe tests for nutrition science can in principle be done, but they are very expensive and take decades. Severe tests for climate science require better observational evidence, particularly in the past.
When there’s no evidence to falsify what is merely a supposition,we are left with “magical theories that explains absolutely everything – including diametrically contradictory phenomena, lack of logic and absence of evidence.”
I agree with Mayo/Katzav that when evidence is inadequate for a severe test, it is important to identify aspects of the hypothesis that remain to be tested, and to provide an assessment of alternative hypotheses.
In climate science, the limitations of available evidence and weak reasoning behind the high confidence levels of the IPCC conclusions reflect acceptance of lower standards of evidence on what is believed to be true.
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“Very high confidence”
Re: “the evidence may nevertheless provide guidance as to how far this claim may be from the truth ”
See: 95% of Climate Models Agree: The Observations Must be Wrong. See 90 model Graph vs HadCRUT4 & UAH Lower Troposphere.
There is no justification for starting all those graphs from the same point in 1983, yet that single choice makes all the difference. Explain that.
This is an outstanding article. I look forward to a guest post by the author.
Yes, 1983 was about 0.1 degrees above the longer term trend line, being a well known El Nino year. Curious choice, but it looks deliberate because they cut off the record before that time which would show it to be a local max.
The choice of the starting point is clearly a major contributor for the deviation from the UAH temperatures, but not that much for HadCRUT4, which agrees with the model average also over the period 1994-1998. Shifting the UAH data up by 0.1C or little less would not really change the conclusions.
While the hiatus is very likely to be a temporary effect and not at all contradictory to AR5 central estimates for climate sensitivity, the models seem to really run too hot.
How significant the deviation is, is a very difficult question. Statistics does not provide clear rules for interpreting this kind of deviations in a comparison based on historical data as it’s now impossible to present an unbiased test for that. When we know the history already, we cannot any more device proper tests for such a comparison. A deviation like this is a strong signal, but it’s not possible to tell based on accepted practices of statistics, how strong it is.
lolwot: “There is no justification for starting all those graphs from the same point in 1983”
The rationale is that the values plotted are running five year means intended to filter out short term variations. Apparently “1983” is the average of 1979,1980,1981,1982,1983. It actually sort of says that in the chart legend, but you’re not the first and won’t be the last, person not to have it register. Why 1979? Nothing intentionally nefarious there probably. I’m 98% certain that 1979 is when the UAH satellite data set starts.
Those guys are quite cowardly, starting only from 1983.
Why can’t they start from 1880, which is widely held to signify the time at which worldwide instrumental temperature records became available?
The IPCC estimate of 2.1C TCR works very well over this range.
Even a training interval of from 1880-1950 gives an estimate of 2.2 C and a clear projection to current-day temperature, including the pause:
http://contextearth.com/2014/02/05/relative-strengths-of-the-csalt-factors/
http://imageshack.com/a/img812/74/abh.gif\
Read it and weep.
To Pekka:
“While the hiatus is very likely to be a temporary effect”
On what is this belief based ?
How do you know it’s a ‘temporary effect”?
How long would “temporary” be? Another decade? only a few years?
Pekka Pirila: How significant the deviation is, is a very difficult question. Statistics does not provide clear rules for interpreting this kind of deviations in a comparison based on historical data as it’s now impossible to present an unbiased test for that. When we know the history already, we cannot any more device proper tests for such a comparison. A deviation like this is a strong signal, but it’s not possible to tell based on accepted practices of statistics, how strong it is.
Starting NOW, with the best model that we have NOW, we can construct a sequential test to use annually (or monthly) with data as they are accumulated in the future, and write criteria for deciding, in finite time, whether the model is sufficiently accurate or sufficiently deviant to accept or reject. For something like AR4 or AR5, or a publication in a journal, we can start the test with the date of publication, or the date of the last data used in formulating the model up to that time.
England et al, have evidently decided that the data now exist to show that the earlier models that did not predict the hiatus are clearly sufficiently deviant to reject. NOW is a good time to begin the sequential test of their new model.
Quote from our hostess. “In climate science, the high confidence levels of the IPCC conclusions reflect acceptance of lower standards of evidence on what is believed to be true.”
I disagree. The high confidence levels of the IPCC conclusions merely reflect the opinions of a bunch of biased “scientists” (politicians), and are completely unrelated to anything resembling the scientific method, and standards of evidence.
Agreed, which is why I set out to find the real cause of AGW we had in the 1980s and 1990s. That was from Asian industrialisation causing vast aerosol level increase and in turn this reduced low level cloud albedo, picked up by the satellites as a reduction in cloud area. The same mechanism quantitatively explains amplification of delta tsi at the end of ice ages.
The mechanism is quite easy to deduce, the second optical effect Sagan missed by misinterpreting earlier work by van der Hulst, which reverses the sign of the ‘indirect aerosol effect’.
The climate models use the false Sagan physics: in hind casting they use twice real low level cloud optical depth, an albedo increase of c 25. This is blatant cheating to direct people away from the fact that the IR physics in the models has been completely cocked up. Net surface IR is at an average of 1/6th the black body level and none can be thermalised in the gas phase.
The latter is straightforward statistical thermodynamics completely missed by Climate Alchemy – thermalisation in the Tyndall experiment can only be at optical heterogeneities, the tube wall.
This is why I only trust MODTRAN, because with it and simple cloud IR physics modelling you can prove how the climate system really works; there is no significant CO2-AGW, as is being shown experimentally,
Unicorns abound!
Andrew
Bingo Andrew . . it is amazing to see the arabesques, reverse ferrets, poor mathematics, use of dodgy data, squirrels, squirms and downright deception that has to be invoked to prop up the AGW “theory”.
First we were told the surface temperature would rise, and has risen, since we started burning stuff. When the surface temperature stopped rising suddenly the problem was the deep ocean stealing the heat. When the climate in some parts of the world was found to be really cold with snow and ice and such, when the rain started coming down in buckets, when California and Australia got hot and droughty suddenly our little carbon dioxide molecules were the cause of “extreme” weather events. No matter that “extreme” has never been defined but the actual mechanism has never been identified although there is a lot of mumbo jumbo spoken about it.
It’s epicycles upon epicycles all the way down. Riddle me this warmists, if rising levels of atmospheric CO2 is causing these ( undefined ) extreme weather events what is causing the normal weather events because so far all we have seen is natural weather occurring on natural timescales despite their being over reported in the complaisant media?
A single horn? Must be the Gore Effect.
And this fits the usual (and very stupid) climate alarmist metaphor about trusting your medicine doctor. What they can’t understand is it depends completely on the speciality of the doctor. Nutritionists, never. Climate scientists, even less. And, for the very same reason. Not a good prediction’s record. An immature science.
Much is known about diet, nutrition and the prevention of cancer.
The existing scientific knowledge is unwelcome to many:
• eat healthier calories, and
• eat fewer calories, and
• exercise more, and
• even then, your personal risk of cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases (etc) will remain finite.
Needless the say, the result is plenty of “magical” diets of dubious scientific validity.
Present scientific recommendations “burn less carbon, for the sake of future generations“ are comparably unwelcome to “consume fewer calories of healthier quality, for the sake of future health.”
Needless the say, the result is plenty of “magical” climate-change theories of dubious scientific validity.
It’s not complicated, Climate Etc readers!
Why?
A calorie is a calorie there is no such thing as a ” healthy calorie”.
Eat fewer calories and you develop anorexia.
Exercising more can lead to injury, missing work and may be a propensity of people who are unable to get on socially with other people.
I think you mean comparably welcome not unwelcome as the message was the prevention measures are not working.
Fan of More Trolling! Hey! Good to see you back posting misleading drivel and biased and irrelevant links!
Misleading drivel – First off, let’s be clear, carbon doesn’t burn ok? It’s only the hydrogen it bonds with that oxidizes. Maybe you really meant hydrocarbons, but I guess we shouldn’t really expect much precision from you eh?
Your “Burn Less Carbon” link leads to – yawn – another Hansen study, which, besides the fact that it’s primary author has been proven wrong again and again with his predictions, has as the lead sentence the following: “Global warming due to human-made gases, mainly CO2, is already 0.8{\deg}C and deleterious climate impacts are growing worldwide.”
We do not know that global warming is due to man-made gasses. That assertion has never been proven, only asserted by those who are ideologically committed to their “cause.” And, by “those” I include scientists like Hansen and Mann who are committed to their cause and to standing by their past statements and predictions which refuse to come true.
Your other link goes to Hot Whopper, and anyone who takes the trouble to read it can see that it is an extremely biased and unscientific source.
Oh, and Web Hubble Telescope…if climate science is really as simple as you say, then why did none of the models predict the pause in global surface temperatures that has lasted for 17 year now, while CO2 emissions have continued to rise?
It isn’t simple. The greenhouse effect only works in a closed laboratory system, and we HAVE NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that it acts on this planet to the extent that it controls global temperatures or is even the main driver of global temperatures.
A considerate reading of the literature might help to dispel your confusion, angech!
“Misleading drivel” by tomdesabla, elementary chemistry by FOMD.
Thanks for the smile, tomdesabla!
Fan,
The review of studies you cite does provide some good guidance for individuals to take or not as they like.
Personally I would be willing to burn less carbon. Is that good enough? Or do you want to force everyone else to do it too?
The celebrated Far Side cartoon Animal waste management is a pretty accurate model of the globalized carbon-energy economy, eh James Cross?
Gee, sorry Fan of more Trolling, I was right and you are still wrong. Your link does not prove that carbon burns. Every compound at that link subject to oxidation HAS HYDROGEN in it. Please note that I didn’t say that a compound MUST have hydrogen in it to burn (oxidize) CO being one example.
I said that you can’t burn carbon.
Your response only serves to illustrate my original point, which is that you post misleading drivel, and your links almost never prove your points. It’s really hard not to call you a liar Fan. I guess your reasoning is extremely motivated.
Claim by tomdesabla, experiment by FOMD.
Conclusion Experiments trump claims.
Remark Diamond-burning videos are cool!
lol thanks fan,
these rejectionists are getting dumber all the time
Coal is up to 90% carbon. Why can’t you burn it? I think there is good evidence that you can.
Some people think how well you live is more important than how long you live. It’s all the same in the end regardless. So chill.
We do know a lot about nutrition and healthy diets but there are still
a lot of conflicting ideas. However, past government “consensuses” about nutrition have often been nonsense that still inflicts us to this day. Wisdom such as: 1. eggs are bad for you, 2. saturated fats are bad so margarine (with trans fats) is much better than butter, 3. the food pyramid, 4. etc.
And Fan, you are correct that carbon can burn. Carbon changes it’s oxidation state from something like -4 for CH4 to +4 for CO2.
tomdesabla: It’s only the hydrogen it bonds with that oxidizes.
What can you possibly mean by that? Do you think it is magic that creates the CO2 you breathe out?
angech: A calorie is a calorie there is no such thing as a ” healthy calorie”.
Why do you say that? Calories from refined sugar are definitely worse than calories from fruits and vegetables, and worse than calories from meat and whole milk.
tomdesabla: I said that you can’t burn carbon.
What exactly do you think happens in the burners of coal-fired ships, trains and electrical power plants?
Mattstat, ” Calories from refined sugar are definitely worse than calories from fruits and vegetables, and worse than calories from meat and whole milk.”
Is that how it is this month? Hard of keep track. There was a big todo when Gatorade switched from Sucrose to Fructose which would be switching from refined cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup. Since refined means you are just dealing with one type, predominately, of sugar in this case, comparing anything refined to a complex source can give the “refined” product a bad reputation. What type of sugar you use as an ingredient doesn’t much matter nutritionally. What it is combined with does matter. Sugars and meats/cheese/dairy diets or sedimentary lifestyles, not so good. Sugars with vegetarian diets or highly active lifestyles, not so bad.
Sugars also are formed with complex carbohydrates, so bread and meat/cheese/dairy tends to promote fat and a high fat/protein low or no carbohydrate diet will promote fat lose. Kind of funny how the body responds to different diets.
The lifestyle part tends to get lost when discussing diet.
http://www.intermartialarts.com/article/sumo-wrestler-diet
lifestyle trumps genetics it seems when it comes to obesity.
Even what was thought of as rock solid science changes over time . .
http://www.mantleplumes.org/Witze.html
Nutrition and Climate does the same even though the “science” is just opinion.
Capt Dalls, 0.8 or less: Is that how it is this month?
yes
Hard of keep track. Not that hard. I was responding to the earlier claim that all calories are equivalent. You do not defend that claim do you?
mattstat, “Hard of keep track. Not that hard. I was responding to the earlier claim that all calories are equivalent. You do not defend that claim do you?”
Yes, with the lifestyle caveat. You can be healthy on a meat diet or a vegetarian diet, your body doesn’t really care what is the source of the calories. The Atkins type diet works just fine since your body processes the input to produce what it needs. In fact, just about any diet you like will work if you include exercise.
Now if you don’t want or can’t exercise, all calories are bad. It really doesn’t matter how may salads or diet whatever you have, if you sit on your butt, it will get bigger :)
If you want an example, a Coke and a Budweiser have almost exactly the same amount of calories. If you are a runner, they aren’t “empty” calories, if not they are.
Capt Dallas 0.8 or less: Yes, with the lifestyle caveat.
In that case I think you are wrong. Digestive products of refined sugars and starches are more likely to be bound by insulin and stored (resulting in weight gain) than are the digestive products of meat. With equal caloric intake, a high carb diet is more likely than a low-carb to produce periods of weight gain overlapping with periods of hunger and fatigue (because the body will reduce its metabolic rate in preference to releasing the stored energy-carrying molecules.) Even butter might be better than a cookie of equal calories, because the butter will take longer to digest and not produce the bolus of blood sugar produced by the cookie; those boluses (or boli if you prefer) stimulate extra insulin secretion which will lead to storage of the sugar and subsequent low blood sugar content.
If you have to change your lifestyle in response to the mixture of types of calories, then the calorie types are not equivalent, are they?
Mattstat, that is likely more portion than type of calorie which is a function of lifestyle. Five Twinkies over the course of a day is not the same a five Twinkies for lunch. With refined products it is not necessarily the product as it is the rate of consumption. Complex carbohydrates are better for a two meal a day diet than a grazing 5 or more snack/meal a day lifestyle.
As far as adjusting lifestyle/diet, that is just a fact of life. Sitting at a computer all day, commuting home, then eating late, puts you in the Sumo weight gain lane. Once you decrease the burn rate you have to adjust the intake rate. In that sense, a calorie is a calorie. Then refined calories are “bad” because you can consume them and process them more quickly. If you want a quick study, compare US obesity to blue collar job loss.
Just a hunch but I think type 2 diabetes has risen dramatically in western civilizations because few people go hungry anymore. Missing a meal or three raises havoc with blood sugar levels causing the pancreas to exercise itself producing insulin and other hormones to increase blood sugar levels in turn causing the liver to use stored sugar reserves or start cannabilizing fats and proteins to manufacture glucose when stored sugar runs down.
As a general rule of thumb you need to exercise body parts to keep them frosty (ready, on edge; http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=frosty ). Getting three balanced meals a day 365 days/year doesn’t give adequate exercise to the systems that regulate blood sugar. In nature, and in many non-western nations, gorging and fasting is a way of life forced upon people by necessity.
That’s my hypothesis anyhow and it’s as good as any I think.
Classic –
So a “hypothesis” that fails to consider the impact of Western diet and lifestyle, but focuses on “three balanced meals a day 365 days/year ” – which is not an accurate descriptor for many of the populations where diabetes is growing the fastest – is “as good as any.”
Really. Don’t bother to study the issue. Don’t bother to review the literature. Don’t bother to develop experimental paradigms to test cause and effect relationships. No epidemiological studies.
Just wing it, and consider the resulting hypothesis to be “as good as any.”
Thanks, once again, Springer, for revealing the difference between skepticism and “skepticism.”
Springer, Obesity is generally linked to prosperity and the prosperously likely don’t miss many meals, so you could be right. As hunter/gather/scavengers, not having to work in order to eat goes against our nature. Now we have a generation of fat starving kids in the US that has to be blamed on something other than the actual cause.
How come it’s the poorest in western civilisations that are the fattest? You think the very wealthy more likely to go hungry or to eat more nutritious meals?
Springer might generally be on to something, but the two main things that are very destructive to modern diets are high sugar intake and high red meat intake. Neither of these were available in great quantities to our ancestors and our bodies simply are not designed for large amounts of either. Of course, sugar addition is something that the fast food, soda, and other industries count on for their profit centers.
“How come it’s the poorest in western civilisations that are the fattest? You think the very wealthy more likely to go hungry or to eat more nutritious meals?”
____
Empty high caloric foods are the cheapest and most readily available for many poor people. Additionally, there are educational and social factors– if mommy is grossly overweight and starts feeding you junk food at an early age, you get addicted early and also never learn what proper nutrition is all about.
Cap’n –
Seriously? You too? Say it ain’t so:
http://www.cpehn.org/pdfs/DiabetesBrief.pdf
http://www.bms.com/documents/together_on_diabetes/2012-Summit-Atlanta/Seligman-Glycemic-Control.pdf
Hasn’t anyone told you guys about The Google?
–snip–
Among non‐elderly adults living in US households with incomes <300% of the federal poverty level, the rate of diabetes is about 7.1% in food secure households, 6.4% in low food secure households, and 16.6% in very low food secure households. After accounting for differences in socioeconomic status, risk of diabetes is about 2.5 times higher in very low food secure households compared to food secure households, and
after additionally accounting for difference in obesity, risk of diabetes is
almost 3 times higher (6). These numbers suggest that the increased risk of diabetes in very low food secure households can not be attributed solely to increased rates of poverty or obesity in these households. Average fasting blood sugar is 100 mg/dL among non‐elderly adults living in food secure households, 101 mg/dL among those in low food secure households, and almost 107 mg/dL among those in very low food secure households, raising the possibility that food insecurity may play a role in the pathway between low socioeconomic status and increased incidence of diabetes.
–snip–
A place where you might start in researching explanations that go beyond “singular notions of causality” (be they traditional or Springer-like).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2094018/
Joshua, Let’s say you just got promoted to the Purina People Chow research team. So instead of giving the ultra poor in the US food stamps that cannot buy hot prepared food or the stuff to prepare hot food, you are going to give them Kibble and Bits for people. Do you have one formula for everyone or do you have Kibble for active adults, senior adults, growing formula, over-weight formula, canned, dry whatever?
For your diabetic age groups you probably would have a formula load with complex carbs, low sodium, high fiber (part of any good complex carb) meat by-product and vegetable based proteins. Now all you have to do is train you peeps to eat your product and not bitch. Then personal economics wouldn’t be a factor.
As it goes, your research shows that poverty cause diabetes. Well, you know that can’t be right, so it must be something else. They must not be eating right because of something other than the system, since the system has to be right, so it must be salty snacks and empty calories from soda and sweet snacks. Not the system that gives them $100 bucks a month to by organic free range chicken, fresh wholesome vegetables and tofu but not toilet paper and anything to prepare the organic free range chicken, fresh wholesome vegetables and tofu. Of course they buy more junk foods, they system makes that easy.
Cap’n –
????
It doesn’t show anything of the sort. In fact, while it shows an association, it shows a more complex causality.
It points to food insecurity as one important factor – which is pretty much in direct contrast to Springer’s “hunch.”
Joshua, Food insecurity and poverty are two sides of the same issue.
“Obesity remains a potent risk factor for the development of diabetes; however, low income has been shown to be an independent risk factor for the development of diabetes among women – even after controlling for body mass index and physical activity level [3]. Alternatively, low SES could be a result of diabetes in so far as disability related to diabetes complications may limit work and educational opportunities.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1618393/
Which came first? Now remember that food insecurity in this day and age also means food aid bringing the system back into the mix. They need your people chow!
Cap’n –
Since you’re a fan of correlation…
http://authoritynutrition.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/sugar-consumption-in-uk-and-usa.jpg
There’s more:
http://authoritynutrition.com/11-graphs-that-show-what-is-wrong-with-modern-diet/#ixzz2tRjZ17iO
Joshua, So you just factor in the 50 year lag or what? The second link, the fat guy sitting on the cushy chair smothering the burger with catsup shows the real correlation. Sit on your butt and it will get bigger.
Now had obesity increased in step with sugar, without the 50 year lag, then you might be on to something. The fact of the matter though is processed and “fast” foods were made for active lifestyles. Computer programming, keypunch, CAM, CAD, unemployment and disability are not considered active lifestyles. Input > output = weight gain. So you should look for those pesky “other” factors.
The nation with the highest per capita diabetes rate is Nauru, population 9,378 with 30.9% of the population having diabetes. Nauru got 34 million in aid from Australia for 2012/13 or $302 per month per person and has about a 90% unemployment rate. Second on the Diabetes list is Saudi Arabia, in the 20% range with a 68% range of obesity. Saudis don’t have to work if they don’t want to, all that oil money doncha know.
Matthew, and Troll, coal burns, in the sense that we harvest the energy in it, because it contains hydrocarbon compounds. If it was pure carbon, you couldn’t burn it in power plants. The context and purpose of my comment was to correct a misconception – we do not generate power burning “carbon” – we generate power burning hydrocarbons, like the ones in coal, natural gas, gasoline, etc. Just because it might be possible to apply enough heat to something, like a diamond (pure carbon) to make it change state, does not mean that we are using the energy from “carbon.” We are using the energy from hydrocarbons. I thought everybody knew that. Say it with me now fellows – H Y D R O C A R B O N S.
I knew you could do it.
One area of science that admits how little it knows about a highly studied problem …
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/meetings/workshops/hypertensionwg.htm
August 26,2004
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_hypertension
Speed:
That’s not only in the US. In the UK they want to put millions more people onto statins. I reckon the drug companies have far too much influence in govt.
“Obesity and diabetes are epidemic,”
Gee. What an impenetrable mystery. It couldn’t be because people are often snorting, grunting over-eaters who choose to ignore common sense and even a modicum of self restraint. Gobbling fast food and swilling “Big Gulps” in combination with no exercise ain’t healthy. I don’t have to be a scientist to figure that out.
You might have something of a point but it might also be that what nutritionists have been telling us to eat is what is making us fat.
I read recently that people who drink whole fat milk and eat butter tend to be less obese that those that eat fat free and do not eat butter.
A diet good for me might not be a diet good for you.
It might be that historical warmings, pausings, and coolings have some degree of unique character to each one that makes it difficult to generalize over them.
“I read recently that people who drink whole fat milk and eat butter tend to be less obese that those that eat fat free and do not eat butter.”
I use butter every day, and half and half in my cereal. I also eat plenty of eggs. However, I run 4 miles 4 times a week, walk and bike on most “off” days at age 63. I also never overeat. Can’t stand the feeling of being full. I weigh the same as I did 30 years ago and my blood sugar is within normal limits.
I grant you I was being somewhat facetious. Nutrition is devilishly complex matter with many variables. They can’t even say for sure whether salt is bad for you…which I also use liberally.
Who knows though? I could drop dead tomorrow. But then of course, so could we all…
There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.
“many a slip…”
So true dear Beth. I take nothing for granted these days. Truthfully though, I find it an exhausting way to live.
You sound like a person who’s never smoked pontificating to smokers about smoking. As an ex-smoker, who quit despite the efforts of the do-gooders rather than because of it, I can say that you probably have little or no idea.
Those studying nutrition in many ways have it easier than those studying climate. Because we do have controlled experiments in dietary ‘choices’ coming from parts of the world that have different diets.
Lack of stomach cancers and other diseases are frequently noted in non-Westernized parts of the world. These diseases crop up as soon as a population adopts the Western diet.
However, population longevity increases at the same time that diseases to which diet contributes increase. This is probably a result of access to Western medicines and medical practice.
We know that overindulgence in Western diets is unhealthy. To say otherwise is similar to saying cigarettes didn’t kill your grandma, so…
However, beyond that generalization we cannot go. Is it butter? Big Mac? They probably contribute.
There are many lessons to be learned from all of this for climate science. I don’t really see much evidence that anyone is even studying the mistakes in nutrition, let alone learning from them. This article is welcome news.
Life on the littoral, pokerguy )
Pelican.
Splash! In he goes!
Finess there’s none,
but assessed in
pelican measure-
meant, success-
full.
“You sound like a person who’’s never smoked pontificating..”
If you’re talking to me, phatboy, Cigarettes were the least of my worries, though I quit those too along with just about anything else you can think of some 25 years back. As for the pontificating, I celebrate the individuals right to poison himself as he sees fit. If you want to eat and drink your way into a diabetic coma, that’s entirely your business.
“Pelicans.”
You’re on a roll Beth, poetically speaking. I love that. Funny too, in that I’ve been watching and admiring pelicans all winter here in south florida. They really seem to have it beat… plenty of fish to eat, plenty of sky to fly around so gracefully, and plenty of ocean on which to sit contemplating the meaning of life. I just might agree to switch places were I given the choice.
pokerguy
Four miles a day at 63! I’m impressed.
