http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26284109-11949,00.html

Guess Ruddie can’t afford the 100Mb net project anymore…

Richard (13:16:07) : (final paragraph)

E. J. Mohr (09:24:01) :
“…temperatures have changed far more in the recent past [s.w.: presumably meaning on a geological timescale but before potential human interference] than anything we have ever seen, it is simple to postulate that natural climate variability exists and is greater than anything we have lived through. Thus far the modern temperature records don’t show anything extraordinary.”

Thanks also to E. J. Mohr (12:35:39) for posting a link to the (first of) some Youtube videos of a Dr. Carter talk on Climate Change. There at least he uses scientific arguments to address this point of whether or not there is anything unusual in the rate of global temperature change over the past few decades. This is towards the start of the second Youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN06JSi-SW8&feature=channel .

Regrettably though, he uses an illegitimate comparison that fundamentally undermines his argument.

Instead of comparing like with like, he blithely compares a rate change plot from one particular site to one which is a global average.

The first plot, introduced at 1:28 into the second YouTube video, is titled “The rate of temperature change through time. From the distribution of delta-O18 from the last 50,000 years from the GISP2 ice core”
This refers to the GISP2 ice core that was extracted from a particular location on the Greenland ice sheet.

The typical rate from the last 5000 years of this plot is then compared directly against the slope of a globally averaged plot. The plot, introduced at 2:48 into the second video, is titled “Global Average Temperature – Lower Troposphere”

The natural temperature fluctuations at a particular location are of course going to be much larger than the fluctuations in a global average. Therefore the data he presents from a particular Greenland site will be a gross overestimate of the expected natural global temperature fluctuations and so cannot legitimately be compared to the rates of global temperature rise seen in the instrumental record.

This invalid comparison completely invalidates the chain of argument that is the centrepiece of Dr. Carter’s talk. Without it, he simply cannot demonstrate that recent global temperature changes are unexceptional.

Dr Carter’s objection to the use of the word “evidence”, that you have now now picked up on, is clearly a semantic argument rather than a scientific one. And it does seem rather contrived to me.

Consider this scenario. You say “I am feeling cold”. You put on a sweater. Then you say “now I am feeling warm”. Would you object to use of the word “evidence” if someone commented “well there is evidence you took action to warm yourself up”?

I would suggest not.

Smokey, do you consider yourself an expert on the null hypothesis and the scientific method? Perhaps then you can be a bit more constructive in your criticism and explain why (to reprise my post s. wing (06:46:29) that uses the sweater analogy) according to Dr Carter:
1) the ‘null hypothesis’ has to be that you felt warmer ‘naturally’, not because you put the sweater on.
2) the alternative null hypothesis – that you felt warmer because you put the sweater on – is “against the fundamental science assumption of parsimony”. It doesn’t seem unnecessarily complicated to me to consider that you may have warmed up because you put the sweater on.
3) It’s “a wrong null hypothesis”, to quote Dr Carter;
4) It’s “predicated … on faulty science logic”. What precisely is the form or class of logical error that has been committed?
5) Even worse, according to Dr Carter, its “a carefully laid climate alarmist trap”. (All I did was suggested the sweater may have warmed me up. What could be so devious about that?)

In anticipation of your more detailed deconstruction of my claimed mis-statements…

Terryskinner (08:39:35) :,
I agree with your points.

Joel (09:13:24) :,
As a detail, the numbers I seem to remember are instead a slightly larger increase in CO2 concentrations from 0.028% to 0.039% of the atmosphere.

But the main point is to disagree that a gas would need to be “magic” for this change to make a difference. The ‘greenhouse effect’ is known to be a strong effect. The total effect changes the Earth’s average surface temperature by around 30 degrees celsius, with water vapour the most important gas and CO2 next. So it is very plausible that a 40% or so change in CO2 can be significant.

fredlightfoot (09:52:35) :,
You’re talking apples and oranges. I don’t accept that anything I have said commits me to the assertion that your neighbour’s greenhouse should be over 100°C.

