Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
You’ve heard of “Post Normal Science”? I investigate “Para Normal Science”. That’s the kind of science that is based on the willing suspension of belief in the physical laws of nature. Continuing my investigation of para normal science, I find a group that takes the long view of sea level rise. They don’t mess about with decadal scenarios. They disdain looking a mere century into the future. The press release is here, the paper’s paywalled, abstract here. The press release is titled:
Sea levels will continue to rise for 500 years
Figure from the press release issued by the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen. Estimates prepared for the purposes of alarmism only, not warranteed for any other application. © 2011 by BeVeRyScArEd Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Neal’s Boring Institute.
My favorite part of the press release about the paywalled paper was this:
Actual measurements. Not fake, counterfeit, false, ersatz, phony, bogus, pseudo, or imitation measurements. Actual measurements.
Whenever they say something like “based on actual measurements”, I can’t help but be reminded of Hollywood’s “Based on a true story”, and how far the Hollywood version always is from the actual story warts and all …
In any case, no matter how they designed their climate supermodel, scenarios five centuries long? I’m sorry, but that’s a complete wank. No one will be alive to see even the 200 year mark. It will make no difference to our current choices. Indeed, it will likely be forgotten before the year is out. It is probably produced specifically with the aspiration of receiving the honor of being entombed in the fifth IPCC assessment report, a fitting burial place for such work. It may be based on a true story, but the facts have been changed to protect the innocent, so much so that any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.
But most of all, it is an exercise in projecting a simple curve into the future, which is a newbie error I was warned against in high school. You can’t just extend a curve out for 500 years, that’s a pathetic joke even if you do call it a “IPCC scenario”. Oh, wait, that terminology is so yesterday. The new IPCC bureaucratic scientese term is “Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) radiative forcing scenarios” … I kid you not.
But even if you call it a Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) radiative forcing scenario, still, five hundred years? Five centuries? Get real!
Para Normal Science at its finest.
w.
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Seems to me these AGW chiefs just stick their fingers in their ears and keep repeating “the world is getting much warmer, sea level rise is accelerating, wild weather events are intensifying, all the ice is rapidly melting!” No, no, no, and no again. STOP with the crapola. }:o(
BTdubs, nice to see matey getting pwned by Willis in the Mexican Stand-off above. Time to don the short trousers and cap, and go back to school.
Also, it cracked me up to read in the article “sorry, but that’s a complete wank”! Does that word have a different meaning elsewhere?! Here in the UK it means a spot of…, shall we say, ‘hand-to-gland combat’! :oD
Dear Aslak,
Lots of science to deal with here. You have ducked all of it. From you, no science at all, and I really did hope that you would pitch in on the scientific issues. Oh well.
I will respond to your email as soon as I have dealt with another (personal) issue. After which, I will submit my response to you, and to this site. The rest of our exchange remains private, as per our agreement.
Behind a $39.95 paywall? The Danish taxpayer has paid for this. Who else? My advice: total honesty.
Absolutly classic material from Lance “sound barrier”, and the “error bar” the model frequents. Hope they have some real, live, unfiltered, unpasteurised beer in the error bar.
No time limits here. Come back to us when you can. Now time for imput from your co-authors?
Best wishes,
Richard.
Looking at the recent past (last 22,000 years) the rate of sea level rise has slowed down owing to the lack of continental ice. The only significant ice remaining is Antarctica and at the current rate of melting it will take a few thousand years.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jpliu/sealevel/Liu_Postglacial_Sealevel.jpg
Mockery, such as, say, this?
As Mark Twain famously wrote of that kind of extrapolation:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.
And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
It appears that mockery of this kind, and concerning exactly this kind of “science”, has been around for some time, why do you suppose that is?
Do you mean actual common ground, or ground of your choosing, ground where you believe you control the rules and allowed evidence (and especially, disallowed evidence), and thus are certain of victory?
Is this chosen ground “climate models”? Are you aware of the phrase the map is not the territory”? The most significant climate changes are, obviously, ice ages and the interglacial periods between them, please show how your model explains how ice ages start and end. Please show how your model also explains what caused the modern warm period, what caused and ended the little ice age, the medieval warm period, the dark ages, the roman warm period, etc. If your models and science cannot explain these, the most dramatic climate changes of all, why should I believe either? If your models and science are so poor that they cannot even explain such huge changes, why should I limit my discussion to that? Why should I limit my “common ground” to ground, which obviously has no connection with climate in the real world at all? You will note that these latter climate changes resulted in fairly large temperature swings, large enough to effect sea levels, and that they appear to have happened about every 500 years, please show that you do, indeed, understand what could only have been the natural causes of these (there being no industrialized civilization to have affected them) and show that the causes of these will not effect your 500 year projection. After all, you are a climate scientist, after all, and therefore you certainly must know what started and ended these climate changes, thus you must be able to show that such things have ceased, that they will not come along and screw up your nice little graph, right?
