UPDATED: This opinion piece from Professor Henrik Svensmark was published September 9th in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Originally the translation was from Google translation with some post translation cleanup of jumbled words or phrases by myself. Now as of Sept 12, the translation is by Nigel Calder. Hat tip to Carsten Arnholm of Norway for bringing this to my attention and especially for translation facilitation by Ágúst H Bjarnason – Anthony
Translation approved by Henrik Svensmark
While the Sun sleeps
Henrik Svensmark, Professor, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen
“In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable,” writes Henrik Svensmark.
The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.
If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.
Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.
But after about 1300 solar activity declined and the world began to get colder. It was the beginning of the episode we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold time, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Sweden surprised Denmark by marching across the ice, and in London the Thames froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failures, which resulted in poorly nourished populations, reduced in Europe by about 30 per cent because of disease and hunger.
It’s important to realise that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th Century and was followed by increasing solar activity. Over the past 50 years solar activity has been at its highest since the medieval warmth of 1000 years ago. But now it appears that the Sun has changed again, and is returning towards what solar scientists call a “grand minimum” such as we saw in the Little Ice Age.
The match between solar activity and climate through the ages is sometimes explained away as coincidence. Yet it turns out that, almost no matter when you look and not just in the last 1000 years, there is a link. Solar activity has repeatedly fluctuated between high and low during the past 10,000 years. In fact the Sun spent about 17 per cent of those 10,000 years in a sleeping mode, with a cooling Earth the result.
You may wonder why the international climate panel IPCC does not believe that the Sun’s changing activity affects the climate. The reason is that it considers only changes in solar radiation. That would be the simplest way for the Sun to change the climate – a bit like turning up and down the brightness of a light bulb.
Satellite measurements have shown that the variations of solar radiation are too small to explain climate change. But the panel has closed its eyes to another, much more powerful way for the Sun to affect Earth’s climate. In 1996 we discovered a surprising influence of the Sun – its impact on Earth’s cloud cover. High-energy accelerated particles coming from exploded stars, the cosmic rays, help to form clouds.
When the Sun is active, its magnetic field is better at shielding us against the cosmic rays coming from outer space, before they reach our planet. By regulating the Earth’s cloud cover, the Sun can turn the temperature up and down. High solar activity means fewer clouds and and a warmer world. Low solar activity and poorer shielding against cosmic rays result in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the Sun’s magnetism doubled in strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of global warming seen then.
That also explains why most climate scientists try to ignore this possibility. It does not favour their idea that the 20th century temperature rise was mainly due to human emissions of CO2. If the Sun provoked a significant part of warming in the 20th Century, then the contribution by CO2 must necessarily be smaller.
Ever since we put forward our theory in 1996, it has been subjected to very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.
First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct, because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we completed experiments at DTU Space that demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic rays help to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.
Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory could not work in the real atmosphere, and therefore had no practical significance. We have just rejected that criticism emphatically.
It turns out that the Sun itself performs what might be called natural experiments. Giant solar eruptions can cause the cosmic ray intensity on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days following an eruption, cloud cover can fall by about 4 per cent. And the amount of liquid water in cloud droplets is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Here is a very large effect – indeed so great that in popular terms the Earth’s clouds originate in space.
So we have watched the Sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern, since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.
That the Sun might now fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by solar scientists at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. So when Nigel Calder and I updated our book The Chilling Stars, we wrote a little provocatively that “we are advising our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.”
In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel argued at the recent UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that the cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years. His explanation was a natural change in the North Atlantic circulation, not in solar activity. But no matter how you interpret them, natural variations in climate are making a comeback.
The outcome may be that the Sun itself will demonstrate its importance for climate and so challenge the theories of global warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable. A forecast saying it may be either warmer or colder for 50 years is not very useful, and science is not yet able to predict solar activity.
So in many ways we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting. I think it is important to accept that Nature pays no heed to what we humans think about it. Will the greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different from the greenhouse theory’s predictions. Perhaps it will become fashionable again to investigate the Sun’s impact on our climate.
–
Professor Henrik Svensmark is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at DTU Space. His book The Chilling Stars has also been published in Danish as Klima og Kosmos Gads Forlag, DK ISBN 9788712043508)
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jeez (16:34:26) : said
“Joel was pointing out that those claiming to be skeptics fail to be skeptical of specious arguments on their side of the fence.
I agree that happens around here more than I would like to see.”
I agree with that comment, we need to hold ‘our’ side as accountable at producing valid science as we do ‘their’ side.
tonyb
Smokey says:
Click 1, 3, 4: (1) Cherrypicked starting point. (2) Cherrypicked ending point (why is most of the last year missing?). (3) Very short time interval…Like using a plot of a week’s weather in October here in Rochester that shows a positive slope to demonstrate that the seasonal cycle is insignificant!
Click 2: (1) Cherrypicked period. (Why end in June 2008? What would happen if we instead used the latest month’s data and compared August 1999 to August 2009…Oh, it would show a rise of +0.29 C; Good reason not to do that!) (2) Comparing a single month’s readings 10 years apart…Not even bothering to compute a least-squares trend. [Hence, I am NOT claiming that comparing August 1999 and August 2009 is a good idea even though it does give a rise that is almost twice what the IPCC models would predict the decadal trend to be! It is a dumb idea even if it gives a result that supports “my side”.] (3) Using the temperature data set that shows the most negative trend of all the available global surface temperature and lower-troposphere satellite data sets.