John Nicklin (10:56:58) : & Richard (13:19:04) :,
Yes, the thickness and effectiveness of the sweater is a substantive issue. As you will understand, you are asserting that the sweater is not effective.

Allan M (11:58:57) :,
Agree a sweater does not produce energy. It instead warms you up by helping to block the escape of heat.

Thank you for your further comments and for now agreeing with me that Dr. Carter got his logic wrong.

However, you then stated: “This is true as an argument in deductive reasoning, but so far there has not been any falsification forthcoming, so it is a moot point.”

You further then criticised my “preference for applying rules of logic” rather than discussing the substantive science – specifically, the substantive science that you summarised with the statement “…logic simply cannot answer the question “From CO2, how much warming?” “.

I actually agree with your final statement, as I already indicated in my response to Tom of Florida. If I was discussing that substantive question then I would not, and could not, confine myself to only rules of logic.

However, my use of logic was merely to point out a huge error in logic in the above article by Dr Carter. The point was relevant and it was certainly not moot that Dr Carter committed the error.

You also said:
[i]“…IF a prediction based on a theory is false THEN the theory is false.
And that is where we are today, in 2009 with the failure of continued warming and related predictions.”[/i]

I don’t accept that either. (And that is even if the disagreement between the temperature data and the computer output was convincing, which it isn’t really to me.) That computer model prediction will surely have had modelling, statistical and systematic uncertainties. The alleged falsification of someone’s 20-year-old computer output does not disprove, in this case, the hypothesis that humans are increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentration and it is affecting the climate.

Ron,
It is obvious that you can’t trap heat. I am sure that when warmists use that phrase they are just being loose with terminology.

———–
I don’t really see that the terminology is loose, even. “Trap” isn’t a scientific word, as far as I know, and I might say “he trapped me in the hallway…” It doesn’t mean I’m still there. We have the same thing with holding and storing a charge. Could that be trapping and keeping?
Water vapour may well be invisible, but, in everyday English, it isn’t. Speaking of which, it’s very awkward to talk about relative humidity and dewpoints without saying that the air can only “hold” so much water vapour. It’s only necessary to elaborate if you think someone doesn’t get it. I think the warmies get that much.

“. . . as an engineer . . . . for more than a quarter of a century I have tried to design things that violate the LAWS OF PHYSICS.”

I thought that’s what you fellows were up to!

Be advised that you are to consider yourself under arrest. You and your co-conspirators are to cease and desist.

As a physicist, I must say that those laws are in place for a reason, don’t cha know? Matter? Energy? You want everything just flying apart?

I’d ask if YOU want order or chaos but it’s not up to YOU! Those laws were in place before you were born and they’ll be around after you are dead.

There, I said it!

If kids today are not exposed to science as a way of thinking, then they need something else. ID might fit that bill. And so might climate change, or any other conservation theme, or perhaps even spiritual mysticism.

I was wondering about that, re. education. When I first encountered the columnist I described, he told me that CO2 correlates very well with the variations in temperature we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution. I told him this made as much sense as the Aztecs saying that the Sun rose because they made a human sacrifice to it every day! Correlations don’t mean anything. They have to be tested.

You read my mind about the comparison to ID. I brought that up with these guys as well. ;)

After the encounters I tried to think back to my own experiences with my science education. I remember we were taught the cycle of hypothesis, test (through observation/experiment), results, and analysis. I think the hypothesis was practically handed to us on a plate. We would do a series of lab exercises which were planned for the class. In our results we were supposed to think about any error that could’ve been introduced into our results, and come up with a quantitative error to add to our result papers. I think the way this was typically done is we would make a prediction using a formula that had already been historically derived, and then we would compare our observations to the predicted result. There was always some error in that regard, and so that’s the error we would put down. It taught a good lesson though, that observation will always have some error in it, and that it could be introduced through the instruments we were using in our experiments.

I remember when I was in jr. high we were taught a lot about scientific principles. I remember there were a series of cartoon movies we watched, which when I think back on them were very instructive. It portrayed a series of Greek gods (I think, or perhaps they were just Greeks who believed in multiple gods) being shown what science was. It showed the fallacies in their mythical thinking (for ex: that the god of lightning caused the storm). The main point it got across was that what we think we see is often wrong. The way to see this is to test what we think we see using a rational process. At some point in my science education I was taught to beware of correlations in data (or occurrences). They must be tested. It may have been through these movies.