When I read that about full fat milk and butter what immediately occurred to me was CLA. CLA is found in full fat milk, butter, eggs, and particularly grass-fed beef. Various claims are made for it including that it increases your metabolism.
If you Google it, you will a lot of stuff that illustrates the complexity of nutritional research. The official scientific line is that nothing is proven about it. However, one of the articles points out that all the research has been with crude mixed isomers and it may only be one of the isomers with the beneficial effects. At any rate, trying to study an isomer isolated from the food it is found in can hardly lead to any conclusions at all about the food.
At any rate, a calorie is never just a calorie. A calorie is consumed with other foods, goes into a body with a unique gastrointestinal tract, unique genes and hormones, musculature, and exercise habits. When we over consume calories, the metabolism for most of us speeds up. When we under consume, it slows down.
The climate is probably just as complex as the body. A W/m2 is not just a W/m2 but goes into a complex system that might dissipate it or store it depending upon a multitude of systems we do not fully understand.
Time was when our antcesters lived mainly on gruel, thin gruel
in hard times.
‘http://beththeserf.wordpress.com/2013/06/22/second-edition-serf-underground-journal-food-and-famine/
Now wet git our vitamins globally, vitamin A – blue fin from the
blue Pacific … vitamin B – lobster from quadrilles in the Atlantic
Vitamin C with broccoli from Italy and oranges from Spain
… D from ubiquitous eggs… that means anywhere, and also
trips ter the sunny South of France, vitamin E from almonds
from Persia and avocados from Mexico.
Trade and steam power, each meant a big advance fer human
well-being and in consequence, happiness fer more of us.)
When we were obligate locavores, malnutrition was the norm by Spring.
==========================
Kim’s ‘obligate locavores’
on CE I have read before,
and like it even better
than of yore.
Yep, same ol’ same ol’ for breakfast every ol’ morning, but since it’s the same ol’ squirrel, he’s beginning to look tired. He’s beginning to think the same ol’ same ol’ nuts aren’t worth getting up for the next ol’ next ol’ morning.
===========================
Nassim Taleb in Antifragile, Ch 22, has some interesting
observations on follow nature as in fasting, ritual as opposed
ter the forced kind: ‘We know we can cure many cases of
diabetes by putting people on a very strict starvation diet
shocking the system – in fact the mechanism had to have
been known for a long time since there are institutions and
anitaria for curative starvation.’ ( p 361)
‘… tests on mice found that in the inital stages of starvation
mice can withstand high doses of chemotherapy,’ (p367.)
I’m looking out my window and the wind is blowing snow. There are interesting parallels to climate science.
I think back to the summer when flowers were in bloom. There were interesting parallels to climate “skepticism.”
I am relaxing amid a snowstorm to make a huge pot of green curry. There are interesting parallels to pretty much whatever I want to draw parallels to.
BTW – there was no pun intended there w/r/t Judith’s last name.
Heavy, man. Wry and ironic. Asinine too.
green curry is kinda of mild. Go for the red!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2385791/Curry-eaters-risk-takers-Fans-spicy-foods-likely-to-enjoy-adrenalin-pumping-situations.html
“Asinine too.”
Eye rollingly so.
Cap’n –
Depends on how much phrik kii noo you put in. Me? I like a lot.
Look, a curried squirrel.
============
Climate science is simple compared to biology. And biology is simple compared to game theoretic exercises such as economics.
WHT,
Climate is indeed simple. It is the average of weather over an arbitrary period. Simple tasks suit simple people.
The game is suitable for children and retarded adults. Basic addition and division skills necessary.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
” biology is simple compared to game theoretic exercises such as economics”
Oncologists thank the Lord daily that they don’t work with something complicated like theoretical economics.
Phew, we really dodged a bullet in our career choice.
I was thinking the same thing. Biology is the most complex system in nature that we know of so far. Economics is an emergent property of biology.
Mike Flynn,
You do realize that we treat guys like you as motivational tools, right?
So sweet to see you put in your rightful place. This is not magic at all, but doing science one better arises from the competitive juices that are part of our makeup.
WHT,
I am pleased to be of assistance.
It must be hard to remain motivated. There are only so many ways to derive the average of weather.
Which part of basic arithmetic do you find difficult? There are many textbooks covering the derivation of averages. If you cannot find one easily, possibly searching Google may help.
Once again, thank you for your compliment.
Live well,and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
@whut
Nothing is more complicated than biology except complicated explanations of why game theory is more complex. However your complex explanations of game theory are due entirely to your biology.
QED
Joshua
You are smarter than this
” And biology is simple compared to game theoretic exercises such as economics.”
Maybe, though it is exceedingly strange to say so, given that so much theoretical biology is game-theoretic. But it wouldn’t be the first time certain people didn’t know WTF they were talking about. That aside, I recall that a biologist once said to me that economics was merely human ecology, which is exactly right and screamingly wrong at the same time, but can a subset be more complicated than its superset? And where is my dinner, anyway?
If everyone has the same model of the behavior of a financial market movement and tries to use that to make money, the market will respond to make that movement invalid. That is Game Theory in a nutshell, and why forecasting of economics is impossible.
Not the case with physical systems such as climate. Climate does not have a brain that can practice an endless recursion of reverse psychology. One can actually make predictions based on forcing functions and watch those come true.
That’s why I don’t listen to scientific charlatans such as NW.
Web, you really don’t know what you’re talking about. The relevance of game theory doesn’t require brains. Otherwise, the theories of Maynard Smith, Hamilton, Wilson, Dawkins and countless other evolutionary game theorists make no sense at all.
You are truly one of the least intellectually curious people I’ve ever encountered. You could easily have Googled the terms “biology” and “game theory” and spared yourself the embarrassment. Do you even know who Maynard Smith is, Web? Are you really that ignorant, or are you just pretending to be?
Pretty much everyone here knows who the charlatan is. That Dr. Curry doesn’t simply ban you for constantly spewing ad homs is one of the great mysteries of CE.
There is actually a very new market tool developed as a PhD thesis at the University of Sydney. It has been developed into a trading program that searches for movement in the market signaling informed trading. There is always a mismatch in information – which leads to some trades leading the field before anyone else knows about it. The idea is to automate picking of these market leading trades. Being plugged into the market means doing this on an intuitive level. But once everyone is doing it on computers – there will be something else. Fundamentals perhaps – that is always a good option.
But the economy is something different entirely – it is not game theory of a few or even many players. It is the psychology of the masses – the zeitgeist – lemmings disappearing over a cliff or hanging on for a ride of their lives. It is full of prompts and feedbacks – economies are chaotic in the sense of complexity theory.
Climate is also chaotic in the sense of complexity theory. Small changes initiate instability as they cascade unpredictably through powerful climate sub-systems. Webby always oversimplifies everything – but he should ask himself what he knows about AMOC or top down modulation of climate. One a critical control variable and the other an unfathomable harbinger of global change.
Now he will say something insulting, simplistic, dogmatic and tribal. Not interested webby.
I wonder how Web knows I’m a charlatan. Are there a great number of scholars out there criticizing my work? Does anyone even notice?… I think you have to be pretty prominent to rise to the level of “charlatan.” Does this mean that I’m more important than I knew? :)
NW,
C. Daskalakis, P. W. Goldberg, and C. H. Papadimitriou, “The complexity of computing a Nash equilibrium,” SIAM Journal on Computing, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 195–259, 2009.
Any model of finance will evolve depending on the actions of the players in the market, making it impossible to make anything close to a reasonable prediction.
Earth sciences is based on finite resources and static physical laws. That makes it easier and distinguishes it from magic. Too bad that is so hard for you to understand. Blame it on a bad career choice.
Web. Please. We have one of Caginalp’s students here as an assistant finance professor and he comes to me for help with his statistics. He publishes in SIAM. Google Caginalp.
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AEA/econwhitepapers/white_papers/Drew_Fudenberg.pdf
See page 6: “Tim Salmon and Nathaniel Wilcox are pioneers in the econometrics of laboratory learning rules…”
The learning rules ARE dynamic, recursive predictive rules about the play of the agents. They are very similar to dynamics specified in evolutionary game theory–the replicator dynamics. Here is some of my work.
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3805925?uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21103390788961
All the charlatans hang out at Econometrica.
You’re some kind of… something.
Completely different than a climate measure such as global average temperature, which one can actually predict based on the forcing:
http://contextearth.com/2014/02/05/relative-strengths-of-the-csalt-factors/
And based on my “intellectually curious” drive, I am making progress on being able to model the SOI of ENSO:
http://contextearth.com/2014/02/10/the-southern-oscillation-index-model/
WHUT,
You don’t predict temperature from forcings, what you predict is that a correlation between some climate variables (not forcings) will continue. SOI is a climate variable, not a forcing.
SOI is a thermodynamic factor in determining the free energy of the system. Where did I ever say this was a forcing??? You better cite where I have said what you claim that I have said .
The magical theories of economics revealed here
http://phys.org/news176978473.html
These are not my ideas, but serve as a warning to those people that think that they can model these problems beyond a zero-sum game solution.
Give me climate science any day.
WHT,
You wrote:
giving a reference to your model.
SOI is one of the indicators of the state of the Earth system. How it’s related to other variables of that system is not so straightforward. You have shown that this indicator is strongly correlated with the GMST. Your analysis does not tell, what we can conclude from that correlation. You may have your own ideas of that, others don’t necessarily agree on those.
Who doesn’t agree with what I am saying? It certainly can’t be Lean, Rahmstorff, Kosaka, Lockwood all who have made the connection between SOI and natural variability in the global temperature.
The measure of SOI is a pressure imbalance, which is enough to drive heat from a source to targets dispersed over the earth’s surface, thus raining the temperature as a first-order perturbation.
I assume you know how to do first-order variational analysis as applied to thermodynamics. The first-order perturbation turns the factors into a linear differential.
This is just the basic idea, taken from the ideal gas law
nRT = PV
then first-order perturbation says
nR dT = d(PV) = V dP + P dV
so that a change in pressure is reflected by a change in temperature.
Why would thermodynamics be wrong in this case, Pekka? You want to casually dismiss thermodynamics? If I were to show this in a classroom, should I be shot for applying something so simple?
In any case, the proof is in the pudding, and you have to explain why the CSALT model fits just by random chance:
http://contextearth.com/2014/02/05/relative-strengths-of-the-csalt-factors/
My goal has always been to simplify the climate models to a point where compute intensive GCMs are not necessary, and you may be getting upset that we are are making progress in that direction.
WHT,
What’s wrong in my view is considering the pressure imbalance in any way as a course for the temperatures as it’s not a primary phenomenon that drives others, but another secondary phenomenon driven by something else., or perhaps one of many possible indicators that tell about something more fundamental.
SOI can explain temperatures only in the sense correlating variables explain each other, while the causal relationships remain unknown.
Everyone has had this discussion with webby – endlessly. At some stage it becomes mind numbingly pointless.
The SOI is of course an index of sea level pressure – it has nothing whatsoever to do with the ideal gas law. Low pressure is a meteorological phenomenon involving warm air rising over warm water in the eastern Pacific in this case – the cooler SST in the central Pacific create the pressure differential and trade wind response seen in the La Nina pattern. Warm air rising expands and cools of course – relocating hear within the troposphere.
Thus the SOI is an indicator of changes in SST associated with ENSO – the SST is responsible for warming (cooling) the atmosphere in El Nino (La Nina) along with changing global cloud patterns linked to warmer or cooler SST in the tropical Pacific.
Webby uses a multiple linear regression technique to scale the SOI to the surface temperature record. As ENSO is the major cause of interannual variability – it gives a patina of verisimilitude to the linear scaling process. but misses the decadal and longer ENSO patterns.
‘Figure 12 shows 2000 years of El Nino behaviour simulated by a state-of-the-art climate model forced with present day solar irradiance and greenhouse gas concentrations. The richness of the El Nino behaviour, decade by decade and century by century, testifies to the fundamentally chaotic nature of the system that we are attempting to predict. It challenges the way in which we evaluate models and emphasizes the importance of continuing to focus on observing and understanding processes and phenomena in the climate system. It is also a classic demonstration of the need for ensemble prediction systems on all time scales in order to sample the range of possible outcomes that even the real world could produce. Nothing is certain.’
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751/F12.expansion.html
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full
Multiple linear regression is not variational this or thermodynamic that – these are pomposities invented by webby. That he thinks he has a handle on ENSO is simplistic nonsense of the highest order. That he imagines he is making progress with simple schemes where models have not is imaginary thinking that has gone well over the edge.
It represents kinetic energy that would otherwise get turned into heat. That is what a free energy calculation demonstrates. No different in fundamentals form the ideal gas law.
People may not like the fact that thermodynamics appears too simple to actually work, but it does.
The proof is in the pudding:
http://imageshack.com/a/img37/5748/v69.gif
As Van said:
It is merely an index of SLP – scaled to the surface temperature. It has nothing to do with energy – kinetic or otherwise – or with any thermodynamic principle.
”
Robert I Ellison | February 14, 2014 at 8:45 pm |
It is merely an index of SLP – scaled to the surface temperature. It has nothing to do with energy – kinetic or otherwise – or with any thermodynamic principle.
”
You are wrong. And the icing on the cake is how well it works.
http://imageshack.com/a/img812/74/abh.gif
‘Change in SOI accounts for 72% of the variance in GTTA for the 29-year-long MSU record and 68% of the variance in GTTA for the longer 50-year RATPAC record. Because El Nino-Southern Oscillation is known to exercise a particularly strong influence in the tropics, we also compared the SOI with
tropical temperature anomalies between 20S and 20N. The results showed that SOI accounted for 81% of the variance in tropospheric temperature anomalies in the tropics.’ http://www.auscsc.org.au/images/PDF/influenceofenso.pdf
Always late to the party – it works a lot better than webby imagines. But the SOI is just an index of pressure. The temperature variability comes from SST and associated cloud changes.
This is really pretty stunning:
Really? The trend data argue that we have no more idea than we used to as to causes of obesity and/or diabetes?
OK.
The rates of automobile traffic accidents have been growing in India and China. The trend data argue that we have no idea why the rate of accidents is growing in India and China.
I can see it now. Data drawing lines in the sand and challenging anyone who disagrees to fights. Data Googling various facts and posting those facts in blog comment arguments. Data studying rhetoric so as to make their arguments more convincing. Other data telling the argumentative data to chill out and go have a beer or something.
Joshua:
Do you know that’s true? (linky?) and why do you think that is?
phatboy –
China –
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-04/12/content_322695.htm
India –
http://www.dw.de/india-has-the-highest-number-of-road-accidents-in-the-world/a-5519345-1
Reasons offered in both articles, although I would think that more people driving in each country would be quite explanatory.
Anyway, the point is that the link between the trend and the conclusion of the article is unscientific. The trends tells could tell us about behavior, changes society generally, or it could tell us about incorrect or contradictory conclusions in the science. The article concludes the latter w/o even bothering to make a freakin’ argument.
Dreck.
I’ve been in city traffic in China many times. The traffic statistics don’t surprise me at all. Traffic lights, stop signs, speed limits, near as I can tell those are not really traffic controls but more like traffic suggestions.
Joshua:
Sorry, I didn’t read the thread from the start, so I thought you were implying something else.
In this case, I agree with you 100%
OK Josh, why are Texan standardized test scores for High School children lower than liberal states like New York
California students score at bottom of nation in reading, math
Presumably you were not aware of that but had you been you could have avoided the brain fart nature of your comment on liberal state superiority in standardized test scores.
California students score at bottom of nation in reading, math
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_24475260/california-students-score-at-bottom-nation-reading-math
Presumably you were not aware of that but had you been you could have avoided the brain fart nature of your comment on liberal state superiority in standardized test scores.
Sorry J
Up thread comment belongs on this post.
Take a breath once in a while.
Can someone explain to me WTF Springer and Doc are talking about in this subthread?
What part of Texas gets lower hs test scores than liberal NY that doc pointed out did you not understand?
Or if you understood that what part of liberal California getting lower scores than Texas did you not understand?
I’m not sure what point Doc was trying to make but if it was that liberal states get better standardized test scores than consevative states then the point does not stand.
Springer, you want me to put sentences at the bottom of my posts like;
THIS POST CONTAINS SARCASTIC COMMENTS
NOTE USE OF DRAMATIC IRONY ABOVE
LITOTES ALERT
DEVILS ADVOCATE BEING DEPLOYED TO SHOW POVERTY OF PROGRESSIVE IDEOLOGY
so you don’t get confused?
New York *is* ahead of Texas, smartass. Check your facts next time.
Springer, why does New York out score Texas? I chose NY, and not California, with care.
The answer is in the relative levels of different ethnic groups.
Now stop being a jerk, that’s Joshua’s job.
Doc –
Once again we see how, despite being a scientist, you are willing to conflate correlation with causation and simplify complex phenomena and mechanisms.
There are various factors related to the association between demographic variables and standardized test scores. Ethnicity is one, income is another, family wealth is another, the educational background of the parents is another.. But the relationships are complex. For example, Midwesterners do better on the SATs than test-takers form other parts of the country. The effect of income is much greater for blacks than for whites. The effects of race are significantly greater for lower income groups sectors of society. .
And of course, all of that ignores the intellectual bankruptcy of attaching too much importance on the results of standardized testing.
And of course, all of that ignores how this entire discussion is irrelevant to the comment of mine you were responding to.
So Josh, you can accept that even simple metrics are the tips of highly complex phenomena? And additionally, simple correlations like money spent per student vs SAT scores break down on investigation? of the
You need to make the description of the system as simple as you can, but no more or no less.
Taubes buys into to commonly accepted, but false premises, that leads him to join in the confusion.
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/08/jfs-special-report-obesity.html
CTM:
The fact that you brag about your “moderator” status on WUWT where nutball enabler is a more accurate description, then you post to a multi-page diatribe to make your glib pointless non-secreter.
You are a parody of David Springer without the charm and intelligence.
Thanks?
Springer has a bit of a problem with irony.
Absolutely hilarious.
Joshua has a bit of a problem with reality. Inappropriate laughter is a dead give away.
I have a testable hypothesis. I can’t find evidence that anyone has tested it specifically yet, though Pekka claims the science is well known.
The problem is one of radiative thermal equilibrium of a sphere absorbing sunlight as a “disc” but radiating to space as a sphere. My reading of Kirchoff’s Law says that absorptivity = emissivity at radiative thermal equilibrium. Therefore I have been trying to compute the “core temperature” as equivalent to “mean surface temperature” (if there is such a thing). My maths and physics interpretation says all spheres will be the same temperature, no matter what the absorptivity or emissivity, since the surface is uniform all over.
So a shiny reflective conductive sphere in space or a dull black conductive sphere in space exposed to sunlight. What will be the temperature of each? My hypothesis says they will both be the same. Wish I could get someone to do the experiment……
In the meantime we have magical untestable theories about earth temperature.
Blouis79,
The validity of the standard theory has been tested innumerable times. Every satellite that contains temperature sensitive equipment is planned using the standard theory. They work as planned. Thus all those satellites prove every day that you are wrong.
This is just one example of the very common fact that the most thorough test of many scientific theories is provided by their successful application in engineering. If the theories would be wrong, the devices would not work as planned.
No, the black thingamajig will initially absorb more of the heat than the shiny one, raising its temperature a little. Then for the next x million years both bodies will emit the same amount of heat back into space.
The black body is always warmer at its surface.
One is reflecting ie no heat gain and the other has absorbed an initial amount of heat it needs to stay at in order to be able to emit the incident energy back.
Angech 14/2/2014.
Pekka, you must be able to furnish louis some references that recount what we have learned from manmade objects in space, starting with that Sputnik thing. Of course, they need to be simple enough for a space cadet to grasp.
Why don’t you experiment, louis. Get yourself two identical shiny balls and paint one black. Put them out in the sun. Are you with me so far, louis? Is there any reason to expect that both balls would maintain around the same temperature, as long as the sun is shining on them equally? Is there any significant difference in the outcome of this experiment compared to the case where balls are in space?
DM,
I have done that. This is not our first exchange of comments. I have given links to spesific satellite designs and explained, how they are based on the vawelength dependence of the emissivity.
“Of course, they need to be simple enough for a space cadet to grasp.”
You may not be familiar with some American colloquialisms, Pekka. Anyway, I was sure you could help louis, if louis could be helped.
Pekka, again bollocks. The Earth is rotating and each local only experiences the (Tmax+Tmin)/2, twice a day, transiently.
We know that the line-shapes of local heating and cooling AM/PM are different.
We also know that the water cycle is different in day time than at night.
Averaging temperature and averaging IR ouput may not represent the energetics of the system.
Treating the oscillating system as flat, and then pretending it is reality, is taking things too far.
Climb into a freezer and place a blow torch against your head then comfort yourself that you are at a reasonable average temperature
re; blowtorch
Hahaha good one, Doc.
Interesting thought experiment. If the spherical body were to contain rock heated to say 5000C degrees and then a small insulating layer placed over it and below the shiny/black surface which would be hotter then? Given that thermos flasks are basically a similar design.
Richard, fill a shiny thermos and a black thermos with hot coffee and put them out in the sun. Which will be warmer to the touch?
“Richard, fill a shiny thermos and a black thermos with hot coffee and put them out in the sun. Which will be warmer to the touch?”
After a whole 24 hours? In the desert? Tested at dawn?
Do it however you like, richie. I would suggest that you team up with louis and doc and work it in 8 hour shifts (that’s a whole day, richie). Get back to us with your results.
Don:
I tell you what, come up with the funding and/or do the experiment yourself. You were the one to suggest it in the first place.
I was just pointing out that whilst it may be true that the rise in temperature during the day will be higher in the black container than the shiny, during the night the rate of drop in temperature will be faster also. How that all plays out is an interesting question with air flow, surface area, volume, etc. playing into the question as well.
Easy if you have a very limited point of view. You KNOW you’re right. Experiments (thought or otherwise) have a habit of forcing a wider, more rational, point of view.
You are making progress, richie. The black one will get hotter in the sunshine. Bit it will start cooling at a faster rate when the sun goes down. You have dipped your toe into some radiative physics there, richie. Now , will the black one ever get colder than the shiny one? If you get past this lesson we will go on to the GHE. Or if you don’t like where this is leading, you can try doc’s experiment with the freezer and the blowtorch to the head.
Don,
The key word is “wavelength”:
As in “get on the same” with respect to every research article and textbook written on radiative physics.
The vast majority of krankpots, such as blouis, talking about radiative thermal equilibrium would be exactly right if Planck’s Law did not exist and the frequency spectrum of radiating bodies was somehow flat with respect to energy distribution. Yet it’s not and the krankpots continue to exist.
Don:
And you think you are telling me something? There are four curves involved. Two heating curves in the sun, with different rise rates and final values. Two cooling curves once we are past the maximums and on into the night towards dawn with again different fall rates and final values.
You jump to a simplistic conclusion that I believe is just that. Simplistic.
If we were to make these balls fully conductive and place the lower ‘half’ in dry ice what do you think that would do to the picture? If they were genuinely super conductive and static the answer is simple – they would always both be the same temperature all of the time – just acting as a transfer mechanism between hot and cold. Other than that unique conclusion there are a range of possibilities I am not sure I could call just like that.
Still, simple answers for simple people.
Why you getting so upset, richie? I proposed a simple experiment to simple louis and you butted in with some irrelevant BS about 5000 degrees…yatta…yatta. I modified my simple experiment to deal with your irrelevant confounding factor. Now you are raving about dry ice and super conductive and whatever. What’s next, daisies and lollipops? And I have not offered any of my own conclusions, simplistic or otherwise. I only agreed with what you correctly stated: “I was just pointing out that whilst it may be true that the rise in temperature during the day will be higher in the black container than the shiny, during the night the rate of drop in temperature will be faster also.” I asked you if the black thermos will ever get colder than the shiny one. You know the answer to that question, but you changed the subject. Are you dishonest, or just silly? In any case, I don’t have any more time for you,.
The big difference between the ball in space and the ball on earth is the the ball in space radiates over its entire surface to space temperature (low).
Pekka claims that selective surfaces can absorb more than they emit. That may be so at a non-equilibrium state, but not by definitiion at radiative thermal equilibrium.
Wavelengths are also a red herring, since they must still all balance at radiative thermal equilibrium.
There is no effective difference between a highliy heat conductive ball and a rapidly rotating ball in terms of “equilibrium temperature”.
It would be a piece of cake to do this experiment in space. Like dropping a hammer and a feather on the moon.
What we do know from space. A warm body in the sun will stay warmer if it is white, not black. Why are human spacesuits white? Why are spacecraft white? How so??? Therefore the earth with a central heating system should also stay warmer if it is white, not black.
Stick with that story, louis. I don’t think anybody with any sense will bother to challenge you on that one.
No Don, nobody wedded to the “magical theory” of earth temperature and GHGs would bother to try challenging.
The next best thing would be to figure the equations to determine the predicted core temperature of different reflectance uniform surface solid conductive or rotating spheres in space and exposed to sunlight.
