No significant warming for 17 years 4 months

1. Time to point out again that when the warmists convinced the world to use anomaly graphs in considering the climate system they more or less won the game. As Essex and McKitrick (and others) point out, temperature, graphed in Kelvins, has been pretty close to flat for the past thousand years or so. The system displays remarkable homeostasis, and almost no lay people are aware of this simple fact.
2. I would like to make a documentary in which man-on-the-street interviews are conducted where the interviewee gets to draw absolute temps over the last century, last millennium, etc. The exaggerated sense of what has been happening would be hilarious, and kind of sad, to see.
3. The intellectual knots that the warmists have already tied themselves into explaining away the last decade and a half of global temps have been ugly. And, as most here know, I am betting that the ugliness gets uglier for the next decade and a half — at least.
4. Don’t sell your coat.

Very nice post …. I made some similar remarks in comments on a John Abrahams / Dana Nuticelli article in the Guardian yesterday – just asking how climate change effects could be “accelerating” when temperatures have not been going up ….. and had my comments repeatedly censored. I woke up this morning to find I am now banned as a commenter. Simply a very sad indictment of the inability of warmest ‘scientists’ to tolerate any form of critique or basic obvious questioning.

Correction: The essay at Lucia’s Blackboard was written by SteveF, not by Lucia.

I keep seeing these graphs with linear progressions. Seriously. I mean seriously. Since when is weather/climate a linear behavorist? The equations that attempt to map/predict magnetic fields of the earth are complex Fourier series. Is someone, somewhere suggesting that the magnetic field is more complex than the climate envelope about the earth? I realize this is a short timescale and things may look linear but they are not. Not even close. Like I said in the beginning, the great climate hoax is nothing more than what I just called it. I am glad someone has the tolerance to deal with these idiots. I certainly don’t.

Thomas said:
“the data are also…..in line with IPCC predictions.”
Ha, ha, ha, ha!
And the sky is green and the grass is blue…..

Perhaps off-topic, but I am having serious thoughts about why we constantly refer to the “greenhouse effect”. To use a greenhouse is to use a pretty poor analogy; the Earth is not surrounded by a hard shell of “greenhouse gasses”, with air movements and other causes of potential cooling inside strictly regulated. It could be that we are not only barking up the wrong tree, but we are in the wrong garden, in the wrong country – and it is not even a tree!
About 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere (i.e. 20.9% oxygen and 78% nitrogen) is not composed of “greenhouse gasses.” Why not test the idea: find a greenhouse, and remove 99% of the glass, so as to leave a thin web of glass (let us assume this is possible). I doubt you will be able to measure any difference between the “inside” of the greenhouse and outside; however, to “improve” its effectiveness, add 0.05% more glass. Stand back, and watch in amazement as the temperatures soar!
You don’t think someone is trying to sell us a load of snake oil, do you?

@ MattN
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/a-barrier-to-understanding/
Norman Page asks:
“what year would you reconsider the CO2 – Warming paradigm if the CRU Global annual mean temperature is cooler than 2005 – 2009…?”
Schmidt answers:
“You need a greater than a decade non-trend that is significantly different from projections. [0.2 – 0.3 deg/decade]”

How long before the 17 year test becomes a 25 year test? – just a matter of homogenising!

M Courtney at 5:25 a.m. says:
“So I also am now banned from posting at the Guardian. That is, I am subject to “pre-moderation”.
The worst impact of creating this echo-chamber is the decline in the Guardian’s readership. The number of comments on their environment blogs is declining rapidly.
It is a shame that a lively, left-wing forum has decided to commit suicide by out-sourcing moderation to alleged scientists who can’t defend their position.
How long until the advertisers realise?”
Would that these former institutions of the Fourth Estate were subject to the forces of the market. Many would have failed already. However, they are being funded — and their employees (formerly investigative journalists) fully paid and supported — as the mouthpiece of elites who are acting similarly to the Robber Barons of the U.S. 19th Century. At least the Robber Barons through their greed also brought productivity. Not so much these elites. Who are they? Fabulously wealthy Islamists on our oil money; brilliant financial scam artists like financiers whether “left or right” (debt posing as equity); IT corporations who (corps are persons) destroy competition; all those corporations that also hate “the market” (immigration “reform” for cheap labor — that will take care of those independent Americans); and the secular religionists. What a motley group.
They will eventually fail. We must see that they do not take the rest of us along with them. Thank you Anthony and crew for your valiant and courageous efforts.

The one time a “Cherry-picking” accusation fails is when you use the present day as an anchor & look back into the past.
The observed temperature differential just doesn’t meet any definition of “catastrophic,” “runaway,” “emergency,” “critical,” or any synonym you can pull out of the (unwarming) air to justify the multitude of draconian measures ALREADY IN PLACE that curtail world economies or subsidize failing alternative energy attempts!!!

How long before the warmists make 1998 go away like they did with the MWP ? Funny how 1998 was the shot across the bow warning when it was on the right side of the graph but an inconvienient truth on the left.

Lucia’s site not currently available…

I suppose we could always wait until 2018. By which time the World will be bankrupt and it won’t matter. Alternatively we could start applying the precautionary principal the other way round. How about: A clear lack of correlation between hypothesis and reality should preclude precipitate action beyond that which is prudent and can be shown to have a benefit.

The problem is that models of catastrophic climate change are being used by futurists and tech companies and rent seekers generally to argue that our written constitutions need to be jettisoned and new governance structures created that rely more on Big data and supercomputers. To deal with the global warming crisis. wish I was making this up but I wrote about the political and social economy and using education globally to get there today. Based primarily on Marina Gorbis’ April 2013 book The Nature of The Future and Willis Harman’s 1988 Global Mind Change.
You can’t let actual temps get in the way of such a transformation. Do you have any idea how many well-connected people have decided we are all on the menu? Existing merely to finance their future plans and to do as we are told.

