by Judith Curry
Critiques, the 3%, and is 47 the new 97?
For background, see my previous post The 97% feud.
Cook et al. critiques
At the heart of the consensus controversy is the paper by Cook et al. (2013), which inferred a 97% consensus by classifying abstracts from published papers.The study was based on a search of broad academic literature using casual English terms like “global warming”, which missed many climate science papers but included lots of non-climate-science papers that mentioned climate change – social science papers, surveys of the general public, surveys of cooking stove use, the economics of a carbon tax, and scientific papers from non-climate science fields that studied impacts and mitigation.
The Cook et al. paper has been refuted in the published literature in an article by Richard Tol: Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the literature: A re-analysis (behind paywall). Summary points from the abstract:
A trend in composition is mistaken for a trend in endorsement. Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cook׳s validation test shows that the data are invalid. Data disclosure is incomplete so that key results cannot be reproduced or tested.
Social psychologist Jose Duarte has a series of blog posts that document the ludicrousness of the selection and categorization of papers by Cook et al., including citation of specific articles that they categorized as supporting the climate change consensus:
- Ignore climate consensus studies based on random people rating journal abstracts
- Cooking stove use, housing associations, white males and the 97%
From this analysis, Duarte concludes: ignore climate consensus studies based on random people rating journal article abstracts. I find it difficult to disagree with him on this.
The 3%
So, does all this leave you wondering what the 3% of papers not included in the consensus had to say? Well, wonder no more. There is a new paper out, published by Cook and colleagues:
Learning from mistakes
Rasmus Benestad, Dana Nuccitelli, Stephan Lewandowski, Katherine Hayhoe, Hans Olav Hygen, Rob van Dorland, John Cook
Abstract. Among papers stating a position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), 97 % endorse AGW. What is happening with the 2 % of papers that reject AGW? We examine a selection of papers rejecting AGW. An analytical tool has been developed to replicate and test the results and methods used in these studies; our replication reveals a number of methodological flaws, and a pattern of common mistakes emerges that is not visible when looking at single isolated cases. Thus, real-life scientific disputes in some cases can be resolved, and we can learn from mistakes. A common denominator seems to be missing contextual information or ignoring information that does not fit the conclusions, be it other relevant work or related geophysical data. In many cases, shortcomings are due to insufficient model evaluation, leading to results that are not universally valid but rather are an artifact of a particular experimental setup. Other typical weaknesses include false dichotomies, inappropriate statistical methods, or basing conclusions on misconceived or incomplete physics. We also argue that science is never settled and that both mainstream and contrarian papers must be subject to sustained scrutiny. The merit of replication is highlighted and we discuss how the quality of the scientific literature may benefit from replication.
Published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology [link to full paper].
A look at the Supplementary Material shows that they considered credible skeptical papers (38 in total) – by Humlum, Scafetta, Solheim and others.
The gist of their analysis is that the authors were ‘outsiders’, not fully steeped in consensus lore and not referencing their preferred papers.
RealClimate has an entertaining post on the paper, Let’s learn from mistakes, where we learn that this paper was rejected by five journals before being published by Theoretical and Applied Climatology. I guess the real lesson from this paper is that you can get any kind of twaddle published, if you keep trying and submit it to different journals.
A consensus on what, exactly?
The consensus inferred from the Cook et al. analysis is a vague one indeed; exactly what are these scientists agreeing on? The ‘97% of the world’s climate scientists agree that humans are causing climate change’ is a fairly meaningless statement unless the relative amount (%) of human caused climate change is specified. Roy Spencer’s 2013 Senate testimony included the following statement:
“It should also be noted that the fact that I believe at least some of recent warming is human-caused places me in the 97% of researchers recently claimed to support the global warming consensus (actually, it’s 97% of the published papers, Cook et al., 2013). The 97% statement is therefore rather innocuous, since it probably includes all of the global warming “skeptics” I know of who are actively working in the field. Skeptics generally are skeptical of the view that recent warming is all human-caused, and/or that it is of a sufficient magnitude to warrant immediate action given the cost of energy policies to the poor. They do not claim humans have no impact on climate whatsoever.
The only credible way to ascertain whether scientists support the consensus on climate change is through surveys of climate scientists. This point is eloquently made in another post by Joe Duarte: The climate science consensus is 78-84%. Now I don’t agree with Duarte’s conclusion on that, but he makes some very salient points:
Tips for being a good science consumer and science writer. When you see an estimate of the climate science consensus:
- Make sure it’s a direct survey of climate scientists. Climate scientists have full speech faculties and reading comprehension. Anyone wishing to know their views can fruitfully ask them. Also, be alert to the inclusion of people outside of climate science.
- Make sure that the researchers are actual, qualified professionals. You would think you could take this for granted in a study published in a peer-reviewed journal, but sadly this is simply not the case when it comes to climate consensus research. They’ll publish anything with high estimates.
- Be wary of researchers who are political activists. Their conflicts of interest will be at least as strong as that of an oil company that had produced a consensus study – moral and ideological identity is incredibly powerful, and is often a larger concern than money.
- In general, do not trust methods that rest on intermediaries or interpreters, like people reviewing the climate science literature. Thus far, such work has been dominated by untrained amateurs motivated by political agendas.
- Be mindful of the exact questions asked. The wording of a survey is everything.
- Be cautious about papers published in climate science journals, or really in any journal that is not a survey research journal. Our experience with the ERL fraud illustrated that climate science journals may not be able to properly review consensus studies, since the methods (surveys or subjective coding of text) are outside their domains of expertise. The risk of junk science is even greater if the journal is run by political interests and is motivated to publish inflated estimates. For example, I would advise strong skepticism of anything published by Environmental Research Letters on the consensus – they’re run by political people like Kammen.
Is 47 the new 97?
The key question is to what extent climate scientists agree with key consensus statement of the IPCC:
“It is extremely likely {95%+ certainty} that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. ”
Several surveys of climate scientists have addressed using survey questions that more or less address the issue of whether humans are the dominant cause of recent warming (discussed in the previous post by Duarte and summarized in my post The 97% feud).
The survey that I like the best is:
Verheggan et al. (2014) Scientists view about attribution of climate change. Environmental Science & Technology [link]
Recently, a more detailed report on the survey was made available [link] . Fabius Maximus has a fascinating post New study undercuts key IPCC finding (the text below draws liberally from this post). This survey examines agreement with the keynote statement of the IPCC AR5:
“It is extremely likely {95%+ certainty} that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. ”
The survey examines both facets of the attribution statement – how much warming is caused by humans, and what is the confidence in that assessment.
In response to the question: What fraction of global warming since the mid 20th century can be attributed to human induced increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations? A total of 1,222 of 1,868 (64% of respondents) agreed with AR5 that the answer was over 50%. Excluding the 164 (8.8%) “I don’t know” respondents, yields 72% agree with the IPCC.
The second question is: “What confidence level would you ascribe to your estimate that the anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming is more than 50%?” Of the 1,222 respondents who said that the anthropogenic contribution was over 50%, 797 (65%) said it was 95%+ certain (which the IPCC defines as “virtually certain” or “extremely likely”).
The 797 respondents who are highly confident that more than 50% of the warming is human caused) are 43% of all 1,868 respondents (47% excluding the “don’t know” group). Hence this survey finds that slightly less than half of climate scientists surveyed agree with the AR5 keynote statement in terms of confidence in the attribution statement.
Whose opinion ‘counts’?
Surveys of actual climate scientists is a much better way to elicit the actual opinions of scientist on this issue. But surveys raise the issue as to exactly who are the experts on the issue of attribution of climate change? The Verheggan et al. study was criticized in a published comment by Duarte, in terms of the basis for selecting participants to respond to the survey:
“There is a deeper problem. Inclusion of mitigation and impacts papers – even from physical sciences or engineering – creates a structural bias that will inflate estimates of consensus, because these categories have no symmetric disconfirming counterparts. These researchers have simply imported a consensus in global warming. They then proceed to their area of expertise. [These papers] do not carry any data or epistemic information about climate change or its causes, and the authors are unlikely to be experts on the subject, since it is not their field.
Increased public interest in any topic will reliably draw scholars from various fields. However, their endorsement (or rejection) of human-caused warming does not represent knowledge or independent assessments. Their votes are not quanta of consnsensus, but simply artifacts of career choices, and the changing political climate. Their inclusion will artificially inflate sample sizes, and will likely bias the results.”
Roy Spencer also addresses this issue in his Senate testimony (cited above):
“(R)elatively few researchers in the world – probably not much more than a dozen – have researched how sensitive today’s climate system is based upon actual measurements. This is why popular surveys of climate scientists and their beliefs regarding global warming have little meaning: very few of them have actually worked on the details involved in determining exactly how much warming might result from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.”
The number of real experts on the detection and attribution of climate change is small, only a fraction of the respondents to these surveys. I raised this same issue in the pre-Climate Etc. days in response to the Anderegg et al. paper, in a comment at Collide-a-Scape (referenced by Columbia Journalism Review):
The scientific litmus test for the paper is the AR4 statement: “anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for “most” of the “unequivocal” warming of the Earth’s average global temperature over the second half of the 20th century”.
The climate experts with credibility in evaluating this statement are those scientists that are active in the area of detection and attribution. “Climate” scientists whose research areas is ecosystems, carbon cycle, economics, etc speak with no more authority on this subject than say Freeman Dyson.
I define the 20th century detection and attribution field to include those that create datasets, climate dynamicists that interpret the variability, radiative forcing, climate modeling, sensitivity analysis, feedback analysis. With this definition, 75% of the names on the list disappear. If you further eliminate people that create datasets but don’t interpret the datasets, you have less than 20% of the original list.
Apart from Anderegg’s classification of the likes of Freeman Dyson as not a ‘climate expert’ (since he didn’t have 20 peer reviewed publications that they classed as ‘climate papers’), they also did not include solar – climate experts such as Syun Akasofu (since apparently Akasofu’s solar papers do not count as ‘climate’).
But perhaps the most important point is that of the scientists who are skeptical of the IPCC consensus, a disproportionately large number of these skeptical scientists are experts on climate change detection/attribution. Think Spencer, Christy, Lindzen, etc. etc.
Bottom line: inflating the numbers of ‘climate scientists’ in such surveys attempts to hide that there is a serious scientific debate about the detection and attribution of recent warming, and that scientists who are skeptical of the IPCC consensus conclusion are disproportionately expert in the area of climate change detection and attribution.
Conceits of consensus
And finally, a fascinating article The conceits of ‘consensus’ in Halakhic rhetoric. Read the whole thing, it is superb. A few choice excerpts:
The distinguishing characteristic of these appeals to consensus is that the legitimacy or rejection of an opinion is not determined by intrinsic, objective, qualifiable criteria or its merits, but by its adoption by certain people. The primary premise of such arguments is that unanimity or a plurality of agreement among a given collective is halakhically binding on the Jewish population and cannot be further contested or subject to review.
Just as the appeal to consensus stresses people over logic, subsequent debate will also focus on the merits of individuals and their worthiness to be included or excluded from the conversation. This situation runs the risk of the No True Scotsman fallacy whereby one excludes a contradictory opinion on the grounds that no one who could possibly hold such an opinion is worth consideration.
Debates over inclusion and exclusion for consensus are susceptible to social manipulations as well. Since these determinations imply a hierarchy or rank of some sort, attempts which disturb an existing order may be met with various forms of bullying or intimidation – either in terms of giving too much credit to one opinion or individual or not enough deference to another. Thus any consensus reached on this basis would not be not based out of genuine agreement, but fear of reprisals. The consensus of the collective may be similarly manipulated through implicit or overt marketing as a way to artificially besmirch or enhance someone’s reputation.
The next premise to consider is the correlation between consensus and correctness such that if most (or all) people believe something to be true, then by the value of its widespread acceptance and popularity, it must be correct. This is a well known logical fallacy known as argumentum ad populum, sometimes called the bandwagon fallacy. This should be familiar to anyone who has ever been admonished, “if all your friends would jump off a bridge would you follow?” It should also be obvious that at face value that Jews, especially Orthodox Jews, ought to reject this idea as a matter of principle.
Appeals to consensus are common and relatively simply to assert, but those who rely on consensus rarely if ever acknowledge, address, or defend, the assumptions inherent with the invoking of consensus as a source – if not the determinant – of practical Jewish law. As I will demonstrate, appeals to consensus are laden with problematic logical and halakhic assumptions such that while “consensus” may constitute one factor in determining a specific psak, it is not nearly the definitive halakhic criterion its proponents would like to believe.
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Some people say that consensus has no role in science. I disagree. Thinking in historical terms, any new consensus begins with a scientific idea and gets larded with politics, exaggerations, implications and complications as it gathers momentum. Skeptics examine the theory and the observations and raise questions and concerns, and, should the facts warrant, propose a new explanation that better fits the facts.
One could say that the role of consensus in science is to be wrong. Historically, there are lots of examples, and maybe a few counter examples.
A better question might be the value of consensus in science.
I agree with you entirely. Science is building brick by brick, and for me to investigate if each of the other bricks had been laid properly would be like attempting to build the whole house on my own. All theories are only provisional, but if they are supported by evidence, have been replicated and have withstood attempts at falsification, then they are good explanations and may be relied upon until something better turns up.
Naturally there are exceptions like Richard Feynman, who declined to read up on any new subject before he tackled it, and Srinavath Ramanujan who in the absence of tuition reinvented mathematics.
Mike M
“All theories are only provisional, but if they are supported by evidence, have been replicated and have withstood attempts at falsification, then they are good explanations and may be relied upon until something better turns up.”
A very concise and useful description of the scientific process.
Thanks!
“if they are supported by evidence, have been replicated and have withstood attempts at falsification, then they are good explanations and may be relied upon”
The world waits for climate science to try this process.
PS, excellent post, Dr. Curry!
Judith, how would you (or did you) respond to the three questions you posted here from Verheggen et al’s poll?
Actually there are just two questions.
Good question. I have a problem with the categories, since for attribution I am around 50%, +/- about 25%. So i don’t fit comfortable in the categories as they are articulated in the survey. In terms of confidence, i would go with ‘very likely’ for my range, between 25% and 75%.
I am at 50% natural and 50% anthro myself – but I am just guessing, so my confidence is very low.
Here is what I find difficult to reconcile in my mind.
Over the last 20,000 years the average rate of sea level rise is 6 mm per year. That is 120 meters of sea level rise over 20,000 years.
119 meters (or slightly more) of that 120 meters of sea level rise is 100% natural.
Or 99.17% of the sea level rise is natural and 0.73% of the rise is anthro (and I am being generous).
Now how much of what is happening today is based on events of 10 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 700 years ago, etc?
I have no clue.
We know that temperature rise lags CO2 rise by about 700 years (at least in glacier ice cores).
So I wonder – what does it mean that the current sea level rate of 3 mm per year is 1/2 of the average rate over the last 20,000 years?
What does it mean that 99.17% of the sea level rise since 20,000 years ago is natural?
I don’t doubt for a second that humans are influencing the climate – but have no clue whether what humans have done since 1950 is showing up in the temperature data and sea level data today, or whether we will see a huge spike in 700 years (or 200 years) – etc.
The attribution question is the biggest and most important question in climate science research (to me) and I really don’t think we have a good handle on it.
Not only do I want to know how much of the warming since 1880 is natural versus human caused.
I would like to know of the human caused portion (whatever that is) – how much is caused by:
1. CO2 emissions.
2. Methane emissions
3. Waste heat (from air conditioning etc.)
4. Black carbon.
5. Land use changes like cutting down trees or asphalt and concrete.
6. You get the picture.
I read one paper to say that black carbon could be 25% of the warming humans caused (once it fell and changed albedo – not while it is in the air as an aerosol).
Anyway – just thought I would throw my 2 cents in.
Richard, not quibling with your comment except that I believe ice core data show co2 lags temperature increase by, on average, 800 years, not the other way around as you state.
Barnes, you are correct. Essay Cause and Effect, covering the Shakun paper proxy hash. Gives all relevant citations, and provides some non-parametric statistics to nail your excellent point.
Ah snap. You guys are right.
That is what I get for writing something off memory – I got it backwards!
Judith: What calculations lead to your numbers?
what numbers? with reference to the verheggen analysis, i used Fabius Maximus analysis
And that’s probably how many more respondents felt, that they weren’t comfortable with the categories as specified. So they would have to make a choice between category that came somewhat close to their personal estimate, or other, dunno, or unknown. Hence the large fraction of responses in those latter three categories.
This is not just mindreading, but based on comments from respondents and based on comparing the results of this question to those from Q3.
And that is why we thought it better to leave those latter three categories out, because its number is in all likelihood much higher than the numebr of respondents who are truly agnostic on the question of human GHG dominated warming.
However, if you agreed with the IPCC consensus, should be no problem clicking the box 76-100%.
Demonstrating that your survey was very poorly designed for actually determining how many respondents actually support what positions.
If it had been properly designed, you wouldn’t have to be “guessing” about who thought what, you’d have answers to tell you.
AK, “If it had been properly designed, you wouldn’t have to be “guessing” about who thought what, you’d have answers to tell you.”
I believe that is surprisingly difficult to do. Could be why there are Professionals in the field.
I thought the “Professionals in the field” were there to
helpput the proper spin on the results (by tuning the questions).My guess is that if all you want is honest answers to honest questions, it’s a lot easier to do.
Bart, the problem is you can’t impute opinions to people who don’t express them in this type of research.
However, throwing some out of the survey is really not kosher. You have a good solid percentage of those who were able to fit their opinion within the confines of the survey options. 66% of them in fact support the consensus view.
You can write pages and pages in a report on your opinions on those who couldn’t express an opinion. You already have written about the differences between those who have published frequently and those who have not.
But the consensus of those confident enough to say that half or more of recent global warming is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide is 66%.
“But the consensus of those confident enough to say that half or more of recent global warming is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide is 66%.”
Now Thomas, you know that is entirely too simple and elegant for a complex field like climate.
In your opinion, is the IPCC WGI5 SPM’s conclusion that
A) Probably correct
B) Maybe correct, maybe not
C) Probably not correct
D) No opinion
E) The question is too poorly framed to make sense.
That would tell you how people feel about the specific “consensus” The IPCC WGI5 SPM’s trying to sell. Then you could argue about whether those with “No opinion” and/or “too poorly framed” belong in the denominator.
Judith,
You wrote: “However, if you agreed with the IPCC consensus, should be no problem clicking the box 76-100%.”
Not necessarily. If the question had just been whether the GHG contribution is smaller or larger than 50% you’d have a point, but we had 6 ranges in total. If a respondent felt that it’s probably more than half but didn’t have a narrow range in mind they’d have a very similar dilemma in choosing a particular range. Many of them did choose a range (mostly in the middle of the three categories, as we also discuss in the paper), but many others didn’t want to pin themselves down with a range that was too narrow to their mind and chose one of the undetermined options (don’t know, unknown, other). I’ve explained why we are confident that this explanation holds for a large number of the undetermined responses: The open comments and the comparison with the other attribution question (Q3) – studiously ignored by everyone including you.
Nobody of my critics has directly addressed this reasoning. Neither has anybody offered an alternative reason why there was such a high fraction of undetermined responses for this question (and not for the others). Neither has anyone answered my question regarding a hypothetical alternative set of possible responses and what their consensus estimate would be in that case.
>”Nobody of my critics has directly addressed this reasoning.”
If you ask proper questions in a survey you don’t need to engage in “reasoning”/guesswork. You just tote up the responses and report the results without spinning.
>”Neither has anybody offered an alternative reason why there was such a high fraction of undetermined responses for this question (and not for the others).”
See above. Poor design. You need to do a better survey.
>”Neither has anyone answered my question regarding a hypothetical alternative set of possible responses and what their consensus estimate would be in that case.”
You are asking us to hypothesize on a hypothetical alternative set of possible responses and blah..blah..blah? WTF does that mean and why would we spend our time doing it?
I will help you, barty. If you want to find out how many of your respondents agree with whatever your definition of the consensus is, just freaking ask them. Give them your definition of the consensus and ask if they agree. What you have used is the cookie- lewandumpsky method. Make it sufficiently vague and complicated so that you can use “reasoning” to get the right answer.
AK, your phasing of the question is no improvement. Are you asking whether the respondent believes that the IPCC got the consensus view right, or are you asking what the respondent’s own opinion is? This would be a very poor poll question. I think we are more interested in the respondent’s own opinion on GHGs than in their opinion of the IPCC consensus, so the IPCC consensus should not be mentioned in the question. The poll did get the respondents’ opinions and the median view turned out to be very likely >50%.
Well what do you think. Don? Do most climate scientists share the view held by, Dr. Curry, that there isn’t much risk of severe impacts because of future AGW. Or are they more like the statements of most (if not all) of the major scientific organizations that represent climate scientists? Do you find you in congruent
Here is a sample:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
American Association for the Advancement of Science as the world’s largest general scientific society, adopted an official statement on climate change in 2006:
The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society….The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now.[38]
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies in 2008 published FASTS Statement on Climate Change[39] which states:
Global climate change is real and measurable…To reduce the global net economic, environmental and social losses in the face of these impacts, the policy objective must remain squarely focused on returning greenhouse gas concentrations to near pre-industrial levels through the reduction of emissions. The spatial and temporal fingerprint of warming can be traced to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, which are a direct result of burning fossil fuels, broad-scale deforestation and other human activity.
United States National Research Council through its Committee on the Science of Climate Change in 2001, published Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions.[40] This report explicitly endorses the IPCC view of attribution of recent climate change as representing the view of the scientific community:
The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century… The IPCC’s conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue.[40]
Royal Society of New Zealand having signed onto the first joint science academy statement in 2001, released a separate statement in 2008 in order to clear up “the controversy over climate change and its causes, and possible confusion among the public”:
The globe is warming because of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Measurements show that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are well above levels seen for many thousands of years. Further global climate changes are predicted, with impacts expected to become more costly as time progresses. Reducing future impacts of climate change will require substantial reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.[41]
The Royal Society of the United Kingdom has not changed its concurring stance reflected in its participation in joint national science academies’ statements on anthropogenic global warming. According to the Telegraph, “The most prestigious group of scientists in the country was forced to act after fellows complained that doubts over man made global warming were not being communicated to the public”.[42] In May 2010, it announced that it “is presently drafting a new public facing document on climate change, to provide an updated status report on the science in an easily accessible form, also addressing the levels of certainty of key components.”[43] The society says that it is three years since the last such document was published and that, after an extensive process of debate and review,[44][45] the new document was printed in September 2010. It summarises the current scientific evidence and highlights the areas where the science is well established, where there is still some debate, and where substantial uncertainties remain. The society has stated that “this is not the same as saying that the climate science itself is in error – no Fellows have expressed such a view to the RS”.[43] The introduction includes this statement:
There is strong evidence that the warming of the Earth over the last half-century has been caused largely by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, including agriculture and deforestation.
International science academies
African Academy of Sciences in 2007 was a signatory to the “statement on sustainability, energy efficiency, and climate change”. This joint statement of African science academies, was organized through the Network of African Science Academies. It’s stated goal was “to convey information and spur action on the occasion of the G8 Summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, in June 2007”.
A consensus, based on current evidence, now exists within the global scientific community that human activities are the main source of climate change and that the burning of fossil fuels is largely responsible for driving this change.[46]
European Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2007 issued a formal declaration on climate change titled Let’s Be Honest:
Human activity is most likely responsible for climate warming. Most of the climatic warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been caused by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Documented long-term climate changes include changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones. The above development potentially has dramatic consequences for mankind’s future.[47]
European Science Foundation in a 2007 position paper [48] states:
There is now convincing evidence that since the industrial revolution, human activities, resulting in increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases have become a major agent of climate change… On-going and increased efforts to mitigate climate change through reduction in greenhouse gases are therefore crucial.
InterAcademy Council As the representative of the world’s scientific and engineering academies,[49][50] the InterAcademy Council issued a report in 2007 titled Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future.
Current patterns of energy resources and energy usage are proving detrimental to the long-term welfare of humanity. The integrity of essential natural systems is already at risk from climate change caused by the atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases.[51] Concerted efforts should be mounted for improving energy efficiency and reducing the carbon intensity of the world economy.[52]
International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences (CAETS) in 2007, issued a Statement on Environment and Sustainable Growth:[53]
As reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), most of the observed global warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to human-produced emission of greenhouse gases and this warming will continue unabated if present anthropogenic emissions continue or, worse, expand without control. CAETS, therefore, endorses the many recent calls to decrease and control greenhouse gas emissions to an acceptable level as quickly as possible.
And, Don, please don’t explain it by referring to the consensus enforcement police or other related wild speculations..
Surely you don’t expect anybody to read all that crap, joey? I hope you wasted a lot of time pulling it together. We are talking about barty’s survey here.
66% matches up very well with the respondents to the Von Storch poll where a similar percentage marked either 6 or 7 on a scale from 1-7 that most of the recent warming or soon to be warming was anthropogenic. To get into the 80s percentiles you have to include those that marked 5 which is the lowest rating above neutral and doesn’t impress me as the response of someone that is 95% sure of it being fact.
Don, you asked for something that there is a consensus around.
I think there is a strong consensus around the following:
I. CO2 emissions lead to global warming.
II Global warming includes a number of significant risks from negative impacts.
III If we continue with our current rate of emissions those risks will increase as the earth warms
That’s sufficiently vague that I can sign on to all three, joey. That leaves the main issue, which is: What is the magnitude of the risk?
I am not convinced that the risk is sufficient to require the immediate and drastic action that the Chicken Littles are hollering about. I am not convinced that it’s the greatest threat faced by mankind. That puts me in
the consensus with the vast majority of the folks who put climate change at the bottom of their list of worries.
This is really ridiculous, coming from the author of the study:
“And that is why we thought it better to leave those latter three categories out, because its number is in all likelihood much higher than the numebr of respondents who are truly agnostic on the question of human GHG dominated warming.”
The individual respondents to the survey either support the consensus, or they don’t. If they are “agnostic”, if they “don’t know”, if they go for “unknown”, or “other”, then they do not support the consensus, period. There is plenty of room in the questions for those who support the consensus to indicate that they support the consensus.
This is the only reasonable interpretation of the results.
“The 797 respondents who are highly confident that more than 50% of the warming is human caused) are 43% of all 1,868 respondents (47% excluding the “don’t know” group). Hence this survey finds that slightly less than half of climate scientists surveyed agree with the AR5 keynote statement in terms of confidence in the attribution statement.”
Another great analysis by Prof Curry.
While I agree that understanding the consensus of relevant experts is an important input to the policy policy-making process, the term “consensus” has political overtones that don’t help. A “consensus” is important in Congress, or when Scouts are planning an outing — but less so in science.
More useful, imo, is Thomas Kuhn’s label “paradigm” for the current consensus in a field of science. We can analyze it in a similar way. How many scientists agree with it? What is their level of confidence in it? But a paradigm is just an agreement among professionals. Unlike “consensus” it does not have the sense of being ordained truth — vox populi vox dei.
Kuhn also has useful insights about why scientists often have a paradigm, and how difficult paradigms are to refute.
Here are some useful excerpts from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about paradigms and their overthrow.
Judith, Bart’s last name is Verheggen, not Verheggan.
Anderegg, Prall et al PNAS 2010 is really flawed. They drew 42 ‘deniers’ from signatories to a document that was signed by over 4,000 people including 72 Nobel Prize winners like Borlag, Pauling, etc., none of who were classified as ‘deniers’, strangely enough.