As I said, you wish to assure yourself that I first agree with your “observations” and only your observations, as you give them. I should not, of course, ever disagree with them, but accept them uncritically, and I must never dare to suggest any observations not on your list! Thus I fight only by your rules, and only with the weapons you supply (if any), and thus cannot possibly win. However, I prefer to do what any good general must, to fight on ground of my choosing, the ground of actual, real world observations, which in this case means actual data taken from the real world and not from some model.
That means I will not ignore the little ice age, or the periodic warming and cooling periods after that. I will take into account La Nina and El Nino events, rather than just blindly lumping them into an “average” and assuming that such events are all caused entirely by CO2. And about average and such statistics:
The average American has one ball and one tit, that is all you need to understand about averages.
Granted, sea levels have indeed been rising since the end of the last ice age, but you know all about what starts and ends ice ages and can assure me that that is certainly not what is happening now, right?
Granted, sea levels have been rising since the end of the little ice age, and you certainly know what started and ended that and can thus assure me that it is not happening now, right? Or perhaps you can simply deny the little ice age, medieval warm period, etc etc and thus give up any pretense at even being a climate scientist, or any kind of scientist at all, your choice.
Recently, however, not granted, seas have been dropping lately, how do you explain that? CO2 goes up, seas go down, isn’t that the exact opposite of your claim?
Granted, earth has warmed since the end of the ice age, which climate change you can explain in detail. Oh wait, they didn’t have SAT’s then, never mind. But wait, they had huge glaciers all over, and they don’t now, a pretty good proxy, so I guess you are not off the hook on that one.
Granted, earth has warmed since the end of the little ice age, mostly around say 1880 and 1890, and somehow managed it without resorting to industrialization, and you can tell us all about how this happened, right? And they did have SAT’s then, maybe not as accurate or comprehensive, but they had them.
Granted, the earth has warmed since the 70’s ice age scare, and, of course, you know all about that, right? And we are all certain that you would never have the start of you “rising temperatures” starting right about then, to make it look like it is rising faster than it is, correct? And, of course, you include the warm temperatures before that period, including the record breaking 1938, right? I mean, you would never just sweep such data under the rug, would you?
Granted, the earth has warmed in urban areas, which contain many of the climate stations you are using for your SAT’s, but you know all about Urban Heat Island Effects, right? I mean, you can show that this has not effected your SAT’s, right? And the fact that for a decade or more now, climate stations all over the world have dropped off the grid, so that there are far fewer than there used to be also does not effect your SAT’s, right? I mean, a small number of climate stations at airports surrounded by large urban centers are just as good as a very large number of stations all over, right?
Since 1998 or so, however, the earth has not warmed, despite rising CO2, can you explain that one?
Not granted, if ocean heat content were increasing, the sea would be rising, it is dropping. In addition, there is uncertainty about such measurements, and more certainty that lately, now that we have more certain means, it is staying steady or even slowly dropping. Also, no secret reservoir of “missing heat” has been found in the deeps.
* CO2 is increasing.
Correlation is not causation. It has been shown that warm periods are followed by increased CO2. So, which is it, CO2 increasing causing warmth, or warmth increasing causing CO2?
However, since we have been measuring directly, there does appear to be increasing CO2, so I will grant that one. Not as much of it as you think may be created by man, but it is there.
There’s that causal thing again, see above.
From CO2 alone, not enough to worry about, combined with water vapor, maybe, but then those cloud thingies get involved. All that shade, wind, rain, transport of heat from down here to up there screws up all the neat calculations. Really, someone should do something about that! Maybe if we cram all the climate into a model, where we can just push a few buttons and make it go away, so much neater.
And really they tell us that all that combined radiative forcing from both CO2 and water vapor is causing effects now, well, if we can see the effects, shouldn’t we be able to measure the increased radiative forcing by now? Are you ever going to even try, or are you simply going to assume that your models are all you need? Is the age of actual experimentation over? Are we to go back to the pre Galileo age, when we make models of the crystal spheres that hold the planets, yet never think to actually use telescopes and look?
Sooo, why aren’t we seeing this increased heat since 1999? I mean, the CO2 is going up, why isn’t the warming here? Could there be something missing from these models? Could the map and the territory be dissimilar?
We have the CO2, yet the seas are dropping, what is wrong with this picture? dropping
If the world were warming, the ice would be melting, and the sea would be rising. The sea is dropping; therefore the world is not warming. Don’t need to be a climate scientist to figure that one out.
See Mark Twain above, other people have made such projections in the past, and been mocked (and been dead wrong and mocked again). If you make similar projections now, you can expect to be mocked as well. And you should be.
You have not “looked at” radiative forcing, you have made no direct observations of it at all, you only infer it from models that leave out too much to be representative of the actual climate. You also cannot explain sea level rise not in the context of man created CO2, yet it has risen and dramatically in the past before such existed, and is dropping despite it’s existence now.
