Guest post by Alec Rawls
“Expert review” of the First Order Draft of AR5 closed on the 10th. Here is the first paragraph of my submitted critique:
My training is in economics where we are very familiar with what statisticians call “the omitted variable problem” (or when it is intentional, “omitted variable fraud”). Whenever an explanatory variable is omitted from a statistical analysis, its explanatory power gets misattributed to any correlated variables that are included. This problem is manifest at the very highest level of AR5, and is built into each step of its analysis.
Like everyone else who participated in this review, I agreed not to cite, quote or distribute the draft. The IPCC also made a further request, which reviewers were not required to agree to, that we “not discuss the contents of the FOD in public fora such as blogs.”
Given what I found—systematic fraud—it would not be moral to honor this un-agreed to request, and because my comments are about what is omitted, the fraud is easy enough to expose without quoting the draft. My entire review (4700 words) only contains a half dozen quotes, which can easily be replaced here with descriptions of the quoted material. Cited section numbers are also easy to replace with descriptions of the subjects addressed. And so with Anthony’s permission, here is the rest of my minimally altered review:
Introduction to the “omitted variable fraud” critique, continued
For the 1750-2010 period examined, two variables correlate strongly with the observed warming (and hence with each other). Solar magnetic activity and atmospheric CO2 were both trending upwards over the period, and both stepped up to much higher levels over the second half of the 20th century. These two correlations with temperature change give rise to the two main competing theories of 20th century warming. Was it driven by rapidly increasing human release of CO2, or by the 80 year “grand maximum” of solar activity that began in the early 1920’s? (“Grand minima and maxima of solar activity: new observational constraints,” Usoskin et al. 2007.)
The empirical evidence in favor of the solar explanation is overwhelming. Dozens of peer-reviewed studies have found a very high degree of correlation (.5 to .8) between solar-magnetic activity and global temperature going back many thousands of years (Bond 2001, Neff 2001, Shaviv 2003, Usoskin 2005, and many others listed below). In other words, solar activity “explains,” in the statistical sense, 50 to 80% of past temperature change.
Such a high degree of correlation over such long time periods implies causality, which can only go one way. Global temperature cannot be driving solar activity, so there must be some mechanism by which solar activity is driving or modulating global temperature change. The high degree of correlation also suggests that solar activity is the primary driver of global temperature on every time scale studied (which is pretty much every time scale but the Milankovitch cycle).
In contrast, records of CO2 and temperature reveal no discernable warming effect of CO2. There is a correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature, but with CO2 changes following temperature changes by an average of about 800 years (Caillon 2003), indicating that it is temperature change that is driving atmospheric CO2 change (as it should, since warming oceans are able to hold less CO2). This does not rule out the possibility that CO2 also drives temperature, and in theory a doubling of CO2 should cause about a 1 degree increase in temperature before any feedback effects are accounted, but feedbacks could be negative (dampening rather than amplifying temperature forcings), so there no reason, just from what we know about the greenhouse mechanism, that CO2 has to be a significant player. The one thing we can say is that whatever the warming effect of CO2, it is not detectable in the raw CO2 vs. temperature data.
This is in glaring contrast to solar activity, which lights up like a neon sign in the raw data. Literally dozens of studies finding .5 to .8 degrees of correlation with temperature. So how is it that the IPCC’s current generation of general circulation models start with the assumption that CO2 has done 40 times as much to warm the planet as solar activity since 1750? This is the ratio of AR5’s radiative forcing estimates for variation in CO2 and variation in total solar effects between 1750 and 2010, as listed in [the table of RF estimates in the chapter on human and natural temperature forcing factors]. RF for CO2 is entered as ___ W/m^2 while RF for total solar effects is entered as ___ W/m^2. [I’m not going to quote the actual numbers, but yeah, the ratio is an astounding 40 to 1, up from 14 to 1 in AR4, which listed total solar forcing as 0.12 W/m^2, vs. 1.66 for CO2.]
So the 50% driver of global temperature according to mountains of temperature correlation data is assumed to have 1/40th the warming effect of something whose warming effect is not even discernable in the temperature record. This is on the input side of the GCM’s. The models aren’t using gigaflops of computing power to find that CO2 has that much larger a warming effect. The warming ratio is fixed at the outset. Garbage in, garbage out.
The “how” is very simple. The 40 times greater warming effect of CO2 is achieved by blatant omitted variable fraud. As I will fully document, all of the evidence for a strong solar magnetic driver of climate is simply left out of AR5. Of the many careful empirical studies that show a high correlation between solar activity and climate, only three papers are obliquely referenced in a single sentence of the entire First Order Draft. On [page___, line ____ of the chapter on aerosols and clouds] there is a bare reference to three papers that found unspecified correlations to some climate variables, with no mention of the dramatic magnitude of the correlations, or the scope and repetition of the findings. And that’s it. Not a single other mention in the entire report. A person reading AR5 from cover to cover would come away with not even a hint that for more than ten years a veritable flood of studies have been finding solar activity to explain something on the order of half of all past temperature variation. The omission is virtually complete.
As a result, AR5 misattributes virtually all of the explanatory power of solar-magnetic activity to the correlated CO2 variable. This misattribution can be found both in AR5’s analytical discussions and in its statistical estimations and projections, and the error could not be more consequential. If it is solar-magnetic activity that drives climate then the sun’s recent descent into a state of profound quiescence portends imminent global cooling, possibly rapid and severe, and unlike warming, cooling is actually dangerous and really can feed back on itself in runaway fashion.
Nothing could be more perverse in such a circumstance than to unplug the modern world in a misbegotten jihad against CO2. The IPCC’s omitted variable fraud must stop. AR5’s misattribution of 20th century warming to CO2 must stop. The evidence overwhelmingly supports the solar-magnetic warming theory. The only support for the CO2 theory is the fact that models built on it can achieve a reasonable fit to the last couple centuries of temperature history, but that is only because CO2 is roughly correlated with solar activity over this period, while these models themselves are invalidated by their demonstrable omitted variable fraud. If warming is attributed to solar-magnetic effects at all in accordance with the evidence then the warming that is left to attribute to CO2 becomes utterly benign.
With natural temperature variation almost certainly both substantially larger than CO2 effects, and headed in the cooling direction, the expected external value of CO2 is unambiguously positive. If anything, we should subsidizing and promoting increases in atmospheric CO2, exactly the opposite of the draft report’s opening claim that developments since AR4 “… [summary conclusion about scientists supposedly being more sure than ever (thanks to the absence of any 21st century warming?) that the effects of human activity are the primary climate concern].”
As someone who recognizes the scientific errors in this disastrous report, I can at least make sure that the issue is put properly before the authors of AR5. Thus I am documenting as concisely as possible the solar-magnetic omission and the errors it leads to. The discussion is substantial but I have kept it well under the character limit for a single comment. This comment is being submitted as a top-level comment on AR5 as a whole, and it is being submitted unaltered as a comment on three different sub-chapter headings where the omitted solar-magnetic evidence ought to be taken into account: ____, ____, ____ [a subheading in the paleo-data chapter, a subheading in the chapter on clouds and aerosols, and a subheading in the radiative forcing chapter].
