No significant warming for 17 years 4 months

“Santer devised a test to falsify warming at 17 years.”
No, he didn’t, as you can read from Anthony’s plain-as-day quote above. He specified 17 years as the minimum number of years required to detect a trend AT ALL.
REPLY: Yes and there’s no statistically significant trend in 17 years. Seems like only a dullard or a true believer wouldn’t get that. – Anthony

John Tillman says:
June 15, 2013 at 5:51 pm
Ryan:
I tried to find recent estimates of CO2 level before the Marinoan or previous Snowball Earth episodes,
——————
635 Mya – 12,000 ppm
715 Mya – 4,000 ppm
http://www.snowballearth.org/Bao08.pdf

CO2 is a GHG, and its accumulation will make the world hotter. We have a real interest in knowing how much. GCM’s represent our best chance of finding out. We need to get as much information from them as we can. Doing nothing is not a riskfree policy.
I think it is plausible that you are correct that the accumulation of CO_2 will make the world warmer. Doubling it from 300 ppm (by roughly the end of the century) might make it 1.2 C warmer that it was in 1955 or 1960, if all things were equal and we were dealing with a single variable linear problem. But we’re not. We’re dealing with a highly nonlinear, chaotic system were we cannot even predict the baseline behavior in the past, when it has exhibited variation much larger than observed over the last 40-50 years which is the entire extent during which we could possibly have influenced it with CO_2. Indeed, temperature increase in the first half of the 20th century bore a strong resemblance to temperature increase in the second half — as did reported behavior of e.g. ice melt in the arctic and more — until second half and first half records were adjusted and adjusted again until a cooling blip in the middle all but disappeared and the second half was artificially warmed compared to the first. Whether or not these adjustments were honest or dishonest is in a sense beyond the point — either way with satellite measurements of LTT it simply isn’t possible to continue to adjust the land record ever warmer than the LTT and hence in a decade or two the issue will be moot.
In a decade or two many issues will be moot. I am not a “denier” or a “warmist” — I am simply skeptical that we know enough to model the climate when we don’t even understand how to incorporate the basic physics that has driven the climate into a model that can quantitatively hindcast the last million years or so. And no, I do not buy into the argument that we can linearize around the present — not in a nonlinear chaotic system with a nonlinear past that we cannot explain. If the climate is chaotic — and note well, I did not say the weather — then we probably cannot predict what it will do, or even what it will “probably” do, CO_2 or no CO_2. If it is not chaotic, and is following some sort of predictable behavior that we might be able to linearize around, well — predict it. In the past.
You point out that doing nothing is not a risk free policy. Absolutely true. However, doing something isn’t a risk free action — it is a guaranteed cost! You are simply restating Pascal’s Wager, in the modern religion of sinful human caused global warming. Let me clarify.
Pascal, of course, said that even though the proposition that God exists was (your choice of) absurd or improbable or at the very least unprovable and lacking proper evidence, the consequences of believing and being wrong were small compared to the consequences of not believing and being right. A slightly wiser man than Pascal — such as the Buddha — might have then examined what the real costs were (tithing the priesthood, giving up enormous amounts of political power to the religion-supported establishment feudal government, wasting countless hours praying and attending sermons where somebody tells you how to think and behave, all of the attendant distortion of human judgment that occurs when one accepts false premises on important matters such as a worldview) and just who it was that wrote the book describing the consequences of disbelief (that same priesthood, hmmm), but Pascal took them at their word that a being capable of creating a Universe and supposedly being perfectly loving would throw humans into a pit of eternal torture for the sin of failing to be convinced of an absurdity by the priesthood. Hence one could “prove” that the costs on one side paid immediately, however great, were less than the expectation value of the future costs on the other side, however unlikely. Infinity/eternity times even a tiny chance exceeds a mere lifetime of tithing etc.
This is the modern climate science wager as well. You remain unconvinced that the GCMs are wrong in spite of the fact that whether you plot the spaghetti in quantiles or standard deviations (where I note that you have not responded to my observation that AR4 plotted both mean and standard deviation of precisely these spaghetti curves and furthermore made claims of likelihood, and there isn’t the faintest reason to think that AR5 won’t do exactly the same thing, in the guide to policy makers, not the scientific sections that nobody but scientists and not all of them ever read) the current climate has diverged pretty much outside of the envelope of all of them.
I ask you again to invert your belief system and reorient it back towards the accepted one within the general realm of science. We do not know if the GCMs are trustworthy or correct or implement their physics appropriately. It is a nontrivial question because the climate is chaotic and highly nonlinear, because there are many different types of models, and because the models do not even make predictions in good agreement with each other in toy problems. We do not know the physics and feedback associated with many of the assumptions built into the models — clouds and water vapor being an excellent example — well enough to trust it without some sort of confirmation, some evidence that it the models are capable of predicting the future or hindcasting the indefinite past.