Because of the the thermal inertia of the oceans and the fact that we should really be measuring the enthalpy of the system – the best metric for temperature is the SST data which varies much more closely with enthalpy than land temperatures.The NOAA data ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.
data shows no net warming since 1997 and also shows that the warming trend peaked in about 2003 and that the earth has been in a slight cooling trend since then.This trend will likely steepen and last for at least 20 years and perhaps for hundred of years beyond that if ,as seems likely, the warming peak represents a peak in both the 60 and 1000 year solar cycles,
For a discussion and detailed forecast see
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/04/global-cooling-methods-and-testable.html

Thomas says:
June 13, 2013 at 6:56 am
“I’d say that on the contrary, anyone who thinks a measured trend that is larger than zero but not quite reaches statistical significance is the same as no trend doesn’t not know enough about statistics.”
And without sufficient knowledge as to what the future actually provides (or a accurate model :-)) then drawing any conclusions based on which end of any distribution the values may currently lie is just a gloryfied guess.
If you were to draw conclusion about the consistency with which the data has has moved towards a limit you would have a better statistical idea about what the data is really saying.

The NYT says the absence of warming arises because skeptics cherry-pick 1998, the year of the Great el Niño, as their starting point.

Going back to 1998 is small potatoes. Let’s go back 1000 years, 2000, 5000, even back to the last interglacial. The best data we have show that all of those times were warmer than now.
17 years? Piffle.

Steven said:
“Since when is weather/climate a linear behavorist?… I realize this is a short timescale and things may look linear but they are not. Not even close.”
Absolutely spot-on Steven. Drawing lines all over data that is patently non-linear in its behaviour is a key part of the CAGW hoax.

This whole argument is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen…
…who in their right mind would argue with these nutters when you start out by letting them define what’s “normal”
You guys have sat back and let the enemy define where that “normal” line is drawn…
….and then you argue with them that it’s above or below “normal”
Look at any paleo temp record……and realize how stupid this argument is
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo4.png

Thanks Christopher, great post.
Thanks, rgbatduke; great comment.

Reblogged this on RubinoWorld.

“From now on, I propose to publish a monthly index of the variance between the IPCC’s predicted global warming and the thermometers’ measurements…In any event, the index will limit the scope for false claims..”
What a beezer wheeze, Sir Christopher. That’ll defrock the rank amateurs, charlatans and criminals… 🙂

[snip – Greg House under a new fake name. Verified by network path. Mr. House has been shown the door but decided to come back as a fake persona preaching the Slayer/Principia meme. -Anthony]

cwon14: I agree totally C02 has NO effect whatsoever on temperature confirmed by Salby et al and many others. To continue to argue with warmists that there is no correlation and put up graphs ect I believe is a waste of time and is just pandering to them which is exactly what they want

“””””…..Mark Hladik says:
June 13, 2013 at 6:02 am
If memory serves, it seems that the Meteorological community has used the ‘thirty-year’ time frame for standardizing its records, in order to classify climate and climate zones. I suspect that meteorologists might soon suggest that a ‘fifty-year’ or even a ‘sixty-year’ time frame become the standard reference frame.
That would be one way to get around Gavin’s “… seventeen year …” test.
Or, we could just adjust the data some more, to make them fit the models … … … “””””
Well there’s a very good reason for that “thirty year time frame” for climate results to become “real”, and also a good reason it should increase.
A recent study published in (I believe) Physics Today, analyzed the career outcomes for USA PhD in Physics, “graduates”.
The basic bottom line is that one third of US Physics PhDs eventually land a permanent real job, that utilizes their (limited) skill set. About 5% found temporary work. Bur 2/3 of all of them end up as lifelong post-doc fellows at some institute or other; never ever using their science learning for anything useful.
By going into the “climate field”, with its 30 year “payoff” time scale, these folks can live off grants for their full career, and really never need to show any believable results, before the next generation of unemployable post-doc fellows, take their place.
As current socialist programs slowly strangle the American economy, making it increasingly difficult for the “middle class” to ever achieve a viable retirement state, the mean career length, must necessarily increase, so the time base for “meaningful” climate results, will have to increase.
Recent articles about the fortunes; or lack thereof, of the LL NIF, so called National Ignition Facility, are hinting that this much ballyhooed boondoggle will never ever achieve ignition break even.
We were told it had a 70% chance of igniting, when the project was approved; now they are saying less than 50%. There is a suggestion that they need to go to a somewhat larger DT fuel pellet.
Oh but that is going to require about a 5X increase in the size and power of the laser. Well think how many post-doc fellows that can keep busy.
We already know just how big a Thermo-nuclear energy source has to be to work properly; and also how far away from human habitation it needs to be for safety; about 93 million miles.

Even taking things down to the very simple basics, one cannot dissuade the warmists.
If you have a theory that rising man made co2 is causing glaobal warming, and you go ahead with models to show that this is possible/true, than you figures MUST be in agreement with observations. Global warming is at a standstill, but co2 levels rise ….therefore your theory is WRONG.

I want to zero in on the most important line stated, “It is better to focus on the ever-widening discrepancy between predicted and observed warming rates.”
In one sentence Monckton has zeroed into the total failure of the alarmist group, the models are wrong. They have overestimated the impact of increased CO2.

“””””……StephenP says:
June 13, 2013 at 6:28 am
Rather off-topic, but there are 4 questions that I would like the answer to:
1. We are told the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.039%, but what is the concentration of CO2 at different heights above the earth’s surface? As CO2 is ‘heavier than air’ one would expect it to be at higher percentages near the earth’s surface.
2. Do the CO2 molecules rise as they absorb heat during the day from the sun? And how far?
3. Do the CO2 molecules fall at night when they no longer get any heat input from the sun?
4. When a CO2 molecule is heated, does it re-radiate equally in all directions, assuming the surroundings are cooler, or does it radiate heat in proportion to the difference in temperature in any particular direction?
Any comments gratefully received…….””””””
Stephen; let’s start at #4. That’s a bit of a tricky question. In an atmospheric situation, any time any molecule or atom “radiates” (they all do), there is no preferred direction for the photon to exit. Arguably, the molecule has no knowledge of direction, or of any conditions of its surroundings, including no knowledge of which direction might be the highest or lowest Temperature gradient. So a radiated photon is equally likely to go in any direction.
As to a CO2 molecule which has captured an LWIR photon, in the 15 micron wavelength region for example, one could argue, that the CO2 molecule has NOT been heated, by such a capture; but its internal energy state has changed, and it now is likely oscillating in its 15 micron “bending mode”, actually one of two identical “degenerate” bending modes.
In the lower atmosphere, it is most likely that the CO2 molecule will soon collide with an N2 molecule, or an O2 molecule, or even an Ar atom. It is most unlikely to collide with another CO2 molecule. At 400 ppm, there are 2500 molecules for each CO2, so it is likely to be 13-14 molecular spacings to the next CO2; our example doesn’t even know another like it is even there.
When such a collision occurs, our CO2 molecule is likely to forget about doing the elbow bend, and it will exchange some energy with whoever it hit. Maybe the LWIR photon is re-emitted at that point; perhaps with a Doppler shift in frequency, and over a lot of such encounters, the atmospheric Temperature will change; probably an increase. The CO2 molecule itself, really doesn’t have a Temperature; that is a macro property, of a large assemblage of molecules or atoms.
But the bottom line is that an energy exchange in such an isolated event, is likely to be in any direction whatsoever.
We are told that CO2 is “well mixed” in the atmosphere. I have no idea what that means. At ML in Hawaii, the CO2 cycles about 6ppm p-p each year; at the north pole it is about 18 ppm, and at the South pole it is about -1ppm (opposite phase). That’s not my idea of well mixed.
A well mixed mixture, would have no statistically significant change in composition between samples taken anywhere in the mixture; well in my view anyway.
I suspect that there is a gradient in CO2 abundance with altitude. With all the atmospheric instabilities, I doubt that it is feasible to measure it.