Verheggen et al replicates the results of Bray, von Storch et al 2008. The raw consensus of published climate scientists is 66%. Then the fun with crosstabs begins.
For the Verheggen and Bray von Storch studies, specialization in attribution is probably not required, as the ranges offered are broad enough to show broad opinion. I would assume people interested enough to become climate scientists would at least be interested enough to read studies on attribution and form an educated opinion.
All discussed in some detail here: https://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/?s=verheggen
You would be surprised. Prior to 2009, i had only read a handful of the primary papers on attribution and had not even read the IPCC section very carefully. Nevertheless, I had formed an opinion based on what I had read and I what I heard discussed by the ‘community’. I suspect many people with a strong opinion on this haven’t even done as much as I had prior to 2009. Climategate motivated me to take a much deeper look into this issue, as well as being involved in some primary research on this topic.
And of course, reading the papers isn’t the same as replication. Reading flawed papers, and most are flawed, is no way to produce quality science. Opinions formed from reading flawed studies are worthy of no more respect from the public than the flawed studies.
> But a paradigm is just an agreement among professionals.
Not at all. It’s a disciplinary matrix of implicit of explicit commitments which has an epistemic and even a cognitive impact on researchers. And by “researchers” we must include more than professionals, but auditors, denizens, etc.
One does not simply step away from one’s own paradigm and look at it from Mordor’s viewpoint.
Must we include MSM as part of etc? http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0828/An-emerging-challenge-to-science-s-credibility
From your own link, Danny:
Here’s one definition of conceit, BTW:
Unduly favorable estimation of one’s own abilities or worth; overly positive self-regard.
Willard,
All I did was ask you a simple question and provide a link to an MSM. I provided no context, took no exception, applied no endorsement.
No need to rip off one’s shirt that I can see.
Oh, and with this: “Here’s one definition of conceit, BTW:
Unduly favorable estimation of one’s own abilities or worth; overly positive self-regard.”
I agree.
Since when is Christian Science Monitor part of the MSM, Danny?
Willard,
You don’t consider CSM as ‘main stream’? Since it’s implied by this comment that we must use your definition (even though yours is unprovided), is that your conceit showing?
a wiki, for your enjoyment and consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_media
“Mainstream media (MSM) is mass media reflective of prevailing currents of thought, influence, or activity.[1] It may be contrasted with alternative media which may contain content discordant with prevailing views.”
and to make it easy, wiki defines ‘mass media’ thusly: “The mass media are diversified media technologies that are intended to reach a large audience by mass communication.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media
and finally: “Alternative media differ from mainstream media as it brings to light non covered news[[1]] along one or more of the following dimensions: their content, aesthetic, modes of production, modes of distribution, and audience relations.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_media
Do you consider Christian Science Monitor as MSM, Danny?
Why do you still misrepresent shirt ripping?
Willard,
Why do you continue to avoid questions, Willard?
Why should I answer loaded questions that help you peddle in your CAGW meme, Danny?
My last two questions were simple, and yet you fail to answer them.
Willard,
“Why should I answer loaded questions that help you peddle in your CAGW meme, Danny?
My last two questions were simple, and yet you fail to answer them.”
And yet you fail to answer mine, Willard. Integrity and all that.
Willard: Not at all. It’s a disciplinary matrix of implicit of explicit commitments which has an epistemic and even a cognitive impact on researchers. And by “researchers” we must include more than professionals, but auditors, denizens, etc.
It does not get clearer than that!
> It does not get clearer than that!
Looks like you have not found the round Tuit to read the relevant chapter in the Eternal Tension, MattStat. Have you?
Willard,
“Not at all. {A paradigm is} a disciplinary matrix of implicit of explicit commitments which has an epistemic and even a cognitive impact on researchers.”
I said that a paradigm — per Thomas Kuhn — is a belief or agreement among scientists. It can be found through surveys and has effects as described by Thomas Kuhn. Your rebuttal is reification — dreaming up abstractions and thinking they are real. This doesn’t help the discussion, imo.
“And by “researchers” we must include more than professionals, but auditors, denizens, etc.”
It’s Thomas Kuhn’s term (in this context), so he got to define what it means. If you disagree it’s clearer to say “I, Willard, believe Kuhn was wrong about the basis of a paradigm..”
“One does not simply step away from one’s own paradigm and look at it from Mordor’s viewpoint.”
I don’t know what you mean by that, but it looks absurd.
> I said that a paradigm — per Thomas Kuhn — is a belief or agreement among scientists.
Actually, you omitted the “belief” part when you said that a paradigm was a just an agreement among professionals. It is not an agreement comprised as the explicit agreement of a consensusal decision-making:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making
Please recall that Kuhn was more interested in a more implicit agreement:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/#3
Your claim that unlike “consensus” it does not have the sense of being ordained truth makes little sense, if all you have is Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. So, in a nutshell, you are wrong:
(1) in having claimed that a paradigm was just an agreement among professionals;
(2) in trying to put a wedge between a Kuhnian agreement and Kuhn’s conception of consensus.
Even shorter, dear Editor, you’re using an equivocation over the concepts of agreement and consensus to entertain the myth that Denizens the vox dei over AGW.
***
The best in all this is that Kuhn’s concept of paradigm may not even apply to AGW. But hey, whatever rocks Denizens’ boat.
Go team!
Willard: Have you?
Yes.
Then show me, MattStat.
Willard: Then show me, MattStat.
Why? Nobody cares whether you are persuaded that I have read anything in particular.
As you have quoted, Kuhn replaced the undefinable word “paradigm” with an undefinable assemblage of words including “disciplinary matrix”. For some reason you still give the wrong title to the essay: it’s “The Essential Tension”.
For better coverage of the history that is in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, read “Inward Bound” by Abraham Pais, along with his bios of Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. Another book on the related philosophical matters is “Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge” by Deborah Mayo. For aspects of probabilistic reasoning consider “Physics and Chance” by Lawrence Sklar.
> Nobody cares whether you are persuaded that I have read anything in particular.
Nobody cares whether anyone is persuaded by anything, MattStat, perhaps even oneself. People care even less about gratuitous criticism. If you’re interested in more than handwaving to Reis, perhaps you might cite Second Thoughts on Paradigms:
https://www.pravo.unizg.hr/_download/repository/Second_Thoughts_on_Paradigms.pdf
instead of The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research:
http://www.philosophy.org.vt.edu/files/8813/4455/4391/Kuhn.pdf
The second has more to do with the distinction between applied and theorical science than with paradigms per se.
Thank you for your correction.
Willard,
“Your claim that unlike “consensus” it does not have the sense of being ordained truth makes little sense, if all you have is Kuhn’s concept of paradigm.”
Your quote you cite as evidence has no relevance to this statement.
If anything it describes a paradigm as the opposite of “ordained truth” (e.g., like “Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computations of plantery positions, Lavoisier’s application of the balance, and Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field”).
> If anything it describes a paradigm as the opposite of “ordained truth” […]
If that’s the case, then this description contradicts the claim that unlike “consensus” it [vox populi] does not have the sense of being ordained truth, which characterizes “consensus” as an ordained truth.
This would also establish that what I said about this claim (it makes little sense, if all you have is Kuhn’s concept of paradigm) is quite relevant indeed.
People.
none of you even come close to being able to square off against willard in a philosophical discussion. pikers.
a better option is to ask him what he thinks. youll learn something.
I did
The blind leading the blind. I would say the UHI is the only effect humans have had on the climate.
The GHG effect is caused by the climate not the cause of the climate. They have it backwards.
By the end of this decade AGW theory should be proven to be wrong as the global temperature trend will be down.
“…here is my prediction for climate going forward, this decade will be the decade of cooling.”
– Salvatore del Prete, 11/23/2010
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/andrew-dessler-debating-richard-lindzen/#comment-8875
Judith –
Two questions. The first is w/r/t this comment of yours:
==> “I guess the real lesson from this paper is that you can get any kind of twaddle published, if you keep trying and submit it to different journals.”
How would that logic apply to the Richard Tol’s article that you linked?
The second question is how do you respond to this opinion of Richard Tol’s?:
Do you think that 47% is consistent with “almost unanimously?”
Joshua
Here is a useful article that puts your tol quote into an overall context
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jun/05/contrarians-accidentally-confirm-global-warming-consensus
I would imagine that a very high percentage of climate papers Used would cite man as the culprit for warmimg.
As you may know I read a lot of science papers as research for my various articles. There are a fair few that are somewhat ambiguous and others where the reference to agw seems to be tacked on almost as an afterthought as the narrative doesn’t really lend itself easily to that conclusion.
I think it would have been useful to have teams of two that consisted of a sceptic and a warmist to examine the papers which need to be wide ranging and drawn at random. These would also need to determine if the reference to agw was wholly germane to the paper or an afterthought.
I have no reason to doubt John cook veracity. However it would be most interesting to have it done again using an agreed methodology whereby only those papers that have an unambiguous result were used. The discarded papers ought to be included in the total figures.
I would still expect the consensus to be very high but from my own experience I would magine there would be a lot of invalid papers.
Tonyb
tony –
==> “it would be most interesting to have it done again using an agreed methodology whereby only those papers that have an unambiguous result were used.”
Honestly, tony, I think it’s all mostly irrelevant, and amusingly indicative of how juvenile the climate wars are.
The constant bickering between “skeptics” and “realists” about quantifying precisely the magnitude of the “consensus” seems more like just pure tribalism than anything else to me. (And I find it particularly amusing since so many “skeptics” say that the whole notion of quantifying the “consensus” is antithetical to “pure” science and a fallacious “appeal to authority” – before they turn around and spend tons o’ energy bickering about the magnitude of the “consensus.”)
I find it all to be evidence of the ubiquitous identity-oriented behaviors (identity-defense and identity-aggression) in the climate wars….in contrast to actual meaningful discussion about different perspectives on the science.
AFAIC, it seems pretty obvious (that as Richard Tol says) there is a high prevalence of shared perspective among published experts that ACO2 poses risks. That prevalence of shared view is of some use for me in evaluating probabilities, even as I’m well aware that such a “consensus” is not dispositive. It means that if I see a “skeptic” making a technical argument that I can’t understand alongside making the argument all the experts that disagree with him/her are either corrupt, stupid, or intent on destroying capitalism – then I can gain something of a foothold on the veracity of their reasoning by considering the probabilities of something that I can get a foot hold on (i.e., the theory that so many experts are corrupt, stupid, or desirous of destroying capitalism). Of course, if they make an implausible argument about why their view of the science is out of step with the “consensus” of experts it doesn’t prove that their technical argument is false. But again, it’s information.
IMO, the issue of the precise prevalence of agreement among “experts” becomes outsized in comparison to the question of whether the existence of a “consensus” is useful. It is to be expected, IMO. I think that it happens because like so much else in the climate wars, bickering about the “consensus” easily becomes a proxy for identity battles. It’s got some very key elements, primarily: ambiguous terminology that enables talking past each other, poor treatment of uncertainties, self-victimization, personality-politics (and I’m sure a few others if I thought about it more).
Joshua, I agree that “it’s all mostly irrelevant.” The issue is that the alleged consensus has been frequently used as a major argument in favour of emissions-reductions programmes and other socio-economic policies; and generally in favour of policies which I see as damaging on balance, and an inappropriate response at best. For too many observers and commentators, acceptance of a 97% consensus that CAGW is occurring is an easy way to avoid having to develop an informed opinion on the issue, particularly when they find the alleged consensus politically useful. Faustino.
Joshua, you just pulled the Mark I Mod I Alarmist bait and switch.
Most who have studied the subject are willing to say that humans are responsible for some level of climate change.
That is very different from saying it poses risk. There may be a consensus on that–but you don’t know and neither do I because the question is never asked in surveys of this sort nor in literature reviews laughingly conducted by people like Cook or Anderegg.
Tom –
My mistake. I was wrong to imply that Tol’s statement that there is “almost unanimous” agreement among published authors that climate change is happening, and dominantly anthropogenically attributable, means that he also thinks it is “almost unanimous” among published authors that ACO2 emissions pose a risk.
Tol doesn’t necessarily agree with me in thinking that it would be illogical to believe that recent climate change is anthropogenically dominated and still think that anthropogenically caused climate change poses no risk. And I can’t assume that he would apply that logic.
But what I find amusing is the side issue; where so many “skeptics” that are active in the “skept-o-sphere” say that they don’t doubt that ACO2 emissions cause warming (something that many, many other “skeptics” who don’t post comments in the “skept-o-sphere” do, in fact, doubt) but that we don’t know the magnitude of the effect, and then turn around and argue with certainty that there is no significant risk or that the risks of ACO2 emissions mitigation certainly outweigh the benefits.
Oh, and btw – interestingly, of course you must realize that the following statement of yours is not consistent with what Tol has said:
Michael –
==> “The issue is that the alleged consensus …”
I don’t agree that there is a “the issue.” I think that there are a lot of issues involving the question of “consensus” and climate change – among them fallacious arguments that are frequently presented by “skeptics.”
Joshua “I am not an alarmist”
See his postings at ATTP under Calling out alarmism yesterday.
Reason
An alarmist believes the sea will rise 20 metres in the next 100 years and we will all fry due the 6 degrees of temperature rise this century.
Joshua say he believes this is true and as it is true he is therfore not an alarmist.
There is a fault with this reasoning somewhere but as he will never see it He feels we will have to agree that in our world as well he is not an alarmist.
I’m not sorry Joshua but you are an a,armistice, plain and simple
No polemics, No cheap shots just the plain unvarnished truth.
Saying you are not when you are does not make your assertion true.
You are judged by what you do not by what you say.
angech –
==> “Joshua say he believes this is true and as it is true he is therfore not an alarmist.”
Not only are you wrong about what I believe, but you are also wrong about what I have said.
How can you judge me on the basis of what I believe if you are completely wrong in your determinations about what it is that I believe?
This only further reinforces your unfortunate acceptance of polemics as manner of discourse.
Joshua,
I’ve seen this in action, elsewhere, applied to me. And yet, I don’t recall it being documented as being an issue by you then so why complain now?
This type of thing does seem to be a rather classic technique
I’ve never seen Joshua say that he believes this or anything that could be interpreted as Joshua believing this. However (and I’ve been trying this recently) getting the person who makes this type of claim to either prove it or retract it, is virtually impossible. There are, I guess, a number of possible interpretations. The person is dishonest. The person has problems with reading comprehension. The person believes that making such claims is alright, even if not true, because this is an important issue and the end justifies the means. The latter, however, would be remarkable if true, given how much time the same people spend complaining about the ethics, honesty, and behaviour of those they regularly criticise.
> However (and I’ve been trying this recently) getting the person who makes this type of claim to either prove it or retract it, is virtually impossible.
You mean like when Danny put words into Hansen’s mouth that he never retracted?
INTEGRITY ™ – Ask Simple Questions
Willard,
Please refer to the ATTP w/r/t ‘reading comprehension’. What ‘Danny’ did was quote a Salon article (so if an error was made the error was made in quoting that article). Danny has not talked with Dr. Hansen. Danny has not found a copy of the book, which Danny was reminded was not written by Dr. Hansen and which leads Danny to then fear that others may have put words in Dr. Hansen’s mouth. Others have quoted blogs and more recent articles all which appear to have actually put words in Hansens’ mouth. So at this point, Danny is not sure what, or whom to believe and lacking the direct source I see no likely change to that coming soon.
So apparently, there is a reading comprehension issue on the part of Willard, or alternatively Willard is choosing to misrepresent what Danny actually did which might make one question Willard’s motives. Knowing you’re not big on answering questions but at the risk of that possibility, which of those two (queue the false choice response so please feel free to provide an alternative) do you think it might be? (A very simple question)
> What ‘Danny’ did was quote a Salon article
More than that, Danny:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/representative-concentration-pathways/#comment-61365
Will you try to wiggle your way out of your commitment by trying to split hairs over the meaning of “I stand by what I read” instead of correcting your misrepresentation of Hansen’s views, Danny?
The problem with the consensus is the question of what the consensus means. The global warmers have been feasting on ambiguity because biguity doesn’t work in their favor.
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=wps-69-2014.pdf&site=24
“In all four cases, the expected impacts cross zero somewhere between 1°C and 2°C of global warming – suggesting net positive impacts for milder warming for AR2 and AR3, and showing such for AR4 and AR5. Impacts get progressively more negative for greater warming, but only become statistically significantly different from zero somewhere between 3°C and 4°C.”
Let’s parse this and see what it means.
1. 1°C – very beneficial
2. 2°C – beneficial
3. 3°C – 50/50
4. 4°C – mildly harmful
Presumably the higher the temperature the more “harm” is obtained.
The surveys, once you get past the cherry picking of participants, inclusion of the ignorant, concluding the incorrect, and all the other errors that invalidate them, hit the issue of what are they really asking.
They typically are asking about support of AGW. This is like asking if you like sunshine or not. The response is pretty much meaningless.
Two questions have to be asked:
1. Does CO2 caused AGW warm the planet?
2. Will the warming be 4°C or greater?
If the answer is yes/no this indicates beneficial warming. This is an argument against doing anything about CO2 and is an even stronger statement than refuting AGW since losing out on potential benefits is indefensible.
Only the yes/yes answer is supportive of CAGW and this will be a small minority and virtually 0 when environmentalists and neo-luddites are factored out (members of the climate cult).
The bottom line is support for AGW is in most cases a vote for more beneficial CO2.
Danny,
What you said was
So – as I think Willard has pointed out – what you had was an article in which the author of a book that quoted Hansen was interviewed about 13 years after talking to Hansen. People pointed out numerous sources that claimed that Hansen had not said what he was claimed to have said, and yet you decided to stand by what you read in the article, despite it being someone’s recollection of a conversation 13 years earlier?
ATTP,
“despite it being someone’s recollection of a conversation 13 years earlier?”
and modified how many years later, via what, a different recollection much further removed from the original?
Maybe an attorney could jump in here, but would a credible source be expected to remember more clearly a conversation at some point nearer the occurrence of that conversation or much farther removed? Conversation took place 1988, article written +/- 2002, correction +/-2011. “”although the book text is correct, in remembering our original conversation, during a casual phone interview with a Salon magazine reporter in 2001 I was off in years.” (Note, it this correction it does not state ‘doubling of CO2’ and only refers to being “off in years”)
I do not, and have not defended what was said in that article. In fact, I’ve pointed out quite clearly that there are two differing recollections. But I have and still do defend that what I did was quote Salon. If Salon made the error, take it up with them. I have zero proof they did so. The evidence provided to the contrary was a link to another blog (which I don’t know if I should trust any more than Salon), a link to another publication’s article (not sure about trusting that), and absolutely no link to the source (the book itself, which once again I was reminded was not written by Hansen so is also someone else putting words in Hansen’s mouth). So you’ll just have to forgive that I know not whom, or what source to trust at this point.
Yours and Willard’s misrepresentation of what was I actually did is common the ‘climate wars’ and it says more about you (IMO) than it does about my reliance on a MSM article dated from 2002 (wondering why it took near 13 years for a supposed correction?).
Read this and look in the mirror, ATTP.
Danny –
==> “Joshua,
I’ve seen this in action, elsewhere, applied to me. And yet, I don’t recall it being documented as being an issue by you then so why complain now?”
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “this” but I assume you mean claims made about your beliefs that are inaccurate.
And I’m not entirely sure what you meant by “it,” but I’ll assume you are asking me why I didn’t complain when people were making claims about your beliefs that are inaccurate.
I think that you’re referring to a particular thread over at ATTP, in which I participated a bit in discussing with you the term “alarmist.” I didn’t take the time in that thread to judge whether there were inaccurate claims made about your beliefs. However, it will suffice for me to assume that rather obviously, you are tbe best judge of your own beliefs and that anyone who claims that they know your beliefs better than you know your beliefs is more than likely making a bad argument.
This gets a bit tricky, as sometimes when person A characterizes someone person B’s beliefs, what person A is really doing is trying to point out Person B ‘s lack of acceptance of the logical implications about what he/she does say about their beliefs. Such problems develop very frequently, and they can’t be resolved, IMO, if the participants are not engaging in good faith.
It was interesting to me that as you were being treated rather rudely by some folks over at ATTP, I was being treated rather rudely by some folks over at The Blackboard. I felt that not only was I being treated rudely, but that people were applying fallacious reasoning to impugn my character, motives, morals, intelligence, reasoning, background, etc. – because they were intent on engaging in bad faith. It was not lost on me that from a surface level – without considering the arguments being made in more depth – there was a striking similarity between how you were being treated and how I was being treated. In fact, I exchanged a couple of emails on the topic – because the similarities were rather striking.
So does that mean that you were having fallacious reasoning being applied to impugn your character, morals, motives, intelligence, reasoning, background etc. in bad faith?
Does it mean that while the attacks being made against me were entirely justified by my morals, reasoning, lack of intelligence, etc., but that the attacks being made against you were explainable by tribalism among your interlocutors?
I don’t have an answer, and I think that some kind of “objective” answer must be contingent on a careful examination of the arguments being exchange at each site, respectively, but I also have little doubt that what appears to be a surface level similarity was not merely reflective of superficial patterns. There is also little doubt, IMO, that our ability to recognize “unfair” treatment is influenced by our identity-related orientation, as is the likelihood of us speaking about our perceptions of “unfairness” when we do recognize their occurrence.
It is when I see people who attempt to control for their own obvious identity-oriented biases that I sit up and take notice. For me, people who display those behaviors are the ones who have the most to contribute to good faith discussion.
Danny,
I’m not trying to misrepresent you, so how did I do so? My recollection is that you suggested that Hansen had said Manhattan would be underwater by now. You then corrected that to the West Side Highway. People pointed out that this came from an article with the recollections of someone who had spoken to Hansen 13 years earlier, and that there were numerous sources suggesting that Hansen had not said what the Salon article claimed he had said. You then said that you stood by what you had read in the Salon article.
Now, of course, you were quite right that the Salon article had indeed said what you claimed it had said. That isn’t disputed. However, you never quite seemed willing to fully retract your suggestion that Hansen had actually said this.
Feel free to correct my recollection if you wish to do so.
ATTP,
First, I have not fully retracted as I have no way of knowing (without putting words in others peoples mouths which seems to be a point of contention with some) who’s recollection is accurate and in what time. So I stand by the fact that I did indeed quote Salon. If Salon was inaccurate please provide a copy of a letter to them disputing the quotation.
Second, that you chose to cut off conversation on your site and then wish to continue that conversation here is of interest and makes one wonder why you would chose to do so?
Willard chose to misrepresent what actually occurred by modification with the implication that I somehow created the wording of the Salon article. This, I did not do, and I only quoted it. That you chose to chime in in support of Willard’s position led me to suggest a mirror might be a fine tool of choice.
See: http://judithcurry.com/2015/08/27/the-conceits-of-consensus/#comment-727836
I didn’t and don’t stand by what was written. I stand by the fact that there was a quote provided by others. Now, today (and the recent days past) I’m not sure which source to accept. The one which occurred nearest the date of the event of 1988? The modification some 13 years later? And again, I remind that the modification (See sks article cited by others) “although the book text is correct, in remembering our original conversation, during a casual phone interview with a Salon magazine reporter in 2001 I was off in years.” does not state a doubling of CO2!
So, ATTP, which is correct? The original Salon article? The evidence of SKS as quoted above (sans CO2 reference)? The book which puts words in Hansen’s mouth?
Lol. It just cannot get worse.
> I have not fully retracted as I have no way of knowing (without putting words in others peoples mouths which seems to be a point of contention with some) who’s recollection is accurate and in what time.
Since Danny’s source might be more right about Jim than Jim himself, there’s no way in the world Danny might need to revise his claim about:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/representative-concentration-pathways/#comment-60961
At least Danny admitted that his memory was off regarding Manhattan. It was more West Side Highway. That the Salon article got it all wrong is no problem for Danny: he’s only a peddler of the CAGW meme, after all.
Still, as Very Tall observed:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/representative-concentration-pathways/#comment-61042
Willard,
Reading comprehension???????? “(presumably) covered by the consensus”. (is there a need for posting the definition of presumably?)
Did I not then explore what others considered the ‘consensus’ to cover wherin VTG indicated the SPM? Is it an unfair question to ask what the ‘consensus’ covers? Is it a reasonable question to ask? Does it include the scientists? Their work product only? Where does it begin, and where does it end? If it covers the SPM does that also include the policymakers themselves?
As ATTP suggested in the RCP topic ‘tactic’s’ are of interest. So the generality of the term ‘consensus’ as tactically utilized by those more climate concerned should also be of interest.
Simple question, Willard, what does the consensus cover, and what time frame? (Somehow, I don’t expect an answer?)
This, for me, is quite apt in the topic of conceits of. So help me sort out ‘my own house’ by providing information and perspectives.
Of course it can, JCH, and neverendingly so.
> Did I not then explore what others considered the ‘consensus’ to cover wherin VTG indicated the SPM?
Didn’t you simply peddle into that thread at AT’s, Danny? How does “but Hay” amount to a retraction of the claim that Hansen’s paper represent the consensus position? Do you recall what Very Tall responded to your misrepresentation of Hay? Here:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/representative-concentration-pathways/#comment-61028
Why have you switched to “but Al Gore” instead of answering Very Tall’s comment, Danny?
Willard,
What does the consensus cover? Whom? And over what time?
Integrity, and all!
Danny,
You claimed I had misrepresented you. I don’t think I have. You could either explain how I have, or you could acknowledge that I haven’t.
What I choose to do on my site is entirely up to me. I didn’t really wish to continue it here. I was really responding to your response to Willard. I wasn’t actually thinking of you when I wrote my original comment and it isn’t really what I was getting at. However, if you are going to provide an example of someone making an alarmist claim, it would seem better to find an actual example, not someone’s hazy recollection of an example.
What’s this got to do with me? I didn’t bring it up as an example. If you want to provide an example of some kind of alarmist quote, it’s up to you to show that it really is a valid example. Not up to me to show that the hazy recollection you’ve chosen to provide isn’t correct.
ATTP,
The non answer to my question is sufficient. If you don’t know or are unwilling to state which is correct then you obviously have no idea that my quotation of the Salon article is either. And who brought it up here? Then who chose to chime in? And who’s responsible for the ‘hazy recollections’ (assuming they are). There was no follow up regarding doubling of CO2, so was the ‘correction’ equally hazy?
You are correct that what you chose to do at/with your site is up to you. But that you chose to reinvigorate the conversation here in support of Willard, speaks volumes. It’s quite interesting (at least to me) that you chose to do so here. Lacking evidence to the contrary, it goes to motive and the ‘tactics’ you rallied against in discussion of RCP’s. Should you disagree, then please indicate the reasoning behind your choice.
I’m still seeking “sorting out my own house” by gaining an understanding of whom, what, and for what time frames the ‘consensus’ covers. My impression was it covered the science and the scientists along with their mouthpieces. VTG indicates it also covers the SPM (I’d not even considered that). Exactly how large is this blanket?
All this discussion of Hansen is interesting – but I tend to believe he isn’t a complete idiot and accept the Skeptical Science version based on the “stopped clock” theory (they have to be right once in a while – if only by accident).
From what I can tell Hansen is going to walk away from this clean on the drowned highway side of things.
West Side Highway, doubled CO2, 40 years. Not going to hit 560 PPM, ever. The worst it will be by 2028 is 430 PPM. He’s off the hook and New Yorkers are safe.