Then demonstrate the accuracy of the predictions with a proper simple experiment. No hand waving or magic required. Just pure theoretical and experimental physics.
Blouis
As no one of us can send spheres to space, we have two alternatives.
One is checking what those have done who do send satellites to space. As I have told with links on an earlier occasion, controlling the temperatures of satellites is discussed on net. From that discussion we can conclude that the temperature can, indeed, be controlled with help of selective coatings. The theory works perfectly in contradiction to your beliefs.
The other possibility is to look at related tests that can be performed without satellites. You should try to understand, why flat plate solar panels use selective coatings and how that allows them to reach temperatures of around 200C (Wikipedia is a good enough starting point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_collector ). When you understand, how that’s possible, you understand also where your present thinking fails.
Here is some good info for our louis:
http://www.tak2000.com/data/Satellite_TC.pdf
It’s all there, louis.
“Therefore the earth with a central heating system should also stay warmer if it is white, not black.”
____
This is perhaps the most nonsensical thing that I’ve seen posted on CE in quite a while.
I will lead you directly to the water, louis:
page 53
5. Means-PTC-Radiation, Coating
Chart ; Coated Sphere Equilibrium Temperature in Sun
Thanks for the satellite presentation, Doc.
You will see the equation on slide 29, where a=e=1 and neither of those terms appear in the equation to calculate temperature. So as log asn a=e=, the equation is still valid. The answer is about 5degC on his numbers. On my numbers, it is 5.7degC.
The chart of temperatures of materials does not clarify the conditions in which the measurements were taken. Real satellites near earth as you will see on slides 28-34 are affected by earth effects. This will change the experimental answers.
(sorry, Don not Doc)
Don, also see the chart on page 32. The sand blasted aluminum has α=ε=0.2, and has exactly the same temperature as the black sphere α=ε=1.
So have experiments been conducted in space verifying that selective surfaces do have α ε at radiative thermal equilibrium????
OK louis, I led you to the water but I can’t make you think. You remain ignorant and free to continue to embarrass yourself. Carry on without me.
So, for those who believe selective surfaces can change the radiative equilibrium temperature of spherical bodies in space, the next part is to demonstrate experimentally that a gas can behave like a selective surface.
Severe tests for nutrition science can in principle be done, but they are very expensive and take decades.
Not even in principle.
“h passes a severe test with e if, and to the extent that, h fits e and it would have been very unlikely that h would have fitted test results as well as it does had h been false.”
That looks to me like a likelihood ratio, as any good Bayesian would calculate it:
LR = P(e|h)/P(e|!h)
“Attaching probabilities to claims is, supposedly, neither needed nor desired in science.”
If you want to think about uncertainty in a consistent way you can’t get away from probabilities. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%27s_theorem
I’m glad I didn’t have to draft this myself. +1.
Agreed. Indeed how to determine whether not-h is “very unlikely” to have produced test results e without having some version of probability? Not to mention problems defining not-h in order to reach this conclusion.
Yes “A fan of *MORE* discourse” seems to have hit the nail on the head: The fields of nutrition and climate share the common problem that in both cases there are large corporations with vested interests in casting doubt on the science. The excessive use of sugar in processed foods is equivalent to the excessive burning of fossil fuels – both generate huge profits and both necessitate casting doubt on the science that might undermine those profits.
May we please stop this conspiratorial drivel about large corporations being responsible for skepticism about the impacts of fossil fuel use on global climate? “Big Government” is spending billions to their millions in support of this poorly supported claim. The observations have diverged from the models – to me, cause enough to say we don’t yet know enough to enact draconian policies with dramatic impacts, esp. on the poor.
yes, its a known fact that Shell funded the 40 or so climate models that fail miserably. And it was Exxon who paid Mann to misuse PCA, hide his data, flip tiljander, and so forth.. sarc off
Bottomline. the industry shills, the shills who argue C02 is a plant food,
the shills who deny radiative physics have not returned any bang for the buck. Nobody buys their arguments. The people who have returned bang for the buck in questioning climate science are
A) unpaid gadflies, who noticed some shoddy practices in science.
Mann and Jones gave these guys all the ammunition folks needed.
B) climate scientists themselves who shilled models that were not
ready for the epistemic weight put on them.
@Steven Mosher…
[…]
Here’s a prediction: the “shills who argue C02 is a plant food” are going to have a similar effect for their cause that the “climate scientists themselves who shilled models that were not ready” did for theirs. Sure, CO2 is plant food, but weeds are plants, so are all the green parts of the “wild” ecosystems. Sooner or later we’re going to see a significant ecosystem reorganization (“eco-catastrophe”), and all of a sudden everybody’s going to go hog wild blaming CO2. And it may even be a heavy contributor. Maybe.
CO2 *is* plant food. Teh carbon in their tissues comes from CO2 just as the carbon in yours comes from the crow you eat.
Yeah … first we fatten the kids … and then we fatten them the adults.
It’s a profitable business model … monstrously profitable, eh?
Colin Lawson accuses large corporations of “casting doubt on the science”. This misses the point. The point is that in these cases we don’t have reliable science in the first place. Powerful organisations such as corporations (including Greenpeace, WWF, etc) and governments will manipulate the situation to their own advantage. This can cut both ways, depending on the organisations’ interest, and in the worst cases people will die. For example: The World Bank will not provide finance for coal-fired power stations.
http://grist.org/news/world-bank-joins-war-on-coal/
fan – take a look at Greenpeace’s business model. It uses baseless fear-mongering to generate its income. It’s a profitable business model … monstrously profitable, eh?
“The fields of nutrition and climate share the common problem that in both cases there are large corporations with vested interests in casting doubt on the science.”
Oh no. Casting down on the science. How awful Like pissing in church. Or talking too loud in the library.
The money in this case is many of order of magnitude greater on the part of the alarmists. The study of global warming with all its ancillary projects and endeavors has become an industry upon which many have become dependent. Billions upon billions of research dollars there for the asking, but it has to be “the right kind of research.
The notion that BIG OIL is behind AGW skepticism is simply wrong. The assertion is a lie.
Sorry, Casting “doubt on the science.”
We’ll know that global warming has “paused” when the oceans stop heating.
Until that happens, scientists have Nature on their side, eh?
Denialists, not so much.
Really? Nobody thinks that there is no GHE?
Apparently some 71 million Americans think that there is no warming taking place at all. Of those who think there is warming taking place, there are presumably many who think that none of it is because of ACO2 (in addition to those who think that that GW is happening but mostly due to causes other than ACO2 – some 37% of the public).
That’s a whole lotta nobodies.
Mosher uses the royal nobody which means if he doesn’t buy it nobody buys it because only his opinion counts.
Fanny says:
“We’ll know that global warming has “paused” when the oceans stop heating.
Until that happens, scientists have Nature on their side, eh?”
Well, no, Fanny. In fact, the alarmist scientists have themselves not so much on their own side. The main metric used is surface temps.
As Ian Jollife responded to the false claims that he supports the Mannian methods, “But equally, if both are OK, why be perverse and choose the technique whose results are hard to interpret?”
Fanny, why be perverse?
“the shills who argue C02 is a plant food,”
Uhmmm, have you invented a new theory of photosynthesis that no one is aware of?
Everything you are likely to eat is here by way of CO2 and most of those things are here in greater abundance from greater amounts of CO2.
Joshua.. nobody who matters, nobody who makes a difference.
OBVIOUSLY you will find some who buy the dragon slayer stuff
But on balance. who has made more impact
Mcintyre or Doug Cotton?
Who testified before Parliment? Nic Lewis or John Sullivan
So yes some nobodies believe there is no GHE. but then you knew that this was my position.
“Nobody who matters”
No true Scotsman. FAIL
Those people vote. Ergo they matter.
You’re such a conceited POS Mosher…
AK,
yes. You’ll note how folks like Joshua give these arguments about corporate funding the twice over with their sharp critical skilzz
NOT.
Here is a clue. Industry is too smart to pay for the best skeptical arguments because
A) they were provided free of charge
B) they dont dare risk diminshing the purity of those sources.
” Industry is too smart to pay for the best skeptical arguments because”
Who do you think is funding the Heartland Institute?
Who is the Heartland Institute?
Someone isn’t getting their money’s worth.
” “Big Government” ”
Big government “wants” evidence for AGW is one of the most ludicrous arguments I hear in the denialosphere.
joey, joey
Barak Obama is the personification of big government. You think he doesn’t want evidence for AGW? I will be very surprised if joshie doesn’t jump on you for blatant selective reasoning, or something like that.
Joseph, big government exist to proliferate itself. To do so requires two things: more revenue and more control.
What are carbon taxes designed to do?
“What are carbon taxes designed to do?”
And you may have noticed that Obama hasn’t proposed a carbon tax. The reason isn’t is because he knows it wouldn’t be politically popular. Why would any politician want to invent a problem that required solutions that could hurt them politically?
CO2 *is* plant food. The carbon in their tissues comes from CO2 just as the carbon in yours comes from the crow you eat.
Doesn’t matter. Mosh actually cares enough to lift a finger and do the work, getting his hands dirty and leaving an unambiguous trail of his output as a result. That is quite different approach from a lot of these blowhards … hint, hint.
Wonderin’ Willis is also one of those guys willing to get his hands dirty, but his paper trail is one of endlessly embarrassing scientific claims.
You could have stopped with “doesn’t matter”.
No amount of pearl clutching, before congress or on blogs or in the literature, is going to change global aCO2 emission enough to make a whit of difference in the eventual outcome of fluffing up the atmosphere with it. We both know that, right?
Springer Spaniel We are doing science. You aren’t. Quite simple, and why it is you that doesn’t matter, other than sitting there like a track hurdle.
You aren’t doing science. You’re commenting on a scientist’s blog. Surely you understand the difference.
Steven Mosher: Bottomline. the industry shills, the shills who argue C02 is a plant food,
the shills who deny radiative physics have not returned any bang for the buck. Nobody buys their arguments. The people who have returned bang for the buck in questioning climate science are
A) unpaid gadflies, who noticed some shoddy practices in science.
Mann and Jones gave these guys all the ammunition folks needed.
B) climate scientists themselves who shilled models that were not
ready for the epistemic weight put on them.
Well said. In this context, “Nobody” is an often-used exaggeration, a rhetorical device that I notice a few people are pretending not to understand.
I especially liked the phrase “not ready for the epistemic weight put on them”: not “stringently tested.”
Yes, when I comment on someone’s lack of understanding, I am acting as a science educator.
So I chalk it up to psychological projection on your part.
If Mosher and Joshua wanted to make sense, they wouldn’t speak Orwellian ‘denying radiative physics’ or ‘GHE’. Logical incoherence and not even wrong. It’s clear that the influence of the atmosphere on the average surface temperature index or energy content is not purely radiative. Pretending that it is, is attacking a strawman.
JC – The “Magical Theory” piece is by Melanie Phillips
oops thx
“JC note: This is a very rich paper, I have invited Katzav to do a guest post”
Yes please
Diet is very simple, it’s what you eat. Dieting is very complex, it’s what other people tell you to eat. See the difference.
Climate is very simple, it’s called weather.
Climate change is very complex , it’s other people telling you to use an umbrella.
Or wear clean underpants in case you get hit by a car.
Well meaning people
Pushing their interpretations
Onto other people
Whether they are right or wrong
Up to two thirds of your bodies cholesterol is synthesized by your liver and does not come from the diet; the amount is genetic.
The levels of the cholesterol binding proteins in the body is genetic, bad cards mean shorter lives.
But statins…
Actually I dropped my cholesterol level almost in half with diet and exercise one time. From 229 to 129. My doctor had wanted to prescribe statins and I don’t want any potential adverse side effects. I got a blood test after 6 months of diet & excercise (lost 60 lbs) and when he called with the results the conversation began with him saying “How in the hell did you manage to do this?”. Green tea (at least a pot every day), brown rice, lean chicken, lowfat cottage cheese, non-fat yogurt, fruits and vegetables, and body builder shake after each workout. Lots of ice water. Every quart of ice water you drink takes 125 calories to warm to 98.6F. Six to nine miles each week on treadmill and three to four hours on a universal gym with maximum possible weight for each exercise. Alternate days on treadmill and pumping iron to give damaged muscles a chance to repair. Five small balanced meals per day. Under 1500 calories total. One day per week eat, drink, and be merry.
http://bodyforlife.com/
It works.
D Springer
Being pedantic (heh).
You do want potential side effects.
You really don’t want (bad) side effects.
Potential side effects on the other hand are just that, potential, ie non existent. You can live with non existent side effects.
Both you and Doc are right, cholesterol levels are inbuilt but can be modified in some people by exercise and diet.
High cholesterol of itself is rarely a problem, smoking, diabetes and genetic poor vascular systems are the only problems.
Look after your parents and siblings, stop smoking and don’t get diabetes.
Angech. 15/2/2014
That was incoherent. Is english not your native language?
If you play on train tracks a potential side effect is getting hit by a train.
I don’t want potential adverse side effects from statins which include:
Are There Side Effects of Statin Drugs?
Most people who take statin drugs tolerate them very well. But some people experience side effects.
The most common statin side effects include:
Headache
Difficulty sleeping
Flushing of the skin
Muscle aches, tenderness, or weakness (myalgia)
Drowsiness
Dizziness
Nausea and/or vomiting
Abdominal cramping and/or pain
Bloating and/or gas
Diarrhea
Constipation
Rash
Statins also carry warnings that memory loss, mental confusion, high blood sugar, and type 2 diabetes are possible side effects. It’s important to remember that statins may also interact with other medications you take.
Which Statin Side Effects Are Serious?
Statins are associated with a few rare, but potentially serious, side effects including:
Myositis, inflammation of the muscles. The risk of muscle injury increases when certain other medications are taken with statin use. For example, if you take a combination of a statin and a fibrate — another cholesterol-reducing drug — the risk of muscle damage increases greatly compared to someone who takes a statin alone.
Elevated levels of CPK, or creatine kinase, a muscle enzyme that when elevated, can cause muscle pain, mild inflammation, and muscle weakness. This condition, though uncommon, can take a long time to resolve.
Rhabdomyolysis, extreme muscle inflammation and damage. With this condition, muscles all over the body become painful and weak. The severely damaged muscles release proteins into the blood that collect in the kidneys. The kidneys can become damaged trying to eliminate a large amount of muscle breakdown caused by statin use. This can ultimately lead to kidney failure or even death. Fortunately, rhabdomyolysis is extremely rare. It occurs in less than one in 10,000 people taking statins.
David the contention was your use of the words potential adverse side effects coupled with the word any.
Potential is a word with sweeping potential.
Potentially one should not leave home to go to work because potentially you might get hit by a car.
That would be a good choice if you did not want any chance of being hit by a car outside your house.
But it is a terrible attitude to take to life.
The potential for having an adverse statin effect is high but usually not terminal.
If you try it and have an adverse side effect you can stop.
The reason for taking a statin is if you have a higher risk than normal of heart disease and you are unable to lose 4 plus stone in weight .
Congratulations by the way on doing so, much better willpower than I have .
I have searched the heavens with my 5 inch telescope for that mythical greenhouse in the sky, but find no evidence that it ever existed or anyone built it. Yet ‘greenhouse gas’ remains the staple scientific explanation for climate change. This is just an analogy, not a scientific explanation, yet it is the only explanation the IPCC can offer.
How did this come about? It could be that a new generation of Puritans, dismayed at the unprecedented rate we use earth’s resources, have rebelled against our alleged profligacy and endeavored to end it with the global warming scare.
Now you may or may not agree with this explanation, but everyone will agree that the science has poorly defined the problem including the failure to explain the discrepancy it creates in the measured Specific Heat of gases..
I have – amongst other things – been researching eggs lately. Eggs seem quite respectable these days – although commonly not recommended for diabetics because of studies linking egg consumption by diabetics with increased risk of heart attacks and stroke. The National Heart Foundation in Australia recommends 6 eggs a week max for both diabetics and non-diabetics. I have had 5 so far this week.
In the end I have settled on an ultra high quality diet. Beans, nuts, seeds, fruit, vegies, lean meat, good fats that include small amounts of butter and cheese, low GI and few simple carbohydrates. I also take supplements – multi-vitamins, extra chromium, fish oil, low dose aspirin. Along with various plant products for blood sugar control – damiana, ginger, cinnamon, macca root, Gymnena sylvestre. Super foods in moderation – spelt, oats, goji berries, chia seed, flax seed – with almond milk in a tasty raw muesli for my free range egg and low fat, grass fed beef sausage free days. The latter with a slice of wholemeal toast and rich, luscious butter.
The question naturally arises – have I gone totally insane? There is nothing wrong with any of this – and good food is a passion. Last night we had baked ‘fried chicken’ and an Italian bean salad. It was just OK – the salad was good and I can improve on the chicken. Night before we had Thai chicken satay kebabs with steamed vegies a la Gado Gado. Splendidly good – a perfect mix of sweet (I am not above a little poison in a really good cause), salt and sour that is the defining characteristic of Thai food. It seems less magical – if a little obsessive.
AGW on the other hand seems less magical than utterly wrong in principle. Unless one counts ignoring the dynamic complexities of ocean and atmosphere circulation – with accompanying changes in cloud, snow, ice, dust, biology and cloud – as magical. Or imaging that these things -including the nonlinear couplings between powerful climate sub-systems – are well understood. The reality is that climate responds to small changes in conditions with abrupt and nonlinear change as internal sub-systems feedback in unpredictable ways. Not AGW as such but dynamic emergent behavior. DEB for short.
On the other hand there is a magical solution – tax carbon dioxide emissions. The inadequacy of this response is so obvious that I imagine ulterior motives. Such as the overthrow of capitalism and the consumerist ethic.
A truly effective response to carbon emissions is as simple as diet. It involves a comprehensive multi-gas strategy that builds societal resilience and maximizes economic development – along with accelerated technological innovation. But this is not what they want to hear. I guess it has parallels with diet.
.
Maybe go easy on the supplements?
‘Beta-carotene and vitamin E seem to increase mortality, and so may higher doses of vitamin A.’
Vitamin E?
http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/supplement/vitamin-e
75 IU of dl-alpha-tocopherol is a fairly low dose – with low risk and some suggestion of benefits. One of the risks is taking with low dose aspirin.
Beta-carotene is not part of the plan – although I do have a fondness for sweet potato. The vitamin A content of the multivitamin I use is 1/3 the recommended daily dosage and nowhere near the safe upper limit.
e.g http://www.med.nyu.edu/content?ChunkIID=21858
Look if I want to discuss my dietary regime – it won’t be with someone who links to a single study on a blog. It certainly wont be with someone who makes sweeping generalizations without knowing any details of my circumstances – and indeed on any and all other issues – and has proven to be fractious, superficial, irrelevant and just plain wrong at every opportunity.
Just plain common sense aye FOMBS?
As the post says, we simply don’t know what helps or hurts when it comes to nutrition. Report out today claims that taking antioxidants to help increase performance and muscle building while exercising actually seems to have the opposite result. Randomized, controlled study. But everyone knows that exercising produces free radicals which are harmful so taking antioxidants during exercise will help, right. I mean, we just know that’s true.
• Eating vegetables and fruits is healthy, and
• vegetables and fruits are high in vitamins and minerals, and so
• vitamin and mineral supplements will improve health …
not necessarily, and possibly even the opposite.
Robert Ellison observes: “The question naturally arises – have I gone totally insane? ”
—–
The question does naturally arise.
‘We included all primary and secondary prevention randomised clinical trials on antioxidant supplements (beta-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, and selenium) versus placebo or no intervention.’
Selenium?
http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Selenium-HealthProfessional/
http://www.abc.net.au/health/minutes/stories/2004/04/21/1092011.htm
Yes – I quoted the source you link to and linked to other reputable sources. It is none of your business but my supplement – in one multivitamin responsibly formulated – contains about half of the recommended maximum for selenium. These are supplements after all and not mega doses of anything. Certainly not as an anti-oxidant.
You are just wasting my time with frivolous repetition – as you seem to have a habit of doing FOMBS. The same really could be said of Randy with fairness.
AGW on the other hand seems less magical than utterly wrong in principle. Unless one counts ignoring the dynamic complexities of ocean and atmosphere circulation – with accompanying changes in cloud, snow, ice, dust, biology and cloud – as magical. Or imaging that these things -including the nonlinear couplings between powerful climate sub-systems – are well understood. The reality is that climate responds to small changes in conditions with abrupt and nonlinear change as internal sub-systems feedback in unpredictable ways. Not AGW as such but dynamic emergent behavior. DEB for short.
On the other hand there is a magical solution – tax carbon dioxide emissions. The inadequacy of this response is so obvious that I imagine ulterior motives. Such as the overthrow of capitalism and the consumerist ethic.
A truly effective response to carbon emissions is as simple as diet. It involves a comprehensive multi-gas strategy that builds societal resilience and maximizes economic development – along with accelerated technological innovation. But this is not what they want to hear – which is the real problem here.
I’ve heard an old saying that an egg a day keeps the doctor away. I believe it stems from a time of malnutrition, and I believe the source is Italian.
========================
Just had a Saturday morning breakfast of free range eggs scrambled with 15ml of full cream milk with low fat, grass fed beef sausages, a very spicy home made ketchup and a slice of nice wholemeal toast. Not sure about healthy but tasty.
My blood sugar started at 7.3mmol/L and finished at 8.8mmol/L – within American Diabetes Association guidelines.
‘In recent years, the prevalence of diabetes has been observed to be rising greatly all over the world, due to increasing life expectancies and to rising prevalences in different age groups (e7). At first sight, then, the question of whether genetic factors play a part seems unjustified, because prevalence is increasing too fast to be explained by genetic causes (e8). However, there are indications that genetic factors do have a relevant influence on diabetes risk. For one thing, twin and family studies show that type 2 diabetes has a strong inherited component (estimated at >50%) (e9). For another, recent studies (discussed below) suggest the existence of a genetic predisposition to develop diabetes in the presence of “diabetogenic” environmental factors such as high-calorie nutrition and lack of exercise.’ http://www.aerzteblatt.de/int/archive/article/138222
My condition is certainly more hereditary than diabetogenic – and explains my obsession with food and nutrition.
The planet is still not warming for a decade to three more at least. Even Kim doesn’t know how long.
I skipped breakfast and lunch. Unless you count coffee. I had an early dinner which consisted of finishing off a bag of cheese puffs, a pint and a half of yogurt, and a big hunk of homemade bread I made last night liberally smothered with margarine (no hydrogenated oils and 0% transfat of course). For desert a small box of chocolates I got for Valentine’s day. A couple of capsules of cold pressed Antarctic Krill Oil and a one-a-day Centrum senior for active adults 50+ washed down with a quart of water flavored with 0 calorie Hawaiian punch water enhancer. I’m feeling a bit peckish now 6 hours later so I think I’ll finish off a baked potato and grilled vegetables I fixed last night on the barbie for me & the Mrs. on Valentines day and pound down another quart of water.
Gee this sure is fun writing down what we eat and do each day. Great weather we’re having. I was in shorts and t-shirt all day and got some sun and exercise with the dogs along with some gardening. That stupid Arctic vortex must’ve pulled north again. It pulls in some gorgeous sub-tropical weather when it leaves. And the full moon the last couple of days with clear sky at night. And my old friend and constellation The Archer aiming his bow overhead. Beautiful evenings. And OMG the sunset colors were just spectacular with every shade of blue, pink orange, and red lighting up some cirrus clouds from behind. Life is good.
I didn’t skip breakfast today. Four eggs scrambled with a fork in a glass bowl and nuked in the microwave for 90 seconds breaking up after the first minute because it congeals on the outside of the bowl first. A cup (uncooked) of Quaker old fashioned oats with nothing but a half ounce of real maple syrup, again nuked for 3 minutes in a glass bowl. Sixteen ounces of water required to make the oats. Plus a slice of my homemade bread toasted with a little margarine. And coffee with artifical creamer and a tsp of cane sugar.
I haven’t had a drink since Friday when I had three beers so I might have a greyhound (vodka and grapefruit juice) or two this evening to get some natural vitamin C and other goodies from grapefruit juice plus a little blood alcohol keeps the liver frosty, thins the blood, dissolves fat from inside the blood vessels, and reduces stress & tension. It is suspected that moderate alcohol consumption lowers the risk of type 2 diabetes too! Who knew?
http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/nutrition/healthy-eating/alcohol-the-benefits-of-moderate-drinking.html
Interestingly one of the side effects (real, not potential) of taking statin drugs to reduce serum cholesterol is you can’t consume grapefruit juice.
Grapefruit juice is high in antioxidants called polyphenolics. Polyphenolics accelerate the breakdown of statin drugs causing blood level of the statin to spike. Spiking statin level greatly raises the risk of adverse side effects of statins. IMO it’s best to avoid dosing yourself with synthetic chemicals to accomplish changes that you can otherwise get simply by modifying your lifestyle instead. It’s slothful and IMO ultimately counter-productive to good health as it is an enabler for unhealthy behaviors.
