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.
Bill Tuttle says:
June 26, 2012 at 2:17 am
Bill, all you need to know is:
Chris Colose = GISS Talking Points = Dull and Uninteresting
And until GISS decides to document the awful AOGCM code Model E, I will not treat any “science” they produce with any seriousness…
Vince Causey says:
June 26, 2012 at 6:35 am
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
==========================================================
No, this is not true, your consensus argument is a fake.
First, a lot of laymen distrust you warmists and actually do not believe a word, because your concept looks very much like a lever to achieve certain political goals. Until recently people were not taught “CO2 warming” at schools, at the same time the hypothesis is ca. 150 years old. This alone is an indication for a layman, that your concept became obsolete long ago but has been revived a few decades ago to use it as a political lever.
Further, another fake is the argument about consensus between scientists. Even a recent study designed to prove this consensus has in fact proven the opposite. Details here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/30/consensus-argument-proves-climate-science-is-political/#comment-972119
Vince Causey says:
June 26, 2012 at 6:35 am
“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.”
Indeed.
Your post and that of dcfl51 (June 26, 2012 at 6:49 am) are quite good. In its context, I’d like to add a little as well, not in disagreement, just addition.
Average sea level rise rates in the second half of the 20th century were no more than about those in the first half of the 20th century or even in the late 19th century, since the end of the Little Ice Age, despite how human emissions rose more than a factor of 10 over that period:
“The mean rate for the twentieth century calculated in this way is 1.67±0.04 mm/yr. The first half of the century (1904-1953) had a slightly higher rate (1.91±0.14 mm/yr) in comparison with the second half of the century (1.42±0.14 mm/yr 1954-2003).
http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Holgate/sealevel_change_poster_holgate.pdf
CO2 has already risen 40% since 280 ppm pre-industrial, a large portion of the way to a doubling from pre-industrial levels. Yet we don’t see anything like a comparable fraction of the several-degree temperature rise claims of alarmists for a CO2 doubling.
Instead, we see, for example, in the area of greatest warming (since lower latitudes have had much less*), over the entire 20th century, where comparing the late 1930s to the end of the 20th century in this NASA graph would shock someone only having seen the type of graphs which tend to reach news articles more:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif
* For instance, in the following for MSU satellite data by zone for 1979->2012, the tropics from 20N to 20S had not more than 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius at most of meaningful temperature rise (unlike how a 5-year average of arctic temperature went up by 0.7 degrees 1979->2000):
http://climate4you.com/images/MSU%20UAH%20TropicsAndExtratropicsMonthlyTempSince1979%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
Even attributing the fraction of the degree total temperature rise in the 20th century to change in CO2, then estimating a limited resulting climate sensitivity from that, would still much overestimate climate sensitivity from it, as such would be an omitted variable fallacy by neglecting how much of it as a minimum came from natural variation. (Actual climate sensitivity is more like http://www.sciencebits.com/OnClimateSensitivity ).
For how other factors matter, one good illustration is:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
with data from
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
and
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/epica_domec/edc-co2.txt
(There are a few who would differ from that official NOAA data for the CO2 trend, but, if they were right instead, overall consequences would be extra inconvenient for the CAGW movement, so displaying the NOAA data which is used in “mainstream” contexts is fitting for this).
Why CO2 seems to correlate with temperature on some timescales and not others (e.g. time delays in temperature-driven emission from the ocean) is discussed at 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/
ferdberple says:
June 26, 2012 at 7:13 am
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.
At some level, generally people do recognize that, at least if they were specifically asked in those words. Yet I was referring to such as those who think they have to make an (incorrect) second law of thermodynamics claim that GHG emissions can’t cause absolutely any warming of the surface.
For what I was talking about there in passing, mainly just please scroll all the way up (in this good but unwieldy thread!) to my earlier post of June 24, 2012 at 2:16 pm which went into the topic far more.
In my observations, even some skeptics don’t immediately recognize the fallacy of the CAGW side’s wide reporting of the 97% consensus figure from Doran & Zimmerman 2009, which asked two questions: (1) if global temperatures rose since the pre-1800s (2) if human activity has a significant effect. #1 is a trick, since the pre-1800s were the Little Ice Age, and #2 is also a trick since significant in a scientific sense basically means non-zero. The CAGW side doesn’t like to be called CAGW, as opposed to simply AGW, because the C in the CAGW term highlights that practical matters depend on more, contrary to the peer-reviewed http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf concluding that the distribution of answers to those two survey questions implies debate on the “role played by human activity is largely nonexistent” amongst climate experts.
While not quoting it all, I’m overall in agreement with your comment (short of a little potential nitpicking which doesn’t seem necessary to get into).
There are volumes upon volumes of paper references for the observed benefits of CO2 increase to plants, even major rise in water usage efficiency, at http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/plantgrowth.php
For instance:
“Two field experiments were done, with the objective of quantifying the response of a short-duration rice (Oryza sativa) variety (BG-300) to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, in the low elevation, subhumid zone of Sri Lanka. Grain yields of rice crops grown under elevated CO2 were 24 % and 39 % greater than the respective ambient treatments in the maha (January – March 2001) and yala (May – August, 2001) seasons.”
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118887984/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
For Earth as a whole, during the moderate percentage CO2 rise for the past several decades, there has been about a 5% rise in net primary productivity measured by satellites since the 1980s; CO2 fertilization is not the only factor when weather and climate is constantly changing to a degree, but it is plausibly a contributor.
