AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW FROM DOWN UNDER
Geologist & environmental scientist
Katharine Hayhoe, PhD, who wrote the December AITSE piece “Climate Change: Anthropogenic or Not?”, is an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is senior author of the book “A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions”.
I am a senior research geologist who has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers on palaeo-environmental and palaeo-climatic topics and also author of the book, “Climate: the Counter Consensus”.
Quite clearly, Dr. Hayhoe and I are both credible professional scientists. Given our training and research specializations, we are therefore competent to assess the evidence regarding the dangerous global warming that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) alleges is being caused by industrial carbon dioxide emissions.
Yet at the end of her article Dr. Hayhoe recommends for further reading the websites RealClimate.org and SkepticalScience.com, whereas here at the outset of writing my own article I recommend the websites wattsupwiththat.com and www.thegwpf.org (Global Warming Policy Foundation). To knowledgeable readers, this immediately signals that Dr. Hayhoe and I have diametrically opposing views on the global warming issue.
The general public finds it very hard to understand how such strong disagreement can exist between two equally qualified persons on a scientific topic, a disagreement that is manifest also on the wider scene by the existence of equivalent groups of scientists who either support or oppose the views of the IPCC about dangerous anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (DAGW).
In this article I shall try to summarize what the essential disagreement is between these two groups of scientists, and show how it has come to be misrepresented in the public domain.
Common ground amongst DAGW protagonists
Though you wouldn’t know it from the antagonistic nature of public discussions about global warming, a large measure of scientific agreement and shared interpretation exists amongst nearly all scientists who consider the issue. The common ground, much of which was traversed by Dr. Hayhoe in her article, includes:
· that climate has always changed and always will,
· that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and warms the lower atmosphere,
· that human emissions are accumulating in the atmosphere,
· that a global warming of around 0.5OC occurred in the 20th century, but
· that global warming has ceased over the last 15 years.
The scientific argument over DAGW is therefore about none of these things. Rather, it is almost entirely about three other, albeit related, issues. They are:
· the amount of net warming that is, or will be, produced by human-related emissions,
· whether any actual evidence exists for dangerous warming of human causation over the last 50 years, and
· whether the IPCC’s computer models can provide accurate climate predictions 100 years into the future.
Dr. Hayhoe’s answers to those questions would probably be along the line of: substantial, lots and yes. My answers would be: insignificant, none and no.
What can possibly explain such disparate responses to a largely agreed set of factual climate data?
How does science work?
Arguments about global warming, or more generally about climate change, are concerned with a scientific matter. Science deals with facts, experiments and numerical representations of the natural world around us. Science does not deal with emotions, beliefs or politics, but rather strives to analyse matters dispassionately and in an objective way, such that in consideration of a given set of facts two different practitioners might come to the same interpretation; and, yes, I am aware of the irony of that statement in the present context.
Which brings us to the matter of Occam’s Razor and the null hypothesis. William of Occam (1285-1347) was an English Franciscan monk and philosopher to whom is attributed the saying ‘Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate’, which translates as ‘Plurality should not be posited without necessity.’ This is a succinct statement of the principle of simplicity, or parsimony, that was first developed by Aristotle and which has today come to underlie all scientific endeavour.
The phrase ‘Occam’s Razor’ is now generally used as shorthand to represent the fundamental scientific assumption of simplicity. To explain any given set of observations of the natural world, scientific method proceeds by erecting, first, the simplest possible explanation (hypothesis) that can explain the known facts. This simple explanation, termed the null hypothesis, then becomes the assumed interpretation until additional facts emerge that require modification of the initial hypothesis, or perhaps even invalidate it altogether.
Given the great natural variability exhibited by climate records, and the failure to date to compartmentalize or identify a human signal within them, the proper null hypothesis – because it is the simplest consistent with the known facts – is that global climate changes are presumed to be natural, unless and until specific evidence is forthcoming for human causation.
It is one of the more extraordinary facts about the IPCC that the research studies it favours mostly proceed using an (unjustified) inversion of the null hypothesis – namely that global climate changes are presumed to be due to human-related carbon dioxide emissions, unless and until specific evidence indicates otherwise.
What hypothesis do we wish to test?
Though climate science overall is complex, the greenhouse hypothesis itself is straightforward and it is relatively simple to test it, or its implications, against the available data. First, though, we need to be crystal clear about precisely what we mean by the term.
In general communication, and in the media, the terms greenhouse and greenhouse hypothesis have come to carry a particular vernacular meaning – almost independently of their scientific derivation. When an opinion poll or a reporter solicits information on what members of the public think about the issue they ask questions such as “do you believe in global warming”, “do you believe in climate change” or “do you believe in the greenhouse effect”.
Leaving aside the issue that science is never about belief, all such questions are actually coded ones, being understood by the public to mean “is dangerous global warming being caused by human-related emissions of carbon dioxide”. Needless to say, this is a different, albeit related, question. These and other sloppy ambiguities (“carbon” for “carbon dioxide”, for example) are in daily use in the media, and they lead to great confusion in the public discussion about climate change; they also undermine the value of nearly all opinion poll results.
The DAGW hypothesis that I want to test here is precisely and only “that dangerous global warming is being caused, or will be, by human-related carbon dioxide emissions”. To be “dangerous”, at a minimum the change must exceed the magnitude or rate of warmings that are known to be associated with normal weather and climatic variability.
What evidence can we use to test the DAGW hypothesis?
Many different lines of evidence can be used to test the DAGW hypothesis. Here I have space to present just five, all of which are based upon real world empirical data. For more information, please read both Dr. Hayhoe’s and my book.
Consider the following tests:
(i) Over the last 16 years, global average temperature, as measured by both thermometers and satellite sensors, has displayed no statistically significant warming; over the same period, atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by 10%.
Large increases in carbon dioxide have therefore not only failed to produce dangerous warming, but failed to produce any warming at all. Hypothesis fails.
(ii) During the 20th century, a global warming of between 0.4O C and 0.7O C occurred, at a maximum rate, in the early decades of the century, of about 1.7O C/century. In comparison, our best regional climate records show that over the last 10,000 years natural climate cycling has resulted in temperature highs up to at least 1O C warmer than today, at rates of warming up to 2.5O C/century.
In other words, both the rate and magnitude of 20th century warming falls well within the envelope of natural climate change. Hypothesis fails, twice.
(iii) If global temperature is controlled primarily by atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, then changes in carbon dioxide should precede parallel changes in temperature.
In fact, the opposite relationship applies at all time scales. Temperature change precedes carbon dioxide change by about 5 months during the annual seasonal cycle, and by about 700-1000 years during ice age climatic cycling. Hypothesis fails.
(iv) The IPCC’s computer general circulation models, which factor in the effect of increasing carbon dioxide, project that global warming should be occurring at a rate of +2.0O C/century.
In fact, no warming at all has occurred in either the atmosphere or the ocean for more than the last decade. The models are clearly faulty, and allocate too great a warming effect for the extra carbon dioxide (technically, they are said to overestimate the climate sensitivity). Hypothesis fails.
(v) The same computer models predict that a fingerprint of greenhouse-gas-induced warming will be the creation of an atmospheric hot spot at heights of 8-10 km in equatorial regions, and enhanced warming also near both poles.
Given that we already know that the models are faulty, it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that direct measurements by both weather balloon radiosondes and satellite sensors show the absence of surface warming in Antarctica, and a complete absence of the predicted low latitude atmospheric hot spot. Hypothesis fails, twice.
One of the 20th century’s greatest physicists, Richard Feynman, observed about science that:
In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience; compare it directly with observation, to see if it works.
It’s that simple statement that is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.
None of the five tests above supports or agrees with the predictions implicit in the greenhouse hypothesis as stated above. Richard Feynman is correct to advise us that therefore the hypothesis is invalid, and that many times over.
Summary
The current scientific reality is that the IPCC’s hypothesis of dangerous global warming has been repeatedly tested, and fails. Despite the expenditure of large sums of money over the last 25 years (more than $100 billion), and great research effort by IPCC-related and other (independent) scientists, to date no scientific study has established a certain link between changes in any significant environmental parameter and human-caused carbon dioxide emissions.
In contrast, the null hypothesis that the global climatic changes that we have observed over the last 150 years (and continue to observe today) are natural in origin has yet to be disproven. As summarised by an seo consultant in the reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), literally thousands of papers published in refereed journals contain facts or writings consistent with the null hypothesis, and plausible natural explanations exist for all the post-1850 global climatic changes that have been described so far.
Why is this conclusion not generally understood?
I commented earlier that science is not about emotion or politics, despite which it is uncomfortably true also that public discussion of the global warming issue is conducted far more in accordance with those criteria than it is about science. As discussed at more length in my book, there are three prime reasons for this.
First, as a branch of the United Nations, the IPCC is itself an intensely political and not a scientific body. To boot, the IPCC charter requires that it investigate not climate change in the round, but solely global warming caused by human greenhouse emissions.
Second, from local green activist groups up to behemoth NGOs like Greenpeace and WWF, over the last 20 years the environmental movement has espoused saving the planet from global warming as its leit motif. This has had two devastating results. One is that radical environmentalists have worked relentlessly to sow misinformation about global warming in both the public domain and the education system. And the other is that, faced with this widespread propagandization of public opinion and young persons, and by also by strong lobbying from powerful self-interested groups like government research scientists, alternative energy providers and financial marketeers, politicians have had no choice but to fall into line. Whatever their primary political philosophy, all active politicians are daily mindful of the need to assuage the green intimidation and bullying to which they and their constituents are incessantly subjected.
Third, and probably most influential of all, with very few exceptions major media outlets have provided unceasing support for measures to “stop global warming”. This behaviour appears to be driven by a combination of the liberal and green personal beliefs of most reporters, and the commercial nouse of experienced editors who understand that alarmist environmental reporting sells both product and advertising space.
But given that the science remains uncertain, shouldn’t we give earth the benefit of the doubt?
This famous slogan (and note its deliberately emotive phrasing) is attributed to News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch; it bears all the hallmarks of having been produced by a green focus group or advertising agency. The catchy phrase also reveals a profound misunderstanding of the real climatic risks faced by our societies, because it assumes that global warming is more dangerous, or more to be feared, than is global cooling; in reality, the converse is likely to be true.
It must be recognized that the theoretical hazard of dangerous human-caused global warming is but one small part of a much wider climate hazard that all scientists agree upon, which is the dangerous natural weather and climatic events that Nature intermittently presents us with – and always will. It is absolutely clear from, for example, the 2005 Hurricane Katrina and 2012 Hurricane Sandy disasters in the US, the 2007 floods in the United Kingdom and the tragic bushfires in Australia in 2003 (Canberra), 2009 (Victoria) and in January this year (widespread), that the governments of even advanced, wealthy countries are often inadequately prepared for climate-related disasters of natural origin.
We need to do better, and squandering money to give earth the benefit of the doubt based upon an unjustifiable assumption that dangerous warming will shortly resume is exactly the wrong type of “picking winners” approach.
Because many scientists, including leading solar physicists, currently argue that the position that the Earth currently occupies in the solar cycle implies that the most likely climatic trend over the next several decades is one of significant cooling rather than warming. Meanwhile, the IPCC’s computer modellers assure us with all the authority at their command that global warming will shortly resume – just you wait and see.
The reality is, then, that no scientist on the planet can tell you with credible probability whether the climate in 2030 will be cooler or warmer than today. In such circumstances the only rational conclusion to draw is that we need to be prepared to react to either warming or cooling over the next several decades, depending upon what Nature chooses to serve up to us.
What is the best way forward?
Given that we cannot predict what future climate will be, do we still need national climate policies at all?
Indeed we do, for a primary government duty of care is to protect the citizenry and the environment from the ravages of natural climatic events. What is needed is not unnecessary and penal measures against carbon dioxide emissions, but instead a prudent and cost-effective policy of preparation for, and response to, all climatic events and hazards as and when they develop.
As Ronald Brunner and Amanda Lynch have argued in their recent book, Adaptive Governance and Climate Change, and many other scientists have supported too:
We need to use adaptive governance to produce response programs that cope with hazardous climate events as they happen, and that encourage diversity and innovation in the search for solutions. In such a fashion, the highly contentious ‘global warming’ problem can be recast into an issue in which every culture and community around the world has an inherent interest.
Climate hazard is both a geological and meteorological issue. Geological hazards are mostly dealt with by providing civil defense authorities and the public with accurate, evidence-based information regarding events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, storms and floods (which represent climatic as well as weather events), and by mitigating and adapting to the effects when an event occurs.
New Zealand’s GeoNet natural hazard network is a world-best-practice example of how to proceed. GeoNet is New Zealand’s national natural hazard monitoring agency. GeoNet operates networks of geophysical instruments to detect, analyse and respond to earthquakes, volcanic activity, landslides and tsunami. The additional risk of longer-term climate change, which GeoNet currently doesn’t cover, differs from most other natural hazards only in that it occurs over periods of decades to hundreds or thousands of years. This difference is not one of kind, and neither should be our response planning.
The appropriate response to climate hazard, then, is national policies based on preparing for and adapting to all climate events as and when they happen, and irrespective of their presumed cause. Every country needs to develop its own understanding of, and plans to cope with, the unique combination of climate hazards that apply within its boundaries. The planned responses should be based upon adaptation, with mitigation where appropriate to cushion citizens who are affected in an undesirable way.
The idea that there can be a one-size-fits-all global solution to deal with just one possible aspect of future climate change, as recommended by the IPCC and favoured by green activists and most media commentators, fails entirely to deal with the real climate and climate-related hazards to which we are all exposed every day.
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Robert (Bob) Carter is a marine geologist and environmental scientist with more than 40 years professional experience who has held academic positions at the University of Otago (Dunedin) and James Cook University (Townsville), where he was Professor and Head of School of Earth Sciences between 1981 and 1999. His career has included periods as a Commonwealth Scholar (Cambridge University), a Nuffield Fellow (Oxford University) and an Australian Research Council Special Investigator. Bob has acted as an expert witness on climate change before the U.S. Senate Committee of Environment & Public Works, the Australian and N.Z. parliamentary Select Committees into emissions trading, and was a primary science witness in the U.K. High Court case of Dimmock v. H.M.’s Secretary of State for Education, the 2007 judgement from which identified nine major scientific errors in Mr Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth“. Carter is author of the book, Climate: the Counter Consensus (2010, Stacey International Ltd., London).
“What can possibly explain such disparate responses to a largely agreed set of factual climate data?”
Follow The Money. The Canadian Katharine Hayhoe, living in Texas, runs her own company.
http://www.atmosresearch.com/who_katharine.html
“Regional climate change, greenhouse gas emissions and climate policy
Katharine Hayhoe – CEO”
She tries to sell “regional climate modeling” and looks for suckers to be parted from their money.
The modern Medicine Show.
What a wonderful piece that Obama should be forced to read! Then he should come on WUWT and test his ideas.
A very well reasoned essay on the essense of scientific scepticism in this arena. Hats off to Professor Carter
I’ve always liked Bob Carter’s sober analysis of the issue, even though he has all the charisma of a high school science teacher (no disrespect!). No wonder Team AGW try to discredit him – his arguments are excellent and are very difficult to counter.
I imagine in 20 years the existence of writings like these will make Prof Carter very proud. He’ll have a whole portfolio to point to as proof that he wasn’t a sucker. As for the others…
Well said Bob Carter. The spurious co2 issue has been distracting policy makers from dealing with the real issues they need to attend to for decades. It is convenient for senior politicians to avoid pressing issues around natural forestry, soil erosion, water resources and infrastructure maintenance and appear statesmanlike by waving the global warming card about, but it doesn’t solve anything.
Time to send a clear message to the pollies. Use our money wisely or we’ll find someone else to administrate the real needs of the taxpayer.
Good article, one small beef though: Although it pains me to say it, the lack of warming in the last 16 years does not automatically void the assumption of a link between CO2 and warming, because there could be hysteresis, time delays in the system.
I don’t personally believe this to be the case, but since it’s a possibility, it would be foolish to ignore it in these sorts of discussions until we have passed a period where it can’t possibly be a fluctuation (they keep expanding the definition of this time period, but I would say 20 years would pretty much cover it)
If you start from the hypothesis that the rich are rich because they serve the interests of the rich, you will see where this Green nonsense takes us.
1. The rich wish the world to be ‘kept under control’, in particular those pesky great unwashed plebs/oiks. They really shouldn’t be allowed to travel the world over and talk with other oiks, because then all the brainwashing of the past 2 centuries comes under strain.
2. How do you stop folks travelling in an era of cheap flights?? MAKE THEM MORE EXPENSIVE. How do you do that? FORCE OIL PRICES UP AND CREATE GUILT ABOUT THE EFFECTS OF OIL-BASED TRANSPORTATION.
3. If you do this, of course you need alternative energy supplies. BUT THEY MUST BE EXPENSIVE TOO, TO KEEP THE OIKS DOWN AT HEEL. So you privatise energy to create a cartel, introduce subsidies for ‘green energy’ to be taken up by rich landowners and you do all that you can to stop the generation of new sources of cheap power like shale gas or thorium-based nuclear power.
4. To do all this, you need a conspiracy of the willing, the supine and the greedy. This includes duping scientists with the bait of lots of grant money to confirm your prejudices, do-gooding scientific dimwits working in environmental pressure groups, media owners to run stories to order and big business getting their mitts on lots of moolah along the way.
It is always best to assume the worst of motives where Ponzi scheme fraud is concerned. You don’t get Ponzi schemes if you are ethical, whereas you do if you are a money grabber. Carbon Dioxide-based warming is a Ponzi scheme with the best of them, with the ‘mis-selling’ of $100bn of research funding, the media being the dodgy salesmen and the scientists being the ‘expert witnesses’ who we all know have testified over the years in ways which did not do much credit to the term ‘scientist’.
If you want to call it class war, call it that.
I call it the rich being what the rich have always been like: avaricious, self-serving, power-hungry, ruthless and utterly disinterested in the vast majority of humanity, seeing them as underbeings completely unworthy of being regarded as part of the same species.
Exceptions exist, as exceptions will.
But in the main, the rich are rich because they do what it takes to get rich and stay rich, i26234ncluding subordinating scientists to their will through controlling the source of grant funding……
Convincing, well written and factual.
What more can you ask for.
Thank you.
Brilliant paper, the best resume of the MSM problem I have seen anywhere.
The next question is “How do we get editors, both newspaper and broadcasting, to read, understand and report on it in an unbiased way?”
I thought the null hypothesis was a statement of the logical opposite of the alternative hypothesis. The purpose is to be able to prove that the null hypothesis is false, and therefore the alternative, logically opposite, hypothesis is true. I thought it was done that way because it is not possible to prove directly that a particular hypothesis is true, but it is possible to prove that it is false.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis.
“The null hypothesis can never be proven. Data, such as the results of an observation or experiment, can only reject or fail to reject a null hypothesis.”
Have I got the wrong end of the stick here? I always thought that one of the main problems for the climate scientists promoting the thesis of DAGW is that they do not have a provably false null hypothesis that leads directly to the conclusion that therefore DAGW is true.
Bob:
Thankyou. As everything from you, that is clear, succinct and accurate.
I commend your book to all.
Some prefer lectures, so I link to this series of videos which comprise a lecture from you for both a both lay and scientific audience.
Richard
when I am at it:
I have never exactly understood what the global mean temperature GMT is a measure for. Even less how the validity and realibility criteria can be met. Nor I have ever been told the ideal value of GMT, but many times what it shouldn’t be.
Climate has always changed and always will. If we want to measure deviation why don’t we use the standard deviation, the statistical measure for this purpose. All the job is done already.
Concerning the Null Hypothesis, In Israel there is a saying that goes like this:
If somebody says something (bad) about your sister (in our case reverse the null hypothesis), it is up to you to prove you don’t have a sister at all (to prove the warming is not natural).
This is what the Warmists are doing – they demand the Lukewarmers to prove they have no sister…
Thank you Bob for your very lucid presentation of the case for sanity. Unfortunately the world does not run on sanity. We need to change that.
Another alternative view, suggest that the more comprehensive records of the N. Hemisphere suggest that the natural temperature oscillations origins are combination of factors from ‘down under’ (the Earth’s interior) and ‘up above’ (solar output)
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/EarthNV.htm
Fabulous posting by Dr Carter
However
1. There is no warming! check all average temperature graphs for past 17 years
2. The ONLY variable that has/is changed/changing rather dramatically is solar activity.
Ergo ALL or any changes in weather/ climate are beginning to be affected by dramatically reduced solar activity
Thanks Bob, this is an excellent article and one to point to when discussing ‘DAGW’ with the doomsayers. One minor comment – perhaps the IPCC’s inverted null hypothesis contains the implicit caveat that ‘…global climate changes are presumed to be due to human-related carbon dioxide emissions, unless and until (and in spite of) specific evidence indicates otherwise.’
I would agree almost totally with this except for a minor detaIl. Any change due to CO2 COULD be considered to be delayed/lagged from the current CO2 levels. An argument often made is that we are ‘storing up’ future (bad) changes. Whilst this could be true, it is mainly used to defer addressing the sort of observations being made here and thus allow ‘HYPOTHESIS PENDING FAIL’ rather than outright ‘FAIL’.
