Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.
The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons. It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.
…
“The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought,” said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” who estimates that moderate warming will be beneficial for crop growth and human health.
…
“My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years,” said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.
Full article here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/16/us-climate-slowdown-idUSBRE93F0AJ20130416
See also: Fireworks in the EU Parliament over “the pause” in global warming
==========================================================
This article is a bit of a turnabout for Alister Doyle, who has run a series of mostly unquestioning articles promoting AGW in the past. Now if only Seth Borenstein at AP can begin to start questioning, we could see real journalism on display.
h/t to Joe D’Aleo
Related articles
- Is the media waking up on global warming? ‘Tic, tic, tic. The sleeping MSM is stirring. Headlines no one could imagine seeing a few years ago are popping up on a regular basis. The backdown is beginning’ (climatedepot.com)
- Nature mag forced to admit warming has stopped: New Climate Deniers say ‘the ocean ate my global warming’ (junkscience.com)
The first step is to realize you have a problem.
By the time various governments stop FUNDING ‘Global Warming research’ (You’ll have to imagine me saying that in a trance-like voice) the media will have come all the way around to raging over every penny spent, and probably blaming conservatives for the whole thing. *sigh*
“Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.”
Think they’d ‘fess up to their models being wrong? NAH…. impossible!
This would be funny if it weren’t so damn asinine.
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/04/12/ontario-court-light-is-a-contaminant/
This is all wonderful to see. For many there is still time to back away gracefully before being caught in the inevitable stampede and being made to look foolish.
Of course, for those heavily invested in Mann-made Global Warming, there is no retreat. Only more frenzied attempts to justify the inverse of observed fact. For that cabal, there will never be any admission of failure, no mea culpa.
Should the Earth find itself in a mini-ice age in a decade or two there will still be insistence that it is being driven by a massive anthropogenic carbon heat-pump deep in the Marianas Trench and the persistent cold is just another example of extreme weather, not climate. They were right all along, see?
It’s not a “slowdown in Climate Change”, it IS climate change (no capitals). It’s what climate does, goes up, then down, then up, then down, etc, ad infinitum. Nothing we’ve ever seen tells us it should be static, or only trend in one direction.
Stages sheep go through after following a bad leader:
1 – Every decision of this leader is perfect – anyone who doesn’t think so is insane, and should be locked away…
2 – Some of the leader’s decisions have been called into question – this is why they are right…
3 – Recent decisions by the leader have prompted some discussion..
4 – We always said that this leader was a failure…
Read Charles MacKay for more descriptions of the idiotic situations people humans get into by following the latest fashions in belief…
Here is the thing. I think most skeptics on this site would agree. AGW may be happening. However the relationship to CO2 is tenuous and has rather than been treated as a POSSIBLE link been focus of the transformation of increased heat readings. The thing that I hate is that there has been a reactionary and almost zealotry response to this information to the point of excluding thought and attempts to reconcile ambiguous data. I am called a denier and flat earther, simply because I question the dogma. Never denying the possible link between the two but rather suggesting that based on current evidence there is little reason to be come militant against CO2 especially when there are SO MANY benefits to an increase in CO2 so long as it does not cause catastrophe.
That is the other thing that bothers me a great deal. A warmed earth ( so long as it is not catastrophic ) is not a bad thing either. It means less energy consumption for a vast majority of the world and longer growing seasons and even a slightly elevated water cycle ( or at least it should though you never know with these things). All of which is beneficial to us as a human race.
I do not know why the media has become the drum major for the cause of Global Warming. But then I do not understand the vehemence that it has for several things. Politics among others. We do not know what is happening in the atmosphere very well, we have not been objectively studying it so we simply do not know. It may well take another 100 years to really understand the effects of industrialization and changed land use practices and the effect it has on the environment.
Could AGW be real? Of course it can. Should we shut down progress because of it? Absolutely not. The fastest way to wealth is energy production.
“Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat”
So, heat from a cooler atmosphere is causing heating in another object which was already warmer than the atmosphere … righttttt.
Has the heat hiding in the oceans got its eyes shut while it counts to 1,000,000? Did you see the big white rabbit? Purleeeeeeeze. I claim my Nobel prize (they started it).
The media/Hollywood has never understood science – these folks are all liberal arts majors. To these yokels a scientist wears a white lab coat and is in a science lab eternally looking into a microscope. And always telling the absolute truth as in “Yes, that radiation has caused these giant mutant spiders.”
“Global warming advocates, who claim to be scientists, struggle to explain warming slowdown”. There, fixed that for them.
Does Al have to give it all back now? LOL
The Alarmists just can come to the realisation that their hypothaesis was wrong.
Somewhere some investigative reporter is thinking: If I could get the goods on climate scientist fraud I would be rich and famous. Once they really start looking there will be an tsunimi [sp] of articles debunking AGW. When it starts it will bury Mikey Mann. Probably more then one is thinking the same way. I can’t wait.
The facts are what they are. You can’t ignore them forever… or explain them away. WUWT has cataloged a mountain of evidence and the evidence forces honest men to re-evaluate the conclusions they drew. But it does take a lot of evidence to push a man into admitting he was wrong. We all look for evidence to support and reinforce our conclusions – we see what we expect to see – its always an uphill push to persuade someone they are mistaken.
All of the certainty about global warming rests on the simple concept of carbon dioxide as an
all-powerful greenhouse gas that controls Earth’s temps. Show that concept as faulty and the
whole AGW house of cards comes tumbling down.
Seth Borenstein and “real journalism” in the same sentence? Shirley you jest.
Agree with Jeff Alberts.
Climate change is happening, because global warming is over. We have started to cool globally. All major data sets measuring the average global air- and sea temperatures, including my own, now show that we have started cooling down for the past 11 years (which is the equivalent time of one full solar cycle).
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
My results show that earth is most likely on an 88 year A-C wave, the so-called Gleissberg solar/weather cycle, with 44 years of warming followed by 44 years of cooling. My own data set, where I have been monitoring global maximum temperatures, proves that all warming in the past was almost entirely due to natural reasons and that global cooling will now accelerate further. I expect more La Nina’s occurring due to less energy going in the oceans. In my opinion, it will only be 4-5 years before this cooling effect will be felt by just about everyone in the whole world.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
Indeed it is this global cooling that is generally causing more rain, more snow and cooler weather, globally, on average, whilst some places might get less precipitation.
(Namely, assuming equal amounts of water vapour in the air, remember that when water vapour in the atmosphere cools more, you get more clouds and more precipitation, at lower latitudes and less at the higher latitudes).
As the farmers in Anchorage (Alaska) have noted,
http://www.adn.com/2012/07/13/2541345/its-the-coldest-july-on-record.html
the cold weather is so bad there that they do not get much of any harvests. And it seems NOBODY is telling them there that it is not going to get any better. Kimberley (in South Africa) is another example where cooling has been quite significant in the past decade.
The results of my investigations suggest that this global cooling will last until ca. 2038. Also, it looks to me that earth’s energy stores are depleted now and that means that average temperatures will probably fall by as much as what the maxima are falling now. I estimate this is about -0.3K in the next 8 years and a further -0.2 or -0.3K from 2020 until 2036. By that time we will be back to where we were in 1950 or 1951, more or less, when global warming started, roughly…
Those that point to melting ice and glaciers, as “proof” that it is (still) warming, and not cooling, should remember that there is a lag from energy-in (maxima) and energy-out. Counting back 88 years i.e. 2012-88= we are in 1924. Now look at some eye witness reports of the ice back then?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/16/you-ask-i-provide-november-2nd-1922-arctic-ocean-getting-warm-seals-vanish-and-icebergs-melt/
Sounds familiar? Back then, they had seen that the arctic ice melt was due to the warmer Gulf Stream waters. But by 1945 all that ‘lost” ice had frozen back.
I therefore predict that all lost arctic ice will come back, from 2015-2035 as also happened from 1925-1945.
There are now many results from skeptical scientists that support my position and results, e.g.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/19/cooling-in-the-near-future/
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
http://www.landscheidt.info/
The sad story is, that where the world should prepare itself for climate change due to (natural) global cooling, for example, by initiating more agricultural schemes at lower latitudes (FOOD!), and providing more protection against more precipitation at certain places (FLOODS!), the media and the powers-that-be are twiddling with their thumbs, not listening to the real scientists, i.e. those not making any money and nice journeys out of the gravy train that “global warming” has become.
So here we are, it is 2013, and nobody is addressing the real problems that we face due to the change in climate and the coming cold.
Henry
denniswingo says: “The first step is to realize you have a problem.”
Unfortunately, many in the climate science community still argue that there has been no slowdown, so they do not accept that they have a problem.
“… said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics …”
Oy!
A novice gambler tosses a coin and gets three heads in a row – confident they can predict the toss of the coin, they get tails on the next throw. So they:
a) Deny that it was tails because their model must be right
b) Try to work out why their model failed to predict the tails.
c) have a bit of common sense?
The simple fact is like the example above, the vast majority of change in temperature is clearly natural in origin. It is called random variation, because it is random and it cannot (easily) be predicted by their models.
But their logic is like the gambler … NO IT IS WORSE THAN THE GAMBLER ABOVE the gambler above was examining the evidence as it came in and when the reality did not match their expectation … they were forced to face this fact.
Global warming “scientists”, not only didn’t follow the evidence, the evidence proved they were incapable of predicting the climate in the 1970s yet despite the clear evidence to the contrary they deluded themselves using HINDCASTS of the data until these deluded individuals convinced themselves there was meaning in what everyone must now realise is nothing but natural variation WITH CLIMATE SCIENTISTS HAVE TWICE PROVEN INCAPABLE OF EITHER UNDERSTANDING OR PREDICTING.
But like the hopeless gamblers they are, they carry on with the delusion that they can somehow find a way to predict natural random climate variation.
The answer to their problem is dead simple, surface tension blocks heat transfer. Try heating water from above. Thats why there is no backup heat to save their bacon, only radiation enters the ocean.
If they would have followed the scientific method this embarrassment of the scientific community would not have occurred.
Silly Reuters. Everybody knows that all the heat has gone to the earth’s core to make it a million degrees. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore says so, and Dave Letterman believes him. The silliest thing, however, is that Reuters is allowing comments.
Begin Sarc – But last year was the Hottest Eveh on less than two percent of the earth’s surface (the US) – End sarc
Took ’em ten years, give or take, but I guess late is better than never.
“Theories for the pause include the fact that the entire theory is based on shoddy science and even shoddier computer simulations.”
There, fixed that…..
I think there is supposed to be a trademark symbol ™ on the ‘Climate scientists’ phrase just below the word Reuters.
TM did not work. Back to school!
denniswingo says: The first step is to realize you have a problem.
Their problem is that they have a total inability to grasp the concept that some things cannot be predicted. We engineers formalise this in the concept of “noise” and e.g. we talk about concepts such as “signal to noise”. So, we can lump all the things we don’t know into this concept of “noise”
In contrast science is so totally arrogant that it doesn’t have a concept of “not knowing” – there is no formal way in science to say “we don’t know” .
And how many times have we heard the phrase “something must have caused the rise in global temperatures”. But because they have no concept of “we don’t know”, they have no way to answer the question without grasping as scientific straws.
So, we get this absurd charade of them saying:
“because we don’t know anything else that caused the temperature rise … it must be CO2”.
Their single biggest failing is that they lack a formal concept of “not knowing” so they are forced to make ridiculous assertions when engineers have a much superior way of answer the question:
“what caused the rise” … “We don’t know” … or using formal terminology “natural variation”.
If you still don’t understand this … thing about “not knowing” as the scientific equivalent of “zero” in maths. It is as if Scientists are still in the dark ages with a system of knowledge that cannot recognise “nothingness”.
I like how the article attributes the start of Climate Change theory to Svante Arrhenius. From his wiki page – Arrhenius clearly believed that a warmer world would be a positive change.
What is missing from his page is that eventually, he changed his mind.
I guess with enough study, the MSM will change, wait, never mind, they will always be spoon fed…
Isn’t it nice how easy it is to become a real journalist. From hack to real journalist in one article. Mr. Watts you forgot the word kudos.
RMB you are a trip. You keep banging away, ignored by all as simply mistaken, but now it is something else. You have some sort of compulsion, maybe you should look into this. I told you what was happening, the warmed water on the surface immediately evaporates. Run your hair dryer for 20 minutes, you may notice that the water level has gone down!
Tell you what, put a few drops of laundry soap (“surfactant”) in there first, eliminate almost all surface tension, it will make you feel better…
“Now if only Seth Borenstein at AP can begin to start questioning, we could see real journalism on display.”
An oracular comment. Could mean that Borenstein senses the herd turning and adjusts to stay with the herd.
Lawrence Solomon finds Climate changing for global warming journalists
He listsNewly skeptical AGW media
Please email him additions as journalists begin the migration from lemmings to conscientious citizens.
@RobW says:
April 16, 2013 at 7:47 am
All good. When such levels of absurdity are reached and made public, people, no matter how keen to believe, are forced to a point where they have to ask of themselves: can I accept this as making sense and still be a functional human?
Since this and other “considered adjudications” whether by court or government department are the direct result of acceptance of a particular viewpoint being established as a truth, they cannot be separated out from it.
So even those who would equivocate and talk of misinterpretation, misapplication, or just mistake, have a big hole opened up in their heads.
Anyone who can “ride through this” after knowing about it, removes themselves from normal human expectations and will increasingly be seen as an outlier, a pariah.
Of course those negatively effected by this event will suffer in the manner normal to the exercise of the tyranny of the inadequate.
As far as I can tell the CAGW have not changed their minds about anything. All they are now doing is looking for reasons why their models are still right, despite the evidence to the contrary.
European Union politicians rejected a plan to prop up the world’s biggest carbon market on Tuesday, sending it plunging to a new record low and raising questions about its survival.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/04/16/us-eu-ets-vote-idUKBRE93F0NT20130416
I can’t believe Godfrey Bloom MEP did this all by himself… Now some journalists are going to have to eat some more humble pie…
denniswingo says:
April 16, 2013 at 7:36 am
The first step is to realize you have a problem.
———————————–
It appears that most of the scientists intimately involved don’t realize the problem is scientific. Most look at the problem as potentially derailing the gravy train although the personal humiliation of having their theories and models refuted will obviously play a part. The politicians look at it as a threat to their power, which is another kind of gravy train. It’s beginning to appear that an enormous shift is required in research methods and assumptions. Paleocliimatology needs to be reined in. As McIntyre has said for years, an engineering grade study by the most trusted observers and participants in the field and related fields needs to be conducted by the US government and indeed all capable nation-states on behalf of their citizens. People are beginning to understand that they are possibly being screwed by their governments. If a period of cooling sets in, the incompetence and rashness of the principal scientists will be confirmed. They will be left standing naked and helpless in the cold.
Innocent Innocent says: Here is the thing. I think most skeptics on this site would agree. AGW may be happening. However the relationship to CO2 is tenuous
Agree with all you said. But suddenly had this idea of “intellectual gearing”. In finance, the gearing ratio of a company is the ratio of debt equity to assets. The higher the gearing ratio … the further their “reach” but more likely the company will go under.
Likewise intellectual “gearing” could be defined as the ratio of speculative inference to the evidence. And just as the high gearing of banks … looked good at the time … but caused a worldwide collapse in the financial markets, so the intellectual gearing seen in climate “science” … way have looked good when it was providing the answers and attention they wanted … but now it has all gone peared shaped their high gearing makes it almost inevitable that this subject is in for a monstrous fall like the banks.
I suppose the only real question (if the banking analogy holds) is how many other institutions are going to be exposed to have taken the same high risks an massively overgeared their subjects and will now be taken down by climate “science”
That so called scientists who are running the AGW nonsense don’t know the basics is unbelievable…all they ever do is waffle on about “our models etc”…
It’s simple enough…if we were suffering AGW then we would be trapping the heat…specifically in the Tropical Troposphere…but no evidence. The modellers over-allow for positive feedback loops and apparently disregard the negatives which cause cooling. And if that is not bad enough they are unaware that CO2’s ability to create heat is logarithmic. Thus whatever temp fig you come up with for a doubling it will not double again…you will get a diminishing return. Pretty basic stuff.
This after a full quarter-century of terminally obnoxious, strident gloom-and-doom (recall Warmists’ “No Pressure” video, an eco-terrorist’s delight). As what point does common sense begin to re-assert itself, and more especially– at what point do death-eating Luddite sociopaths begin to realize that their Cargo Cult will be held accountable?