Now the CO2 level side of the prediction is interesting. Since it was predicated on a doubling by 2028 – it is pretty obvious that the predictions of CO2 rise are way off. The prediction was made in 1988, the CO2 level was 352 PPM. The .Hansen 40 year estimate requires a 5.2 PPM/Y increase.
The CO2 level now is 400, it has increased 1.78 PPM/Y since 1988. Based on a 5.2 PPM/Y increase it should be 492.4 right now.
The 940 PPM RCP8.5 prediction of CO2 is in line with a 5.2 PPM/y increase starting in 1988. It is not in line with a 1.78 PPM/Y increase. The Hansen prediction assumes a 5.2 PPM/Y increase which is 292% of 1.78 PPM/Y, the actual annual average increase. That is a big error. It is really off. It is worse than guessing. It is wrong. And further – it is pretty obvious the RCP8.5 scenario was derived from this sort of misguided thought process and that the underlying incorrect assumptions haven’t been questioned.
Why isn’t anyone calling these clowns onto the carpet?????
1.78 PPM/Y ≠ 5.2 PPM/Y, CO2 ISN”T GOING TO HIT 940 PPM in 2100, NOT NOW, NOT EVER, NEVER!!!
Why doesn’t anyone make the bozos at the IPCC clean up their predictions?
Danny,
You were trying to give an example of someone saying something alarmist. You haven’t done so. If you were really interested in doing so, you would put the effort into actually doing so. Someone’s recollection of what they think someone else has said is not an example. I don’t need to do anything other than point out that your example is no such thing.
ATTP,
That you are making the choice to not accept an article written 13 years ago but are willing to accept the ‘correction’ to that article which was ‘recollected’ a couple years ago stands in exactly the same light you’re shining on me. Why? Well that goes to motive, wouldn’t you agree?
The questions were simple, and we know how Willard gets all worked up about not addressing the simple questions. Which is correct? Salon, the SKS which does not include doubling of CO2 in the quotation, or the book? If you don’t know, that’s perfectly okay to say.
In order to ‘put in the work’ it would be helpful to know the bounds. So to make sure I meet the specifications I need to have an understanding of what the consensus covers, whom, and the duration. Apparently, according to some, the SPM would be an acceptable document (do you agree?) but without an understanding of those bounds I wouldn’t want to waste your time or mine.
Thank you.
Danny,
I have no idea what you’re getting at here. I have no reason to think that the Salon article wasn’t a reasonable representation of an interview with someone. My very simply point was that someone’s recollection of another person saying something alarmist is not really evidence that that other person said something alarmist.
I think you’re making too big a deal of this consensus thing. The SPM is – from what I’ve seen – a reasonable representation of a consensus position. Personally, I don’t really think in terms of a consensus. It is always moving. New papers appear and new research is done. However, the most basic form of the consensus in this topic is that we are warming and that it is mostly anthropogenic.
ATTP,
“I have no reason to think that the Salon article wasn’t a reasonable representation of an interview with someone.” And that, in a nutshell, was why I quoted it. And I stand by it as a choice for that very reason along with the supplemental information that in the SKS article (some many years later) the ‘correction’ to the ‘mis-remembered’ Salon article contained a quote that did not in any way refer to doubling of CO2.
And this: “Personally, I don’t really think in terms of a consensus. It is always moving. ” IT IS ALWAYS MOVING (wish I knew how to bold) is the heart of my point. Does it cover the science? Sure. The scientists when speaking with journalists? Not sure. The mouthpieces, such as Al Gore in his Nobel Speech (this was where I was going). Only when convenient. And Al Gore’s choice of his words (not words placed in his mouth) when they turned out to be inaccurate or at the very least, premature, were inconvenient.
So I thank you for what I perceive as an honest answer. I only wish you’d made the choice to step in with words to this effect at your house, but whatever. You do what you want with your site.
Oh, and by the way, the consensus IMO cannot cover ‘new work’ unless the Cook work is revised as it was a survey of history. But ‘tactically’ it is applied forward. And I’d find it an ever so respectable move on your part to list it equally to the ‘tactics’ applied vs. RCP’s. It’s all part of the ‘climate wars’.
“However, the most basic form of the consensus in this topic is that we are warming and that it is mostly anthropogenic.” makes sense to me.
HTML <b> Tag
AK,
Thank you. It was not my intention to yell, so this should help going forward. It’s appreciated!
You’re welcome.
Joshua, your English needs a bit of explanation.
Do you mean “and half the published papers almost unanimously” which would agree with 47%
Or do I read you as l
” last century and a half” ?
Aside from this fun nit picking the answers to your first question is simply that Richard Toll’s article is not rubbish. The support for this is that you are trying to attack it and have no credibility due to your perceived bias. Therefore his article must be good.
To the second you are mixing your metaphors. You confuse published papers seeking to test what caused climate change (which are very few) with papers mentioning climate change (which are a lot) with a survey of something totally different which was what do climate scientists themselves think of attribution.
To repeat your discovery , only 47% of climate scientists in the survey felt mankind was the dominant cause.
Richard Toll is entitled to his description, your comparison is illiterate, unmathematical and undeserved.
angech –
My point was that to the extent that the existence of a “consensus” is meaningful, what matters (to me at least) is not the bickering about the exact quantification, but the (imo) rather obvious conclusion that the vast majority of published authors agree that the effect of ACO2 dominates recent climate change.
Now that prevalence should be viewed in context. One aspect of the context is that to some degree, by looking at the prevalence in the literature we don’t necessarily get a complete picture of opinions among all scientists with expertise in the field. Another part of the context is that even the prevalence of opinion among scientists with expertise in the field isn’t something that should be considered dispositive.
Another part of the context is that many “skeptics” explain their lack of alignment with the prevalent view among experts by making implausible arguments about so many scientists being corrupt, stupid, or incompetent.
Another part of the context is that so many “skeptics” argue that considering the prevalence of agreement among experts is either anti-science or a fallacious “appeal to authority,” along with amusingly spending tons o’ time bickering about quantifying the prevalence of consensus.
Another part of the context is that the identity-protective behaviors that we see in the bickering about the “consensus” fits so well into the patterns that go along with cultural cognition more generally in so many contexts.
There are many interesting aspects of the consensus bickering.
Joshua writes- ” but the (imo) rather obvious conclusion that the vast majority of published authors agree that the effect of ACO2 dominates recent climate change.”
My response- Your “obvious conclusion” is meaningless without a significant narrowing of variables.
Danny,
Likewise, but I’m not sure that it’s something worth saying.
I shouldn’t defend my moderation decisions, but there were two main reasons for cutting it off. It appeared to simply be going in circles and I didn’t see much point in it continuing. It’s not as if I hadn’t asked people to draw it to a close. Also – as Joshua has pointed out – people were responding somewhat rudely to you, and I didn’t particularly want it to get any worse. You can take it or leave it; stay away or come back; it makes no different to me.
This I don’t understand
I have no recollection of making a mistake or of being asked to own up to a mistake. Maybe you could actually point out what mistake I made and where I was asked to own up to it. Bear in mind that you have now accussed me of misrepresenting you and accussed me of not owning up to a mistake. I’ve asked twice that you clarify in what way I’ve misrepresented you or to retract that. I don’t recall you doing either. Now I’m going to ask that you point ou where I made a mistake that – after being asked repeatedly – I wouldn’t own up to. Could we at least resolve one of these, because being accused of things that I don’t think I have actually done is what motivated my first comment on this post.
Hmmm, maybe not that complimentary, but it’s hard to know how to describe those who think that someone’s recollection of what someone else said many years previously, is particularly strong evidence of that person actually saying it. There are plenty of examples of people claiming I’ve said things that I haven’t. None of these are evidence that I’ve actually said what was claimed. I don’t see how this is all that complicated.
More Josh dishonesty:
“they don’t doubt that ACO2 emissions cause warming (something that many, many other “skeptics” who don’t post comments in the “skept-o-sphere” do, in fact, doubt) but that we don’t know the magnitude of the effect, and then turn around and argue with certainty that there is no significant risk or that the risks of ACO2 emissions mitigation certainly outweigh the benefits. ”
How about giving us the breakdown Josh? Which skeptics argue this regularly?
Asking someone to provide evidence of the risks is nowhere close to arguing that there is no risk, let alone doing so “with certainty”. But such an assessment doesn’t fit your narrative, does it.
Don’t you have a kids birthday to do somewhere?
Danny
A couple of weeks ago there was a long discussion at wuwt about the supposed claim by Hansen. Did you see it? I you didn’t I will try and hunt it out for you.
( I know that was a question but neither you nor I mind sttaightforward questions )
Tonyb
Tony,
I don’t recall reading that which you reference, but I read constantly and my retention is maybe 10%. I would appreciate a link.
And if you ever have a question for me, please feel free to ask away.
Danny
Here it is
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/26/dr-james-hansens-recent-alarm-of-catastrophic-co2-driven-sea-level-rise-looks-to-just-be-spurious-correlation-in-his-own-mind/
It mentions the salon article but gets interesting when it discusses The height of the west side highay and various commenters then add in other perspectives.
I don’t know if this aids or confuses your desire to get to the bottom of the correctness or otherwise of the original article
Tonyb
Tonyb and Danny Thomas, an interesting exchange. I researched this event and discussed it as a glaring example in essay False Alarms, in you know what ebook. The big payoff is in footnotes 9 (no Salon retraction despite since admitting error) and 10 (Hansen disavowed only the time frame, not the general prediction, and has since doubled down–several times. Maybe I should not have used so many footnotes…
Rud,
Don’t tell ATTP & Willard!
Oh, and Rud,
Do you or anyone else know what the ‘consensus’ is supposed to cover, whom, and what time frames? I cannot seem to generate an answer to this query.
no Salon retraction despite since admitting error
Well, of course. Their article was an interview with someone who got something wrong. They don’t need to retract anything, given that they appear to have correctly represented the interview. It’s not their fault that the person they interviewed’s recollection was wrong. That doesn’t somehow mean that Hansen said what they interviewee claimed he’d said. This isn’t complicated!
ATTP,
“It’s not their fault that the person they interviewed’s recollection was wrong.”
Proof?
Was the original recollection wrong, or was the quotation in the SKS article wrong (and I remind you the SKS article does not include within the quotation anything regarding doubling of CO2)? Both are wrong?
Danny –
==> “Do you or anyone else know what the ‘consensus’ is supposed to cover, whom, and what time frames? I cannot seem to generate an answer to this query.”
I’d suggest the following as a place for you to start in evaluating answers to your query.
Josh,
Thanks for that. I might buy it if it included terms such as papers counted by the survey (looking backwards only), and those of the hard sciences. I’m not comfortable with the “almost unanimously” as it’s obviously a point of contention.
I don’t agree that it should cover the SPM.
Then the follow up becomes, how is it applied (or used tactically)?
Danny –
Given your reservations, you might consider asking Tol what evidence and methodology he used to draw his conclusion. Tol seems to have looked quite a bit at the literature.
I can only have a general sense, but it seems about on the money to me. Certainly, from what I can tell there are relatively few papers published that indicate that something other than human influence has dominated the causality of climate change over the past century and a half.
It’s good enough for me, for now, for the purpose of assessing the general prevalence of opinion of experts. As someone who can’t understand the technical arguments, it’s good enough for me for assessing probabilities. Of course, whether Tol’s assessment is accurate or not, the existence of a consensus isn’t dispositive. But it helps me to place alternative views so abundantly evident in the “skept-o-sphere” into the appropriate context; contrasting views, while they may be abundant in the “skept-o-sphere” are not well-represented in the research literature, and alternative views are predominantly held by people who lack the credential of having published their research.
it is what it is. Of course, some might argue that the high prevalence of shared opinion among experts who have published their research can be explained by a large number of scientists being stupid, corrupt, or desirous of starving children so that capitalism can be destroyed. In fact, I’ve seen such arguments made quite regularly. But while I can’t rule such theories out, they don’t seem terribly plausible to me. YMMV.
Josh,
I don’t buy this in the least: “Of course, some might argue that the high prevalence of shared opinion among experts who have published their research can be explained by a large number of scientists being stupid, corrupt, or desirous of starving children so that capitalism can be destroyed.”
I do want to state that I appreciate your response.
And I thought we were using ‘those more climate concerned’ and ‘those less climate concerned’. ;)
ATTP–so it is OK for Salon to leave misleading, admittedly wrong impressions out there in cyberspace forever because just a recall mistake? Thank you for this clear statement of your morals. Nuff said. You, Sir, are a true Lysenko/Alinski warmunist. Wear that badge.
Tony,
Thank you for the link.
Made me reread the article again.
Additional quotes: “Didn’t he also say that restaurants would have signs in their windows that read, “Water by request only.”
Under the greenhouse effect, extreme weather increases. Depending on where you are in terms of the hydrological cycle, you get more of whatever you’re prone to get. New York can get droughts, the droughts can get more severe and you’ll have signs in restaurants saying “Water by request only.”
When did he say this will happen?
Within 20 or 30 years. And remember we had this conversation in 1988 or 1989.
Does he still believe these things?
Yes, he still believes everything. I talked to him a few months ago and he said he wouldn’t change anything that he said then.”
Interesting that at the time of the 2001 article, Reiss specifically recalled saying in answer to “When did he say this would happen?” Within 20 or 30 years, and then backtracked on that some 13 years later to say he’d misquoted the time frame. And it was reaffirmed when asked if he (Hansen) still believed these things.
Something seems amiss, and the SKS article states nothing about doubling of CO2 in the most current Reiss quote. https://www.skepticalscience.com/Hansen-West-Side-Highway.htm (as provided from ATTP’s site kindly to me).
He said they would happen in 2040… with doubled CO2.
JCH,
Prove that’s what was said. The Salon article dated 2001 nearest the time of the interview didn’t say that.
Salon article:
20 years West side hwy will be under water (no mention of CO2 doubling)
10 of hottest ten years in the last 10 years
Tape on windows due to high winds
Same birds won’t be there
Trees in median will change
More police cars due to increased crime due to higher heat
Water by request only
Confirmation of 20 to 30 year time frame
Confirmation that he still believes those things
10 of 15 years hottest
Republic of Maldives first to disappear
G.H. effects affect Hurricanes, fires and tornadoes. (With specific references to Oakland and New Mexico fires)
and tropical diseases.
Pretty specific details to be wrong on years and omitting doubling CO2.
Do you have access to the book? I’ve asked ya that before, if I recall, and don’t recall an answer. When I looked it was listed as out of print.
http://www.salon.com/2001/10/23/weather/
Nothing is amiss. It’s in the book. But you’re missing the most suspicious thing… the book was written before the book review. See how sinister this is? He wrote the book before the book review. And then they asked Hansen what was said some 14 years beforehand, and it was like he answered like the book was written after the book review, and you know what that means?
JCH,
“and you know what that means?”
It seems you’re asking me to peer in to the minds and hearts of folks and I’m underqualified. I can only cite what I read.
You keep saying ‘it’s in the book’. Do you have the book? Do you know of a source for it? Have you read it and therefore know for a fact what it says?
I’m not going to buy the book to satisfy your completely unreasonable demands. The book is quoted on a blog by a person who was so sick and tired of all of the prevarications on the matter that he went and bought the book and cited the relevant passages that fully backed up Hansen’s memory of a conversation that took place in his office some 13 years beforehand. The actual time period was longer than Hansen remembered – 2040.
Your game is obvious. You’re a gimmick.
JCH,
I didn’t ask you to buy the book. I might be interested if I could find it. I asked, quite clearly if you’d read it. Obviously, you have not.
You then quote some anonymous guy on the internet who claims to have read it. I, prior to your reference to some anonymous guy (presuming he exists), quoted some guy who claimed to have …….wait for it……..actually researched and written the book and was quoted about several very specific items from the same.
Yep, I’m really good at this whole gimmick thingy. Well played!
So you honestly believe the person made it up? LMAO. Misquoting the book in defense of James Hansen would lat about a millisecond.
I’ll buy the book. And then we’ll settle this.
JCH,
I have no idea if ‘they made it up’ but I have reason to doubt that the author did.
Buy it if you chose. Who says I’m gonna trust you after your ad homs?
If you were as sharp as you seem to wish to appear, you’d recognize that there is a lack of trust for alternate sources which is why I asked if you knew where I could find it.
Danny –
As far as what terms you use, that’s your decision. And I’ll use whatever term I’m comfortable with.
A while back I went with SWIRLCAREs (Someone Who Is Relatively Less Concerned About Recent Emissions) and SWIRMCAREs (Someone Who Is Relatively More Concerned About Recent Emissions) for a while, but knew all along it would be too cumbersome to be practical long term.
So I went back to “realists” and “skeptics.” Both are terms that people use to refer to themselves, so it reduces an polemical connotation, and I put both terms in quotation marks to make the putative nature clear (because I’ve seen unskeptical “skeptics” and unrealistic “realists” and skeptical “realists” and realistic “skeptics”).
BTW you said over at Anders’ crib that I used the term denier. Would you mind linking to where you saw me do that? I’ve never used the term in reference any individual, but some time back I had some complicated taxonomy that placed people (generically) on a full spectrum of beliefs (with denier at one end of the spectrum and something like “alarmist” at the other end of the spectrum)… Is that what you were referring to? ‘Cause other than that, I haven’t used the term. And since you said that I’ve used the term, I’d like you to provide a link as that would be the only example and I’ve been trying, without success, to remember what that taxonomy was.
Rud,
Am I getting to you, or something? What an utterly bizarre thing for you to say. They were reporting on an interview with another individual. If that other individual had said something libelous and actionable, then of course there would be reasons for a retraction, but mis-remembering what Hansen said doesn’t really fall into that kind of category. Their report was a presumably a fair representation of an interview. The interviewer’s recollection appears not to be correct, but it’s hard to see why this incorrect recollection is such a big deal as it’s not really in the category of things that would be really damaging to the person’s reputation. The only reason it has become significant is because a group of people, who most regard as ridiculous, use it as an example of alarmist rhetoric. Since it’s really only someone’s recollection of someone else saying something alarmist, it’s not really a particularly good example. Only those clutching at straws and willing to use anything would argue that it was.
Now, of course, I haven’t said the above in the expectation that you would respond in some sensible and reasonable fashion. I fully expect another conspiracy-laden outburst. Feel free not to disappoint.
ATTP,
Impressions of you change with the greater interaction. Cut off communication ‘because it’s your ball and you can take it and go home if you want’. You, when repeatedly asked, don’t own up to your mistake when discussing Hay and Church’s SLR presentation. And then you toss in a backhand “Only those clutching at straws and willing to use anything would argue that it was.”
Nice, Attp. Nice.
Danny
You might find this Q and A with Dr Hansen interesting.
http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2013/12/03/qa-with-james-hansen/
It is also worth googling the Royal Society papers where Dr Hansen gave a number of lectures over the last few years
Whether any of it supports the amount of sea level rise by 2020 or 2040 I don’t know but he was certainly pessimistic and expected a very high level of sea level rise with sudden jumps as opposed to a linear rise
tonyb
Tonyb,
I will do so, and I thank you.
ristvan | August 28, 2015 at 8:29 pm |
ATTP–… Thank you for this clear statement of your morals. Nuff said. You, Sir, are a true Lysenko/Alinski warmunist. Wear that badge.”
Nutter.
Another badge.
Danny,
Response here.
ATTP,
Link takes me to post, not a comment (unless that was your intention but if so it’s not clear).
Danny,
It’s in moderation. One thing. What did I get wrong about Hay and where did you repeatedly ask me to own up to it?
ATTP,
I asked you repeatedly to cite your source in the Hay/Church SLR discussion at your site. It was near the end. I’ve got to go to work so don’t have time right now to seek it out but if you cannot find it I’ll be happy to look. I’m assuming your numbers were wrong as I asked where they were in the Church presentation and I told you where I got mine to include page and area of the page. Since I asked repeatedly and you didn’t respond I figured you must have goofed and were uncomfortable saying so in front of your tribe.
ATTP,
One example: https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/representative-concentration-pathways/#comment-61141
Since I asked repeatedly and you didn’t respond I figured you must have goofed and were uncomfortable saying so in front of your tribe.
What a dick. Book cost $1.00.
JCH,
Classy, man. Classy.
Where? I told ya Amazon showed it as out of print.
Danny,
That isn’t an example of me getting something wrong. You were comparing the Hay et al. values for 1901 – 1990, with the IPCC numbers for 1901 – 2010. I pointed this out over and over again. The IPCC numbers for 1901 – 1990 are on page 6 of the presentation to which both you and I linked. I struggling to understand how you can’t get this.
Danny,
Read this comment again and think about it. I’m, however, now done as you accussed me of two things that you’ve neither backed up nor retracted. That’s roughly two things too many.
Istvan does his King Canute
You could say the same thing about any publication, web or dead trees. Both Fox News and the Guardian spring to mind. Drawing strong overall conclusions with respect to a single incident, as they say, rather labels Rud as an agent of the amoral Okhrana,
In passing, wasn’t Eli involved in a whinefest here recently about certain words in the Urban Dic? and how everybunny had to play nice?
Thanks, Professor Curry, for your analysis of conceit in consensus. The consensus concept undermines the main goal of the scientific method: To minimize ego-driven bias in making and reporting scientific measurements and observations.
Nice review. Consensus is a political, not a scientific (Feynman science) construct. The perceived need for a climate science consensus (McNutt, Obama SOTU) merely underscores the politicization of the science. Schmidt’s 38% chance that 2014 was hottest on record is an example.
It is important to document what this consensus supposedly contains. Not just show it is a falsely contrived construct. Climate models are good and getting better. Most recent warming is anthropogenic (CO2 control knob attribution). Polar amplification endangers Arctic ice, and hence polar bears. Sea level rise accelerating. Ocean acidification threatens corals and oysters. ECS 3. Hockey sticks are good paleoclimate work (PAGES2, not Mann). And so on.
Because, the crisper that supposed consensus about CAGW is and the more indelible it is made, the more rapidly the whole house of cards falls as Mother Nature continues to refuse to cooperate with the consensus. Clear targets are easier to shoot down than fuzzy ones. There has already been too much goal post moving by ‘the team’. For example AR5 providing only an essentially unrevised ECS range, whether there has really been a surface temp pause (Karl’s new revision of history), when SLR will accelerate (Hansen’s new confabulation)… Make the team live with their supposed consensus. It gets less comfortable for them, and easier to ridicule, every year.
Rud,
I’ve been recently more fully educated. The consensus applies only to the SPM (I found this to be an interesting application as I was unaware that a ‘scientific consensus’ would apply to a non science publication. The recent Karl and Hansen works are post AR5 so additionally I’ve been advised that they are science building on science and are (not yet with no clue offered as to when/if they will be?) covered under the ‘consensus’ blanket.
And finally, is it just me or is there a problem? How does 97% subtracted from 100% leave a sum of 2%?
“Among papers stating a position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), 97 % endorse AGW. What is happening with the 2 % of papers that reject AGW?”
Is there some middle ground involving the 1% which is unaccounted, that I’m missing?
I had not thought of the SPM as a consensus science summary. Very nice idea. Certainly indelible. And with the process admixture of policy politics.
> The recent Karl and Hansen works are post AR5 so additionally I’ve been advised that they are science building on science and are (not yet with no clue offered as to when/if they will be?) covered under the ‘consensus’ blanket.
Don’t be shy, Danny:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/representative-concentration-pathways/#comment-61365
Willard,
That doesn’t relate even remotely to my comment of today on Karl/Hansen, but I’ll bet your personal Integrity meter is pegged.
Danny,
“The consensus applies only to the SPM”
Why? The SPM is edited for political use. The WG1 findings are imo closer to views of scientists. It’s an important distinction.
For example, Obama’s Clean Power Plan rests on a finding in Chapter 10 of Working Group I of the IPCC’s latest report, AR5 — something important but little known. See page 884:
The better-known statement in AR5’s SPM concerns all anthropogenic forcings.
Editor,
Didn’t get an answer to that:
“verytallguy says:
August 20, 2015 at 7:29 pm
Well, I’ve just cycled 40 miles and it was much better than being embroiled in this mess.
Danny, you seem to be going on and on about how I won’t answer questions on the consensus.
My personal definition of current consensus would be the latest IPCC SPM, subject of course to any radical new data emerging since.
Hope that’s clear.”
I see it differently. I see it as a tool (tactic?) (appeal to authority) to be used against those of us apparently less qualified who delve in to and question the science (sometimes wrongly) and the motives (sometimes wrongly) to be undermined before we even get started. I mean, after all, how can one go against a consensus without starting from a negative position? (But I’m more of a middle grounder and not of the tribe of ‘those more climate concerned’.)
Danny,
You don’t see the IPCC as valid. I do, in the sloppy fashion that real-world institutions provides. No point in debating this.
“appeal to authority”
Mentions of that — and it comes up frequently in our mad climate wars — imo conflate debates in science and public policy. Among scientists appeals to authority might be invalid (not for me to say). But they are the basis on which public policy decisions are made. In politics — like my field, finance — belief that one understands a subject outside one’s own field almost always leads to mistakes. Everything is more complex than it looks.
Editor,
I didn’t state that I don’t see IPCC as valid (but I have some questions). My issue is with how the ‘consensus’ term is utilized tactically (preemptively?). The individual quoted specifically chose to apply the consensus to the SPM (a summary, not a scientific work and containing no abstract) and this I found to be interesting. Application to the science, from which the study took the wording from the abstracts, makes sense (w/o taking the time to question the method as this post does so already). But it is used as a ‘blanket’ to cover the entirety of the AGW theory in application (at least this has been my impression), even when a new paper is published and the abstract was not included in the Cook work.
willard (@nevaudit) | August 27, 2015 at 4:13 pm |
Now, it has been pointed out that the Salon article was an interview with an author of a book. It was not an interview with James Hansen. The author (Bob Reiss) is recalling a conversation from 13 years earlier. At best then, we have the Salon writer’s article on the 13-year old memory of an interview by a different person with Hansen. This isn’t even second-hand, it’s third-hand.
“Sigh”. Hansen posited 560 PPM by 2028. This is 5.2 PPM/Y increase from the 352 PPM in 1988 which is the general time period the prediction was made. 5.2 PPM/Y gives you roughly the IPCC 940 PPM in 2100 for RCP8.5. So 40 years would be the correct number range from 1988.
However, 5.2 PPM/Y from 1988 would mean todays CO2 level should be 492 PPM and it obviously isn’t.
The big issue is all the atmospheric CO2 predictions are horribly off.
The CO2 level won’t be 560 PPM in 2028. It won’t even be 440 PPM. It might reach 430 PPM.
That would be a useful debating tactic except the team refuses to debate.
Try Stossel again with Gavin Schmidt and Christy; midrange of 0-2000 m ocean temp increase in 10 years, sea level rise over past 100 years vs next 10 years, increase in hurricanes over last 20 years vs projection, increase in average rain in West, vs Midwest vs SE. Has to be something straightforward to measure, which eliminates ocean acidification. A paper going over the range on PH in the pacific northwest measured daily variation many times the projected global increase with little impacts on marine life.
Good to restate the claims for posterity and see how they come about in x years. Best one was the pause being changed to weird metrics of canvas or wood buckets and sea vessel water intakes vs buoy thermocouples and ARGO measurements.
Scott
20 years is more indicative of natural variability than climate change.
Oh, you mean like the warming from 1976-1998?
Hansen 2015 is way beyond SLR accelerating.
I read a paper the other day that has the recent rate at 4.4mm per year.