“Lukewarmers” are called that because they can’t seem to make up their minds. That is because they let you dictate the terms of the discussion to only what you want them to consider. That is because they have not used the scientific method, and looked outside the models, outside the theories, outside what you allow them to look at, and looked at the real world. Once you have, once you have actually seen the direct observations of the actual climate, what it has actually done and is doing, and not just some model somewhere, you give up all that wishy washy stuff.
Once you have seen the territory, you don’t need the map anymore.
Many accurate observations in your post, but maybe a typo(?) or two in the above paragraph? Or did I misunderstand?
gallopingcamel says:
October 20, 2011 at 9:13 pm
The only significant ice remaining is Antarctica and at the current rate of melting it will take a few thousand years.
Pretty sure Antarctic ice overall has increased in recent times. If I remember right the west side has had some melt but the increase of the east side makes up for it 3 X over. Funny how you only hear about the side that has some melt and not that the other side is pushing record amounts. I remember reading this from a researcher who was working the icy side.
F. Ross says:
Many accurate observations in your post, but maybe a typo(?) or two in the above paragraph? Or did I misunderstand?
As for the dates, that is around the date that the little ice age ended, it may be as early as 1850, no one really agrees. Around this time the temerature warmed rapidly, to about the temeratures we now enjoy today (somehow managing this without SUV’s). It is also muddled because certain vested interests are very keen on the whole little ice age going away, if they cannot make it disappear, they can muddy the waters so much that no one wants to even think about it any more, since it is so surrounded in “controversy”. That is really known as “disinformation”, or, if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS. You simply throw out so many alternate theories that no one can find the truth in it all.
Thay did indeed have SAT”s back then, because they had invented ways to measure the air temperature. Thermometers were around in smallish numbers, thus there are some records of air temperatures in some places. These can be compared to records now, to give at least some indication of how much temperatures have changed. Plus when the Thames river freezes over so hard that you can have a frost fair on it, that is a pretty good proxy. For that matter, George Washington being able to drag cannon over a frozen river is another good proxy. The simple fact that we have more records from this time than of earlier times allows us to read of things like that and deduce approximate temperatures, at least enough to see that it was considerable cooler then (not to mention just plain cold), and that it warmed rapidly when that period ended.
Legatus says:
October 21, 2011 at 12:07 am
Got it. My bad. Thanks for the clarification.
[snip – no we mock you – zero tolerance on trolls starting flame wars ]
Hi Willis
I apologize for overlooking your earlier response on my tiny phone screen. You did indeed answer my questions. So, let me get this straight:
* You agree that added CO2 heats Earth (but argue that cloud feedbacks lessen this effect).
* You argue that this added heat is spent on more thunderstorms, but it will definitely not be heating the ocean, melting any ice, or warming the atmosphere.
It seems like you should write a paper quantifying this anthropogenic impact on thunderstorms. Maybe you can look at extreme rainfall and flooding while you are at it.
Regarding the recent dip in altimetry sea level: It is obviously due to ENSO. Please note, that this ENSO response was predicted before it happened (see Landerer et al. 2008) / find it on google ). So there is a really solid reason to expect the global mean sea level estimates “to reverse their recent downward trend and begin to increase as the La Niña effects wane”. You can consider that a short term prediction from me if you want, since you ridicule my long term projections.
——-
Stephen Brown commented: “Willis, you are a marvel. Every time you strike a match, there’s a bonfire!” – yes, you excel at agitation. To all of the individuals who asked me questions in the comments. I yearn to respond to a few of your questions, but I cannot address a huge agitated mob.
Isn’t the robustness of a model dependent on what they call ‘stress tests’?
Which broadly means: if my input parameters at time zero change by x, what is the effect of that on output y? And if there is a statistical probability of stochastic events occurring in the future which also change the model’s output, how long before all you have is noise?
As far as I undrstand it, with weather systems, they fulfil the characteristics of a chaotic system whereby small input variations both in the past, now and in the future rapidly produce sufficiently large output variations as to render all predictions pointless.
Please point out if this is wrong.
Because if the prediction is: ‘It’ll either rise or fall’,well forgive me for saying so, but I don’t need taxpayers’ money spent to prove that.
Aslak Grinsted
I have followed this discussion with interest.
It seems to me that you face complete refutation many times over in three major categories
1. methodology of positive science
2. assessment of the downsides versus the upsides of global warming over whatever time-scale
3. assessment of the upsides versus the downsides of any policy action intended to ameliorate the risks of global warming.
I understand that the focus of your paper is only positive questions to do with global warming. However science does not supply value judgments, whereas policy requires them. So even if your positive science were all granted, the only result could be … so what?
1.
You say you could only make sense of Crispin’s position. Yet one of the criticisms was that you have confounded correlation with causation! How could you not make sense of that?