@stan stendera says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:10 am
I agree. Or at lest I HOPE that there is, somewhere, a number of individuals who have a minimum of inquisitiveness in their nature, and they can get backing from editors and administrators. There is scant evidence that such people actually exist in the MSM even though it is the primary requirement, with it being almost exclusively the domain of The Regurgitater and The Opinionator.
Even if there are none, there must be significant numbers who want to project a false dignity of purpose, and most reliably, those who can smell the possibility of fame and fortune.
The hockey stick is not hitting goals now.
Based on some of their past arguments, I’m waiting to hear the excuse that CO2 is just getting lazy–or that it became fearful of the sequester and decided not to perform properly.
(Maybe I shouldn’t give them excuses.)
RMB says: “The answer to their problem is dead simple, surface tension blocks heat transfer.”
I’ve asked you before to provide a relevant equation or a link to a journal article that establishes the truth of this. But no. You continue to assert this non-fact here and other places without a shred of proof. There must be more productive ways to expend your effort.
The answer to the question of proof is very simple, try heating water from above. The agw theory says that we emit co2 and the sun’s rays heat the co2 and the heat from the co2 comes in contact with the ocean. The heat then causes increased evaporation and according to Trenberth is absorbed by the ocean and stored. I decided to try and heat water from above. I applied heat from a heat gun 450degsC fan forced to the surface of water. After 5mins there appeared to be no sign of the water heating so I stopped and checked. The water remained stone cold. The heat was being totally rejected by something and my conclusion was that the most likely explanation was surface tension. Remember that surface tension is demonstrated by placing a paper clip on water and observing that despite not being shaped like a vessel and having measurable weight it is supported by the surface tension. Heat has no weight.
The irony of the situation is that if you want to heat water from above the only way to do it is to float a vessel on the surface and apply the heat source to the vessel, the vessel cancels the surface tension underneath and allows heat to flow.
What thismeans is that the oceans only accepts energy via the sun’s rays, physical heat is blocked by surface tension and therefore there is no backup heat in the ocean so when the sun’s activity drops as it is doing now this planet gets cold.
Shorter version : “fiddlesticks”.
I guess that is why they are now trying to get the indoctrination taught in school: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/04/some-ask-whats-the-value-of-common-core-state-standards/
@Theo Goodwin says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:40 am
It is most certainly a herd. As anyone who has worked with herds knows, when there is a breakaway, with the rest of the herd constrained, unless very quickly stymied, the rest follow. It cannot be stopped.
The constraints are there; with the Mail, Economist, and this, the breakaway has happened. There is nothing anyone can do about it now.
james griffin says: “The modellers…are unaware that CO2′s ability to create heat is logarithmic.”
Utterly false. The models are all based on essentially the same logarithmic forcing equation.
Lloyd Martin Hendaye says: “This after a full quarter-century of terminally obnoxious, strident gloom-and-doom (recall Warmists’ “No Pressure” video, an eco-terrorist’s delight). As what point does common sense begin to re-assert itself, and more especially– at what point do death-eating Luddite sociopaths begin to realize that their Cargo Cult will be held accountable?”
When they are arrested for resorting to violent acts in the death throes of warmism.
@John R Walker says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:53 am
I notice in the Reuters report you link to, Royal Dutch Shell is specified as lobbying for a much higher CO2 price. The reality of who is actually behind all this and why is being gradually shown.
Contrary to popular opinion, comparison of the projected to the observed values of the independent variable of a model is not what one does in testing this model under the scientific method. Instead, one compares the predicted to the observed relative frequencies of the outcomes of observed events in the underlying statistical population. Thus, the much ballyhooed “pause” is irrelevant.
Oh my, those are some mighty flimsy straws they grasp at. Funny to watch them flail about though.
Look at all that scary water vapor in the photo they used.
Tol is quoted as saying “My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years.”
I wonder if he was slightly misquoted, and that he actually meant that his confidence in the model outputs have gone down — these, to a reporter, might be a form of data? Or is he really questioning data — does he think temps have actually gone up? Or something else?
Steve Hill from Ky says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:09 am
Does Al have to give it all back now? LOL
Can we charge him (Al) with crimes against humanity and fraud?
One thing fur sure is that you won’t see Micheal Moore with a bull horn in front of Algore’s mansion demanding the money back!
“Now if only Seth Borenstein at AP can begin to start questioning, we could see real journalism on display.”
And the flying pigs will wear ice skates to do touch-&goes in a frozen Hell. Borenstein is a classic example of what David Codrea calls “authorized urinalists”.
RMB says: “The answer to their problem is dead simple, surface tension blocks heat transfer
henry@jorgekafkar and RMB
actually the cooling is caused by more UV being back radiated TOA to space
so less UV is getting into the oceans.
subsequent to this the differential between 0 and 90 degrees becoming bgger,
you get more clouds at lower latitudes and less at higher latitudes
hence the cooling is amplified by less insolation at lower latitudes…
he that has an ear listens/// and understands.
Well there are groups that do NOT want CAGW to be shown as false – these are the politicians using it to obtain more taxes and ‘governance’ and those who have their snouts in the subsidies trough rolled out by those politicians.
Apparently, UK was only saved from power cuts in the last weeks by an oil fired power station that is due like many others this year to be phased out. UK has just over 4000 windmills placed on 360 plus subsidy farms. UK also experienced 20- 30 THOUSAND deaths from cold due to energy poverty due to the subsidies being farmed. (google UK deaths from cold) So every time you see a windmill in UK that windmill represents around 6 people who died of cold in energy poverty just last winter. By this time next year it will be 12 dead people per windmill as energy prices and subsidy farmers’ profits are going up faster than they can build wimdmills.
So it really is about time someone in the mainstream media looked at this. Ten times more people dying from energy poverty than are killed on the roads in UK is not an academic argument on core top statistics or widths of tree rings – or do we need to wait another 5 years before the people profiting handsomely from CAGW grudgingly admit it is actually getting colder?
.
Terry Oldberg says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:30 am
Really, Terry? You state the obvious then counter it with a false claim. The “pause” IS one big thing the models didn’t predict. Hence, a failure of a modeled outcome and no amount of statistical sophistry can excuse that away. I repeat–none of the models predicted this observed event; this “pause” falsifies models that didn’t predict it and is very relevant.
RockyRoad:
I take issue with your claim that the models did not predict the “pause.” These models do not, in the normal sense of the word “predict.” They “project.” While climatologists commonly conflate the two words, they have differing meanings. Predictions are what would be needed to regulate the climate. The climate models do not make them.
pat says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:03 am
The hockey stick is not hitting goals now.
Sorry Pat but you are wrong, wrong, wrong. They are hitting goals, thet are all own goals, that’s all. 🙂
The process of deconstructing this has begun. It cannot be stopped now.
As others have mentioned above, this step, of allowing orthodoxy to appear less than complete and sacrosanct, is required.
From here on, such reports will become increasingly “balanced”. Personally, I give it to the early part of next year for virtually all reports to contain some “balance”. After that, repudiation will become more and more normal through to the end of next year.
The danger now is that those with reason to hide, whether “scientists” or other, will be allowed to crawl under a rock. There is no justification for it on the grounds of “pragmatism”, through thinking that it is necessary to placate to more easily change perceptions. This is inevitable anyway.
To allow this crawling away would be an offense to humanity. Never forget, there are many, many dead from this. To not have justice for these deaths and other destruction is to treat them as detritus, rubbish, garbage, and is to become the things that must be defeated and held to account.
Every day, across the world, someone dies directly because of this. They have been killed.
@jorge
The duty warmist, jorgekafkazar, puts down an OP with:
“Utterly false. The models are all based on essentially the same logarithmic forcing equation.”
Interesting. If the climate fantasists’ models correctly handle that variable, please list, in descending order of importance, why the models remain unfit for purpose.
The wikipedia really does not want you to find out but Crispin Tickell, offspring of the infamous Huxley aristocracy, ur globalist and archwarmist advisor to Maggie Thatcher, is still a trustee of Thomson Reuters.
Crispin himself tells you:
http://www.crispintickell.com/page109.html
So don’t you expect Thomson Reuters to ever become unwarmist.
This is why they tried to “Chicken Little” in all of the Draconian Carbon changes. They knew in their hearts that even after torturing the data as much as they did, the warming they could manufacture was only modest.
Imagine where we would all be if the US, China, Russia and India had all agreed to the Kyoto Protocol and Global Carbon (CO2) levels had actually decreased over the last fifteen years. These charlatans would be screaming from the rooftops about how the warming had stopped and they had saved the planet.
Sometimes inaction is the best course of action.
Phil’s Dad says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:52 am
“As far as I can tell the CAGW have not changed their minds about anything.”
It doesn’t matter what they think. In fact the more visibly they insist on this the better.
“Studies” will continue to proliferate. If what is referred to on WUWT is indicative, they will come thick and fast in their final ejaculations, and be increasingly implausible – if that is possible compared to some recent attempts at imitating erudition.
These of course will need to be dismembered. The purveyors of these need to be treated with the derision, scorn, ridicule and contempt which they invite. And this should form a part of the public reporting of these things.
This can play out in one of two ways. The stars of AGW will claim to have discovered, in their brilliant and independent way, all the things that skeptical scientists have been saying for over 20 years, without mentioning or citing them a single time. They will then take credit for fixing our understanding of climate change and accept Nobel prizes, whether any are awarded or not. OR The world will acknowledge the skeptical scientists for being right all along and grant them the honor and respect they deserve.
My heart hopes for the latter, but my brain says the former is more likely.
Mike Haseler says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:34 am
…
In contrast science is so totally arrogant that it doesn’t have a concept of “not knowing” – there is no formal way in science to say “we don’t know” .
…
The problem has little if anything to do with “science,” which contrary to your assertion is quite comfortable with “not knowing.” It has everything to do with the “operators” and the society within which the work takes place. For over a century the operator’s practicing science have in large part been motivated by the dominance of theory over empirical observation, and that in turn has been most strongly manifested within physics. For many sciences the commonplace social injunction has been to work harder and to grow up and be “like physics.” Can’t happen. Field reality is mathematically complex – “soft” in the “hard” vs. “soft” science parlance. It doesn’t matter whether that field reality data is biological, climatological, geological, sociological, or economic either. Anyone asserting certainty without qualification in any of those fields is trying to sound like a “grown up” – a physicist, who, at least in calm, fair weather, at STP, can tell you to the microsecond how soon you will hit the ground, if you fall out of a tree at a given height and don’t hit any branches on the way down.
Humans are pretty much set on a “lazy” approach to understanding anything. It’s one reason why so many of us listen to priests, politicians and “experts”. It’s also why priests, politicians and “experts” hope to be able to trust “peer reviewed” sources. We like to hope that someone else – “the elders” – knows best. “Experts” protect us from having to peer out into the dark on our own and try to decide what those sounds out there mean. So, we have the MSM reporters depending on factoids dribbled from what the “experts” say because it sounds important, even if its as unlikely as Hanson or Mann screaming that the sky is falling. For most of us the appearance of setting any course into the unknown seems better than drifting backward into it – hind sight is nearly perfect in that we at least know what happened even if not why, while foresight is guess work. Charlatans from card readers to climatologists and shamans assure you they can foretell the future. The future however, once it is safely in the past, always assures us that they were simply guessing.
Andrew says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:52 am
“@jorge
The duty warmist, jorgekafkazar, puts down an OP with:”
Barkin up the wrong tree. Jorge just states a fact.
The models probably even have the CO2 effect right. Where they fail is most prominently by inventing the never-observed-in-nature positive water vapor feedback. And a lot of other reasons…
““My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years,” said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.
1) How is he an expert (economist) in climate change? Would he be an expert 5 years ago and less so now after finding out that he has been wrong all along?
2) What knowledge and information does he bring to bear that reduces his confidence in the DATA? Turn yourself to having less or no confidence in the models, or are model runs your “data”?
3) You should give your money back you received for educating students at U of Sussex in UK.
@ Mike Haseler says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:54 am
Novel way of looking at it. And a working model that has some use.
Your reference or wondering about effects of any collapse brought on or exaggerated by this over gearing, I think does open up the whole inter-connectedness of this to view. It is much wider than just a specific “scientific” question or structures built directly on that.
I think it is hard to find any institutional or cultural norm that is unaffected by this either on a practical level, or on the level of what constitutes a desirable way of looking at things, expectations in implementation and, mainly, values.
And when this goes down, through what you refer to as gearing, the whole lot will go down.
…and as Crispin Tickell, trustee of Thomson Reuters, is an offspring of the Huxley dynasty, this…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Henry_Huxley#Mental_problems_in_the_family
…could indicate that warmism could indeed be linked to a hereditary weakness of the mind…
jc says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:29 am
”I notice in the Reuters report you link to, Royal Dutch Shell is specified as lobbying for a much higher CO2 price. The reality of who is actually behind all this and why is being gradually shown”
But this has been known all along! If you owned an oilfield – with a limited ‘content’, would you let it be sold cheap or try desperately to get the oil price UP?? It is not rocket science to see that Big Oil is behind a lot of the scaremongering. And, as for the likes of Shell and BP, etc, putting money into renewables or alternative energy – why would they do that? – probably to control it’s pace of development and ‘release’ into the world and ideally to maintain a monopoly on THAT too!!
Fortunately, there is less chance of that future company type control these days due to the internet, developing countries (china, etc) – which is why governments, via taxes, wanted to get in on the act – but it really doesn’t matter who holds the reins – we will continue to get stuffed in the future!!
AGW is a social creation not science.
A school book for kids about scientific method is enough to demolish any of AGW claims.
No one can claim to know such a complex system with hundreds of inputs and an unknown number that we don’t even know about.
“Theories for the pause include ..” every dam excuse they can think off whilst ignoring the basic one that you got it wrong in the first place . Which would hardly be a surprise given their dealing with chaotic events for which even in the short term prediction is unreliable .
…and look here who’s on the board of trustees of Thomson Reuters as well…
http://thomsonreuters.com/about/trust_principles/trustee_directors/
… Pascal Lamy, ultra globalist…
Still keen on the “news” from this “trustworthy” organisation?…
Why Tickell is missing on this list I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t maintain his homepage and has disappeared. Well, they got Lamy as replacement it seems.
@ Kev-in-Uk says:
April 16, 2013 at 10:28 am
I’m not saying the facts have not been there to be seen by those who want to. Or that it the implications of these are obscure.
But for virtually everyone in the street, these do not register. And “big oil” – or “big anything” that can be made to sound vaguely ominous and indifferent to Virtue and the average person and his neighbour – are of course behind the non-believers.
The MSM finally notices ‘the pause’
I will only be happy when they start questioning ‘the cause’
Somewhat related, in that the Guardian is still going on full bore CAGW KIRIBATI IS DROWNING, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2013/apr/16/kiribati-end-game-climate-change-in-pictures?CMP=twt_gu might be well worth a full rebuttal yet again by Willis or another with real life understanding and knowledge of coral atoll islands. Yes, there have been articles posted here before on this issue, but the photos in the guardian would be great headers leading in to the rebuttal of each of the points the photos captions suggest.
@ Ian W says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:48 am
It occurred to me to Google also “Canada deaths from cold” which turns up no stats concerning excess deaths due to cold weather (on the first page at least). I can only conclude it is a non-issue here. The only time there is any concern about people being killed from winter cold is during cold snaps when the odd drunk student gets disoriented and lost, or sadly, a street person fails to make it in from the cold due to mental issues. Fuel poverty exists but deaths from lack of heating is either not widespread or it is not on the national radar. I suspect that the former is the case.
@ DirkH says:
April 16, 2013 at 10:08 am
I don’t know what the relationship is between Tickell and the Huxleys is, but for me, if someone wants a vision of dystopia based on “scientific” principles, I have never read better – or more plausible – than Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It even comes complete with Savages living attuned to simple nature – how prescient is that?
“Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding”
Understanding??? What understanding?
Three possible explanations from Roy Spencer:
1) the real climate system is not as sensitive to increasing CO2 as the models are programmed to be (my preferred explanation)
2) the extra surface heating from more CO2 has been diluted more than expected by increased mixing with cooler, deeper ocean waters (Trenberth’s explanation)
3) increased manmade aerosol pollution is causing a cooling influence, partly mitigating the manmade CO2 warming
Read more at:
Global Warming Slowdown: The View from Space
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/global-warming-slowdown-the-view-from-space/
Wait, just a minute, late news, the UK has just had its hottest three days this year – snow has melted and people have been seen WITHOUT coats on!! We’re doomed I tell you.
“By the time various governments stop FUNDING ‘Global Warming research’ (You’ll have to imagine me saying that in a trance-like voice) the media will have come all the way around to raging over every penny spent, and probably blaming conservatives for the whole thing. *sigh*”
_________________________________________
“Today more [insert affected persons who was in work for AGW] were laid off due to lack of support from [insert your governing body] and the funding pulled by [your local conservative party’s name.]