Do you consider the deviation of observed temperatures from the entire range predicted by these inconsistent models from observed temperatures to be evidence for the GCMs being trustworthy? If you answer yes, then I have to conclude that you have fully embraced CAGW as a religion, not as science. Note that I didn’t say “proven” or “disproven”. One does not verify or falsify in science (and yes, I’m perfectly happy to tackle anyone on list who is a Popperite) — one increases or decreases one’s degree of belief in propositions based on a mix of consistency and evidence. Negative evidence (including failure to agree with predictions in a reasonable manner) either decreases degree of belief or you have given up reason altogether, just as positive evidence should increase it.
If you agree — as I hope that you do — that the lack of agreement is troubling and suggests that perhaps, just maybe, these models are badly wrong since the current climate is diverging from the entire envelope of their predictions (which were themselves averages over ensembles of starting conditions, presuming some sort of ergodicity that of course might be utterly absent in a chaotic system or a system with many non-Markovian contributions with many timescales from the past and with the possibility — nay, the observed certainty — of spin-glass-like “frustration” in its internal dynamics on arbitrarily large timescales) then this should cause you to take a hard look at the entire issue of certain costs versus risks versus benefits because changes in the plausibility/probability of downstream disaster have enormous impact on the expected costs of action versus inaction, and even on which actions are reasonable now and which are not.
For example, on youtube right now you can watch Hansen’s TED talks video where he tells the entire world that he still thinks that sea level will rise 5 meters by the end of the century. 5 meters! Do you agree with that? Do you think that there are ten actually reputable climate scientists on Earth who would agree with that? Bear in mind that the current rate of SLR — one that has persisted for roughly 140 years with only small variations in rate — is 1.6 mm/year (plus or minus around 1.5 mm). 9 inches since 1870 according to the mix of tide gauge and satellite data. This is the same Hansen who conspired to turn off the air conditioning in the US congress on the day he made a presentation to them to sufficiently convince them that CAGW was a certain danger and that they should fund any measures necessary to prevent it. Trenberth, OTOH — sadly, so committed to CAGW that he can hardly afford to back out now but probably a basically honest person — fairly recently called for 30 cm by the end of the century, a number that is a linear extrapolation of the current rates but at least isn’t radically implausible — a foot in 90 years, or a bit over an inch a decade.
Five meters is Pascallian — sixteen or seventeen feet, a disaster beyond imagining, morally equivalent to eternal damnation. Trenberth’s assertion, on the other hand, is completely ignorable — just like nobody even noticed the 9 inch rise over the last century plus or is noticing the current (supposed) 3 mm/year, nobody will notice it if it continues decades or longer. Certainly there is reason for alarm and the urgent expenditure of trillions of dollars to ameliorate it.
Let me explain the real cost benefit of CAGW to you. The money spent on it by Europe so far would have prevented the recent monetary crisis that almost brought down the Euro, which in turn might have triggered a global depression. Why do you think that Europe is backing off of CAGW? Because there has been no warming observed pretty much from when Mann’s infamous hockey stick was first published and used to wipe out the MWP and LIA that “inconveniently” caused people with ordinary common sense to doubt that there was a catastrophe underway, and screw a disaster in 2100, the monetary crisis amelioration has helped cause is a disaster right now.
It’s a disaster right now in the US. We’re all spending a lot more for gasoline, coal, and oil derived products because the energy companies love CAGW, and probably help fund the hysteria. They make a marginal profit on retail cost, demand is almost entirely inelastic, and anything that makes prices rise is good for them. We pay substantially more for electricity than we probably need to, especially in states like California. We can “afford” this only because we are so very very wealthy and because none of the measures we take to ameliorate CAGW will even according to their promoters have any significant impact on it in the future, while measures we are taking for purely selfish and economical reasons (using lots of natural gas, for example) turn out to have a large impact on carbon utilization.
And of course the same anti-civilization priests that preach the sin of burning carbon preach the even bigger sin of taking any of the measures that might actually work to ameliorate hypothetical CAGW caused by CO_2 such as building lots of nuclear power plants or investing heavily in LFTR. Western North Carolina alone could provide 100% of the energy requirements of the entire world for some 17,000 years, and mining it of course produces lots of the rare earths that are equally valuable for use in magnets and energy storage devices that might make electric cars ultimately feasible (at the moment, thorium is viewed as toxic waste when mining rare earths, which is why the US imports them all continuing our tradition of simply exporting our pollution).
But the real disaster, the big disaster, the ongoing catastrophe, the most tragic aspect of the religion of CAGW is that all of the measures we have taken to combat it, with their moderate to severe impact in the first world, have come at the expense of the third world. The third world is suffering from energy poverty above all else. Energy is, of course, the fundamental scarcity. With enough, cheap enough, energy, one can make the desert bloom, build clean water and sewage systems, fuel industry, fuel transportation, fuel communication. Most people living in the first world cannot imagine life without clean running water, flushable toilets, electric lights, air conditioning, cell phones, computers and the Internet, cars, supermarkets, refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, but I grew up in India and I could literally see that life happening outside of my first-world window in the heart of New Delhi. I cited a TED talks of evil featuring Hansen up above — if you want to watch a TED talks of good, google up the one on washing machines. Washing machines are instruments where you put in dirty clothes on one side and take out books on the other side. You take out time, and wealth, and quality of life on the other side. And this cannot begin to compare to India, where there isn’t any water to wash clothes in for the poorest people unless they live near a river or it is the Monsoon.