A sample of the omitted evidence
Listed below are a few of the most prominent and compelling studies that have found a strong correlations between solar activity and climate, together with a semi-random collection of similar findings, totaling two dozen citations all together. It would be easy to list two dozen more, but the purpose here is just to show a sample of the omitted evidence, in order to document up-front the existence and validity of it. Included are brief descriptions of the findings for about ten of the studies. None of the observed correlations are reported anywhere in AR5. The first four are the ones I mentioned above:
Bond et al. 2001, “Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene,” Science.
Excerpt from Bond: “Over the last 12,000 years virtually every centennial time scale increase in drift ice documented in our North Atlantic records was tied to a distinct interval of variable and, overall, reduced solar output.”
Neff et al. 2001, “Strong coherence between solar variability and the monsoon in Oman between 9 and 6 kyr ago,” Nature.
Finding from Neff: Correlation coefficients of .55 and .60.
Usoskin et. al. 2005, “Solar Activity Over the Last 1150 years: does it Correlate with Climate?” Proc. 13th Cool Stars Workshop.
Excerpt from Usoskin: “The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 — .8 at a 94% — 98% confidence level.”
Shaviv and Veizer, 2003, “Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate?” GSA Today.
Excerpt from Shaviv: “We find that at least 66% of the variance in the paleotemperature trend could be attributed to CRF [Cosmic Ray Flux] variations likely due to solar system passages through the spiral arms of the galaxy.” [Not strictly due to solar activity, but implicating the GCR, or CRF, that solar activity modulates.]
Plenty of anti-CO2 alarmists know about this stuff. Mike Lockwood and Claus Fröhlich, for instance, in their 2007 paper: “Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature” (Proc. R. Soc. A), began by documenting how “[a] number of studies have indicated that solar variations had an effect on preindustrial climate throughout the Holocene.” In support, they cited 17 papers: the Bond and Neff articles from above, plus:
Davis & Shafer 1992; Jirikowic et al. 1993; Davis 1994; vanGeel et al. 1998; Yu&Ito 1999; Hu et al. 2003; Sarnthein et al. 2003; Christla et al. 2004; Prasad et al. 2004; Wei & Wang 2004; Maasch et al. 2005; Mayewski et al. 2005; Wang et al. 2005a; Bard & Frank 2006; and Polissar et al. 2006.
The correlations in most of these papers are not directly to temperature. They are to temperature proxies, some of which have a complex relationship with temperature, like Neff 2001, which found a correlation between solar activity and rainfall. Even so, the correlations tend to be strong, as if the whole gyre is somehow moving in broad synchrony with solar activity.
Some studies do examine correlations between solar activity proxies and direct temperature proxies, like the ratio of Oxygen18 to Oxygen16 in geologic samples. One such study (highlighted in Kirkby 2007) is Mangini et. al. 2005, “Reconstruction of temperature in the Central Alps during the past 2000 yr from a δ18O stalagmite record.”
Excerpt from Mangini: “… a high correlation between δ18O in SPA 12 and D14C (r =0.61). The maxima of δ18O coincide with solar minima (Dalton, Maunder, Sporer, Wolf, as well as with minima at around AD 700, 500 and 300). This correlation indicates that the variability of δ18O is driven by solar changes, in agreement with previous results on Holocene stalagmites from Oman, and from Central Germany.”
And that’s just old stuff. Here are four random recent papers.
Ogurtsov et al, 2010, “Variations in tree ring stable isotope records from northern Finland and their possible connection to solar activity,” JASTP.
Excerpt from Ogurtsov: “Statistical analysis of the carbon and oxygen stable isotope records reveals variations in the periods around 100, 11 and 3 years. A century scale connection between the 13C/12C record and solar activity is most evident.”
Di Rita, 2011, “A possible solar pacemaker for Holocene fluctuations of a salt-marsh in southern Italy,” Quaternary International.
Excerpt from Di Rita: “The chronological correspondence between the ages of saltmarsh vegetation reductions and the minimum concentration values of 10Be in the GISP2 ice core supports the hypothesis that important fluctuations in the extent of the salt-marsh in the coastal Tavoliere plain are related to variations of solar activity.”
Raspopov et al, 2011, “Variations in climate parameters at time intervals from hundreds to tens of millions of years in the past and its relation to solar activity,” JASTP.
Excerpt from Raspopov: “Our analysis of 200-year climatic oscillations in modern times and also data of other researchers referred to above suggest that these climatic oscillations can be attributed to solar forcing. The results obtained in our study for climatic variations millions of years ago indicate, in our opinion, that the 200- year solar cycle exerted a strong influence on climate parameters at those time intervals as well.”
Tan et al, 2011, “Climate patterns in north central China during the last 1800 yr and their possible driving force,” Clim. Past.
Excerpt from Tan: “Solar activity may be the dominant force that drove the same-phase variations of the temperature and precipitation in north central China.”
Saltmarshes, precipitation, “oscillations.” It’s all so science-fair. How about something just plain scary?
Solheim et al. 2011, “The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24,” submitted astro-ph.
Excerpt from Solheim: “We find that for the Norwegian local stations investigated that 30-90% of the temperature increase in this period may be attributed to the Sun. For the average of 60 European stations we find ≈ 60% and globally (HadCRUT3) ≈ 50%. The same relations predict a temperature decrease of ≈ 0.9°C globally and 1.1−1.7°C for the Norwegian stations investigated from solar cycle 23 to 24.”
First paleo chapter error: omitting all solar variables besides TSI
The paleo-observations chapter is the right place for the evidence for a solar-magnetic climate driver to be introduced because most of this evidence is obtained from the deposition of cosmogenic isotopes in various paleologic strata: ice cores, geologic cores and tree rings. When solar activity is strong, less galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) is able to penetrate the solar wind and reach earth, making variation in cosmogenic isotopes found in time-indexed strata a proxy for solar activity. But when this chapter does get around to looking at cosmogenic records, it only looks at how they can be used to reconstruct total solar irradiance (TSI). It never even hints at the flood of studies that show a high degree of correlation between solar activity and various paleo proxies for climate and temperature!
This takes place [in the addendum that asks whether the sun is a major climate driver]. This addendum mentions the long-period changes in TSI that go with orbital variation (Milankovitch cycles), a factor which hasn’t changed enough since 1750 to account for any significant amount of the warming since that date. Neither can TSI changes from changes in the sun’s output of electromagnetic radiation be responsible for significant recent warming because, as solar activity jumps dramatically up and down over the roughly 11 year solar cycle, solar output is known to remain remarkably stable, varying only .1 to .2%.