We also watched the complete Cosmos series by Carl Sagan. A wonderful series on science!

I think I mostly got what science was, through my public school education, but I was a bit misinformed. It was only by listening to someone who really got to the essentials of why science was beneficial and necessary for our modern world that I filled in some of the gaps.

I honestly don’t know what kind of science education the alarmists I described had, if any. It seemed to me they didn’t have the first clue. In any case, what I saw was disturbing to me, because they spoke as though they were establishing fact. As I mentioned earlier, one of them is a columnist for my local paper. I had always assumed that a responsible publication, when it was publishing information about what’s happening in nature, it would always refer to scientific sources for information. This columnist wrote an article literally asserting his own facts, using some scientifically derived data sets he loaded into a spreadsheet, and from them concluded that AGW was real. I asked him if he had any scientific sources to back up his claim. He said no. He said he was not making a scientific claim, and did not claim to be doing so in his article. He said, “This is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal.” He made no claim to being a scientist, either. He said all of it was his opinion–at the time. Yet just a week later I found him claiming in an online forum on the newspaper’s website that his “opinion” was indisputable fact. Why? Because “I have seen nothing that contradicts it.” Of course nothing contradicted it, because it hadn’t been tested!

I eventually complained to the opinion editor about the column, saying that anyone reading it would assume that the author was making scientific claims. The editor said, “I don’t see him making any scientific claims in his article.” So that went nowhere.

What I eventually came to realize after discussing his beliefs with him is all he really had for scientific justification for them was anecdotes. He basically believed in a “probability theory” which says, “It’s highly unlikely to be anything else.”

It was clear to me these alarmists believed that the Earth system is so big that the complete phenomenon is too big to study completely. They assumed they could take their anecdotes and assume they add up to a reality. It’s basically the Precautionary Principle: We don’t have complete information on this situation, but based on this fact (X chemical is known to be carcinogenic, or CO2 is a greenhouse gas) we can assume it’s causing Y deleterious effects, which will grow worse unless we act. We don’t have to test our theory that it is in fact causing these effects, and we shouldn’t, because it would take years to study the issue. By then so much harm may have been done that the whole community could be poisoned and die (or in the case of AGW, we could reach “the tipping point” and then we’re doomed).

This was probably the reason he thought it was within journalistic ethics to use a statistical analysis to take “this is probably happening” and suggest it as “fact”.

The Precautionary Principle has been used in the past to justify shutting down plants in certain isolated locations, because people were coming down with cancer in the community, or having babies with birth defects. The idea that these maladies sometimes were within statistical norms was apparently not considered. Maybe they were right to shut these places down in some cases. With the exception of Love Canal we never seem to get to the bottom of it. The plants are just shut down and the EPA moves in, making them Superfund cleanup sites. We’ve found this acceptable in the past, because these incidents are isolated. We don’t feel that they affect the society at large. This time the advocates of this approach are running into more pushback because in this situation we’re not talking about a mining community. We’re talking about our entire country!

Heat is not being trapped, but heat escape is being slowed down. Just like the greenhouse gas effect is supposed to work, except in this case the contribution made by CO2 is very small.

Consilient?

Learn a new word today, did we, Shurl?

I Shurl did. Knot that I have a small vocabulary :) since I play scrabble.

“Extraterrestrials using the fifth dimension are beaming dark energy on earth (remember 95% of mass and energy is dark) to slowly heat and thus terraform earth into a more habitable for them climate.”

Of course, this is obvious, but they’re not doing a very good job of it. Why has the warming stopped? Have they lost interest?

Evidently they want a measured rate of raise of CO2, which is happening from the heat already provided to the Oceans and the contribution of fossil burnings :). They wait until CO2 starts dropping to push up the dark energy flux. They follow the principle of least interference, “changes in terraforming should be incremental”.

Falsify that now.