by Geoffrey Weiss and Claude Roessiger
The so-called debate about the causes and effects of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a notable irony. Rather than a forum for free disputation, AGW has in recent years become the site of a consensus equating majority opinion with truth—leaving little, if any, room for debate. After all, doesn’t everyone but a misguided few agree that we are in the grip of an unparalleled, man- made climatic catastrophe?
Challenging this consensus and its advocates often leads not to reasoned argument and coolheaded policy making but to sometimes overheated recrimination and silencing of those with alternative interpretations. This we discovered firsthand when, as close observers of AGW controversies since 2015, we convened a conference about climate change and public policy.
Unanticipated events preceding the conference were an unsettling enough demonstration of the rule of consensus in contemporary life. Worse still, subsequent inquiry revealed that the AGW conference was just the tip of a bigger and—according to consensus—fast-melting iceberg. Beyond our conference and the controversies surrounding AGW, consensus thinking adversely impacts diverse other current issues, individual awareness of them, public discourse, policy making, the practice of science, and collective understanding of the nature of truth.
Conference planning and the sway of consensus
Our own diverse perspectives on AGW—those of an entrepreneur and a physician—led us to believe that the proposed conference would attract a wide range of participants. We envisioned a gathering of experts from the academy, government, industry, and other interests who would debate the impact of AGW upon public policy. Our goal was to convene a gathering of approximately 30 speakers and 500 attendees at the conference facilities of a local public university. The initial meeting of our planning board and three university faculty members was cordial and evoked considerable enthusiasm for the conference—until we presented our list of speakers. The lineup included an even balance of individuals who were either proponents or skeptics of AGW. And, with that, we collided with the first of the consensus advocates who would take issue with our approach.
“This program of speakers is unacceptable to us,” the faculty leader stated. “It has several climate change deniers. You know, of course, 97 percent of scientists agree that global warming is real and that it is a consequence of human activity.”
Lacking the support of university faculty, we engaged the conference facilities of a nearby hotel and proceeded with fund-raising. In August 2018—just two months before the scheduled event—AGW activists alerted members of the host city council to the controversial panel of speakers. As a result, the city leadership rescinded their endorsement and financial support of the conference.
“It was a concern about why alternative views [of climate change] would be spoken of that are not held by 99 percent of climate scientists,” claimed one councilor to a local newspaper. “[It is] reprising the whole debate about climate science.” He didn’t want the city, which had championed several environmental issues, “giving speakers like that a forum.”
Despite this setback, the conference opened as planned in October 2018. A capacity audience attended, and the discussions were generally well received, with only a small contingent of university representatives betraying their scorn. At its conclusion, the conference provided several themes around which the speakers and attendees could agree. Reviews were mixed—some finding no common ground with many of the speakers’ views, others praising the planners’ efforts.
Conference aftermath: three crucial questions
Our purpose in designing the conference was to provide an educational event and discussion forum for a regional audience of policy makers, business leaders, and professional stakeholders interested in the policy implications of AGW. Several of the speakers were skeptical of the pace of global warming or of global policy favoring the rapid development of renewable energy resources in response to AGW—but not one denied AGW.
Little did we realize how polarizing the conference would be. In particular, we were struck by the vehemence with which the local university scientists withdrew their cooperation upon learning the composition of the speaker panel. It seemed to us that they had no interest in engaging with a discussion regarding AGW and its effects—topics that, to them, closed all argument because the solutions seemed certain. The loss of our municipal sponsorship and the accompanying publicity in the local press further alerted us that forces were actively at work to undermine our project.
Our efforts to understand what led others to disengage from us and to decline our invitation to debate raised three questions: 1) Why did academic scientists avoid this opportunity to consider the AGW consensus with a few of its challengers? 2) How do scientists, the media, policy makers, and the laity acquire reliable technical information upon which to base decision making? 3) What is the difference between deniers of science and skeptics of science? We asked these questions because the cultural mood at the time of our conference seemed so emotionally charged that it prompted some to boycott discussion.
Science, faith, and consensus
In addressing why academic scientists spurned the conference, we might begin by considering how scientific truth differs from faith—in this case, faith in the AGW consensus. We sought the insights of a scholar of philosophy to guide our thesis. Generally speaking, faith leads from theory to a search for evidence, whereas scientific truth derives from empirical evidence that defines a theory. The distinction suggests philosophy’s query: What is truth? Rather than conflating truth and majority opinion, science pursues a measured truth that, at least for a time, can meet the rigorous test of the scientific method. If we seek any form of absolute truth, we shall find it only in faith—and not in empirical science. As the philosopher Karl Popper suggested in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), a theory that cannot be falsified is faith, not science.
Consensus thinking should not be confused with consensus science. It is a historical truism that all science tends to consensus until it does not, at which point a new consensus forms around a new insight. Alfred Wegener, often considered the progenitor of continental drift theory, was derided and ostracized when he first proposed his thesis. Over time, empirical evidence disproved older notions, and today we take Wegener’s insight for the consensus belief. And tomorrow? We don’t know. New research may lead to yet another understanding. To deny that research would be to declare ourselves for a faith. It seems that a body of academics today have become brokers for a faith, shutting down—or shouting down—the continuation of scientific inquiry.
As human knowledge expands exponentially, we must admit the possibility of many corrections and new hypotheses that may lead us to new understandings. Nothing will serve us better than unbiased science guided by observation, the established scientific method. Science of this caliber not only demonstrates the transience of consensus but also, when informed by philosophy, helps elucidate the nature of truth.
Science, truth, and the role of philosophy
Since ancient times, scientific findings divergent from accepted thought have been regarded with skepticism, denial, and even contempt. Skepticism of new scientific ideas is inherent in the scientific method and ensures that fresh concepts are rigorously examined and rendered free of error before their general preferment. Denial and contempt, the scientific community agrees, have no place in experimental inquiry. Yet past and present examples are easily found.
In the early 1960s, Judah Folkman, MD—more recently a pediatric surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital—conducted research indicating that cancers require the formation of new blood vessels to sustain their growth. This process, he suggested, had potential for developing cancer therapeutics. The ASCO Post, December 10, 2020, recalled the disbelief by granting agencies and mockery from competing researchers that Folkman faced; conventional scientific wisdom judged his ideas to be too illusory for serious attention. Then, in 1992, Napoleone Ferrara, a scientist at Genentech, Inc., identified a protein called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a potent stimulus to new blood vessel formation. Folkman’s hypothesis was acquitted. Cancer therapies targeted against VEGF were quickly synthesized and shown to be effective against certain malignancies.
Folkman’s experience suggests that consensus, in science and elsewhere, too readily excludes what the French call recul. Best understood as detachment, the term embodies the notion that, in the presence of uncertainty, a space be reserved for perspective. This allows for the possibility that different forms of truth may become entangled to advantage. In the 18th century, what we today take for a scientist was known as a philosopher. Such was Benjamin Franklin, one of the foremost scientists of his time. Those that think science is dispassionate sense while believing philosophy to be impassioned nonsense would do well to consider Franklin: Was there a man more pragmatic? When Franklin and Voltaire met in France, they were hailed as the Enlightenment’s union of empirical knowledge and wisdom. We miss this union now, believing science complete of itself. This suggests the first of four corrective truisms concerning the alliance of science and philosophy: knowledge without wisdom is a tool within an otherwise empty box.
This leads toward a second truism. Contemporary science is widely held to be the bearer of things known. This cannot be, however, because empirical science, ever subject to question, can only represent a moment in time. In science the known and the unknown are the obverse and reverse of one coin, one without the other being at best half an explanation. Thus, the second truism: in all things, there exist the known and the unknown.
A 1927 essay, “Possible Worlds,” by the English biologist J. B. S. Haldane, characterizes the universe as “not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Science has had to face the challenge of the unknown, understanding that only by the union of philosophy and science can knowledge be advanced. In Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018) the German theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder observes that “science has reached a limit at which it must be rescued by philosophy.”
Earlier, in writing Dieu et la science (1991), Jean Guitton, the renowned 20th-century French philosopher, concluded that he could detect no opposition between God and science but, rather, complementarity. The same might be said of philosophy and science. Although it can offer critical thinking, philosophy is not a critique of science, but an equal, complementary discipline. Philosophy advances its own claims, based on a long-tested process as rigorous as the scientific method. The representation in some circles that science offers absolute truth is thus in error and brings us to our third truism: science without philosophy is half a horse.
The ancient Greeks understood this. The word γνώση, transcribed as gnosi, encompasses what in English requires more than a word: that is, knowledge, cognition, awareness, learning, and sense. Beyond these lies what is not known. The quantum physicist tells us, with a straight face, that the laptop upon which we write our words is, and is not, the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat—in other words, the threshold beyond which the unknown lies. Here we arrive at our fourth truism: the unknown is the dark matter of all things, the greater part of our universe.
Hossenfelder is critical of theory in search of evidence: empirical evidence would do better in pursuit of theory. In her view, lacking empirical evidence of the unknown, a coterie of
“Truth or Consequences” | Page 5 of 12
physicists has taken up a game of mathematical pyrotechnics, formulating equations to support increasingly arcane hypotheses about what they cannot for now explain. Then prejudice—today called confirmation bias—intrudes, whereby such fragments as may be supposed evidence are taken for whole stone. These researchers might productively emulate philosophers, who follow procedures as defined and tempered as those of empirical science. The police of every land have a rule: a murder without a body is not a murder. In science—even, or perhaps especially, in the realm of the unknown—a theory without evidence is not a theory.
Our four truisms not only suggest a deep interconnection between science and philosophy but also help nullify the false premise that there is no truth. Based on our inquiry, we can affirm that truth exists and may be fairly assayed by diligent processes long established in both science and philosophy. It is by turning our backs on these processes that we lose ourselves.
The importance of understanding truth in contemporary public life
In our interaction with civic authorities and the media we were bewildered about how and why they had taken a position against our conference. How had they come to the judgment that our forum offered a message potentially too damaging to endorse? Drawn from legitimate academic, religious, scientific, and policy centers, our speakers were not invited to promote a single way of thinking. Who would want to attend a meeting in which everyone agreed upon a topic?
Hence, the second question that resulted from our conference: How do scientists, the media, policy makers, the laity—any of us who have a stake in learning and understanding the truth—acquire reliable information to support decision making?
Debate about the status of truth has endured since the origins of philosophical thought. Some argue that truth is entirely subjective, residing in the realm of the individual observer. Others insist that truth must be objective, that it belongs not to human beings but to the laws of nature. Most philosophers have attempted to navigate between these two poles, noting that the first leads to skepticism while the latter is simply impossible insofar as the human observer always adds an interpretative element to even the most impartial of truths. While craving a certainty that exceeds the boundaries of human thought, the human mind is in fact prisoner of its own subjectivity. We can never think beyond our own minds, perceptions, biases, and presuppositions. This suggests that the concept of truth is less stable and less independent than we might want to admit.
Even so, we are not forced to conclude that truth is only a matter of subjective understanding. To take this position implies the utter collapse of truth as a working concept: if truth is a matter of each individual’s view—which suggests that we accept contradictory truths, since there is nothing external to the individual by which we can verify the truth—then truth, logically, ceases to exist. We must avoid this skeptical position at all costs, for the erasure of truth leads not only to the impossibility of any agreement, but also to the impossibility of any disagreement. When constructively pursued, disagreement brings with it invaluable results by requiring each individual to respond to ideas and arguments he would otherwise have ignored, either intentionally or unintentionally. In short, disagreement plays the vital role of keeping dogmatism in check. Although we may not be able to entirely break free of subjectivity, it is nevertheless worthwhile to find ways to bolster our idea of truth such that it conforms to the highest possible standards of verification.
To this end, we suggest that crucial to the evaluation of any truth are three kinds of verification: empirical, experiential, and logical. Today, most people only apply one of the three at any given moment.
Some hold that empirical verification is the gold standard of any and all truths. These are the strict materialists who maintain that seeing is the only foundation for believing—loosely speaking, this is the “scientific” point of view. Among this cohort are the academicians who rebuffed our efforts to collaborate.
On the other hand, there are those who fall into the experiential camp. This group is largely comprised of people who know little to nothing of how knowledge is evaluated and shared, preferring instead to appeal to their own sense of reality. Their reasoning is largely emotional. These include the city fathers who withdrew endorsement and support of our conference, taking on faith the judgment of others.
Finally, there are the others who prioritize logic but who, without appealing to both experiential verification and empirical verification, can easily get lost in the clouds.
Each form of verification is in fact crucial to any serious inquiry. Through empirical verification, we are able to see whether the claim conforms to the body of knowledge that we already have. Experiential verification allows us to test whether the claim conforms to our own individual experience and makes sense according to our paradigm of reality. This is not mere subjectivism: we cannot discount human experience, for it is the starting point of any and all knowledge. This explains why the third kind of verification—logical verification—is necessary. Because our experiences may be partial, or even deceptive, we must abide by what is logical, even if it is not always supported by personal experience.
Each kind of verification acts as a check on the others. A robust standard of truth thus maintains that a true proposition is one that satisfies all of empirical, experiential, and logical verification. If a claim fails in one area it is a hypothesis, not a true proposition. There is nothing wrong with a hypothesis—at the heart of all inquiry, it is a working claim that is constantly being tested and revised. There is nothing false in a hypothesis but, equally and most importantly, it is not yet true.
Such a rigorous standard for judging a proposition draws a firm line between hypothesis and truth—thus restoring the latter to its rightful place. As a result, we could end up with access to fewer truths than we might otherwise have thought, but this is not a negative. The goal of inquiry is not to give all our ideas and opinions the status of truth, but to accord such status only to those ideas that have been hard won, and which have the ability to endure after we no longer have a stake in the discussion.
In our quest for truth, therefore, we must deal with the imprecision, peculiarities, and prejudices of the human mind and seek to diminish their agency. This we found as we assembled our conference and encountered opponents dedicated to a consensus that abolished inquiry about alternative interpretations. For example, one of the city councilors with whom we interacted accused certain speakers of harboring ideas that denied the impact of climate change—even though the reality was otherwise. Neither the conference planners nor the speakers regarded themselves as deniers of climate change or its threat to the quality of life, the infrastructure, the economy, and myriad other affairs. Several speakers were skeptics and challengers of the consensus; as analysts with alternative perspectives, they came armed with data that they submitted to public scrutiny. Even so, their opponents in public life and academia sought to demonize them and to annul their messages before they were uttered.
Deniers—or skeptics?
As our conference experience suggests, zealous consensus advocates tend to assign all challengers to the category of denier. If, as it seems, this proclivity is sometimes misguided, how
do we definitively distinguish between denial and skepticism? Hence, our third question: What is the difference between deniers of science and skeptics of science?
A topical example points to the answer. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided an unprecedented opportunity to observe the interplay of new research findings with the scientific community, policy makers, the media, and the public. The rapidly evolving public health emergency created an immediate need for reliable information to guide policy and to aid medical decision making.
The entry of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as putative therapies for the corona virus infection first gained traction in a letter to the editor of Cell Research (published online, February 2020). The letter described laboratory experiments in Wuhan, China, then the epicenter of the emerging pandemic. Testing five common anti-infective and anti-inflammatory agents against SARS-CoV-2 infecting cultured monkey kidney cells, the authors demonstrated that chloroquine had promising antiviral activity. Quickly following this report was an observational study by P. Gautret et al. (International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, published online, March 20, 2020) wherein 26 patients with test-proven COVID-19 were treated with hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin (a common antibiotic) and compared to 16 control patients treated at another hospital without hydroxychloroquine. The authors suggested that the hydroxychloroquine-treated patients efficiently reduced viral carriage when compared to the untreated patients. This thread of evidence led to widespread application of hydroxychloroquine to the therapy of patients with COVID-19.
Rick Bright, PhD, Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), was a vocal proponent of allocating congressionally mandated funds for “safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not for drugs, vaccines, and other technologies that lack scientific merit.” (CNN Politics, April 22, 2020). When demoted to a lesser position within the HHS, he alleged that this was retaliation for his challenging the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19: “Contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit.” He left government service in October 2020. Subsequently, multiple observational studies of hydroxychloroquine use appeared in the literature, most showing lack of efficacy, several indicating a higher risk of death.
This example illustrates the importance of the distinction between “science denial” and “science skepticism.” Dr. Bright was skeptical of the utility of hydroxychloroquine based upon, at the time, the absence of scientific knowledge confirming its efficacy and safety. He denied no science; he was victimized for rejecting the politically motivated belief in hydroxychloroquine as a therapy for COVID-19.
What characterizes science denial? In 2009, Chris Hoofnagle, a Ph.D. physiologist, published a blog in the Guardian that lists the features of denialism in scientific research: 1) alleging that scientific consensus involves conspiring to falsify data or suppress the truth; 2) citing fake experts or individuals while marginalizing, demonizing, or denigrating published experts; 3) cherry-picking atypical or even obsolete papers; 4) making unreasonable demands upon research, claiming that any uncertainty invalidates the findings while rejecting probabilities and mathematical models; 5) comparing apples and oranges, promoting false equivalencies among competing ideas, or drawing flawed conclusions from scientifically valid research. As this list demonstrates, there is clearly an element of intended obfuscation by science denialists, who often deploy propagandistic techniques to cripple the arguments of their rivals.
The skeptic is a different creature altogether. Some speakers at our conference and others who have published their concerns in various media belong to a cohort of individuals whose skepticism of certain scientific theories and resultant policy decisions offers an important service to the community. They demand rigor in scientific analysis, provide alternative interpretations of events, and enforce a critical reexamination of the facts. We carefully vetted the credentials of our conference speakers who, to support their arguments, came with data published in peer- reviewed literature. Nevertheless, they were subjected to the same berating accorded the charlatans of science denial. In The Climate Skeptics (2004), Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research attempts to disqualify the skeptics’ influence, arguing that climate researchers end up in a compromised position whether or not they engage in debate. He then contradicts himself by calling for a public exchange of scientific ideas: “Extreme opinions of individuals or dubious arguments cannot prevail where there is broad and open discussion among specialist scientists.”
Exactly! Was that not our stated purpose in holding the conference?
Unlike science denial—which actively challenges or passively ignores accepted science, using dissuasion, disinformation, or propaganda—informed skepticism may bespeak a plausible alternative interpretation of the evidence. For an expert scientific authority to assume a priori that the skeptic has nothing of value to offer seems to us an intellectually undignified position to assume. Closure of dialogue with those articulating any skepticism for AGW is explicitly unscientific.
Motivations for consensus advocacy
Why would traditional academic scientists stonewall inquiry challenging the consensus? According to Fostering Integrity in Research (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017), the answer is as banal as human nature, with the usual weaknesses at play: for example, fear of impugning the views of one’s colleagues, losing esteem in one’s discipline, or diminishing the importance of one’s research; and desire for personal gain, whether in the form of money, power, promotion, grants, sponsorship, patronage, or prestigious employment. At their most benign, such motivations may be no more than annoyances among colleagues and supervisors; at their worst, they may contribute to scientific disinformation, misconduct, or fraud.
We conjecture that our academic opponents rejected participation in the conference as a consequence of their devotion to AGW consensus. Perhaps they perceived a number of our speakers as direct threats to a career’s worth of work. Or perhaps they just preferred to vilify our lecturers rather than to engage in discussion.
We believe that the city fathers who withdrew endorsement of our meeting were simply following the persuasive power of the AGW consensus advocates. It is doubtful that they, not being experts, discerned any advantage to disputing the consensus. At worst, they can only be accused of lacking the courage to assail the controversy.
The cost of consensus: four lessons
Our experience of creating a conference of honest and balanced inquiry for the community furnished the following lessons:
First, the academics with whom we sought a collaboration clearly evinced a climate change chauvinism favoring a narrative of AGW that excludes discussion of alternative understandings. We were perhaps naïve in our belief that experts representing both AGW advocacy and skepticism could, on equal footing, share a panel.
Second, in the minds of climate change advocates, denier and skeptic are indistinguishable appellations. Under the regime of a “97 percent scientific consensus,” skepticism is given no quarter. The unwillingness of card-carrying scientists and experts to engage in the climate discussion with skeptical scientific peers and professionals was baffling to us; the vindictiveness of the AGW proponents was a shock.
Third, the fractious demeanor shown within the climate consensus group translates equally well to other belief federations. The COVID-19 pandemic has been witness to its share of scientific disinformation and bias. There are undoubtedly smaller tempests in other teapots.
Finally, empiricism having shown itself to be a surer guide than speculation, truth in science requires consideration of all observations, and these must be as readily available and unfiltered as evidence presented to a jury, whether by saints or scoundrels, whether credible or not. A poor substitute for such truth, consensus advocacy exacts its price from society and culture. Without unrestricted access to information and opinion, we are left under the control of the anointed of the day—all those who, with apparent impunity, erect barriers to the imagination and innovation that advance knowledge. Truth reposes with us individually—a collective is never accountable.
“doesn’t everyone but a misguided few agree that we are in the grip of an unparalleled, man- made climatic catastrophe?”
The “few” are not the misguided ones. The “everyone” else are the misguided ones.
Empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that global warming is beneficial for the global economy and the biosphere.
The integrated assessment models over estimate the negative impacts and underestimate the positive impacts. Empirical evidence indicates the impact of global warming on every impact sector is more positive that the IAMs project. Overall, glo9bal warming is beneficial.
https://www.mdpi.com/energies/energies-12-03575/article_deploy/html/images/energies-12-03575-g015.png
Source: https://doi.org/10.3390/en12183575
With ecosystems corrected and the revised GW impacts on Energy included, the Total* (dashed black line) moves to near the Agriculture impact sector projection – i.e. about +0.5% GDP at +3C GMST.
From your paper’s abstract:
If these findings are correct, and if FUND projections for the non-energy impact sectors are valid, 3 °C of global warming from 2000 would increase global economic growth.
How much economic growth results from inundating half the state of Florida and most of the coastal cities around the world by 2100/3.0 C — a mere 0.2% of GDP? That’s clearly absurd.
So half of Florida will be inundated by 2100? Did this nugget of information come as a result of your experiments with a time machine?
“Here’s what Miami could look like in 2100 — Under an extreme flooding scenario”
https://miami.curbed.com/2017/7/13/15965280/miami-climate-change-2100-flooding
The Dutch built walls a long time ago with low tech, to deal with rising sea levels. I see no reason that Floridians can’t do the same, should the scenario actually come to pass (which is questionable).
1. porosity of Florida soil. Incoming sea comes up from underneath as well.
2. length of coastline: 8,436 miles.
3. It’s you and me who will pay for it, not simply Floridians. Keep your wallet out.
Why should we pay? I don’t live in Florida. And you obviously wouldn’t have to put walls on all 8500 miles of it.
I would be shocked if the cost, world-wide, of adapting to rising oceans would be more than the cost of curbing CO2 enough to make a difference. And then, there’s China… does anyone think they’ll cut emissions? How about India? How about Africa – are we going to condemn the poor of the world to stay energy poor (which means: poor)?
You and I would pay because Floridians can’t afford it.
But there won’t be a seawall put up around Florida. Too ineffective.
