Can We Actually Even Tell if Humans Are Affecting the Climate? What if we did nothing at all?

Asking such questions and searching for ways to disprove or falsify a theory sorts the scientists from the pseudo-scientists. That such questioning is “doing science” is not something the alarmists want the general public to know – they’ve already been told it’s done by consensus, and those alarmists are fighting tooth and claw to keep it that way. If it wasn’t so horrendous, I’d say it was sad.

“We generate a number of alternate explanations, hypotheses (, sic) that might explain the phenomenon.”
Ok; the much touted “Greenhouse Effect” simply delays the flow of energy (alternating as IR light, thermal energy, IR light, thermal energy, etc. etc.) through the complex Sun/Earth/Atmosphere/Universe system by a few tens of milliseconds (speed of light times a few miles of atmosphere). Since the period of the cyclic energy input (one day) contains about 86 million milliseconds the “Greenhouse Effect” does NOT “trap” any energy and has NO EFFECT on the average temperature of the Earth.
Furthermore, this delay (caused by energy making multiple trips through the system at very nearly the speed of light) is not the same as how a thermal insulator functions by slowing the velocity of heat though a system.
This delay simply causes the gases in the atmosphere to warm up slightly faster after sunrise (or the dissipation of clouds), alternatively this delay causes the gases in the atmosphere to cool down slightly slower after sunset (or the accumulation of clouds). The signature of the “greenhouse effect” is in the “response time” of the climate. This signature cannot be observed with “steady state” instruments like FLIR cameras or satellites, and it is not contained in the historical temperature records.
How’s that for an alternate hypothesis ?
Cheers, Kevin

I still don’t get the CO2 making it warm thing.
We’re told atmospheric CO2 is increasing and that it’s a well mixed gas that gets warmer when it gets hit by the LWR bouncing off the earth. O K
If it’s true that it’s well mixed and the CO2 gets warmer, shouldn’t the temperature have increased everywhere by the same amount in unison?
Did a bunch of those CO2 molecules decide to leave Europe and meet up in NW US instead?
If the molecules are warmer and they’re everywhere, what happened?
cn

Temperatures don’t warm, water or air does.

Oh, and the cause of the Challenger disaster was well known at the time. We (the USA) where limited in our ability to launch rockets in cold temperatures due to an over reliance on segmented solid fueled rockets. This was considered a critical weakness in our national defense system. We did not want our enemies to know that we could not launch satellites when it was too cold. So this “secret” information was carefully “leaked” to Dr. Feynmann so he could “discover” the cause of the disaster without revealing national secrets.
The cause of the disaster was management that launched a rocket outside of its clearly defined performance envelope. Same as if you plug a 9 volt dc electrical part into a 120 volt ac system. Not going to work for long. You may get “lucky” a few times, but GOOD is always more dependable than LUCKY.
Cheers, Kevin.

Stuart Elliot said:
June 25, 2013 at 9:06 pm
But it would be really inconvenient and embarrassing to climb down from the pulpit of this new church, so Mr. Martin’s fine words are unfortunately going to be ignored for as long as the preachers can get away with it.
——————————————–
You are so right Sir. And the preachers and the politicians are getting away with it.
obama’s speech today in which he claimed that 2012 was the warmest year on record and that “In a world that’s warmer than it used to be, all weather events are affected by the warming planet”, and his statement that the XL pipeline will not be built until it can be made to be carbon-neutral (which means never) are indicators of how right you are.
The warmunists are winning, I am afraid.
or to put it another way…
The warmunists are winning. I am afraid!