Many criticisms go to the very heart of your methodology, for example your critics have shown you have relied on:
• personal argumentation
• assuming what is in issue
• appeal to absent authority
• confusing correlation with causation
• invalid simple extrapolation
• failing to take into account many relevant variables
• failing to state – in words! – any actual reasonably well-confirmed causal physical hypotheses
• failing to show how your model explains what caused the modern warm period, what caused and ended the little ice age, the medieval warm period, the dark ages, the roman warm period
• etc.
How could you “not make sense” of these criticisms? They represent complete demolition of your entire methodology!
Thus the problem is that not only is your argument not scientific, but it is riddled with fallacies, and therefore it doesn’t even meet the minimum requirements of logical thought.
So you don’t even get to square one in establishing the necessary basis for asking the questions that you want to assume as common ground for any discussion.
In a rational discussion, you would either
a) acknowledge the above criticisms as well-founded, and change your argument so as to take account of them, showing how you have still been able to maintain the same conclusion, or
b) answer them to show they are not well-founded.
But you can’t do either. For you to do a) would require not just a revised “model”, it would require a total change in your whole intellectual method. In other words, you’re wrong!
2.
But let’s assume you’re right. Okay.
So what?
Nothing follows from your hypothesis. You have not established any justification for any policy action whatsoever. It is no more relevant to policy than any other irrelevant fact.
In order to justify policy action, the first thing you, or anyone, would need to show, is that the downsides of global warming would be worse than the upsides.
The basic data set needed to show this, would be the evaluations of the humans interested in using the affected resources now and in the future. These evaluations are subjective, are dispersed in the minds of seven billion people, are constantly changing, and are universally discounted for futurity.
So how are you, or how is anyone, going to obtain knowledge of that data set?
Please admit that you, and any government official or group whatsoever, are not capable of that knowledge, and that without it, any pretension of government to justify policy action is false.
3.
But even if we knew that the downsides of global warming were worse than the upsides – which we don’t – the bald assumption that government is capable of automatically producing a better rather than a worse outcome, is worse than baseless. It is culpable invincible ignorance. For starters, the same data set would be required to know whether policy action would improve, or worsen matters, and government can *never* know it.
The only way government policy could be assumed to produce a net benefit – however you defined the ultimate human welfare criterion – is by simply ignoring the costs. But obviously if you ignore the costs, anything will seem beneficial!
The absurd belief that government can manage the ecology is just a re-run of the belief that it can manage the economy, which has just been proved wrong in the 20th century at a cost of over 100 million deaths.
You should be saluted for being one of the very few of the warmists with the intellectual courage to actually attempt to engage in a dialogue of reason with your critics.
And you should be thanked for openly exhibiting the utterly hopeless and self-interested mendacity of the entire irrational belief system, which is no better than the worst superstition.
But if I am wrong, then kindly let us have your revised reasoning taking into account all the above criticisms, or showing why they don’t apply, and showing how you have still managed to arrive at the same conclusion.
“I yearn to respond to a few of your questions, but I cannot address a huge agitated mob.”
You come here to comment then play the “victim” card – it’s pretty much what I expected.
Again, do you stand by the press release? Respond if you can, but I don’t think you will (too busy feeling sorry for yourself – and perhaps you DON’T stand by the press release after all).
@Aslak
” I cannot address a huge agitated mob”
+++++
I do not consider myself to be agitated nor mobbish but rather, engaged.
Justin J has given us a pretty calm dissertation outlining a number of issues I left aside. They are all, I think, worthy of a response as well. There are a larger number of issues related to climate science in general and I am not expecting you to defend the atrocious work of others. We will take each up with their respective authors.
You will see above a comment was deleted for being nothing more than inflamatory trolling. This is a problem all over the blogosphere. However, think of how we scientists are dismissed as ‘trolls’ when we raise absolutely legitimate issues with papers on the climate and have our comments deleted, binned, boreholed (as RC calls it) or edited (!) post facto as happened at SkS. It is to the discredit of the warmist camp that they chortle with glee as they delete opinion contrary on their CO2 castles in the sand. It is literally farcical.
AGW caused by CO2 is, in my view, a postulate that has run its course. It was entertaining; it brought people together; it raise awareness that mankind is capable of mismanaging and wasting the Commons; it showed people are willing to lie to get money. The billions spent to try to prove its truth have not been entirely wasted, just largely so in my view. We could have done much better by now. Mankind is still spending more than a trillion Dollars per year waging and preparing for war. This is universally (save in Strange States) considered to be a Bad Thing. Spending a similar amount of treasure to continuously replenish a gigantic ‘carbon’ trough into which the accounting, trading and industrial complexes have thrust their snouts is also a Bad Thing if the entire proposition is found (as I believe it has) to be lamentably defective.