In fact, even the beginning of human agriculture during the current Holocene epoch may have been strongly connected to what CO2 rise allowed:
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/boyd/AgOrigins.pdf
Frank K. says:
June 26, 2012 at 8:15 am
@ur momisugly me: Bill, all you need to know is:
Chris Colose = GISS Talking Points = Dull and Uninteresting
Add “Pedantic and Supercilious” and you’ve nailed it…
We don’t need to know every detail about glacial-interglacial variations to say something useful about what doubling or tripling CO2 does. Again, try applying this logic to virtually any aspect of your life, or other scientific disciplines
1 C is sufficient for my point.
I almost don’t know what to say in response to this. You have a — to you — satisfying heuristic explanation (I suppose) of the glacial-interglacial variations that completely dominate the climate record of the last 3 million years. You therefore conclude that those mechanisms cannot possibly be confounding the empirical assignment of values to the sensitivity parameters used in global climate models today and call that science? Not even worthy of being considered as a contribution to your possible error. I see. You completely understand the elephant (although you cannot predict its shape or dynamical properties or explain simple things, like why the period keeps changing and the cold keeps deepening in the glacial phase) and so you are completely confident that you understand everything about a fold on its skin.
You can say what doubling or halving CO2 does from precisely one “experiment”. In the coldest part of the last ice age, when concentrations approached 180 ppm (according to Vostok cores), roughly half what it is today. I’m guessing that you subscribe to the hypothesis that CO_2 is the driver for warming out of ice ages — not supported by the Vostok cores but maybe supported by the recent Shakun meta-analysis, if it holds up. Yet even if it holds up, there is are several problems with this. One problem is that the timing of the rise is remarkably periodic (even if the period itself varies for unknown reasons). A second is that if the climate is so sensitive to CO_2 that it a tiny increase from half the level it is today is enough to trigger runaway CO_2 mediated warming, then why is it that the high levels it then attains aren’t enough to stabilize it when integlacials end? CO_2 decrease fairly definitely lags the temperature drop at the end of interglacials. The leading rise was and remains debatable, but the trailing fall is not.
Clearly a doubling of CO_2 from the tiny levels that are sufficient to nucleate a supposed runaway increase associated with the steep climbs out of glaciation against the full “resistance” of huge amounts of high albedo glaciation and oceans that we can only expect to be even colder than today’s damn cold oceans (the vast bulk of oceanic water being at 4K, except for a relatively thin layer at the very top) is not enough to prevent a nearly equally rapid descent into glaciation beneath CO_2 levels that supposedly singlehandedly kept things warm throughout the interglacial itself. It’s not impossible, but neither is it convincing, at least if the climate sensitivity is as large as is being alleged.
Either way, it is a catch-22. If the climate sensitivity is large, then macroscopic state variables responsible for ending ice ages can make secular climate changes that overwhelm even the large sensitivity and hence cannot be ignored. If the climate sensitivity is not so large, then a significant portion of contemporary temperature fluctuations up or down must in fact be attributable to things other than carbon dioxide.
Which one?
To answer that, a reasonable thing to do might be to look at the climate record within the Holocene. Here things get dicey, because we are still left without a convincing answer for why ice ages begin and end at the particular times that they do, and so we cannot really tell if any of the contributing factors are likely to be responsible for any of the relatively short period temperature oscillations observed in the Holocene. We can guess that the overall shape (ignoring the Younger Dryas as hopelessly unexplainable at this point) — a rise to the smooth peak of the Holocene Optimum followed by a gradual drop in temperature punctuated by many bumps on the order of degrees centigrade in scale up and down — as indicated in a blurry rescaled axis shifted smoothed composite here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
which is alas, a curve made from data without error estimates (as seems to be the rule rather than the exception in at least parts of climate science, at least as far as I can tell from looking at graphs). This curve — if you think about it almost certainly underestimates the variation of global temperature throughout its range (as is carefully noted on its caption), but
Is there any pattern to the fluctuations, anything that might exclude the possibility that the Earth is less naturally variable in the present than it was in most of the Holocene? There is not. Have sudden warmings occurred in the Holocene before? They have. Have they been strongly regional, often warming the northern latitudes (for example) suddenly? They have — it is remarked on in the text and note the light blue line of Greenland and dark blue of Vostok (which often heterodyne, either constructively or destructively). Did the climate optimum occur when they were in phase? It did. Did the LIA occur when they were in phase again? It did. Was the LIA the coldest period in the entire Holocene? It was. Were there other climate optima (local maxima) where things were quite warm although not as warm as the optimum? There were.
Shift scale to the 2000 year curve, no longer a hockey stick, that is an inset on this page. We see that with any reasonable smoothing the MWP is back, so that contemporary temperatures are very close to what they were without anthropogenic forcing (and with substantially lower CO_2) a thousand years ago. We also see that by far the dominant feature isn’t the rise at the end, it is the dip of the LIA. Recall — in perspective — that this was the coldest interval in the entire Holocene, where contemporary temperatures are still a solid degree shy of the warmest temperatures in the Holocene. Indeed, again allowing for smoothing, we’ve pretty much made it back to the mean of the Holocene, not an entirely crazy thing to have happen naturally after a global minimum with a fairly sudden onset.