“To knowledgeable readers, this [different recommended websites for further reading] immediately signals that Dr. Hayhoe and I have diametrically opposing views on the global warming issue.”
Professor Carter, your logic and presentations always make me yearn to sit in your classroom. Would you please elaborate on the differences in the websites you and Dr. Hayhoe recommend?
Thank you Bob: Succinct. Concise. Devastating.
Probable results: Ignorance. Denial. Agism. Cognitive-dissonance. Anger. Conspiracy theories. Fingers in ears + lalalala.
Not necessarily in that order, or complete.
‘Wage, wage war against the lying and the fright.
H/t Kim.
Onya, Bob.
I really like this article Bob as it shows how much Climate Science has corrupted scientific method. IMHO the scientific method is what climate skeptics have been fighting for all along.
Sorry, but the idea that Hayhoe and Carter are equally credible scientists in the research community could only be greeted with incredulity.
More clear and concise thinking from Bob Carter. The man should be listened to by everyone but with the clear left bias of the MSM, no one will get to hear him. One of the best posts on WUWT for a very long time.
Very clearly described. Mother earth has her ways and turns in combination with the sun which we humans not yet can explain. If we can’t explain what and how climat changes have happened in the past – then we can’t tell what will happen in the future.
. She is senior author of the book “A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions”.
If you need faith that something will happen, it’s not science.
How does the quantum mechanical ‘many worlds’ interpretation fit with Occam’s razor? Always puzzled me.
Bob: I have found another blog that seemingly agrees with you.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/11/short-term-trends-another-proxy-fight/
Real Climate? Yep.
If one looks at the charts, using Rahmstorff’s method of removing natural signals (ENSO and volcanic), one can see the current temps at about 0.2 deg over the average. That means that over 1/2 the observed warming was natural. It also means that the anthorpogenic temperature signal over the entire 20th century was about 0.2 deg C.
Well done, Gavin!
I suspect the clue to the disparity in the two positions lies in the words “faith based” in the title of Dr Hayhoe’s book.
Excellent article! Plenty thanks Bob (and Antony for publishing) 🙂
Will, with your consent (si?), pass this on to a variety of people here in Sweden.
Brgds from Sweden
ThomasJ
Here is a video of an excellent Bob Carter climate presentation:
http://blip.tv/jim-karlock/balance-context-in-the-global-warming-debate-798183
Thanks
JK
I always appreciate Dr Carter’s clear, calm assessments. Apart from his fine capacity to articulate the situation, he never fails to keep a cool head and wide perspective. Just the example the other ‘team’ should emulate if we are to progress the debate, such as there is one, in an adult fashion.
so Nice to see your article:-) will be asking the local library to get your latest on the shelves:-)
I note the keywords you politely ignored in ms hayhoes comment,
Faith Based Decisions….
thats NOT science thats warmist religiosity, wonder if she also was a failed divinity student like the Goracle:-)
One small disagreement with regards to your explanation of the null hypothesis. I was always taught that the null hypothesis was simply the assumption, right at the start within your hypothesis, that the variable being tested had NO effect. If, after testing, the data didn’t allow you to reject the null hypothesis at any statistically significant level, then your conclusion must be that there was no evidence that the variable had any effect. If, on the other hand, you could reject the null hypothesis, then your conclusion must be that there was evidence that the variable had influenced the results. Hence Kevin Trenberth’s assertion that climate science is so sure, so robust, so spot-on right that climate scientists don’t need to start with the null hypothesis any more, and instead can start with the assumption that climate change is occurring, is also so much hot air. Trenberth’s anti-science stance is almost comical, given the insults thrown our way whenever we question the myriad of claims made about the causes and effects of AGW.
I love your work Dr Carter, Please keep pushing the agenda of building resilience to whatever the Earth can throw at us and a balanced approach to natural hazard mitigation. History would suggest civilisation depends on it.
To be slightly critical, I do think you missed two factors key to the public acceptance of DAGW:
1. That the hypothesis was tenable in the early 90’s when first proposed (but should have been discarded at the latest when warming stopped in the early 2000’s).
2. The attractiveness of soft environmental science to universities and students over two decades when the role of tertiary education and the funding models for research were changing dramatically for the worse. As a result we have a plethora of ‘scientists’ ill equipped for anything more than pushing green agendas and shaping political agendas with a concurrent lack of hard scientists who can be critical of the status quo.
I have no doubt that the history of science will fete you and I hope people like you can begin to restore public confidence in science after the damage done by this issue has begun to be more universally recognised.
Wow. This will be mailed off to my Congressman and Senators right away. What an excellent presentation of the science and anti-science surrounding AGW.
Thank you Mr. Carter!
Professor Carter wrote,
“Temperature change precedes carbon dioxide change by about 5 months during the annual seasonal cycle…”
How do we know that carbon dioxide follows temperature by 5 months, rather than temperature follows carbon dioxide by 7 months, since it’s an annual cycle?
Thank You,
PJW
make it a sticky!
Standing ovation!
I’m not particularly fond of “climate events”, but I think the use of “climate-related events” satisfactorily clarifies the meaning.
“Every country needs to develop its own understanding of, and plans to cope with, the unique combination of climate hazards that apply within its boundaries.”
Realizing developing countries may need assistance in this endeavor; I would support aid to those countries as long as it’s not under some extortionist pretext of being “owed” to them because of our past “sins of emission”.
I’m an ordinary bloke, living an ordinary life in England’s Midlands. I’m not a scientist; I never went to University, but here is an article which I can read and understand. No graphs, no bulls***. A straight forward explanation of the way in which scientists account for what they observe.
Thank you, Robert Carter, for putting the entire thing in a nutshell. I have always been sceptical about things like political promises, but when scientists start arguing about something like the reasons for possible global warming, it’s difficult for a layman to cut through the gobbledygook, and form an opinion of his/her own. This is great! I feel better about being a sceptic now, even a little smug!
Thanks again!
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
Here is a dispassionate, sincere, logical and scientifically valid look at the CAGW scaremongering, world-wide, financial and political destructive solutions to a climate change situation that has not been scientifically validated. My ‘money’ and reputation are firmly and confidently ‘on’ Bob Carter’s viewpoints and conclusions.
Thank you Professor Carter. It is always refreshing to read a well laid out discussion of the issue that those without multiple degrees in several science fields can easily grasp and understand.
Certainly the realclimate web site is poor since Trenberth and Mann have their fingers firmly in it.
CO2 cannot warm the lower atmosphere since CO2 is not a source of energy so the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies. Water vapour can store heat and slow cooling through virtue of latent heat alone not some impossible theory of GHG’s developed to cover confused thinking about atmospheric energy flux. ( Since this energy is unitized as Watts we should talk about power not energy).
Bob Tisdale does not lay the blame in the right place. He writes “Third, and probably most influential of all, with very few exceptions major media outlets have provided unceasing support for measures to “stop global warming”.” The real blame for the improper scientific approach to D(C)AGW lies with the scientific community; led by the Royal Society, the American Physical Society, and the World Meteorological Organization. These are the organizations which have betrayed science. Just think what the effect would be if just one of these learned societies were to endorse what Bob has just written. The good ship CAGW would immediately capsize.
@DirkH – “She tries to sell “regional climate modeling” and looks for suckers to be parted from their money.”
But is not her rabid denial of reality a deal killer in the end? We have a similar person here in the Mid Atlantic – he sells regional weather forecasts, and has to be accurate in order to make a living (more accurate the local pretty boys on the TV). He has been over the past 10 years or so, constantly being able to predict both long term trends, and short term patterns with a much greater degree of accuracy than any of the TV (or NWS) talking heads. So he is successful. Given Kayhoe’s denial of the facts at present, her models have yet to be correct. Even a slow learner after a while will realize there is no use for bad models, and so her business will not have any customers.
Atmospheric CO2 storage is a concept of confused minds. Our annual production of this trace gas is 3% of the total annual production. The 97% is totally NATURAL and we are led to believe that our little bitty 3% is stored whilst the rest is used. This is complete rubbish. Our bit is no different to any other so it mixes and is used in the carbon cycle by plants much is stored in the oceans depending of water temperature and the partial pressure though temperature is by far the most important factor. Here is joins the carbon cycle forming plant material, shells and rock.
Most of the original atmospheric CO2 has been sequestered in limestone and a little fossil fuel. Using this fossil fuel does not cause a problem but gives plants more food to grow bigger and better.
The ‘lag’ in the effect of Increased CO2 concentration and temperature increase… thing… so let us not get too carried away with 16 years (plus the UK Met Office projected further 5 years) lack of warming.
If this were the case, that ‘lag’ would have been observed historically would it not?
Or is it being proposed that a lag effect of CO2 on temperature has just/might just for the first ime in Earth’s history started/might start to happen? If so, how? Why?
There is an historically observed CO2 v temperature lag, but it is in the opposite direction, CO2 increase lags behind temperature increase.
Thoughtful and well written presentation, Prof Bob Carter.
Here is one of the Professor’s peer reviewed papers concerning climate data. http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/McLean_deFreitas_Carter_JGR_2009.pdf
This is fits in with the null hypothesis “global climate changes are presumed to be natural, unless and until specific evidence is forthcoming for human causation.” -no human finger print in that data.
“Given that we cannot predict what future climate will be, do we still need national climate policies at all?
Indeed we do, for a primary government duty of care is to protect the citizenry and the environment from the ravages of natural climatic events.”
Here in the U.S. we have FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency for that. I don’t believe we need a “climate policy” overlaid on top of that, especially since there is no agreement as to where climate is headed.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
In this lengthy article, Dr. Carter makes the point that the Greenies are pushing for drastic measures to curtail one possible future climatic condition. The fact is, there are many possible future climatic conditions. The earth might do something completely unexpected. Mother Nature doesn’t care. I’ll repeat, Mother Nature DOES NOT care. Not at all. She will minimize Gibbs Free Energy, nothing more, nothing less. The natural systems will alter to equilibrate in the long run. Since cooling is also possible, even likely, why not prepare to respond to change, rather than try to prevent it? (That is Dr. Carter’s suggestion, if you read it all.) To answer myself, I’ll say the Greenies care not for preparation, they only care for control. Political power and control. Progressivism at its worst.
In addition to relying on the scientific method and rational argument, which for most people won’t work most of the time- we cannot all be knowledgeable about EVERYTHING- we can back up our skepticism by observing human behavior. Everyone,, even religious fundamentalists who believe the world is only 6000 years old, interacts with and observes other humans. We all
become aware of con artists who try to get us to donate to
questionable charities, try to sell us products which will make us
appear younger, slimmer, and have more hair on our heads
IF CAGW were a legitimate concern, would believers be burning CO2 by
flying to conferences in Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Rio? If human produced
CO2 is such a serious threat, wouldn’t it make more sense to
have “teleconferences” instead of meeting in person? Shouldn’t CAGWers
who actually believe in the seriousness of the situation be setting an
example on drastically cutting back energy use? . Our natural
ability to detect “huxterism” helps us spot the CAGW scammers
who preach “do as I say, not as I do”.
Wow – what a lucid piece of argument. If only all protagonists in the climate change debate had such clarity.
philjourdan says:
January 30, 2013 at 4:59 am
“@DirkH – “She tries to sell “regional climate modeling” and looks for suckers to be parted from their money.”
But is not her rabid denial of reality a deal killer in the end? ”
I did not say she is successful. I said she tries. Maybe with success – The US govt finances many idiotic endeavours, for instance.
On the other hand, universities churn out a whole generation of climate modeling leeches so I guess it’s tough business.
@DirkH – “I did not say she is successful. I said she tries. Maybe with success – The US govt finances many idiotic endeavours, for instance.”
Ah yes! Label her company green, and she needs no customers, just the federal trough.
And yes, you did not say she was successful. My mistake in assuming that everyone who starts a business wanted a successful one.
TheBigYinJames says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/30/global-warming-anthropogenic-or-not/#comment-1212223
Henry says
no worries. I think Bob Carter is even a bit optimistic by showing a zero line for 15 or 16 years.
Actually it is like this:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2013/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2013/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2013/trend
i.e. a negative trend over the past 11 years – in other words: earth is cooling.
All this while CO2 is still going up
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1993/to:2013/plot/esrl-co2/from:1993/to:2013/trend
By plotting the Gleissberg solar/weather cycle I was able to ascertain that all warming in the past was natural and therefore it is just plain fact that climate change will occur now due to further global cooling.
The worst of the cooling period will be around 2028 – 2038, similar to 1940-1950 (the Gleissberg cycle is 88 years)
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/01/24/our-earth-is-cooling/
Thanks Bob – spot on
One complaint is the use of DAGW
Where did this term come from?
Why didn’t you use CAGW?
Do you think alarmists could accept the word Dangerous instead?
cn
TheBigYinJames, Grizzled Bear and Surfer Dave:
I write to comment on your different views of the Null Hypothesis as it applies to AGW in hope of clarifying the issue.
Your different views are stated in your posts in this thread which I list here:
TheBigYinJames writes at January 30, 2013 at 12:59 am
Grizzled Bear writes at January 30, 2013 at 4:30 am
Surfer Dave writes at January 30, 2013 at 1:24 am.
My comment is as follows.
The Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed a system has not experienced a change unless there is evidence of a change.
The Null Hypothesis is a fundamental scientific principle and forms the basis of all scientific understanding, investigation and interpretation. Indeed, it is the basic principle of experimental procedure where an input to a system is altered to discern a change: if the system is not observed to respond to the alteration then it has to be assumed the system did not respond to the alteration.
In the case of climate science there is a hypothesis that increased greenhouse gases (GHGs, notably CO2) in the air will increase global temperature. There are good reasons to suppose this hypothesis may be true, but the Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed the GHG changes have no effect unless and until increased GHGs are observed to increase global temperature. That is what the scientific method decrees. It does not matter how certain some people may be that the hypothesis is right because observation of reality (i.e. empiricism) trumps all opinions.
Please note that the Null Hypothesis is a hypothesis which exists to be refuted by empirical observation. It is a rejection of the scientific method to assert that one can “choose” any subjective Null Hypothesis one likes. There is only one Null Hypothesis: i.e. it has to be assumed a system has not changed unless it is observed that the system has changed.
In the case of global climate no unprecedented climate behaviours are observed so the Null Hypothesis decrees that the climate system has not changed.
Importantly, an effect may be real but not overcome the Null Hypothesis because it is too trivial for the effect to be observable. Human activities have some effect on global temperature for several reasons. An example of an anthropogenic effect on global temperature is the urban heat island (UHI). Cities are warmer than the land around them, so cities cause some warming. But the temperature rise from cities is too small to be detected when averaged over the entire surface of the planet, although this global warming from cities can be estimated by measuring the warming of all cities and their areas.
Clearly, the Null Hypothesis decrees that UHI is not affecting global temperature although there are good reasons to think UHI has some effect. Similarly, it is very probable that AGW from GHG emissions are too trivial to have observable effects.
The feedbacks in the climate system are negative and, therefore, any effect of increased CO2 will be probably too small to discern because natural climate sensitivity is much, much larger. This concurs with the empirically determined values of low climate sensitivity.
Empirical – n.b. not model-derived – determinations indicate climate sensitivity is less than 1.0deg.C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 equivalent. This is indicated by the studies of Idso from surface measurements
http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/Idso_CR_1998.pdf
and Lindzen & Choi from ERBE satelite data
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
and Gregory from balloon radiosonde data
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/OLR&NGF_June2011.pdf
Indeed, because climate sensitivity is less than 1 .0deg.C for a doubling of CO2 equivalent, it is physically impossible for the man-made global warming to be large enough to be detected (just as the global warming from UHI is too small to be detected). If something exists but is too small to be detected then it only has an abstract existence; it does not have a discernible existence that has effects (observation of the effects would be its detection).
To date there are no discernible effects of AGW. Hence, the Null Hypothesis decrees that AGW does not affect global climate to a discernible degree. That is the ONLY scientific conclusion possible at present.
Richard
But given that the science remains uncertain, shouldn’t we give earth the benefit of the doubt?
The benefit of who’s doubt?
From the beginning, the AGW scam has been foisted upon the public in terms of carbon credits, taxes, subsidies and mandates. Like all scams, money is the key factor in it’s advancement. $$$ for grants to endlessly study the scam, $$$ to build solutions for well placed cronies, $$$ for environmental groups preaching the end of the world to concerned contributors, $$$ in taxes for politicians to squander in a manner not even related to the problem.
IF this were one of purely scientific concern or exploration, then the $$$ would be minimal, and as a result spent very wisely to economically determine IF there was a problem. What we have instead is the Piltdown Man hoax.
Doubt is nothing more than the inability of the advocate to convince a quorum and for this we should go along with naive and the gullible to lower our standard of living? I say let the naive and gullible be fleeced today, because maybe tomorrow they will learn their lesson.
To Peter White,
Take a look at the following chart :-
http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/879/co2lagkz2.png
There is a remarkable correlation between the temperature graph and the CO2 advanced by 5 months. Now try to imagine how it would look if the CO2 line were moved forward 7 months rather than back 5 months – nothing like the same correlation. I don’t think there’s any doubt that it is the temperature changes which lead the CO2 changes.
Johan E G Silén:
At January 30, 2013 at 1:45 am you write
The answers to your question are in Appendix B of the item at
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
I think you will also want to read all of that item and also the WUWT article and all of its thread at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/23/a-question-for-zeke-hausfather/
I hope this helps.
Richard
@- Bob Carter
(i) Over the last 16 years, global average temperature, as measured by both thermometers and satellite sensors, has displayed no statistically significant warming; over the same period, atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by 10%.
Of course the warming IS statistically significant over 14 or 18 years, the 16 year period is a cherry pick.
But more to the point, there has been no statistically significant cooling over sixteen years while the natural factors that are attributed to be the cause of cooling in the past, the PDO, AMO, ENSO and a deep solar minima are all in play. Either these natural factors are having no influence this decade, or something else is offsetting the expected effect of these factors.
As John N-G shows the warming measured is entily consistant with the warming predicted from the CO2 rise.
{link}
(ii) During the 20th century, a global warming of between 0.4O C and 0.7O C occurred, at a maximum rate, in the early decades of the century, of about 1.7O C/century. In comparison, our best regional climate records show that over the last 10,000 years natural climate cycling has resulted in temperature highs up to at least 1O C warmer than today, at rates of warming up to 2.5O C/century.
The past extremes are local phenomina not global and synchronous. The obvious evidence for the exceptionality of the present warming is on the lack of past sea level rise during those historical extremes compared to the thmal expansion of the oceans seen now.
(iii) If global temperature is controlled primarily by atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, then changes in carbon dioxide should precede parallel changes in temperature.
In fact, the opposite relationship applies at all time scales. Temperature change precedes carbon dioxide change by about 5 months during the annual seasonal cycle, and by about 700-1000 years during ice age climatic cycling. Hypothesis fails.
An old canard. The season changes in CO2 are related to differences in the biosphere between the north and south hemispheres. The ice age cycle is initiated by orbital changes, the CO2 changes are required to explain the full amount of temperature change from glacial to interstadal however.
(iv) The IPCC’s computer general circulation models, which factor in the effect of increasing carbon dioxide, project that global warming should be occurring at a rate of +2.0O C/century.
That is an equilibrium figure not expected to be reached until all the effects of the extra energy from raised CO2 have impacted the system.
(v) The same computer models predict that a fingerprint of greenhouse-gas-induced warming will be the creation of an atmospheric hot spot at heights of 8-10 km in equatorial regions, and enhanced warming also near both poles.
Wrong. Basic physics predicts that ANY warming, including from El Nino events will cause a ‘hot spot’.
But present day measurement methods are not yet sufficiently sensitive to detect these small divergences in temperature from the background noise. They are certainly not yet good enough to detect the change in a hot spot for the <1degC warming seen so far.
Polar amplification has been seen at the North pole of course, the Antarctic however is significantly decoupled from the global climate and still effected by the ozone depletion from CFCs causing an intensification of the circumpolar vortex.
Pretending that the inability to measure changes in the hot spot refutes it, or ignoring other known factors that modify polar climate is disingenuous at best.
Excellent stuff, Bob.
I found one too many bys in a sentence
“young persons, and by also by strong lobbying from “
I have corresponded with Bob before and he is a remarkably clear thinking Sober person. I Happen to agree with most everything he writes. It was Bob that converted me from a believer to a scientific literate on this subject. There is enormous risk in plonking all our eggs into an enormous multi-billion dollar warming basket. The risk is we’ll forget the other side and be totally unprepared for a cold shift, after all we are effectively being told such a shift is impossible. The 2011 Queensland Australia flood was a stark example of what such a folly does, The government wanted to believe that in the land of droughts and flooding rains, the flooding rains were gone for all time and they could hold the flood mitigation dam at maximum, How wrong they were, and now that government is just a memory, just 7 left of that party after the election.
Bob, also makes the case for misdirection of funds away from solving the human problems of poverty and disease into the trendy green Behemoth NGOs who then proceed to waste it all on anti-human campaigns. This is where Agenda 21 derives from.