Every measure we erect to oppose the development of carbon based energy raises prices, and raising prices has a devastating impact on the development of the third world. Worse, the money we spend in the first world comes out of money we might otherwise spend in useful ways on the economic development of the third world — we have finite resources, and spending more on one thing means spending less on another. If we spent just one of the billions of dollars we spend a year on CAGW on global poverty, how many lives would we save (save from death, save from disease, save from poverty, save from hopelessness), mostly of children? Millions, easily. A year.
So next time you want to talk about the “risk” of doing nothing, make sure you accompany it with the immediate cost of doing something for a problem that might or might not actually exist, whose impact (if it does indeed exist) could range from ignorable, as in a 30 cm SLR by 2100 to “catastrophic” (let’s say a whole meter of SLR by 2100, since only crazy people who are convinced that they are the religious salvation of humanity think it will be five), but a problem that will largely sort itself out even if we do nothing in a decade and beyond as technologies such as solar cells and (we can hope) LFTR and maybe long-shot thermonuclear fusion make burning carbon for energy as obsolete as TV antennas on top of houses within two decades not to “save the world” but to save money.
In case you wonder if I think there are measures worth taking to ameliorate the risk of CAGW, I would answer certainly. Here is a list. All of these measures have a guaranteed payout in the long run regardless of whether or not CAGW is eventually borne out not by the current crop of GCMs but by observational science and models that actually work. None of them are horribly expensive. None of them are the equivalent of “carbon trading”, “carbon taxes”, or other measures for separating fools from money, and all of them would be supported as part of the general support of good science.
* Invest heavily in continuing to develop natural gas as a resource. This is actually real-time profitable and doesn’t need a lot of government interference to make happen.
* Invest heavily in fission based power plants. I don’t think much of pressurized water Uranium plants, although I think that with modern technology they can be built pretty safely. But however you assess the risk if you really believe in a global calamity if we burn carbon, and do not want to go back to outhouses, washing clothes by hand in a river and going to bed at sundown and living in houses that are hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter, fission plants are surely better than that.
* Invest in building LFTR and other possible thorium-burning fission designs. Start mining the thorium we’ve got and extracting our own rare earth metals for use in things like super-magnets (thereby driving down world prices in the process).
* Continue to invest in fusion and solar cell and storage device research at an aggressive level, without subsidizing their premature adoption.
* Back off on all measures intended to reduce the burning of carbon for energy and nothing else until there is solid observational evidence of not only warming, but catastrophic warming. Try to actually do real cost-benefit analysis based not on Pascal’s wager and mass public hysteria caused by the likes of Hansen, but on observational data backed by real knowledge of how the climate works, once we have any.
* And sure, continue to do climate research, but at a vastly reduced level of public funding.
Hansen succeeded in one thing — he caused the diversion of billions of dollars of public funding into climate science over more than two decades. If you want yet another horrendous cost — funding climate research intended to prove that if temperatures increase 5 C by 2100, it will be bad for tree frogs in the amazon instead of funding research into thorium, funding research on dumping massive amounts of iron into the ocean to supposedly increase its rate of CO_2 uptake instead of increasing the funding of fusion research, or research and development of vaccines, or development of water sanitation projects in third world countries, or the development of global literacy programs, or name almost anything that could have been done with the money pissed away in an overfunded scientific diversion that might yet turn out to be completely incorrect — net feedback from CO_2 increases could be negative to the point where the climate is almost completely insensitive to CO_2 increases (as has been quite seriously and scientifically proposed, and which is rather consistent with the evidence of the last 33 years of high-quality empirical observations of e.g. LTTs and SSTs).
Personally, I will believe that even the proponents of the CAGW, now CACC (since there is no visible warming, the marketing has changed to “climate change” in order to try to perpetuate the Pascallian panic) truly believe the kool-ade that they would have us all drink the day that they call for us to build fission plants of one sort or another as fast as we can build them. In the meantime, I will continue to think that this whole public debate has a lot less to do with science, and a lot more to do with money, power, and an unholy alliance between those who want to exploit the supposed risk of disaster to their own direct and personal monetary benefit and those who hate civilization itself, who think that the world has too many people living in it and who are willing to promote any lie if it perpetuates the cycle of poverty and death that limits third world population growth, if it has any chance of topping the civilization that they perceive of as being run by the wealthy and powerful at their personal expenses.
rgb

@rgbatduke

One cannot generate an ensemble of independent and identically distributed models that have different code.

But one can generate an ensemble of proxy temperature data, sparse historic instrumental temperature data and modern instrumental temperature data. I’m learning something new every day.

@rgbatduke
How coud I forget? And model predictions of course.
Have your cake or eat. You can’t have ’em both. But thanks anyways for so thoroughly refuting the hockey stick.