Thus, concludes the addendum, the sun cannot be responsible for any significant amount of the warming since 1750. But it is only able to reach this conclusion by completely omitting any consideration those solar variables other than TSI that could be affecting global temperature. Unlike TSI, solar wind speed and pressure vary considerably over the solar cycle and between solar cycles. So do the Ap index and the F10.7cm radio flux progression, while the GCR that the solar wind modulates (measured by neutron counts at Climax, Oulu and other locations) can vary by a full order of magnitude over the solar cycle. In contrast, TSI varies so little that it is called “the solar constant.” If there is a mechanism by which solar variation is driving global temperature, it is most likely to work through those solar variables that actually vary significantly with solar activity. Yet the discussion in the addendum pretends that these other solar variables do not even exist.
So that’s the first error in the paleo-chapter addendum: pretending to have addressed the range of possible solar effects while studiously neglecting to mention that there are a bunch of solar variables that, unlike TSI, vary tremendously over the solar cycle and might affect our climate in ways that we do not yet understand. We in-effect live inside of the sun’s “atmosphere,” the extended corona created by the sun’s magnetic field and the solar wind. AR5 simply assumes that this solar environment has no effect on global climate, and they do it by rank omission of the relevant variables. The omitted variable problems that result are not an accident. They are omitted variable fraud.
Second paleo-chapter error: the highly irrational assumption that temperature would be driven by the trend in solar activity rather than the level
Perhaps in an effort to justify ignoring all solar variables other than TSI, the paleo-chapter addendum ends with what it presents as a general reason to dismiss the possibility that solar variation made any significant contribution to late 20th century warming by ANY mechanism:
[The statement here it the familiar claim that, because solar activity was not rising over the second half of the 20th century, it cannot possibly be responsible for late 20th century warming. I wrote a series of posts last year documenting the number of anti-CO2 alarmists who make this amazing claim, that it is not the level of forcing that creates warming, but the rate of change in the forcing. See for example, “Solar warming and ocean equilibrium Part 3: Solanki and Schuessler respond.”]
TSI peaks at the high point of the solar cycle just as the other solar variables do, so no matter what solar variable is looked at, it can’t have been the cause of recent warming, because none of these variables showed any upward trend over this period, right? Wrong. That’s like saying you can’t heat a pot of water by turning the flame to maximum and leaving it there, that you have to turn up the flame sloooooowly if you want the water to heat. It is incredible to see something so completely unscientific in AR5, passing as highly vetted science.
And the “flame” did stay on maximum. Again, there was an 80 year “grand maximum” of solar activity starting in the early 1920’s (Usoskin 2007).
[WUWT interjection for Leif and others who deny that there was a 20the century grand maximum of solar activity: if 20th century solar activity was merely “high instead of exceptional” (Muscheler 2007), it makes no difference to the argument here, as I explain in a postscript at the bottom.]
By claiming that solar activity would have had to keep rising in order to cause late 20th century warming, AR5 is in-effect assuming that by the late 70’s the oceans had already equilibrated to whatever temperature forcing effect the 20th century’s high level of solar activity might have. Otherwise the continued high level of solar activity would have caused continued warming.
Claims of rapid ocean equilibration have been made (Schwartz 2007), but they don’t stand up to scrutiny. In order to get his result, Schwartz used an energy balance model with the oceans represented by a single heat sink. That is, he assumed that the whole ocean changed temperature at once! Once you move to a 2 heat sink model where it takes time for heat to transfer from one ocean layer to another (Kirk-Davidoff 2009), rapid temperature adjustment of the upper ocean layer tells us next to nothing about how long it takes for the ocean to equilibrate to a long term forcing. [For an in-depth comparison of one heat-sink and the two heat-sink energy balance models see Part 2 of my ocean equilibration series.]
The paleo-temperature record is typified by multi-century warming and cooling phases, suggesting that equilibration can easily take centuries, making it ludicrous to assume that the warming effect of a grand maximum that began in the 1920’s must have been spent by 1970 or 1980 or by any particular date.
So no, there is no way to save the utterly incompetent argument in the paleo-chapter addendum that a solar driver of temperature can only cause warming when it is on the increase. If solar wind pressure or GCR does in some way drive global temperature, there is every reason to believe that it would have continued to warm the planet for as long as solar activity remained at grand maximum levels. There is no excuse for the IPCC to be omitting these variables, which are much more likely than TSI to be responsible for the high observed degree of correlation between solar activity and climate. For the paleo chapter to be tenable, all of the now massive evidence that there is some mechanism by which solar activity is driving most temperature change must be laid out in full.
Technical note: misattribution is assigned manually in AR5, but the concept is the same as for purely statistical omitted variable fraud
If TSI and the other solar variables all move roughly together, won’t omitting the solar variables other than TSI cause their explanatory power to be attributed to TSI rather than CO2, since they are more closely correlated with TSI than with CO2?
In a purely statistical estimation scheme yes, but the IPCC uses a combination of parameterized elements and estimated elements, and amongst the parameterized elements are the radiative forcings of CO2 and TSI, meaning that their relative warming effects are parameterized as well, with CO2 being assigned 40 times the warming effect of TSI over the 1750 to 2010 period.
This parameterization means that the explanatory power of the omitted solar magnetic variables gets attributed forty parts to CO2 for every one part to TSI. This structure forces the misattribution onto CO2. You can think of it as a manual assignment of the misattribution.
The general concept of the omitted variable remains the same. There is only so much attribution for warming to go around (100%). If attribution is given to the solar-magnetic variables in accordance with the evidence from the historic and paleo records, meaning at least 50%, then there less than 50% that can possibly be attributable to other causes.
Which again brings the scientific competence of IPCC into question. If CO2 has 40 times the warming effect of the 50% driver of global temperature (total solar effects), that makes it what? The 2000% driver of global temperature?
The chapter on aerosols and clouds inverts the scientific method, using theory to dismiss evidence
Where the paleo chapter simply pretends that no solar variable other than TSI exists, the chapter on aerosols and clouds doesn’t have that option. It is tasked to address directly the possibility that variables like the solar wind and GCR could be affecting climate. But this chapter still comes up with a way to avoid mentioning any of the massive evidence that there must be some mechanism by which solar activity is driving climate. Just as it starts to touch on the subject, it jumps instead to examining the tenability of particular theories about the mechanism by which solar activity might drive climate.
This happens right at the beginning of [the section that discusses the possible interplay between cosmic radiation, aerosols and clouds]:
[The quote here is the first two sentences under this sub-chapter heading. The first lists three papers as finding non-specific correlations between cosmogenic isotopes and various climate variables. The second sentence executes an immediate transition to a discussion of the evidence for particular mechanisms by which solar activity might drive global temperature.]