JCH,
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0827/Rising-seas-even-more-dangerous-than-thought-says-NASA
Rignot is a co-author on Hansen 2015; Josh Willis is a co-author on Nieves 2015. The 1.9mm has nothing to do with the 4.4mm.
JCH,
I wasn’t rebutting your 4.4mm as I have no idea to what paper you’re referring as no link or other reference was provided. I was providing a piece of news dated today which relates to your topic. That offering has a different rate and it specifies that that rate is a result only of a change in the mass of oceans. “Data collected by a cadre of NASA satellites — which change position in relation to one other as water and ice on the planet realign and affect gravity’s tug — reveal that the ocean’s mass is increasing.” (from the CSM article)
You’ve asserted that the 1.9mm has no relation to the 4.4mm you cited from reading a paper recently. Cannot be rebutted or corroborated based on the information you’ve provided.
JCH: “The 1.9mm has nothing to do with the 4.4mm.”
Timg: And the 4.4mm per year has nothing to do with reality.
timg56 – you’re clueless. The paper was about SLR since 2010… probably through 2014. So the 4.4,mm may not include the 2015 spike in SLR. The period included a very large drop in sea level caused by the 2011 La Nina.
JCH, you refer to Yi et. al. in AGU May 2015. You have to read the whole thing plus my essay on SLR, PseudoPrecision, to know how bad the 4.4mm/year since 2010 estimate is. Should never had gotten past peer review without a major rewrite to add the following qualification. Yi is an estimate from a likely artificial trough in 2010 to a likely artificial high in 2014. Artificial because 2010-2014 is from Jason 2. The satellite spec is available: repeatable accuracy <=3mm (orbit, waves, and humidity impact on return signal), with random instrument drift of <=1mm/year. The whole difference from the usual 3.1-3.3 (including ~0.3 GIA) is within the sat instrument error Yi does not discuss.
And Yi tried but IMO failed to prove the closure problem for 4.4mm/year using ARGO for thermometric rise plus GRACE for ice mass loss. Got higher thermometric than any other closure estimate (three papers at least on recent years), plus higher ice mass loss. GRACE is near end of mission and deteriorating.
And Yi did not attempt to explain with this past 4 year rate did not turn up on tide gauges, especially those regards as reasonably land stable.
Another 'SLR accelerating' junk paper in the runup to Paris. The other 'SLR accelerating' attempt this year just rewrote global tide gauge history (past got lowered, kind of like Karl with temperatures) to reach the 'accelerating' conclusion at 3.2mm/yr.
Yes, there certainly will be a lot of junk before Paris. We can agree on that.
JCH: “timg56 – your are clueless”
timg56: what rud said.
Looking at the graph 1a, what does more than 100% (supported by 17.1 % of those surveyed!) of the global warming is due to human-induced GHGs mean? Greater than 100%? Do we even know how much of the CO2 is due to human activity? As a sceptic, I’m sceptical whether these respondents knew what they were saying.
This is a painful subject, that was the subject of several previous posts. See this post (including links to previous posts on the topic)
http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/19/most-versus-more-than-half-versus-50/
“This is a painful subject”
OMG, Dr. Curry, you ain’t kiddin’.
Andrew
John, I believe that some believe that it is natural forces that are suppressing the full extent of anthropogenic warming.
Actually, the argument is that greenhouse warming is causing something like 120% of the warming; when you subtract 20% of cooling from aerosols, you get 100% caused by humans.
The difference between the effect of just greenhouse gases and all forcings is reflected in AR5 by their difference confidence levels.
More than half “extremely likely” due to all anthropogenic forcings, but only “very likely” that more than half due to GHGs.
And this is why the consensus will never be proven wrong. With Al Gore’s house covered by 100 feet of glacial material, they will simply say “Ah, but without AGW it would have been 200 feet.”
A brilliant strategy.
Actually, the argument is that greenhouse warming is causing something like 120% of the warming; when you subtract 20% of cooling from aerosols, you get 100% caused by humans.
Which allows for interesting questions in the SH,where cloud albedo and the cooling effects are similar to the NH and the SH aerosols are natural.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/6/e1500157
Well if you haven’t nailed detection and attribution down it is very difficult to make any predictions.
Editor: “The difference between the effect of just greenhouse gases and all forcings is reflected in AR5 by their difference confidence levels. More than half “extremely likely” due to all anthropogenic forcings, but only “very likely” that more than half due to GHGs.”
But the sum of all anthropogenic forcing is less than GHG forcing (cf. AR5 WG1 Figure TS.6). Why should one be more confident that the effect of a smaller number exceeds a fixed threshold?
HaroldW,
“Why should one be more confident that the effect of a smaller number exceeds a fixed threshold?’
Good question, but over my pay grade. As with all most good science, the PHL survey raises new issues requiring more study.
I’m guessing there’s also a bias against “I don’t know” in survey responses.
People may believe that if they’re worthy of being surveyed, they feel compelled to answer anything than confess lack of knowledge, regardless.
Hey, does the paper “Learning from mistakes…” classify as a peer reviewed climate paper? How about Cook et al. (2013)? If so, then Dana Nuccitelli is on his way to becoming a climate expert.
You have recognized Scooter’s wet dream.
Why not try another approach. Offer a large number of grants to study the counterpoint to man’s impact! “If it is not mostly anthro caused emissions, then what is it!” See how many climate scientists submit grant proposals. Allow untenured scientists that are associated with institutions that might sabotage their careers to submit in secret.
This should already have been done. Fixing it is a good idea.
The 22 PPM = 0.2 W/m2 study indicates that the IPCC worst case 940 PPM in 2100 is only going to cause 2.96 W/m2 or 0.80 °C of warming.
0.8°C is in the beneficial (less than 3°C) range. Stopping beneficial warming is sort of crazy but is typical of the global warming thought process.
There is at least $6 billion of one-sided climate funding. Simply reassign the current climate budget to researching anthropogenic benefits and non-GHG forcings until at least $6-10 billion has been spent. We already know that there isn’t going to be any harm due to CO2 so we can quit wasting money on that for the time being.
I thought we were against damaging the gross national product.
The actual percentage is likely 130 to 140%. Stay tuned.
Citation?
Tonyb
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/34/E4640.full
That’s about cosmic rays and it’s pay walled
Tonyb
From the looks of things, there is no rush is there?
What is point of this?
Our results suggest weak to moderate coupling between CR and year-to-year changes of GT. They resonate with the physical and chemical evidence emerging from laboratory studies suggesting a theoretical dynamic link between galactic CR and GT. However, we find that the realized effect is modest at best, and only recoverable when the secular trend in GT is removed (by first-differencing). Thus, it is important to stress that they do not suggest that CR influences can explain global warming and should not be misinterpreted as being in conflict with the IPCC (25). Indeed, the opposite is true: we show specifically that CR cannot explain secular warming, a trend that the consensus attributes to anthropogenic forcing. Nonetheless, the results verify the presence of a nontraditional forcing in the climate system, an effect that represents another interesting piece of the puzzle in our understanding of factors influencing climate variability.
Life is a puzzle… for a trillion, has been verified. That is a big relief.
Unfortunately, in this experiment, regardless of what good reasons you can offer, there is no counter-factual evidence.
For now, I’ll cite reality. The science will catch up.
So, no actual scientific citation? hmmm
Tonyb
I did not say there was. What do you think “stay tuned” means?
JCH is channeling the future and the great beyond. He was a child prodigy with this capacity and began watching “I Love Lucy” before there was a “I Love Lucy” and Ricky was still in Cuba.
Actually it’s the present. They are starting to say it. From 1985 until 2013-2014, natural variation worked against ACO2 – masked it.
Against; not for, which is the AMO crowd’s, people like Michael E. Mann, assumption. PDO big; amo LITTLE.
Blunderbunny just provided an example of the error that has permeated climate science discussion for many years – that the AMO is causing something major to happen to the global mean surface temperature.
1940-1970 standstill
What is even more interesting is that the 32 and 50 year trend is still substantially lower than reported earlier. In other words, according to this simple analysis part of the 1970-2000 warming was due to the upswing of AMO. Similarly, the 1940-1970 flat temperature may have been the result of the downswing of AMO canceling the greenhouse gas warming. This provides in my opinion a more elegant explanation than the aerosol explanation most commonly used, but more research is needed to better pinpoint whether this is true.
I always thought the sampling for the 97% consensus was flawed and biased. It is like going to a dairy convention and asking “how many of you like cheese?” Sure you like it. And if the public don’t buy cheese (e.g. fund your research) how are you going to vote against something that pays your bills?
When deregulation of the Queensland dairy was under consideration as part of Australia’s National Competition Competition Policy 20-odd years ago, the supposedly independent committee was almost all from the industry. An economic study was commissioned from a good economist, John Fallon. The first thing he planned to do was market testing – how would non-Queensland producers respond to deregulation? John was told that no milk would be sent to Queensland, and he was not to do market-testing. Even so, his analysis showed a net public benefit from deregulation. He was told to assess more and more bizarre scenarios, some of which gave highly negative results, then to average them to show a major disbenefit from deregulation. The day after the market was eventually deregulated with huge assistance to Queensland dairy farmers and processors, and every day since, milk has poured into Queensland from more efficient southern producers.
It matters what the consensus is and who’s in the club?
Okay, so there have now been countless probes into Earth’s mantle and into the deep hydrosphere so this consensus is the result of actual observation of the physical world? The orbit thing and the solar thing have been sorted at last, so we suddenly know what caused the sea level fluctuations and various warmings and coolings of the last few thousand years? The YD, Bond Events and LIA all explained? So tell me…I was asleep when all this info came tumbling in.
Yes, only yesterday evening none of this was known! They didn’t even seem interested. Consensus was just the usual bunch of punts and push-polls about the punts. It really didn’t matter if there were ninety-seven on one team and three on the other. There was no ball!
No ball was needed, one goal was bricked-up.
Rabbi Josh Yuter’s paper was awesome! Wish he had more essays on subjects I connect with.
Agreed. And no coincidence that this stems from deep (in this case Jewish) culture. A large part of the ‘job’ of culture is to maintain a consensus in the face of the unknown or the unresolvable. If one starts to pick apart such a cultural consensus, one begins to see the jigsaw of mechanisms from which they are built up.
This is highly relevant to the climate domain. The climate consensus is not a position on science, it is a cultural consensus that I think the Rabbi might well recognize. A culture based on the certainty of calamity, which has long since left the science behind.
The power of culture (and ignorance and idiocy) was demonstrated by a recent case, I think in England, where an 18-year-old Indian girl got in difficulty in the sea and her father fought off lifesavers on the grounds that them touching her would bring dishonour on him,. She drowned. There is no substitute for clear understanding, but culture can unfortunately trump it.
I think the Rabbi’s arguments are particularly strong in our current political environment, as the whole diversity and multiculturalist push is really a cover for a collectivist Marxist ideology. I would argue that the European and American intellectual sphere’s are moving away from traditional western thinking, things such as Aristotle’s essential forms to a Marxist view of ‘everyone is the same’. Therefore the old arguments have less traction than they used to.
A great video on the ‘egalitarian’ no-form push of modern society:
Polling of the general population on “belief in global warming” and “to what extent to you believe AGGs are responsible for rise in global; temperatures (<10%, 10-20%, 20-30% … etc.) is absolute complete nonsense. It is asking for people to say what they believe on a subject that requires extensive scientific / technical training in order to understand the basics, but probably not the details which would require advanced physics, thermodynamics, mathematics, computer science/modeling, statistics, etc. After saturating the population with Al Gore and Michael Moore disasterville, polar bears, power plant smokestacks (emitting plumes of mostly water vapor but suggesting pollution spewing all over the planet, you ask people what they believe. These "people" being polled are not competent to make informed judgments on climate science. The propspeak machine has worked very hard to accomplish this.
Danny –
There are people who have strong views about climate change, even though they don’t understand the science, on both sides of the issue. You mention influencing factors only one one side. There are other influences: the claims of a “hoax,” the attribution of the prevalence view among experts to corruption, funding bias, or anti-capitalism, anti-government sentiments, short-term weather phenomena, and importantly, the complicating factors discussed in the article that you linked in the previous thread.
==> “Polling of the general population on “belief in global warming” …) is absolute complete nonsense.”
I don’t agree. I don’t think that it’s “nonsense,” even though I think that the results don’t measure what the polling is ostensibly intended to measure. What it winds up measuring is how much views on climate change are linked to identity orientation. The answers to the questions tell us more about how people are identified than what they know about climate change.
==> ” These “people” being polled are not competent to make informed judgments on climate science. ”
Interesting. Why do you put “people” in quotation marks?
Danley, in a democracy the “general population” will often determine what policies are proposed and accepted, however ignorant they might be, polling will influence policymakers. It will also influence those who have strong views on the matter (whether or nor well-informed) in the intensity of their efforts to make a particular case. Politicians and the media will always be interested in people’s views, and how to influence them. The basis for those views is secondary.
The people who wrote chapter 11 of the IPCC AR5 didn’t agree with the “95%” stated in chapter 10 of AR5.
“The CMIP3 and CMIP5 projections are ensembles of opportunity, and it is explicitly recognized that there are sources of uncertainty not simulated by the models. Evidence of this can be seen by comparing the Rowlands et al. (2012) projections for the A1B scenario, which were obtained using a very large ensemble in which the physics parameterizations were perturbed in a single climate model, with the corresponding raw multi-model CMIP3 projections. The former exhibit a substantially larger likely range than the latter. A pragmatic approach to addressing this issue, which was used in the AR4 and is also used in Chapter 12, is to consider the 5 to 95% CMIP3/5 range as a ‘likely’ rather than ‘very likely’ range.”
I give much more explanation and references in Natural Variability and Chaos – Seven – Attribution & Fingerprints Or Shadows?.
Do 97 % of the Angels dance on the head of a needle? Do we have high confidence Angels exist?
I don’t know about Angels, but Unicorns love to dance on the head of a needle, a pin even.
The survey that I like the best is:
Verheggan et al. (2014) Scientists view about attribution of climate change. Environmental Science & Technology
Well, the problems with Verheggan are:
1. They found their people by searching publications for “global warming” and “Climate Change”.
2. They didn’t restrict it to atmospheric scientists. The harm and mitigation people (like biologists) tend to be environmentally biased and don’t know any more about whether forcing is high than I do.
3. They only got about a 1/3 response.
4. They biased the sample toward “mass publishers”. The people who publish frequently are pro-warmer because of the gate keeping.
http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2014/07/1-scientific-publishing
Since 1% publish 42% of the papers, the 0-3 people are 95-98% of scientists.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/07/analysis-most-cited-climate-change-papers/
http://www.carbonbrief.org/media/420438/scopus-graph-1_600x418.jpg
There is quick way to check this. The number of climate papers published each year is about 13000. The number of climate scientists is kind of ambiguous. 31,487 signed a paper disavowing MMGW. There are 15 million people world wide in science fields. Even if we limit the number of “climaty” scientists to about 1.5 million … with 42% published by 1% the 7500 or so remaining papers are stretched pretty thin. There are only about 120,000 climate change papers total.
The 58 percent of the 0-3 publishers who believe forcing is 50% or greater is dangerously close to 50%. Given the mildly cherry picking selection criteria, the partial response, and the inclusion of innocent bystanders (non-atmospheric scientists) the percentage of knowledgeable scientists who believe GHG forcing is 50% or more is probably in the 20%-50% range.
Try this
http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/11/15/why-climate-deniers-have-no-credibility-science-one-pie-chart
you can calculate the %, I’m too lazy, want to stay in bed.
http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Powell-Science-Pie-Chart.png
This familiar false argument. There are 13950 articles that mention global warming. There are 24 articles that reject global warming.
Gee, how did we arrive at that? “By my definition, 24 of the 13,950 articles, 0.17% or 1 in 581, clearly reject global warming or endorse a cause other than CO2 emissions for observed warming.”
1. His definition.
2. Explicit rejection of global warming.
3. Lack of explicit rejection is acceptance.
Lets correct some things.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14240.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20150319
1. Fco2 = 3.46 ln (C/C0), 22 PPM = 0.2 W/m2 measured over a decade. This is 1/3 the IPCC TSR which is basically Ftsr = 2 * 5.35 ln (C/C0).
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=wps-69-2014.pdf&site=24
“In all four cases, the expected impacts cross zero somewhere between 1°C and 2°C of global warming – suggesting net positive impacts for milder warming for AR2 and AR3, and showing such for AR4 and AR5. Impacts get progressively more negative for greater warming, but only become statistically significantly different from zero somewhere between 3°C and 4°C.”
2. The question is catastrophic global warming – not just some warming. Some warming is beneficial. The temperature has to get over 4°C before we are sure it is even going to be harmful. That still isn’t catastrophic – just net harmful. After all if the catastrophe from global warming isn’t “statistically significantly different from zero” the only people who are going to care are the scientists.
To be really fair the Desmog or his designate would have to:
1. Pick someone objective to do the analysis.
2. Only pick papers that use the honest 22 PPM = 0.2 W/m2 CO2 forcing.
3. Only pick papers that, “Clearly endorse that anthropogenic CO2 emissions will cause warming of 4°C or more”.
Most papers use fraudulent forcing since without fraudulent forcing there isn’t an issue. Using a fair standard there might not be any papers that support CAGW.
bob,
You reference one of the least credible blogs on this subject. Desmogblog is a joke.
You keep hanging out with the clowns, people will start to think you are part of the circus.
PA, try the correct equation
dF = 5.35 * ln (C/Co)
In the one you use you leave off the per decade part
0.2 watts per meter squared per decade is the one from your cite.
Timg56,
Is that your opinion on Desmogblog, or did you just hear that on the clowncar radio?
Can you provide evidence that they are unreliable?
Didn’t think so.
Next
Yes Bob, evidence in the form of their policies to block and edit any comments which question or contradict their narrative.
And with the constant referral to Koch brothers and Big Oil funding “deniers” maybe you should take a lot at who runs and funds Desmogblog. I guess convicted felon isn’t reasonable grounds for questioning one’s honesty and integrity. At least for you.
I was being nice when I referred to thos guys as clowns. They are far closer to dishonest sh*tbirds. Trust me Bob, you don’t look good with birdcrap on you.
bobdroege | August 28, 2015 at 6:07 pm |
PA, try the correct equation
dF = 5.35 * ln (C/Co)
No it isn’t.
The SWAG (scientific guess at CO2 forcing is
dF = 5.35 * ln (C/C0)
The TCR (guess at the actual performance under field conditions :for 2 decades) is said to be twice dF or about 2 W/m2 or:
dFtcr = 2 * 5.35 * ln (C/C0)
In 2020 we will know for sure but it doesn’t look like things are going to change much from 22 PPM = 0.2 W/m2 (44 PPM = 0.39 W/m2 would essentially be the same)
0.2 W/m2 = x * ln (392/370).
x = 0.2 W/m2 / ln (392/370) = 3.46.
The REAL CO2 forcing measured in the field is:
dFrealtcr = 3.46 * ln (C/C0).
Using somebody’s model or offhand guess when you have a measured value for CO2 forcing is inexcusable.
PA,
That’s 22ppm = 0.2 watts per meter squared per decade
It really changes your results, and to ignore that part is inexcusable
Timg56,
We know big oil funds deniers, haven’t you heard of Soon and his deliverables?
Are you defending the Koch brothers, that doesn’t look good on your realism resume.
Anyway, no matter where I found it, it was a guest post by this guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Powell
He is a Reagan and Bush guy, not a felon to the best of my knowledge.
bobdroege | August 29, 2015 at 10:41 am |
PA,
That’s 22ppm = 0.2 watts per meter squared per decade
It really changes your results, and to ignore that part is inexcusable
Well, no it doesn’t.
If the CO2 level changed 0 PPM for the next decade the forcing might change from 0.2 to 0.21 or possibly 0.22 but that is it. The decade measurement period would have incorporated most of the lagging temperature effect that makes the TSR higher than the CO2 forcing alone.
This is why a 2021 paper by the same authors would be so exciting It would be an actual TSR measurement (which is defined as the 20 year change).
Global warmers were wrong about the hot spot, the rate of CO2 increase, the sea ice, etc. etc. Since they are always wrong they are probably wrong about this and we will probably find the 20 year TSR is just 44 PPM = 0.39 W/m2 which is the same as 22 PPM = 0.2 W/m2.
Now this would be scary for global warmers because if the TSR isn’t higher than the forcing, there is no reason to expect the ECS is either.
PA,
Your cite doesn’t say what the forcing was in 2000 and 2010, only that the trend between the two years was 0.22 watts per meter squared per decade.
You know the difference between a value and a trend don’t you?
I just read the abstract, the rest is behind a paywall, but here is the end of the abstract
“These results confirm theoretical predictions of the atmospheric greenhouse effect due to anthropogenic emissions, and provide empirical evidence of how rising CO2 levels, mediated by temporal variations due to photosynthesis and respiration, are affecting the surface energy balance.”
Which confirms the dF = 5.35 * ln (C/Co)
You did not find a paper dismissive of AGW
tough luck for you
bobdroege | August 29, 2015 at 3:08 pm |
PA,
Your cite doesn’t say what the forcing was in 2000 and 2010, only that the trend between the two years was 0.22 watts per meter squared per decade.
This is simply wrong. You need someone scientifically versed to explain the article to you.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/co2-forcing-barrow-ak2.jpg
The trend was 0.2 W/m2 over a 22 PPM (370 to 392) change in CO2. Most of the CO2 effect is immediate and the residual TCR effect from the 1990s would come into play so the TCR shouldn’t be radically different than the measured forcing change.
Your claim that GHG forcing is time dependent is an error in the way GHG forcing was explained to you. GHG forcing is primarily dependent on the concentration of trace gases. There is a mild residual effect after a concentration change – but in a period of continuous increase the residual effect of prior concentration changes will be inherited.
Bob,
Your cite doesn’t say what the forcing was in 2000 and 2010, only that the trend between the two years was 0.22 watts per meter squared per decade.
You know the difference between a value and a trend don’t you?
You can’t define a forcing at an instant in time. It is always defined as a change over some time interval. That’s why the correct terminology should be “change in forcing”, but people often simply say “forcing”. However, that doesn’t mean that one can define a forcing in 2000 or 2010; you can only define the forcing at a given time relative to some earlier time.
I managed to mess up the blockquote tags in the above comment. The first part was meant to be quoting Bob.
“… scientists who are skeptical of the IPCC consensus conclusion are disproportionately expert in the area of climate change detection and attribution.”
Are you saying that those scientists who should know say they don’t know?
“…i would go with ‘very likely’ for my range, between 25% and 75%.”
And those who are willing to go out on a limb on this question say they are more than 50% and <75% sure that the anthropogenic portion of climate change falls within a range of 25% to 75%.
If you were a client of a financial planner, discussing where to put the bulk of your retirement savings now that you are 67 years old, would you pick what the financial planner would pick given these odds and disclosures?
Dart board please.
There is a couple of basic problems.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14240.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20150319
1. The forcing appears to be 0.2 W/m2 for 22 PPM CO2 increase over a decade or about 1.05 W/m2 for the 295 (1900) to 400 (2015) increase.
It doesn’t seem to bother anybody that this is about 1/3 of the IPCC forcing assumption. Even cheap capacitors are within +80% to -20% of their nominal value. Off by a factor of 3 is incompetent.
2. They haven’t fixed any of their numbers. Hello, anybody home? You are off by a factor of three – fix your models, predictions and estimates.
3. The RCP rates of emission seem to ignore reality.
4. The RCP rates of CO2 increase (which leads to the forcing) seem to ignore reality.
5. Despite incorrect forcing, rates of emissions, and rates of CO2 increase in PPM they go on to investigate and predict future harm… Huh? Why?
Nobody is using valid numbers for their crystal balls. Until this is fixed there is no reason to even care about what a misinformed consensus based on mistaken assumptions thinks.
GIGO.
“The forcing appears to be 0.2 W/m2 for 22 PPM CO2 increase over a decade or about 1.05 W/m2 for the 295 (1900) to 400 (2015) increase.
It doesn’t seem to bother anybody that this is about 1/3 of the IPCC forcing assumption. Even cheap capacitors are within +80% to -20% of their nominal value. Off by a factor of 3 is incompetent.
2. They haven’t fixed any of their numbers. Hello, anybody home? You are off by a factor of three – fix your models, predictions and estimates.”
The even greater problem is that the so-called “radiative forcing” 0.2 W/m2 for 22 PPM CO2 increase is not a forcing that can warm either the atmosphere or surface by any amount whatsoever. The CO2 (+ H2O overlap) “partial blackbody” emits in the ~15um band regardless of concentration, and the equivalent blackbody Planck curve temperature is ~217K, circled below:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vvN1VZjxhu4/Vc0gRW-aXeI/AAAAAAAAHUI/dlx0Wlsaeco/s640/OLR%2BNimbus_energy_out%2B2.jpg
By Planck’s Law and principle of maximum entropy production, a blackbody at 217K cannot warm (increase the temperature/frequency/energy) of any other blackbody warmer than 217K, including the 255K atmosphere and 288K Earth. The reason is that all of those lower-energy/frequency microstates (molecular orbitals and vibrational states) are already completely saturated in the higher energy/frequency/temperature blackbody, and because any transfer of heat from cold to hot requires an impossible continuous decrease of entropy.
You are spamming, hockeypuck. Please stop depositing your Skydragon doo-doo all over this here blog. It stanks.
Well, it is odd that there is no equatorial hot spot and the satellite record is flat.
That would suggest that the effect is localized to the surface, or is self correcting higher in the atmosphere, or the surface record adjustments are really that bad.
PA, “Well, it is odd that there is no equatorial hot spot and the satellite record is flat.
That would suggest that the effect is localized to the surface, or is self correcting higher in the atmosphere, or the surface record adjustments are really that bad.”
Well, it most likely suggests that warming is less than expected and convection/advection increases are greater than expected. Darn dynamics.
Climate is a game of two halves
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1996.6/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1996.6/mean:12/trend/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1996.6/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1996.6/mean:12/trend
Don, you have no clue how the Maxwell/ Clausius/ Carnot/ Boltzmann/ Feynman/ US Std Atmosphere gravito-thermal greenhouse effect differs from the “Skydragon book,” and saying so just shows your complete ignorance of the basic physics, just like your silly claim that photons behave the same as steel balls. Pathetic.
I will not stop defending the work of these great physicists and the 100’s of atmospheric physicists, meteorologists, physical chemists, etc. who produced the US Standard Atmosphere and International Standard Atmospheres no matter how many asinine comments you post Don.
You are a silly little dude, hockeypuck. The 100’s of atmospheric physicists, meteorologists, physical chemists, etc. who produced the US Standard Atmosphere and International Standard are not peddling the crap you are peddling. Name 200 of them who are running around climate blogs making fools of themselves like you are. You are flying with the Skydragons. Birds of a feather doo-doo together. Keep cranking, little dude.
Don, two Einstein quotes couldn’t better describe you:
“Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.”
“”Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
Donnie, best you read up on elementary/high school physics first to find out why photons don’t behave like your steel balls as you laughably & pathetically claimed.
Donnie thinks Maxwell/ Clausius/ Carnot/ Boltzmann/ Feynman/ US Std Atmosphere physicists are all “skydragons”
Although way beyond your grade level, here’s Feynman deriving the atmospheric temperature profile for a PURE N2/O2 atmosphere from gravity/mass/pressure and without ONE single radiative transfer or GHG calculation whatsoever. How’d he do that Donnie, magic?
