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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RayG (11:03:06) : “@ur momisugly Charles of SOMA. Sir Charles, was your baronetcy created in 1984, perhaps?”
Ray, I think you’re confusing Orwell with Huxley.
derek (10:43:11) :
“…the scientists have only themselves to blame for the state of science today.”
Derek, please change it to;
“…the Carbon Cult have only themselves to blame for the state of Climate science today.”
Because the rest of us are watching in disbelief.
“…And the real world to stop this scam is the world of politics”
This is exactly the problem, By the time rational argument can convince the MSM and the public at large, the politicians may have done their worst. It’s essential imo to direct our efforts at opinion formers. The problem of disinfecting the teachers and their pupils can come later.
I’ve only been out to a pub about four times since new year. On two of those I;ve got into furious arguments with otherwise sensible men who have swallowed the entire AGW hypothesis wholesale. On the other hand I have met a young lady about to start a PhD in some arctic-related field – and she is convinced the AGW hysteria is based on ‘politics’ / money – not science.
Let’s hope her generation will try to unpick what has been done – after all they have careers and reputations to forge. But it’s the ambition of the politicos and NGOs which is the massive stumbling block, allied to their stupidity, never mind the ‘scientists’
Arthur Glass (11:49:35) :
“’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%.”
Its roughly 380 parts per million.
Dividing by 10^6 = 0.000380 mole fraction CO².
[moved the decimal point 6 digits to the left]
Times 100 = 0.038 per cent.
[moved the decimal point 2 digits to the right]
Best to check everything, Arthur, even if you’ve done it before correctly. If you’ve done it before incorrectly, use more question marks.
R Gates
Quote: ” and be one more bit of data supporting the AGW hypothesis.”
I’m sorry, but you could not be more wrong.
The only way is if you eliminate every other thing, including it’s just natural, which is something we can not do.
I have an hypothesis that invisible glass shrinks as it gets warmer.
I’m going to fill my invisible glass with water and warm it up.
The water spilling over the top supports my hypothesis that invisible glass shrinks as it gets warmer.
You can’t see or test for it either.
Causal relationships don’t require the dependent variable to change in lock step with one independent variable with other independent variables are involved.
So true. Except lock step was the prediction.
Less snow in winter was predicted. Nothing about a chance of the snowiest winter ever.
re the less-than-successful fightback this week:
BBC: Pallab Ghosh: Climate change human link evidence ‘stronger’
The analysis, published in the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change Journal, has assessed 110 research papers on the subject.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8550090.stm
a wag on Bishop Hill was amused by some on the Editorial Board at Wiley:
EDITOR IN CHIEF, Mike Hulme, University of East Anglia, UK
***Perceptions and Communication of Climate Change
Irene Lorenzoni
University of East Anglia, UK
Lorraine Whitmarsh
Cardiff University, UK
Willingness to bend the rules for the sake of climate change advocacy unfortunately isn’t a disease restricted to climate scientists. There are many people within government and within the news media who are similarly afflicted. Warmist zealots in newsrooms are blocking the story from the mainstream media, and warmist politicians are blocking it from the political arena.
wren,
“Causal relationships don’t require the dependent variable to change in lock step with one independent variable with other independent variables are involved.”
You have to apply correlation tests and calculate confidence intervals. If a relationship has a high confidence, say 99%, then we can eliminate chance, at low confidence we can’t draw any conclusions.
Re Arthur Glass (11:49:35) :
“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%.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Percent [%] stands for hundreths
ppm = parts per million
1M ppm = 100% [100 hundreths of a million]
380K ppm = .380 of a million or 38%
38K ppm = ,038 of a million or 3.8%
3800 ppm = ,0038 of a million or 0.38%
380 ppm = ,00038 of a million or 0.038%
R. Gates (09:50:41) : 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 water …
If that were only the case! The AGW Alarmists hypothesize hundreds of disastrous outcomes, from acne to malaria epidemics to Manhattan under 20 feet of ocean to the entire planet boiling away.
You attempt to restrain the AGW hypothesis to a paltry set of marginal, indeed unmeasurable, minor phenomenological tweaks. That’s rather disingenuous. Haven’t you seen Al’s movie? Or Hansen’s Venus Syndrome lectures?
Frankly, R, I’d be relieved if the Alarmists confined themselves to minutia. Maybe we’d all see that more rain, longer growing seasons, more biodiversity, more biological productivity, etc. are GOOD things, and nothing to be alarmed about. Maybe forestalling to coming glaciation should be a project the whole world gets behind. That would better, IMHO, than spending $trillions on non-solutions to a non-problem.
Unfortunately, R, you don’t speak for Al, or James, or the IPCC, or the EPA. All those guys have dire reports of a catastrophic future if we don’t devolve civilization to the Stone Age immediately, like yesterday, and it may already be too late.
PS – species stress? Gag me.
Insert after “warming water…” please. Thank you.
Joe (12:06:16) :
“The problem is that when these scientists fall, ALL of scientists will be painted by the same brush.”
