Note: This will be the top post for a day or two, new posts will appear below this one.
Readers may recall my original post, Nature’s ugly decision: ‘Deniers’ enters the scientific literature. followed by Dr. Paul Bain Responds to Critics of Use of “Denier” Term (with thanks to Jo Nova, be sure to bookmark and visit her site) Dr. Robert G. Brown of Duke University, commenting as rgbatduke, made a response that was commented on by several here in that thread. As commenter REP put it in the update: It is eloquent, insightful and worthy of consideration. I would say, it is likely the best response I’ve ever seen on the use of the “denier” term, not to mention the CAGW issue in general. Thus, I’ve elevated it a full post. Please share the link to this post widely. – Anthony
Dr. Robert G. Brown writes:
The tragic thing about the thoughtless use of a stereotype (denier) is that it reveals that you really think of people in terms of its projected meaning. In particular, even in your response you seem to equate the term “skeptic” with “denier of AGW”.
This is silly. On WUWT most of the skeptics do not “deny” AGW, certainly not the scientists or professional weather people (I myself am a physicist) and honestly, most of the non-scientist skeptics have learned better than that. What they challenge is the catastrophic label and the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO_2. They challenge this on rather solid empirical grounds and with physical arguments and data analysis that is every bit as scientifically valid as that used to support larger estimates, often obtaining numbers that are in better agreement with observation. For this honest doubt and skepticism that the highly complex global climate models are correct you have the temerity to socially stigmatize them in a scientific journal with a catch-all term that implies that they are as morally reprehensible as those that “deny” that the Nazi Holocaust of genocide against the Jews?
For shame.
Seriously, for shame. You should openly apologize for the use of the term, in Nature, and explain why it was wrong. But you won’t, will you… although I will try to explain why you should.
By your use of this term, you directly imply that I am a “denier”, as I am highly skeptical of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (not just “anthropogenic global warming”, which is plausible if not measurable, although there are honest grounds to doubt even this associated with the details of the Carbon Cycle that remain unresolved by model or experiment). Since I am a theoretical physicist, I find this enormously offensive. I might as well label you an idiot for using it, when you’ve never met me, have no idea of my competence or the strength of my arguments for or against any aspect of climate dynamics (because on this list I argue both points of view as the science demands and am just as vigorous in smacking down bullshit physics used to challenge some aspect of CAGW as I am to question the physics or statistical analysis or modelling used to “prove” it). But honestly, you probably aren’t an idiot (are you?) and no useful purpose is served by ad hominem or emotionally loaded human descriptors in a rational discussion of an objective scientific question, is there.
Please understand that by creating a catch-all label like this, you quite literally are moving the entire discussion outside of the realm of science, where evidence and arguments are considered and weighed independent of the humans that advance them, where our desire to see one or another result proven are (or should be) irrelevant, where people weigh the difficulty of the problem being addressed as an important contributor (in a Bayesian sense) to how much we should believe any answer proposed — so far, into the realm where people do not think at all! They simply use a dismissive label such as “denier” and hence avoid any direct confrontation with the issues being challenged.
The issue of difficulty is key. Let me tell you in a few short words why I am a skeptic. First of all, if one examines the complete geological record of global temperature variation on planet Earth (as best as we can reconstruct it) not just over the last 200 years but over the last 25 million years, over the last billion years — one learns that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about today’s temperatures! Seriously. Not one human being on the planet would look at that complete record — or even the complete record of temperatures during the Holocene, or the Pliestocene — and stab down their finger at the present and go “Oh no!”. Quite the contrary. It isn’t the warmest. It isn’t close to the warmest. It isn’t the warmest in the last 2 or 3 thousand years. It isn’t warming the fastest. It isn’t doing anything that can be resolved from the natural statistical variation of the data. Indeed, now that Mann’s utterly fallacious hockey stick reconstruction has been re-reconstructed with the LIA and MWP restored, it isn’t even remarkable in the last thousand years!
Furthermore, examination of this record over the last 5 million years reveals a sobering fact. We are in an ice age, where the Earth spends 80 to 90% of its geological time in the grip of vast ice sheets that cover the polar latitudes well down into what is currently the temperate zone. We are at the (probable) end of the Holocene, the interglacial in which humans emerged all the way from tribal hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. The Earth’s climate is manifestly, empirically bistable, with a warm phase and cold phase, and the cold phase is both more likely and more stable. As a physicist who has extensively studied bistable open systems, this empirical result clearly visible in the data has profound implications. The fact that the LIA was the coldest point in the entire Holocene (which has been systematically cooling from the Holocene Optimum on) is also worrisome. Decades are irrelevant on the scale of these changes. Centuries are barely relevant. We are nowhere near the warmest, but the coldest century in the last 10,000 years ended a mere 300 years ago, and corresponded almost perfectly with the Maunder minimum in solar activity.