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=feynman
And here’s the 100’s of physicists, meteorologists, physical chemists, rocket scientists who derived the US Standard Atmosphere without ONE single radiative transfer or GHG calculation whatsoever, and which completely removed CO2 from their mathematical model of the atmosphere. How’d they do that Donnie, magic?, or was it with your steel ball theory?
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=1976+US+Standard+Atmosphere
You are a persistent little joker, hockeypuck. Please provide citations showing that Einstein/ Maxwell/ Clausius/ Carnot/ Boltzmann/ Feynman/ and hundreds of US Std Atmosphere physicists support your BS story of a gravito-thermal greenhouse effect. I know you can fabricate a story by misrepresenting little cherry-picked tidbits from various sources, but produce some actual quotes of those folks discussing the gravito-thermal greenhouse effect that agree with the BS that you are yammering about incessantly. Or just stop the spamming and go back to your lonely blog and yammer to yourself. And you should be nice to me. Nobody else will converse with your little silly self.
I Googled it:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22gravito-thermal+greenhouse+effect%22
1,040 results
I don’t see anything from Einstein, Maxwell, Feynman et al. Just hockeypuck BS.
The little hockeypuck should have been back by now with his Maxwell portfolio. And then there’s prof. Claes Johnson, of the skydragon school of physics.
Donnie boy, I’ve given you the links to the Maxwell et al description of the gravito-thermal GHE many times, yet you refuse to read them, not that you’d have any comprehension anyway.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/05/maxwell-established-that-gravity.html
Same with Carnot, Clausius, Boltzmann, Feynman, US Std Atmosphere, etc., etc. gravito-thermal GHE, all of which are linked in this post:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/new-paper-confirms-gravito-thermal.html
Donnie boy, just stick to your hilarious, albeit pathetic, photons-are-steel-balls theory and don’t bother reading what these great physicists wrote on the gravito-thermal GHE.
I am not going to follow your links, hockeypuck. I was just making you work. We have seen all of your crap pseudoscience too many times and we have seen it destroyed, every time. You are on the lunatic fringe. Stop the spamming.
Donnie boy, who claims photons behave as steel balls and believes in perpetual motion machines, is the ultimate “crap pseudoscience,” “lunatic fringe,” “spammer.”
No, I will not stop defending the works of these great physicists Donnie boy, no matter how ignorant you choose to remain.
Yet another reference: Carnot’s book explains how our atmosphere is one giant heat engine/air conditioner which cools, not warms, the surface:
https://www3.nd.edu/~powers/ame.20231/carnot1897.pdf
Hockeyschtick,
You should listen to Don, he’s right.
Where on earth is this 217 K blackbody/brownbody?
Maybe a tanker car of liquid nitrogen?
I have seen a few of those but they are not common.
Can you tell the difference between an emission curve and an absorption curve.
If you could, that might help your analysis.
But it’s not looking good right now.
“You should listen to Don, he’s right.”
Oh sure, donny boy is right about photons-are-steel-balls, perpetual motion machines, cold bodies warming hot, lots of things. NOT
“Where on earth is this 217 K blackbody/brownbody?”
It’s right here circled in red just below the 220K Planck curve:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vvN1VZjxhu4/Vc0gRW-aXeI/AAAAAAAAHUI/dlx0Wlsaeco/s640/OLR%2BNimbus_energy_out%2B2.jpg
“Can you tell the difference between an emission curve and an absorption curve.”
Of course. CO2 both absorbs and emits 15 micron IR, which by Wein’s law corresponds to a BB emitting temperature of 193K. Due to water vapor overlap with CO2, the combined emitting temperature of the CO2 + H2O “partial blackbody” is ~217K, just like I circled above.
Yes or No: Do you agree with donny boy that a 217K BB can warm a 255K BB by 33K up to 288K?
Well, I believe in wave particle duality being necessary to explain everything.
Read your chart, at the bottom it says “over Sahara”
Any idea if anywhere in the Sahara is at 217 K?
Because that is an absorption line at 15 microns, it doesn’t mean that there is a blackbody at that temperature.
That is an extreme claim and you will have to provide evidence that there is a 217 K blackbody, before I decide to tell you whether or not that blackbody can heat a blackbody at 255 K.
But I can tell you that an atmosphere composed of some amount of CO2 will irradiate in the infrared depending only on the absolute temperature of the CO2 and the concentration. Some of that will be directed to the surface and since it can not penetrate rock, it will warm the surface, no matter what the temperature of the surface. Some of it will even leave earth and hit the sun, and even warm that, to a totally imperceptible degree.
You see, it doesn’t matter what you think the second law says, a photon, according to the standard model, can only carry three pieces of information, one being its energy, and two for the direction it is traveling, which leaves no room to store the temperature of the body that emitted it, and no room for the temperature of the body that absorbs it.
To sum it up, there are no physical laws prohibiting a cold object from warming a warmer object.
Sorry to crush your hopes.
LOL. Pathetic. I see you attended the same “skool” of fizzikx as donny boy. No wonder you two think alike.
Why do you think they bothered to calculate and draw the Planck blackbody curves on the OLR chart, as they do on just about every other OLR chart? It is because they are comparing the wavelengths/frequencies to “equivalent” blackbody emitting temperatures.
Please lookup Wien’s law, which is derived from Planck’s law, and which may be used to calculate the equivalent blackbody emitting temperature for a particular wavelength/frequency. For 15 microns it is 193K.
You apparently think the mere line-emitter CO2 is some magical super-blackbody with emissivity higher than a true blackbody, and the 15 micron very-low-energy/frequency photons from CO2 can even heat the 5800K SUN!
“To sum it up, there are no physical laws prohibiting a cold object from warming a warmer object.”
ABSOLUTELY FALSE. The principle of maximum entropy production/2nd law absolutely prohibits this.
Read an elementary school physics book instead of listening to donny boy fizzikx. I’m not going to waste any more time on this particular thread entertaining your silly theories.
bobdroege | August 30, 2015 at 9:30 pm |
Well, I believe in wave particle duality being necessary to explain everything.
…
To sum it up, there are no physical laws prohibiting a cold object from warming a warmer object.
Sorry to crush your hopes.
Blackbody radiation follows a Wein/Planck distribution curve.
Claiming that a specific frequency/wavelength represents a specific temperature isn’t correct either.
A cold body can’t warm a warmer body either.
What is happening is a less cold atmosphere will stop the surface from losing heat as fast as a cold atmosphere. The temperature of surface is incoming short wave – (convection + latent + net sensible ) = 0. Net sensible heat lost is outgoing – downwelling. Outgoing is Boltzmann law black body emission. If downwelling increases the temperature of the surface will increase.
“Claiming that a specific frequency/wavelength represents a specific temperature isn’t correct either.”
A misquote. What I said is “Why do you think they bothered to calculate and draw the Planck blackbody curves on the OLR chart, as they do on just about every other OLR chart? It is because they are comparing the wavelengths/frequencies to “equivalent” blackbody emitting temperatures.” Note the quotes around “equivalent.”
“A cold body can’t warm a warmer body either.”
Correct.
“What is happening is a less cold atmosphere will stop the surface from losing heat as fast as a cold atmosphere.”
First of all, all of the 33K “GHE” is gravito-thermal, clearly shown by Feynman, Maxwell, Clausius, Carnot, Boltzmann, US & International Std Atmospheres, Volokin, Chilingar, the HS GH eqn, etc etc.
GHGs increase cooling by decreasing the lapse rate, accelerating convection, increasing Cp, increasing radiative surface area to space.
Gases free to convect and transfer latent heat do NOT act as solid objects that warm by limiting convection, just the opposite.
” If downwelling increases the temperature of the surface will increase.”
Nope, the downwelling low-energy/frequency 15 micron IR from CO2 cannot warm/increase the frequency/energy/temperature of the 95K warmer 288K surface. This is impossible for the reason you just stated above “A cold body can’t warm a warmer body either.”
The molecular line-emitter CO2 is falsely considered by climate scientists to be a true blackbody. It is not. It only emits as a very “partial blackbody” along a 193K Planck curve and thus has emissivity less than a true blackbody. In addition, CO2 emissivity decreases with temperature, unlike a true blackbody.
hockeyschtick | August 30, 2015 at 10:55 pm |
…
The molecular line-emitter CO2 is falsely considered by climate scientists to be a true blackbody. It is not. It only emits as a very “partial blackbody” along a 193K Planck curve and thus has emissivity less than a true blackbody. In addition, CO2 emissivity decreases with temperature, unlike a true blackbody.
I understand the argument being made. It just isn’t persuasive.
http://lasersparkpluginc.com/uploads/CO2_Absorption_Data.pdf
The above argument is goofy.
http://cybele.bu.edu/courses/gg612fall99/gg612lab/lab1.html
If you assume an arbitrary layer that absorbs all outgoing IR and no incoming SW it raises the temperature of the surface about 19% (50% more than the 13% that is observed). The actual arbitrary atmosphere absorbs some incoming and is transparent to some outgoing.
The grey body argument simply doesn’t matter. You don’t care what color the radiation is. Further – the atmosphere would be opaque to its own emissions if you did buy the grey body argument. It would thus function as an arbitrary absorbing layer.
As I said “the downwelling low-energy/frequency 15 micron IR from CO2 cannot warm/increase the frequency/energy/temperature of the 95K warmer 288K surface. This is impossible for the reason you just stated above “A cold body can’t warm a warmer body either.”
You seem to believe that all photons are created equal and their frequency/wavelength/energy makes no difference as to whether they will be thermalized by a blackbody at a particular temperature. This is false. Google ‘frequency cutoff for thermalization’ for 463,000 references explaining why a low-frequency/energy photon cannot warm a blackbody at a higher frequency/energy/temperature. A BB at 193K emits 15 micron IR. Whether 15 micron IR comes from a true blackbody or CO2 makes NO difference as to whether or not it can warm a blackbody warmer than 193K!
hockeyschtick: A BB at 193K emits 15 micron IR. Whether 15 micron IR comes from a true blackbody or CO2 makes NO difference as to whether or not it can warm a blackbody warmer than 193K!
You write as though there is only one micron. The atmosphere holds a stratified population of CO2 molecules, and within each stratum there are distribution of their energies and the energies of the absorbed and emitted photons. The surface contains populations of many species, and they also are stratified, and each species and stratum contains a distribution of energies of the molecules and associated emitted and absorbed photons. It is quite possible for a sub-stratum of CO2 molecules of above average energy to warm a substratum of below average molecules at the surface. As the mean temperature of the air rises, the amount of energy transferred thus from the high energy strata of the CO2 molecues to the low energy strata of the surface molecules increases, thus slowing the overall cooling rate of the surface. That is what is hypothesized to happen if the atmospheric CO2 concentration is increased while the insolation stays within its usual bounds. There are no violations of any thermodynamic laws in this hypothesized process, but you have to remember to think in terms of populations of molecules and the distributions of their energies.
Temperature is proportional to the mean kinetic energy, but almost all of the molecules in the region sampled by the thermometer are above or below average, with a few way above average and a few way below average. When you ignore the variations in the energies, you write about something that does not exist, that is your argument is vacuous.
“You write as though there is only one micron. The atmosphere holds a stratified population of CO2 molecules, and within each stratum there are distribution of their energies and the energies of the absorbed and emitted photons.”
I am using “15 micron” as a shortcut to saying “a narrow band of line-emissions centered at 15 microns” because I don’t want to have to type all of that everytime. Nonetheless, the relatively narrow, low-energy 15 micron band from CO2 is the only band located within Earth’s thermal radiation spectrum, and that band is also overlapped ~50%+ by water vapor:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nOY5jaKJXHM/TJe36s1JB0I/AAAAAAAABTE/kgD4VUKlyu0/s400/Fullscreen+capture+9202010+123527+PM.jpg
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=co2+bit+player
Once again, “the downwelling low-energy/frequency ~15 micron-band IR from CO2 cannot warm/increase the frequency/energy/temperature of the 95K warmer 288K surface. This is impossible for the reason you just stated above “A cold body can’t warm a warmer body either.”
“Temperature is proportional to the mean kinetic energy, but almost all of the molecules in the region sampled by the thermometer are above or below average, with a few way above average and a few way below average. When you ignore the variations in the energies, you write about something that does not exist, that is your argument is vacuous.”
Do you not understand that in the LWIR CO2 ONLY emits FIXED ~15 micron band IR no matter what the surrounding temperature/kinetic energy of the atmosphere is? This is due to bending vibrations of it’s molecular structure and is FIXED at ~15 microns bands ONLY. CO2 is NOT a true blackbody as climate scientists and apparently yourself believe. Do you not know that the temperature of the entire surrounding atmosphere from the surface to 100km is WARMER than the CO2 “partial blackbody equivalent” emitting temperature of 15 micron/193K?
Thus, your argument is vacuous.
15μm eh?
http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/smoothed-CO2-emissionheight1.png
1. CO2 doesn’t absorb a single wavelength in the 15μm region.
2. The effective emission height varies from ground level to the stratosphere.
3. Some to all of wavenumber 695 to 750 will be absorbed and reemitted toward the surface from the surface air layer..
4. The energy absorbed by the surface is the sum of all radiation incident on the surface that is not reflected. 6 W/m2 at 15μm warms the surface just as effectively as 6 W/m2 at 0.560 μm (the chlorophyll peak). Since the surface is generally black to infrared 6 W/m2 at 15μm is more effective at warming.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Atmospheric_Transmission.png
The absorption curve for CO2 at 15μm near the surface looks like a thimble just as shown above – we know that from the emission height.
Your serve.
Dude,
The second law only prohibits a cold body from heating a warm body in a closed system. The earth’s atmosphere is not a closed system and there is something available to perform work. ITSS!
You should read about what happened in 20th century physics based on the work of Planck.
Your little red circle is absorption, not indicative of emission at the appropriate temperature. So the blackbody calculation of that temperature so does not apply. If that curve was measured at the surface of the earth, that absorption hole would not be there. That hole is from the CO2 absorption.
CO2 does not act as a blackbody, as you say it is restricted from emitting wavelengths other than those specifically involved with the vibrational and bending transitions at the temperatures we are talking about.
But I guess there is no arguing with the gravito-thermal guys, but I wonder why that is not published and supported by mainstream physics.
No wait, I know, same reason Mickey and Minnie got a divorce.
“1. CO2 doesn’t absorb a single wavelength in the 15μm region.”
Absolutely false. You don’t even know the difference between a wavenumber (which for CO2 is centered at ~666 cm-1) and a wavelength (which for CO2 is centered at ~15 microns)!
Per quantum physics, the bending vibrations of CO2 that absorb and emit LWIR are FIXED at ~15 microns. In the LWIR CO2 can only absorb and emit at ~15 microns!
“2. The effective emission height varies from ground level to the stratosphere.”
Absolutely false again. The ERL is located at ~5.5km where the temperature =255K = equilibrium temp with the Sun.
“6 W/m2 at 15μm warms the surface just as effectively as 6 W/m2 at 0.560 μm (the chlorophyll peak).”
Nope. Google ‘frequency cutoff for thermalization’ for 643,000 results proving I’m right & you are wrong.
bobdroege | August 31, 2015 at 5:08 pm |
“Dude,
The second law only prohibits a cold body from heating a warm body in a closed system. The earth’s atmosphere is not a closed system and there is something available to perform work. ITSS!”
Dude, no doubt you got that total nonsense at SkS
Totally shot down here:
“Why Earth is a closed thermodynamic system that must obey the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics”
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/01/why-earth-is-closed-thermodynamic.html
“there is something available to perform work.”
Hell yeah, there are two things to perform work, solar insolation and gravity!
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-gravity-continuously-does-work-on.html
“You should read about what happened in 20th century physics based on the work of Planck.”
Sure, right here and why it totally disproves CAGW:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/plancks-law-proves-why-radiation-from.html
“Your little red circle is absorption, not indicative of emission at the appropriate temperature. So the blackbody calculation of that temperature so does not apply. If that curve was measured at the surface of the earth, that absorption hole would not be there. That hole is from the CO2 absorption.”
Bull. By Kirchhoff’s Law and Planck’s law, CO2 absorbs and emits at the same frequency/wavelength/energy. The OUTGOING LONGWAVE RADIATION spectra I posted shows the 15 micron EMISSION from CO2 clearly marked.
“CO2 does not act as a blackbody, as you say it is restricted from emitting wavelengths other than those specifically involved with the vibrational and bending transitions at the temperatures we are talking about.”
Partially correct. CO2 ABSORBS and EMITS LWIR at exactly the same ~15 micron bands as a “partial blackbody” with a peak emitting temperature of 193K/15um.
“But I guess there is no arguing with the gravito-thermal guys, but I wonder why that is not published and supported by mainstream physics.”
LOL. First published by Maxwell 1872 “Theory of Heat” and thousands of times since including some of the greatest physicists in history Carnot, Clausius, Boltzmann, Feynman, US Std Atmosphere, etc etc.
“No wait, I know, same reason Mickey and Minnie got a divorce.”
That’s good analogy for your Mickey Mouse fizzikx.
hockeyschtick, quoting me: “You write as though there is only one micron.
Oh, bother! I meant: “You write as though there is only one molecule.”
You have to consider the distributions of the energy levels and the admission/absorption spectra of all the species in all the strata. Once you do that it is perfectly reasonable that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere can slow the rate of surface cooling, even if the CO2 temperature is below the surface temperature.
hockeyschtick | August 31, 2015 at 1:14 pm |
…
I am using “15 micron” as a shortcut to saying “a narrow band of line-emissions centered at 15 microns” because I don’t want to have to type all of that everytime
The narrow band happens to partially occupy a gap in the water vapor absorption spectrum so it is sort of a big deal.
The analysis seems to ignore the fact that the atmosphere is heterogeneous and resembles a mud wrestling match – all the molecules get dirty.
Soon or later one of your CO2 atoms all charged up from a photon is going to hit water vapor, O2, or N2.so the emitted radiation from the CO2 absorption is not necessarily going to be in the same band.
I don’t know what to tell you… You are about 1/2 as wrong as the global warmers. You don’t think there is forcing. The global warmers think the forcing is 3+ W/m2. The actual forcing is about 1 W/m2 from GHG.
You are only off by 1 W/m2, warmunists are off by at least 2 W/m2.
“Once you do that it is perfectly reasonable that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere can slow the rate of surface cooling, even if the CO2 temperature is below the surface temperature.”
The only “slowing of cooling” from CO2 is a delay of a few milliseconds for photons traveling from surface to space, easily reversed and erased at night. No net effect or warming. In contrast, CO2 accelerates convective COOLING by preferentially transferring kinetic E to N2/O2.
“Soon or later one of your CO2 atoms all charged up from a photon is going to hit water vapor, O2, or N2.so the emitted radiation from the CO2 absorption is not necessarily going to be in the same band.”
Collisions transfer kinetic energy to N2/O2 primarily 99.96% of atmosphere, which accelerates convective COOLING.
“I don’t know what to tell you… You are about 1/2 as wrong as the global warmers. You don’t think there is forcing. The global warmers think the forcing is 3+ W/m2. The actual forcing is about 1 W/m2 from GHG.
You are only off by 1 W/m2, warmunists are off by at least 2 W/m2.”
No. I’m off by zero W/m2, now proven on Earth and 7 other rocky planets with both observations and theory:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/new-paper-confirms-gravito-thermal.html
hockeyschtick- The only “slowing of cooling” from CO2 is a delay of a few milliseconds for photons traveling from surface to space…
Consider this graphic:
http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/sites/default/files/article_images/components2.gif
Of the solar energy absorbed by land and sea and exiting the surface via radiative emission, ~71% is absorbed by the atmosphere. The trip to emission altitude via molecular movement adds much much more than “a few milliseconds“, no?
And increasing GHGs ought to increase the percentage absorbed by the atmosphere. Do you see a way around that?
blueice2hotsea | September 1, 2015 at 12:00 am |
hockeyschtick- The only “slowing of cooling” from CO2 is a delay of a few milliseconds for photons traveling from surface to space…
Consider this graphic:
I don’t believe your graphic.
The Federal government can’t manage the fiscal budget. What makes you think they know what is going on with the energy budget?
Hockeyschtick,
Einstein, Einstein, and more Einstein
I think Albert and Max had some disagreements, and history has shown that Einstein came out as the winner.
” Open system: The system in which the transfer of mass as well as energy can take place across its boundary is called as an open system.”
This is an interesting quote, I wonder where I got it from?
SKS maybe, Realclimate perhaps, SOU’s wonderful blog, not, Wikipedia?
Note the grammar, is not from reliable site.
I just wonder what branch of physics allows a photon, once emitted from a CO2 molecule at say 217 K, to decide whether or not to interact with another atom, molecule or surface?
The temperature of CO2 is not determined by the wavelength it is absorbing or emitting, as you know there are several wavelengths at which CO2 is active.
The effective emission heights of downwelling and upwelling long wave radiation.
http://scienceofdoom.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/effective-emission-level-lindzen-1999.png
Whose theory does this favor?
Thanks for that graphic PA! I’m going to use that extensively.
“Whose theory does this favor?”
Without question, the HS greenhouse equation of the gravito-thermal effect wins by a mile, and which determines the “ERL” is located right at the center of mass of the atmosphere where P = 0.5 atmospheres (after density correction). As you can see from the top chart, the 255K “ERL” is located at an average ~500 millibars, right at the center of mass of the whole atmosphere, just as the HS greenhouse equation predicted.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tL9Rn1JavZ0/VHrS9zarKrI/AAAAAAAAG18/5C1X4NifzoQ/s1600/quick%2Band%2Bdirty.jpg
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/11/quick-and-dirty-explanation-of.html
“I just wonder what branch of physics allows a photon, once emitted from a CO2 molecule at say 217 K, to decide whether or not to interact with another atom, molecule or surface?
Google ‘frequency cutoff for thermalization’ for 643,000 references explaining why, and read
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/plancks-quantum-theory-explains-why-low.html
“The temperature of CO2 is not determined by the wavelength it is absorbing or emitting, as you know there are several wavelengths at which CO2 is active.”
In the LWIR of Earth’s thermal radiation, the only band in which CO2 absorbs and emits is centered at ~15 microns. The kinetic temperature of the surrounding atmosphere and the CO2 has NOTHING to do with the fact that CO2 emits at a FIXED ~15 microns in the LWIR due to its fixed molecular structure bending transitions. The entire atmosphere surface to space is WARMER than the “equivalent partial blackbody” FIXED emitting temperature of 193K at ~15 microns.
“Of the solar energy absorbed by land and sea and exiting the surface via radiative emission, ~71% is absorbed by the atmosphere. The trip to emission altitude via molecular movement adds much much more than “a few milliseconds“, no?”
No. Absorption followed by emission of a photon by CO2 only takes microsconds and all the bouncing around at the speed of light only delays the average photon a few milliseconds on the eventual way to space.
“And increasing GHGs ought to increase the percentage absorbed by the atmosphere. Do you see a way around that?”
More will be absorbed and remitted perhaps adding a few milliseconds more delay. So what?
More importantly, increased CO2 increases radiative surface area, which increases radiative LOSS to space. That’s why increased CO2 cools the stratosphere through thermosphere, and troposphere as well as I’ve shown.
And even more importantly, the probability of CO2 transferring heat by collisions with N2/O2 is about 2 orders of magnitude higher than emitting a photon, which increases convective COOLING.
Note the NASA energy budget you posted above IS basically correct, and DOESN’T INCLUDE ANY RADIATIVE FORCING FROM GHGs WHATSOEVER!
Arrhenius believers go down to defeat yet again.
hockeyschtick Absorption followed by emission of a photon by CO2 only takes microsconds and all the bouncing around at the speed of light only delays the average photon a few milliseconds on the eventual way to space
We should not be discussing the absorption/emission delay for an isolated CO2 molecule, but rather for CO2 in the atmosphere where the molecule too is bouncing around. I’ve read that high rate of collisions in the lower atmosphere inhibit photon emission.
Do you have a source that claims otherwise?
“I’ve read that high rate of collisions in the lower atmosphere inhibit photon emission.”
Here: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/why-greenhouse-gases-accelerate.html
hockeyschtick
Thanks for your reply. From your link: atmospheric mass reduces photon emission in favor of collisional activity. So, energy transfer from surface to emission height is dominated by conduction and convection.
If adding GHGs were to decrease the portion of energy that is directly radiated from the surface to space, without proportionately decreasing incoming energy, then per Newton’s Law of Cooling, surface temps will change.
“Thanks for your reply. From your link: atmospheric mass reduces photon emission in favor of collisional activity. So, energy transfer from surface to emission height is dominated by conduction and convection.”
Convection dominates radiative-convective equilibrium of the entire troposphere up to the top at P=0.1 bar, as proven by Robinson & Catling Nature 2013 on every single planet in our solar system with a thick atmosphere (including Earth of course and even Venus).
The ERL is located at the center of mass of the atmosphere at ~5.1km, but the average tropo height is ~10-11km, so convection dominates way past the ERL.
“If adding GHGs were to decrease the portion of energy that is directly radiated from the surface to space, without proportionately decreasing incoming energy, then per Newton’s Law of Cooling, surface temps will change.”
GHGs can collectively only “trap radiative heat” for a few milliseconds on the way to space, easily reversed and erased every night, so no net warming possible. Even if the radiative delay was much longer, a BB at ~217K cannot warm/increase the T of a 288K BB one iota due to the frequency cutoff for thermalization.
hockeyschtick
Can you either correct or affirm the following:
1. Collisions delay photon emission
2. Fewer collisions occur at low density, low temp. altitudes.
3. Vertical convection lofts CO2 to emission height
4. Convection is a sloooow ride, i.e. >> milliseconds
“Can you either correct or affirm the following:
1. Collisions delay photon emission”
No. CO2 can either transfer quanta of energy via radiation of a photon, or transfer that same quanta of energy to e.g. N2/O2 kinetic energy via a collision.
Can’t have it both ways, and in the troposphere, CO2 is ~100X more likely to transfer that quantum energy via collisions, accelerating convective cooling, because collisions are 100X more frequent due to the higher density.
“2. Fewer collisions occur at low density, low temp. altitudes.”
Correct, above P=0.1 bar tropopause, photon emission takes over from convection since the atmosphere is too thin above P> milliseconds”
Sure, but the difference is convection is far more efficient at least 10X at moving massive amounts of heat than those very-low-energy-frequency 15um CO2 photons, so it more than makes up for the fact that it’s much slower than speed of light by factor of ~10X.
“so it more than makes up for the fact that it’s much slower than speed of light by factor of ~10X.” is misleading so let me reword it:
“so it more than makes up for the fact that it’s much slower than speed of light, and transfers ~10X more heat than does radiation in the troposphere.”
Typos: “Correct, above P=0.1 bar tropopause, photon emission takes over from convection since the atmosphere is too thin above P> milliseconds”
should be “Correct, above P=0.1 bar tropopause, photon emission from GHGs takes over from convection since the atmosphere is too thin above P < 0.1 bar to sustain convection"
blueice2hotsea | September 1, 2015 at 5:25 pm |
hockeyschtick
Can you either correct or affirm the following:
1. Collisions delay photon emission
2. Fewer collisions occur at low density, low temp. altitudes.
3. Vertical convection lofts CO2 to emission height
4. Convection is a sloooow ride, i.e. >> milliseconds
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/7845/2010/acp-10-7845-2010.pdf
Average convection velocity is 0.5-0.7 m/s.
The thermal stays coherent for about 4 km. So convection is a hour and a half to two hour ride into the sky.
It is like parachuting – but much slower and in the wrong direction.