The first sentence of this quote is as close as AR5 comes to making any mention of overwhelming evidence that there is SOME mechanism by which solar activity drives global temperature. The citations suggest some correlations between solar activity and climate, but the strength of the correlations and how well established they are is completely obscured, and that’s it. Bare reference to three papers (author and year) with virtually nothing about what they found. The second sentence effects the transition into looking at the evidence for particular theories of possible mechanisms by which solar activity might effect climate. A short discussion later the evidence for these particular mechanisms is asserted (quite tendentiously) to be “[not strong enough]” for the mechanisms to “[have a significant effect on climate]” (page __, line __). This proclaimed weakness in turn becomes the rationale for omitting the proposed mechanisms from the IPCC’s general circulation models, and hence from the projections that are made with those models.
What do the AR5 draft authors do with the overwhelming evidence that there is SOME mechanism at work that makes solar magnetic the primary driver of global temperature? They don’t like the particular theories offered, but they have to still acknowledge that SOME such mechanism must be at work, don’t they? But readers don’t know about that evidence. It was skipped over via that one sentence of oblique references to a few papers that made unidentified findings, allowing AR5 to continue as if the evidence doesn’t exist. They never mention it again. They never account it in any way. It is GONE from AR5. The authors declare their dissatisfaction with the available theories for how solar activity might drive climate, and use this as an excuse to completely ignore the massive evidence that there is some such mechanism at work.
This is an exact inversion of the scientific method, which says that evidence always trumps theory. The IPCC is throwing away the evidence for a solar-magnetic driver of climate because it isn’t satisfied with the theories that have been proposed to account for it. This is the definition of anti-science: putting theory (or ideology, or anything) over evidence. Evidence has to be the trump card, or its not science. The IPCC is engaged in pure, definitional, anti-science, precisely inverting the scientific method.
It is as if a pre-Newtonian “scientist” were to predict that a rock released into the air will waft away on the breeze because we understand the force that the breeze imparts on the rock but we have no good theory of the mechanism by which heavy objects are pulled to the ground. We should therefore ignore the overwhelming evidence that there is some mechanism that pulls heavy objects to the ground, and until such time as we can identify the mechanism, proceed as if no such mechanism exists. This is what the IPCC is actually doing with the solar-climate evidence. Y’all aren’t scientists. You are actual, definitional, anti-scientists.
More anti-science: the aerosols and clouds chapter repeats the second paleo-chapter error
You know what I’m talking about: that bit about thinking that a climate driver can only cause continued warming if its own level continues to increase. The clouds and aerosols chapter says again that just leaving a proposed climate driver on maximum can’t possibly cause warming (page___, lines ___):
“_____ _____ _____ _____ ____”
And that’s the end of the section, AR5’s punctuation mark on why solar activity and GCR should be dismissed as an explanation for late 20th century warming.
This is anti-scientific in its own way. Scientists are supposed to be smart. They aren’t supposed to think that you have to slowly turn up the flame under a pot of water in order to heat it. You could collect every imbecile in the world together and not a one of them would ever come up with the idea that they have to turn the heat up slowly. It’s beyond stupid. It’s like, insanely stupid. And multiple chapter-writing teams are proclaiming the same nonsense? Fruitcakes.
Okay, I guess that means I’m ready to wrap up. Y’all have taken all these tens of billions in research money and used it perpetrate a fraud. As I have documented above, you have perpetrated the grandest and most blatant example of omitted variable fraud in history, but so far only the skeptic half the world knows it. You still have a shot, before global cooling is an established fact, to make a rapid turn around and save some shred of your reputations. But if AR5 comes out insisting that CO2 is a dominant warming influence just as global cooling is proving that the dominant climate driver is our now-quiet sun, then you all are finished on the spot. You’ll still have your filthy lucre, but the tap is going to turn off, and your reputations will be destroyed forever.
Can you imagine a worse juxtaposition? Still waging war on CO2 as the sun is already proving that CO2 is entirely beneficial? And this is what the evidence says is going to happen, all of that evidence that you have been so studiously omitting. I’m eager for your embarrassment, but I would much rather see you save yourselves, so that the needed policy reversals can some that much sooner. The anti-CO2 policies that your fraudulent “science” has supported are right now destroying the world economy. You idiots are killing our future. Please wake up and try to save your own reputations before your lunatic anti-science ruins us all.
End of review
“Omitted variable fraud” is the more fundamental critique
It is common for those who are swayed by the evidence for solar-climate driver to frame their protest against the IPCC’s dismissal of the evidence by protesting the short shrift the IPCC gives to the theories of how those effects might work. Here, for instance, is Tim Ball’s 2008 critique of AR4:
…they studiously avoided any discussion of the clear relationship between sunspot activity and temperature. They claimed there was no mechanism to explain the correlation so it could not be included, but that is incorrect. A very valid mechanism known as the Cosmic Theory (Svensmark and Calder, “The Chilling Stars”) has been in the literature with increasing detail since 1991. The date is important because IPCC claimed it was excluded because it was not published in time to meet their cut off date for consideration.
In other words, AR4 did exactly the same thing that AR5 is doing. They used the supposed lack of a sufficient theory for how a solar magnetic driver worked as an excuse not to present the overwhelming evidence that some such mechanism is a potent driver of global climate (a ruse that I documented in submitted comments on the Second Order draft of AR4, and TAR pulled the same trick as well.)
Ball’s response—that there actually is a pretty good theory—is perfectly correct, but it skips past the deeper point: that there can never be any excuse for “studiously [avoiding] any discussion of the clear relationship between sunspot activity and temperature.” The “omitted variable fraud” critique directly exposes and attacks this excuse making. Empirical evidence, the raw data, is supposed to be the ultimate arbiter. If any excuse is used to shunt the evidence aside, it’s no longer science.
We also know the consequences of this fraudulent anti-science. Omission of any variable with known explanatory power (regardless of whether the mechanism is understood) creates misattribution of the same magnitude. It’s a first order mistake.
In contrast, giving short shrift to the GCR-cloud theory is a lesser problem. So long as the IPCC’s predictive scheme attributes recent warming to solar activity in accordance with past patterns it isn’t a big deal whether a particular solar-temperature mechanism is modeled or not. At least the known explanatory variables are not being omitted and we are down to second order errors instead of first order errors.
Note that it is not necessary to invoke any theory. Predictions of future solar activity, for instance, are not based on physical models, but are purely a projection of past patterns, and this is sufficient to avoid first order error. Avoid the omitted variable fraud, account the known explanatory power of the solar-magnetic variables in any reasonable way, and big mistakes are avoided.
For the fraudsters, big mistakes are the whole point. Only with big mistakes can our eco-leftist “scientists” wage their war against industrial capitalism. Only big mistakes can give mainstream-left politicians the vast energy taxes that they eye as a treasure trove and allow them to channel hundreds of billions of dollars in wind and solar subsidies to their friends and backers.
