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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If you want the WUWT to peer review your work. I recommend creating a journal of your own. Ask Anthony to put a link in the sidebar that says “The Proceedings of WUWT” or whatever title you like for the journal. Then you could easily store all of your peer-reviewed papers by subject. You could show your work how the comments affected some of your initial assumptions or addressed errors, etc. You could publish the original and the revisions, and then the final product. All of your work would be in a journal and put in one place. All the WUWT authors could publish articles there following peer review on the blog. That way, a body of WUWT knowledge would build and you would eventually have more peer reviewed papers than the IPCC, thus overturning their credibility.
Willis Eschenbach says:
October 23, 2011 at 11:12 pm
“But that’s why I post here. So that people, including but not limited to the authors whose work I am discussing or criticizing, can step up and show me where I’m wrong. If I’m wrong, their ideas and claims are enhanced. That’s science.”
__________________
No, that is blog science. Not all the authors of the papers that you are discussing even know about WUWT. You really ought to contact the authors for each paper that you critique and ask them to comment on the new “Proceedings of WUWT” article. If you create a journal, then they will likely come to do it. They won’t necessarily comment on a blog since that is not where science is done in any other field (not biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, none of those).
“So your feel-good advice, while it does great credit to your heart, is sadly neglecting your brain. These are people out actively trying to damage the economy, our own in part but particularly the economies of energy-starved developing countries.”
__________________
I always say the golden rule applies, no matter if the people you are dealing with are absolutely crazy or not. It sounds like you need to become an energy economics activist. That is where your primary objections lie from what it sounds. You should focus exclusively on writing articles about politics concerning energy. I have no problem with voicing opinions on energy policy, but I do have a problem with voicing opinions about peer-reviewed science without attempting to participate in the peer review process.
“PS—What are the odds that someone will quote me out of context from this post, as though I wanted to destroy the reputation of innocent scholars? I am a man of science, I think real scientists are great, I have no desire to do anything to their reputations.”
________________
So what is Aslak if not a real scientist in your opinion, an activist? He publishes in the scientific journals and has studied science at a university; any objective person would characterize him as a scientist. I recommend that you become an energy policy activist in order to come up with an energy policy plan that won’t wreck the world’s economy. I recommend you write articles exclusively about energy politics or otherwise create a WUWT journal and get other scientists to participate.
otter17 says:
October 24, 2011 at 4:06 am
Five.
It is quite clear you have no clue about what is going on in climate science. If you are surprised that trivial errors make it through what these days is far too often “pal review” rather than peer review, you have not been following the story at all. Trivial errors making it though is the most common story in climate “science”. You really should get out more, your naiveté is stunning.
Certainly, I’d love to do that. However, for all of the reasons you so casually dismiss on this list, it is extremely difficult and slow to do so. It may well be that there are errors in my work that are not caught by the WUWT readers. What you fail to consider is that the peer review process catches less errors than are caught here. I know this because of the papers that get published in support of my claims here.
Quick example. Some scientific fools published a peer-reviewed paper saying there was half the plankton in the ocean that there was in 1900. I wrote a long paper saying no way, that’s nonsense.
About three months later, three separate scientific papers appeared saying no way, that’s nonsense.
Could I have been one of those three papers? Sure … if I had the credentials and the desire. But from my perspective, my paper did far, far more to counter the bad science than their papers did. Why? Because my paper was a) timely, b) an interesting read, and c) exposed immediately to the harsh glare of the public. It is quite possible that my paper stirred some of the scientists to write their rebuttal.
So while you claim that “science isn’t about impact factor”, that just means you don’t understand the stakes. I’m not here for theory. I’m here to get something done, namely to supply good science and counter bad science. I’m here to stop a bunch of folks from using bogus scientific claims to further impoverish the poor of the world by sentencing them to a lifetime of expensive energy.
If you think “impact factor” isn’t important in the climate wars, wake up, get out of bed, and come join in the battle, you’ve somehow slept through the last decade or two.
Are you being intentionally dense? I say I want to counter papers in a timely manner as they appear, not down the line when they are 3-6 months too late to do any good.
You write to suggest that I counter bad science with a whole string of papers that are all 3-6 months too late to do any good.
You sure you are awake here?
Wow, you truly are naive, it’s not just an act … take a look at the Steig paper on Antarctica. It got the cover of Nature magazine. Care to guess if the rebuttal got a corrected cover?
BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA, oh, otter, you’re precious, truly you are. Read the Climategate emails to see the problems with that. And “get some support from fellow scientists”??? That’s even funnier. Climate scientists don’t do “support”. They have only a few tricks—they can shut their mouths, roll over and play dead. That exhausts their repertoire.
I’ve tried that. I contacted UC Berkeley and other schools in the area. They wouldn’t even reply. I found out something interesting. PhDs are not given to people who want to conduct new, trailblazing science. They are a way for an existing scholar to train his/her replacement in the ways of his knowledge (and the errors therein). They don’t want brilliant minds. They want people who think exactly as they do … and that’s not me. In addition, the schools I talked to all blew me off because of my age (64). When a scientist is training a replacement to keep his personal line of climate BS alive into the future, he wants a young guy, not his contemporary. What good would I do him, I’ll die about when he does.
