Science trumps politics and patronage: Al Gore is 'losing the bet' against scientific forecasting

Perhaps he meant to say TIPPER POINT rather than TIPPING POINT

Well, forecasting is hard; especially forecasting the future.

Chris y
“A model result is skillful if” ……. does not equal “no change” but rather a better prediction than the simpler alternative. That could be Lord M’s pocket calculator or me after a few beers.
🙂 michael

And, of course he will never say what “better” predictions are. “Better” than what???

We know life after death exists because the massive consensus of the men of cloth say it is so. We know God exists because the overwhelming consensus of Judeo-Christian-Islamic preachers say He does. Those unequivocal facts are confirmed by the people with their supernatural worldview or “ideology”.
That, forecasting-free, is the essence of scientific method foisted by the left and the Post Modern Scientists.

In an unfortunate collaboration with the increasingly uncomfortable religious establishment that is in direct conflict with actual scientific evidence and the methods of scientific reasoning taught in school and the misguided ideologues of the environment. It is a global partnership of many groups — the religious or spiritual who no longer can believe in religion and adopt the environment as a substitute, the actively religious who see in it the opportunity to destroy science, rabid environmentalists who view humans as a sort of plague attacking the planet rather than a part of the ecology of the planet that deserves consideration as well, and a large body of idealistic scientists who have let their idealism and perhaps a bit of self-interest suborn the requirement of science to be brutally objective even when the results one obtains are not the results one desires or that will guarantee future funding. And sure, the “commynists” masquerading as environmentalists, so-called “watermelons” that are green on the outside and red on the inside.
But even this collective would not succeed if it were not for the simple fact that people make ordure-piles of unearned moolah by promoting the illusion of future catastrophe. All one really needs to do to understand CAGW is to follow the money. Quite a lot of the trail leads back to Al Gore, or so I have heard — a major investor in carbon trading and alternative energy sources. But even this pales in comparison to the money made by the world’s energy companies from CAGW.
Who benefits from CAGW? The very companies that are demonized by the poor fools that are exploited to generate the “crisis”. Anything that raises the cost of energy raises their profits. The more artificial the better. What better way to make more money from coal in a totally inelastic global energy market than to artificially double the cost of electricity of all sorts? It doubles the net profit gained from selling the electricity to a world that will pay whatever it is charged for it but where it is also a regulated public utility. And do power companies care if they are required to use solar power or wind power to provide a fraction of the power they sell? Not at all. They’d sell us electricity made by harnessing hamster wheels if we passed laws requiring it. They’d make far more money selling hamster-power in a market heavily inflated by the scarcity of hamsters than they would make selling coal based power in a market dominated by an abundance of coal.
This is why it is nearly pointless to argue. The pockets behind this are infinitely deep, and we’re talking trillions of dollars in rake-off additional profits in the global energy marketplace over decades. If somebody were able to prove beyond any doubt that carbon dioxide is completely harmless, entirely beneficial, and that global climate is totally insensitive to it (whether or not that is plausible, just pretend) they’d be assassinated. Or, more likely, the record would be “adjusted” some more to disprove their claim. That’s a lot cheaper and safer than overt assassination.
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Having read Jonah Goldberg’s book entitled “Liberal Fascism” I’m inclined to think that the scientific method is being overridden by political correctness matching the pattern that Goldberg calls “fascism.” Fascists seek to destroy the existing order and to build a utopia upon the ruins under which the power to make decisions is removed from those ruled and bestowed upon smooth talking pseudoscientists in the employ of the ruler.