But it’s an easy fraud to expose. Pretty much everyone who has ever taken a first course in statistics is familiar with the omitted variable problem. That is every undergraduate economics major, every business major, every science major, and most other social science majors. Right now, most of these people believe it when they are told that they can’t check the facts for themselves, that they just have to trust (or not trust) the credentialed climate scientists. But it is not true. Not only can they check the facts for themselves, but it is trivially easy.
All they need to do is scan a selection of the many empirical findings that solar-magnetic activity “explains” in the statistical sense something like half of past temperature change, then observe that all solar magnetic variables are in fact omitted from the IPCC models. It’s right there the RF table for each area report, where total solar effects are parameterized as having some tiny fraction of the warming effect of CO2. Then bingo. They know that powerful solar-warming effects are being misattributed to the coincidentally correlated CO2. They have checked the facts for themselves, at which point the voices of authority insisting that they cannot check the facts for themselves instantly become the Wizard of Oz, ordering them to ignore the man behind the curtain. Not even trusting little Dorothy fell for that.
Fundamental and accessible. That’s why I have trying to push the “omitted variable fraud” critique for many years. Anthony has a bigger bullhorn than I have had access to in the past, so maybe it will get out there this time!
If Leif is right that sunspot counts since 1945 should be reduced 20%, it does not alter the above analysis in any significant way
My review cites Usoskin’s claim that solar activity was at “grand maximum” levels from about 1920-2000. Frequent WUWT contributor Leif Svalsgaard denies that the recent peak in solar activity was a “grand maximum,” arguing that Max Waldmeier’s post-1945 sunspot counting scheme yields numbers that are about 20% too high.
If solar activity from 1945 to 2000 was merely “high instead of exceptional” (Muscheler 2007, whose cosmogenic proxies for solar activity extend through 2001), the narrative here is not significantly altered. As my review reiterates, you don’t have to keep turning the flame up under a pot of water to cause warming. Coming out of the Maunder Minimum/ Little Ice Age, if what the paleo-data says is the primary driver of global temperature remained at a high setting for most of a couple of centuries, that should cause continued warming. To actually argue that solar forcing has to continue rising in order to cause continued warming (the IPCC just asserts it) you’d have to argue that oceans had already equilibrated to the forcing, but there is no evidence for that, while the history of planetary temperature suggests that equilibration can take several centuries.
It is true that some of the strongest correlations between solar activity and temperature have short lags, on the order of ten years, but rapid responses to short term changes in solar-magnetic activity do not militate against longer term responses to longer term forcings. On the contrary, short term responsiveness implies longer term responsiveness, just as the rapid response of daytime temperatures to the rising sun implies that the longer term increase in insolation as the seasons change towards summer should cause seasonal temperature change (which of course it does).
For present purposes, it doesn’t matter whether solar activity quickly jumped up to high levels after Maunder and stayed mostly at those levels until the end of the 20th century (with the notable exceptions of the Dalton Minimum and the turn of the 19th century lull), or whether solar activity over the second half of the 20th century really did ascend to the highest levels seen since 9000 BC (Usoskin). As far as we know, either scenario could easily account for the modest amount of warming in question.
That’s an unexceptional .7° C from 1600 to the 1961-90 average according to Moberg 2005 , or .5° between 1750 to 1961-90. That 1961-90 temperature average is the HadCRUT3 zero point. HadCRUT3 reached a peak of .548 in 1998 and has fallen a couple of tenths since, so altogether there was a peak of about a 1° increase over the IPCC’s 260 year study period (now down to about .8°) which is nothing unusual in the ups and downs of global temperature.
There is no reason to think that the sun could only be responsible for this unexceptional temperature increase if there had been 50 years of the highest solar activity since 9000 BC. Of course the IPCC thinks that any steady level of solar activity over the second half of the 20th century rules out a solar explanation for the small amount of warming over that period on grounds that the level of solar activity didn’t keep going up to even more extreme levels, but they’re just a bunch of fruitcake anti-scientists.
Submitted review contains one inaccuracy that is corrected in the review posted above
My submitted review claimed that the only reference in the First Order Draft to the vast evidence for a solar-climate driver comes in a single sentence that makes an oblique reference to a single research paper. In the corrected review above, that becomes a single sentence making oblique reference to three research papers.
Two of the papers only look at solar-climate correlations over the second half of the 20th century and hence are inherently unable to draw strong conclusions. I guess I was thinking that the only “real” citation was to the survey paper that actually addresses the paleo-data. But those details are irrelevant to the point I was trying to make—that a reader of AR5 is given no hint of what is in any these papers—and no clue that numerous studies point to solar activity as the primary driver of global temperature. The submitted review quotes the full sentence, so it isn’t hiding anything, but it isn’t fully accurate.
So that’s the price of procrastination. It was just before the submission deadline and I had a reunion dinner to rush off to so I was not able to vet as thoroughly as I would have liked. Still, this is the only actual screw-up in my submitted review: it isn’t one oblique reference to a single paper, but one sentence obliquely referencing three papers. With the draft report unavailable to WUWT readers I don’t want to put forward any mischaracterizations, so I made the correction and am footnoting it here.
The posting here also fixes some typos, adds links to some of the cited papers, adds some formatting that was unavailable on our Excel submission form, and touches up the presentation in a few spots.
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“Of course they omit natural phenomenona, they do so because they’re not charged with taking natural into account.”
I’ve noticed the sun’s been up for longer periods each day the last few months. Should the IPCC — as they’re “not charged with taking natural[sic] into account” — conclude from that that in about a year, we’ll have continuous day light?
Simply amazingly anti-science position: “we’re looking at a natural system, but we’ll ignore natural drivers of the system”. It’s as if I asserted that the source of all the water in the Ohio river are the waste-water treatment facilities along its course.
William M Connolley says:
“This is describing a GCM study, based on the Lean ’95 reconstruction, ”
Alex Rawls claims that the models assume that CO2 is 40 times as effective as solar (TSI) in terms of climate change. You quote Lean ’95 as reconstructing TSI and UV. This implies that relying on this Lean ’95 paper will not do a proper job of analyzing whether solar wind / magnetic effects are important. Since you quote the IPCC as relying, at least in part, on Lean -95 as justifying the opinion that solar effects are not of great importance in climate change, it appears you haven’t really responded to Alex’s complaint about the IPCC position.
“The response from the iPCC is correct based on their mission statement. The IPCC only investigates the risks of climate change caused by human activity only, not solar causes or any thing else.”
How do they isolate what is “caused by human activity” if they do not consider natural causes?
William M. Connolley says:
February 22, 2012 at 7:58 am
I note that you, too, are implicitly dismissing the post author’s argument that IPCC has ignored solar forcing; the Stott paper is (as you’d expect)
Indeed the work of Stott e.a. is referenced, but with some caveats::
In addition, a combined analysis of the response at the surface and through the depth of the atmosphere using HadCM3 and the solar reconstruction of Lean et al. (1995) concluded that the near-surface temperature response to solar forcing over 1960 to 1999 is much smaller than the response to greenhouse gases (Jones et al., 2003). This conclusion is also supported by the vertical pattern of climate change, which is more consistent with the response to greenhouse gas than to solar forcing (Figure 9.1).