{Switch to Person involved in layouff} “It just hurts us so bad that they can take this mistake in the weather and use it to cut important scientific research. This will just hurt us more when the warming returns and we are not prepared for it. In the meantime I will not be able to support my family.”
In 20 years they will all joke about the time when we ‘all’ believed in Global Warming while at the same time following a similar gris-gris. Except for a few of us. Again. 🙂
Rinse. Repeat.
I wonder what the next WUWT will cover…
I hope someone writes about the epidemiology of this “Dam Failure”. Highly honored, feted, rewarded glorious personages sporting Nobel Prizes real and surrogate … get rock star status in the gloom and doom science. Governments, Hollywood stars, every single university and research organization in the world flocks to their side…. then climategate, the cracking began and became louder as hurricanes quieted, real sea-level rise slowed, thermometers became suspect, windmills started to hurt economies, people, bats and birds, Antarctic ice expanded, climate sensitivity began to decline, some tentative “gee the sun might be a bigger player” speculations came from unexpected sources … 10 years of no warming goes by with only a few of the annointed whispering of this travesty in private emails, the span stretches to 15 years- a voice at the Doha Climate Conference shouts it out and the fear-locked silence on praying climate hockey team members is broken. Illuminati start scurrying around briefly with explanations, looking in the deep oceans, the smoke, etc. and then IPCC’s Pachauri, Hansen and others see the jig is up (Hansen even had to retire under the strain). Scientists begin to waffle, turnabout, a final blizzard of hockey stick papers come out to try to flood the AR5 deadline…and then one CAGW newspaper, then two and then a bunch break ranks. There will be more and there will be suspense on who will come out and who will morph and who will “Paul Erlichicize” his career and become a crusader for the other side. This is unbelievable!
Gary Pearse says:
April 16, 2013 at 11:25 am
I hope someone writes about the epidemiology of this “Dam Failure”
Gary , I believe you just did , and remarkably well I might add !
““Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat”
So, heat from a cooler atmosphere is causing heating in another object which was already warmer than the atmosphere … righttttt.
”
That’s the bit I like too… since they don’t actually understand the mechanics of ANY of it, they can’t say WHY the ocean would suddenly start absorbing more heat than before, but it’s the only explaination that they can think of (that doesn’t make them totally wrong.)
@RockyRoad says:
…Based on some of their past arguments, I’m waiting to hear the excuse that CO2 is just getting lazy–or that it became fearful of the sequester and decided not to perform properly.
Actually, CO2 is causing massive Global Warming as we speak – but it’s not going to show up in the data that skeptics examine – because they’re only looking at the data to find something wrong with it. CO2 has been working on this warming for 20 years, and isn’t going to disrupt its activities and provide data to amateurs who haven’t even had a peer reviewed paper published….
Hey Dodgy, I understand your annoyance!
“Actually, CO2 is causing massive Global Warming as we speak – but it’s not going to show up in the data that skeptics examine – because they’re only looking at the data to find something wrong with it.”
How inconsiderate is that? Amateurs like me and all the others here (tax payers all) who obviously don’t even deserve to tie your shoe laces up, trying to look at the data and test it. What a bummer when its already been peer reviewed by the professionals. And to top it all someone goes and sells a load of crap thermometers which show no discernible warming this century when the models have declared otherwise.
Life just isn’t fair to you pros is it?
I am trying to think of the word for when something that was happening now no longer is. Not “slowdown”, or “pause”, or a “hiatus” or “rest”. It’ll come to me.
Robert L says:
…I hope someone writes about the epidemiology of this “Dam Failure”
Gary , I believe you just did , and remarkably well I might add !..
One thing he forgot to mention was the existence of a few brave souls who saw the scam for what it was immediately, and fought it unaided and alone for many years. John Daly and Steve McIntyre are two of these names – there are probably some more, and they should NOT be forgotten…
I did not have time to complete my comment as I had to attend to a student.
It would be an interesting exercise to correlate national rates of excess deaths among the poor and elderly due to fuel poverty arising from misguided global warming policies. Ontario’s electrical energy rates are set to skyrocket once again due to the smug, self-righteous and [self-snip] Liberal government. Fortunately most Ontarians use natural gas for our heating, so hopefully not too many people will fall victims. Probably this is a bigger issue in the Old World, especially where modern insulation is a novelty and temperatures in recent decades have been more benign than recently.
On the other hand, what a great way to get rid of the excess useless population!/sarc
“Contrary to popular opinion, comparison of the projected to the observed values of the independent variable of a model is not what one does in testing this model under the scientific method. Instead, one compares the predicted to the observed relative frequencies of the outcomes of observed events in the underlying statistical population. Thus, the much ballyhooed “pause” is irrelevant.”
Really Terry??
You have a very poor understanding of the scientific method. First of all, a “pause” of this duration was NEVER predicted by ANY of the models, hence, all of the models are demonstrably faulty.
More importantly, a “model” is not a true scientific experiment in and of itself. A model CAN be USEFUL in evaluating an hypothesis, IF AND ONLY IF the model is a reasonably good REPRESENTATION OF REALITY. Obviously, the climate models are not a good representation of what is actually going on in the Earth’s climate system. The climate models do not fully incorporate all of the variables in the system, since the modelers DON”T EVEN UNDERSTAND all of the variables and how they interact! If you don’t have at least a reasonable approximation of what all of the system variables are, and how they ALL interact, your model CANNOT be accurate.
Finally, you don’t test MODELS under the scientific method, you test HYPOTHESES USING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. A model is not an hypothesis, a model is an abstraction of reality which attempts to model the system being hypothesized about. As such, model output CANNOT be treated as “data”.
1. Form an hypothesis
2. Design a repeatable experiment to test your hypothesis
3. Gather experimental data
4. Analyze the data in a way which other scientists can follow and duplicate
5. Make conclusions based upon the analyzed data
6 Determine whether your hypothesis is tentatively supported or must be reworked or outright rejected.
That, in basic form, is how the scientific method works. The ONLY way a model actually works as a reasonable test of your hypothesis is IF (and ONLY IF) you can demonstrate that the model is a reasonable approximation of the actual reality-based system being modeled. If the model is a poor approximation of reality, the output of the model (although perhaps interesting) is ultimately meaningless.
This is where the AGW Cult has gotten things TERRIBLY wrong… they assumed that their models were a wonderful approximation of the real climate system, and it is turning out that their models are actually not a very good approximation of the real climate system, and so the output of most of the models is garbage, because the design of the models is at best incomplete, and at worst, utter garbage to begin with. The first error that was made was that they created this THING called “Global Average Temperature” and assumed that it actually had some reality-based meaning (which it does not). Secondly, they designed many of the models with the express purpose of “proving” their hypothesis, which caused bias in the models designs right from the beginning. From there, things just went progressively further downhill.
PeterB in Indianapolis:
It looks as though you missed my response to RockyRoad. The models do not “predict” but rather “project.” As they do not predict, their predictions cannot be proved faulty.
From the Reuters article:
“Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments’ willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the
end of 2015 to combat global warming.”
Critical reading test: What is missing from this paragraph?
“…willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels.” SHIFT TO WHAT? There IS no viable replacement that is politically, economically, or energy equivalent.
It is good news! My favorite vid is by Phelim McAleer at the Copenhagen climate conference, asking activists how they travelled there http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y4InWXmERU and I think that is what made lots of otherwise neutral people skeptics, the hypocrisy coming from climate activists.
jc says:
April 16, 2013 at 10:55 am
“@ DirkH says:
April 16, 2013 at 10:08 am
I don’t know what the relationship is between Tickell and the Huxleys is, but for me, if someone wants a vision of dystopia based on “scientific” principles, I have never read better – or more plausible – than Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It even comes complete with Savages living attuned to simple nature – how prescient is that?”
Aldous Huxley’s brother Julian Huxley was the founder of the WWF. The family knows a thing or two about depopulating landscapes and forcing people to live as savages.
Once the Economist bailed out, it was no longer safe to hew to a crumbling official line: the sand beneath the structure was washing out on the tide. To mash a few shoreline metaphors.
“Finally, you don’t test MODELS under the scientific method, you test HYPOTHESES USING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. A model is not an hypothesis, a model is an abstraction of reality which attempts to model the system being hypothesized about. As such, model output CANNOT be treated as “data”.”
Very well said. I am thrilled that PeterB in Indianapolis has arrived to explain that scientific hypotheses and models are very different things. The distinction and all that it implies must be learned by all who are interested in the use of models in climate science and who doubt that mainstream climate science, as practiced today, qualifies as science.
Terry Oldberg says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:30 am
Models are not scientific theories. Models are reproductions of systems of objects that scientific theories are about. Models cannot be used for prediction. If you think otherwise, please explain.
Theo Goodwin:
The term “model” is polysemic, that is, it has several meanings. That it is polysemic has a dire consequence when this word is used in making an argument about the methodology of a study and the word changes meaning in the middle of this argument. The consequence is for an equivocation fallacy to be created. In making arguments about the methodologies of their studies, climatologists habitually use the equivocation fallacy. Through this usage, climatologists reach logically improper conclusions about the methodologies of their studies.
The possibility of building the equivocation fallacy into an argument can be headed off through disambiguation of the language in which this argument is written. Under one disambiguation of the language in which arguments about the methodologies of studies are written, the English word “model” is reserved for an algorithm that makes a predictive inference while the French word “modele” is reserved for an algorithm that makes no predictive inference. In the disambiguated language, a model makes predictions but a modele makes none of them. A modele makes projections but a model make none of them. This useage makes a “model” similar to a scientific theory, as you point out.
Each entity which, in AR4, is called a “model” is a modele. It can be shown that modeles are unsuitable for the purpose of regulating the climate and thus that the $200 billion study of global warming has failed.
“Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown”.
Reuters better be careful or Mike Mann will slap them with a libel lawsuit. I hope they are not implying that he’s struggling to explain the slowdown? He must be tweeting furiously at the moment!
Terry Oldberg says:
The models do not “predict” but rather “project.” As they do not predict, their predictions cannot be proved faulty.
__________
And therefore they should not be used for economic policy decisions. If they have no “predictive” value they are at best curiosities — fantasies of what might or might not happen. I don’t think we should be gambling our future and ruining our standard of living on these wildly inaccurate projections.
Reg Nelson:
Right on!
The ‘market’ would has a term for the present condition we find AGW in, and I think it loosely applies now; the term is “overbought” .
Definition of ‘Overbought’:
1. A situation in which the demand for a certain asset unjustifiably pushes the price of an underlying asset to levels that do not support the fundamentals.
2. In technical analysis, this term describes a situation in which the price of a security has risen to such a degree – usually on high volume – that an oscillator has reached its upper bound. This is generally interpreted as a sign that the price of the asset is becoming overvalued and may experience a pullback.
.
“Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.”
OR….that their fundamental theory is simply wrong.
Julian Shwinger (nobel Laureate) – about conformity in Science…
After 1989 Schwinger took a keen interest in the non-mainstream research of cold fusion. He wrote eight theory papers about it. He resigned from the American Physical Society after their refusal to publish his papers.[3] He felt that cold fusion research was being suppressed and academic freedom violated. He wrote: “The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science.”
james griffin says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:58 am
“………And if that is not bad enough they are unaware that CO2′s ability to create heat is logarithmic. Thus whatever temp fig you come up with for a doubling it will not double again…you will get a diminishing return. Pretty basic stuff”.
That statement encapsulates the scientific community’s shortcoming from the beginning of this affair. They failed to shout from the rooftops that the AGW concept depends on an absurd misunderstanding at its very root. The CO2 molecule (or any conglomeration of those molecules) has absolutely no ability to create heat – zilch, zero, nada. It cannot add heat to a system and cannot (unconstrained) ‘trap’ heat. Don’t tell me I am wrong without an experimental proof.
DirkH says:
April 16, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Its true that (from memory) Aldous Huxley’s alternative vision, constituting Utopia (The Island? – not nearly as memorable as Brave New World, Utopia’s seem to have a habit of being a bit lifeless) did not have people thick on the ground – a type of Arcadia. But there were people there at least!
Perhaps when WWF was founded it was more conservation rather than extermination, or maybe Aldous was just not as clear about the agenda as Julian – he did take lots of drugs.
Duster “The problem has little if anything to do with “science,” which contrary to your assertion is quite comfortable with “not knowing.”
I’m suggesting more than “not knowing” but having a formal concept. It’s the equivalent of saying that the answer to “if I have two apples and give away two apples … I have nothing” … meaning the absence of anything or the mathematical concept of “zero” is that there is something whose value is nothing.
In science “noise” is considered as an error: a perturbation of the signal … something that can be removed through averaging.
In engineering (with 1/f noise which cannot be averaged out) we have a different concept which is that noise has a finite value. It exists as something which cannot be removed or destroyed (much like heat). So, engineering naturally has this idea that whole parts of systems both cannot and should not be modelled.
In contrast science has a deconstructionalist philosophy: that any system can be dissected into constituent parts and those in turn into constituent parts and that the whole is the simple sum of the parts. Saying that you can deconstruct the system into smaller and smaller parts is the equivalent of saying that no matter how small the part, the noise can be eliminated by some suitable means. In other words as the sample -> inf. then error ->0
Applying this to climate “science”. The philosophy behind science that you can deconstruct the global climate science and understand its constituents parts,directs the academics toward producing climate models with no concept of “what cannot be understood” or “natural variation” as we also call it.
Because the climate “scientist”, has no concept of a finite level of natural noise that cannot be reduced by any amount of sample, they end up with a missing term in their equations so instead of
GLOBAL TEMPERATURE = f(CO2) + NATURAL-VARIATION
They end up with the equation:
GLOBAL TEMPERATURE = f(CO2) x fudgefactor.
The fact that that fudge factor is around 3x (300%) ought to have rung alarm bells. But apparently not. Because “NATURAL-VARIATION” is about 70% of all the raw signal, it has clearly never occurred to them that something like 70% of the climate variability is completely missing from their models.
In other words the majority of the global climate is undetermined by the small group of parameters which they have falsely and stupidly assumed must be the cause of all the climate signal …. because as I keep repeating … they have no concept that 70% of all the climate change has nothing to do with the parameters they input into their models.
Engineers are used to this. Engineers live with real world system with erratic operations, with real people who can’t be modelled.
But climate scientists can neither cope nor understand these real world systems and that is why they continue this fruitless search for a model that models the unmodelable”.
kcrucible says:
That’s the bit I like too… since they don’t actually understand the mechanics of ANY of it, they can’t say WHY the ocean would suddenly start absorbing more heat than before, but it’s the only explaination that they can think of (that doesn’t make them totally wrong.)
Nah. It still makes them totally wrong.
The whole “global warming” religion is based on the notion that the ONLY way their models can be made to fit the data for the mid 20th century forward is to add in their fudged up CO2 factor. That is the argument from ignorance fallacy that the whole house of cards rests on.
They have been able to push that line, because they have been able to feign the necessary ignorance. That is no longer tenable. They now have to admit that there MUST be something else, something other than what they have included in their models to date, that can make those quantities of heat appear and disappear.
They have been playing the “God of the gaps” routine, but they did it wrong. They had to. In order to appear scientific yet scary, they had to make their gap EXACTLY the size of their desired CO2 effect. Problem is, now they have one CO2 sized gap, and two CO2 sized plugs they need to stuff into it. Whoopsie.
If they admit that the oceans can suddenly and unpredictably swallow up (or not) an amount of heat equal to 15 years of “global warming”, then they have themselves claimed that CO2 ain’t the ONLY thing to which such a quantity of heat can be attributed. Any effect that can make 15 years of “global warming” suddenly vanish now (necessary to explain the present) and that can also make it suddenly appear later (necessary to maintain the scary stories that get them funding and political power) can also have made “global warming” appear in the past. Say, @1980-2000.
So many (hah! most?) climate scientists have a vested interest in CO2-based AGW, but it’s nice to see them throw a bone to the faintest possibility that it could be over. It’s the reaction of the masses that will be interesting the climate scientists climb down.
Back during the 70’s ice-age scare, people in the upper N.H. (Canada, U.S. N. Europe, etc.) had been taught about the ice ages in grade school. So it wasn’t much of a stretch for them to buy into the stories that the Holocene party was over and it was time to head back to an ice age. It had happened before so it was probably going to happen again. Bye-bye lovely weather.
Now we have a generation that has had all-CAGW-all-the-time drilled into them from every which social and media direction and so it seems impossible that the warming would stop, let alone possibly reverse. Ice ages are a thing of the past and we are all gonna fry, right?!?
