If you try really really hard to ask questions a certain way, then you’ll get the answers you want. ~ charles the moderator
Scientists misread data on global warming controversy
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Well-publicized troubles have mounted for those forecasting global warming. First, there was last year’s release of hacked e-mails from the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia, showing some climate scientists really dislike their critics (investigations are still ongoing). Then there was the recent discovery of a botched prediction that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 in one of the Nobel-Prize-winning 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Instead, the glaciers are only shrinking about as much as glaciers everywhere, twice as fast as they did 40 years ago, suggest results from NASA‘s GRACE gravity-measuring orbiter.
The recent controversies “have really shaken the confidence of the public in the conduct of science,” according to atmospheric scientist Ralph Cicerone, head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Cicerone was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting last month on a panel calling for more communication and release of data to rebuild lost trust for scientists. IPCC chiefs have made similar calls in the handling of their reports.
Scientists see reason for worry in polls like one released in December by Fox News that found 23% of respondents saw global warming as “not a problem,” up from 12% in 2005. Also at the AAAS meeting, Yale, American University and George Mason University released a survey of 978 people challenging the notion that people 18 to 35 were any more engaged than their elders on climate change. Statistically, 44% in that age range — matching the national average — found global warming as either “not too important” or “not at all important,” even though they grew up in an era when climate scientists had found it very likely that temperatures had increased over the last century due to fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases.
But what “if” (apologies to Kipling again) scientists are misreading those poll results and conflating them with news coverage of the recent public-relations black eyes from e-mails and the glacier mistake? What’s really happening, suggests polling expert Jon Krosnick of Stanford University, is “scientists are over-reacting. It’s another funny instance of scientists ignoring science.”
Krosnick and his colleagues argue that polling suggesting less interest in fixing climate change might indicate the public has its mind on more immediate problems in the midst of a global economic downturn, with the U.S. unemployment rate stuck at 9.7%. The AAAS-released survey of young people, for example, finds that 82% of them trust scientists for information on global warming and the national average is 74%.
“Very few professions enjoy the level of confidence from the public that scientists do, and those numbers haven’t changed much in a decade,” he says. “We don’t see a lot of evidence that the general public in the United States is picking up on the (University of East Anglia) e-mails. It’s too inside baseball.”
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The thing about climate science is, it doesn’t matter what opinion polls say, or which scientists made intentional or unintential errors, the climate will be what it will be. Only some vast mass conspiracy on a global scale by hundreds, if not thousands of scientists involving the measurements of everything from sea level, to arctic sea ice and satellite data would be needed to bring about any “hoax”.
Here’s the hypothesis the AGW proposes: Human activity, specifically the production of CO2, is altering the climate. Here’s the expected observable effects from that hypothesis: rise in average global tropospheric temperatures, especially pronounced at higher latitudes, reduction of arctic sea ice (and eventually, Antarctic sea ice) on an annualized basis, the cooling of the stratosphere due to the delay of thermal transmission from the troposphere, an intensification of the hydrological cycle as wet areas will see more intense rain or snow, and dry areas will see more intense dryness, species stress as ecosystems change, acidification of the oceans through the absorption of some the exess CO2, increased release of methane from the melting of permafrost and destablization of ocean deposits through warming waters…
The AGW hypothesis will not be absolutely proven by the occurance of anyone, or even all of these events taking place and being measured and observed, BUT the lack of even a large number of them would be damaging to the AGW hypothesis. So far, the hypothesis remains credible as all of the above effects have been observed, with the exception of the reduction of the Antarctic sea ice on an annualized basis– as it is in fact slightly increasing. Some AGW models account for this through the unusal weather patterns created by the reduction of the ozone layer over Antarctica. If however, in the next few decades, the year to year extent of Antarctic sea ice does not level and then begin to decline, it could be a sign of trouble for AGW. Also, even though the rate of the decline of the arctic sea ice has been greater than the rate of the incline for Antarctic sea ice, if the arctic sea ice also began a long term reversal of its annualized decline, and began to increase and show positive anomalies (over a period of more than just two or three years), that would be a major hole in the AGW hypothesis.; AGW theorists think quite the opposite will occcur, and eventually it will be the Antarctic sea ice that will show a leveling in it’s slow annualized incline, reverse course and begin to decline like the arctic sea ice.
So AGW scientists have made specific prediction, and so far the preponderance of the evidence supports their theory. Only the data…not the pundits, nor politicians, nor the public opinion will change that…and February 2010 continues this year’s trend as one of the warmest on (satellite record) for tropospheric temps, and if the Jan-Feb. 2010 trend continues, then 2010 will be the warmest year on instrument record, and be one more bit of data supporting the AGW hypothesis.
Federal carbon emissions regulation, permit fees and rationing are out. But on the bright side, “the public” still loves the climate science that is behind it!
That should cheer up all of the depressed climate quacks out there.
Around 1979 the public got a wakeup call on what life would be like if there were no more oil.
That issue still has traction and to frame an energy policy on reasonable steps to increase efficiency and reduce waste to stretch the existing sources farther would garner a lot of support from the public at large.