Click 5: (1) Cherrypicked ending point (why is more than a year missing?). (2) Still, it does show the general upward trend in temperatures over time
It is not deceptive to plot data on a graph that is scaled to the range over which the data actually varies. It is in fact common since it allows one to see much more detail in the data than is apparent when one arbitrarily starts the y-axis at 0 ppm. It might be deceptive if the labels on the y-axis were not there but they are clearly there for everyone to see.
Yes…Exhibit A on how to be skeptical: Take graphs that haven’t even appeared in a peer-reviewed publication from websites that have a strong point-of-view and assume that they are accurate and and in no way deceptive. Makes perfect sense!
Since I have explained countless times and you don’t defend them but then just continue to use them, it is sort of a waste of time. Don’t you think?
You’re lumping us all in together, and maybe that’s warranted. But I for one am skeptical and many claims on both sides. I think the Sea Ice threads both here and at CA are much ado about nothing. I think the concept of a “global average (or mean, whichever you want to promote) temperature” is a meaningless concept, yet both sides try to use it to their advantage.
Joel Shore, Smokey
Its rather rich for Joel to be talking about cherry-picking of graphs, in the context of the blatant massaging of global temperature data – antarctic or otherwise – in support of AGW that is routinely exposed on this web-site.
I guess Joel is cock-a-hoop about the last couple of months up-spike in ocean surface temperatures. Lets put this in a longer time-scale pespective as you yourself would advocate.
The global temperature record (all the main 3 or 4 including NCDC) over the last half century or so show, in the context of overall steady rize in global temperature, a succession of distinct peaks of 1-3 years duration that include El Nino events (the last, 1998 one certainly is). Due to the general up-slope, the maximum of each peak has been significantly higher than the previous one.
However the current ocean temperature spike (2009) only equals the previous one in 1998. And the overall shape of the temperature curve gives the appearence of “going over the hill” during the decade 1999-2009. (As reflected in the polynomial fit of my earlier posting, 13 Sept, 00:41:06).
Before you write this off as just noise, however, it is worth noting the work at Rochester by Douglass and Knox (Ocean heat content and Earth’s radiation imbalance, DH Douglass, RS Knox – Physics Letters A, 2009 in press) which shows new and substantial analysis indicating periodic shifts from plus to minus in the oceans heat flux budget. The shifts they measure (not only from ocean surface but down to 750m) appear to coincide with the PDA timescale, e.g. shift from negative to positive in the 1970’s, shift back from positive to negative 10 years ago. This gives an a priory reason to look for such a downward inflection. An then of course there is always the sun (sunspot and magnetic minimum).
In the coming years if you wish to continue having cherries to pick, be careful for early frosts.
For AGW’s there is the problem of the “silent evidence”. They have been told to look out for the right wing “nuts” and so that’s what they seem to notice. And the right wing “nuts” can be vocal. They want to be noticed. But is that everyone? Are there other groups who are quieter, unseen, unnoticed by the AGW crowd? That is silent evidence.
Take me for example–I have voted for the Green party, I thought Green architecture and construction was the only school of architecture worth pursuing, I am 40ish and have never owned a car and find some good feeling in that fact, (that I have in some small way reduced my material impact), I see the green side of not having kids–I have none–and I look at technology for what it allows us to not do, the ways it allows us to make life simpler and lighter (although not necessarily slower, but rather, more flexible). And I don’t know of anyone else like me amongst my friends, so I am, perhaps, part of a body of “silent evidence”.
Now someone could say, “but you’re just one guy”. But the problem of silent evidence is that you don’t know how many there are. There is no political party that matches my views now, so who’s going to represent me and people like me? (Remember, its more or less a two party system, where are the alternatives?) But nevertheless, in some narratives I get lumped in with right wing “nuts”. I post here, I pretend to be “sceptical” (pej. quotes) and so I “fit the profile” and that’s all Joel needs to know.
But I am part of that group that TonyB describes, that group that initially believed “the science”, and later as we looked more closely–and notice the word “look”, as in gazing upon, examining, holding in mind, thinking about–once we looked, our natural scepticism “raised the eyebrows”–wait, this thing they say, what is it based on? Is that what it is based on? That’s not enough, there are too many untested assumptions… and so on.
But the problem of “silent evidence” has perhaps led AGW believers to imagine a narrative where all “deniers” are merely under the influence of right wing think tank “nuts”. Meanwhile, for me, whom they have probably never heard from, I am “silent evidence”, for me it was the scientists from the prestigious institutions themselves, and specifically what they said that raised my sceptical curiosity. Really? They claim to know that?
To be sceptical is not easy, it doesn’t come naturally, it is like a muscle that needs building up. So maybe Joel thinks, in his narrative, that I’m under the influence of right wing think tanks, and he thinks that I’m in with the lot who are not sceptical about solar theories and cosmic ray theories—- I am sceptical about ALL of it! *snip* why is that so hard to understand?
And if someone notices anything I say that shows lack of scepticism, would they kindly point it out to me, I am not perfect and I would like to know.
jeez: “Joel was pointing out that those claiming to be skeptics fail to be skeptical of specious arguments on their side of the fence. I agree that happens around here more than I would like to see.”
