and the red line is very similar to the blue line, but shifted ten years to the right…

interesting.

Reading some of the alarmist literature, I’m struck by how speculative and/or how math-intensive it is, and how little is based on observations that have gone through rigorous scrutiny. It seems as though the “alarmist train” is being run by mathematicians and statisticians, not scientists. Mathematics and simplistic statistical analysis can create the illusion of absolute truth in the real world. I sometimes think that some math-minded people are knowingly pulling a con-game on the world at large, because so many people are mathematically illiterate and do not understand the nature of the relationship between math and science.

I also notice that alarmists strangely avoid going to the heart of the matter. I’ve proposed two times to alarmists, “Why don’t we look at the tropospheric temperature record, where the greenhouse effect actually takes place?” They talk around it. They talk about the surface temperature record, and the CO2 record and say, “See how they correlate, and how the relationship fits well with the established formula for radiative forcing?”. Or they say, “Look at the stratosphere and how it’s cooling. That’s evidence of greenhouse warming.” I can see the rationale for that conclusion, but it’s not the end of the story. There’s a mystery that they do not want to acknowledge. If we look at the troposphere itself there’s a slight warming, but from what I’ve seen, even using a temperature data set that an alarmist referred to me, it’s less than .1 degrees C from the 1980s to recently, way less than the climate models say it should be.

What I find with the alarmists is the same thing I’ve heard is true of people who believe in creationism: They demand an explanation, even if none that is rigorously rational exists. So they grasp for the one, no matter how flimsy, that agrees with their world view and seems to make the most sense at the moment. They use mathematics and statistics to reassure their belief, to give the imprimatur of “truth”. It’s all based on a belief that “We affect the world”. Yes we do, but to what extent is the question. To them our effect is as large as the world. The evidence says maybe the scope of the effect of industrialization on temperature is as large as the world, but the magnitude of the influence is so small that it could not lead to the catastrophe that alarmists predict.

A – what’s stubbornness got to do with anything? Smokey is wrong – that is all. What do you think of his endless stream of graphs that show only a carefully picked small segment of the available data? Do you think they are worthwhile, or irrelevant?

REPLY: I think looking at recent trends is instructive, the relevancy increases with time.

Nice strawman there. Sorry that the AGW conjecture still fails. The question was about the non-correlation between CO2 and temperature, not about the definition of climate.

[snip smooookey don't make me turn this board around! ~ charles the motherderator]

REPLY: To be fair, you are pretty stubborn yourself on your own belief system. There’s plenty of stubbornness to go around. – A

Been following along for quite some time. And noticed along the way how wonderfully accurate the “small-scale process models” were; and am completely confident in the regional weather predictions from the “regional weather models” (they NEVER miss, do they?); and the infallibly accurate predictions from the other models, too.
…
Engineers don’t have the luxury to be wrong 99 percent of the time. We adhere to things like fundamentals.

Any references to regional weather models or small scale process studies using DNS which are wrong 99% of the time? Are they all in the same category?

Do you use models for engineering applications? Do you develop models at all?

By the way, to all you climate scientists out there. We engineers (with the lawyers’ assistance for permits and such) are going to design and build the processes to combat your faked CO2 crisis – carbon capture and sequestration, cap and trade, renewable energy as replacement for fossil fuels, bio-fuels for transportation, and all the rest.

Riiiight, I’m not a climate scientist, but I say Go For It.

“Had you missed the models of smaller scale and/or more simplified circulation systems, e.g., small-scale process models, regional weather models, mesoscale models, etc., developed over the past several decades?”

No, I had not missed that. Been following along for quite some time. And noticed along the way how wonderfully accurate the “small-scale process models” were; and am completely confident in the regional weather predictions from the “regional weather models” (they NEVER miss, do they?); and the infallibly accurate predictions from the other models, too. I thought of all that accuracy every time I shoveled 12 inches of “partly cloudy” from my driveway, and just laughed when I was drenched in rain on a “fair and sunny” day, predicted by those models. Oh, what? Not the same models? You mean CLIMATE models! Of course…the ones that failed to properly predict anything so far…like the recent run of cool temperatures in Los Angeles…the complete blanket of snow across Canada this past winter…snow in Buenos Aires…absence of record hurricanes…sea levels refusing to rise as predicted…ice growing and growing globally…THOSE models!

Engineers don’t have the luxury to be wrong 99 percent of the time. We adhere to things like fundamentals.

By the way, to all you climate scientists out there. We engineers (with the lawyers’ assistance for permits and such) are going to design and build the processes to combat your faked CO2 crisis – carbon capture and sequestration, cap and trade, renewable energy as replacement for fossil fuels, bio-fuels for transportation, and all the rest. And the economies in the world that are forced to do these things are going to crumble, with people unemployed, cold, and hungry. Liberal state governments, and federal governments, will increase tax rates to compensate for falling revenues as businesses fail. Tax-payers will soon revolt. The non-participating economies will continue to consume fossil fuels and grow their economies.

And the engineers will be pointing straight at the climate scientists with their faked CO2 crisis, properly laying the blame entirely at your feet.

This is not a game.

I am the engineer who characterized the GCM’s as statistical. Although they claim to be physical, the constants they use in presumed feedback were selected based on how well the models hindcast. This is there fatal flaw and why I don’t believe they have any predictive value. When you notice a correlation, you should then investigate the physical relationships to determine cause and effect; not just try different mathematical relationships and time lags.

Do you realize that the “best” models (ones that hindcast best) assumed a huge positive feedback from clouds? They assumed that small increases in air temperature would reduce cloud cover. There are certainly ways to test this and they have all failed. If this were so, there would be markedly less cloud cover in the warmer areas of earth.

Why does cloud cover vary? Maybe cosmic rays, maybe chaos. Either way, if you want to predict weather and climate better, we should research cloud dynamics. When I found out the GCM’s used all sorts of positive feedback fudge factors to exaggerate the climate sensitivity by a factor of five, like Burt Rutan, I knew it was BS.

When they explain all the texture in the temperature record and there is a residual 1K climate sensitivity with a very high correlation, I might take them seriously. Of course once you explain everything but a linear trend, you might look to other roughly linear factors like land use change.

enjoy the abscence of logic and science in the “arguments” and “discussions.”

it’s enough to make a grown engineer cry.

Sadly, if you are an engineer, it appears you do not understand what scale-up is and how important it is. One simply does not start by constructing the biggest facility first. Yet those who write GCMs ignore this.

Had you missed the models of smaller scale and/or more simplified circulation systems, e.g., small-scale process models, regional weather models, mesoscale models, etc., developed over the past several decades?