Essay by Charlie Martin
We know, with great certainty, that the overall average temperature of the Earth has warmed by several degreees in the last 400 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age. Before that was a period called the Medieval Warm Period; before that was another cold period, and back at the time of the Romans there was a long period that was significantly warmer — Southern Britain was a wine-growing region. What we’re a lot less certain about is why?
Of course, the “why?” here has been, shall we say, pretty controversial. It’s worth wondering about the controversy and about the social mechanisms through which science is done — I wrote about them during the Climategate controversy as the “social contract of science” — but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Instead, let’s talk about how a scientist thinks about these sorts of questions and arrives at new answers. Back in grad school we called that “doing science”, and it was something everyone liked doing and wished they could be doing instead of whatever they actually were doing, like faculty meetings and refereeing papers.
The process of “doing science” is something you usually learn more or less by osmosis, but there are some good hints around. One of the best is a paper from the 16 October 1964 issue of Science, “Strong Inference” by John R Platt. Let’s say we have some phenomenon of interest, like global warming, or high blood sugar, or that damned yellow patch in my lawn. We want to know why it happens. Platt’s strong inference describes the process we should use when “doing science” as:
- We generate a number of alternate explanations, hypotheses, that might explain the phenomenon.
- For each hypothesis, we come up with an experiment which will prove the hypothesis wrong. That is, not one that “proves the hypothesis”, but one which, if successful, would disprove or falsify the hypothesis. (Sir Karl Popper argued in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery that this falsification was the core of scientific knowledge.)
- We do the experiments. If an experiment falsifies a hypothesis, we discard it ruthlessly. Then we go back to (1) and try again.
A lot of times, the rub — and the really creative thinking — comes in from finding the right experiment. Richard Feynmann was known for an ability to see right through a problem to a simple and elegant experiment that would disprove a hypothesis. He demonstrated this during the review following the Challenger disaster. You may remember that the launch happened on a very cold morning in January; less than two minutes after launch the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up, killing all seven astronauts.
The question, as always, was “why?”
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There are now over 500 vineyards in the UK :
http://www.englishwineproducers.com/vineyards/vineyard-search/
It may be of interest to readers of WUWT to learn of a University of Kentucky 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.
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.
Thanks for the citation to Karl Popper’s ‘Logic’. So early as Part I, Chapter 1, Section 6, Falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation, does he note that “it is always possible to find some way of evading falsification, for example by introducing [i]ad hoc[/i] an auxiliary hypothesis, or by changing [i]ad hoc[/i] a definition.”
di Finetti and Jaynes condemn piling on auxiliary hypotheses as mere adhockery – that now passes as ‘science’.
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.
My analysis strongly indicates that “climate change” is nearly all natural and that trying to control the burning of fossil fuels to slow “climate change” is like spitting into the wind. Click on my name for an example.
“What if we did nothing at all?”
That would mean giving up control, something that the Obama Administration and the UN is very much against.
“Time for some new hypotheses.”
You mean a hypotheses that follows proper science? Won’t happen while the Eco-fanatics are allowed to dominate.
BTW – I believe the CAGW by CO2 concept doesn’t just fail when judged by the models. It fails at all levels of falsification.
Let us not forget that none of these are proof that anthropogenic CO2 is causing, or may cause, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption in the Earth’s climate:
-Arctic Ice disappearing
-Glaciers retreating
-Coral reef bleaching
-Mt Kilimanjaro losing snow
-Polar bears doing anything anywhere
-Some creature or plant facing extinction
-A change in cyclones/hurricanes/typhoons
-Droughts
-Floods
-Dry rivers
-Computer models or simulations
-A “consensus”
-Al Gore’s movie
-Etc. causing etc. by etc. reported by etc., etc.
“””””……gbaikie says:
June 25, 2013 at 10:22 pm
“Aside: Now, just to try to forestall one of the usual threads of argument, there really is very little question the greenhouse effect actually exists — the natural temperature of a rock in orbit around the Sun at the same distance as the Earth is nearly -40°. So let’s not have the “but there’s no such thing” argument, okay?”……”””””””
Well there’s a problem with your assertion.