Not a day goes by that I don’t think, “What if they’re right?” [specifically referring to those promoting CO2=AGW].
My skepticism always comes back to the original CO2=AGW claim. The original hypothesis warned us that increasing CO2 will lead to runaway global warming and climate catastrophe. Remember? The alarmist crowd jumped on the Al Gore bandwagon, and now they can’t get off without admitting that higher levels of CO2 may not cause runaway global warming. They are in a very uncomfortable situation, so they constantly try to distract from their original contention by claiming walruses and polar bears are dying because of AGW, etc., etc., etc., etc. But the original claim is CO2=AGW. I am skeptical of that claim.
As we can see every day, the goal posts are constantly being shifted, as it becomes increasingly clear that CO2 is benign as a trace gas. It really is harmless.
But the central hypothesis remains, and I am still skeptical that CO2=AGW. I question my skepticism every day, as I’m sure most skeptics do. But so far I have no reason to think I’m wrong in my skepticism. Yes, CO2 probably has a small effect. But the planet is showing us that any warming due to CO2 is so very small that it can be disregarded. It is inconsequential. And there is certainly no scientific justification for spending enormous sums on a hypothesis that isn’t being confirmed by reality.
Finally, Joel Shore has the same objection to every chart I’ve posted: cherry-picked start/end times. But that objection can apply to every chart ever made by anyone, so it’s a frivolous objection.
I provide the most recent charts I can find. Rather than complain that a chart ends last year instead of this year, Joel could post his own charts. But his M.O. is to snipe from the sidelines. He’s terrified at the invitation to write an article; he would then have to take a stand, and back it up with facts. The true peer review he would encounter here isn’t like what he’s used to: being hand-waved through by the friendly referees that have insinuated themselves into the climate peer review system. I don’t think Joel is capable of taking the alarmist position and backing it up with verifiable facts that would withstand questions by skeptics.
Smokey says about Joel…..
“I don’t think Joel is capable of taking the alarmist position and backing it up with verifiable facts that would withstand questions by skeptics.”
Which is why I don’t take Joel seriously. The AGW people tapdance and they nitpick.
If the “science is settled” it should be quite easy to prove here. But of course……
Stefan, TonyB, jeez, Jeff Alberts and others: I am glad to hear you guys express that you feel it is important to be skeptical on claims from all sides. Maybe my original comments that provoked these responses were overly pessimistic.
Smokey: I am glad to hear even you say “Not a day goes by that I don’t think, ‘What if they’re right?'” although I have to say that the “evidence” that seems to convince you otherwise seems extremely weak to me.
Smokey says:
The underlying problem, of course, is the sources of your charts. They are not produced by scientists active in the field but rather by scientists and organizations that have a particular axe to grind. Hence, they tend to choose the start and end times that provide the best evidence for their point-of-view. And, as I have noted, trends over short time periods are simply not resilient…and can thus show a wide variety of different behaviors. This is true of some previous multiyear periods that are embedded in what we now know is a resilient warming trend between the 1970s and 2000. And, it is true even of climate models forced with steadily increasing greenhouse gas levels. And, as I have pointed out countless times, we experience a close analogy every spring and fall when it is not uncommon to have periods of a week or more where the local temperature trend is the opposite of what would be expected based on the seasonal cycle, this being true even in a city like Rochester with a very strong seasonal cycle.
And, by the way, I have referred people to various charts or used the http://www.woodfortrees.org/ make-your-own charts.
Finally, in regards to your own skepticism, I once asked you to tell me some specific aspects of the argument against AGW that you are skeptical about and you never did answer that question even though there are plenty of extremely nutty things out there (not even peer-reviewed in any reputable journal) that I was hoping you would happily disassociate yourself from. In return, I told you of two aspects regarding AGW that I am skeptical about [not meaning I know that they are wrong but meaning that I don’t think there is sufficient evidence that I have seen to back them up at the moment]. One is the connection between AGW and hurricane intensity and the other being Hansen’s recent claim that if we really go to town burning fossil fuels (especially coal) then we would likely trigger a true runaway greenhouse effect, like happened on Venus.
I have taken lots of stands here and have always backed them up with facts. And, I have withstood lots of questions from “skeptics”. In fact, you have occasionally derided how I have kind of taken over the comments section of threads, but that is only because when I post something there are then often tons of comments that I have to respond to.
As for writing an article here, I have given the reasons why I don’t want to do that:
(1) I don’t think I have much original to contribute since most of what I post is based on the research of people actually in the field and is explained in detail in the IPCC reports, original peer-reviewed papers, or other places.
(2) It would be a huge time commitment on my part, particularly responding to all of the comments. As I noted, it already becomes a big time commitment for me when I just post a comment in a thread here because of all the responses it provokes that I then feel compelled to respond to.
Finally, I wouldn’t get so high-and-mighty about what outstanding peer-review is provided here. The fact is that nobody spotted the mathematical errors in the post that Roy Spencer made here on WUWT http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/28/spencer-pt2-more-co2-peculiarities-the-c13c12-isotope-ratio/ (regarding whether the origin of the current CO2 rise is anthropogenic) until Tamino blogged about it almost a year later. And, at least in hindsight, it should have been obvious that if you get the exact linear regression fit to like 5 significant figures for two pieces of data that you think represent independent things, then perhaps you should question whether they are really independent!
