by Kip Hansen
Some problems require a restart.
— HTG Explains: Why Does Rebooting a Computer Fix So Many Problems?
Let’s say Windows is running very slowly. It’s possible that a misbehaving program is using 99% CPU and draining the computer’s resources.
In all cases, a restart wipes away the current state of the software. Any code that’s stuck in a misbehaving state will be swept away, too. When you restart, the computer or device will bring the system up from scratch, restarting all the software from square one.
Ultimately, the answer is that “resetting a computer wipes away the current state of the software, including any problems that have developed, and allows it to start over from square one. It’s easier and faster to start from a clean state than identify and fix any problems that may be occurring — in fact, in some cases, it may be impossible to fix problems without beginning from that clean state.”
Is it time to hit that RESTART button?
I have been fooling around with computers since the first “less than room-sized” computers became available. I have built 8 inch by 12 inch computer memory cards from near-microscopic ferro-ceramic donuts and tiny copper wire matrixes. Yes, I have entered simple programs into computers using toggle switches on the front panel, carefully saved programs and results on 8 inch floppy disks (and myriad versions of recording tape), and I remember my joy at my first computer with a 10 megabyte hard-drive, my first dot matrix printer and the joys of BASIC. I “graduated” computer science from IBM International HQ where I was on the original Olympics and Sports Internet Team, building (and helping to invent the technologies for) the first massively-scalable dynamic-content websites for such events as the tennis grand slams, the Masters golf tournament, and the three IBM-supported Olympic games (Atlanta, Nagano, and Sydney). So I know a little bit about using modern personal computers. When these computers get bogged down, and they do, one inevitably saves whatever is worth saving (if possible and if anything) and hits the RESTART button.
Has Climate Science become hopelessly bogged down? Has Climate Science reached a point where misbehaving programs [paradigms] are using 99% of research efforts and thus draining away – frittering away – the field’s resources? Are far too many precious hours, days, years being spent fighting the Climate Wars – the deadlocked scientific and policy debate surrounding climate change issues – defending scientific positions, many untenable, most based on their policy implications, rather than attempting to discover the underlying nature of the Earth’s climate itself? Has Climate Science been co-opted by the “CO2-induced Global Warming” hypothesis, starting off on the wrong foot, down the wrong path, led on inexorably by confirmation bias, enforced group think and bias in funding proposals, thus inevitably arriving at what appears to be a scientific dead-end?
Is the seemingly unending battle over tiny changes in metrics such as LOTI (Land-Ocean Temperature Index), ocean heat content, Annual Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Over Land & Sea (and its plethora of alphabet/version variations), fledgling measurements of global sea level rise, [and the list goes on] . . . is this the purpose of Climate Science? Can we justify the effort and resources being spent on this activity? Does any of it produce new understanding of the Earth’s climate or lead us to answers about potential solutions to changing climate?
Or is a major portion of the entire scientific endeavor we call Climate Science just an exercise in spinning our wheels, getting the subject mired further and further into the mud?
Does the current state of Climate Science resemble your venerable Windows computer – churning and churning, but producing nothing of value, “using 99% [of the] CPU and draining the computer’s resources.”?
What Would It Mean to Hit the Climate Science RESTART Button?
I don’t know. I am not knowledgeable enough, nor do I have the scientific background necessary, to answer that question. But there are readers here aplenty – many of them professionals and leaders in their scientific fields – that are knowledgeable enough and that do have the scientific backgrounds necessary. Certainly, there is enough brain power and scientific muscle here to make a stab at laying out at least the bare bones of an outline of how to approach the question.
Let me be pragmatic – do I think that it is possible to actually start a scientific field over from square zero? No, of course not. But it would be a fascinating group thought experiment. An experiment probably best performed by a dozen or two acknowledged experts from the various scientific disciplines involved – preferably non-combatants in the Climate Wars – to get together for a four-day weekend conference somewhere — possibly under the Chatham House Rule to protect participants from the sometimes-vicious personal and professional attacks all-too-common in the Climate Wars — to consider this question:
What Would It Mean to Hit the Climate Science RESTART Button? Some things that might be considered:
If we started to investigate the Earth’s climate from first principles, where would we start? What questions would we seek to answer?
If we pretended we had just arrived on this planet, and wanted to learn about its climate system, what would we study? How would we study it? What things would we measure to inform us of which physical characteristics of the climate? How would we measure those? How would we determine the meaning, the significance, of the measurements we made?
If we hypothesized “CO2-induced Global Warming”, what approach would we take to investigate it? What metrics would we use? How would we gather them? How would we test them to ensure that they truly informed us about that hypothesis? Would we recommend focusing on annual averaged temperatures of the air 2 meters above ground level and of the sea’s top few meters? Would be combine those two metrics into a single number?
How would we propose to test whatever hypotheses we posited, with true Popper-esque Risky Tests?
If our findings pointed to needed societal changes, in our collective opinion, how would we suggest that our discoveries be translated into societal policies?
It should be obvious to all that I am out of my depth here – in over my head – let me be the first to point this out. I don’t know what questions should even be asked.
But the right people would know – and maybe someone should/could ask them to get together and develop an outline which could then be compared to what is currently being done. This might lead to some insight in how to break the current Climate Science deadlock. It might lead to some new ways of thinking about the subject. It might open up new research directions. It might just help direct the next generation of climate scientists in new directions.
This wouldn’t cost that much – a four day conference somewhere away from the hustle – a dozen or two bright, open minds focused on a fascinating thought experiment. Reputations protected by the Chatham House Rule. Results issued as a joint working paper. The idea needs only a champion to head it up and move it from a pipe-dream to an event.
Any takers?
Post Script: My purpose in writing this essay. making this proposal, is simply to put this idea out in the wild where it can be seen and, hopefully, generate some interest in the professional climate science world.
I’d like to see your comments including your take on what questions such a forum, if it were ever to be held, should consider. – Kip Hansen
JC comments
I’ll start off the discussion. I agree that pushing the ‘restart’ button would be desirable, from the perspectives of both the science and policy – both are in a really big rut.
The main impediment is the monolithic climate science-government-industrial complex. A lot of money, reputations, and political capital are tied up in the status quo. I can’t imagine a forum such as proposed by Kip working; the key element is who would attend, and it would be boycotted by the establishment types. If they didn’t attend, they would dismiss any outcome. Such is the sad state of affairs, whereby there are large-scale institutional violations of the norms of science.
Specifically with regards to climate scientists, there is a large number of scientists, including those in influential positions, that regard 100% of the warming to be anthropogenic, and the only scientific challenges are to refine our estimates of radiative forcing and refine climate model parameterizations. Think Gavin Schmidt, among many others.
What might trigger pushing the reset button? Well in the U.S., election of any of the Republican presidential candidates might do it. Funding priorities for scientific research and energy policy would change. Many scientists would be relieved, I’m sure others would be horrified. If the U.S. climate change funding were to be redirected to be predominantly for natural climate variability, would the rats desert the sinking funding ship and start focusing on natural variability?
What research findings, following the current trajectory, might trigger a rethink? Apart from continuation of a slow rate of warming, I am thinking that failing to close the carbon cycle in a simplistic way might prove to be very illuminating, as well as the satellite observations of atmospheric CO2.
From the policy perspective, failure to implement meaningful reductions in carbon emission and to change/improve the climate in a material way could promote a rethinking of this whole thing, but it will be a decade at least before any meaningful evaluation can be made.
I think the only practical thing that can be done in the very near term is paying much more attention to research ethics, the traditional norms of science, and the problems generated by scientists that become activists, particularly the journal editors and professional societies.
To start focusing on natural variability and find that it is solar driven and not internal and chaotic would leave no option other than restarting from square one.
First you need that finding, which would take a major research program. What we need is the program.
The finding is already found.
Just study and understand data we already have.
@Kip
“Yes, I have entered simple programs into computers using toggle switches on the front panel, carefully saved programs and results on 8 inch floppy disks”
Altair 8800B. Proud owner. My first PC hardware design was a wire wrapped Intel 8251 UART on an S-100 card. I had to initialize it through binary toggle switches on the front panel of the Altair. As I recall it took 28 bytes and that was enough to get a serial terminal connected to it where I could enter hexadecimal using keys 0-9 and A-F instead of the front panel.
A founder of MITS who produced the Altair, Forrest Mims III, is a personal friend of mine although I didn’t meet him until 25 years later.
Good times!
First
1) We need to emphasize as JC said the cleaning of the current journals and ethics processes and standards. No science is worth doing if it is going to get passed by bogus processes. So, this MUST be cleaned up and improved. We need independent review of independent review at least until it seems to be working better. We need transparency. Every organization must recommit to complete openness of data, code, methods.
2) We have to have admission models as currently approached is not possible. Numerical models of gridded earth with complicated processes iterated over billions of times which need non-physical forcing to stabilize is stupid. We can have models, we have to have models but let’s have some real mathemeticians come in and validate the tools.
3) We need to assess again from scratch what we know and what we don’t know. The first IPCC tried to assess this and made a huge mistake in underestimating the impact of the ocean. The same can be said for the sun and many other things. Once we know what is uncertain we can assign priorities to research.
4) We need to question assumptions. For each assumption we need to build experimental frameworks and tools to validate the assumption. Can we assume that water vapor will rise with higher temperatures? Seems basic but things complicate this.
5) Our historical record is extremely flawed. Historical data is beset by many problems that are unfixable and represent massive uncertainty. While we can certainly keep working to find good proxies, improve and find new proxies the fact is we may have to depend on building this science on NEW data. We need to assess what tools we need to collect the data we need. The new ARGO deeper buoy system is a good start. We should have equally spaced thermostats at surface across the world and oceans in relatively fixed locations with at least 3 identical units per location so we can detect failures, vote on what is the right data, etc… It must all be automated and continuous using communications, solar power, backup systems. We need to be able to measure a wide variety of variables. The purpose of this is to create a phenomenal amount of detailed data that can overcome our ability to look into the past by being able to see minute changes that may be magnified by time and to simulate with much higher resolution the impact of this or that to be able to effectively run “experiments” over thousands of locations by letting nature do its thing and observing better.
6) We need to focus on basic science and give up prediction. Prediction is hard and it is ludicrous with our state of true knowledge. Focus on specific testable theories and assumptions with no preconcieved bias by not tieing it to a model that makes a prediction that people have invested their careers and soul into.
Why? Why do this? Could scientists get the funding to do this? I am not certain but it is the only ethical way forward and therefore the only way that will ultimately lead to defensible long term value. It is extremely likely in my mind that such a sensing network for the world would find millions of uses and generate vastly more than its cost in helping to predict disasters, track things to a level that will allow us to handle mother nature much better.
Natural variability is solar powered, but it is not solar regulated.
Temperature on earth does cycle in narrow bounds that stay the same, they stay the same in the NH and SH while while solar input changes and while the land and ocean areas differ a huge amount. A temperature that is regulated this well is not regulated from an external process. A temperature that is regulated this well does have internal thermostats and forcing that is turned on and off as needed.
When oceans get warm, polar oceans thaw, that increases snowfall that replenishes ice on Antarctica,Greenland and Mountain Glaciers. The ice is rebuilt until the weight and volume does cause the advance and expansion of glaciers and ice shelves and increase of Albedo and the increase of ice and ice cold water that is dumped onto land and into the oceans. That ice does cool the earth until the oceans get cold and the polar oceans freeze. That decreases snowfall and then the sun takes away ice every year and the earth does warm.
About 2000 years ago, there was a Roman Warm Period and then it got cold. About 1000 years ago, there was a Medieval Warm Period and then it got cold. That was called the Little Ice Age. It is warm now because it is supposed to be warm now. It is a natural cycle and we did not cause it.
When the oceans are warm and wet, it snows more and that bounds the upper limits of temperature and sea level. When the oceans are cold and frozen, it snows less and that bounds the lower limits of temperature and sea level.
CO2 just makes green things grow better, while using less water.
Natural Variability is easy to understand.
Negative North Atlantic Oscillation episodes reduce Arctic sea ice simultaneously with Greenland melt events, such as in summer 2012.
Focus on natural variability and FIND that your assumptions (its solar driven) is true? great way to re start.
First, if you want to study natural variability you have to ask yourself
Models?
Data?
Both?
Let’s start with Data.
1. the Science IS studying the sun. In fact the entire sun spot record has been RESTARTED FROM SCRATCH. This involved years of study. Years of going back to original drawings and even old records that had not been used before. We now have a new sunspot series. So much for the science not looking at the “main driver”
2. Temperature data. Skeptics dont believe the record. How are you going to restart with something you dont believe. Further Skeptics have tried to do their own series ( JeffID) when he confirmed the hadcrut record, that restart was dropped. Skeptics want a re start.. go do your own temperature series.
That way you have data you can trust. But this will never happen. Even the skeptic ‘red team’ effort on global temperatures fizzled.
3. Paleo data. You guys dont believe in proxies. How you gunna restart with no data? no modern data, its all corrupt. No paleo data, its all based on proxies and statistics.
Models?
You dont believe in models. How you gunna make progress with tools you dont believe in and will never accept?
Both?
see above
Steve writes-
“Models? You dont believe in models. How you gunna make progress with tools you dont believe in and will never accept?”
My question-do you believe there is any model that is reliable to forecast the changes in the climate of a specific region over the next 50 years?
@Rob: Sure, within some error range. Scientific questions are *always* within some error range. Even naively, we could reliably claim that, say, Washington DC’s surface high temperature is >99% likely to be between +60 and +150 F some day in July of 2050.
So you need to specify the level of accuracy that you want.
What kind of range do you want? That’s the condition that will determine whether or not our current models are up to the task.
Did you know?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12138229/Moon-overhead-makes-rainfall-lighter-scientists-conclude.html
Was this accounted for in the models? Bet knot.
One thing that is being lost here is that it is perfectly possible to use the “consensus” peer reviewed literature and come to the conclusion that there is little reason to expect catastrophic warming. Michaels and Knappenberger come to mind. Doing so makes one a skeptic. So, it’s not true that “skeptics don’t do work, etc” We use the work that the majority of researchers publish and make up our own minds.
@Steven Mosher | February 3, 2016 at 12:00 pm
The assumption is that natural variability is internal.
The Data:
1) Yes RESTART FROM SCRATCH and study solar wind metrics at the noise level in relation to atmospheric and oceanic teleconnections.
2) Of course there has been surface warming, the trick is to distinguish when surface warming is forced, or a negative feedback to a decline in climate forcing.
3) Of course proxies are highly useful, when used in a legitimate regional context.
Steven,
After seeing all of this, which I don’t question, I’d vote for dropping all climate change research and refocus on weather prediction research.
Rather than “saving” us from some projected climatic state far enough out that we will all be dead, how about working on stuff that people alive today will benefit from?
Arch, you should always start by asking yourself if a new piece of information is relevant.
At ~1% of total rainfall, no, the Moon’s influence is not yet relevant to the models. The models aren’t that accurate yet anyway, having bigger errors from other sources.
It’s cool that the measurements are accurate enough to pick up on this effect, though.
Stephen Mosher wrote: Skeptics don’t believe the record. How are you going to restart with something you don’t believe. They do mess with the data but their changes are not large enough to match their flawed model output.
Clearly you have not spent time on my website.I use the data published by NOAA and NASA. I use the same data the Consensus Consensus Alarmists use. I understand why the cycles change the way they do and the Alarmists do not understand. They don’t even have a really good clue.
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page55.html
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page76.html
Mosher
go do your own temperature series.
With money from … ?
Restart Question #1: does changing the atmospheric composition of Earth by ppm of CO2 cause the global to heat?
Wagathon the absence of answers to your question is deafening.
To pretend a consensus of opinion exists that Western science is capable of teasing out human-caused global warming amidst the deafening cacophony of natural variability — a statistical impossibility — is an example of pathologically altruism at best. Whatever the motives are that underlie the Left’s desire to kill Americanism to prevent the calamitous climate change they claim to fear, there’s nothing they can do to thwart the actions of the vast majority of humanity living in the 3rd World, Brazil, Russia, India, China.
Restart Question #2: What happens to the energy in a major thunderstorm or other convective storm such as a hurricane? There’s a lot of heat being in the evaporation and condensation of the moisture involved in the storms – where does the heat go?
So great is the energy found in a hurricane if it could be harnessed it would power the US for years. Alas most of the energy is used up transferring a huge column of air into the upper atmosphere. Of the energy contained in an average hurricane, 1,500,000,000,000 watts… fully half of the global electrical output, according to an article by PBS’ NOVA, just 0.5% of the energy released is what we see flattening cities in places like Florida. Some 99.5% of the hurricane force cause no harm and is naturally dissipated — every second, some 2 million metric tons of air are circulated in, up, and out of the hurricane — where heat energy is radiated to empty space — which every day equals, the energy released by the fusion of four hundred 20 mega-ton hydrogen bombs (See, Rice University’s Hurricane Trivia at Houston TeacherTECH Archives).
Reply to erikemagnuson ==> Willis E. wrote a several blog posts and a paper (If I recall correctly) on this question. See his posts at WUWT. There will be a link to the paper.
If there is to be a reset in regards to “climate science”, perhaps it should begin with an analysis of the basics- how do we determine whether the climate in a specific area is changing in a positive or a negative manner. What are the key “climate characteristics” of a specific region? These characteristics vary greatly in different places.
Current climate models seem to do a poor job of accurately predicting changes in future temperature in a specific area, but they seem to be even less reliable at modeling changes in rainfall in specific regions. The average worldwide temperature change does not really matter. What matters is what changes in a specific region and do those specific changes impact humans positively or negatively.
Some advocate spending large sums to reduce CO2 emissions. What reliable evidence is there that these actions will result in a better “climate” for humans? What data can be believed to show where the climate will be better vs. worse?