“Average convection velocity is 0.5-0.7 m/s.
The thermal stays coherent for about 4 km. So convection is a hour and a half to two hour ride into the sky.”
Thanks for that reference too PA! I’m going to use that extensively as well.
Thus, convection can easily dominate & overcome any alleged “radiative heat trapping” or milliseconds of radiative delay by GHGs during the 12 hour night.
HS is in this oddly self-contradictory position of saying that the ERL is important to determine the temperature, but that the radiative effect of gases isn’t important. That logic will take some untangling.
Jim D | September 1, 2015 at 9:37 pm |
HS is in this oddly self-contradictory position of saying that the ERL is important to determine the temperature, but that the radiative effect of gases isn’t important. That logic will take some untangling.
I am unaware of any study that indicated evenly self-contradictory positions were superior to oddly self-contradictory positions.
One more fact for HS. If you assumed the atmosphere was a thick layer around the earth and the sun went out, assuming the atmosphere radiated at 240 W/m2 (just like the current TOA) would take about 4.8 months to cool to absolute zero. And the ocean has 1100 times the thermal inertia of the atmosphere.
@JimD: “HS is in this oddly self-contradictory position of saying that the ERL is important to determine the temperature, but that the radiative effect of gases isn’t important.”
Not even wrong.
The ERL is determined by the center of mass and radiative equilibrium with that huge yellow ball in the sky, NOT GHGs!
Arrhenius-believers have confused the cause (gravito-thermal) with the effect (IR absorption/emission from GHGs). The only “radiative forcing” is from the one and only energy source the 5800K SOLAR blackbody, not the wimpy 193K or -80C CO2 wannabe “partial blackbody.”
“That logic will take some untangling.”
No doubt, for you.
Assistance here in my new post today incorporating PA’s OLR figure above. Thanks PA!
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/09/why-effective-radiating-level-erl-is.html
@PA; “the ocean has 1100 times the thermal inertia of the atmosphere.”
i.e. 1100X the heat capacity of one atmosphere. That means the oceans could swallow ALL of the heat in our atmosphere 1100 TIMES OVER before even warming a fraction of ONE degree.
Sun heats oceans, oceans heat atmosphere, atmosphere cools Earth to space. The tail does not wag the dog.
In addition, even if 15 micron IR could penetrate the oceans (it cannot penetrate water beyond it’s wavelength of 15 microns), radiation from the GHG -18C partial BB to the true BB ocean at ~4C cannot warm the warmer BB at all!
Arrhenius-CAGW-believers demolished yet again.
HS, you attempted to untangle your logic, but are hopelessly even more entangled. So when you keep saying radiation is not important, it actually is. Presumably your atmosphere is not emitting light, but IR, and somehow doing it without the aid of GHGs. Interesting stuff.
Jim D | September 2, 2015 at 12:23 am |
“Presumably your atmosphere is not emitting light, but IR, and somehow doing it without the aid of GHGs. Interesting stuff.”
Well I suppose it is quite interesting and confusing to you JimD that IR is in fact LIGHT or ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION on the ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUM, and that ALL THERMAL RADIATION FROM BLACKBODIES IS WITHIN THE LONGWAVE INFRARED SPECTRUM. Therefore, the only emission/absorption from GHGs of relevance to the GHE is in the LONGWAVE INFRARED SPECTRUM of LIGHT.
Please Google all terms in CAPS above to educate yourself on elementary school physics, I’m done tutoring you.
HS, your atmosphere is emitting IR and has an ERL just like in the consensus. I understand this well, but you don’t seem to think this idea has anything to do with radiation, which is where you went off the rails.
Jim D | September 2, 2015 at 12:23 am |
HS, you attempted to untangle your logic, but are hopelessly even more entangled. So when you keep saying radiation is not important, it actually is. Presumably your atmosphere is not emitting light, but IR, and somehow doing it without the aid of GHGs. Interesting stuff.
First – lets refer to a useful version of a blueice2hotsea chart…
Not this one:
http://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/energy_budget/images/2014.07.08erb_ppt_big_labels_percents_v2.jpg
This one:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/The-NASA-Earth's-Energy-Budget-Poster-Radiant-Energy-System-satellite-infrared-radiation-fluxes.jpg
Radiation 58 W/m2
Convection 18 1/2 W/m2
Latent: 86 1/2 W/m2
58+ 18 + 86 + 1 = 163 W/m2
So…
Only about 36% of the energy is lost through radiation. Which means the warmers who think that all energy is lost by radiation are going to be off by almost a factor of 3 – all things being equal. And global warmers are off by a factor of three. AGW is only good for 1.05 W/m2 since 1900.
And it should noted that the 22 PPM = 0.2 W/m2 (which gives you the 1.05 W/m2 from CO2 since 1900) is the high end. This is the “Clear Sky Flux” difference. If the sky is not clear or not fluxing the effect is drastically reduced.
According to Wiki:
“On average, about 52% of Earth is cloud-covered at any moment”
I can’t find an estimate for how much of the time things aren’t fluxing.
So… the Anthopowhosit Globular Whateveritis (AGW) could be as little as half a Watt per square meter since 1900.
While I disagree with HS about GHG the effect is potentially so small that real world data probably won’t settle our argument. About the only thing we will agree on is global warmers are wrong.
hockeyschtick
Oops. I need to fix #3 and clarify. Thanks,
Can you either correct or affirm this statement?
Collisions delay photon emission to space in the sense that energy that would otherwise be directly radiated to space is instead largely transferred via collision to non-GHGs which eventually rise via convection to ERL where collisions with GHGs transfer energy back to the GHGs which then radiate photons to space.
“Consensus is thus a social convenience in that allows a collective to define itself based on those decisions and proceed accordingly. Constantly reviewing the same controversies without resolution is not only exhausting but it also risks similar bullying tactics by proponents who simply want to get their way with no regard for halakhic merit. As such, it is my opinion that a halakhic decisor ought to consider popular opinion when issuing general or specific rulings, though the weight given will vary given the circumstances and consequences. However, those who insist that their definition of consensus definitively determines normative halakhah for the entire Jewish people, and to the extent no other opinions have halakhic merit nor other options be considered, deny not only basic logic but the Biblical and Rabbinic religious traditions they claim to defend.” (Ending paragraph).
Interesting discussion on both the basis of consensus and the merits of consensus. His points are well made: endlessly arguing the same point (and so, presumably, preventing action) breaks down community harmony and progress. But his further point, that INSISTING on a particular consensus as the only correct one, or unalterable, and disagreements with the consensus are forbidden, goes against all principles, practical or religious.
The “consensus” in climate change is not the problem but the refusal to consider evidence and argument that the consensus could reasonably – or for practical purposes – inadequate to describe reality.
Excellent post. The bottom line really is the bottom line.
“Bottom line: inflating the numbers of ‘climate scientists’ in such surveys attempts to hide that there is a serious scientific debate about the detection and attribution of recent warming, and that scientists who are skeptical of the IPCC consensus conclusion are disproportionately expert in the area of climate change detection and attribution.”
Question 13 — What’s the difference between a response of I don’t know (8.8) and responses of Unknown (9.9) and Other (3.1)?
Seems like these answers should be lumped in with I don’t know. This would change the “I don’t know” category value to 21.8
Yes – problems with leading questions and answers.
Since the question assumes either natural or anthro, other wouldn’t seem to be possible.
And the difference between I don’t know and unknown would be?
How about unknowable – I don’t know and I don’t think anyone can because there’s no good way to know how much energy earth absorbed during the past, and so, no way to know what imbalance might have occurred.
Awesome post! Cook et al. amaze me in two ways. First, they imagine scientific controversies can be settled by counting papers that (allegedly) endorse their favored hypothesis but provide no new or independent evidence for it. Second, they still believe demanding fealty to groupthink is a great way to win friends and influence people. “Consensus” rhetoric does not marginalize or silence skeptics, it energizes them.
Without rigour – soon mortis.
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/the-art-of-evasion
If ‘Science’ means, as Kuhn defines, ‘What scientists do,’
Cook et al would be normal science. If ‘Science’ means
as Popper and Feynman define, ‘A rigorous search for
truth to data involving critical evaluation and allowing
refutation, then it ain’t.
Hi Beth.
Why can’t science mean both of those things? If scientists are doing the latter, it’s what scientists do. If not, it’s still what scientists do.
?
Say, jim,
Isn’t the first, Cook et al faux investigation, science perverse?
Can ‘ Science’ mean ‘non- investigation?’ Ought’nt what
scientists do meet some demands of research rigour else
anything goes? No distinction between science and defence
of dogma?
Beth, yes. You nailed it.
The conceit of consensus replaced the humility of honesty in awarding funds for research after WWII. The inevitable consequences: the Climategate emails that surfaced in late November 2009.
omanuel: Dyson did his work after WWII.
“Consensus” rhetoric does not marginalize or silence skeptics, it energizes them.”
Exactly. And lets hope they never understand this.
Understanding it it irrelevant because the version of climate skepticism that haunts this site is irrelevant.
JCH,
From your view, what “version of climate skepticism” is relevant?
AGW theory will be irrelevant before this decade is out because it is wrong and has been proven to be wrong by the historical climatic record and present day temperature trends and atmospheric processes ,none of them coming to be, as called for by this stupid theory.
Skeptics won the AGW debate when global temperatures refused to follow increasing CO2. Researchgate has revealed a broader based and more troubling sequel to Climategate:
http://tiny.cc/999j2x
Newsflash: Climate models predict total surface warming to within 5%. Data here:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/07/gistemp-only-004c-behind-models.html
If you arrange the Verheggen responses from most certain more than 50% at one end to most certain less than 50% at the other, the median falls at very likely more than 50%. That is, half the climate scientists were at very likely or more, while half were at very likely or less. But the median position agrees with the IPCC consensus, as it should.
The Verheggen survey is BS, yimmy. So any spin you put on it is also BS.
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/268791343_Comment_on_Scientists'_Views_about_Attribution_of_Global_Warming
Stop citing phony surveys, yimmy. You can’t fool us.
http://www.academia.edu/11797234/Comment_on_Scientists_Views_about_Attribution_of_Global_Warming_
Duarte delivers a stinging slapdown.
It has become obvious that there is not a majority of scientists that believe in CAGW. If 97% of scientists believed in CAGW there would be honest surveys reporting it. The lack of honest surveys is pretty telling.
The number of scientists that are CAGW believers might be in the 20-30% range (the % of neoluddites and environmentalists in the general population).
This is means it is a religious belief and has nothing to do with science.
It turned out that the ones in the highest quartile of climate publications were also the most likely to give a >100% attribution to GHGs despite Duarte’s hoped for lack of expertise. I think he was just blowing smoke.
You can see how many actual climate scientists of the WG1 type were in the survey from Verheggen’s paper (more than half). It doesn’t match up with the impression Duarte wants to give, or he did not read it carefully enough. The paper clearly showed that the non-scientists tend to bring the attribution down which may be opposite to Duarte’s attempted point.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es501998e
Duarte’s got form for rushing out rather mistaken ‘slap-downs’.
See the one that Judith cites in her post for another example.
Duarte’s premise is ridiculous on its face. The poll was voluntary, so none of his paranoid skeptics would have needed to answer anyway, and it was anonymous, like all such polls, meaning there isn’t going to be a list somewhere with who participated and what answers they gave next to their names. Polls never do that, otherwise they just would not work. Duarte assumed both these things wrongly.
The problems with Verheggen’s paper were:
1. Biased selection of participants.
2. Inclusion of non-participants (biologists, psychologists, etc.)
3. Only about 30% participation
4. Weighted toward frequent publishers who because of gatekeeping are more likely to be global warmers.
Given the validity problems it is likely that less than 50% of “real” climate scientists believe man is responsible for more than 50% of the warming (given the 22 PPM = 0.2 W/m2 study it is impossible that CO2 emissions could be responsible for most of the warming).
However bad this study was it was a quantum improvement over past studies.
However, the basic problem is that instead of taking empirical measurements of GHG forcing we are having scientists vote on how strong it is.
When it comes to science – voting instead of measuring is wrong. It is ludicrous that this has to be said – it should be obvious.
There shouldn’t be 1 study of downwelling IR after 35 years – there should be a dozen. And the one actual study indicates CO2 forcing is grossly overestimated.
Verheggen checked biases in response rates, and while the “unconvinced” tended to be more active in responding, their higher response rate did not distort the results too much.
Bias,
helas,
tres
ludicrass.
” I guess the real lesson from this paper is that you can get any kind of twaddle published, if you keep trying and submit it to different journals.” – JC
The thigh slapping continues….
Prior to this statement, Judith referenced the Tol paper.
How many journals declined this paper Judith? Where was it eventually published??
I love the smell of tribalism in the morning.
oops – should read the comments before posting.
Someone has already asked his blindingly obvious question (not one of the ‘skeptics’, naturally)
Right. The skeptics probably don’t read Sow as much as you and Joshua.
I’m curious just what was included in this version of Richard Tol’s paper. It’s paywalled, so I don’t know what all it says, but I remember reading earlier versions of the paper. They were beyond terrible. His first draft was posted and discussed over on The Blackboard, and I discussed it there starting with this comment. What followed was a very lengthy exchange where I was almost the only person willing to acknowledge Tol had made a glaringly obvious and incredibly stupid mistake, one where he based a central criticism of the Cook et al paper on the idea they had presented their ratings in a random order. Only, they hadn’t. They had presented them by abstract year and alphabetical order (within the year), which was certainly not random.
Tol eventually wound up dropping the argument from his paper, I think in his fourth or fifth draft. He never admitted it was wrong though. In fact, he kept defending it even after dropping it from his paper, making one wonder why he would drop it from his paper. Whatever his reason, it appears that to this day, Tol still believes sorting abstracts by the year they were published gives you them in a random order. It’s mind-boggling, especially in that almost nobody calls him out on how ridiculous an idea that is. I think I’ve only seen two people other than myself acknowledge his argument on that point is wrong,
Personally, I don’t have high expectations for the paper. I would say Cook et al’s paper is utter garbage, but I have no problem acknowledging most of the “refutations” and “rebuttals” to it have been pretty bad too.
I defended you, brandoon. So why you mad at me?
Oh, Brandon! For heaven’s sake! You are becoming soooo predictable!
Your recent flurry of comments here, there and elsewhere, notwithstanding your vow** sometime in the last few months that – for reasons you decided to keep to yourself – appear to contradict your proclamation (via your own blog) that you weren’t going to bother gracing other skeptic blogs with your presence and attention.
Consequently, I am left with the rather distinct impression that you are inclined to perceive every issue (particularly those in which matters might have some bearing – no matter how remote – on those to which you have taken exception, in your own inimicable fashion) only in the very narrow terms of the few molecules of the very old bone(s) at which you continue to gnaw.
As the mother of my long, long ago across the street neighbour was wont to say, in such circumstances, albeit in her rather old-fashioned Mancunian way: “Give over”!
**Evidence available on request
Hilary, “Hadaway wi’ yuh, man!” would be the Geordie version.
Hilary Ostrov:
I’m pretty sure I never vowed anything of the sort, so:
Yeah, I’m going to request evidence.
@Brandon S? (@Corpus_no_Logos) | August 28, 2015 at 8:28 am
In reply to your request, here’s my evidence:
Your very own words, which I had noted and quoted over at BH, circa Jul 28, 2015 at 9:48 AM. For <gasp> context, pls see:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2015/7/25/cooked-motl-josh-337.html?currentPage=2#comments
I fully appreciate – as far too often turns out to be the rather unfortunate case when you are gnawing at a few molecules of a much larger and very old bone – that you may not have meant what you said, nor said what you reallymeant.
But that’s your problem, kiddo. Not mine, nor anyone else’s for that matter!
Hilary Ostrov:
While context is great and all, being able to read helps more. First, this site isn’t a “skeptic” blog, so I have no idea why you think me saying I’ve pretty given up on them would mean I should stop posting here. Second, saying I’ve given up on places and that I don’t feel comfortable posting there doesn’t mean I won’t still post there. It just means I’ve given up any good expectations of those sites.
I posted at Skeptical Science for some time before they banned me. I didn’t do that because I thought Skeptical Science was a good site. I didn’t do it because I thought I could convince the Skeptical Science regulars I was right. I did it because I thought some people reading Skeptical Science might hear what I had to say and listen. That’s the same reason I may still post at “skeptic” blogs I’ve since given up on.
So you can say:
But the fact you choose to jump to conclusions about what people mean rather than just read what they say doesn’t mean they’ve somehow contradicted themselves. All it means is you choose to read contradictions into what people say rather than just read what people say.
@Brandon, during the course of your self-exculpatory, non-responsive treatise [August 29, 2015 at 7:01 am] – which you appeared to conclude with a classic exercise in projection – you forgot to “translate” from plain English to Brandonspeak™:
** The only two blogs you had specifically named
So, please be so kind as to “translate” that which I have bolded, above. Thanks.
P.S. You don’t get to tell me what I “can say” – or what I can’t, for that matter!
Michael,
Gotta give ya credit:”I love the smell of tribalism in the morning.” for at least recognizing it’s tribalism all around.
My comment is in moderation.
What good is a consensus among scientists who publish unreproducible research?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results
Psychology is not a hard science.
But neither are opinions based on unknowns.
Someone can have an opinion on what percentage of warming is anthro versus natural, but that would presume one knows what amount of natural variation has occurred. Things like albedo were not even measured before satellites ( early estimates for earth albedo were 50% ) and even with satellite measurements, the amount of uncertainty in absorbed solar is greater than a doubling of CO2.
We could assume albedo for the past is known and constant, but this is not science.
Now, forcing from CO2, while not uniform, does impose an energy surplus for just about every profile, so something has to change to return to equilibrium, and that something would seem most likely to be warming.
But no one knows for sure.
Freeman Dyson is clearly not a climate expert. He is a very old scientist who thinks he can successfully opine on anything now because he did some great work in the late 1940s on QED.
Elder scientists rarely know what’s going on, even in their own fields.
So Appell, ageist not sexist, a good point for you on this blog. So you are saying old people are…..
Dumb?
Their opinions are wrong because they are old?
Or are you just upset that a brilliant mind can consider matters like Climate change and detect that your ideas just don’t add up.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll pick you in my soccer team over him but if it comes to science he makes the first team, not you.
David Appel — Except when older scientists like Dr. Ivar Giaever agree with you.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/07/nobel-prize-winning-scientist-says-obama-is-dead-wrong-on-global-warming/
I see it very differently.
The way I see it is that Dyson is suggesting it’s hardly “settled” or “uncontroversal”, that there are large gaps in the basic knowledge etc and he is personally not comfortable in stating that we must do something!
My evidence to the UK House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Select Committee inquiry in 2013 may be of interest:
http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/WrittenEvidence.svc/EvidenceHtml/4191
Note my reference to what I call the “Beyond Expertise Problem” (section 2.2).
Excellent submission, guenier. Less obvious that the politicians understood and/or accepted your evidence. Has there been a shift since 2013?
Not so far as I’m aware. However the submission was mentioned a couple of times by Graham Stringer (Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton) in a debate in Westminster Hall last November. The Hansard report is here: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmhansrd/cm141120/halltext/141120h0001.htm (Go to Columns 159WH and 160WH and look for his reply to Ian Lavery.)
Thanks, good to have Stringer and Lilley on the case. I summarised Lilley’s demolition of Stern’s work on CE some time ago.
The lead author is called Verheggen, that’s with an e not an a.
The thing that has long puzzled me about Cook et al’s work is what part of science it belongs to. Clearly it has nothing to do with climate science, which is concerned with temperatures, clouds, oceans, glaciers and a raft of other physical phenomena.
And if it were social science, it would surely be offering some, perhaps anthropological, analysis of why these chaps think this way.
To me, it looks, walks and quacks like political persuasion. So why does it even come up for consideration in science circles?
Dr. Curry said “Fabius Maximus has a fascinating post” (e.g. is 47% the new 97%?).
Boy, it sure looks like Fabius Maximus did some serious cherry-picking to put a negative spin of the Verheggan survey.
Just modifying two points of the Fabius Maximus post changes the 47% to about 75%:
(1) Adding the category Very Likely to agreeing. Boy, excluding this category is really splitting hairs. The IPCC defines Extremely Likely at 95% and Very Likely at 90% probability.
(2) Reflecting a broader “I don’t know” category to include Unknown and Other (which the Verheggan Study addresses but Fabius Maximus doesn’t).
Well, the AR5 made a very explicit choice to go to ‘extremely likely’, up from the ‘very likely’ of AR4. This was unjustified IMO, and in the opinion also of many others surveyed by Verheggen et al.
Seems like this is an Inside Baseball type of point (e.g., argument among highly knowledgeable people — the Pros).
From a layman’s perspective, I doesn’t seem like the difference between 95% and 90% on a Theory is that big of a deal — certainly not in accepting the 47% argument.
That depends on the layman in question.
Tom Fuller wrote about Bart Verheggen a few times.
“The answer is very clearly found in the data. Sixty-six percent (66%) of the respondents to the survey believe half or more of recent warming is attributable to human emissions of CO2.”
https://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/more-on-verheggen-et-al-great-survey-pity-about-the-report-its-still-66/
Hmmm … 31 points short of 97%.
Don Bishop — I disagreed with Tom Fuller’s use of the word “dishonest” (for anything greater than 66%).
Almost 22% of respondents had no quantifiable opinion. If one believes this should be accounted for, this is a “difference of opinion” and not “dishonest”.
One could say, “For those that have a quantifiable opinion, the % is greater than 66%”.
So now you are expert in survey review Stephen?
Many of us have seen papers that give a nod to global warming at the end even though the content of the paper had no equation including CO2 or other rationale linking CO2 to the study. One can’t just use a search engine, one must read and understand the paper.
At any rate, then there is this, from the article:
…
n the investigation, a whopping 75% of the social psychology experiments were not replicated, meaning that the originally reported findings vanished when other scientists repeated the experiments. Half of the cognitive psychology studies failed the same test. Details are published in the journal Science.
Even when scientists could replicate original findings, the sizes of the effects they found were on average half as big as reported first time around. That could be due to scientists leaving out data that undermined their hypotheses, and by journals accepting only the strongest claims for publication.
…
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results
Have any of the 97% papers been replicated? Even if so, did the researcher check the paper to ensure the actual study utilized CO2 in a material way, and didn’t just have a sentence at the end saying “effect x” will get worse due to global warming?
Its worse than that, duarte gets it right. The merely use the global warming consensus as a starting point for their analysis, i.e. they ‘import’ the consensus assumption about CO2 warming (they don’t evaluate it).
Link to Duarte’s new and improved slice-n-dice of Cook et al.
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97?
> The merely use the global warming consensus as a starting point for their analysis, i.e. they ‘import’ the consensus assumption about CO2 warming (they don’t evaluate it).
They actually try to quantify that “import”:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
To criticize C13 for what it doesn’t do might very well be suboptimal, Judy.
Little willy quotes his heroes BS paper> “We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW,”
Wow, the greatest threat faced by mankind and 66.4% expressed no opinion. Don’t those people care about their children and grandchildren?
> [T]he greatest threat faced by mankind and 66.4% expressed no opinion.
Yet Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming, Don Don. All these numbers provide a good approximation of the size of the Denizens’ bandwagon.
Go team!
Wee willy, the denizens position broadly stated is that we do not endorse CAGW. Probably the majority here will go along with some AGW.
from the paper> “We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW”
That is not endorsing CAGW, or even any amount of AGW. Why do two thirds of papers on climate change not express a position on the alleged greatest threat faced by mankind, little willy?
Thank you for your question, which means you have little idea how the linguistic division of labour (to borrow Putnam’s concept) on abstracts work, Don Don.
I’d rather say that Denizens fully endorse the CAGW meme. They fabricated it and that’s all they have, for the most part. Just look how you go from “no position on AGW” to “not endorsing CAGW.”
Go team!
Stop the gaudy foolishness, willy-fanny.
Now, I will be generous and give you another chance to be honest, for a change. Surprise us, wee one:
Wow, the greatest threat faced by mankind and 66.4% expressed no opinion. Don’t those people care about their children and grandchildren?
“To criticize C13 for what it doesn’t do might very well be suboptimal, Judy.” – Willard
Willard,
You fail to fully appreciate the blog-scientist methodology; blog-posts claiming flaws in climate science/reseearch are correct – no critical appraisal required.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14240.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20150319
Well… 22 PPM = 0.2 W/m2
RCP 8.5 2100 940 PPM = 2.96 W/m2 or 0.80 °C.
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=wps-69-2014.pdf&site=24
“In all four cases, the expected impacts cross zero somewhere between 1°C and 2°C of global warming – suggesting net positive impacts for milder warming for AR2 and AR3, and showing such for AR4 and AR5. Impacts get progressively more negative for greater warming, but only become statistically significantly different from zero somewhere between 3°C and 4°C.”
0.8°C is still in the “beneficial” range of global warming. Even the worst case IPCC 2100 CO2 level is going to be harmless (in fact net beneficial). How can these people possibly be claiming harm from CO2?
To claim harm from CO2 requires dishonesty, deception, and use of more than 0.80°C warming.
Stop making sense.
Then what of the math that shows “just from co2 alone” that ALL of the increase in temps is responsible for? If half of the increase is from something else, what is it? (providing of course that there has been warming and not a manipulation of data) The IPCC has stated definitely (on many different occasions) that there is no other possible cause. Do I get time on the supercomputer for a different formula? I don’t think so.
Ask JCH ,
He says 140-150% of all the increase is due to CO2 alone. When he lets you know what dropped it 50% ( not natural variation of course)
You will have your answer.
inflate much?
Remember when you schooled me on cooling coming in 2015? I don’t much attention to what you say.
keep your eye on the ball
Is that before or after they changed their temperature measurements again (upwards).
At least you try to think about things even though you persist in putting up cherry picked slopes on graphs.
You might be a good candidate for the truth test.
“How to judge an alarmist”.
1 ask them to give a figure for sea level rise by 2100
2 ask them give the temperature rise they expect by 2100.
Anyone here commentating or lecturing on consensus and 97% should be prepared to put up a non weasel answer to these 2 questions.
That is a numerical sensible answer.
The people most vocal here about unsubstantiated claims are the first to clam up when this question is asked.
Even worse they use the “Joshua” defence.
1. I don’t have to tell you what I believe
2. I won’t tell you what I believe
3 you are wrong to believe whatever you believe I believe.
4 . I am not an alarmist because whatever calamity I believe in is not a calamity because it is true.
5. And I won’t tell you what it is because your a skeptic.
Would you like to go first?
I I’ll state here that you will never see Willard, Michael, Joshua, Appell, Way or ATTP give an answer to these simple questions
Never.
A response, yes,
an answer no.
Does ATTP believe in a 20 foot sea level rise ?
A6 degree warming by the end of the century?
Of course he believes it .
Will he admit it no he is an alarmist who believes he is a rationalist.
His response would instead be the evasive ” It’s possible but I’m not telling you as you would call me an alarmist”.
angech,
No, these are not question to which there are simple answers. Look if the IPCC reports if you want a sense of reasonable answers to these questions. Make sure, however, that you learn the difference between a projection and a prediction.
No, he doesn’t. Why would I possibly waste my time answering any of your posed questions if you make statements about me which are simply not true.
angech –
“Even worse they use the “Joshua” defence.
1. I don’t have to tell you what I believe
2. I won’t tell you what I believe”
If you want to know what I believe, ask me. No,I don’t “have” to tell you what I believe, but I am more than happy to do so.