David – you have missed one aspect of cholesterol. It is a component of the cell membrane. It plays a role in other biological functions as well – it is critical to our well being. Probably due to that, it is manufactured by the liver. I have (had) high cholesterol. I tried diet and exercise first and that hardly moved the needle. However, the smallest dose available knocked it down a lot. So, for some people, the liver produces so much cholesterol that a low fat diet isn’t effective. I’ve been using a statin for many years and so far, so good. I’ve been fasting, 600 calories, one day a week and it has helped me lose weight. I agree with you about salutary effect of fasting. Burning energy stores has to be a good thing every so often.
How would you like it of the doctor told you he was going to be the first to use the new but untested and unverified Bayesian implant system — to replace your mom’s hip — because, there’s no evidence to falsify his opinion that it will ultimately prove to be the superior restorative option?
+10
-6.02 x e+23
Guess what???
I got two of those untested metal/metal hip resurfacings more than 13-years ago. I run, hike, bike, kayak, swim, surf and perform professional geologic fieldwork at the same pace I did in my 20’s. One of my buddies who went for the tried and true plastic bearing has had to have it revised after 4-years and his doc telling him to take it easy with a couple pages of restrictions.
My priors were the certainty of weak plastic and amputation of the head and neck of my femurs versus durable metal and conserve the bone.
If everyone was like you Mr. Wag, humans would have gone extinct long before our Neanderthal cousins.
That’s great. I am happy for your success. Who are these guys–e.g.,
“The personal injury attorneys of Kaiser Gornick LLP based in San Francisco, California are skilled defective medical devices litigators who can help those across the country who have been harmed by manufacturers of Metal-on-Metal hip implants (MoMs). Increasing evidence suggests that Metal-on-Metal hips experience device failures at rates that are unacceptably higher compared to alternative options, such as metal-on-polyethylene, ceramic-on-metal, or ceramic-on-ceramic hip implants. More than 500,000 Americans have one or more MoMs implanted, many of whom are not aware of the potentially severe side effects associated with these medical devices.
If you or someone you love has suffered injury due to the early failure of a Metal-on-Metal hip implant, contact the offices of Kaiser Gornick LLP today at…
Howard, in what country did you receive those untested hip resurfacings? Were you part of a clinical trial?
Yes, I was part of an FDA sanctioned clinical trial at one of 5 surgeons participating in the USA.
Wagatron: I had already anticipated the exact nature of your shallow response, so I reserved plenty of ammo. Trial attorneys are trying to get rich from the procedure is proof of nothing. You see, not everyone looked at ALL the priors, including:
1) small boned people are higher risk of failure
2) poor bone stock (low density, cysts, AVN, etc.) = high risk of failure
3) surgery is more difficult due to lack of room because the femur top isn’t amputated.
4) improper positioning will result in excess metal wear and failure.
5) Orthopods are not board certified and are, in general, from the bottom of the medical school barrel.
My surgeon (he’s at the top of the field) from day 1 cautioned about all of these factors. Since he taught all of the classes on the procedure, he made all of this information available to the entire field.
Ironically, he was accused of being sexist and ageist because women and the elderly carry a greater chance of having multiple risk factors. Small females experience the bulk of the failures So folks wanting the latest and greatest pushed to have it done even with increased risk factors. Many went doctor shopping to get their confirmation bias confirmed. Also, once it went mainstream, the hacks had trouble positioning the implants correctly.
This is a perfect example of the importance of having a well thought-out conceptual model before you decide to pull the trigger.
Is it shallow to consider observational data? It can be difficult to keep an open mind particularly when facts challenge preconceptions–e.g.,
“Metal-on-Metal hip implants peaked at about one third of hip replacement procedures back in 2007, and have since dropped off to represent only 10% of the market today. A 2011 report showed twice the number of revisions (ie. where the prosthetic device must be surgically replaced), for metal-on-metal hip replacements than other varieties that include ceramics and polyethylene. The issue with metal-on-metal is that both the ball and socket are metal, meaning that metal working against metal can cause erosion, leaching of metals particles and more rapid failure.
“Although metal on metal joints are common in cars and other machinery, the ease of manufacture, as well as the possibility of oiling the joints and replacing them with spare parts, obviously makes them a good choice. Once inside the body however, something more durable and able to withstand the abrasion and stress and strain of day to day life, without maintenance is necessary….”
Cite your sources. You are just repeating marketing materials.
I have no personal stake what is the best technology implant technology is for hip restoration but anyone who is interested can easily Google more information about it. Obviously, you may know more about metal-to-metal than the FDA although if any honest person would admit that the FDA has reservations about the efficacy of the metal-to-metal approach.
“I have another theory to explain the current deluge. It is Galileo, Newton and Einstein weeping uncontrollably from above.”
That would seem to be more likely that some explanations given so far.
Gosh David. I was endorsing your theory and making the logic behind it accessible to the WUWT crowd by an analogy they already believe in. You really don’t know how to take a compliment.
My bold.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/science/giant-laser-complex-makes-fusion-advance.html?hpw&rref=science&_r=0
This hypothesis was hard and expensive to test. We know more than when we started but was it worth the price — $5.3 billion so far? How would we know?
Well, while I am a fan, this test wasn’t very successful.
The bigget problem is there’s no known material with which to make a containment vessel that can survive for long. So even if an energy surplus is achieved maintenance on the reactor will make it economically infeasible.
There’s really only one ultimate solution and that’s to harvest & store sunlight either through artificial organisms (synthetic biology) or artificial leaves. I would put money on the former because nature already designed & tested the technology for us and all we have to do is reverse engineer it then cut & paste together synthetic organisms.
The high temperature plasma is contained electromagnetically and then interacts with advanced metals with water blankets to transfer heat. Metaql fatique is an active research area.
Big thing is that after starting in 2019 the empirical data rpoved the models wrong so they change the models. Still working on comparing data to models and changeing them to reflect experimental results.
In a hundred years we will have fusion. Give or take 25. With that energy we can desalinate sea water, split hydrogen from water and run carbion free vehicles with fuel cells or electricity.
Remember where cars and airplanes were 100 years ago. Technology improves even faster now.
Scott
Starting in 2010, not 2019.
Faraday was asked, “what good is the use of this electricity”
He responded, “Madame, what good is a baby”
A long way to go but it is a good step.
But they learn from real data and change the models.
Scott
Platitudes. No one ever gets technology predictions right 100 years in the future. Not even 50. I recall in 1963 being assured we would have flying cars and nuclear electricity so cheap it wouldn’t be metered. How’s that going and why?
My kid worked on this during summers at both Princeton and MIT about 10-years ago. He said the general feeling was that fusion energy is perpetually 40-years off in the future.
I agree with Springer on this… the platitudes about economic fusion, synthetic biology, designer microbiology reminds me of great American blue collar philosophy:
wish in one had, drop a deuce in the other and see which one fills up first.
Nature provides both technologies to us. Fusion is for stars not planets. Biology is for planets not stars. Figure out which one we live on and go from there.
By the way, it used to be that fusion was perpetually 20 years away. It’s a step closer to realism if the meme is that it’s now 40 years away.
I just read an article on ITER. Ironically I read it while dropping a duece.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fusions-missing-pieces-iter-problems/
The Problems with ITER and the Fading Dream of Fusion Energy
The consensus is that it would be abandoned by now if it weren’t for national pride. None of the countries involved in funding it want to be the first to drop out.
The only way we’re going to take advantage of fusion power is to learn to cost effectively harvest and store solar power. There are a couple of promising ways to do it but my bet is on the method that nature has been using for billions of years in the oldest most successful organism on the planet – photosynthetic bacteria. Even the simplest of these are incredibly complex machines but they are still machines. Machines can be reverse engineered with tried and true means and methods. The cost of reverse engineering in molecular biology is dropping at a rate that reminds me of Moore’s Law of semi-conductors i.e. cost falls in half every 18 months. Just over ten years ago it cost $1 billion and took 13 years to sequence a human genome. Today it costs $3 to $5 thousand and takes one or two days.
A photosynthetic bacteria has a genome thousands of times simpler than the human genome. Today researchers can build a bacterial genome from scratch on a desktop computer then use a laboratory benchtop machine to assemble it using mail-order DNA snippets. We can test them by removing the DNA from a living bacteria and inserting our replacement code and bringing it back to life. As this process grows faster and cheaper the reverse engineering effort is accelerated. The reverse engineering process almost entirely consists of “what if” questions and answers. What happens if I delete this gene or modify that one. By these means an methods we figure out what makes these machines tick and thence how to build them to do what we want instead of what nature designed them to do.
It’s only a matter of time and not much more time given the rate at which the means and methods of synthetic biology are improving. This technologic course was first charted in 1986 and was considered then to take between 30 and 50 years. It’s right on track for 40 years. Interestingly one of the earlier milestones was a global network to share and process the immense amount of data involved in reverse engineering the molecular machinery of living cells. That’s where I made my contribution to the effort.
Springer,
Platitudes are us. At least the fusion guys take data and change models. This is one kind of government largess, like the trip to the moon and the mid planets that they can put one part of the culture funds towards. Plus art galleries and museums.
Nuc energy was killed by the envros propaganda about risk. They moved to climate change and anti fossil fuels. Hard to keep up with them in the age of low information voters.
Big picture is biology is a good potential avenue. So is solar voltaic power plants but for all the land they shadow. Coal too if we can control the anciliary damage to mountain tops and streams, plus NOx, SOx and mercury emissions.
Fusion is a grand challenge with world changing impacts if successful. As you said, envisioning the future of technology development is difficult. But the future comes one day at a time so we keep slogging away on multiple paths. I still like the vision of fusion electricity by the ocean creating electricity, tied to desalination plants instead of dams for water, with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles emitting water vapor.
All in good times my friend.
Scott
Why not solar PV floating on the ocean, combing IBM’s new concentrated PV technology with Nocera’s artificial leaf technology? Both involve bringing water into contact with the actual PV cell, so the technologies could probably be combined cost-efficiently.
The waste heat (at 80-90°C) could be efficiently used for low-temperature distillation, cooled by deep water at 2-4°C. The pressure differential involved might be enough for a second round of power generation, sufficient to power the pumps and other local technology involved in the process. Perhaps even enough to power the pumps to bring the water to its eventual users.
Near-term, the H2 created by electrolysis could be bio-converted to methane, which could be transported under ambient pressure a thousand Km down. Both pipes and submarine shipping could probably be made very cheap, with a little technology maturation, since no real pressure containment technology would be needed. From there, it could be fed into existing methane distribution and power generating technology, supplying electricity and gas for industry and the office/residential market. This would extend the effective life-time of investments in such technology (both R&D and infrastructure), making them more attractive.
Longer term, as the technology for storing and transporting H2 becomes safer and more mature (if it does), the methane-generating technology could be turned to sequestration. (If necessary.)
Alternatively, the methane could be locally stored, along with oxygen from the electrolysis, and combined in fuel cells to produce energy and high-concentration CO2 for sequestration. (If necessary.)
This tidbit of Springerian Philosophy is a corollary of the divine Duck Commander wisdom:
JC SNIP
Absent any real ability at critical thinking Horwad goes for shock value.
How’s that working out for you Horwad?
Gosh David. I was endorsing your theory and making the logic behind it accessible to the WUWT crowd by an analogy they already believe in. You really don’t know how to take a compliment.
So, let me get this right, CO2 increases, traps infrared radiation (IR), and we all fry, right? But, what if the CO2 does not trap IR? Who would know if it does? How about a scientist who uses IR to look at the stars, they would have to know if the IR they were looking at was being blocked by the atmosphere, right? So lets see what one says:
IR Expert Speaks Out After 40 Years Of Silence : “IT’S THE WATER VAPOR STUPID and not the CO2″
I’m a professional infrared astronomer who spent his life trying to observe space through the atmosphere’s back-radiation that the environmental activists claim is caused by CO2 and guess what? In all the bands that are responsible for back radiation in the brightness temperatures (color temperatures) related to earth’s surface temperature (between 9 microns and 13 microns for temps of 220K to 320 K) there is no absorption of radiation by CO2 at all. In all the bands between 9 and 9.5 there is mild absorption by H2O, from 9.5 to 10 microns (300 K) the atmosphere is perfectly clear except around 9.6 is a big ozone band that the warmists never mention for some reason. From 10 to 13 microns there is more absorption by H2O. Starting at 13 we get CO2 absorption but that wavelength corresponds to temperatures below even that of the south pole. Nowhere from 9 to 13 microns do we see appreciable absorption bands of CO2. This means the greenhouse effect is way over 95% caused by water vapor and probably less than 3% from CO2.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/ir-expert-speaks-out-after-40-years-of-silence-its-the-water-vapor-stupid-and-not-the-co2/
Simply put, this says that “the science of radiative transfer” is falsified. Since that is the very heart of CAGW, then the whole “science” falls apart. If “radiative transfer” simply doesn’t work with the IR at the frequency the earth gives it off, then CO2 cannot heat the planet.
If this is true, then the expected increase in temperature of the air at 12 Km altitude in the tropics that “radiative transfer” from CO2 should be causing would also not be present, and guess what, it isn’t. That is now two absolute proofs that “the science of radiative transfer’, without which Global Warming cannot happen, is false.
Science, make a guess, make a prediction, with numbers, about that guess, then see if reality, observed through experiment or observation matches your prediction. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter how wonderful and true the idea seems, how many scientists are said to believe it, how great those scientists are said to be, or anything else, if your prediction is wrong, drop the idea.
The “science of radiative transfer”, by CO2 at least, has now been shown false, falsified, twice, by actual observation. It is now time to drop it entirely.
This is the heart of the matter, everything else you see, on this site or any other, is just dancing around on the edges.
The CO2 band is in fact close to the center of the wavelengths emitted by the clear sky because that temperature is somewhat like that of the South Pole. So looking up CO2 is front and center of those wavelengths which is why it is an important part of back radiation at the surface.
“So, let me get this right, CO2 increases, traps infrared radiation (IR)…”
——–
Nope, you didn’t get it right.
I agree the water vapor is most significant gas.
For a number of reasons.
But Earth is warm because it’s covered with oceans.
Climate is controlled by ocean. Weather is the atmosphere.
The Ocean’s have a higher average temperature than the land areas.
Ocean absorbs most to the energy from the sun.
Ocean warmth causes higher night time air temperature for land area.
Ocean temperature is warmer than average temperature of land at same latitude.
Take Earth, add say more water so ocean is 3000 meter deeper.
Model temperature of this world which has more than 99% covered with
ocean.
If modeled correctly, Earth average temperature would be higher than Earth’s current average temperature.
Really?
http://www.spectralcalc.com/blackbody_calculator/blackbody.php
I plugged in 288K for temperature, 1um low limit, 50um high limit, and the power spectrum shows 75% of peak power at the 15um line.
How do you explain a “professional infrared astronomer” not knowing this?
It’s at 75% the peak, but it represents only 4.6% of the spectral energy (5.8 W/m2/sr/um). That’s also the surface emissions, not the emissions downward. When you look at Tsky when there’s little water vapor, say 35F surface, and Tsky is no more than -40F, 15u has 2.6W/m2/sr/um spectral radiance. This measurement shows less than ~140mW/m@/sr/um at 15u, what it doesn’t show is the actual surface temp when the measurements were taken. I’ve measured Tsky below -60F at colder surface temps.
Mi Cro
Sure. 4.6% ain’t bad. The official number is 8% due to shoulder broadening IIRC.
I’m not sure why you’re saying it can’t be seen in downwelling IR. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
http://www.arm.gov/science/highlights/RNDE2/view
First Ground-Based Spectral Observations of the Entire Infrared Band
Submitter: Turner, D. D., National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Mlawer, E. J., Atmospheric & Environmental Research, Inc.
Area of Research: Radiation Processes
Working Group(s): Aerosol Life Cycle, Cloud Life Cycle
Journal Reference: Turner DD, EJ Mlawer, G Bianchini, MP Cadeddu, S Crewell, JS Delamere, RO Knuteson, G Maschwitz, M Mlynzcak, S Paine, L Palchetti, and DC Tobin. 2012. “Ground-based high spectral resolution observations of the entire terrestrial spectrum under extremely dry conditions.” Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L10801, doi:10.1029/2012GL051542.
See figure:
http://www.arm.gov/science/highlights/images/R00416_1.png
Great big fat 15um mountain in the spectrum.
So what, it’s 100mW/(m2 sr cm-1). And it still doesn’t distinguish what it was in the 50’s to know how much it actually changed.
So how much energy is that in W/m2? And how much energy was that before the partial doubling of Co2?
50 mW/(m2 sr cm-1)?
Actually since it’s 2u wide it would be double so 100 mW/(m2 sr cm-1). for a doubling of Co2, maybe.
Mi Cro,
The width of the CO2 peak is about 100 1/cm in the relevant units.
Pekka, you’re correct. But did you notice the transmission graph, and how the band is totally blocked? At what level of Co2 is it not blocked?
100mW? WTF? Where on earth are you getting this stuff?
CO2 forcing increase since 1750 is 1.8W/m2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing#Changes_in_radiative_forcing
Can’t you look these things up for yourself instead of having me do it? What grade are you in? Maybe your teacher can help.
The 100mw came from the measured ir response of the atm in the chart up thread, Pekka rightly pointed out I miss adjusted the units on the x – axis.
Note the transmittance in the Co2 bands is down to zero, more Co2 isn’t going to make it go up much.
Your chart has calculated values, for things like this, I think measurements mean more.
CO2 can do one thing water vapor can’t – feed plants.
It sure can!
And “sleeper weeds” are plants.
Write that down.
Rationalization is the hallmark of the denier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial
“The subject may use:
simple denial: deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether
minimisation: admit the fact but deny its seriousness (a combination of denial and rationalization)
projection: admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility by blaming somebody or something else.
“
Discussing, whether CO2 can have the claimed influence is ridiculous, as everyone can find out that it can.
Everyone can use the UChicago MODTRAN page to calculate the influence of CO2 to the outgoing radiation. If someone doubts MODTRAN, he may go to Science of Doom to get the full code of a program that does essentially the same calculation and gets essentially the same results. Thus all the required information is openly available and discussed extensively on web.
All this is just facts, not speculation nor dependent on trust on climate scientists.
The strength of feedbacks is a much more difficult question, but they need not be considered in disproving all the standard erroneous arguments that CO2 cannot have a significant effect. None of the arguments I have in mind refers to feedbacks as the basis for the conclusions. They enter on the next step of understanding.
“more Co2 isn’t going to make it go up much”
Depends on how much more we’re talking about. There is a known radiative response per doubling of the amount if everything else remains equal. This isn’t really a matter of dispute. The dispute is in the other things that don’t remain equal. This area of radiative physics has, as Pekka stated, long ago left the area of theory and moved to practice in all manner of devices from heat seeking missile guidance to astronomy to my favorite example millions of electronic CO2 sensors in commercial building ventilation systems that monitor CO2 built up from exhalation of occupants and turns on fans that exchange indoor with outdoor air before level becomes adverse to health and comfort:
http://www.raesystems.com/sites/default/files/downloads/FeedsEnclosure-TN-169_NDIR_CO2_Theory.pdf
There’s probably a lot of that you don’t understand. I can’t really help you in a blog. Either you take the time to attend some physical science classes and/or work in an appropriate field or you trust others who have done so.
“There’s probably a lot of that you don’t understand”
Maybe, maybe not. But what’s important is what surface stations tell us, the actual measurements, not the drivel passed off as GAT either. And it says the other things regulate surface temps.
Compare surface temps on a clear day/night vs cloudy days.
Want to see the effect of Co2 you have to look into things like this, not made up GAT series.
Legatus
You present a pretty convincing argument, which Jim D and R. Gates have been unable to refute here (despite their objections).
It would be interesting to see if one of the CAGW believers here will take a stab at really refuting it with observation-based data.
Max
@WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | February 14, 2014 at 8:39 pm
Thanks for showing, once again, that you have no proof of feedbacks necessary to make increasing CO2 dangerous.
manacker, Legatus presents a “convincing argument” of what exactly? It looks like the typical “dragonslayer” denial that CO2 has any IR effect. Would he believe in physics programs like MODTRAN? Apparently not. I tried. Seems beyond hope. Perhaps you can explain some basics to him, like that CO2 actually is a greenhouse gas. Good luck.
But you apparently wanthuge feedbacks so that your plants can grow in some uncontrolled experiment, You rationalize this as a delusional self-centered fool who thinks the world stops after “jim2” expires.
Lawyers are pitching state attorneys general in 16 states with a radical idea: make the food industry pay for soaring obesity-related health care costs.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/food-industry-obesity-health-care-costs-103390.html
Perhaps we should make the lawyers pay the costs of running the prison service, as there would be less prisoners if there were fewer laws and lawyers?
Yeah Doc, your onto something there. We can make auto companies pay for the damages from accidents and booze companies pay for alcohol-related injuries, etc.
That way individuals wouldn’t have to be responsible for anything! UNtopia!
It would be great if legal epistemics caught up with even the first half of the 20th century, but I would be satisfied if it moved out of the 13th.
Those 600,000 papers had to be pretty expensive. That money probably could have paid for a few (many?) longitudinal studies that would have a better chance of throwing some light on the situation.
As it is so easy to get people to honestly talk about the exercise they get and the food they eat.
I’m afraid lots of them are based on longitudinal data. The trouble is that the explanatory variables are usually lagged choices of the observational units, and all statistical heck breaks out.
“Obesity and diabetes are epidemic, and yet the only relevant fact on which relatively unambiguous data exist to support a consensus is that most of us are surely eating too much of something. ”
Yep, it’s called food.
And about my above (see), what more sever testing do you need?
CO2 absorbing and re-radiating Infra Red radiation (IR) is the very central idea behind “Global Warming” (“Climate Change”). If it cannot, or does not, do this, then the whole idea falls apart.
So, if you want a sever test, what sever tests would you need?
What would you test?
Well, what is said to cause “Global Warming”?
Would you test, oh, I dunno, the absorptions of IR by CO2? If not, why not?
Saaaay, by actually LOOKING for that absorption? If not, what, are you going to use astrology to tell you, read tea leaves, what?
Saaay, by looking for the expected heated air at about 12Km altitude in the tropics as the IR is absorbed by the CO2 and transfers that heat to the air around it? If not, why not?
Now, finding out what does, or does not, result in various kinds of climate, is very difficult to do a sever test of. But finding out whether CO2 does it is not. After all, it has actually been done now, and the idea of CO2 as a major driver of catastrophic, or even noticeable, warming, has been falsified. Twice. Severely.
And if you don’t believe that, tell me, if CO2 causes “climate change”, exactly how does it do that, given the actual observations? Be specific.
You can use MODTRAN or online radiation codes to see its effect as a function of amount and wavelength in a real-atmosphere profile. These codes are verified by spectral-resolving IR observations. That’s your severe test. Done.
Perhaps you should buy one of these!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_laser
If these don’t work, then the whole shebang is falsified.
BD,
The fact that an infrared CO2 laser actually works illustrates how the radiative properties of CO2 are not MAGICAL at all.
What is also interesting is that a solar-pumped laser is possible
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22co2+laser%22+%22solar+pumped%22
Which illustrates how incoming radiation at one wavelength can be converted to outgoing radiation at another of much lower wavelength .
This is essentially the same radiative physics as that applied to climate science, but taken to a logical extreme.
Yeah Web,
Some people can’t see the forest for the hand in front of their face, or the science for the computer in their laps.
It isn’t that you can’t measure ir re-emitted from Co2 or that you can’t make a Co2 laser, it’s how much heating it causes at the surface as the % of Co2 increases.
At 14-16u, photons have very low energy, at the same flux as an hour of .5u solar it takes 30 hours at 15u to radiate the same amount of energy. And as fast as it cools every night, it’s pretty obvious that Co2 doesn’t keep the air warm after the Sun goes down.
Micro, Of course CO2 is not going to be able to keep the night-time temperatures from getting cold. No one ever claimed otherwise. These are differential perturbations that we are talking about leading to a few degrees in average temperature, not tens of degrees in instantaneous changes.
Why would you try to wing it like that? Are you that desperate?
A normal scientist would estimate this via a calculation and some numbers. And then others would evaluate the calculation and show where a mistake was made. But since you can’t even do something like that, your claim is completely hollow.
How about pouring over 120 million surface station records looking for any evidence it has any actual effect?
What can you conclude form not see anything? You cannot conclude that science has got it wrong, because science doesn’t claim that something should be seen in that exercise.
Proving that a strawman invented bt you does not exist is not an interesting result.
Unfortunately for the skeptics,
The only thing that the amount of heating due to CO2 in the atmosphere depends on is the amount of CO2 and the temperature, the amount being more important.
If we double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we double the amount of heat provided to the surface.
It’s not so much the amount absorbed as it is the amount emitted by the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Bob Droege, “If we double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we double the amount of heat provided to the surface.”