Furthermore, I think I have made it clear to you that I am a physicist who has published a fair bit in the peer-reviewed literature in physics (and related fields), but I have not published on climate science and thus would not be used to “being hand-waved through by the friendly referees that have insinuated themselves into the climate peer review system” even if that was an accurate description.
Robert in Calgary says:
Most of what I post are far from nitpicks with other people’s point. They usually go pretty much to the heart of what they are saying. And, I try to state straightforwardly where I believe that they are incorrect.
As for the “science is settled,” I don’t think that is a phrase that you will find that I have used here. There are lots of remaining issues in climate science, not the least of which is better nailing down the climate sensitivity. However, that does not mean that nothing is known with any degree of certainty. There are some things that are known with close to absolute certainty (for example, that the current CO2 rise is due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels and that the levels of CO2 are higher than they have been in at least 750,000 years and likely millions of years) and some things that are still quite uncertain (like what the effect of AGW will be on hurricanes).
And, regarding being able to “prove” AGW, that is an impossible task. Science is inductive, not deductive, and it is impossible to prove anything. It relies on the accumulation of evidence…and it is very difficult to show the strength of a theory without delving into that evidence in detail, which is really a lifelong project. This is why controversial issues like AGW and evolution can remain controversial in the public sphere (and including among a small minority of scientists) for a long time after there is general agreement in the scientific community, at least on certain aspects of the theory.
Joel
I think you are secretly rather fond of us here-in the fashion of a headmaster chastising recalcitrant and backward pupils of course 🙂
Don’t forget I have supported you several times when I knew you were right and criticised ‘my’ side when they were wrong. I also think many of us are much more ‘liberal’ than you believed, and we are certainly not under the ‘influence of ‘right wing think tanks’ frankly I find some of them rather scary.
Perhaps your perceptions that sceptics and deniers are all the same might be changing. I certainly ‘take you seriously’ and enjoy our discussions, but you do seem to believe in true Orwellian Animal Farm fashion;
“‘warmist proxies good
sceptic proxies bad”
as I said to Tom P over in the other thread.
best regards
tonyb
TonyB:
Yeah…I appreciate that.
I don’t think I have criticized (or invoked) any particular individual proxies. What I have expressed is the fact that finding individual regions of the world that were likely warmer during the MWP than presently does not in itself show that this was true globally. And, even if several regions had periods that were warmer then than now, when the “then” is described as being sometime in an approximately 500 year period between 800 and 1300, that does not necessarily make any time during that period warmer because the proxies tend to show warmth that is asynchronous (different places experience their warmest temperatures at different times). And, in fact, the lack of synchronicity of the warmth in different regions is, according to Mann et al., a major region why the “bump” that they see during the MWP in their reconstruction is broad and diffuse rather than sharper like the current warming seems to be.
AGW anthem
Every political movement needs a rousing and aspirational song to keep up morale: so here is one for proponents of AGW: “Aggressive sunbathing”
Link to file:
http://download.yousendit.com/cmcwWGJITWNxRTFjR0E9PQ
Actually that’s because they splice the surface stations onto the end, so you suddenly have more “accurate” data as compared to the proxies. Not to mention that MBH98 and subsequent reconstructions rely heavily on a very small number of outdated proxies (Graybill Bristlecones, remove those and they lose their HS). They seem to refuse to want to use the updated proxies, such as the Yamal series and the Ababneh bristlecone, and seem to want to use Tiljander upside down from the original author’s research. They have never answered the legitimate questions as to why they cherry-picked so blatantly. That’s one thing that makes me skeptical of their claims.
I have also not seen anything that conclusively says that tree-ring width is primarily driven by temperature.
Joel Shore
I will put two hypothetical scenarios to you;
If you saw a competent study that demomstrated that the MWP was a synchronous event in terms of time and reasonable dispersion worldwide would that be enough to make you seriously reconsider your viewpoint?
If a serious study debunked the concept of ice core co2 measurement and demonstrated it had much greater variability over the last 1000 years than the 280ppm quoted, would that make you reconsider your position?
tonyb
Joel, you say in one breath that it is impossible to prove anything, and in another breath, that there are things known with “close to absolute certainty”.
The problem isn’t whether real practical knowledge is possible, the problem is, how do you know when you’ve achieved real practical knowledge.
People are notoriously bad at estimating how much they know, and typically, having more information available doesn’t increase people’s knowledge, but merely their confidence in what they had already got stuck on. See Taleb’s The Black Swan.
Maybe this is just something that some people get and some don’t, depending to what extent they have an introspective character, enabling them to be skeptical about their own thoughts. But that’s just a wild speculation on my part.
Now it is not like we’re debating the scientific evidence of the world being round—-how many times have AGW skeptics been likened to “flat Earthers”? Even the Chairman of the IPCC does this! Several times! In public! And on video! As if to say, these people are “skeptical” about science, that’s like being “skeptical about the Earth being round! You, Joel, yourself have fallen for this habit, earlier when you likened “skepticism” to “creationists”.
Bear in mind, we’re debating not only a complex system, but predictions about a complex system. A system that has a multitude of physical and ecological and social components. We’re not debating whether the Earth is round.
And one defense which you employ for this endeavor is that it is impossible to be absolutely certain, but it is possible to be “close to absolute certainty” regarding this complex physical ecological social system and its future behavior.
I think the problem is not science. It is lack of introspection.