_________________________
Agree! It’s an ‘internal’ problem that THEY have to deal with. Unfortunately, they (whoever ‘they’ are) don’t seem to be doing anything except talking to each other about everything but their problem. Their problem, as in the difference between “science” and some wierd thing called ‘psyence’. (I used to think that everyone talked about the weather:-)
The ‘psyentists’ and their ‘psyence’ will win and take over the Scientists and the every field of Science. It’s “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” all over again. Life’s a beach, sometimes you drown.
Wren (10:05:20) :
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.
According to NOAA, we’ve been in an *El Niño* Southern Oscillation since November — it’s the culprit that produced a relatively snowless Vancouver for the Winter Olympics.
The 2000 – 2009 charts I’ve seen indicate that temperatures have either flatlined since 1998, or warmed so slightly as to be insignificant. According to the CAGW canon, temps should have continued to climb at a steady pace, matching the increase in CO2, regardless of other factors.
Bumper sticker seen in Chicago:
“Stop Global Whining”
Gotta love it 🙂
Latitude said:
“The only way is if you eliminate every other thing, including it’s just natural, which is something we can not do…”
Sorry, but that is never the standard for testing a hypothesis. You don’t have to eliminate “every other thing”, for that would take a hypothesis about what “every other thing” would be reasonable, and you’d be chasing your tail forever. The AGW hypothesis simply has to posit certain real world, measureable effects that will happen, gather data to support or deny the existence of those effects, analyze the data, and report the results. This is the scientifc standard.
In the end, even if we see the polar sea ice at both poles melt, the average global temp go up by 9 or 15 degrees, and all sorts of other effects predicted by AGW hypothesis, no one can never say for 100% certainty that it was all caused by AGW related to CO2..but you can say it is likely to very high degree of certainty.
M. Simon (13:18:50) said:
“…Less snow in winter was predicted…”
This is simply not true. Climate scientists (and scientists in general) have long realized the chaotic nature of complex systems and the existence of unknown variables.Many AGW models show MORE snow for certain regions for several decades, followed by more rain as the winters get too warm. No model predicts a lock-step linear progression, where each year is warmer than the next, etc. Events like solar minima and la nina are part of that chaotic, non-linear, system. But, what is predicted are trends. The arctic sea ice will trend downward, (but not lock step every year) but over decades, sea levels will rise over decades, permafrost will melt, etc.
Chaotic systems are never lock-step and linear, but over a broad enough sample and long enough period of time, trends will emerge. This is the nature of climate change, and the role of AGW theory is to predict those trends. If they don’t materialize over time, (and many scientists obviously think they already have) the the theory can be discarded. If they do materialize, the theory is not proven as absolutely correct, but only proven as very likely correct.
Mr. Gates’ analysis might have been reasoned and dispassionate. It also had nothing to do with AGW. Mr. Gates makes the same mistake that most people do when they look at AGW theory. They approach it backwards. Specifically, AGW does not seek to prove that the world is getting warmer. Rather it seeks to identify the cause. Natural warming can explain all the things that he mentions. These things neither support, prove or disprove AGW and are in fact simply straw-man arguments. The preponderance of the science that deals directly with CO2 as a cause of the warming does not fit with the observations of the natural world. While there is still a slight possibility that the AGW may have some validity, it gets smaller by the day. One thing that he did say was however correct. The climate will be what it will be no matter what politicians, climate scientists and Al Gore and his ilk say or do.
It all comes down to thermometers for me. A thermometer measures a given temperature in a given place at a given time. (If its read accurately and is correctly calibrated). I still fail to understand how Jones and Co. can take a thermometer reading, (assuming its accurate), and interpolate that to cover hundreds of Sq Km. My background is aviation, and an airfield Wx station is designed to give me the conditions on the runway, nowhere else. I know enough meteorology to know that 5km away the conditions may be quite different. How they can presume to produce a global or even regional average using the methods they do is beyond my comprehension, and seems beyond all logic. Add to that the good work done here regarding the siting of most Stevenson screens, and to this bear with little brain, the whole process seems fundamentally flawed.
So, I fail to see how anyone can trust the raw data, never mind interpolate it to a few tenths of a degree. I am now old enough to have seen nearly 60 years of weather, and here in the NE of the UK. It is is cold in winter, and about every 10-15 years, we might get a good summer. I read enough history to know that the Romans grew grapes not far from here 2000 years ago, and that a millennium later, the Vikings colonised Greenland. For Jones, Mann and Co to tell me that the world is warming by 0.2C or whatever per decade, given the vagueness of their raw data I find a bad joke. I would not buy a secondhand car from these people. But then I have thought about the matter, but I suspect that most of the people in this country and others, do not bother to think about it. A large part of the problem is their disengagement from politics. If it comes from the mouth of a politician, it is fundamentally flawed anyway.
Statistics, it seems, is the new Science!
Consensus, aka “another poll showed”, is now more important than observation, geologic precedence and apolitical objectivity than the shrivelled organ that was once ennobled as “the scientific method”
How did this happen? Was it just because of a societal shift, born of hubristic certainty, that elevated sound-bite answers above heretical questioning?
When, and how, did it happen that second-rate geographers from third-rate universities using fourth-rate (I’m being generous here) statistical comprehension to leap-frog their inabilities to the core of world strategic planning?