It will be interesting to hear the gears crunch in those heads as they try to shift their beliefs into reverse. Some will blow a gasket.
This is what I’m after, hearing more about the press waking up and what they are saying now. Now is the beginning of the turn around for the masses who largely believe what they are told to believe.
“It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.”
Yes, the real scientists have been saying that for a long time, but no champagne for coming clean until their names are printed and their reputations restored. Start with Vincent Courtillot and include Brian Tinsley, both linking solar activity to short term changes.
I love this peer reviewed article on the lack of temperature rise over the past 10 years.
http://ht.ly/2w0Vb7
They conclude that :
The ability to predict retrospectively this slowdown not only strengthens our confidence in the robustness of our climate models, but also enhances the socio-economic relevance of operational decadal climate predictions.
The ability to predict retrospectively……. Bwhahahaha
How on earth are the BBC going report this standstill and possible cooling that may be coming. If the rest of the media get behind it, as seems likely, it is going to be impossible for the BBC to report it, as they have backed themselves in to a corner on unbiased climate reporting, because of that infamous meeting in 2006. The report of that meeting has still not come in to the mainstream awareness yet, despite widely presented on the blogs, I fear/hope it will still come back to bite them. It was a despicable piece of bias, and against the BBC charter, which we support here with our money.
Keith Gordon
How can this be? I thought the science was ‘settled’.
What I worry about is what if the Earth HAD gotten warmer? They would still have been wrong, but would have boasted that they were right with more fervor than ever. Many CAGW proponents don’t understand this argument. They think that if the Earth had gotten warmer, there would be no doubt that they were right. This is the kind of logic we are fighting. It’s nice to see them scratching their heads, but I think they’re still going to try and delay until the planet gets warmer again. And THEN they’ll be right… all along. (/sarc on that last part)
before you become too complacent and believe rationality is starting to prevail, I suggest you surf any climate article at Huffington post and read the comments. The vast majority of posters will tell you flat out that the warming pause is a lie, and they seem to take great pride in the fact that they would not be caught dead checking out alternative views at WUWT or any other sceptic blog.
Unless we enter an actual ice age, and even then only once it is decades under way, will the majority of these people concede that maybe, just maybe, the earth is not warming. They will then turn around and blame the ice age on modern society and demand we shut it down to reverse the process.
MrX says:
April 16, 2013 at 2:45 pm
What I worry about is what if the Earth HAD gotten warmer? They would still have been wrong, but would have boasted that they were right with more fervor than ever. Many CAGW proponents don’t understand this argument.
——————
Absolutely. I’ve thought before too that if we’d immediately halted all burning of fossil fuels and reduced CO2 emissions to zero some 15-18 years back, they’d have viewed the temperature trends today as confirmation of the IPCC’s zero emission scenario.
Spooky.
denniswingo says:
April 16, 2013 at 7:36 am
The first step is to realize you have a problem.
Perfect! A 12 Step Program for recovering Alarmists Anonymous!!
The Alarmist Anonymous Prayer (with apologies to Red Green and all Possum Lodge members)
I’m an Alarmist but I can change, if I have to, I guess…..
MtK
Gary Pearse asks “How is he [Richard Tol] an expert (economist) in climate change?”
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/economics/people/peoplelists/person/289812
Better to address the argument than the person.
“some as yet unknown natural variations”.
It is not ‘unknown’. It is the cooling expected after the sun peaked in the late 20th century, with a decade or so heat lag. This ‘unknown’ phenomenon happens every day after noon. A child could understand it.
Richard G says:
April 16, 2013 at 12:06 pm From the Reuters article:
“Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments’ willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the
end of 2015 to combat global warming.”Critical reading test: What is missing from this paragraph?
“…willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels.” SHIFT TO WHAT? There IS no viable replacement that is politically, economically, or energy equivalent.
I will tell you.
Prepare for something even more irrational than co2 regulation and any of the abuses and falsehoods and attacks on science and reason perpetrated so far. We destroy coal and oil and our existing energy sector so we can have free energy. Yes, free energy. We will now convert to fwee energy.
Now, I do not have millions of views or thousands and thousands of subscribers on Youtube, as the fwee energy crowd does, but at least I can be relied upon to tell the truth: any alternate energy source will not come for free. And the less existing cheap energy we have to develop, manufacture, and ship energy technology, the fewer people in the world it will benefit or reach.
H.R. says:
April 16, 2013 at 2:20 pm
So many (hah! most?) climate scientists have a vested interest in CO2-based AGW, but it’s nice to see them throw a bone to the faintest possibility that it could be over. It’s the reaction of the masses that will be interesting the climate scientists climb down.
Back during the 70′s ice-age scare, people in the upper N.H. (Canada, U.S. N. Europe, etc.) had been taught about the ice ages in grade school. So it wasn’t much of a stretch for them to buy into the stories that the Holocene party was over and it was time to head back to an ice age. It had happened before so it was probably going to happen again. Bye-bye lovely weather.
Now we have a generation that has had all-CAGW-all-the-time drilled into them from every which social and media direction and so it seems impossible that the warming would stop, let alone possibly reverse. Ice ages are a thing of the past and we are all gonna fry, right?!?
It will be interesting to hear the gears crunch in those heads as they try to shift their beliefs into reverse. Some will blow a gasket.
Imagine one of the generation that you are talking about they have lost their engineering job because energy costs were so expensive that the company has moved all its heavy engineering to China. They can no longer afford to run a car because of the unemployment and the extra ‘carbon taxes’ on fuel. They are in fuel poverty and spend most of the winter wrapped in blankets and their grandparents died from hypothermia by their switched off one bar electric fire. This is the story of many many people in Europe. 600,000 families cut off from electricity as they cannot pay the bill. Death rates in the tens of thousands in UK in one winter because they are putting the cost up so that their friends in on the subsidy business can make fortunes. It suddenly dawns on these people that all that was not to save the world at all – it was so the prime minister’s millionaire father in law could make £1000 per DAY – from just allowing windmills on his land and other politicians in UK and elsewhere; and so politicians, greens and scientists could go to far flung tropical areas to cram 8 hours work into 10 days having all expenses paid jollies from taxes. This generation that suddenly realizes – probably in the midst of power cuts next winter – that they were conned and have lost out hugely in money, jobs, and lives – because of climate ‘scientists’ who knew it was all a scam – will lose their sense of humor.
This will not end prettily
@DirkH and possibly @jorge
On re-reading, now with more available time (my issue), I wonder if we are violently agreeing with each other?
Theory, however propagandized by barrage MSM coverage, fails, if unsupported by observable facts. This is the case in respect of the discredited scam which is CAGW.
It’s a long way down for the controllers and acolytes of these MSM organizations, never mind the “scientists”.
Scam at haste. Be brought to account at leisure.
Honest question: pray tell how I have been filtered to “awaiting moderation”?
Friends:
OK, it seems the mass media are – at last – starting to notice that global warming stopped at least 16 years ago. The problem now is to inform them of why this halt to global warming is important.
I again state the importance in case there are readers here who do not know it.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the recent halt to global warming was not possible. But the halt happened and this demonstrates that the hypothesis of man-made global warming is wrong.
This is stated in IPCC AR4 (2007) Chapter 10.7 which can be read at
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-7.html
It says there
In other words,
The IPCC expected that global temperature would rise at an average rate of “0.2°C per decade” over the first two decades of this century with half of this rise being due to atmospheric GHG emissions which were already in the system.
This assertion of “committed warming” should have had large uncertainty because the Report was published in 2007 and there was then no indication of any global temperature rise over the previous 7 years. There has still not been any rise and we are now way past the half-way mark of the “first two decades of the 21st century”.
So, if this “committed warming” is to occur such as to provide a rise of 0.2°C per decade by 2020 then global temperature would need to rise over the next 7 years by about 0.4°C. And this assumes the “average” rise over the two decades is the difference between the temperatures at 2000 and 2020. If the average rise of each of the two decades is assumed to be the “average” (i.e. linear trend) over those two decades then global temperature now needs to rise before 2020 by more than it rose over the entire twentieth century. It only rose ~0.8°C over the entire twentieth century.
Simply, the “committed warming” has disappeared (perhaps it has eloped with Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’?).
I add that the disappearance of the “committed warming” is – of itself – sufficient to falsify the AGW hypothesis as emulated by climate models. If we reach 2020 without any detection of the “committed warming” then it will be 100% certain that all projections of global warming are complete bunkum.
Richard
You say that “…the halt happened and this demonstrates that the hypothesis of man-made global warming is wrong.” It sounds as though the scientific method of investigation has been followed and the hypothesis called “man-made global warming” has been falsified by the evidence. This, however, is not the case.
The scientific method has not been followed but that this is so has been obscured through repeated applications of the equivocation fallacy in arguments made by climatologists about the methodologies of their studies ( see article at http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/15/the-principles-of-reasoning-part-iii-logic-and-climatology/ ). A consequence from failure to follow the scientific method is for falsifiable hypotheses to be absent. We cannot falsify hypotheses because they do not exist!
They finally realize they have been mann handled.
Zeke:
Please allow me to correct the error in your post at April 16, 2013 at 3:15 pm.
You say
Sorry, but ALL energy sources come for free.
Coal. oil, gas, uranium, wind, waves, etc. all exist and cost nothing. They are all free because they all exist in nature. But collecting any one of them and converting that source into useable energy costs money.
Wind and oil are both free. But obtaining usable energy from wind is much, much more expensive than obtaining the same amount of usable energy from oil. There are NO alternatives to energy from fossil fuels and nuclear power which are anywhere near as cheap.
That is why energy from wind power, solar power and muscle power (from animals and slaves) was abandoned when the energy available from fossil fuels became available by use of the steam engine.
Richard
So what does this mean about the “97%?” That they were dunderheads?
Calling 97% “dunderheads” is no way to win friends and influence people.
We are hearing the first yowls of something which is likely to disintegrate into one heck of a cat-fight.
ralfellis says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:29 am
“Theories for the pause include the fact that the entire theory is based on shoddy science and even shoddier computer simulations.”
There, fixed that…..
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
That is certainly one of the explanations and it should be included in the list of possible explanations.
CAGW took off largely as a consequence of the late 1970s warming as seen in the thermometer record. It has always surprised me that warmists could have such high degree of confidence in the late 1070s to 1990s warming when the satelitte record of that period shows no warming; it is flat until and around the super El Nino of 1998.
Given the satellite record, one obvious explanation is that the land based thermometer record became contaminated by issues relating to poor siting, station drop out, UHI etc. Surely, that possibility is no less likely than the IPCC proclaimed only explanation for the ‘observed’ warming must be CO2 (since we can’t think of anything else).
In fact one would consider that contamination of the land based thermmeter data set was the prime suspect, and not CO2, since CO2 emissions cannot explain:
(i)
The 1850 to 1880 warming.
(ii)
The mid 1880s to 1920 cooling
(iii)
The 1920 to 1940 warming.
(iv)
The 1940 to 1970s cooling.
In the light of these simple facts, it is difficult to undersatnd how any objective observer could have high confidence in the proclaimation that in must be CO2.
jc says @ April 16, 2013 at 9:29 am
I notice in the Reuters report you link to, Royal Dutch Shell is specified as lobbying for a much higher CO2 price….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes, Shell, BP and Enron were in on the scam from the beginning.
Remember Muller from BEST? His consulting business includes a Shell Oil President, Marlan Downey, “Former President of the international subsidiary of Shell Oil” which might have something to do with all of Muller’s publicity shenanigans. – A puppet attached to Shell Oil with money strings comes to mind. Privately held consulting firms are so nice for hiding money trails aren’t they? ( see my old comment HERE for more on Muller.)
Shell Oil wanted to push natural gas. Ged Davis, the Shell Oil VP who wrote the Sustainability Scenarios for the IPCC shows this in the “Sustainable Development (B1)” part of the February, 1998 ClimateGate (1) email 0889554019, ( link ) which asks for comments on the attachment: “Draft Paper for the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios” by Ged Davis
To quote from the Sustainable Development (B1) section:
“…The impact of environmental concerns is a significant factor in the planning for new energy systems. Two alternative energy systems, leading to two sub-scenarios, are considered to provide this energy:
1. Widespread expansion of natural gas, with a growing role for renewable energy (scenario B1N). Oil and coal are of lesser importance, especially post-2050. This transition is faster in the developed than in the developing countries…”
No wonder Shell Oil (and BP) have been pushing global warming since day one when they provided the initial funding for the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia. It will be a real money maker. Tear out the old infrastructure and replace with Natural gas, Solar and Wind. A new twist on ‘the broken window fallacy’ where the entire country has to shell out to pay for replacing the ‘window’ the energy sector is so busy breaking.
Some Major dailies have “disappeared” the Muller conversion article by the way. I guess too many people had the brains to figure out Muller’s scam.
David Hone is not only SHELL OIL’S Senior Climate Change Adviser he is also Chairman of the International Emissions Trading Association.
Besides lobbying the UK Parliament to strangle Shale Gas by insisting that CCS be deployed – in which venture he’s succeeded- he and his mentor James Smith. SHELL OIL’S previous UK Chairman took SHELL very deeply into Carbon Trading.
“””””…..The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons. It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say…….””””””
Well that must be the answer; can climate science be as easy as that ? We don’t know what, and we don’t know why, but we are quite sure that we have a robust understanding of the science behind it. Film at eleven !
And the language isn’t even florid enough for acceptance as an entry for the Bullwer-Lytton prize.
Who pays money for this stuff ?
And so begins the “Urban Legend” that was global warming. Thankfully some media types are recognizing that some of the leading climate “scientists” are better classified as political activists than dispassionate researchers.
In my post of April 16, 2013 at 4:27 pm, I erred. I meant to address it to richardscourtney but forgot to do so.
DirkH says:
April 16, 2013 at 10:27 am
I generally like to read your comments, but this one was a bit offensive. Mental illness is not a weakness of the mind. In fact, mental illness tends genetically to be associated with highly advanced intellectual capacity. There is often a fine line between genius and madness. John Nash was certainly a highly capable individual. Albert Einstein had a schizophrenic child.
Stay on topic, and avoid triumphalism. The demise of the AGW cult is going to deal a real blow to genuine science, which the world can ill afford. This has been one of my primary worries and sources of anger about the whole brouhaha. These guys borrowed scientific credibility from an account in which I am heavily invested, and I certainly gave them no permission or encouragement to do so.
Be careful what you wish for – you might get it. We, who kept our feet on the ground through the entire onslaught of pseudoscientific malarkey, are going to have to pick up the pieces when it all comes crashing down.
I am happy to see the MSM pulling the plug on, or at least questioning the validity of the CAGW theory. But I don’t think that Reuters was really doing much of that in the subject posting. I blogged this as “Reuters Posting Rationalizes Climate Model Failures” http://cbdakota.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/reuters-posting-rationalizes-climate-model-failures/
cbdakota
Buy popcorn, make note of the weasels before they slide below our radar.
Terry Oldberg:
At April 16, 2013 at 4:27 pm and in response to my post at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/16/the-msm-finally-notices-the-pause/#comment-1277502 you say
Sorry, but your comment displays two errors of understanding.
Firstly, each climate model is a representation of the climate system as understood by the modellers who constructed it. Hence, an error in that representation is observed if there is a difference between behaviour of the real climate and the climate behaviour predicted by the model. The error can be in
(a) the understanding of climate
or
(b) the representation of that understanding built into the model
or
(c) both (a) and (b).
There are no other possibilities.
The models predicted (n.b. predicted and not projected) “committed warming” which has not happened. This demonstrates that the models are in error in a manner which prevents them from predicting behaviour of the real climate. And, therefore, as I explained they are useless as tools for predicting (or projecting) the real climate.
Secondly, there was a hypothesis and my post quoted, cited and linked to it in the IPCC AR4 Report.
The hypothesis was that AGW would occur as emulated by the climate models. That hypothesis has been falsified by the disappearance of the “committed warming”. And that hypothesis was a representation of the understanding of climate behaviour in response to anthropogenic emissions of GHGs as built into the models; i.e. it was an emulation of the hypothesis of man-made global warming.
Simply, the important point is as I said in my post,
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the recent halt to global warming was not possible. But the halt happened and this demonstrates that the hypothesis of man-made global warming is wrong.
Richard
richardscourtney:
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify.
As I’ll use the term “prediction,” it is a product of a conditional prediction or “predictive inference.” An example of the latter is:
Given that is cloudy:
The probability of rain is 30%
Given that it is not cloudy:
The probability of rain in the next 24 hours is 10%
Given that it is cloudy, the prediction of this particular predictive inference is that the probability of rain is 30%. This claim is testable in the statistical population that underlies the associated model.