I wouldn’t know, I’ve always been improving my skills.
Nonsense. I have huge credibility with scientists outside of WUWT. Credibility doesn’t come from passing peer review, if that were true Michael Mann would be very credible. Credibility comes from the strength of your arguments. Scientists read my work and make up their own minds. What more could a journal article give me?
Nonsense. Every climate scientist worth his salt reads WUWT. They’d be fools not to, if only to see what the opposition is up to. And the peer review I regularly receive here is more stringent than the review for my piece in Nature magazine. You’re talking about things regarding which you are innocent of experience and knowledge. Despite that, your claims might easily make it through peer review … but they won’t fly here on WUWT.
Of course, this blog is not equivalent to a peer reviewed journal. In many, perhaps most cases, it is far better. The peer review is superior to any journal that I know of, the readership is educated, smart, and merciless, and the reach is far wider than the majority of climate journals.
You seem to have missed the part where virtually all the climate journals closed their doors to people who do not follow the party line on climate. You missed the Climategate discussions by the scientists on how to keep me, and folks like me, from getting published. You missed the part where the journals rolled over and refused to ask mainstream climate scientists to archive their data and code. Your ideas about science are like something out of my 1950s schoolbooks, full of good guys in white coats. The good guys are dead, otter, the journals are complicit, pal review runs rampant, crooks subvert the IPCC, “scientists” with an agenda and a scary story are feted, scientific malfeasance runs rampant, and the good scientists are all somehow struck dumb, unwilling to utter a squeak of protest …
And in the middle of this huge mess, you come out here like some Pollyanna on steroids, full of light, sunny misinformation, to breezily tell me how I should do science? You don’t have a clue about climate science, but you’re willing to lecture me on how to do it?
I’d cry if I wasn’t laughing so hard, otter. You are describing another planet, an imaginary world of honest scientists and impartial journals that has been ground to dust by Stephen Schneider and Michael Mann and James Hansen and Post-Normal Science and Jerry Ravetz and the inhabitants of the Climategate rats nest and the rest of their un-indicted co-conspirators. It’s lost in the dust of pal-review and bogus whitewash “investigations” and alarmism disguised as scholarship and unarchived data and secret codes and clandestine instructions to erase evidence of wrongdoing.
So wake up, my friend, people are going to start pointing and laughing, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do, you’re late to the party and badly misinformed …
w.
otter17 says:
October 24, 2011 at 4:13 am
For a desperately naive guy, who seems to know nothing about climate science, who posts anonymously on the web, and who appears to have slept through the last two decades of the climate wars, you have an astounding fantasy going.
Clearly, you think that
a) you are qualified to tell people what they should do to fight their part of the climate wars, and
b) that I might blindly follow instructions from some random voice on the web, and,
c) other mainstream climate scientists will make their voices heard in support of honest science, and
d) that your recommendations have the slightest connection to the reality of modern climate science, and
e) that the journals are neutral arbiters conducting thorough peer review.
In order of their appearance, the answers are: you aren’t, I don’t, you’re kidding yourself, no connection at all, and don’t make me laugh.
It is recommended that you do your homework before donning your armor and going jousting, That works so much better than the other way around.
w.
Willis answers otter17:
“Five.”
And:
“…wake up, my friend, people are going to start pointing and laughing, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do, you’re late to the party and badly misinformed.”
Otter, you have been so owned. I suggest reading the WUWT archives for a couple of months before spouting your nonsensical talking points. And quit clicking on alarmist echo chamber blogs. This is the internet’s “Best Science” site, where truth gets separated from fiction, like wheat from chaff. You have considerable catching up to do.
[snip sorry – you don’t get to make the rules, or to project them onto me – Anthony]
I was summarizing Willis’ position on the state of the climate science. Sorry if I accidentally said WUWT, characterizing the site as a whole. What is the official position statement on climate science for WUWT, btw?
Ok, so to be clear, Willis Eschenbach, your position on the state of climate science appears to be as follows from what you have written above. Correct me if I am wrong in any way.
* There is a climate war that must be won or else misguided politicians and scientists will create legislation and force CO2 emission reductions, causing further poverty for the third world.
* Peer review in journals has been corrupted, and has reduced the number of correct contrarian papers that appear in journals.
* WUWT is a better source of peer reviewed information than the existing science journals
* Impact factor and website page hits are important in order to win the climate war.
* It is ok to antagonize or reduce the reputation of mainstream climate scientists in order to win the climate war.
We will have to agree to disagree, Willis. It would appear we are on opposite sides of the climate war. I wholeheartedly support CO2 emissions reductions using the best our current technology can muster. I wish to phase in emission reductions slowly over the next few decades and begin to ramp down faster as the technology improves. From what I have read so far, it seems there is a chance we can actually IMPROVE the world’s economy and increase third world energy access by reducing CO2 emissions. Check out this guy who made his own windmill for his village in Malawi.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2006/12/homemade_windmi/
Here is a video for William Kamkwamba. Very inspiring.
http://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_on_building_a_windmill.html
o17;
Windmills for isolated villages: appropriate tech. Windmills for cities: inappropriate tech.