I have said before we need to target the greens soft vulnerable underbelly, the anti-human agenda which does not represent the beliefs of most of their naive followers. Most greens supporters really don’t think we should kill pensioners by forcing them into fuel poverty, or process the food eaten by the poor into ethanol to burn in our cars, or even throw money at windmills that could be spent on cures for cancer, or immunizing poor children against death by measles. I find pointing out that the next best fuel to coal is flour works. Burns great in blast furnaces. Most intelligent supporters believe Humans first, then the environment – Their lack of morality, the antihumanism is the key to their downfall
izen:
I write to comment on your post at January 30, 2013 at 3:26 am because I very rarely find myself in agreement with you. You say
Yes! Absolutely!
It is a ridiculous idea that Hayhoe comes near to Carter’s high standards of scientific ability and credibility. Carter’s suggestion that he and Hayhoe could be considered to be comparable shows Carter’s great humility.
Richard
Bob
Excellent summary.
Where more time/space is available, we can appeal to “Einstein’s Razor”
The DAGW hypothesis is too simple – by attributing too much to anthropogenic CO2 without adequately accounting for the null hypothesis of nonlinear chaotic solar, atmospheric and oceanic fluctuations, especially the highest uncertainty of clouds.
TheBigYinJames says:
January 30, 2013 at 12:59 am
Except then you have to explain the 20 years of warming before that. Assuming the CO2 increase is primarily due to burning fossil fuel (I accept that, in other eras oceans warming could lead to CO2 release later), then the temperature increase has to lag CO2, and it’s hard to explain the warming followed by level just by relying on CO2.
Where did “DAGW” come from? I don’t think I’ve seen it before. And how do we distinguish between it and Beneficial AGW? 🙂
Always nice to see a new essay from Bob Carter. He was the first scientist I contacted directly about climate stuff. His videos defending the scientific method were very good. That and his geologist’s common sense make him one of the most valuable people in the battle.
An excellent summary. It is my opinion that anyone who disagrees with this analysis has no interest in science.
Please feel free to cut and paste this comment somewhere on “RealClimate” and “SkepticalScience”, WITH my real name and contact information.
But do not forget the post by Dr. Carter also!
Mark H.
There is a correlation between atmospheric CO2 content and ice ages in the geological past.. Certainly CO2 has no warming effect but its reaction to LIR could make the atmosphere cool faster.
The article states:
My question is this: Why is it considered dangerous that “the change must exceed the magnitude or rate of warmings that are known to be associated with normal weather and climatic variability”??
By analogy, man traveled by horse-drawn chariot or buggy for thousands of years. Along comes mechanized transportation that lets man travel many times faster and that’s somehow considered “dangerous”?
I think this relatively new term “dangerous” applied to the CAGW meme simply demonstrates the Warmistas are lowering the bar and stepping back from the term “catastrophic”. I wouldn’t be surprised in the future if they drop the “dangerous” term altogether, then try to dissociate themselves from all this silly scaremongering.
They used to chase witches–now they chase CO2 goblins. I wonder what they’ll be chasing next?
vukcevic says:
January 30, 2013 at 2:15 am
Another alternative view, suggest that the more comprehensive records of the N. Hemisphere suggest that the natural temperature oscillations origins are combination of factors from ‘down under’ (the Earth’s interior) and ‘up above’ (solar output)
It is this kinds of nonsense that mars WUWT and detracts from the valid points Carter makes.
Gerald Wilhite says:
January 30, 2013 at 3:07 am
Professor Carter, your logic and presentations always make me yearn to sit in your classroom. Would you please elaborate on the differences in the websites you and Dr. Hayhoe recommend?
==========================================================================
First time here?
HenryP says:
January 30, 2013 at 5:43 am
By plotting the Gleissberg solar/weather cycle I was able to ascertain that all warming in the past was natural
There is no such weather cycle and there is currently no such solar cycle [it is more like 105 years, but is not a real cycle].
that a global warming of around 0.5OC occurred in the 20th century, but
============================
I don’t even believe that any more……………
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/data-tampering-at-ushcngiss/
Peter White:
At January 30, 2013 at 4:36 am you ask
The leading parameter is determined by statistical analysis to determine the coherence.
The effect was first reported by Kuo, Lindberg and Thomson in 1990 in the paper they published in Nature. The synopsis of their paper says
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v343/n6260/abs/343709a0.html
Since then several others have conducted similar analyses and obtained the same finding but also determined that the time of the lag varies with latitude.
Correlation shows a mathematical relationship between two parameters. When one changes then the other changes in a magnitude stated by the mathematical relationship. But correlation gives no indication about causality.
There is no clear correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature (e.g. global temperature has not risen for the most recent 16+ years while atmospheric CO2 concentration has continued to rise).
Coherence shows that two parameters vary such that when one varies then the other varies later. This does give information about causality between the parameters. If the parameters are A and B then if B follows A any change to B cannot be the cause of a change to A (in the absence of a time machine).
Atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature cohere such that the CO2 follows the temperature at all time scales[there you are . . mod]. This indicates that the changes to the CO2 cannot be the cause of the temperature changes.
Coherence in the absence of correlation is a strong indication that two parameters are responding to a third parameter (or more parameters). For example, leaves fall off trees soon after children return to school following their summer break: this coherence is very strong (it happens every year). But there is no correlation between the children and the falling leaves (the number of children returning to school has no mathematical relationship to the number of leaves that fall from trees). The time of year is the “third parameter” In this example.
Richard
izen says:
January 30, 2013 at 3:26 am
“Sorry, but the idea that Hayhoe and Carter are equally credible scientists in the research community could only be greeted with incredulity.”
Leave it to a faither to use a logical fallacy instead of a logical argument.
A great article. Thank you Professor Carter.
Like some other commenters I was struck by the title of that book and thought the reference to ‘faith’ totally bizarre. It makes sense only in the context of a DAGW-religion!
“DAWG” would be a catchier acronym. Its components could easily be switched from DAGW, thus: “Dangerous Anthropogenic Warming of the Globe.”
@- cementafriend
“Here is one of the Professor’s peer reviewed papers concerning climate data. http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/McLean_deFreitas_Carter_JGR_2009.pdf”
You do know this paper was comprehensively and roundly debunked ?
Its egregious mistake is to claim that after removing any trend in the data by taking the derivative of the changes the remaining natural variations explain all the variance INCLUDING the trend.
It was useful perhaps to show that if you do the opposite and remove all the natural variation, ENSO and volcanic, then the resulting secular trend as shown by Foster and Rhamsdorf is consistant with the rise in CO2.
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2012/10/carbon-dioxide-and-temperature/
Sorry – Off Topic – but very funny.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9837026/Wind-turbine-collapses-in-high-wind.html
“The Bradworthy Parish Council, who opposed the turbine, expressed concern that there was “nothing exceptional” in the speed of the winds.
Installed by renewable energy company Dulas it was supposed to have a life expectancy of 25 years.
izen:
In your post at January 30, 2013 at 6:01 am you say to Bob Carter
NO! Absolutely not!
The recent 16 year period is NOT a “cherry pick” for two reasons.
Firstly, from now backwards is the most recent time. If you want to know what is happening now then it is the ONLY appropriate period and any other period is a “cherry pick”.
Secondly, 16 years is important because it falsifies the climate models according to the NOAA falsification criterion. There has been no discernible (at 95% confidence) rise in global temperature whether or not one extrapolates back over the 1998 ENSO peak or interpolates across that peak.
The facts are clear.
According to the falsification criterion set by NOAA in 2008, the climate models are falsified by the recent period of 16+ years of (at 95% confidence) zero global temperature trend. This is because NOAA says the climate models simulations often show periods of 10 years when global temperature trends are zero or negative but the simulations rule out near zero trends in global temperature for periods of 15 years. What the models “rule out” nature has done.
The climate models are falsified: this contradicts your superstitious belief in AGW, and you need to come to terms with it.
Richard
Moderator:
Sincere thanks for your correcting my silly typing mistake in my post at January 30, 2013 at 6:32 am.
Richard
@izen: What you are implying is that a time period isn’t significant unless it shows warming. Only warmists would believe that is valid science.
Re: Mario Lento says:
January 30, 2013 at 12:20 am
What a wonderful piece that Obama should be forced to read! Then he should come on WUWT and test his ideas.
How can anyone continue to believe a reading of the facts would change our President’s mind about ANYTHING?
@- richardscourtney
“It is a ridiculous idea that Hayhoe comes near to Carter’s high standards of scientific ability and credibility. Carter’s suggestion that he and Hayhoe could be considered to be comparable shows Carter’s great humility.”
There are a number of tried and tested methods for assessing the credibility of any scientific researcher.
The number of papers published in the field, how recent those papers are, the quality of the journal in which they are published and how often they are cited by others.
Hayhoe wins on all points, except perhaps citations. The Carter et al 2009 paper has certainly been widely cited, by climate scientists debunking it as an example of the error that can be made in using a derivative to remove a trend, and then claiming that you have somehow ‘explained’ the trend you removed!
The success of the CAGW crowd is based on their proper application of Sales 101. People buy on emotion and “what’s in it for me”, not on facts and logic. (that’s also why Republicans lose national elections). The old axiom “you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle” describes the reason why so many false ideas can be sold to the public even when they are based only on beliefs rather than sound science. Presenting a warming climate as dangerous and something to avoid at all costs has tapped into the ignorance and doomsday mentality of the general public. Then you convince those same people that they can actually have a hand in saving themselves by jumping on the band wagon and applying political pressure. Now add in a compliant media that will support any idea that puts them in a position to make money, who knowingly takes full advantage of confirmation bias in that people will watch and read anything that agrees with their own point of view. And there you have it, a successful campaign.
Warming is a good thing, it is far better than cooling. We must continue that approach, convincing the public that cooling would be a condition that must be avoided. You must believe it in order to sell it. Whether we can prevent another glacial period or not is irrelevant, it only matters that we stop the insanity of bankrupting ourselves in a hopeless attempt to fix a non problem.
To add some new material to the debate I’d like to discuss James Lovelock, famous or notorious author of The Revenge of Gaia. He has said that:
– Before reaching the age of 70, 30 per cent of humans will die of cancer, and the main cause of cancer is breathing oxygen.
– Nuclear is the only viable short-term solution to the energy crisis.
– Wind power is no solution at all.
– Methane sulfonic acid (MSA) in the atmosphere is the chief determinant of cloud cover and thus albedo and its effects dwarf those of carbon dioxide. (Lovelock calls the sulfur cycle his greatest discovery.)
– Droughts in the corn belt of the USA are caused by deforestation in the Amazon basin.
– On criticisms of Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth: “The biologists were the worst. They spoke against Gaia with the kind of dogmatic certainty I hadn’t heard since Sunday School. At least the geologists offered criticisms based on their interpretation of the facts.”
– “They could not prove us wrong but were sure in their hearts that we were.”
– “I am not a doomwatch sort of person.”
– On why the Nimbus 7 ozone observations were rejected when they did not fit the model: “It was awful, absolutely awful. No way to do science.”
Perhaps we have been too enthusiastic in our demonization of this scientific giant?
I disagree with the following –
I agree that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation, and that more CO2 will absorb more radiation. But stopping there leads to the wrong conclusion.
The atmosphere obtains heat from 3 sources – convection, evaporation, and radiation. However, since the only way it looses heat is via radiation, it follows that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere must release more heat than it absorbs. Therefore, increasing CO2 cools the lower atmosphere.
Of course, some of this extra heat returns to the surface and should cause its temperature to increase. However, because the atmosphere will be cooler than it was before the extra CO2 was added, the increase in surface temperature will be less than the IPCC claims. Also, if that extra heat is converted into convection and evaporation, the net change (sensitivity) is close to zero. Depending on the absolute humidity (number of water molecules in the atmosphere) and the daily insolation, increasing CO2 can actually cause the surface temperature to decrease.
Most excellent posting and the contributions by Richard S. Courtney are much appreciated.
Too bad most of the brainwashed masses, including President Obama, will not read it.
Beautiful, just beautiful 🙂
*bookmarks*
Izen says:
“There are a number of tried and tested methods for assessing the credibility of any scientific researcher.
The number of papers published in the field, how recent those papers are, the quality of the journal in which they are published and how often they are cited by others.”
Based on that, then Richard Lindzen has even more credibility, and he’s a skeptic. Oh wait – it only counts if you are “of the faith.”
PS: “That DAWG won’t hunt.”
Izen says:
“An old canard. The season changes in CO2 are related to differences in the biosphere between the north and south hemispheres. The ice age cycle is initiated by orbital changes,”
The truth is we don’t know what initiates and ends glaications. If we did, we would be able to predict the beginning of the next one in the same way we could predict whether a particular asteroid will strike the Earth. If we don’t know how ice ages start and end, then we don’t understand climate very well at all, and your comments are pure hubris.
izen:
Your post at January 30, 2013 at 7:10 am is silly. In the absence of any flaws in Carter’s arguments you try to demean Carter by saying he is no better a scientist than Hayhoe.
As I have told you in the past, the number of a scientist’s publications indicates nothing about the value and merit of the scientist’s work. Quality of the published work indicates the value of thge work.
A tonne of bovine excrement is not worth one gram of a diamond.
What has Hayhoe done which matches the work of Carter on sub-sea cores?
Nothing (and you know it).
Carter is retired so he has not published as much as Hayhoe recently. And you assert that means she is a more credible scientist than Carter? Even you should be capable of seeing why you are wrong about that.
And you admit that Carter has a higher citation index than Hayhoe. You try to get around that by saying some of those citations are challenges of Carter. Well, if that were true then it would demonstrate that many scientists consider Carter’s work to be so important that it is worth the effort of challenging it.
Simply, citation index shows Hayhoe is in a lower scientific league than Carter, and your post admits it.
Stop playing the man and try to play the ball. You will lose if you play either, but playing the man is egregious.
Richard
Excellent book Dr. Carter. Now if I could only get scientists I know to read it they could learn about the faulty science of CAGW they support.
[The models are clearly faulty, and allocate too great a warming effect for the extra carbon dioxide (technically, they are said to overestimate the climate sensitivity).]
They actually over-estimate the amount of positive water vapor feedback in response to any type of warming and the real disagreement isn’t over CO2 warming which represents long standing science but with these brand new computer model assumptions that very much are not established science. The claim that skepticism in the main goes against greenhouse theory itself has successfully made skeptics the objects of ridicule.
In light Dr. Carter’s analysis, it struck me that governments can use AGW as an out for their failures regarding emergency response to disasters.
Taking Hurricane Sandy as an example, it may appear that the US government would have been prepared for a “regular” or natural storm but how can anyone be prepared for a climate change-fueled super storm?
Izen says:
“The obvious evidence for the exceptionality of the present warming is on the lack of past sea level rise during those historical extremes compared to the thmal expansion of the oceans seen now.”
How can we possibly know the rates of sea level rises in previous interglacials? And if you are describing only the warm periods that occurred in the holocene, then the answer to why the sea levels weren’t as high is because there were more glaciers then.
In order to help your understanding, let me explain that at the end of the last ice age, there were lots of ice sheets. As a result, there was less water in the oceans, and this made sea levels very low. These ice sheets gradually retreated over millenia, causing more water to return to the oceans and sea levels to rise.
Did you know that you could once walk between southern England and France? Do you honestly think that the reason that you can’t walk across today is because of the “thermal expansion of the oceans?”
mpcraig says:January 30, 2013 at 7:56 am
In light Dr. Carter’s analysis, it struck me that governments can use AGW as an out for their failures regarding emergency response to disasters.
Reminds me of a poster often found in our engineering dep’t: “A lack of planning on your part, does not create a crisis on my part.
Izen says
Polar amplification has been seen at the North pole of course, the Antarctic however is significantly decoupled from the global climate and still effected by the ozone depletion from CFCs causing an intensification of the circumpolar vortex.
henry says
the arctic melt is due to the warmer Gulf Stream
same as here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/16/you-ask-i-provide-november-2nd-1922-arctic-ocean-getting-warm-seals-vanish-and-icebergs-melt/
(2012-88=1924)
However, the warming (looking at energy-in) has ended in 1995 when ozone started increasing.
The warming started in 1951 when ozone (& others) started decreasing.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
I have ozone data from the Swiss alps showing 1951 and 1995 as bending points. I have also data from the SH showing 1950 and 1995 as bending points. The notion of CFC’s destroying ozone was probably a red herring or a minor factor.
don’t listen to anything Leif Svalgaard has to say about this – for some reason he is just trying to get us all off that trail.
leif svalgaard says
(referring to the Gleissberg solar/weather cycle)
There is no such weather cycle and there is currently no such solar cycle [it is more like 105 years, but is not a real cycle].
Henry says
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 108, 1003, 15 PP., 2003
doi:10.1029/2002JA009390
Persistence of the Gleissberg 88-year solar cycle over the last ∼12,000years: Evidence from cosmogenic isotopes
Alexei N. Peristykh
Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA
Paul E. Damon
Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA
link: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2002JA009390.shtml
Among other longer-than-22-year periods in Fourier spectra of various solar–terrestrial records, the 88-year cycle is unique, because it can be directly linked to the cyclic activity of sunspot formation. Variations of amplitude as well as of period of the Schwabe 11-year cycle of sunspot activity have actually been known for a long time and a ca. 80-year cycle was detected in those variations. Manifestations of such secular periodic processes were reported in a broad variety of solar, solar–terrestrial,and terrestrial climatic phenomena. Confirmation of the existence of the Gleissberg cycle in long solar–terrestrial records as well as the question of its stability is of great significance for solar dynamo theories. For that perspective, we examined the longest detailed cosmogenic isotope record— …..
etc
izen says:
January 30, 2013 at 6:01 am
“That is an equilibrium figure not expected to be reached until all the effects of the extra energy from raised CO2 have impacted the system.”
Extra energy? Where does the extra come from? Does CO2 produce its own energy? Please explain.
As to the accusations of cherry picking, since Hansen’s grandstand in 1988 with the AGW mantra, till date, in 25 years, the numbers of years for which there has been no statistically significant increase in warming out number the warming years by a wide margin. And CO2 rise has been steady through the entire period. So much for the models and their garbage.
Professor Robert (Bob) Carter: “a large measure of scientific agreement and shared interpretation exists amongst nearly all scientists who consider the issue. The common ground, much of which was traversed by Dr. Hayhoe in her article, includes:
· that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and warms the lower atmosphere,
· that a global warming of around 0.5OC occurred in the 20th century, but”
===========================================================
Not true. I humbly allow me to refer to a previous comment of mine on a study dealing with the “consensus” issue: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/30/consensus-argument-proves-climate-science-is-political/#comment-972119
The reason why the 16 years is significant is because it shows how bad their models are, using their own words. See 15 years and 17 years below.
izen says:
January 30, 2013 at 6:01 am
Of course the warming IS statistically significant over 14 or 18 years, the 16 year period is a cherry pick.
I went by http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
Here is what I found.
For RSS the warming is NOT significant for over 23 years.
For RSS: +0.126 +/-0.136 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1990
For UAH, the warming is NOT significant for over 19 years.
For UAH: 0.143 +/- 0.173 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1994
For Hacrut3, the warming is NOT significant for over 19 years.
For Hadcrut3: 0.098 +/- 0.113 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1994
For Hacrut4, the warming is NOT significant for over 18 years.
For Hadcrut4: 0.095 +/- 0.111 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1995
For GISS, the warming is NOT significant for over 17 years.
For GISS: 0.116 +/- 0.122 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1996
If you want to know the times to the nearest month that the warming is not significant for each set, they are as follows: RSS since September 1989; UAH since April 1993; Hadcrut3 since September 1993; Hadcrut4 since August 1994; GISS since October 1995 and NOAA since June 1994.
PLEASE TELL ME WHERE I MISSED THAT 14 YEARS OF SIGNIFICANT WARMING.
Georgi says: “How does the quantum mechanical ‘many worlds’ interpretation fit with Occam’s razor? Always puzzled me.”
Many worlds is a product of interpreting quantum mechanical behavior within the limits imposed by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Yet we often forget that Einstein’s theory of relativity has created a need to consider time as a physical dimension rather than an illusion of change documented by cyclic devices (clocks). Maybe we have been taken in by the anthropogenic interpretation of time, we sense it passing, we sense the past therefore it must exist and thus we can measure it, instead of what should be the ‘null hypothesis’, that time is a product of using a cyclic tool to measurement non cyclic change. In fact, Einstein’s theory has now become the null hypothesis since no new experiment attempts to challenge the fundamental interpretation. I suspect however that the theory suffers from anthropogenic observer bias..the assumption that whatever we observe, measure and test must signal the underlying physical mechanisms. Yet complexity theory teaches us that simple feedbacks of simple systems result in incredibly complex emergent behaviors (non-linear dynamic system) that reveal nothing about the simple physics that created that behavior.
Maybe one day we will look back on Einstein’s theory of relativity at its collapse and discovery the inadequacy of our scientific approach. Or maybe not!