Judith writes
“Specifically with regards to climate scientists, there is a large number of scientists, including those in influential positions, that regard 100% of the warming to be anthropogenic, and the only scientific challenges are to refine our estimates of radiative forcing and refine climate model parameterizations.”
I agree, but believe the most important point has been missed. What makes us rationally think, not believe, that we know where the climate is likely to change positively vs. negatively? When you don’t really know, investment in robust infrastructure is the ONLY means to protect humans from adverse weather- regardless of the root cause.
Yes. Increasing c02 will warm the planet.
next
All other things being equal.
And things aren’t necessarily equal.
Andrew
Prove it!
Up to the point where negative feedbacks kick in.
Roger, “Up to the point where negative feedbacks kick in.”
No, I think that would be “unforced variability”. The definition of sensitivity doesn’t allow for negative feedback greater than CO2e forcing. In such a situation the combined forcing would be about 210%
Will increasing CO2 be harmful to the climate in northern California?
When?
Climate science is too immature for such determinations.
The powers that be wouldn’t let you hit a reset button. They would take it away from you, ignore it, belittle it, etc. It would be an effort in futility. Sorry…
Congress is a skeptical power that be’s.
But even more powerful than congress is public opinion.
Vox populi, vox Dei
If one looks at the trends over the past 15 years, what do these graphs show?
http://imgur.com/peYGgVn
Moreover, the craving for certainty is a sign of weakness, for strength loves uncertainty and adventure: in this respect Nietzsche champions the methods of science against the traditional methods of philosophy and religion. (Morgan, George A., What Nietzsche Means, p. 21)
As sceptical ages, suffering from uncertainty go over to a rigid faith, men with a repugnance to premature dogmas and restrictions allow a total belief, on the other hand, to be wrested from them only slowly and late, because they do not suffer from uncertainty, but get pleasure from it.
–FREDERICK NIETZSCHE, Der Wille zur Macht, p. 349
http://imgur.com/aVBLgPu
The sort of histrionics and over-the-top claims manifest in this post from Hotwopper are not a sign of strength, but of desperation:
In the latest Gallup poll, only 36% believe that gobal warming will pose a serious threat to their way of life.
http://imgur.com/JWHAA7b
Those graphs of public opinion about climate change and the environment are useful. But imo from a practical perspective this is trump: how the public ranks the major public policy issues. Climate change consistently ranks at or near the bottom:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/167843/climate-change-not-top-worry.aspx
The public tends to give strong reactions — we must fix this, or that! — to individual issues. It’s like making a budget. What counts is not my wish list but my priorities. I can say I must diet, but that means little if I focus on things I consider more important.
Editor of the Fabius Maximus website,
That certainly seems to be the reality.
In Polling in America, Samuel J. Best and Benjamin Radcliff concur with your point:
@Editor
I agree. Global warming or climate change or whatever is a very low priority.
http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/0q_gflikhegrbocxdscfog.png
2% of respondents put down environment/pollution as the most important problem. 4% think ethics/moral/religious decline is the most important problem.
Think about that. The decline of religion is twice as high a priority to the US public. That’s enough to send shivers down the spine of every godless Bill Maher and Huffpo liberal. LOL
Keep in mind that’s ALL environmental issues and all pollution. If we were to break out CO2 “pollution” it probably wouldn’t even get a mention.
Right, let’s do science by gallup poll.
Where is that in the scientific method?
COngress?
Congress can’t even change direction on issues that matter.
yes polls show that Climate concerns are low priority.
That means congress will not fall on their sword to change the current direction of climate science.
bobdroege said:
Why is it that the scientist kings hate democracy so much?
The epistemology, upon which our polity is based, goes something like this:
Steven, even when the Congress was controlled by the Democrats, with Obama in the WH, they didn’t do anything substantive about the alleged climate danger. They could have never gotten a binding treaty to reduce ACO2 through the Senate, for example. The mitigation schemes that have been put in place and the science practiced at federal agencies have been influenced by executive authority. The current Congress can’t, won’t even try, to change the direction because it’s not possible. If any one of the Republican candidates gets into the WH, the game changes. Rolling back some of that crap is not falling on a sword. Only the lefty-greeny crowd will be mad about it.
Glenn.
You should find a poll that asks the question of what climate change will do to your grandchildren’s way of life.
bob d,
I don’t believe the suggested action is to prioritize research funding by opinion poll. It is to show that the impetus for Congress (who authorizes the funding) is pretty low.
I’m coming to the conclusion that a great deal of research funded by government is a luxury. As a taxpayer and voting citizen, there comes a time that you eschew luxuries and budget for the necessities. Congress needs to be run through Junior Achievement’s course for 1st graders – “Identifying wants & needs”. Most would flunk.
bob d,
RE You should find a poll that asks the question of what climate change will do to your grandchildren’s way of life.
I can answer that one – nothing they can’t deal with.
What benefit would come to those who have accepted perfidy as necessary to reach their goals? A “hard boot” would be the only way to reset such entrenched tribalism.
From time to time I see a comment and think, “Damn, I wish I had been the first one to say that!” The “hard boot” is one of those times. LOL.
We have become the U.S. of Fiat.
We have had fiat national history for several generations.
We have had a fiat money system now for more than a century.
We have fiat patriotism in our nation’s capitol, especially in offices of national responsibility and authority.
Our two worse than worthless political parties are in cahoots in an effort to make our nation’s Constitution into a fiat Constitution.
And now we are increasingly relying on fiat physics as a foundation for our scientific research. And we believe all of it???? Sheesh!
Ain’t it a hoot?
The #1 issue as I see it is, “what is the optimal earth temperature for humanity?” Whenever I ask that question of a climate scientist (for more than 20 years), he/she refuses to answer or says the answer is “too complex.” Perhaps.
But, as long as climate scientists forecast the mean temperature for the earth/ocean system (“warmest year ever!!”) climate science is spinning its wheels until we know whether the optimal temperature on that graph is warmer/cooler/the same as it is today.
That is where any “restart” should begin.
We do not regulate earth temperature, if you want colder, move to a colder place, if you want warmer, move to a warmer place. If the place you are gets too warm or too cold, move! You can become a snowbird and move back and forth.
If you want to kill my grid with green junk, we are at war.
Mr Pope, I doubt it could be said any better. +1000
This reminds me of back in grad school when the ozone hole was the scare of the day. One of the primary threats we were told to worry about was increased cancers from uV radiation. Then someone did the math and the worst case scenario was that an individual’s exposure could be expected to increase the same amount as would occur if they moved from Minneapolis to New Orleans. Scary, huh?
The ozone hole cycles to large and small. They took away R12, claimed they were right and recently the hole opened again in its natural cycle. The patent on R12 had run out and it did only cost 50 cents for a one pound can. They needed it banned so they could replace it with their new product that they could charge more and they held the new patent and a corner on the market.
Some like it hot and some like it cold, it is good that we have choices and not everyone chooses the same thing. Some things grow better in hot climates and some things grow better in cold climates. Whoever designed this earth did a really wonderful job. We have really cold places and really hot places and everything in between.
There is no optimal earth temperature for humanity. The optimal earth temperature is there to pick. There is a lot of data so you can pick your temperature. An average warmest ever is a tiny of a fraction of a degree warmer. That means that natural variability made some places a lot warmer and some places a lot colder but it balanced out very close.
“Whenever I ask that question of a climate scientist (for more than 20 years), he/she refuses to answer or says the answer is “too complex.” Perhaps.”
Its not complex. It’s simple.
There is no optimum. There are boundaries. Too cold and too hot.
Climate science aims at informing us how we can avoid crossing the boundary.
Your question has a un examined assumption.
go examine it.
“There is no optimum. There are boundaries. Too cold and too hot.
Climate science aims at informing us how we can avoid crossing the boundary.”
There we have it, AGW science for a Trillion.
Mosher, “There is no optimum. There are boundaries. Too cold and too hot.”
Really, I thought the boundaries were catastrophic, mo’ catastrophic and much mo’ catastrophic, like BAU, mo’ BAU, and much mo’ BAU. That way switching from much mo’ BAU to just plain BAU is doing nothing and we all know doing nothing isn’t productive.
Capt.
you will note I said nothing about the consequences of boundary crossing.
The main point is this. Stupid skeptical arguments ( whats the optimum?)
need to die.
You dont help yourself by wasting one brain cell on advancing or defending it
as per your post:
“There is no optimum.”
Steve: an assertion isn’t an argument.
The term “Holocene Optimum” has been around for quite some time.
Clearly there are those who dont share your view.
As for “stupid arguments”, your prior assertion that “science doesn’t deal in probabilities” is perhaps one of the most absurd I’ve even encountered.
It seems to me that if we make what seems like a logical assumption that the “optimum” is somewhere between too cold and too hot, then it is meaningful and worth arguing over. Particularly, if there was some period in the past that was significantly warmer than today (was there?) before the CAGW story came along it was called the whatever “optimum”, because it was nice then. But I hate to disagree with my mentor, Mosher.
.
One practical thing that can be done in the very short term is to define in detail a research program on natural variability. Nothing like that exists, to my knowledge. A four day workshop should be a good start, in fact this is a common practice in federal research, kicking off a new program. The pro-AGW types need not attend, as they have nothing to offer, or they might be interested in the funding.
In fact NASA tried to do this for the sun-climate link several years ago, but it did not fly. Now may be the time. Note that a skeptical Congress should be sufficient. Congress sets the research agenda.
David, the Congress can’t tell NASA, NOAA, NSF etc. what to do. They are controlled by Obamaites:
The main impediment is the monolithic climate science-Obamaite-industrial complex.
Obama gets replaced by one of the Republican candidates (you know who) and the problem can be solved. The current Congress doesn’t have the guts to fight and win the budget battles that would be necessary to influence how the scientific federal agencies are run.
Don, every major research program has to be approved by four Congressional Committees. Two (House and Senate) authorize it and two others (likewise) fund it. Congress controls the research agenda.
Here is a nice precedent. A few years back, Congress was unhappy with NSF’s billion dollar STEM education program. The relevant staffers asked the Education Department if they would like to do something, which of course they said they would, and proposed a new program. So Congress cut $200 million from NSF’s budget and gave it to Education. Happens all the time. But the staffers need a detailed program design first.
Merely threatening to do this would probably turn the AGW agencies around, but there has to be a specific program design to make it happen.
OK David, if what you say is accurate, maybe I should say that the Republicans in Congress have been uninterested, or unwilling to force changes in how the climate research is being conducted.
I am not familiar with the process you are describing. Are you saying that money bills approved for the separate agencies in budgets passed by Congress and signed by the President can be later snatched from one agency and given to another unilaterally by Congress? A committee? I haven’t heard of that, David.
My guess is that if the Republicans in Congress tried to take control of federal climate research there would be a lot of pushback.
Don:
DW is right that Congress establishes the budget for each agency and program. Congress can also change the allocation of funds later. All of this is subject to presidential veto so negotiations typically produce the final numbers.
Note that Congress doesn’t really demand a particular outcome for research. And it is most common to simply toss more money into an existing program/agency and direct that “$50,000,000 shall be available for XYZ research”.
However, you have an important point in that political appointees run the day-to-day affairs of (most) agencies. There is a lot they can do to thwart (or enhance) Congressional directives.
I know that Congress sets the budget and outlines the spending purpose for each agency, opluso. That has to be signed by the President and implemented by agencies and departments run by people the President appoints and gets through Senate confirmation. It seems that David may be saying that (in this case) Republicans can change already approved and implemented budgets by some process that he hasn’t yet adequately described. Give money, then take it back. I ain’t seen that happen. Doesn’t the President get mad?
This is how the appropriations process has actually been playing out, in a nutshell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibus_spending_bill
If the Congress puts anything in there, or leaves anything out that irks Obama, he will veto it and the Republicans will get blamed for “shutting down the government”.
Let’s say they get mad at NOAA for failing to turn over emails. They manage to pass an Omnibus bill with a big cut in NOAA funding. Obama get’s mad and says they are gutting climate science and putting the earth on a sure path to destruction. He vetoes the Omnibus bill and the Republicans get blamed for “shutting down the government”.
The R’s don’t have the inclination or the guts to go there. And it never comes to that, because they have made some trade-off somewhere in the bill where they got something they wanted. With a Republican POTUS and full control of Congress, they would control the budget.
I think you are correct. Republicans have long complained about problems with the language of the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, etc. Yet they have failed (often to even try) to amend and correct these perceived problems — even during the 4 years under Bush 2 when they controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress.
We should also note the Senate 60 vote rule and the “invisible filibuster”. Makes it really hard to get anything with significant opposition through the legislative process, unless you can round up 60 Senate votes for cloture:
http://uspolitics.about.com/od/glossary/a/whatisfilibuster.htm
Monfort gets taken to school by Wojick about the powers of congress. Awesome.
My political science professor in 1977 had the class write down the following:
“Congress controls the purse strings”.
No federal agency can do jack diddly squat without congress approving the spending first.
Your understanding of the federal budget process isn’t even rudimentary, springy. Let’s wait for Wojick to come back and explain his claims. Hey, he might actually know something. Iam willing to learn about something that has somehow been kept secret. Perhaps Wojick will let the Republicans who have been in control in Congress know how they can defund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood. Or maybe you can, dip. Tell me and I’ll pass it on. Irrelevant rube.
Yeah, let’s let Wojick take you to school again. It was pretty funny.
In the meantime remember “Congress Controls the Purse Strings” and it has shut down the government many times to prove it to recalcitrant presidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdown_in_the_United_States
It is not a question of changing implemented budgets, as there is a new budget every year. Admittedly, continuing resolutions are a problem. But what Congress really lacks is a well defined skeptical research program to shop to the agencies and then fund. It simply does not exist.
Just checking to see if Wojick came back. No, only the ignorant guy. Ta, ta.
Just saw your comment, David. I will point out again that the agencies are run by Obama and his minions. Just like the Justice Dept. I am sure you have noticed that with impunity the DOJ ignores or changes the implementation of laws passed by Congress, on Obama’s orders. So I don’t think the Obamaites running NASA, NOAA etc. are going to be interested in any suggestions for skeptical/climate denier research programs put together by Republicans in Congress or anywhere else.. The power of the purse is over rated. Out.
Don,
You shouldn’t argue on a topic where your knowledge level is less than the person you are arguing with.
Sure an agency appointee will do their utmost to follow the President’s agenda. However what that utmost entails can depend on how much money they get. Congress can decide that a particular agency or programs that agency runs won’t get funded in the next budgetary cycle. What good is a CPP when the responsible agency doesn’t have the budget to enforce it?
As David W. mentions, it isn’t this simple in practice, but it exists.
You usually aren’t so dim, tim. Wojick said:”Note that a skeptical Congress should be sufficient. Congress sets the research agenda.”
But they don’t. We have a skeptical Congress and they have not set the research agenda. The NOAA is defying their oversight authority, as we speak. We have a Congress that doesn’t like the non-enforcement of immigration law and they don’t like Obamacare and they don’t like Planned Parenthood selling babie’s body parts. They don’t like these and a lot of other things.
How many Congressmen in the majority do you know, tim? They say they really hate this stuff, but they don’t have the guts to “shut down the government”, over any or all of it? They are afraid they will pay some unbearable political price for exercising the power of the purse. The mainstream media will pile on them and blame them for obstruction, shutting down the gubmint for narrow parochial interests, messing up the economy yatta..yatta..yatta. Do you have a short freaking memory, time?
I patiently explained the way the budget process has been working these days. Don’t you remember the recent omnibus spending bill that gave Obama everything he wanted? It was a few freaking weeks ago, tim. Hello!
You and Wojick and that dim springy are talking theory and I am talking the freaking reality, tim. It’s a waste of time trying to have an intelligent conversation with you people.
Looks like the ‘power of the purse’ boys are done here. I hope I didn’t hurt their feelings.
Don,
If you are talking about the odds of something occurring with Congress, I’m in full agreement with you. If the discussion is whether or not Congress has the ability to do something, then I am in agreement with David.
Which one matters the most? Your point, as it is irrelevant what Congress can do if they refuse to do anything.
RE: the dim part. Comes with being a former torpedoman. Strong back – weak mind.
There are practical, procedural and political constraints on the exercise of the power of the purse. I explained that. It’s hard now. Wait till next year.
One practical thing that can be done in the very short term is to define in detail a research program on natural variability. Nothing like that exists, to my knowledge.
I have been doing that for 8 years. A few others I know are also doing this. I am promoting this. It is not difficult. It always snows more when oceans are warm and polar oceans are thawed and then it always gets cold. It always snows less when oceans are cold and polar ocean are frozen and then it always gets warm. It is a natural cycle and we do not control it.
If CO2 causes warming, and it should, it melts the polar oceans sooner, starts the more snowfall sooner, and limits the upper temperature at the same bound.
This is simple, common sense stuff.
David there is a lot of research on the sun climate link in the literature. How do you know not enough is being done when you don’t know what or how muchhas been done already? I think it’s difficult to to draw any conclusion on such limited knowledge.
The Euros, especially the Danes, are doing a little on the sun-climate link but there is certainly not a lot. The vast bulk of climate research is done by the USGCRP and they are doing basically nothing.
How you know more needs to be done than what’s being done? I would take you more seriously if there a number of researchers complaining in the field about the lack of research/funding.
Joseph,
As someone no one takes seriously, how seriously (or not) you take someone matters only to yourself.
My project for 2016 is to advance the RAMA Initiative I proposed last year. I intend to query scientists and the public on issues related to Recognition, Attribution, Mitigation and Adaptation with regards to climate change.
I hope to establish a base of knowledge that all agree on in those areas and to identify a way of resolving the disagreements between various factions.