TonyB says:
I’ve already said, I think, that my view of the MWP is based on what reconstructions are available at the moment…and it is certainly subject to revision in light of new evidence. Of course, if new evidence contradicts lot of previous evidence, it behooves the presenter to explain why they think this difference occurs and why they believe that their new evidence is more reliable. (This is what Mann et al did—i.e., they explained that the previous evidence for strong warmth during the MWP was strongly biased toward proxies from the North Atlantic / Europe region and that to the extent to which warm periods did occur in other regions during the MWP, they tended to be asynchronous.)
Well, this I think is very hypothetical because the evidence regarding CO2 is very strong now and so it would take considerable evidence in the other direction to overturn it…and this evidence would have to include plausible explanations for how such variation is consistent with the behavior seen since we have been measuring CO2 at Mauna Lao (and elsewhere) since the late 1950s.
So, in principle, I am always open to new evidence, but in practice you have to realize just how much previous understanding and evidence would have to be overturned (or re-interpretted) in order for the understanding on CO2 levels to change.
Stefan says:
To be fair, the statements that I said were close to absolute certainty were not predictions. They were statements regarding the cause of the recent CO2 rises and statements regarding the past CO2 levels over the period for which we have ice core data. One could quibble with what “close to absolute certainty” means…and I purposely left it vague. The IPCC tries to define the degree of certainty assigned to various statements, although these numbers are usually themselves statements of judgement rather than rigorous statistical statements and thus subject to their own uncertainty.
Well, sure. That is a problem…And, yet would you not agree that using science to inform our decisions, even though it will always be in the face of uncertainty (maybe even uncertainty that is difficult to quantify) is better than the alternative?
However, the good thing about science as a whole is that it does not really rely on individual scientists being unbiased or not wedded to certain viewpoints. It is a way for systematizing knowledge even in the light of these human frailties.
Joel Shore (20 Sept 15:25:07)
“And, regarding being able to “prove” AGW, that is an impossible task. Science is inductive, not deductive, and it is impossible to prove anything. It relies on the accumulation of evidence.”
Which “science” is it that you are referring to?
We have an interesting and illuminating impasse about what science is; on one hand I – and this dead guy called Carl Popper – say that science is deductive based on economic interpretation of measured facts, and if it cant be falsified its not science. But Joel says the precise opposite: “no – science is inductive, not deductive, its impossible to prove anything (implying that if it can be falsified then its not science – at least not the sort of science that he is interested in)”.
I looked at some dictionary definitions and other reference sources about these two words, inductive and deductive, since their meanings might be slipping and blurring. There was an interesting visual thesaurus linking words in a map of proximity and connectivity. Inductive was linked to synthetic and synthesis while deductive was linked to analysis and analytic. I like to think of it in terms of the length of the paths that one draws between observation and conclusion. Short and economic (“parsimonious”) = deductive; long and convoluted involving multiple serial assumptions = inductive.
Two teams of scientists, team inductive and team deductive, were given a task: design a speedometer for a car – a device for measuring and displaying the speed that a car is travelling.
So team inductive got to work. This team included a fair number of physicists with computational and modelling skills. It became immediately clear to them that this was a task requiring the procesing of multiple factors all impacting on speed: what was the energy and force driving the car forward, what was the origin of this energy? Chemical and thermodynamic energy from the combustion of fuel needed to be carefully evaluated and modelled. What was the efficiency of this conversion from chemical to kinetic energy – how much was lost in the inefficiency of the motor? Several team members were assigned to modelling these processes. How much energy was lost as friction and heat through the gas exhaust? Simulation of the turbulent fluid flow and associated heat fluxes along the exhaust pipe was clearly called for.
Then of course there were hours of immense fun to be had modelling and evaluating the fluid friction of the air passing over the car. This of course was modified by the dynamics of the air itself – what was the prevailing wind direction? Access to local climate models was thus clearly an indespensible component of correct quantification of the air friction component. The advantage of this aspect of the overall solution was that the climate model input was a variable that could be usefully adjusted to prevent the speedometer system from outputting unacceptable or out-of-limits results.
It was agreed by all team members at an early stage that in order to promote road safety and limit excessive use of road travel, road travel itself being found to be politically undesirable, that the output of the planned speedometer should always show continuously increasing speed regardless of the (questionably relevant) spatial relationship between the car and the ground (depending on whether one took a merely Cartesian or a Euclidian or relativistic or any other geometric frame of reference, or whether even this question was really anything other than a distraction deceitfully inserted into the argument by speed deniers).
Then of course there was the friction between the tyre and the road. An important input here was the curvature of path of the travelling car and associated sideways force and geometric distortion of the tyre, adding heat to the tyre affecting its friction, and whether or not this induced tyre to road shear and slippage, each in turn calling for further modelling inputs. Of course tyre dynamics were temperature-related so local climate was again a critical factor and another useful variable.
So it became clear to team inductive that to have any hope whatsoever of measuring speed in a credible way, to give an output that would be accepted by internationally recogonised car speed scientists associated with the high profile journals and societies, that a large number of data inputs were needed: chemical measurement probes in the fuel tank to asses the fuel chemical potential energy; probes within the ignition chamber to assess on a millisecond basis pressures and temperatures to illucidate combustion energy. Then multiple sensors were required in the exhaust pipe to provide input for fluid flow modelling of the exhaust gasses. Sensors were also required at many locations on the car’s surface to assess airflow and boundary layer turbulence, as the exact location of the laminar-turbulent transition was a key factor in getting the drag models to work reliably. Sensors were needed within the tyres also. Other factors and associated sensor inputs were also identified and subject to in-depth research and computer simulation.