Dick Witman:
re your rant at January 30, 2013 at 8:24 am
Weather and climate change. They always have, everywhere. Live with it.
Yes, new high temperature records are set every year, and new low temperature records are, too. That is because the temperatures have only been measured for a short time.
AGW sceptics are NOT in the pay of ‘Big Oil’.
If any energy company were to offer me money then I would take every penny (I suppose Bob Carter and Anthony Watts would, too, but I don’t know that).
Energy companies fund CRU, Phil Jones, Michael Mann, and other warmunists: they don’t fund people like Bob Carter who tell the truth about there being no threat from AGW.
Richard
The best summary of the issue I ave ever read.
lsvalgaard says:
January 30, 2013 at 6:28 am
There is no such weather cycle and there is currently no such solar cycle [it is more like 105 years, but is not a real cycle].
Yes, I am pleased that you agree, there is 105 year ‘cycle’ (history of our discussion on the existence or non-existence of such period goes back few years), but more to the point it appears that the changes in the earth’s magnetic field exhibits more or less the same 105 year period of change as shown in the second illustration of
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/EarthNV.htm
Agree with HenryP that the most if not all of global warming appear to be NATURAL.
Good article, one small beef though: Although it pains me to say it, the lack of warming in the last 16 years does not automatically void the assumption of a link between CO2 and warming, because there could be hysteresis, time delays in the system.
I don’t personally believe this to be the case, but since it’s a possibility, it would be foolish to ignore it in these sorts of discussions until we have passed a period where it can’t possibly be a fluctuation (they keep expanding the definition of this time period, but I would say 20 years would pretty much cover it)
You are quite correct, but you failed to note his discussion about the null hypothesis. The entire point of the hockey stick graph from the beginning is that without some supposedly credible curve that “erased” the MWP and LIA and replaced them with a flatline up to an industrial era hockey stick increase, nobody would ever have drunk the IPCC kool-ade in the first place!
That is, if it was really just as warm (withing noise) in the MWP or the RWP as it is today (as apparently it was) without CO_2, it is very difficult to argue that it is only as warm as it is today because of CO_2. If the LIA was really the coldest single century in eleven thousand years (as apparently it was) than it is hardly surprising that the Earth might spend several centuries warming back up from it, a process that occurred independent of CO_2 levels and that continues similarly independent today.
That’s the point of the “natural variability”. Michael Mann became famous strictly because he managed to cook up a graph that utterly eliminated it on a millennial time scale, erasing the evidence of natural variability altogether so the current variation could be blamed on CO_2 and human influences. Humans really aren’t that dumb — sheer common sense would have prevented most people from buying the CAGW or DAGW (is this a renamed, kinder gentler version of CAGW, one where warming is merely “dangerous” and no longer “catastrophic”?) hypothesis when there was nothing extraordinary about the present compared to the past. It still would, but at this point the big lies have already been told, and a thousand small lies support them. There is a large social-inertia mass to be moved and only the weight of truth to move it. Historically that weight is up to the task, but it often takes decades to centuries to work.
So you are dead right. The C/DAGW hypothesis has not been disproven. Nor has the hypothesis that the next glaciation is going to start in 2014, with the coming solar minimum ushering in a century or more of unrelenting cooling in the teeth of increased CO_2, as occurred before during the Ordovician-Silurian transition — an ice age where the minimum CO_2 concentration in the atmosphere was roughly 10x that of the present, and where the ice age began with CO_2 concentration 17 times higher than it is today. Nor is the hypothesis disproven that the climate will be dead on stable within 0.2C for the next century. Nor is the hypothesis disproven that magnetic monopoles exist and are the correct explanation for the quantization of charge.
This is why the null hypothesis is so important, especially in arenas where we have little real understanding and our theories at best weakly explain only certain aspects of the data in a non-unique way. In the next decade, it might warm, cool, or remain the same. Do we really know enough to predict which one?
Probably not.
If you’d gotten all of the members of the IPCC together in 1998 and forced them to bet on whether the 33 year anomaly at the end of 2012 would be a whopping 0.2C, with no statistically discernible warming since 1998, you could have gotten any odds you like from them on a bet of no. They would have said no, no, no, absolutely impossible, I’ll bet you ten dollars to a dime that it cannot happen.
But it did, and continues to happen. The only significant cliimate event of the last 33 years appears to be the 1997-1998 super El Nino. Nothing else mattered. Not CO_2, not volcanoes, not aerosols, not black soot. And what caused that ENSO event? Surely not CO_2 — it was an accidental confluence of several chaotically oscillating events and (very probably) a pair of back-to-back strong solar maxima. CO_2 may have contributed — one expects CO_2 alone to contribute roughly 0.1 C/decade of warming along its current path of increase — but there is no plausible explanation for ENSO events being caused by CO_2 levels, or even a theory for how they might affect them. There is no quantitatively predictive theory for ENSO events at all.
At the moment, with La Nina events stacking up, the ocean looks rather like it is in neutral. With the Sun quite possibly having already passed the weakest solar maximum observed in over a century and on the long slope downhill to a protracted minimum that might be followed by an actual Maunder style minimum, an event correlated (possibly causally, possibly not) with the LIA, with the PDO in a different phase that is chilling Alaska and the west coast of the US, with the Atlantic oscillation holding steady enough but bound to invert its phase eventually (it is one of the least predictable of the oscillations) who knows what will happen?
You might still find IPCC members and CAGW warmists to take a bet for the resumption of warming, but would they give you strong odds or bet their own money — not grant money, not other people’s money, but their own life savings — on major, high climate sensitivity warming? Only if they are stupid. It’s a lot easier to play poker with other people’s money, or to play for plastic chips. As soon as you’re betting real money, your own money, you suddenly either grow a brain or are quickly cleaned out and leave the game.
At the moment, the “best” bet supported by a linear time model built on the reliable 33+ year satellite data is for a gradual warming at a rate less than 0.15 C/decade. Of course, there is little reason to pick a linear model, and note that I said linear time, not linear CO_2 concentration. CO_2 is entirely covariant with time — a monotonic nearly linear function — so there isn’t really any difference. The “best” causal model supported by the same data is that strong ENSO events cause discrete jumps between otherwise stable temperature regimes. Historically super El Ninos are rare, so the best extrapolation is for no change (pending something like a string of La Nina’s, weak El Ninos, or another super El Nino). And in all of this there are many wild cards — the effect of the gradually increasing CO_2, the longer term effect of the PDO inversion, the possible effect of a phase inversion over the Atlantic as well, the unknown effect of solar state on climate given a pending series of solar minima that are extreme, if not grand, compared to most of the last century, and the inexorable progression of the earth in cycles of orbital resonance, axial precession, continental drift slowly altering oceanic circulation patterns, volcanic activity, and other human but non-CO2 influences such as irrigation, deforestation, aerosol production, soot production, silting and fertilizer induced algae bloom altering oceanic albedo, UHI effects…
To me the really amazing thing is that somebody thinks that they can predict climate at all, even one lousy decade out. As far as I know, there are no models out there that causally explain the temperature record of the last eleven thousand years of the Holocene only, let alone the last fifty or sixty million years, where temperatures are mostly warm except when, for no reason that anyone can positively determine or predict, it decides to spend anything from a few hundred thousand to a few million years all iced up. We could never have predicted, using GCMs, the RWP, the MWP, the LIA, or the modern warm period back (say) in the year 1000 BCE, even given excellent data on the previous 500 years of global climate at that time plus a knowledge of the Sun’s state up to that time.
The Null Hypothesis thus goes unchallenged, unless and until somebody comes up with enough data to convincingly falsify some of the many warming and cooling and remaining the same alternative hypotheses. A tiny variation in the Earth’s albedo is more than enough to plunge temperatures by 1 to 2 C almost immediately and trigger a return to LIA conditions or worse. A tiny variation the other way might similarly warm it. We don’t understand clouds, or clouds and the sun and their nonlinear interactions. We don’t fully understand how they all three tie into the state of the oceans, the phases and details of the global atmospheric circulation, and more. Our ignorance (and ability to compute) vastly exceeds our knowledge in the case of global climate.
How, then, is this settled science? The best that we can say about climate science is that it is a work in progress, a work that has yielded almost no a priori predictive value so far as far as a whole decade out.
Spending vast sums of public money to prevent “dangerous” anthropogenic climate change at a time when the poorest people in the world need a hand up to achieve the simplest of the comforts of modern civilization is not just a mistake, it is a catastrophe all by itself. The followers of the modern “Green” religion have managed what even the Catholic Church failed to do — they have made the pursuit of simple human comfort enabled by the use of our natural resources and ethically neutral science into a sin.
Today, right now, over the next hour, millions of women will carry laundry not into a machine but down to a river, over to a well, out to a large bucket. Using cold water and rocks or boards, they will scrub that clothing by hand, over hours, then rinse it and wring it out. They will lay it out to dry on whatever is handy — trees or rocks, a fence. After a day’s hard work, their family will be able to wear clothes that aren’t horribly filthy for a few days — and even this assumes that they are wealthy enough to have the idle time needed to do the laundry at all (millions more, tens of millions more, do no). Then they will go home to fix food on a fire fueled with wood, or charcoal, or dried dung, feed their family, and go to bed with the sun in a smoke-filled, filthy hut infested with insects and co-inhabited by animals both wild and domesticated. Tomorrow they will rise to work once more, all day, at the difficult business of merely staying alive in a world where the only energy available to them is food fueling their own human strength, a handful of burnable material, and if they are fortunate the energy they can derive from a domesticated animal or two.
Today, right now, there are people selling “Carbon Futures” in an absurd trading scheme that enriches the rich and won’t ameliorate the unproven DAGW hypothesis at all, not even if it works they way it is supposed to! Much of the money that disappears into the pockets of energy companies or shell companies set up solely to allow companies to “import” carbon consumption rights that exist only in the imagination comes from our own pockets, and could have been spent instead building energy resources that could profoundly change the lives of all of those people who still do not have electric lights, refrigeration, washing machines, clean water and safe sewage treatment, enough to eat, reliable jobs, political and social security, health care, or any means of transportation that doesn’t have fur.
The greatest crime of the age, the true catastrophe of the age, the most horrible sin of the age — is this.
rgb
Dear Professor Carter,
” • that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and warms the lower atmosphere,”
An excellent article but it contains what is to me the biggest logical flaw that has beset the climate argument since it re-emerged in its current form in the ‘seventies. Unlike you I am not a professional scientist, credible or otherwise. I dropped out of High School back in 1950 (not really voluntarily) and I had to learn to think for myself, logically, from that day on. From that day to this I have considered a number of scientific matters with particular interest in statistical fraud, medical research fraud and political fraud. I became interested in AGW only about five or six years ago.
In my experience the majority of people carrying out statistical analysis have picked up the mechanics of the subject along the way without any study of first principles. They have learned how to juggle Excel or OpenOffice without any study of the basics of data selection. They went from an hour or two of instruction, straight to a spreadsheet. Consequently, as with far too much of statistical analysis, there is no credible grounding for the numbers bandied about in “climatology”. They would better have commenced with Pascal and Fermat but instead settled for Messrs. Microsoft.
When my attention was caught by AGW I did not have the benefit of what Anthony was to teach me about such things as urban heat islands etc., etc., etc. But I was astonished to find that the argument depended on junk numbers.
The methods of compilation of very old temperature data was rough and ready and could only produce information of limited accuracy – an error of’ perhaps’ two degrees Fahrenheit either way, and we are looking for changes of fractions of a degree per decade. These numbers had been converted to Celsius to two decimal places! Two decimal places! To me those two decimal places screamed out fraud. Not innocent error – not sheer dumb headedness, but deliberate fraud. I had thought that I was looking at a science that had not previously engaged my attention but what I saw was fraud staring me in the face. Not even the “statisticians” who learned their craft from Excel are that dumb headed.
I looked at other things such as the averaged nature of the calculations, the totally inadequate distribution of the gathering points, and the mismatched timings of temperature readings. Junk.
I looked at the central, virtually first principle nature of the claim for a greenhouse gas and a greenhouse effect. My first principles were the first and second laws of thermodynamics and the ideal gas law. It seemed to me that to accept the greenhouse effect I had to take it that all three of these first principles had been rejected or overridden. But this was not the case. Very few ‘credible’ physicists had, at that time, debunked this spurious ‘first principle’ of greenhouse effect.
Pascal drew attention to the fact that first principles can never be proved to be correct and I am ready to see my favourite first principles turned aside if someone will take the trouble to persuade me that they are disproved. Of all the scientists around the world feeding themselves on the taxpayers’ shilling, not a single one has yet made a serious attempt to do the disproving. Anthropogenic Global Warming is not happening, period, while those three first principles remain standing.
As an anecdotal non-scientific aside regarding that fearsome greenhouse gas, water vapour, let me say that as I sit here typing alongside the sub tropical beach where I live, I am very uncomfortable. The sweat pours down my brow. The temperature is a modest 26C but the humidity is through the roof. Humidity is not comfortable. While my neighbours complain, as they always do at this time of year, I am grateful for that vapour. I am grateful because if the humidity were not there, the temperature would be in the low forties and few of my age in my energy cost regime can afford the electricity for air conditioning any more. Water vapour is cooling of course.
Regards,
Ken Harvey
Chuck Nolan says:
One complaint is the use of DAGW
Where did this term come from?
____________________________________________________
It’s a Hansen favorite from way back, here’s one example:
”However, the 2°C scenario cannot be recommended as a responsible target, as it almost surely takes us well into the realm of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
“A Slippery Slope: How Much Global Warming Constitutes “Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference”?” — James E. Hansen
To those who say hysteresis, it is easy to show using standard radiative physics that there can be very little CO2-AGW.
It all comes down to the 50 year mistake by meteorologists who claim a pyrometer measures ‘back radiation’ when it’s really the temperature radiation field.
The IR absorption has been exaggerated by a factor of 6.84.
richardscourtney says:
January 30, 2013 at 8:54 am
“Energy companies fund CRU, Phil Jones, Michael Mann…”
I think Al Gore deserves to be mentioned too, after collecting from Al Jazeera.
Henry@Dick Witman
http://www.adn.com/2012/07/13/2541345/its-the-coldest-july-on-record.html
I wonder what the farmers in Anchorage would say to you, Dick? Would they perhaps be thinking of you what I am thinking of you right now?
wikeroy:
re your comment to me at January 30, 2013 at 9:42 am.
Yes, I agree that Mr Gore is a warmunist and – as you say – his recent sale to Qatar he has also collected from ‘Big Oil’.
My entire sentence said,
Richard
henry@vukcevic
the Gleissberg cycle is well known but it seems more likely to be a weather cycle of 80-90 years rather than an exact solar cycle.
I therefore have a suspicion that the combination of the recurring 55 and 105 year solar cycles form this weather cycle.
HenryP says:
January 30, 2013 at 8:18 am
Persistence of the Gleissberg 88-year solar cycle over the last ∼12,000years
There is no 88-yr cycle now and the past 400 years.
vukcevic says:
January 30, 2013 at 9:01 am
Yes, I am pleased that you agree, there is 105 year ‘cycle’ (history of our discussion on the existence or non-existence of such period goes back few years)
Yes, I showed you long ago that there is a 105-yr cycle. Good you remember.
Agree with HenryP that the most if not all of global warming appear to be NATURAL.
A mark of pseudo-science is to agree on parts of something even if it contradicts what you say. Now tell Henry there is a 105-yr cycle.
And boy, oh boy, what a job FEMA does, too!
Great summary. Has somebody got the time to comment on this newsletter.
http://www.nnfcc.co.uk/publications/nnfcc-newsletter-issue-26.-carbon-capture-and-storage-special-issue
I looked at the central, virtually first principle nature of the claim for a greenhouse gas and a greenhouse effect. My first principles were the first and second laws of thermodynamics and the ideal gas law. It seemed to me that to accept the greenhouse effect I had to take it that all three of these first principles had been rejected or overridden. But this was not the case. Very few ‘credible’ physicists had, at that time, debunked this spurious ‘first principle’ of greenhouse effect.
Speaking as a skeptical physicist, I assure you that the greenhouse effect does not violate either of the laws of thermodynamics or any gas law, ideal or not. Furthermore, laws of physics aside, it can be directly observed in the differences between TOA and BOA IR radiation spectra. It therefore has direct empirical evidence supporting it as well as the simple and direct application of the laws of electrodynamics and statistical mechanics in context.
If you think otherwise, please provide an argument beyond “it seems to me”. Since I teach physics, including the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics and electrodynamics, when I say “it seems to me” there might be some reason to take it seriously (or not — that’s up to you). In general, whether or not my opinion is valuable I can back up my opinions with any number of arguments and/or references to data. You by your own assertion state that you have no credentials and uncertain knowledge in what amount to some of the most difficult subjects humans ever learn or work with. Exactly why do you think that there is no greenhouse effect (as far as I can tell from your comment) at all?
rgb
Yes, new high temperature records are set every year, and new low temperature records are, too. That is because the temperatures have only been measured for a short time.
Oops, you mean every day, or very nearly so. That’s because temperatures have only been measured for a short time, are highly variable, highly local and because the Earth is a damn big place. We just set/tied a record low high temperature in Durham four or five days ago. Today (who knows) we may or may not set a record high high temperature or high low temperature. We set several high and/or low temperatures a year, on average (as do most places) and it doesn’t take many distinct places doing the same thing before you have many places setting records every day.
There, I fixed that for you (in the way you intended anyway:-).
rgb
“· that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and warms the lower atmosphere,”
There is no evidence that this effect even is possible and, if it is, it would be undetectable. This is junk science. The effect requires that the tropical upper troposphere at -17 deg C is heating up and radiating IR at the surface, in turn heating it up and then the lower atmosphere. Well, the surface is 15 deg C and simply cannot absorb or be warmed by the colder source. Totally against thermodynamics. Furthermore, satellite measurements show that the tropical upper troposphere has not warmed, but in fact cooled a bit over recent decades.
The above failure of the greenhouse gas junks science totally sinks the entire demonization of CO2 and human activities related to CO2 emissions.
As we are cooling, we need all of the CO2 plant food we can get.
The past extremes are local phenomina not global and synchronous. The obvious evidence for the exceptionality of the present warming is on the lack of past sea level rise during those historical extremes compared to the thermal expansion of the oceans seen now.
You mean like the synchronous warming in the 1930s during which the arctic polar ice melted, the sea level rise rate (measured by tide gagues at that time) was also over 3 mm per year, there was a horrendous dust-bowl drought with high temperatures across the United States — all without the benefit of a significant global level of anthropogenic CO_2?
Also, what is your evidence that the past extremes are local phenomena and not synchronous. I thought all of that Mann-ist sort of claim was debunked long ago and even most warmists now once again acknowledge the reality of the RWP, the MWP, and the LIA. They are, after all, right up there and visible on most of the wikipedia pages that illustrate proxy-derived temperatures across the Holocene in spite of their substantial dilution by statistically incompetent work done by many dendroclimatologists. Recently even folks like Briffa have been leaving this particular long since sunken ship (and now if one could only remove it from the wikipedia pages…).
rgb
vukcevic Yes, I am pleased that you agree, there is 105 year ‘cycle’ (history of our discussion on the existence or non-existence of such period goes back few years)
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 30, 2013 at 10:05 am
Yes, I showed you long ago that there is a 105-yr cycle. Good you remember.
I remember it somewhat differently. At the time you were more in with the 77-88 years (7 or 8 SS cycles). I was suggesting around 107, and even proposed :”How about Gleissberg and 107 year Vukcevic cycle?”
Rest of my comments from ‘my’ now defunct thread at SC24:
“Topic: Maunder and related matters (Read 72,725times)”
You can see here
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Gleissberg.htm
As usual your comments are outright rejection of my points (so no quotes are necessary)
rgbatduke:
In my post at January 30, 2013 at 8:54 am I wrote
At January 30, 2013 at 12:09 pm you have responded saying
Indeed so, and I am not sure what you intended by “Oops”.
Clearly, if a record is set on a day then it is set in the year which includes that day (e.g. the hottest January day in ‘place X’ was recorded in year-such-and-such).
However, there is a more important issue which derives from that. I recently explained it in a post to an egregious troll in another WUWT thread, so I copy that post here.
Richard
==============
Moe:
You add to your proclamations of your ignorance of statistics when you write at January 26, 2013 at 12:47 am
The weather monitoring started only about 150 years ago.
On its first day the first weather station recorded eight record values; i.e. max. and min. for temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and barometric pressure. On the following day some (possibly all) of those records would have been broken.
As time passed the period between obtaining a new record increased, but records inevitably continued to be broken. This is true for each weather monitoring site. And there are now hundreds of monitoring sites.
Therefore, a weather record is obtained somewhere on most days. This results from the short time of the monitoring (~150 years) and the large number of measurements (8 parameters measured at hundreds of monitoring sites on each of 365 days each year).
But the Earth has been warming from the Little Ice Age for centuries, so the globe warmed for most of the ~150 years that the measurements have been made. Clearly, when the measurements started there was equal probability of obtaining a record high or record low temperature. But 100 years later the globe was warmer, so there was more chance of setting high temperature records and less chance of breaking the low temperature records which were obtained when the Earth was cooler.