Not ambitious or anything. I guarantee it will fail to reach its higher goals. However, I hope to advance our understanding somewhat.
It may serve as partial support for those advocating a reboot for the issue.
Have Rud organize a virtual conference.
Simple goal.
1. What data do we need to study natural variability
2. What methods/tools do we need?
here’s an idea.. Do a guest post for Judith.
Outline what data you think is needed to study natural variability.
Then ask yourself this.
1. Would you allow the use of GCMs to study natural variability
and live or die by the answer?
2. can you untangle natural variability from anthro forced variability using
stats only?
make the argument.. dont just call for a conference.. Make an argument here about the data you need and the methods you will accept.
we will red team your proposal..
Mosh
Just posted this at foot of thread before seeing it is more relevant here;
—– —- —–
Mosh
As far as proxies for natural variability are concerned, would you consider tree rings-for drought/excessive rainfall- together with tree line heights/tree species-for long term temperature trends- to be reasonable ones to determine natural variability?
These would be used to predate/augment the instrumental record.
I have the data for the US, The Alps and Britain. Whilst not the globe it would be indicative of three disparate areas.
tonyb
“1. What data do we need to study natural variability
2. What methods/tools do we need?”
For a top down explanation, heliocentric astronomical ordering of the solar signal at the noise level, so you can see what primarily drives say, the North Atlantic and Arctic Oscillation anomalies at down to weekly scales that are almost universally assumed to be internal variability. Back to 1659 using CET as a NAO/AO proxy.
Mosh, it is not a question of data and methods so much as experimenting with well known hypotheses. So of course I would not use the pro-AGW GCMs. I would develop some relatively simple models that experiment with plausible assumptions regarding natural variability. No doubt some data analysis would also be required. New data needs might then arise.
I am relatively certain that the results would be quite different from what the GCMs are giving, because they refuse to use the hypotheses I will be exploring.
I am thinking that $100 million a year is a good budget estimate. This is either 4% or 10% of the USGCRP budget, depending on how one counts.
David,
You have greater faith in Congress than I do.
I went through a 2 day firefighting course in the Navy and later to 2 years of Fire Protection engineering at Maryland. One of the ways to fight fire is to starve it of fuel. I’ve concluded that the best way to fix government is to starve it of tax dollars.
There is no need for a restart, just simply getting back to the basics of what scientists do and involving interested and astute people in the wider community. Climate science is succesfully morbund thanks to political interference. It is not a scientific problem for the scientists to resolve, it is a human problem. Climate scientists must ask themselves – how open am I to all theories put forward however distasteful. All avenues of must be thoroughly explored in great detail. My own contribution can be viewed at blozonehole.com which provides a credible alternative theory on the reson for the ozone hole and provides answers for many currently unsolved or unsatisfactory scientific findings
Ike, of course, in his farewell Speech, warned of the Military-Industrial complex of which those of us being of a certain age heard much..
In the same paragraph he warned of what he called an equal danger.
That being science controlled by governments and group think.
Gone were the days of the individual scientist working in her or his lab.
His advisers had him stop short of stating another danger: the media.
There, too often, bad news is good news, and good news is no news.
The media, if by no other means than selection of material is of great influence.
Thomas Jefferson stated that Freedom of the press was our most important right. He also stated that the only thing in it to be trusted was the advertisements. Was it Ellen Goodman that initiated the term ‘denier’ ,applied to anyone exercising the fundamentally important scientific procedure of being skeptical?
An absolute part of the fabric of human nature is that if one hears something enough times, it becomes belief, which then stimulates non reasoned emotion leading to irrational behavior. The previous threads here illustrated how skewed thinking has become.
Why stop with just climate science?
Society suffers from the same perverse decline of inspiration and entanglement in useless forms:
“This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations, surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities, inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely. Victims of the delusion that equality and liberty are the better assured by the multiplication of laws, nations daily consent to put up with trammels increasingly burdensome. They do not accept this legislation with impunity. Accustomed to put up with every yoke, they soon end by desiring servitude, and lose all spontaneousness and energy. They are then no more than vain shadows, passive, unresisting and powerless automata.”
Le Bon, The Crowd
Revolution, world war or decline seem to be the only cures for society. What would that look like in climate science?
There is no reason to stop with fixing climate science, but that is my obsession.
nickels,
I suspect the Climate Wars will go the same way as the Culture Wars (if one believes the Climate Wars are a separate phenomena from the Culture Wars, something which Andy West argues they are not https://judithcurry.com/2013/11/01/cagw-memeplex/ ). And this is certainly likely to be the case once folks start getting a whiff of the sticker shock from CO2 abatement.
The fourth frog on the log!
I like this quote. I agree, in a way. I’ve finally come around to seeing the culture war as (somewhat) of a distraction; the real problem is the overreach of government into every aspect of our lives (America) and the resulting power that that has given to one side of the culture wars (the commie left)…
I am not a climate scientist but may I suggest that to re-start surely we must return to the original climate temperature data – i.e. the raw data before they started homogenizing it based on assumptions etc. I’m Australian and it first started when Torok and Nicholls started to homogenize the data in 1996 and they removed many of the measuring stations – they started with 1418 stations which they reduced to 224.The Bureau of Meteorology have since reduced it to 112 all of which have now been homogenized.
I’m not objecting to people producing papers based on the raw data and proposing an homogenized system but it should be peer-reviewed and the methodology presented. The RAW data should remain and be made available as the base for discussion.
The adjustments are really not very large and they do not change the basic facts. No data is outside the bounds of the past ten thousand years.
We are still inside the bounds of natural cycles for the past ten thousand years.
I’m sorry but the BoM adjustments change a cooling trend into a warming trend. That I’m afraid alters the “basic facts”
The Bến Tre option.
We had to burn the village in order to save it
Maybe instead of “restart” we need “stop”. Stop discussing incomplete, noisy, short-term, cherry picked and sometimes erroneous data. Wait a decade or two before resuming?
As someone who has written about this quite a bit, let me take the other side of this question.
(1) “Climate Science deadlock”
What is the evidence that there is a “deadlock” in climate science? The IPCC has clearly identified the current areas of consensus and the frontiers (marking its findings with degrees of confidence). Multiple lines of research moving ahead, with vigorous debate on the many frontiers.
There is a paradigm, to use Thomas Kuhn’s schema — but then there is almost always a paradigm. I see few signs that we’re not in the “normal science” mode. It’s adherents suppress other perspectives, probably more than usual (as several younger climate scientists have told me). But that is not extraordinary, especially for a science so politicized.
Much of this is funded by the public, and I believe that such research could be better directed to serve the public’s needs (I suspect that’s what Prof Curry was considering in her comment). But imo no “restart” is needed.
(2) “What Would It Mean to Hit the Climate Science RESTART Button?”
I agree that this would make for an interesting seminar discussion. I would bet big (which is my field) that the practical consequences would be near zero. Large institutions are usually unaffected by such things.
(3) What is deadlocked?
The public policy discussion. Much evidence shows that the US public policy discussion is deadlocked. Twenty-eight years after Hansen’s Senate testimony brought the issue to Washington…
(a) polls consistently show that the US public ranks climate change at or near the bottom of major policy concerns.
(b) One of the two major parties remains adamant against substantial policy action (logical given the polls).
(c) The Federal government has not approved any of the large-scale public policy measures necessary to limit global surface atmosphere temperature rise to 2C: cap and trade, large carbon taxes, massive regulations to de-carbonize, end to subsidies for mining and use of carbon-based fuels — let alone moving from the free-market system (as proposed by a range of people, from Pope Francis to Naomi Klein).
The public policy debate could use a restart, in the sense not of a “reboot” giving a clean slate — but restarting a stalled engine.
Editor, I am 2 minutes away from a dinner cooking for now 2 hours (braised lamb shanks and fresh ravioli) so this is a placeholder til later. Your statement, and the post question, need more parsing.
Rustvan,
I agree. But it was just a comment. I could write 2,000 words on this and only scratch the surface.
I look forward to seeing your response.
The deadlock parsing, in three hopefully helpful parts. Science, science perceptions, policy.
1. Science. There is a majority (IPCC) and a minority (skeptics). There is no deadlock, as the skeptical minority seems to be winning the observational debate (pause plus karlizarion, no accelerating SLR,…). Increasing the warmunist noise level does not equal deadlock. It indicates an absence thereof.
2. Perceptions. There are a couple of aspects. MSM is still mainly tuned in, but polls show most voters are already tuned out.
3. Policy. Couple of comments. First, COP21 speaks for itself. Nothing binding, only naming and shaming, and China cannot be either named or shamed until after 2030. Right. Second, renewables are failing despite government interventions. IMO, UK is the present test (basket) case. PE and I have posted enough reasons here last year.
So, in sum, deadlock only in some short impatient time frame. Ain’t deadlocked in the long view. Not at all.
BTW, the merlot with the braised lamb was excellent. I shall now have another glass.
Ristvan,
I don’t understand your comment. It looks like you agree with me with regards to both the science (not deadlocked) and the public policy debate (deadlocked, with endless debate but no policy action).
I don’t understand what you mean by wanting “parsing”.
How was the (braised lamb shanks and fresh ravioli)?
There is a majority (IPCC) and a minority (skeptics).
No, the number of real independent scientists who agree with the IPCC is really small. The number of skeptic scientists is huge. The number of scientists who work for someone who will fire them if they express a skeptic view is huge. The alarmist government agencies and universities and media do get rid of those who disagree.
My wife is fixing braised lamb for my birthday dinner this Sat. I was planning on a potato dish, but ravioli sounds good.
From JC’s opening comment
> … the monolithic climate science-government-industrial complex
This leaves out the glue – which is the bloody-minded MSM. Vain, capricious, narcissistic, dishonest, malicious …
How to “restart” them ?
I would start investigating the climate by starting with the question, why does average surface temperature vary so little? Over the entire 20th century, annual average surface temperature only varied by ± 0.3°C, which is ± 0.1% … what causes such stability? It can’t be the thermal mass, the global temperature changes more than that every month.
Answer that question, and the rest fall in line. The problem with climate science is at its very root, which is the incorrect assumption that on a global basis, ∆T = λ ∆F.
w.
Reply to willis ==> Very good point, with which I agree. It is the stubborn stability of the climate over the long term that remains a mystery — well, a two-state stability — Ice Ages and Interglacials.
This question should definitely be included at any restart forum or discussion.
If the average annual surface temperature has not varied by more than +/-0.1% in a century, what is the role for natural variability? Should it be renamed “natural INvariability”?
A bundle of sunlight enters the system each day. If a roughly equivalent bundle of energy did not leave the system each day, what would the consequences be?
Since that does not happen (at least I do not think it does,) what you have is a system that tends to be naturally stable on the boundaries, and potentially quite variable within them.
Restart all you want, Same Answers, Etc. Same Answers, Etc. The warming is 100% anthropogenic. Same Answer. Restart. Same Answer.
For once I agree with JCH. No point in restarting if bias stands in the way of proper scientific endeavour and examination of policy proposals.
JCH:
I agree with you about most of the science — except for the parts like “when”, “where” and “how much”.
No, the temperature does not seek a normal, it cycles from warm to cold and this repeats inside the same bounds. The temperature is variable with a natural cycle inside well bounded limits.
JCH,
You don’t know whether the bundle of energy leaving is equivalent or not.
Willis, it snows more when oceans are warm and thawed and it snows less when oceans are cold and frozen. That explains why temperatures vary so little. I have talked to you about this at climate conferences. I still use your quote on my Climate Website.
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page60.html
The temperature that Polar oceans freeze and thaw is the thermostats.
The more snowfall when oceans are warm and thawed and less snowfall when oceans are cold and frozen regulates temperatures and provides the bounding of temperatures.
Of course it’s stable because of thermal mass, Eschenbach. The reason GAT can vary a lot month to month is it’s measured in a thin layer which has very little thermal mass. Take the average temperature of the global ocean and see how much that varies from month to month instead of taking the average temperature at the ocean/atmosphere interface.
“It can’t be the thermal mass, the global temperature changes more than that every month.”
Without the thermal reservoir of the oceans, would those surface changes not be even larger?
Dr. Curry mentions:
I’ve recently run across a YouTube video of a speech by Pat Michaels that describes this better than anything I’ve read or listened to on the web or elsewhere. I’ll have to confess that I may not be the best judge of such a thing — I’m just a lay person who’s very interested in the subject. Of particular interest is where he quotes Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address @25:00. He quote’s the part that academics really like:
He then quotes a later passage:
Ike’s speech is here:
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=90&page=transcript
Michael’s (IMO excellent) video is here:
Dwight Eisenhower said:
Reinhold Niebuhr dubbed this “scientific-technological elite” the “scientist kings.”
All the mayhem and destruction of WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII took the wind out of the sails of Modernism and Positivism.
The establishment, however, managed to put the wind back in. But the cure was ephemeral. Current events are once again taking the wind out of the sails of Modernism and Positivism.
“there is a large number of scientists, including those in influential positions, that regard 100% of the warming to be anthropogenic, and the only scientific challenges are to refine our estimates of radiative forcing and refine climate model parameterizations. Think Gavin Schmidt, among many others.”
Is it really to be believed that so many truly believe that or is it merely that it is to their advantage to say that they believe it?
“If the U.S. climate change funding were to be redirected to be predominantly for natural climate variability, would the rats desert the sinking funding ship and start focusing on natural variability?”
The answer to this question must surely be in the affirmative.
“From the policy perspective, failure to implement meaningful reductions in carbon emission and to change/improve the climate in a material way could promote a rethinking of this whole thing, but it will be a decade at least before any meaningful evaluation can be made.”
Over the last hundred years there is no correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature – just compare the graphs. It is time to admit that lack of correlation implies lack of causation and that climate is much more complex than the mere result of CO2 ‘forcing’.
“I think the only practical thing that can be done in the very near term is paying much more attention to research ethics, the traditional norms of science, and the problems generated by scientists that become activists, particularly the journal editors and professional societies.”
Amen. Good luck with that. It is unlikely that the many grifters in this field will improve their behaviour without the threat or actuality of sanctions.
Restarting with a blank piece of paper is a good idea, but I wonder if people on both sides of the issue can really refresh their memories. The only practical alternative is to keep muddling through in good faith.
Although I share Dr. Curry’s pessimism regarding the impact of a four day conference on future funding from the Government/Research/Institution complex, I do believe managing the current state of climate affairs as a military conflict may have some merit.
” Red Teams in the United States armed forces were used much more frequently after a 2003 Defense Science Review Board recommended them to help prevent the shortcomings that led up to the attacks of September 11, 2001.” (wikipedia).
A Red Team is assembled precisely to identify shortcomings of the present policy/research endeavors. Therefore, membership is limited to those who are knowledgable yet capable to develop strategies necessary to fill gaps or identify the need for revisions to current as well as alternative paradigms.
The use of the Red Team in the military became a necessity with the failures of information and preparation identified after 9/11/01.
What would be the impetus now for a Red Team?
The hiatus was one such opportunity but never seized upon because of strong Presidential intervention to suppress alternative climate research and news.
Another opportunity presented itself when Karl et al manufactured a data set that eliminated the hiatus which, when assessed, represented bad science that supported the President’s agenda for COP21 so the malfeasance was never fully illuminated.
We of course could wait for the current El Nino to wane and global temperatures begin to fall, yet, I suspect that NOAA and NASA scientists already have a mechanism to blunt any temperature decline by manipulating temperature records to suit their purposes. Gavin is not above such research behaviors.
What would allow a Red Team to convene and have significant input into reordering the Climate Narrative? a narrative to a change in a new political climate that would be developed now, during the primaries for implementation after November 2016 elections.
Interested parties for developing a Red Team should be assembling now to flesh out a plan that would likely have viability early in the next Administration. Waiting to see who wins the election wastes valuable time since most of the new Administrations agenda is articulated, packaged, and politicized by January 1, 2017.
Get the Red Team assembled and staffed before formal opposition can recruit resources from the usual suspects. The current state of election chaos means that money and intellectual efforts will be focused upon winning, or, in reality not loosing badly Congress AND the Presidency. This is as good a time to cast our eyes about for members of the Red Team.
Reply to RiHo08 ==> Yes, the Restart Forum is a variation of the Red Team concept — with a twist.
RiHoo8, “What would be the impetus now for a Red Team?”
Impact of climate change policy on national security would be pretty good. There is good evidence that biofuel policy and commodities trading increased price volatility and contributed to Arab Spring. “Necessarily higher” energy prices also tend to devalue the dollar which is of national security interest and raise the price of everything. Since Climate Illuminati seem to avoid tighter probabilities like the plague, by-pass them and go to potential unintended consequences of their “plan”. The military loves poking holes in things when given the go ahead.
There are not enough qualified people for a red team.
Plus red team and blue team have to be able to play for both teams
Not for reinventing the climate science wheel, but there are plenty of qualified people for the “value added” solutions proposed.
“There are not enough qualified people for a red team.”
Now you’re just being silly. Round up some smart people and qualify them.
Andrew
Yes, evidently smart people foster dissent to find the truth.
That may not include calamitologists, though.
Mosher doesn’t want smart people in his lil’ Climate Club because entry by an outsider would quickly illuminate how the club really doesn’t do anything worth anyone’s time.
Andrew
Reply to Steven Mosher ==> Well true but only if “qualified people” is defined as “people who agree 100% with my/our sides positions”.
This is the problem in a nutshell — the Climate Establishment claims that only its own members are “qualified” — defining “qualified” as “fully supportive of the IPCC consensus position”.
From the Climate Establishment point of view, holding any divergent viewpoint, any non-conforming understanding, is proof of being “unqualified”.