There is absolutely no evidence in this historical record of a third stable warm phase that might be associated with a “tipping point” and hence “catastrophe” (in the specific mathematical sense of catastrophe, a first order phase transition to a new stable phase). It has been far warmer in the past without tipping into this phase. If anything, we are geologically approaching the point where the Earth is likely to tip the other way, into the phase that we know is there — the cold phase. A cold phase transition, which the historical record indicates can occur quite rapidly with large secular temperature changes on a decadal time scale, would truly be a catastrophe. Even if “catastrophic” AGW is correct and we do warm another 3 C over the next century, if it stabilized the Earth in warm phase and prevented or delayed the Earth’s transition into cold phase it would be worth it because the cold phase transition would kill billions of people, quite rapidly, as crops failed throughout the temperate breadbasket of the world.
Now let us try to analyze the modern era bearing in mind the evidence of an utterly unremarkable present. To begin with, we need a model that predicts the swings of glaciation and interglacials. Lacking this, we cannot predict the temperature that we should have outside for any given baseline concentration of CO_2, nor can we resolve variations in this baseline due to things other than CO_2 from that due to CO_2. We don’t have any such thing. We don’t have anything close to this. We cannot predict, or explain after the fact, the huge (by comparison with the present) secular variations in temperature observed over the last 20,000 years, let alone the last 5 million or 25 million or billion. We do not understand the forces that set the baseline “thermostat” for the Earth before any modulation due to anthropogenic CO_2, and hence we have no idea if those forces are naturally warming or cooling the Earth as a trend that has to be accounted for before assigning the “anthropogenic” component of any warming.
This is a hard problem. Not settled science, not well understood, not understood. There are theories and models (and as a theorist, I just love to tell stories) but there aren’t any particularly successful theories or models and there is a lot of competition between the stories (none of which agree with or predict the empirical data particularly well, at best agreeing with some gross features but not others). One part of the difficulty is that the Earth is a highly multivariate and chaotic driven/open system with complex nonlinear coupling between all of its many drivers, and with anything but a regular surface. If one tried to actually write “the” partial differential equation for the global climate system, it would be a set of coupled Navier-Stokes equations with unbelievably nasty nonlinear coupling terms — if one can actually include the physics of the water and carbon cycles in the N-S equations at all. It is, quite literally, the most difficult problem in mathematical physics we have ever attempted to solve or understand! Global Climate Models are children’s toys in comparison to the actual underlying complexity, especially when (as noted) the major drivers setting the baseline behavior are not well understood or quantitatively available.
The truth of this is revealed in the lack of skill in the GCMs. They utterly failed to predict the last 13 or 14 years of flat to descending global temperatures, for example, although naturally one can go back and tweak parameters and make them fit it now, after the fact. And every year that passes without significant warming should be rigorously lowering the climate sensitivity and projected AGW, making the probability of the “C” increasinginly remote.
These are all (in my opinion) good reasons to be skeptical of the often egregious claims of CAGW. Another reason is the exact opposite of the reason you used “denier” in your article. The actual scientific question has long since been co-opted by the social and political one. The real reason you used the term is revealed even in your response — we all “should” be doing this and that whether or not there is a real risk of “catastrophe”. In particular, we “should” be using less fossil fuel, working to preserve the environment, and so on.
The problem with this “end justifies the means” argument — where the means involved is the abhorrent use of a pejorative descriptor to devalue the arguers of alternative points of view rather than their arguments at the political and social level — is that it is as close to absolute evil in social and public discourse as it is possible to get. I strongly suggest that you read Feynman’s rather famous “Cargo Cult” talk:
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
In particular, I quote:
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a
friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing–and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.
I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government
advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether
drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it
would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a
result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re
being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.
Time for a bit of soul-searching, Dr. Bain. Have you come even close to living up to the standards laid out by Richard Feynman? Is this sort of honesty apparent anywhere in the global climate debate? Did the “Hockey Team” embrace this sort of honesty in the infamous Climategate emails? Do the IPCC reports ever seem to present the counter arguments, or do they carefully avoid showing pictures of the 20,000 year thermal record, preferring instead Mann’s hockey stick because it increases the alarmism (and hence political impact of the report)? Does the term “denier” have any place in any scientific paper ever published given Feynman’s rather simple criterion for scientific honesty?
And finally, how dare you presume to make choices for me, for my relatives, for my friends, for all of the people of the world, but concealing information from them so that they make a choice to allocate resources the way you think they should be allocated, just like the dishonest astronomer of his example. Yes, the price of honesty might be that people don’t choose to support your work. Tough. It is their money, and their choice!
Sadly, it is all too likely that this is precisely what is at stake in climate research. If there is no threat of catastrophe — and as I said, prior to the hockey stick nobody had the slightest bit of luck convincing anyone that the sky was falling because global climate today is geologically unremarkable in every single way except that we happen to be living in it instead of analyzing it in a geological record — then there is little incentive to fund the enormous amount of work being done on climate science. There is even less incentive to spend trillions of dollars of other people’s money (and some of our own) to ameliorate a “threat” that might well be pure moonshine, quite possibly ignoring an even greater threat of movement in the exact opposite direction to the one the IPCC anticipates.