We’re already paying for sea-level rise in Florida and elsewhere:
$300 M in federal tax money to buy out homes along the NJ shore, in their “Blue Acres” program.
$400 M in Miami Beach to raise roads and improve dunes, paid for by increased utility fees, state taxes and federal taxes.
$48.3 M awarded from Louisiana Office of Community Development, Disaster Recovery Unit (OCD-DRU) to move 99 residents off Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana.
$15.67 B in coastal home values lost.
$30 M – NOAA teaming up with other public agencies as well as private entities to provide $30 million in new grants to support coastal resilience projects in 23 states and U.S. territories.
$1.7 M in Newtok, Alaska, where FEMA is buying homes because of climate change. Asking for $150 M.
with many more counties and cities asking for money for sea level rise protection.
This info is a couple of years old. Might be more costs by now.
That we are paying doesn’t mean we *should* be paying. Sane policy would have Florida accumulating funds now to deal with the future problem.
Sea level rise problems today are not from AGW… they are from subsidence. People tend to build cities in areas that, for geological reasons, tend to subside.
Also, sea level rise is hardly new. The oceans have been rising since the last ice age. Archaeologists excavate undersea settlements that were well ashore when inhabited. While AGW alarmists assert that the rise is accelerating, that merely shift the time a bit when the events happen – if it is even true.
Appell
Get current with the science. We are coming out of the LIA. Sea level rise has been going on for 200 years. Subsidence is obvious a major factor. The least you could do is catch up with the literature.
The oceans have been rising since the last ice age.
Sea level rose about 1 m in the 5000 years before the industrial era, an average of 0.2 mm/yr. It’s now rising over 16 times as fast, and accelerating.
Feb 13, 2018
New Study Finds Sea Level Rise Accelerating
Global sea level rise has been accelerating in recent decades, rather than increasing steadily, according to a new study based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating
3 inches over 100 years. Where is the acceleration?
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=680-140
3 inches over 160 years. Where is the acceleration?
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=170-011
4 inches over 100 years. Where is the acceleration?
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=9410660
7 inches over 160 years. Where is the acceleration?
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=120-012
I assume the same kind of hysterical thinking is still in play as it was nearly 40 years ago. How did that work out?
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2019-02-15190822_shadow.jpg
7 inches over 120 years. Where is the acceleration?
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2021/04/image-142.png
Rising Oceans would increase inertia of earth and increase Length of Day
The atomic clock is used to measure length of day. 9 leap seconds were added in the seventies and they got a late start, they did not start until 1972 after making an initial adjustment. 6 leap seconds were added in the eighties. 7 leap seconds were added in the nineties. Now, only 5 leap seconds have been added since the end of 1998 and none since 2016. The Length of day has decreased and that would not be true if there was any kind of runaway sea level rise. For whatever reasons, they are lying or just not understanding what they claim to be expert at doing. I have had this discussion with some of you several years ago. It is still holding. I read a story about melting ice and then I go check the atomic clock data, and I relax and just say, not yet.
Watch for it, if runaway sea level rise starts, the Length of Day would increase.
LOD is measured accurately by the atomic clock. There is a lot of uncertainty in measuring and averaging sea level, but not in measuring Length of Day.
Leap Seconds Inserted into the UTC Time Scale
Date MJD Date MJD Date MJD Date MJD
2016-12-31 57753 1998-12-31 51178 1989-12-31 47891 1979-12-31 44238
2015-06-30 57203 1997-06-30 50629 1987-12-31 47160 1978-12-31 43873
2012-06-30 56108 1995-12-31 50082 1985-06-30 46246 1977-12-31 43508
2008-12-31 54831 1994-06-30 49533 1983-06-30 45515 1976-12-31 43143
2005-12-31 53735 1993-06-30 49168 1982-06-30 45150 1975-12-31 42777
1992-06-30 48803 1981-06-30 44785 1974-12-31 42412
1990-12-31 48256 1973-12-31 42047
1972-12-31 41682
1972-06-30 41498
https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/atomic-standards/leap-second-and-ut1-utc-information
People have said, the inertia of earth is huge, but the inertia of the oceans is tiny. The Crust of the earth floats on the core and the oceans are significant when compared to the crust. During major ice ages, Length of Day was significantly shorter. Most ice on land is in or near polar regions, closer to the spin axis. Most water is in oceans closer to the equator, further from the spin axis.
Ice mass is close to the spin axis, water is far from the spin axis. When the dancer or skater pulls arms in tight, the spin is faster, when the arms are out the spin is slower. When water is moved from the oceans to be sequestered as ice on land, the inertia of the crust of the earth is reduced. When ice on land thaws and enters the oceans, the inertia of the crust of earth is increased.
The GHGs have not caused SLR since 1972, the consensus climate alarmists are clearly lying or plain wrong and there is NOT A DAMN THING we can do about what they tell us, but we clearly do not need to believe Sea Level Rise or any other alarmist junk they promote.
Those climate events are not happening due to manmade CO2 but the harm causes by their “so called” fixes are going to happen now, and yes, their man-made harm is already very bad.
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December 26, 2020 at 12:00 am
https://climatecrocks.com/2020/12/25/sea-level-rise-worst-case-scenarios-looking-well-worse/comment-page-1/?unapproved=118163&moderation-hash=98cda8c0d805a3d4c6c1d6979642c14e#comment-118163
Those climate events are not happening due to manmade CO2 but the harm causes by their “so called” fixes are going to happen now, and yes, their man-made harm is going to be very bad. The recent power and water outages prove their “so called” fixes are already bad. There is a story in the Houston Chronicle Today by James Osborne, “Grid once stayed on in colder weather”.
He wrote about Christmas 1989, then flash forward to 2021.
Ice Core Records are Knowledge Records sequestered for us to finally understand what causes past alternating warm and cold phases of climate.
Before warm tropical ocean currents flowed into the polar regions, there was little ice sequestered on land and oceans were much deeper. The polar regions are great ice machines. Ice machines must be powered and the must have energy dissipation. When polar regions are frozen there is no evaporation, no snowfall and no ice sequestering.
Tropical warm currents finally flowed into the polar regions and promoted evaporation and the water vapor changing into ice in the clouds promoted the IR out from the clouds, the ice was stored on land and was build up until ice flowed into the salt water and formed sea ice.
Warm tropical ocean currents power the great ice machines. Sea ice forms to turn the machines off and thaws to turn the machines on again.
It is this simple. The oceans have warmed to lower sea level, sea level rises when sea ice prevents sequestering of ice.
A seemingly ignored cycle seems to control main events on earth. The Eddy cycle. Things happen at inflection points (both peaks and roots) that bring big changes. We are presently at or near a peak.
The pic of Miami becoming a sort of Venice (interesting for boat builders) may not be the course nature might take.
In 6200bce – Eddy root -, Doggerland sank. Wiki says depth about 32m.
The wall built by the Dutch is only for keeping out a water depth of about 5m (nice trip up the Afsluitdijk causeway ).
5200bce was another root. The evidence here is more real (see https://melitamegalithic.wordpress.com/2019/12/17/geology-for-the-heretic-the-mystery-of-the-megalithic-calendar-orientations-resolving-site-x/ ) The depth now is nearer to 200m (no prime real estate, — not yet), except for a very small islet that still had evidence of cart ruts until obliterated by target bombing. Or further evidence inland, the result of listric collapse (see https://melitamegalithic.wordpress.com/2019/09/25/beyond-the-heretic-reality/ ) See animated gif at bottom.
A good number of proxies were in agreement and helped to put a date to events.
That’s not a photo of Florida in 2100. It’s a photoshop of someone fantasy.
You’re just cherry picking sites. Anyone can do that yet find acceleration. Charleston SC:
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8665530
acceleration = 0.086 mm/yr2
current sea level rise = 6.9 mm/yr
sea level rise in last 20 years = 7.6 inches (1 inch every 32 months)
Look at sea level change since the last glacial maximum: 120 meters from about 5 C of warming, or 24 m/degC. There isn’t as much ice now, but still plenty to melt, ~100 meters of sea-level equivalent, and the science says the world will ultimately see 15-20 m or so per degC of warming, on millennial timescales. The first 15 m is already a done deal.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
The GHGs have not caused SLR since 1972, the consensus climate alarmists are clearly lying or plain wrong
What an easy way to do science — “everyone I disagree with is clearly lying or plain wrong.” So very convincing. Air tight. Flawless in its reasoning.
Clueless.
Cherry-picking? Everywhere I turn the same story.
http://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=130-081
The same story. No acceleration.
http://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=680-471
It doesn’t matter what continent. No acceleration.
http://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=8418150
> Everywhere I look
First citation on the Wiki page should have gotten you this, Kid:
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/1551/2018/
But wherever you look if all you see is a single linear trend, chances are you won’t be able to eyeball any acceleration.
W
Coinciding perfectly with introduction of satellites. Get wise on what obviously happened.
This from a 1979 USGS report about the Charleston to Savanna region.
The average modern rates of relative uplift and subsidence (assuming they are constant) are compatible with rates noted throughout the Coastal Plain. Long-term extrapolation of modern rates appears unreasonable; episodic or oscillatory movements are much more likely. ?? 1979.
Interesting for the USGS to ask a question whether there is variability in the geological process. Going against the grain. Otherwise when all the tidal gauges are showing little to no acceleration. why just at Charleston.
The average modern rates of relative uplift and subsidence (assuming they are constant) are compatible with rates noted throughout the Coastal Plain. Long-term extrapolation of modern rates appears unreasonable; episodic or oscillatory movements are much more likely. ?? 1979.“
Coinciding perfectly with introduction of satellites. Get wise on what obviously happened.
You have a little excuse for everything. I go by the science, such as the NASA article I posted earlier on acceleration of global mean sea level. (GLOBAL MEAN, not cherry picked sites.)
And, as someone wrote elsewhere, you’re not going to detect acceleration if all you look at is a linear trend. The question is, is a quadratic fit better, and if so, what is the resulting acceleration. All you’re doing is eyeballing, which isn’t science.
Mr. Appell seems gloomy about the future climate.
Climate alarmists always seems gloomy about the future climate.
Their “consensus science” predictions — a climate crisis is coming — are getting old, and tired.
The future of our planet is is bleak !
Florida will be underwater !
Is that reality?
No, just always wrong predictions.
This is reality:
We have all lived with rising CO2 levels for all of our lives.
And we all have up to 45 years of experience living with global warming.
That actual global warming was mild, harmless, and pleasant for most people.
The most warming was in colder Northern Hemisphere areas, mainly in the colder months of the year, and mainly at night.
Such as warmer winter nights in Siberia.
Global warming since the mid-1970s has been at a rate of about half of the average predictions of climate alarmist’s beloved climate models — representing the “climate science consensus”.
We don’t need any more always wrong wild guess predictions of a coming climate crisis — 64 years of those wrong predictions were more than enough.
We don’t need any more always wrong average climate model predictions, that do NOT get more accurate over the decades, as if accuracy does not matter — 40 years of those wrong predictions were more than enough.
In the climate alarmist world, wrong predictions + wrong climate models = the science is settled, and the planet is doomed
In a logical world, wrong predictions + wrong climate models = the science is NOT settled, and the actual climate is wonderful.
Richard Greene
Bingham Farms, Michigan
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
Kid,
Everywhere you look clearly does not imply you looked everywhere.
I looked at one place. It refutes whatever point you may think you have.
Let me cash in my chips and go home.
“ Key findings are that at the 95% confidence level, no consistent or substantial evidence (yet) exists that recent rates of rise are higher or abnormal in the context of the historical records available for the United States, nor does any evidence exist that geocentric rates of rise are above the global average.”
P Watson 2016
“ However, long term tide gauges, recording sea levels worldwide, as well as along the coastline of Australia, and within the bay of Sydney, do not show any sign of accelerating sea level rises at present time.”
Boretti 2012
> P Watson 2016
I think I found that one:
http://www.watson2016.com/
“…. show that according to climate models, externally forced and thereby the anthropogenic sea level fingerprint on regional sea level trends in the tropical Pacific is still too small to be observable by satellite altimetry.”
Palanisamy 2015
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378383912001871
“ We show as the naïve averaging of all the tide gauges included in the PSMSL surveys show “relative” rates of rise about þ1.04 mm/year (570 tide gauges of any length). If we consider only 100 tide gauges with more than 80 years of recording the rise is only þ0.25 mm/year. This naïve averaging has been stable and shows that the sea levels are slowly rising but not accelerating.”
Parker 2015
“ Extending the sea level record back over the entire century suggests that the high variability in the rates of sea level change observed over the past 20 years were not particularly unusual. The rate of sea level change was found to be larger in the early part of last century (2.03 ± 0.35 mm/yr 1904–1953), in comparison with the latter part (1.45 ± 0.34 mm/yr 1954–2003). ”
Holgate 2007
“ Here we address the question as to whether the recent decadal trends in the tropical Pacific atmosphere-ocean system are within the range of internal variability, as simulated in long unforced integrations of global climate models. We show that the recent trends are still within the range of long-term internal decadal variability.”
Birdbath 2016
I suppose reading Kenneth is an improvement on teh Goddard, Kid.
“ Here we provide evidence that superimposed on any possible anthropogenic trend there is a significant amount of natural decadal and multidecadal variability”
Dang Endor for 2014
“ In particular, the east-west contrast in the Pacific of sea level trends observed since the early 1990s cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by climate models, nor yet definitely attributed either to unforced variability (such as the PDO) or forced climate change.”
Clark 2015
Do you not understand the meaning of “global mean?”
From your Clark 2015:
“Recent analyses confirm the twentieth century sea level rise, with some analyses showing a slightly smaller rate before 1990 and some a slightly larger value than reported in the AR5. There is now more evidence of an acceleration in the rate of rise.”
You left that out.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40641-015-0024-4
“ However, our results clearly show that it could be several decades before the acceleration detection methods considered here reveal (in a statistically significant sense to 95% confidence) such a discernable acceleration in individual tide gauge records. ”
Haughty 2014
“ There is observational evidence that global sea level is rising and there is concern that the rate of rise will increase, significantly threatening coastal communities. However, considerable debate remains as to whether the rate of sea level rise is currently increasing and, if so, by how much. ”
Haigh 2014
“ No scientific consensus has been reached yet as to how a possible acceleration could be separated from intrinsic climate variability in sea level records. This has led to an intensive debate on its existence and, if absent, also on the general validity of current future projections”
Bidder 2015
“ Among the major unanswered questions is why GMSL acceleration has not yet been detected in the altimeter record, given the increasing rates at which glacial and ice sheet melt are estimated to have occurred6,7 and as greenhouse gas concentrations have risen8”
Fasullo 2016
CK, 7-year old papers on SLR are out-of-date
David Appell | June 2, 2021 at 9:21 am |
Not sure how you’re calculating the acceleration. But if it were 0.086 mm/yr^2, over a century it would have increased by 8.6 mm/year … and the trend is only 3.4 mm/year. I measure the acceleration at 0.00001 mm/yr^2.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/sea-level-charleston-sc.png
Next, it’s obvious that Charleston’s sea level has been accelerating for the last ten years or so. But it was decelerating for the ten years before that. In fact, as with many tidal records, it accelerates and decelerates frequently.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/20-year-trailing-acceleration-charleston-SC.png
And here’s the same data for the global Church and White, Jevrejeva, and Ray & Douglas sea level datasets—frequent changes between acceleration and deceleration.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/30-year-trailing-sea-level-acc-3-datasets-2.png
So no … there’s no persistent acceleration in sea level.
w.
CK, acceleration already apparent in tide gauge data of global mean sea level:
https://www.globalchange.gov/sites/globalchange/files/global_average_sea_level_change.png
We went through this before, Willis. Calculating a “20-year acceleration” is useless, because the error bars are huge.” (Go ahead, show them.) Acceleration is calculated over the length of the dataset.
Fit a second-polynomial to the data, y=ax^2+bx+c. The acceleration will be 2a. The present SLR will be 2ax+b.
“ Reconstructions of sea-level changes for the past 1000 years derived using benthic foraminifer data from salt marshes along the East Coast of the United States suggest an increased rate of relative sea-level rise beginning in the 1600s. ”
Larsen 2006
“ Although the acceleration found for the global mean, urn:x-wiley:21699275:media:jgrc20911:jgrc20911-math-0004, is not significant, local values range from urn:x-wiley:21699275:media:jgrc20911:jgrc20911-math-0005 in the central Indian Ocean to urn:x-wiley:21699275:media:jgrc20911:jgrc20911-math-0006 in the western tropical Pacific and east of Japan. These extrema are associated with patterns of sea level change that differ significantly from the first half of the analyzed period (i.e., 1900–1950) to the second half (1950–2000). We take this as an indication of long period oceanic processes that are superimposed to the general sea level rise.”
Note the error bars on the global sea level acceleration. What’s not to like?
Wenzel 2014
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2014JC009900
Global warming since the mid-1970s has been at a rate of about half of the average predictions of climate alarmist’s beloved climate models — representing the “climate science consensus”.
Says what analysis?
PS: Scientists don’t make predictions, they make projections.
Although the acceleration found for the global mean, urn:x-wiley:21699275:media:jgrc20911:jgrc20911-math-0004, is not significant, local values range from urn:x-wiley:21699275:media:jgrc20911:jgrc20911-math-0005 in the central Indian Ocean to urn:x-wiley:21699275:media:jgrc20911:jgrc20911-math-0006 in the western tropical Pacific and east of Japan.
LOL
Typical of a cut-and-paster who doesn’t take the time to read and understand what he’s pasting. LOL
Appell
No, my IPad comment box is blank when I type. I can’t see what I type. It said acceleration is 0.0042+- 0.0092 mm/yr.
Deal with the science. It shows acceleration is zilch.
But more than that, as other papers have said there is a great deal of uncertainty..
A continuation: https://www.sis-group.org.uk/news/storegga-again-news.htm
Some people are connecting the dots.
What’s all this about an ” unparalleled, man- made climatic catastrophe”
Have Weiss & Roessiger no respect for the catastrophes of post-Biblical proportions that perplex the American heartland and Lovecraft Country?
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2021/06/it-takes-tough-devourer-of-galaxies-to.html
“Then that person eats chicken and destroys a galaxy, when they could have eaten beef and produced a few extra pounds of carbon.”
You have a wonderful way with words Russell. A tiny typo though?
Respect vegan Cthulhu!
Mind you I personally prefer Philip Dick’s planet producing cosmic entities to Lovecraft’s.
https://images.saatchiart.com/saatchi/92256/art/1477400/719092-BLYHNFNC-32.jpg
David Appell says: “Here’s what Miami could look like in 2100 — Under an extreme flooding scenario”
https://miami.curbed.com/2017/7/13/15965280/miami-climate-change-2100-flooding
What a complete joke. Here is the tidal gauge from Miami. There is 0.00% chance of Miami flooding. Same for New York
https://imgur.com/gOFTbWe
https://imgur.com/fhq1svR
https://imgur.com/oFeek1Q
https://imgur.com/BkLO94p
https://imgur.com/ZZOVo1S
https://imgur.com/uZltRKM
BTW, go to the West Coast and there are plenty of tidal gauges showing sea levels FALLING. David, you are trying too hard to push this nonsense. Simply look at the graphics. There is no evidence to support your alarmist claims…none.
How can you possibly rely on actual tide gauge measurements when we have computer game predictions of doom?
Climate models have never failed … to predict doom … and be wrong,
The responses to my comment are missing, or avoiding, the main point, which is “Empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that global warming is beneficial for the global economy and the biosphere.”
You need to address the economic impacts of global warming. All impact sectors, including sea level rise, are more positive (less negative) than projected by the FUND IAM (and the other main IAMs). In total, the economic impact is beneficial, not damaging and not catastrophic. Therefore there is no justification for polices and actions to attempt to reduce GHG emissions.
Peter, I’m sorry to tell you, but ever since Nordhaus said that 4°C of warming is “optimal,” many people have wondered what the heck is wrong with climate change economists.
Richard Tol didn’t do you any favors either. Nor did that ridiculous graph you posted on the last post on this blog, showing 0.2% GDP damages from sea level rise at 3.0 C of global warming. I can’t believe you’d even offer up such a thing.
“‘4°C of global warming is optimal’ – even Nobel Prize winners are getting things catastrophically wrong,” The Conversation, November 14, 2019
https://theconversation.com/4-c-of-global-warming-is-optimal-even-nobel-prize-winners-are-getting-things-catastrophically-wrong-125802
The chart is of the FUND impact sector projections to +3 C GMST. Read the L&G19 paper I linked!!
The Conversation is rubbish – it is strongly alarmist biased – like you and Gretta Thundberg and most climate alarmists/catastrophists.
We do not have a climate catastrophe. And whatever it is, doesn’t have us in its grip. Yet the authors even after adopting that are shut out. You can say the words, and still not gain entrance into the consensus loony bin.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
You miss the point. The force for the AGW consensus is so strong that the papers won’t get published, regardless of merit.
AGW is sort of like Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for COVID19. Both looked good from simple lab experiments. AGW has not been tested, not in the sense of Hopper’s approach. It is largely a field of computer simulations, and those simulations are exceedingly complex, and are applied to a system that is chaotic in many different dimensions. I have little faith in them, because they have failed to predict, and because there are good reasons to believe that they cannot predict. Note that this lack of faith is not a denial of AGW, but rather a critique of the methodology, and of the rush to claim results when climate is such a slow process that those results are not falsifiable.
HCQ showed antiviral activity in a laboratory setting – which is analogous to the solid physical result that increased CO2 concentration, in the absence of other factors, will result in increased temperature.
Both are interesting, both suggestive, neither complete.
The HCQ saga also showed a politicized, consensus-biased science. Rather than doing reasonable tests of it, those who advocated it were immediately stigmatized (some for good reason – it’s one thing to advocate tests, it’s another to claim that it is a miracle cure). Some HCQ tests were done, but they failed to test an important hypothesis: that HCQ may be effective in the early stages of the disease, but not later – the same thing that was found with Remdesivir and monoclonal/polyclonal antibodies. Personally, I doubt HCQ helps, but the malfunctions in the process of investigating it (on both the side of the proponents and the side of the skeptics) makes truth hard to discern.
COVID19 also showed a sclerosis in the clinical field – a requirement that treatment be “science based” in a situation where there was not enough time to do traditional science – RCT’s, peer review, etc. So a lot of good anecdotal evidence was ignored. There was clear, early evidence that the disease was spread via aerosols, but since the long standing consensus held that only a couple of diseases spread through aerosols, this was rejected, at a cost of who knows how many deaths in the US alone – people washing their hands a lot when appropriate indoor ventilation was far more important (and has been ignored to this date).
Science – true science – doesn’t march to a schedule. It does not, and should not be expected to produce results when politicians or patients demand it. It is a slow process, converging, but not monotonically, on truths.
Scientists, on the other hand, can contribute their existing knowledge and try to apply it to new situations, and did during COVID19. But too often, organizations, or the general population of clinicians, attacked anyone who did not base their treatment on gold plated, consensus accepted science.
So “science” and “expertise” became conflated, both in the minds of the public, and in the minds of scientists/experts. Overall, it was a pretty sorry spectacle with COVID19, and has been just as bad (and as economically damaging) with AGW.