Thus at the end of the day it was deemed impossible to prove that the “speed” of the car that one measured was correct or not, or that the car was in fact moving at all, or whether it was even in contact with the road, and indeed what it was exactly that one meant by the concept of a “road”. The best one could hope for was an accumulation of evidence on the subject (naturally accumulated with the supervision and filtration of appropriate people).
Then team deductive got to work. They measured the circumferance of the wheels. And set up a sensor to measure the rate of rotation of the wheels. From this they got a speedometer.
Of course, the question of which side had the best approach, is deep and complex. Strengths and weaknesses can no doubt be found with both. Scientists reading this will naturally take sides with either team inductive or team deductive, and this decision will likely be correlated with whether they are supporters of opponents of the AGW hypothesis.
It is the “science” of the impossible-to-prove that always attracts political activism. The approach taken by team inductive illustrates the method that has been developed in the last half century for supporting political campaigns with what is dressed up to be scienific evidence and research. This method and process can be termed “political pseudo-science”. In fact it is not real science, since according to the original classical language root meaning of the word, science is about trying to better understand something with the final aim of knowing the truth about it. Political pseudo-science is, by contrast, about promoting a superficially scientific-sounding hypothesis which supports a certain political activist movement, and then raising a smoke-screen of information, data and argument linked by convoluted and flexible paths in such a way that the same politically mandated conclusions always pop out unchanged unaffected by any of the actual data: “its worse than we thought”. This combined with wearing down the opponents – labelled as sociopathic “deniers” and enemies of the people – with marginalisation, intimidation, real violence and sheer volume of unrelenting verbiage.
Some scientific questions are clearly and unambiguously falsifiable – thus actually scientific in the Popperian sense. For instance, is there oil in these rocks? Will this medicine cure this disease? When will this comet pass the earth? Then there are questions beyond the scientific method – for example anything happening outside out cosmological light-cone, or observation of events in other universes.
But there is a miasmic grey region in between, of marginally provable with difficulty merging into outright unprovable. It is this region of the marginally provable – nonprovable that without fail attracts political activism supported by political pseudo-science. Or perhaps attract is the wrong way to describe it, rather, political pseudo-science drives the subject matter deliberately into this grey region at the margins or badlands of science.
AGW is far from the only example of this. Anti-nuclear activism draws heavily on political pseudo-science that exaggerates the biomedical dangers and health effects of radiation and radioactivity, painting a picture of hideous and unlimited harm and danger from the tiniest exposure to ionising radiation. In the same way that AGW proponents obstruct direct conclusions from global climatic observations, radiation scare-mongers energetically obstruct direct discusion and conclusions from simple linkages between exposure to radiation of animals and people and resultant health impacts – or lack of them. They ridicule this as naive, and instead they construct elaborate inductive narratives starting with molecular and genetic level events, linked to cell biology and with an added mixture of epidemiology, hey presto – the politically mandated result of deadly danger from tiny radiation exposure is reliably and repeatebly produced. Any real data linking organism exposures and health results is dismissed by a barrage of argument that such links are impossible to prove. The fact of daily exposure to levels of natural radiation far higher than levels they insist are deadly – is forcefully suppressed. In so doing, the western world (with the laudable exception of France) has destroyed its nuclear industry at a time when it might be needing it most.
Then take genetic modification of agricultural crops. The same left wing – anarchic anti capitalistic mob of thugs have created the political momentum to roll forward another political pseudo-scientific campaign. Here the tactics of shifting in and out of the sphere of the provable are ludicrously evident. Does experience show that 10 years of such and such a GM crop is without health or environmental harm? Then it means that the harmful effects only appear after 20 years. What about if there have been 20 years with no significant ill-effects? Then a new model is produced showing that the effects will spring up in 40 years! Possibly even after hiding for a generation.
So at a time when GM technology might prove to be more necessary than ever expected, our political culture is doing its best to destroy this technology and science base as well.
For a scientist, arguing against political pseudo-science is a form of asymmetric warfare. The political pseudo-scientists employ guerrilla tactics of brief and daring raids into the terrifying territory of the falsifiable and scientific, followed by retreat into the safety of the impossible-to-prove.
And – guess what: its worse than I thought!
Political pseudo science is deeply corroding our scientific capability and the edifice of science itself. It is pervading more and more scientific disciplines, with the inductive philosophy of grossly inflated pride in technological leaps through hoops shackling us to a disfunctional epistemology of convoluted linear inductive logic and forcing us away from real answers rather than drawing us toward them.
If this process runs its course and the capability of western culture and society to carry out the scientific method is finally destroyed, perhaps only Islamic or Chinese or other Asian nations or cultures will carry it forward to future generations. Our proximity and cosiness with such cultures might in the not too distant future be significantly increased, as we all find ourselves huddled together around the equator.
Phlogiston
Very nice post. Thanks.
tonyb
Joel
I gues you will read and respond to the post by Phlogiston. Whilst you are still around please confirm the TOTAL amount of co2 in the carbon cycle (oceans atmosphere plants etc) and mans TOTAL contribution to that amount.