Many at NASA felt the same way when Richard (“Dick”) Feynman was asked to step in and determine the cause of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. He’s “not qualified”, he’s not a “rocket scientist”, he’s just a “physicist”, he “doesn’t know anything about the space program”, he “isn’t one of us”. But that’s just what was needed, an outsider — all that was really needed was superior intelligence and and open mind, with enough scientific training to understand the basics and a mind open enough to dig out the truth.
There are plenty of superior intelligences in Science today….and almost none of them are combatants in the Climate Wars.
Define your meaning of qualified. Feynman was a theoretical physicist, not a rocket or aeronautics guy. Yet he alone got to the root Challenger cause,mcold embrittled booster O rings, which Morton Thiocol had warned about from the beginning.
In the warmunist world, I think qualified only means practicing the religion.
That might qualify for cargo cult science, but not otherwise, elsewhere.
Mosher your presence here contradicts your serious science. It’s well past time that you moved on.
Kip Simple.
Prove there are enough skeptics for a red team on Satellite data.
Assemble the team and have them do their own version/
or try the ocean..
you wont because you cant.
you cant because no skeptic wants to actually do science.
Give me a $100 million endowment and I’ll assemble the mother of all red teams. It may take me about 10 years to have it working smoothly because I’ll have to activate a series of newly minted PhDs and assorted specialties, and there’s a need to gather more data. :-]
“Global average temperature” is a myth. “Equilibrium climate sensitivity” is a myth. “Transient climate response” is a myth. Indeed, even “equilibrium” is a myth when it comes to climate states.
There are plenty of qualified “red team” scientists, but the moment you start talking about those myths as though they’re real, they stop listening to you.
Anyway, IMO the closest science can get to a “reboot” is a “Kuhnian revolution” ala the Plate Tectonics Revolution*, of which the climate version would seem to be already underway.
The path it’s following is somewhat different, probably due to the enormous investment from outside science in the current paradigm. (For the record, Kuhn excluded scientific fields with substantial interference from government or industry sources from his analysis, which would make “Kuhnian Revolution” in those fields a metaphor.)
*The paper mentioned on page 12 may be seen here.
Steven Mosher: There are not enough qualified people for a red team.
The Red Team consists of House and Senate Republicans, their many staffers, and the many intelligent, qualified, well-informed people who write to them. Rep Lamar Smith (Rep, TN) claims to have solid information from anonymous sources at NASA, to pick one example Sen Inhofe (R, OK) maintains lists of published papers that challenge the IPCC consensus (they are not all good papers, but neither are all of the papers cited by the IPCC good.)The Blue Team outnumbers The Red Team but it regularly makes claims, extrapolations, insults, and other commentary that exceed what can be supported by the published evidence — because of that, and for other reasons, they have not won the public policy debate among the voters of the US.. Hardly a week goes by that some Red Team member does not utter a gross exaggeration, that is disputed soon by a Red Team analysis that is widely circulated to all interested parties to the debate. Three well-selected Red Team members could easily defeat ten well-selected Blue Team members in public debate, which is one of the reasons that the Blue Team prefers to avoid public debate.
See Kip.. You can’t and you won’t assemble a red team of skeptics to look at satellite data.
How many skeptics does it take to red team the work of a couple guys in Alabama or Santa Rosa?
I suggest rud and springer and Brandon and Monkton as the perfect team to red team Rss and then uah..
Lead with an example.. Show us how this works…
Rep Lamar Smith (Rep, TN) claims to have solid information from anonymous sources at NASA
He has all the data and all of the code and he likely has not one clue what to do with it. Red team email reader… Lol.
Mosher
You have hijacked the thread doing what the warmists usually do by asking spurious questions like; who are going to be members of the Red Team? Getting to a discussion of a Red Team begins with a commitment to assemble and staff such a creature. It takes a lot of sorting and sifting to get to the right size and then the right people. Your question is irrelevant at this stage. It will take a lot of work to get to the stage whereby names are put forward and evaluated.
I realized you can’t think of anyone who is qualified for Red Team participation, it doesn’t mean that other people can’t. There are bright people in the science industry besides yourself who may serve admirably on a Red Team.
Richard Feynman was not a rocket scientist, yet he was member of the Roger’s Commission investigating the Space Ship Challenger disaster.
Of course we all need to remember, bright people can be wickedly ignorant.
Mosher
There are not enough qualified people for a red team.
Translation : the blue team is given all the money.
Challenging Models with Red Teams is Essential to Science
In his Feb. 2nd testimony John Christy explains why current “climate consensus” is excluding funding to research proposed to examine alternatives. Red Teams challenging models are essential to science to test/examine the contrarian positions.
Easy. Assemble a red team to look at Christys work. Demonstrate how you go about picking a team and do the work. Heck Rud can fund it with the money he refuses to give to Harvard.
Mosher
That “blue team” already has the hundreds of gigabucks. We need to fund ~ ten gigabucks to Christy & crew to develop models / statistical methods that work.
Reply to Windchaser ==> It has nothing whatever to do with me personally. It is not a matter of checking one or two questionable climate metrics. Those who think it is are sadly so far off base scientifically, in my opinion, that they need a total retraining.
The stakes are really too high for society to allow Climate Science to go bumbling along its current path without some serious and deep reconsideration and rethinking.
If that independently carried out exercise turns up a solution of “more of the same”, then at least we can be satisfied that we, society, have done due diligence.
Nope, it’s not. But that’s a good place to start. If people can’t agree on even the clearest or most important metrics, then there’s no way we can move forward.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of people here who question the analyses of the surface temperatures and whether mankind is responsible for the rise in atmospheric CO2.
Whatever you think of climate sensitivity, we should have moved on past these simple issues by now. If you’re going to get hung up on the most basic of points, you’ll never advance.
“I think the only practical thing that can be done in the very near term is paying much more attention to research ethics, the traditional norms of science, and the problems generated by scientists that become activists, particularly the journal editors and professional societies.”
I think so, too. Anyhow it can´t hurt – and it is necessary for our society to prosper.
A better question is this : how do we restart the skeptical paradigm to focus on the science and not the personalities?
Can skeptics be remediated to focus on sensitivity efforts or are Judith and Nic wasting their time showing skeptics how to work on the important questions?
How do we restart the Mosher Paradigm to focus on the science and not on skeptics?
Andrew
Why bother ?
Reply to Steven Mosher ==> Your comment is a good example of how pervasive and deep the taint of the Climate Wars goes.
At the first hint of criticism or perceived threat, from the “other side” (which for you is the skeptics and their skeptical paradigm), the first reaction is to circle the wagons, put up a defense, and stage a counter-attack. (Quite mild, in this case, but there it is, sticking out, all the same.)
Hardly helpful.
Both “sides” in the Climate Wars are what is wrong with Climate Science today — the fact that there are “sides” at all and that people consider themselves on one side or the other.
It is this very thing — this scientific defensiveness — that has muddled the subject, bogging it down, and is at the root of my theoretical call for a Restart Forum or Discussion.
Kip, your reply to Mosher is spot on. A Treffer. And he is probably too blinded by warmunism to see it.
Kip says “I am not knowledgeable enough…”
You are knowledgeable enough to recognize how much of the current state of affairs is working at cross purposes to what some of the leaders in this field had envisioned for the science several decades ago. Looking at a problem from a detached distance sometimes provides insights not possible from within. Many CEOs have come in from the outside, supposedly with little knowledge, and been able to identify “truths” not seen by those closest to the action. Fresh eyes can bring unattainable clarity at times.
One of the most obvious disfunctions that I noticed was the defensiveness associated with this science. All involved should be working toward one goal instead having blood sport competition and a zero sum game mentality. A breakthrough in expanding knowledge should be applauded rather than having it be a threat and a sense of personal loss.
Wrong kip.
you cannot be skeptical of skeptics.
personally I started out to RED TEAM GISS and CRU.
Result. they were right. I was wrong.
Now I suggest that you focus on Red teaming the skeptic team
red team goddard,
red team monkton
start our with the easy ones.. prove yourself.
Here is the thing. you are calling for a do over.
There are no mulligans.
get over it and figure out why it took so long for a brilliant skeptic like Nic Lewis to come along and show you all how to do it.
Don’t get so defensive Kip. I just asked a question. How do we restart the skeptical paradigm to focus on the questions that really matter?
That’s a fair question.
As fair as yours.
Or does a restart preclude questioning skeptics?
Are you opposed to asking questions about restarts?
Is the list of questions beyond debate?
Kip:
You dont like my questions. I get that.
but here is what you wrote
‘It should be obvious to all that I am out of my depth here – in over my head – let me be the first to point this out. I don’t know what questions should even be asked.”
But you know enough to not like my questions?
pretty funny
Reply to Steven Mosher (his several responses) ==> You seem to be responding in Climate Wars mode — “skeptics” do this, “skeptics” should do that, Red Team my “opponents”, etc.
This is what I am defining as the problem…..the sharply drawn lines of “us” and “them”.
Sure, there are overly strident voices on both sides of the divide that are playing the fool in this “battle”….and they make terrific straw men to attack as if they themselves were the problem. They are not. They are just loud voices shouting from soap boxes in the square.
There are, however, real scientific questions about the Earth’s climate that need attention — some of these we know and some of these we don’t know — there are holes, gaping holes in the opinions of some, in our basic knowledge. Because of these holes, some of which we may not even be aware of — the unknown unknowns — we may well, as a field, be missing the research avenues that would lead to a far better understanding and potential solutions (if there be such things) to climate issues.
The purpose of the proposal — a Restart Climate Science Forum or Discussion — is to allow the discipline to take a few steps back and re-examine its foundations, its store of gained knowledge of basic issues, its approaches to the overreaching questions, to look and see if there are important questions that have been overlooked in the rush to prove or disprove the CO2-induced Global Warming hypothesis.
If you read all the comments — at least all of mine — you’ll see that I acknowledge that the sensitivity issue is one of the important questions — but not the *only* question and probably not the *most important* question — for anyone in climate science, regardless of their perceived “side” in the Climate Wars.
I am definitely NOT calling for a “re-do”….that is a wildly inaccurate interpretation of my proposal. I am calling for a serious and deep review of the entire field, starting from Square Zero, to consider, as a thought experiment if you will, whether the almost-exclusive focus of the discipline of Climate Science on the CO2-induced Global Warming Hypothesis (and the resulting insanity we call the Climate Wars) has led the field astray, causing it to ignore other, potentially more-important questions.
I am only calling for some serious thinking and rethinking.
Surely you can’t feel threatened by that?
“You dont like my questions.”
This is the same Mosher who claimed you shouldn’t ask questions.
Andrew
They could start a draft.
The red team could draft scientists who have had a game changing paper featured on Climate Etc.
You have probably wanted this since the ERA went down.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/02/politics/women-military-draft-generals/index.html
This is a disaster waiting to happen. Commissars coming to US soon? You get your wish.
Mosher is on your side
Reply to bobdroege ==> The concept of “sides” is the problem! “Sides” doesn’t have any place in Science.
The effort is to make a good faith effort at the whole subject review by scientific professionals who are NOT taking “sides”.
“Mosher is on your side” in the sense that Mosher agrees with you that we need an open and fair-minded look by independent researchers at some of these questions.
It was already done with the surface temperatures. The result turned out to be the same as the “establishment” scientists were already saying.
We should do the same with satellites, complete with error bars.
But here’s the real question: when the work is done, will you accept the results?
Arch,
I have a niece who graduated 7th (out of 250+) ROTC students in her Warrior Forge class (when it was still conducted at Ft Lewis). Not 7th among the minority of female participants, but 7th overall. She was a better soldier than all but 6 guys. She is an Army nurse, but I’d trust her in combat any day.
I suppose the ERA comment was directed at me. My parents had a close friend whose brother was a General. When he came home to visit his family, my parents often socialized with him. The General’s granddaughter was killed in action in Afghanistan. I have a letter the General sent to my mother not long after this happened. I doubt he would oppose including women in a draft, but you would have to ask him. One could understand it if he did, but I suspect he would see it is an important component of national defense.
Mosher
Certainly you jest. If the skeptics are not, as you claim, adequately focused on the science, and a restart could be made, who on the consensus team would listen to those newly reconfigured skeptics?
Regards,
Richard
I would be glad to read and review any skeptical red team analysis of satellite data. Or any science a skeptic tried to do.
Heck I really liked mckittrick papers and watts work.
Heck I criticized ar4 for trashing Ross s work.
Sadly there is only nic Lewis and Anthony.
Thin bench.
I am sure there are many skeptics who would be happy do do a lot of science, including me, as soon as the government funds us instead of the pro-AGW scientists.
For example, and as you may know, the official US NSF climate change research summary says that long term (dec-cen) natural variability simply does not exist. So it funds zero research on those processes, even though skeptics have pointed them out relentlessly. I have checked the awards.
I also recently analyzed the (13 agency, including NSF) US Global Change Research Program research summaries for the last five years and there is basically no mention of natural variability. Their $2.5 billion per year research program, which is probably the bulk of research globally, simply assumes AGW.
Give us the money and we will give you the science. Or stop taunting.
Mosher
Sadly there is only nic Lewis and Anthony.
Couldn’t be due to selective funding could it?
Steve:
your comment made me smile.
I cant remember how many times Ive asked you about TCR and ECS and the failure of the climate science community to reduce the range of uncertainty associated with estimates produced over the last thirty years, but its been more than once, certainly.
Instead of spending your time equivocating and snarking your way through your work week, why haven’t you and your band of gentlemen at the Berkely Car Wash spent some of your time and grant money doing the hard work of science?
Not your bag, baby?
It seems not.
Bitching that what you do isn’t averaging…
that the adjustments to the instrument record “cool the record” while ignoring that cooling the record for 90% of the observation period, while leaving the last 20 years intact in fact increases a warming trend, and on and on and on…
really.
Mosher’s such a clown. In the US the “skeptics” have consistently won the climate wars. US spending on global warming concerns are trivial. We have no carbon credit trading, no carbon taxes, gasoline and electricity prices are at near historic lows. Mosher was claiming it was a huge win for AGW cultists that alternative energy tax credits were extended. Those credits don’t amount to a hill of beans! Neither party in congress is doing more than paying lip service to this non-problem called “climate change”. It’s all academic with a very low spending priority.
Adjustments do cool the record.
get over it and ask yourself why you didnt see it.
Mother, youre an equivocating “gentleman”.
You assume I didn’t see it; youre simply incorrect. Now, why dont you reread acknowledge and respond to the point I made, which concerned the trend, not the overall record.
Your degree is in english; cant you read?
I think that you can, and your obtuseness is intentional, deliberate and purposeful, and
2) why dont you guys at the berkley Car Wash do some of the hard work of science and try to nail down ECS and TCR a biot better? Its seems like you armor than happy to leave the heavy lifting to Nic and Judith.
David
‘I cant remember how many times Ive asked you about TCR and ECS and the failure of the climate science community to reduce the range of uncertainty associated with estimates produced over the last thirty years, but its been more than once, certainly.”
maybe you have a memory problem?
http://www.speed-light.info/measure/speed_of_light_history.htm
also, Judith’s work reduces the range. Do you deny her contribution?
“Mosher’s such a clown. In the US the “skeptics” have consistently won the climate wars. ”
That’s why ya’ll are clamoring for a do over..
too funny.
This is Springer’s idea of victory
http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/01/obamas-paris-global-warming-treaty-will-cost-at-least-12-1-trillion/
Stephen,
This from your link illustrates how the current strategy of subsidizing renewables has misfired:
http://www.sevenquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/insanity.jpg
Mosh: pointing out the evolution of a more precise estimate for the speed of light does not, in any respond to the question I asked. You, of all people must be aware of this. This is a technique you use repeatedly, for example, when the point is made that lowering the temperature record (over, say 99% of observations) may in fact have the effect of increasing the overall warming trend, you merely ignore the issue.
Now, you may consider efforts to estimate ECS and TCR today to be on par with attempting to determine the speed of light using 17th and 18th century technologies, IDK, that doesn’t seem all that reasonable to me.
From my perspective, an obsession with GCMs, which currently are at least 7 orders of magnitude too coarse to simulate emergent climatic phenomena at the expense of observational studies is part of the problem.
I actually was curious, since youre in the belly of the beast, paid to market the product that BEST creates, why you think there hadn’t been more progress. Callender’s estimate calculated over 70 years ago seems to be pretty close to where we are now. Thats not much progress.
Its interesting that you chose the speed of light, and not efforts to quantify the mass of an electron as your example.
It didn’t take centuries to hone in on the correct answer for that question, nor did it take centuries to develop the Integrated circuit.
Pointing out a situation which took centuries to resolve really doesn’t deal with the question I posed to you.
For someone who has the ability to use english with a great degree of precision, I find your unwillingness to engage the question on its merits to be disappointing.
There is a kernel of constructive criticism in Mosher’s comment. He could just give you the kernel, but he likes to watch knees jerk in unison.
I will say it again.
There is a lot of brain power on the skeptical side that goes under utilized
Imagine if they focused on one question.
Long agao I told them that they would do more more by working inside the system. Nic has. Mc has. Anthony has. Judith has.
It pretty simple. I point out the biggest weakness and tell them to put their strength on that weakness.. instead we get popes climate theory and Goddards crap.
Now the really funny thing is this. The other day somebody asked me why I was helping skeptics by pointing them at the soft spots.
The answer was simple. I could tell skeptics there was million dollars under that rock.. and every last one of them would knee jerk deny it, and never look to see.
The other day someone told me to stop encouraging skeptics to do their own science. the last thing the Lewandowsky’s of the world want is to argue with a skeptic who actually has publications. My answer was the same. I can make skeptics NOT do science by telling them to do science.
its just too funny to watch
” The other day someone….”. The other day somebody…”
I assume those speakers were on the consensus side. What kind of perverted mindset is that? So they don’t like the idea that someone is out there trying to prove them wrong. They don’t want anyone sniffing around the soft spots. Where would we all be if the skeptics actually discovered new insights into the mechanisms of the climate. Gasp! It couldn’t get any worse than that.