What “force” for the AGW consensus? What’s your proof of this “force?”
Oh come on, the current state of consensus “climate science” is appalling. The only thing that lets it shine is a way too incompetent “critical side”, which is rather building obscure theories than correcting all the imprecisions, and sometimes straight forward non sense, the consensus side is producing.
Me personally, I find it pretty easy to dig out the dirt and correct it. Here is a formidable example.
https://www.greenhousedefect.com/basic-greenhouse-defects/deception-with-emission-spectra-part-1
This may be why Koonin makes a distinction between climate science and what he calls consensus science
https://wp.me/pTN8Y-6D0
“?That ‘Obama Scientist’ Climate Skeptic You’ve Been Hearing About … His track record on getting climate science right is extremely poor”
By Naomi Oreskes, Michael E. Mann, Gernot Wagner, Don Wuebbles, Andrew Dessler, Andrea Dutton, Geoffrey Supran, Matthew Huber, Thomas Lovejoy, Ilissa Ocko, Peter C. Frumhoff, Joel Clement on June 1, 2021
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/that-obama-scientist-climate-skeptic-youve-been-hearing-about/
Thank you Dr Appell. Enjoyed reading your post on “Some Early and Important Work on Climate Science, Carbon Dioxide, and Human Influence”
Mornin’ David (UTC),
Here’s my Arctic alter ego’s take on the Oreskes, Mann, Dessler et al. Scientific American article you refer to:
https://twitter.com/GreatWhiteCon/status/1399981361243561986
YMMV!
If a climate scientist gets ANY predictions of the future climate right, then his predictions would be judged to be above average.
The coming climate crisis is nothing but many decades of always wrong predictions, made by people whose record demonstrates they can not predict the futuire climate.
They consistently predict a coming climate crisis.
That never happens.
They conistently predict rapid dangerous global warming.
That never happens.
Their predictions of rapid, dangerous future global warming do not match actual harmless past global warming.
So why would anyone with sense take scary coming climate crisis predictions seriously?
Or expect them to be right?
Including Mr. Koonin’s predictions.
And your predictions.
And my predictions.
(although I don’t make predictions)
Evenin’ Cliff (if I may refer to you thusly?),
Was your comment addressed to me, or has the threading gone awry in here?
If the former then I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re going on about, since whatever it is it bears no relation to the questions I have been repeatedly asking. Or indeed to the points made by Oreskes et al. as far as I can tell.
Cliff, scientists don’t make predictions, they make projections.
Evidence that consensus science is not science
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/05/06/consensus-science/
Evidence that consensus science is not science
Just make your point here please instead of in a X,000 word blog post.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/05/06/consensus-science/
Your blog post is full of errors, none worse than this one:
Yet this proportionality continues to be used in climate science as the only link between human fossil fuel emissions and global warming.
That’s just abysmally wrong, and shows you simply do not know the history of the science. Read books like The Warming Papers by Pierrehumbert and Archer, or The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart, which is even online: https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm
Read, read, read, study, study, study
Instead of lecturing and hectoring others, why not tell us what the book you recommended says, in one sentence or two?
Just click on the link and you’ll find this tight little summary (instead of hundreds or thousands of words):
“This Website created by Spencer Weart supplements his much shorter book, which tells the history of climate change research as a single story. On this Website you will find a more complete history in dozens of essays on separate topics, updated annually.”
WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE, a lot sooner than expected. 😜
It is used to compare measured IR emissions from Earth versus emissions from an Earth without an atmosphere.
E. Schaffer commented:
Me personally, I find it pretty easy to dig out the dirt and correct it. Here is a formidable example.
https://www.greenhousedefect.com/basic-greenhouse-defects/deception-with-emission-spectra-part-1
Are you aware the red curve is just the theoretical Planck law for the given surface temperature? It’s not a measurement of anything.
That is what the article outlines. Yet it is used as a benchmark.
E. Schaffer
I read your comments, got very interested and visited your blog:
https://www.greenhousedefect.com/
E. Schaffer,
Thank you. Thank you and congratulations for everything you have explained and described in your blog.
Christos Vournas
@Christos
Well thanks, I am only getting started ;)
Again, the red curve is theoretical only, for comparison to the idealized case. Not a measurement of anything.
You are only repeating your pointless statement. As the article explains, Gavin Schmitt claims (and of course not only him) the red curve would represent reality.
“In actuality the surface emits about 150 Watts per square meter (W/m2) more than goes out to space”
As 240 go into space, adding 150 means 390, and that is only true for a perfect emitter at 288K.
> As the article explains, Gavin Schmitt claims (and of course not only him) the red curve would represent reality.
Here’s what Gavin Schmidt (note the spelling) says:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/2010_schmidt_05/
I’m not sure where’s the implication that a classic “blackbody” represents reality when the very first sentence of thy Wiki is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
E. Schaffer: The red curve does not represent a measurement. Period. It’s just the Planck Law for a blackbody, as seen with no atmosphere above it.
@Willard
288^4 * 5.67e-8 = 390
and 390 – 150 = 240
So when Gavin Schmitt says the surface would emit 150W/m2 more than go to space, he means the surface would emit 390W/m2, which is only true for a perfect emitter at 288K. I mean that is next to an endless number of “energy budget” diagrams claiming some 390W/m2 or even higher. And next to the “red curve” suggesting a perfectly emitting surface.
“I’m not sure where’s the implication that a classic “blackbody” represents reality”
Well, maybe you are blind.
@David A.
Are you a bot? If you do not have a point, you just repeat some senseless phrases like a broken record? Interesting..
> So when Gavin Schmitt
Again, E. Schmidt.
As for your “but emissivity”:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2021/04/25/mind-your-units/
@Willard
You are talking to my feet, not my head. You have no clue what you are up against, as your quotation of not so smart articles responding to even worse ones shows. lol
E,
You must be new here.
The name is Gavin Schmidt. A blackbody is an idealization.
@Willard
True, corrected.
Thank you.
I added “emissivity estimates” to my Contrarian Matrix:
https://contrarianmatrix.wordpress.com/lots-of-theories/
I find this article and the comments very entertaining because they show the complete lack of understanding the fundamental principles of causation. I spent 25 years teaching these principles to scientists and engineers who worked for most of the Fortune 500 companies, NASA, FAA, US Military, etc. and none of them had ever been taught these fundamental principles. So, it is no surprise that people spew this ignorance about the core principles of science. Specifically: Every time you ask why, you must get at least two answers in the form of an action cause and one or more conditional causes. When you ask why again, you get at least four causes, then 8,16,32,64, etc. The only thing that stops this infinite set is when we are humble enough to acknowledge we don’t know – our point of ignorance!
Dean, if we don’t know anything, how did NASA put men on the moon?
David Says: Dean, if we don’t know anything, how did NASA put men on the moon?
If NASA relied on the statistics like “Mike’s Nature Trick to Hide the Decline” NASA would never have even been able to make a paper plane fly. Just look at the results of the climate models. They fail miserably. The fact that NASA allows their name to be attached to such garbage is appalling, but that is their objective.
https://imgur.com/KEQ3aOZ
https://imgur.com/SUGl8Of
https://imgur.com/a/IrE63Xo
If NASA relied on the statistics like “Mike’s Nature Trick to Hide the Decline”
Clearly you have NO idea what that sentence meant, which had nothing to do with statistics.
You should be soundly embarrassed.
Just look at the results of the climate models. They fail miserably.
“We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful [14 of 17 projections] in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model‐projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.”
“Evaluating the performance of past climate model projections,” Hausfather et al, Geo Res Lett 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085378
figure:
https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1202271427807678464?lang=en
That is a really hard question. I worked with the people who put man on the moon, I am one of them.
I tried to work with the same people to understand climate and they said, “it is too hard and would take too long”
Go figure!
If you think these are successful models, you don’t know what a successful model is.BTW, in any settled science, there is only 1 model and it exactly models the observations. Climate Science is nowhere near that.
People that believe climate “scientists” are creating valid models are simply living in denial.
https://imgur.com/WilpgD0
David says: “We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful [14 of 17 projections] in predicting subsequent GMST changes,
If that is true, they must have a code that explains the dogleg in 1980. They must have a code that explains the cooling between 1880 and 1910, and the no warming between 1940 and 1980. If you can show the code that takes a variable that only increases, and can model a variable that increases, goes flat, and increases then they have created a whole new field of statistics and mathematics. BTW, Mike’s Nature Trick to Hide the Decline is exactly what it says.
https://youtu.be/XvhouGwqVt4
Classic:
In order to claim it’s worse than we thought, Appell cites a paper that admits that all the models run very warm, but claims success anyway because observations are only just slightly lower than the lowest of low modeled warming.
The correct way of putting that- activists and the media have exaggerated potential warming since the 1970s (at least the ones who weren’t predicting cooling at the time).
Appell cites a paper that admits that all the models run very warm
Of course, it doesn’t show that at all. Typical though.
The “dogleg” is a product of your lousy curve-fitting.
BTW, Mike’s Nature Trick to Hide the Decline is exactly what it says.
Decline in what?
BTW, in any settled science, there is only 1 model and it exactly models the observations.
Your mistake is thinking that all these models are intended to be identical. There are good reasons they are not — to test competing submodels, different parametrizations, computing algorithms, etc. That’s one reason Spencer’s comparison to 63 models (or whatever) is rather meaningless (and misleading).
BTW, many established areas of science, such as gravity, have more than one competing model. And they’re far more mature than climate science. Even quantum mechanics.
Putting men on the moon was real
The future climate is imaginary.
Putting men on the moon was real
The future climate is imaginary.
Both involve solving the underlying equations of physics as expressed by known physical laws.
“‘Putting men on the moon was real
The future climate is imaginary.’
Both involve solving the underlying equations of physics as expressed by known physical laws.”
No, they don’t. Good luck solving the equations for the atmosphere. There are no closed form solutions for the relevant equations of fluid dynamics. That’s why they use models – approximations to solve what you simply cannot solve with math.
One of the lies told about climate models is that since they use proven laws of physics, they are correct. In fact, because of the chaotic nature of the atmosphere, those proven laws are not sufficient for correctness, In addition, because of many orders of magnitude too little computational resource, the physics cannot be well modeled. That’s why they use “parameterizations” of all sorts of different types, including heuristics, to deal with sub-grid scale phenomena.
Climate modeling is hard, and not unlikely to be impossible – at least by using finite element models and running them forward in time steps way into the future. But that’s what they do.
Real science is done in parameterization development, but most of that can be actually *tested* because the same parameterizations work in weather models, which produce predictions (projections if you want to be picky) that are tested within days to a couple of weeks.
To highlight just how nonsensical the data is supporting this climate alarmist, NASA literally produced two major data sets that tell completely different stories. The NASA GISS shows 1 degree C increase since 1980…but no warming for the 90 years prior. For some reason, the physics of the CO2 molecule only work after 1980. Then NASA uses it satellite to get extremely accurate measurements, and you get literally no warming since 1980. Well, 0.08 degrees, and it was negative last month. Here are the charts.
https://imgur.com/QSvpyvd
co2islife: decline in what?
Appel claims the study doesn’t show the models run warm.
The study’s author disagrees:
“”By and large our models have gotten it right, plus or minus a little bit,” said Hausfather, a UC Berkeley scientist who is climate and energy director at the Breakthrough Institute. “If they get it wrong, it’s slightly on the warm side, but I wouldn’t read too much into that.”
To define “slightly,” remember that this gang still believes that Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” (millions would starve to death in the US in the 1980s) and James Hansen 1988 (the Westside Highway will be underwater by today) “have gotten it right, plus or minus a little bit.”
And, of course, look at the charts showing observations running at or below the lowest of the low projections for warming. Because that’s what they were saying- right? We all remember Willard and Appel saying for years and years that global warming would be less than the low-end of any projections, right?
Ehrlich’s only mistake, learned by the climate glitteratti, was that if he had simply “projected” a range of starvation deaths of somewhere between zero and one million, his projection would have been “right.” As it is, Ehrlich leads the chorus of activist scientists in saying the dates for his catastrophic projections were merely “slightly” off.
This is a Newsflash, Science is done by disagreeing with the consensus. I’ve never seen an experiment when the objective was to accept the Null. Every experiment I’ve seen the objective is to reject the null. You reject the tyranny of the status quo. Politics is done by polls and consensus, science is done by experimentation and data analysis. BTW, no climate alarmist can explain why a 33% increase in CO2 can result in 0.00 warming.
BTW, if something is understood, it can be modeled. Alarmists can’t model temperature using CO2 as a significant independent variable. That is all you need to know about this “science.” They can’t model their theory without “adjusting” the data, so they rely on canceling critics and the consensus of like-minded political activists masquerading as scientists.
https://imgur.com/a/IrE63Xo
BTW, no climate alarmist can explain why a 33% increase in CO2 can result in 0.00 warming.
{eye roll}
when was this?
can’t model temperature using CO2 as a significant independent variable.
Exxon, 1982:
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vblbm8bE-vo/XOCobvj2XII/AAAAAAAAE_U/qh1lXDvR090GcZgMGGk4LJCDsyGHKRp3wCLcBGAs/s1600/temperature%2Bplot.png
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that Exxon had scientists that made predictions in 1982 that turned out to be completely wrong.
“Completely wrong” in what way?
What happened in 1980?
“The present findings corroborate the earlier conclusion based on study of the Paleozoic climate that “global climate may be independent of variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.” [64] (p.198).
Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. J. Hansen, D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, G. RussellScience: 28 August 1981, Volume 213, Number 4511
…”The major difficulty in accepting this theory has been the absence of observed warming coincident with the historic C02 increase. In fact, the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere decreased by about 0.5°C between 1940 and 1970 (9), a time of rapid C02 buildup. In addition, recent claims that climate models overestimate the impact of radiative perturbations by an order of magnitude (10, 11) have raised the issue of whether the greenhouse effect is well understood.” …
(The authors are atmospheric physicists at the NASA Institute for Space Studies, Goddard Space Flight Center. New York 10025.) D. Johnson contributed to the carbon dioxide research as a participant in the Summer Institute on Planets and Climate at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University.)
http://www.sealevel.info/1981_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
Reference 11 from above article is found in “Science. 1980 Mar 28;207(4438):1462-3. The following is an excerpt from reference 11.
The Climatological Significance of a Doubling of Earth’s Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration. Idso SB.1
1U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory, 4331 East Broadway, Phoenix, Arizona 85040
Abstract: “The mean global increase in thermal radiation received at the surface of the earth as a consequence of a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide content is calculated to be 2.28 watts per square meter. Multiplying this forcing function by the atmosphere’s surface air temperature response function, which has recently been determined by three independent experimental analyses to have a mean global value of 0.113 K per watt per square meter, yields a value of </= 0.26 K for the resultant change in the mean global surface air temperature. This result is about one order of magnitude less than those obtained from most theoretical numerical models, but it is virtually identical to the result of a fourth experimental approach to the problem described by Newell and Dopplick. There thus appears to be a major discrepancy between current theory and experiment relative to the effects of carbon dioxide on climate. Until this discrepancy is resolved, we should not be too quick to limit our options in the selection of future energy alternatives.”
PMID: 17779615 DOI: 10.1126/science.207.4438.1462
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17779615
This is a Newsflash, Science is done by disagreeing with the consensus. I’ve never seen an experiment when the objective was to accept the Null.
Snarf. Many of the experiments done in particle physics over the last several decades were to confirm the prediction of new particles. Like that of the Higgs boson a few years ago at CERN. The LIGO gravitational wave detector was set up to specifically to confirm the prediction of gravitational waves made by Einstein in 1916. g-factor of the electron, Lamb shift, and on and on and on and on. In general I find that you never know what you are talking about.
In the history of science, the scientific consensus is often later proven to be wrong. Sometimes slightly wrong. Sometimes completely wrong. And there is often resistance to new ideas by those who want to keep the consensus alive.
That’s why a consensus is meaningless in science. It is also interesting that large steps forward in science are often made by indiividuals, or small teams of scientists, who disproved the existing consensus at the time. Having a concsensus does not create truth.
The consensus is not often wrong. Give examples.
Do you understand why the concept of consensus is used in climate science, but rarely cited in other sciences?
“Snarf. Many of the experiments done in particle physics over the last several decades were to confirm the prediction of new particles.”
No, they were done to test the predictions. There’s a difference.
And many were done to look for predicted particles that were not found (at the energies they searched).
Experiments to “confirm” are not really in Popper’s view. They can confirm or refute an a hypothesis, and that is proper science.
And, while much science works along with consensus, many important breakthroughs come from challenging consensus views. Such challenges are often met with the sort of suppression and denial we see addressed at climate skeptics, or at those who thought that a lab leak might have been the cause of COVID19, or at those who thought that aerosol transmission was important in COVID19.
David Appell | June 2, 2021 at 1:27 pm |
The consensus is not often wrong. Give examples.
David Appell’s comment – “Do you understand why the concept of consensus is used in climate science, but rarely cited in other sciences?”
Perhaps because “climate Science ” is less about actual science.
Further on “What happened in 1980?”
“Natural v. forged consensus. The consensus concerning the behavior of the observed globally averaged temperature is pretty much a natural consensus. The consensus concerning the model response to increasing CO2 is not. The issue is described by Boehmer-Christiansen in both the 1 December issue of Nature and in a book-length analysis. Briefly, a number of groups in the early 80’s wanted to push increasing levels of CO2 as a major environmental issue. However, it was recognized that this would be difficult to do in view of the degree of scientific disarray on the issue of anthropogenic global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created in order to forge a consensus on the scenario of significant warming (rather than to objectively assess the issue in terms of supporting and contradictory findings) so as to facilitate the development of international policy. Even so, such consensus as was forged was largely restricted to the Policymakers Summaries of the IPCC documents rather than the detailed texts. Moreover, the extent of the claimed consensus has steadily diminished in IPCC documents as one goes from the 1990 report through the 1992 update,to the 1994 report on warming potentials, and to the forthcoming 1995 report 4. Clearly, the rapidity with which these reports are produced has little to do with the normal cycle of scientific research. Also, the effort involved in producing such a flurry of documents is largely incompatible with doing research. I would suggest that one is seeing a fairly harried effort to preserve whatever consensus has been forged until policy can be enacted.
Packing the consensus. Of course, the whole issue has been further confused by the attempt (largely successful) by environmental advocates to mix natural with forged consensus, natural climate fluctuations with anthropogenic warming, insignificant warming with large warming, and the present relative warmth with predictions of steadily increasing warmth. To this they have added totally hypothetical claims of various consequences of putative global warming, and in all of this, they have been abetted by journalists. The whole disorderly exercise has been subsumed within a single label, and universal scientific agreement has been claimed for the resulting confusion 5.”
3 Boehmer-Christiansen, S.A., 1994. A scientific agenda for climate policy? Nature,372,400-402.
4 There is a natural attempt to suggest in various summaries and press releases that progress is rendering the global warming scenario more certain. However, scrutiny of the detailed statements reveals no real evidence of this. Rather, one finds such one finds such odd contradictions as the1990 and 1992 reports claiming broad consistency between model predictions and observations,while the 1994 and 1995 reports attempt to use the very uncertain and largely undocumented behavior of sulfate aerosols to account for the previously ignored discrepancies between predictions with which these reports are produced has little to do with the normal cycle of scientific research.Also, the effort involved in producing such a flurry of documents is largely incompatible with doing research. I would suggest that one is seeing a fairly harried effort to preserve whatever consensus has been forged until policy can be enacted.”
From Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved, R.W. Hahn, editor, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996.Science and Politics: Global Warming and Eugenics. Richard S. Lindzen Sloan Professor of Meteorology. M.I.T.August 31, 1995
‘In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, not withstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.’ Isaac Newton
The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) defined abrupt climate change as a new climate paradigm as long ago as 2002. A paradigm in the scientific sense is a theory that explains observations. A new science paradigm is one that better explains data – in this case climate data – than the old theory. The new theory says that climate change occurs as discrete jumps in the system. Climate is more like a kaleidoscope – shake it up and a new pattern emerges – than a control knob with a linear gain. This is the current dominant climate science paradigm.
The elaborate conspiracy theory of this post suggests that we should remain open to contrarian thought bubbles. The same ones endlessly – unless it’s some mad ‘new physics’ about rotisserie planetary warming or neutron star matter driven climate change. But all in all we have made reasonable inferences from geophysical data and – even with absolute uncertainty – it is more than time to move on to reasonable policy.
‘The global climate system is composed of a number of subsystems — atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere — each
of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’ A Mathematical Theory of Climate Sensitivity or, How to Deal With Both Anthropogenic Forcing and Natural Variability?
Climate is an emergent property of the dynamic interaction of Earth subsystems. We leap to that dramatic conclusion via nonlinear toy models – from Edward Lorenz, Michael Ghil and Demetris Koutsoyiannis to Anastasios Tsonis. The latter uses climate indices to identify synchronous changes associated with state changes in the climate system on decadal scales. These toy models embody a conceptual understanding of the behaviour of the system as Hurst-Kolmogorov stochastic dynamics seen in geophysical series at all scales.
Lorenz’s toy model provides a key to understanding the temporal chaos of the finite dimensional phase space of climate models. In the spatio-temporal chaos of the Earth system the convenient finite dimensional phase space is lost. ‘That’s why almost nothing transports from temporal chaos to spatio-temporal chaos. There are no attractors, bifurcations and such. The whole mathematical apparatus has to be invented from scratch and it will take decades. To know the state of the system, we must know all the fields at all points – this is an uncountable infinity of dimensions.’ Tomas Milanovic
It is of course well beyond our current capacity to model and predict the Earth system. The most that can be said is that human emitted greenhouse gases bias a chaotic system to a warmer state. There is implicit in chaos the risk of dramatic and rapid change emerging from small changes in the Earth system. That much should be accepted as truth in line with Isaac Newton’s 4th rule of natural philosophy. There are of course those who don’t and never will.
The politically pragmatic response is the ‘raising up of human dignity via three overarching objectives: ensuring energy access for all; ensuring that we develop in a manner that does not undermine the essential functioning of the Earth system; ensuring that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever their cause may be.’ The Hartwell Paper 2010
Robert wrote:
Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’
There is much wisdom in the words he wrote.
The subsystems most often ignored involve ice.
When the Arctic is thawed in warmer times, it snows more until more ice is dumped into the oceans to cause a cooler time, a little ice age. In the cold time, the Arctic is frozen and there is no significant snowfall on sequestered ice and it flows into the ocean and thaws, keeping the ocean cold and frozen until the ice runs out and then it warms into a Roman or Medieval or Modern Warm time and the cycle repeats. This is simple and fully supported by the ice core data.
The climate systems have capacitors and inductors in a dynamic system with many parts. The consensus climate analysis deals with a static solution to a dynamics problem. That does mean that their solution is 100% wrong, all the time.
This common sense article should be self evident. But in this bizarro world of obsessive religious adherents the criticisms will abound. There is nothing scientific with the AGW fanatics l
There is nothing scientific with the AGW fanatics
Read this and get back to us:
https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/65562/cover/9780521865562.jpg
I rest my case. Adult science is not done with 5th grade equations.