Stott used the HadCM3 model with 10x solar, according to Lean e.a. and Hoyt and Schatten, not mentioned in the IPCC report, to check a possible better attribution of its weak TSI variability. They found that solar statistically might be underestimated by a factor of about 2 at the cost of the influence of CO2 (20% less). But again, within the constraints of the model. If one sets no minimum border on the influence of aerosols (-1.5 W/m2 in the model), it might be as well 5 times (that means no influence of CO2 at all…). Thus the attribution problem still is far from solved, if you don’t let the constraint of aerosol influence interfere with the statistics.
Further, the “vertical pattern of climate change” is not consistent with a response to greenhouse gases at all, as Figure 9.1 in this case shows the “hot spot” in the upper troposphere in the tropics, which doesn’t exist…
And last but not least (we have had that discussion already a long time ago in the better days of RC, before over half my comments were deleted), the influence of CO2 must be halved, if human aerosols have a much lower influence than implemented in the models:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oxford.html
The old discussion at RC about my doubts of the aerosol connection is here (at #14):
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/climate-sensitivity-and-aerosol-forcings/
“I am going to offer a completely non-scientific theory as to why solar activity is deemphasized. Since the sun’s activity is beyond the control of humans, it is scary and avoided.”
I respectfully disagree. Solar activity is omitted because it doesn’t give anyone an excuse to impoverish the world.
Well done, generally. I’ve been arguing the same way ever since I discovered the climate problem a decade plus ago. Simply looking at the last 100 years of the reasonably reliable climate record, while both CO_2 and Solar Activity in general increased and/or remained high, only solar activity correlates well with the VARIATIONS in the upward trending data. Yes, there are a ton of other possibly confounding variables (in particular the effect of decadal oscillations) but if one was simply fitting the data with two parameters, solar activity and CO_2, there is obvious covariance sufficient to permit a decent fit to be made with an entire range of attribution of warming to CO_2 and solar activity. However, a CO_2 only model fails to explain the deviations from monotonic increase in temperature, where solar activity can, in a reasonable theory, provide an explanation.
The evidence for the importance of solar forcing is indeed being strengthened by the year as the current solar cycle advances, arguably the lowest in at least a century. First, there is a levelling (at least) of global temperatures. Second, this levelling is accompanied by secular changes in important climate parameters, e.g. H_2O levels in the stratosphere. Third, it is accompanied by a measured increase in the Earth’s bond albedo via the proxy of reflected Earthlight from the visible dark face of the moon. Solar forcing is directly tied to bond albedo in every viable theory of global climate; at the Earth’s mean temperature it has an effect on the theoretical greybody temperature of the planet (the baseline from which the GHE proceeds) of roughly 1K per 0.01 in bond albedo. An increase from 0.30 to 0.31, in other words, would decrease global temperatures by roughly 1K completely independent of everything else — an amount sufficient to cancel at least 2/3 of the total observed warming of the last century to century and a half.
Taken together, these observations both place increasingly severe limits on the hypothesized positive additional forcing that is required beyond what the CO_2 portion of the GHE is supposed to produce, and damn skippy, is a clear case of omitted variable fraud.
It would be very interesting to build a completely unbiased parametric predictive model of the global climate, one with good forecast and hindcast capabilities when prepared with only selected portions of the climate record. In particular, it would be interesting to build a neural network based predictive model — more or less my speciality. It is for all practical purposes impossible to force a neural network (whose inputs are just tables of “neurified” numbers for trainging purposes where one doesn’t even have to label the variables, the ultimate in double blind fitting) to choose one variable over another when the two are covariant, and unlike traditional model NNs don’t require one to worry about covariance when preparing the model data — as long as you avoid including the “answer” in proxy form, they will simply optimize the contributions from two or more partially correlated variables.
It is similarly difficult to interpret the result — a NN might have several thousand weights that are all mutually optimized to produce a good predictive model (one that is neither overfit nor underfit and that was robust against random retrainings with different partitionings of training and trial data) and one cannot point to the 1027th of them and say “this one represents the contribution of CO_2”. But this is their strength in this case. Neither can one go in and preset the 1027th weight to force it to make CO_2 the primary driver. One has to infer the NN’s eventual decomposition by performing various projections of input data to determine what it has decided the sensitivity is to single variable forcings with all other variables fixed.
I do have one criticism of the top article, though. It is easy to let anger slip through into postings on WUWT, but in a scientific critique they have little to no place. Such a critique should be written in a dispassionate way. I hope and assume that the actual AR5 report was written in this way, however much anger slipped through into the top article.
We would all do well to remember that while some participants in the CAGW scare (if not scam) may well be dishonest and deceptive — quite possibly dishonest first of all to themselves, making it far easier to justify fooling others — I would expect that most of them are not. Some of them, as we have very recently seen, are willing to walk away and publicly repudiate the entire process when they perceive of the scientific process being corrupted to political ends.
The proper thing to do in the case of AR5 is present, as the top author had done, a detailed critique of omitted science and publications, and I even think under the circumstances that it is fair to directly address omitted variable fraud in the discussion, to put them on their guard. It is then up to the IPCC to take this criticism seriously, or open themselves up to immediate rebuttal if they fail to modify the report. Documenting the omissions and clearly laying out the reasons that this is not good science makes them all the more vulnerable to the mounting criticism of overt bias if they fail to directly address them in the final document.
The stakes are high. The climate is going to do what the climate is going to do, and it is not doing what the CO_2-only model predicts that it should be doing right now. More and more real scientists, including climate scientists contributing work to AR5 and the IPCC, are being forced to confront this by the only thing that ultimately matters — the actual data.
If the IPCC fails — for the fifth time — to address the scientific weaknesses in the CAGW scenario, after they have been fairly and objectively pointed out in the very critical reports that they have solicited in an admirably open process — then I rather suspect that they will be marginalized and blasted apart, as there at this point a number of government watchdogs in the large granting agencies who are responsive to allegations of confirmation bias and the politicization of the scientific process, whether or not the IPCC is.
rgb
If I had done what William M. Connolley did at Wiki, I would have too much shame to come here and draw attention to myself.
Johnnythelowery says:
February 22, 2012 at 7:59 am
“Boot Connelly off here for life. His actions go before him. If this is the same twit from Wiki: boot him off! It’s good that someone, or anyone, bats for the AGW here but not Connelly.
We booted Emmanuel so and so off here for life for being repetitive and boring about his Iron Sun. Connelly’s actions at Wiki, if true, are far more eggregious.
Boot Connelly off here for life.
All those in favour say ey”
Nay.
Banning comments is a standard totalitarian tactic used at AGW advocacy sites such are Real Climate, SkepticalScience, and others.