Come on Bob, that is not even wrong as the Mosh would say. A doubling of CO2 will increase the average atmospheric forcing by about 3.7Wm-2 which is in the ballpark of a 1% increase. That is about 99% short of doubling the amount of heat provided to the surface.
If the earth were a planar black body evenly illuminated by an unchanging sun then doubling CO2 from 280 to 560ppm would cause a 1.1C rise in surface temperature.
The rub is that the earth isn’t a planar black body and the sun isn’t unchanging. No one quite knows when, why, and how much the sun changes. A rotating massive sphere instead of a planar massless black body complicates matters further. And the greatest complicating factor of all is it’s a water world being illuminated with temperature fluctuating above and below the freezing point life a mofo. Water vapor ostensibly accounts for some 75% of the atmospheric greenhouse effect and the amount of it in the air is extremely variable in spatially and temporally. Adding insult to injury water vapor transports an immense amount of solar energy insensibly (no change in temperature of the vapor) from the surface where we might otherwise feel the heat to thousands of feet above our heads in the clouds where we don’t feel the heat.
There are many phenomena in nature that, for one reason or another, are not susceptible to verification by independent testing. These typically include events that either occurred a long time ago or that occurred at distant sites not accessible to us, or both. Examples include the expansion of the Universe after the Big Bang, the variations in climate of the Earth in the past or in the future, the origin of life on Earth, putative existence of life elsewhere in the Universe, the evolution of species on Earth, continental drift, and other such topics. There is no way to go back into the past or travel great distances to directly verify hypotheses. Although the remnants of the past may be discernible to some extent in proxies that exist in the present, these tend to have significant limitations. For such phenomena that occurred long ago and/or in distant locations, scientists create hypotheses that would “explain” how these processes might have occurred in conformity with the known laws of science. If these hypotheses provide a reasonable explanation of phenomena and are in conformity with scientific laws, they acquire the elevated status of a theory. Such a theory is typically not unique and represents one viewpoint—often a preconceived viewpoint. It provides one possible explanation for events that cannot be verified by any known means. Conjecture for things improvable is a safe venture—no one can ever prove you wrong. It is far more dangerous to predict tomorrow’s weather than it is to predict the climate 100 years from now—tomorrow’s weather is subject to practical test. I call this kind of science “subjective science”. It is not amenable to detailed verification such as the laws of motion. While some subjective science has strong foundations (e.g. evolution, continental drift) the foundation of almost every subjective aspect of climate change are weak.
Scientists do not seem to be able to shrug their shoulders and admit that we just don’t know the answers to some questions. What happens is that one of the unprovable hypotheses in a subjective science gains popularity amongst scientists and is regarded by the majority as the most credible. When a significant number agree, a consensus evolves. The consensus acts like a gigantic gravitational field, drawing in more and more scientists. Eventually, the consensus gels, and ultimately hardens into a belief system — an orthodoxy. The foundations are often weak, and not understood by the public. The emergence of the consensus as the essence of reality in science has replaced scientific skepticism, and as Lindzen (2008) has noted: “simulation and programs have replaced theory and observation, where Government largely determines the nature of scientific activity.” As Lindzen (2008) has emphasized, “the bulk of the educated public is unable to follow scientific arguments; ‘knowing’ that all scientists agree relieves them of any need to do so.” Taking issue with the consensus “serves as a warning to scientists that the topic at issue is a bit of a minefield that they would do well to avoid.” It should also be noted that many climatological publications are so full of jargon and so obscure that they are unreadable except to a very few narrow specialists. So, not only the general public, but even much of the science community is unable to digest these abstruse treatises.
The consensus acquires legitimacy in proportion to the number and prominence of the scientists who subscribe to it. As the consensus becomes firmly imbedded in culture, it acquires the respect usually accorded to fact. Orthodoxy is a belief system. Thus, in regard to global warming, we have believers (alarmists) and non-believers (skeptics). Otherwise intelligent people often discuss whether or not they “believe in global warming.”
But like any religion, scientific orthodoxies cannot tolerate disagreement with the orthodoxy. Therefore the alarmists have politicized the science of climatology to enforce their views. To further the ends of the alarmists, some academicians have carried out counting studies where they sum up the number of scientists who subscribe to the alarmist persuasion. Perhaps the most absurd aspect of the climate alarmist movement is the putative relationship between obesity and global warming. If you enter “obesity and global warming” into Google, you obtain 1,100,000 responses. Typical responses in the queue are: (1) Is Obesity Causing Global Warming? A new study has suggested that obesity is affecting the planet …by raising carbon emissions …; (2) Do Obese People Aggravate Global Warming?—ABC News; (3) Scoop: Burning the Fat: Obesity and Global Warming, a study in the latest issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology by Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts plays out a grim scene: a world of overweight …; (4) thinner is better to curb global warming, study says—CNN.com; and there are thousands more like this. Some claim the effect is through excessive use of resources, while others blame it on increased flatulence.
Well said.
Is there a study showing that obese people are more subject to flatulence? I am inclined to the view that since obese people have a much bigger gut than average they would be inclined to produce more “easterly” wind.
Donald
Outstanding
Truth. Pure Truth. Some on this blog should be required to go to the black board and write out what you have written 100 times. This is worth repeating.
Thank you Donald Rapp for your insightful reminder that
there are times when conjectures are not testable and when
we should allow that we just don’t know.
I look forward to reading your book, ‘The climate Debate’
(2012) available at Amazon.
The one I have a problem with now is big bang. The. Discovery of the excellerated expansion of the universe is contrary to the hypothesis. It is explained by dark energy but dark energy has not been discovered as yet.
I think the theory of evolution is still on solid footing. The way ‘the past’ is tested there is through the fossil record. Scientists were able to show in the trial in Ohio that predictions of what should evolve during gaps in the record have, in a few cases, been proved out when fossils were discovered. So far there is no sound evidence of flaws in the theory and the fossil records are fairly robust.
Professor Rapp: your comment sums this whole sad issue up beautifully. Perhaps those who appear to derive their social life from commenting endlessly on this blog might find it useful to take some time out and think about what you have said.
Donald
+100
Until you have convincing proof that increased flatulence is not raising the seas, we should raise gas taxes on beans…
Judith: Officials burdened by an ongoing humanitarian weather crisis of a type that climate models project will get worse in the future will always to have difficulty coming up with a reasonable balance statement for the press. Their mis-statements – which are repeated endlessly – are damaging the credibility of your profession! (How many members of Congress believe that Hurricane Sandy was made possible or caused by climate change?)
Based on the information in the IPCC Report on Extreme Weather, it should be possible to draw up ahead of time generic balanced statements that can be used by officials when the next hurricane, hurricane, flood, tornado, cold spell, or drought is in the news. Such statements could: 1) Review the difference between an extreme weather event, climate, and climate change. 2) Cover whether or not significant increase (or decrease) in this type of extreme WEATHER event has been observed. (In the few cases where change has been detected, the amount of change should be quantified.) 3) Explain that it is difficult to detect changes in the number of extreme events against the background of natural variability in WEATHER. 4) Explain that climate models project an increase (or decrease) in the number of these extreme weather events and how big the change is projected to be at a particular time in the future. 5) How many decades in the future will it be before scientists project that they will be able to detect this change in CLIMATE. 6) A reminder to review the dates of past incidents (equally extreme or more extreme) of this type of WEATHER. 7) Optional: Review information about how improvements in weather forecasting and adaptation to our current climate have saved lives and reduced property damage. 8) Optional: Review information about how society can minimize the cost of this type of extreme weather event: Don’t build in areas known to be dangerous or subsidize homeowner’s insurance. Follow government recommendations to evacuate or stay inside. In the case of flooding, explain that changes in land use and rivers have increased danger far more than climate change.
+10
Nutrition science would only be like climate science if there existed a group of people who complained bitterly about “advocacy” whenever a nutritionist recommended dieting.
What about cholesterol v inflammation as the root cause of heart disease? Why do you suppose it has taken the medical profession to finally take it seriously?
Yes, charges of advocacy in dieting by nutritionists exist in spades. Does that mean that the article applies to climate science?
Sorry I forgot a ‘so long’.
hypothesis are not even hypothesis; when the influence of oxygen & nitrogen in controlling the temperature are not taken into consideration.
All the rest is brainwashing / indoctrination of the suitable mediums – easy to make twisted minds, as the prolific commenters, for example
Nutrition science benefits from looking at diets and health of diverse groups around the world who have been eating the same way for generations. A lot can be, and has been, learned from studying these. Similarly in the US, obesity varies by state and local dietary habits. It doesn’t take a decades long study to learn from existing data. The past has so many clues to the causes.
Of course I understand that any calls not to feed the trolls…or any specific troll, doesn’t have a prayer of success. But it felt good, and it felt right, and I’ll likely keep doing it, just for the sheer pleasure of it.
Melanie Phillips (who? some random blogger) has an opinion, and it is posted. OK, so she doesn’t like how Julia Slingo phrased her statement. Should we care? It serves instead as a typical example of the skeptical defensiveness around weather events which are very stressful for them as they look for even hints that AGW might be invoked so that they can attack them. It is just part of the random background noise these days.
Melanie Phillips is a 62-y-o British journalist, author, publisher, and prominent right-wing voice in the British media. She started on the left of the political spectrum, writing for The Guardian and New Statesman. I’ve found a lot of her blogs and columns made good sense.
Jim D (who? some random poster) perhaps carries less weight than Melanie P.
These are journalists/commentators with a clear political bias like Mark Steyn. How can they be taken seriously on scientific issues? No cred. There are lefty bloggers too. Why not post them for balance at least. Probably because the consensus science and publications can represent the other side by itself, without the help of non-experts who just blog.
However, Melanie had this interesting line of thought that Judith decided not to include “the Met Office (where, incidentally, the anthropogenic global warming scam was first invented in the late 1980s under the influence of Margaret Thatcher who wanted to smash the coal industry,…” That’s a new one.
Jim, I’ve come across the Thatcher link before, though I can’t recall the source or, without it or other info, vouch for it’s authenticity. Tony B might know about it.
She says it like she believes it. Talk about magical theories.
ABC Online: How Margaret Thatcher led the way on climate change. Jon Dee 9/4/2013
Many people’s first exposure to climate science was when they saw Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Gore took a topic that was beyond most people’s comprehension and made it easy to understand.
Back in 1988, however, it was a different politician who put the science of climate change firmly on the global agenda. Unbeknownst to many, that person was Margaret Thatcher.
As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s national science academy, she presented a series of high profile speeches on the topic of climate change. Armed with a degree in chemistry from Oxford, her scientific expertise enabled her to speak from a position of strength and knowledge about climate-related issues.
She used that knowledge to act as a champion for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and personally opened the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (the UK’s foremost climate change research centre).
What many people admired about Margaret Thatcher was her ability to embrace the potential of science to guide and lead the way on environmental issues. What marked her out even more is that she embraced the ‘precautionary principle’ years before other politicians did. As she once said:
“…the danger of global warming is as yet unseen but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.”
On November 8th 1989, she addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations about the need for nations to join together in tackling climate change.
It was a groundbreaking speech where she eloquently set out the case for international action and argued for an ongoing role for the IPCC. Indeed, some would argue that the IPCC owes its existence to the support that Thatcher gave it at that time.
Her political understanding of the issue also led to her call for a global response that would bring about real change:
“It is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay. Whole areas of our planet could be subject to drought and starvation if the pattern of rains and monsoons were to change as a result of the destruction of forests and the accumulation of greenhouse gases. The environmental challenge which confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out.”
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2013/04/09/3732680.htm
Of course, Jim, Thatcher was a right-winger, so you might discount what she said as being politically biased.
So, Melanie’s own theory is that Thatcher invented this reasoned and scientific view of AGW in order to smash the coal industry, as opposed to saying what she really thought? Very sly.
Jim, early in Thatcher’s premiership, the coal miners tried to bring down the government. The country was in disarray, the miners’ leader effectively sought a coup. I seem to recall a minister, perhaps later PM John Major, recalling the link Thatcher made at that time (early days) with coal and climate as an argument in the stoush. I’ve lived in Aus since 1979, no doubt a UK based current affairs and politics journo would be much more across such things. Why don’t you ask her? e-mail support@embooks.com
Faustino, from your excerpt, I believe Thatcher’s AGW and precautionary principle views were genuinely held. Melanie thinks she invented AGW in cahoots with the Met Office to smash the coal industry, and her words were just for that ultimate purpose.
By the way, it’s an interesting twist that if the fossil fuel industry were represented more by unions than by corporations, as in the UK back then, the right would not have much sympathy for it, and maybe you would find the left defending it more.
In her earlier post Judith included these two successive paragraphs from the Met Office document
Read in full they make perfect sense, but extracting from that only the last sentence leaving out the context leads to a ridiculous statement. Whether Julia Slingo, herself, has done that error in some presentation is not clear. What’s clear is that that orphaned sentence has been used against her.
Makes perfect sense?
“As yet, there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of
climate changeCarbon Pollution to the recent storminess, rainfall amounts and the consequent flooding. This is in part due to the highly variable nature of UK weather and climate. ”That would make more sense. The term climate change is confusing when discussing weather related variability.
“There is an increasing body of evidence that extreme daily rainfall rates are becoming more intense, and that the rate of increase is consistent with what is expected from fundamental <Greenhouse Effect physics . There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly heavy rain events. ”
There are terms; the greenhouse effect, the CO2 or radiant physics portion, climate disruption, the GHE plus all the other effects possibly. carbon pollution which should include some form of adverse health effects, and the omnipresent Climate Change which is redundant.
If the north Atlantic is warmer because of natural variability, warm AMO, then the UK would be in a warm AMO regime that could last 10 to 15 years. Sometime during that regime they should expect THE 60 year (AMO) flood but since the AMO is a known weather/climate pseudo-oscillation, the MET or UK “weather” service should have been all over the AMO influence on UK climate before the impacts of the AMO impacted the UK. Slingo could have used Unicorns in place of “Climate Change”.
Melnie Phillips?? – that really is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
So based on Michael’s recommendation, I went ahead to actually read the article that Judith linked. Here’s a quote:
Really? Judith links to an article that talks of those claiming that all extreme weather events are caused by climate change?
And Faustino adds that Melanie’s blogs and columns “make good sense?”
So Melanie makes up an argument and attributes it to “them,” and Judith thinks that the argument is a “good example” of magical thinking in climate science, and Faustino suggests that the argument should be taken seriously because the person who invented that argument is a reliable source.
Sad.
Well listen to President Obama’s state of the union address. John Holdren makes a statement on this also, as per this: http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/198394-obama-to-announce-1b-climate-change-resilience-fund
Judith –
Quote mining to confirm biases is not reflective of a sound, scientific approach.
Is such a statement consistent with a belief that “all extreme weather events are caused by climate change?
Sorry – pasting that URL in my browser brings up the right clip, but for some reason drops the wrong clip into the comment thread.
One more try….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=5eDTzV6a9F4
And here’s the article with the clip was linked:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/10/white-house-climate-change-polar-vortex-google-hangout
Joahua – One man’s bias is another woman’s considered, scientific opinion.
Oh that Melanie Phillips, the one that is frightened by Islam and rechristened London as Londonistan. Why anyone would listen to what she has to say about climate is puzzling.
Here’s the thing. I think it is entirely valid, and consistent with skepticism, to challenge the scientific analysis. I think it is entirely valid, and consistent with skepticism, to challenge scientific analysis that ignores uncertainty. I think it is entirely valid, and consistent with skepticism, to argue about the precise magnitude of the uncertainty.
But when a “realist” speaks in qualified terms with acknowledgement of uncertainty, and his/words get twisted into the shape of a straw man that eliminates that acknowledgement of uncertainty, well, that’s “skepticism.” That’s motivated reasoning. It doesn’t advance building bridges, in fact retards progress. We see this happen over and over in this debate (on both sides, of course). So this is where I see your actions as not in alignment with your goals.
Melanie is a tribal warrior who is advancing a tribalistic agenda. Someone focusing the science does not employ straw men to do their biding.
You say that tribalism is a problem on the realist side (I agree that it is) – but doesn’t that imply that you should hold “skeptics” accountable for their tribalism also?
I’m beginning to suspect Judith has some codependency issues WRT to Joshua’s flagrant trollery.
Judith, his motivated reasoning and willful misreadings are so relentless…and so purposeful in their intent …that you must realize that responding to the guy is pointless. It’s not about an honest exchange of ideas, it’s about a sick need for attention on his part. Particularly from you.
jim2 –
I’m inclined to agree. So how does that apply here?
PG appeals to people to not respond yet again. ‘Cause it worked out so well last time.
http://judithcurry.com/2014/02/11/uk-floods-in-context/#comment-452811
Too funny.
Joshua,
It is interesting that Judith is repeatedly drawn to the rhetorical hyperbole of the likes of Melanie Phillips.
“Rhetorical hyperbole…”
And yet, that’s exactly what they attempt to do. If you asked some random climateerist, ,”are all extreme weather events caused by AGW?” they’d likely answer something like, “well no, of course we can’t say that. But you see the dice are loaded in that direction, making each one more likely to happen.”
And truly, I can’t think of a newsworthy weather event in the last five or six years that didn’t see some sort of an attempt made to tie it in with man made ‘climate change.” Your not liking it, doesn’t change it.
One more thing on Melanie Phillips. Someone remarked on her book concerning terrorism in London, that if half the things she said were true, we would be at war with the UK instead of Afghanistan.
Judith –
Interestingly, that article that you linked misquoted Holdren. Willis ran with the misquote as a “Quote of the Week” at WUWT.
A perfect example of exactly what I was talking about.
Jim D
All politicians’ views always are, right?
Even Al Gore’s, which elevated him to “savior of the planet” and have earned him millions.
Look for the underlying motive, Jim. It makes things easier to understand.
Maggie’s underlying motive was to destroy the stranglehold that avowed Communist and NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, had on UK energy and politics.
Max
manacker, so what about the theory that she started AGW in cahoots with the Met Office (see the quote by Melanie Phillips)? Do you give that any credibility at all? Did the Met Office also want to crush the miners, or did she force them to subscribe to AGW? How does this theory go on that point? This whole thing could be just speculation by an individual blogger putting 2 and 2 together and getting 5, as bloggers often do in the fog of their biased thought process. As I said, I haven’t seen this theory before. It looks kind of magical how much influence Thatcher had on the Met Office. How would you modify her statement into something with a remote chance of credibility?
Magical economics:
“The savings of the European Union’s 500 million citizens could be used to fund long-term investments to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis, an EU document says.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/12/us-eu-banks-savings-idUSBREA1B1ZI20140212
Off topic, but another example of how reality is irrelevant to those who would control everyone else.
We’ll see
Magical thinking about climate indeed. It starts from the top down. In 2004 the heads of eleven scientific academies got together and produced a document called “Joint science academies statement: Global response to climate change.” These eminences represented scientific academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States. Their recommendation: immediate action is required to reduce significantly the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The document is also quite open about ignoring the science involved: “…lack of full scientific certainty … is not a reason for delaying immediate response.” When heads of scientific academies join to call for ignoring science and acting on unproven mass hysteria there is something wrong with our system of putting such people into high office. And here is some more magical thinking. The IPCC has hammered in the idea that greenhouse warming from carbon dioxide is the cause of anthropogenic global warming or AGW. They have been at it for twenty-five years but nobody has bothered to check what laws of physics have to say about it. That is not hard to find out. First, if you are going to start a greenhouse warming you must simultaneously add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This is required because the absorptivity of a greenhouse gas in the infrared is a fixed property of its molecules and cannot be changed. If you want warming you must supply those molecules. Secondly, if you observe that a warming started at a particular time it is very easy to find out whether it was greenhouse warming or natural warming. Simply check the Keeling curve (or its extension by ice core data) to find out if there was an increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide that coincides with the start of that warming. Now it happens that twentieth century warming came in two spurts. The first one started in 1910 and raised global temperature by half a degree Celsius. The second one started in 1999, in only three years raised global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius, and then stopped. Together they raised global temperature by 0.8 degrees, which is close to several estimates. And the Keeling curve? Absolutely smooth, no kink or bend or bump in it. Conclusion: there has been no greenhouse warming during the entire twentieth century. And there is none during the twenty-first, thanks to the hiatus-pause-whatever-you-call-cessation-of-warming. I keep mentioning this but either these global warmists ignore it or simply have no idea of what I am talking about. I am saying that the entire global warming movement is a sham, made impossible by the laws of physics. You know, physics, the science. You don’t have to take my word for any of this, just check it out yourself and see if your gray matter can understand this: global warming is impossible without greenhouse warming and greenhouse warming does not exist.
Arno Arrak
Well put.
Magical theories: One man’s random walk is another man’s correlation, and yet another man’s causation.
Max
The similarity between nutritional status research and climate science…ah…research is: changing the goal posts.
The obesity epidemic in the USA began at the beginning of the 20 th Century when BMI calculations for the population was an average of 18. Life expectancy in 1900 was 46 (males) and 47 (females) years. By 1998, BMI average was 28 and life expectancy was 78 (males) and 79 (females). The NIH had a longitudinal nutrition study that supported the USA population was gaining in nutritional status as well as longevity. All well and good.
Then suddenly and without warning NIH declare “normal” upper limits of BMI calculation was 25. 30 million Americans on June 17th 1998 became obese. In a blink of an eye all sorts of people were going to die of heart disease, develop type 2 diabetes, etc etc etc. Funny thing, all those people who were now overweight (BMI 25 to 30) and those mildly obese (BMI 30 to 35) live longer than those with “normal” BMI range of 18 – 25; and, of course, its still true today.
Now there is a long and complex history behind NIH changing the goal posts as there is a long and complex history of why the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age disappeared in Michael Mann’s hockey stick and perpetuated by IPCC. Both for the same reason, to justify NIH’s grant letting behavior and NAS grant letting behavior as well as to “sell the public” on their particular messages.
In part Dr. Curry, the answer to the question: why are there so many Magical Theories, it is because there are so many people with Magical Thinking:”If I think it, it is true. I am a fire engine.” Rather typical 4 year old thinking. Rather typical modeler’s thinking. Rather typical catastrophic warming due to CO2 thinking; we are all going to fry & die. It is true because I thought it.
Reasoning with a four year old is just the adult relinquishing their authority, creating anxiety in the child because there is no one in control and the world is a scary place when you can’t trust the authority.
We need to be reminded of Mr. Rogers: Scary mad wishes don’t come true.
By the way, ah…the obesity epidemic in children has “leveled off” I wonder why? Maybe we are now just getting around to counting every one and recording their BMI. McDonalds is still in business. What a bunch of BS obesity epidemic is.
Temperatures have entered a pause. What a bunch of BS CAGW is.
The severe test for nutrition has been the increase in longevity. (increase in nutrition has lead to an increase in longevity).
The severe test for climate science is the “pause.” Increase in CO2 and no increase in global mean temperatures.
Everybody, take a deep breath, exhale slowly and repeat after me…..I will calm down.
Rock on, RiHo
The severe test for the pause theory, and the skeptical view in general, since they have bet their shirts on it, will be the next El Nino that some say is coming along this year.
Utter nonsense jimmy dee – as usual.
What science says is that these decadal modes cause changes in the frequency and intensity of ENSO over 20 to 40 years.
‘This study uses proxy climate records derived from paleoclimate data to investigate the long-term behaviour of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). During the past 400 years, climate shifts associated with changes in the PDO are shown to have occurred with a similar frequency to those documented in the 20th Century. Importantly, phase changes in the PDO have a propensity to coincide with changes in the relative frequency of ENSO events, where the positive phase of the PDO is associated with an enhanced frequency of El Niño events, while the negative phase is shown to be more favourable for the development of La Niña events.’ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL025052/abstract;jsessionid=1243E59A59C22A6209A69DD132463422.f04t01?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false
Willing it away on the basis of wishful thinking – including thinking that ENSO is at all predictable more than 3 months out – is the definition of magical thinking.
There are some, who shall remain nameless, who even think that a pause is predictable out to a decade or three. Those would be the clueless ones, don’t you think?
“We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.” Anastasios Tsonis
‘At the UN’s World Climate Conference 2009 in Geneva Latif gave a talk about prediction that used, amongst other material, results from this paper.[2] New Scientist reported about Latif’s research that “we could be about to enter one or even two decades of cooler temperatures.’ Wikipedia
‘A negative tendency of the predicted PDO phase in the coming decade will enhance the rising trend in surface air-temperature (SAT) over east Asia and over the KOE region, and suppress it along the west coasts of North and South America and over the equatorial Pacific. This suppression will contribute to a slowing down of the global-mean SAT rise.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/107/5/1833.full
I have long argued that the pause was associated with the climate shift in the Pacific Ocean circulation, characterized by the change to the cool phase of the PDO. I have further argued that if this is the case, then the warming since 1976 was heavily juiced by the warm phase of the PDO. I didn’t know how to quantify this, but I thought that it might account for at least half of the observed warming, and hence my questioning of the IPCC’s highly confident attribution of ‘most’ to AGW.’ Judith Curry
There is doubt that the Pacific is in a cool mode – or that these persist for 20 to 40 years.
e.g. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
Magical thinking is imagining it is not happening.