Discernible global warming continued until about 16 years ago. Clearly, there is now high probability of setting high temperature records because the globe has only been this hot for the last 16 years of the 150 year record. But there is little probability of setting low temperature records because the Earth was cooler for ~130 years of the monitored time.
But you say of the recent time “the cold records falling at a third the rate of warm records”.
A third! That is so high a proportion of “cold records” that it is extraordinary.
”The cold records falling at a third the rate of warm records” is strong evidence that the global warming over the last ~150 years has been trivial.
And you would have known that if you had any understanding of what you are talking about.
Richard
@RichardCourtney – actually, 4 record temperatures were set the very first day. We know about record high and low, but now we have record high low, and record low high. Or at least the weather people around here tell us we are tracking those.
Record High low – the highest low temperature on a date
Record Low High – The lowest high temperature on a date.
“· that human emissions are accumulating in the atmosphere”
They’re actually not. It’s going to take a long time to seep through the mental block which has accumulated over time, but that was never more than an assumption, for which evidence consistent with it was sought, but falsification was never attempted.
If, however, you actually look at the data, it is clear that temperatures are driving CO2. This plot shows that, since accurate records began, CO2 has evolved to a high degree of fidelity according to the difeq
dCO2/dt = k*(T – To)
where k is a coupling constant, and To is an equilibrium temperature. This is simply a 1st order Taylor series expansion of a continuous transport process for which the rate of change depends on temperature. One such process is the continuous transport of CO2 into downwelling waters and out of the upwelling waters of the thermohaline circulation. With this equation, if you have the starting point and the temperatures in between, you can calculate the CO2 concentration to high accuracy at any time up to the present. You don’t need to know anything about human inputs at all.
The relationship precludes any significant contribution from human emissions. This is because the coupling constant k which matches the variation also precisely matches the trend. Since the rate of human inputs also has a trend, k would have to be reduced to make room for it, but then the variation would not match. The conclusion is necessarily that human inputs are rapidly sequestered, while temperature determines the equilibrium concentration of CO2.
StephenP says:
January 30, 2013 at 10:53 am
Great summary. Has somebody got the time to comment on this newsletter.
http://www.nnfcc.co.uk/publications/nnfcc-newsletter-issue-26.-carbon-capture-and-storage-special-issue
See: http://ukipscotland.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/longannet-carbon-capture-scheme-scrapped/
“Environment Canada wants to spend $6 billion to reduce the atmospheric concentration of a trace molecule by 0.01 ppmv, and assuming there is any advantage in doing so, supposedly cutting global temps by 0.0007°C.”
When an oil company in our province asked for input for their carbon capture plan, I wrote about the huge costs for little gain. They thanked me for my input but it made no difference.
“In fact, the opposite relationship applies at all time scales. Temperature change precedes carbon dioxide change by about 5 months during the annual seasonal cycle, and by about 700-1000 years during ice age climatic cycling.”
What is the relationship when night turns into day? And is there even smaller time scales where we have similar relationships?
Can anybody help me? (I am looking for fractal similarities.)
Thank you professor Bob Carter. I will definitely resend your posting.
vukcevic says:
January 30, 2013 at 12:54 pm
“Yes, I showed you long ago that there is a 105-yr cycle. Good you remember.”
I remember it somewhat differently.
Yet show my FFT analysis http://www.leif.org/research/FFT-Power-Spectrum-SSN-1700-2008.png
Go figure…
It should be innocent until proven guilty…but the judge has already been convinced otherwise.
Bart:
At January 30, 2013 at 1:02 pm you quote Bob Carter saying of CO2
And you dispute that with your dispute beginning
Actually, Bob Carter knows that his statement is contentious because he and I were speakers at a Conference in Stockholm where my presentation dealt with that specific issue.
In a brief summary such as he provides here, Bob Carter has adopted the reasonable position of conceding that contentious matter and using his available space to explain that if the accumulation were true then it would not be important.
For information of onlookers I provide a brief clarification of the contention. I do NOT intend to participate in a deflection of this thread into a side-track about the issue.
The IPCC and some others (e.g. Ferdinand Engelbeen) assert that human emissions of CO2 are accumulating in the atmosphere.
Other people (including you) claim the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 is entirely natural and results from the rise in global temperature.
I don’t know the cause of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 but I want to know. The rise is certainly NOT that human emissions are accumulating in the atmosphere: if that were so then the rise and the emissions would relate, but they don’t. Something has disturbed the equilibrium state of the carbon cycle with the result that atmospheric CO2 has increased. It is most likely that rise in global temperature has caused the disturbance but the anthropogenic emission – or something else – may have induced it.
(ref. Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005) )
Richard
lsvalgaard says:
January 30, 2013 at 1:19 pm
Yet show my FFT analysis http://www.leif.org/research/FFT-Power-Spectrum-SSN-1700-2008.png
Go figure…
Yes, indeed to point to you at the time that there is nothing what Gleissberg claimed for 77-88 year cycle and you and rest were upholding as correct; that he was wrong and that I was right that ~107 year cycle exists, and you were permanently ridiculing it.
I was talking about 2×53 year climate cycle long before discussing it with you, as shown here :
Re: Global Cooling
« vukcevic on Oct 13, 2008, 8:56pm »
Here is a fraction of Maunder curve (Y2) http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/graph1.gif
plotted against Global temperature chart.
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/mgt.gif
See link
http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=globalwarming&action=print&thread=7
Dear Prof Carter,
I think there is a problem intrinsic to climate science, which makes the field exploitable to outside influences at the first place. This is the widespread acceptance of the “modelling paradigm” as valid scientific practice by both sides of the debate. For even sceptics express doubts in terms of the models’ failure to predict (project) such-and-such a course of events, that is, they doubt the quality of actual models but not validity of the paradigm itself.
However, fitting multiple models of high Kolmogorov complexity to a single run of a unique physical instance is not science, for what science traditionally does is just the opposite of it: fits a single model of low Kolmogorov complexity (Ockham’s razor, anyone?) to multiple runs of a wide class of physical instances.
The rift is so deep, that this paradigm shift in itself pushes climate science over the edge, to the bottomless pit of pseudoscience.
Highly complex computational climate models, built of several million lines of code each (like GCMs) are good for nothing if treated as theories. They only have some heuristic value at best, that is, they may help to accomplish Feynman’s first step in establishing a new law: “First we guess it.” Please note the methods used to guess things are left unspecified by Feynman, so even weird and expensive devices like GCMs may be included, who cares? Beyond taxpayers, who are supposed to pay the bill, I mean.
But computational climate models are not good for even the second step, to “compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right.” Not good enough, because they include too many additional presuppositions, most of them hidden from open scrutiny by various parametrization methods. And there are so many of them, of these open parameters, that no one is ever able to carry out a full logical analysis anyway (that’s what high Kolmogorov complexity means, that one can’t compress the model’s description to a reasonable size).
See how Michael Mann Defends Climate Computer Models in Scientific American (and find the flaws in his reasoning)
My Climate Model Bashing also worth a read perhaps.
I still wonder who was the first one to introduce this kind of computational modelling to climate science and how could it get so popular, that there is even a term like “experimentation in silico” now? Which has nothing to do with the traditional concept of experiment, of course. The new term is also used widely in medical sciences, which tells us something about its merits.
The flawed meme is already present in William Welch Kellogg’s speech at the 1975 Endangered Atmosphere Conference. He outlines the difficulties of computer modelling of climate change and man’s role because of the nonlinearities involved in climate, but he concludes that climate models “are really the only tools we have to determine such things.” Heh, if the only tool we have is a hammer, everything should be a nail, right? What a brilliant logic.
rgbatduke says:
January 30, 2013 at 9:02 am
================================
Thank you for yet another superb commentary which puts a range of issues into their proper context. You have such a gift (or cultivated ability) for lucid explanation. It is greatly appreciated!
(I also found Bob Carter’s head post to be of exceptional value.)
As we approach the inevitable hype for AR5 it will be crucial to have independent scientific voices addressing the public on a cluster of ‘where have we come from, what do we know, and where are we going’ kinds of climate research and policy questions.
At what point did predictions of future weather, right/wrong/or in between, become a business model that had billions of dollars thrown at it.
Did it improve the predictions ?
Or, starve the actual science to ensure continued funding.
vukcevic says:
January 30, 2013 at 1:58 pm
Yes, indeed to point to you at the time that there is nothing what Gleissberg claimed for 77-88 year cycle and you and rest were upholding as correct
My [then] little grandson Peter pointed out long ago that there is a 100-yr cycle in http://sidc.be/html/wolfaml.html as I [and many others] well knew, e.g. in http://www.leif.org/research/JASR_9142.pdf “…the sunspot number. Because the latter seems to exhibit a 100 year Gleissberg cycle, B does as well.”
A sure mark of a pseudo-scientist is lack of knowledge of the literature and incessant claims of having seen something before anybody else. You are right up there. DK-syndrome again?
When 75% of scientists/climatologists agree with his assessment…then I will accept it. Until then, the jury is still out.
Bob Carter,
I found you clear, dispassionate and objective in the first 60% of your important article. Thank you, that part is as well said as many others over the years.
I start a fundamental disagreement with you after about the 60% point of your article and continue profound disagreement with to the articles end. I started disagreeing with you when you said this:
With those words you shifted both epistemologically and metaphysically to a different reference point. You went from a formal physical scientific reference to a completely non-scientific reference point.
In the scientific reference frame the focus is on physical nature (including man’s mind). The philosophy of science and the history of science serve you well as a reference frame in the first 60% of your article. Scientists know your explicit reference frame for your remarks and there can be a relatively clear dialog on a decent common basis.
Then with the above quote you entered the a fundamentally different area of the human condition; a uniquely different part of philosophy. You jumped into the area of philosophy that is man-made; an area containing such man created entities as political orgs, intellectual volunteer orgs, and the media.
My fundamental criticism of you starting with entering that man-made area is you present no explicit reference frame (philosophy) from which you start speaking about that unique area. What are your fundamental premises and principals that are the bases for your evaluation? I could try to deduce or infer your fundamental reference frame but why should I need to since you are capable of doing so yourself.
I think there was an unfounded leap at the 60% point in your article.
John
It took me a while to grasp Bob Carter’s crucial point. Significant climate change will occur sooner or later for reasons that could be natural, anthropogenic or both; the change may be warming, cooling or cyclic. Therefore we must prepare rationally over time for all these possibilities – not throw fortunes at the currently fashionable one.
rgbatduke says, January 30, 2013 at 12:01 pm: “…I assure you that the greenhouse effect … can be directly observed in the differences between TOA and BOA IR radiation spectra. It therefore has direct empirical evidence supporting it …”
============================================================
No, “greenhouse effect” can not be directly observed in the differences between TOA and BOA IR radiation spectra. Differences between TOA and BOA IR radiation spectra can be observed, OK, but this is not the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC. The IPCC maintains that “greenhouse gases” not just absorb and re-emit the IR radiation coming from the Earth surface back to the surface (partly), but also that this re-emitted IR radiation affects the temperature of the source (the surface).
So, there are 2 parts in the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC: (1) absorption/emission and (2) effect on the temperature of the source (the surface).
The first part was proven experimentally 150 years ago, no problem with that, but the second one has apparently never been proven experimentally, by a real scientific physical experiment.
On the other hand, it was experimentally proven long ago (1909) by American professor of physics R.W.Wood that that sort of IR (back/trapped radiation) had zero (or negligible) effect on the temperature of the source: http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html . Thus the second part was in fact disproved.
There is no evidence that this effect even is possible and, if it is, it would be undetectable. This is junk science. The effect requires that the tropical upper troposphere at -17 deg C is heating up and radiating IR at the surface, in turn heating it up and then the lower atmosphere. Well, the surface is 15 deg C and simply cannot absorb or be warmed by the colder source. Totally against thermodynamics. Furthermore, satellite measurements show that the tropical upper troposphere has not warmed, but in fact cooled a bit over recent decades.
This entire comment is completely incorrect. There is plenty of evidence that it is not only possible, it is real, an accomplished and understood fact. The physical mechanism is well understood. It is directly observable by any human who takes note of the fact that cloudy nights are warmer, on average, than clear nights — I first learned about in Boy Scouts forty-five years ago when there wasn’t any contention about the idea because nobody was proposing runaway global warming (and it was an accomplished and understood fact way back then, too).
At this point, in addition to the underlying physical theory (which makes sense) there is direct spectroscopic evidence — effectively photographs of the GHE in action. The ground is not warmed by the greenhouse gas, it is warmed by the sun. But the presence of an absorber/radiator layer of atmosphere above the ground most definitely slows the rate at which the ground cools, in completely understandable ways. The GHE does not violate any laws of thermodynamics.
Finally, whether or not upper troposphere temperatures have or have not warmed is irrelevant to whether or not the greenhouse effect exists at all — at most it exhibits the fact that it may well not vary monotonically with CO_2 concentration in a saturated atmosphere where CO_2 is only one, and not the strongest one, of the many greenhouse gases present, or — as I often point out on this list in the opposite direction (where it is equally valid) it stands as yet another not-particularly-well-understood aspect of the most difficult scientific problem humans have ever tackled.
Claims like this one (the GHE doesn’t exist, or violates the laws of thermodynamics) give skeptics a bad name among people who actually know what the laws of thermodynamics are well enough not to apply them to an open thermodynamic system (or any other system) incorrectly, and should be avoided. You’ll note that Carter’s top article pointed out the existence of the greenhouse effect as a point of agreement between him and the various “warmist” arguers. There is a simple reason for this — because there is literally not the slightest question that the GHE (or as John Nielsen-Gammon puts it on his blog, the “Atmospheric Effect” as atmospheric radiative electrochemistry is a lot more complex than any simple sound bite phrase can convey) is real and responsible for a substantial part — roughly 1/10th of the Earth’s mean absolute temperature. It is an important 1/10th.
rgb
Tom McGaffey:
Your post at January 30, 2013 at 2:52 pm says in total
You really, really don’t understand science.
Why would “75% of scientists/climatologists” convince you? Why not 74%?
In reality only one person could show Carter to be wrong if he were.
As Albert Einstein famously said when told 100 scientists had rejected his “Jewish science”,
“It would only take one of them to provide one piece of evidence to show I was wrong”.
If you cannot find fault with what Bob Carter has written then you have no reason to dispute it.
Richard
I don’t know the cause of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 but I want to know. The rise is certainly NOT that human emissions are accumulating in the atmosphere: if that were so then the rise and the emissions would relate, but they don’t. Something has disturbed the equilibrium state of the carbon cycle with the result that atmospheric CO2 has increased. It is most likely that rise in global temperature has caused the disturbance but the anthropogenic emission – or something else – may have induced it.
Richard Courtney, I’ll give you my best guess. The increase is indeed anthropogenic, but has little to do with fossil fuels. Over the last few centuries mankind has been reducing the biosphere, mainly deforestation. Mankind is returning the CO2 from this activity into the atmosphere. Add to that the burning of other substances, like dung, that would otherwise lead to naturally sequestered CO2.
Nature has a negative feedback for the reduction in the biosphere, it is the release of plant food. Good old Gaia is quite brilliant. This plant food, CO2, enhances growth of the biosphere in an attempt to return to an equilibrium state. Interestingly, the release of CO2 also provides a slight warming to enhance the plant growth even more. However, this process has it’s own negative feedback (the cooling effect of CO2) which limits its power. Nature once again showing pure brilliance.
The Japanese satellite that tracks CO2 concentration supports this hypothesis. The highest values are over 3rd world countries.
The ironic result of man’s silly AGW crusade is that it slows the development of the nations that are most responsible for this situation. In other words, by diverting resources from helping the developing nations the alarmists have been responsible for continuing the increase in CO2.
This is not to say that fossil fuel emissions have no effect, the effect is just much smaller than claimed. And, there is no real need to return the biosphere to its previous equilibrium. The new equilibrium is better for the survival of our species for many reasons.
Richard M:
I am replying to your post at January 30, 2013 at 3:56 pm.
My comment you are answering said I was NOT going to participate in that side-track. I have discussed the carbon cycle on WUWT several times and probably will again. But this thread is too important for it to be side-tracked onto another issue.
Sorry.
Richard
The first part was proven experimentally 150 years ago, no problem with that, but the second one has apparently never been proven experimentally, by a real scientific physical experiment.
Piffle.
The GHE is a simple statement of detailed balance, comparing two cases. In the first case an absorber is heated by the sun and radiates directly back to space. In the second the absorber is heated by the sun and radiates directly into a gas that acts as a saturated absorber in substantial portions of the spectrum. It is bone-simple physics that in the second case the interpolant layer will cause the mean surface temperature in dynamical equilibrium to be higher. I don’t give a rodent’s furry behind what the IPCC claims or does not claim, what late 19th or early 20th century physicists claimed or did not claim. If you look at the TOA and BOA IR spectrographs, there is a matching hole. Unless you really do want a violation of the first law of thermodynamics — that would be the one requiring energy to be conserved — the GHE is real, and the spectrographs are direct evidence.
This is, by the way, a “real scientific physical experiment”. You just don’t want to accept what it tells you. There is also a wealth of observational evidence correlating nighttime cooling rates and e.g. atmospheric humidity (water vapor is another greenhouse gas), not to mention the evidence associated with planetary temperatures as a function of the particular mixes of their atmospheres.
I repeat — the GHE was accepted as proven fact long before the IPCC came into the picture, not because of some grand global conspiracy but because there was little question about the physics and experimental support for it. Quantum mechanics simply improved our understanding of it further, well beyond what its original inventor(s) imagined, and IR spectroscopy proved it beyond any doubt. Trying to assert that it doesn’t exist at all simply robs you instantly of all credibility, especially when you do so on the incorrect basis that it was proven false back in 1909, or that the IPCC (as an entity) makes some specific claim for it that is somehow bogus.
Nobody — and I do mean nobody — credible (where I use the word in the purely personal sense of credible to me as a scientist) asserts that there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect and that carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is completely irrelevant to the Earth’s mean surface temperature. There is plenty of room to argue about feedbacks — I’m perfectly happy to believe that water vapor feedbacks could cancel almost all of the warming that results from additional CO_2 (if and as evidence is presented to that effect) and am very skeptical indeed about the large positive feedback from water vapor that has been claimed. There is plenty of room to argue about other atmospheric effects — aerosols, cloud albedo, soot, as well as the possible effect of solar mechanisms known and unknown outside of direct insolation, orbital variations, and much more. The physics of the system is very complicated, no doubt. But it is silly to claim that there is no GHE at all.
None of the really credible skeptical scientists make this argument, of course. Indeed, they shake their head just as sadly as I do when it is made, because it makes rational arguments against catastrophic global warming all the more difficult to advance when there is such low hanging fruit available for warmists to use to allege that all arguments against their hypothesis are as silly as this one. Spencer argues for low feedback, not no GHE. Carter argues for low feedback and/or a weak effect in the first place, not no GHE. Lindzen, Curry, go down the list, Greg. You know who argues for no GHE — the infamous “Slayers”, folks who can propose that the reason for global warming is fusion occurring in the Earth’s crust with a straight face. Or people who argue that it is all PV=NkT — adiabatic compression of a static atmosphere (talk about violations of the second law!)
I do realize, of course, that at this point I will never convince you otherwise (or any of the others who are grasping at straws trying to “disprove” AGW altogether). You are just as religious in your opposition to the idea as Hansen is in his support. Just bear in mind that you are, in your own way, as damaging to the very point of view you wish to advance as Hansen is to his.
In the meantime, you might want to reread this:
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2012/08/the-best-ever-description-of-the-atmospheric-greenhouse-effect/
(which is pretty good) or this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-emission-spectra/
or best of all, read Petty’s book on radiative atmospheric physics. Then come talk to me.
rgb
whenizen facts enough
try a good old ideological buff
the trouble is in the rough
those facts sticky stuff
back to blind mans bluff
rgbatduke says, January 30, 2013 at 4:06 pm: “I don’t give a rodent’s furry behind what the IPCC claims or does not claim … the GHE is real, and the spectrographs are direct evidence.”
=============================================================
It is your right to ignore what the IPCC claim, but the whole climate policy is based on their claims. Their main claim is that the surface radiates IR and the “greenhouse gases” send back a part of it to the surface, thus affecting the temperature of the source (surface): http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-1-3.html
This is the “official” greenhouse effect. If you have another one, then please make it clear what you are talking about, to avoid confusion. Anyway, the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC is politically relevant and yours, if you have one, is apparently not, sorry.
Again, your spectrographs can not prove the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC because your spectrographs can not prove the alleged effect on the temperature of the source the trapped/back radiation allegedly produces.
On the other hand, as I said, professor Wood proved it experimentally, that that alleged effect on the temperature of the source was zero or negligible. To prove that he used (surprise!) thermometers. This is a really easy reading: http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html.
Note, that the fact that back radiation has zero or negligible effect on the temperature of the source does not violate any known physical law, hence your references to physical laws are irrelevant.