@Dave Springer says:
October 23, 2011 at 12:35 am
@Crispin
>…soot is largely produced in the NH and distance it travels from the source before falling out to the surface is limited to several thousand kilometers and also given that more “global warming” occurs in the winter than the summer and more in higher latitudes than lower it makes the black soot hypotheses quite reasonable on the face of it. …
Offsetting this however is its effect while it is still airborne and studies of airborne soot over the ocean suggests the shadow it casts causes a cooling effect rather than warming effect and, moreover, when it settles out onto a liquid ocean surface it has no further effect because it is incapable of lowering the albedo of water. Given that even in the northern hemisphere ocean surface is much greater than land surface the shadow cooling may very well be the dominant one in the global picture.
+++++++++++
The shadowing of the earth by BC is only possible if the BC absorbs or reflects the incoming sunshine so the idea that it is net cooling is defective. The ground is shaded, but the atmosphere around the particles is heated by the energy that would otherwise have reached the ground. This was directly measured in the Asian Brown Cloud by 4 remote controlled aircraft which recorded much higher tempearatures than was expected. Do you recall that report? Not that long ago. In short, BC has an overall warming effect because it has a much lower albedo than the ground it shades.
Regarding the atmosphere as a heat engine:
The mischaracterisation of the atmosphere as a greenhouse was a serious mistake and it is misleading a lot of people. There is little that is similar to a greenhouse going on in the atmosphere.
In Bejan’s Ch.5 of Convective Heat Transfer (2005) there is an explanation of how heat moves between a hot plate below and a cold plate above with photos. This is very much like the Earth with its thin, expansive atmosphere. It is mentioned above that the thunderstorms, for example, are discrete heat engines. This discrete behaviour is not because the atmosphere does not behave like a heat engine, it is because whenever there is a large thin fluid between a hotter plate below and a colder plate above, there is an automatic division of the fluid into cells that set up their own cycling of heat (from hot to cold) and these cells can only grow to a certain size based on the physical characteristics of the fluid. If there are no surface features nor strong winds like the jet streams, there is a tendency to divide into square or hexagonal cells that are similar in size and flow characteristics. This is an element of ‘self-organisation’, or more properly, it is inherent in the physics of the fluid.
A heat engine has a hot end, a moving gas that changes in volume, a cold end which draws off the heat, and a storage medium for heat that can transport some in it back to the hot end temporarily in the form of expanded gas. It usually has a ‘regenerator’ which is water vapour in this case. It stores or yields heat in the form of a phase change. A thunderstorm qualifies on all counts as a heat engine. Multiple thunderstorms arising on a hot plain in Africa are represented by the naturally occurring cells between the hot and cold plates.
When the atmosphere is considered to be a heat engine (a Stirling engine with walls of stationary air) it becomes quite easy to see what influence various elements of the atmosphere will have. Any additional heat drives the engine harder. The work done by this engine is the propulsion of air, basically. It transports water and air first vertically in the centre and horizontally at the bottom. Diurnal expansion and contraction also drives the engine.
Bejan’s point about Constructal Law is that the system teeters on the edge of turbulence at all times. This is self-limiting. It is the most efficient at moving heat (doing work). If the temperature at the hot place (ground) is elevated the system responds by stepping its energy flow rate slightly, again staying just inside the ‘developed flow’ boundary and on the edge of turbulence. (Turbulence absorbs a lot of energy so it avoided.) Having dumped the heat upwards at the maximum possible efficiency the system returns to its earlier stable state. His point was that this is so obvious that it is not even interesting to study. If CO2 or Black Carbon or Solar variation or tilting of the Earth occurs, the atmosphere will change its dynamics to dump the heat into space at the most efficient rate with the whole thing stabilising automatically at the point of highest efficiency, which is as I said, on the edge of turbulence.
They are not GHG’s, they are just working fluids with different capacities to capture incoming or outgoing energy during the time which the cells prepare to dump the heat. There is absolutely no greenhouse. Greenhouses heat by interrupting the very mass flows that Bejan points out automatically develop to move the greatest amount of heat away with the least energy. A direct consequence of the heating effect seen 1975-1995 is the drying of the upper atmosphere. That is exactly what a free-flowing heat engine cell would do with water vapour being a major component of the working fluid. All the pretty up-down, in-out, reflected, radiated, absorbed charts are fun to work with, but the engine will cool the atmosphere as soon as it heats up, slowing the transport if it cools below. It takes a catastrophic cooling to induce stratification in the atmosphere strong enough to create an ice age and I favour a GCR inundation as the primary culprit. In other words I favour the cloud hypothesis at the moment because it has the capacity to disrupt the engine’s function (cooling the prime mover).