rgbatduke says (June 13, 2013 at 7:20 am): [snip]
Wow. I read every word, understood about half, concur with the rest. The part I didn’t understand took me way, way back to college physics, when we solved the Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom. That was the closest I ever came to being a physicist. 🙂 While I enjoyed the trip down memory lane, if you expand this comment into an article, I’d suggest using an example more familiar to most readers than the physics of a carbon atom. 🙂
I looked up the xkcd comic for green jelly beans. During my “biostatistician” period, I was actually involved in a real life situation similar to that–’nuff said.
I remember a thread on WUWT in which a commenter cherry-picked an IPCC GCM that came closest to the (then) trend of the so-called global average temperature. Other commenters asked why the IPCC chose to use their “ensemble” instead of this model. Apparently the model that got the temperature “almost right” was worse than the other models at predicting regional cloud cover, precipitation, humidity, temperature patterns, etc. Green jelly beans all over again.

As I understand it, running the same model twice in a row with the same parameters won’t even produce the same results. But somehow averaging the results together is meaningful? Riiiight. As meaningful as a “global temperature” which is not at all.
This, actually, is what MIGHT be meaningful. If the models perfectly reasonably do “Monte Carlo Simulation” by adding random noise to their starting parameters and then generate an ensemble of answers, the average is indeed meaningful within the confines of the model, as is the variance of the individual runs. Also, unless the model internally generates this sort of random noise as part of its operation, it will indeed produce the same numbers from the same exact starting point (or else the computer it runs on is broken). Computer code is deterministic even if nature is not. This isn’t what I have a problem with. What I object to is a model that predicts a warming that fails at the 2-3 sigma level for its OWN sigma to predict the current temperatures outside still being taken seriously and averaged in to “cancel” models that actually agree at the 1 sigma level as if they are both somehow equally likely to be right.
The models that produce the least average warmingin the whole collection that contributes to AR5 are the only ones that have a reasonable chance of being at least approximately correct. Ones that still predict a climate sensitivity from 3 to 5 C have no place even contributing to the discussion. This is the stuff that really has been falsified (IMO).
Also, global temperature is a meaningful measure that might well be expected to be related to both radiative energy balance and the enthalpy/internal energy content of the Earth. It is not a perfect measure by any means, as temperature distribution is highly inhomgeneous and variable, and it isn’t linearly connected with local internal energy because a lot of that is tied up in latent heat, and a lot more is constantly redistributing among degrees of freedom with vastly different heat capacities, e.g. air, land, ocean, water, ice, water vapor, vegetation.
This is the basis of the search for the “missing heat” — since temperatures aren’t rising but it is believed that the Earth is in a state of constant radiative imbalance, the heat has to be going somewhere where it doesn’t raise the temperature (much). Whether or not you believe in the imbalance (I’m neutral as I haven’t looked at how they supposedly measure it on anything like a continuous basis if they’ve ever actually measured it accurately enough to get out of the noise) the search itself basically reveals that Trenberth actually agrees with you. Global temperature is not a good metric of global warming because one cannot directly and linearly connect absorbed heat with surface temperature changes — it can disappear into the deep ocean for a century or ten, it can be absorbed by water at the surface of the ocean, be turned into latent heat of vaporization, be lost high in the troposphere via radiation above the bulk of the GHE blanket to produce clouds, and increase local albedo to where it reflects 100x as much heat as was involved in the evaporation in the first place before falling as cooler rain back into the ocean, it can go into tropical land surface temperature and be radiated away at enhanced rates from the in the SB equation, or it can be uniformly distributed in the atmosphere and carried north to make surface temperatures more uniform. Only this latter process — improved mixing of temperatures — is likely to be “significantly” net warming as far as global temperatures are concerned.
rgb

One must always remember the mandate of the IPCC when review information they provide. They are not mandated to study all possible causes of climate change, only human caused climate change:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) in 1988 to assess scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information that is relevant in understanding human-induced climate change, its potential impacts, and options for mitigation and adaptation.”
Hence, the whole concept of open science within the IPCC is not relevant since they are working with a stated and clear agenda.

The secret to our success, such as it is, is the ability to adapt to changing conditions.
If conditions were unchanging, what would be the point of random mutations in DNA.

@rgbatduke
Brilliant comment (essay). Of course formimg an ensemble of model outputs and saying that its mean is “significant” is arrant nonsense -it isn’t a proper sample or a hypothesis test and it certainly isn’t a prediction. All one can say, given the disparity of results, something is wrong with the models, as you point out. The thing that is so depressing is that people who should know better seem to believe it – probably because they don’t understand it.
On the subject of Monte-Carlo, some non-linear systems can give a very wide range of results which reflect the distribution of inputs that invoke the non-linearity. In my field, cardiac electrophysiology, this is particularly important and small changes in assumptions in a model will lead to unrealistic behaviour. Even forming simple statistics with these results is wrong for the reasons you so eloquently state. Widely diverging results should force attention on the non-linear behaviour that cause this divergence and a basic questioning of the assumptions.