Your paper is about projecting sea levels. You are responsible for the science supporting those forecasts. Your work is based on premises that I think you were supplied, not that you derived them yourself. As several contributors have indicated, there are sound reasons to suspect that those premises are inaccurate or wrong. All you have to do is accept the reality of the numbers from the field and rework your projections. No problem. You can still correct that. This is not complicated.
There is advantage to you personally and scientifically to re-cast your work in the mould of these perhaps new understandings. When we stand on the shoulders of giants, we should remember that some are giants of progress and some are gigantic frauds. To question the work of others is not wrong, it is expected. When someone tells me he has a mechanical device that delivers a net thrust http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/reports/2006/TM-2006-214390.pdf I look for errors and misunderstandings, as well as holding out the possibilty that they may be the first to create one.
Above all, I think you need to show that increased CO2 leads to actual warming and actual sea level rise, as that is the core claim of your paper. All the works I have seen which rely on the real measurements available do not support the claim, and all the works which do, are based on models created with the presumption that the conclusion was already known to be true. That is why in the Climategate files one finds the statement to the effect that ‘the data and methods were defective but the conclusion is correct”. Now, what could be sillier, and more unscientific, than that?
OK @frank K: regarding the PR.: It actually accidently went out ahead of my final corrections (as can be verified from the fact that it has a wrong phone number). But it is pretty much only the words “using climate models” in the intro which I would have removed. The desciption of the RCP scenarios was very simplified, but if you really want the details then go here and here. How you interpret these scenarios, has no bearing how my model will respond to them though.
The victim card: I don’t feel singled out as a victim, because it is like this on pretty much all WUWT threads: I just wanted to highlight for bystanders that adressing WUWT really is like adressing an agitated mob. I hope a few will agree that WUWT is not a place you want to be associated with (even if you are a sceptic). If you want evidence, then you should try to count the number of insults, sneers, and sarcastic comments that you guys have posted. WUWT is clearly not the place for a polite debate. Lord WUWT is like the Monckton of Blogs. Finally, if you look at the crowd’s answers to my questions, then you will find it is a conflicting cacophony of views. That is why I wanted Willis in particular to answer.
@Justin J: Our paper is just as much about adaptation as it is about mitigation (and I do not advocate any policies in particular, but just hope that we atleast can avoid the worst case). I think that my study actually save you guys alot of money as it shows that a 1m rise is pretty much given. With that info, you can avoid the costs in developing areas that will be exposed to the risk in the future.
To hear you guys talk about “personal argumentation”: ROFL.
When I said I could make sense of crespins answer, well then I just meant he was the only one who could express his views in a coherent manner, and with atleast a minimum of explanation attached.
It is true that our model is based on a causative hypothesis, but that is not just pulled out of a hat. The form of our particular model is justified by process models like these of ocean heat content and similar for ice sheets. Once you have identified a causative relationship like that, then it is completely sensible to try to estimate the sensitivity etc from data. Especially when the processs model response can be condensed into a simple model like ours. These physical models are certainly much better justified that your hand-waving hypothesis, that the system will not respond to any forcing that is imposed on it …. Well, that just comes across as some hippie “Mother Gaia will protect us”. Do you also assume that climate, and sea level will have a zero response to volcanic eruptions and change in insolation?
How much money? Please give an example scenario of this claim. Not a single person will purchase a property and then live to see one meter of sea-level rise in their lifetime. One meter, two meters, ten meters, are all a ‘given’ over an extended period of time between now and the end of the Holocene. This is not news. Humans still inhabit the same coastal cities that they created thousands of years ago. Even Venice is still here, and Holland, and New Orleans. Whatever tiny sea-level rise has occurred during the whole of human civilization has been adapted to, or simply ignored.
You do have to address that astonishing green line on the plot though. Unless I am misunderstanding the Y-Axis you are trying to say that if emissions are stabilized in 10 years, sea-level will stop rising. Therefore humans, in your opinion, have the ability to completely stop the normal continuous on-going sea-level rise during our current Holocene interglacial. Is this true?
In light of the historical record, exactly what do you *believe* sea-level should be doing today?
[A] :: Increasing
[B] :: Remaining static
[C] :: Decreasing
I lke this! I like it a lot. This should be a continuous evaluation also. If they survive the first 5 years, they immediately start the next 5 year accuracy watch.
Accountability is what is lacking. And if you think about it, this is a phenomenon everywhere, not just in Science. Just look at Sports, Politics, Education, Law Enforcement, Civil Service, and everyday life. I’m not sure if it is a devolving human failing or just a peculiar result of modern times and our narcissism. But almost without fail in all fields, humans are consistently failing to weed out the unqualified and in fact doing the reverse, via affirmative action and the Peter Principle. My intuition is that this will be ruinous to the human race.
@Aslak
I have the feeling you are trying to misrepresent what I have written by ‘semi-citing’ it in an amplified and lampooning manner. Please be careful not to do that – we will notice immediately.