Now, I’ll be quite frank about not really trusting the results on this curve (and the many curves contributing). You can if you wish; my own reservations are a mix of human and scientific reservations. On the human side, I’ve read the Climategate emails and looked through the comments in Mann’s original code, and let’s just say that I seriously doubt or trust his objectivity. On the technical side — quite aside from the statistical questions that have plagued tree ring analysis — I just don’t trust it. Give me ice cores, sediment layers, radioactive proxies — those things have errors, I’m sure, but at least there I can imagine a fairly reliable monotonic relationship between temperature and the state being measured in the core, layer, whatever, and can trust the usual laws of large numbers to average over any smaller confounding relation and give a number with an error that is probably larger than the statistics alone suggests but still not completely unreliable. Tree rings, however, don’t just depend on temperature, or depend on temperature in a reliably monotonic way. Nor do I trust ways of “selecting” samples that supposedly do, or that match up to some desired(?) criterion.
Even so, while we don’t have an accurate thermometric record, human written records do support the existence of the MWP and LIA — as global events — pretty well. And the less resolvable longer term proxies (and written records, where they exist) suggest a pattern of warm and cold periods that actually has a resolvable fourier component over a lot of the Holocene, suggesting but not mandating some sort of periodic driver. In my opinion — again, think what you like — this data does not support the hypothesis that the climate fluctuations visible across the Holocene, which included rapid temperature rises and falls to the extent that we can determine them from reasonably reliable proxies, were due to Carbon Dioxide or for that matter, aerosols or atmospheric composition variation at all. If anything, they suggest not just one but several powerful drivers of climate lurking beneath the surface with internal periodic dynamics that sometimes heterodyne to create relatively rapid collective movement of the mean global temperature (and, no doubt, all sorts of completely natural other “extreme” phenomena — droughts and floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, icy winters and hot summers and the other way around).
To return to the question, is it reasonable to expect that a significant fraction of contemporary warming is due to these inferrable drivers, drivers we can tell are there from the variability of the data, drivers that in particular would already have made the 20th century much warmer than the 19th, 18th, and especially the 17th? I don’t really think that there is any question about it. Humans (and CO_2) probably had little to do with the MWP, and CO_2 definitely had nothing whatsoever to do with the LIA, which happened in spite of interglacial levels of CO_2 and CO_2 had, in all probability, little to do with the warming that proceeded from the Dalton minimum on. If you can provide me with any quantitative model that accurately or even qualitatively reproduces the general thermal history of the Holocene, I’d be happy to look at it, but as things stand I think the best one can do is list a set of factors that might contribute and wrap them up as substantial uncertainty in all models that ignore them or parameterize them in a certain (possibly incorrect) way.
Solar state, for example, is often treated as a perturbation of CO_2 forcing (because TOA insolation just doesn’t vary that much as the sun cycles) but there is compelling evidence in the form of the coincidence between the Maunder minimum and the LIA that it isn’t always a perturbation. Or, this could have just been an accident, but IMO this is much less likely as there are other coincidences between solar state and temperature — they just aren’t consistent enough to be turned into a simple gain term in a climate model, they are necessarily nonlinear and coupled to other variables in unknown ways. It is also very difficult to rule out a much stronger solar dependence when solar scientists are having a hard time agreeing now on how much of the Sun’s internal state can be inferred from modern era sunspot counts, let alone historical ones or anecdotal ones.
All of this to explain in some small way my own basis for doubting the “catastrophic” predictions of AGW on the basis of model predictions (without getting into the carbon cycle and other minutia). But as you note, who am I? Just an “arrogant” physicist and obvious climate amateur, easily ignored. What about professionals? Well, reports from the field indicate that the current IPCC report is going to settle on a total climate forcing from a doubling of CO_2 down to 2.8 C from the 5 or even 10 C of the past. Of this, roughly half is supposedly going to come from CO_2 (1.4 C), rather consistent with Hansen’s 1981 computation for the forcing given a predominantly moist air lapse rate. Of the rest — you may believe that you can trust the extra 1.4 C from other climate forcings that increase the sensitivity, but I don’t. I’m not sure that I trust even the 1.4 C from CO_2 when it comes from model parameters tuned to best fit recent climate data.
Climate science I may or may not know enough about, but modelling I know a rather lot about, and multivariate empirically fit nonlinear models are notoriously not unique; they may well have many local optima on a rough landscape and home in one that best matches an heuristic initial guess. Also, fitting a nearly monotone function with a primary parameter that is another nearly monotone function tells you almost nothing — one needs significant variations with both signs to begin to know whether you have the details right (and I eagerly await a hindcast of the significant bidirectional variation of the LIA and MWP, the Dalton minimum and the warming of the 1800’s and first half of the 1900s).
But again, what do I know about climate? Let’s see what climate scientists believe, when they aren’t offered a binary two question survey one question of which is a no-brainer:
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2010/11/yale-exam-part-2-what-do-scientists-believe/
This is hardly a “denier” or “skeptic” blog — John Nielsen-Gammon is a climate modeler and if anything a “warmist” by WUWT’s overgenerous (and meaning-free, sadly — as noted above, warmist, skeptic, denier are all too loose to enter anything but blog-level discussion and even there they are far too often used in a derogatory and hence pointless way) standards.
To summarize for people that don’t follow links and read TFA, John NG reports and discusses the 2007 George Mason survey of members of the AGU and AMS — basically climate scientists or people that should be sufficiently expert in the field that their opinions might matter to a non-expert. Some 57% of them did not (or no longer, in case you think this is a change from earlier state of belief) believe that 21st century warming will necessarily be catastrophic. To be fair, 85% think that it will be anywhere from catastrophic to significant. That leaves 15% — one climate-qualified scientist in seven — that do not think it will be significantly damaging.
A far cry from the “98% of scientists believe in Global Warming” (well duh, try 100% of the ones that can actually read a graph) and “think humans have had an effect on it”. Yet as John points out, the Yale survey shows that even scientist in general flubbed this question, because they are actually clueless about what the debate is all about!