@ rgb@duke. I took the liberty of sending an email to Judy Curry asking that she take a look at your comment and consider asking you to write a tightened up version to be used as a discussion topic at ClimateEtc. Please give this some thought and ping her at her home institution to the Southwest of you. (Okay, West Southwest.)
Thank you,
RayG

Sounds like work. Which is fine, but I’m actually up to my ears in work that I’m getting paid for at the moment. To do a “tightened up version” I would — properly speaking — need to read and understand the basic structure of each GCM as it is distinguished from all of the rest. This not because I think there is anything in what I wrote above that is incorrect, but because due diligence for an actual publication is different from due diligence for a blog post, especially when one is getting ready to call 40 or 50 GCMs crap and the rest merely not yet correct while not quite making it to the level of being crap. Also, since I’m a computational physicist and moderately expert in Bayesian reasoning, statistics, and hypothesis testing I’d very likely want to grab the sources for some of the GCMs and run them myself to get a feel for their range of individual variance (likely to increase their crap rating still further).
That’s not only not a blog post, that’s a full time research job for a couple of years, supported by a grant big enough to fund access to supercomputing resources adequate to do the study properly. Otherwise it is a meta-study (like the blog post above) and a pain in the ass to defend properly, e.g. to the point where it might get past referees. In climate science, anyway — it might actually make it past the referees of a stats journal with only a bit of tweaking as the fundamental point is beyond contention — the average and variance badly violate the axioms of statistics, hence they always call it a “projection” (a meaningless term) instead of a prediction predicated upon sound statistical analysis where the variance could be used as the basis of falsification.
The amusing thing is just how easy it is to manipulate this snarl of models to obtain any “average” prediction you like. Suppose we have only two models — G and B. G predicts moderate to low warming, gets things like cloud cover and so on crudely right, it is “good” in the sense that it doesn’t obviously fail to agree with empirical data within some reasonable estimate of method error/data error combined. B predicts very high warming, melting of the ice pack in five years, 5 meter SLR in fifty years, and generally fails to come close to agreeing with contemporary observations, it is “bad” in the specific sense that it is already clearly falsified by any reasonable comparison with empirical data.
I, however, am a nefarious individual who has invested my life savings in carbon futures, wind generation, and banks that help third world countries launder the money they get from carbon taxes on first world countries while ensuring that those countries aren’t permitted to use the money to actually build power plants because the only ones that could meet their needs burn things like coal and oil.
So, I take model B, and I add a new dynamical term to it, one that averages out close to zero. I now have model B1 — son of B, gives slightly variant predictions (so they aren’t embarrassingly identical) but still, it predicts very high warming. I generate model B2 — brother to B1, it adds a different term, or computes the same general quantities (same physics) on a different grid. Again, different numbers for this “new” model, but nothing has really changed.
Initially, we had two models, and when we stupidly averaged their predictions we got a prediction that was much worse than G, much better than B, and where G was well within the plausible range, at the absolute edge of plausible. But now there are three bad models, B, B1, and B2, and G. Since all four models are equally weighted, independent of how good a job they do predicting the actual temperature and other climate features I have successfully shifted the mean over to strongly favor model B so that G is starting to look like an absolute outlier. Obviously, there is no real reason I have to start with only two “original” GCMs, and no reason I have to stop with only 3 irrelevant clones of B.
Because I am truly nefarious and heavily invested in convincing the world that the dire predictions are true so that they buy more carbon futures, subsidize more windmills, and transfer still more money to third world money launderers, all I have to do is sell it. But that is easy! All of the models, G and B+ (and C+ and D+ if needed) are defensible in the sense that they are all based on the equations of physics at some point plus some dynamical (e.g. Markov) process. The simple majority of them favor extreme warming and SLR. There are always extreme weather events happening somewhere, and some of them are always “disastrous”. So I establish it as a well-known “fact” that physics itself — the one science that people generally trust — unambiguously predicts warming because a simple majority of all of these different GCMs agree, and point to any and all anecdotal evidence to support my claim. Since humans live only a pitiful 30 or 40 adult years where they might give a rat’s ass about things like this (and have memories consisting of nothing but anecdotes) it is easy to convince 80% of the population, including a lot of scientists who ought to know better, that it really, truly is going to warm due to our own production of CO_2 unless we all implement a huge number of inconvenient and expensive measures that — not at all coincidentally — line my personal pocket.
Did I mention that I’m (imaginarily) an oil company executive? Well, turns out that I am. After all, who makes the most money from the CAGW/CACC scare? Anything and everything that makes oil look “scarce” bumps the price of oil. Anything and everything that adds to the cost of oil, including special taxes and things that are supposed to decrease the utilization of oil, make me my margin on an ever improving price basis in a market that not only isn’t inelastic, it is inelastic and growing rapidly as the third world (tries to) develop. I can always sell all of my oil — I have to artificially limit supply as it is to maintain high profits and prolong the expected lifetime of my resources. Greenpeace can burn me in friggin’ effigy for all I care — the more they drive up oil costs the more money I make, which is all that matters. Besides, they all drive SUVs themselves to get out into the wilderness and burn lots of oil flying around lobbying “against” me. I make sure that I donate generously to groups that promote the entire climate research industry and lobby for aggressive action on climate change — after all, who actually gets grants to build biofuel plants, solar foundries, wind farms, and so on? Shell Oil. Exxon. BP. Of course. They/we advertise it on TV so people will now how pious the oil/energy industry is regarding global warming.
Not that I’m asserting that this is why there are so many GCMs and they are all equally weighted in the AR5 average — that’s the sort of thing that I’d literally have to go into not only the internals of but the lineage of across all the contributing GCMs to get a feel for whether or not it is conceivably true. It seems odd that there are so many — one would think that there is just one set of correct physics, after all, and one sign of a correctly done computation based on correct physics is that one gets the same answer within a meaningful range. I would think that four GCMs would be plenty — if GCMs worked at all. Or five. Not twenty, thirty, fifty (most run as ensembles themselves and presenting ensemble averages with huge variances in the first place). But then, Anthony just posted a link to a Science article that suggests that four distinct GCMs don’t agree within spitting distance in a toy problem the sort of thing one would ordinarily do first to validate a new model and ensure that all of the models are indeed incorporating the right physics.
These four didn’t. Which means that at least three out of four GCMs tested are wrong! Significantly wrong. And who really doubts that the correct count is 4/4?
I’m actually not a conspiracy theorist. I think it is entirely possible to explain the proliferation of models on the fishtank evolutionary theory of government funded research. The entire science community is effectively a closed fishtank that produces no actual fish food. The government comes along and periodically sprinkles fish food on the surface, food tailored for various specific kinds of fish. One decade they just love guppies, so the tank is chock full of guppies (and the ubiquitous bottom feeders) but neons and swordtails suffer and starve. Another year betas (fighting fish) are favored — there’s a war on and we all need to be patriotic. Then guppies fall out of fashion and neons are fed and coddled while the guppies start to death and are eaten by the betas and bottom dwellers. Suddenly there is a tankful of neons and even the algae-eaters and sharks are feeling the burn.
Well, we’ve been sprinkling climate research fish food grants on the tank for just about as long as there has been little to no warming. Generations of grad students have babysat early generation GCMs, gone out and gotten tenured positions and government research positions where in order to get tenure they have had to write their own GCMs. So they started with the GCMs they worked with in grad school (the only ones whose source code they had absolutely handy), looked over the physics, made what I have no doubt was a very sincere attempt to improve the model in some way, renamed it, got funding to run it, and voila — B1 was born of B, every four or five years, and then B1′ born of B1 as the first graduated student graduated students of their own (who went on to get jobs) etc — compound “interest” growth without any need for conspiracy. And no doubt there is some movement along the G lines as well.
In a sane universe, this is half of the desired genetic optimization algorithm that leads to ever improving theories and models The other half is eliminating the culls on some sort of objective basis. This can only happen by fiat — grant officers that defund losers, period — or by limiting the food supply so that the only way to get continued grant support is to actually do better in competition for scarce grant resources.
This ecology has many exemplars in all of the sciences, but especially in medical research (the deepest, richest, least critical pockets the world has ever known) and certain branches of physics. In physics you see it when (for a decade) e.g. string theory is favored and graduate programs produce a generation of string theorists, but then string theory fails in its promise (for the moment) and supersymmetry picks up steam, and so on. This isn’t a bad ecology, as long as there is some measure of culling. In climate science, however, there has been anti-culling — the deliberate elimination of those that disagree with the party line of catastrophic warming, the preservation of GCMs that have failed and their inclusion on an equal basis in meaningless mass averages over whole families of tightly linked descendents where whole branches probably need to go away.
Who has time to mess with this? Who can afford it? I’m writing this instead of grading papers, but that happy time-out has to come to an end because I have to FINISH grading, meet with students for hours, and prepare and administer a final exam in introductory physics all before noon tomorrow. While doing six other things in my copious free moments. Ain’t got no grant money, boss, gotta work for a living…
rgb