your Admiral Blair is in Australia tomorrow (27th June) for another CAGW fest, and the political opposition – who will/should win the Federal Election in September & remove the carbon tax – are well-represented by their Minister for Climate Action, Environment and Heritage, Greg Hunt, the party’s former leader, John Hewson, & the party’s former Defence and Environment Minister, Robert Hill!
27 June 2013: National Business Leaders Forum on Sustainable Development
Venue: Main Committee Room, Parliament House, Canberra, Australia
Keynotes: Admiral Dennis Cutler Blair, former United States Director of National Intelligence, retired United States Navy Admiral.
‘The Future Global Security Agenda’…
SESSION 3: Security in a Warming Century – from Havana to New Delhi to Townsville (Australia): how do we build adaptive and resilient business models?
In a world that is 4 to 6 degrees warmer, heat waves, sea level rise and more intense severe weather events will threaten the security of our communities…
To mitigate future warming risks, we will need to adopt low carbon technologies as we adapt to our changing climate and create opportunities for future prosperity…
SESSION 5: Unlocking Sustainable Investing: security for the future…
http://www.nblf.com.au/2013-forum/program
it’s all about the money.

gbaikie says:
June 25, 2013 at 10:22 pm
//////////////////
Do we have a false perception of our own planet’s temperature?
We are in the middle of an inter glacial period. If glacial/inter glacial periods are not the result of fluctuations in GHCs, but instead orbital swings etc coupled with deep ocean temperature, then to measure the Earth’s temperature today gives a false impression.
Don’t forget that the deep ocean is only about 3degC. This is the largest internal heat source, and it is this heat source that comes back to bite in glacial periods.

http://joannenova.com.au/2013/06/jcu-caves-in-to-badgering-and-groupthink-blackballs-politically-incorrect-bob-carter/
my other post web site not active

Reblogged this on In the Dark and commented:
A post about the doctrine of falsifiablity and its relevance to Climate Change….following on from yesterday’s post…

There are now over 500 vineyards in the UK :
http://www.englishwineproducers.com/vineyards/vineyard-search/

Your definition of science is 180 degrees from what is actually happening with grant driven science. Can you imagine the chance of the Large Hadron collider being built if the proposal read: ” to prove that the Higgs Boson doesn’t exist”? The people and organizations that provide the money want results and negatives aren’t considered results but failures. I would love to see an analysis of the number of papers that are published in major journals that adhere to your “doing science” approach. Sadly, I would think they would be a small minority.

To answer the question of how much are we impacting the climate, one has to be able to answer the questions of what are the natural cycles in the climate and how they have varied in the past and what caused them.
Climate science defaults to the claim that the natural cycles are very small and can almost be ignored.
Well, the simple fact is that noone really knows what the natural cycles are, how much they can vary and what caused them. There really should a whole sub-science focussed on this and there have been a few fits and starts of one at various times. But the other climate scientists shut them down.
I put the ENSO, the AMO, continental drift and solar in here but there are obviously many more natural drivers.

Thanks for the kind words, guys. On the chart, Anthony pointed that out too, and I mentioned it in a comment. I was interested in the part with actual predictions and didn’t think about what people might infer from the hindcast part. On the thing about the black body temperature, you can compute what the black-body temperature would be thermodynamically; it’s an abstraction and doesn’t require a real black body. The computation I saw was much lower that 5°C, but 5°C is still a lot lower than what we have *with* an atmosphere, so my basic point still stands.
By the way, this is the first of a regular Thursday science and technology column at PJM, pushed up because of Obama’s speech. Tomorrow’s regular column is about intelligence collection and NSA. I’d love to have you guys come back.