Two remarks. One is that humans are strongly herd/tribe influenced animals, including scientists. Since CAGW politicians have carefully arranged for an enormous social stigma to be attached to openly stated public disagreement with the entire CAGW scenario, and since a small group of climate scientists have openly conspired to actively punish any climate scientist that dares to publish something that questions the science (if you get nothing else out of the Climategate emails, you have to get that as there is absolutely no doubt that this happens as they openly discuss how they will get journal editors and scientists fired for the “sin” of disagreeing with their “cause” in print), the survey results almost certainly undereport the result with negative social and professional consequences. A similar effect is clearly visible on other religion surveys, where people routinely (for example) will check a box indicating that their religion is “Christian” in spite of the fact that they haven’t been to church or prayed in thirty years and, when questioned more closely and in protected circumstances, admit that they really don’t believe much any more, or where people routinely undereport the level of their drinking or smoking to even their physicians.
Second, even the best of the surveys — so far — vastly oversimplify a complex issue even for professionals in the field. See John’s other remarks. As he puts it, there are actually completely different definitions even of CAGW — he separately labels them as CAGW and cAGW — indicating whether one thinks catastrophe is likely or possible (but unlikely). By the latter standard I believe in cAGW — how could any scientists not? Especially without a specified lower bound cut-off for a degree where “do not believe in in the possibility of catastrophe at all” becomes the correct answer (a question that has absolutely no objective answer anywhere along the range, so you’re basically asking for a judgment call on incomplete information and theories).
By some standards, then, John is himself a model-building, cAGW-believing, 2.5 C 21st century total warming, skeptic, a skeptical warmist denier, like myself. He’s just on a different point on a continuum between CAGW and complete disbelief in anthropogenic warming at all, where it is quite possible for a person to be rational and even a trained scientist — if possessed of incomplete information and knowledge — and be anywhere on this continuum.
So to conclude — thank you very much for trying to perpetuate the illusion (that is clearly confounded by actual surveys with some degree of granularity in the questions asked) that “All climate scientists agree” with CAGW. By all means, let’s try to keep all discussions maximally polarized, let’s try to maintain the social and professional stigma attached to being a “denier” and openly endorse letting such a shoddy and ad hominem term into the supposedly objective discourse in Nature. That way your personal beliefs and conclusions will win out in the public debate and you can help “save the world” with your egregious (if rationally supported) assertions of enormous, inevitable climate change. By all means refuse to even consider the possibility that rational people might disagree, and do not even think of working through an actual cost-benefit analysis or contemplate whether or not you are being (to some extent) used to further political ends that are not, actually, linked to CAGW. After all, the ends justify the means, and your certainty of being correct gives you the right to force me to agree, legally, morally, socially, and economically. Doesn’t it?
BTW, there is one other number of interest in the surveys. Only 26% of respondents in the GM survey indicated that they found “An Inconvenient Truth” to be “very reliable”. If there was ever absolute proof that climate scientists, by their very public silence, are violating Feynman’s rules for absolute honesty in stating your scientific beliefs accurately to the lay public when public policy decisions and money are on the line, this is it. If you are a climate scientist some politician produces a piece of crap designed to create a panic and hence unconditional support for some political agenda, how can you stand by quietly even if you agree with parts of the agenda?
Time for some soul-searching, eh? By acquiescing in a lie — even a partial lie — a scientist becomes a liar. And the consequences of this particular lie are immediately apparent, and only very slowly being reversed.
In another decade, perhaps two, of really accurate observations of the climate, the more rigorous control of confirmation bias in the discipline, the removal of openly negative social, political, economic and professional risk associated with disagreement with “the cause” (and perhaps, one might hope, the premature exit of some of the defenders of “the cause” from science altogether due to a well-deserved loss of credibility), I might become anything from a full “denier” to a full blown “warmist” as my own judgment and analysis of the data and methods dictate. I think it is safe to say that this is absolutely true of all (good) climate scientists — even those who are currently CAGW will downshift to cAGW if e.g. climate sensitivity continues to be lowered by more accurate modeling with a longer baseline and perhaps better understanding of what is, after all the most difficult problem humans have ever attempted to solve, being worked on by mere mortals. It might even turn out to be true for you — if CAGW doesn’t turn out to be right, congratulations on your early insight, no need to alter your beliefs.
In the meantime, maybe you could lighten up and — I dunno, I’m just throwing this out there — give people who disagree with you the courtesy of doing so honestly. John NG seems to manage this effortlessly. He and I don’t “agree” — he is around 1.5 degrees to the right of my own best guess as to the climate sensitivity by 2100 at 2.5 C (just under the current IPCC result, note well, pretty much mainstream with a hair of skeptical windage) but he is going to repost the top article, with comments, on his blog because a) he agrees (I think) with the basic “denier as a term belonging in the literature” assertion and b) he actually encourages his blog readers and students to openly discuss the issues including the ones that I raise, because whether or not I’m right everybody learns from the discussion, not from its abrupt and authoritarian name-calling termination. Even me. I promise.
And with that, I formally end this thread (my participation in it, anyway). Too much to do in my several day jobs. Where are the damn oil companies and other participants in the great fossil fuel conspiracy when you need them to fund full-time denier ranting, anyway?
rgb
Vince Causey,
Well, I think you give a bit too much credit to how well “skeptics” accept fundamental physics. A quick scan through these comments and those of other posts will reveal that even the elementary points of radiative transfer, the carbon cycle, etc are not understood by most people here– which to me at least, is a sign that such people are not in any position to challenge the mainstream science. I’m at least glad Robert Brown accepts textbook science…it’s a starting point.