For the readers’ sake I would like to ask you to refrain from excessive writing and just address the scientific points of the “greenhouse effect” controversy directly in a possibly concise way.
rgbatduke says:
January 30, 2013 at 4:06 pm
“…the GHE was accepted as proven fact…
I share your impatience with people who attack the theory from a decidedly uninformed perspective. What is commonly called the GHE is, in its most basic form, proved every single minute of every single day, at the least by all the man-made satellites orbiting above. These would not function if they did not utilize thermal IR reflecting MLI blankets to keep them warm and toasty by trapping energy from the Sun and preventing its rapid egress into the cold of space. There can be no argument or misdirection in this example – there is no convection, no conduction of heat to space, it is all purely radiative transfer.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Anyone who thinks he or she has a silver bullet which will discredit the greenhouse theory on an elementary level is fooling his or her self. That said, one must be careful about applying theory beyond its realm of applicability. The theory definitely works in a simple framework such as the satellite example above. But, I would aver that the evidence for it behaving so simply in more complex situations, particularly on this Earth, is not very substantial, and the current warming hiatus is IMHO grounds for keeping an open mind.
The atmosphere of the Earth is very complex, being composed of several different GHGs which absorb and radiate in different parts of the spectrum, i.e., at different levels of energy. And, there are powerful convective effects moving heat from the ground to higher altitudes, as well as persistent changes of state in the most powerful GHG. I submit that it is likely true that the GHE is responsible for making the Earth warm enough to be habitable by life as we know it. But, whether that effect is monotonic at present conditions is, I would suggest, an open question.
Considering the temperature-CO2 relationship, it is apparent that temperatures drive CO2. Although my claim that it is the main driver is controversial, to say the least, nobody has yet denied to me that there is at least a short term causative relationship. And, that relationship is positive. If CO2 in turn drives temperature in a positive direction, then there is an overall positive feedback with a fairly high bandwidth, and we should be seeing wild swings in these variables, which could only be prevented from running away entirely by more significant negative feedbacks. The lack of such variability suggests quite strongly that the GHE from added CO2 is, at best, very weak.
In sum, I do not think the GHE works precisely as is commonly assumed in its most simple form on this very complex planet.
richardscourtney says:
January 30, 2013 at 1:41 pm
Thank you for taking notice. Most people, I think, are not ready yet to deal with the possibility that the whole controversy is flawed at its very heart. I keep posting the info because I hope that, little by little, people will begin to take notice, and realize that there really is no alternative. When temperatures begin falling precipitously in the near future, and the CO2 rate of change slackens off in lock step, then maybe more eyes will open.
rgbatduke says:
January 30, 2013 at 4:06 pm
……..”I do realize, of course, that at this point I will never convince you otherwise (or any of the others who are grasping at straws trying to “disprove” AGW altogether). You are just as religious in your opposition to the idea as Hansen is in his support. Just bear in mind that you are, in your own way, as damaging to the very point of view you wish to advance as Hansen is to his.”
==============
Piffle indeed.
We’re not playing games anymore.
“Science does not deal with emotions, beliefs or politics, ”
It does now Bob.
Bart says:
it is clear that temperatures are driving CO2.”
That is problematic:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2,Temperaturesandiceages-f.pdf
Cohenite,
I have to agree with Bart:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.25/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958
∆T drives ∆CO2.
Yes, my comment was ill considered; what Lansner’s article shows is that CO2 has no effect on temperature.
izen says:
January 30, 2013 at 3:26 am
You beat me to it!
Dr. Carter – excellent summary, loved it.
Thanks, Dr. Carter,
Excellent article, I have placed links to it in my climate pages.
Well, I was impressed until you wandered off from discussing science and into politics/economics. “Indeed we do, for a primary government duty of care is to protect the citizenry and the environment from the ravages of natural climatic events.” Uhggg – no, no, no. With this “duty” we could justify taxing the population to finance those who foolishly locate where the risk is high. For example, encouraging living on a hurricane coast through such government protection is essentially to misallocate capital, and that is the greatest evil of both the global warming believers and any other assumed government “duty”. Misallocation of capital through government mandate has caused more deaths than any other scourge.
Dr. Brown (rgbatduke).
+1000.
I enjoy reading every one of your comments. What would it take to get you to debate ANY of the ‘warmists’ . . . 😕 Hey, maybe some ‘Big Oil’ or Koch Brothers funding . . 🙂
( . . and I better put ‘sarc’ for the above . . . ).
As just a simple mechanical/aeronautical engineer (of over 30 years now), but with a bit of passion for the atmosphere (from my flying days), I dug into the CAGW after the 4th IPCC report, and came quickly to the realization that it was WAY overblown ( . .to me, very obviously ‘political’ . .), and always agree with your comments.
Those who try to dispute the ‘greenhouse effect’ often I think are looking at it wrong. As you say, it reduces the rate of cooling. Another way to put it is that it, ‘warms the surface of the earth AS COMPARED TO IF THERE WAS NO ‘GREENHOUSE GASES’. . .” . That to me is the crux. The last portion often is left off, so people read, ” . .the green house effect warms the surface of the earth” . . and look at it different,as if it is really ‘creating heat’. I fully accept the idea that more CO2 reduces the rate of cooling, therefore, theoretically, or “if all else remains unchanged’, temps would warm some. But the nature of the atmosphere and its dynamics, albedo, aerosols, solar cycles ( . .better be careful, don’t want to upset Leif – which by the way I do respect his comments . . ) ocean cycles, and the other items I haven’t mentioned is clearly a much greater effect on climates – that is, unless there is real EVIDENCE to the contrary for the ‘DAGW or CAGW’ of CO2. . .
Anyway, to keep this short ( . . probably a lost cause already . . 🙂 ) , seeing comments from people I truly view as ‘experts’ looking at the REALITY of this all is always great.
DirkH says:“What can possibly explain such disparate responses to a largely agreed set of factual climate data?”Follow The Money. The Canadian Katharine Hayhoe, living in Texas, runs her own company.She tries to sell “regional climate modeling” and looks for suckers to be parted from their money.”
I agree with DirkH’s approach.
“In 2012, documents stolen from The Heartland Institute revealed that Carter was paid a monthly fee of $1,667 (USD), as part of a program to pay ‘high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist [anthropogenic global warming] message’.”
Dr. Carter is yet another admirable person. You run into so many of them on WUWT.
Eugene WR Gallun
I would think that Super El Niño’s follow a long period of equatorial heating, thus increasing the thermal gradient between it and the polar regions, and as a consequence causing a lot of warm moisture rich air to advect toward the poles, depositing much of that moisture during its travels. Just a thought.
Thanks to Professors Carter and Brown for the gratuitous education. Their points of edification give lie to the cliche, “You get what you pay for.” Keep up the great work!
leif svalgaard says
http://www.leif.org/research/FFT-Power-Spectrum-SSN-1700-2008.png
interalia his other remarks also imply that he thinks that the guys who discovered the Gleissberg cycle with a periodic length of 88 years (analysing data going back 12000 years) must be wrong . All this of course because he believes his SSN data ar more important than any other data.
Henry@vukcevik,
As you know, I don’ trust SSN too much, going back in time. So we let Leif peddle with those SSN data. But it is interesting to note that there does seem to be a variability within the cycles.
What is important is: what has been observed in data other than SSN?
Well, for example, to explain weather cycles, before they started with the carbon dioxide nonsense, they did look in the direction of the planets, rightly or wrongly.See here.
http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/cycles-astronomy/arnold_theory_order.pdf
To quote from the above paper:
A Weather Cycle as observed in the Nile Flood cycle, Max rain followed by Min rain, appears discernible with maximums at 1750, 1860, 1950 and minimums at 1670, 1800, 1900 and a minimum at 1990 predicted.
(The 1990 turned out to be 1995 when cooling started!)
Please note: indeed one would expect more condensation (bigger flooding) at the end of a cooling period and minimum flooding at the end of a warm period. This is because when water vapor cools (more) it condensates (more) to water (i.e. more rain).
now look here:
1900- minimum flooding : end of warming
1950 – maximum flooding: end of cooling
1995 – minimum flooding: end of warming
if I look at my graph
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
it follows that this time around the cycle could have been around 95 years and indeed it would be possible for me to alter the wavelength from 88 to 95 years and still get most of the actual measured data (the blue line) near or on top of the red line. However, stretching it to 105 is definitely not possible, at least not with my data.
trafamadore says:
January 30, 2013 at 8:54 pm
“I agree with DirkH’s approach.
“In 2012, documents stolen from The Heartland Institute revealed that Carter was paid a monthly fee of $1,667 (USD), as part of a program to pay ‘high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist [anthropogenic global warming] message’.””
No, you got it wrong, it’s
“In 2012, documents stolen from The Heartland Institute revealed that Carter was paid a monthly fee of $1,000,000,000 (USD), […]”
See? Now, are you right or am I? Wrap your head around the concept of linking to your source.
That being said, fair’s fair. Now tell me how much Hayhoe is paid in her university job to prove CO2AGW, and how much profit she makes with her company.
Send out your wire fraudsters to retrieve the info, call Gleick.
I agree with Bart too. It’s the warmth that causes the rise in atmospheric CO2, not warming. The annual temperature cycle pumps the CO2 out of the oceans at this temperature level (~2 ppm/year). At the lower temperature levels ahead, the pump will reduce it’s output. I predict ~1.5 ppm/year in the 2010s, lower than in the 2000s (~2 ppm/year) in average.
Edim says
….not warming.
henry says
you meant: the increase in CO2 does not cause warming?
Here is something interesting that I picked up from one of Willis’ posts:
You must have noticed that anywhere on earth the temps. of the oceanic waters do not get much higher than 32-34C, no matter what. I have noticed the same thing here with my own swimming pool. But the heat going in still produces an enormous amount of water vapor eventually resulting in clouds & weather mostly at or near the equator (and e.g. high evaporation rate of the water if my pool gets close to 32C).
Thus, there must be a limit on the heating going in versus the rate of evaporation (=boiling at prevailing pressure) of the top layer of molecules of water.
Did you ever have some low boiling fluid like freon on your hand/armpits and did you notice how much energy it extracts (how cold your hand/arm pit becomes) as the fluid evaporates? You can actually get cold burn, if you are not careful.
The sun’s UV rays is what heats the oceans, mostly, due to the absorbency of water in the UV region. This means that most of those particular UV rays coming in on top will be converted to heat. Once this heat in the top layer of the molecules reaches boiling point, at the ruling pressure, you get evaporation and that extracts energy from the layer of molecules lying below. That is what is causing some sort of a balance. That is why you will never get the water above 32 – 34C (from the sun’s rays).
This means that the top layer of water comes easily to boiling and every first year chemistry student knows that if you boil water, the first smoke released is that of the CO2 dissolved. i.e.
HCO3- + heat => CO2 (g) + OH-.
so the current atmospheric CO2 concentration in the air is a function of the HCO3- content in the oceans.
it might be important to remember that.
@HenryP: The water vapor is at a high energy state, and then releases that energy into the atmosphere as latent heat energy. So in a way, the water temps have a hard time getting hot, but the heat goes somewhere, no? Isn’t this how the sun affects climate? I imagine this is why La Nina’s can make the world grow warmer. The solar irradiance, including UV, warms the colder water which is exposed due to less cloud cover, and sure the water that evaporates keeps the water cooler than it would be, but the energy is retained in the atmosphere. As well, warm air rises, and heat leaves through the upper atmosphere into space too. So, it’s complicated.
Thanks, Prof. Carter, for an excellent exposition of the situation, written so clearly that even a politician could understand it. The only problem I can see is that nowhere in it do I find a description of the gravy train resulting from the adoption of realism: without that, the politicians won’t be changing their “minds”, y’know.
lsvalgaard says: January 30, 2013 at 2:46 pm
A sure mark of a pseudo-scientist is lack of knowledge …..DK-syndrome again?
Hmmm…. ‘there you go again’, back to science:
Re:Gleissberg cycle
W. Gleissberg: “One long cycle is equal to 7 eleven-year cycles or 77.7 years” ( & maximum of the present 80-yr cycle).
Peter: cycle about 105 years
Hathaway: Gleissberg cycle = 88 years
Obviously the 7 year old was more astute than Dr. H.
L. Svalgaard:” …observed fact over the past 300 years. It even has a name: the Gleissberg cycle , varying between 75 and 125 years.”
Vukcevic: “Most importantly FFT power spectrum analysis shows that there is noting there between 50+ and 100+ years. ‘Gleissberg cycle’ as is not an accordion, stretching and squeezing to fit requirements.”
What Vukcevic discovered is not 105 year cycle, but the unique planetary formula
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC4.htm
describing the 105 year periodicity as shown in your spectrum
http://www.leif.org/research/FFT-Power-Spectrum-SSN-1700-2008.png
Henry, I mean it’s not the change in temperature but the temperature level that causes the change in atmospheric CO2 (dCO2/dt = f(Ta), Ta = T – T0). Constant temperature causes CO2 change and at some (lower) temperature the CO2 change is zero. At even lower temperatures the change will be negative. For the level of the 2000s temperature plateau it’s ~2 ppm/year.
The annual S(S)T cycle pumps CO2 into atmosphere.
vukcevic says:
January 31, 2013 at 3:27 am
‘Gleissberg cycle’ as is not an accordion, stretching and squeezing to fit requirements.
Ah, but it is. That is the point. It is not a real cycle with a fixed period. Hence not due to planets.
Henry@vukcevik
I think your Y2 maunder type curve (last graph) here
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC4.htm
looks reasonably good but it must be out by quite a few years.
Namely, whereas I can try to make a fit from a curve (with a certain amount of data from the near past) to the past and to the future where I do not have data,
– this is just to show more or less where we came from and where we are headed – ,
I cannot change the data within the curve where I do have data. In my case I have studied all daily maxima from 47 weather stations with more or less complete records (balanced by latitude and 70/30 @sea/inland from 1974. That equals 47 x 365d x 38yr = 651890 daily results. All trends that I do on these data e.g. linear, binomial, exponential, etc. all show with high correlation that we changed sign, from warming to cooling, somewhere in 1995, looking at maxima (=energy-in).
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
Your Y2 meander type curve seems to suggest that it was around 1992?
Your Y2 meander type curve looks at means (which data set?) which we know lags maxima by at least 3 years, seeing that 1998 was the maximum on planet earth (looking at energy-out)
So, according to my results you are out by at least 5 or 6 years.
(it is not really that big a difference between two skeptics who used different methods of approach but it is a significant amount of years i.e. a large error. At least we both agree that it will get cooler )
Edim says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/30/global-warming-anthropogenic-or-not/#comment-1213161
Henry says
Agreed!
Just remember that the [HCO3-] not only depends on photosynthesis of previous ages, but also underwater volcanic action and other prevalent CO3 2- cycles, whether or not volcanic in origin, + cooler periods of the past and present:
CO2 + H2O + cooling => HCO3- + H3O+
So, there are a number of factors, that influence the final output, which is probably why the lag varies between as much as 700 and 1000 years (acc. to prof. Carter) – I heard figures of between 600 and 1200.
lsvalgaard says: January 31, 2013 at 5:54 am
…….
2009:
Dr.S. : It even has a name: the Gleissberg cycle , varying between 75 and 125 years
Vukcevic : Your FFT analysis shows clear ~108y, I have personal favourite (95 +118)/2 = ~107y
2013
Dr.S : …it is more like 105 years, but is not a real cycle.
Vukcevic : unique planetary formula describing the 105 year periodicity
Vuk does not play accordion with the cycles. .
Dr.S. : Hence not due to planets.
Strange that, another Vukcevic formula links to planetary hypothesis too
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC2.htm
Whel known group of the pseudo-scientists, among them the old Ken McCracken ex-NASA’s scientist, Beer and Steinhilber are now subscribing to the ‘planetary hypothesis’. Since one can’t say they suffer from the D & K syndrome, perhaps they’ve gone loopy, not to say senile in the old age.
http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2012/12/aa19997-12.pdf
Dr. S. what do you say?
Even Nature magazine is at it:
The Sun’s magnetic activity varies cyclically over a period of about 11 years. An analysis of a new, temporally extended proxy record of this activity hints at a possible planetary influence on the amplitude of the cycle.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7434/full/493613a.html
Horror-scope science ay , …
Hi Henry
The Y2 curve
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC4.htm
was discussed many times with Dr.S, so there was no need to explain, but since you are not familiar I should point out that only thing you need to take into account is the zero crossings as approximate times of change of direction, no more no less. Actual max or min do not relate to any max or min either in SSN or temperature. Since we do not know if there is, and if there is what it is a transfer mechanism either to the SSN or the global temperature change (which is uncertain anyway) than few years in either direction may not be that important.
vukcevic says:
January 31, 2013 at 8:32 am
Vukcevic : unique planetary formula describing the 105 year periodicity
[…]Whel known group of the pseudo-scientists, among them the old Ken McCracken ex-NASA’s scientist, Beer and Steinhilber are now subscribing to the ‘planetary hypothesis’.
They advocate 88-yr cycle…
lsvalgaard says: January 31, 2013 at 8:55 am
……..
Yes, I know, 88 yr is not in the 1700-2010 data, so it must be from proxies, but they do go for 104 years too, they got one wrong one correct (Alzheimer’s?).
Are you going to write a rebuttal. Svalgaard of Stanford shouldn’t have any of it, or you are happy just with giving hard time to Henry P and myself ?
vukcevic says:
January 31, 2013 at 9:25 am
Yes, I know, 88 yr is not in the 1700-2010 data, so it must be from proxies, but they do go for 104 years too, they got one wrong one correct (Alzheimer’s?).
If you don’t have 88-yr [from planets] and they do [from planets, their Figure 4], then one is wrong or both. Which is it?
As one who was formerly 100% convinced by the AGW hypothesis, I am beginning to have my doubts. I do, however, remain convinced that AGW (true or not) is a good and perhaps necessary motivator for our transition away from fossil fuels.
We can argue forever about available reserves, but conservative estimates give us perhaps 50 years of oil, 100 years of natural gas, and 300 years of coal. As we pursue more difficult deposits, financial and environmental costs will increase. To avoid a crash of civilization (or at least a dramatic decline in global standard of living), we NEED to develop alternatives BEFORE fossil fuel prices rise high enough that we can’t afford it. It takes decades or more to transition energy infrastructure. Thus I am strongly in favor of incentives/taxes that favor renewable energy over fossil fuels (especially oil), regardless of whether AGW is a valid hypothesis. If AGW motivation can help us along this road and has at least some chance of being true (precautionary principle), then I am in favor of keeping it in public discourse. Not as a “we must act now or die” scare tactic, but as one of several issues prodding us to transition from finite to infinite (renewable) energy resources.
@Markael Luterra – The argument of the remaining reserves of fossil fuels being an incentive to find alternative solutions is a red herring. Back in the 19th century, the “remaining reserves” of whale oil was rapidly diminishing. What happened? As the price went up, enterprising people looked for alternatives, and found them. Were they cost effective? not at first, but as the price of whale oil continued to increase, the cost of the alternatives became more competitive, until finally whale oil was no longer economically feasible, but the alternatives were.
The price of fossil fuels will follow the same pattern. But here is the kicker. it will happen gradually and not shock the economies of the world into a massive depression. As the price of fossil fuels climbs due to scarcity and difficulty in extraction and refining, alternatives, some already in existence today, will gain in competitiveness, until they become more competitive, and more economical. At that time, they will supplant fossil fuels. But the process will be gradual, and not a sudden devaluation of total economies.
That is why I am not worried about fossil fuels and their availability. Economic laws of supply and demand will eventually cause them to become too costly to be feasible, and other sources will then be in wide use and cheaper.
Edim says:
January 31, 2013 at 4:52 am
I would make one caveat: the linearized model is substantially valid in the modern era since 1958. However, a change in state could change the local equilibrium temperature and/or the slope of the model. The change might occur slowly and smoothly, or it might be abrupt. Looking at the data, there appear to be several spots where there are effectively step changes in the affine relationship, though they are small enough not to throw the model off by much.
This could be an illusion created by changes in the way measurements are constructed, e.g., with the addition and subtraction of monitoring stations or, of course, with continued fiddling of the numbers by the collecting agencies. Or, it could be an actual physical manifestation of changes in the transport mechanisms between sources and sinks. The modern era results could be an outcome of a surge of CO2 rich water in the underwater pipeline, which could dissipate in the coming years or could, though it seems less likely, surge even higher.
We cannot say for sure. The recent hiatus in the global temperature metric has coincided consistently with a hiatus in the rate of change of measured CO2. Assuming the conditions which prevail now continue into the near future,when temperatures start to go down, the rate of change should decrease, resulting in a marked reduction in the slope of the CO2 absolute level. So, we anticipate a divergence between the accumulated emissions line, which to all indicators looks like it will continue accelerating, versus a deceleration in the measured atmospheric concentration.
Markael Luterra says:
January 31, 2013 at 9:54 am
“I do, however, remain convinced that AGW (true or not) is a good and perhaps necessary motivator for our transition away from fossil fuels.”
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That pithy bit of garage shop wisdom has firm grounding in experience. By fixing a problem which doesn’t exist, you create other problems which then have to be fixed.