Go read the book before you speak. Have a look at Chapter 4.
Predictable. As the AMO flips and the church of CAGW collapses, we can expect coping mechanisms manifested in the behavior of the most committed zealots.
‘The climate system is made up of building blocks which in themselves are based on elementary physical principles, but which have surprising and profound collective behavior when allowed to interact on the planetary scale. In this sense, the ”climate game” is rather like the game of Go, where interesting structure emerges from the interaction of simple rules on a big playing field, rather than complexity in the rules themselves. This book is intended to provide a rapid entrée into this fascinating universe of problems for the student who is already somewhat literate in physics and mathematics, but who has not had any previous experience with climate problems.’ Principles of Planetary Climate
Knowing the building blocks is a prerequisite – and putting them together is the way to creatively advance science. Most of us don’t get close to that ideal.
The climate ‘debate’ is more a dogs breakfast than a feast of ideas. Many can’t get past the 2nd LoT – and I have noticed in the most recent posts some having problems with the 1st. I suggest – btw – that if David has mastered radiative transfers – he flip through to the final chapter on dynamics. He has a lot of catching up to do.
Psychiatrist offices will be packed greater than an Elton John concert as a new monthly crankiness enters the mental health nomenclature brought on by the monthly release of temperature data absent any warming trend. Fragile egos will litter the landscape when reality sets in. No warming.
The hottest investment tip for the next 2 decades, surpassing even cryptocurrency, new ski resorts. Unprecedented snow will have them flocking to the slopes.
Mr. Appell
Great response !
‘Go read a book’
It has to be true
Because it’s in a book
And I (you) like the book.
= Automatic truth
We can see hints of the ubiquitous multidecadal signal. The AMO is likely an aspect of broader flow patterns. Without an evident mechanism for changing climate on its own account. But cool states seem reasonably consistent with warmer surface conditions – on top of the secular warming trend removed from the index.
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/styles/node_key_figures_display/public/key_figures/climate_data_set/AMOindex-Zhang.png
The AMO acts as a negative feedback to changes in the solar wind temperature/pressure, via the NAO/AO. The three colder AMO anomalies in the early-mid 1970’s, the mid 1980’s, and the early 1990’s, are exactly during the periods of strongest solar wind conditions of the space age. The same pattern occurred around 1904, 1914, and 1924, also all near sunspot minimum. The post 1995 weakening of the solar wind corresponds to the warming of the AMO since then.
https://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/esrl-amo/from:1900/mean:11
Your AMO Graphic pretty much explains why you have a cyclical pattern in temperatures in the N Hemi, and not the N Hemi. CO2 has nothing to do with the AMO, and LWIR between 13 and 18 won’t warm water. Visible radiation does. Anyway, compare the AMO Graphic to the N Hemi in this chart. Once again, the published data rules out CO2 as the cause of warming, yet NASA GISS uses non-CO2 warming to implicate CO2 for the warming.
https://imgur.com/KBWewBh
This AMO vs Temperature Graphic pretty much rules out CO2 as the cause of the warming.
https://imgur.com/rcMFKkz
https://imgur.com/r5Ncrhx
The more you dig, the less convincing the alarmists become. Why isn’t NASA stopping the misrepresentation of their data? Trillions will be spent fighting this non-existent threat. Don’t you think we should first cure cancer, educate our children, and solve real problems before we go on these nonsensical Quixotic ventures? Children graduate in Chicago that can’t read, and we want to stop the climate from changing. How absurd is that?
“Children graduate in Chicago that can’t read, and we want to stop the climate from changing. How absurd is that?” Children graduate in Chicago that can’t read, but they want to stop the climate from changing. How absurd is that?
I think you should stop digging and start exploring.
I think you should make the important distinction between AGW and CAGW.
AGW is supported by science. More CO2 is ecpected to cause some global warming. There has been warming since the mid-1970s. We can’t prove CO2 caused x% of that warming, but it is a logical assumption that more greenhouse gases should cause some global warming. The lab science suggests mild warming. The actual warming was mild. But there were periods of 10 years or more when CO2 levels rose, but the global average temperature did not.
But there is no science, or observations, to make the claim of a coming climate crisis, or CAGW. That claim seemed to have begin with oceanographer Roger Revelle in 1957, although stated quietly, with uncertainty. The same coming crisis claim has been made for the past 64 years, seeming to get louder, and more confident, with every year, as if the climate alarmists are getting more frustrated that no climate crisis has begun.
AGW = reasonable assuumption
CAGW = unreasonable assumption
AGW is contradicted and falsified by science. Human CO2 causes no i.e. zero increase or decrease in temperature. Human CO2, fossil fuels CO2, cement production, breathing etc does not change the net global CO2 atmospheric concentration. Net global CO2 concentration is determined by Henry’s Law. Net global CO2 concentration is independent of the source of the CO2. Increasing CO2 output only results in increasing ionic forms of CO2 in water and eventually more limestone, dolomite, calcite precipitation in water. Henry’s Law maintains the gas/liquid partition of CO2 at the ocean and water surface everywhere (even raindrops) very rapidly (seconds) based dominantly on temperature and ocean surface area at that temperature. If ocean surface is above ~26 C then CO2 is outgassing into air. If ocean surface is below ~ 26 C then ocean surface is absorbing CO2 gas. Salinity/pH play a minor role too. This in no way implies that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. CO2 absorbs and emits LWIR. But human CO2 does not increase total CO2, therefore human CO2 produces no incremental warming or cooling or greening, glacial melting, social injustice, etc. Global warming is a global fraud.
Bud: when we burn fossil fuels, where does the CO2 go?
What’s causing the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere and ocean, and why did it begin with the industrial era?
But there were periods of 10 years or more when CO2 levels rose, but the global average temperature did not.
Everyone here really should write this on a Post-it note and stick it to their monitor:
CO2 IS NOT THE ONLY INFLUENCE ON CLIMATE.
budbromley,
I visited your site. Thank you for the wonderful job you do:
https://budbromley.blog/2021/05/27/how-much-co2-is-in-a-raindrop-how-much-co2-is-in-the-ocean-how-much-co2-is-in-the-air/
“How much CO2 is in a raindrop? How much CO2 is in the ocean? How much CO2 is in the air?
Posted on May 27, 2021 by budbromley”
“AGW is contradicted and falsified by science. Human CO2 causes no i.e. zero increase or decrease in temperature. Human CO2, fossil fuels CO2, cement production, breathing etc does not change the net global CO2 atmospheric concentration. Net global CO2 concentration is determined by Henry’s Law. ”
Yes, you are right, “AGW is contradicted and falsified by science. Human CO2 causes no i.e. zero increase or decrease in temperature.”
I would like to add here that in atmosphere-ocean surface, and in atmosphere-water droplets CO2 exchange there is a strong natural “delaying” mechanism to Henry’s Law. To get dissolved by the oceanic surface or in water droplets the CO2 molecules has first to come in contact with the H2O in a way that permits their capturing…
This natural “delaying” mechanism, I think, is partially explains the reason the atmosphere CO2 content is continuously rising.
The fossil fuels burning is the major contributor to the CO2 rising in atmosphere content.
“Human CO2 causes no i.e. zero increase or decrease in temperature. “
Yes, because the CO2 content (400 ppm) in Earth’s atmosphere is a trace gas in a 1 bar (Earth has a very thin atmosphere).
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Chris, did you watch this short video: https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_-ziliLAdom4
bud, I watched the video now and I liked it.
What is your point.
Henry’s K and CO2 equilibrium between CO2 gas in water surface and CO2 gas in air are independent of the source of the CO2. The ~400 ppmv net global average CO2 concentration and its trend are independent of human CO2 emission. Henry’s Gas Law K is independent of sources and sinks. In this video lecture, Professor Murry Salby, atmospheric physicist, goes though the differential math demonstrating that net global average CO2 concentration is independent of human emissions. About 30 minutes. https://youtu.be/b1cGqL9y548
“Sea water contains 20 g of CO2/cm2 of the earth’s surface, as against 0.4 g/cm2 in the atmosphere.” (Mason) That is a 50:1 CO2 gas ratio.
Emissions of human CO2 do not change Henry’s K partition ratio. The observed record of net global average atmospheric CO2 concentration, e.g., at NOAA Keeling Lab at Mauna Loa, is NOT a record of human CO2 emissions, not even partially. It is a record of the Henry’s K equilibrium, the residual difference between two multi gigaton per year simultaneously operating fluxes (i.e. CO2 absorption into water vs CO2 emission from water) based on temperature. The 2 ppmv per year slope for 2020 with a large shark’s teeth change acceleration and deceleration slope within 2020 which returns to 2 ppmv slope indicates extremely large sinks and sources and very high fluxes. The CO2 trend from the last ice age to today is a record of Henry’s law acting to adjust the CO2 partition based on temperature change. Human-produced CO2 cannot change the global CO2 concentration, therefore human produced CO2 results in no net warming, or more accurately said, no net reduced cooling.
In addition to Henry’s Law, the ocean’s infinite buffer for carbon is removing aqueous CO2 gas from the liquid side of the Henry’s partition ratio, with the result of forcing absorption of more CO2 from air.
“The Law of Mass Action ensures when all these chemical reactions have been accounted for in the total net reaction (and when increasing the amount of a gas, CO2, in the air), calcium carbonate (solid) will be stabilized in the ocean, because the chemical reaction will be forced in the direction from left to right. This result is the opposite of what is commonly asserted (that solid calcium carbonate would be dissolved by the increasing amount of CO2 in the air).” (Segalstad)
“The loss of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by deposition as carbonate and organic carbon in sedimentary rock was estimated by Rubey as totaling 920 X 1020 g. More recently, Wickman (1956) has published some revised figures. He places the amount of carbonate carbon per square meter of earth’s surface as 2420 +/- 560 g and of organic carbon at 700 +/- 200 g. Taking the figure of 3100 g/m=cm2 for the total amount of carbon transferred from the atmosphere to the sedimentary rock, this is equal to a total of 158 X 1020 g of carbon, or 580 X 1020 g of CO2. This latter figure is of the same order of magnitude as Rubey’s but considerably lower. The figures show clearly that the amount of carbon dioxide deposited in sedimentary rocks far exceeds the amount in the present atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere (about 1.5 X 1020 ), and thus indicate that large amounts of carbon dioxide must have been released from magmatic sources throughout geological time to maintain organic activity. Wickman’s figures show, in addition, that far more carbon dioxide has been removed as limestone and dolomite than as coal or other organic carbon.” (Mason, page 209)
The top 200 meters of ocean has enough CO2 buffering capacity to absorb all human CO2 emissions. (Stumm and Morgan, Jawoworski, Segalstad.) As humans, volcanoes, etc add more CO2 to the air, it becomes limestone, calcite, dolomite, etc. Contrary to the misunderstanding of most people, the ionic chemistry which is continually removing aqueous CO2 gas from water and from the liquid side of the Henry’s partition operates in seconds and this is easily demonstrated. It is only the emission and re-solution of solid carbonates side of this carbon chemistry from stone or slurry that require years, or centuries for volcanic eruptions or erosion of exposed stone. The absorption of CO2 gas into liquid water and the dissolution of aqueous CO2 gas into its several ionic forms and their reaction with calcium and other abundant ocean ions in alkaline ocean happens in seconds.
In lab practice, the absorption or emission adjustments due to Henry’s law are so fast that special methods and instruments for isobaric and isothermal control are required to capture accurate, intact samples. This is a problem in Keeling data. Keeling said the methods were more numerous than the people taking samples. CO2 rapidly either outgasses or absorbs from water as the flask or sampling valve is being filled so that what is measured does no longer represents the environmental sample, unless special instrumentation and care is taken. This is a very real problem that brings into question the measure of CO2 in ice core samples, from which all kinds of assumptions are made with regard to CO2 trend. Zbigniew Jaworowski, Salby and others have discussed these reliability issues.
CO2 flux is a directional vector of an amount of CO2 flowing per unit time, through a unit area. In this case, the unit area is the surface area of water everywhere which is in contact with atmosphere. The amount of CO2 flowing per second per square meter of water surface is an enormous amount flowing in two directions, into the atmosphere and into the water, with the direction based on temperature, and both directional fluxes are more than 10 times larger than fossil fuel emissions.
Henry’s Law is very well known and understood chemistry used in thousands of labs every day. It is the basis of the gas chromatography industry. But that does not imply it is easy to sample and measure with accuracy and precision. In 1803 William Henry observed that the amount of gases such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, etc were taken up by water at a particular temperature and ratio of the gas in the water and gas above were proportional and the proportion varied by temperature. The ratio is called the Henry’s constant K, which is different for each gas. Tables of Henry’s constants are in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics found in most chemistry labs. Mackay et al. (2006) among others has compiled measurements of Henry’s Constant for over a thousand compounds for pure water under standard temperature and pressure as well as additional salinities and temperatures using a variety of methods. The math is well known and results are accurate and predictable. Optimal design of the measurement system for a specific Henry’s partition is of enormous importance and has been studied for over 100 years. Naively estimating the slope-to-intercept ratio is dangerous: the sample slope divided by the sample intercept estimator has infinite moments and varies wildly. Nevertheless, refineries, chemical plants of all kinds, engines, power plants, hazardous wastes, phase strippers, etc operate based on this chemistry. This is not theory or hypothesis or estimation. This is a gas law of chemistry and physics.
The ratio of CO2 gas in atmosphere and liquid water in all forms (rain, dew, ocean, lakes, soil, cloud droplets) adjusts continually based primarily on temperature. Winds and ocean currents affect Henry’s partition. Smaller effects (relative to total water volume, and relatively stable STP) are pH and water pressure. A cloud passing over warm ocean surface in daylight will change water from emitting CO2 to absorbing CO2. Gigatons of CO2 are moving into and out of water every second, all day every day.
The source of the CO2 is irrelevant to the partition ratio. The residence time of the CO2 in atmosphere or water is irrelevant to the partition. The carbon isotope ratio is irrelevant to the Henry’s partition ratio. Ocean water that is more or less alkaline changes the partition ratio, but in any event ocean’s alkaline pH favors absorption and CO2 dissolution, which increases the reactant side pushing the calcium carbonate ionic chemistry reaction equation to the product side, which means continuously more precipitate calcite, dolomite, limestone, etc. The enormous size of the oceanic buffer for carbon means that pH change of ocean is minimal and carbon from CO2 will not significantly change ocean pH, much less change it to acidic. (Segalstad)
When humans or volcanoes etc add more CO2 to air, water absorbs more CO2 to rebalance Henry’s partition to maintain the ratio for that local temperature. Globally averaged water and air temperature are irrelevant and deceptive; local temperature for a surface area of water is determinant of absorption or emission flux, below or above about 26 C (78 F) respectively. The local temperature at a water surface controls the Henry’s partition to 50 parts CO2 gas in water to 1 part CO2 gas in air. The slowly increasing net global average atmospheric CO2 concentration reported in NOAA Mauna Loa and elsewhere, presently trending on a slope of about 2ppmv per year, is the record of temperature affecting the equilibrium equation for Henry’s partition ratio.
CO2 is a “greenhouse gas” and absorbs and emits LWIR. But human CO2 has no effect on net global CO2 concentration except in local cells and locations, for example the CO2 concentration in front of the face of AGW proponents and in their conferences varies more than 100% within seconds. But CO2 is rapidly and chaotically mixed with more than 10 times this amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere. Human CO2 causes no net change in radiative emissions nor warming (nor slower cooling), nor sea level change, nor greening, nor melting glaciers, nor changes in social justice. Zero.
“Stop treating it [i.e., AGW…human-caused global warming/climate change] as a worthy opponent. Do not ascribe reasonableness to the other side. It is not reasonable, not true, not even plausible.” ~ Richard Lindzen, Professor Emeritus, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (31 March 2021. Zoom lecture Clintel Foundation.)
References:
Mason, Brian. Principles of Geochemistry.
Stumm, Werner; Morgan, James J. authors. Aquatic chemistry : an introduction emphasizing chemical equilibria in natural waters. 1981
Segalstad_Chapter-6-3-1-2_Ocean-Chemistry_NIPCC_CCR-II-B_2014. P819.
Salby, Murry. Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate.
Salby, Murry. Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics.
bud, thank you.
I visited the video with the lecture of Professor Murry Salby, atmospheric physicist, that net global average CO2 concentration is independent of human emissions. About 1 hour and 30 minutes.
https://youtu.be/b1cGqL9y548
bud, you wrote:
“…The local temperature at a water surface controls the Henry’s partition to 50 parts CO2 gas in water to 1 part CO2 gas in air. The slowly increasing net global average atmospheric CO2 concentration reported in NOAA Mauna Loa and elsewhere, presently trending on a slope of about 2ppmv per year, is the record of temperature affecting the equilibrium equation for Henry’s partition ratio.”
Please, help me understand the following:
Does the “50 parts CO2 gas in water to 1 part CO2 gas in air” mean 400 ppm CO2 in air and 400 * 50 = 20000 ppm CO2 in water?
And if so, at what water temperature the 800 ppm CO2 in air could occur?
Also, if there were 800 ppm CO2 in air the CO2 gas in water at what proportion to the CO2 gas in air would be?
“Consensus thinking should not be confused with consensus science. It is a historical truism that all science tends to consensus until it does not, at which point a new consensus forms around a new insight.”
The James Webb Space Telescope is due to bring eye-opening new insights next year, being the advanced replacement for the Hubble.
Prepare yourselves for a new theory of gravity leading to the ultimate realisation of climate change via gravitational forcing.
New physics gravitational forcing of the equatorial regions correlates with the latest research linking El Niño/La Nina climate cycles with human evolution:
….
Scientists are proposing a new theory of human evolution.
A groundbreaking new analysis of data suggests that key evolutionary changes in prehistory were driven by cyclical changes in tropical climate.
In the past, most scientific attention had been paid to northern hemisphere ice ages as an evolutionary driver – but now scientists are suggesting that changing cycles of El Niño and La Niña weather phenomena, in a zone around the equator, were also key contributors to human evolution over the past 3.5 million years.
….
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/el-nino-human-evolution-b1857019.html?amp
It’s only one small step for mainstream science to conclude that dark matter formed immediately at the time of the Big Bang, not only creating the core of galaxies but also the ‘seeds’ for known matter to coalesce around, creating stars and planets.
….
Supermassive black holes could be formed out of dark matter, a new study has suggested.
Researchers have observed supermassive black holes as early as 800 million years after the Big Bang. It is not clear how they could form in such little time, or how they were initially created.
….
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/space/black-holes-dark-matter-supermassive-b1806827.html
The idea of exotic matter exerting a strong gravitational interaction between cores allows for scientific unification of the known forces.
A yet even stronger gravitational interaction between cores when on the same plane of rotation, allows for a tidal forcing hypothesis for the ice ages as well as all other climate cycles, including the El Nino/La Nina of the equatorial regions.
“You only have to spend an hour or two revisiting 60s music to realise we’re stuck in a cultural dark age right now”
https://youtu.be/OqcDG_xLWPY
Thank you Alan.
A double thanks. It brings back memories of my white bell bottoms, madras shirt and blue and white shoes.
“A double thanks. It brings back memories of my white bell bottoms, madras shirt and blue and white shoes.”
It’s a pleasure. Thank you both :)
Alan Lowry: That song makes the 1960s look bad, except for the two dancing girls. A hog caller and a garage band. Here is an antidote from 1964, when I first became an audiophile:
“She’s Not There” by The Zombies:
Cliff – you miss the essence of the song, which is very 60s and why it was a hit.
That said, I much appreciate your contribution. It’s a shame there isn’t a dvd documentary for the Zombies which I could add to my collection.
Rather than fixating on Leftists killing off the free enterprise economy, the unending political scandals, the failure of consensus-driven climate science and the many examples of global warming alarmists being about as liberal as ISIS, we are instead heartened to learn that plants love CO2.
we are instead heartened to learn that plants love CO2.
Simplistic. They don’t like higher changes, or droughts, or extreme rainfall. Crops lose nutrients. More insects to devour them. And on and one. “Plants love CO2” is one of the most simplistic statements out there.
Plant’s love CO2 is a simple statement that is true.
Plant’s love CO2 is a simple statement that is true.
Then why are there no plants on Venus or Mars, where the atmospheres are about 96% CO2?
“Then why are there no plants on Venus or Mars, where the atmospheres are about 96% CO2?”
Seriously? You call that an argument?
Plants love CO2 is correct. Sherwood Idso demonstrated that higher CO2 concentrations enhanced the growth of many plants, which is hardly a surprise.
That doesn’t mean plants love a planet with 737K mean temperature and a 92 Bar pressure, nor one with a mean temperature of -210K with a surface pressure of 7mb.
“Indur Goklany has assembled a massive collection of evidence to demonstrate two facts. First, the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are dominant over the climatic effects and are overwhelmingly beneficial. Second, the climatic effects observed in the real world are much less damaging than the effects predicted by the climate models, and have also been frequently beneficial. I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence. Goklany and I do not claim to be infallible. Like the climate-model experts, we have also evolved recently from the culture of the cave-children. Like them, we have inherited our own set of prejudices and blindnesses. Truth emerges when different groups of explorers listen to each other’s stories and correct each other’s mistakes.” Freeman Dyson (2005)
With CO2 enrichment, plants usually prefer warmer temperatures and need less water too.
It is also common for CO2 enriched plants to be MORE resistant to insects and diseases.
Changes in nutrients tend to be very small, and some nutritional values are improved.
You might want to read a few peer reviewed CO2 enrichment studies in prestigious science journals.
Not the few anti-CO2 enrichment studies that you like.
Your depth of knowledge of plants and CO2 enrichment opposes the anti-scientific consensus, and is shallow.
You might want to talk with greenhouse owners about their CO2 enrichment systems.
And you forgot to mention plants also don’t like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, deer, and aliens (crop circles).
Human beings have always had, among their numbers, those who have never stopped believing that progress is possible if you solve a problem. Mathematicians over the ages have produced solutions to many problems as our best guesses, and many have proved sufficient to see progress. Euclid advised us there is no such thing as a straight line although marking out or drawing one gives a very reasonable and useful accuracy. There are patterns in our numbering systems that fascinate us even now, and we are still some way from discovering a pattern in Pi if there is one.
Weather has always confounded us. History tells us that. Even in this age of super computers we know that the closer in time we get to the time of an event the better equipped we are at achieving high degrees of accuracy and yet lightning strikes and other apparently random events still confound us. Climate is simply an attempt to explain weather over longer time periods.
Is climate, like the weather and Euclid’s straight line, not something we will ever accurately know but always have a practical knowledge of and shouldn’t that influence the development of practical solutions rather than idiotic virtue signalling as if we are appeasing a greater authority?
Thanks to Geoffrey Weiss and Claude Roessiger for their article and to Judith Curry for publishing it.
AGW believers Ben Santer, Michael Mann et al authored a peer reviewed paper acknowledging their climate models overstate warming.
“In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble,” reads the first line of the abstract. In other words, the observed temperature trends were less than their models.