If Connelly is prepared to debate the science here, then he should certainly be allowed to do so.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
AGW_Skeptic> the wiki issue
The answer is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ARBCC. You could try reading it, but that would probably be too much like hard work, so you’ll rely on someone else’s inaccurate and slanted paraphrase.
> Connolley… edited the wiki article on the IPCC within the last 30 days.
Smart detective work. See-also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/William_M._Connolley.
> I wonder how that happened?
See here.
Phil>
Ta. Good advice, too. I shall try to take it, for my part. It would be more interesting to talk about the science. Speaking of which…
> No climate scientist has any idea why http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CETjun.htm ? Let’s hear what William M. Connolley has to say.
Errm, that is a plot of the CET. You must have a point, though I confess I can’t see what that point is.
> past Dansgaard-Oesgher or Bond cycles…
Yep, with you so far, all part of the std.picture.
> The past warming and cooling cycles all correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes. There is no correlation with atmospheric CO2 changes
For the Bond cycles, that sounds plausible. Obviously its wrong for the iceage cycles.
> What is your or the Realclimate or the AR4 explanation of the past warming and cooling cycles?
From context, I assume you mean the Bond cycles stuff. I don’t think they are fully understood; indeed, people argue about whether they are periodic or not (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event). Rahmstorf is RC; you can find a ref to his work there.
> The past warming and cooling cycles all correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes
Could be. But you present no refs, so I can’t judge. Please do so.
Bob Kutz> how on earth can you make the claim that the IPCC isn’t convinced of CAGW? This; “# Warming of the climate system is unequivocal. # Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (>90%) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations. # Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the times…
I can sense your outrage as I read the words as they are actually written, rather than the meaning you want them to have. “# Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” Certainly it is. But “unequivocal” just means cannot-be-reasonably-disagreed-with, not “catastrophic”. And similarly for your other points. Why can you not even read the material that you quote?
Reblogged this on TrueNorthist and commented:
A thoroughly fascinating read that is well worth the time.
jj says:
watch this and consider all the evidence before jumping to wild conclusions
I’d like it understoood that this post was not made by me, and would request that this poster identify himself differently to avoid confusion.
Re; William Connolley, February 22, 2012 at 8:21 am
“> If the IPCC is so convinced about the case for CAGW
It isn’t. You won’t find the phrase used at all. You just made it up.”
Saying the phrase is not used at all is a far cry from making something up. On this point you are cornered. David did not use quotation marks and the IPCC firmly indicates an endorsement of the notion that current warming is caused by anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and that it is catastrophic.
Given your rebuke of poor David, how do you explain this;
“The IPCC WGI Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC,2007) came to a more confident assessment of the causes of global temperature change than previous reports and concluded that “most of
the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”. It also concluded that “discernible human influences now extend to other aspects of climate, including ocean warming, continentalaverage temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns. Since then, warming over Antarctica has also been attributed to human influence, and further evidence has accumulated attributing a wider range of climate changes to human activities. Such changes are broadly consistent with theoretical understanding, and climate model simulations,of how the planet is expected to respond.”
That’s taken from the IPCC websites pdf version of the meeting report from the “IPCC Expert Meeting on Detection and Attribution Related to Anthropogenic Climate Change” held by the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland 14–16 September 2009. It directly sites AR4’s claim that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”.
Given that WGIII (TAR4) concerns itself with mitigation strategies including carbon taxes and investment in renewable (though it doesn’t mention non-carbon based, curiously) energy, and restrictions on motor vehicle production and usage and “land use regulation and enforcement”, it would be hard to justify the notion at they (IPCC) don’t view this change as catastrophic. They certainly describe it as such.
If that isn’t the IPCC supporting the CAGW dogma in your opinion, then your opinion is no longer relevant to any conversations of logic and science.
Bill, it is time to repent.
I see little danger that this wonderful post will be found wrong, but not from the solar influence point of view. First, it turns out that all 4 main atmospheric gases, N2, O2, water vapor, and CO2 have IR absorption capabilities. The IR absorption spectrum of air clearly shows the strong influence from N2 and O2. It also turns out that CO2 absorbance abilities are rather limited compared to the other three gases. In light of being a truly minor player regarding IR absorption/emission, CO2 simply does not have a detectable influence.
Second, direct chemical bottle CO2 data, gathered together by Ernst Beck, clearly shows that CO2 has been much higher than now during three periods of the last 200 years, showing lag times and great variability relative to temperature.
Third, according to Jaworowski, an authority on ice cores, ice cores are severely traumatized during extraction and, besides some in situ chemistry that decreases detectable CO2 from the samples, extensive microfracturing occurs. Thus, he considers that ice cores lose 30–50% of their CO2 before assay. If you take the published ice core CO2 values and back calculate these losses, the values are equal to or greater than the atmospheric CO2 today.
To assume that ice cores show absolute CO2 values of old atmosphere is just plain stupid. For the IPCC to allow and support ice core data to be merged with Mauna Loa volcano CO2 data is intellectual and scientific dishonesty, amounting to fraud and, taking into account the policy decisions involved, criminal intent.
A preview of AR5 and the aftermath. Sounds like if you squint and stare really hard right in one place long enough, you’ll see it until you look somewhere else. Stop looking somewhere else, because it’s really, really important to the world that you don’t look somewhere else. A whole lot of forcing and not much falling into place. No action required. Or will they scale the catastrophe higher this time round after scaling it lower to appear at least a little credible last time?
You may not be able to prove that their rejection of the variable(s) is intentionally fraudulent without evidence that they know or should know that their rejection is false (tempting to conclude but hard to prove intent). Or is this IPCC project subject to various nations’ FOIA law? If FOI is important for any issue, it’s this effort to establish the behind the curtain edict as global authority for everything from science to how we live and breathe.
But cheer up, the LA times is promoting every agnostic from holocaust denier to Adolf Eichmann.
I have to agree with William M. Connolley . The important question is what caused the 1970 to 2000 measured warming.
An analysis that focused on this period would make a more compelling argument.
The GCR theory is plausible, although I favour tropospheric aerosol reductions as the main cause of the 1970-2000 warming. But then GCRs and aerosols seed clouds in similar ways. So what seems to evidence for one may be evidence for the other.
Any good reason not to include the 2000-2012 period in there?
Oh, wait, perhaps it is because there was no measured warming at all, so that the entire period confounds the CO_2-only hypothesis, with last month’s lower troposphere 33-year mean anomaly negative once again.
Actually, the most compelling arguments are the ones with the longest time base, not the shortest. To discuss the causes of any local warming or cooling trend, it helps to know the long timescale natural variability of the system. It then helps to regulate your explanations of the local trend with the possible causes of the observed natural variability.