It is not skeptical to determine that you know what I believe, in particular with certainty, if you haven’t even asked me about what I believe. It’s “skeptical.”
If you want to know what I believe (which seems to be the case since you’ve written multiple posts now talking about the subject), feel free to ask.
If you really wanted some twisted numbers look at co2 levels in relation to the amount that is released. Allegedly co2 stays in the atmosphere hundreds of years. Yet with ever increasing amounts, nearly half is disappearing. ( I have closer to 70%). Which in any one year dwarfs the release of any year in the 1950s. Yet they show a rise in co2 levels during that time. Additionally, if there is any surprise the rise of co2 levels is connected with solar cycles AND cosmic ray fluxes. You would think that today’s co2 output would be ever higher in the ppm year over year. Since 1998 no year has been higher in the number of molecules increased. Source. NOAA.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/getPart_(6).pdf
This says it all which is AGW theory will be obsolete before this decade ends.
Had to copy it, here it is.
THE UN’S IPCC HAS NO CREDIBILITY ON GLOBAL WARMING – by Allan MacRae
In 2002 the PEGG, the journal of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) solicited the following debate on the now-defunct Kyoto Accord (Kyoto Protocol), between Dr. Matthew Bramley and Matt McCullough, P.Eng. of the Pembina Institute, who supported the Kyoto Accord and relied upon the IPCC’s position, and Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Harvard Astrophysicist, Dr. Tim Patterson, Carleton Paleoclimatologist, and Allan MacRae, P.Eng., who opposed Kyoto based on scientific statements in their PEGG article and rebuttal.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/KyotoAPEGA2002REV1.pdf Now, after 13 years, it is instructive to look back at the two positions and determine how they have fared.
One’s predictive track record is perhaps the only objective measure of one’s competence. The IPCC has a negative predictive track record, because ALL of its scary projections have failed to materialize. The IPCC thus has NO credibility, actually it has NEGATIVE credibility. Probabilistically; based the IPCC’s negative predictive track record, one would more correct if one assumed the opposite of the IPCC’s scary projections.
All the IPCC’s scary projections of catastrophic humanmade global warming, wilder weather, and climate change have failed to materialize, despite significant increases in atmospheric CO2, the purported driver of this falsely-predicted “weather weirding”. According to the best data from satellites, global temperatures measured in the Lower Troposphere (LT) have not increased significantly in about 18 years. Hurricane frequency and intensity are at record low levels. The climate has been remarkably stable despite substantial increases in atmospheric CO2.
The IPCC’s sycophants responded by falsifying the Surface Temperature (ST) record to overstate global warming: See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/14/problematic-adjustments-and-divergences-now-includes-june-data/ In 2008 I calculated the “Warming Bias Rate” [for 1979 to end-2007] = (Hadcrut3 ST – UAH LT anomalies) / time = 0.2C/2.8 decades or about 0.07C/decade. That was the apparent Warming Bias Rate in the ST versus the LT. In 2015 the Warming Bias Rate [for 1979 to mid-2015] = (Hadcrut4 ST – UAH LT anomalies) / time = [0.685 – 0.204]/3.5 decades = about 0.14/decade. THIS IS TWICE THE WARMING BIAS RATE OF JUST ~6 YEARS AGO – AN UNBELIEVABLE INCREASE! It is extremely improbable that the total (since 1979) difference in the (ST minus LT) temperature anomalies diverged this much in just 6 years. It is much more probable that the ST data was falsified to overstate global warming.
Pembina in its 2002 Rebuttal quoted the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers as follows: “In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations… The globally averaged surface temperature is projected [in business-as-usual scenarios] to increase by 1.4 to 5.8º C over the period 1990 to 2100.”
In reality, the only quality data – from satellites – shows NO significant global warming for the past 18 years! Pembina further stated: “The IPCC, however, finds good agreement between model simulations and observed temperature over the past 140 years, including the temperature increase up to 1940, if the simulations include solar variation and volcanic activity along with emissions of GHGs and particulates.”
In reality, the models quoted by the IPCC have grossly over-predicted the amount of future global warming. These models were utterly corrupted by fabricated aerosol data that was used to justify an incredibly high climate sensitivity to CO2 (ECS). The fabricated aerosol data was used to force the models to hindcast the global cooling that occurred circa 1940 to 1975. This false aerosol data was literally created “out of thin air” and is contradicted by actual data. See Dr. Douglas V. Hoyt’s comments at: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=755
The IPCC and its sycophants have fabricated a false scenario of catastrophic humanmade global warming and wilder weather that has NO credibility and is contradicted by two decades of data. There is evidence of the falsification of climate model inputs and surface temperature data to overstate claims of global warming. .
In comparison, let us review the eight predictions we made on our 2002 Rebuttal [my comments in brackets]:
Kyoto has many fatal flaws, any one of which should cause this treaty to be scrapped.
Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist. [NO net global warming has occurred for about 18 years.}
Kyoto focuses primarily on reducing CO2, a relatively harmless gas, and does nothing to control real air pollution like NOx, SO2, and particulates, or serious pollutants in water and soil. [Note pollution in China and former Soviet Union.]
Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity. [Since the start of global warming hysteria, about 50 million children below the age of five have died from contaminated water.]
Kyoto will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and damage the Canadian economy – the U.S., Canada’s biggest trading partner, will not ratify Kyoto, and developing countries are exempt. [Canada adopted Kyoto but then most provinces wisely ignored it – the exception being now-depressed Ontario, where government drank the Kool-Aid.]
Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment – it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution. {Note the air in China.]
Kyoto’s CO2 credit trading scheme punishes the most energy efficient countries and rewards the most wasteful. Due to the strange rules of Kyoto, Canada will pay the former Soviet Union billions of dollars per year for CO2 credits. [We shamed our government into not paying the FSU, but other governments did so, to bribe them to sign Kyoto.]
Kyoto will be ineffective – even assuming the overstated pro-Kyoto science is correct, Kyoto will reduce projected warming insignificantly, and it would take as many as 40 such treaties to stop alleged global warming. [IF one believed the utterly false climate models, one would probably conclude that we must cease fossil fuel consumption.].
The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels. [Those governments who adopted “green energy” schemes such as wind and solar power are finding these schemes are not green and produce little useful energy. Their energy costs are soaring and those governments are in retreat, dropping their green energy subsidies as they try to save face.]
In summary, all our predictions have proven correct in those venues that fully embraced the now-defunct Kyoto Accord, whereas none of the IPCC’s scary projections have materialized.
So what happens next? Will we see catastrophic humanmade global warming? No, our planet will cool.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/13/over-2000-cold-and-snow-records-set-in-the-usa-this-past-week/#comment-1502081 [excerpts]
I (we) predicted the commencement of global cooling by 2020-2030 in an article published in the Calgary Herald in 2002. That prediction is gaining credibility as solar activity [in current SC24] has crashed… It is still early in the prediction game, but SC25 is also projected to be very weak, so we will probably experience two consecutive very-weak Solar Cycles in SC24 and SC25… IF the Sun does indeed drive temperature, as I suspect, then successive governments in Britain and continental Europe have brewed the perfect storm. They have crippled their energy systems with excessive reliance on ineffective grid-connected wind power schemes. I suggest that global cooling probably WILL happen within the next decade or sooner, and Europe [and the world] will get colder, possibly much colder. I suggest that Winter deaths will increase in the Europe as cooling progresses. I suggest that Excess Winter Mortality rates will provide an estimate of this unfolding tragedy.
Timing is difficult to estimate, but I now expect global cooling to be evident by 2020 or sooner
> The Verheggan [sic.] et al. study was criticized in a published comment by Duarte […]
The Grand Dame failed to mention that Bart V & al replied almost one year ago:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es505183e
***
Also, Bart V’s name ought to have been corrected too long ago.
They hardly replied at all.
What did you think of the last 4 paragraphs?
There were so many devastating things wrong that Duarte pointed out, and half of the response is devoted to one comparatively trivial issue on which they seem to disagree. Not sure I agree with what they say about it, not everyone is anxious for the type of “fame and glory” that Dr. Curry has chosen, but anyhow it’s just way down the list of things wrong w the paper.
Well – I don’t particularly care about the bickering about more technical issues, as IMO, it’s perhaps analogous to bickering about how to rearrange the deck chars on the Titanic. IMO, what might be meaningful about the existence of a “consensus” (meaningful but not dispositive) is rather obvious: the majority of expert opinion is consistent with a belief that the risks posed by ACO2 emissions merit consideration of targeted policies.
So I don’t think that the majority of Duarte’s comment, nor the response, were of much interest.
What I found of interest were the strikingly fallacious arguments that Duarte presented towards the end of his comment, and what I found to be of most interest about the response was how those fallacious arguments were addressed.
So I disagree that they hardly replied, and I don’t think that in comparison, the arguments that Duarte made were “devastating” when viewed against some of the terrible (and unscientific) arguments that he presented.
Really, who gives a whit about the consensus…any consensus? What is the point of having a brain? We takes our chances. :O)
It’s hilarious.
W: There is a 97% consensus
S: Science isnt about consensus
W: There is a 97% consensus
S: The number that doesnt matter is 47.
W: 97
S: 47
W: 97, count the papers!
S: you are all corrupt!
W: who?
S: 97% of you
W: lemme get this right. you all think we are this great giant monolithic power that is oppressing you and keeping you from publishing, but
on the other hand it’s only half of us who believe.
It’s the half with the power to relegate certain out of favor (Muller led) researchers to pay for play journals of last resort to get their little box checked.
These authors testing for inappropriate statistical methods? hahahahhahaha
It doesn’t seem to me that the article on Jewish halakha is relevant here. As the author there points out, consensus/custom is an important deciding factor in halakhah. He may disapprove of the way it is carried out, but he acknowledges the fact. Things that were once burning issues have since been settled by consensus, either by the society or by its sages, and tend to stay settled.
All this is irrelevant to science.
@mike I agree with you about the irrelevance of consensus to science. However, it is clear that this argument only works within our own sphere. Since society at large seems to have accepted the notion of scientific consensus I see the power of the Rabbi’s argument as a way of arguing against consensus within the context of our evolving societal Marxist/consensus mindset.
When in Rome……
An example of an earlier consensus: “The Nazis enlisted other physicists, including Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, to denounce Einstein. One Hundred Authors Against Einstein was published in 1931. When asked to comment on this denunciation of relativity by so many scientists, Einstein replied that to defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact.” [Britannica.com]
Except the problem here is you have neither.
You have neither 100 scientists nor one fact.
The consensus didn’t come first, it came after many facts, and a lot of data, and a score or twenty score scientific papers.
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Really, do the Cook, the Nucc, and the Lew have any credibility left whatsoever?
Sounds like a bad joke – but sadly, these individuals ARE a bad joke … on objective science. Marketeers masquerading as scientists.
At the end of the day, that is the bottom line, ticket.
When you find yourself trying to defend work by any of these three, you are either desperate, dishonest or such true believers that becoming clueless would be an improvement.
Dr. Curry — Have you ever discussed with us your range of 25% to 75%? Is there any process/resources that you have used that us lay people could apply?
Also — is your probability the same with all values in this range, or is there a sliding scale? (with a somewhat stronger or weaker opinion as the scale increases or decreases between 25% and 75%).
One of the objectives of our survey was indeed to find out with much more detail than before what exactly climate scientists agree on and to what extent.
However, the number Fabius Maximus arrives at is nowhere near the actual consensus among climate scientist about whether recent warming is predominantly human induced. I replied to his and Tom Fuller’s line of reasoning here: https://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/pbl-survey-shows-strong-scientific-consensus-that-global-warming-is-largely-driven-by-greenhouse-gases/
Basically, they ignore the fact that a large fraction (22%) of respondents responded with either I don’t know, unknown, or other, to one of the two attribution questions. We argue that many of these respondents aren’t truly agnostic about that issue, but merely wanted to avoid having to pick a very specific range of values. We back that up with evidence, both in the ES&T article and in the abovementioned blogpost. It’s based on comparing the responses to the other attribution question (which is studiously ignored by critics) and on respondents’ open comments to the first question.
Hence, we stand by the results as reported in our paper that depending on the subgroup, the level of agreement with human dominated recent warming is between 79 and 97%, depending on the extent to which you’re zooming in on (arguably more expert) subgroups.
Thanks Willard for pointing readers to our reply to Duarte (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es505183e). We intended to survey the wider scientific field of researchers who studied various aspects of climate change. Duarte would rather have us do something different, and made a number of unsupported assertions and allegations on the go. Your mileage may vary of course.
Bart, my take on this is that it is very difficult to argue that people who checked ‘don’t know’ or ‘unknown’ support the consensus. If the question is ‘what % of scientists support the IPCC consensus conclusion”, then how can you argue that these individuals aren’t included in the denominator (i.e. out of total respondents).
Well, you can always pick a scientist near the one in question and interpolate. I guess that’s what Bart’s doing.
> [I]t is very difficult to argue that people who checked ‘don’t know’ or ‘unknown’ support the consensus.
Yet, in BartV’s words:
Conversely, arguing that they don’t support the consensus from the comfort of one’s armchair (witness the 43-47 gimmick) is absurd.
-I don’t know
-unknown
-or other
BV mindreading>”We argue that many of these respondents aren’t truly agnostic about that issue, but merely wanted to avoid having to pick a very specific range of values.”
So, these presumably adult “scientists” give a bogus answer to avoid picking blah…blah…blah. Hey, they don’t agree with either range of values, or they would have picked one or the other. You are just making crap up to get to the magical 97% result. Those are denominator folks. End of story.
Yeah, BV, Judith is correct. Your rationale is very difficult in the deepest Japanese sense. On this thread we now have it evidenced explicitly, defensively, and undeniably, by the paper first author–you. More true ‘climate science’ on full display.
Denominators and fractions mean what ‘climate scientists’ mean, not what grade school mathematics (and underlying set theory) teaches?
Thanks. You have now vividly defended Humpty Dumpty science (about the meanings of words, found in Through the Looking Glass).
H/t Lewis Carroll.
Reading your response, I’m struck how thoroughly biased your survey is. Basically, any time you offer a “multiple (including 2) choice question”, you should also offer an answer of “mu”.
Let me give you an example based on a recent discussion here: suppose you have a survey with the following question:
If you had left out the last (bolded) answer, “D)”, I would have refused to participate in your survey, because that’s my answer. But many might have given a “bogus” answer, perhaps “C)”.
AK, your best comment ever, IMO. Loved Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Not least, because I also have 4 to maintain, three different types in three different states. Dirt, street, 2 long cruisers.
Good memories of Zen and the Art …. a book that I have read again and again since the early 70’s. I really understood in related to the concept of Phaedrus as the rational 3rd person who endured in a sea of fools.
Hiya Bart,
I’ve asked several times to see the data. I’d really love to see it. Can it be arranged?
Thanks
Bart, according to my records, I sent this e-mail to you on June 4 regarding the lie in your abstract, and the empirical claims you made in the paper without any apparent data. According to my records I’ve not received any reply from either of you. Do you have answers to my questions? Will you run a correction, or do I have to go to the journal myself?
“Hi Bart and Bart,
I didn’t notice this before, but in your abstract in the ES&T paper, you state:
“90% of respondents with more than 10 climate-related peer-reviewed publications (about half of all respondents), explicitly agreed with anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) being the dominant driver of recent global warming.”
However, Table S3 in your supplemental materials indicates that the correct figure is somewhere between 71-77%
It’s 71% for 11-30 publications, and 77% for 32-300 publications (I assume the quartiles excluded 31 because no one had exactly 31 pubs.)
I’m looking at Question 1 only since it’s the question that asks about human attribution. Q3 just asks about GHG without specifying human attribution, and includes a list of several gases. And you included ties on that question as agreement, so we’re not going to be able to use those figures to say who thinks anthropogenic GHGs are “the dominant driver of recent global warming.”
Did you mean the statement in your abstract to apply only to those respondents who chose a human attribution percentage on Q1? We wouldn’t be able to exclude scientists who say we don’t know – that’s a central position in the debate, gets at the core issue for some people. A consensus figure could never exclude people who say we don’t yet know something.
In any case, your statement in the abstract doesn’t restrict the figure to opinionated or confident respondents. It just says “90% of respondents with more than 10 climate-related pubs…”, which is incorrect.
A correction would be in order here, yes?
Now, I did see this passage that seemed to touch on this issue: “A ratio expressed this way gives the appearance of a lower level of agreement. However, this is a consequence of the question being difficult to answer, due to the level of precision in the answer options, rather than it being a sign of less agreement.”
Where did this data come from? Participants said the question was difficult due to the level of precision in the options? I don’t see any items in your questionnaire asking about the questions, or why participants chose an answer. It’s not in the paper either. Where did this come from? (We sometimes ask participants questions about questions, or to expand on their answers, I just don’t see any such questions here. See Simine Vazire’s work for an interesting example of what happens when you repeat personality scale questions – when you make participants reconsider how happy or extroverted they really are, etc.)
Last thing: Where can I get the data? Was it linked on the ES&T page?
Hoogachtend,
Joe”
Jesus:
https://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/pbl-survey-shows-strong-scientific-consensus-that-global-warming-is-largely-driven-by-greenhouse-gases/
Page 8966
I am impressed that Jose managed to avoid using fraud in the above comment. However, given this comment, where there is not only an accusation of fraud, there is this
If I was Bart I would not respond to a single thing from Jose until he had either retracted this or proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. If it was me, Jose would have had an extremely strongly worded response to this type of claim, but I suspect Bart is a good deal politer and more reasonable than I am.
To be quite clear, anyone who spends their time making accusations of fraud, and claims that others are dishonest, is probably a complete joke who should simply be ignored. I do find it quite disappointing that Judith is promoting this. Firstly, I’m not aware of any academic environment where such rhetoric is regarded as acceptable. You don’t make such claims unless you can actually prove them to the satisfaction of the larger academic community. Jose is far from having done any such thing. Secondly, I don’t think encouraging Jose in his crusade is doing him any favours. It’s possible that Jose could make a positive contribution to this field, but – to date – he almost certainly has not done so, and if he carries on as he his, is unlikely to ever do so.
For someone claiming to be interested in science and research, Jose has an…err…curious take accuracy and professional behaviour.
“To be quite clear, anyone who spends their time making accusations of fraud, and claims that others are dishonest, is probably a complete joke who should simply be ignored.”
“The McIntyre and McKitrick paper is pure scientific fraud. I think you’ll find this reinforced by just about any legitimate scientist in our field you discuss this with. To recap, I hope you don’t mention MM [McIntyre and McKitrick] at all. It really doesn’t deserve any additional publicity.”
True.
Mosh
Not sure of your meaning. Are you saying the M and M paper is fraudulent or is it reinforcing the comment that those who shout fraud should be ignored?
Incidentally, A nobel prize awaits those who manage to prove malicious intent by the major suppliers of temperature data. All it needs is a peer reviewed paper by a sceptic, which shouldn’t be difficult to write if the ‘fraud’ is so obvious.
tonyb
“I am impressed that Jose managed to avoid using fraud in the above comment.” – attp
To be fair, he did use it 43 times in one of his other posts.
Did Jose lie when he spoke of a McCarthyite blacklist, and who is “likely” to end up on one?
Skimmers, beware of the Jon Stewart method in the comments. Commenters above are posting a bunch of fluff meant to look like a rebuttal. Their quotes have nothing to do with anything I’m talking about (e.g. the abstract). Their comments are meant to deceive people who aren’t following closely – they provide heuristic cues that perhaps some kind of rebuttal is happening, but they have no content, no argument.
It’s particularly common for these operatives to just paste a quote, any quote, and leave it hanging without an argument, as though it stands on it own. It’s like Stewart playing some clip and then making a face and cueing his audience to laugh or clap. This probably happens in a lot of places, there are a couple of people on this site’s comments that seem to never do anything but the Jon Stewart method. They haven’t met a consensus scam they won’t try to protect.
Jose,
The quote was meant to point out that the details in the abstract were covered – quite thoroughly – in the paper itself (as if that wasn’t obvious). The abstract is not the paper. It is a short summary meant to highlight key points. If it included all the possible information and caveats, it would not be called an abstract, it would be called the paper.
What did you think of the rest of my comment? It certainly wasn’t only a quote I left hanging.
For someone who claims to be a protector of good scientific practice and a defender of the scientific method, you seem more than willing to make absolute statements for which you have little – if any – evidence. Why is that? Do you think these basic rules apply only to others, and not to you?
I argue that I don’t know what their position is re the dominance of human GHG. I don’t argue that they support the consensus. Have you read the blogpost mentioined above?
Consider this scenario:
Suppose we had asked whether respondents thought GHG contributed 200 % of recent warming, and the result was that 90% of respondents gave an undetermined answer (dunno, unknown, other), 8% responded with one of the options 51%, 52%, … and 2% with one of the options below 50%, what would be your conclusion re the level of consensus? Presumably that it’s only 8%, based on your reasoning and that of Fab Max and Tom Fuller. I think that would be an incorrect conclusion, to the point of being misleading if it wasn’t accompanied by an explanation of why this percentage was so small.
My tentative conclusion would be that the level of consensus would be better approximated as 8/(8+2) = 80% in that case, though indeed that would not be very robust with such as extremely large fraction of undetermined answers. Luckily we also asked a more straightforward question based on which we can distill very similar information. And, lo and behold, it also comes at 80% agreement!
Would you insist in this hypothetical case that the level of consensus is 8%, without reservation?
Looking forward to your answer.
If we are going to peek inside people’s brains to guess what they really think, I think we also need to adjust for self-interest bias. My proposed methodology would be factor in the relative percentage of grant funding by alarmist/skeptic sourcing (obviously we going to have to do an informed guesstimate, but I’m confident we can perform up to the minimal standard set by Cook, Lew and mann). So, just as political pollsters adjust their numbers when they decide they have over-sampled from one party, we can adjust response numbers by assuming financial self-interest has prevailed on those whose brains we peek into.
— Comment got garbled, so here;s the latter part again, hopefully correct this time–
Suppose we had asked whether respondents thought GHG contributed less than 0%, 0%, 1%, 2%, 3%, …., 99%, 100%, 101%, …, 199%, 200%, more than 200%, of recent warming. I.e. with many, very detailed answer options.
And suppose the result was that 90% of respondents gave an undetermined answer (dunno, unknown, other), 8% responded with one of the options 51%, 52%, … and 2% with one of the options below 50%, what would be your conclusion re the level of consensus? Presumably that it’s only 8%, based on your reasoning and that of Fab Max and Tom Fuller. I think that would be an incorrect conclusion, to the point of being misleading if it wasn’t accompanied by an explanation of why this percentage was so small.
My tentative conclusion would be that the level of consensus would be better approximated as 8/(8+2) = 80% in that case, though indeed that would not be very robust with such as extremely large fraction of undetermined answers. Luckily we also asked a more straightforward question based on which we can distill very similar information. And, lo and behold, it also comes at 80% agreement!
Would you insist in this hypothetical case that the level of consensus is 8%, without reservation?
? You had 1868 respondents to the first question and 1222 to the second. Are you really going to assume people that had no opinion on certainty at all are in any particular camp? You really have don’t know, unknown, other and don’t care groups when it comes to confidence.
Captdallas, please read what I write. I don’t assume that those are all in one camp. Actually the opposite: I argue that we don’t really know. Fabmax a.o. assume what you imply shouldn’t be assumed. So we’re in agreement on that it seems.
Bart,
What you wrote missed the point. 1868 respondents had an opinion on question 1 and only 1222 had an opinion on question 2. A third of your respondents default in to the “I don’t know, Unknown, other” category in question 2, That is a bug/feature of your survey.
One of the biggest challenges with surveys I suspect is determining your margin of error. First blush it looks like you have roughly a 33% margin of error with the question 1 .and. question 2 combination. Now if you can reduce the group for that 1 .and. 2 combination to whatever number answered both question one and two then you would have something.
Looking at your other questions, it looked like the confidence question had the lowest number of respondents. In other words, a lot of your respondents had opinions but were not all that confident in them.
Bart if the data is on line it could make a great research into climate scientist fear of “i don’t know”. I can see the headlines now, 33% of climate scientists are afraid to admit they don’t know.
“I can see the headlines now, 33% of climate scientists are afraid to admit they don’t know.”
That wouldn’t be good for the cause. Barty should withdraw the paper, before it get’s out that the settled science ain’t really settled. Unless Barty can explain why in a nearly unanimous consensus there are so many that “don’t know” “unknown” “other” “don’t have a clue” “afraid to say” “been there done that” “got the T-shirt” etc.
Don, Bart would likely argue that only 2% of climate scientists are afraid of saying they don’t know. 2/(2+8)=20%
For the second question, 1222 is the number for GHG > 50%. If you work it out, that is nearly all of the fraction of the 1868 that had GHG >50% in the first question. The uncertain ones seemed mostly in the <50% and don't know categories, and this is not surprising at all. Your headline would be that almost all the skeptics who think it is not GHGs are very unsure of themselves.
JimD,”For the second question, 1222 is the number for GHG > 50%. If you work it out, that is nearly all of the fraction of the 1868 that had GHG >50% in the first question. The uncertain ones seemed mostly in the <50% and don't know categories, and this is not surprising at all. Your headline would be that almost all the skeptics who think it is not GHGs are very unsure of themselves."
That could be correct but then what happens to the 97%? Besides, it the headline that matters. There is a roughly 67% majority that believes AGW is happening and could be a potential problem. Why not use that? Because 97% was a better headline, even though getting 97% of any group to agree on anything is virtually impossible.
You are trying to change the subject, but in that 97%, the people who are least certain of themselves include nearly all the ones who think it is <50%.
“You are trying to change the subject, but in that 97%, the people who are least certain of themselves include nearly all the ones who think it is <50%."
Capt is not changing the subject, yimmy. He's talking about the freaking survey, just like you are. The reality is that there is no 97% consensus. And those people who are least certain are NOT uncertain of themselves, they are uncertain of the freaking science. They are honest. The zealots are dishonesty certain. Like you.
JimD, a 2/3rds majority is a super majority. It is rare, real and impressive. Anyone educated would be impressed. A 97% majority is extremely unlikely and rarely seen used in anything other than in propaganda. Why would climate scientist feel they need to pad the truth other than as a propaganda tool?
This survey had only 1% saying insignificant or cooling. You can see that about 97% think there is a significant warming effect, so that number was confirmed.
Keep spinning, yimmy. It’s a tired old song and dance, but still amusing. This has to be very frustrating for you.
You shot yourself in the foot, yimmy:
“For the second question, 1222 is the number for GHG > 50%. If you work it out, that is nearly all of the fraction of the 1868 that had GHG >50% in the first question.”
What is 1222 divided by 1868, yimmy-yimmy. That is your consensus.
donnie, the 97% is the number who think that GHGs have any warming effect. Are you not keeping up?
JimD, “donnie, the 97% is the number who think that GHGs have any warming effect. Are you not keeping up?”
@BarackObama
Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.
How is it used jimmy?
You can include me and just about everyone else here in that meaningless consensus, yimmy. Having a warming effect is not the alarmist meme. What you clowns want to do is declare a 97% loose meaningless consensus and then pretend the consensus reflects nearly unanimous agreement on dangerous AGW. It’s really not working for you. It’s a lie. It has badly backfired. You have no credibility.
I was saying that the survey confirmed the 97% number and went further to show that those thinking <50% were not very sure of themselves.
We don’t find what you are saying to be interesting, or credible. Try being honest, yimmy.