On the subject of Monte-Carlo, some non-linear systems can give a very wide range of results which reflect the distribution of inputs that invoke the non-linearity. In my field, cardiac electrophysiology, this is particularly important and small changes in assumptions in a model will lead to unrealistic behaviour. Even forming simple statistics with these results is wrong for the reasons you so eloquently state. Widely diverging results should force attention on the non-linear behaviour that cause this divergence and a basic questioning of the assumptions.
Eloquently said right back at you. Computational statistics in nonlinear modeling is a field where angels fear to tread. Indeed, nonlinear regression itself is one of the most difficult of statistical endeavors because there really aren’t any intrinsic limits on the complexity of nonlinear multivariate functions. In the example I gave before, the correct many electron wavefunction is a function that vanishes when any two electron coordinates (all of which can independently vary over all space) are the same, that vanishes systematically when any single electron coordinate becomes large compared to the size of the atom, that is integrable at the origin in the vicinity of the nucleus (in all coordinates separately or together), that satisfies a nonlinear partial differential equation in the electron-electron and electron nucleus interaction, that is fully antisymmetric, and that obeys the Pauli exclusion principle. One cannot realize this as the product of single electron wavefunctions, but that is pretty much all we know how to build or sanely represent as any sort of numerical or analytic function.
And it is still simple compared to climate science. At least one can prove the solutions exist — which one cannot do in the general case for Navier-Stokes equations.
Does climate science truly stand alone in failing to recognize unrealistic behavior when it bites it in the ass? Widely diverging results should indeed force attention on the non-linear behavior that causes the divergence and a basic questioning of the assumptions. Which is, still fairly quietly, actually happening, I think. The climate research community is starting to face up to the proposition that no matter how invested they are in GCM predictions, they aren’t working and the fiction that the AR collective reports are somehow “projective” let alone predictive is increasingly untenable.
Personally, I think that if they want to avoid pitchforks and torches or worse, congressional hearings, the community needs to work a bit harder and faster to fix this in AR5 and needs to swallow their pride and be the ones to announce to the media that perhaps the “catastrophe” they predicted ten years ago was a wee bit exaggerated. Yes, their credibility will take a well-deserved hit! Yes, this will elevate the lukewarmers to the status of well-earned greatness (it’s tough to hold out in the face of extensive peer disapproval and claims that you are a “denier” for doubting a scientific claim and suggesting that public policy is being ill advised by those with a vested interest in the outcome). Tough. But if they wait much longer they won’t even be able to pretend objectivity — it will smack of a cover-up, and given the amount of money that has been pissed away on the predicted/projected catastrophe, there will be hell to pay if congress decides it may have been actually lied to.
rgb

Santer’s later paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/28/1210514109.full.pdf
Admits the models failed, and it turns out we didn’t have to wait 17 years to establish that fact after all.

rgbWell, who did assemble it? It says at the top “lordmoncktonfoundation.com”.
Aw, c’mon Nick, you can do better than that. Clearly I was referring to the AR5 ensemble average over climate models, which is pulled from the actual publication IIRC. This is hardly the first time it has been presented on WUWT.
And the spaghetti graph is even worse. Which is why they don’t present it in any sort of summary — even lay people inclined to believe in CAGW would question GCMs if they could see how divergent the predictions are from each other and from the actual climate record over the last 33 years, especially with regard to LTT and SST and SLR. SLR predictions are a joke. SST predictions have people scrabbling after missing heat and magic heat transport processes. The troposphere is a major fail. Everybody in climate science knows that these models are failing, and are already looking to explain the failures but only in ways that don’t lose the original message, the prediction (sorry, “projection”) of catastrophe.
I’ve communicated with perfectly reasonable climate scientists who take the average over the spaghetti seriously and hence endorse the 2.5C estimate that comes directly from the average. It’s high time that it was pointed out that this average is a completely meaningless quantity, and that 2/3 of the spaghetti needs to go straight into the toilet as failed, not worth the energy spent running the code. But if they did that, 2.5 C would “instantly” turn into 1-1.5C, or even less, and this would be the equivalent of Mount Tambora exploding under the asses of climate scientists everywhere, an oops so big that nobody would ever trust them again.
Bear in mind that I personally have no opinion. I think if anything all of these computations are unverified and hence unreliable science. We’re decades premature in claiming we have quantitative understanding of the climate. Possible disaster at stake or not, the minute you start lying in science for somebody’s supposed own benefit, you aren’t even on the slippery slope to hell, you’re already in it. Science runs on pure, brutal honesty.
Do you seriously think that is what the AR’s have produced? Honest reporting of the actual science, including its uncertainties and disagreements?
Really?
rgb