I refer to your writing ‘hand-waving hypothesis, that the system will not respond to and forcing that is imposed on it…” What you wrote is a mis-characterisation of what I wrote about a system response. I was pointing you to a free programme of great efficacy that can be used to simulate heat engines and I did this because you might not know such a tool exists. The atmosphere is a heat engine, not a greenhouse and this very early mis-characterisation of warming has caused many people to be confused about how things work. The mention of ‘Mother Gaia’ is irrelevant. That is basically Mother Earth News Goes Global. None of us here, at least the sentient ones, assume that the climate will ‘have a zero response’ to any of the forcings. In fact it is the mis-characterisation of this acceptance (that all forcing have at least some impact) which fills so many warmist blogs as they toss little calumnies back and forth and then giggle. It is like listening to Grade 2 sandbox talk.
Please try not to allow the execerable example of some researchers to refuse to discuss their work and spend all of their time on misdirection. By misdirection, I mean inflating and deliberately misinterpreting things said as a way of trying to avoid addressing the points raised, however inconvenien, in the hope that be generating an emotional response will allow your to depart with some sort of ‘victory’ over your supposed oppoents. Science does not have ‘victors’ it has discussions that lead to a greater understanding of the truth, even if animated.
I am actually surprised by your last post. I thought you were going to attempt to engage at least some of us in a discussion of the most important points we raised. I will be disappointed in you if you exit now without dealing wht at least some of them. There is no point in complaining about the ‘cacophany of views’ as you put it. I felt they were pretty consistent in addressing the premises you used as a departure point, and there were too many that were unnecessarily sarcastic, I agree. This is one of the few well managed sites where all opinions are welcome so you can expect a certain amont of venting. It is my hope that if you do not rise to the bait, but rather to the occasion, our views might help you in your work.
Thank you for answering with your comment about a causative hypothesis. It is important (and much discussed here) that it is indeed a hypothesis, not an accept theory with validation in the field. As you can probably tell, the readers here are widely read and have concluded that the core premises, particularly the one assuming a causal relationship between CO2 and the global temperature is weak. I think any of us can tell you that the R value for correlation is 0.53. I am not sure if your read Dessler’s paper that was drawing a conclusion from a correlation of R=0.01. It would be a mistake to think skeptics are clueless about these matters. On balance, CO2= >T proponents are skating on very thin statistical ice.
Let’s see how a review of the premises (your 4) would affect your forecast sea rise magnitude. As for the 1 meter, that will happen as Greenland continues its slow melt (if it continues) and if Antarctica stops or slows its net accumulation. Someone pointed to the increase on the East side. We already reviewed that paper here. Sea level will continue to rise as it has been for ages, I hope. It is stops we are in FAR more trouble than has heretofore been assumed because it means we really might be going into the (overdue) next ice age. Given the poor and logarithmic temperature response to CO2 and it unpredictabilty (low ‘R’) we will not be able to stave it off.
The hypothesis that we are already causing an additional meter rise of sea levels with our CO2 emissions is not supported by any evidence from this, the last, or any century. None at all. Zero. Sea level change is not related to CO2 nor caused by it. It is a just-so story. The Earth has been a ball of ice (with low sea level) and had very high CO2 and the opposite (no summer ice, mundane CO2). Scary warming makes for vaguely entertaining Hollywood movies but not actual science or policy.
Aslak Grinsted says:
October 21, 2011 at 2:32 am
Thank you for the apology, Aslak, working on a phone screen drives me nuts.
Not sure what your point is about thunderstorms. I don’t recall I said anything about the anthropogenic effect on thunderstorms, so why would I write a paper quantifying it? And you seem to think that “extreme events” are changing, but I find no evidence that is true, so I’m not sure what you mean there either.
I found Landerer et al, of course it’s paywalled. But really, are you serious? The abstract says:
Your “evidence” is 200 years of model runs? Really? You’ll have to explain that one to me, Aslak … because 200 years of “simulated monthly data” and 200 sheets of toilet paper contain about the same amount of information about the real world.
And I find absolutely no prediction of the decrease before it happened in the Landerer abstract, although it might be in the paywalled paper itself … but I doubt it, otherwise, they would have been crowing about it, and reasonably so. That’s a tough prediction to make.
No, there is no such “solid reason” in the Landerer paper, there’s a pile of useless model runs. However, since sea levels have been rising for at least a hundred years, your short term prediction (that they will rise again) is trivial.
But predicting a fall of sea level is not trivial. So if there is a “prediction” of a sea level fall in the paywalled paper, break it out and copy it for us. Because I find nothing about such a prediction in the abstract, and any kind of prediction is extremely uncommon from AGW adherents—it is falsifiable, which seems to act on you folks like garlic on vampires.
But hey, if he did predict the drop in sea level, I’ll give him huge props. So bring the prediction on, Aslak—what did Landerer say the predicted drop in sea level would be, and when did he predict the reversal would begin?