The models that you claim to have predicted the “pause” have no underlying statistical population. Thus, your “predictions” do not match my definition of predictions. They do match my definition of “projections.” Your argument rests upon an example of an equivocation fallacy that conflates my definition of “prediction” with my definition of “projection.”
Often we are duped into fighting tactical battles about the validity of facts and theory and while too often ignoring the stratigic war plan here.
We need to shine a bright light on the motivations of those who have corrupted the global warming issue.
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t our responsibility to bring that about?” Maurice Strong, former undersecretary of the UN
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will
be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” – Tim Wirth, former
member of Congress, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs.
There never were high CO2 trend changes in either long running thermometer or tide gauge records, which exposes any and all headline grabbing alarmist claims as being *lies* and extends the blade of the hockey sticks too far back to blame it on CO2 even if you ignore the bad math needed to create them.
So when do electricity prices and air-fares go down?
Mike Haseler says:
April 16, 2013 at 1:51 pm
….
I’m suggesting more than “not knowing” but having a formal concept. It’s the equivalent of saying that the answer to “if I have two apples and give away two apples … I have nothing” … meaning the absence of anything or the mathematical concept of “zero” is that there is something whose value is nothing.
In science “noise” is considered as an error: a perturbation of the signal … something that can be removed through averaging….
We aren’t arguing. I like that description of how science operates BTW. You used “deconstruction” in a manner that doesn’t invoke literary criticism and post-normal science. My son is an aerospace engineer and is currently dealing with the very kind of problem you discuss. My own point was different. It is that no matter how much we would like this to be a scientific issue, the majority of people involved are really not much concerned about understanding how climate really works so much as having the appearance of so doing. They want soothsayers rather than science.
I’m coming to the conclusion that a lot of climate science is based on the logical fallacy of confusing necessary with sufficient conditions.
http://bellsouthpwp.net/s/e/sean_c_rhoades/LogicalDebate/FallacyOfTheDay/Fallacy12.htm
As an example, an argument is presented that the recorded increase in energy imbalance at TOA, along with the observed decrease in outgoing longwave radiation within the wavelengths that CO2 is expected to absorb and re-radiate said energy, plus increases in the measured amounts of “back radiation”; constitute direct empirical evidence for CO2-induced global warming. However, I would suggest these are all necessary, but not sufficient, conditions to lead to that conclusion.
You can collect all the evidence you want to support each of these conditions individually, but it won’t be sufficient to reach that overall conclusion, because of this fallacy of composition within the argument itself.
An increasing energy imbalance would surely exist if warming was occurring for whatever reason, not just if CO2 is the culprit. So the change in energy imbalance itself is not a sufficient condition to relate CO2 to warming, it is only a necessary condition…and it is also a necessary condition of ANY warming.
The decrease in outgoing radiation in the CO2 wavelengths is just what you would expect to observe considering the known radiative properties of CO2…it doesn’t logically follow that this is the cause of the change in energy imbalance. It is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for that conclusion, since there could still be another cause or causes for the change in imbalance.
Finally, the increases in measured amounts of “back-radiation” are again a necessary but not a sufficient condition of CO2-induced warming since there could be another cause or causes besides increased back-radiation to explain modern warming.
The difficulty with the science seems to lie in first knowing the full number and nature of all sufficient conditions required to come to a particular conclusion when you’re looking at such a complex and chaotic system, and when some such conditions may not yet be even known or properly understood.
The SS Global Warming has hit the iceberg of truth and is rapidly sinking below the waves. As the cold and unforgiving waters of public backlash flood the hull, all the fellow travellers find themselves trapped. Squealing and foaming like rabid weasels, they are desperately trying to find an exit, but the Internet has welded all the hatches shut. Bleeding paws are franticly scrabbling at every hatch;
The missing heat is in the oceans!
Unpredicted negative feed backs!
Natural variability!
It’s just a pause, it will be back!
But there is no escape. They got the “basic physics” of the “settled science” wrong. They calculated linear flux to and from an atmosphere modelled as a mathematical layer or static body. However the gases in our atmosphere move. They should have run the flux equations iteratively on discrete moving air masses. They modelled conductive flux between the surface and atmosphere incorrectly, but more importantly, they never modelled the critical role radiative gases play in tropospheric convective circulation. It is not just the magnitude of the effects of radiative gases on atmospheric temperatures that they calculated incorrectly, but the very sign of their effect. Radiative gases cool our atmosphere at all concentrations above 0.0ppm
The claim that the atmosphere is 33C warmer than it would otherwise be without radiative gases is the very foundation of AGW claims. This basic error is recorded permanently on the Internet. There is no escape.
Slow down? Pause? Are you kidding???
Trenberth, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE find the missing heat. When Lewiston, Idaho reports that an AIRPORT has recorded a record low temperature, we are NOT talking P–A–U–S–E! Pendleton set a new record at its airport too. But Lewiston???? During the warm-up decades caused by oceanic oscillations, Lewiston was hotter than hell morning, noon, night, winter, spring, summer, fall, all the time! Not so the past few years I tell ya. It’s been FALLING! No pause. No slow down. FALLING!
“RECORD LOW TEMPERATURE SET AT LEWISTON ID AIRPORT
A RECORD LOW TEMPERATURE OF 28 DEGREES WAS SET AT LEWISTON ID
AIRPORT TODAY. THIS TIES THE OLD RECORD OF 28 SET IN 1894.”
My little piece of western pucker brush territory will dip below 26 tonight. Pendleton’s records go further back then Lewiston’s. And this time the warning is for a HARD freeze! As in tender wheat shoots killing freeze. I re-covered my outdoor faucets tonight and I had JUST uncovered them a week ago!
Brought to you by the new era of Weather is the harbinger of AGW.
Idiots.
By the way, me dear ol’ grandma (Irish through and through) always said, germinate seeds just before May but NEVER plant the vegetable garden till after May 7th. Why? She said that from time to time a hard frost will hit during the 1st week of May and wipe out your labors. She lived nearly 100 years. Probably knew what she was talking about.
Perhaps they are an exemplification (living example of) Charles Mackay’s work titled:
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
A couple of Charles’ famous quotes:
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”
.
Pause?? What pause? It’s worse than we thought… is all I’m hearing in rebuttal. It is like arguing with a phone answering system… beeeeeep. GK
Andrew says: “@jorge The duty warmist, jorgekafkazar, puts down an OP with:”
DirkH says: “Barkin up the wrong tree. Jorge just states a fact. The models probably even have the CO2 effect right. Where they fail is most prominently by inventing the never-observed-in-nature positive water vapor feedback. And a lot of other reasons…”
Thanks, DirkH. Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Andrew: to answer your question, above, if it’s still desired, Dirk’s water vapor feedback, above, is #1 model glitch. #2 is probably cloud handling algorithms. #3 may be the improper use of stochastic algorithms, empirical tables, or linear correlations. #4 may be neglecting convective heat transfer. #5 using constant values for varying parameters such as the black body temperature of the sky. #6 incorrect albedo for seawater and land surfaces. #7, possibly error in atmospheric thickness computation. Need I go on? The list is probably much longer. I’ve not delved deep enough into the models to know them all, but I have constructed models of complex systems and am well aware of some of the pitfalls.
Terry Oldberg:
Your post at April 16, 2013 at 7:33 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/16/the-msm-finally-notices-the-pause/#comment-1277670
makes false and untrue assertions concerning the contents of my post at April 16, 2013 at 3:40 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/16/the-msm-finally-notices-the-pause/#comment-1277502
I shall be blunt for clarity.
1. The IPCC AR4 made a clear prediction.
My post quotes it, references it, cites it, links to it, and explains it.
2. The IPCC AR4 prediction has proved wrong.
The predicted ”committed warming” has vanished and, therefore, the “pause” has occurred .
3. That failed prediction demonstrates climate model predictions of AGW are wrong.
It shows that the models don’t emulate climate so they do not emulate effects of changes to climate.
4. The media need to be made aware of points 1 to 3.
The media cannot investigate things of which they are not aware.
5. Your claim that there is not a prediction is plain daft.
My post quotes, references, cites, links to, and explains the prediction.
. Your belief in the existence of an undefined “equivocation fallacy” is your delusion.
You proclaim that this “equivocation fallacy” exists and has importance. I and others have repeatedly asked you to define, to state, and/or to explain this “equivocation fallacy” but you either cannot or will not. All – including me – who have questioned you about your equivocation fallacy have concluded that it only has an abstract existence, it is not defined, it has no effects, and it only exists in your mind: it is your delusion.
Richard
richardscourtney:
I have made no false assertions. Your attempt at proof of your assertion that I have done so is an example of an equivocation fallacy. This example employs the polysemic term “prediction” in making an argument, changes the meaning of this term in the midst of this argument and draws its conclusion from this argument. By logical rule, one cannot properly draw a conclusion in this way.
In this thread, I’m unaware of requests for me to describe the equivocation fallacy. This fallacy is known to logicians and examined by them in their literature. A Web search produces the URLs of numerous articles.
Available articles examine the role of this fallacy in arguments made by climatologists about the methodologies of their investigations of the global warming phenomenon. The biblography of one of these articles ( at http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/15/the-principles-of-reasoning-part-iii-logic-and-climatology/ ) provides citations to most of the others. In addition to myself, the authors of these articles are: a) Vincent Gray and b) Green and Armstrong. Gray’s “The triumph of doublespeak” is perinent but not cited.
Recently, I submitted a detailed report on the equivocatiion fallacy in global warming climatology to the commission that preparing a climate change assessment report for the government of the U.S. I think you’d find this report enlightening. Send a request to terry@knowledgetothemax.com if you’d like to receive a copy.
@Gail Combs says:
April 16, 2013 at 4:17 pm
@Gail Combs says:
April 16, 2013 at 4:17 pm
Sorry about the above content free post! Although I suppose it could be taken as meaning complete affirmation of your post where nothing more needed to be said. I won’t claim that though – regrettably, since it might have made me look like the epitome of incisiveness . I will admit a brain/attention/digit failure.
After that preamble, I will say much the same as I might like to have claimed in the above manner. My quoting of that point, basically based on what I happened to come across at the time, is at least for me, and I think generally, what people have been doing fairly typically in the attention given to the “background” realities to AGW. Whilst that awareness in itself is useful it only goes so far.
Your more comprehensive description adds meat to the bones and is what is needed to actually develop a case based on evidence as to what has and is still occurring. It is normal for the “white-collar” proponent apparently lurking in the background, but in fact indispensable to the implementation of such schemes, to be able to walk away with accrued benefits and no accountability. Que Wall Street.
For this to occur here would be a negligence that itself amounts to criminality. Comprehensive accounts and evidence should be detailed and developed. From what I have seen on this site, you are likely to have collected a valuable archive of information. Hopefully, people are retaining evidence as they come across it. From now on, to put all this together will be a major part of seeing not just reality prevail but justice.
Many of us have been watching the slow backtracking with great amusement. The Telegraph, Mail, Sun, Express and others followed by the Economist, AP and now Reuters. The last 3 are important and especially the last two as they are news agencies. Now let’s watch the media cut and past. The leaks from the great dam called CAGW will only get worse the longer the temperature standstill continues.
One of the hardest things in life is to admit your were a fool after nailing your flag to the mast / painting yourself into a corner / digging yourself into a hole. Stop digging. LOL.
@Peter says:
April 16, 2013 at 2:47 pm
Rationality will not prevail. Not at least in the sense of a careful consideration of an argument, and a formal evaluation. It doesn’t need to.
What will prevail is reality. A reality perceived as simple observations, not requiring elaboration. These can be summed up as: “They said this would happen and it didn’t.” This is not being simple minded, it reflects the core nature of intelligence itself. No need for fancy analysis.
Your comments about the Huffington Post, as being indicative of the established mindset and its obduracy, are only partly true.
Firstly, the type of person this publication caters to is not representative of the whole. Secondly, it is common when a basic belief or position is under threat to see a reaction that seeks to obliterate this threat by increased, not decreased, vigilance and virulence. A death spasm.
Ultimately, your concern is based on such people having a disproportionate, or even total, influence on the course of affairs largely through the capacity to dictate social requirements or norms. This has been the case, for those of that positioning and mentality, for many years. This does not mean it will prevail into the future. Everything indicates such dominance is now ending.
This is normal, and even though this manifestation is particularly repressive and dictatorial, it has reached its end point. The entire legitimacy of this class of people is now evaporating. The demise of Global Warming will play a significant role in that.
Such people are first and foremost conformists and cowards. When the ascendancy of this sectional interest group is undermined, and confidence in the efficacy of their tribal mob becomes uncertain, the adherents will disappear into the woodwork.
@ richardscourtney says:
April 16, 2013 at 5:06 pm
Precisely.
This whole proposition is now discredited entirely on the basis of previous claims by its proponents. No science is required. No argument need be mounted.
All that needs to be done – from the point of view of public understanding – is to compile previous claims, back to Hansen in 1988, compare them to reality, and say: “Here, look”.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
No diversions. Obfuscation shown for the deceit it is. Illustration of personal benefits accrued by participants. Revelation of duplicity which shows character.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
And in recent scientific news we have:
Long live the temperature standstill.
Jimbo:
re your post at April 17, 2013 at 2:48 am.
The paper by Nic Lewis showing “low climate sensitivity” is now being discussed in a WUWT thread presented by Nic Lewis at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/16/an-objective-bayesian-estimate-of-climate-sensitivity/
Richard
Jimbo says
Long live the temperature standstill.
Henry says
The problem is that temperature will not stand still. If you look across my tables,
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/
it becomes clear that the worst of the cooling is yet to come
Before they started with the carbon dioxide nonsense, people looked at the planets to explain weather cycles, 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 range in meters between a plentiful flood and a drought flood seems minor in the numbers but real in consequence….
end quote
According to my table for maxima, I calculate the date where the sun decided to take a nap, as being around 1995, and not 1990 as William Arnold predicted.
This is looking at energy-in. It looks like earth reached its maximum output (means) a few years later, around 1998.
Anyway, look again at my best sine wave plot for my data
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
now see:
1900 minimum flooding – end of the warming
1950 maximum flooding – end of cooling
1995 minimum flooding – end of warming.
predicted 2035-2040 – maximum flooding – end of cooling.
Do you see the pertinent correlation of the flooding of the Nile with my sine wave?
Lastly, to make the gravity of what we are discussing here even more clear:
the world has to wake up to the fact that it is globally cooling because it (i.e. more cooling) will have dire consequences for global agriculture. Note the poor crops in 2012 in Anchorage.
In the little ice age thousands died because of hunger and starvation.
This is because the differential between zero latitude and 90 degrees latitude will become bigger. Naturally, apart from more cooling at higher latitudes, this will also cause less precipitation at higher latitudes and more at lower latitudes. This will amplify the cooling effect due to less insolation occurring naturally at lower latitudes. Do you get that? Do you understand why this is so?
So, to prevent famines in the future, for 7 billion people and counting, to survive, we need to encourage more agriculture at lower latitudes, e.g. Africa, south America.
Now, how about some of you clever people here peer review my tables – and do some stats to confirm what I am observing, because if what I am saying is right, we should be ringing the alarm bells. There really is nothing to celebrate about global cooling.
Let me be absolutely clear: The diehards will NEVER admit they were wrong. They will create excuses “like the ocean ate my global warming and it will come back later” but will NEVER admit they were wrong. You see, the ocean argument means they can carry on with their careers, retire and still cling on in 50 years time and take their theory to their graves. Even if we entered another Little Ice Age, it won’t matter. The heat is hiding. Simple.
Expect a new IPCC deep ocean temperature projection out to 2100. 😉
richardscourtney says:
April 16, 2013 at 3:40 pm
//////////////////////////////////
Richard
As usual you have made a number of powerful observations. I was pleased to see you making a strong case regarding all existing natural resources are free; it is only a matter of the costs of extraction, conversion to energy, and distribution thereof that costs money. This is a fundamental point which is often overlooked, or not understood.
As regards the so called basic physics, you state:
“…I again state the importance in case there are readers here who do not know it.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the recent halt to global warming was not possible. But the halt happened and this demonstrates that the hypothesis of man-made global warming is wrong.
This is stated in IPCC AR4 (2007) Chapter 10.7 which can be read at
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-7.html
…”
/////////////////////////////////////////
A point which is often overlooked by the warmists is that the proclaimed effects of the simple physics of CO2 is that an increase in CO2 levels LEADS ALWAYS to an INCREASE in backradiation, and thereby an increase in warming and/or heat trapping. An increase in the concentration of CO2 cannot give rise to no temperature increase, let alone to a drop in temperatures. If the warmists are right about CO” residency and the locked in effect of that that already exists, one does not even require an increase in concentration of CO2 for further warming to inevitably occur.