Disappear? How? Will someone PLEASE explain the mechanism to me?
One proposed mechanism is that e.g. UV light passes into the ocean bypassing the surface layer where absorbed IR turns straight into latent heat with no actual heating, warms it at some moderate depth, which is then gradually mixed downward to the thermocline
The catch is, the water in the deep ocean is stable — denser and colder than the surface layer. It turns over due to variations in surface salinity in the so-called “global conveyor belt” of oceanic heat circulation on a timescale of centuries, and much of this turnover skips the really deep ocean below the thermocline because it is so very stable at a nearly uniform temperature of 4 C. Also, water has a truly enormous specific heat compared to air, even dumping all of the supposed radiative imbalance into the ocean over decades might be expected to produce a truly tiny change in water temperature, especially if the heat makes it all the way down to and through the thermocline.
So one ends up with deep water that is a fraction of a degree warmer than it might have been otherwise (but nevertheless with a huge amount of heat tied up in that temperature increase) that isn’t going anywhere until the oceanic circulation carries it to the surface decades to centuries from now.
To give you some idea of how long it takes to equilibrate some kinds of circulation processes, Jupiter may well be still giving off its heat of formation from four and a half billion years ago! as it is radiating away more energy than it is receiving. Or there could be other processes contributing to that heat. Brown dwarf stars don’t generate heat from fusion, but nevertheless are expected to radiate heat away for 100 billion years from their heat of formation. The Earth’s oceans won’t take that long, but they are always disequilibrated with the atmosphere and land and act as a vast thermal reservoir, effectively a “capacitor” that can absorb or release heat to moderate more rapid/transient changes in the surface/atmospheric reservoirs, which is why Durham (where I live most of the year) is currently 5-10 F warmer outside than where I am sitting in Beaufort next to the ocean at this minute.
So if the “missing heat” really is missing, and is going into the ocean, that is great news as the ocean could absorb it all for 100 years and hardly notice, moderating any predicted temperature increase in the air and on land the entire time, and who knows, perhaps release it slowly to delay the advent of the next glacial epoch a few centuries from now. Although truthfully nobody knows what the climate will do next year, ten years from now, or a century from now, because our current climate models and theories do not seem to work to explain the past (at all!), the present outside of a narrow range across which they are effectively fit, or the future of whenever they were fit. Indeed, they often omit variables that appear to be important in the past, but nobody really knows why.
rgb

l expect to see further cooling for.the rest of the year.
The current jet stream pattern is what is putting a brake on the warming , but l do think we can expect to see more heavy rain and the risk of floods across the NH during the rest of the year. As Arctic air dives deep to the south.

Nick Stokes says:
You say exactly what you are referring to:
Yes, he does. And you understand quite well what he said. And yet you lie and pretend otherwise. Why must you lie, Nick?
The graphs Monckton publishes above! But these are clearly marked “lordmoncktonfoundation.com” – not a common IPCC adornment. You’ve cited Monckton graphs, Spencer graphs. If there is an AR5 graph with the features you condemn (AR5 trend line etc) where is it?
It is on the graphs that Monckton and Spencer published, of course. But then, you knew that.
Monckton and Spencer cite and present the AR5 model ensemble graphs in their own insightful critiques of the AR5 work. Duke expands on those critiques in a particularly cogent way. And you lie about it. Everything under heaven has its purpose, it seems.

@ rgbatduke says:
June 13, 2013 at 1:45 pm
“…perfectly reasonable climate scientists…”
————————————————————————————————————————–
Should read: “…give the impression of perfectly reasonable…”
A simulation.
Reason is not restricted to the capacity to follow one comment or assertion (in any language including mathematical) with another that in itself does not create an obvious disjunction with either the first or with other points of apparent relevance that it is obviously contingent on at that particular point. This is mechanical in nature, and relies on the perception that what can be expressed within those particular confines constitutes all that is both required and possible.
This is a lawyers mode of being with apparent plausability of association being in itself the demonstration of the required reality to be established. It is also the mechanism which is used when it is said that someone is “being reasonable” in that they will accept a situation or proposition on the basis that a resolution is desirable quite regardless of the seen and understood, and incompletely identified or acknowledged, elements or context that would otherwise “complicate” matters. These rely on a circumscribed view, and a self-contained justification. Not fundamental principle.
Being “reasonable” in the above social or proceedural way is not evidence of reason. Reason, or the effective existence and application of intelligence, requires, at the start, not just acceptance of a reality but the desire to be subject to it. At any and all times.
The world is full of people who are practiced at, by virtue of not appearing hostile, or not observably failing to agree with that which cannot be denied, seeming “reasonable”. This, in itself, is meaningless. To be genuinely reasonable requires a readiness to admit realities that undermine conveniences built on and around a contrary conception.
Reason and honesty are synonymous.
In the case of “Climate Scientists” who will not or cannot acknowledge a reality pertaining to this field, they are not “reasonable” in any meaningful way. If, in conjunction with such a position, they can pass this off as “reasonable” it merely illustrates a core aspect of their character.
I realize that your use of the word reasonable above was both off-hand and likely intended to communicate the socially civilized nature of the exchanges you refer to, with no apparent hostility or reticence that might be characterized as evasion or duplicity.
But it is very important not to paint a false picture. A pretense of openness and “reasonableness” fails if basic foundational issues of indisputable importance are not acknowledged. And that is the case with these “scientists”.
A stick is a stick. Two plus two does not equal five.
There are no excuses.