But to simultaneously hit us with guilt, shame and a plea to altruism for future generations sake when we can’t see the clear benefit and then witness the experts begin to lose credibility may be reaching a mile too far.
Now we’re entering a PR battle along with a pissing contest.
Bring on the clowns.
44% ……found global warming as either “not too important” or “not at all important,”
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
If the general population knew about WattsUpWithThat that number would grow!
I still hope for the day that WUWT will get into the top 100 websites (by number of hits) in the world.
Max Hugoson (08:05:15) :
IS GLOBAL WARMING MAN MADE?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
If you take into account UHI, temp station placement, dropping of certain temp stations from the temp record, fiddling with temp data handling methods, bias of acceptance of papers for publication in science magazines and journals, Hollywood continually making global warming movies,
all of which are man made,
then yes, global warming is man made.
Max Hugoson (08:05:15) :
IS GLOBAL WARMING MAN MADE?
CO2 is known to be a heat trapping greenhouse gas. The theory of man made global warming assumes that the CO2 in the atmosphere (about 0.04% of air) that has increased due to use of fossil fuels by humans has been causing global warming.
In science, the method used to verify the validity of a theory is to compare the theory with actual observations. To verify the theory of man made global warming, we may compare the change in CO2 in the atmosphere to change in mean global temperature during the same period.
In science, for a theory to be valid, it must apply at all times. As a result, to verify the validity of the theory of man made global warming, we can consider the years since 1998. The result of this comparison is shown above.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/normalise/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/normalise/trend
In the chart above, based on the data since 1998, for more than a decade, there has been increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, but there has not been any change in the mean global temperature trend.
As a result, based on more than a decade long data, global warming is not man made.
======
Causal relationships don’t require the dependent variable to change in lock step with one independent variable with other independent variables are involved.
Despite the cooling influences of a La Nina and a down-cycle in sunspot activity, the 2000-2009 decade was warmer than the previous decade.
[ MichaelC58 (04:49:46) :
All three young intelligent people in our LA office at my recent visit there, barely knew of AGW, were not in the slightest concerned about it, knew nothing of the climate controversy or ClimateGate or of Cap&Trade (or health reform for that matter).]
At least there is hope for the world. The brain washing failed. At least these 3 have not been educated beond their intelligence.
The public would be a 100% supportive of the climate science community if they were open and honest with their research ( keep the public informed) but since it is the other way around where research is supressed to avoid any scrutiny. The way the climate scientific community is handling this tells me they have something to hide and have a personal interest in the outcome.
If they were open and honest there would be no problem addressing global issues people world wide would be more supportive but since they have gone this route they the scientists have only themselves to blame for the state of science today. It all comes down to honesty and they choose the other road the road of ( just because we said so) road. Science needs a overhaul and if it doesn’t nothing will change.
Quoting from Richard Harter’s Piltdown Man page.
“The hoax succeeded in large part because of the slipshod nature of the testing applied to it; careful examination using the methods available at the time would have immediately revealed the hoax. This failure to [adequately] examine the fossils went unmarked and unnoticed at the time – in large part because the hoax admirably satisfied the theoretical expectations of the time.
“The hoax illuminates two pitfalls to be wary of in the scientific process. The first is the danger of inadequately examining and challenging results that confirm the currently accepted scientific interpretation. The second is that a result, once established, tends to be uncritically accepted and relied upon without further reconsideration. “
” Only the data…not the pundits, nor politicians, nor the public opinion will change that…and February 2010 continues this year’s trend as one of the warmest on (satellite record) for tropospheric temps, and if the Jan-Feb. 2010 trend continues, then 2010 will be the warmest year on instrument record, and be one more bit of data supporting the AGW hypothesis.’
How old is the current atmosphere of the earth? Something on the order of 10^9 years, if I recollect aright. In that temporal context, how likely is that, in a highly chaotic system, temperature ‘trends’ over such short durations will be significant? Granting, for the sake of argument, that in the 20th c. the ‘global temperature’ rose .6 degrees with a margin of error of plus or minus 2, and that the current ‘global temperature’ is is about 290 Kelvin, how significant is such a rise? And how significant has the anthropogenic influence been, including but certainly not limited to the increase in greenhouse gasses from the burning of fossil fuels?
I’ve been studying Pielke Sr, to the best of my limited ability. It is certainly intuitively persuasive that human activity has a marked affect on the atmosphere, as it has on all of the other ‘spheres’.
Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
(thank you & forgive me)
———————
If you can keep your head
when all about you are losing theirs
and blaming it on you,
then, with apologies to Kipling,
you might not be a mann-made
psyentist.
Wren (10:05:20) :
Causal relationships don’t require the dependent variable to change in lock step with one independent variable with other independent variables are involved.
But that is how CO2 was blamed in the first place because they did match for a few years.
Of course you could take the other stated reason “we couldn’t think of anything esle to blame”
@ur momisugly Charles of SOMA. Sir Charles, was your baronetcy created in 1984, perhaps?
Reply: Is this someone who knows me? ~ ctm
Wren (09:47:44) :
My social group includes two engineers, a physics professor, a pharmacist, a lawyer, and a medical librarian. The economy, the stock market, house prices, and Iraq have been frequent topics of conversation at our gatherings. If the subject of global warming ever came up, I missed it.