“Over most of the early twenty-first century, however, MODEL tropospheric warming is substantially larger than OBSERVED,” reads the abstract, adding that “model overestimation of tropospheric warming in the early twenty-first century is partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.” (Capital letters are mine for emphasis.) In other words, their computer models SUBSTANTIALLY overestimated the global warming which has been observed in the real world.
This means their computer models are not validated and should not be used for decisions, much less to justify the expenditure of millions of dollars and trillions of dollars in GNP impact.
Since CO2 was climbing steadily during the same period as the so-called “hiatus” or “pause” in the temperature trend, AGW hypothesis that human-produced CO2 causes climate change is falsified under the scientific method. The CO2 trend cannot be forcing the temperature trend if the CO2 trend and temperature trend are diverging. There are additional non-theoretical, non-proxy, measured contradictions to AGW, for example the well-known period of ‘global cooling’ from the late 1940’s to the late 1970’s while at the same time the CO2 concentration trend was increasing. There are other non-theoretical, measured contradictions of AGW, for example, the fact that CO2 (NOAA Mauna Loa) continued its ~+2 ppmv per year slope during the 2020 covid-19 pandemic when fossil fuel CO2 emissions declined significantly.
Abstract: https://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2973.html
Paper:http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/articles/articles/SanterEtAlNatureGeosci17.pdf
There are additional non-theoretical, non-proxy, measured contradictions to AGW, for example the well-known period of ‘global cooling’ from the late 1940’s to the late 1970’s while at the same time the CO2 concentration trend was increasing.
Cooling aerosols from post-war, pre-regulation air pollution.
Again: CO2 isn’t the only influence on climate.
Did the cooling aerosols suddenly drop out of the sky in 1975, allowing a global coolinhg trend to end, and allowing a new global warming trend to begin?
Or did the aerosols suddenly lose their ability to block sunlight?
The data on air pollution do NOT show much of a change happening between 1975 and 2000, yet there was global warming?
SO2, for one example, had a peak of emissions in the 1975 to 1980 period, with not much of an emissions reduction by the year 2000.
So how did air pollution aerosols ‘block sunlight’ before 1975, but NOT ‘block sunlight’ after 1975?
“Satellites may have underestimated warming in the lower atmosphere,” LLNL 5/24/21
https://www.llnl.gov/news/satellites-may-have-underestimated-warming-lower-atmosphere
Surface temperature measurements, adjustments, and infilling HAVE repeatedly underestimated warming trends. Or so we are told by later “revisions”.
We know that because of the many “adjustments” that were made, long after the intial measurements and infilling.
For example, the -0.5 to -0.6 degrees C. global cooling from about 1941 to 1970, as reported in the mid-1970s, is now reported as only about -0.1 degree C. global cooling, from 1940 to 1970, which is quite a large revision.
https://wsf-inc.org/sites/wsf-inc.org/files/styles/large/public/blog_time_evolution_radiative_forcing.jpg?itok=-zWy92Qu
We know that because of the many “adjustments” that were made, long after the intial measurements and infilling.
OMG, do you still not understand adjustments and why they are necessary? Go learn.
BTW, the satellite data are FAR MORE heavily adjusted. And they don’t even measure temperatures.
I love the “may have underestimated” science.
David Says: “Satellites may have underestimated warming in the lower atmosphere,” LLNL 5/24/21
https://www.llnl.gov/news/satellites-may-have-underestimated-warming-lower-atmosphere
Funny, RSS models fail as well. Go Figure, maybe GISS is off a bit, ya think?
https://imgur.com/1BNMuTq
https://imgur.com/SUGl8Of
https://imgur.com/fhq1svR
https://imgur.com/WilpgD0
Many of our leading universities have become temples of wokery where lunacy is the norm, discourse is banned and to disagree is to invite being cancelled. It is therefore not surprising that the ultimate virtue signalling triumph, saving the planet, has become the supreme mission and to question any aspect of this is evidence of the devil at work.
Those who have joined this cult have abandoned scientific principles. Having an open mind and practising wokery are incompatible activities. Refusing to contemplate that there are flaws in climate science is to deny the mechanism by which science progresses.
This has been known for a long time:
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. ” H. L. Mencken
And is ever more in evidence today on many subjects in addition to AGW.
This essay by Geoffrey Weiss and Claude Roessiger is the only one I have yet found to identify the primary attributes of scientific scepticism and its benefits, even its necessity. Thank you for showing that some people care and understand this, which is unlike some other prominent bloggers here, who dance to a different tune. Geoff S
Dear Geoffrey, Claude and Judith,
When I were a lad, and an academic, the theories of Thomas Kuhn were more popular than Popper. Hard though that may be to imagine!
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/
Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. To this thesis, Kuhn added the controversial ‘incommensurability thesis’, that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability.
My undergraduate set texts even included The Feynman Lectures on Physics!!!
https://youtu.be/41Jc75tQcB0
What say you?
Best wishes,
Jim
Good morning Judith (UTC),
For some reason my Feynman video seems to have disappeared into your moderation queue.
Would you mind fishing it out for me?
TIA,
Jim
A stimulating piece. I was surprised you did not reference Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he notes that paradigms show particular resistance to “shifting” not only when the science becomes professionalized, and thus the subject of career interest, but also when there is a “moral element” involved. AGW theory has flourished in the anti-capitalist manure that has been building up since before Marx. It is very much rooted in moralistic aversion to capitalism, whose crimes now allegedly include threatening life on earth.
Meanwhile I would be highly skeptical of any list of the characteristics of “Deniers” that appears in a Guardian blog! I have never met anybody who “denied” the mild warming of the past century or so, or that there is a human element. Who are these deniers? They seem an entirely mythical group of demons. Meanwhile those appropriately skeptical are accused of being prepared to “play Russian roulette with the planet.”
AGW theory is as much — if not more — about psychology and ideology as it is about climatology.
Re Kuhn,
You and me both Peter, since my first attempt to introduce his name into the conversation failed to appear, and my 2nd attempt was dissed by Mr. Ellison.
However perhaps you and I could have a vaguely sensible discussion in a quiet corner somewhere?
> However perhaps you and I could have a vaguely sensible discussion in a quiet corner somewhere?
There’s always Roy’s.
Thanks for the tip Willard,
So Roy’s is the place to go for “vaguely sensible discussions in quiet corners” in general? Or Roy is a big fan of Thomas Kuhn? Or possibly even both I suppose?
Jim,
How sensible a discussion can be is up to you, not the place.
There are lots of comments at Roy’s. Each is therefore drowned in noise. I find that it adds quietness.
Mornin’ Willard,
My apologies, I utterly failed to comprehend your remark. Not having been round to Roy’s for years I thought you meant it was now literally quiet rather than full of white noise.
Are there still sky dragons being noisily slain in there on a regular basis?
J.
Robert L. Elison says above:
“There is implicit in chaos the risk of dramatic and rapid change emerging from small changes in the Earth system. That much should be accepted as truth in line with Isaac Newton’s 4th rule of natural philosophy. There are of course those who don’t and never will.”
I don’t know who “those” are, whereas the notion of truth is not a well defined concept. But i shall kindly ask Robert L. Ellison to explain to me how we know that in ‘chaos there is “the risk of dramatic and rapid change emerging from small changes in the Earth system”. From what I know – and I, like quite many other people, may be wrong – the word ‘chaos’ is shorthand for ‘chaos theory’; which is a label of a mathematical discipline. And ‘implicit’ means that something is inherent in the semantics of a word, or an expression, in normal usage. But it does not mean that something is inherent in an entity, object … (you choose). So, how do we come from the – applied mathematics – reasoning to some physical system? As for planets it’s fairly easy to observe and describe their trajectories; while it might be a little more laborious to track the paths of some minor particles that we cannot see. Or, to put it otherwise, how does a NASA definition of the expression “abrubt climate change” change our knowledge about the world? There is much figurative language here: “discrete jumbs in the system”, “a kaleidoscope”, “new patterns”, “control knob”. Tropes may be useful when explaining complicated matters to ordinary people; but they can’t be used to clarify thoughts. And, by the way, as is well known from the history of science not all new paradigms offer “better” explanations. For instance, Chomskyan ‘Generative Linguistics’ offered ‘other’ explanations than those of the traditions, but it has worked about 60 years on trying to demonstrate its theoretical superiority and has not succeeded.
Truth is defined by Isaac Newton as the product of the scientific method. And a new scientific paradigm emerges when the old runs into failures to explain phenomenon. The phenomenon here is the emerging evidence of abrupt climate change in the Earth system. Identified in hundreds of geophysical series. Theories explain observations or it is not science.
e.g. https://history.aip.org/climate/rapid.htm
There is much figurative language here: “discrete jumps in the system”, “a kaleidoscope”, “new patterns”, “control knob”.
Discrete jumps and new patterns is descriptive of abrupt climate change – the CO2 control knob is a widely used trope at odds with system behaviour. A kaleidoscope is something we are all familiar with. Shake it and a new pattern emerges. It is an analogy. Perturb flow in Earth’s spatiotemporal flow field and there are shifts in ocean and atmosphere ‘oscillations’ – i.e. globally coupled new patterns.
It was the NAS and not NASA – and to see what it means requires familiarity with the literature and the observations – and a solid founding in relevant physical sciences – and not just some misguided application of semantics.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2014/06/23/the-unstable-math-of-michael-ghils-climate-sensitivity/
Mornin’ Robert,
Since my prior comment about “the scientific method” still hasn’t appeared I will try again, after double checking for “rude” and otherwise “unusual” words, phrases and links!
When I were a lad, and an academic, the theories of Thomas Kuhn were more popular than Popper! Via Plato at Stanford:
Thomas Kuhn’s academic life started in physics. He then switched to history of science, and as his career developed he moved over to philosophy of science, although retaining a strong interest in the history of physics.
Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions.
Let’s see how that version fares, shall we?
If it is just for me Jim – you needn’t bother trying again.
Evenin’ Robert,
It’s not just for you of course, but I’m surprised to learn that you’re not interested in the philosophy of science in general and Kuhn and/or Popper in particular.
Or have I misunderstand something?
Thanks for a reply, Robert (if I may?)
Well, I’m not sure that Newton meant the same with the word ‘science’ as we do using its modern sense. And, as is widely acknowledged today, there is no such thing as “THE scientific method”. Each science must develop its own theories and methods, depending on the ‘nature’ of its domain. And, furthermore, I to my knowledge Newton’s concept of truth was embedded in the version of classical logic that was prevalent by then, ie. truth functions of linguistically expressed propositions.
Whether a scientific theory, as a set of propositions, is ‘true’, is, by all means, a question that is not easily answered. And there are sometimes competing theories of which finding the candidate for the ‘better one’ is not straightforward. Ockam’s Razor does not always work, and fashion may support the ubiguity of some theories. As with, e.g., Chomskyan linguistics that developed extremely complicated sub-theories, and became widespread, whereas the previous ones had not “run into failures to explain phenomen[a]”. In atmospheric sciences it may not be evident what an “abrupt” process is, so it may be hard to ascertain the phenomenon and also to offer a ‘theory that will explain the observations’.
Thanks for the “Rapid Climate Change” link; which I’ll read in due time, including some of the references. And I apologise for having missread NAS as ‘NASA’; but that does not answer the question of what a ‘paradigm’ is. A search on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (it has no entry for ‘paradigm’ but it) gives you 557 contextual hits for ‘paradigm’, and if we try ‘scientific paradigm’ you will be happy to know there are 1362 contextual hits. It means that there is no fixed semantics and that the meaning will change somehow depending on the context. So, no wonder, that NAS has felt an urge to offer a definition. But NAS is just an organisation of skilled people, so how does that make it an authorative definition; even in the context you mention (“The Unstable … “).
You seem to become rude in the last words you mention: “ … requires familiarity with the literature and the observations – and a solid founding in relevant physical sciences – “; but I hope not. I’m normally not rude; but I could say that someone who uses the phrase “ … and not just some misguided application of semantics.” apparently does not know much about how linguistic semantics works. I’m not a physicist, but I seem to be able to follow the debate in ‘relevant physical sciences’, and I may have noticed that some Americans seem to have a tendency to think that their worldview is the only true and relevant one. Instead I’m rather good on words, and I have in general recommended my students not to use the word ‘pattern’ (or its equivalent in the languages I’ve used when teaching) because it’s not always a scientific term. The patterns you experience in visual perception may be checked experimentally, but the pattern of the use of words associated with a particular person may be fairly insignificant; and therefore such an approach is not scientific. Cognitive and computer scientist don’t know that so they do that kind of research, but a linguist knows. Maybe the cognitivists and the computer freaks should ‘get familiar with the literature and the insights of linguistics’? I therefore have recommened my students that they call it ‘regularities’, especially because that can be quantified; which not all patterns can.
You say that “kaleidoscope” is an analogy. Allow me another analogy: language use can be seen an a complex system, and I may be inclined to call it a super complex system whereas the atmosphere may be called a hyper complex system. A relevant question is, therefore, if I can find out something in the first system that – described by some formal theory – can be relevant to the description of the other system, and explain some observations in both systems. It cannot, a priori, be excluded.
Newton’s truth has an empirical foundation. It is hypothesis and rigorous testing and replication. At another level there is a more creative synthesis – but still grounded in observation.
e.g. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016WR020078
Pattern has a meaning in dynamics that you are unaware of. And you suggest that it is rude to say so?
‘We are living in a world driven out of equilibrium. Energy is constantly delivered from the sun to the earth. Some of the energy is converted chemically, while most of it is radiated back into space, or drives complex dissipative structures, with our weather being the best known example. We also find regular structures on much smaller scales, like the ripples in the windblown sand, the intricate structure of animal coats, the beautiful pattern of mollusks or even in the propagation of electrical signals in the heart muscle. It is the goal of pattern formation to understand nonequilibrium systems in which the nonlinearities conspire to generate spatio-temporal structures or pattern. Many of these systems can be described by coupled nonlinear partial differential equations, and one could argue that it is the field of pattern formation is trying to find unifying concepts underlying these equations.’ https://www.ds.mpg.de/LFPB/chaos
As for paradigm – I suggest you try Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
Robert I Ellison: Pattern has a meaning in dynamics
ha ha ha ha ha
I said that pattern has a meaning in dynamics – a meaning that is widely understood. We can see in this hand waving dismissal a characteristic of junk science.
Robert I Ellison, from your link: We investigate complex pattern formation in a system for which we have excellent experimental control and where the underlying equations are well known: Rayleigh-Bénard convection.
This is a subset of “patterns”, a word which is not defined. but instances of which are recognized or asserted.
This is analogous to your running aground on “abrupt climate change”, where not one of the asserted, or recognized instances, has been shown to satisfy the desiderata of the NAS textual definition. They are “abrupt” by comparison with the other climate changes that have been studied.
Note that the exact mechanism generating the stripes of zebras, unlike the mechanisms of the Rayleigh-Bénard continuously changing patterns, are not known. James Murray discusses the zebra patterns in his fine books Mathematical Biology (the second edition is indeed 2 books), but no underlying reaction-diffusion system causing the stripes in the melanin-generating hair cells is known. It must be a process in utero where it is hard to study.
‘Technically, an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause. Chaotic processes in the climate system may allow the cause of such an abrupt climate change to be undetectably small.’ NAS 2002
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/bifurcations.png
In general I have no time for Matthew’s pettifogging nonsense.
Rayleigh-Bénard convection happens above oceans – leading to a domain albedo feedback to SST. Warmer oceans lower albedo.
https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/87000/87456/pacificoceandetail_tmo_2016032.jpg
For more, there is the famous Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_reaction
Robert I Ellison: In general I have no time for Matthew’s pettifogging nonsense.
Robert seldom declines to respond to what I have written.
‘Technically, an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause. Chaotic processes in the climate system may allow the cause of such an abrupt climate change to be undetectably small.’ NAS 2002
As I wrote, there hasn’t been an abrupt climate change that has been shown to have either: (a) crossed some threshold; or (b) been caused by some kind of “force”; or (c) changed faster than the change in forcing. The proviso that the change may be “undetectably small” means that there is no way to rule out the claim that any particular observed climate change has been “forced”.
It’s always nice to read an illustration of a bifurcation. The existence of Rayleigh-Bénard reactions relevant to climate science is nicely illustrated by his high-altitude photography.
Warmer oceans lower albedo. Except for when they don’t. This is a bit of a tangent, to which we can return some other time.
Another source for an overview of chaos in physical systems is “Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures, 2nd Edition (Coursesmart)” by Kondepudi and Prigogine. I also recommend “Analysis of Observed Chaotic Data” by Barbanel.
Abrupt climate change was defined by the NAS and it’s clear that Matthews ‘observations’ don’t match up. These internal modes are emergent properties of the interaction of Earth subsystems. In the words of Michael Ghil (2013) the ‘global climate system is composed of a number of subsystems – atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere – each of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’
The cloud cells illustrated in the satellite imagery represent a bistable state and not a ‘bifurcation’. Closed cells persist for longer over cooler oceans before raining out to leave open cells. A major source of variability in the global energy budget.
e.g. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4973593
I quoted the Max Planck Institute on the search for patterns in spatiotemporal chaos. A field distinct from temporal chaos and for which little math or theory exists.
In the climate system patterns emerge in many nonlinear oscillators for which data exists in the modern era.
e.g. https://stateoftheocean.osmc.noaa.gov/all/
This is the PDO – a node in the globally coupled flow field. As was seen in the ‘stadium wave’.
https://stateoftheocean.osmc.noaa.gov/atm/images/pdo_short.gif
Shifts in patterns can be seen in geophysical series. As Harold Hurst did in the long flow record of the Nile River. Or as Andrey Kolmogorov did in turbulent flow. The principle has been shown experimentally in physical models of the atmosphere.
Here as in all science the foundation is observation. Something missing from Matthew’s missives. He then hand waves at couple of texts as if that establishes his credentials.
Robert I Ellison: Abrupt climate change was defined by the NAS and it’s clear that Matthews ‘observations’ don’t match up. These internal modes are emergent properties of the interaction of Earth subsystems. In the words of Michael Ghil (2013) the ‘global climate system is composed of a number of subsystems – atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere – each of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia.
It was several years ago that I first drew attention to the disjunction between the NAS “definition” of “abrupt” climate change and the characterizations of examples of “abrupt” climate change. Since that time, there has not been a single example of an actual climate change that has satisfied the desiderata of the definition.
He then hand waves at couple of texts as if that establishes his credentials.
I recommend them to anyone who wants to read more. As to my “credentials”, either those references are informative or they are not. In this forum, credentials are much less important than citations and clear writing.
There are several other definitions – from various sources – given in this more recent report from the NAS. Perhaps you will have better luck comprehending one of those. But then try to move on to real world observations. As opposed to irrelevant ‘information’.
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18373/abrupt-impacts-of-climate-change-anticipating-surprises
Robert I Ellison: Perhaps you will have better luck comprehending one of those.
More silliness. I pointed out the vacuity of the definition that you have relied upon these last few years. If there are multiple definitions, which one is “definitive”?
More pettifogging quibbling. Between the NAS and Matthew – I know where the vacuity lies.
From the post: “What is the difference between deniers of science and skeptics of science?”
This question appears easy to answer at first glance. When an opinion contrary to one’s own is expressed based on the same evidence there are three possibilities for the conflict:
1) I made a miscalculation or had an invalid assumption.
2) They made a miscalculation or had an invalid assumption.
3) They know I am right but are not acknowledging the truth due to ulterior motives.
Climate science, economics and politics are sciences of such complexity that is extremely difficult to avoid biases in selection of data or weighting. Then add to this a political bifurcation where perceptions of ill-will are growing more common than trust.
The only moral that is universally accepted (and I mean every aware species, on and off the planet,) is that truth is good. Why is this? Honesty builds trust. Trust opens predictability, for example, that a contract will be honored. Predictability provides safety that stability and increases validity in assumptions. In short, truth and honesty lead to progress, peace and prosperity. But in daily practice though, truth and honesty and honor are very difficult to follow. There are many rationalities for concealment and deception, namely avoiding being put at a vulnerability. Cultural evolution and maturity are the heart of many problems. Paying forward is a good thing to teach children. Unfortunately, we are leaving them in hopeless debt.
Always wrong wild guesses of the future climate are not real science at all. They are climate astrology.
To the authors, Geoffrey Weiss and Claude Roessiger, two reasons (among many) that your conference flopped were that; A) for a legitimate climate scientist to debate any denier would be elevating denial to the same level as the evidence based science of climate change; and B) the discourse has shifted from debating the science (except of course for the most hard core laymen) to what actions needed based on the science.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.13
“A) for a legitimate climate scientist to debate any denier would be elevating denial to the same level as the evidence based science of climate change”
This way of thinking de-legitimizes these so-called scientists.
Do the Laws of Science Debunk Climate Change?
“1) Why did academic scientists avoid this opportunity to consider the AGW consensus with a few of its challengers?”
Because bullies are also cowards.
Because you can’t lose a debate if you don’t have a debate !
The debate’s been taking place for decades in the scientific literature. That not good enough for you? Too carefully worded? Too clear about data and sources? Not enough hand waving? Political accusations not allowed?
D.A. – do you maintain that the “scientific literature” does not censor contrarian views? That the “peer review” has not been redefined?
D.A. – do you maintain that the “scientific literature” does not censor contrarian views?
What is a “contrarian view?”
If someone submits an good, scientifically robust paper and it passes peer review, it gets published.
If someone submits a paper titled “There is no greenhouse effect” it will get immediately rejected. I suspect they do get such papers. I get emails like that every once in a while. Also ones saying special relativity is wrong.
“If someone submits an good, scientifically robust paper and it passes peer review, it gets published. ”
Oh, nonsense. Peer review is one of the main ways that dissidence is suppressed. Often the suppression is valid – the dissidence is wrong. But we have seen too many examples in pathological science, which AGW is, where papers are suppressed because to publish them would be to threaten reputations, careers and funding.
It would be very difficult for AGW to not become corrupt, given the political and funding climate. I did a search almost 20 years ago for papers on AGW that were outside the climatology field, and found many – most way outside the field, but who were riding the AGW bandwagon in order to get funding. When you see published, funded papers on the impact of AGW on surfing, you know things have gotten out of hand.
My father, a globally respected scientist in his field (remote sensing) had enough crossover into the AGW field to come away with his impression that the field was broken – corrupt and unscientific. I know a number of others, specialists in the field, who left rather than participate in the lousy science.
Now, none of that is to say that real science isn’t being done. There is plenty of work to do in paleoclimatology, and in modeling, that is real. But the overall field is required to come up with alarmist results, and do so as required.
And the modeling – well, that is just not scientific. When your model can only forecast the past, after massive tweaking, it isn’t yet science. It is a guess. When it reliably forecasts the future (or more accurately, the future climate regime), and that is then actually tested by checking, when the future arrives, you are approaching science. Until then, it is just computer games.
I use weather models a lot, have taken courses in both weather and climate modeling, and have done modeling myself in another field. I am not at all impressed by the way future climate is modeled. It is nuts – because the system is chaotic, and because running any model of such a multidimensional chaotic system for many cycles is absurd, but that’s what is done. The models are tuned for “stability” – which is to say that the parameterizations and the estimated constants codes are tweaked until they produce a result that is at least physically possible (which they would not without tweaking). [note: parameterization doesn’t mean tweaking a bunch of constants – parameterization is the use of sub-models to estimate phenomena that cannot be modeled at grid scale – minor things like convective systems (the main head engine of the atmosphere).