Every action has a reaction, and a large portion of the problems which challenge us today are of our own creation, as reactive effects of things we tried to do previously.
Don’t do anything. You’re not, as Monty Python would say, qual-ee-fied. No insult intended. I am no expert, either.
But, leave the worry about obtaining energy to the professionals in the field who understand all the possibilities and ramifications. Do NOT give a bunch of additional power to government bureaucrats and power mongers, who are even more clueless than you or I on the subject, so that they can exercise even more power over your life. Because exercising power over your life is what they ARE expert at, and hence will be the major portion of any “solution” they attempt to enact.
Markael Luterra:
Your post at January 31, 2013 at 9:54 am begins saying
Oh dear! ‘Peak Oil’ rises from the grave again. This really is the zombie that won’t stay dead.
The use of fossil fuels has done more to benefit human kind than anything else since the invention of agriculture. Your numbers about reserves don’t mean what you think. And – at present – there is no possibility of significantly reducing the use of fossil fuels without a cost including the death of billions mostly children.
Importantly, there is no threat that we will run out of fossil fuels; none, zilch, nada.
‘Peak Oil’ has been refuted times without number on WUWT. Indeed, David Archibald has posted a series of articles promoting that nonsense and his arguments have all been trashed.
Use the WUWT search facility and read the threads which discuss the matter. Your fears will be removed by knowledge of reality.
Richard
lsvalgaard says:
January 31, 2013 at 9:48 am
If you don’t have 88-yr [from planets] and they do [from planets, their Figure 4], then one is wrong or both. Which is it?
Of course they are.
The 88 year cycle comes from the Earth’s magnetic field variability, modulating GCRs affecting both C14 and 10Be nucleation.
Here are details for your ‘rebuttal’,
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MS.htm
I am looking forward to read it.
Henry@M.Luterra
With nuclear power they bury the problems in the soil, (the waste), which will most certainly become a big headache for future generations.
Better to put more CO2 in the air:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/24/the-earths-biosphere-is-booming-data-suggests-that-co2-is-the-cause-part-2/
Everything we eat and drink is made of sugars and starch (carbon) which has carbon dioxide as the building block.
Coal does have problems (like sulphur, heavy metals, etc) but oil and gas are just great!
Scientists actually are missing a lot of burnt carbon, i.e. the CO2….it seems to have simply disappeared….I think I know where it went…..I have not seen any actual figures but I did observe that just about everybody I met wants more crops, more lawns and more trees. Places like Johannesburg and Las Vegas used to be deserts or semi deserts. Now they are all green. The oceans have become a lot greener due to the warming of the past;
My dogs did their things in the woods today and I thought: it helps the environment. CO2 is like dung in the air. I thank the Lord for water and carbon dioxide every day. Anyone asking for less of either must be daft….You don’t say anything bad about your father and mother?
We need to be careful about demonizing nuclear waste. No, it’s not a problem technically, it’s a problem politically. If we reprocessed it like they do in France, we could extract about 8 time more energy from the spent fuel. But in the US, we don’t reprocess for the simple reason that people think nuclear is bad … and technically because reprocessing facilities allow you to remove the plutonium (which is created when the uranium breaks down into the “nuclear waste”).
Also – the waste from nuclear is concentrated and dense and takes up a relative small area to store it especially if you reprocess it.
I’m especially irritated when people point to Fukashima as proof that nuclear is bad. Less than a few people have died due to radiation and the radiation levels around Fukashima quickly went down to the SAME levels naturally ocuring in Denver, CO (due to large amounts of granite). Most of the people died in the tsunami itself and the rest of the people died due to the forced larger than needed scale evacuation process. Nothing to do with radiation. It’s just irrational fears.
vukcevic says:
January 31, 2013 at 10:52 am
“If you don’t have 88-yr [from planets] and they do [from planets, their Figure 4], then one is wrong or both. Which is it?”
Of course they are. The 88 year cycle comes from the Earth’s magnetic field variability, modulating
So, you first use them as an argument for planetary control, then you say they are wrong. They get the 88-yr peak from the planetary torque [see Figure 4], not from the proxies. You see, this is a telltale mark of pseudo-science to do such things, but one, naturally expects that from you, and you deliver as expected. Now, continue to explain to Henry why he is wrong about the 88-yr cycle he claims. Another mark of pseudo-science is that one is careful not to criticize other pseudo-scientists.
lsvalgaard says: January 31, 2013 at 12:13 pm
………
So clearly the torque is not the source, else it would show in the susnspot spectrum
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MS.gif
but it does exist since it shows in the Earth’s field (see link), since the Earth’s field is generated by outer core circulation, which would also be subject to the torque.
So how sunspots are generated?
Evidently by electro and magnetic feedback between solar closed magnetic field (magnetic cloud, magnetic ropes from CMEs) and planetary magnetospheres:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC2.htm
Correction:
Evidently by electro and magnetic feedback between solar closed magnetic field (magnetic cloud, magnetic ropes from CMEs) and planetary magnetospheres:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC2.htm
[Reply: Fixed. -ModE]
vukcevic says:
January 31, 2013 at 12:47 pm
So how sunspots are generated?
Evidently by electro and magnetic feedback between solar closed magnetic field
No, that is not the way it works. You can learn more about this subject here http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrsp-2011-3/
Thanks Mod.
lsvalgaard says: January 31, 2013 at 12:13 pm
…… a telltale mark of pseudo-science to do such things
not the pseudo-science, but the ‘science- lite’ necessitated by the time factor.
Thanks for the remainder, so necessary correction is implemented:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MS.htm
I only support my own hypothesis, one more brick in the wall, eliminating torque, gravity, angular momentum …only e-m planetary (magnetosphere) feedback still going strong.
vukcevic says:
January 31, 2013 at 1:35 pm
I only support my own hypothesis, one more brick in the wall, eliminating torque, gravity, angular momentum …only e-m planetary (magnetosphere) feedback still going strong.
Of all the ones mentioned, yours is the least plausible and is the easiest to refute [as I have done repeatedly]. Yet another mark of a pseudo-scientist is being impervious to learning.
Like many people I started to really understand things so much better after I saw Bob’s presentation to colleagues in Australia. Simple and straightforward, describing something highly complex with the aid of graphs that were not too difficult to understand…and underpinned by his natural dry wit.
vukcevic says:
January 31, 2013 at 1:35 pm
not the pseudo-science, but the ‘science-lite’ necessitated by the time factor
necessitated by the lack of basic knowledge
Bob, on your test of modern changes in temperature lying well within the change seen historically over the Holocene, I agree, but you could also point out that the natural variability over a glacial / interglacial cycle is about 8 C.
izen says:
January 30, 2013 at 6:01 am
Of course the warming IS statistically significant over 14 or 18 years, the 16 year period is a cherry pick.
I’m betting that this “statistical significance” is calculated by assuming that temperature is “stationary”. That means that each year is treated as an independent event. Obviously, from the existence of ice ages and warm periods over geological time, temperature is NOT stationary.
If you have a temp of 10 F below zero one day, it’s not going to suddenly jump to 70 F the next day- it takes time to warm up or cool down for days, years, and centuries. – consecutive years are NOT independent events.
I was playing with this concept by flipping coins, starting with zero, adding +1 to the running trend for heads, -1 for tails. After 30 flips,, when you check for runs you’ll usually get a “significant” at the 1% or 5% level despite the fact that you know that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get significant trends from flipping coins.
Mario Lento says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/30/global-warming-anthropogenic-or-not/#comment-1213454
Henry says.
Sorry. I have a completely different opinion/
I do not think that nuclear energy is safe and sound/
I note that Japan is now officially admitting that nuclear energy is not safe. Obviously, it never was safe in the first place, if only because of the waste problem. They (Japan) apparently have so much claims and clean up costs that they have decided to halt all plans for new nuclear plants.
Germany has stopped using nuclear energy. Holland has also shelved all plans for new plants. These people are not stupid.
The world is currently still sitting with two enormous problems in Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Obviously, nobody of those still singing the praises of nuclear energy is prepared to volunteer to clean up the mess that we still have there. The 300 people that were involved in the encapsulation of Chernobyl, have all since died. And the job actually needs to be re-done, but the government in the Ukraine does not have the money for it. They have asked the EU or AEC for money for this. Can you believe that? How much can it cost to re-encapsulate a plant if a whole country cannot pay for it?
The point is: would I ask somebody else to go and work in a nuclear plant if I myself would not be prepared to do it?
As it is written – do unto others as you would like done by others to you. Or the inverse of that. Anyways, you get my drift
I therefore decided to add my voice to those opposed to nuclear energy.I would not ask to stop all nuclear energy, if I had not carefully studied the possible alternatives>
1) There have been proposals to use “renewables” like wind. However, I found several report backs from those using wind, that wind power is very unreliable.(you could ask for reports from Denmark, UK or USA about this)
2) In the case of using solar power for generating electricity, it was found that this was very, very un-economical. Subsidies in Spain have recently been withdrawn. They cannot afford it anymore.
3) I don’t have a problem with us using coal, as, contrary to popular opinion, I found that your carbon footprint is actually good for life.
The pattern of global warming that I observed on earth, prove that it (i.e. the global warming) is mostly a natural process and has nothing to do with the increase in carbon dioxide.
People will have to get used to the idea that our carbon footprint (carbon dioxide) is actually good for life.
However, when using coal, you still sit with the heavy metals, sulphurous gases and carbon monoxide. These are poisons that have to be removed from the exhaust.This may prove a bit expensive.
4) Many discussions are currently going on about fracking and using gas for generating energy.
It has been proved all over the world that using gas is the most economical and efficient way to generate electricity. It also produces a lower carbon footprint. This might be important for those people who believe that God’s idea of creating life out of ( mostly water and) carbon dioxide was not such a good idea, i.e. the AGW and CAGW crowds.
It will also generate many more new jobs, which the country needs badly.
5) Obviously, where possible, hydro power is probably the cheapest, cleanest and most reliable option for generating electricity.
We should investigate if there are not more possibilities to pursue this option.
Henry
The rift is so deep, that this paradigm shift in itself pushes climate science over the edge, to the bottomless pit of pseudoscience.
As a person who has devoted countless years to large-scale computational modeling in physics, well said, sir!
rgb
I was playing with this concept by flipping coins, starting with zero, adding +1 to the running trend for heads, -1 for tails. After 30 flips,, when you check for runs you’ll usually get a “significant” at the 1% or 5% level despite the fact that you know that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get significant trends from flipping coins.
Covered rather nicely in How to Lie with Statistics, actually. Data dredging is also so commonplace that it has become positively banal:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/significant.png
Hurricane Sandy does prove CAGW, doesn’t it?
rgb
But the nature of the atmosphere and its dynamics, albedo, aerosols, solar cycles ( . .better be careful, don’t want to upset Leif – which by the way I do respect his comments . . ) ocean cycles, and the other items I haven’t mentioned is clearly a much greater effect on climates – that is, unless there is real EVIDENCE to the contrary for the ‘DAGW or CAGW’ of CO2. . .
I don’t think Lief rejects the notion that solar cycles could have an important influence on climate, only that (outside of the direct variation of insolation itself, which is not negligible but is small and not obviously directed) that they are a simple/linear influence. Having looked over his arguments and the data he provides to back them up, they are certainly reasonable. There is no completely consistent link between solar state and climate state, although there are some intriguing correlations sometimes.
That doesn’t rule out a causal link, even a powerful and important causal link, only that such a link be simple. The climate system is multivariate, so it could be that coincidences between several more or less independent natural cycles are required for the solar state to become an important influence. That sort of thing would explain why sometimes (when the stars are aligned right) there appears to be a strong nonlinear influence, and others (when they aren’t) there isn’t. No simple one dimensional regression or fourier analysis is going to reveal complex causality of this sort, and honestly, I don’t think even multidimensional data analysis (difficult as it is) is likely to, but a good multidimensional theory that makes sense and works to predict the times that the sun seems to matter and distinguishes them from when it seems to matter less might convince even Lief. Unless/until such a thing is worked out, though, the sun doesn’t seem to function consistently as the primary determinant of climate variation as he can show with simple, direct, counterexamples.
There is still a fair bit of open science to do, though. Solar state does appear to affect the ionic chemistry of the upper atmosphere in nontrivial ways. At also appears to be moderately correlated with things that modulate at least some chemistry in the lower atmosphere. There are a few hypotheses out there for how this could affect weather/climate, none of them compelling (yet) but a number of them not really ruled out either — again things are too damn complicated and in a nonlinear system even small effects can be magnified by other aspects of the complex system, sometimes.
Back when I was younger, one of my professors (Dr. Richard Palmer, who taught me stat mech) studied spin glasses. Spin glasses are an archetypical “complex system” — basically they are a lattice of magnetic spins with a supposed nearest neighbor spin-spin interaction that is randomly either ferromagnetic (minimum energy alignment of the pair) or antiferromagnetic (minimum energy anti-alignment of the pair). The dynamics and statistical mechanics of a spin glass are very, very different from the stat mech of a simple ferromagnet or antiferromagnet.
Richard was one of the inventors of the concept of “frustration”. As one lowers the temperature of such a lattice, one encounters numerous places where one can decrease the bond energy between some pairs only at the expense of increasing it between others. Sets of bond pairs where this is the case are said to be “frustrated” as they can never be made completely happy. As the lattice tries to cool and find a new thermal equilibrium, frustration strongly inhibits the random sampling of configurations one usually uses in e.g. Monte Carlo to find a minimum energy state. The lattice hence exhibits what was dubbed broken ergodicity — its statistical fluctuation was effectively restricted to sub-manifolds of the phase space that randomly depended on seemingly tiny differences in the initial state — defects or patterns of frustration, once frozen in, could not easily be annealed out and the lattice would not proceed towards a true ground state, only a local low energy valley that might not even be particularly close to the ground state. All sorts of oddities in local dynamics were then enabled in this local “equilibria”, especially in the kinds of complex energy landscape that was thus established, where one could easily stay for a while in a seemingly stable state only to jump into another seemingly stable state with a completely different energy and/or other properties.
The point of this isn’t that the climate is a spin lattice, but the climate may well be like a spin lattice in a number of important ways. For example, there are “blocking highs” that form spontaneously in the usual way from the nucleation and growth of fluctuations that happen all the time in the environment dictated by the previous large scale pressure structure, time of year, and so on. Once formed, though, they can influence weather and climate (if climate is going to be what we call any sort of variation in global mean temperature) over an extraordinarily long time — the system can become “frustrated” in the sense that more normal short time scale fluctuations are suppressed and global weather (and hence climate) is dominated by a single thing. Weather being a hobby, I’ve observed this sort of thing a number of times over the last few years.
There are also things like ENSO — patterns that are stable enough to be given a name, yet unpredictable and chaotic and with an obvious long range, long time influence on the climate (let alone the weather). On top of this are many other drivers — changes in atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric composition, solar state, oceanic circulation patterns. The climate actually is so complex that it makes a mere spin glass look simple. In such a “frustrated” complex chaotic system, patterns like “if A and B but not C are all true, then increasing X will increase Y, otherwise Y will either not change or decrease” are if anything to be expected rather than come as a surprise.
This year a strong El Nino might raise global temperatures because of a matching blocking high that shifts global atmospheric circulation from one locally stable pattern to another before the El Nino dissipates. Another year an equally strong El Nino might not be accompanied by the blocking high and the patterns might go back to where they were, with no permanent effect. The blocking high itself might be a child of solar state, or the precise path of a hurricane the previous year. The hurricane might have had the path it did because of the infamous Brazilian Butterfly. Ozone levels over the antarctic might have affected the southern oscillation, which in turn dictated when Brazilian Butterflies hatch, and the southern oscillation might have inherited its state in part from the previous La Nina. Change any of these and the climate is entirely different — three years or five years or ten years or fifty years from now.
The lesson of the spin glass is that — it cannot be linearized. It is fundamentally, deeply nonlinear. Only if one looks at it locally in space and time will it — for a time — behave linearly, maybe, but then it can find a way to relieve frustration by changing this whole block of spins from up to down, which suddenly alters everything, and it shifts to some other regime of behavior. Strongly nonlinear systems don’t stand up well to linear analysis.
Yet I have the strong feeling that that is what climate science is all about. Turn the CO_2 dial, the temperature dial will follow.
Or not.
rgb
rgb
(dr Brown) says
Hurricane Sandy does prove CAGW, doesn’t it?
henry says
I wonder if you ever figured it out yet?
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/#comment-192
rgbatduke says: February 1, 2013 at 9:37 am
There is still a fair bit of open science to do, though.
Agree, but not all of us up to it.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GMF-SSN.htm
Like a challenge?
I would be more than happy to provide all details.
izen says
Of course the warming IS statistically significant over 14 or 18 years, the 16 year period is a cherry pick.
henry says
we all know that the primary solar cycle is 10.66 yr average.
so why would anyone be looking at 1.5 solar cycle? that is dumb.
here is the result of the last 11 years
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2013/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2013/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2013/trend
we are cooling.
and it won’t stop.
until at least 2038, by my calculations.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
we will have have to learn to live with it.
rgbatduke says:
February 1, 2013 at 9:37 am
The problem is that there are large lags, and you cannot just do a 1:1 comparison to tease out the correlation. Just as with the CO2, there is no obvious correlation to temperature, but when you compare the derivative of CO2 to temperature, the correlation becomes obvious.
Here is found an observable correlation between TSI and global temperatures.
HenryP says:
February 1, 2013 at 7:41 am
A) Chernobyl is not representative. It was a bad design, put into action by a government that did not care about the risks.
B) Fukushima was a 2nd gen design, much less robust than current gen, and it held up pretty well to an incredibly stressful situation. Better siting alone would have prevented the problem, but next gen reactors will be passively stable, so no problem even in such a 6-sigma natural disaster.
C) Nuclear waste is less radioactive than coal ash.
vukcevic says:
February 1, 2013 at 11:48 am
“There is still a fair bit of open science to do, though.”
Agree, but not all of us up to it.
Nice admission there.
Bart says:
February 1, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Here is found an observable correlation between TSI and global temperatures.
No, that is not TSI, but a running sum of incorrect sunspot numbers.
Leif Svalgaard says:
February 1, 2013 at 12:15 pm
So, correct the sunspot numbers, rejigger the coefficients of the model, and find a similar relationship.
Leif Svalgaard says:
February 1, 2013 at 12:11 pm
vukcevic says:
February 1, 2013 at 11:48 am
“There is still a fair bit of open science to do, though.”
Agree, but not all of us up to it.
Nice admission there.
——————
I never said I was scientist, just a practical engineer; engineers are concerned with application of the known and verified science.
You could do it, but than you would have to admit you were either wrong or obstructing progress of new knowledge or both.
This is strange. You all should know that since I was directed to investigate the matter of AGW, a few months before climate gate, I never knew that man made global warming was a hoax. It was a long journey for me to realize that you cannot “calculate” that which has which has never been properly tested or measured.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2011/08/11/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-aug-2011/
Today I was directed to pray for each one of you this present on this blog, specifically for wisdom, in each of your particular life’s family- and occupational situations. This has not happened to me before. Somehow I was reminded of Solomon’s prayer, who also asked for wisdom, and received in addition to wisdom, also wealth. The scriptures I had in front of me was Matthew 6:14 -34
God bless you all.
Henry
Bart says:
February 1, 2013 at 12:45 pm
So, correct the sunspot numbers, rejigger the coefficients of the model, and find a similar relationship.
Well, there isn’t any. But since you thought it was good, perhaps you would look for a relationship.
vukcevic says:
February 1, 2013 at 12:49 pm
engineers are concerned with application of the known and verified science.
Then you are a poor engineer, as you do not heed known and verified science, even when explained to you.
You could do it, but than you would have to admit you were either wrong or obstructing progress of new knowledge or both
Here you make the unjustified assumption that what you peddle is new knowledge. It is not and it is not science. But, since when do you even listen…
@Henry: Excerpts of what you wrote in [ ] and my responses not in brackets:
Henry says.
[Sorry. I have a completely different opinion/
I do not think that nuclear energy is safe and sound/
I note that Japan is now officially admitting that nuclear energy is not safe. Obviously, it never was safe in the first place, if only because of the waste problem. ]
You have presented nothing related to safety here. Nothing at all. You are presenting people’s emotional reaction to things they do not understand. Mother nature destroyed their nuclear plants there in Fukushima. There is an expensive clean up of course.
[They (Japan) apparently have so much claims and clean up costs that they have decided to halt all plans for new nuclear plants.]
How does this prove anything about safety?
[Germany has stopped using nuclear energy. Holland has also shelved all plans for new plants. These people are not stupid.]
How does this address that nuclear is unsafe?
[The world is currently still sitting with two enormous problems in Chernobyl and Fukushima.]
Chernobyl is nothing like Fukushima. Fukushima fuel can not reach criticality. I do not believe there are any human fatalities related to nuclear at Fukushima. However thousands died from the tsunami and many more dies from unnecesary evacuation.
[Obviously, nobody of those still singing the praises of nuclear energy is prepared to volunteer to clean up the mess that we still have there.]