It sounds eerily like some famous emails.
Steven, “I point out the biggest weakness and tell them to put their strength on that weakness.. instead we get popes climate theory…”
Pope’s climate theory is a simple water vapor/convection feedback loop. Higher temperature-more water vapor-more poleward advection – more polar ice accumulation. You could add that a higher rate of poleward advection increases polar vortex instability and sudden stratospheric warming events. A higher rate of moist air convection would also increase the ratio of liquid topped mixed phase clouds to “normal” clouds used in parameterizations.
If you really want to have fun with it you could read Manabe who estimates the GHE as being around 60 C and the convection/advection feedback being -30 C , if the rates of increase in both are non-linear, you get climate regime changes.
Of course that would indicate that past climate should have a bit more wandering than +/- 0.1 C and we know that is impossible thanks to Mann don’t we? Besides, past climate doesn’t really matter since there is more than enough evidence to justify necessarily higher costs of everything ala Greg Laudanum.
Oh and I forgot, there is absolutely zero evidence of a long term persistent trend provided you confuse “average” temperature anomaly with available energy.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c0pfLjbKCEU/VP3rswWDfRI/AAAAAAAANGo/rEIY7HakJCg/s839-Ic42/simple%252520linear%252520regression%25252013mma%252520and%252520oppo.png
Steven Mosher said:
My answer is probably not going to make either you or Don Monfort happy, since you insist on working within the system, like Erasmus did (even though “the system” had become corrupt and vitiated) and Don wants to raze the system, since he, operating in the tradition of bomb throwers like Machiavelli or Ulrich von Hutten, believes the system to be too debauched and beyond reform.
Nevertheless, the fact is that most successful political reform occurs by having people who work both within and without the system.
Likewise, most successful political reform in our two-party system occurs by having people who work both sides of the aisle.
“raze” “confusing” before some nitpicker sees it
There is a lot of misguided pseudo-intellectual babbling going on around here. It can be amusing. You can get the gist by quickly skimming and save yourself a lot of time by skipping over the gratuitous italics padding.
Don Montford said:
Just like Donald Trump?
Well maybe you’re right. For Trump is certainly a man of faith, especially his unshakable faith in the absolute, transcendental, imperial “I,” as opposed to reason, the finite “I,” and an objective world.
The new Christians would turn out to be at least as bigoted as the old. No one has calculated how many sixteenth-century Christians slaughtered other Christians in the name of Christ.
So maybe instead of Machiavelli and von Hutten, Trump is cut more out of the same cloth as Martin Luther.
Or John Calvin:
Or the Roman Inquisition:
See what I mean. The dolt is going on about 16th century Christians. WTF is that about? Hey dolt, check your calendar and the street signs. Try to catch up.
I see that you deleted my comment, Judith. WTF is that about? If you don’t give me a plausible explanation, or don’t put it back up, I will not be commenting here any more. Your chance to be rid of me.
Glenn
“Nevertheless, the fact is that most successful political reform occurs by having people who work both within and without the system..”
1. we are talking about science, not politics
2. Since the VAST VAST majority of skeptics are already OUTSIDE the system, my call to them to balance that out by working inside the system as well, looks pretty damn brilliant, by your own argument.
Hint: quoting others to make your argument doesnt work.
Make YOUR argument dont try to steal the arguments of dead guys who are not around to correct you when you abuse their positions for your own purposes.
‘
I’ll be off now. Got more important and productive things to do. Maybe I’ll come back from time-to- time to update on our progress, or just to say I told you so. Will still be looking in to read the dozen or so commenters who are intelligent, interesting and honest. You know who you are.
I’ll just leave this quote from a very brilliant 11th century Norman soldier-philosopher, who was scorned and ignored by his ignorant philosopher contemporaries, because he was honest and way ahead of his time. On the other hand, he was given many honors and rewards by his C in C, William the Conqueror. Italics is an affectation I won’t use and it strains the eyes readers. So I’ll give it to straight:
“You are a blank, glennny. You don’t know anything about Mosher or myself. We are both intelligent, honest realists calling it like we see it. You are a blank on a crusade against straw men.
Where did you get the blanking idea that I want to raze the system? You seem to experience the world and interact with its inhabitants only metaphorically, avoiding reality because it doesn’t interest you. I was literally a bomb thrower in defense of truth, justice and the American way. I served Democrat and Republican administrations and have commendations from Presidents of both parties for service above and beyond blah..blah..blah.
You just made that blanking blank up about me believing our system is too debauched and beyond reform. I believe that our system needs very little reform. This country has saved the world multiple times from tyranny guided by the principles of the old Constitution that is under constant attack from the “reformers”. The pen and phone usurpers have to go. That is what elections are for. Now get busy constructing your little straw men.
Does my involvement in the democratic political process scare you, blank? You are blankety-blank.”
——–Simon de Montfort
Google him. You might not be able to locate this exact quote, but he was a very interesting dude.
Steven,
I agree with a lot of what you are saying here. However you are off target regarding Alexander Pope’s hypothesis. While simple, it sounds to be far closer to a realistic hypothesis than the equally simple CO2 control knob hypothesis.
Mosher
they would do more more by working inside the system. Nic has. Mc has. Anthony has. Judith has.
A few have managed it, yes. What though are the career chances of young climate scientists not exhibiting enough consensus ?
Mosher
See John Christy’s Feb 2nd testimony highlighting the divergence between surface and satellite/balloon measures. Those two independent data sets agree closely while the models are “cooked” to hot by 250%.
Sorry Satellite data is heavily pencil whipped.
To get an idea look at the huge changes in version to version.
That’s structural uncertainty son. and its enormous.
But amuse me. Point me at Christy’s TEMPERTAURE data..
go ahead try…
not anomalies.. I want to see the actual temperatures..
The raw data, and the adjusted data.
Go ahead I will wait.
So are you saying that the balloon data conspired with the satellite data to undermine the models?
Mosher. See Spencer’s discussion on the method and links to the data. at http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tmt/
So Steven, are you inferring that climate models are themselves structually sound enough to dictate global energy policy?
It’s not the personalities – it’s the lies, cover-ups, data manipulation, 97% consensus manufacturing, refusal to share data, ignoring FOIA requests, etc. If the warmunistas would simply come clean, some progress could be made.
Steven Mosher: A better question is this : how do we restart the skeptical paradigm to focus on the science and not the personalities?
You need to read more of the science, and comment less. A good start would be the GWPF review of the benefits of CO2, which focuses on the science and eschews personality assessments. That’s just for starters. There are reviews of the benefits that have accrued from the warming of the last 140 or so years; and there are reviews of all the known unknowns associated with changes in the hydrologic cycle.
Personality appraisals are not confined to the Red Team, but that is a separate issue. The Red Team cries “hoax” and the Blue Team cries “put the deniers in jail”.
” GWPF review”
I will wait for their red team review of temperatures. They have gone silent and not published anything.
As for the benefits of C02.. I would doubt not doubt that they exist.
Hoax versus Jail.
The GOA has come down on NOAA whenever folks cry hoax.
The DOJ has done nothing about jailing deniers.
Moral equivalence? na..
In any case, its hard to join the call for a re start from people who say the debate isnt over..
Enjoy this current round of calvin ball and calls for mulligans
Climate science is clearly in a rut and needs a shake-up. The fact that in 35+ years of study and tens of $Billions spent on research, with absolutely no progress made in reducing the “official” uncertainty range values for TCR or ECS, are stark evidence that a problem in research focus exists. An “official” TCR value that can be supported by a broad scientific commission is desperately needed for an accurate assessment of the AGW threat and to guide current public policy decisions related to this concern. The other key piece of data needed for accurate AGW forecasting to support policy decisions is a more accurate and realistic “business as usual” forecast compared to the IPCC’s RCP8.5 for atmospheric CO2 and other GHG rise in the atmosphere for the next 300 years.
As a retired former NASA employee during Apollo, Skylab and Space Shuttle programs and NASA Contractor during ISS design and development, I recommend something like the NASA Apollo Program management approach that achieved the amazing success of the Apollo Program. With this approach, at the direction of our next President, the AGW threat issue would be assigned to a single Federal Government Agency with a named Program Manager who will organize the Program to manage the AGW threat and to be held personally accountable and responsible for:
1. Prioritizing climate research needs and managing the research required to determine key information needed to support good public policy decision-making.
2. Identify key specific Climate Problems that have already occurred, if any, in terms of deviation from normal with respect to What? Where? When? and How Much?
3. Determine root cause of any such Problems identified
4. Identify a range of possible solutions to mitigate the identified climate problem with known root cause, and perform trade studies on these potential solutions with respect to Performance, Cost and Schedule required to implement them.
5. Identify specific Potential Climate Problems and the data that needs to be gathered and monitored to track future development of these Potential Problems.
6. Recommend to Congress and the Executive Branch an optimum current public policy position needed to safely manage the identified AGW threats.
7. Continue to monitor the AGW threat situation and recommend any changes to public policy required to mitigate specific climate problems that are developing.
8. Convene scientific “non-advocacy” reviews using independent science review panel members, without conflicts of interest, from a broad spectrum of the US scientific and engineering community to review significant research findings and recommendations proposed for public policy decisions.
Where’s Dick Feynman when you need him?
“The fact that in 35+ years of study and tens of $Billions spent on research, with absolutely no progress made in reducing the “official” uncertainty range values for TCR or ECS, are stark evidence that a problem in research focus exists. ”
Yup. Climate “science” is moribund. TCS and ECS ranges haven’t been narrowed in 50 years.
On the other hand research spending of tens of billions over a 50 year period is very little annually and most of that is on instrumentation which is a good thing because we need reliable data more than anything else. In comparison the US space shuttle program cost $196 billion over 30 years.
I assume from what has been said, that Mosher would support increasing grants to those with different viewpoints so that they have the resources necessary to work within “the system”. He also would support peer reviewed journals and the MSM publishing the results. Many fully qualified scientists and engineers from many disciplines are capable of challenging any assumptions currently in place. In fact, statisticians and computer programmers are vital components of all of the climate research.
Perhaps the huge dollars being advocated to biologists to “study” the impact of computer generated climatic projections on their favourite species should be given to the Watts and others to actually study climatology (or meteorology). This would reduce the number of “mays”, “mights”, “coulds”, “possibles” and “perhaps” papers that add nothing to the debate. I am getting tired of shrinking goats! How about a review paper on UHI, followed by some real studies that measure UHI. I would think that any serious climate scientist would be begging for the establishment of broader and refined data gathering systems.
Mosher’s comment that there aren’t enough “qualified” folks to create a “red team” is pure hubris.
“I assume from what has been said, that Mosher would support increasing grants to those with different viewpoints so that they have the resources necessary to work within “the system”. He also would support peer reviewed journals and the MSM publishing the results. Many fully qualified scientists and engineers from many disciplines are capable of challenging any assumptions currently in place. In fact, statisticians and computer programmers are vital components of all of the climate research.”
1. I worked for nothing for 3 years.
2. Journals dont matter to me.
3. Challenging assumptions IS CHILDS PLAY, increasing understanding is hard.
4. tell me about programming for statistics. duh.
Compare temperature and sea level to past measurements for ten thousand years. Use data and not model output. Is the data out of bounds? No, then do nothing about the problem, but study to figure out why the data is still in bounds.
In my post here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/30/going-forward-realistically-on-climate-studies-now-includes-october-data/
In my post here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/30/going-forward-realistically-on-climate-studies-now-includes-october-data/
I reposted earlier comments of two men who discussed this issue: Leo Smith and Gary Pearse. Their comments are well worth reading for the present discussion.
How do you have a “field” made up of a considerable number of tight fenced plots where the individual owners admit to knowing little or nothing of the other plots?
What “field”? What climate science?
“Is it time to hit that RESTART button?”
This is one of the most ridiculous posts I have ever read. Just because you or Judith don’t like the consequences of the last 150 years of physics is no reason to “restart” anything.
If you think the physics is wrong, PROVE IT. The world will beat a path to your door.
Reply to David Appell ==> No one, neither Dr.Curry or I, have expressed any opinions that could reasonably be construed as thinking “the physics is wrong”. (Well, honestly, couldn’t even *unreasonably* be construed as that.) Thus, the world is excused from the need to beat a path to my door.
David, I believe very few think the physics is wrong. Of those that I’ve read they make a good case however erroneous. The world will not beat a path to their door or even be very much interested in it. It is relegated to faux science as you well know. The real issue is the matter of sensitivity and so far uncertainty is all skeptics have to offer. I do think you make a good and relevant point though.
ordvid are you saying that proof that the physics is wrong has been relegated?
redbbs, Yes, whenever I’ve read the one or two commenters who say it is wrong, the replies have always been well that’s very interesting now let’s move along. Or more candidly they say go away.
And that’s your proof? This thread is extraordinary.
I will have to go back to the most recent comment by that person showing that the physics is wrong. Stay tuned. He has shown this information more that once here and has always been shot down without ever addressing his contention.
I realized that we were talking past each other. What I was saying was that very few skeptics believe the physics is wrong. That is not where a restart would be as most are in agreement.
You were asking me for two things. First that proof existed and second that it is relegated. Actual proof may of may not exist, I could not even be the judge of that. That it is relegated to Faux science is my assertion simply based on my experience reading this and other blogs. I may be wrong but I doubt it and I certainly would try a consensus poll. I could not find the comment I was looking for but I believe Douglas Cotton is the guy who thinks the physics is wrong and shows his proof here:
http://www.climate-change-theory.com/
http://www.climate-change-theory.com/Planetary_Core_and_Surface_Temperatures.pdf
Now there is another guy who shows the physics is wrong with equations but It would take me hours to find it again. Maybe he’ll pop up again sometime.
The real world is not a “spherical chicken of uniform density”.
Hey Mosh: I dont hector people I teach grad students how to do the hard work of science…
you know, no post hoc selection of data without an rational articulated protocol for doing so, one established before any data is collected?
you know, like applying a bonferroni correction when one mines a data set for correlations?
now, dont be a prat.
At least I dont try to freeload on the name of an established university’s reputation.
David youre a prat.
No one is arguing the physics…people take issue with professional malfeasance related to applied statistical analysis.
Now, your bleating and complaining, when you had the gall and temerity to review a book hyouhad not, in fact, even read renders you unfit for any role in the discussion.
Now, what are you going to do?
threaten to “report me to the police”?
“No one is arguing the physics…people take issue with professional malfeasance related to applied statistical analysis.”
Simple. Go look at UAH or RSS.
You have their data, and code
You have their analysis.
Do it better.
Go look at GISS or CRU.
you have their data and code
You have their analysis
Do it better.
The best proof of malfeasance is doing it better. go ahead.
You can restart the science all on your own.
Same with ECS or TCR.. you have the data… do better
David, I wonder whether you understand much physics. Especially the last 150 years. Lets see… Einstein corrected Newton. Michelson Morely corrected the aether. My little patented discovery corrected Helmholtz on solid/liquid interfaces in EDLC. And so on.
What you appear to dislike is that Mother Nature is refuting your cherished warmunist beliefs. CO2 control knob v. Pause. Accerlerating SLR, not. Greenland now again accumulating ice thanks to a natural arctic cycle — remember that little off line email exchange? What say you to 2015?
Say what? Ma Nature is proving that your beliefs are false. Very hard for you and yours to prove otherwise. The harder your side tries, the more laughable your sides papers become.
what pause?
Is the existence of the pause settled science?
ice is depleted and retreats in cold times when it does not snow much.
ice is replenished and advances in warm times when it does snow much.
This bounds temperature and sea level.
Steven Mosher said:
You mean the CAGW side can play the doubt card too?
Somebody needs to put a bug in Oreskes’ ear.
But I suppose playing the doubt card is only foul when the other guy does it.
Physics is one thing. Computer code is another.
I don’t have any issue with physic’s view of the resonances of CO2. But, I do wonder if the climate models actually reflect the physics.
Shy guy
Go get the code for modelE or MIT GCM or any of the others publically available. You wonder? curiousity is good. restart the science by look at the existing science..
Examining the code will not help much. The models could be 99.44% properly reflective of the physics and still give wrong numbers.
Moreover, the models are limited by their relatively poor resolution in time and space. There may be a wide range of important processes that operate at spatial frequencies higher than those resolved by the models. If so, examining the code will not show the problem.
Recall that Freeman Dyson (Freeman Dyson!) deprecates these models.
If you think the physics are “right” then prove it by narrowing ECS estimated range. Right now and for the past 50 years “the physics” says doubling of CO2 might produce anywhere from 1.5C to 4.5C of warming which is a practical range of “no problem” on the low end to “holy crap we gotta do something” at the high end.
@ David , I think you point is one of the main problems. The theory is covering an enormous range of possible outcomes. Besides that, so many are determined to rescue the theory whenever it is in danger, by the introduction of auxiliary hypotheses or change of definitions. The degree of falsifiability of a theoretical system protected in this way is equal to zero.
However, I would say that the high end has clearly been falsified.
@ S or F
> … so many are determined to rescue the theory whenever it is in danger, by the introduction of auxiliary hypotheses or change of definitions
Agreed. That’s why I still regard the AGW “model” as an hypothesis – a series of theories lumped together mutably and so broadly as to defy falsification deliberately; empirical data not needed
Trenberth has inverted the null hypothesis so as to require critics to prove a negative. It’s his speciality
“If you think the physics are “right” then prove it by narrowing ECS estimated range.”
http://www.speed-light.info/measure/speed_of_light_history.htm
“Before the 17th century scientists believed that there was no such thing as the “speed of light”. They thought that light could travel any distance in no time at all. Later, several attempts were made to measure that speed:”
The physics–light has speed–was established in 1638.