Your turn, Aslak. Put your prediction where your mouth is. What did the prediction say about when the sea level would begin to decline, and how much did the prediction say it would decline?
(Heck, I’ll make a prediction of my own. My prediction is that what Landerer said is not a prediction at all as you claim. It is some utterly prosaic and unfalsifiable statement like “in the event of an extreme la nina it is possible that the sea level might decline” or like that. So that’s my prediction, Aslak, that Landerer’s prediction is not falsifiable. Heck, now I’m all fascinated to see what you come up with, this should be very interesting.)
I agitate for two very good reasons, Aslak.
1. Because I’m tired of being lied to by climate scientists, and
2. Because you and your mates are sitting on your asses and not doing anything about the lies, deceptions, and scientific malfeasance in the field.
In other words, I agitate because you are not doing your job.
I’m tired of people claiming that 200 years of “simulated monthly data” means anything. I’m sick of people like Landerer calling simulated model output “data”, and you referring to it as if it were data. I’m so over being referred to paywalled documents that as in this instance, when examined, say nothing like what you claim. I’m sick of folks like you sucking up public money and justifying it by taking some bozo simple equation, extending it out 500 years, and then claiming that I should be very, very worried about it. I was warned against that kind of puerile pseudo-mathematical nonsense of “extending a trend” by both my high school science teacher and Mark Twain, and unlike you, I listened to them.
So yes, I agitate. I agitate for good, honest science. I fight for transparency. I advocate for not lying about climate model outputs as you do, by calling them “data”. That is active deception, Aslak, and you likely don’t even realize it, so I agitate for scientists like you to wake up. In fact, I agitate for a simple reason—BECAUSE YOU DON’T. If climate scientists like yourself would be out there fighting for transparent science, I wouldn’t need to agitate at all. Instead, you all refuse to make even the slightest negative comment when faced with egregious scientific misconduct … and then you bitch when someone like me has to do your job that I’m some kind of agitator.
I agitate for climate scientists to clean up their own backyards from the egregious excesses of the Climategate conspirators. I agitate for people like you to develop the balls to speak out against bad science and malfeasance.
So I’m glad to hear that I “excel at agitation” in your estimation, because I plan to continue to do it until folks like you take up the task, and until you stop wasting your education and your fine mind grinding out junk like 500 year forecasts and start cleaning up the execrable mess that is modern climate “science” … kick back, get a beer and some popcorn, this might take a while.
Am I upset with you? No. You’ve let your idealism and your strange beliefs overrule your head entirely, but there’s lot’s of folks out there like that, it seems to be catching. I feel sorry for you, that you are engaged in a useless enterprise, predicting the future of 500 years from now. I’m frustrated by you, because climate science is in the dumper and you don’t seem to care, you’re lost in meaningless 500 year predictions that will be forgotten next week in the next bad news cycle. It’s not clear to me how you justify wasting your obviously good mind on such a puerile task, but that’s your business.
So yes, Aslak, I do agitate … and I invite you to join me in the agitation for decent, honest, transparent science, where the practitioners are no longer, as today, terrified to say “we don’t know”, and seeming incapable of saying anything like “Fred, that’s malfeasance, don’t do it”. You could start by accurately describing your current endeavor, you could begin saying “we don’t have a clue what will happen in 500 years, but we’re happy to say we do, here’s some pretty colored lines on a page, we extended some trends for you.”
I await the verification of your dubious claim that Landerer made a falsifiable prediction of the drop in sea level before it happened.
My best to you, and thank you for being one of the few mainstream AGW scientists who is willing to defend his work in public, either here or anywhere … and that statement alone should tell you something about the strength of your side’s arguments …
w.
PS—Don’t know if it’s a common name in your country, but your name “Aslak” is great, it sounds like a superhero in a Marvel comic book.
Aslak Grinsted says:
October 21, 2011 at 8:43 am
If you can’t bear “insults, sneers, and caustic comments”, then you shouldn’t have become a climate scientist, Aslak. You want us to spend billions upon billions of dollars based on your “science”, but you want us to play patty-cake with you and tickle your tummy and blow in your ear and not ask the tough questions? Sorry, this is 2011. Anyone who wants to waste the taxpayers billions is going to have to toughen up and make the case why we should spend that money.
And as to “insults, sneers, and sarcastic comments”, I get many, many more of them here than you are getting, take a look at some of my threads. I’ve been called every name in the book … so what? Embrace the suck, stop whining and grow a pair, Aslak, and defend your work.
Because saying oooh, those bad boys and girls were soooo mean to me, I’m not going to play, that doesn’t work any more. We’ve been cozened by that claim far too many times, and you want to spend our tax money on your fantasies. If you want to get some traction here, you’re going to have to put on your big-boy shoes, strap on your psychological buckler and greaves, and DEFEND YOUR WORK.