I could say your last sentence back to you.
“The severe test for the pause theory….”
What the heck is “the pause theory?”
And why would an El Nino, which is inevitable eventually, prove or disprove anything about climate?
What happened to weather is not climate?
What happened to short term trends do not falsify anything?
What happened to…oh I don’t know…science?
Maybe magical thinking is just another term for post-normal science.
GaryM, unlike you many skeptics don’t believe that the next El Nino could bring a new record global temperature, and that successive ones after that could raise it further. That is the pause theory. You need to help bring them back to reality since you don’t subscribe.
Jim D,
I haven’t been around as much as of late. Can you tell me who these skeptics are who claim “the next El Nino could bring a new record global temperature, and that successive ones after that could raise it further?”
I will concede that I am one skeptic who doesn’t think the reported global average temperatures are nearly as accurate or precise as claimed, but that is a different point. Who is it who thinks that the next El Nino couldn’t result in a reported highest GAT? Or that subsequent El Ninos couldn’t raise it further?
should be “don’t believe,” not “claim.”
GaryM, if the skeptics think El Ninos will lead to new record temperatures, and note that this is what they have been doing for the last 30 years, then the climate of the future is no different from the recent past and the pause is an illusion. Pausists don’t think the pause is this kind of illusion. They think that the AGW escalator has stopped. If you don’t, make it clear, because your view looks different from that. Has the escalator stopped as the pausists think, or is OHC rise belying that idea?
Denying the Pacific is in a cool mode? Yes say it back to me jimmy dee.
And yes the elevator is more like one of those people movers you used to see at airports.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_Net_zps9f7faaaa.png.html
What is amazing is that no amount of science gets through at all. All those people I quoted – and many more – and not a moments reflection. A-maz-ing.
“There are some, who shall remain nameless, who even think that a pause is predictable out to a decade or three. Those would be the clueless ones, don’t you think?”
——
They can remain nameless or go by multiple names. Quite amazing that models supposedly can’t predict ENSO beyond a few months out but these Magical armchair scientists can see decades ahead. Simply Magical!
In the last 24 months of your flippin’ cool phase the SAT has been going up at a .6C per decade. This is not your pappy’s cool phase. In your pappy’s cool phase, the temperature of the earth went down. It dropped. You know, like it actually got colder. Strange concept.
Is your refrigerator runnin’? Better go catch it.
Significant positive anomalies (coinciding with high negative loadings) indicate moderate southerly (V) anomalies just of the Central American coast, as well as anomalously high SST (S) and air tempeature (A) anomalies halfway between Australia and South America, as well as increased cloudiness (C) near the Philippines. Significant negative anomalies (coinciding with high positive loadings) indicate strong easterly (U) anomalies along the Equator and centered on the dateline. All of these anomalies support the diagnosis of La Niña-like conditions, even though the temperature anomalies described here are secondary compared to the better established anomalies along the Equatorial cold tongue.
On the other hand, reduced cloudiness (C) west of Ecuador is consistent with El Niño rather than La Niña.
In sum, an overall ENSO-neutral assessment remains reasonable. …
While ENSO-neutral conditions are the safest bet for the next few months, a transition towards El Niño by mid- or late 2014 would not be surprising, perhaps even overdue. … – Wolter
The cool phase of the PDO will end up with an average warming of around 1.2C per decade, maybe even higher.
.12C per decade.
“I have long argued that the pause was associated with the climate shift in the Pacific Ocean circulation, characterized by the change to the cool phase of the PDO. ”
—–
The wrong assumption here is that the 40% increase in CO2 has had no effect on the PDO– as if the PDO were completely independent. Such assumptions are both unsupportable and unscientific as a basis for evaluation the effects of CO2 on the climate system.
Yes, RG, that’s an example of a recursive own goal.
Attributing the warming rise on the warming trend of the PDO, which is partly a surface temperature measurement of the warming climate.
That’s why one uses a proxy for the overall Stadium Wave. A Stadium Wave proxy such as LOD measures a detrended indicator of the natural variability, which won’t get conflated with the dominant forcing factor.
http://contextearth.com/2014/02/05/relative-strengths-of-the-csalt-factors/
What a bizarre concatenation of tendentious drivel.
You have a choice. Believe this coterie of recalcitrant know nothings who collectively have zilch credibility – or believe the scientists I quote above. These latter are a mere sampling.
Temperature during the pause are increasing?
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/HadCRUT4vCERES_zpse5107cfd.png.html?sort=3&o=35
Don’t think so.
And while Claus Wolter is a pre-eminent ESO expert – the failure is to put his in an appropriate context of a possible minor El Nino followed by another major La Nina typical of a cool Pacific mode.
More and more intense La Nina are statistically more likely over the next decade to three – which is the point.
‘Updated standardized values for the PDO index, derived as the leading PC of monthly SST anomalies in the North Pacific Ocean, poleward of 20N. The monthly mean global average SST anomalies are removed to separate this pattern of variability from any “global warming” signal that may be present in the data.’ http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/PDO.latest
If only they knew what the nonsense they were sprouting. Instead of making things up they might actually say something interesting.
I don’t score own goals Chief
Watch this score on the opposition:
http://contextearth.com/2014/02/05/relative-strengths-of-the-csalt-factors/
This applies the SOI and LOD stadium wave data from the training period of 1880 to 1950 and then applies it from 1950 to current day with the same scaling
http://imageshack.com/a/img812/74/abh.gif
SOI is a thermodynamic characteristic that is bounded and reverts to a mean value of zero, making it perfect for making projections.
Everyone has had this discussion with webby – endlessly. At some stage the repetition becomes mind numbingly pointless.
The SOI is of course an index of sea level pressure – it has nothing whatsoever to do with the ideal gas law. Low pressure is a meteorological phenomenon involving warm air rising over warm water in the eastern Pacific in this case – the cooler SST in the central Pacific create the pressure differential and trade wind response seen in the La Nina pattern. Warm air rising expands and cools of course – relocating heat within the troposphere.
Thus the SOI is an indicator of changes in SST associated with ENSO – the SST is responsible for warming (cooling) the atmosphere in El Nino (La Nina) along with changing global cloud patterns linked to warmer or cooler SST in the tropical Pacific.
Webby uses a multiple linear regression technique to scale the SOI to the surface temperature record. As ENSO is the major cause of interannual variability – it gives a patina of verisimilitude to the linear scaling process. but misses the decadal and longer ENSO patterns.
‘Figure 12 shows 2000 years of El Nino behaviour simulated by a state-of-the-art climate model forced with present day solar irradiance and greenhouse gas concentrations. The richness of the El Nino behaviour, decade by decade and century by century, testifies to the fundamentally chaotic nature of the system that we are attempting to predict. It challenges the way in which we evaluate models and emphasizes the importance of continuing to focus on observing and understanding processes and phenomena in the climate system. It is also a classic demonstration of the need for ensemble prediction systems on all time scales in order to sample the range of possible outcomes that even the real world could produce. Nothing is certain.’
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751/F12.expansion.html
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full
Multiple linear regression is not variational this or thermodynamic that – these are pomposities invented by webby. That he thinks he has a handle on ENSO is simplistic nonsense of the highest order. That he imagines he is making progress with simple schemes where models have not is imaginary thinking that has gone well over the edge.
Chief, “Temperature during the pause are increasing?
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/HadCRUT4vCERES_zpse5107cfd.png.html?sort=3&o=35
Don’t think so.”
Surface temperatures can and do increase while the energy in the Earth system decreases. “Surface” temperature can vary by nearly 0.30 C with absolutely no change in energy just redistribution of surface energy. One of those fun facts not normally discussed in the high confidence high precision world of climate science.
The actual “lower troposphere” temperature as measured by satellite and radiosondes doesn’t change as much though since the temperature range is smaller and there is less latent cooling/warming impact.
In waterworld the trend in the sst pause is negative.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3sh/from:1996.9/mean:12/plot/hadsst3sh/from:1996.9/mean:12/trend
The severe test for the pause theory, and the skeptical view in general, since they have bet their shirts on it, will be the next El Nino that some say is coming along this year.
The 3 month anomaly of sst suggest a colder trend in the areas of the Indonesian outflow,The cold jets through the Tasman sea are impacting the warm pool, and alimentary ( very rough but consistent with tsunami buoy data) suggest a decrease in sea level around the indonesian archipelago.
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDYOC059.shtml
When in complete panic mode, these denialists will stop at nothing, including pretentious writing.
Now watch this drive:
http://imageshack.com/a/img37/5748/v69.gif
About the only behaviors that the CSALT model won’t capture is the occasional extreme temperature intervals, such as the Cold Sunday of 1982 and the Heat Wave of 1977.
http://imageshack.com/a/img845/1371/rjpn.gif
It’s not magic, just diligence in capturing all the major forcings that have impacted climate.
You sure do like to score own goals don’t you?
Notice that what you quoted said ” global average SST anomalies are removed to separate this pattern of variability <b<from any “global warming” signal that may be present in the data”
That’s what we are after, the global warming signal, and you just kicked it into your own net.
You can’t make this stuff up.
At some point the repetition becomes mind numbingly pointless. The contradictions pile up – first that the PDO was contaminated by a global warming invalidating it – then it wasn’t invalidating it.
And the only real complaint is webby’s clumsy rhetoric compared to using big words like verisimilitude. It is at least used correctly – as opposed to variational or other webby pomposity.
The people who actually have a dog in the fight are the life insurance companies, they set policy rates based on morbidity data.
http://www.bcbst.com/MPManual/HW.htm
There is no single optimal BMI, as short people need a slightly higher BMI than taller ones.
Being underweight carries risks; slightly chubby people do best on chemo than under/over weight patients.
Traditionally, when we worked for food, being overweight was a sign of health or wealth, usually both.
=====================
Jim D
You write:
Great!
We have a “severe test”.
Let’s see how it plays out, Jim.
First of all, will there be a next El Nino? (California is hoping this will be the case, so the drought ends next year, since President Obama’s visit there doesn’t seem to have done the trick).
Second, will it end the pause and cause sustained multi-decadal warming as we saw in the early and late 20thC? (You and I have a small wager on that.)
– Let’s say there is no El Nino and no shift in the current pause(game over – you lose)
– Let’s say there is no El Nino and sustained multi-decadal temperature trends revert to those seen in the early and later 20thC (game over – you win)
– Let’s say there is an El Nino and temperature goes up a bump, as it always does with El Ninos, but not significantly on a sustained basis (game over – you lose).
– Let’s say there is an El Nino and sustained multi-decadal temperature trends revert to those seen in the early and later 20thC (game over – you win)
Max
There is a study I’d like to see, the comparison of diet and climate change beliefs for the CAGW, lukewarmers, and the so-called D. groups.
Magical Theory meets Bad Karma.
Pingback: Magical theories of science, and how they influence us | Fabius Maximus
“U.S. lays out vision for 2015 climate pact to U.N.”
http://www.grandforksherald.com/content/us-lays-out-vision-2015-climate-pact-un
“The United States on Wednesday submitted to the United Nations its vision for a new international climate agreement that is “built to last,” outlining what it thinks should be the main elements of a climate deal to be agreed upon in Paris in 2015.
…
Unlike the 1997 Kyoto protocol, in which the agreed treaty required ratification by Congress, the 2015 would instead rely on countries’ domestic authorities to enforce their contributions.
Petsonk said Wednesday’s U.S. plan was ‘an international counterpart’ to President Barack Obama’s major speech on climate made in June 2013, when Obama laid out a strategy to reach the national goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.”
Democracy? We don’t need no stinkin’ democracy!
“Unlike the 1997 Kyoto protocol, in which the agreed treaty required ratification by Congress, the 2015 would instead rely on countries’ domestic authorities to enforce their contributions.”
Huh? I’ve got a pen and a phone?
Better the authorities who can only regulate pollution rather than the gubmint who can tax you, eh?
His pen and phone are beginning to look like a hammer and sickle.
Jim D, hey diddle diddle, exclude the middle.
“Better the authorities who can only regulate pollution rather than the gubmint who can tax you, eh?”
This is a parody right?
The government “who can tax you” is the government who is going to “regulate pollution.” And the current way they intend to regulate it is by requiring coal powered plants to purchase expensive technology that doesn’t even work yet.
(In case you haven’t been paying attention, the geniuses at the Supreme Court recently changed the Constitution to provide that when the government forces you to buy something, that is a tax. So legally there is no difference now.)
Whatever the magical legal thinking of the Supremes, the practical effect is the same. The government destroying an industry, without a single vote by the legislature on the issue.
So no, I don’t feel better that it Obama is destroying the energy economy one section at a time by regulation, rather than a carbon tax.
Yes, it’s a parody. I knew you would not like it any better even without carbon taxes or carbon trading. Forget the money, they only wanted to regulate industry for fun all along. Another parody of your next idea.
Jim D
Naw. It’s not for fun.
It’s for control.
Control = power
Max
If it is control, it is control of the environment, and that is the purpose of regulation. Without it you get cheaper products for sure, but more pollution, poisons and general crap in the environment that everyone gets to share the effects of. There is a constant balance here between profit and environmental health, and it is not newly invented just for CO2.
When the government can no longer pay for the drugs to treat hypertension, diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, it will tell us to ‘Work for Food’.
===========
“Arbeit macht frei?”
So, Nino events could, might and and maybe leave successively higher temperature records (Jimmy old bean … such a good ol’ boy). Nina events are only weather, of course
And he calls this a theory … not till it’s tested empirically. So at best an hypothesis
Unless it’s a theory of no consequence, since could, might and maybe are of no intrinsic use to theory until actually tested. Such a nuisance, this scientific method thingie … wishful thinking is way better
(Sheeesh …)
The La Ninas are also getting warmer than the previous, even during the pause, but that is less noticeable unless you plot out the temperatures and study the levels of the minima. The skeptics have not noticed this, it seems, but it is quite obvious when you look at it.
Nothin’s gettin’ warmer jimmy dee.
Jim D, of course skeptics have noticed it, so what? We’re only about a decade after the multi-centennial peak, of course everything’s still a bit warmer. Watch what happens with the La Ninas in the next decades.
“Robert I Ellison | February 14, 2014 at 2:00 am |
Nothin’s gettin’ warmer jimmy dee.”
—–
Yep, the oceans have been rising through fairy dust, not thermal expansion and melting glaciers,
“Watch what happens with the La Ninas in the next decades.”
—-
Indeed worth watch as each successive La Niña appears to be getting a bit warmer, indicating the cycle is still active but working from a higher base, as would be expected from warmer oceans and a climate system with more system energy to start the La Niña out with.
Spa… Cadet. is moderated? Seriously – Judith? It is merely shorthand for the less colourful groupthink phenomenon that is the leading cause of cognitive dissonance in the ranks of the wtf do you want to call hem?
Please restore at least one of my comments here. Neither contains ad homs of any note – and I am a little bored with repeating myself.
Better yet – perhaps you could supply a list of banned words to encourage the slide into drab and dull at CE.
Shall we ban crank? And welcome bland and innocuous in everything? A hopeless and unwanted task.
Shall we ban Cheif (sic) Skippy Ellison’s Fairy Dust Physics 101? Sp@ce C@dets at least has an underlying rationale that is not merely juvenile banter following me around like a bad penny.
Btw – CERES seems to be the Fairy Dust Physics 101. Most odd indeed.
R. Gates
“Fairy dust”?
OR
Satellite altimetry of a heaving ocean attempting to measure millimeter per year trends when error bars are several times the rate of change?
I’d say it’s more like the latter (as Carl Wunsch et al. plus NOAA scientists involved have all noted).
Max
PS Yes. Sea level has continued its long term trend of rising, with large swings in decadal rates (from slight lowering to larger rate of rise) since the mid 19thC. Yawn!
Funniest thing happening at WUWT. Somebody posts a simple model for CO2-based global warming and comes up with an ECS of 1,8C for doubling of CO2.
Mosh, Zeke, and Doc all point out that what the guy is determining is TCR and not ECS, which will make the ECS actually about 50% higher than this.
So Watts agrees with the IPCC projections of an ECS of around 3C.
A magical Own Goal for Anthony Watt’s Team!
Well played!
“Funniest thing happening at WUWT. Somebody posts a simple model for CO2-based global warming and comes up with an ECS of 1,8C for doubling of CO2.”
Actually that was a MAXIMUM of 1.8C assuming that ALL of the rise was solely caused by CO2. No SO2 or anything else.
An theoretical upper limit, not a definition of value.
WHUT, you write “So Watts agrees with the IPCC projections of an ECS of around 3C. “A magical Own Goal for Anthony Watt’s Team!”
Not at all. I pointed out over there that what was being estimated was the MAXIMUM value for climate sensitivity. This is the same error that Max Anacker makes regularly on Climate Etc. So if the maximum value could be as high as 3 C, it does nothing to show that an estimate of 0.0 C to one place of decimals or two significant figures is wrong.
The Keeling curve and the Law Dome ice record show that atmospheric CO2 really took off in the 1950’s.
This line-shape is really jolly useful if you want to test the length of a lag, a lag that leads to a difference between transient and ‘equilibrium’ climate sensitivity. The line shape of the atmospheric CO2 changes should reflect changes in global temperature. If one were to plot both log([CO2]) and temperature, a lag in the effect of temperature toward a particular level of CO2 should displace the temperature curve to the right.
You have your CSALT fit Web, how far do you need to displace temperature to get a better fit?
The answer is zero, on annual scales. There is no lag. Which is what one would expect on a rotating planet, that has an axial tilt.
TCS=ECS.
Lindzen explained last week that for a one or two degree rise, equilibrium is reached very quickly. the higher the rise, the longer it takes to reach equilibrium. For 6 degrees it takesthousands of years. So your simple assertion is fundamentally wrong and based on no consideration of what transient and equilibrium actually mean. At low temperature rises the transient is over quickly and only the Equilibrium is important.
Doc,
I know exactly what you are talking about but it is well explained by the physics and math. You miss the fact that sunk heat shows a transient response that is diffusional . A diffusional response has a characteristic response function. It looks vaguely exponential but has a fat tail. The initial part of the transient is very sharp, leading people to believe that it is an exponential response with a very short lag. That is why you are SOOOO very confused by what you are seeing. It is common among people that have never solved the heat equation leading to the heat kernel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_kernel
This is a very good paper showing how researchers can model the heating and cooling of lakes based on the seasonal forcing functuions
http://www.tellusa.net/index.php/tellusa/article/view/16226/html
Dissension in the ranks again?
Why can’t you denialists get your act together and come up with something, anything to explain the 1.3 C average global land warming of the last 130+ years?
WHUT, you write “Dissension in the ranks again? Why can’t you denialists get your act together and come up with something, anything to explain the 1.3 C average global land warming of the last 130+ years?”
Max and I discussed this many months ago, and we agreed to differ.
Why should we skeptics have to explain why global temperatures are changing in some specific manner? These changes have been going on for millions of years, all caused by Mother Nature. She is still doing what she has always been doing. There is no need to explain anything.
pretty funny what happened when the guy calculated TCR and thought he was doing ECS.
wonderful OWN GOAL
RichardRH wrong as usual.
Here is a clue. If you want to calculate ECS you first better understand the meaning of the term. Go read skeptic nic lewis. he, unlike you, is actually published in the field. he, unlike you, actually shows his work.
he, unlike you, testifies before Parliment.
Learn from the better amongst you. Improve on their work.
Start by getting definitions correct.
Nic has laid them out at WUWT before. DAFS
Richie is having a bad day.
Jim Cripwell
Looks like somebody let Webby out of his cage again.
He is ignoring several recent (partly) observation-based studies, which all show that 2xCO2 ECS equilibrium is around 1.8C, rather than the model-predicted 3C used by IPCC.
You object that these studies are only partly observation based, (i.e. lots of assumptions on natural forcing/variability factors). I cannot argue with your objection. It makes sense. IOW these are still just estimates (including a lot of theoretical assumptions), albeit better estimates than those used by IPCC, which were purely model predictions.
Webby objects that they do not fit his (one size fits all) “salty” model.
Huh?
Max
In many ways this is an exact science and if an amateur makes an incorrect association and follows through, he will get raked over the coals for it. That’s what happened here.. “B..bb..but, I thought it was THEIR goal :(“
” That is why you are SOOOO very confused by what you are seeing.”
So on one hand we have someone who is having a go at equilibrium thermodynamics, treating the planet as flat and averaging temperatures over a full seasonal year. on the other hand we have someone who is used to examining oscillating pseudo-steady states and works in non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
Take a hot plate an have it connected to a variable resister and introduce a sinusoidal timer, so that you have 12 hours with no current, then a slowly rising current for 6 hours and then 6 hours of slow decline.
Place a large volume of water on the hot plate and monitor the temperature of the water over 30 cycles.
Now repeat, but increase the current by 1.05.
What do the two waveforms look like?
What is the ‘equilibrium’ temperature of the water in the two runs?
Here is a graphic of Ln([CO2]), prior to and after 1960, and the HASCRU4 Global land/ocean temperature.
You can see the inflection point around 1960 in the CO2 signal, and a reasonably similar inflection point in the temperature.
Logically, if there were a lag in the response of additional atmospheric CO2, then the inflection point in temperature would be displaced to the right.
Now I am quite happy for Mosher and Web to expand my education with the interpretation of signals, so boys, what are the kinetics of this ‘lag’ between a change in CO2 and a change in temperature, just give it me in terms of zero, first or multi-order rate constants.
No hand-waving nor appeals to authority please, just basic kinetics.
Damn, here is the graphic
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/1960CO2inflection_zps13628f10.png
first off doc if you want to diagnose the lag you have to understand that its the lag of all forcings.
So, sum all the forcings. the key is to first forget C02.
You want to estimate the sensitivity of the system to Forcing.
so Change your C02 in Watts. then add solar watts, then add methane watts, then subtract aerosol watts, then add landchange watts..
when your done you have a stab at the total forcing..
then look at the system response to that forcing: that will get you a goood stab at lambda.
you can go over to Lucia’s and see how to compute a time constant
hmm this is somewhat akin to schwartz method as I recall.
OK, Doc, no hand-waving. Read my paper on Diffusive Growth available from the menu at http://ContextEarth.com
This discusses both thermal diffusion and CO2 diffusive sequestration.
There are no exponential rate constants because the diffusive response put the time in the denominator, so that one gets responses that look like
$$exp{-x/\sqrt{Dt}} $$
This is basic physics .
“Steve
You want to estimate the sensitivity of the system to Forcing”
In the whole history of kinetic analysis the single worst method for analysis of a complex system is to estimate the levels of the various fluxes and then examine the sum.
You can have a reasonably good stab at influx, measured to within +/-0.05%, but all the others are +/- >1%.
There is too much give in the system for you to anything but a back of the envelop guesstimate.
Now this isn’t a personal opinion, it is canon law from one of the head honchos of the team, Trenberth:-
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/1997and2009_zpsc79b5968.png
in just 12 years these ‘forcings’ of which you speak were all over the place.
Now its is 2014;
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/nasa_new_energy_budget.png
I cannot be arsed keeping up with all the changes in these ‘constant’ fluxes, but obviously you do. So, I must completely disagree with your point, because Steve, it is self-eventually bollocks with 168 w/m2 being absorbed by the surface in 1997, 161 W/m2 in 2009 and now 163.3 W/m2.
“Web,
There are no exponential rate constants because the diffusive response put the time in the denominator, so that one gets responses that look like
$$exp{-x/\sqrt{Dt}} $$
This is basic physics ”
A first order rate constant has units of 1/time, you know when you put the time in the denominator.
Diffusion into large reseviors or sinks is first order.
I asked for the math that discribes the transition between transient and ‘equilibrium’ sensitivity.
Take Earth 1850 and double [CO2] ppm in Jan 1st.
what will the temperature be in 1860, 1960 and 2060, and why?
Show your working.
Someone grunted:
Hey I did caveman. I provided a link to my paper. What do you have? Nada.
This one’s for the Chief.
Didier Sornette of “Dragon-King” fame has a recent paper out suggesting that the growth of atmospheric CO2 is showing super-exponentially accelerating growth:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.2832
That’s the Dragon-King, Chief. Thanks for scoring another Own Goal.
A dragon-king is an extreme outlier at tipping points in – inter alia – climate.
It is otherwise known as noisy bifurcation.
e.g. http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218127411028519
Tipping points are something webby has resolutely, loudly and obnoxiously insisted don’t happen in climate. So now Didier Sornette claims to have identified a regime change in carbon in the atmosphere since 2009.
‘As for atmospheric CO2 content, we find that it is at least exponentially increasing and most likely characterized by an accelerating growth rate as off 2009, consistent with an unsustainable FTS power law regime announcing a drastic change of regime. The coexistence of a quasi-exponential growth of human population with a super-exponential growth of carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere is a diagnostic that, until now, improvements in carbon efficiency per unit of production worldwide has been dramatically insufficient.’