Eustace Cranch says:
June 13, 2013 at 12:11 pm
“…one cannot directly and linearly connect absorbed heat with surface temperature changes — it can disappear into the deep ocean for a century or ten…”
Disappear? How? Will someone PLEASE explain the mechanism to me?
Disappeared = not currently measured

M Courtney says:
My only fault with the comment by rgbatduke is that it was a comment not a main post. It deserves to be a main post.
I concur!
With the title “The Average of Bull$#!^ is not Roses”
🙂

Nick Stokes says:
June 13, 2013 at 3:23 pm
rgbatduke says: June 13, 2013 at 2:43 pm
“Jeeze, Nick:
First of all, note “fig 11.33a” on the graph above.”
Yes, but the graph is not Fig 11.33a. Nothing like it.
The great AGW WORM-OUT has begun.
“Predict global warming? Me?? No – that’s just a Monkton fabrication.
All we did was project a statistical envelope of warm-cold wet-dry storm-notstorm glacier retreatadvance moreless twisters and peccatogenic day-to-day change in weather which never happened in pre-industrial times.”
Get used to this, NS is the figurehead (aka frigging in the rigging) of a vast diatribe of AGW denial that is on its way.

ClimateReason,
(how do you quote somebody on this?)
u said, ” I’ve graphed 6 periods of glaciation over the last 3000 years-’our’ lia wasn’t the only one as Matthes pointed out, just the most recent.”
hasn’t that shown that the temperatures have been going down during this period? The LIA is associated with the maurader minimum, Saying that we are “recovering” from that implies that the sun itself is “recovering” from that. However, the change in temperatures during the last 5 decades are not based on changes in the sun’s intensity since that effect is pretty much instantaneous.
http://chartsgraphs.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/tsi_1611_2009_11yr_ma.png
if you look at this chart, and if you think that solar irradiance is the cause of the variation then we would have 1.5 C average variation every 6.5 years due to the solar cycle (the solar cycle does cause some variation but only very little since it is only .075% of the total sun’s activity (peak to trough)

jai mitchell says:
June 13, 2013 at 3:41 pm
“However, the change in temperatures during the last 5 decades are not based on changes in the sun’s intensity since that effect is pretty much instantaneous.”
Sigh… Just another guy who does not understand the concept of frequency response.

Nick Stokes says:
June 13, 2013 at 3:52 pm
phlogiston says: June 13, 2013 at 3:37 pm
” No – that’s just a Monkton fabrication.”
Clearly he thought he was referring to the IPCC, but the graph is labelled “Monckton”, and his diatribe matches the graph in this post. It does not match the AR5 graphs that he later linked to.
I’m sure Monkton himself can clarify the provenance of this figure.

Nick Stokes says:
June 13, 2013 at 4:27 pm
An un-vetted person doing statistics, how shocking!
Do you assert – contrary to Monkton – that the ensemble models are spot-on in predicting the global temperature trend in the last two decades? Or are we still in the cloud of unknowing?

Why is it when we cherry pick a start date of the year 1000 do the warmists suddenly shut up? It’s probably because of the Viking swords in their backs..

Steven Mosher says:
June 13, 2013 at 11:54 am
“Finally, there is no such thing as falsification. There is confirmation and disconfirmation.
even Popper realized this in the end as did Feynman.”
So, your first statement makes the claim that it is false to claim that there is such a thing as falsification? 😉
Seriously, I’m pretty sure that you misunderstood Popper (I can’t make be sure about Feynman but it doesn’t sound like him either). I think you must be thinking of naive falsificationalism which is not the same thing.
Cheers, 🙂

Nick Stokes is here to quibble again. rgbatduke has written some very compelling posts today so Nick must punish him by quibbling over trivial points which customarily arise from Nick’s deliberately obtuse misreading of isolated statements while ignoring the most forceful and incisive arguments found in the comments. It’s his modus operandi at ClimateAudit, so I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised to witness in spades here.
Thanks to rgb for the being generous with his time and for passionately dissecting these issues in depth. Occasionally people convey a deep understanding of the core problems facing climate science and rgb did it brilliantly today. It’s comforting to know he’s teaching at a well-known university.

Obama is about to screw up our country again!
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-12/tougher-regulations-seen-from-obama-change-in-carbon-cost.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-13/obama-tells-keystone-foes-he-will-unveil-climate-measures.html

He says we shall soon be approaching Dr. Ben Santer’s 17-year test: if there is no warming for 17 years, the models are wrong.

There is a propensity to quote one sentence from the Santer paper (jn the abstract) as if it is the defning point therein, and weild it as a benchmark for the surface data stat sig, or for model verification, or to claim that the anthropogenic signal is lost. This is a profound misunderstanding of the paper, which conlcudes;

In summary, because of the effects of natural internal climate variability, we do not expect each year to be inexorably warmer than the preceding year, or each decade to be warmer than the last decade, even in the presence of strong anthropogenic forcing of the climate system. The clear message from our signal-to-noise analysis is that multi-decadal records are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temperature.

This is not a discrepancy with the abstract, which maintains that you need *at least* 17 years of data from the MSU records, but that may not always be sufficient.

When trends are computed over 20-year periods, there is a reduction in the amplitude of both the control run noise and the noise superimposed on the externally forced TLT signal in the 20CEN/A1B runs. Because of this noise reduction, the signal component of TLT trends becomes clearer, and the distributions of unforced and forced trends begin to separate (Figure 4B). Separation is virtually complete for 30-year trends…
…On timescales longer than 17 years, the average trends in RSS and UAH near-global TLT data consistently exceed 95% of the unforced trends in the CMIP-3 control runs (Figure 6D), clearly indicating that the observed multi-decadal warming of the lower troposphere is too large to be explained by model estimates of natural internal variability….
For timescales ranging from roughly 19 to 30 years, the LAD estimator yields systematically higher values of pf”– i.e., model forced trends are in closer agreement with observations….

The 17-year quote is a minimum under one of their testing scenarios. They do not recommend a ‘benchmark’ at all, but point out that the signal to noise ratio declines the more data you have.
It is not enough to cite a quote out of context. Data, too must be analysed carefully, and not simply stamped with pass/fail based on a quote. Other attempts at finding a benchmark (a sound principle) are similar to Santer’s general conclusions that you need multi-decadal records to get a good grasp of signal (20, 30, 40 years).