Don Don,
You must at least find it interesting since you keep replying…
Time for a new poll. Bart, why don’t you and Judy design a poll. If you two can agree on the questions, it would probably carry more weight than if either of you alone created it.
Stop making sense, this is climate wars.
Well, the results can be interpreted in several different ways. I think duarte is on the money when he recommends that survey researchers lead such studies, or at least be involved.
I’m not claiming infallibility or anything like it, but I am a professional survey researcher.
I believe the correct way of presenting the results of Bart’s survey is to say:
“66% believe half or more of current warming is caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
It appears from comments received during the survey that some who listed ‘don’t know’ were reacting to the perceived difficulty of responding to the question.’ It is possible that may impact the results.
Analysis of subgroups showed that those with higher numbers of publications …”
E cosi via.
That way Bart is not forced to divine what some respondents were thinking and does not have to hide the headline result of his survey.
Judith,
We did have survey researchers on board, e.g. Kees Vringer has a lot of experience with that. Advice was sought from other social scientists as well.
But your comment appears at odds with what you often proclaim: the virtue of bringing in outsiders.
As for multiple interpretations: you highlighted only one, which is clearly at odds with the published paper. At least mention those difference then.
Still curious how you would answer my alternative type of question. That goes to the heart of my argument. Studiously ignored by everyone here it seems. Tribalism lives!
Do you really think that we should be imposing some kind of regulation on how we do research? How do we do that? Refuse to accept a paper of this type unless someone with some kind of accreditation is on the author list? Also, do you really think that someone who seems incapable of discussing other people’s research without accusing them of fraud is someone we should really be listening to when it comes to giving advice about how best to do research. FWIW, my answer to the last question is “absolutely not!”.
Ken,
Are you trying to be seen as a numbnut? Seriously, Judith isn’t saying anything of the sort. She is agreeing with Duarte that if you are goinbg to conduct a survey to help establish what so many seem to think is an important point (i.e. a consensus), then using professional survey researchers is recommended. I believe most people would understand that as a recommendation to involve people who understand how to perform surveys. A numbnut says it is the imposition of regulations.
If Bart’s comment above about 90%, 8% and 2% providing a consensus of 80% is any indication of his survey expertise, the Duarte’s recommendation is clearly well called for.
timg56,
Hmmm, I presume you’re implying that I said that. Given that I didn’t, you’re either not reading things very carefully, or illustrating the point I made earlier about some people relying on being dishonest in order to try and score some kind of point. Having encountered you before, I’d go for the latter, but you’re welcome to try and convince me that you just struggle to concentrate for more than a couple of words in a row.
So now you are expert in survey review, Timmy “pompoms” G?
Ken,
Here is what you said:
Do you really think that we should be imposing some kind of regulation on how we do research?
I don’t have any problem with reading comprehension. Perhaps you do. #1, I said “A numbnut says …”. In other words, if the shoe fits, wear it.
#2, exactly how does what I have the hypothetical numbnut saying differ from what you wrote? Beyond it being a more concise restatement.
You are truly unbelievable at times.
Come on, timmy boy. Think of how this “recommendation” would be implemented. You can even imagine a framework with secularist invisible hands if you please. Try not to get something that could not be described as regulations.
Jesus. What a joke.
OMG, willy boy! Do you really believe that “recommendations” have to be implemented? I will have to help you:
No, you are just being silly and disingenuous, again. It’s a very reasonable and entirely harmless recommendation. The crooked cooked up consensus cabal is of course under no obligation to do the right thing. They will carry on as usual with the ersatz survey methods that get the results they need, for Paree!
Willard,
The only joke is you slipping into those shoes so easily.
Like Professor Rice, you jump to a conclusion that shows your ass. A recommendation to include someone knowledgeable in the technical aspects of what your research is based on is not some made up high dungeon perverse requirement. Just as asking someone whose background is physics to consider asking an expert on statistical analysis is a reasonable request.
According to your logic, you would have your general practitioner perform open heart surgery. You are a tard Willard and no amount of demeaningname calling changes that.
Hmmm, I had assumed that the reason why my GP would not typically perform open heart surgery was that there was some kind of system in place (maybe a form of regulation) that essentially prevented them from doing so. I hadn’t realised that it was simply a recommendation.
> A recommendation to include someone knowledgeable in the technical aspects of what your research is based on is not some made up high dungeon perverse requirement.
Invisible are clapping at how you portray regulations, timmy boy. Joe “recommends” that someone like Kees Vringer participates in the research. Wait. Why is he listed as author, again?
Jesus.
Bart,
“My tentative conclusion would be that the level of consensus would be better approximated as 8/(8+2) = 80%”
So in your hypothetical repolling, out of 1200+ respondants only 10% respond with something other than “I don’t know” and you conclude that the there is a 80% consensus in support of humans being the primary causation?
I hope I am misunderstanding you, because that conclusion is, well to borrow US Federal Judge Koh’s remark during the Apple vs Samsung case, when presented with a witness list 75 pages long, “Someone must be smoking crack …”
Tim,
I wrote: “My tentative conclusion would be that the level of consensus would be better approximated as 8/(8+2) = 80% in that case, though indeed that would not be very robust with such as extremely large fraction of undetermined answers. Luckily we also asked a more straightforward question based on which we can distill very similar information. And, lo and behold, it also comes at 80% agreement!”
I thought I clarified that such a result wouldn’t be robust, but of course if you are intent to misconstrue what I meant I can’t stop you. Makes you rise the tribal ladder after all, good for you!
I also aksed:
“Would you insist in this hypothetical case that the level of consensus is 8%, without reservation?”
Based on your scolding me, can I assume that your answer to that question would be “yes”? Or do you prefer not to answer, like everyone else?
Bart
I was commenting on the 90, 8, 2% statement. That you had other questions which you believe provide supporting evidence and your conclusions are not necessarily robust are both reasonable and honest. My apologies for singling out just one aspect of your comments here.
“I thought I clarified that such a result wouldn’t be robust”
Not only isn’t it robust, it’s meaningless. A consensus is (from Merriam-Webster):
a general agreement about something : an idea or opinion that is shared by all the people in a group
If you throw out 90% of the group, you can’t use the word “consensus”. That’s gone. You’re simply talking about an interesting fraction – eight tenths – of a subsample, which has nothing provable to do with the opinion shared by all the people in the group. You can’t generalize from a droplet to an ocean.
In fact, even putting any numerical value on a consensus is meaningless. There either is a consensus or there isn’t. Consensus isn’t a math term. It’s a psychological term. You want to talk about fractions, go ahead. But if you want to talk about consensus, it has to include all or virtually all of the group involved. You can fudge a little because, again, it’s not math. It’s a group dynamic. So saying a 97% consensus is stronger than a 96% consensus is meaningless. Either it’s a consensus of the group as a whole or it’s not. If you have to argue over what level of consensus it is, it’s not a consensus – it’s disputed. Consensus doesn’t have levels. It is or it isn’t. There is no try.
willard,
Nope. Just as you, Ken and apparently Bart are not either.
Anything else twit?
Since BartV just showed how the Denizens’ official counterargument leads to absurdity, timmy boy, therefore it might not be the best of times to be coyly wave those pompoms. As Joe would himself say, Jesus, what a joke [1].
When all you have is “the results can be interpreted in several different ways,” you should wait for another post, preferably one with a myriad of connotations such as The Conceits of Consensus.
Go team!
[1]: http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/27/the-97-feud/#comment-612349
Willard,
Or more appropriately, twit, I said nothing of the kind.
What I said was a recommendation to include a subject matter expert was nowhere close to what you and Ken Rice are trying to claim . I am beginning to think he is decent enough to rethink some of his posts. As in he believes, but recognizes boundaries. You are still a twit.
Give me a T. Give me a W. Give me … Well you get the rest.
> I said nothing of the kind.
You said very little on this thread, timmy boy. You mostly waved your pompoms to show your appreciation for some Denizens. The best Denizens got is to weasel out of this post is “it’s a matter of interpretation,” like the Grande Dame of Climate Science said.
This relativist stance contrasts with the “conceit” rhetoric. It’s the best Denizens got this round.
It’s time for you to go wave your pompoms in the new thread, timmy boy.
Recycling the pom pom line I see.
Way to show your Green credentials.
“Would you insist in this hypothetical case that the level of consensus is 8%, without reservation?”
Yes.
“don’t know”, “unknown” and “other” are valid responses that are listed as options in the questionaire, so why include them if you are not using them to catagorise the answers?
Judith Curry says:
“The(y) merely use the global warming consensus as a starting point for their analysis, i.e. they ‘import’ the consensus assumption about CO2 warming ”
Bart Verheggen says:
“We argue that many of these respondents (22%) aren’t truly agnostic about that issue, but merely wanted to avoid having to pick a very specific range of values”
Judith Curry retorts:
“Bart, my take on this is that it is very difficult to argue that people who checked ‘don’t know’ or ‘unknown’ support the consensus.”
And Bart Verheggen responds”
“I argue that I don’t know what their position is re the dominance of human GHG.”
Any my question: Why is it important for there to be a consensus when most of the scientists involved in attribution studies say that the science is not settled?
Consensus only has value for those involved in policy who, by and large are political types always assessing which way the wind blows. And, it usually boils down to: “you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. It just that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Consensus attempts to fool all of the people all of the time.
As betwixt
the cup and
the lip so
little separates
the precious
conceit and
deceit.
Beth, you are a very wise serf. Even if upside down since down under. Apologizes to you and your wonderful country for my typical crude Yankee jokes. But I learned them in Melbourne, not Chicago, during a crazy week of Aussy rules football finals.
We Yanks thought English rugby was crazy, so Harvard/Yale ‘invented’ American football a century and a half ago (well, in 1875, and actually one game after darned Princeton did the same cheating forward carry thing–but they are a party school except for their Einstein stuff).
You all crossed all that whimsical Ivy League stuff with, I dunno, Crocodile Dundee tackles crocs, and such. Without helmets! Seriously!!!
Highest regards from someone who personally witnessed THE GAME, 1968, when Harvard beat Yale 29-29. Only cognoscenti will understand that famous headline. But all true. And still relevant to this thread, in many ways.
Highest regards from up over to down under.
We educate our serfs in Oz. Trouble is, we often forget to educate our PhDs.
Say, Rud, do not jokes seem somehow the best way
ter deal with our human fallibility, bi-asses and serf
baggage?.*… a pome:
We envy the gods their longevity,
not recognizing that they envy us.
Envy the heightened drama of existence
that comes with knowledge of life’s brevity
– over before you know it,
– got to have something to show for it,
serious ambition, love and dynasty,
creativity, can’t just sit around like
gods on Olympus clouds, dreaming
up low tricks to play on us below.
Those gods.Can’t keep their jealous eyes off us,
entertain themselves by fooling us,
mortals existing just for their sport.
Stuff of Greek Tragedy, they have to fill
all those tomorrows and tomorrows
of eternity with something, theatre
of the absurd. Sometimes they even come down
to earth, like goddam randy Zeus, making
more mischief, more mayhem via god children,
like Herakles, whom Hera makes mad
so that he kills his wife and children in
a frenzy. And then there’s Helen, daughter of Zeus ..
Tine to bring on the Trojan Wars.
* Then of course there’s yr cold avenger ‘n forensic
analysis types ter keep us in line.)
+10 Beth. A nice time of day to tune into Judith’s and get one of your pomes. Short life spans cram in lots of fun! Like butterflies :)
Correction Not one but TWO pomes! Well done.
Tempus fugit, Peter, tempus fugit. ) … (
PS Hey Pierre, don’t we miss kim?
Yup. She seems to value her privacy tho and that’s her choice.
I miss Kim a lot. In pithy comments, Kim could (A) Tell me when I was being a knucklehead; (B) Make me laugh.
SS,
A topic on which I think we can all agree! :)
In case it has been lost in all the quasi technical discussion, the IPCC figure for climate change somewhere betwee1+ and 6 C/century rests firmly on a calculated 1 C of CO2 greenhouse effect and the positive feedback multiplier from water vapor *positive* feedback.
Just stop and think for a moment. Other than the negative feedback of IR radiation through the IR window we are left with ~3/4 of the solar insulation absorbed by the ‘surface’ mostly in the ocean. The earth must and does find a way to get rid of this energy. The only trick available is water vaporization and surface boundary air warming and convection to tropospheric altitudes where this same water and vapor can unload the radiation to space. Notice the word only. There is no other physics available to transfer this, on order of 120 watts of energy flow. Warming and vaporization respond to and are driven by any forcing of surface temperature. Yes probably there is water vapor feedback in the first few meters above the surface determined by the mean free path of IR in the water vapor which warms our atmospheric ‘blanket’ and provides us with the climate which we enjoy. Adding a doubling of the CO2 will reduce the mean free path of the CO2 15 u side band by a factor of 2 and so move its contribution of energy capture to half of its altitude of ~200 meters down to ~100 meters. I would not quibble with any other set of numbers of this magnitude which anyone wishes to posit. This changes the level at which this 1.6 watts is thermalized and brings this warming closer to the level of < 10 meters where water vapor is adding its major share to the 120 watts which must leave the surface. (actually CO2 does not add 1.6 watts to the power balance but merely shifts its absorption ~100 meters lower.) Perhaps one can conjecture an addition to water vaporization. I doubt it but no mater since water vaporization is the only cooling tool which is responding to any increase in surface temperature and as such is a Negative feedback when taken as a whole. Not withstanding the random complexity of the many energy transfers between convection, radiation interception, re-radiation etc (not to mention clouds) which seems to have occupied the physicists for decades, in the end nature has solved all of these equations to derive a net cooling effect. It is doubtful that it will ever be completely understood (and verified) with sufficient detail and accuracy to determine the problem solved in exquisite detail. How lucky we are that nature has found the solution.
In case you missed it, this hydrologic cycle a *net* NEGATIVE feedback. (~120 watts per whatever temperature rise you wish to ascribe to the surface warming from these IR absorbing gasses)
To say that any increase in surface/air warming and vaporization of water will suddenly become a positive rather than a net negative feedback to the planet stretches logic beyond incredulity.
Verheggen’s reply to my Comment consisted of a mysterious lie pertaining to a 4% figure of unknown provenance. I debunked it a long time ago on Bishop Hill, but did not include it in my blog post. Anyone should have seen the lie for what it was, but that requires carefully reading their paper, my comment, and their reply. People like the physics guy never do that kind of work. They will always try to obscure scams having to do with the consensus – even the Cook fraud goes unchallenged with these people. The next year will be very interesting.
You can’t trust any of the Cook or Verheggen crowd with consensus research. They will not be honest. They will not do real science. They will deceive. They have no place in scientific journals. This is political-religious campaign for them, nothing more.
In any case, here’s the rebuttal. There was no response from the Mr Rabett to whom I responded, most likely because he was mistaken and this was made clear. (you can also find it at the bottom of this page: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2015/1/15/duarte-on-verheggen-et-al.html):
——————————–
On Mr. Rabett’s comment, I’m guessing he refers to this part of Verheggen et al.’s reply:
“The size of this group of “non-climate scientists” in our survey is 81 (∼4% of the respondents). If they were excluded from our survey, the level of concensus based on Q1 of our total group of respondents who expressed an opinion–that is, excluding the undetermined responses–would remain the same: 84%.”
As far as I can tell, this claim is wildy false. The “Other Expertise” category comprised about 17% of their respondents, or about 317 (they don’t give the figure — we can only eyeball the graph.) You can see this in Figure S1 (fourth column set) of their first Supplemental doc here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es501998e
Notably, they have another “Other” category on the same graph (last column). It might be 4%. It’s unclear why there are two Other categories, or why they cited the small one instead of the large one, or instead of summing them (there will be some overlap in categories, as some researchers might have been tagged as more than one area of expertise.)
And, it’s important to know that we could never assume direct climate science expertise even in their WG1 category, since it includes “Land Use Change” which I suspect captures some planning people, perhaps the traffic experts. And “Emissions” which might include automotive engineers or the platinum-pushing experts I quoted in my Comment (platinum-group metals are used in catalytic converters.)
As you may infer from the above, we don’t actually know who is in what group or what their expertise is. That is the fundamental problem here — we don’t know the results of this study with respect to relevant climate scientists. The authors are using labels like WG1, WG2, etc. somewhat dangerously, as in some cases it refers to people who actually served on those working groups at IPCC, but most of the time it refers to labels the authors themselves applied to over a thousand researchers who did not serve on those working groups. We don’t know much beyond that. If John Cook had anything to do with such classifications, that would be a huge red flag, and reckless of them to allow. But we don’t know much about it.
The authors’ bizarre reply where they argue that people who were included in the survey precisely because of their climate-related work would deny having done such work (their questions 7a and b) — and would thus be excluded from the results — gives me the feeling we’re dealing with people who have little respect for truth or the intelligence of the reader. As one of many, many examples, I think the sociologists who wrote the following paper would think it was climate-related: “Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States” (McCright & Dunlap, 2011)
Rather strange blather,
from Mr. Duarte given that Verheggen points out that their selection criteria were broad, and that they attempted to include the small number of credible critics.
In such a group it is very likely that some would not be very much involved in climate science.
Jose Duarte, may have the feeling that they are not to be trusted, but Jose Duarte has indeed shown himself to be a special snowflake. Go melt.
Jose is correct in not placing trust in John Cook. He is IMO mistaken in associating Bart Verheggen with Cook.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.”
-Richard Tol, Energy Policy 73, 701–705, 2014
Well, at least one of Hansen’s predictions came true, driven partly by the man himself, so I’m not sure what sort of accomplishment it is, but he did accurately predict that the demand for more climate studies would increase (to paraphrase.)
Professor Curry,
How many people noticed the shift in the headline finding between AR4 and AR5?
From AR4’s Summary for Policy-makers: very likely about GHG.
AR5 repeated this finding — but on page 884, in Chapter 10 of WGI:
The IPCC shifted their headline to extremely likely about all forcings. From the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC’s AR5 Working Group I.
Who noticed the shift in the subject of their finding from GHG to all forcings? Many of the news stories about AR5 mistakenly reported that the IPCC had increased its confidence. Even some climate scientists misunderstood. As in this September 2013 interview you gave…
The first mention I see of the difference in the subject of the headline findings is in August 2015 by Tom Curtis (attorney) in a comment at Skeptical Science, Kudos are do him for this discovery.
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Those who think that a consensus is a substitute for science are not real scientists. Even a pseudo-scientist uses at least some scientific sounding language to maintain his status but consensus talk is entirely free of it. Global warming consensus is not even the first one we know of. There was once upon a time a consensus about the existence of a magical fluid called phlogiston that penetrated solid matter and was released by combustion. It was eventually renamed “caloric” like global warming was renamed “climate change” and then faded from view. What killed phlogiston was discovery of new facts about the role of oxygen in combustion. We also have new facts about global warming and and its connection with the hiatus that have been unearthed by Dr. Ferenc M. Miskolczi, a Hungarian scientist. But unlike the acceptance of new facts contradicting Phlogiston, new facts about warming are being deliberately suppressed by the global warming establishment. They don’t stop with verbal arguments but have proceeded to falsify the experimental record about global warming. To set the record straight we must first eliminate obvious fraud before we can proceed to theory. It can be demonstrated that fraud is practiced by temperature control bodies such as HadCRUT, GISS and NCDC with the aim of changing our impression of what the climate is really doing. I will give you an example involving the existence of a ‘pause’/hiatus of warming that I have periodically brought up. It is not the one you think of. There was a complete stoppage of warming in the eighties and nineties that lasted from 1979 to 1997, an 18 year stretch. That is as long as the current well-known ‘hiatus’ has lasted. But you will not find it from official land-based temperature curves set up by the three organizations named above. That is because they are deliberately pushing a false picture of warming upon us. In the place of a hiatus of the eighties and nineties they show a fake “late twentieth century warming” that does not exist. How do I know this? Because fortunately these guys still don’t control the satellites, and there is that hiatus in satellite records for anyone to pull down. I discovered this in 2008 while doing research for my book “What Warming?” I also discovered then that HadCRUT3 was instrumental in the cover-up operation and even put a warning about it into the preface of the book. Nothing happened. Later I connected all three organizations above with the cover-up when it turned out that they had had their data-sets adjusted by the same computer and the computer left its footprints on the output from all three temperature curves. These footprints consist of a set of identical sharp upward spikes that heretofore had passed as noise, which they are not. Two of them sit right on top of their version of the super El Nino of 1998. Despite this dirty work the status of the hiatus in the eighties and nineties is not in doubt,however, thanks to ENSO. Its oscillations created a wave train of five El Nino peaks, with La Nina valleys in between them, right smack in the middle of the hiatus. In such a case the global mean temperature is determined by the midpoint of a line connecting an El Nino peak with its neighboring La Nina valley. I marked all these midpoints for the entire wave train. I ended up with all the dots forming a horizontal straight line, proving absence of warming for 18 years. The hiatus itself, with dots marking the progression of global mean temperature, is shown as figure 15 in the book. The role of HadCRUT3 in the cover-up operation is shown in figure 24 in the book. When a hiatus exists atmospheric carbon dioxide keeps increasing but there is no corresponding warming as predicted by the Arrhenius greenhouse theory. That of course is a wrong prediction, repeated 18 times, and invalidates the Arrhenius greenhouse theory completely. But the IPCC has been using it and they still do not want to let it go. They can be reassured that an alternative greenhouse theory exists that explains it all. It is called MGT (Miskolczi greenhouse theory), the one they summarily rejected in 2007. Numerous alarmist authors feel the same way as the IPCC does and have published more than two dozen scholarly, peer-reviewed articles to prove that there is no hiatus. They have not succeeded. They are looking for a “missing heat” somewhere in the ocean when it actually left for outer space before they even got started. Two of the articles made a splash, One of them was by Karl and the other one by Trenberth. Karl’s argument depends upon a completely re-written global temperature record that should fit in well with the re-written hiatus of the eighties and nineties. Even so, I could find only two experimental points in his entire paper could qualify as observations of warming. MGT, the Miskolczi greenhouse theory, differs from the Arrhenius greenhouse theory in being able to handle more than one greenhouse gas simultaneously absorbing in the IR. The Arrhenius theory can handle only one – carbon dioxide. That makes it incomplete because there are several different greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This is why it differs from reality. According to MGT, carbon dioxide and water vapor in the atmosphere form a joint optimal absorption window in the infrared whose whose optical thickness is 1.87. This value was obtained by analysis of radiosonde measurements. In 2010 Miskolczi showed that addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for 61 years straight did not change its optical thickness in the IR. If you now add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it will start to absorb IR just as Arrhenius says. But this will increase the optical thickness. And as soon as this happens water vapor will start to diminish, rain out, and the original optical thickness is restored. The added carbon dioxide will of course continue to absorb but the reduction of water vapor has reduced the total absorptivity enough to prevent any warming. And that explains why there is no warming during a hiatus. We are now dealing with the working out of the consequences of applying the laws of nature to climate, not with inexplicable changes to natural laws as uninformed opinion would argue. Just the mere existence of the hiatus proves that both the greenhouse effect of Hansen as well as AGW simply do not exist. It follows from this that all the money spent and laws invented to fight CARBON DIOXIDE POLLUTION are a complete and total waste. When that truth sinks in there will be plenty of people who were involved instigating this insanity who need to be punished. First step should be to fire them all from government service. Second one, cancel all contracts involved with mitigation. And don’t forget to nullify the laws these people stuck us with. There is more, but I will leave the rest for local options that are sure to come up.
Anybunny interested in this tripe should first work their way through <a href=http://scienceofdoom.com/2011/04/22/the-mystery-of-tau-miskolczi/ the Science of Doom’s deconstruction or Roy Spencer on Miskolczi. FWIW Mis is very sky dragon and Arno one of the true believers.
Quantifying measures of certainty in terms such as “95%+ certain” (which the IPCC defines as “virtually certain” or “extremely likely) is meaningless. it is assigning a statistical likelihood on subjective measures that are at best consensus show of hands, i.e., “beliefs.” It is no different than saying 95%+ of practicing Christians believe that Jesus was the son of the supreme god and was resurrected in order to save you from your sins. In both cases you can say it because it is merely a belief but there is no tangible basis to say that it can be demonstrated or proven as fact.
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This is good. Presidential candidate Rick Santorum on the consensus, fact check by Politico, and Richard Tol’s response
http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/09/03/its-all-wrong-un-convening-lead-author-dr-richard-tol-slams-media-for-false-claims-about-alleged-97-consensus/
More on Santorum’s blunder:
https://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/rick-santorum-misrepresents-our-climate-survey-results-on-bill-maher-show/
Cue to “but interpretation.”
Santorum is indeed wrong, as is Fabius Maximus. Verheggen et al made the same mistaken inference in the other direction.
> Verheggen et al made the same mistaken inference in the other direction.
More misconscrewing from GW:
https://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/pbl-survey-shows-strong-scientific-consensus-that-global-warming-is-largely-driven-by-greenhouse-gases/#comment-31850
And that’s on top of more proofs by assertion.
Remember, kids: Humans will use 3,000 Quads by 2075. If they all come from coal we’re ruined.
“2) it is based on the argument that respondents who didn’t provide a specific estimate for the contribution of greenhouse gases (22% of the total number) think that this contribution is small. That is a wrong inference,”
This is ridiculous.
“unknown”-means unknown
“I don’t know”-means don’t know
“other”-means a choice not provided
The “unknowns” and the “I don’t knows”, clearly do not support the consensus. Those are denominator people, period.
> The “unknowns” and the “I don’t knows”, clearly do not support the consensus
How do you know that, Don Don?
Tell us how “unknown” and “I don’t know” fits into the alleged AGW settled science consensus , willy willy. Make a fool of yourself, again.
Here, Don Don:
https://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/rick-santorum-misrepresents-our-climate-survey-results-on-bill-maher-show/
You’re welcome.
Just as everyone expected willy willy made a fool of himself, again. That is the toothpaste marketing survey explanation, willy willy. I had a very faint hope that you would be serious.
If you want serious stuff, Don Don, wait until Judy posts something about Steyn. Perhaps MattStat could review the book. You have to admit that Denizens can’t get much more serious than that!
You don’t seem to like it here, willy.
You don’t seem to have anything more than styleless scorn, Don Don.
That’s all you deserve, willy willy.
I don’t feel any special treatment from your part, Don Don. You’re the Don, after all.
Who’s your man, BTW: Rick, the Donald, Jeff, or someone else?
97% of politically-funded climate science have conclusions that bolster political expansionism.
That’s their job.
100% of denialsts have views on cimate science that conform to their political outlook.
That is just what I have been pointing out. It will help that it is coming from you, Michael.
Such assertions would be more worth paying attention to if backed up by data.
After all, given the way CAGW alarmism supports the socialist agenda, why would any socialist make a fuss about it, no matter how skeptical they were of the science?
They believe in uniformity.
Michael,
If by “denialist” you mean someone who denies that human actions have any effect on climate… well, I do not know of any scientists who take that view.
“Denialist,” when applied to actual scientists (e.g., Curry or Lindzen) is just a smear term used to attack someone who claims that numbers matter: how can we figure out if the human influence on climate is 10%, 30%, 50%, 90% or whatever of the observed change?
Scientists are supposed to be concerned about details like that, you know!
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Pingback: On the difference between ‘science’ and ‘bandwagonism’ (or ‘science as a consensus of experts’): a reply by Judith Cury, Ph.D. in geophysical sciences (1982), to the suggestion that the ‘RICO Act’ should be
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