I’m not convinced by your low sensitivity argument being a sign of “good skepticism,” since there are decades of research into the sensitivity question, and clear convergence on a relatively wide yet constrained estimate of about 2 to 4 C per doubling CO2. It’s unfortunate that we can’t narrow this further, but it doesn’t allow people to just make up whatever sensitivity they want…whether it be 1 C or 10 C. If someone argued that sensitivity was 10 C, I would criticize them as well, but I don’t really see anyone serious doing that. One of my criticisms of this post is that uncertainty is not a license to just make things up.
However, even more connected to the term [snip. You know better.] than the conclusions people come to about AGW, is the manner in which they arrive at those conclusions. I don’t believe there is a serious argument about the attribution of modern global warming, nor has there been a credible challenge to the IPCC central sensitivity estimate. There are a few strong outliers in the field (such as Lindzen) that have raised some interesting scientific issues, and these have subsequently been examined in more detail after they were proposed (as good science should)..whether it be the IRIS hypothesis or the satellite results, but follow-up studies have demonstrated that these results are methodologically flawed, not really showing “sensitivity” estimates, or not robust to subjective choices made by the authors. And with respect, you need to turn to the literature, not here, for a fair assessment of these results and various arguments that have risen.
Damn you Henry Clark! You made me post again, if only to state, on the record, that your last three posts were truly amazing. Everybody should listen to Henry. I’m listening to Henry. I made some of the same points in my terminating rebuttal, but not as eloquently or completely as Henry did.
Now, seriously, I’m closing the window and not reopening it again for at least 24 hours. Must join 12 step program, get off e-crack!
rgb
Syrup of IPeCaC.
Chris Colose says
And with respect, you need to turn to the literature, not here, for a fair assessment of these results
Henry says
you go here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/#comment-1018487
\
and PLEASE don’t come back HERE again before you have have actually done some real research yourself…
@HenryP, dont be too hard on Colose, he can’t help himself.
Hansen agrees with you on the temperature trend for the last 25 million years.
Unfortunately, Chris Colose likes to talk trash about others understanding of basic physics, and yet won’t broach the subject of Model E as evidence that GISS lacks any real understanding (or maybe it’s just laziness) of proper computer programming and documentation methods (just look at GISTEMP and Model E).
Of course, just look who is in charge of NASA GISS…I guess the apples don’t fall far from the tree.
On the contrary, “denier” is rarely used merely to split off the lunatic fringe from the responsible skeptics. The existence of the latter is not admitted by most believers, at least not when they’re making a newsworthy pother. Rather, “denier” is used in the opposite sense: to tar the responsible skeptics with the lunacy of the lunatic fringe via guilt by (verbal) association (i.e., equivocation). Look at how Bain uses it. He implicitly defines it in two senses (quotes are from his essay):
1. Those who deny that global warming is occurring (“is real”) at all:
“one may have little more luck of convincing a denier that climate change is real….”
This is an insinuation beyond the evidence. Few deny that there hasn’t been warming in recent decades.
2. Those who deny that global warming is anthropogenic:
“since 2008 the number of deniers of anthropogenic climate change has climbed to one-third or more of the population in high-carbon-emitting countries such as the United States and Australia.”
This is an insinuation beyond the evidence. Most of this “one-third” actually disbelieves only that most of the warming since the seventies has been man-mde, not all of it.
3. “Denier” is also used by believers like Bain in a third sense: to label for those who deny the need to Act Now To Move To Renewables and To Compensate Third-World Victims (i.e., To Tax, Spend, and Subsidize Enormously).
Activists blur the boundaries between these three meanings of the word as part of a pea-and-shell strategy to lead the audience to accept the following argument:
Denial of the need for Action Now = Denial of ANY antrhropogenic warming.
Denial of any antrhropogenic warming = Denial of any warming, period.
Denial of any warming, period = Perverse rejection of the plain facts.
Therefore, Denial of the need for Action Now = Perverse rejection of the plain facts.
Deniers are thereby implicitly equated with knee-jerk pooh-poohers, complacent head-in-the-sanders, stand-pat threat-minimizers, and torpid conservatives.
Robert Brown says (June 26, 2012 at 9:32 am): “Now, seriously, I’m closing the window and not reopening it again for at least 24 hours. Must join 12 step program, get off e-crack!”
Aaaaawwwwww…
Anthony Watts says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/#comment-1018646
Henry says
Ok/
perhaps I was a bit upset…
An unbiased projection of global warming into the future can be found here in this graph:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/orssengo3.png
this also shows a marked cooling from 1994\, as correctly predicted by me.
However, Orssengo saw the max. of warming at around 2000 whereas I see it a bit earlier, meaning his graph must be adjusted a bit.
If you want to know where that graph came from, look here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/25/predictions-of-global-mean-temperatures-ipcc-projections/
Anthony, do you perhaps have any idea as to what happened to Orssengo?
Is it true that he passed on?
Don’t know.
I’m at least glad Robert Brown accepts textbook science…it’s a starting point.
I write textbook science:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Class/intro_physics_1.php
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Class/intro_physics_2.php
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Class/Electrodynamics.php
How about that. Somebody that accepts textbook physics and teaches graduate and undergraduate E&M and quantum (although I haven’t written a quantum textbook, sadly) is somehow — along with a fair number of other physicists of my direct and personal knowledge who somehow were never surveyed, one of whom (gallopingcamel) posts on this list and who knows more about E&M radiation than I do, if it comes to that — somehow manages not to buy into the 1.4 C of CO_2 forcing plus 4.3 C of additional water vapor forcing equals 5.7 C of total forcing and disaster! scenario.