Accordingly, it follows as a matter of first principle, in any year where CO2 levels increase unless there is a corresponding increase in temperatures, the CO2 warming conjecture is potentially being invalidated. Thus in any year where there is an increase in CO2 concentrations and no corresponding increase in temperature an explanation is required explaining why there was no observed warming that year. That explanation must be consistent with the physics of the CO2 warming conjecture.
Of course, that explanation could be nothing more onerous than it is due to natural variation; ie., an unexplained phenomena that is as strong or stronger than the effects of CO2. However, reliance on natural variation inevitably undermines the entire CO2 conjecture since it recognises the effects of matters which we do not know or understand but which are at least as powerful as CO2. Once one accepts the existence of such natural variation and its power, immediately the entire thermometer record becomes explainable by natural variation without the need for CO2 to play any role whatsoever.
Accordingly the pause in warming is of utmost significance and even climate scientists recognise the need to explain this. There is no easy explanation which remains consistent with the underlying premise for the claimed effects of the basic physics of the properties of CO2, and hence the reason why we are seeing such desperate claims such as the backradiated energy has suddenly stopped heating the atmosphere but through some unspecified switch in process has decided to take refuge in the deep ocean. That claim is not simply a sign of desperation but opens a Pandora’s box.
Of course, there can only be a pause to the warming, if in practice there was significant warming taking place before the pause interrupted matters. You will note from my comment (richard verney says: April 16, 2013 at 4:05 pm) that I question whether there was in fact much warming post the late 1970s (apart from natural warming that took place incidental to the 1998 super El Nino) . I am sceptical of the land based thermometer record which I consider has become so basterdised that it is not possible to draw any firm conclusion from it, and it appears irreconcilable with the satellite data set (dependent upon the significant one places upon the fact that the satellite data set is not measuring ground temperature).
@Jimbo says:
April 17, 2013 at 3:24 am
Agreed that the “diehards” will not change. What that 2 or 3% think – and it is that small a proportion who cannot extract themselves – is irrelevant.
They must have the active support of at least another 10 or 15% minimum AND the compliance of something close to the majority of the rest of the population.
This is not just a matter of the “democratic process”. If a significant section of society see that this threatens their very basis in life, and “politics” is unresponsive, there will be violence.
This issue has been created and – tenuously – maintained at a certain level through relentless manipulation and propaganda, and plain deceit. It cannot survive any failure in that.
BTW I realize your comment was largely sardonic!
For any Warmists who deny the temperature pause please see the following. Some climate scientists have been aware about pauses since 2005. We are now in 2013 and still some people deny the pause. I wonder why?
Even some brave folks who should know better plunged in some time back.
Yet in March 2013 we still have those denying the standstill. What kind of world is this??? Sheesh.
richard verney:
Thankyou for your post addressed to me at April 17, 2013 at 4:15 am.
My response to your argument is Yes.
Richard
Arthur4563 (April 16; 8.12am) has summarised the whole thing beautifully. Also:
‘It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown variations, scientists say..’
Oh, right – so you guys are now admitting that YOU HAVEN’T GOT A CLUE – and we’re all being charged BILLIONS to fund ‘climate change/CO2 reduction’ measures which are probably worse than useless..
Oh, boy – I see some wonderful Class Actions coming along…
How about their projections?
Jimbo:
I’m short on the time it would take to read the report from which you quote but gather from your quote that the authors have extracted confidence limits on the rate of change of the population mean through fabrication of information about the properties of a non-existent population containing time-temperature pairs at intervals in time that are infinitesimally separated. In this population, the population mean varies linearly with the time, events are statistically independent and the residual errors are normally distributed.
Terry Oldberg, we are being asked to make drastic changes to our way of life based on projections / predictions (take your pick) that are currently observed to be failing. If the failing continues will you concede that the models as they stand have failed.
Jimbo:
The models that have thus far been created are unsuitable for the purpose of regulating the global temperature. Thus, it is accurate to say that the government-sponsored research which created these models has been a complete failure. The conclusion that the ‘pause’ proves these models to have failed results from a flawed argument.
Correcttion:
“…..models as they stand have failed?“
Or theat climate sensitivity according to the IPCC is in error? No?
This is the sign of a religion. They will consider everything except this.
I’ve been seeing more and more creative ways to photograph steam, in order to impress low information consumers of low information journalism but yikes! That one has raised the bar. It wouldn’t surprise me if most of that is fog rising off a relatively warm body of water, on a cold morning.
No, the incessant drum beat of doom goes on. Case in point, this morning’s NPR broadcast about the oh-so-scary looming demise of the Great Barrier Reef and the “OMG! Look what happens in this experimental coral reef tank when we boil the water and suddenly spike the CO2 content! Reefageddon I tell ya!”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/03/07/173702462/australias-heron-island-a-canary-in-the-coal-mine-for-coral-reefs
richardscourtney says:
April 16, 2013 at 3:55 pm “Zeke: Please allow me to correct the error in your post at April 16, 2013 at 3:15 pm.”
RichardsCourtney, you have pointed out that all energy is technically free, but to mine it or retreive it or harvest it and to distribute it in any way all costs money. You next say “There are NO alternatives to energy from fossil fuels and nuclear power which are anywhere near as cheap.”
First we must both agree on the problem we are both addressing. From the Reuters article:
“Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments’ willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the end of 2015 to combat global warming.” So the problem is twofold: on the one hand governments and banks have already decided to sabotage and destroy the fossil fuel industry; and on the other hand, there is no replacement technology. The efforts to close coal plants have been successful both here and in the UK; and while remaining coal fired plants such as Drax has not been closed, it has been required to burn wood instead of coal. Here where I live, coal plants are slated to be closed in the next 7 years. I think we both agree that renewables such as worthless wind turbines are an intermittent expense added on to our coal and gas plants, which also introduce price and supply volatility resulting in blackouts and rising energy prices for consumers and industry. This describes the problem we both are discussing.
Now the people are far less convinced of the science, yet the destruction of our energy sector continues unabated. Progressives who previously had the integrity to stand up and be counted among sceptics, and reject the abuse of science for political gain, continue to call for the destruction of coal and oil power called for by governments, NGOs, and banks. How can they do this? They argue that new free energy sources will appear. All that is necessary is to destroy the greedy evil coal and gas industries, and these repressed sources of energy will simply emerge.
Perhaps you were not aware of this “logic.”
I will now disagree with your first point, and correct your own error. Let’s suppose, in a thought experiment for a moment, that there was a cheap new source of power, and that new source of power needed to be developed, manufactured, shipped, and purchased at an affordable price by as many people as possible both here and abroad. The only way that could happen is by the full use of cheap abundant energy, a powerful infrastructure, and through mass production – even money cannot provide all of these, if they are regulated out of affordability. So your statement that money is necessary to retrieve free energy is only partially true. It is the infrastructure, capital, and power that would make this new energy source available in a meaningful and affordable way to all the people who need it. So to argue that our power and transportation system must be crippled and destroyed in order for new free energy sources to emerge, as is the habit of some, is an argument that is even less sufferable from an engineering and scientific pov than the argument that we must destroy the use of fossil fuels because of C02 emissions. People who make these kinds of arguments reveal that they have no experience, expertise, scientific, engineering, or economic understanding and have recused themselves from any kind of credibility in the subject of electricity. No endless sources of QE or government funds can materialize the replacement technology for fossil fuel. And the window for that to happen is being closed by the transition to worthless wind and solar and the closing of the coal plants.
TomB says:
April 17, 2013 at 7:47 am
Perhaps the Churchill quote is apropos:
– Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in November 1942
Zeke:
Thankyou for your post addressed to me at April 17, 2013 at 9:15 am.
My reply to each of its main points is, Yes.
Richard
Terry Oldberg:
I am replying to your post addressed to me at April 17, 2013 at 9:18 am
I made no fallacies.
The IPCC made a prediction. I cited it, quoted it, linked to it, and explained it.
That is not a fallacy as anybody can check for themselves by reading my post at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/16/the-msm-finally-notices-the-pause/#comment-1277502
Your pretence that the IPCC did not make a prediction ‘lets them off the hook’.
And, importantly, it contravenes the fundamental scientific principle that model outputs are assessed by comparison to empirical reality.
Whatever definitions you may dream up, the IPCC did make the prediction and reality has shown the prediction is wrong.
You say to me
Firstly, I am sure the commission will accept your report with gratitude because they desperately want excuses for the increasing failure of the models.
Secondly, I am grateful for your kind offer, but that is not what I want. I would like a clear, simple and succinct statement of your “equivocatiion fallacy” together with any required definitions of terms used in that statement to be posted here for all to see. After that I may want to accept your kind offer of a copy of your treatise which only I would see.
Richard
richardscourtney:
In your latest message to me, you make an argument that contains the two polysemic terms “prediction” and “model.” The presence in this argument of polysemic terms invalidates your conclusion that your previously made argument was sound.
A possible corrective for staying endlessly on this merry-go-round is for you to bone up on the equivocation fallacy and its role in deceptive climatological arguments. As Vincent Gray, Green and Armstrong, I and numerous logicians have already published on this issue, I don’t see it as appropriate for me to have to supply you with a customized, pro-bono tutorial.
Jimbo is correct in observing that even a return of the Little Ice Age wouldn’t convince climate scientists that an AGW process isn’t currently operative in the earth’s climate system. The climate science community has too much financial and intellectual capital invested in AGW ever to abandon it.
I’m talking about the climate scientists themselves here, not simply those in the activist environmental movement who believe AGW is real and is very dangerous.
Here is a completely serious observation on my part — glacial ice sheets must be crossing the Canadian border before American climate scientists in government and in academia ever admit their climate models are deeply flawed.
Yes Bunky, these climate scientists are that corrupt and that intellectually dishonest.
As a practical matter, the issue of AGW will not be decisively resolved unless environmental activists impose truly serious near-term sacrifices on the American public, sacrifices which go far beyond the death by a thousand regulatory cuts which damage America’s economy but which don’t necessarily reduce America’s and the world’s total carbon emissions.
Beta Blocker:
An alternative to death by a thousand regulatory cuts is for fossil fuel producers to join together in lawsuits against climatologists and their employers alleging fraud.
From Columbia University. It would seem obvious that heat rises and that the Sun heats the ocean, not the air.
Conduction: When air is contact with the ocean is at a different temperature than that the sea surface; heat transfer by conduction takes place. On average the ocean is about 1 or 2 degrees warmer than the atmosphere so on average ocean heat is transferred from ocean to atmosphere by conduction. The heated air is more buoyant than the air above it, so it convects the ocean heat upward into the atmosphere. If the ocean were colder than the atmosphere (which of course happens) the air in contact with the ocean cools, becoming denser and hence more stable, more stratified. As such the conduction process does a poor job of carrying the atmosphere heat into the cool ocean. This occurs over the subtropical upwelling regions of the ocean. The transfer of heat between ocean and atmosphere by conduction is more efficient when the ocean is warmer than the air it is in contact with. On global average the oceanic heat loss by conduction is only 24 watts per square meter.
Terry Oldberg:
I said to you
Your reply is at at April 17, 2013 at 12:12 pm but you seem to have overlooked my request.
Please provide me with a clear, simple and succinct statement of your “equivocation fallacy”.
Indeed, your reply to me causes me to make an additional request.
It begins saying.
richardscourtney:
In response to your latest message to me, I offer the following reply. My reply is a lightly edited version of comments I submitted earlier to an advisory committee to the government of the United States. My comments are on a draft of the Federal Advisory Committee Climate Assessment Report (FACCAR) that has been offered up by this committee for public comment. My comments on this documsnt start immediately below.
Summary and Introduction
No statistical population underlies the models by which climatologists project the amount, if any, of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions that the people of the United States will have to endure in the future. For the people of the United States, the absence of a statistical population has dire consequences. They include:
• The inability of the models to provide policy makers with information about the
outcomes from their policy decisions,
• The insusceptibility of the models to being statistically validated and,
• The inability of the government to control the climate through regulation of
greenhouse gas emissions.
Notwithstanding its inability to control the climate, our government continues to enact legislation and spend money in attempts at controlling the climate. Evidently the government continues to labor under one or more misapprehensions. To relieve the government of these misapprehensions is a task that the authors of the FACCAR should do.
Currently, the FACCAR reveals neither the absence of a statistical population nor the consequences from this absence. Rather than describe global warming climatology warts and all, the FACCAR obscures its unsavory features through repeated applications of a deceptive argument. Philosophers call this argument the equivocation fallacy ( Wikipedia: “Equivocation.” ) .
In the course of the following remarks, I show how the Advisory Committee can, if it wishes, expose and eliminate instances of this fallacy in the version of the FACCAR that eventually is published. Elimination of all instances of the fallacy would reveal to public view that the publicly supported investigation of the global warming phenomenon has failed. Retention of the fallacy would conceal this failure from public view.
The Equivocation Fallacy
Currently the failure of global warming research is concealed by multiple instances of the equivocation fallacy (EF). An example of an EF follows (Jumonville, 2003 ):
Major premise: A plane is a carpenter’s tool.
Minor premise: A Boeing 737 is a plane.
Conclusion: A Boeing 737 is a carpenter’s tool.
Like the argument which is called a “syllogism,” (Wikipedia: “Syllogism.” ) the example has a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. Like a syllogism, the example has three terms; they are “plane,” “carpenter’s tool” and “Boeing 737.” Thus, it would be easy for one to mistake the example of an EF for a syllogism. However, there is a significant difference between the example and a syllogism: the conclusion of a syllogism is true but the conclusion of the example, that “a Boeing 737 is a carpenter’s tool,” is false. What is it about the example that makes its conclusion false when the conclusion of a syllogism is true?
A pathological feature of the example can be exposed by replacement of the first instance of “plane” by “carpenter’s plane” and by replacement of the second instance of “plane” by “airplane.” The example then reads:
Major premise: A carpenter’s plane is a carpenter’s tool.
Minor premise: A Boeing 737 is an airplane.
Conclusion: A Boeing 737 is a carpenter’s tool.
While being like a syllogism in certain respects, the reworded example has four terms while a syllogism has three of them; the four terms are “carpenter’s plane,” “carpenter’s tool,” “airplane” and “Boeing 737.” Rather than being an example of a syllogism, the reworded example is a four term fallacy ( Wikipedia, “Fallacy of Four Terms” ) . That there are four terms has the consequence that the reworded example does not have the three terms that are a property of a syllogism. It is no surprise, then, that the conclusion of the example is false.
The technique that I used in exposing the fallaciousness of the example is suitable for general use. The technique is to disambiguate all of the terms in the language in which an argument is made. Prior to my rewording of the example, the term “plane” had two meanings; one was “carpenter’s plane”; the other was “airplane.” A term that has several meanings is said to be “polysemic.” Disambiguation of the language in which an argument is made eliminates the polysemic terms from this argument. It is the presence of polysemic terms that can lead a person to mistake an EF for a syllogism.
The source of the term “equivocation fallacy” is as follows. An “equivocation” is an argument in which a term changes meanings in the middle of this argument. By logical rule, a proper conclusion cannot be drawn from an equivocation ( Hall, “Proper inferences avoid equivocation.” ). To draw a conclusion from an equivocation is the “equivocation fallacy.”
Polysemic terms in climatology
In making arguments regarding the methodologies of their studies, global warming climatologists use polysemic terms. Some of these terms are words. Others are word pairs. The two words of a word pair sound alike and while they have different meanings climatologists treat the two words as though they were synonyms in making arguments.
The following terms are polysemic and are used by climatologists in making methodological arguments (Oldberg, 2011):
model
scientific
project-predict
projection-prediction
validate-evaluate
validation-evaluation
An example
A post to the blog Real Climate offers an example of an EF in the methodological argument of a global warming climatologist. Under the heading “Is Climate Modeling Science?,” the global warming climatologist Gavin Schmidt attacks an opponent’s claim that climate models are not scientific. His argument, though, draws an improper conclusion from an equivocation thus being an example of an EF.
Were climate models of the past built under the scientific method of inquiry? Schmidt argues that:
At first glance this seems like a strange question. Isn’t science precisely the quantification of
observations into a theory or model and then using that to make predictions? Yes. And are
those predictions in different cases then tested against observations again and again to
either validate those models or generate ideas for potential improvements? Yes, again. So
the fact that climate modeling was recently singled out as being somehow non-scientific
seems absurd (Schmidt, 2005).
Reduced to the form of major premise, minor premise and conclusion, Dr. Schmidt’s argument seems to be:
Major premise: All scientific models are built by a process in which the predictions of these models are validated.