Greenhouse gases are indeed one of the mechanisms that cool the earth. A lot of the earth’s cooling comes from direct radiation from the surface, however, in LWIR wavelengths that are not blocked by the atmosphere.
The greenhouse cooling does occur high in the troposphere, at the height where it becomes approximately transparent to LWIR in the absorption bands due to the thinning of the atmosphere. As greenhouse gas concentrations increase, the emission height increases just a little. Because of the lapse rate, emissions from the increased height are a little bit cooler. Because the rate of emissions is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature, greenhouse gas cooling works slightly less efficiently. However, since the incoming radiation is not similarly modulated, the Earth has to get rid of just as much heat (per unit time). Consequently the surface warms, just a bit, to increase the rate of loss directly from the surface.
It really is pretty simple. Sure, there is more internal complexity. The CO_2 molecule has a very complex spectrum in the relevant bands. The absorption/emission lines are (predominantly) pressure broadened through most of the troposphere, and hence they become narrower with increased height and reduced pressure, density and temperature. This means that the entire atmosphere column has some differential transparency as lower heights radiate energy that can “bleed” through the opening gaps in the lines of molecules above, so the picture isn’t quite as simple as raising the emission height as if that is a sharp number. It also means that the atmosphere’s transparency in the absorption band varies with the weather — on a clear high pressure day, it actually is more opaque in the CO_2 band than it is on a low pressure day, so the emission heights themselves vary dynamically and locally. It also means that there is a complicated nonlinear relationship between places with uplifting air (possibly carrying energy as latent heat in water vapor), air pressure and density, relative opacity, emission height, albedo, back radiation, and more that it is difficult to even mentally form a model of even though any given piece is understandable.
This is why the climate problem is so difficult. We have no “rules” that function in some separable way so that we can say “If this happens, then this will happen.” Our best models say “If this happens, anything can happen” and then people assume that the statistical distribution of anything is somehow a predictor, in spite of the fact that direct evidence obtained by trying this refutes the assertion.
I can’t solve the coupled Navier-Stokes equations for the ocean and atmosphere in my head out to climate-relevant times. You can’t either. They can’t even be solved with world-class computers at a resolution that is meaningful or likely to be meaningful. So why assert that you know that CO_2 is no risk or danger at all, that it cools the planet instead of warms it, etc. The best that we can say at this time is that looking at the direct relationship between atmospheric CO_2 and global average temperature over the pitifully short length of time represented by the instrumental record, even allowing for a certain amount of well-intended fiddling with the temperature record by world-saving zealots with a vested interest in the catastrophe, it is most likely true that the simple theory of CO_2 caused warming is correct with little or no feedback, and with a very modest total climate sensitivity just about where theory says it should be.
The one thing that has proven to be incorrect in the work of Hansen and others who built the first climate models is the feedback. Without feedback, there has never been a risk of catastrophe. Feedback has always been a sketchy proposition (in my opinion) because positive feedback usually indicates instability in dynamical systems and there is no evidence of a serious climate instability outside of one triggered by long-time orbital stuff or perhaps shorter but still long time ocean circulation stuff. There is direct evidence that climate models overestimate the cooling effect of aerosols, and hence exaggerate the water vapor feedback to compensate, and that this may well be why they continue to diverge from the actual temperature as aerosols remain roughly constant but CO_2 goes up without this positive feedback. There is also direct evidence that the models are overwhelmingly off in their treatment of the ocean — again IMO unsurprising given that the ocean is an entire secondary set of Navier-Stokes equations that are if anything even more poorly understood and which are coupled to the atmosphere. It would have been surprising, and would still be surprising, if any of the GCMs actually worked.
Without strong positive feedback, the risk of catastrophe is greatly reduced. It is not zero, because it isn’t zero even if we do nothing — the climate is chaotic and could slap us around for a century on a whim (look at the climate history of e.g. California, which was a desert for most of the last 500 years pre-anthropogenic CO_2 and could return to being a desert starting two years ago and it would be a decade before we even could tell). We cannot tell even if we are increasing or decreasing the risk by adding CO_2 — both are plausible, and the models are no help at all.
Then one has to look at the benefits of the CO_2 (and the energy produced burning coal to make it). They are substantial. Indeed, they are both crucial to our civilization. A billion people dine every day on the increased plant productivity of the additional CO_2. Civilization itself was built on top of the burning of coal.
Is it wise to invest, perhaps even invest heavily, in alternative energy resources that do not rely on coal? Absolutely. A number of them require no fuel at all, or require things like Deuterium or Thorium that exist in such abundance that human civilization could continue, based on them as a fundamental energy source, for millions of years instead of (at most) hundreds of years, and with atmospheric CO_2 no longer being a concern either way. In fifty or a hundred years, we may understand the climate system and biosphere well enough to deliberately move atmospheric CO_2 towards some optimal concentration. That optimum could easily be higher than what it is now, even if it is lower than what it will be then. In the meantime, wise investment in the technology and science that might one day produce ways of generating energy that cost less than coal and hence are the obvious choice for a free society seems strongly indicated.
What is not indicated is nonsense like “Carbon Trading”, or treating CO_2 as the harbinger of a future disaster. It is most probable that it is no such thing, and it is absolutely certain that so far it has been an unmitigated blessing to the human species and general world ecology. It is rather likely that it will continue to be net beneficial for another 100 to 200 ppm. Beyond that it is difficult to be certain. We haven’t done the experiments or the science, and sometimes comparatively small changes in an ecology can have large effects. But there is every reason to think that a strong investment in the technology of alternate energy production over the 20 to 40 years required to reach these concentrations with no demonization of coal based power at all is sufficient to push us over the hump to where coal is deselected not because of CO_2 risk but because there are much cheaper alternatives that use no fuel at all or comparatively abundant and energy rich (nuclear) fuels.
Organic chemists I know despair over the fact that we burn oil and coal. They are so valuable as feedstock to the entire organic synthesis chains that make countless materials of great value to our society, feedstock that would be enormously more expensive to generate from raw CO_2 and water and air (or even from plant material where at least some steps have already been accomplished by nature). We are burning the wealth of the world when we burn oil and coal. So far, that burning has been an investment, one that has uplifted the human species from abject global poverty (even in the heart of pre-Enlightenment “civilization”) to a state where even the poorest amongst us in energy rich countries are wealthier than the nobility of the feudal world 400 years ago. It has been the basis for human freedom, as cheap energy reduces the incentive for human slavery by devaluing unskilled human labor. But we would be most unwise to continue burning our capital in this way indefinitely. We only get one shot at transforming global civilization to an energy basis capable of going the distance, or we risk falling back to comparatively primitive sources and which would almost certainly entail the death of enormous numbers of humans.
Imagine the die off if a coronal mass ejection of unprecedented magnitude slammed the Earth in two days and blew the entire continental electrical grids of the world by frying every single transformer in the system, so that it would take years to rebuild — no air conditioning or refrigeration or lights or heat in all of the world’s cities, no transportation into those cities, a complete breakdown in delivery and services. But at least in this case there would be light at the end of the tunnel and after several billion deaths, we would turn the lights back on. If we burn all of the coal and all of the accessible oil and do not have alternatives waiting in the wings or have any sort of CME-based event or nuclear war even that brings down civilization for a single decade, it might never rise again with all of the cheap and readily available carbon-based energy used up.
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