Along with the vast majority of actual climate scientists, who currently settle for 2.8 C total forcing, plus or minus many 1.5 degrees — but it is a moving target. Recently moving down.
My knowledge of physics — as you will no doubt wish to point out — is not a sound basis for taking my assertions seriously but neither is yours! Physics alone cannot resolve questions about the most difficult set of coupled Navier-Stokes open nonlinear dynamical system humans have even thought about tackling, where even mathematicians haven’t managed to prove existence theorems for solutions to the simpler versions of the N-S equations. And besides — as a theoretical physicist — permit me to state openly that much as I love theory and computer modeling — did I mention my online book on beowulf style computing or my random number generator tester, dieharder? — like all good physicists of theoretical or experimental persuasion, I accept the principle that empirical evidence and the study of the data itself trumps theory, no matter how compelling the theory. “CO_2 and aerosols only” is simply an inadequate explanation of paleoclimatology, in spite of the very best efforts to “rehabilitate” recalcitrant data.
Still, let’s go with our starting point, and agree to disagree unless and until you manage to convince me not with name-calling or public dismissal, but with actual arguments and discussion. Science works better that way.
By the way, don’t be so quick to dismiss all the other skeptics who post on WUWT. Sure, some of them are desperately in need of a physics education. So give it to them, patiently and consistently, as long as they will listen, and X them out when they exhaust your patience. There are three or four people on list who have exhausted my patience, sure, but there are lots of people who have not, not all of whom have Ph.D.s. Some of them put forth arguments I find very difficult to reject even though I don’t really “like” their conclusions.
I then perform the essential mental exercise and discipline of the true scientist or philosopher in any field (or married people in general). I keep an open mind about the possibility that I am wrong, unless or until I can effectively argue for or against their assertions, and even then I have found it worthwhile to never quite close my mind on a topic (especially when the disagreeing individual is my wife), I just shift the burden of providing sufficient proof (by my standards, but who else’s can I use?) to keep me interested on to them before I re-engage on the topic. We don’t all have to agree all of the time, and being “right” in any objectively verifiable sense isn’t the same as winning a debate.
Although as you can see, I’m a complete sucker for anybody whose position on things appears to be capable of change. You’d be a far better advocate for your point of view if you relied less on authority and more on presenting your reasons slowly, patiently, and with at least the illusion of an open mind.
rgb
Greg House says:
June 26, 2012 at 8:18 am
Vince Causey says:
June 26, 2012 at 6:35 am
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
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No, this is not true, your consensus argument is a fake.
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I beg to differ. Let’s consider who says what.
On one extreme you have the catastrophic warmists – ie those at GISS, Hadley centre, NOAA and the lead authors of the IPCC who are asserting 1.2C warming without feedbacks and 3 to 5C with feedbacks. Then you have those labelled “den*iars” by the first lot who say 1.2C without feedbacks and the feedbacks themselves are non existent or negative. In this group I would count Lindzen, Choi, Akasofu, Spencer, Balliunus, Michaels, Ball, Christy, Scafetta and possilby Pielke. Mostly the media, learned societies and policy makers have aligned themselves with the first group.
Then there are those who argue that the greenhouse effect does not exist. Other than G & T, I am not aware of any scientist who holds this position. In fact I have only heard this argued by bloggers. Now that does not mean it is false. It might well be true. But if you want to argue that there is no consensus for the argument that the greenhouse effect is real, I think you need to back that up with some citations to scientific papers. Just saying there is no consensus is unconvincing.
You also say “your concept looks very much like a lever to achieve certain political goals.” You equate people who hold the view that the greenhouse effect is real but insignificant with those holding extreme catastrophic views. But most of these individuals have been directly opposing the politicization of climate science, have been opposing plans to “mitigate” CO2 emissions, opposing plans to build useless and expensive wind farms. To say otherwise is either to speak from ignorance or to denigrate the work these people are doing, often enduring vilification by the media and seeing their livelihoods threatened by the powerful catastrophic group.
I hope that just because you cannot agree with everyone on the greenhouse effect, you do not think it necessary to cast slurs on peoples motives.
Chris Colose,
“Well, I think you give a bit too much credit to how well “skeptics” accept fundamental physics. A quick scan through these comments and those of other posts will reveal that even the elementary points of radiative transfer, the carbon cycle, etc are not understood by most people here– which to me at least, is a sign that such people are not in any position to challenge the mainstream science.”
I know, I know, There will always be those who declare the greenhouse effect does not exist, just like there will always be those who think Einstein was wrong. That doesn’t mean that all arguments against the catastrophic view are wrong either.
“I’m not convinced by your low sensitivity argument being a sign of “good skepticism,” since there are decades of research into the sensitivity question, and clear convergence on a relatively wide yet constrained estimate of about 2 to 4 C per doubling CO2.”
No. Models are programmed to assume that the climate works a particular way – primary forcing leads to high water vapour leads to more warming leads to more water vapour. This might be true in the sense of a simple laboratory flask, but there is no real empirical evidence that the climate behaves this way. It is an assumption and should be treated with suspicion.