Martin’s paper it seems to me is more important than many of your comments seem to appreciate. I can’t understand why they seem to miss or ignore the important point in his piece. That is, the point in the title?
Admittedly Martin doesn’t make the leap from his excellent sources (Platt and Feynman) to say something really useful about climate change but nevertheless the issue is presented fair and square and it is a real issue. How can we tell if humans are having the effect on climate that is claimed?
The argument and example he uses (Hawkin’s graph of model results against calculations of global mean temperatures from empirical data , note it is not actual observations and that ignores another problem about which a great deal has been written on this blog) show that he is in fact drifting significantly off the point.
The main reason is that the models he wants to use to make the point do not provide crucial experiments. The reason why Feynamn could provide a simple rebuttal of a hypothesis about O rings on the Shuttle is that the hypothesis had been stated so precisely. It was highly testable. Designing an experiment that refuted the hypothesis was relatively easy.
With climate models this is not the case by a long stretch. Refutation involves deducing the consequences of the hypothesis, then deducing the evidence that would show if an effect is taking place and then designing an experiment that will reveal whether or not the hypothesis is wrong. With systems such as we are dealing with, this deduction and design are complex and fraught with difficulties arising from issues of definition, metrics, data and complex systems behaviour.
Inevitably, with such complex models, failure of a model to agree with actual observation is not sufficient reason to reject the model completely, as seems to have been done on this and other blogs recently. There are many reasons why there is no fit and there are many aspects of models that can cause differences in output and therefore cause the model not to fit. Such models do not provide opportunities to test hypotheses about the underlying scientific reasoning of models or even of their structuring.
The point about models of these sorts of system vis a vis Platt (1964)is that the models come nowhere near being able to provide ‘clean experiments‘. But this cuts both ways. By the same token that the models are not testable they cannot also be rejected out of hand. As an aside, it is worth noting that in comparing the various models, as in Hawkin’s graph, there is no clear statement about what the key elements of the models are. So there is no easy way to understand just what sort of failure is taking place and how to interpret the discrepancies between model output and observation.
As Martin says, “the rub…comes in finding the right experiment”. Unfortunately his example isn’t it.
So, and this is the important corollary in respect to Martin’s argument, this is precisely not where to look for the crucial discriminating evidence by which we can eliminate competing hypotheses or reject models outright. We have to look elsewhere. OK, the graph looks convincing and is good for PR, but simply taking the diverging trend and then arguing that the models are useless is inadequate in a skeptical scientific context. The argument has to be built on a surer foundation.
The sort of argument that meets these criteria is that presented recently by Dr Murry Salby, see http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/climate-scientist-dr-murry-salby.html who argues on the basis of the time series relations of CO2 and temperature that it is temperature that drives CO2 and not the other way around, and on different time scales. This goes a long way to making the argument but still is not fully ‘clean’.
Salby deals with ‘black boxes’ in a classic and well-constructed approach that provides a lot of evidence that supports his thesis. But it is not a crunch argument. That has to come from empirical observations of Carbon in the various components of the earth-atmosphere-ocean system in experimental set ups designed to test any hypotheses to the limit.

Let’s suppose we have come up with a physical theory, about the universe. Well why not call it “the theory of everything”.
By some remarkable happenstance, our theory of everything turns out to be absolutely correct about everything . (we should be so lucky.)
It follows, that our new theory, can and will exactly predict the outcome of EVERY experiment we could perform. BUT WE DON’T KNOW THAT ; we only just came up with it.
So we can start doing experiments. Since it’s a theory of everything, there are a lot of different experiments we can do. Every time we do one, a different one, we find it agrees with what we predicted from our theory. But no matter how many experiments we do, there are always plenty of ones we have not done, and we still don’t know that we will get the predicted result, for the next experiment we do, no matter how many we have done.
One day, we may do an experiment and get a result that is different from what our theory predicted. And that result can be corroborated by anyone who repeats that experiment.
So our theory of everything is false, as it does not correctly predict the outcome in all cases, no matter how many cases we have run.
Well we don’t have a theory of everything. We have theories which apply to experiments which conform to some specific set of rules, that separate those experiments from “everything”.
Same rule applies; a single contrary result falsifies the theory, no matter how many cases came out correctly.
We can further restrict the class of conditions that our theory applies to, if we can identify the rogue parameter that gives us the misses. Or we can modify the theory, so it now includes the previous misses in its successes, without losing any we already had covered.
It’s amazing, how many without science training, demand “a proof” of some conjecture; but never offer a contrary case that falsifies the conjecture. They are the ultimate trolls, who simply want to muddy the water.
I hope when they go home at night, that their mother does not run out from under the verandah, and bite them on the ankle.
In some branches of mathematics (fictional), it is possible to prove that some postulate is true. or maybe that it cannot be proven to be true, or that a solution exists, even though we cannot (or have not yet) found that answer.
Fermat’s last theorem, is a case in point. x^n + y^n = a^n has NO integer solutions (for x,y,a) for n >2. I suspect that it holds for |n| >2, because there are a gazillion cases for n = -1.
Off hand, I can’t give one for n = -2, but I suspect they exist.
The conjecture was proven, for n = 3,4,5….. but not for every integral n, until a long, bizarre, but apparently rigorous proof was given a few years back.
One thing is certain. Nobody has discovered Fermat’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem. (if indeed he had one).