10 years minimum, but 15 years practically, 17 years for confirmation, 20 years with padded proof, 30 years would eliminate any natural effects, 60 years would clarify the long term natural trends and 90 years would definitely answer some important questions…but if we had 120 years of worldwide satellitle coverage I couldn’t really predict what we would know…surely we should collect such data and then reconvene.

Samurai, I also nearly dropped my uppers when I saw the R2 value is 0.11.
It’s almost ZERO! Close enough to almost call it zero. At least it isn’t negative, but then, it could start to be without much of a change.

“Finally, there is no such thing as falsification. There is confirmation and disconfirmation.” — Steven Mosher, June 13, 2013 at 11:54 am
I agree with that. Just as verification, in the sense of proving a truth, can’t be had in any science, neither can falsification which is the same thing — proving a truth, the truth that something is false. Haha! Doh!
“Even Popper realized this in the end as did Feynman.”
Feynman, of course, is no surprise. Besides, I understand he didn’t have a lot of time for philosophy. You can see why. 🙂
But Popper, on the other hand, is a surprise to me. I’ve read some of his stuff and similar but not all of it by a long shot, and on the whole I am very sympathetic to it, except for your point above where I thought he had a big blind spot. He kept banging on about corroboration, for instance, when confirming (putative) truths but seemed a little more adamant when it came to falsification. Dogmatic I’d say.
In fact, the last I heard on this—and that was at least about a couple of decades ago maybe—was that he used to throw a hissy fit if someone brought the symmetry up. Ooh, touchy! 🙂
I didn’t know he recanted though. That’s news to me. Good for him.
The upshot is that he took us all round the houses and back to where we started in the first place — stuck with induction. Haha. Fun if you have nothing better to do.

rgbatduke at 1:17 pm – Oh Yes, follow the money. Corporate America, which of course includes Big Oil, has consistently been the main supplier of money to the Green Movement for decades.

How dead can a turkey be 🙂

Steven says: June 13, 2013 at 4:36 am
“I keep seeing these graphs with linear progressions. Seriously. I mean seriously. Since when is weather/climate a linear behavorist? The equations that attempt to map/predict magnetic fields of the earth are complex Fourier series. Is someone, somewhere suggesting that the magnetic field is more complex than the climate envelope about the earth? I realize this is a short timescale and things may look linear but they are not. Not even close. Like I said in the beginning, the great climate hoax is nothing more than what I just called it. I am glad someone has the tolerance to deal with these idiots. I certainly don’t.”
————————————–
YES, YES, and YES!
I can’t see how any legitimate scientist would entertain these climate hacks beyond the first mention of a linear projection in their papers. At that statement they prove they don’t know what they are talking about. I agree you can use a line to interpolate data between two actual data points, but to fit a line and then project that into the distant future? Give me a giant break.
If you don’t know the real function it is wrong to assume a line will work. You might as well assume a Taylor expansion out to twelfth order for that matter. Assume anything; you’ll most likely be wrong. Assuming a line doesn’t get you any closer to being right.
The most amazing thing to me is that the line doesn’t even fit the data displayed! If they would analyze the residuals they’d see they weren’t normally distributed. The line isn’t even appropriate over the short timescale they plot.
Dr. Santer’s 17 year plot clearly shows the temperatures have gone up and are now coming back down. It’s not even leveling off, no more than the peak of the voltage on an AC circuit. It smoothly goes up and comes back down.
Can you imagine these guys as an artillery battery? They’d plot the first few points of the shell as it comes out of the barrel and project it linearly to their target.

Blimey – some incredible minds here. Genuinely impressive stuff!
I shall now sum up my research in this matter using my limited intellect.
Its June.
I’m cold.

Can I edit Dr. Stokes’ comment to make clearer?
If there is a common signal programmed into the code of multiple models, averaging across model runs is the way to get it to show up in the output.

The problem is that we are likely dealing with a strange attractor, a fractal distribution, Which implies that regardless of the scale, the variability will appear the same.

Climate, in loose terms, is the average of the variability.

What this means mathematically is that there is no time scale that will prove satisfactory. There is no time scale at which you can expect the signal to emerge from the noise, because the noise is not noise. It is chaos. The system will continue to diverge, no matter if you collect data for 100, 1000, 1 million, 1 billion years.

By that reckoning, the seasons should be indistinguishable.

The best that can be hoped for in our current understanding is to look for patterns in how the system orbits its attractors. This behavior may give some degree of cyclical predictability, or not, depending on the motion of the attractors. We use this approach to calculate the ocean tides with a high degree of precision, even though the underlying physics is chaotic.

There is no reason to presume that, given an ever increasing forcing, climate should be cyclical. On geological time scales stretching to hundreds of millions of years, there is no cyclical behaviour. There is no reason to expect it on every time scale. The cyclical, or osciallting processes we are sure of (ENSO, solar cycle on multi-decadal scale) are the variability within the climate system. You appear to be arguing that the world’s climate has ascillated roughly evenly around a mean for the length of its existence. Surely you know that this is wrong.

Climate science on the other hand has ignored the cyclical behavior of climate and instead attempted to use a linear approximation of a non-linear system. And is now confused because the linear projections are diverging from observation. Yet this divergence is guaranteed as a result of the underlying chaotic time series.</blockquote.
I'm fairly confident 'climate science', which discusses the four seasons, is aware of cyclical behaviour. Weather is chaos, climate is more predictable. The millennial reconstructions don't have cyclical patterns, but they do have fluctuations. We now have an ever-increasing forcing agent, so the question is not whether the global climate will change, but by how much. That is where the discussion of supposedly diverging trends is centred.

Monckton of Brenchley:
Though correlation indeed does not imply causation, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.
You have me puzzling on this one. If true, then RSA encryption should be impossible. The input causes the output, but as I understand it (probably incorrectly) it is next to impossible to find a correlation between the two. I don’t immediately see how your statement is a logical necessity.

juan slayton says:
June 14, 2013 at 9:15 am
“…it is next to impossible to find a correlation between the two.”
You generally do not have “the two”, just the one, the output.

For those with an interest, several months ago, the University of Kentucky hosted of forum on climate change with three excellent speakers who were all self-described conservatives. Liberals reported how they better understand that there are thoughtful conservative perspectives on, and solutions to, climate change, thus allowing for a broadened public discussion. In turn, conservatives in attendance learned the same thing. You can watch the recording of this event at http://bit.ly/135gvNa. The starting time for each speaker is noted at this page, so you can listen to the speakers of greatest interest to you.