Because if you don’t, all you’ll hear is hyenas laughing as you slink away from the campfire. I encourage you to make a stand, to fight for what you think is true. Ignore the boos and the catcalls, that’s just the pack howling, hoping for a kill, that chorus has been with us since the time of the ancient Greeks. The question is, are you going to roll over for the chorus, or are you going to make your voice heard?
w.
@Crespin: the hand waving thing was not aimed at you. Sorry if appeared to be so. It was aimed at Willis’ thunderstorms and clouds. I can sort of appreciate a lukewarmer position that some negative feedbacks are so great that there is nothing to worry about (although that is contradicted by evidence). But I don’t understand his position at all. Especially when he says the system is responsive, and yet it responds to forcing by completely contracting it.
You seem to be from the “co2 saturation” camp. I think you should try to calculate what happens to surface T, if you double the concentration of a gas that is near saturation in the long wave band in a 1D column model of the atmosphere (be sure to have a high vertical resolution).
Even though or press release mentions co2 in the rcp description, then it is actually just relating Radiative forcing to a SL response. It does not matter to this simple model whether the forcing scenario is a consequence of added CO2 or changes in the sun.
Since you bring up correlations between CO2, temperature and sea level. Then let’s start by restricting ourselves to a period where the continents have not moved too much. Then you can look at Rohling et al.2009, or my page here for some scatter plots:
http://www.glaciology.net/Home/Miscellaneous-Debris/relationshipbetweensealevelriseandglobaltemperature
Crispin in Waterloo says:
October 21, 2011 at 9:42 am (Edit)
Thank you, Crispin. The climate is a heat engine. In turn, it contains a host of smaller heat engines (thunderstorms, dust devils, tornados). Between all of them, they regulate and govern the surface temperature. And as you say, unless you analyze it as a heat engine, the results will be meaningless at best and misleading at worst.
See the work of Bejan, which references other “heat-engine” analyses of the climate.
w.
Aslak :
“Even though or press release mentions co2 in the rcp description, then it is actually just relating Radiative forcing to a SL response. It does not matter to this simple model whether the forcing scenario is a consequence of added CO2 or changes in the sun. ”
This is Aslak trying to wiggle out and getting in deeper.
So, how much of current supposed warming ( or current cooling) do you attribute to Solar change ? ( couldn’t even read a summary or release on your sunspot paper)
Doesn’t this admission cast even more doubt on the efficacy or accuracy of a simplistic model that is admitted to have needed adjustment to bring it into line with reality at some point ?
Making your model results cross with reality at one point may not guarantee the dynamic reliability of such a tool.
Are you admitting that you don’t know whether the current conditions are more dependent on
Solar activity or trace gasses in the atmosphere ?
And finally, does the fact that the release specifically and repeatedly mentions and points to
so-called GHG’s in the atmosphere as the culprit, and the graph itself is labeled, as representing through it’s different colored lines future sea-level related to “emissions” scenarios, and Solar change is not mentioned at all as a a possible factor.
How come that is ?
@Willis
Thanks for putting Bejan’s link up. He is a genius. It is a surprise that more is not made of the difference between a heat engine (rapid heat death) and a greenhouse (mechanical interruption of mass transfer retarding heat death). They are totally different systems yet gases are still referred to as ‘greenhouse gases’. They should be referred to as ‘working fluids’ by anyone dealing with atmospheric sciences. Perhaps there are not too many engineers working in that field.
@Aslak
I find Willis’ challenges to you a bit gruff by quite fair. I again compliment you for coming here to discuss your work. The need to stand up for proper science has never been greater. May we all do so together. It may have profound, unexpected results.
Sincerely
Crispin
RE: aslak grinsted says: (October 21, 2011 at 10:29 am)
“You seem to be from the “co2 saturation” camp. I think you should try to calculate what happens to surface T, if you double the concentration of a gas that is near saturation in the long wave band in a 1D column model of the atmosphere (be sure to have a high vertical resolution).”
Using the University of Chicago MODTRAN web tool and forcing a constant energy flow of 292.993 watts per square meter looking down from 70 km up in clear tropical air, I got the following resultant surface temperatures:
CO2 Temp 280 PPM 300.73 deg K 396 PPM 301.18 deg K 560 PPM 301.63 deg K 792 PPM 302.10 deg K 1,120 PPM 302.58 deg KI believe these represent the raw effect of changing the CO2 concentrations without any climatic feedback effects. I believe this program was developed by the Air Force to calculate radiation levels that might be observed by flying aircraft over the wavenumber range from 100 kayzers (cycles per cm, CM-1) to 1498 kayzers. The nominal CO2 absorption band is around 667 kayzers.
Below is a typical MODTRAN comparison spectrum that I found.
The radiance here is in cgs units.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_hvznaYV8Rdw/Syygt0X4nOI/AAAAAAAAAgs/5Tl54KGfHjE/s320/Modtran.PNG