Why am I a skeptic? Because I recognize the true degree of our ignorance in addressing this supremely difficult problem, while at the same time as a mere citizen I weigh civilization and its benefits against draconian energy austerity on the basis of no actual evidence that global climate is in any way behaving unusually on a geological time scale.
For shame.
After reading Dr. Brown’s posts and rebuttal comments, I feel obligated to make a donation to Duke. What is the going rate to audit a course?
Arguably, in it’s attribution, sensitivity, and severity. To assert that it is the same is a fallacy of begging the question. Of course, it also contradicts the A of AGW, which RGB said that so few whatchamacallits do.
If something slows the cooling of a warm object, like say putting hot coffee in a thermos, then the warm object will cool, but more slowly. But that is misleading when there is a constant influx of energy, such as an electric heating pad wrapped in a blanket. In that case, the object gets warmer and warmer … that’s the net effect.
@davidmhoffer
Why do you need the freezer? Did you think I was in the anti-GHE camp? My powers of explanation must be waning.
Marcel Kincaid says:
June 26, 2012 at 12:30 am
(@ur momisugly me) “Because modern day climate change is different from a couple of million years’ of repetitively cyclical climate change — exactly how?”
Arguably, in it’s attribution, sensitivity, and severity. To assert that it is the same is a fallacy of begging the question. Of course, it also contradicts the A of AGW, which RGB said that so few whatchamacallits do.
Arguably, the variations over the past few millions of years show that Mama Nature’s whim is sufficient to account for pretty much any climatic condition you’d care to name, observations show positive *and* negative (as well as high, low, and no) sensitivity, and the current rate of change ain’t exactly “severe.”
Marcel Kincaid: 12.41 am: A bit misleading.
The extra insulation requires an increase of the potential difference to drive the required energy flux. Surface temperature rises asymptotically to a new, constant level
Climate scientists hijacking the Holocaust to prevent debate or to declare the science as settled, is probably one of the most stinging attacks on Holocaust survivors to date.
That journalists allow this indiscriminate use of the term “denier” in this context is beyond the pale. Shame, shame, shame on Nature.
Chris Colose says:
June 26, 2012 at 12:13 am
Bill –
//”Because modern day climate change is different from a couple of million years’ of repetitively cyclical climate change — exactly how?”//
You’re missing the point. While it’s scientifically interesting to figure out whether some time in the past 1,000 years, 10,000 years, two million years, etc were a bit warmer or a bit cooler than today, it’s even more interesting to figure out why and what it means. The atmospheric physics often leads to esoteric details that aren’t of much interest to society. Even more useful to them might be what the modern implications of such a warming would be, of which the past is but one tool to constrain the future.
I’ve always been able to enthrall my guests with discussions on atmospheric physics – until the beer runs out, anyway. But, if that’s your point, you’re in science fiction territory. We do not have the capability to constrain the future – we can’t even constrain idiot politicians between voting cycles.
The last time global temperatures were in excess of modern by at least 1-2 C was probably the last interglacial (~120,000 years ago) … [snipped dissertation of stuff I’m already familiar with – both sides of the argument] … There is also the rate of warming which is important, and a typical glacial to interglacial transition is much slower.
News flash: we have no idea how the present (insignificant) rate of warming (or cooling, by most observations) will affect the speed of our transition into the next glaciation. We hope that increased warming means we’ll have a good breathing spell, period.
There is no evidence from past climate reconstructions, from modern observations, from theory, or from comprehensive general circulation models that there will be any magic saviour to completely offset the radiative forcing from CO2…such a mechanism is absent in the Holocene (where variability is rather small), and the scant evidence published for low sensitivities may be attractive here but is not well supported in the scientific literature, often for very elementary reasons.
You haven’t read much outside the CAGW literature, have you? Or left the confines of the Ivory Tower, evidently.
Whether the effects of a Pliocene-like transition is “catastrophic” is not a scientific question, but it is beyond dispute that this would lead to a climate unlike anything agriculture based society has ever seen on a large scale.
So, you consider the expansion of areas suitable for agriculture a *bad* thing. Considering your Malthusian pronouncements, you’re at least consistent.
Evidence from such past climates does not at all point to a “low sensitivity,” and this is something most sensible people take seriously. If you are offended by the term “denier” that stop trying to get past fundamental physics, results from decades of study, and the evidence from the past climate record, with poorly thought out arguments, repetitive one-liner talking points, logical fallacies, appeals to e-mail scandals, and other forms of rhetoric that only work for people with no scientific training.
I’ve evidently had more scientific training than you’ve had instruction in logic. And speaking of repetitive one-liner talking points, you assembled a pretty fair list. How’s your cognitive dissonance syndrome handling Doc Brown’s comments?
Oh. Didn’t read them, I see…
Robert Brown wrote :
Dr. Brown, thank you for you post. If you will, can you please present us with a scientific publication that defines that ‘catastrophic’ label on AGW which according to you ‘most of the skeptics’ are challenging ? After all, as I am sure you will agree as a scientist, challenging undefined labels is best left to pseudo-scientists and voodoo priests.