I don’t believe the models. Yes, I’m an outsider, but it doesn’t take a specialist to see the difference between science as tested by experiment, and computer games which are used to forecast the future but are only tested against the past. And, since these models have lots and lots of tweaks, many of which are not tested against reality, it would be surprising if they didn’t get tweaked enough to forecast the past.
Waving “science” around like a talisman is not convincing. I know what science is, and it isn’t using untested models to direct world policy. It is a halting, complex, non-monotonic process which converges on truth only when it allows negative feedback to be tested and applied.
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !” -Phil Jones, in an email.
As far as I can see, there has been a consensus academic hand-wave that ENSO and the AMO are unforced internal variability, and very little debate about it. And no debate about the discrete solar forcing of heat and cold waves.
There are a few ideas about ENSO origins. One is as a stochastically forced oscillation. But it obviously has its globally coupled internal dynamic.
El Nino operates as a negative feedback to net changes in climate forcing. At multi-millennial scales with the increase in El Nino from 5500 years ago, in response to large tropical volcanic eruptions, and more regularly during periods of slow solar wind conditions at seasonal to annual scales.
Because endlessly debating the same junk science with contrarians is a waste of time. The rest of the world is looking for policy for the 21st century.
This is the 21st century.
And the 21st century policy of replacing a reliable electric grid, powered mainly by fossil fuels, AT GREAT EXPENSE, with a less reliable electric grid, powered mainly by unreliable wind and sunshine, is not a logical policy.
Meanwhile one billion people in the world have no electricity, two billion other people do not have reliable electricity and tens of millions of people with rerliable electricity live in cities with too much air pollution in China and India. Two nations who seem to love coal as much as so-called environmentalists around the world love to ignore their air pollution.
The debate should be on why CO2 increases were accompanied by global cooling from 1940 to 1975, but gobal warming after 1975. The so aerosols blocking sunlight before 1975 did not suddenly fall out of the sky in 1975.
The debate should be on why so many decades of rapid dangerous global warming predictions were wrong, as the actual global warming has been mild, and mainly affecting colder areas, mainly during colder months, and mainly at night.
The debate should be on whatever happened to the -0.5 to -0.6 degree C. global cooling fom 1940 to 1970, with rising CO2 levels, that was MUCH later revised to only about -0.1degree C. global cooling.
And Mr, Appell, adjustments to data are done at the time of raw measurements or soon after if an error is found. Huge revisions like the one I just described, done many years later, are not ordinary “adjustments”. They are huge, suspicious revisions.
It is also true that after “adjusting” raw data, it is no longer real data.
It becaomes a number that someone believes to be better — an opinion, hopefully expert — that would have resulted if the measurement methodology had been correct and accurate in the first place
Meanwhile, we are told the hottest year in the US was 1998, yet not one US state set a maximum heat record in 1998. But 22 of 50 states had heat records set in the 1930s. Very interesting.
If climate science was settled, as if science is ever settled, would we have heard ‘a climate crisis is coming’ for 64 years in a row, while the actual climate improved?
Would we have had 40 years of climate models over-predicting warming?
Would we have an ECS number from the 1970’s that never seems to change, leading to claims that CO2 causes much more warming than we actually measure?
Mr. Appell:
The fact that plants love CO2, and would grow larger with more CO2, (and can’t survive without CO2), has nothing to do with the CO2 level on other planets.
Cliff:
“Higher CO2 tends to inhibit the ability of plants to make protein… And this explains why food quality seems to have been declining and will continue to decline as CO2 rises — because of this inhibition of nitrate conversion into protein…. “It’s going to be fairly universal that we’ll be struggling with trying to sustain food quality and it’s not just protein… it’s also micronutrients such as zinc and iron that suffer as well as protein.”
– University of California at Davis Professor Arnold J. Bloom, on Yale Climate Connections 10/7/14
http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2014/10/crop-nutrition/2014
“Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any supposed positives.” Smith et al. PNAS (2009), http://www.pnas.org/content/106/11/4133.full.pdf
“Unfortunately, the simple idea that global warming could provide at least some benefits to humanity by increasing plant production is complicated by a number of factors. It is true that fertilizing plants with CO2 and giving them warmer temperatures increases growth under some conditions, but there are trade-offs. While global warming can increase plant growth in areas that are near the lower limits of temperature (e.g., large swaths of Canada and Russia), it can make it too hot for plant growth in areas that are near their upper limits (e.g., the tropics). In addition, plant productivity is determined by many things (e.g., sunlight, temperature, nutrients, and precipitation), several of which are influenced by climate change and interact with one another.”
“Does a Warmer World Mean a Greener World? Not Likely!,” Jonathan Chase, PLOS Biology, June 10, 2015.
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002166
Cliff:
“Higher CO2 tends to inhibit the ability of plants to make protein… And this explains why food quality seems to have been declining and will continue to decline as CO2 rises — because of this inhibition of nitrate conversion into protein…. “It’s going to be fairly universal that we’ll be struggling with trying to sustain food quality and it’s not just protein… it’s also micronutrients such as zinc and iron that suffer as well as protein.”
– University of California at Davis Professor Arnold J. Bloom, on Yale Climate Connections 10/7/14
http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2014/10/crop-nutrition/2014
Cliff:
“Higher CO2 tends to inhibit the ability of plants to make protein… And this explains why food quality seems to have been declining and will continue to decline as CO2 rises — because of this inhibition of nitrate conversion into protein…. “It’s going to be fairly universal that we’ll be struggling with trying to sustain food quality and it’s not just protein… it’s also micronutrients such as zinc and iron that suffer as well as protein.”
– University of California at Davis Professor Arnold J. Bloom, on Yale Climate Connections 10/7/14
“Higher CO2 tends to inhibit the ability of plants to make protein… And this explains why food quality seems to have been declining and will continue to decline as CO2 rises — because of this inhibition of nitrate conversion into protein…. “It’s going to be fairly universal that we’ll be struggling with trying to sustain food quality and it’s not just protein… it’s also micronutrients such as zinc and iron that suffer as well as protein.”
– Univ of California at Davis Professor Arnold J. Bloom, on Yale Climate Connections 10/7/14
More succinct please. Your ‘science’ is nonsense and I do not a4nd never have advocated for 100% renewables. There are undeniable realities – energy density being the primary one. More more advanced nuclear fission that will start to come on line this decade. In the interim there is natural gas and high efficiency low emission coal.
The generation of public policy comes about through lobbying, where various interest groups (individuals can lobby as well) compete to influence legislation favorable to their business or agenda. In fact, many times parts of the legislation is actually written by lobbyists. This is ‘justified’ by claims that the lobbyist is an ‘industry expert’. It is also common that legislation purported to address a pressing social need comes in groups of bills presented over extended periods of time. This process is well choreographed at the party level and involves public relations and apporopriate social narratives carried by sympathetic organs in the media, where feasibility is gauged and interest is generated. Long term agendas are supported with associations and academia.
There is nothing in the description above that necessitates an actual requirement of mass need to generate public policy, in reference to the whole populace. Where is the actual need that is evident for action on climate change? Where is the evidence of catastrophe? Preparation for a future condition? If so, then it should be carefully ranked with the needs that are current, which would mean that scarce funds be prudently allocated. In order for a ‘future need’ to receive more funding than would be appropriate, meaning diverting funds from pressing needs that are current, the populace needs to be convinced. And so the narrative is extremely important to the special interests that seek public funding for their agenda.
I was right with the paper until I got to this part:
We saw conspiracy to falsify data and suppress the truth in the Climategate scandal. We saw the same with Peter Gleick. We saw the same with Caspar Amman and the Jesus paper. When there actually IS proven and documented conspiracy being engaged in by the leading lights of the “consensus”, their first claim is total nonsense, and very dangerous nonsense at that.
I object strenuously against the false dichotomy of “fake experts” vs “published experts”. Some published “experts” are fake as hell, and some unpublished experts really are experts. Peer-review in climate science is a sick joke, that’s why it’s called “pal review”. Here’s my experience with the fake expert Michael Mann and peer review.
So the first two of their ways to distinguish skeptics from “deniers” are absolute garbage. Here are the other three:
Unfortunately, those are all highly subjective. For example, mainstream climate scientists refer to Tyndell’s 1860s’ papers on CO2 … “obsolete”, or “path-breaking”?
As to “comparing apples and oranges” and “drawing flawed conclustions from scientifically valid research”, here’s Gavin Schmidt doing that exact thing … and not one person has found a single incorrect statement in that post despite me asking a whole raft of scientists, including Gavin, to falsify it. Down to the last man, they’ve made up some bogus excuse and run for the door … who is the “denier” here?
Finally, anyone calling their scientific opponent a “denier” is not a scientist of any kind, because they are attacking and trying to discreit their opponent without the slightest reference to their ideas. People call me a “denier” all the time … funny how, when I confront them, they can NEVER tell me just what it is that they think I “deny”.
No surprise there … I deny nothing. Instead, I disagree with some things.
TL;DR version? Their means of distinguishing between skeptics and “deniers” is a sick joke, meaningless, misleading, and subjective.
w.
Agreed. As noted regarding this very flawed framing of, and testing for, denialism, here: https://judithcurry.com/2016/04/21/the-denialism-frame/
(with a clarification that was added here: https://wearenarrative.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/the-denialism-frame/)
I’ll take my chance to be a climate denialist:
CLIMATE DOES NOT EXIST.
Sure, and tis the chloroquine talking .
Not even Dellingpole ever mistook Willis or Tony for a scientist of any sort.
Russell | June 2, 2021 at 10:26 pm
Nature magazine didn’t subscribe to your childish ad-hominem point of view when they peer-reviewed and published my “Brief Communications Arising” entitled “Climate Change Effect on Lake Tanganyika” … instead of being so stunningly dumb as to look at credentials like you do, they looked instead at my ideas, peer-reviewed them, and found them worth publishing.
You, on the other hand, don’t even have the balls to sign your own words …
w.
> childish ad-hominem
Masterful.
Excellent from the heart comment from Mr. WE.
Refreshing reading after four “groundhog day” almost identical comments in a row from Mr. Appell. Who will work hard to find a few outliers out of thousands of studies on CO2 enrichment and plant growth, andcompletely ignore the rest. Mr. Appell hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest, to paraphrase Paul Simon.
Climate alarmists ‘ definiotion of settled science:
64 years of WRONG coming climate crisis predictions
40 years of WRONG climate computer game predictions
40 years of climate computer game predictions not getting more accurate
40 years of temperature revisions that almost always increase the slope of the global warming trend — obviously not correcting random errors
100 years of no obvious acceleration of rising sea level using stable tide gauges
30 years of global warming with very little CO2 level change (1910 to 1940)
35 years of global cooling as CO2 levels rose (1940 to 1975)
45 years of pleasant, mild global warming (1975 to 2020), completely unlike the rapid, dangerous global warming predictions made during every one of those years.
The use of a single global average temperature, that not one person lives in, to disguise the fact that actual warming since the mid-1970s mainly affected colder regions, mainly during colder months and mainly at night.
Dismissing 4.5 billion years of climate change — in 1995 the IPCC declared natural causes of climate change were just “noise”, with no proof that was true.
The United Nations IPCC allows politicians and climate activbists to write the final draft of the Summary for Policymakers, where uncertainty from the back up science reports is deleted. The back-up science reports are released many months later, so the Summary and back-up can not be compared when the Summary is released. Most journalists just quote the Summary press release.
IPCC claiming a “95% confidence” in their predictions, which is a a meaningless number, based on a consensus of personal opinions, not based on data, or past success with climate predictions.The 95% sounds scientific, but is not — it is used for propaganda purposes. It has no relationship to the 95% often used with statistics.
Claims that +1.5 degrees warming from pre-industrial is a meaningful number, with no scientific justification. Pre-industrial is only roughly defined with clmate proxies, and people living at the time thought their climate was too cold, not an ideal climate.
Use of the proaganda term “climate emergency” with no scientific justification (after 64 years of wrong coming climate crisis predictions)
Use of the propaganda term “climate denier” to ridicule people who haver NEVER denied the existence of climate change.
I suppose that adds up to “settled science” if you are a climate alarmist?
Richard Greene
Bingham Farms. Michigan
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
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Tyson, ad hominem comments are not science regardless of the ir source, be it Rostrum, Oreskes, etc.
Over 50 years of always wrong wild guess climate predictions, of a coming climate crisis, are not real science.
Wrong, scary predictions are just climate astrology.
Skeptics of climate astrology are falsely attacked as skeptics of climate science.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
If all the predictions are wrong, then climate science is not settled.
If “the climate science is settled” claims can not be falsified by the wrong climate predictions, then the “science” is junk science.
I agree with you there, but the ad hominem harms your argument, is non logic, and turns readers off.
Regarding the term “climate change denial” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial):
Tyson gives a strawman argument to defend a strawman argument. Does Tyson smoke cigarettes?
Watch out Mr, Bud Bromley — TYSON MCGUFFIN sounds like some big heavyweight English boxer with 24 knockouts. I would not risk criticizing him in any way. (My attempt at humor to break up the usual arguments here for a moment).
Mr. Bromley;
ad hominem comments are not science — that’s true.
But they ARE useful propaganda — they work for the climate alarmists.
We climate realists should use them too.
Read Saul Alinsky’s two books to understand why ridicule works to distract the opposition, puts them on the defensive, and make them seem unworthy of debate (of climate science).
So there is no debate.
The claim of catastrophic climate change (CAGW) is also not real science.
CAGW is hard to disprove because it is always coming in the future, so has not happened yet.
With real climate science, one can discuss the current and past science.
But climate alarmists are not very interested in that.
But predicting the future climate has been a mystery, other than saying it will change.
But that’s where climate alarmists come alive — predicting the future climate.
They claim the future climate can ONLY get worse.
Because they say so.
And they must be right, because they have peer reviewed, published in ‘prestigious’ science journals, papers, that say so.
When reporting what climate alarmists believe, it sounds like ridicule !
Always wrong wild guesses, predicting a coming climate crisis for 64 years in a row, while the actual climate improves, are not real science.
Unfortunately, you can not win any argument with climate change zealots using science.
Their belief in a coming climate crisis was not based on facts, data and logic, so can not be changed with facts, data and logic.
The coming climate crisis is a secular religion, based on faith.
A secular religion that worships government bureaucrat scientists and government funded scientists, all self-proclaimed climate “experts”.
Never mind that these people have spent many decades making wrong climate predictions, and playing climate computer games that “project” double the warming that actually happened.
Every year they proudly declare “the science is settled”, and make yet another scary, coming climate crisis prediction.
People with common sense, who point out that the past 45 years of global warming were harmless, at worst, probably beneficial, are character attacked and ridiculed for pointing out climate reality.
The coming climate crisis predictions have nothing to do with real science.
Scary climate and environmental predictions, consistently wrong for over 60 years, are a political strategy.
They are a political strategy to create fear, knowing that fearful people are more easily controlled.
COVID fear is declining, so the fear of a coming climate crisis is ramped up again.
Excuse me, I meant “climate emergency”.
Note: I apologize for all the spaces in my comments — I need them to read what I have typed, due to a serious vision disability, that can not be corrected.
Richard Greene
Bingham Farms. Michigan
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
(the “website box” will not accept my URL)
Best line:
“Truth reposes with us individually—a collective is never accountable.”
For all you consensus defenders: I am sorry for what happened to you. But you can still get better. Your life can belong to you. And you can have responsibilities.
In an earlier comment Mr. Appell posted a chart that showed tide gauge data beginning in 1880. (sorry there was no reply button on that comment) .
I happened to have three dozen NAOO jpeg tide gauge charts, selected randomly last year, from among those that had long records.
I examined all 36 today, after reading Mr. Appell’s comment.
Only 2 of 36 tide gauge records were long enough to be useful for an average in the late 1800s. So I have to wonder how data for the late 1800s were collected.
New York City, NY Battery tide gauge
NOAA records began around 1855, but there was a data gap starting about 1880, that lasted about 15 years. So not useful for 1880 or 1890 averages
San Francisco, CA
NOAA records begin about 1855, but there is a huge datum shift in the late 1890s, followed by a fairly steady trend line until present day. Perhaps the tide gauge was moved, or instruments changed.
Not useful for the entire period from 1880 through 2020.
In summary, not one of the 36 tide charts I had in my files would have been useful for before 1900, and many records started well after 1900.
My charts were not picked at random. They are from all over the world, and only those with long records.
In summary, I believe Mr. Appell’s chart, showing sea level rise before 1900, is not trustworthy. Also, I did not notice any adjustments mentioned for land subsidence.
Richard Greene,
Knowing your track record on claims, I’m going to go with the published work by the professionals. More on that graph here:
https://data.globalchange.gov/report/indicator-sea-level-rise-2019
An example:
12-16 inches
sea level- rise in Philadelphia since 1900
https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/multimedia/sea-level-rising
David Apple – do you notice any deception in the statement from the link you provided
“Observed sea level rise in Philadelphia, PA, has significantly exceeded the global average of 8 inches over the past century, increasing the risk of impacts to critical urban infrastructure in low-lying areas. Over 100 years (1901-2012), sea level increased 1.2 feet (Data from Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level).”
DA
Complaints above about cherry-picking and then uses an area in the mid Atlantic that is well known for subsidence.
Here, we quantify global-mean relative sea-level rise to be 2.6 mm yr−1 over the past two decades. However, as coastal inhabitants are preferentially located in subsiding locations, they experience an average relative sea-level rise up to four times faster at 7.8 to 9.9 mm yr−1. These results indicate that the impacts and adaptation needs are much higher than reported global sea-level rise measurements suggest. In particular, human-induced subsidence in and surrounding coastal cities can be rapidly reduced with appropriate policy for groundwater utilization and drainage.
Here, we quantify global-mean relative sea-level rise to be 2.6 mm yr−1 over the past two decades. However, as coastal inhabitants are preferentially located in subsiding locations, they experience an average relative sea-level rise up to four times faster at 7.8 to 9.9 mm yr−1. These results indicate that the impacts and adaptation needs are much higher than reported global sea-level rise measurements suggest. In particular, human-induced subsidence in and surrounding coastal cities can be rapidly reduced with appropriate policy for groundwater utilization and drainage.
DA
Complaints above about cherry-picking and then references Philadelphia in a region known for subsidence, including those areas affected by groundwater withdrawal.
A recent paper. “ Here, we quantify global-mean relative sea-level rise to be 2.6 mm yr−1 over the past two decades. However, as coastal inhabitants are preferentially located in subsiding locations, they experience an average relative sea-level rise up to four times faster at 7.8 to 9.9 mm yr−1. These results indicate that the impacts and adaptation needs are much higher than reported global sea-level rise measurements suggest. In particular, human-induced subsidence in and surrounding coastal cities can be rapidly reduced with appropriate policy for groundwater utilization and drainage. “
A 1950 paper speaks to groundwater problems in the Philadelphia area.
From a new paper.
“
An insult, followed by cherry picking a very unusual tide gauge with high land subsidence. A weak response.
The more I look into the “science” backing the climate alarmism, the bigger a joke it becomes. NASA itself provides all the evidence needed to debunk the CO2 drives temperature false narrative.
1) NASA produces multiple global temperature graphics and they all disagree. The claim that this is a “settled” science is laughable. They don’t even have the proper measurements, and without a standard measurement, you can create a model to give you any answer you want.
RSS: Look how observed falls outside forecast band
https://imgur.com/1BNMuTq
RSS: Unlike CO2, Water Vapor is nearly PERFECTLY correlated with temperature
https://imgur.com/yAF0mc4
RSS: Water Vapor has been increasing. What causes more water vapor? More warming VISIBLE sunlight reaching the oceans.CO2 is transparent to incoming VISIBLE radiation.
https://imgur.com/wrT5lTb
GISS and UAH disagree on the temperature trend and change since 1980
https://imgur.com/9lWDdfa
NASA GISS shows that clearly there are factors other than CO2 causing warming
https://imgur.com/KBWewBh
Another way to look at it
https://imgur.com/QSvpyvd
Facts are, NASA GISS produces charts that show a full 1.4 degrees C difference between the N and S Hemi. CO2 is equal in both hemis so no CO2 forces can at least cause 1.4 degrees C. If that is the cause, what is to say those same forces can’t be responsible for the 0.4 degree C warming in the S hemi? Especially considering the water vapor chart above.
https://imgur.com/nXlIMgL
These charts simply demonstrate that climate scientists aren’t looking for answers, they are looking for excuses to push a big government agenda.
Thank you! I turn to your website for a some sanity, on what should be a scientific topic.
Where is that website?
The charts are too small for me to read, and do not enlarge when I click on them — maybe caused by old computer?
In the midst of all this discussion, I’m just a poor country boy.
I have traveled and mapped global systems on the ground worldwide for decades. Auto industry from raw material to recycling. Emerging solar and wind networks. Global internet and deployment of 7 billion mobile devices.
Etc
I know that in ANY system – even simple ones like making cars – only about 20% to 30% of the system is stable and predictable – and the other percentage is constantly changing.
That’s why the Toyota way is centered on constant daily innovation in the hands of the workers….not 3-5 year production forecasts like those that bankrupt most other auto companies.
I also helped create the CAFE laws of the US – so was in the room when the long term forecasts were made. All – repeat ALL – the experts and policy makers missed the shift of cars to pickup trucks, and then underestimated how recyclable these trucks are.
So what?
I always look for perturbations that may hint at new insights in extrapolated forecasts and “expert” assertions.
Here is one for folks to ponder.
Covid and the various lock downs just created a drop of 50% to 70% – or more – in global Vehicle Miles Traveled – depending on location.
That is most likely the largest drop in VMT since driving data were recorded.
Driving is measured in trillions of miles per unit of time, so this is no tiny behavioral event.
It also yields CO2 reductions in the short term that are much larger than those sought in the long term by climate scientists, and the Electric Vehicle proponents.
If the CO2 emitting auto is such a large contributor to climate change –
– then what are the implications of such a huge dynamic drop in CO2 emissions?
In addition global air traffic basically stopped. Dead. Air travel is also asserted to be damaging to the “climate” because it injects CO2 and “soot” directly into the heart of the “atmosphere”.
One might easily argue that the “climate” is so large and complex that this transportation “blip” is irrelevant.
But this “blip” might also point toward the sensitivity – or lack thereof – in the climate estimating sensors.
DATA QUESTION: Did the sensors underpinning future “climate science” policy detect this massive drop in CO2 emissions?
If yes, what are the implications?
If no, what are the implications?
This sudden global behavioral change we saw in Covid might suggest that a BEHAVIORAL “cure” for CO2 emissions might be stimulating more of the Covid induced – LOW CAPITAL COST – change in driving/flying BEHAVIOR AND LOGISTICS.
Instead of forcing 7 billion humans to invest trillions of dollars – a priori – in – HIGH FIXED COST – global solar and wind infrastructure….