You also say “nor has there been a credible challenge to the IPCC central sensitivity estimate.” You dismiss Lindzen’s paper as being flawed, but he has now produced a new paper which deals with the issue raised by critics in the original paper. However, it is not only Lindzen who is the outlier. There numerous scientists who genuinely do not believe in the catastrophic warming argument, an argument which is making climate the slave of a single driver – CO2 levels. As the climate only appears to have warmed by about 0.6C during the 20th century, which has seen CO2 levels rise from about 280ppm to 390ppm, I would say that is pretty good data supporting a low sensitivity.
Vince Causey says
” I know, I know, There will always be those who declare the greenhouse effect does not exist”
The greenhouse theory takes many forms.
The usual one presented in Climate Science textbooks has a magnitude of 33K.
This is achieved (so they say) by radiating slabs in the atmosphere.
Greenhouse gases are said to achieve this.
…….and that’s about it!!!!
I don’t think many sceptics would be happy to sign up to such a feeble conjecture.
This does not mean that they are any less familiar with radiative physics than greenhouse theory enthusiasts.
I’ll add Vince to the list of the highly rational, BTW. And bear in mind that there is an entire spectrum of belief here — it isn’t “there is no possibility of catastrophic warming” versus “it is certain that there will be catastrophic warming”. There could be, say, a 10% chance of catastrophic warming, a 40% chance of warming that does some non-catastrophic damage, a 30% chance that there is net-beneficial warming and CO_2 increase, and a 20% chance that by bumping CO_2 we will have narrowly averted a plunge into the next ice age, which would be 100% catastrophic. Smeared out on a curve.
Now take an assessment like that, where every scientist climate flavor or not would probably assign different values to the probabilities, and try to weight them by the certain costs of measure X — say, carbon trading or subsidizing wind farms or literally giving $100 billion dollars to third-world countries as “reparations” for using carbon based fuels — against the expected value of return in terms of amelioration of each level of expected negative effect and POSITIVELY weighted by the benefit of the positive ones (because there are some, like it or not) and integrate over some space of contributors, and you have some idea of how shoddy and complex the political process and economic decisioning is. Bear in mind that a lot of people could die either way, from action or inaction, and that money spent now is CERTAIN loss against at most an EXPECTATION of relative gain later.
Suddenly a fundamental principle of medicine sounds really good. First, do no harm. This doesn’t mean that doctors always act “for the good of the patient” — quite the contrary. It means that they DON’T DO ANYTHING that they aren’t PRETTY DAMN SURE will be the right thing.
Hard to double blind, placebo controlled experiments in climate science, so perhaps we should just wait patiently until we can be certain that our actions and decisions will do no harm, or at least fairly minimize our expectation of harm and maximize our expectation of benefit.
The sad thing is — as Bain noted in his article and comment on WUWT (not that he’ll ever return to read this thread, unless he has an iron constitution and a flameproof suit:-) there are things that we very likely could agree on, if the debate weren’t being conducted on a deliberately irrational and emotional level, saving ickle birdies at all costs instead of doing a cold-hearted actuarial study that counts the human cost ahead of that measured in ickle birdies. I’d be thrilled to see money go into:
* Solar energy research and development. Not everybody on-list agrees, but I think this one is a no-brainer and one that will ultimately “save the day” regardless of carbon trading or panic. Moore’s Law is something I have some experience with and solar PVC energy is already damn near break even at the consumer level. Invest a few billion here, drop the time required to halve the cost per watt by five years, win all around with a net positive ROI.
* Thorium fission. Regular old fission too, but thorium is nearly proliferation proof and we’re looking for global solutions for the intermediate run. Nuclear energy is relatively cheap, relatively safe (if CAGW is correct, right? Anything is safe compared to that…) and can be made safer if not cheaper.
* General work on alternative fuels. Don’t subsidize them at the production level, but if somebody wants to work on miracle algae that takes in human waste at one end and outputs carbon neutral gasoline at the other, at half the cost of mined and refined gasoline, who cares if they don’t succeed, given a modest investment to help out? Scientific research is cheap and almost always yields some ROI, if not the one you think you’re paying for, and when one wins one wins big.
* Fusion. Seriously, here it is 2012 and I really thought we’d have it in hand a decade or more ago. WUWT? Dump a few billion into it. It has a way bigger ROI than flying to the moon, mars, finding the Higgs particle, or looking for super-algae. The nearly unique solution to a steady state, multimillion year human civilization.
* Civilizing the whole world, world peace, gently ending religious mythical superstitious thought, advancing the cause of a rational society. Maybe understanding why substitute religions like CAGW with Carbon as “human sin” slip right in in place of the older sort based on ghosts and magic. I’m sure it is all the work of the Devil, but even God can’t complain much about trying to manage world peace and universal civilization, even if the effort is pushed by atheists and non-scriptural-theism deists or the like since the Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus of the world seem a lot more inclined to fight or seek to impose their collective will on others than they are to acknowledge the complete sanctity of individual free choice, no fatwahs, no burnings at the stake.
* Sure, why not. Eradicate Malaria! Cure cancer! Achieve universal literacy! When one considers the cost of CAGW amelioration, bear in mind that we are choosing to use our scant surplus dollars in that way instead of others! We could do a hell of a lot with $100 billion over a decade or less as a “make the world a better place” slush fund that was not pre-dedicated to Carbon and the bloodsuckers that have already fixed their sharp little fangs into that particular teat.
Just my opinion, but there you go.
rgb
“nor has there been a credible challenge to the IPCC central sensitivity estimate.”
I love that one. The actual temperature record itself doesn’t constitute a challenge?