Minor premise: All climate models are built by a process in which the predictions of these models are validated.
Conclusio: All climate models are scientific models.
Upon superficial examination, this argument seems to be an example of a syllogism. As the conclusion of a syllogism is true, the conclusion of Dr. Schmidt’s argument also seems to be true. However, with the help of the list of polysemic terms provided earlier, it can be seen that this argument contains the polysemic terms “model,” “scientific,” “prediction” and “validate.” Dr. Schmidt’s argument, then, draws its conclusion from an equivocation. By logical rule, this conclusion is improper.
Need for disambiguation
One can avoid reaching improper conclusions about the methodologies of climatological studies by disambiguating terms in the language of the associated arguments. In the course of the following remarks, I disambiguate these terms.
Disambiguating “model”
In the language in which global warming climatologists make methodological arguments, the word “model” is polysemic. The word means: a) a kind of algorithm that makes a predictive inference and b) a kind of algorithm that makes no predictive inference. That a “model” makes and does not make a predictive inference is of logical significance, for logic contains rules that discriminate correct from incorrect predictive inferences. Without a predictive inference, these rules are inoperative.
Thus, going forward I’ll disambiguate the language of the methodological arguments of global warming climatology through elimination of the polysemic term “model.” I’ll accomplish this task by reserving the word “model” for reference to the kind of algorithm that makes a predictive inference. For reference to the kind of algorithm that makes no predictive inference, I’ll reserve the French word modèle. As I’ll soon show, models and modèles have remarkably different characteristics. To fail to distinguish between a model and a modèle is to obscure these differences.
Disambiguating predict-project and prediction-projection
To “predict” is to do something different than to “project” yet most global warming climatologists use the two terms synonymously (Green and Armstrong, 2007). In doing so, they create the polysemic term predict-project and the polysemic term prediction-projection. I shall disambiguate the two polysemic terms by drawing a distinction between: a) predict and project and b) prediction and projection.
The idea of a “prediction” is closely related to the idea of a “predictive inference.” This relationship follows from the fact that a predictive inference is a conditional prediction. An example of one is provided by the following two statements:
Given that it is cloudy:
the probability of rain in the next 24 hours is thirty percent.
Given that it is not cloudy:
the probability of rain in the next 24 hours is ten percent.
A “prediction” is an unconditional predictive inference. It is like a predictive inference but with the exception that one of the conditions has a probability of 1 because this condition has been observed. Suppose cloudy has a probability of 1 because it has been observed. Then the prediction that is a product of the predictive inference referenced immediately above is
The probability of rain in the next 24 hours is thirty percent.
Thirty percent is the probability of rain, given that it is cloudy in the associated predictive inference.
To make a prediction, one needs a predictive inference. A predictive inference is made by a model. A predictive inference is not made by a modèle. Thus, while predictions are made by a model, a modèle is incapable of making predictions.
On the other hand, a modèle is capable of making projections while a model is incapable of making them. The “projection” of global warming climatology is a mathematical function that maps the time to the projected global average surface air temperature.
Related to the idea of a “predictive inference” is the idea of the independent events in a statistical population. Each such event is associated with a state of nature that is called a “condition” and a state of nature that is called an “outcome.” In the above example, an event has one of two possible conditions; they are “cloudy” and “not-cloudy.” Also, an event has one of two possible outcomes; they are “rain in the next 24 hours” and “no rain in the next 24 hours.” The statistical population of a model is said to “underlie” this model. A modèle has no underlying statistical population.
The statistical population of a model has properties called “relative frequencies.” The non-existent statistical population of a modèle has no such properties. A consequence is for probability theory to be inapplicable to a modèle. A further consequence is for it to be impossible for the builder of a modèle to express incomplete information.
Disambiguating validate-evaluate and validation-evaluation
Validate-evaluate and validation-evaluation are polysemic terms that were created by the IPCC. As the long time IPCC expert reviewer Vincent Gray tells the story ( Gray, 2008, pp 8-9 ), many years ago he complained to IPCC management that the IPCC assessment reports of the day were claiming the IPCC modèles to have been validated when these modèles were insusceptible to being validated. After tacitly admitting to Dr. Gray’s charge, the IPCC established a policy of changing the term “validate” to the similar sounding term “evaluate” and the term “validation” to the similar sounding term “evaluation.” Thereafter, many climatologists fell into the habit of treating the words in each word-pair as if they were synonyms. A consequence was for the two polysemic terms validate-evaluate and validation-evaluation to be created. These terms may be disambiguated through recognition of the fact that the meanings of the words in each word-pair differ.
A model is said to be “validated” when the predicted relative frequencies of the outcomes of events are compared to the observed relative frequencies in a sample that is randomly drawn from the underlying statistical population, without a significant difference being found between them. As it has no underlying statistical population, a modèle is insusceptible to being validated. However, it is susceptible to being “evaluated.” In an evaluation, projected global average surface air temperatures are compared to observed global average surface air temperatures in a selected time series.
Disambiguating “scientific”
According to Wikipedia ( Wikipedia, “Scientific theory”), “A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment.” For a model, validation serves the purpose of confirming through observation and experiment. Does evaluation serve the same purpose for a modèle?
No it does not. In an evaluation, projected temperatures are compared to observed temperatures but a judgment is not made in which claims made by a modèle are confirmed or denied. Thus, “scientific” cannot legitimately be used as a modifier of “modèle.” On the other hand, under Wikipedia’s definition of “scientific theory,” “scientific” can legitimately be used as a modifier of “model.”
Translating Gavin Schmidt’s argument
With the help of the disambiguated terminology developed immediately above, Dr.Schmidt’s argument can be translated into a form in which it is free from the potential for drawing a conclusion from an equivocation. With its polysemic terms removed and conclusion rewritten for consistency with its premises, this argument reads:
Major premise: All scientific models are built by a process in which the predictions of these models are validated.
Minor premise: All climate modèles are built by a process in which the projections of these modèles are evaluated.
Conclusion: (none logically possible)
No conclusion is logically possible from it because the Dr. Schmidt’s argument is not of the form of a syllogism. On the other hand, it appears to be of this form prior to disambiguation of polysemic terms in the language in which it is expressed.
The conclusion that “All climate models are scientific models” is a consequence from drawing an improper conclusion from an equivocation. To draw such a conclusion is an example of an EF. Dr. Schmidt’s conclusion results from an EF.
Contrasting a model and a modèle
Disambiguation of terms in the language in which climatologists make methodological arguments reveals that there is a contrast between a model and a modèle. This contrast is illustrated in the table positioned immediately below
model modèle
makes predictive inference makes no predictive inference
makes predictions makes no predictions
underlying statistical population no underlying statistical population
makes no projections makes projections
susceptible to validation insusceptible to validation
insusceptible to evaluation susceptible to evaluation
product of scientific method not product of scientific method
conveys information to user conveys no information to user
makes climate controllable does not make climate controllable
The last two lines of the above table deserve amplification. If there were any, predictions from a climate model would convey information to a policy maker about the outcomes from his or her policy decisions prior to these outcomes happening; the availability of this information might make the climate controllable. Currently, however, we have no climate models. We do have climate modèles but they make no predictions hence conveying no information to a policy maker. Thus, after decades of effort and the expenditure of several hundred billion U.S. dollars on global warming research, the climate remains uncontrollable. Nonetheless governments, including our federal government, persist in trying to control the climate.
It is conceivable that climate models can be built. To try to build them offers the only hope for one day being able to control the climate.
The “models” of AR4
Every entity which, in IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4), is referenced by the polysemic term “model” is an example of a modèle. Each modèle has traits lying on the right hand side of the contrast presented immediately above. These traits are:
makes no predictive inference
makes no predictions
no underlying statistical population
makes projections
insusceptible to validation
susceptible to evaluation
not product of scientific method
conveys no information to user
does not make climate controllable
If the language of the methodological arguments that are made in the FACCAR were to be disambiguated, the authors of the FACCAR would be compelled to admit that the items in the above list are descriptive of the climate modèles that are currently being used in making policy on emissions of greenhouse gases by the federal government. If these admissions are not made, there will be continuing catastrophic waste of the capital of the people of the U.S. on: a) attempts at controlling the uncontrollable and b) foolishly framed, deceptively described global warming research. To make these admissions would require courage and integrity on the part of the Advisory Committee.
Works cited
Wikipedia: “Equivocation.” URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation .
Wikipedia: “Syllogism.” URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism .
Jumonville, D., 2003: “Fallacies in Argument.” URL = http://lionsden.tec.selu.edu/~djumonville/etec641/WebQuest/fallacy.htm .
Wikipedia: “ “Fallacy of Four Terms:” URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_four_terms .
Hall, James: “Proper inferences avoid equivocation ”: Lecture 13 in the series of lectures entitled “Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World Through Experience and Reason.” This series is published on DVDs by The Teaching Company.
Oldberg, T. 2011: “The Principles of Reasoning. Part III: Logic and Climatology.” URL = http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/15/the-principles-of-reasoning-part-iii-logic-and-climatology/ .
Schmidt, Gavin 2005: “Is Climate Modelling Science?” URL = http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/ .
Gray, Vincent 2008: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Spinning the Climate.” URL = http://icecap.us/images/uploads/SPINNING_THE_CLIMATE08.pdf .
Green, Kestin and J. Scott Armstrong: “Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists vs. Scientific Forecasts,” Energy and Environment, Vol 18, No. 7+8, 2007. URL = http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/files/WarmAudit31.pdf .
Wikipedia, “Scientific theory, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory .
I apologise to all that I failed to close quotation after “…argument was sound.” in my post at April 17, 2013 at 1:03 pm.
Richard
When private industry lobbies the government to do something, and it turns out private industry was totally wrong, it is somehow always the government’s (politicians’) fault and the government (politicians) who gets the blame. Apparently what works for private industry also works for scientists. Why would anyone ever want to be in government?
Please correct me if I’m wrong but I think what Terry Oldberg is saying is that the computer models the climatologists use to make their “projections” of the future climate, or “modeles” as he called them, are not to be confused with “models” that represent a theoretical understanding of a subject and can be used to make actual predictions.
As such Terry is saying that the modeles can’t be “falsified” because they were never making predictions in the first place (merely projections) and so there is nothing to falsify. Basically all are in agreement that the modeles are rubbish, just that Terry is saying they cannot be “falsified” using statistical analysis of actual trends since the modeles aren’t using valid statistical techniques in the first place (he says they are absent a statistical population).
So basically there is general agreement but argument over semantics, arising from using the term “falsifying”.
Graham W:
Thankyou for your attempt to help in your post at April 17, 2013 at 2:44 pm.
I am truly grateful because I suspect you may be right. However, with no disrespect to you, I want Terry to make a simple statement of what he means. Like you, I could say what I think he means, and so could anyone else. But there is only one true meaning of Terry’s words and it is his responsibility to provide it.
Please note that this is NOT an esoteric matter because it has potential for serious practical effects.
This thread is about media understanding of AGW. The climate models are the source of the predictions and projections of future climate. The models have made a wrong prediction (n.b. prediction and not projection). The media can understand that information and the implications of it.
But that information is obscured by proclamations that the models don’t make predictions and projections because of some “equivocation fallacy” which nobody – not even its inventor – can explicitly state.
Richard
richardscourtney:
You seem to believe I invented the equivocation fallacy thus being compelled by the requirement for clarity of expression to describe it. If so, your belief is false.
richardscourtney: No problem, I take your point. Good to see you posting here again, by the way!
Lawsuits brought by fossil fuel producers against climatologists and their employers will have little positive effect in the absence of a widespread public debate over AGW policy issues, a debate which challenges the validity of AGW science and theory.
We will not see that kind of useful debate emerge unless and until the voting public is asked to make significant near-term economic and lifestyle sacrifices in order to reduce their carbon footprints, both individually and collectively.
Only when the voting public is asked by America’s most influential political leaders to make significant personal and collective sacrifices in the name of carbon emission reductions will AGW alarmists be compelled to publicly defend their theories, in direct response to informed criticism.
So …. Why hasn’t America’s senior political leadership declared a War on Carbonism, and why haven’t they asked the American public to make significant near-term economic and lifestyle sacrifices in order to reduce their carbon footprints?
We kind of know the answer to that question, don’t we?
If America’s politicians asked us to make the sacrifices necessary to reduce our carbon footprints, climate change would suddenly become a contentious public issue, one which was highly visible on everyone’s day-to-day radar, and therefore an issue worthy of extended public debate.
For those who promote AGW theories as their profession, the outcome of a widespread public debate concerning the validity of those AGW theories might be either a blessing or a curse, depending on which way it went.
Would both AGW alarmists and AGW skeptics alike be willing to gamble that an extended public debate over the validity of AGW science might be either a blessing or a curse for their respective agendas, once the dust finally settled?
Beta Blocker:
It seems to me that multi-billion dollar judgements for fraud against prominent research universities would have a salutary effect on the quality of the research that is conducted by these universities.
Terry Oldberg:
I have noted your post at April 17, 2013 at 4:30 pm.
I ask you to please reply to my post at April 17, 2013 at 1:03 pm
Richard
richardscourtney:
Regarding your request of April 17, 2013 at 1:03 pm, you’ve got my response.
Terry Oldberg:
re your answer to me at April 17, 2013 at 4:43 pm .
Thankyou, that is very clear.
Either you don’t know what you are talking about or you are incapable of saying it other than in gobbledeygook. So, please stop wasting space on numerous WUWT threads and elsewhere with the meaningless gobbledegook.
And, importantly, DO NOT claim I made a false argument (as you did e.g. at April 17, 2013 at 12:12 pm) when you are incapable of stating or are unwilling to state any error in what I said except in meaningless gobbledeygook which has no meaning except to you.
Richard
richardscourtney:
Being unwilling to join you in fallacious argumentation and unable to engage you in logical argumentation, I wish you a good day.
The lack of warming for 16 years is only one of a long list of fundamental issues with the extreme AGW hypothesis.
If an idea, a theory is repeated enough, it is natural to assume there is some truth to the hypothesis. What has been ignored is there are multiple periods when planetary temperature does not correlate with atmospheric CO2.
For example, the following is Greenland Ice Sheet temperature Vs atmospheric CO2 for the last 11,000 years. The Greenland Ice sheet gradually becomes colder and experiences the Dansgaard-Oeschger warming and cooling cycles (1450 year cycle plus or minus 500 years) and atmospheric CO2 gradually increases. The Greenland Ice Sheet temperature is not disconnected from planetary temperature. There are periods in the geological record where there are ice epochs of millions of years when atmospheric CO2 was high and periods of millions of years when atmospheric CO2 has low and the planet was warm.
The observational data and basic analysis indicates that there is something fundamental that has been missed.
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://www.climate4you.com/
Scientists as opposed to agenda pushers, try to solve physical problems.
The AGW theory predicted – this is fundamental logical pillar of the theory, if the ‘prediction’ does not occur the theory is invalid – that the AGW warming should be the greatest in the tropics as this is the region where there is the largest amount of long wave radiation reflected off in to space. As the lower atmosphere is saturated due to the overlap of water vapour and CO2, the ‘theory’ predicted that the tropical tropospheric warming at roughly 10 km above the surface of the planet. The tropospheric warming at roughly 10 km in turn would warm the tropics by long wave radiation.
There has been no tropical warming in the 20th century and there has been no tropical tropospheric warming at roughly 10 km. The warming that has occurred in the 20th is in high latitude regions.
Interesting that that there are cycles of past warming (1450 years plus or minus 500 years) followed by cooling in high latitude regions in the paleorecord.
It is difficult to understand how group think and peer pressure can inhibit the solution of what caused the past warming and cooling cycles.
[34] Recently, it has been claimed that model‐based estimates of global‐scale TLT changes are a factor of three larger than the observed ‘residual’ TLT trend (J. R. Christy, Testimony in Hearing before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, March 8, 2011, http://republicans.energycommerce. house.gov/Media/file/Hearings/Energy/030811/ Christy.pdf) (hereinafter Christy, online document, 2011). This residual trend was estimated after statistical removal of ENSO and volcanic signals from UAH TLT data, but not from model data. The net effect of removing ENSO and volcanic signals was to reduce the UAH TLT trend over 1979 to 2010 from 0.14 to 0.09°C/decade (Christy, online document, 2011).