….and by RAPIDLY changing global transportation and housing investment by re-directing about 1/4 of global GDP according to current theories….
….maybe a very practical solution might be to shift global commerce to high productivity networks like Amazon and Alibaba….and to online work from driving to work….
…rather than a priori changing $Trillion energy infrastructure to untested global systems
Remember – when the petrol automobile came out – it was billed as a savior rescuing the world from the global environmental insult of tons of horse manure piled high in city streets.
Did the climate instruments detect this Covid collapse in global transportation?
If not, then what are the implications for climate science?
Did the global shift to online work and education – on more than 7 billion global devices – reduce CO2, etc?
If yes, then what are the implications fo CO2 reduction?
Just a poor country boy wondering about life in the big city
Remember the Glorious Soviet Five-Year Plans?
Regarding the term “climate change denial” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial:
Geoffrey Weiss and Claude Roessiger, thank you for your essay.
Just look how NASA debunks their own CAGW Theory:
1) This Chart shows a clear difference between the N and S Hemi. CO2 is 415 ppm in both the N and S Hemisphere, so CO2 can’t be the cause of the differential. The differential must be of natural non-CO2 causes.
https://imgur.com/r5Ncrhx
2) This chart shows the global temps increasing by 0.5 degree C since 1980. The observations fall outside the model estimates to the downside.
https://imgur.com/1BNMuTq
3) This chart shows temperatures increasing 0.08 Degree C since 1980. Basically flat.
https://imgur.com/eYK0LKM
4) NASA GISS takes all the station data, both corrupted and uncorrupted, and puts it in a blender to create a composite. Guess what? When you use garbage data you get garbage results. NASA GISS’ composite increase in temperatures blows away all the more accurate measurement techniques. It increases. This is the chart alarmists absolutely love.
https://imgur.com/8AGI3g7
5) You can’t even tell temperature from water vapor.
https://imgur.com/yAF0mc4
6) Guess what? More visible radiation reaching the oceans has caused more water vapor. That has nothing to do with CO2.
https://imgur.com/wrT5lTb
7) Climate science is dependent upon people not understanding the scientific method and reading a chart. NASA produces all the evidence that CO2 isn’t the cause of the warming.
https://imgur.com/q4RTtDw
8) Control for Water Vapor and the Urban Heat Island effect, you find no warming. The laws of physics don’t cease to exist at the South Pole.
https://imgur.com/a/mHIjixS
The bottom line, a settled science has 1 model that perfectly explains the observations. Think Gravity. Climate Science has many models and none, I repeat none, come close to explaining the observations. NASA hasn’t even settled the measurement/data issue. How can you claim to have a settled science when you don’t even have a confirming set of data? You can literally pick and choose the data sets you want to make your case. Settle science requires settled data sets.
https://imgur.com/WilpgD0
CO2:
Concerning Al Gores infamous ice core temperature and CO2 chart.
It was shown at a sharp angle because otherwise the temperature peaks seemed to slightly lead the CO2 peaks. The producer noticed that “inconvenience”, so they created an unusual “three dimensional” view from a sharp angle, to disguise the truth. Honest Al.
The last time it could be said that the science of climate change was not well enough understood for action was before the Charney Report, July 1979 (https://tinyurl.com/The-Charney-Report).
Punctuating this fact was the soon after published Exxon Primer on the CO2 Greenhouse Effect (https://ibb.co/Fh0nfH7) dated April 1982 and circulated internally in November 1982.
These statements from Exxon’s introductory remarks have been borne out by 40 years of observations:
Tyson said:
Since their estimate of the climate sensitivity ranges from 1.3 to 3.1 °C per W/m2, just about any result would bear out their claim about global changes. And their lower value (1.3) barely encompasses the amount of the warming to date.
However, the Antarctic hasn’t warmed at all in seven decades.
Not only that, but we’re 40% of the way to a doubling since then, so the Arctic should have warmed 4°C … but the MSU Arctic Data shows only about 1°C of warming.
So their hugely broad sensitivity range barely encompasses the actual warming, not near the middle but at the lowest sensitivity, and the Arctic has behaved NOTHING like what they claimed.
“Borne out”??? I don’t think so.
w.
Evenin’ Willis (UTC),
“The MSU Arctic Data shows only about 1°C of warming.”
Since when? And can you by any chance provide a link to the data you’re referring to?
TIA
Jim, the UAH lower troposphere data is below.
https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
w.
Jim
If you come up with a graph for the Arctic data, please share.
@Willis – You say “MSU”, I say “UAH”. Or should that be the other way around?
@CK – Will do when I have a spare half hour, which won’t be for a while I fear. Amongst numerous other things I’m currently trying to sell Joe Biden a portrait of a lady!
https://twitter.com/DavidstowInfo/status/1400781766747635712
Afternoon CK (and Willis?),
Here’s the hastily constructed first draft of the UAH “North Pole” data that I promised you:
https://greatwhitecon.info/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/UAH-NPole-Monthly-2021-04.png
What do you suppose it “proves”?
Jim Hunt | June 6, 2021 at 9:43 am |
Afternoon CK (and Willis?),
Here’s the hastily constructed first draft of the UAH “North Pole” data that I promised you:”
Jim – does the chart have a time frame? or is the 1-507 supposed to represent a time period ? if so what is the time period
Jim Hunt | June 6, 2021 at 9:43 am |
Jim, my comment related to Tyson’s claim that the Mobil analysis was accurate, viz:
The Exxon statement claimed a 10°C polar rise would occur from a doubling of CO2. I pointed out that a) Antarctica hasn’t warmed in 7 decades and b) the Arctic, rather than warming 4° as per the Mobil predictions, has only warmed 1°C.
You were dubious about the 1°C, saying:
… so now you’ve graphed it for yourself and indeed, it’s 1°C.
Which shows that I was correct, that the Mobil prediction was way out and not “borne out by observations” as had been incorrectly claimed.
w.
Joe – It’s the entire data set. 1978-12 to 2021-04.
Willis – However in one of my numerous critiques of Professor Koonin’s recent magnum opus I discussed Arctic temperature:
https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2021/05/steve-koonins-unsettled-arctic-science/
I included this graph of surface temperature derived from ERA5 data:
https://greatwhitecon.info/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NOAA-ERA5-Arctic.png
That shows a much greater temperature rise over a significantly shorter timeframe, does it not?
Jim, the ERA5 is the output of a climate model that is nudged periodically so it doesn’t run off the rails. You can go with that … or with the observational data I provided. Your choice.
w.
Evenin’ Willis,
I think the word you’re looking for is “reanalysis”?
What’s more your alleged “observational data” is nothing of the sort. It’s almost literally “pie in the sky”. This is the sort of observational data I prefer:
https://greatwhitecon.info/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ESS-Terra-721-20210606.jpg
Do you have any idea where that is?
Jim Hunt | June 6, 2021 at 6:04 pm |
Nope. I say exactly what I mean. I said:
The fact that you have issues with that 100% accurate description is … well … interesting.
w.
Mornin’ Willis,
I’ll take that as a “I’ve no idea where that is!” then shall I?
No doubt you also have no idea of its current significance?
Perhaps if the powers that be hadn’t so brutally curtailed our “polariced” conversation you might have learned a thing or two?
https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2021/05/watts-up-with-polariced-mysteries/
Jim Hunt | June 7, 2021 at 4:08 am |
Nope. Take it EXACTLY as I said it, and please, stop trying to put your nonsensical bogus “I can read Willis’s mind” interpretations on it. You can’t. Stop it.
w.
Evenin’ Willis,
I suffixed my remark with a question mark, since I am no mind reader.
It would be so much easier if you simply answered my questions, would it not?
Then I wouldn’t need to speculate!
J.
Jim Hunt | June 7, 2021 at 3:39 pm |
Oh, please, stop with the pedantry.
It would be so much easier if you noticed that you are a most unpleasant individual, and that I have absolutely no interest in engaging in a discussion with you. I don’t wrestle with pigs—they enjoy it, and I just get dirty.
Go sell your line of patter to someone else. Not interested in the slightest.
w.
Here’s an ancient pig wrestling contest for your information Willis:
https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2014/04/debating-skeptics-is-like-mud-wrestling-with-pigs/
Jim –
1) any particular reason the start date of dec 1978 is labeled as 1 instead of Dec 1978?
2) any particular reason the chart start date is Dec 1978 when the NH was going through a relatively cold spell?
3) did the choice of the start date of Dec 1978 enhance the appearance of greater warming and/or a faster rate of warming over the 20th century since the late 1970’s were one during a colder spell in the NH?
4) what would the rate of warming be if you had chosen a start date of the 1920’s or the 1940’s?
Choosing a start date the gives the reader the impression of a greater rate of warming comes across as deceptive, at least it does to most objective observers.
Look forward to any insights on how to present a more comprehensive picture of the warming
thanks
Mornin’ Joe (UTC),
I hurriedly grabbed the data Willis pointed me, stuck it all in Excel and produced a graph of the whole shebang.
If you don’t like my version please feel free to do the work and create your own.
You’re welcome.
Jim Hunt’s comment – “I included this graph of surface temperature derived from ERA5 data:
Jim Hunt’s comment – ” That shows a much greater temperature rise over a significantly shorter timeframe, does it not?”
Jim – your response is exactly my point – Climate scientists have a habit of selecting starting dates and other data points that enhance the appearance of greater rates warming. Most objective individuals would call that cherry picking data points – ie deceptive
Perhaps you can provide some insight into why climate scientists seem so reluctant to presenting a broader historical picture.
Evenin’ Joe,
Perhaps you can provide some insight into why climate “skeptics” seem so ignorant?
Please feel free to follow my instructions to Steve Koonin on how to drive NOAA’s WRIT tool to produce a temperature time series starting in 1900:
https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2021/05/steve-koonins-unsettled-history-of-us-temperature/
You’re welcome.
Mornin’ Willis (et al.),
Here’s another Rorschach test for you. Do you have any idea where this is?
https://greatwhitecon.info/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Laptev-Terra-721-20210609.jpg
A reasonable analysis of the science back in 1982. I doubt co2 will reach 600ppm by 2100 but it could hit the lower 500ppm by then.
Some locations will get a better climate for humans while other places will be adversely impacted. Humans will easily adapt to changes occurring over decades.
The most prudent actions people can take to adapt to an adverse climate is the construction of robust infrastructure.
Since the climate is always changing on our planet, it should be expected that some areas will get a better climate, and others worse.
But if climate change affects people, it would be from changes in the local climate where they live — not from changes of a single global average temperature that no one lives in.
If the pattern of warming measured since the 1970s continues, the most warming will continue to be in colder areas, mainly in the colder months, and mainly at night.
Who would be harmed by that ?
In addition, if the temperature differential between the tropics and the Arctic continues to decline, there should be milder weather in the Northern Hemisphere.
That has already been happening since the 1970s:
— The 12 year record, without a major hurricane (Cat. 3 and stronger) making US land fall from 2005 to 2017,
— The eight year record, from 2009 through 2017, when the US experienced the fewest number of hurricane strikes over any eight-year period, since records have been kept.
— The declining count of EF1 and stronger tornadoes (US), and
— A decline in climate related disasters (global data from UN).
Oh my my my, Exxon couldn’t have been more wrong:
“Our best estimate is that doubling of the current concentration could increase average global temperature by about 1.3C to 3.1C. The increase would not be uniform over the earth’s surface with the polar caps likely to see temperature increases on the order of 10C and the equator little, if any, increase.”
Any lawyer will easily win a case using that evidence. They made statements…that turned out to be wrong on a biblical scale. This climate alarmism will never pass cross-examination.
CO2 has increased by 30% over the past 100 years, and the only warming you can find is in the NASA GISS nonsense temperature reconstruction that is refuted by both the RSS and UAH measurements. Exxon made statements that are easily proven to be wrong and the Climate Alarmists think they have a winning case in court. They have obviously never participated in a cross-examination. The alarmists will be humiliated.
This is all the evidence you need for Exxon to win in a court of law….outside of a Banana Republic.
https://imgur.com/a/CDasqHH
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‘Finding invariant properties within motion and change is essential to science. Newton’s laws are eminent examples. The first law asserts that, in the absence of an external force, the position x of a body may change in time t but the velocity u := dx/dt is constant. The second law is a generalization of the first for the case that a constant force F is present, whence the velocity changes but the acceleration a = du/dt is constant and equal to F/m, where m is the mass of the body. In turn, Newton’s law of gravitation is a further generalization, in which the attractive force F (weight) exerted, due to gravitation, by a mass M on a body of mass m located at a distance r is no longer constant. In this case, the quantity G = F r^2 /(m M) is constant, whereas in the application of the law for planetary motion another constant emerges, i.e., the angular momentum per unit mass, (dθ/dt) r^2, where θ denotes angle. However, whilst those laws give elegant solutions (e.g., analytical descriptions of trajectories) for simple systems comprising two bodies and their interaction, they can hardly describe the irregular trajectories of complex systems. Complex natural systems consisting of very many elements are impossible to describe in full detail nor their future evolution can be predicted in detail and with precision. Here, the great scientific achievement is the materialization of macroscopic descriptions rather than modeling the details. This is essentially done using probability theory (laws of large numbers, central limit theorem, principle of maximum entropy). Here lies the essence and usefulness of the stationarity concept, which seeks
invariant properties in complex systems.’ https://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/1001/
Dimitris Koutsoyiannis advises that I should bypass chaos and proceed directly to stochastics (pers. corr.). Although here stochastic is not synonymous with random. From the Nilometer on Rhode Island in Cairo – we get the long record of Nile River levels. Random events converge to a mean. Analysis of observed hydrological data reveals persistence or clustering of events – in which events of similar magnitude persist for a period. Mandelbrot and Harris (1968) describe it as extremes being very extreme indeed (the Noah effect) and periods of high or low flow being very persistent (the Joseph effect).
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/nile-e1527722953992.jpg
These effects emerge from shifting patterns in the spatiotemporal chaos of Earth’s coupled oceans and atmosphere. They were recognised in the modern era as nonlinear oscillations in ocean and atmospheric indices. That it is globally coupled is apparent from the fractal nature of turbulent flow – from micro-eddies to planetary waves. Indeed our host has written on a signal propagating through the system defined as indices as nodes on a network. That flow sometimes converges in extremes that are completely deterministic but seemingly random is no surprise. That we perturb the flow with emissions of greenhouse gases and other changes to the Earth system seems apparent.
https://judithcurry.com/2013/10/10/the-stadium-wave/
‘Perhaps we can visualize the day when all of the relevant physical principles will be perfectly known. It may then still not be possible to express these principles as mathematical equations which can be solved by digital computers. We may believe, for example, that the motion of the unsaturated portion of the atmosphere is governed by the Navier–Stokes equations, but to use these equations properly we should have to describe each turbulent eddy—a task far beyond the capacity of the largest computer. We must therefore express the pertinent statistical properties of turbulent eddies as functions of the larger-scale motions. We do not yet know how to do this, nor have we proven that the desired functions exist’. Edward Lorenz (1968)
Some 50 years later we are no closer to expressing ‘the pertinent statistical properties of turbulent eddies as functions of the larger-scale motions’. The way forward there is probabilistic forecasts initialised with ‘big data’ from modern observing systems using stochastic parametrization on quantum computers. Worth every penny of the cost of a ‘moon shot’.
RIE,
‘Everyone’ can agree that eddy formation can be seen in flowing water; and ‘everyone’ can agree that it is hard to model by mathematics; and ‘everyone’ can agree that there are spatio-temporal ‘chaotic’ observations of such events; but can ‘anyone’ show that these descriptions operate (at a scale and force and rapidity and impact) that merits imminent mitigation or alternatively some form of global harm related to the impact of humans?
Historians attribute to Erasmus (circa 1469-1536) the proverb “One swallow doth not a summer make” – or similar words.
I have a problem swallowing projected existentially threatening summers, be they stochastic or Lorenzian chaotic by Appellation. Seriously, Robert, what is the link, if any, between fun with eddy and impending doom? Geoff S
“A small forcing can cause a small [climate] change or a huge one.” National Academy of Sciences, 2002.
The evidence for abrupt climate change has been accumulating for a century.
e.g. https://history.aip.org/climate/rapid.htm
But one has to dive deeper than an aphorism.
RIE,
That is a comprehensive fail to answer the question.
On my desk right now is my copy of the book “Chaos – a Program Collection for the PC” by Korsch & Jodl.
If you have read it, you might appreciate the depths of the ‘aphorism’ in this practical instance.
Here is a copy of a randomly chosen page 31.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/chaos.jpg
Geoff S.
“A small forcing can cause a small [climate] change or a huge one.” National Academy of Sciences, 2002.
But one has to dive deeper than an aphorism.
Thanx for the irony.
I’m not so sure I believe the above aphorism, but were it well founded:
it implies a small negative forcing change ( like reducing GHGs ) could also cause a huge climate change.
And really, implies a zero RF change cause also cause huge climate change.
Probably more accurate is not that RF change causes climate change, but that dynamic instability is possible no matter what RF regimes.
That certainly would better explain past variation which has occurred with seemingly independent of past temperature variation.
A very odd response indeed. A random page of math that has no application to the Earth system. The math for spatiotemporal chaos has yet to be invented. As Ed Lorenz said in the quote above. When GS is not waffling about swallows it is hand waving of the highest order.
Temporal chaos is about geometry in a dimensionally finite phase space.
‘It deals mathematically with systems of non linear ODE where all unknowns are coordinates of the phase space and the state of the system is perfectly defined by a point P(t) in the phase space by giving its coordinates (degrees of freedom). If this rings a bell with Hamiltonian mechanics, it is good as it should…
The biggest difficulty comes from the fact that we lost this convenient finite dimensional phase space. That’s why almost nothing transports from temporal chaos to spatio-temporal chaos. There are no attractors, bifurcations and such. The whole mathematical apparatus has to be invented from scratch and it will take decades. To know the state of the system, we must know all the fields at all points – this is an uncountable infinity of dimensions.’ Tomas Milanovic
The National Academy of Sciences quote on the American Physical Society page is not an Erasmus aphorism. As the book title says – climate surprises are inevitable. More likely when the system is forced to change most rapidly.
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/10136/abrupt-climate-change-inevitable-surprises
I predict nothing – I simply describe how the unpredictable system actually operates.
Robert I Ellison: Random events converge to a mean.
As a general rule, that is not true. It isn’t true of Brownian motion, for example. The sample mean of a sequence of independent random variables with the same distribution converges to the mean of that distribution (there are a few conditions on the variance), but that is a special case. The independent samples themselves do not converge to anything.
https://datasciencechalktalk.com/2019/08/30/convergence-of-random-variable/
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David Appell | June 3, 2021 at 10:10 am |
co2islife: decline in what?
Rule #1 in cross-examination. Never ask a question that you don’t already know the answer. Thanks David, I’m glad you asked. Here are 3 videos that go into detail highlighting the fraud behind “hide the decline.”
https://youtu.be/JlCNrdna9CI
https://youtu.be/_reUlZhbU4o
https://youtu.be/XvhouGwqVt4
https://youtu.be/bj-SvEpmNgE
https://youtu.be/UnTH-4vGcZI
Never would independent researchers ever independently replicate “Mike’s Nature Trick to Hide the Decline.” That was unique to the researcher and would never be performed during an independent reconstruction.
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Verhneimbatsk (63.1500N, 87.9500E) ID:RSM00023678
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/stdata_show_v4.cgi?id=RSM00023678&dt=1&ds=14
Gasp!!! Just 5 years ago Siberia was colder than it was back in 1915. Yes, there looks to be sudden warming in Sibera. Care to explain how CO2 can cause cooling and then sudden warming?
https://imgur.com/G8An34V
Did the physics of the CO2 molecule suddenly change in 2015? If Climate Science was a real science, people wouldn’t be highlight temperature outliers evidence of man-made climate change and instead, try to explain how sudden warming can occur. Most likely air patterns have changed or more sunlight is reaching the earth. Neither have anything to do with CO2
BTW, global temperatures are back to the 1980 levels.
https://imgur.com/9x6iLig
Climate is intrinsically variable at all scales. Nor does it involve uniform global warming or cooling. That is the result of changing patterns of heat transport in turbulent flows – driven by surface pressure and planetary rotation – of oceans and atmosphere,
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/pages2k.png
Some of it involves circulation in the polar cell. As the planet warms the mass of air circulating in the cell increases. This cools at high latitudes and falls creating high pressure at the poles pushing the edge of the polar vortex – and frigid polar air – into higher latitudes. Where it meets warmer air there are extremes of tornado and blizzard.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Jetcrosssection.jpg
Many things – btw – change surface wind patterns. Trees, buildings, mountains. Are the local changes caused by wind turbines measurable? Some actual science would be nice.
She says her results suggest that on average one or two birds are killed by each turbine each year, though there can be variation depending on the site. “We get really low counts, even lower than studies from overseas,” she says. “If you look at the global trend, bats tend to be at greater risk than birds. That’s also coming out in Australia and they get much less attention.”
After 15 years working with the industry, she believes the money energy companies spend on bird and bat monitoring – estimated at between $20m and $120m over the next decade in Victoria alone as the state installs about 1,000 more turbines – could be better directed elsewhere. She says some individual monitoring should continue, but wants industry and government to back a research fund that would look at the cumulative impact of windfarm development on threatened species.
“What we want to do is, by pooling all our data and identifying the species most at risk where windfarms are built, work out how to limit risks and offset impacts before they begin,” Bennett says.
Part of the money would be spent addressing the biggest problems faced by threatened bird species that live near or pass by windfarm developments. It would go to restoring critical habitat, such as wetlands, and reducing fox and feral cat numbers. Research suggests cats kill a million birds across Australia each day.
“If we can leverage funding from what is a small threat to address larger threats then we will get a better outcome for species at risk,” she says. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/04/do-windfarms-kill-birds-how-australia-can-limit-the-impact-on-threatened-species
How do we know that the wind farms didn’t disrupt the air pattern causing a high-pressure system, resulting in clearer skies, more sunlight reaching earth and warming? CO2 won’t cause rapid and sudden warming, but changing wind patterns artificially will. Creating clouds will definitely cause temperature change.
https://imgur.com/wAy25pO
Climate change is a tautology – climate is nonlinear change in a system we are forcing into new territory. With little to no understanding of consequences. In the CERES era most variability in the global energy budget emerged from marine boundary layer stratocumulus feedback to sea surface temperature in the eastern Pacific Ocean. In the region of PDO and ENSO abyssal upwelling.
https://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_May_2021_v6.jpg
https://www.mdpi.com/climate/climate-06-00062/article_deploy/html/images/climate-06-00062-g002-550.jpg
https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/6/3/62/htm
Pacific decadal variation is a pattern in Earth’s spatiotemporal chaotic flow field that is immensely variable and that drive megadrought and megaflood. Moy et al (2002) presented the record of sedimentation shown below that is influenced by ENSO variability. It is based on the presence of greater and less red sediment in a lake core. More sedimentation is associated with El Niño. It has continuous high resolution coverage over 12,000 years. It shows periods of high and low El Niño intensity alternating with a period of about 2,000 years. There was a shift from La Niña dominance to El Niño dominance that is associated with the drying of the Sahel. There is a period around 3,500 years ago of high ENSO activity associated with the demise of the Minoan civilisation (Tsonis et al, 2010). Red intensity was intermittently in excess of 200. For comparison – red intensity in 1997/98 was 99. It shows ENSO variability considerably in excess of that seen in the modern period.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/moys-2002-2.png
It is one source of extremes on our nonlinear world. But climate is not the only or most pressing changes we are making to the planet. Nutrient exports are disrupting ecosystems around the world. Populations of 1000’s of charismatic species have crashed since the 1970’s. Deserts grow as terrestrial ecosystems degrade.