I want to put things into a proper context as to our actual cupability and impact . Please leave aside the ‘well even a little bit of cyanide can harm us argument.’
thanks
tonyb
Phlogiston:
Brilliant and true.
Especially this:
“Then team deductive got to work. They measured the circumferance of the wheels. And set up a sensor to measure the rate of rotation of the wheels. From this they got a speedometer.”
Applying that to climate in light of my comments just do the following:
1) Ascertain the position of the ITCZ when global air temperatures are stable.
2) Measure the distance it moves during negative and positive oceanic phases.
3) Ascertain the distance it moves as a result of the estimated temperature forcing from say 100 ppm of CO2.
4) Bear in mind that the purpose of the movement is to neutralise temperature forcing from whatever cause so that the temperature equilibrium set by the solar/ocean interaction remains undisturbed.
Phlogiston: I don’t know what to say about your diatribe except to note that your example of “inductive” and “deductive” logic with the speedometer has nothing that I can see in common with the actual correct usage of those terms.
And, your whole thing about “political pseudoscience” just seems to be an excuse for people with your political point-of-view to ignore and belittle science that they don’t like the policy implications of. I.e., it is just politicizing science in the name of preventing it from politicization. (Of course, it amuses me to no end that the politicizers of science are deemed to be organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, AAAS, the various scientific professional societies and so forth whereas those fighting the politicization seem to be organizations like the Heartland Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, and so forth.)
Unlike you, I see politicizing of /attacks on science by both the Right and the Left, although the Left’s (e.g., postmodernism) seems to have been less effective and more marginalize than the Right’s.
TonyB says:
Well, you can always engineer to get the answer that you want to hear by asking the wrong question. The question is not our total contribution to the total carbon cycle, which is indeed rather small (see here: http://www.globe.gov/fsl/eventsimages/CCdiagramWEB.jpg ) but rather our contribution to the level of CO2 in the ATMOSPHERE specifically (and, as far as ocean acidification goes, in a certain chemical form in the oceans). The problem is that the rate of our introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere is very fast compared to the geologic timescales over which some aspects of the carbon cycle that will eventually restore the balance operate. And hence, our perturbation to the atmospheric concentrations will persist for thousands of years.
I’ll put things back into the context of this thread. Earlier, E.M Smith said, “the MODELS are bunk since they cannot predict (or project) a cooling trend.”
Your reply was, “What the models predict is that on average there will be warming. However, each individual model run shows the sort of noise that is inherent in the real climate system and thus it is not uncommon to have approximately decade-long periods with little trend or even a negative trend.”
OK, so various model runs can do that. Ten or twenty years is just noise. Now if noise could only persist for one year, then we’d have some empirical evidence by now of the models’ skill; we’d be out of the noise periods and the long term trend would be clear. But ten years can be noise. So we are still in the noise period where it is too early to tell. In what context then, in which particular findings, or speciality, is it appropriate to be discussing whether we’re “close to absolute certainty” ? In what particular context is it appropriate for the IPCC to be talking about findings as “very likely” ? What does it mean when the IPCC summary for policymakers states that it is “very unlikely” (defined as less than 10%) that climate sensitivity is less than 1.5C ? Joel, what was your vague definition for “close to … certain” ? Would it be 99%? Would it be 95% ?
We are still in the noise period. There is no empirical evidence as yet that model projections are correct–all we are doing so far is comparing modelled noise with climate noise. So what are they based on, these IPCC projections which are using the term “very unlikely”? They are apparently based on nothing but faith in a set of hypothesis whose real world implications are yet to be tested—-remember, the IPCC is reviewing the broad science and offering one single summary to policymakers for the future of the planet. It is the sum total, the whole picture presented, and its degree of certainty, that counts, not whether some particular individual bit of research managed to match a high standard of empirical testing and verification, of which there are no doubt many examples. You simply can’t jump from “I fixed a car engine and it works” to “I will design the next Boeing Mach-10 super jetliner”. Recall, you have made much about the gradual accumulation of knowledge. Sometimes the whole is indeed greater than the parts. But sometimes you only have a heap of parts that don’t add up to anything. How do you know the difference? If it is science then you know by testing. By empirical testing.
Yes science can inform our decisions. For example, empirical research shows that most predictions by experts turn out wrong. So we can use that. We can take into consideration these things that studies of human behaviour show about our ability to be biased. So we are informed by that. Or course, this doesn’t come from physics, it is not a “hard” science, but then what is so firm and nailed-down about the projections of future climate, ecology, and social systems? Do you see the dilemma? If you want to work it into a softer science, open the field of climate up to issues that are greater uncertainties, then you open yourself up to the counter-indications from other soft sciences.
This is how you, a physicist, ends up having a conversation with a non-scientist like me. You’ve left the fortress of rigour and highly specialised skill, years of technical discipline, and entered a quagmire of philosophical discussions, judgements, social dynamics, and issues about “wisdom”.
Science as a whole, I believe and as is generally accepted, is self-correcting, simply because everything tends to progress, as far as we can see. The big issue, however, is that any required self-correction takes time. Peer review can also be peer pressure. I don’t know if you have ever lived in a culture where 99% of people are wrong but as far as they are concerned, everything is in the natural order of things? (I’m referring to living in South Africa when Apartheid was still in force). Eventually the people (who were the majority) corrected the system, which had been imposed by the authoritarian minority. And yet, it took many decades. There are examples in science where discoveries took a long time to be accepted. I recently heard an experienced medical professor state that, “when scientists see something they don’t like, they ignore it”. The scientists he was referring to, were actually a very prestigious medical institution that advises the government on health policy.