In the roughly 70 years before CO2 started increasing significantly, world temps increased about 0.5 degrees. In the roughly 70 years since CO2 started increasing significantly, world temps increased about 0.5 degree. Ooops.
In the 15 years in which the highest CO2 levels in the instrumental record have occurred, the temperature trend is cooling. Ooops.
Since CO2 is logarithmic, and CO2 has increased by over 40% over pre-industrial levels, and that this in turn yields that about 60% of whatever the actual sensitivity is has already been achieved, then is sensitivity is HIGH we should have seen the bulk of the response already evident. Even a lower estimate of 3 degrees per CO2 doubling would suggest that by now we should see evidence of a total change close to two degrees. We’ve seen 1/4 of that, and it matches the previuous time period in warming due to natural variability alone almost exactly. The only possible conclusion being that sensitivity is very low. Ooops.
Not to mention that the cheerleaders for catastrophe always scream about how many ppm it takes to double pre-industrial levels of 278 ppm. If CO2 is a factor, who cares what the pre-industrial levels were? Unless someone invents a time machine and transports the entire human population back in time, what difference does it make? The only number that matters is the TODAY’s number. The CURRENT concentration of CO2 is nearing 400 ppm. Is the climate today problematic? Highest crop yields in human history is a problem? Largest area under cultivation in human history is a problem? Lowest total Cyclone energy since we started tracking it about 30 years ago? Sea level rise decelerating is a problem? Ice slightly lowe in the Arctic and slight higher in the Antarctic is a looming distaster?
The fact of the matter is that at 400 ppm, the climate is treating us and the entire biosphere about the best we’ve ever had it. So instead of wringing our hands about doubling the CO2 levels of 1750, let’s worry about doubling the CO2 levels of 2012. We’re at 400 ppm. Double is 800 ppm. The Manua Loa record since 1960 shows a very nearly linear increase of about 2 ppm per year. So to talk about doubling, we should be talking about something, compared to current levels, which will take 200 years. And, based on the sensitivity estimates supported by the TEMPERATURE RECORD will result in about…..one more degree or less. OOOOOOOOPS.
“Any sufficiently advance magic is indistinguishable from science”.
Unless one bothers to look under the covers at the actual temperature record and the actual history and the actual physics, in which case, actually, the catastrophe turns out to be magical.
Robert Brown says:
June 26, 2012 at 1:01 pm
I write textbook…My knowledge of physics…I love theory…I then perform the essential mental exercise…I keep an open mind…by my standards…I’m a complete sucker…
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Everyone who teaches can write a textbook. And Robert, it is not about you, it is about what you have been promoting here.
By the way, have you already found a real genuine falsifiable experiment to back the warmists’ basic claim about CO2 causing 7 degrees warming? You know, we are waiting.
Vince Causey says:
June 26, 2012 at 1:31 pm
Then there are those who argue that the greenhouse effect does not exist. Other than G & T, I am not aware of any scientist who holds this position. In fact I have only heard this argued by bloggers. Now that does not mean it is false. It might well be true. But if you want to argue that there is no consensus for the argument that the greenhouse effect is real, I think you need to back that up with some citations to scientific papers.
=======================================================
That is exactly what I have done here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/30/consensus-argument-proves-climate-science-is-political/#comment-972119 .
We have a study proving my point about a consensus(ca.70% majority) for the opposite.
Vince Causey says:
June 26, 2012 at 1:31 pm
You also say “your concept looks very much like a lever to achieve certain political goals.” You equate people who hold the view that the greenhouse effect is real but insignificant with those holding extreme catastrophic views. But most of these individuals have been directly opposing the politicization of climate science, have been opposing plans to “mitigate” CO2 emissions, opposing plans to build useless and expensive wind farms. To say otherwise is either to speak from ignorance or to denigrate the work these people are doing, often enduring vilification by the media and seeing their livelihoods threatened by the powerful catastrophic group.
I hope that just because you cannot agree with everyone on the greenhouse effect, you do not think it necessary to cast slurs on peoples motives.
===========================================================
First of all neither you nor I can look into the heads and read the motives. We can only guess more or less. Of course, there are perpetrators-warmists and there are misled warmists. However, both these groups share the concept of AGW, and in my opinion this concept looks very much like a lever to achieve certain political goals. That is why I said “your concept”. You can go deeper, if you like, and ask yourself, whether the misled warmists without motives have in fact been helping the perpetrators-warmists or not.
it’s certain that some of them will do so, and likely that most of them will. But, logically speaking, it’s not certain that all of them will. One needs to avoid falling into the position of utterly demonizing the opposition.
Greg HouseRoger Knights says: “No, give them a civilized alternative that communicates their disdain for us without stepping over the line. If the other side won’t pick up this option and instead persists in its un-civil behavior of using ‘denier,” we would then be in a position to scold them about it–and score a point with the audience.”Strawman. I didn’t say my suggestion would necessarily inhibit the Other Side, but that if it didn’t, we would score a point with onlookers. What’s wrong with that? If that’s the best we can do, as I think it is, then that’s the best we can do. If you have a better idea, speak up.
PS: This pother is about my suggestion of three less-offensive words warmists could use in place of “denier.” I suggested “climate change pooh-pooher,” “climate change minimizer,” and “climate change complacenist.” This matter actually came up a few months ago when a visiting warmist asked for a replacement and I went to some lengths to give him both neutral terms—which he wouldn’t accept—and less offensive derogatory ones.
It appears Girma Orssengo is alive and well…
http://judithcurry.com/2012/06/25/questioning-the-forest-et-al-2006-sensitivity-study/#comment-213026