Likewise, to clarify exactly which aspect of AGW ‘skeptics’ challenge, could you please mention a scientific publication that challenges the ‘alleged magnitude of the projected warming’ to the point where you found it convincing evidence against the IPCC conclusions (of 1.5 – 4.5 C warming per doubling) ?
Rob Dekker (June 26, 2012 at 2:26 am):
For a scientific publication that challenges the alleged magnitude of the projected warming ( 1.5 – 4.5 C warming per doubling ) go to http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/15/the-principles-of-reasoning-part-iii-logic-and-climatology/ . In brief, to provide a policy maker with a numerical value for the equilibrium climate sensitivity is to provide this policy maker with no information about the outcomes from his/her policy decisions. This conclusion follows from: a) the unobservability of the equilibrium temperature and b) the mathematical theory of information.
Chis Close says:
“Evidence from such past climates does not at all point to a “low sensitivity,” and this is something most sensible people take seriously. If you are offended by the term “denier” that stop trying to get past fundamental physics, results from decades of study, and the evidence from the past climate record, with poorly thought out arguments, repetitive one-liner talking points, logical fallacies, appeals to e-mail scandals, and other forms of rhetoric that only work for people with no scientific training.”
That is a lot of assertion, personal attacks and and no science.. FAIL!
Marcel Kincaid says:
June 26, 2012 at 12:11 am
“‘And movement it is … ideological politics, not science, certainly not skeptical science.’
Hiya, MK! How’s the view from the pulpit in the CAGW cathedral these days?”
This simply further confirms what I wrote … but then, tu quoque fallacies tend to do that.
No, it simply illuminated your capacity for projection — which your comment above confirmed.
Robert Brown says:
June 25, 2012 at 6:17 pm
“There’s a lot of CD on both sides of the climate debate, and all of us who hope that we are actually rational need to be aware of CD and its symptoms to be on the lookout for its insidious
effects in our own thinking.”
That is true, especially when a disagreement has millions of people involved. A fallacy seen amongst a sub-portion of skeptics, of incorrectly claiming mankind’s emissions must have zero effect, can be motivated by knowing they don’t want the economic consequences of the CAGW movement becoming dominant yet not knowing or not fully appreciating better ways to argue against CAGW.
I slip somewhat into confirmation bias implicitly myself, like I’m more likely to read a publication on solar variation in the first place if it predicts a transition to a grand minimum soon than if not, so my input data gets a bit biased in non-random selection.
“The really interesting thing is that someone in the throes of classic CD can actually have their beliefs directly and totally contradicted — I mean evidence that those beliefs are absolutely false, embarrassing and public contradiction by actual events to powerful to possibly ignore and can still come out of the situation with their belief set stronger.”
Indeed, in many cases. Depending on the person, sometimes after someone takes a side in an argument, they may feel afterwards only more emotionally and mentally committed to the side they chose — even if having lost the argument from the perspective of a hypothetical unbiased rational outside observer. Cognitive dissonance allows avoiding the pain of admitting to having made a mistake.
Also, part of why many don’t change their views based on defeat in rational argument is that many arguments are truly fighting only over small subcomponents of someone’s overall belief system.
Frequently, people believe what they want to believe or promote what they want others to believe.
With regard to CAGW, some sincerely promote CAGW beliefs without internal bias needed if what they have seen of the science is a limited portion; for instance, there is a large difference between seeing only the equivalent of hockey sticks as opposed to having seen graphs like those in
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/ and other parts of the picture.
However, for the kind of CAGW proponent who can not be convinced by any direct rational argument, often part of the overall situation appears to be like this:
Someone wants Earth in the future have more greenery, more natural wildlife, and fewer crowds of people, to have houses surrounded by more vegetation, etc. In some cases, they go from that to thinking they can bring such about if human civilization were to decrease in energy consumption, decrease in material consumption (production), and so on along with population decrease. In practice, trying to enforce decreased material consumption would be essentially forcing decline in prosperity (for the difference between prosperity and poverty is most of all in physical matters from the cost of the top living expense — physical residences — to food and energy), but they may try not to see it that way or imagine the decline being primarily amongst groups of people some dislike (e.g. SUV drivers).
For that particular type of environmentalist (not the only type possible — like even I could be called an environmentalist in a drastically different way), they often want CAGW to be believed, because controlling, rationing, and decreasing human CO2 output would be the closest thing yet to doing so to mankind in general, for promoting deindustrialization, short of scenarios like expansion of nuclear power plants which many of them do not want at all. Dr. Lindzen once wrote an article describing how huge portions of the environmental movement utterly jumped on global warming in the 1980s and beyond, as it was essentially just what they had been waiting for, allowing proposing basically the same solutions of industrial cutbacks which had previously been proposed with global cooling as the reason before (global cooling blamed by them predominately on human aerosol emissions).
So when specifics of CAGW are logically disproven, some may figure they had a setback in an individual skirmish (or else not fully admit that even in their own minds), but they are not remotely about to do what would feel to them like switching sides in an overall war.* Mix that with increased ideological polarization and groupthink over time when even primary news sources read tend to differ. There are also negative emotions sometimes involved against opposing groups in society, a little like pure communism having always the equivalent of fully a 100% tax rate on an entrepreneur makes no sense even on paper from an unemotional perspective of just compensating for any perceived externalities of believed costs to society from him but can be explained by different reasons like jealousy.