“””””…..feet2thefire says:
June 26, 2013 at 11:08 am
@george e. smith:
“One thing is certain. Nobody has discovered Fermat’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem. (if indeed he had one).”
Actually, you must have been out of the loop. Andrew Wiles solved it in 1994.
Look it up. It took me 12 seconds to re-find it.
Steve Garcia…..”””””
I’ve not been out of any loop.
I’ll repeat the pertinent part of my statement, for those who are ESL challenged.
“””””…… Nobody has discovered FERMAT’S PROOF of Fermat’s last theorem…….””””””

Mr. Garcia, please… you didn’t read what Fermat wrote. Do it, read it aloud. Then look at the amount of paper Mr. Wiles’ proof would have needed in Fermat’s time, if the mathematical proofs and methods used by Wiles would have been known back then. Do you find Fermat’s description to be appropriate? So I think what Mr. Smith wrote is correct.

A wonderful explanation of how science operates in the lab.
Would anyone care to propose how we could or would set up this “experiment” on a planetary scale?
This argument would be applicable if we had another earth to manipulate the level of atmospheric gases, and then see what happens. Well, we don’t.

To feet2thefire:
With respect to the proof of Fermat’s theorem presented in 1994–at the
time, popular press accounts all mentioned that Wiles’ proof ran to
many, many pages. Fermat’s statement simply said that the
margin was not large enough to contain his proof, which thereby implies
it was much more compact. George e. smith
states the commonly-held viewpoint that Fermat’s never-seen proof
was probably wrong. You owe george e. smith
a word of apology, for jumping to conclusions.

@JRP. I understand the distinction you are making between the models and the real hypothesis of AGW. But it is perfectly valid to treat each model, or ensemble thereof, as an hypothesis stating, “this is a good approximation of how earth’s climate works and positive feedback from CO2 is the most important determinant.” Why is this important? Because that is how AGW theorists and the popular press treat them. From those models, they draw the conclusion that manmade CO2 will have catastrophic effects and gird it in the rainments of something equivalent to Einstein’s theory of relativity. While a simulation is not really a test of the underlying hypothesis, reality is a test of the hypotheses embedded in the models. The models as hypotheses and as skillful predictors are by and large falsified (both by temperature divergence from predictions, the missing predicted equatorial hotspot, and other tests).
I don’t buy your statement to the effect that the models still deserve respect and attention because it is complicated and there are good reasons the models might have failed. Of course there are–they have failed. But as hypotheses, the models are falsified to a high degree of statistical significance. The proponents job now is to come up with models that actually have some predictive skill about the future, not about the past–It’s too easy to tune a model without even intending to if you know the answer in advance, especially when further grant money depends on the results. When the models do better than a ruler laid on a graph of recent temperatures in a statistically significant way, then they are worth paying attention to. Until then, they aren’t worth much time or effort except as negative results, that is, we now know that the particular set of climate relationships, forcings, and feedbacks represented by the models are probably not good approximations of how earth’s climate works. That would be useful if the scientific and political communities could accept that and move on to other and more rigorous ways of examining the AGW hypothesis.
The only reason anyone would pay attention to these models is that politicians and the press have made careers of embracing them–either out of ignorance or mendacity. So regrettably, it is important to make sure the public and scientific community understands that the models themselves are probably falsified as hypotheses. That is an uphill climb against a hostile press and political establishment.
Obama’s speech today is a little like a hedge fund manager who just lost billions by trading on a predictive market model that he paid someone $500,000 to develop. Does he double down and hope it works next time or does he trash the model and fire the analyst? The president doubled down. So regrettably, we will have to continue to address the falsification of the models over and over.