For centuries people worked to narrow the estimates.
Nobody said… “this is taking too long, light must NOT have a speed”
No. the physics was right– light has a speed– improving understanding takes time.. there is no time clock..
That said Are you denying that Judith’s work narrows the range?
Hey Steve: if you think the physics are correct why dont you work on narrowing the range of estimates for ECS and TCR?
After all you are doing the hard work of science, or at least thats what you guys at BEST are spending your grant money to do.
I just google scholar searched you. There aren’t many papers published by you in peer reviewed journals regarding this issue…like none.
tick tock tick tock
I’m counting on the the lack of progress. Policy action will continue to be gridlocked until there are better answers to fundamental questions like what, where, and when are the effects of aCO2, what are the benefits and costs of mitigation, etc. Until ECS is narrowed from a range of “who cares” 1.5C to “OMG” 4.5C the followup questions have a similar range which renders them useless for government policy decisions.
And no Judith’s work isn’t narrowing the range. It’s just one more opinion and one that isn’t being accepted by the consensus manufacturing industry. The only definitive answer is going to come from nature herself and that requires time to see what happens. Any policy action today limiting aCO2 emission that would have a non-negligible consequence to GAT 100-years from now is necessarily so draconian it will never be implemented. In the meantime there are many problems facing the world where solutions are tractable and yield a lot more bang for the buck. You know the drill. See Bjorn Lomborg. I’m sure Judith will encourage you to do the same.
No, the physics was wrong, light didn’t have a “speed”. They had to create a new physics, with a new definition of “speed”, before they could understand what was going on.
David, I don’t agree with you about Kip Hansen’s post being ridiculous. He may want to re-boot climate science because he sees skeptics being defeated by the science. The desire to start over if things aren’t going well is wishful, but not ridiculous.
Reply to Max-etc ==> I’ll repeat this here for those reading down this far —
It is a error to think I am calling for a restart or a re-do of Climate Science itself — I simply call for a Forum, a four-day or so meeting — to discuss the idea of what a fresh or new approach to the entire topic might be — to discuss whether the discipline has been lured or strayed in a dead-end. You see, the history of science is full of examples of areas of investigation that turned out to be dead-ends — some from hypotheses that seemed reasonable at the time, some from misunderstood findings that seemed to point in a certain direction (leading to a rush of in-the-end worthless research).
A serious thought experiment by a bunch of really-smart-people.
How can anyone object to a dozen or two smart folks getting together to re-look-at and rethink such an important scientific field?
Why does this idea kick up so much defensiveness?
If the mainstream consensus approach is, in fact, the best when all things have been reconsidered, then that’s great! We’re good.
If not, then a change in course can be suggested.
Kip Hansen, thank you for your reply. I apologize if I misinterpreted the intent of your post.
I didn’t realize that “physics” was a settled science.
One side has too much invested in current paradigm (AGW) and enjoys a too dominant position to allow a reset.
Only when evidence becomes incontrovertible that current paradigm is deeply flawed will it start to be significantly eroded. We might be in for a very long wait. This type of problems have often taken decades to be sorted out by science and only after everybody involved is long dead.
I want to thank Judith Curry for her extensive input and for starting off the discussion.
I agree with her that getting the right people together would be problematic, but it might be somehow possible to get a group with enough collective professional respect together in a Red Team-type forum to consider the questions and implications. I wouldn’t hold out for the findings of the Forum having any great impact with the Climate Establishment — but they *might* influence the rising generation of climate scientists and possibly influence the public and political debate as well as the possibility of attracting funding to address some of the issues raised.
Dr. Curry hits the nail on the head with “a large number of scientists, including those in influential positions, that regard 100% of the warming to be anthropogenic, and the only scientific challenges are to refine our estimates of radiative forcing and refine climate model parameterizations. Think Gavin Schmidt, among many others.” This is true in too many places — even our own Steven Mosher expresses his opinion, asking defensively: “Can skeptics be remediated to focus on sensitivity efforts…?”. It is this narrow, blindered Climate Wars scientific approach that stifles the possibility of new and significant progress in the field.
It is still my hope that with this idea released, it may infect enough minds to inspire some active thinking along these lines — and maybe — just barely maybe — some brave souls will attempt such a Forum or at least public discussion.
” — even our own Steven Mosher expresses his opinion, asking defensively: “Can skeptics be remediated to focus on sensitivity efforts…?”.
Kip, I can’t answer for Mosher and would not attempt to, but his question simply turns the idea of a restart on its head. If you were to hit the restart button, one of the very first if not the very first question to ask in the face of rising CO2 atmospheric concentrations would be, “how sensitive is our climate to rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere?” The idea that climate science has got it wrong about asking this most basic and fundamental question is misguided. This is THE question and if you hit the restart it will be THE question again. I don’t see how this question is a ‘blindered climate wars scientific approach’ or how it ‘stifles the possibility of new and significant progress in the field’. It is the most pertinent and basic question to ask. It is the question both skeptics and warmists should have in common. It’s the answer that poses the challenging differences.
Reply to John Carpenter ==> No one suggests that the question of Climate Sensitivity to Increased CO2 Concentrations is not a valid or important question.
But it certainly is NOT the one-and-only question, not the only important question, it is just one of the questions that Climate Science, as a whole, should be asking. It has nothing whatever to do with “skeptics and warmists”.
“It has nothing whatever to do with “skeptics and warmists”
I agree and did not infer that it did. You offered no other equally important question and am interested in what you think is.
Reply to John Carpenter ==> That’s what the Restart Forum is intended to ask — what questions are important.
Yeah Kip, TCS and ECS really is the $64,000 question for climate science. Cost/benefit analysis of mitigation can’t really begin until the adverse effects of aCO2 can be nailed down and for that we need to know where, when, and how much it’s going to warm. The answer hasn’t been improved in over 35 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jule_Gregory_Charney#Charney_Report
Climate science is moribund and so long as it remains that way so will policy action on global warming. Write that down.
Actually, we have been hammering away at the current paradigm for 30-40 years. The original sensitivity of 3C to a doubling of CO2 remains, with the 1.5-4.5C range. I guess this is the “settled physics”, so let’s go with it. The red team really should address the question why have measured temperatures diverged from the projections? Both surface and atmospheric data show a widening gap with projections. Perhaps the physics really isn’t settled, or we don’t have a handle on how natural variability offsets projected warming. Although it may seem parallel, trying to ascribe temperature increase by focusing on CO2 is not the same as focusing on natural climate variability. The first effort simply extends the current paradigm while the second challenges it, and has the potential to identify the “unknowns” Such is the straight-jacket of settled science.
Cost/benefit analysis of mitigation can’t really begin until the adverse effects of aCO2 can be nailed down and for that we need to know where, when, and how much it’s going to warm”
No.
You can create the outcome space for the entire envelope of 1.5 – 4.5 c. See Held’s work at Potsdam.
Mosher writes—“You can create the outcome space for the entire envelope of 1.5 – 4.5 c.”
My response- LOL- creating lots of BS does not demonstrate accuracy.
John Carpenter
“how sensitive is our climate to rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere?” The idea that climate science has got it wrong about asking this most basic and fundamental question is misguided.
That’s a strawman – noone is saying that. The issue is the approach to that question — exclusive focus on CO2, largely ignoring all else — not the question itself.
The “discovery of global warming” started with paleo climate, mainly trying to understand the ice ages. There is the real big restart button. We did not solve that at all. We’re still stuck with the unexplained 100ky cycle, while the ice age cycle should be 41ky (Huybers https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3382981/Huybers_EarlyPleistoceneSummer.pdf?sequence=1 )
I’m working on that, focussing especially on MIS 3, where we have something very close to an interglacial in the paleo-biologic records but deep freeze in the isotopes and other proxies. Huybers fig 2E on the right between 100 and 0 clearly reflects the problem. There is your reset button. If you push that, CO2 ceases to be a climate regulator.
But it will probably take some generations to settle.
If the perps are allowed to get off without facing consequences they will certainly go on to other fraudulent activities. Witness our banking fiascos and neocon foreign adventures.
When one factors in the millions of deaths from starvation (due to land use policy’s effects on commodities pricing) and the hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths from fuel poverty (illnesses from living with inadequate heating) the CAGW fraud is the worst holocaust in history, even exceeding the harm caused by the saturated fat scam.
These quacks, at minimum, must be locked up.
A reset button of a sort is looming. If the satellite temps keep diverging from the models there comes a point where the models will be so obviously wrong that they will not be able to be sustained. Then what?
Essentially a new generation of models will have to be constructed which incorporate, at a minimum, the new, lower sensitivity numbers. But once that happens the whole cluster of scenarios in which we all fry cease to be the outcomes of model runs.
At that point the policy wonks will have no choice but to rethink the trillions of dollars in costs reducing CO2 emissions is likely to cost. And, as the severity of the threat is reduced, the opportunity costs of CO2 suppression will have to be reassessed relative to the other things which could be done with the money.
I doubt there will be much in the way of “dramatic” change. Instead, the hysteria will be drawn from the debate and the Climate Wars will quietly be forgotten. There will still be some climate loonies like Mann, Rolm, Dana and such like searching for “the missing heat” like pocket change in a sofa; but the climate mainstream will bury its mistakes and move forward into the brave new world of lower sensitivity.
Nature is a patient instructor.
A reset button of a sort is looming. If the satellite temps keep diverging from the models there comes a point where the models will be so obviously wrong that they will not be able to be sustained. Then what?
We have past that point, now What?
Nature is a patient instructor.
Mother Nature is on our side. We will win.
I can sympathise with Mosher’s exasperation at the ignorance of scientific findings amongst the “climate skeptics”. As someone who does not accept the DAGW proposition, I have nonetheless found myself arguing in support of some of the steps in that argument because they seem to have empirical support.
As one example, I’ve supported a (mis-named) positive greenhouse effect against people who doubt even that process. I pointed out the Feldman2015 time series and was met with the reply “Well why hasn’t radiation from CO2 ever been measured before?” They didn’t even know of the measurements of DWLWIR from CO2 going back 40 years.
Another example, I point out that the rise in CO2 must be due mainly to human activity because the emissions estimates, atmospheric measurements, and mass conservation together implies nature is operating as a carbon sink from the atmosphere. In response this frequently provokes a whole range of strawman arguments about mass balance, seemingly in an attempt to escape the inevitable.
There are a heap of people who engage in the “climate debate” without bringing a commitment to objectivity into the activity.
Despite the amount of support behind several steps in the DAGW proposition, a critical part of it that doesn’t have empirical support is the increase in humidity in the mid troposphere for the positive water vapour feedback. The weather balloon data are the only measurements available on this point, they are the only in-situ measurements, they are your one-stop shop. The NCEP reanalysis is well cited, and Garth Paltridge showed in his paper [ DOI: 10.1007/s00704-009-0117-x ] that the linear regression of specific humidity between 1973 and 2007 at pressure levels between 700mbar and 200mbar was unequivocally a negative slope. Not positive as AGW simulations required.
There are other reasons for disbelieving DAGW, but you only need one solid reason.
Kip’s CliSci RESTART button should include a reminder of how the scientific method is supposed to be applied, with empirical testing and with integrity and transparency. Here is why:
There is no point in RESTARTING climate science if you are going to RELOAD the same old dud program.
Reply to Andrew M ==> “There is no point in RESTARTING climate science if you are going to RELOAD the same old dud program.”
You got that right!
Reply to Andrew M ==> “There is no point in RESTARTING climate science if you are going to RELOAD the same old dud program.”
You got that right!
You must restart by saying that what has not worked for more than two decades is wrong and you must consider something other than CO2
Nice work, Andrew. The water vapor is the big hole in the theory. If convincing evidence of the strongly positive water vapor feedback continues to elude them, lots of climate scientists should start worrying about having to wait tables and drive for uber.
Whenever an academic says something like “let’s reset the clock” – it invariably means they are trying to find a way to convince sceptics to accept not only their (science free) views, but their authority to force those science free views on others.
But how can we negotiate when the only choices we have is this:
1. Accept the facts
2. reject the facts.
Science is the dictatorship of the facts – there is no arguing with science – because the facts of the natural world force us to accept them (sooner or later).
So, trying to negotiate with sceptics to change our views is about as senseless as negotiating with a volcano … the volcano doesn’t have a view … it just is what it is. Likewise, we sceptics cannot change our views unless or until the facts change.
> possibly under the Chatham House Rule
Wouldn’t that violate the norms and ethos of science?
Reply to willard (@nevaudit) ==> Not an entirely silly question.
The Chatham House rule would allow professionals to freely speak their minds on a very contentious subject, within the confines of the Forum.
Chatham House Rule: “The Rule
Since its refinement in 2002, the rule states:
When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”
Thank you for reminding me of the Chatam Rule and for acknowledging my question, Kip.
Now, how about answering it?
Yes Willard, it would, to a degree. Science needs to be transparent in order to comply with the norms and ethos of science. Perhaps such proposed meetings would be more properly described as fora?
Reply to Willard ==> In the intensely politicized state of Climate Science today, it can be difficult for scientists, even senior scientists, to speak freely if their opinions might run counter to the prevailing consensus.
Chatham House rules allow the participants to speak freely, to discuss deeply, to play devil’s-advocate, to doubt and question existing authority, to delve deeply into questions that might be politically dangerous and to do all these things without fear of retribution from those in power (political, academic or professional).
Such a forum/fora would, ideally, produce a statement of their proceedings, possibly a document, possibly with a minority statement as well.
This is far different from performing scientific experiments in which everything should be open for inspection.
Chatham House rules actually allow for the norms and ethos of science to take precedence — to actually happen — when the field under discussion in in such a high state of controversy and politicization that careers can be damaged or destroyed over simple statements taken out of context.
> Chatham House rules actually allow for the norms and ethos of science to take precedence — to actually happen — when the field under discussion in in such a high state of controversy and politicization that careers can be damaged or destroyed over simple statements taken out of context.
Thank you for this response, Kip. I’d be tempted to paraphrase what you just said wit don’t let transparency damage science. I’m not sure if it’s correct, because the paraphrase has been suspected of overthrowing the norms of science.
I agree that such fora is not science and that scientific norms should not apply to them.
Reply to Peter M. Davies ==>. Thank you for this, Peter, a rare voice of reason.
Peter Davies, “I agree that such fora is not science and that scientific norms should not apply to them.”
Climate Science isn’t really science, it is a combination of science and policy. I doubt you could find a single main stream climate scientist that doesn’t have some pet policy initiative they like to include in their speaking engagements.
Old school science is about discovery, climate science is about degree of urgency. To get published you don’t even have to find something novel, provided it reinforces or enhances the sense of urgency. it is a good old boy’s club with a few minor modifications to make it more PC which makes it a good match for Chatham House Rules.
That won’t solve much though because without urgency it is just another trivial pursuit with a fringe following suffering from apocalypse burnout.
https://images.hedgeye.com/media_assets/0057/6692/Apocalypse_Fed_09.18.2014_normal.png
> I agree that such fora is not science […]
That’s very clever, Peter, but the “contentious subject” appears to be climate science in the suggestion to Hit the Climate Science RESTART Button.
What if Bishop wrote her editorial under the Chatam Rule?
Not sure what your point is Willard. Dorothy Bishop did a blog post on the behaviour of some autism researchers and the apparent lack of peer review with which I fully support. In this thread IMO Chatham House rules can only apply when no science is being done.
I think the ideas that human activity is a cancer upon an otherwise pristine and perfect planet and that fossil fuels are bad and that we must move on to solar and wind have taken on a life of its own independent of climate science.
And so the whole thing is now bass ackwards in which climate change and its alleged catastrophic consequences simply provide the rationale for the underlying agenda. Climate science is not the issue that needs to be rebooted. The underlying Malthusian-Ehrlichian agenda is the issue that needs to be rebooted. This mentality is evident in the history of the ozone scare.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291833573_ozonePaperResource
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291516578_AN_EMPIRICAL_TEST_OF_THE_CHEMICAL_THEORY_OF_OZONE_DEPLETION
And it is also evident in the complete disregard for basic statistical principles at the highest levels of climate science.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2725743
Patterns abound.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/your-lifestyle-is-to-blame-for-70—90-of-cancers-2015-12-17
We were told this by our parents back in the sixties.
The restart button is quite responsive on a PC, not so effective on a train — espcially one that’s choc-a-block with gravy.
That’s a bit glib. However, I do think your analogy is flawed. You can’t very well restart scientists as if they computer programs — their “corrupted” state will persist.
I think all there really is in climate science (in other circles too) is an evolving system, and improving the evolutionary mechanisms — mutation + selection/rejection — is what we should be striving for. To be clear, that’s better generation of ideas and better evaluation of them.
E.g. the clique of climate scientists mostly affects the “mutation” side; their unwillingness to share data messes up the “selection” side.
I’d like to suggest another solution previously proposed
by mosomoso, to obliterate the Climatariat, by ‘burning
their cities, salting their ground, sanding up their wells’
…that sort of thing.
I agree – a scorched earth approach may be the only way to do a reset. The climatariate is too invested in their religious dogma to be persuaded by rational debate and facts, and their proposed “solutions” to the non-existent problem would amount to a different scorched earth result that would be far more damaging.
Would that make the IPCC a rootkit?
You can reboot a PC but not an IPCC ? Shucks.
There’s at least one rhetorical question missing…
Should a moderately mature scientific field addressing critical and time-sensitive questions waste even more time than has already been spent addressing the insincere concerns of cranks, charlatans and a handful of aging second-raters?