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DOUGLASPAPER.pdf
A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions
We examine tropospheric temperature trends of 67 runs from 22 ‘Climate of the 20th Century’ model simulations and try to reconcile them with the best available updated observations (in the tropics during the satellite era). Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean. In layers near 5 km, the modelled trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and observed trends have opposite signs. These conclusions contrast strongly with those of recent publications based on essentially the same data.
http://www.johnstonanalytics.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/LindzenChoi2011.235213033.pdf
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
Richard S. Lindzen1 and Yong-Sang Choi2
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000- 2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. An earlier study (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) was subject to significant criticisms. The present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various criticisms are taken into account. … … We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. …. …The heart of the global warming issue is so-called greenhouse warming. This refers to the fact that the earth balances the heat received from the sun (mostly in the visible spectrum) by radiating in the infrared portion of the spectrum back to space. Gases that are relatively transparent to visible light but strongly absorbent in the infrared (greenhouse gases) interfere with the cooling of the planet, forcing it to become warmer in order to emit sufficient infrared radiation to balance the net incoming sunlight (Lindzen, 1999). By net incoming sunlight, we mean that portion of the sun’s radiation that is not reflected back to space by clouds, aerosols and the earth’s surface. CO2, a relatively minor greenhouse gas, has increased significantly since the beginning of the industrial age from about 280 ppmv to about 390 ppmv, presumably due mostly to man’s emissions. This is the focus of current concerns. However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1C (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of well mixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007). This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5C to 5C and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling. Clouds also change so that their visible reflectivity decreases, causing increased solar absorption and warming of the earth. Cloud feedbacks are still considered to be highly uncertain (IPCC, 2007), but the fact that these feedbacks are strongly positive in most models is considered to be an indication that the result is basically correct. Methodologically, this is unsatisfactory. Ideally, one would seek an observational test of the issue. Here we suggest that it may be possible to test the issue with existing data from satellites.
The extreme AGW paradigm pushers have anchored the media with an absurdly stated temperature rise for a doubling of atmospheric CO2. A ‘projection’ from a model that is fundamental incorrect is not relevant to the discussion of climate change. The UN and the EU started with the assumption that a massive new UN and EU bureaucracy would need to be created and funded to monitor and limit CO2 emission. This is the justification for a super government, a government to govern all countries, staffed by the EU and UN. The IPCC ‘research’ and reports were to be written to justify the funding of the new bureaucracy, the massive transfer of funds from the developing world to the third world, and the funding of the ‘green’ scams.
If you are interested in the details concerning the extent of this fiasco I would highly recommend reading Christopher Booker’s ‘The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with ‘Climate Change’ Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History?’ I have read it twice. AGW has become a mania among the liberals. The parasites have moved in to take advantage of the mania and liberal tenancies to spend public money and think later.
William Astley:
The AGW theory does not predict. It projects. There is a difference between a prediction and a projection that is quite important.
What I cannot understand about climate science is that the wrong answer makes the reality just having a pause. In other branches of science or in engineering the wrong answer means you reject the theory as junk. Remember this is science that was right beyond question, not just probably right, and questions got you rated alongside concentration camp guards or at the very least as closet Nazis. There should be no new factors in proven beyond doubt science. All Biological and geological factors should have been either modelled accurately or have been proven beyond any question to have no effect.
As for excuses involving smoke particle action that has zero excuse value given it was known and studied pretty well by the Victorians who had even quantified the effect around Manchester.
In reply to:
Terry Oldberg says:
April 17, 2013 at 9:58 pm
William Astley:
The AGW theory does not predict. It projects. There is a difference between a prediction and a projection that is quite important.
William:
The correct mantra is the general circulation models do not predict, they make projections. The logic for that statement is that there are other variables that can affect climate. There is however a qualification in the statement the GCM do not make predictions, they make projections.
Theories do make predictions. One of the necessary components by definition of a theory, is the theory’s predictions. Think of it as the essential logic of a theory.
There are two related ‘predictions’ for the extreme AGW theory.
1) In the case of the tropical tropospheric warming at roughly 10 km, that is a fundamental pillar of the AGW theory. If there is to be substantial warming (say even 1C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2) of the planet due to the increase atmospheric CO2 there needs to be tropical tropospheric warming to drive the warm. The observations indicate that there is neither warming in the tropics and in addition there is no tropical troposphere warming. These two observations support each other.
2) As there are a limited number of climate forcing functions, the general circulation models do in fact make a prediction. As atmospheric CO2 was risen and is rising, planetary temperature cannot stop rising. The CO2 forcing mechanism cannot turn on or off.
This is an interesting line of discussion. I have been thinking of a physical explanation as to why there is no tropical tropospheric warming. I will move the essence of this discussion to Roy Spencer’s thread.
William Astley:
Thanks for the interesting response. A scientific theory is built upon the underlying statistical population. Can you describe the events in the statistical population that underlies the extreme AGW theory?
Terry Oldberg:
Your post at April 17, 2013 at 9:58 pm says
No!
The IPCC projects and predicts.
A projection is an extrapolation and a prediction is a forecast.
At April 16, 2013 at 3:40 pm I cited a clear example (with citation, quotation, link and explanation) of an IPCC prediction.
The AGW-hypothesis (n.b. it is not a theory) PREDICTS that the globe will warm in response to anthropogenic emissions of GHGs.
Your long and muddled screed at April 17, 2013 at 4:17 pm demonstrates you do not understand this. But at every opportunity you make a post saying
“The AGW theory does not predict”
IT DOES. It predicts the globe will warm in response to anthropogenic emissions of GHGs.
There is another character who keeps posting on WUWT to claim that surface tension prevents heating of water from above. You and he each fail to explain or justify your assertions when pressed. This failure is because you have each gained a notion which you have become convinced is true although it is plain wrong.
I ignore the ‘surface tension guy’ because his claims are of no consequence. But your false assertions inhibit dissemination of the fact that climate model predictions have failed. Hence, your false assertions merit refutation.
Richard
richardscourtney:
As you had made no apparent progress in understanding the equivocation fallacy and its role in climatological arguments, yesterday I attempted a friendly exit from my conversation with you. However, by your latest message you continue this conversation.
The content of your message suggests that you remain baffled by the equivocation fallacy and it pertinence to global warming research but I cannot have a productive conversation with you about errors in the methodology of this research until you come up to speed on it. It you were to attain mastery over this topic, you would then know why it is logically crucial for terms used in making methodological arguments to be defined unambiguously. Consequently, you would understand why I have gone to the trouble of disambiguating this terminology. In your current state of mind, you continually frustrate me by re-introducing ambiguity into this terminology thus reversing my work.
Henry@RMB
if you were to study the absorption spectra of water you would find that water absorbs strongly in the UV area and also a little bit in the IR.
That means that only in these wavelength areas of the incoming radiation, the radiation is – and will be – converted to heat in the water.
Hence the importance of a small change in concentration of ozone (and HxOx and NxOx) at the TOA. When it becomes more, as currently it does, it can and will back radiate a bigger portion of incoming UV. This lowers the heat coming into earth.
In turn, when less heat comes in, the differential between 0 and 90 degrees latitude changes, leading, on average, to more cloud formation at lower latitudes and less at higher latitudes. This amplifies the observed cooling effect as it reduces total insolation of earth significantly.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/
Terry Oldberg:
At April 18, 2013 at 1:23 pm you say and ask William Astley:
Before anybody gets bogged-down in trying to answer that:
Can YOU define what YOU mean by a “statistical population”?
I, Willis Eschenbach, and others have repeatedly put this question to you but to date you have failed to provide an answer.
Your question is meaningless unless and until you provide an answer to the question I have posed to you.
For reasons of clarity and transparency, I state that I think your entire message I quote in this post is nonsense which sounds ‘sciencey’.
Perhaps you can show me to be wrong by answering another question by way of illustration.
Case (a)
It was a scientific prediction when Halley said a comet would return in a specific year, and his hypothesis of climate orbits was confirmed when the comet did return as predicted.
Case (b)
It was a scientific prediction that the IPCC said “committed warming” would occur in the first two decades of this century as a result of anthropogenic GHG emissions, and the hypothesis of AGW is disconfirmed by the failure of that “committed warming” to occur.
What was the “statistical population” in Case (a) and how does that differ – according to you – from the “statistical population” in Case (b)?
Richard
richardscourtney:
In the text of recent messages from you, I find examples of the ad hominem fallacy. In introducing these irrelevant and misleading entities into our debate is your purpose to try to win this debate while holding a weak hand by switching the issue from the equivocation fallacy in climatological arguments to flaws in my character?
I’m surprised to find that you are unclear on the definition of “statistical population” yet feel qualified to debate methodological issues of scientific investigations. You can find the URLs of Web pages providing definitions via a Web search.
Terry Oldberg:
I can only understand your post at April 18, 2013 at 2:00 pm to be saying you do not know what you mean by a “statistical population”.
I repeat
Can YOU define what YOU mean by a “statistical population”?
Please, no more evasions, no more obfuscations, and no more pretence that you have arcane knowledge which others should obtain for themselves.
Your ‘sciencey’ soundbites are meaningless noises unless and until you answer this simple question.
Richard
Terry Oldberg:
Your post at April 18, 2013 at 5:46 pm again demonstrates your appalling ignorance of logic.
It is NOT an ad hom. to insist a questioner defines the terms used in his/her question and then to state the obvious inference when provision of the definition is refused.
You are making the ridiculous assertion that the AGW-hypothesis – and climate models which emulate it – don’t make predictions and projections. That assertion is built on whatever mystical meaning you are applying to “statistical population”.
I repeat
Can YOU define what YOU mean by a “statistical population”?
Perhaps you don’t understand the question, so I will rephrase it.
What is the “statistical population” which you say is needed for the AGW predictions (e.g. as presented by the IPCC) to exist?
Your continued arm waving is demonstrating the falseness of your assertions for all to see.
Richard
PS I am not debating anything. I am successfully inducing you to expose the falseness of your unfounded and illogical proclamations which inhibit dissemination of the fact that predictions of climate models have failed.
richardscourtney:
As you may know, when a debate is conducted under the rules of logic, it is permissible for a debater to attack one or more of his opponent’s claims through refutation. In refuting a claim, one demonstrates that this claim is inconsistent with facts or with one or more logical principles. Thus, for example, it is logically permissible for you to attack my claim that the climate models of AR4 lack underlying statistical populations through identification of the populations that I claim to be missing.
It is impermissible for a debater to attack his opponent’s character, for his character is unrelated to the issue under debate. Thus when this issue is the existence of statistical populations underlying specific climate models it is impermissible for a debater to characterize his opponent as having an “appalling ignorance of logic.” For a debater to do so is to make his opponent’s alleged ignorance of logic the issue when the issue is the existence of the statistical populations.
Regarding my definition of “statistical population,” it is identical to the definition in the field of mathematical statistics. As you are capable of looking up this definition, I do not thwart you if I leave it up to you to determine what this phrase means.
@ Terry Oldberg says:
April 19, 2013 at 8:43 am
Introducing a term that an argument is reliant on and then, when asked, not being willing to define the precise meaning with which you use it, instead referring the questioner to an alternative unspecified reference, and inviting them to interpret meaning from that, invites confusion and is not a good look.
That is not how things are done.
jc:
As the term “statistical population” is rigorously defined in mathematical statistics, clarity is not lost in referring Richard to the literature of that discipline for his definition. Under ordinary circumstances, I would respond to a request such as Richard’s as a matter of courtesy. However, in the past he has used responses to similar requests as launching pads for ad hominem arguments. To refer him to the literature serves the purpose of depriving him of a target for additional attacks.
Terry Oldberg:
I repeat:
What is the “statistical population” which you say is needed for the AGW predictions (e.g. as presented by the IPCC) to exist?
Richard
@terry Oldberg says:
April 19, 2013 at 10:26 am
A Problem
You refer him to the literature.
The literature is unspecified.
He consults what he takes to be “the literature”.
Neither he or you can confirm on information exchanged that this is what you take to be the literature.
He derives meaning from this literature which may or may not be that which you base your understanding on.
He returns to argumentation with the meaning he has derived from this process being the sole basis of his usage of it and interpretation of your usage of it.
He does not know if his understanding strictly accords with yours.
You do not know if your understanding strictly accords with his.
The term therefore remains unusable in any process requiring precision since it is based on untested assumptions by both parties.
A definitive position that is reliant on it is therefore impossible.
To have the capacity to arrive at a definitive position requires agreement on meaning of terms.
Where there is any uncertainty at all this must be explicitly addressed.
As a result of the above, uncertainty must exist.
Therefore the meaning of the term must be addressed.
Or the term rejected.
You have introduced the term.
His argumentation can proceed on the basis your meaning has not been demonstrated, and this therefore invalidates anything based on it. His argument does not require meaning to be explicit and exact.
Your argumentation cannot proceed without reliance on this term, so its meaning must be made clear, and this accepted. Your argument requires meaning to be explicit and exact.
It is beholden on you having introduced a term, and claiming it as a basis for your argumentation, to make its meaning clear.
jc:
Your description is inaccurate. That no statistical populations underlie the climate models of AR4 is not a premise to an argument but rather is a conclusion drawn logically from facts uncovered through structured research and presented in a peer reviewed article ( http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/15/the-principles-of-reasoning-part-iii-logic-and-climatology/ ). Under the norms of science, if a person does not like a conclusion from an article, his or her recourse is to submit a refutation for peer review and contingent publication. No norm requires the authors of peer reviewed and published articles to submit to badgering in internet blogs or provide free consulting for bloggers.
jc:
At April 19, 2013 at 1:22 pm you say to Terry Oldberg
He cannot.
I knew he could not because I learned that in previous attempts to understand his “equivocation fallacy”.
My purpose in this discussion is to reveal to all that he cannot “make its meaning clear”. And as you say
Yes. That is precisely what I am saying. But Terry calls that an ad hom.
Richard
Terry Oldberg:
I again ask:
What is the “statistical population” which you say is needed for the AGW predictions (e.g. as presented by the IPCC) to exist?
Richard
@ Terry Oldberg says:
April 19, 2013 at 3:43 pm
I expressed no opinion as to the meaning of that term or any term, the application of that or any term, scientific or social conventions of any sort, the nature or integrity of any argument you might want to develop or assert, or anything at all to do with climate.
I am not at all encouraged that your response has been in entirety dedicated to issues of no relevance whatsoever to what I said. This does not reflect well on the potential value of any argument you may wish to advance.
I submitted my comment after having observed that you were involved in an exchange where the clarity of purpose had been lost. In the expectation that certain protocols – dictated by LOGIC – would thereby be reinstated thus allowing a further development of both arguments allowing a resolution.
This appears to have been overly ambitious.
To repeat the obvious, any term used in developing any argument must be precisely understood.
Utilizing them, whilst refusing to clarify meaning, whether claiming them as premise or conclusion, renders any argument meaningless.
jc:
I disagree.
Terry Oldberg:
Quad Erat Demonstrandum
Richard
@terry Oldberg says:
April 19, 2013 at 4:26 pm
Tiresome ridiculous and wasteful.
Wake up to yourself.
You are not a child.
PeterB in Indianapolis says:
1. Form an hypothesis
2. Design a repeatable experiment to test your hypothesis
3. Gather experimental data
4. Analyze the data in a way which other scientists can follow and duplicate
5. Make conclusions based upon the analyzed data
6 Determine whether your hypothesis is tentatively supported or must be reworked or outright rejected.
Stages 2 & 3 also need to be documented and published. So that other scientists can both attempt to duplicate the work and verify that the methodology is sound.
henry@Mark and peterb
Good point by peter. I have given you clues
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/16/the-msm-finally-notices-the-pause/#comment-1277829
you only need a first year stats class of 47 students to each check one weather station and repeat my findings…
make a note of the remarks at my tables, as they also give clues, e.g. you cannot put in long term averages for missing data, as we normally do in stats, when studying weather patterns over time.
My sample was random in that I only approved the (weather) station if it had complete or near complete records.
I also balanced it by latitude and 70/30 @sea and inland, more or less. Longitude does not matter as we are looking at the average yearly temperatures, which includes earth’s seasonal shifts and earth turns every 24 hours. The interesting part is to look at the maxima: you can do a very nice binomial fit if you set the speed of warming/cooling out against time which gives you the deceleration.
if all goes well, you should also come to the conclusion that deceleration of warming started around 1972 or so, and that global cooling will only come to an end around 2040….
…give or take a few years…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/19/another-escalator/#comment-1281031
Terry Oldberg: Re the lack of a statistical population, do you mean that for a sufficient population to exist there is a requirement for a sufficient number of events to exist, each event in the context of climate science being defined as a 30 year period of recorded temperatures?
Graham W:
Thankyou for the good question you pose to Terry Oldberg at April 22, 2013 at 3:35 am.
Indeed, that is one – of an infinite number of – possible explanation of what Terry Oldberg means. I await his (probable failure to provide) answer with interest because for a long time I and others have been trying to fathom what he means.
Again, thankyou.
Richard