And he seems to be crowing about it? Frankly – I don’t get the psychology at all.
WHT,
When scoring in their own goal, expect lots of excuse making: “….but but but…” Or distraction and misdirection: “one or three decades of no warming…” etc.
Yes, RG, the Chief and Watts and these other pseudo-skeptics are very skilled at scoring own goals. We just give them an assist everyone a while — just pass them the ball and they kick it into their own net.
That entire Pattern Recognition debacle
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/01/alleging-malpractice-climate-skeptic-papers-publisher-kills-journal
is an example of Team Denier scoring multiple own goals and Watts trying to save face.
That’s bs, not dragon king. Emissions are increasing exponentially in the last 10 years or more, atmospheric CO2 is linear in this period, the annual growth is flat, just like the temperatures.
http://judithcurry.com/2014/02/13/magical-theories/#comment-454526
“Dragon-King” Sornette is the one who decided to call it “super-exponential” growth. Take it up with him. You are his Fan-Boy.
Whatever, the CO2 continues to grow, with no end in sight.
Webby
The study you cited shows that CO2 is increasing more rapidly than population.
Duh!
The per capita CO2 generation rose by 15% from 1970 to today.
As the study says, human population growth rate is expected to slow down significantly (from the 1.7% CAGR of the 1970s/80s to the 1% CAGR today to a CAGR of around 0.2% from now to 2100.
But per capita CO2 generation will probably continue to increase as undeveloped nations gain access to industrialization and an energy infrastructure. My guess (based on the past) is that this could increase by another 30% over the rest of this century.
If this guess is correct (and UN/US Census Bureau projections on population growth are right), we would arrive at a year 2100 CO2 concentration of around 650 ppmv. This would represent a CAGR of around three times that of the population growth rate.
So the study makes good sense.
Max
The Guardian, today:
Flooding and storms in UK are clear signs of climate change, says Lord Stern — Author of 2006 report says recent weather is part of international pattern and demonstrates urgent need to cut carbon emissions.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/13/flooding-storms-uk-climate-change-lord-stern?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2
Really a “Magical theory”.
“magical theories that explains absolutely everything – including diametrically contradictory phenomena”. Nearly a century ago it was this observation (applied to Adlerian psychoanalysis) that led Karl Popper to his Falsifiability Criterion of science. The philosophical world seems to have wandered away from this, but really nothing better has been found. One point. Popper tried to find a formal criterion of “verisimilitude” or closeness to the truth to find a way of ranking admittedly false theories. He failed in this and as far as I know no-one else has succeeded. The requirement to pass severe was his, but he had no formal model of it. Neither is it clear what purpose one would serve.
Telepathy aka speaking
Telekinesis aka movement
Magic is merely doing something at a level that someone else is unable to comprehend.
Magical theories on the other hand, are the acts of that someone else trying to explain what they don’t understand.
The ability to conjure up a magical explanation against the facts and expect it to be believed is at 5 year old level or less.
And impossible to argue against.
Hypothesis testing has fairly little use in climate science as almost all relevant questions are quantitative, they concern strength of warming and values of other indicators rather than well defined hypotheses. We know that CO2 contributes to GHE and has a warming influence. That’s a reliable result of physics, not a new hypothesis.
We may formulate hypotheses of he type “TCR is larger than 1.0C” and test them, but that’s artificial as it’s more natural to ask: “What can we say about the value of TCR?”.
As we know that the models are incomplete and inaccurate, we need not test whether they are complete and accurate. We may, however, wish to know, how well they are likely to predict future climate given correct forcings. That’s again a quantitative question that cannot be formulated as a single hypothesis test (or a set of many quantitative questions).
Joel Katzav is surely highly competent to discuss principles like those I present in the above chapters, but I don’t think his background makes him capable of giving worthwhile answers to the quantitative questions I consider relevant for climate science. For better and worse we need climate scientists when we wish to have best possible answers to those questions. (Better for obvious reasons, worse if we consider bias likely or even possible.)
The difficulty of answering the relevant questions is well known to IPCC. That’s manifested in the published guidelines for presenting uncertainties. That shows up also in the complex solution that involves both likelihoods and level of agreement.
Pekka
Indeed. From Katzav’s paper
Same ol’ same ol.’
Very well said Pekka!
+100
The only reason there is so much debate is that environmentalists hate nuclear power. When will we kick those morons to the side of the road and proceed with the most obvious and best no-regrets policy?
Nuclear power has a minimal CO2 footprint, if you are worried about that in the first place, and is compact and can be economical if the regs are rationalized.
So, we could move ahead with CO2 mitigation and if we see global warming isn’t the big bugbear scientists feel in their collective gut, then we have plenty of coal to burn.
France likes nuclear power, at 75% of it’s electricity supply.
Are you interested in having France lead a one-world government? Either that or your outlook looks a bit provincial.
WHT – your comment about France is so illogical, I don’t even know where to begin. You lessen yourself when you make specious arguments like this. Don’t you care about your credibility?
jim2 makes an excellent point. Clearly, environmentalists control energy policy, and have for decades. Not only that, but the general public unquestioningly accepts whatever environmentalists say.
And yet, here I am communicating with you, jim2
What to make of that?
The list of people who would be happy to increase the use of nuclear power in the United States (even to the point of replacing coal) regardless of how serious AGW is includes: Skeptics, “skeptics,” doubters, Republicans, conservatives, moderates, and even a fair number of “climate concerned,” including the realists but not the “realists.”
The list of people who will not accept increasing the use of nuclear power in the US includes, but rather insist on policies known to have little to no impact on GHG emissions: climate activists, environmental activists, Democratic Party activists.
Naturally, the stasis on energy policy is therefore the fault of Republicans and “deniers.”
jeffn –
The % of the public who would like lower taxes is very high. The % of the public that are willing to give up the services paid for by taxes is significantly lower.
The % of the public who would support the centralization of energy policy and the provision of subsidies sufficient to fulfill a sizable portion of our energy needs through nuclear energy is than the % who think it would be just peachy if we had more nuclear energy. That would also apply to the % who think that we should significantly reduce our safety regulation of nuclear energy. That would also apply to the % who would support the building of nuclear energy facilities in their communities.
The % of the public comprised by those groups is relatively small and they do not have disproportionate power to, for example, libertarian extremists, Republican Party activists, industrial stakeholders who might be able to profit from reduced nuclear regulation and increase federal support for nuclear energy.
I have no idea why you’d think that to be true. Seems to me that it is inherently logical to assign responsibility for such a complex phenomenon as energy policy at the feet of a relative minority. Do you have some evidence to support your views?
That would be inherently illogical….
Joshua
‘The % of the public comprised by those groups is relatively small and they do not have disproportionate power to, for example, libertarian extremists, Republican Party activists, industrial stakeholders who might be able to profit from reduced nuclear regulation and increase federal support for nuclear energy.”
really, evidence? are you certain? Pretend that judith wrote this
“The % of the public comprised by those groups is relatively small and they DO have disproportionate power to, for example, libertarian extremists, Republican Party activists, industrial stakeholders who might be able to profit from reduced nuclear regulation and increase federal support for nuclear energy.”
Imagine she wrote the opposite of what you did.
what would you say?
He would tell her to put on her big boy pants. Today is Friday, right? Friday is big boy pants day ain’t it?
mosher –
Reasonable questions. I comment you for that.
There were different parts to my statement – for which I have different amounts of certainty.
I could provide evidence to show that they comprise a relatively small % of the public. As to how disproportionate is their power relative to other, relatively small groups, I would guess that the evidence would be pretty hard to show. So in response I would say that my statement did not accurately reflect certainty – and so maybe I should do some more research/ask for relevant feedback, and in the very least, revise my statement to better reflect my uncertainty.
So you make a valid point. I should have been more qualified in what I said.
I would ask her for the evidence that supported her conclusion. If she didn’t offer any, and as a result qualified her previous statement, then I would say “Thanks.” and move on.
Distinguishing between fact and opinion is important, and it is tricky to be fully consistent in doing so. The first step, however, is to recognize the importance and to acknowledge how tricky it is.
Meh. The Democrats can’t sign on to nukes because they vocally opposed them for 40 years. Ask John Kerry if “flip-fop” is a potent label.
The main point, however, is that there is a consensus on an alternative to fossil fuels. It works, it’s safe, it is GHG-free, it has support from liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, climate true believers and skeptics.
Tell me why we haven’t built one of them in the U.S. in all the 20+ years that global warming has been “an existential threat that demands urgent action.”
As for this somehow or another heading down the road of socialized power… nonsense. Much of my power in Virginia comes from a nuclear plant and oddly enough it isn’t nationalized. The regulatory problem is well known if you bother to care about GHG emissions- its an approval process tailor-made to allow anti-science activists to delay any project (and make any investment so uncertain) that it never happens. Why spend 20 years and millions of dollars on design and study when it can all evaporate on the electoral whim of Rep Wind Vane (D-progressive activists)? Especially since Rep. Vane doesn’t seem to care if you build a coal plant.
And isn’t it just too cute that a political process like that just has to have too much corporate money in it.
The “magical theory” of attractive forces between neutrons has brought society back to the dark ages after sixty-eight years (2014 – 1946 = 68 yrs) of deceit out of FEAR of the source of energy in cores of:
1. Heavy atoms like Uranium
2. Some planets like Jupiter
3. Ordinary stars like the Sun
4. Galaxies like the Milky Way.
The same force (neutron repulsion) likely contributed to the breakup of continents in natural nuclear reactors (Oklo-like).
See p. 48, Figure 4.3 of the book by P.K. Kuroda, The Origin of the Chemical Elements and the Oklo Phenomenon, (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1982) 165 pp.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/3642686699
Gee I just thought that obese people ate more than other people and that the obesity caused the rise in diabetes. I also just assumed that anyone who said they had been dieting but still put on weight was a simple liar.
· Jim D | February 13, 2014 at 10:00 pm | wrote
You can use MODTRAN or online radiation codes to see its effect as a function of amount and wavelength in a real-atmosphere profile. These codes are verified by spectral-resolving IR observations. That’s your severe test. Done.
The last first, the IR telescopes have done the “spectral-resolving IR observations”, as I have pointed out, the former is merely a computer model, a fiction, and it is trumped by that observation. When reality does not match what you believe, it does not matter how lovely your computer model is, whether you are using MOTRAN or FORTRAN or SOULTRAN or how real you feel your “real- atmosphere profile is (if it is in a computer, tell me, how REAL is it, exactly?), how many computers you have, or the prettiness of all their blinking lights, you are wrong. What is in a computer exists only in its little mind, computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes. Apparently that is not understood, your idea was to use a computer program first, imaginary reality, and only then check anything with, I dunno, actual observations, reality. If the REALITY does not match the computer program, throw out that program.
Actual observation of, you know reality (a new concept for many) shows that CO2 is absorbing and re-radiating so little infra red that it is irrelevant. This actual, observed REALITY trumps any computer model of any kind. Plus, if that CO2 were absorbing that IR, it would warm and heat the air around it, and that also has been shown to not be happening by actual observation, REALITY.
Meanwhile, right in this thread, people are still chatting gaily away about how complex climate is (true), and about “the climate sensitivity” (to what, exactly, be specific), when this isn’t about that, this is about CARBON DIOXIDE and whether it effects climate to any meaningful degree. According to the actual observations, it’s effect CAN ONLY BE maybe 3% of what they say it is. Thus, if someone says we will warm 3C, make that 0.09C, not exactly catastrophic.
A question, a sever test, does throwing stuff in a computer and just accepting anything its says as reality count as a sever test, why or why not?
“Plus, if that CO2 were absorbing that IR, it would warm and heat the air around it…”
—–
A complete failure to understand the basic properties of GH gases and their effects. Might want to go here for a refresher: (read it all)
http://scienceofdoom.com/roadmap/atmospheric-radiation-and-the-greenhouse-effect/
Legatus actually says this “Actual observation of, you know reality (a new concept for many) shows that CO2 is absorbing and re-radiating so little infra red that it is irrelevant. ”
So wrong. From this you make it clear you have not seen any of the actual abundant observations that have been made in this area. You need to try looking around before putting your mistakes in writing on the internet.
One-word answer Yes.
One-sentence answer Yes, iff the model is verified and validated.
And finally …
Needless to say, the vast span of modern globalized enterprises — from computer chips to airplanes to chemical synthesis to biomedicine — are entirely dependent upon accurate computational simulation.
Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ deals similarly with these issues of faith-versus-uncertainty (passions are aroused, needless to say).
Thank you for your question, Legatus … it may help you to reflect that “reliability” (however great) never amounts to “infallibility” … and yet we board aircraft, send email, trust physicians, and even pray upon occasion. Happy reading-and-reflecting!
Here’s a relevant paper from Julia Slingo and Tim Palmer. Climate models have chaotic dimensions – as does climate.
‘In 1963, Lorenz published his seminal paper on ‘Deterministic non-periodic flow’, which was to change the course of weather and climate prediction profoundly over the following decades and to embed the theory of chaos at the heart of meteorology. Indeed, it could be said that his view of the atmosphere (and subsequently also the oceans) as a chaotic system has coloured our thinking of the predictability of weather and subsequently climate from thereon.
Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic. The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change.’
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full
• “Some turbulent dynamics is chaotic” does *NOT* imply
• “all turbulent dynamics is chaotic”, or even that
• “climate dynamics is generically chaotic on decadal scales.”
Satellite altimetry, satellite gravimetry, and satellite-acquired ARGO thermometry, all plainly show sustained, monotonic, non-Lorenzian global heating dynamics.
That’s common sense, eh Robert I Ellison?
“That’s common sense, eh Robert I Ellison?”
_____
Nope, that’s Cheif Skippy Ellison’s Fairy Dust Physics 101.
Chief Skippy Ellison’s Magic Fairy Dust Physics 101 explains away actual physcial processes with one quick sprinkle of dust!
‘In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is a flow regime characterized by chaotic property changes. This includes low momentum diffusion, high momentum convection, and rapid variation of pressure and velocity in space and time.’ Wikipedia
Decadal climate shifts are a reality.
‘We construct a network of observed climate indices in the period 1900–2000 and investigate their collective behavior. The results indicate that this network synchronized several times in this period. We find that in those cases where the synchronous state was followed by a steady increase in the coupling strength between the indices, the synchronous state was destroyed, after which a new climate state emerged. These shifts are associated with significant changes in global temperature trend and in
ENSO variability. The latest such event in the 20th century is known as the great climate shift of the 1970s. Extending this analysis in the 21st century confirms that another synchronization of these modes, followed by an increase in coupling occurred in 2001/02. This suggests that a break in the
global mean temperature trend from the consistent warming over the 1976/77–2001/02 period may have occurred. We also find the evidence for such type of behavior in three forced and unforced climate simulations using state-of-the-art models. This is the first time that this mechanism, which appears consistent with the theory of synchronized chaos, is discovered in a physical system of the size and complexity of the climate system.’ Anastasios Tsonis.
‘The use of a coupled ocean–atmosphere–sea ice model to hindcast (i.e., historical forecast) recent climate variability is described and illustrated for the cases of the 1976/77 and 1998/99 climate shift events in the Pacific. The initialization is achieved by running the coupled model in partially coupled mode whereby global observed wind stress anomalies are used to drive the ocean/sea ice component of the coupled model while maintaining the thermodynamic coupling between the ocean/sea ice and atmosphere components. Here it is shown that hindcast experiments can successfully capture many features associated with the 1976/77 and 1998/99 climate shifts. For instance, hindcast experiments started from the beginning of 1976 can capture sea surface temperature (SST) warming in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific and the positive phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) throughout the 9 years following the 1976/77 climate shift, including the deepening of the Aleutian low pressure system. Hindcast experiments started from the beginning of 1998 can also capture part of the anomalous conditions during the 4 years after the 1998/99 climate. The authors argue that the dynamical adjustment of heat content anomalies that are present in the initial conditions in the tropics is important for the successful hindcast of the two climate shifts.’ http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00626.1
None of the things you cite show monotonic increase at all.
You have a habit of being comprehensively wrong FOMBS.
Don’t care for Julia Slingo and Tim Palmer? Not surprising for science denying sp@ce c@dets.
lolwot said | February 13, 2014 at 8:20 pm |
“There is no justification for starting all those graphs from the same point in 1983”
Yes there is. This covers the entire sattelite record, since the 5-year running mean takes from 1978 to 1983 to produce an initial figure.
So no cherry picking, simply that’s when the data started.
Plain fact Satellite altimetry, satellite gravimetry, and satellite-acquired thermometry, all plainly show sustained, monotonic global heating since 1985.
That’s inarguable, eh Steve Ta?
Unless the scientific community is globally enrolled in centuries-old conspiracy of fraud and deceit, that is.
Yeah! Now that’s the central tenet of the denialist crede!
Climate-change science is a vast conspiracy! Everybody knows THAT!
ARGO has shown a steric sea level rise of 0.69mm/yr – over a period of volume loss. Altimetry says 3.2mm/yr. The period of increase is not the entire ARGO record.
The GRACE satellite data is interesting and useful but not really relevant to sea level rise. Thermometry? You have got to be kidding.
This is simply ridiculous logic and inappropriate use of the measurement tool. It is extremely likely (95% certainty or greater) that both the heat content and the overall volume of the ocean have been increasing for many decades. The rise of both metrics correlate with each other and combined with the glacial mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica tell us that to also a very high degree of probability the Earth climate system has been gaining energy for many decades. Only your magic fairy dust can alter this basic conclusion.
What a load of spew Randy.
Robert Skippy Chief:
You’ve not explain your new magical science whereby the sea level could be rising, Greenland and Antarctica losing ice mass, OHC increasing, and yet the climate system not gaining energy. Please elaborate on this new fairy dust powered physics.
I have a number of times Randy – it is a pointless exercise to reiterate.
Just this again. Up is warming – down is cooling.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_Net_zps9f7faaaa.png.html?sort=3&o=8
Net anomalies in CERES data??? That’s your explanation for how the global climate system is not gaining energy even though sea level, OHC, and glacial ice mass say it is? You do realize that CERES net anomalies tell us next to nothing about these other metrics, right? Oh my…and I thought I was only kidding about the fairy dust!
According to your fairy dust physics Chief Skippy Ellison, why do we even need ARGO or GRACE satellite data…CERES net anomaly data can tell us all we need to know…that’s just Fairy Dust Physics 101!
R. Gates
Here’s how a skeptical person sees this:
The problem with GRACE data is that they are still tentative and highly speculative. Error margins are greater than trends. The fact that this technology showed diametrically opposite results from 11-year 24/7 satellite observations in both Greenland and Antarctica, raise doubt as to its validity.
And ARGO data have only been around for a decade. After first showing slight cooling, the raw data were adjusted to show slight warming. But these data are also still inconclusive to date as far as long-term trends are concerned.
My advice: Be a bit more skeptical – don’t believe everything you see printed under the name of “climate science”.
Max
The radiant flux at toa is the primary metric for how and why energy content is changing in the Earth system.
The severe test is how well this matches atmospheric temperature – which is after all heated by the oceans in large part.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/HadCRUT4vCERES_zpse5107cfd.png.html?sort=3&o=35
Your tribal irrelevancies notwithstanding Randy – CERES data is meaningful or not – but it is in principle the principle measure of changes in Earth energy content.
‘The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’
http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
Fairly basic climate principles – aye Randy?
Correction to “Recent cooling of the upper ocean”
Most of the rapid decrease in globally integrated 18 upper (0–750 m) ocean heat content anomalies (OHCA) between 2003 and 2005 reported by Lyman et al. [2006] appears to be an artifact resulting from the combination of two different instrument biases recently discovered in the in situ profile data. Although Lyman et al. [2006] carefully estimated sampling errors, they did not investigate potential biases among different instrument types. One such bias has been identified in a subset of Argo float profiles.
This error will ultimately be corrected. However, until corrections have been made these data can be easily excluded from OHCA estimates (see http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/ for more details). Another bias was caused by eXpendable BathyThermograph (XBT) data that are systematically warm compared to other instruments [Gouretski and Koltermann, 2007]. Both biases appear to have contributed equally to the spurious cooling. …
Manacker, once we redact your various unsupported claims, inflated error-bars, conspiracy-theory narratives, and random abuse … there’s nothing left, is there?
We’re learning more each year … it’s amazing!
The essential problem with CERES is that quantitative differences in energy in and energy out can’t be determined because of insoluble problems in intercalibration.
d(W&H)/dt = energy in (J/s) – energy out (J/s)
Where W&H is work and heat.
This can be approximated by:
d(OHC)/dt = energy in – energy out
Where OHC is ocean heat content.
Thus ARGO gives the sign and a good idea of the extent of the radiant imbalance in any period. CERES gives important information on the source of the imbalance and where the imbalance is in the radiance spectrum of outgoing energy – and thus on processes in the Earth system.
The ARGO data from von Schuckmann and Le Troan I have discussed in relation to sea level rise. Has there been a rise over the full ARGO record – or no net rise consistent with CERES?
I guess the answer might be available soon.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/237f9f0f-7543-40dc-bec5-ead3859d7758_zpse9c0cb59.jpg.html?sort=3&o=6
CRACE gives fantastically interesting and useful information about the shifts in water across the planet – at least to a hydrologist. It doesn’t address causality.
Max,
Skepticism is a tool, not a destination. I am always skeptical about everything, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe certain things are more likely than not. Yes all measurement techniques, including both ARGO, Jason, and GRACE must be seen through the tool of skepticism, but that skepticism does not mean to not adopt a “provisional” truth from the data given. After reading everything I can find about these various measurement tools and the validation protocols used in testing them I have taken the position that is far more likely than not that: the oceans are gaining in heat content, the sea level is rising over the long-term, and Greenland and Antarctica are losing net glacial mass. Skepticism is not a badge you wear that says: “I choose to not think anything is more likely than anything else”. This would be called fake-skepticism.
R. Gates
Agree that skepticism is a “tool”.
It is also an integral part of the scientific method.
I would simply state that I am a bit more skeptical that you are about any papers being released in an attempt to corroborate the CAGW hypothesis as outlined by IPCC (the so-called consensus position).
GRACE methodology is still very much in question because of uncertainties in correcting for glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) (read the many papers pointing this out).
And these results followed 11-year results from 24/7 satellite altimetry (1992-2003), which do not have this problem and which showed that both Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets were gaining mass.
ARGO first showed slight cooling and (after some “adjustments”) – VOILA! – showed slight warming since 2003 (there goes that skepticism again, Gates).
The global SST record shows warming of the sea surface atmospheric temperature until 2001, after which it switched to cooling. So this raises some skepticism about any ARGO warming of the upper ocean since 2003.
I’m not saying that either the ARGO or GRACE conclusions you cite are necessarily wrong – I’m simply saying, as a skeptic, that they are not necessarily right and should be regarded skeptically.
Hope this clears it up for you.
Max
The problem with Randy and all these other space cadets is selective blindness from cognitive dissonance. Some things just don’t compute – such as the world ain’t warming for decades at least.
Manacker, your unshakeable skepticism in regard to ocean-heat, sea-level rise, and polar ice-melt, is indistinguishable from tomdesabla’s unshakeable skepticism in regard to carbon oxidation.
Conclusion Rational skepticism is healthy; unshakeable skepticism is nutty.
Only a God’s eye perspective enables causality in the climate system to be understood.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=82
Rational conclusion? Unshakeable conviction in a worm’s eye perspective is totally nutty.
Just common sense aye FOMBS?
So now webby is denying what he claimed just last week was his justification for repeating his spew endlessly. One wonders just what the justification for the mind numbingly pointless repetition is then.
And webby’s comment disappears into the aether.
For those interested in a great overview of the dynamics of “Magical Thinking” you might like to check out a book I am just coincidentally presently reading, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking,” subtitled “How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Its author is Matthew Huston. It has been said that the easiest person to fool is yourself and this book has helped me understand how I do it so well. Enjoy.
Judith
“Truly, AGW is a magical theory that explains absolutely everything – including diametrically contradictory phenomena, lack of logic and absence of evidence – whenever people observe profoundly, ‘Something funny’s happening to the weather’.
well, there is a problem here.
when a theory doesnt explain everything, when some evidence stands opposed to it, you will hear folks say “the theory is false” because it doesnt explain everything.
Second there is no such thing as CONTRADICTORY phenomena. Phenomena are related by laws of logic. There are phenomena that confirm a theory and phenomena that disconfirm and phenomena that seem unrelated. All theories are in tension with the evidence and the tension is never relieved entirely. With AGW there is tension caused by the pause.
In the face of tension there are three responses.
1. throw the theory out.. baby with the bathwater
2. question the data ( is the pause real) here is where theories
are magic
3. Modify the theory. which looks like cheating to people who want to do #1
The problem is there is no real procedure for deciding 1-3 apriori
this problem is not unique to climate science
People who want to throw out the models would still like to see the theory improved. You have set up a false and in some way an incomplete scenario – as is your wont to do. What is missing is data – we need more of it. For example, Way can’t conclude his method produces numbers that correlate with the temperature of the surface of much of the Arctic. This is due to a paucity of data. So, a program to collect surface temperature would allow one to perform a correlation of his numbers with reality. This would either prove his procedure produces good number or not.