* Ideological tribalism:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ideology.html
Plus, even aside from the preceding, there is the ego factor. Few people, if defeated in an argument on the internet, will necessarily admit even to themselves, let alone others, that they were mistaken. Instead, almost every single time, at most someone just leaves entirely without apology. In person, not on the internet, more politeness may occur, but still factors overlap.
Usually, the only benefit of argument is for observers and other readers or watchers, being not likely to convince the opponent an argument is directly aimed at.
There are theoretical ways to instead avert the above to a degree. If given an opportunity to accomplish, education in a non-confrontational manner may go better than direct argument, ideally so subtly as to not raise the emotional ties and psychological blocks of ideological tribalism.
But, beyond that, often someone’s worldview is influenced by their perspective of the future. There is a technophilic view which is a true counter. The above contrasts to if someone instead realizes that vastly increased yields per unit area through advancing high-tech agriculture can allow more land to be spared for nature, that concern about the environment increases with human prosperity (like a desperate low-tech poor farmer will slash-and-burn part of a rainforest without hesitation unlike a Western environmentalist of the upper middle class who is well-fed due to higher-yield industrialized agriculture), and much more which would take a book’s worth of writing to cover. Negative visions of the future contrast to if some, like O’Neill or those who promote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram for instance, see a positive vision, where in the long term mankind expands into space and brings life along. The CAGW movement probably would never have gained much traction in the world of the year 2000+ A.D. envisioned by many 1950s mindsets.
Of course, all of the preceding discussion is skipping some additional factors, like how easily and often a proposal for research aiming to explain post-LIA climate variation primarily through natural causes would get funded versus one more “mainstream.”
Interestingly, analysis implicitly quite contrary to CAGW appears to be published relatively more often amongst climate research funded by Russian institutions (and possibly Asian sources on average too), more so than amongst that funded in Western countries.** There are exceptions, like the Danish National Space Center is apparently still funding Dr. Svensmark, as in the author of http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/forskning/05_afdelinger/sun-climate/full_text_publications/svensmark_2007cosmoclimatology.pdf , but I mean on average.
** I was just particularly noticing that when recently having come across http://helios.izmiran.ru/hellab/Obridko/77381570.pdf (although, beyond the likes of the top of its figure 7, true synthesis with other factors like trying to determine exactly how much of a 60-year AMO/PDO oscillation could be separate from the change in solar/GCR influences, to combine them in a model, seems beyond what has been done so far).
Andrew W says:
What a load of tripe.
The term “denier” is used to describe those who believe current GW is not AGW
Henry says:
It is warming? Again? CURRENTLY?
You trusted all the calibrations and adjustments, EVEN FROM THE SCEPTICS?
You trusted all the learned doctors and professors and engineers??
well, I did not,
and so I went and checked it out, just on my own
JUST TO MAKE SURE.
I find that tecnically earth is in a cooling phase since 1994/5.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Now, I challenge you or anyone to duplicate my work
(preferably use 45 different weather stations)
JUST TO MAKE SURE FOR YOURSELF
“””””…..mkelly says:
June 25, 2012 at 12:36 pm
George E. Smith; says:
June 25, 2012 at 1:28 am
Simple existence proof mydog, If you put one end of the poker into the fire, so it gets hot, the molecules in the poker will bounce all over the place colliding with each other.
Mr. Smith and others please tell us the boundaries of your thought experiments……”””””
The boundary to MY thought experiment, is that I never get between a person, and a cliff (s)he is determined to leap off. I’m always willing to try to help someone trying to walk away from the cliff; but never someone hell bent on going over it.
I’m happy to learn from you that the crystalline structure of steel prevents it being heated; that’s a wonderful discovery, you should be proud of. I’ll have to look that up in “The Constitution of Binary Alloys”. The Carbon-Iron phase diagram, is just about the most complex phase diagram known; certainly the most complex one in that book.
Chris Colose,
“I think I was quite clear in my post that pointing out how Earth has been warmer in the past is irrelevant for the attribution, sensitivity, or severity of modern day climate change.”
I guess all these paleo-climatoligists are wasting their efforts then?
Patrick Davis says:
June 25, 2012 at 10:59 pm
“No it doesn’t. CO2 cannot trap heat, it simply impossible to do that. Try again.”
Ooooohhhh, this is fun, ain’t it?
***
Chris Colose says:
June 26, 2012 at 12:13 am
The last time global temperatures were in excess of modern by at least 1-2 C was probably the last interglacial (~120,000 years ago),
****
You forgot the MWP, then before that the bulk of the Holocene Optimum. Duh.