Recall where we came from in this thread. You claim that the climate models (and what the IPCC bases its projections on) are not even out of the noise period where they are indistinguishable from nonsense (ten years without warming is just noise, right?). We know that human psychology can hold onto bias, even when faced with strong empirical counter-evidence, and we know that experts overestimate their confidence in their predictions–a fact often observed, and hard to ignore when scientists start bandying about terms like “virtual certainty” and “10% (very unlikely)”–so we know it happens and can happen.
Quite simply, policy must consider all these items of information.
God, I can’t believe this thread is still alive!
Joel asked of Smokey:
Finally, in regards to your own skepticism, I once asked you to tell me some specific aspects of the argument against AGW that you are skeptical about and you never did answer that question even though there are plenty of extremely nutty things out there (not even peer-reviewed in any reputable journal) that I was hoping you would happily disassociate yourself from.
I know this was directed at Smokey, but I’ll contribute. I constantly hear or see this being presented as evidence against global warming:
Jupiter, Mars and Neptune are all warming, so the recent warming trend of the Earth can’t be our fault.
Never mind that each could be warming for different ecological reasons based on the atmospheric or geologic dynamisms of each planet, so the fact that all three are warming does not disprove AGW in our case. Now, if there are no explanations as to why each would be warming, then it would give more credence to the solar-centric side to explain our warming. Only problem is, I have never been able to confirm that those planets are warming at all. Looked everywhere for confirmation. Even asked some here to provide the evidence of the other planets warming. I can’t find it, and no one has shone me the link to such information, other than a link to a Hannity or Rush quote. Until I see the confirmation, this is not a valid point that weakens the AGW argument.
Phlogiston (22:46:17),
I agree, that was a really great post. I recognized Joel Shore in it throughout. No wonder he called it a “diatribe.”
One thing I was taught by one of my physics profs was a simple definition of inductive vs deductive reasoning: deductive reasoning is from the general to the particular; inductive reasoning is from the particular to the general.
Alarmists live and breathe inductive reasoning: a polar bear drowns… global warming! A hurricane hits… global warming! Dead walruses are found on a beach… global warming! And so on. They constantly argue inductively, taking a particular occurrence and extrapolating it to the entire climate.
This is, of course, faulty logic. To show the value of deductive reasoning: they cannot take the general climate, and deduce that global warming causes polar bears to drown, because some polar bears always drown. But human evolution has made a survival trait out of inductive reasoning. You can’t assume a bear is not hungry; you run away from all bears. So the general public laps up scary stories and using their hard-wired inductive reasoning, they extrapolate one scary story to apply to everything. Deductive reasoning is hard. It takes will power and discipline.
Alarmists must show that the climate is outside the bounds of natural variability, which is the basic question. The theory of natural climate variability has never been falsified; the climate has had repeated extremes, both up and down, before humans had any possible effect.
We are in the middle of a benign climate; CO2 has been many thousands of ppmv in the past — when the climate was plunged into an Ice Age. And CO2 has remained at very high levels for hundreds of millions of years at a time, a time when life flourished. Yet looking at a very short time span, alarmists use inductive logic for CO2 just like they use it for polar bears: “Look! CO2 is rising, therefore it causes global warming!”
Using deductive logic, CO2 need not even be mentioned, unless the climate can be shown to be abnormal. GCMs should be programmed to completely omit CO2 because, as Occams Razor demands, they should never increase beyond what is necessary the number of entities required to explain anything. Throwing CO2 into the mix serves an agenda, but it is not necessary to explain the climate [and GCMs have a really abysmal ability to predict the climate. Unlike the theory of natural variability, which predicts multi-decadal length warming and cooling periods, riding on the gradually rising trend line going back to the LIA and before that, to the last great Ice Age].
Inductive logic has its uses, as when a cop arrests a suspect for a crime based on a few clues, instead of arresting everyone who could possibly have been connected in any way. But then, deduction takes over.
[Many other excellent posts here, too. 500+ posts is a pretty satisfying thread, and I’ve learned a lot. But I haven’t learned why Joel spends so very much time on this site, still trying to convert his first skeptic.]
Sonicfrog (14:00:36),
I’ve had this link for a while, hope it helps. It’s got its own citations on the first page: warming on other planets.
I think the crux of the whole matter is this:
It doesn’t matter whether the IPCC has it right or wrong… Just the fact that CO2=AGW is a “scientific”consensus is enough for the scaremongers. Because there is a “scientific” consensus everyone else, meteorologist, climatologist, geologist, scientist, statitistician, engineer or anyone who is not part of the consensus, must be quiet and let the United States of America become a part of a worldwide socialistic government.
So everybody just be quiet and accept that if they can’t clean us out and humble us with the health care debacle, they can use cap and trade, and of course we must spend additional trillions to install the high speed rail systems across the USA.
Or we can tell all the clowns the scientists and the politicians on both sides of the aisle, that the party is over and we’re gonna build the fence around Washington DC…. nothing in or out…. It’s past time for a holiday from big government.
Mike Bryant