Of course we are affecting. If we are continuing urbanization, deforestations and desert expanding global warming / climate change will be more and more eminent. Moisture contents on the surface of the earth control our climate. We have changed the soil surface into concrete surface thus reduced the evaporation and water absorption system of nature. For details please click on my name.
________________________________

@ Phil”
“”””…..I think given the work that Andrew did on Fermat (not just on the T-S approach) he’s probably the best qualified to make that judgement, and that’s certainly what he said……”””””
Well Phil, I’m presuming that you know the chap, so that you have some idea of the extent to which he studied Fermat; pre and post T-S.
So that leads me to make the following conjecture; aka WAG.
Given that Fermat knew nothing of the (non) existence of the T-S conjecture, and how it would come to relate to his last theorem. And given that Fermat BELIEVED that he had a proof of his theorem (that was not a 150 page proof of T-S). And given that Andrew Wile extensively studied Fermat’s theorem, prior to T-S, so can be regarded as an (if not the) expert.
Then it is reasonable to assume that in his studies, he must have also discovered Fermat’s simple but fallacious proof..
So for me; while congratulating T-S and Andrew Wile, on their combined success; the big outstanding problem is :
NOBODY HAS DISCOVERED FERMAT’S “PROOF” OF FERMAT’S LAST THEOREM.
I think that is every bit as important as proving the theorem, and would surely have been found by anyone, knowledgeable enough to believe Fermat fooled himself.
PS My formal mathematics studies, only went to MSc (in Physics & Maths) level, and I did not take the finals.
So T-S is quite beyond my horizon of understanding. So I am quite certain, that I could read Andrew Wiles 150 page solution, along with T-S; and have not the foggiest idea what they were talking about.

“””””…..cormac says:
June 28, 2013 at 1:06 pm
Good question on falsification Charile!
One way of testing the greenhouse gas hypothesis and the size of the effect is the following:
Since the 1970s, satellites have been measuring the heat emerging from our atmosphere into space. If no reduction is observed in heat emitted at wavelengths associated with absorption by GHGs , the theory would be nicely falsified. In fact, a pronounced dip in energy at just those wavelengths is clearly observable, a dip that has been growing steadily in tandem with the rise in atmospheric GHG concentration……..”””””
Did you read, what you just wrote Cormac ?
First off, from a ‘satellite in outer space’, it is not possible to observe ANY HEAT emerging from earth for essentially none is.
What is being emitted, is LWIR EM radiation energy, which is NOT “heat”.
According to Kevin Trenberth’s cartoon budget, ONLY 40 W/m^2 out of the 390 W/m^2 emitted from earth surface, escapes to outer space. The rest is captured by the atmosphere, including GHGs.
Also according to the overwhelming consensus (maybe 97%) of all scientists believe that ordinary atmospheric gases (N2, O2, Ar) do not emit LWIR thermal EM radiation; only GHGs can do that.
So the earth spectrum from outer space is supposed to consist of a weak (40 W/m^2) surface emitted thermal spectrum, plus a whopping great GHG band spectrum, because the atmosphere can only cool by GHG resonance emissions.
So when you talk of “a pronounced dip in energy at just those wavelengths”, that is an observation (presumably), that flies in the face of assertions that only GHG spectra are emitted by the atmosphere. An increase in GHGs, would necessarily result in an INCREASE in the GHG bands peaks, NOT a decrease.
So there must be something wrong with the assertion that the atmosphere can ONLY emit GHG band spectra emissions, and NOT broad thermal radiation spectra. Apparently the overwhelming consensus of 97% of all scientists is in error, ant the atmospheric gases, must be able to radiate broad thermal spectra..