Let me say this. I’m no phycisist, chemist or climatologist. Most of the time I have to look up terms used by the specialists for this topic. However, I’ve been working in IT for many years. Part of this included maintaining computers with computing power way beyond what most people can even remotely imagine. And I have an issue with these models. A model that could be used to accurately foresee the actual development of Earth’s climate would have to be extremely sophisticated and I honestly doubt that the models in use are even remotely like that. I also have doubts that the machines those models run on can be considered “good”. How many supercomputers are involved in this? Earth simulator isn’t afaik. None of the famous, superbly amazing super rigs are involved in this.
I’m actually convinced that it is possible to write a program that can be used as a reliable model. Yes, absolutely. The problem is: is it worth the effort? This program would be extremely complex and highly sophisticated, after all it would have to deal with, most likely, millions of inputs every second. That is simply not worth it. And ultimately it would always end doing what if scenarios based on a non-linear, chaotic system, which is the next big problem I have with these models.
It’s not possible to foresee the development of a non-linear, chaotic system with a computer model. It’s not possible. No computer in the world, not even the best, biggest, fastest supercomputer, can even foresee next week’s lottery numbers. Theoretically it’s possible to write a program to do that. The problem is that the program is utterly worthless, because, well, let’s take my country for a second, we draw 6 numbers from 45, which all fall into cone, get whirled through with air and then the lowest one is picked by a “pedestal” that rises from below through the mass of plastic balls. In order to foresee the outcome I would have to consider so many factors that can change within a split second. Any outcome that the model would calculate, would have to be based on the conditions during the weekly draw right at the moment when the balls fall into the cone. And since there are an infinite numbers of possibilities on those conditions, that model will be worthless because ultimately, you’d have to fill out an infinite number of lottery tickets anyway, since the model would be based on an infinite number of possible conditions. A 100% possibility would be impossible. If anything, I doubt it would ever get above 50% and with that it’s back to basic binary. It’s either on or not.
Yes, I’m saying theoretically, because the amount of work in such a program would be ridiculously massive, so massive that no one in his right mind would start with it. Not to mention all the data that would have to be collected to make it even remotely work. That data would be the micro climate in the studio where the draw happens. That includes several heat sources, heat working on the balls, the delay in the small, individual hatches, that open to let the balls fall into the cone (microseconds or even less than that), etc. In fact, I would say that working out this system would likely cost a lot more than whatever would be in the pot of said lottery.
So if it doesn’t work for something as small as a lottery, how could it be possible to foresee the climate development, which isn’t only significantly larger, but also has even more possible influencing conditions? The soft- and hardware would have to be even more sophisticated than the one used for a theoretical lottery model. Not to mention that such soft- and hardware doesn’t exist. And that’s not even counting the work of programming it all. It’s illogical to me. Actually, it sounds utterly insane to me and thus I’m highly skeptical when it comes to any such models.
Chis Close says:
“Evidence from such past climates does not at all point to a “low sensitivity,” and this is something most sensible people take seriously. If you are offended by the term “denier” that stop trying to get past fundamental physics, results from decades of study, and the evidence from the past climate record, with poorly thought out arguments, repetitive one-liner talking points, logical fallacies, appeals to e-mail scandals, and other forms of rhetoric that only work for people with no scientific training.”
With all due respect Chris, you have seriously mis characterised the skeptics position, Your appeals to “fundamental physics” and “decades of study” is wasted because none of this is disputed. Skeptics accept the following as true: 1) The GHG effect is real, 2) CO2 is a GHG gas, 3) Increasing CO2 will cause some degree of warming 4) Humans are largely responsible for increases in CO2. The area of dispute – and it is an important area – is the question of how much warming?
Both skeptics and pro-warming types expect that the warming due to doubling CO2 levels from it’s pre industrial levels will be about 1.2C without feedbacks. The contentious area is to do with feedbacks. Scientists such as Lindzen, Choi etc have written peer reviewed papers that suggest a negative feedback. Others have put feedback as weakly positive. Then you have the computer models which have assumed – ASSUMED – feedbacks averaging 3 or more times the original CO2 induced warming.
The evidence for the lower feedback comes from observational data involving CERES satellite as well as monitoring of water vapour levels in the mid troposphere. Argo system is also showing less sea level warming than would be expected from the radiative imbalance of current CO2 levels. There are many other issues such as the now known problems with tree ring thermometer proxies and urban heat island temperature adjustments as well as the fact that rate of sea level rises are not accelerating.
None of these issues are trivial, none of them involve “poorly thought out arguments”, the talking points I’ve laid out are not “one-liner talking points” (although brief due to the limited space in a blog), they are not “logical fallacies” but instead highlight contradictions in the presently constructed high sensitivity warming scenarios.
In short, there is plenty of reason to question the catastrophic interpretation. If you have solid evidence that backs up high sensitivities then you have omitted them from your discussion, which consists mostly of arm waving, and appeals to authority.
If you would care to deal with any of the issues I have raised . . .?
Rob Dekker says:
June 26, 2012 at 2:26 am
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Of course, “catastrophe” in the context of climate change is not defined in the scientific literature. But we are constantly being told that the world is approaching a tipping point and that we have only X years to save the world. These statements tend to appear in mainstream media reports and conference speeches so they don’t need to be backed up, but they have the desired effect of scaring the pants off the general public and the politicians. If you want to know what catastrophes would ensue after we pass such a point of no return, ask the people putting out the scares.