I haven’t a clue other than a suspicion that our political guardians may be teetering between grade 5 and “you voted for this moron” status.
Attention Moderator and friends
This piece on the future of the IPCC surely deserves attention:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/04/ipcc-major-change-needed
aMINO aCIDS iN mETEORITES (09:50:12) :
…..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.
…………………………………………………………………………..
I find this pretty cool. I like the young generation coming up. There is something about them that is unlike other generations of my lifetime.
My generation is the 60’s early 70’s. Despite the belief that that generation was peace-loving I found (and still find) my generation to be constantly confrontational and always trying to overthrow every and anything that moves—even if that overthrow makes no sense.
The next generations since then until now have not really had an identity expect for maybe video games, the internet, and cel phones. But they seem to not have a particular identity.
But this current young generation seems to have a face. They seem to want to face reality. My generation wanted escape from reality and to create a utopia that never could happen. This current generation seems to be creative about the real world. They seem to want real answers. And they are anything but confrontational.
I like it!
My reply;
I have raised a couple of video gamers myself, I have been talking to my daughter (a young professional web site developer, very savvy on social media trends and mechanisms) about her low levels of concern about the whole spectrum of issues with the AGW fraud and debate.
She has the opinion that the whole issues of global warming in SO a NON-issue in reality to the day to day requirements of working in today’s economy, even from the prospective of marketing and advertising venues and slow volumes, that Natural forces of the general market will “do what they will” out of any bodies control to regulate the system.
That the resources spent talking about, but doing nothing about the weather, are just more of the usual waste, due to expenditures on attempts at manipulation, of the free thinking minds of the smart and educated. Who are swimming with the current where ever it goes, knowing it is totally out of control anyway.
Mike,
Alarmism comes about when science mixes with politics…and it has a valuable role to play. It was a good thing that there was some alarmism when it was recognized that flurocarbons were depleting the ozone layer. Scientists found the link, and something political was done about it. I try to avoid even listening to the alarmists, and focus on the science, as politics in general is far too tedious for me.
Jim and Mr. Gore, and the rest have a role to play, and honestly and passionately believe they are right. It is naive and a gross misunderstanding of these men to think it is about money, fame, research dollars or anything else. They really believe what they are saying, and if…and that’s still open for exactly the kind of healthy debate we have here at WUWT, but if the AGW hypothesis is correct, then the “alarmists” will have served exactly the role they need to fill.
Personally, I straddle the fence on the AGW issue in terms of outcome. I happen to currently think there is a pretty good over 75% chance that the AGW hypothesis is correct, but I am not completely convinced that the outcome will be totally dire. We are due for another glacial period in the current Ice Age we are in, and holding back this glacial period through AGW could be the best thing for all of us. On the flip side, the acidification of the oceans, and loss of biodiversity are a concern for me, more so than other so-called “dire” consequences. The Chinese, Russians, Canadian, U.S., and others are already making plans for the exploitation of the arctic once the sea ice melts. This is human nature…to use resources as they become available…for better or worse.
The best version of ‘If’, in my opinion, starts:
If you can keep your wife, while all around are losing theirs and blaming it on you….
Max Hugoson (08:05:15) wrote:
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.
——————–
Max: Let’s not be as irresponsible as Gavin Schmidt. CO2 is increasing at about 1% a year or 10% a decade. The radiative forcing associated with increase CO2 (which only flat-earthers deny) varies with the log base 2 of 10%, which is 14% a decade. Reasonable, but revisable, estimates of the forcing associated with a doubling (one log base 2 increase) are 3.6 W/m^2, which translate to 1 degC increase using Boltzmann’s law (pure physics, no feedbacks). So you would expect to see a 0.15 degC rise due to CO2 alone on your graph – something you can’t detect in the background noise and natural variability. So your graph tells us nothing about whether warming is man-made, natural, or some combination of both.
The CAGW crowd believes that feedbacks will amplify this warming by a factor called climate sensitivity which they believe lies somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5. That would be 0.22-0.68 degC. The higher end of this range is getting increasingly unlikely (Hansen has reduced is personal estimate of climate sensitivity from 3 to 2.5), but the lower end isn’t incompatible with your graph. Climate models do show occasional decade-long pauses in warming, but fifteen-year-long pauses are rare.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/edu/dees/V1003/readings/Kerr.Science.2009.pdf
So every year that the pause continues, the probability that climate sensitivity is in the high range of 1.5-4.5 diminishes (if it is even >1). As it goes down, the projections of catastrophe should go down too.
If you consider the whole 20th century, CO2 is halfway to doubling, making the log base 2 of the increase equal to 0.5 (or 0.75 if you add in the other long-lived GHGs). These numbers are also compatible with observed twentieth century temperature warming. (If you are skeptical about some of the surface record, consider only the fraction confirmed by satellite data.) Of course, the CAGW crowd amplifies this warming with feedbacks and then cancels the amplification with aerosols – and nobody can prove they are right or wrong. (They think aerosols explain the mid-century temperature dip, but – given the MWP and LIA – natural variability is a satisfactory explanation.)