Doesn’t that depend on where the line is drawn? 2 C or less isn’t in the crank zone. 1 C or less might be close to crank, but is the bottom end of the mainstream range. If you gear up for 10 C and it turns out to be 1 C, who’s the crank?
The obvious answer is no, and they should turn their back on the anti-science consensus and join the enlightened skeptics in embracing the pursuit of knowledge.
Reply to Magma ==> I fear your comment could be equally applied to both sides in the Climate Wars. To which side did you intend to apply it?
Kip, unlike me, you have taken the classy route. The terms cranks, charlatans and aging second-raters are quintessential warmist put downs against anyone having the temerity of diverging from the dogma. That is the default tactic when actual scientific rebuttals are not at the fingertips.
This SO applies to climate “science.” A rise in CO2 preceeds warming comes to mind. From the article:
…
The Perversion of Science and Medicine (Part I): On the Nature of Science
…
Above all, scrupulous researchers must avoid post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning, “after it, therefore because of it”; they must make sure their conclusions truly follow from their observations and experiments, rather than assume that a conclusion follows simply because a certain independent event preceded it. Take, for instance, the often heard proposition, repeated time and again, without dissent, in the medical literature on the subject of “guns and violence” — namely, that guns in the U.S. are responsible for high rates of suicide. When in reality, the overwhelming available evidence compiled from the discipline of psychiatry is that untreated or poorly managed depression is the real culprit behind high rates of suicide. Moreover, from the social science of criminology, we solve the seeming paradox that countries such as Japan, Hungary, and Scandinavia which boast draconian gun control laws have much higher rates of suicide (2 or 3 times higher) than the U.S. And that is, that in these countries where guns are not available, citizens simply substitute for guns other cultural or universally available methods such as Hara-kiri, drowning in the Blue Danube, suffocation (with poisonous gases such as carbon monoxide), or hanging, and they commit suicide by these methods at higher rates than in the U.S.(8)
Today, sadly, many government researchers who depend on government funds (naturally, extracted from the taxpayers) are frequently placed in a conflict-of-interest situation or position themselves in dubious circumstances in which their credibility (and professional reputations) can be called into question. (I would also say honor, but the term is considered anachronistic and antiquated in many quarters.) Given the nature of research impacting directly on public policy, many of these researchers are veritably pressed to reach preordained conclusions about scientific projects in which government officials and political leaders have a vested political interest or an ideological ax to grind.
In these circumstances, particularly when politics and ideology are at stake, we end up not with objective research and the attainment of scientific truth, but with what Dr. Edgar Suter of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research (DIPR), myself, and others have called politicized, results-oriented research.(9,10,11) This kind of pseudo-science, masquerading as scientific research has adverse and detrimental effects on public policy generally, and science and medicine, in particularly.
…
http://www.haciendapub.com/medicalsentinel/perversion-science-and-medicine-part-i-nature-science
Definitely need public campaigning to strengthen FOI
and transparencyin research.The reverse of what
Lewandowsky et AL are campaigning to achieve,
convenient closed science for the in-group.
FOI. Make hiding tax-funded data a criminal offence?
I’m not sure about the reset button, but there are many common problems with climate science and my field of computational fluid dynamics.
1. The literature suffers from pervasive selection bias. You run the code until you get a result that you like and then file the other not so good run results in the trash.
2. There is little to no “fundamental” research, i.e., trying to develop new theoretical understandings that could really change the field.
3. There is dramatic over reliance on “models.” This is partly because its easy to run models and requires a lower level of skill than fundamental work.
4. It is rare to publish sensitivity studies using the models. For this, you vary parameters of the method (and there are thousands or hundreds of thousands) systematically and report the results.
I see MT has a comment at Rice’s echo chamber than shows a high level of independent thought in that he talks about this issue of sensitivity of results and exact reproducibility of model results. As he says its a big deal and people need to take it more seriously.
We are going to publish a paper in a few months on all the “knobs” in CFD and showing some such sensitivity studies. Hope it changes people’s attitudes, but I’m not holding my breath.
if you want to “fix” the problems in climate models, you must understand that the amount of ice on land is important. When oceans are warm and thawed, more ice is put on land until it advances and dumps onto land and into oceans enough to cool them. That allows polar oceans to freeze and reduce the snowfall rate and then the sun takes away ice every year and the ice depletes and retreats until the oceans get warm again. Put this in you models or just give up.
I think the skeptics can get together and hit the restart button. Their first question to address among themselves is whether they can understand the current climate in quantitative terms, such as why the radiative temperature is 33 C less than the surface temperature. Also why is the CO2 increasing? Not unless or until they can come to an agreement on the current state, and maybe some paleoclimate, in quantitative terms would they be qualified to go on to discuss future climate. But I think they will deadlock even on current and past climate because they won’t believe the consensus on that either. This may be a valuable lesson for them.
Maybe they can build their own StickOMatic! Yeah, that’s it!
I suspect that the skeptics could formulate a fairly solid understanding of past surface land temperature back to say 1900 but it would have pretty wide error bars. And there is no reason not to take the satellite products as pretty definitive from about 1980 on (with the appropriate corrections which have been transparently applied.)
However, I am not entirely sure that agreement is required for the reset. The simple divergence of the models from the satellite temps in combination with a pretty robust argument that this deviation is caused by getting the CO2 sensitivity wrong on the high side could led to a path forward.
A good deal of climate science, of necessity, is model based. If the models are flawed, and it looks like they are, then the reset is basically when new models are constructed which are based on the new, lower, sensitivity estimates.
Can they understand the necessity of the present amounts of both CO2 and H2O in explaining the 33 C greenhouse effect in today’s climate. I think not. This will be their deadlock point. Will they endlessly argue with the Salbyites about the origins of the CO2 rise rate? What will they say to the gravito-thermal people to convince them what they know about earth’s temperature is better. Arguing among these factions would be very interesting, but also uninformed by experts and ultimately a waste of time.
Jim D is a glib symptom of the larger problem.
For he would have us believe that anyone who started out open minded and skeptical ( he skilfully glosses over where comparable funding might come from ) would necessarily arrive at the same conclusions as present climate establishment, who started out precommitted to the politically desired alarmist consensus.
His outlook is exactly why a reboot is needed.
.
When ctrl/alt/del won’t work, try Del*.*
“If we started to investigate the Earth’s climate from first principles, where would we start? What questions would we seek to answer?”
Unfortunately, this is how Climate Science got itself into the hot-mess that it currently is in.
Why not just ask engineers, who make professional liability insurance payments, 1) What will it take for us to be able to control the earths temperature? 2) Will they stamp and sign the solution? and 3) Will their insurance companies allow them to?
I doubt seriously that the solution proposed would be de-industrialization, turning off the lights and sitting with our fingers crossed for the next 60 years to see what happens.
That’s what were talking about, isn’t it? Controlling the climate?
Haven’t we had enough of the tree ring guys?
If you want something done, ask an engineer.
I am an engineer. if you want to control the temperature of earth, you need something that changes state at the right temperature. you would pick something abundant. water changes into ice at exactly the right temperature. when earth is warm, take water out of thawed oceans and dump it on land. use land where not many people live, such as Antarctica, Greenland and on mountains. store that ice in these places and dump it onto land and into oceans to cool the earth. When you have enough ice and it is dumping ice and ice cold water fast enough to cool and freeze the polar oceans and stop the snowfall you can allow the sun to take away some ice every year until it gets warm again.
If there is a god, god is an excellent engineer. If there is no god, we are really lucky. Man did not cause this and man would have a hard time if we decide to try to override this wonderful natural cycle.
That is a brilliant summation of how Mother nature ingeniously works. Thank you.
Dr. Curry,
Thank you for this blog and for your contributions to what I view as a proper scientific approach to a serious and engaging field. As an outside observer to the field of climate science who has read this fantastic blog (and others) and followed silently for a long time now, I believe that besides the obvious political pollution the field of climate science suffers from being to insular. Not enough cross-pollination of researchers or ideas from other fields.
Of course because I am an outsider to the field I may have this quite wrong. However, while fields such as biochemistry and metabolism (the fields in which I do research), genetics, and many others, each have increasing interconnected lines of thought and collaboration the bulk of climate science seems quite isolated in comparison. Heck, a bunch of computer engineers recently solved a mathematics problem that had stumped the greatest mathematicians for decades–they were successful PRECISELY because of their “outside” nature.
Combining relative isolation with a highly political atmosphere and you get the mess we seem to see here. It is not a particularly detailed “reboot bullet list”, but I believe bringing more active researchers from outside the field would help in a number of ways. First, new approaches and analytical strengths can have an obvious impact. Second, researchers who are established outside the field will bring their expectations and SOPs for data transparency, methods, etc. into the field. Over time the continued pressure from academics used to a different level of accountability may gradually see an improvement in these areas.
I may be completely wrong about this, as not being completely enveloped in the field I may be unaware of a lot of cross-pollination that actually does go on. In that case I am quite happy to be corrected. However, this is how it appears to me.
Please excuse any typos, I am on my phone.
Discussion: can we hit the ‘restart’ button?
No. Here we are, and we have to struggle forward from here.
Reply to matthewrmarler ==> I have been a professional personal counselor (in my distant youth) and I must add a caveat to your otherwise correct statement: “Here we are, and we have to struggle forward from here.”
When a person does not like where s/he has arrived — his/her “here” — a more correct approach is to have the person do a serious review of how s/he got to that point — this is best done with a disinterested, trained third-party (a counselor) — so that past mistakes can be identified and avoided in their future efforts to “struggle forward”.
I vote for the republican winning the election option. That winner will need to clean house at the EPA and NOAA at a minimum, and maybe shut down the EPA completely so that it can be restarted. The new potus will have to deal with a hostile msm along with the rest of the green mobblob. If hillary or bernie win, then congress will continue to do very little but will hopefully block their initiatives.
We don’t need to hit RESTART. We need to hit START.
Because the Earth is hot inside. And because cloud makes an absolute joke of min/max. And because a mere ten thousand years ago you could have walked to Tasmania from Melbourne. Plus the rest.
But especially cloud. Duh.
– ATTC
Then the place to start is having a through understanding of the forces that caused Tasmania to be an island. The same forces and energy that continues to shape our world today.
You would think that understanding a very recent and very radical climate change like the heave out of the Younger Dryas into the Optimum, with the flooding of land bridges etc, would be of major concern and interest. But no, that’s someone else’s job – and hardly a funding magnet.
Instead we are presented with an altogether imaginary “stable” climate interrupted by Sputnik and the Bomb (if opinionating in the 1950s), by soot and SO2 (Sgt Pepper Cooling) and now by CO2.
I don’t know if Warming or Cooling is winning the close, boring two-horse race right now. I just hope the race stays close and boring. Never mind Younger Dryas…Just a repeat of 2200 BC would make a big enough mess. They reckon those dry and chilly Bond Events come round every 4k years or so. I wouldn’t know…but is anybody looking?
Even just understanding the simple flooding of land bridges. Always assumed as a relative rise in sea level. I have never seen anything to justify this assumption. More likely widespread downward block faulting, as with Tasmania. It is lasy assumption like this on which much larger concepts are built.
The restart button should take you back to the 19th century when the brilliant physicist Josef Loschmidt (Maxwell’s teacher) was first to estimate a realistic size of air molecules. This became the beginnings of Kinetic Theory and Loschmidt was able to understand (as we can even better today) why gravity acting on those air molecules in flight between collisions forms both a density gradient and a temperature gradient simultaneously in the troposphere, each being the one and only state of maximum entropy – which is what the Second Law of Thermodynamics says the system will evolve towards.
Once you understand that this “props up” the surface end of the thermal plot of temperature against altitude in the troposphere then you realize there is no more warming that has to be explained with the fictitious concept that back radiation can be added to solar radiation and the total used in Stefan Boltzmann calculations. It can’t be.
Somewhat related although the climate debate rarely gets into it, here’s a comment from Dr Tol
https://twitter.com/richardtol/status/694817025571622912
Fernando,
The ultimate goal of Team Green is to “scientifically” manufacture whichever “proof” is most compelling to justify immediate implementation of the renewables Utopia. That’s just as true for the CAGW proseltyzers as it is for the peak oil now theorists.
Both theories — CAGW and peak oil now — are towering speculative edifices built upon precious little factual data.
But as Tol points out, the peak oil rationale tends to argue against itself.
Glenn, I’m afraid most individuals who get involved in the climate issue aren’t well versed in the oil and gas industry. Simultaneously, most individuals who are involved in the business are in a bit of a bind, they are reluctant to face reality, or they don’t like to publicize what’s becoming so evident.
I also find most people lack a clear understanding of the difference between the various streams we see reported as “liquids”. The outfits preparing forward views or outlooks (agencies and companies) prefer to keep you confused, by mixing biofuels, NGL, synthetics from gas, and the crude oil and condensate streams.
So it’s not surprising to see the euphoria and cornucopian beliefs in the crowd. The data I have at hand tells me the CO2 concentration will peak at around 630 ppm. We happen to live on a planet with limited resources.
I think the only practical thing that can be done in the very near term is praying much more, and I am not religious.
The inclination to have a field of climate science will kill science no matter how much you reset. It’s a thing too complicated to solve. The message ought to be to find something else to study, if you’re a physicist, because you can’t do this.
How does a reset help that?
Both the warmist wing and the wicked-problem wing want to retain the field, so the field will stay and displace science.
In economics this is known as the bootleggers and baptists problem.
They wind up on the same side with regard to prohibition, although they’re opposites on drinking.
Hmm.
perhaps we could have a doomsday clock for the AGW theory.
I would say the clock is at 5 minutes to midnight.
Starting now.
where each minute is a year.
In other words with 4 years of cooling, a Republican Government [shudder],
Arctic sea ice increase the penny will drop.
Here’s to 2/3/2020
Good grief you love being dead wrong. What on earth would cause cooling? Are you going to leave your refrigerator door open for 4 years?
Reply to JCH ==> Just for a laugh, let me point out that since a refrigerator is a simple heat pump, which pumps heat from inside the box to outside the box, leaving the door open can not cause a cooling of the space occupied by the refrigerator. In reality, it will cause a slight warming (of your kitchen, for instance) as the inefficiencies of the motor and compressor create heat (electricity ==> heat) which is naturally added to the room.
(This is not about the other issues in either the original comment nor JCH’s reply)
Plenty of doomsday predictions to go around
http://climatechangepredictions.org/categories/doomsday
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/02/24-days-to-al-gores-10-years-to-save-the-planet-and-point-of-no-return-planetary-emergency-deadline/
Diversity vs. university (lit. one version) seem a rather trite description for our current social dilemma, not just its trivium of climate science. The current academic focus has become a diversification more genetic than intellectual and it faces its inevitable ouroboral outcome. The RESET button is there, although it may take a Constitutional Convention to find it. Perhaps our notions of mathematical models for the universe may be naive, but they reveal only a Comedy of Errors. Enjoy the show, our great-grandchildren shall certainly be amused by our lilliputian aggrandizements.
Off-topic: I’ve noted some comments in this post asserting that the basic physics of climate models is not in question. Imagine two thermal reservoirs, say at 200K and 300K between which a steady energy flux of 1kW flows. What is the rate of energy dissipation for this irreversible process? (Hint: doesn’t matter whether the flow is through a gas, liquid, solid or vacuum.) How is thermal dissipation incorporated in climate models, or “… at this point, what difference does it make?”
pdq
Quondam said:
I disagree.
The Modernists have been waiting around for almost 400 years for the long-awaited “RESET” button to be pushed. It is, after all, one of the three cornerstones of Modernism.
As Stephen Toulmin explains in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity:
All that stood in the way of an apodictic science that would allow man to “make himself master and possessor of nature,” both Hobbes and Descartes assured us, was all that nasty old religious and superstitious stuff. That’s what drives us to depart from factual reality. Get rid of that, they said, and the sky’s the limit.
But “the dream of finding a scratch line to serve as a starting point for any “rational” philosophy is unfulfillable,” Toulmin warns. “There is no scratch.
Waiting for the much heralded “RESET” is kind of like waiting for Godot, or the second coming of Christ.
All we “are required to do is use our experience critically and discriminatingly, refining and improving our inherited ideas, and determining more exaclty the limits to their scope,” Toulmin concludes.
Statistical distributions instead of deterministic models
Excellent idea to “Reboot”.
Demetris Koutsoyiannis directly addresssed this by the need to use statistical distributions instead of the IPCC’s “global climate models” which have gone so far astray – 250% off at least.
e.g. see his 2010 presentation:
Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics and uncertainty
He has demonstrated Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics across NINE orders of magnitude.
With modern operating systems it is rare to have to reboot unless there is an actual hardware problem (which reboot probably won’t help) or there is planned maintenance.
If the bad processes can be identified, we can use the kill command.
From this discussion, it seems the skeptics regard the climate scientific establishment as as a virus that has hijacked the computer and their opponents see the skeptics as annoying adware that sometimes may have a malicious purpose.
If we reboot, the virus will still control the computer and the adware will reinstall itself.
Sorry.
Yep.
But I suppose hope springs eternal.
WHO knows.
http://krwg.org/post/babies-genes-three-people-could-be-ethical-panel-says
Evolution is in Progress.
Reply to James Cross ==> Your computer doesn’t run Windows? If it does, Microsoft Support would disagree with your assertion.
The analogy isn’t, btw, that the CO2-induced Global Warming Hypothesis is a virus — only that it, or other features/characteristics of today’s mainstream climate science, might be absorbing 90% of the research efforts and research funding on dead-end topics or approaches.
Certainly, as exhibited clearly in the comments to this post, much of the problem is the Climate Wars, and the attitudes associated with it.
What possible harm could come from a thorough re-examination of the field by non-combatant scientists from a selection of disciplines?