Amongst predictions of catastrophe which have been made in recent times are:
1. Manhattan will be under water by 2008.
2. The Arctic Ocean will be ice-free by summer 2012.
3. The Himalayan glaciers will all be gone by 2035.
4. The tundra’s permafrost will melt releasing vast quantities of methane.
5. Sea levels will rise by several metres.
6. The Maldives will soon be under water.
7. There will be 50,000,000 climate refugees by 2010.
8. Polar bears will become extinct.
9. There will be mass starvation due to crop failure.
10. There will be more frequent and more severe extreme weather events.
etc, etc
All of this and more is supposed to flow from the raised temperatures due to CO2. So, by disagreeing that temperatures will rise as predicted, skeptics are saying that these and other catastrophes are not happening and will not happen.
You ask for published papers which contradict the IPCC’s sensitivity predictions of 1.5 – 4.5 degC for a doubling of CO2. Only 1.2 degC of this is the no-feedbacks effect of CO2. The rest is allegedly caused by strong positive water vapor feedbacks.
A. The absence of the tropospheric hotspot tells you immediately that there is no detectable positive water vapor feedback. This immediately sets an upper limit of 1.2 degC on the effect of CO2 doubling.
B. The work of Spencer & Braswell involving the novel approach of phase space analysis suggests water vapor feedback is negative and sensitivity is actually around 0.5 – 0.6 degC. As part of their work, S&B created a very simple climate model, not as a climate predictive tool, but as a test bed for their approach. They deliberately built negative feedback into their model. Phase space analysis correctly detected the sign and size of this feedback. But conventional simple regression analysis such as used by Dessler in his papers detected positive feedback !!! If conventional analysis can diagnose positive feedback when the feedback is known to be negative, how can we place any reliance on similar analysis of real world data ?
C. Lindzen & Choi compared sea surface temperature changes with changes in outgoing long wave radiation. Positive feedback implies that OLR should drop when SST temperatures rise. All of the IPCC climate models predict this. But the actual real world data showed the opposite, i.e. negative feedback. This indicated sensitivity of 05 – 0.6 degC again.
D. The work of Miskolczi shows that there has been no trend in the optical depth of the atmosphere over the past 60 years. This implies that, as CO2 concentrations rise, humidity in the upper atmosphere has been falling by an exactly compensating amount. So climate sensitivity to CO2 is zero. This is an astonishing result but, if you think that this is tosh, then try refuting this work. Measurements of humidity by weather balloons and satellites confirm that humidity has, indeed, been declining at the relevant altitudes.
Of course, the final piece of evidence that the IPCC sensitivity figure is wrong is the simple fact that temperatures are not rising as predicted. And they can’t even make their models “predict” the past without constant post-hoc adjustments to their parameters.
Do I need to clarify my own thinking? I don’t say increasing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 does nothing. I say it does nearly nothing (is immeasurable) and there’s no evidence the overall effect contributes to heating or cooling. In spite of experiments to the contrary, there are still people–right here among us–who think greenhouses heat up because the enclosure blocks IR radiation…and they expand that thought to our atmosphere. Want to increase temperature? Restrict convection. What can radiation do in a system where convection is unrestricted?
There are many who are wise enough to see that the atmosphere can slow the rate of loss to space. The path length is longer, okay, that’s fine, and the atmosphere has some inertial thermal mass, but how long is this delay? What is its median value? What is the distribution…is it Gaussian? Is this delay the same at the equator and at the poles? In a cyclic system represented by our day-night cycle, how does a small delay contribute to “increasing the Earth’s average surface temperature by 33C”?
Robert Brown says:
June 25, 2012 at 10:12 pm
Now, as far as I know, the only experimentally proven (by Tyndall in 1859) thing about “greenhouse gases” is that they have the ability to absorb and re-emit some portion of infrared radiation. That is all.
And I can readily believe this. Right up to the year. Which leaves you with 152 years of physics to go!
I certainly encourage your continued study. You have some exciting times ahead of you! Why, only two years after this a guy named Maxwell published some amazing results that will help you learn about radiation! A few decades later a guy named Planck and another named Boltzmann and just a ton …[etc.ad nauseum]
So why with your self-proclaimed science expertise – you teach and write on the subject – don’t you go fetch to prove your point that there are experiments to prove your point?
Why are you reduced instead to giving primer pictures, and incorrect science explanations of them, when you have been requested to provide higher educated rational science experiments?
Do you really think we can all be fooled they exist when you with your great knowledge of the subject can’t find them either?
How does denigrating your questioner by belittling his science knowledge regardless whether this is accurate or not to avoid confronting the issue, differ in any way from the use of the term “denier” which you argue so eloquently against here?
To remind you: “..and no useful purpose is served by ad hominem or emotionally loaded human descriptors in a rational discussion of an objective scientific question, is there.