You see, there are ways to improve clarity. I can’t conclude from your posts that you understand such things. That doesn’t prove you don’t.
Steven,
Magical models can no longer hide reality. That game is over.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/noaa-has-entered-a-data-free-cheating-phase/#comment-318163
With deep regrets,
-Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
“For example, Way can’t conclude his method produces numbers that correlate with the temperature of the surface of much of the Arctic. This is due to a paucity of data. So, a program to collect surface temperature would allow one to ”
Wrong on several counts.
1. The purpose of what Way and I do is simple: provide the best unbiased estimate GIVEN the data. This is a hypothesis or prediction.
2. Refusing to estimate IS ALSO making an estimate and we can show
that CRU who does not estimate the arctic is biased low.
There is one way to test our estimate. Starting in 2002 we launched a new platform into space: AIRS. since that time AIRS has been measuring the surface temperature over the entire planet, including the arctic.
It also measures the SAT.. and temperatures at 1000,925,850,700,600hPa ( actually 100 layers)
If our prediction about the arctic, made with sparse data, is correct, then a comparison with AIRS will bear this out. If we differ from AIRS that will also be instructive..
stay tuned..every month of data is 450Mb
Starting in 2002 we launched a new platform into space: AIRS. since that time AIRS has been measuring the surface temperature over the entire planet,
Airs shows a significant response to the solar cycle that impacts enso in the declination phase.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2011ScienceMeeting/docs/abstracts/2b_Ruzmaikin_contr.pdf
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2011ScienceMeeting/docs/presentations/2b_Ruzmaikin_SORCE_2011.pdf
Mosh
You cite three alternates:
As a rational skeptic, I’d say you should always do #2. How reliable are the data? Are there any uncertainties? What is based on empirical evidence (i.e. actual physical observation or reproducible experimentation) and what is based on theoretical deliberations?
As to #3 – the theory is NEVER “magic” – it ALWAYS gets modified as new data emerge. The “pause” has shown us, for example, that the theoretical assumptions/estimates/etc. built into the climate models, which predicted warming of 0.2C per year, were erroneous. So these should be modified.
I do not see this as “cheating” at all – it’s simply following the scientific method.
The problem arises when the theory is cast in concrete (or “magic”) – i.e. becomes the paradigm.
Then new data which conflict with the paradigm are either ignored or simply not recognized, in order to protect the “magic” theory.
And it appears that this is where we are with climate science as reported by IPCC today, Mosh.
Max
maks, “Airs shows a significant response to the solar cycle that impacts enso in the declination phase.”
There is also an interesting correlation between solar and diurnal temperature range related to the Hale cycle. I haven’t seen a paper that directly addresses the correlation, but the Northern and Southern Hemispheres vary in synch with the cycle. Kind of neat.
Mosher states I’m incorrect, then proceeds to do as I said. OK, whatever.
Mosher: What is AIRS calibrated/verified with in the Arctic? Has this been coordinated with boots on the ice and boots in the boats data to “ground truth” it?
So, 2002 AIRS giving data, why do we need Cowtan and Way. Where is the last 12 years of Northern Hemisphere proven temperature data? Why do we need the guesstimated stuff if the real values are sitting there?
Don’t throw the models out but improve them by comparing to empirical data. Some may be thrown out but using only ensemble averages masks problems with individual simulations. When they drift from data modify them and then get more data to compare. The big problem now is the lack of measurement systems on land, in the satellites, in the surface ocean and in the deep ocean.
That is expensive but doable.
Scott
Of course when the graphs show a discrepancy between the
models, with the observations outside the envelope of the
projections yer can jest reconstruct the graphs.
http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/30/ipcc-disappears-the-discrepancy/
beth
That’s the magic!
It’s called “hindcasting”.
(Covering your behind when forecasts don’t work out by using chartmanship to modify the forecast to fit what actually happened.)
Your fellow serf,
Max
Scott
What you have just described as called “the scientific method”.
Feynman also describes it well.
And, yes, it appears that the big problem now is the lack of measurement systems on land, in the satellites, in the surface ocean and in the deep ocean.
And we have some discrepancies, as well:
ARGO (after upward adjustment of initial raw data) shows slight warming of the upper ocean since 2003, while HadSST shows cooling of atmospheric sea surface temperature since 2001.
GRACE (after questionable adjustment for isostatic lift) shows decrease in ice mass of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets since 2005, while 24/7 satellite altimetry of both ice sheets showed net growth from 1992 to 2003.
So it appears to this rational skeptic that the trends could simply be the result of adjustments.
And your statement is spot on.
Max
Max,
Thanks.
Where is the ARGO data adjustments?
It seems that adjustments should be saved with raw data so outsiders can evaluate the changed data. Bias shows up when data is always adjsuted to show warming now and cooler temps int the past.
Scott
Scott
I have not seen the ARGO data “adjustments” that resulted in an apparent shift from slight cooling to slight warming.
Maybe someone else here has seen a publication listing these in detail and can cite a link.
Max
Aside from remarking that Melanie Phillips falls victim to composition/division fallacy and can thus be dismissed out of hand, Mayo converges to zero knowledge in infinite regress, which is unsatisfactory in itself and points to an ultimately failed argument (for one thing, severe testing itself fails severe testing, the formulations rely on spotty assumptions, and the models do not reflect the actual), one ought observe that http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/maybe-nigel-lawson-is-right-there-cant-be-global–warming-because-isnt-it-always-colder-at-night-9126449.html is wickedly funny.
And while I disagree with http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/global-warming-winter-weather-and-the-olympics-five-leading-climate-scientists-weigh-in/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 it is not a bad read, and I doubt I’ll get any credit for allowing that I can respect the scientific views of people who come to other scientific conclusions than to I. But if more people could present their views at least that well, it might make for less sarcasm and pointing and laughing at the perpetrators.
Wow!
Sounds like Jim Cripwell talking about “climate science” today.
But while it is certainly true that “leading authorities” disagree with one another, IPCC has hijacked a forced “consensus” position that must be endorsed if one wishes to publish in certain journals, and the political leadership of most of the once-revered scientific bodies (RS, NAS, etc.) have simply become “yes-men” for IPCC.
Max
For sure, the IPCC won’t respect them in the morning.
=========
The morning after is always rough.
Magical theory. Well, there IS a billion dollars in it for someone!
“During a call with reporters on Thursday evening, the assistant to the president on science and technology, John Holdren, said, without any doubt, the severe drought plaguing California and a number of other states across the country is tied to climate change.
“Weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change,” Holdren said.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/198394-obama-to-announce-1b-climate-change-resilience-fund#ixzz2tKvyNDtp
When every weather everywhere is evidence, you’re theory predicts….. what?
jeffn
John Holdren does not have a clue about the underlying causes for the recurrent California droughts (1950s, 1970s, today). There seems to be a connection with ENSO, but certainly not with man-made global warming (or “climate change” as it has been rebranded).
Remember that Holdren joined up with Paul Ehrlich in telling us we were doomed to starve to death because of a “population explosion” (which never happened – and starvation rates have decreased sharply while average life expectancy at birth has increased).
He also seriously suggested shooting massive amounts of sulfuric acid into the stratosphere to save us from global warming (that isn’t even happening anymore).
If President Obama is so scientifically misinformed that he listens to this guy, heaven help him – the guy’s a joke.
Max
Extreacts from a DT article FYI:
At the expo grim-faced farmers strolled amid house-sized harvesting machines that they probably won’t need this year. But as much as they cursed the cloudless sky, they also blamed California’s complicated water delivery system, and the environmental lobby, for exacerbating the drought. A chief target of their ire was the Delta smelt, a three-inch long fish the US Fish and Wildlife Service decided to protect several years ago. That prevented billions of gallons of water being channeled from the Delta’s smelt’s home in the Sacramento River to farms.
Without its protection the Delta smelt would become extinct but farmers are of the view that people, and America’s economy, are more important.
Daniel Errotabere, 58, a third generation farmer, who is fallowing 1,500 of his 5,200 acres this year, said: “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us. When you waste a resource like that out to the ocean it’s hard to live with.”
Mr Errotabere employs 35 people and will have to let go a third of them.
Half of his garlic and garbanzo bean crops will go. “Its been devastating,” he said. “Farmers up and down the valley are in the same position. I’ve been farming since 1979 and I’ve never seen this.”
Ryan Jacobsen, executive director of the Fresno County Farm Bureau said up to 250,000 acres there may lie fallow this year. He said: “This drought is in the billion-and-a-half to two billion dollar range. Farmers are having to get rid of cattle because there is no grass to feed them. “It’s catastrophic and there will be repercussions at the supermarket.”
On his visit Mr Obama was expected to draw a connection between the drought and global warming. Ahead of the president’s arrival John Holdren, Mr Obama’s science and technology adviser, said : “They’ve always had droughts in the American West of course, but now the severe ones are getting more frequent, they’re getting longer and they’re getting drier.” He said the world’s climate has been so affected by “the human-caused buildup of greenhouse gases that weather practically everywhere is being influenced by climate change.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10638983/The-new-Dust-Bowl-epochal-drought-hits-Californias-Central-Valley.html
So, Mr President, it’s global warming, not the diversion of billions of gallons of water to protect a wee fish? Whether or not AGW has a part, couldn’t that water have a higher-valued use?
Joel Katzav has a very interesting article ‘Severe testing of climate change hypotheses’ published in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics [link] to complete manuscript.
That is a good article. Thank you.
My opinion is that Deborah Mayo’s book “Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge” is worth reading.
As everyone knows, Richard Feynman also advocated severe testing, which he called “bending over backward” to make sure you are not fooling yourself.
A fan of *MORE* discourse | February 14, 2014 at 9:57 am | Says
Legatus asks: A question, a severe test, does throwing stuff in a computer and just accepting anything it says as reality count as a severe test, why or why not?
One-word answer Yes.
One-sentence answer Yes, iff the model is verified and validated.
OK, what if it is unverified and invalidated by actual data from the real world, what then? I mean, are we just to accept whatever the computer spits out, when we do not know the data that was put in it, or how the computer program was written? What if the programmers want it to spit out a certain answer, with billions of dollars if it gives them the answer they want? Might that make you slightly suspicious? What if they cherry pick the data, make unreasonable assumptions, use grids to make an urban heat island stand in for wilderness hundreds of miles away, and even “adjust” older temperatures down, ones measured before they were even born (all actual examples)? What if they admit that they don’t understand the major drivers of climate, like, say, clouds, ocean currents, and even the ENSO (El Nino La Nina stuff), to mention a recent example that they now specifically admit is NOT included in their gigantic computer programs? And what if they take this program that they have now admitted does not represent the real world of climate, and run it a godzillion times (a big scary number), and then take the results they like and throw out the rest, and tell you that they predict such and such? And what if their prediction does not come true, and keeps not coming true, for, oh, say, 17 years and 5 months (and counting)? Might any of that make you a tad suspicious that perhaps, just perhaps, their computer is only telling you what they want you to hear because they told it to?
And exactly how are you to validate a computer program that predicts such and such increase in world temperature due to back-scatter IR radiation from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere? Might you, I dunno, actually LOOK for said increase in radiation? Would the largest, most discriminating instruments in the world, IR telescopes that can detect the faintest IR from the edges of the universe, be good enough for you? And would not such instruments, which, after all, have to look through this atmosphere for distant IR signals, find it increasingly hard to do so if the atmosphere is itself radiating more and more IR back-scatter toward said telescope due to more CO2? So, will you still agree with a computer program that claims increasing IR back-scatter if the largest, most sensitive instruments in the world say it is not there? If not, exactly what WILL you accept for it to be “validated”?
If anything.
(1) A thorough review of the past century (and more!) of climate-modeling will go far to address your doubts, Legatus!
(2) Following which, Easterbrook’s essay Do Climate Models need Independent Verification and Validation? is recommended.
(3) And finally, James Hansen’s review Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implicationsincludes a thorough discussion of the limits of satellite radiometry
Conclusion Climate-science provides reasonable assurance that CO2-driven global heating is real, serious, and accelerating.
Except to those folks whom no amount of rational evidence would convince, eh Legatus?
At some point the repetition becomes mind numbingly pointless. Webby justifies it be reference to some US pundit or other n keeping on message and wearing down the ideological opposition. Way to engender discourse in good faith.
Here’s a relevant paper from Julia Slingo and Tim Palmer. Climate models have chaotic dimensions – as does climate.
‘In 1963, Lorenz published his seminal paper on ‘Deterministic non-periodic flow’, which was to change the course of weather and climate prediction profoundly over the following decades and to embed the theory of chaos at the heart of meteorology. Indeed, it could be said that his view of the atmosphere (and subsequently also the oceans) as a chaotic system has coloured our thinking of the predictability of weather and subsequently climate from thereon.
Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic. The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change.’
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full
Here’s another from James McWilliams.
‘AOS models are therefore to be judged by their degree of plausibility, not whether they are correct or best. This perspective extends to the component discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupling breadth: There are better or worse choices (some seemingly satisfactory for their purpose or others needing repair) but not correct or best ones. The bases for judging are a priori formulation, representing the relevant natural processes and choosing the discrete algorithms, and a posteriori solution behavior…
In each of these model–ensemble comparison studies, there are important but difficult questions: How well selected are the models for their plausibility? How much of the ensemble spread is reducible by further model improvements? How well can the spread can be explained by analysis of model differences? How much is irreducible imprecision in an AOS?
Simplistically, despite the opportunistic assemblage of the various AOS model ensembles, we can view the spreads in their results as upper bounds on their irreducible imprecision. Optimistically, we might think this upper bound is a substantial overestimate because AOS models are evolving and improving. Pessimistically, we can worry that the ensembles contain insufficient samples of possible plausible models, so the spreads may underestimate the true level of irreducible imprecision (cf., ref. 23). Realistically, we do not yet know how to make this assessment with confidence.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.long
That a solution chosen from many feasible solutions on the basis of a posteriori solution behaviour can become irrefutable is magical indeed.
Radiant flux measurements are not remotely made at the Le Grange points. They are made with satellites in close orbit to the planet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcPpPTGy6ws
This is fun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0B8Yi7AZvQ
At some stage you will stop retailing nonsense – aye FOMBS.
Incoherent as usual.
Is the sockypuppet around your neck tied too tight?
Ah – right place – this format is pathetic.
So now webby is denying what he claimed just last week was his justification for repeating his spew endlessly. One wonders just what the justification for the mind numbingly pointless repetition is then.
You talk as if you were living in the Victorian era. No one is going to wade through your pretentious drivel.
Webby objects to big words – as opposed to his clumsy drivel. He has repeated this particular whine many times too often. It is all too tedious webby – go away.
FOMD, now would be an excellent time to remind you of another one of Hansen’s failed predictions:
“We suggest that an El Nino is likely to originate in 2006 and that there is a good chance it will be a “super El Nino”, rivaling the 1983 and 1997-1998 El Ninos, which were successively labeled the “El Nino of the century
Further, we argue that global warming causes an increase of such “super El Ninos”. Our rationale is based on interpretation of dominant mechanisms in the ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) phenomenon, examination of historical SST data, and observed Pacific Ocean SST anomalies in February 2006.
We argue further that global warming has increased the likelihood of “super El Ninos”, such as those that occurred in 1983 and 1997-1998.”
No “Super El Nino” since 2006 and none imminent.
FOMD, about those climate models, the latest of an increasing number of peer-reviewed papers pointing out the continued failure of the models to accurately project global temperatures:
http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/models-overestimated-warming-says-paper.html
and
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603
GIGO
A Fan of *MORE* discourse: Climate-science provides reasonable assurance that CO2-driven global heating is real, serious, and accelerating.
Is it your claim that the General Circulation Models (GCMs, aka “Global Climate Models) have been subjected to stringent testing (the point of Legatus’ question) and have passed the tests? If you align each forecast with the data on the date of the forecast, they are almost all high compared to subsequent data, and the data trend itself is outside the 99% confidence interval of the mean projection.
My weight has been increasing for years. I weigh myself before and after a big poop and then claim my weight gain has paused which proves calories have no influence on weight. A solid conclusion or a pile of crap?
I did not see Donald Rapp’s piece from Thursday. I quote ” Therefore the alarmists have politicized the science of climatology to enforce their views.”
While obviously accurate, it does not address the most important issue.
Why did the Royal Society and The American Physical Society lead the elite of the scientific establishment (including, I may say, our hostess) to completely endorse the non-science of CAGW?
Based on this discussion, it appears skeptics have gained a little ground in the argument. Now they say skeptics are right, climate scientists can’t prove what they say is true. But they want to mitigate anyway. That’s still not good enough.
jim2, you write “That’s still not good enough.”
What a wonderfully enigmatic statement! “Good enough” from whose point of view? I take it you mean that mitigation is not good enough; stronger anti-CAGW measures are required.
I take the opposite view. The scientific establishment has endorsed the Church of CAGW. A succession of senior scientific advisors to the leaders of most of the western style democracies have Preached the Word of CAGW. Including our hostess. And including one very powerful politician with a solid scientific background, namely Angela Merkel.
Who is going to convince The Royal Society, The American Physical Society, Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and All, to unendorsed CAGW?
Who is going to bell the cat?
“Good enough” from my point of view. I see that sentence was ambiguous. I mean we should do zero mitigation until we know we have a problem, chicken little arguments notwithstanding.
And, skeptics have gained some ground in the argument, but not in stopping the spending on the imaginary problem of global warming.
The real purpose of magical theories has been exposed:
http://theinternetpost.net/2014/02/15/tsar-bomba-king-of-the-bombs/
Science begins with hypotheses. A hypothesis is a story constructed in the scientists mind about what they think OUGHT TO BE true. Hypotheses are essentially prescientific. They are a guessing game – a place where your reasons for conjecturing something need not be explained. A hypothesis does not become a theory unless tested by evidence.
The reasons behind a hypothesis can be very diverse. They range from quite scientific things like mathematical elegance and analogy to other areas of science (stadium waves :-) ); right through to completely unscientific things like political and religious biases. There are no rules in science about what kinds of thinking can be used to generate hypotheses because having ideas isn’t a logical linear process. A certain amount of illogicality and creative chaos is allowed in the generation of hypotheses.
In an area of science where hard evidence is hard to come by often all we have is a corpus of untested hypotheses which are routinely used to make scientific guesses. It is not unreasonable to make scientific guesses based on nothing more than untested hypotheses – that is part of the process by which hypotheses get tested. But when lots of hypotheses linger for years or decades in an unconfirmed state then the danger is that people start to evaluate them on the basis of how much they like the illogical stories used to construct them rather than on the basis of any real evidence.
For example look at nutrition. Political and religious biases underlie many of the hypotheses in this area. There is an extremely strong vegetarian presumption that meat is bad arising from the ethical desire to live without killing other creatures; the squeamishness of urban dwelling scientists; and from the political notion that grains and vegetables make more efficient use of land and would allow us to feed more people in a less environmentally damaging way. These ideas are OK when simply used to GENERATE hypotheses. But they are not evidence and should not be used to EVALUATE hypotheses. Vegetarian politics is a very weak reason for believing that meat is bad in any nutritional sense.
However that is exactly what is happening. A damaging culture of vegetarian nutritional political correctness holds sway in nutrition science; poised to destroy the career of anyone who might break ranks and suggest that a diet with lots of meat in it might actually be good for you. Of course there is no strong evidence for that hypothesis either. But unlike the hypothesis that meat is bad for us, people will attempt to reject the hypothesis that meat is good for us even in the complete absence of evidence simply because it goes against their biases. Furthermore this is often done in a very vicious and personal way as if enough sheer nastiness can compensate for a lack of a real scientific argumente. Just look at the lifetime of abuse heaped on poor old Atkins and his diet.
My father gave up butter (which he loves) on the advice of nutrition science purely out of concern for his heart. He has subsequently spent the last 30 years using margerine (which he doesn’t like) instead, surviving two massive heart attacks and a quadruple bypass along the way. Nutritionists liked the idea that margerine was more healthy because it is made from vegetable oils — pure vegetarian bias. But today we know that the transfats that were in margerine (substances not found in nature) can be far more damaging to the heart than any of the natural fats found in butter.
I too am approaching the age where I need to be concerned about my heart. But I have decided to completely ignore the advice of the nutritionists because I don’t trust them. My plan is to simply pay attention to the quality of oils and fats in my diet. I think I have have a better chance of getting a good outcome from my approach of “eat natural and don’t eat rubbish” as my father has had from slavishly following the dictates of these arrogant nutritional pontificators who have been playing dangerous games with people’s lives for political reasons.
I could go on to write about the obvious parallels in climate science. But I’m sure you can all fill in the blanks. I’ve written enough.
Gald to see Debora Mayo being discussed. I think she is one of the most important philosophers of science currently working. But I’m not sure the article by Katsav really does her justice. In her book she makes several powerful points. The first big point is that we should not talk about the probability of hypotheses, which are either true or false. What is important for science is the reliability of the methods of testing. So we can talk about how often a given test will give results that far from a given null, i.e the probablity that we would observe such an extreme result were the null true. But that is not the same as talking about the probability that the hypothesis is true. to make sense of the notion of severity we need to have some idea about how tests will perform – we need to know the sampling distribution. That is far from straightforward in cases as complex as those allegedly described by the climate models. Good theories are ones that have survived severe testing, using severity in the precise way she defines. Saying that we are 95% confident that most global warming is caused by humans is not science, it’s a description of what some people believe. Note also that to
A second big point in the book is that science generally works through a hierarchy of models, with grand overall theories being broken down into manageable bits to test. This seems to me of great importance in the climate debate. There does not seem to be much to learn (and learning from error is something she lays much stress on) from overall climate model performance. Perhaps there would be more learnt if we tried to examine, e.g, whether the water vapour feedback works as supposed, and if instead of putting more money into bigger models and faster computers we tried to collect better data and of a type which can answer a precisly specified question.
Finally Mayo has a nice website at
http://errorstatistics.com/
I found Mayo’s strict anti-Bayesianism unconvincing and really little more than committing the foreign tourist fallacy–say the same thing LOUDER and slooower and hope that the native will understand your language. In this case, classical probabilists have been making the same kinds of arguments as Mayo forever. But the argument is not winnable. And it is precisely a probabilistic degree of belief that we need if science is to be applied to action, a la decision theory. The existence of some specific organic cause leading to my death in the next year may indeed be either true or false, but the probability of this hypothesis being true is the relevant information needed for planning and insurance purposes.
This sciences lie on an assumptions that people quickly forget afterwards, for dietetics, a GLOBAL healthy diet is supposed to exist or be defined. Although anybody can see it is wrong. we are individual.
we need a dietetic for each person on earth.
for climatology although we are not able to see if energy budget is off balance at any time scale, although we don’t know if the climate system contains more energy at any time scale ( the depth s monster), we assume that the horrible thing called global temperature of a tiny part of climate system can measure the energy imbalance of the whole system.
Quite a risky business.
Okay.
If MODTRAN is as capable as it’s described (while I trust the em absorption, I’m suspect on cloud and particulates), let’s have it calculate how long it should take to cool down on a clear night, or how cold it will be in the morning for various lengths of night. That we can compare to surface station data and see if they match.
What’s the calculated rate of cooling verses actual.
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Judith
The comparison of climate science to nutrition science is inaccurate. We know a lot more about nutrition than climate change. The primary reason why obesity is on the rise is not because we lack knowledge on nutrition but because people do not put this knowledge into practice.
Here is a simple way to prove this. Stay on a 2,000 kcal daily diet and run 5 km every day. Do this for one year. It is certain you will lose weight and avoid obesity. To maintain your weight and health, do it for the rest of your life. The science is uncontroversial. Following it is the problem.
In climate science, there is real uncertainty. If we cut CO2 emission by half, will it stop global warming? We cannot test this in a lab. We can only model it in computers, which is also uncertain and subject to manipulations.
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Profs.
Professor Bob Ryan on
February 15, 2014 at 3:48
am
Professor Rapp: your
comment sums this whole
sad issue up beautifully.
Perhaps those who appear
to derive their social life
from commenting endlessly
on this blog might find it
useful to take some time
out and think about what
you have said.
Profs.,
You don’t have to tell me
what to do
what to eat
what to think
what to believe
what to like.
Just be earnest and let’s see
IF I WILL FOLLOW YOUR ARGUMENTS.
But thx to good will.
To all enlightning contributions.
My own hypothesis on nutrition and obesity is that our culture is a bigger factor, but that these feed into eachother. I saw a TED talk which highlighted a study showing how body language/postures affect hormone levels. It was quite stricking. Lack of sense of opportuning, failure to feel successful, stress, etc. wreak havoc on the endocrine system. A small change in the number of positive postures or anxious and submissive postures achieved each day are likely to do more harm than eating nothing but canned food and refined carbs.
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