Everyone knows that religion isn’t a polite topic of conversation. Those others are all safe, though.
I hope someone checks out my figures in the preceding post. Idon’t trust myself.
“Only the data…not the pundits, nor politicians, nor the public opinion will change [evidentiary confirmation of the hypothesis of CO2-driven global warming]”.
The ‘data’ can change nothing. The world does not fall naturally apart into bits of data (at least not in the sense statisticians use the word). Data are human constructs, and valid data refer to reality as signifier to signified.
Anyway, R. Gates, your dispassionate and thought-provoking exposition of the AGW stance was a pleasure to read in the overheated climate of this debate.
City warmed by ‘false spring’
“There was only one year in 1988 when we didn’t have snow after the first day of spring,” he said. “We want it to end, but wishing and hoping and praying won’t do it.”
———————–
OT for the Weather is Not Climate Dept.
“CO2 in the atmosphere (about 0.04% of air) ”
Isn’t this figure an order of magnitude off ? (I ask because I screwed up this calculation before). I’ll stick my head out and go with .00380%.
[snip]
” temperature ‘trends’ over such short durations ”
Something fell out from that sentence into the ether; ‘short durations ‘ refer to the satellite record (30 years) and the more problematic surface record (200 years of spotty data).
Arthur,
You actually raise an interesting philsophical point related to the notion that the “data” doesn’t change anything, which is far beyond the scope of this thread. In a short form version though, certainly reality, or the “world” as you stated, is not broken down into neat little bits of data, but that data comes from what we chose to measure or pay attentin to, and how, therefore, our minds choose to break down reality into neat little bits of information. If I stick a thermometer into a pan of water which is placed over a heat source, I can choose to break down the reality of the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the pan by reading that thermometer and having it tell me the “temperature”. As the temperature rises past 100 degrees F, and then on to 150 degrees F, and so on, as some point I wouldn’t choose (unless I was into experiencing pain and bodily harm) to stick my hand into that water. So in this way, by measuring the average kinetic energy of the molecules in that pan, via a very focused and specifc means, the data has in fact changed something…namely, my consciousness, whereas I choose at some point not to stick my hand in the now boiling water.
And so it is the AGW hypothesis. Very specifc data collection is underway on a global basis, and yes, while the actual collection and analysis of the data doesn’t change the dynamics of what is going on in the oceans and atmosphere, (unless you believe the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle can work on such a large scale!) it does change the consciousness of those scientists who study that data. Depsite all the hoopla, the great majority still believe the data is indicating that the AGW hypothesis is probably correct.
Now, what ought to be one of the roles of sites like this (and Anthony does a tremendous service to all concerned) is to make sure that the data is accurately gathered, broadly shared and reviewed, and then communicated in a way that policymakers and the public at large can understand…without hyperbole, political colorations, or allegiance to any outcome other than the accurate understanding precisely what the data is or isn’t telling us.
And the next few years of data gathering are critical to changing perceptions of all concerned, one way or another….
Peter of Sydney (04:50:33) :
Take heart. AGW had a massive head start, a get deal of coin and media backing.
Just give it time and the planet will show how incorrect the climate scientists have been on hanging a shingle on a single gas.
Mike Ramsey (06:41:59)
When you have the ear of the media, you can manipulate the masses and politicians rely on these masses for votes. Unless AGW does a stupid thing, it will take time for the mighty to fall. In which case they will be affecting policies until then.
The problem is that when these scientists fall, ALL of scientists will be painted by the same brush.
Joe #12.06
They will clutch at straws, with methane venting becoming prominent as a way to scare the bejesus out of us. This has to be hit on the head and fast.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/327/5970/1246
Joe said:
“Just give it time and the planet will show how incorrect the climate scientists have been…”
How much time Joe? I am fairly certain, that even if the next 10 years are warmer that the last 10, which were warmer than the 10 years before that, we will see some AGW skeptics who will never accept the data. Likewise, if somehow the arctic sea ice were to suddenly began a long period of positive year to year anomalies, and the troposhere were to go into long period of cooling (like 10 or 20 years) there would still be those who would cling to the AGW hypothesis. Both camps, in the extreme, are True Believers, and will cling their position and ignore all contrary data so as to prevent cognitive dissonance.
Meanwhile, the true scientists will remain objective, and simply see if the data matches the predictions set forth. To the extent they do, and the data checked, verified, and shared with peers, then they report their findings, and the same for the data that does not support the hypothesis. These past few years of the slowdown in the upward march of tropospheric global temps are easily and well justfied as being related to the extended solar minimum and the extended La Nina. Moving forward, already the data is saying that 2010 is starting out to be a record year, most likely the warmest year since measurments began. If this comes to pass, then the scientist will have yet one more piece of data adding to the confirmation of the AGW hypothesis.
R. Gates (12:04:37) said:
Belief is not part of the scientific method. It is a hallmark of the other philosophy.
Hmm,
leaning too heavily on one poll is dangerous..
Now if this was a set of polls trending the same way thats a different matter.