Please understand that by creating a catch-all label like this, you quite literally are moving the entire discussion outside of the realm of science, where evidence and arguments are considered and weighed independent of the humans that advance them, where our desire to see one or another result proven are (or should be) irrelevant, where people weigh the difficulty of the problem being addressed as an important contributor (in a Bayesian sense) to how much we should believe any answer proposed — so far, into the realm where people do not think at all! They simply use a dismissive label such as “denier” and hence avoid any direct confrontation with the issues being challenged.”
See the original top of the page for italicised stress. If you were unaware of the hypocricy here, you’re not now…
Now, your claim – you go fetch.
For those who erroneously think that being told it is radiation that explains some picture they are given, as in the space blanket, is proof it is, you need to be aware that those pushing this fake fisics created to support the AGW claims tweak real physics in various ways, here by taking convection out of the picture.
Here a primer on the three methods of heat transfer; conduction, convection and radiation: http://schoolworkhelper.net/2010/08/thermal-energy-transfer-conduction-convection-radiation/
Your body is naturally conducting heat to the air around you and convecting heat currents arise from this (as our weather system works), this if trapped by a space blanket creates a volume of air which will get hotter and you will feel it hotter when that gets above your body temperature. Convection is the primary method of heat transfer in fluids; liquids and gases are fluids.
The air around us is a heavy volume of fluid gas, an ocean of gas weighing a ton on our shoulders, a stone(14lbs)/sq inch, subject to gravity. A good picture to help visualise this is to know how sound travels: http://www.mediacollege.com/audio/01/sound-waves.html
“Note that air molecules do not actually travel from the loudspeaker to the ear (that would be wind). Each individual molecule only moves a small distance as it vibrates, but it causes the adjacent molecules to vibrate in a rippling effect all the way to the ear.”
If you’ve been told that the molecules of air are ideal gases and our atmosphere empty space with these, imaginary, ideal gas molecules zipping through it at great speeds, then knowing how sound works is the antidote to bring you back to reality. The empty space ideal gas atmosphere was created to sell AGW, to make all the arguments about radiation by taking out convection.
By taking out convection they could pretend that there is no Water Cycle which cools the Earth 52°C from the 67°C it would be without water. By doing this they could promote the illusion, by this the sleight of hand, that “greenhouse gases warm the Earth by 33°C from the -18°C it would be without them – the Greenhouse Effect”.
There is no Greenhouse Effect, there is no “greenhouse gas warming from -18°C to 15°C, it’s an illusion created first by taking out the Water Cycle.
The figure of 7°C for carbon dioxide is completely made up, of unknown origin. Which David missed in giving this link:
davidmhoffer says:
June 24, 2012 at 6:34 pm
Here’s an actual experiment:
http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htm
So, who do you think created this verry clevver imaginary world tweaked from real physics across the range of science disciplines?
And what other real world physics have they tweaked?
Henry Clark says:
June 26, 2012 at 3:41 am
A fallacy seen amongst a sub-portion of skeptics, of incorrectly claiming mankind’s emissions must have zero effect,
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I’ve yet to come across anyone that claims emissions have zero effect. No one. Most people recognize that everything has both negative and positive effects. The same thing with emissions.
Every single living organism on the planet produces emissions. In total this has an enormous effect on the climate of the earth. I am yet to find any human being or group of human beings that can determine if this effect is positive or negative.
For example. Plants remove CO2 from the atmosphere and replace it with O2. This should have the effect over time of plunging the earth into an ice age if CO2 theory is correct. We have pretty of good evidence of this from the history of ice ages.
Most plants and animals on the planet would find an ice age to be a bad thing. Therefore plant emission have a harmful effect on the planet. Therefore we need to get rid of plants.
Luckily for the planet humans came along in the nick of time and started returning the CO2 back to the atmosphere that plants were removing. If we are very lucky this may just help prevent the next ice age.
So, human CO2 emissions are saving the planet. By trying to stop CO2 emissions, many scientists and politicians are trying to get rid of what they see as “excess” human population, to make more of the earth’s resources available for their own offspring. Many animals employ the same strategy and kill the pups of competing members of their own species, to advantage their own pups. Be it eugenics or climate science, the motivation remains the same.
Myrrh,
If you think the warming effect of a space blanket is entirely due to the suppression of convection, then why don’t you find the military just equiping their people with survival blankets made out of black plastic garbage bags? Surely that would work just as well.
Could it be something to do with the difference in colour? Now why would that be?
Terry Oldberg (June 25, 2012 at 7:39 pm )
Is absolutely correct.
Care should be exercised when using the “H” word.
For most purposes it probably doesn’t matter too much if you are a bit muddled and think that EM radiation is Heat.
However if the discussion involves the Second LoT then this confusion may lead to inadvertently contradicting it.
Then the reader will have to work out if you really think that heat is spontaneously transferred from a colder to an object at a higher temperature.
This would involve a violation of the Second Law.
However what was perhaps meant was that radiation from the colder object was being absorbed by the hotter object.
This is not a contradiction
The confusion can be avoided if we remember that heat always has the capacity to do thermodynamic work in the given situation.
Thermodynamic work (like a moving piston output) will only happen when a heat engine is placed between a higher temperature source and a lower temperature sink.