Actually ” mainstream climate science, might be absorbing 90% of the research efforts and research funding on dead-end topics or approaches” does sort of sound like a virus burning CPU cycles and doing nothing but trying to convince us to do something not in our interest.
However, that isn’t exactly my view. I was speaking more to the conversation here.
Ultimately I think most skeptics need to lose the political spin they put on everything, focus on the science, and reject some of the more outlier hypotheses they tolerate.
Ultimately I think most warmists need to lose the political spin they put on everything, focus on the science, and reject some of the more outlier hypotheses they tolerate.
Who are these “combatant scientists” and what makes them “combatants?” Scientists do research and draw conclusions based on their findings. People from the outside might believe they are “combatnts” but I don’t think they consider themselves “combatants” any more than scientists from any other field.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/patch-rebounds-after-split-from-aol-1454445340
In the real world, money is used to measure success/keep score — there is no equivalent in Climate Science. A climate reset will require a strong leader with control of the budget, a background in science/engineering, experience in managing a large organization and the ability and authority to set specific easily measured goals and objectives.
His/her job will be to fix what made this such a shoddy enterprise. And when Climate Science is fixed, he/she can fix our schools and establish world peace.
Mosh
As far as proxies for natural variability are concerned, would you consider tree rings-for drought/excessive rainfall- together with tree line heights/tree species-for long term temperature trends- to be reasonable ones to determine natural variability?
These would be used to predate/augment the instrumental record.
I have the data for the US, The Alps and Britain. Whilst not the globe it would be indicative of three disparate areas.
tonyb
How far back should any ‘reset’ go?
The radiative transfer equations and the HITRAN database of spectroscopic parameters underpins present AGW theory.
But the math behind that was developed in the field of astronomy to analyse the movement of energy by radiation and conduction in the atmosphere of a Sun.
AGW theory.
So, somewhere along the line,
AGW became, without a lot of justification,
ACC ( Anthropogenic Climate Change ).
And, somewhere after that,
ACC became, at least in the insinuated norm,
CACC ( Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change ).
And also, all changes are assumed bad ( little if any benefit, lots of detriment ).
The Comments Section here has largely been sidetracked by a few persons who are hopelessly stuck in “climate warrior” mode — they just can’t seem to step of that endless Climate Wars nuttiness and discuss something as simple as a proposal for a four day series of meetings to review the state of Climate Science.
I can not fathom what the rationale is behind the efforts being made here to deflect, turn-back, obfuscate, divert, mock, redirect and/or prevent even a discussion of the idea of such a conference.
This is why Climate Science is dead-ended, dead-locked and a perceived by some scientists in other disciplines as a mockery of a scientific endeavor. The entire field is mired up to its knees in the sticky battlefield mud of the Climate Wars — those not spending most of their efforts mainly firing salvos in the controversy, the non-combatants, are hampered by the need to keep their heads down while constantly looking over their shoulders and watching their step, lest they inadvertently make a misstep or a misstatement and have their professional reputation trashed by one set of combatants or the other.
This is why such a Forum, such a Discussion, is so desperately needed.
Is there any reason this blog couldn’t be such a forum?
Get a cross section of scientists from across the spectrum on global warming to participate perhaps along with a few from the economic and political sphere.
Pose the same questions to all of them. A lot of the questions are exactly the ones you asked in this post. What are the most important metrics? What should we spend money on? What would be required for any of them to change their mind about their perspective?
Provide everybody’s answers to everybody else and see where the debate leads.
Keep the denizens out of the mix until the main debate is over.
Actually might be done as a kind of webinar with followup comments.
Reply to James ==> To really be effective, the participants will need to be top flight professional scientists in applicable related fields, not known to be polarized Climate Wars combatants, and dedicated to the idea of a careful and diligent review of climate science.
They must be able to speak their minds freely, to raise touchy and controversial subjects, to criticize and question the work of some of the leading figures in the discipline without fear of professional reprisals.
Climate Etc. is far to public a venue for any of that. As you can see, many reading here condemn even the idea of suggesting such a discussion. This is a good venue to bring up the idea.
Luckily, I have no professional reputation at risk — and am immune to the constant carping and sniping that comes from both sides of the climate divide.
“To really be effective, the participants will need to be top flight professional scientists in applicable related fields”
Agree.
“not known to be polarized Climate Wars combatants”
Maybe. Seems the main criteria would be whether they are willing to engage in a “restart” discussion.
“Climate Etc. is far to public a venue for any of that.”
Do you expect this discussion to be held in a secret room? More public the better I would think. There would be an in issue of this venue being perceived as too partisan. But I think it would be hard to find any venue interested in this forum that wouldn’t already be engaged in some way in “combat”.
“As you can see, many reading here condemn even the idea of of suggesting such a discussion.”
Yes, the denizens would need to be kept out of it until the main debate was over.
Kip
APS tried that with the review headed by Dr Steve Koonin.
That did not end well for him or the state of science in climate.
Always nice to keep trying but the definition of insanity is to fail over and over doing the same things.
Scott
This might apply to most blogs or some public figures, but the vast majority of climate scientists are not involved in blogs or speak out publicly. And science is done almost exclusively in journals. So I really don’t understand what you are getting at.
Reply to Joseph ==> “the vast majority of climate scientists are not involved in blogs or speak out publicly” —
Those are “the non-combatants, [who are] are hampered by the need to keep their heads down while constantly looking over their shoulders and watching their step, lest they inadvertently make a misstep or a misstatement and have their professional reputation trashed by one set of combatants or the other.”
This is what you claimed:
The “field of climate science” consists of the research done by thousands of researchers. How can you claim the entire field is mired (and needs a reboot) based on the action or statements of a few vocal scientists?
And this statement is pure speculation on your part.
Reply to Joseph ==> You are free to have another opinion on the matter. Judith has posted from personal experience on this point, the MSM has featured the reticence of climate scientists to speak out, etc.
If you just happen to be a climate scientist, please share your feelings, impressions, and experiences with your colleagues on this — are they willing to speak publicly regarding doubts they might have regarding the conclusions of the IPCC? Would they voice these doubts over dinner with colleagues at a climate conference? Would they be willing to be quoted expressing those doubts by the New York Times?
I am certainly not the first one to point out this aspect of climate science today.
Well again we are talking about thousands of scientists from all over the world and vague anecdotes isn’t enough for me.
Reply to Joseph ==> So….not a climate scientist yourself. Do you actually even know any personally?
I think you are completely wrong, Kip. This is an extremely complex scientific debate with literally thousands of interrelated and highly technical sub-issues. One could not even list them all in four days, much less review them.
Reply to Wojick ==> Thanks for being forthright. The initial idea would be to do an outline of “what would a new beginning, a fresh take, a “from square zero” research program look like?” — the fact that it is a scientific debate, a science controversy, rather than just a science discipline working its way towards a better state of understanding is what I am saying is wrong…..and that might be subject to improvement by an effort like the one I describe in the original post. Dr. Curry doesn’t think it is doable, and she may well be right, but it might be worth the effort.
Kip. A long time ago I contributed this suggestion under my name in the denizen’s thread set up by Judith.
“I strongly believe that the establishment of wikis should be commenced on a selected number of issues to which a few volunteers could contribute using an agreed praxis. This may lead to advances in the state of climate science (in gradual increments) and prevent the same issues from being constantly recycled with no consensus ever seemingly being reached.
Dr Curry could act as a facilitator for these wikis, which BTW will be restricted to just the few volunteers. The end object will be the eventual publication of papers for the consideration and criticism of all denizens in an open forum.”
Wiki’s are a transparent way IMO, to review and re-invent many of the paradigms that have been part and parcel of climate science over the past 15 years or so.
Reply to Peter M Davies ==> An interesting idea, though I admit I don’t quite get your vision. I suspect that Dr.. Curry barely has enough time to do what she does and run this blog — unlikely to have time for an additional undertaking.
In a more-normal science field, open blogs like this would fulfill the need to allow input of interesting ideas, asking of interesting questions, allow outsider observations to be brought to the attention of researchers, and occasionally publish summaries of state-of-the-art findings on various questions.
Kip, I didn’t notice many people here dis four-day ‘reboot’ conference idea…
My first computer program was written for the EDSAC II in 1960. Rebooting wasn’t always a good idea, because some of the vacuum tubes might blow. My next programming activity was on a military computer using delay line memory, and rebooting sometimes needed some additional fine-tuning to get it back in synch. It always helped to have a sense of humor and a good understanding of what was and was not possible for a computer to do.
After more than fifty years there is still room for humor and for realism about computers and computer models. Rather than a reboot, what may be most needed is to explain to the politicians and lay public how hilariously funny it is to use weather-forecasting computers and software (so-called Global Circulation Models) — which can barely manage to produce a decent two-week weather forecast — and then actually believe what they forecast for eighty years into the future.
Casting the global-warming “community” as a circus, and many of its members as clowns, may in itself trigger the desired reboot.
Reply to Tetragrammaton ==> “It always helped to have a sense of humor and a good understanding of what was and was not possible for a computer to do.” You got that right, brother. In the early days of the Internet, [arrogant, ignorant, clueless] corporate execs would insist that web sites perform absolutely impossible feats of magic.
In the following years, we managed to invent and develop some of that magic, like streaming live video, which I first demo’d to Lou Gerstner at the 1997 Masters [Golf] Tournament, the year Tiger Woods won his first major championship. I did not invent nor develop it, just had the job of incorporating it into a live web site and demo’ing to our CEO and his wife. His comment, when he saw it, was “I bet that’s going to cost us a lot of money.” — referring to the cost of research and deployment. For the record, I did not make the foolish mistake of demo’ing off the real live internet — parts of which I did not myself control — I served myself the live streaming video via server running on my own computer. My manager, however, tried to repeat this demo to a group of a few dozen IBM VPs, over the real internet — which naturally failed due to some in-house DNS server being on the fritz that day. Naturally, he blamed me for my success and his failure.
The same sense of humor is necessary when trying to do anything at all constructive or engage in any kind of fence-mending in Climate Science today.
The basis for modern climate science is the 1964 paper by Manabe and Strickler – http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/related_files/sm6401.pdf . If you want a “reset” then a good place to start would be to get a scientifically qualified team not yet involved in climate science to confirm the findings of that paper.
It rather depends on how far you want to go. Do you want to confirm all the fundamental physics of absorption and emission that went into it? That’s probably pretty cast iron stuff though. Or just the conclusions of the paper itself, which formed the basis for models of the atmosphere?
Since congress cannot subpoena the emails at Hokkaido University, maybe these guys would join the red team: An increase in the rate of global mean sea level rise since 2010?
How about if congress were to set up an agency to do “red team” (skeptical) climate research? ? More feasible than a Restart.
One of the main functions of that agency would be to fund the start-up of a skeptical climate peer-reviewed journal. That has been a key weakness in the debate so far, and would greatly aid in getting the debate unstuck. As it is now, warmists feel they can ignore what isn’t published in climate-related journals.
Probably the only thing that would force a restart is for a few colleges, or even just one, to establish ad hoc (unofficial) Voluntary Science Courts and start taking online text-based testimony. I described this in detail recently at the end of a thread, here:
as a comment on Climate Etc. 1/29/16, at http://judithcurry.com/2016/01/28/insights-from-karl-popper-how-to-open-the-deadlocked-climate-debate/#comment-761187
It’s not just climate. The NASA Mars mission has some problems as well.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/3/10908408/congress-nasa-journey-to-mars-no-plan-or-money
If Congress ever gets the Mars thing figured out, maybe it would be a model for fixing climate research.
Starting over or materially changing Climate Science in some crash process is not going to happen and probably is best that it will not. Changes in Climate Science will mainly come from within and probably start with those from within becoming more skeptical of the certainty with which some evidence and even conjecture is presented. A knowledgeable skeptic from outside can readily see that the work that is being undertaken and the direction are not the problem, but rather it is the lack of a well founded and comprehensive statistical approach to the work and the mixing of science and advocacy which I judge prevents good sensitivity testing of the work at hand – that is the tendency to stop looking when the expected evidence shows up.
Those from the outside can get involved, but with no guarantee of materially changing things, in either an active publishing role or by analysis and discussions at blogs such as this one. I have personally found that is rather an easy task to communicate with most of those in the climate scientists community – at least those that I have attempted to contact. That contact gives a better perspective of the approaches and capabilities of these scientists. Many times it is not that work published is wrong but rather that is incomplete with the lack of sensitivity testing and/or the authors being hesitant to show the uncertainty involved in the results.
Has the RESTART already begun in Australia?
https://theconversation.com/csiro-is-poised-to-slash-climate-research-jobs-experts-react-54170
Looks like.. No, they aren’t doing a RESTART, they are doing a FREEZE. Anything climate related in CSIRO will be about fighting the climate or mitigating impacts, but the extent of climate sensitivity and world impact is taken as settled.
That is just what we do not need, for climate science fundamentals to be frozen in time at the point of the Paris Treaty.
Odd that some of the scientists admit they can’t model the southern hemisphere and predict impacts on Australia accurately. That didn’t seem to dull alarmism in Australia. Neither is it wise to throw good money after bad into models that haven’t delivered.
Some discussion has already begun on JoNova’s site.
Politicians “timing the market”
@Kip Hansen,
For clarification: are you saying that scientists should stop monitoring surface temperature, ocean heat content, or sea level rise?
Reply to Windchaser ==> There are two issues:
1) What I think Climate Science, as a field of scientific endeavor, should do — which is get together a substantial body of superior minds to consider how the subject should be approached, what questions need to be asked, what metrics would be collected/measured to answer those questions, how hypotheses could/should be tested, in fact, to come up with this list first, then try to answer them — without reference or deference to what has been done to date.
2) What my personal opinions are about your question: I feel that two of these three metrics (if we add in sea surface temp, we have three again) are being over-used/stretched/wrested to represent characteristics of the physical Earth climate system inappropriately — that they are possibly being assigned significances which do not apply.
I will write post/essay on this topic, probably at WUWT, as an opinion piece — but the short form is that I suspect we are using them on the same logic that has the drunk looking for his lost cars keys under the street lamp — “because that’s where the light is good”. — we have some historical records long these lines.
The exception is ocean heat content — which is in its infancy as a data series — far too short and uncertain for any use — and unclear as to where the heat comes from (the surface of the ocean or the underlying earth/under-sea-volcanism/steam venting/etc.
This post and JC’s comment:
focuses on climate science, not the impacts of climate change. If there are no significantly negative impacts (measured in $) of human caused GHG emissions, or if the impacts are likely to be net beneficial, then more research on climate science is a massive waste of money. After 30+ years focusing on climate science and little effort to determine the damage function, it is certainly time to hit the rest button – but it is to reset to a major change of emphasis, away from climate science and onto the impacts and the damage function.
Reflecting on real costs of smashing windows …
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/08/23/the-alarming-cost-of-climate-change-hysteria/#8dffa986f701
Thank’s Beth. Why is the US President incapable of understanding what he’s doing to his people and the people of the world?
Peter,
kinda’ like climate complexity of interacting systems,
bit o’ this, bit o’ that, philosopher-king-noble-cause-bias,
hubris ‘n Dunning-Kruger-Effect, I guess.
Reblogged this on I Didn't Ask To Be a Blog.
POST SCRIPT: My thanks to all those who have contributed to the comments section following my essay — and of course to Dr. Curry for posting it here and for being the first to join in the discussion. Lots of interesting ideas and suggestions.
A surprising amount of push-back from some quarters against even allowing the topic to be discussed in a conference/forum — which speaks directly to the very reason that such a forum is needed.
The surprising developments in Australia — “Now that climate science is ‘settled’ . . .” [ https://judithcurry.com/2016/02/04/now-that-climate-science-is-settled/ ] — add a very interesting twist to the topic. Apparently even the Climate Establishment in Oz believes that everything is settled and most of the climate scientists can go home and begin looking for work elsewhere in other fields — their job there is done. If the US elects a Republican president, we can expect the same here, for different (?) reasons. Maybe even a Democrat will make the same decision Australia’s CSIRO has made.
That being the case — maybe the RESTART Forum might be re-purposed as a Mission Review Forum….in my opinion, a failed mission that has left so many of the foundational questions of climate unanswered, failed to answer even the basic questions posed by the CO2-Induced Global Warming Hypothesis (how much, how fast, beneficial or harmful). Heck of a time to quit in my opinion.
Maybe those Climate Scientists left standing after the pink-slip bloodbath should get their heads together as I suggested.
Oh my. Steven Mosher has been busy on this thread.
Restart climate science from a rational basis? Oh noes, that would never do.
Got to keep the ‘boundaries’ nonsense going. At all costs.
The entrenched scientific institutions will never voluntarily recant on their climate dogma. But it doesn’t actually matter. Scientific progress can be ans is being made outside institutions, even with their shonky adjusted data.
The new climate paradigm lifts its eyes up beyond the tropopause and finds the Earth-Moon system to be in an entrained resonance within a solar system maintained in meta-stability by quasi cyclic forcing affecting every object in it.
And like all true systems, the feedbacks within operate by wobbling either side of shorter and longer term means.
Roman Warm Period > Medieval Warm period > modern warm period
The warm periods roll around every thousand years or so. Interspersed by cold periods like the dark ages and little ice age.
Not rocket science is it Mosher?
Reply to tallbloke ==> Thanks for checking in and lending bit of support.
It was a good essay Kip. That’s why the noisy Mr Mosher turned up to derail the discussion.
Judy
The main impediment is the monolithic climate science-government-industrial complex.
Yes. Almost all the money comes from government, and government as a whole desires a finding of alarmism. So climate science is tasked and funded to produce alarmism. Which it dutifully does.
But can some way nevertheless be found to split the money ? 50-50 pro- and anti- the CO2 Control Knob?