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/images/18.66e0efc517643c2b8109ac/1607769322818/planetary-boundaries-cover-1620.jpg
It is far from beyond us to reduce all human pressures on the Earth. Precision farming techniques apply nutrients where they are needed.
Living soils return carbon lost from terrestrial systems and create a drought and flood resilient agriculture. Restoring forests, rangelands, wetlands and coasts conserves biodiversity. Electricity is 25% of the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. Mitigating greenhouse gases from all sources requires a broader multi-gas and aerosol strategy – CFC’s, nitrous oxides, methane, black carbon and sulfate. Along with ongoing decreases in carbon intensity and increases in efficiency and productivity. And technical innovation across sectors – energy, transport, industry, residential and agriculture and forestry.
The goal is prosperous communities in vibrant landscapes. The basis must be ‘the raising up of human dignity via three overarching objectives: ensuring energy access for all; ensuring that we develop in a manner that does not undermine the essential functioning of the Earth system; ensuring that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever their cause may be.’ The Hartwell Paper, 2010
“The goal is prosperous communities in vibrant landscapes. ”
We meant well, but it ended up as always.
Prosperous communities have economic freedom. Vibrant landscapes are the result of stewardship of the gifts of nature. Both are essential.
Here is a question for this blog’s resident anti-skeptics — David Appell, Tyson McGuffin, Willard, Joshua etc.
Roger Pielke Jr. notes that reaching President Biden’s target of a 50% reduction in America’s carbon emissions by 2030 requires that on average, at least one coal or gas-fired power plant must be closed every month for the next nine years.
If climate activists truly believe that reaching Biden’s 2030 target is critical for saving the planet, shouldn’t they be demanding that these power plants be closed on schedule even if not enough new wind and solar is available by 2030 to cover the shortfall?
It can’t be done at all just in the electricity sector.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/medium/public/2021-04/sources-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2021.png
RIE: “It can’t be done at all just in the electricity sector.”
My reading of Pielke’s article is that cutting GHG emissions almost exclusively from the electricity sector is not his policy position; i.e., his policy position is that closing one fossil fueled power station every month, on average, is the electricity sector’s fair share of the overall GHG reduction burden goal for the year 2030.
Low hanging fruit. Reduce emissions of methane, nitrous oxide, CFC’s – as well as black carbon and sulphide. Continued improvement in productivity and efficiency in transport, industry and electricity production. Reverse carbon losses from agricultural soils and ecological degradation as a matter of some urgency. The US has a 12% land use offset available that is not shown in the EPA pie chart. Retire old coal plants in favor of natural gas. Maximise generation from geothermal heat, landfill gas and that from intensive animal husbandry. Feed cows probiotics. It can’t be done with wind and solar power. That isn’t the plan.
https://www.snl.com/articles/391931895.png
RIE: “……… It can’t be done with wind and solar power. That isn’t the plan. ”
Robert, in reference to the full content of your latest remarks, I’m waiting to see a plan from any group of climate activists, including those activists within Biden’s administration who advise him directly, which describes in reasonable detail just how the United States will get to his 50% by 2030 GHG reduction goal.
Any such plan worth its salt would include a contingency fallback position if it becomes evident the GHG reduction targets can’t be met.
I myself have presented such a plan here on Climate Etc. and on WUWT which does in fact achieve Biden’s target. But it does so by imposing strictly enforced energy conservation measures; by substantially raising the price of all forms of energy for all Americans; and by imposing what amounts to a carbon fuel rationing program not unlike the one imposed during World War II.
So the basic question still remains. Will climate activists walk their talk and present a reasonably detailed plan which deals directly and realistically with the many problems and issues associated with reaching 50% by 2030?
This represents a 52% reduction in per capita emissions by 2030. We are developing gas fields and retiring old coal plants. Biden has many of the same elements in play – but he is mere months into his presidency. We have yet to see detail.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/emissionsreduction01.jpg
https://www.industry.gov.au/policies-and-initiatives/australias-climate-change-strategies
And you insist that ‘activists’ agree to the idiocy of your proposal.
The Paris Agreement
https://wp.me/pTN8Y-7lM
The evidence defies the assumption of steady continuous warming. In both the higher latitudes of the Northern hemisphere and the higher latitudes of the Southern hemisphere it’s *colder* than usual:
https://youtu.be/yp3JqboJI6I
The scientific consensus is that greenhouse gas emissions – and other changes to the Earth system – are driving the planet to inevitable tipping points. The contrarian consensus is that any departure from uniform global warming falsifies climate science. The latter is complete and obvious nonsense. Having them remain ‘voices in the wilderness’ is the best thing for it.
‘The idea that Earth’s climate could abruptly change in a drastic manner has been around for several decades. Early studies of ice cores showed that very large changes in climate could happen in a matter of a few decades or even years, for example, local to regional temperature changes of a dozen degrees or more, doubling or halving of precipitation rates, and dust concentrations changing by orders of magnitude (Dansgaard et al., 1989; Alley et al., 1993). In the last few decades, scientific research has advanced our understanding of abrupt climate change significantly. Some original fears have been allayed or now seem less ominous, but new ones have sprung up. Fresh reminders occur regularly that thresholds and tipping points exist not only in the climate system, but in other parts of the Earth system (Box 1.1).
What has become clearer recently is that the issue of abrupt change cannot be confined to a geophysical discussion of the climate system alone. The key concerns are not limited to large and abrupt shifts in temperature or rainfall, for example, but also extend to other systems that can exhibit abrupt or threshold-like behavior even in response to a gradually changing climate. The fundamental concerns with abrupt change include those of speed—faster changes leave less time for adaptation, either economically or ecologically—and of magnitude—larger changes require more adaptation and generally have greater impact.’ https://www.nap.edu/read/18373/chapter/3
/ Years ago, my heart was set to live, oh
And I’ve been trying hard against unbelievable odds
It gets so hard in times like now to hold on
But guns they wait to be stuck by, at my side is God /
https://youtu.be/Cn1t6l7UUPc
Well, Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
“I got forty red-white-and-blue shoestrings
And a thousand telephones that don’t ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things?”
And Louie the King said, “Let me think for a minute, son”
Then he said, “Yes, I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61”
In case you didn’t read the IPCC, there is no convincing evidence of sea-level rise. None. The #1 Smoking Gun that CO2 isn’t causing warming is the lack of sea-level rise increase. If in fact, temperatures did form a “dogleg” in 1902 as the Hockeystick demonstrates, sea-levels would have stopped falling and immediately reversed their downtrend and accelerated upward. That didn’t happen.The more you look behind the “science” of climate change, the more obvious the fraud becomes.
https://imgur.com/kPGU5HW
https://imgur.com/SgT23bH
The most falsified aspect of the hockey stick is not the “hide the decline” of the post 1960 tree ring temperature proxies. It’s that pretending that those proxies would detect a signal prior to thermometers.
I make his words mine…
Why did the authors Geoffrey Weiss and Claude Roessiger not discuss the https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2015/12/data-or-dogma-promoting-open-inquiry-in-the-debate-over-the-magnitude-of-human-impact-on-earth-s-climate Congressional hearing? It was convened under the guise of an open debate about the evidence for AGW but turned out to be something “completely different.”
https://skepticalscience.com/Response-Data-or-Dogma-hearing.html
It fits perfectly with the theme of Weiss and Roessiger’s theme in this post.
Science moves on – contrarians don’t seem to. And unless you count faster rotating planets being warmer or neutron star material masses whizzing about the solar system – there are no new ideas. Just the old and unsophisticated rehashing of the hockey stick.
https://miro.medium.com/max/765/1*wp5_T42Prc8KCgI8ZokcCw.png
http://pastglobalchanges.org/products/highlights
While my last comment is in moderation – I’ll take the opportunity to direct attention to up to date data. Just while we are waiting for that inevitable tipping point.
https://climate.nasa.gov/system/charts/15_co2_left_061720.gif
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsX4qHgDlZM
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Robert, Garbage In Garbage Out. NASA GISS has 3 different temperature charts, RSS has another and UAH has another.Note the hot pockets over S Africa, Venezuela, Alaska, and others early in the series, and then warming mostly in the Northern Hemisphere in the later part. Care to explain how CO2 can do that? Are the physics of the CO2 molecule different in the N Hemi than the S Hemi? Lastly, why are the really hot spots concentrated over areas largely forests and tundra? The oceans also look to be pretty well covered, but we all know there are no reliable sources for the major area of the oceans. That is all nonsense data.If your video was any near accurate, why aren’t the sea levels accelerating? Climate science just conveniently fails to ask the right questions. There are countless dogs that don’t bark situations.
Expecting uniform global warming is complete nonsense. Here’s a reconstruction based on a different methodology. And if you look at the NASA site – there is data on sea level rise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VbgzCahx8o
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-018-0044-6
Satellites are preferable for a number of reasons – but they do show warming. About half in the last 40 years is anthropogenic according to Kravtsov et al.
http://images.remss.com/figures/climate/temperature_and_vapor_trop20_V4.png
Robert, you admit that uniform warming nonsense:
“Expecting uniform global warming is complete nonsense. ”
Therefore, because CO2 does increase uniformly across the globe, and the physics don’t change due to location, other factors must be causing the temperature differentials. Can you name them and model them? Absolutely not. You can’t identify warming from natural forces vs CO2. Ironically, you produce all the evidence to understand what is happening, and you don’t even seem to understand the graphic you posted.
Just what do you think this chart means? Hint, it perfectly models temperatures and has nothing to do with CO2.
https://imgur.com/yAF0mc4
It is mostly to do with cloud changes in the eastern Pacific driven by changes in state as patterns in Earth’s spatiotemporal chaos.
e.g. https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/6/3/62
Like many other academic scientists in areas other than climate science, I generally accepted CAGW, because I thought it was the consensus opinion of professionals who were in the best position to reach valid conclusions on the matter. In trying to explain matters in my area of scientific expertise to non-specialists, I became aware that the years of training and the rigorous competition in the world of academic science provided scientists with information and with training and practice in evaluating research results and conclusions have capabilities that are not shared by others, even if they are very intelligent and knowledgeable in their own area of expertise. So, why I am I know a skeptic with regard to CAGW? It started with climategate which I spent considerable time learning about and evaluating. After catching up a bit on the consensus, I ventured to comment on some popular blogs expressing my view that uncertainty was so substantial and the data sets were so suspect that it would be unwise to spend huge sums of money to avoid an outcome that was not well demonstrated by observation. I am a fan of Dr. Bruce Ames, inventor of the Ames test for carcinogens. He later stated (this is not conjecture, I heard him speak about it) that he wished he had not invented the Ames test, because it incorrectly labeled many chemicals as carcinogens, which almost certainly were not and which certainly would have provided society with substantial benefits if they had been used. This epitomizes to me what it means to be a scientist. It is the way I was trained as a scientist. Regardless of my published conclusions, when the results no longer support my favorite hypothesis, I have to reject it publicly, even though doing so might harm my reputation or my ability to obtain grant funding. By the way, I see many comments on this site from people who seem to be totally unaware of how academic research works. At all major research universities, one must publish and obtain competitive national-level grant funding to gain tenure and promotion. That means that folks like me at a university that ranks in the top 100 research universities in the U.S. (but nearer the bottom of that list than the top) have to compete successfully with the best scientists in the world (IMHO) to keep a job for which they have spent about 10 years post B.S. for which to qualify (5 years for PhD and 5 years post-doc). Had I been confronted with a situation in which my results indicated CAGW was wrong, I would like to think I would have been brave enough to let the data be my guide. However, feeding my family was my top priority, so I could have probably have rationalized sufficiently to be a consensus supporter.
The response to my comments on blogs that the data supporting CAGW did not seem very solid totally shocked me. The responses were what I would have expected if I had gone to a church and stated that there is no God. There was anger, there was criticism of me as a person, there were comments that I have never heard in my own field of research in more than 30 years of experience. I must admit that I may have misunderstood some issues in climate science, because it is not my area of research (though I do have experience modeling complex biological systems, which are similar in some ways to the climate system). However, I did not misunderstand the responses I received to perfectly rational objections to some CAGW tenets. They were not responses like I have seen in criticism of my own peer-reviewed publications and grant applications. They were personal, hateful and not scientific at all. What I did understand about CAGW made me skeptical, but the response of climate scientists to my rather mild doubts convinced me that there was indeed a severe case of confirmation bias in this field of research. In following the field in the years since Climategate, I have seen nothing that has changed my mind. The insistence of climate scientists on referring to skeptics as denialisms provides sufficient evidence that they have not gotten to that conclusion by evidence but by belief. I do not deny climate change, or that carbon dioxide contributes to it. However, it is worthwhile to consider this. The uncertainty profile of climate models during the last 20 years has not decreased. Any other field of science in which there was no measurable progress in the last 20 years would be in deep trouble. Unfortunately, climate science has hitched its wagon to a political system and has made enemies of anyone who disagrees, and has largely abandoned science. For example, have you ever heard of a field of research in which investigators routinely refuse to provide their raw data and the computer programs they used to analyze it to other scientists? I haven’t, but there are many documented examples in climate science (including in the climategate files).
The most frustrating aspect of this situation to me is that the media have virtually all bought in to the CAGW narrative and consistently repeated the truly debunked statement that 97% of climate scientists agree with the narrative of CAGW. This will likely lead to the possibility that we will bankrupt the world economy and kill millions of people in the poorest countries in the world by denying them inexpensive effective energy (like natural gas) because of world markets driven by outrageously uncertain conclusions that carbon dioxide is poison. It is also frustrating that the media completely ignore the incontrovertible evidence that increased carbon dioxide has “greened” the world and been substantially beneficial in food production.
Stephen Pruett,
You write almost 1000 words to tell us how you are unlike commenters on this site who “seem to be totally unaware of how academic research works,” yet you offer not a single citation in support of your myriad assertions.
I will assume that you have for example participated or at least been attending the Perspectives on Climate Sciences – From historical developments to research frontiers lectures and in particular paid close attention to Raymond Pierrehumbert (Univ. Oxford): “A journey from GFD to exoplanets, with Snowballs and global warming along the way.” But if you have not, do not despair, they can still be found on the web.
I don’t have to tell you that climate scientists are bound by the “Duty to Warn” doctrine just as much as any other profession (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_warn).
Stephen
Excellent comments. For those who grasp what science with integrity means, you hit home. For those who don’t, your comments will pass over their heads.
Exxon scientists’ 1982 predictions of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures compared to observational data from NOAA and NASA, respectively.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM34UMEr6L4&w=1280&h=720%5D
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I just saw a reply from Ellison (high above) to an earlier reply from me, but there was no reply-button on Ellisons reply, so I post my reply here. We have now over 300 comments so there is a good chance that nobody will see this.
It’s rude to say of somebody, of whom you know virtually nothing, that that ‘somebody’ is “unaware of” something. You cannot possibly know. Also, your longer account of some physics a few steps down (from my reply above) is no news for me. It’s part of the highschool (quivalent = ‘gymnasium’) or undergraduate syllabus in a number of European countries. And, some years ago I wrote a paper about ‘language change from ignorance’. The semantics of the modern use of the word ‘climate’ is such a change (check the etymology).
It’s the same with “antropogenic”. In “climate” parlance it doesn’t mean the carbon released from your body when you die and decay, or the carbon you emit when breathing, but the carbon that dinosaurs kindly left over in the crust of the earth some million years ago and now has been drilled out.
Actually and accidently, I’m aware of the use of ‘pattern’ in so-called chaos theory, but that use – and your explication – doesn’t make it a technical term. It’s only a label to some math. I willingly admit that I’m not able to do the math (I’ve done other things in my time) while I do think I understand what the math does.
On Newton on truth and empirical evidence: it reminds me of a meeting with Ray Jackendoff at Brandeis University in 2005. I asked him why ‘word class’ (ie. nouns, verbs etc) was a kind of axiomatic notion in Generative Linguistics, and he answered that he thought it was (uncontested) empirical knowledge. I said that I considered it a theoretical question. Then he answered (quote): “you don’t argue with gravity”. Today I might quote the title of Carlo Rivello’s (physics for ordinary people) book: ‘Reality is not what it seems’. And truth? Only contingent propositions can, ultimately, have their truth value determined and, therefore, be denied (˚it is raining; denial: ˚it is not raining). Other propositions can only be falsified (˚all swans are white; falsification: ˚I met a black swan). This is the trouble with propositions on so-called Climate Change. They are not contingent propositions, but hypotheses; so they cannot be denied (without you being inconsistent). Further trouble arises from their lack of falsification criteria, which are either missing or not well defined. Compare with this principle:
‘It has long been an aphorism of journalism that if one man says it’s raining and another says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both, but to look out of the window and see for yourself.’ [The Spectator 06/06-21]
As for “paradigm” Wikipedia offers its usual drill when ‘it’ does not know what to do about a certain entry. ‘It’ makes recourse to dictionaries. Kuhn cannot claim copyright to the (in my view unfortunately chosen) label “paradigm”, which means the same as the widely used compound word ‘shool of thought’. I also said to my graduate students that they should buy, on paper, their own dictionaries – or all volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica – (because then they would still be able to use them if somebody pulled the plug of the internet) but they should not use either the dictionaries or wiki as references. References should be scientific papers or books.
Two more things:
(1) “Climate scientists” will have to explain to ordinary people – beyond the middle class believers and arts intellectuals – what ordinary people can’t see for themselves out there, viz. explain why “Climate scientists” claim that there is a “climate disaster underway”. If not, ordinary people may respond like the ‘gilets jaunes’, yellow vests, in France, indicating: we won’t pay for your fantasies.
(2) la Nature lance en permanence d’innombrables essais, qui sont d’immenses gaspillages
Bernard Beauzamy, 2017, http://www.scmsa.eu/accueil.htm.
In English: Nature constantly launches countless trials, which are immense wastes.
So, the idea that ‘nature’ has some kind of balance or equilibrium that is disturbed by humans is romantic fiction. Humans are part of nature, and sometimes humans are themselves, and produce, huge amounts of garbage; so the “energy-clean world” is a fairytale.
And finally: many of the main articles and comments on this website are relevant, interesting and technically informative. Some of the spillage is just gobbledegook, or versions of the question asked by ‘TikTok Tolkien theorists over whether Orcs are Chaotic Evil or Neutral Evil’ [The Spectator 04/06-21]
I think I’ll check out here, folks.
Hans Götzsche | June 7, 2021 at 8:55 am
That is a finely written post.
Please visit often.
Thanks.
I appreciate your kind words. More kind words are needed in this debate.
So, I think I may be back, anyhow.
It is polite to keep to the thread. I am used to dealing with the real world. All swans are white is an empirical truth until it isn’t. If we lose that we lose science. Patterns in fluid dynamics are fractal – now there’s a mathematical term – from micro-eddies to planetary waves.
‘Big whorls have little whorls
Which feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls
And so on to viscosity.’
Lewis Fry Richardson, 1922
‘You can see spatio-temporal chaos if you look at a fast mountain river. There will be vortexes of different sizes at different places at different times. But if you observe patiently, you will notice that there are places where there almost always are vortexes and they almost always have similar sizes – these are the quasi standing waves of the spatio-temporal chaos governing the river. If you perturb the flow, many quasi standing waves may disappear. Or very few. It depends.’ Tomas Milanovic
I guess the the “energy-clean world” must indeed be a fairytale. Heck, I don’t even know what you mean by that!
A clean energy world on the other hand, is not only achievable, but we are already moving in that direction, albeit slowly.
1. Please define what is a “clean energy world”
2. Why do you seem unconcerned about the over 2 billion people who don’t have regular access to electricity? Shouldn’t a goal be to get people access to electricity as quickly as possible?
Rob at 9:29 am
Surmise
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lA-z-FCDLA&w=1280&h=723%5D
I’ve pondered this issue for forty years now, ever since I first listened to one Professor Criswell’s lectures. Even though he did not live to see his project executed I’m encouraged to see the progress made by NASA and other space agencies around the world with Project Artemis.
How is a “clean energy world” achievable when
1 Wind turbines cannot be manufactured without the use of fossil fuels
2 Solar panels cannot be manufactured without the use of fossil fuels
3 Both wind turbines and solar panels require considerable mining for minerals that is reliant on machinery etc that are reliant on fossil fuels
4 A typical electric car requires SIX times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires NINE times more mineral resources than a gas fired plant.
5 Since .2010 the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has INCREASED by 50% as the share of renewables has risen.
6 It is estimated there will be TWO BILLION cars worldwide by 2050. If these are required to be EVs there needs to be a quantum jump in mining which will be reliant on fossil fuels.
A clean energy world is an oxymoron
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Steve Koonin, “the curmudgeon” picked specifically for Obama’s science team as someone who challenges orthodox views, is embroiled in controversy over his new book ‘unsettled science’, and the debacle etc:
https://youtu.be/oskcqzRPqoc
Thanks for the heads up Alan. What with one thing and another I haven’t had a chance to Google “Steve Koonin” yet today.
A commenter on the video enquires “Why does Koonin deserve any serious criticism?”
Isn’t it obvious?
Guess what? As I’ve pointed out that the regional variations in temperatures, as well as the randomness of its trend simply rules out CO2 as the cause. I’ve posted hundreds of charts that debunk the CO2 drives temperature charts.
https://imgur.com/a/IrE63Xo
Antarctica shows no warming with a 25% increase in CO2.
https://imgur.com/a/mHIjixS
When you actually look for causes, they become pretty obvious. I’ve also pointed out that the oceans were warming. That won’t happen with LWIR between 13 and 18µ, so CO2 won’t warm the oceans. Visible radiation however will warm the oceans, and guess what? More solar radiation has been reaching the oceans. Imagine that, more warming visible radiation reaching the oceans results in warming, no need for CO2.
Magnitude Of Recent Surface Solar Radiation Forcing Over US Is Tens Of Times Greater Than From CO2
Over the US, the modest change in cloud cover from 1996-2019 predominantly drove the +11.77 W/m² surface solar radiation forcing during 1996-2012 (then -2.35 W/m² from 2013-2019). These “brightening” and “dimming” magnitudes easily overwhelm the values associated with an annual 2 to 2.5 ppm rise in CO2 forcing (0.2 W/m² per decade).
https://notrickszone.com/2021/06/07/magnitude-of-recent-surface-solar-radiation-forcing-over-us-is-tens-of-times-greater-than-from-co2/
currently, global warming is nothing but a burden to gold diggers, but when the temperature crosses the line, we would be first to fall….I agree with you
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Splendid. Thank you.