When this is done on a scale longer than 100 years, what is revealed is that natural variability can account for 100% of the local warming. We aren’t even out there at a 2 sigma event over the last 12,000 years, and the initial baseline of the thermometric era was not only a 2 sigma event, it was a three or four sigma event on the low side. Global temperatures are not geologically “unprecedented” — that is blatent fraud in and of itself as a glance at the non-CAGW-reconstructed paleoclimatological record clearly reveals.
So no, looking at a 30 year baseline is not “the important question”, at least not if you want to have a chance of finding the right answer. Before you can analyze a signal, you first have to correctly identify the range of the noise and its natural variability, and then systematically obtain the predictors of that variability. CO_2 cannot be ascertained to be the primary driver of the variations observed now without fully accounting for the natural variations over centuries and millennia where it was not a relevant (variable) driver at all.
rgb
You still have a shot, before global cooling is an established fact, to make a rapid turn around and save some shred of your reputations.
They should not wait too long. See the two slopes for surface sea level temperatures. There has been no change for 15 years and the slope for the last 10 years is -0.00962834 per year. If they are waiting for 17 years of no positive slope, they will really have egg on their faces. (Also the latest UAH value for AQUA ch05 is now 0.35 C below the previous lowest value since 2002!)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1980/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.08/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002.08/trend
It’s nice to see this fellow participating… whoever he may be
William M. Connolley says:
February 22, 2012 at 9:05 am
AGW_Skeptic> the wiki issue
The answer is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ARBCC. You could try reading it, but that would probably be too much like hard work, so you’ll rely on someone else’s inaccurate and slanted paraphrase.
But why do the moderators allow him to derail the discussion from the point of the post? Why is this type of thread-jacking allowed? I can’t believe that anyone would quote WikiPedia as an authoritative source — for example…
Bob Kutz says:
February 22, 2012 at 8:31 am
“William, how on earth can you make the claim that the IPCC isn’t convinced of CAGW?
This; […]
is from a wikipedia article you yourself edited as recently as January 28, 2012. The source cited is the IPCC summary for policy makers. I think you are familiar with it.”
You can’t argue with William M. Connolley by citing the wikipedia. William M. Connolley would in that case do one of two things:
-Tell you that wikipedia, according to wikipedia, is not a reliable source
-Change the article you’re citing to say what he wants.
John West says:
February 22, 2012 at 8:46 am
Johnnythelowery says:
“Boot Connelly for life from here!!!! …………………………………….. Please.
All those in favour say Ey”
NAY!
He can’t edit here, let him spout where he can be refuted for all to see.
—————————————–
You can’t trust him. You can’t trust that he believes what he is saying is true; because in the past said things were true when he knew damn well they wern’t. See the difference between a person with countervailing ideas (see Leif V Scarfetta) and a liar.
1. He might be saying it because he believes it to be true (and is qualified to hold the opinion)
2. He might be saying it because it serves a purpose
3. He might be saying it to wind us up, muddy the waters, waste our time
4. He might saying it because it frustrates those who search for truth
I say get rid of him.
Dave Dardinger> Alex Rawls claims that the models assume that CO2 is 40 times as effective as solar (TSI) in terms of climate change.
Yes, but he just made it up. It isn’t true. You’ll notice he provides no evidence for the claim.
FE>
well, as you say, we’ve disagreed before, and there is little hope of having a proper discussion here – too much noise, too low a level of understanding. Plus, you evaded my question.
Bob Kutz> the IPCC firmly indicates an endorsement of the notion that current warming is … catastrophic
No it doesn’t, you’re just making things up.
> Such changes are broadly consistent with theoretical understanding, and climate model simulations,of how the planet is expected to respond
Yeees, notice the absence of the C-word in there, though.
> Any good reason not to include the 2000-2012 period in there?
Nope, feel free to include that too.
> all 4 main atmospheric gases, N2, O2, water vapor, and CO2 have IR absorption capabilities
No. N2 and O2 are diatomic.
> Ernst Beck, clearly shows that CO2 has been much higher than now during three periods of the last 200 years
Not that lunacy again. Come on, that belongs off in the wild fringes… oh, wait…
Coach Springer, “You may not be able to prove that their rejection of the variable(s) is intentionally fraudulent without evidence that they know or should know that their rejection is false ”
The IPCC has already stated that they believe that all natural factors and cycles have been overwhelmed by CO2. We’re done—intentionally fraudulent it is. Too many people have pointed out that this is wrong for them not to be intentionally continuing to ignore natural factors.
Ignoring important natural cycles entirely fits their needs for a political agenda centered around demonizing CO2 as the controller of our climate and accusing humans of messing with the controller.
Bottom line: the IPCC cannot afford to EVER admit to being wrong, goal-oriented, or dishonest, as they would then fail their political propaganda mission. This has nothing to do with science and all to do with political expediency.
I am disappointed that the moderators have left an apparently (self-snip) Wikipedia-banned propagandist like Connolley post oven a dozen times and derail what could have been an interesting scientific discussion. This is a waste.
Rawls: “[U]nlike warming, cooling is actually dangerous and really can feed back on itself in runaway fashion.”
I’m not questioning that on balance cooling from present levels is less friendly to humans than warming. But there may be others here who like me are unfamiliar with the rationale for that passage’s runaway-feedback comment. Further explanation would be welcome.
Philip Bradley: I have to agree with William M. Connolley . The important question is what caused the 1970 to 2000 measured warming.
Even if that were the only important question, the answer to that question requires the answers to many other questions, such as:”Is there any evidence that the 1970-200 warming had a different cause from previous warmings?” and “Has the 1970-2000 warming ended?”
William M. Connolley says:
February 22, 2012 at 6:59 am
> You sure do. And many of us has more than a clue as to the bias of the language, choice of references and so on in some of the articles.
“I doubt it. I’ve asked several times for examples of such (in other threads) and people always back off (though I wouldn’t want to derail this thread with more wiki stuff).”
That “people always back off” is very unlikely, even if their perceptions were wrong. Who are you trying to fool, yourself?
> Your response seems to be that you know that most of the processes are well known and understood. Still, without a temperature increase correlation, you have nothing
“You really really don’t understand, do you? It isn’t based on correlation, it is based on the underlying physical processes. If you want to understand how the attribution analysis is done, you’ll need to actually read it.”
**********************************************
Yes, I understand you have avoided actually responding to my original claim, and now just repeat your own without support, while misrepresenting what I said, and adding some juicy innuendo for flavor.
I don’t need to understand some “attribution analysis” to know that it isn’t possible to know what is not known or that “most” is known and understood. That is a statement of faith, not of science.
And I didn’t say theory was based on correlation:
February 22, 2012 at 5:13 am “The explanations (theories) may begin with limited understanding of Earth’s complex physical processes, but the correlations are what “gave rise” to them.”
The observation that the earth is warming is explained by certain processes, William. Not the other way around. Without observations of warming, explanations of warming are rather moot, don’t you think? And observations of cooling or no warming, in the absence of good reasons, would falsify AGW.