That’s untrue. There’s money to be made in cleaning up. Nuclear is incredibly profitable. The radiation levels around the plants are the SAME AS THEY ARE IN DENVER Colorado. Did you know that?
[The 300 people that were involved in the encapsulation of Chernobyl, have all since died.]
Again, nuclear plants are not designed the way the Russians designed Chernobyl. That which happened in Chernobyl could not have happened to any nuclear plant in the US or Japan. Cars used to be very dangerous, they are now considered safe. Yet, I teach a teen driving clinic several times per year at local race tracks… one thing we tell them is that 6000 teens die every year in the US in car accidents. One month worth of car accidents in the US has killed more people than all of nuclear energy related incidents in the US’ history.
[The point is: would I ask somebody else to go and work in a nuclear plant if I myself would not be prepared to do it?]
You don’t need to ask, many people earn a very good living at nuclear plants. Nuclear energy can be sold at $0.04 per kWh. I spend plenty of time at nuclear plants and have stared down at the spent fuel rods under 40 to 60 feet or water on numerous occassions. I have spent 2 work weeks straight above the reactor by the spent pool for 10 hour days and picked up LESS radiation than if I were walking in a park. I wore a tee shirt, jeans and wore a dosimeter and TLD to measure alpha/beta and gamma radiation. What dose I picked up totalled less than a single millirem. It’s perhaps the safest big industry in the world by any measurable metric.
[1) There have been proposals to use “renewables” like wind. However, I found several report backs from those using wind, that wind power is very unreliable.(you could ask for reports from Denmark, UK or USA about this)]
Agreed-and Denmark has the highest electricity costs in the world
[2) In the case of using solar power for generating electricity, it was found that this was very, very un-economical. Subsidies in Spain have recently been withdrawn. They cannot afford it anymore.]
Agreed – Germany has highest use per capita and they enjoy the 2nd highest electricity costs in the world. They are building lots of coal plants to make up for loss of nuclear.
If you want to present opinions, please back them up with facts, not emotions.
So I say again, please be careful not to deamonize the nuclear industry.
Leif Svalgaard says:
February 1, 2013 at 2:20 pm
“Well, there isn’t any.”
Sure, sure…
Bart says:
February 1, 2013 at 5:48 pm
“Well, there isn’t any.”
Sure, sure…
You are contradicting your previous comment
Mario Lento:
I write to support your comments in your post at February 1, 2013 at 5:20 pm.
The Fukushima nuclear facility is a clear demonstration of the incredible safety of nuclear power plants.
The facility was hit by a severe earthquake which moved it as considerable distance then it was inundated by a tsunami which killed hundreds of thousands. The nuclear facility suffered damage, but it was so safe that the it killed nobody before, during or after the damage.
How much safer could it be than that?
Richard
Henry@Mario, Richard, Bart
We have one nuclear plant here in South Africa which they put near the ocean. (Koeberg). We had already several incidents and near accidents there. And all the fish in the neighborhood died…. I found out that is because the plant apparently needs horrendous amounts of cooling water and the fish (in the atlantic) could not adapt to the warmer water. Now they wanted to start with a similar plant on the other side, on the Indian ocean. I thank God that apparently with the newest safety regulations in place, to build a new nuclear plant has become more and more prohibitively expensive. If there were no safety issues, after studying the Fukushima disaster, why would they (AEC) have changed the (building) regulations?
You can put up a gas powered plant for a fraction of the price. What with shale gas becoming cheaper, USA would do well to stop building nuclear plants as well. Was there not an incident in the USA as well, in Long Island? Anyway, FWIW, that is my advice to you. Nothing emotional but the facts. There have been too many incidents, some of which resulting in whole areas becoming inhabitable. You can have it there, if you want it, (it is far away enough for me), but not in my back yard please.
It is not that I did not give you alternatives.
.
HenryP:
re your post addressed to me at February 2, 2013 at 5:15 am.
OK. You prefer shale gas to nuclear power. If local economics decree then you will get your preference. But that is not the discussed issue: the safety of nuclear plant is.
False assertions should be shown to be false.
The attacks made in this thread on the ‘safety’ of nuclear power were – and are – false.
Similarly, your promotion of shale gas is opposed by false assertions of ‘earthquakes’ and ‘water pollution’.
And this thread is about Bob Carter’s article which rebuts false assertions concerning AGW.
We all have desires, but truth matters whatever our desires may be.
Richard
Henry@richard
I had noticed from newspaper reports (not remembering exactly all the specific details) that building regulations for new nuclear plants to address the weaknesses of the systems observed after the Fukushima disaster have been tightened up. I suspect these are not only safety issues related to earth quakes but a few others as well.
I am just a bystander, not an expert, but are you saying those tightened regulations due to new SAFETY requirements are/were unwarranted?
Otherwise we agree on simple economics. Nuclear will phase out because of high costs, mostly related to SAFETY issues. I would also not invest a penny in oil and gas exploration in the arctic, either, because we all know it will all freeze up there again in the next few decades.
Just looking at the facts, no false assertions.
HenryP:
In your post at February 2, 2013 at 7:13 am you say to me
And
You say you were “Just looking at the facts, no false assertions” while you assert there was a Fukushima disaster.
The disaster was a major earthquake and tsunami which killed hundreds of thousands, but the Fukushima plant was so safe that it suffered that assault from nature and killed nobody. Of course, the damage to the plant was examined to obtain information to make other plants less likely to suffer damage if subjected to similar assault. But the damage to the Fukushima nuclear facility was not a “disaster”.
There was no “Fukushima disaster”. Saying there was is a “false assertion”.
Richard
Richard says
There was no “Fukushima disaster”.
Henry says
What about all the Japanese living in a 25 km radius who were asked to leave
and not come back?
Why do you think the Japanese (as a nation() have gone COMPLETELY against nuclear?
Emotions? Or reality affecting so many people’s lives?
HenryP says:
February 2, 2013 at 5:15 am
That there have been “incidents” does not invalidate the concept. Tight regulation and careful planning are, of course, necessary. But, I suspect that a lot of your opposition is based on the usual irrational fear of anything “nuclear”, which has come about because of the devastation observed from nuclear bombs.
All advanced technologies are potentially catastrophic. It is estimated that upwards of 20,000 people died from the accident at a chemical plant in Bhopal, India. Did we stop manufacturing pesticides? Of course not. But, that disaster was labelled a “chemical” one rather than nuclear, so it did not make the same deep impression as the natural disaster at Fukushima.
Current Gen III reactors are far safer than the Fukushima design. The next generation will be far better, making it almost impossible to produce a catastrophe of any kind.
As I said,
you can have it (the toothache)
I don’t want it, NIMBY
HenryP says, February 2, 2013 at 10:49 am: “Richard says
There was no “Fukushima disaster”.
Henry says
What about all the Japanese living in a 25 km radius who were asked to leave
and not come back? Why do you think the Japanese (as a nation() have gone COMPLETELY against nuclear? Emotions? Or reality affecting so many people’s lives?”
========================================================
Henry, this is as logical as concluding on CO2 danger BECAUSE politicians decided to cut emissions. This is an inversion of the common sense, sorry.
There was a real earthquake and tsunami disaster with like 20,000 dead, but no dead and no injured from the radiation. Evacuation was not necessary.
@HenryP says:
February 2, 2013 at 10:49 am
Richard says
There was no “Fukushima disaster”.
Henry says
What about all the Japanese living in a 25 km radius who were asked to leave
and not come back?
Why do you think the Japanese (as a nation() have gone COMPLETELY against nuclear?
Emotions? Or reality affecting so many people’s lives?
+++++++++
Henry: It sounds as if you are do not want to understand words. So I will make it clear.
The 25km radius evacuation was forced upon people through over reaction. People like you who fail to understand nuclear.
In summary.
No one died because of anything related to nuclear. People died (who were elderly, very young or hospitalized for other non related problems) during the evacuation process. The evacuation was way an emotional irrational reaction from other people which caused havoc on people for no reason. The rest of the people who died, were killed by the tsunami itself.
Your rants are a waste of time, instead you should read the responses from Richard Courtney and others and try to find out where you are wrong. Then and only then will you learn something.
HenryP says:
February 2, 2013 at 1:27 pm
For the record, I live 20 miles from a Gen II reactor which supplies our region with power. I have zero concern.
Henry@bart
Yes. You are all safe since you were all included in my prayer. All bloggers here.
Just watching the Belgian news here.
Apparently they closed both nuclear plants in July last year there due to SAFETY related issues. The day’s news was that they won’t come back on line until at least end of march 2013. But even on that date they were not too sure.
I am sure you guys there all have ZERO concern about SAFETY with regards to ur nuclear plants.
However, I am just noting those people/employees in progressive countries who express real doubts….
I figure USA not as a specific progressive country where employees have much of any say (thinking of the Simpsons…..)
Obviously then Henry, you don’t drive a car because many thousands of people get injured or killed all around the world. Or is it that you don’t have any concerns about safety. Imagine that all those progressive countries let people risk their lives on a daily basis.
You’re one of those who doesn’t have the comprehension level to understand how many lives are made better through the benefits that come about through the use of affordable and abundant energy.
Your sarcastic rants show you to be quite simple minded.
Mario Lento says
Obviously then Henry, you don’t drive a car because many thousands of people get injured or killed all around the world
Henry says
I am neither ranting nor raving nor am I being sarcastic. The reason why the Simpsons are so popular everywhere in the world is because there are many, many people, like him, all over the world, who prefer to look the other way if it is to keep their jobs secure.
We cannot have an accident in a nuclear plant, that is the point I am trying to make. It has to be fool- and full proof. Yet, in spite of what you say, here is a whole list of accidents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents
So, who is the one who is simpleminded?
HenryP:
Everything has risks and everything has costs. At issue is whether the costs and risks are sufficient to outweigh the benefits of any technology.
This discussion began when you (at February 2, 2013 at 5:15 am) said you prefer shale gas to nuclear.
At February 5, 2013 at 5:39 am you have now claimed there have been nuclear “accidents” and you have linked to a piece on Wicki which describes them.
Please look up how many deaths and injuries have resulted from
(a) the nuclear power industry
and
(b) the natural gas industry.
You are being one-sided in the extreme. Nuclear power is very safe. It is safer than the gas industry which you prefer. And the gas industry is very safe, too.
Richard
Richard
you say
Please look up how many deaths and injuries have resulted from
(a) the nuclear power industry
and
(b) the natural gas industry.
Henry says
a)how much bigger is the gas industry compared to the nuclear energy industry?
b)the amount of people affected by nuclear fall out cannot be estimated in terms of actual tumors and cancers, misformed babies, and other human suffering (e.g. loss of habitat) , etc.so therefore the estimate of deaths and injuries to determine which is the safest energy source is your academic exercise, not mine. Counting the deaths in Chinese coal mines makes that industry probably the least safe. However, I know that we simply cannot compare human suffering like this on any fair scale.
This is not a discussion. This is debate. A debate differs from a discussion in that there is no reconciliation possible between two differing points of view. You may well be right that I am compelled to take an emotional approach to human suffering and also that I will never forget the nature of people to try and hide things if their jobs are on the line. For example, we had the use of asbestos going on for so long, whilst, in hind sight, the powers-that-be (governments!) already knew that it was causing (lung) cancer.
You win this debate on points because I was not able to convince the others on this blog. Congratulations. You are a great debater.
@Henry: In the entire list in your link. 3 people died and they died from mistakes a long time ago that were human caused mistakes. 3 people! More people died from choking on food, falling down while walking, or almost anything else one can imagine.
You proved my point, that nuclear is amazingly safe. And I thought you were useless.
Do you know how many people died from poisonous materials making solar panels? Arsenic, cadmium telluride, hexafluoroethane, lead, and polyvinyl fluoride… and do you know how much toxic waste the Semiconductor industries have poured into the environment? Tons, literally tons.
And you don’t hear me harping on getting rid of the semiconductor process, no. Everything in life has some risks. Driving a car, walking, reaching over ones head to pick up hard and heavy obejects… We just do our part and make things safer over time. Nuclear is probably safer than any other form of energy. You would not know that because your head is in the sand. And you proved it time and time again.
Now go take a chill and stop making a fool of yourself publicly.
HenryP: A lack of energy leads to human suffering. And you are so afraid of the benefits, that people like you cause horrible poverty by not being able to under risk to benefit. Nuclear energy in the US is LOW risk high benefit.
@richardscourtney: You wrote, “You are being one-sided in the extreme. Nuclear power is very safe. It is safer than the gas industry which you prefer. And the gas industry is very safe, too.”
Wonderful point. Yes – you point out the great silliness of HenryP. He will, however, refuse to see that he prefers anything less safe than nuclear because he is afraid… afraid because people indoctrinated him into feeling that way. HenryP has become a useful mouthpiece… and less intelligent people will follow him. Sorry HenryP, you are a nice fellow, really, you just insert yourself without the benefit of fact, knowledge or understanding of what you’re even saying.
That’s what happens when you try to spread thoughts that are don’t come from your own head. There is no way to defend yourself, other than go back to sources and then parrot other people’s beliefs. So, try forming your own thoughts, and learn from reason. OK?
Mario Lento says
in the entire list in your link. 3 people died and they died from mistakes a long time ago that were human caused mistakes. 3 people!
Henry says
That is the problem. They all died later, usually of “natural” causes (read cancer)
[The 300 people that were involved in the encapsulation of Chernobyl, have all since died.]
Obviously where you and I differ is the trust in human nature. I don’t trust nuclear energy from its very beginning (manufacture) , transport (where is the missing fuel?), use (incidents, accidents) , handling of waste etc. etc. There are too many things that can go wrong. We have the same with other energy sources but the human suffering with nuclear problems will only show up much later and are often disguised by the relevant authorities to minimize claims..
Anyway. Like I say. I respect your opinion to say that it is safe.
I expect you to respect my opinion to say that it is not safe.
For the record, I live 20 miles from a Gen II reactor which supplies our region with power. I have zero concern.
25 miles here (Shearon-Harris). I don’t have “zero” concern, because Shearon-Harris has a large spent-fuel cooling facility that is probably more dangerous than the reactor. But I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it.
HenryP, your “praying for everybody” is very revealing. How, exactly, do you think this action is going to influence the natural course of events? If you believe in prayer-mediated supernatural intervention, why not pray for somebody who really needs it, like the several billion people who live in abject poverty or the millions of children who are slowly starving and suffering from malnutrition and disease, whose lives are nearly hopeless? Your prayers almost certainly won’t have any effect there either, as there is evidence that prayer does not affect outcomes in any measurable way, but at least that would make some sort of ethical sense.
Personally, I wish people would get off of their butts and start prototyping LFTR reactors — we have a medium sized mountain’s worth of Thorium in NC (along with all of the attendant rare-earth metals) and could probably provide 100% of the state’s energy needs for a few million years from it, with zero chance of a meltdown, far less waste than what is produced from a traditional Uranium plant, and at a fraction of the cost. Carbon free (if that matters) too. It could revolutionize the economy of the entire state, as cheap electricity is a key ingredient of nearly all sorts of manufacturing or other economic activity. But the Greens oppose any sort of nuclear power even more than they oppose carbon based power. They really do seem to want us to regress to the dark ages, where even candlelight comes from burning carbon and is forbidden.
rgb
Dr. Brown says
why not pray for somebody who really needs it, like the several billion people who live in abject poverty or the millions of children who are slowly starving and suffering from malnutrition and disease, whose lives are nearly hopeless?
Henry says
I am surprised – special forces rgb coming in.
Now you, too, are included in this prayer, whether you believe in it or not. If you have a question about my faith, you may want to look here:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2011/07/23/why-do-i-believe-in-god/
……….wise men still seek – and found Him – as happened 2000 years ago…..
I suspect those 3 wise men were old, so I am sure you might still have some time left to find Him.
In the case that you do accept Him in your life, you might actually find yourself initiating those very activities yourself, afterwards, that you think I am not doing. Remember it is “work and pray”?
http://www.heartforchildren.co.za
So far, I have heard good reports about the idea of using thorium reactors, but just like you I am puzzled why it does not come off the ground. Are you waiting in the USA for the AEC? My experience with other agencies operated from Switzerland is that they will not do much of anything if it might affect their flow of money (usually from inspections to check against their specific regulations).
As I recall the American Standards were always good and useful (to me). Perhaps you guys should try to organize your own type of Atomic Energy Council for the Americas?
HenryP: There are few things more arrogant than you believing or suggesting that you have the power to ask G_d to take action because of your opinions of what people need. As if people who disagree with you need G_d’s help in some way. Stop the nonsense.
I’m sorry for even partaking in a discussion with the likes of you. It’s as if you can read the words, and string a sentence together, but that you can’t put things into a perspective. The thought of people like you in a crucial decision making capacity literally gives me the heebie jeebies.
Still, you’re a nice fellow.
Mario now says
There are few things more arrogant than you believing or suggesting that you have the power to ask G_d to take action because of your opinions of what people need. As if people who disagree with you need G_d’s help in some way. Stop the nonsense.
henry says
I suppose that question could be compared with whether or not it was God speaking to Moses to free the Hebrews from slavery. Or speaking to me 30 years ago (or Martin Luther King, for that matter), to preach that apartheid (segregation) was a sin. Seeing that I was similarly divinely directed to investigate what is wrong with the carbon dioxide, indeed, I do speak with His authority now to say that people can feel free to use fossil fuels, especially, if, like me, they want to be – or become – free from that horrible nuclear energy business. ….
Alas, at last, there is freedom of this oppression, too. God has said that the carbon dioxide is fine and asked me to check it up. I could not find any evidence to the contrary.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2011/08/11/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-aug-2011/
Cheers.
Henry
Henry P:
I am writing this to you as a brother in Christ.
/sermon start/
There are different viewpoints and we can all learn from each other. It is a rejection of Christ’s three commandments of love to claim that somebody must be wrong when they propound an opinion which is not evil. Listen, think and learn when somebody says something you don’t agree: as Cromwell said to Charles 1,
“I beg ye in the bowels of Christ to consider that ye may be wrong”.
Any one of us can be wrong, and we each are from time to time.
God is on our side because He is on the side of everybody: indeed, He is beside and with everyone. It is blasphemy to imply – as you are doing – that God is not on the side of those who dispute your view. As Mario Lento has repeatedly tried to tell you, an assertion that your view is God’s view is to mock God because – whether or not you recognise it – the assertion is a claim that you are God.
Your prayers are commendable, but when you invoke God as your justification then you are behaving – in the words of Christ – like a “whited sepulcher”: i.e. the appearance hides the reality.
Seek humility, and please beware the sin of pride. God is not mocked. His Will will be done whatever you say or do. And always pray.
/end of sermon/
Now, can we, please, return to the subject of the thread?
Richard
Richard says
It is blasphemy to imply – as you are doing – that God is not on the side of those who dispute your view.
Henry says
I never implied such a thing/ !! As I said, many of us are still searching and it may take a lifetime to make a commitment to accept the Truth.
May I remind you: the original dispute was whether or not nuclear energy is safe enough or not.
I say it is not. Mario (and others like yourself) think it is safe enough. Fine. This is no problem? We can still be friends? I respect their opinion. You are my brothers! I just expect them to respect my opinion.
Where the problem becomes a bit difficult for me is when I heard on radio here nuclear energy being promoted by professors as the best alternative to fossil fuels (wind and solar does not work), and it being completely generally accepted that fossil fuels are bad for generations to come.
I am just relating that this is where I started to investigate this whole carbon dioxide story. This is a type of oppression? It was experienced as oppression to me. The lies and the deceits by the nuclear industry, to promote their aims, whether or not intentional and whether or not innocently. Just like there are many people who still believe segregation is still the best…
Then we had the Fukushima accident…
\So, I am just saying, we are free.
Thank God, we are free, at last.
We donot have to go wind. We donot have to go solar. \We donot have to go nuclear.(even though the thorium looks a bit interesting to me)
More carbon dioxide is OK.
God is good.
I am blessed.
@richardscourtney:
You are the voice of reason. Amen.
@HenryP: I meant it when I said you are a nice fellow. You want to “do” something meaningful… and may feel the need to insert yourself to help rid badness. But, please take some of richardscourtney’s words of advice. Maybe your goodness can be spent on learning what you do not understand, rather than judging things you wish you understood better.
Your persecution of nuclear energy parallels the actions of the people who have made CO2 into an evil villain. When you insert G_d into your side, you start to believe that any side except yours and G_d’s must be wrong. I am fairly confident that you do not know G_d’s view of nuclear energy.
Mario says
I am fairly confident that you do not know G_d’s view of nuclear energy.
Henry says
I never said or implied that I know God’s view on nuclear energy.
Please go over my comments again.
I just said that I don’t think it (nuclear energy) is safe (enough)
Why do you all keep twisting what I actually said?
Anyway, even if looked at from the point of view those who oppose more carbon dioxide:
it is well known fact that water vapor is much stronger GHG than CO2?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/30/global-warming-anthropogenic-or-not/#comment-1214618
(the warming of the water due to cooling causes more H2O (g)?)