A rock circling the sun at earth’s mean distance, presumably receives the same mean insolation that the earth does; 1362 W/m^2 per a recent NASA / NOAA assertion.
Assuming that this rock is close to spherical, it intercepts the same energy as a flat circular disk at the same place , with its normal pointing at the sun.
The rock presumably has no atmosphere, so it has no clouds, and no “cloud albedo”.
If the rock was a black body (there’s no such thing), it would absorb the total incident solar energy and warm up above zero K.
What Temperature it reaches depends on several other factors.
What is the thermal conductivity of the rock, and does the rock rotate on its axis, so it is not locked to the sun.
If the thermal conductivity is infinite, it doesn’t matter whether it rotates or not, it will be at a uniform Temperature, and will be radiating a BB spectrum uniformly, at that Temperature, so it is radiating 340.5 W/m^2, so the Temperature will be 278.4 K based on 390 W/m^2 giving 288 K or 15 deg. C
So the Temp would be about 5 deg. C.
If the conductivity is not infinite, the sun side will be hotter than the dark side, so it will be radiating faster than the dark side, and. heat energy will be flowing from sun side to dark side, because of the Temperature gradient.
With a non BB absorption, then it will be something else again.
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.
The area I see that progress is most likely to improve the understanding of climate is to identify and account for any short term natural cycles that we have already measured in the Global and other temperature data.
Ones in the 1 year to 15 year in length are the ones I think will be most useful.
We all understand how we can measure day, weather, season and, to a certain extent, climate. We also see individual irregular patterns (El Nino, etc) that are longer than a year but then again I have found little if any research into the regular natural patterns that will have occurred that are longer than a year in duration.
I believe that there is at least a 4 year natural cycle hidden in the existing temperature data. That is, there is a pattern to the 1461 day full solar ‘year’. Not really surprising given that 365 is only a human approximation anyway.
I think that we are destroying all that 4 year information in the data by chopping it into 365 day segments. We should instead use the 1461 day ones of a ‘full solar year’. This reveals things that we may have accidentally ignored otherwise.
If we use a 1461 day ‘full solar year’ segment, then curious regular patterns emerge from long term series like CET.
http://s1291.photobucket.com/user/RichardLH/story/73127
We also can find similar patterns in the UAH satellite data series.
http://s1291.photobucket.com/user/RichardLH/story/70051
The same 4 year periods occurring in both temperature series, one a whole area view from satellite of 34 years in length and the other a single geographical point but of 241 years in length seems unlikely to be a coincidence.
Perhaps the 37 month, 4 year, 7 year and 12 year signal from the satellite data is also visible in other temperature records as well?
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.
The short answer is no. We have no way to know if our 100ppm (or anything else we are doing) is affecting the climate or not.
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).
Oy vey…
He starts off with this:
“We know, with great certainty, that the overall average temperature of the Earth has warmed by several degreees [sic] in the last 400 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age. ”
What a beeeginning.
Either this guy failed math or history – or something.
400 years ago was the end of the Little Ice Age?
Need I read any further?
Steve Garcia
Oh, and the “several degrees”? Two factites this guy missed on, in his first sentence.
Round file!
With great certainty.
Steve Garcia
p.s. Anthony, this is a pretty bad thing to post. I give you credit for letting him have this forum. All he did with it was make himself look ignorant.
@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
“””””…..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…….””””””
And for extra credit, try READING, and WRITING DOWN Andrew Wile’s proof, in 12 seconds / minutes / hours / whatever.
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.
I hate to break it to the author, but the LIA ended not 400 years ago, but 150 years ago. Perhaps what he meant was that the coldest decades of the LIA (circa 1315-1850) occurred approximately 400 years ago. Not a good start to an essay.
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.
“I hate to break it to the author, but the LIA ended not 400 years ago, but 150 years ago.”
IMHO, the LIA is still in the process of ending. The planet is still naturally warming. It is recovering from one of the very coldest episodes of the entire 10,700 year Holocene. That takes time.
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.
“Charlie Martin says:
June 26, 2013 at 8:13 am
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.”
The normal greenhouse theory [which is wrong] states Earth would be around -18 C without greenhouse effect.
And you said a rock would -40 C [F is same]. Proving a rock wouldn’t be -40 C was easy- as we have rocks and sometimes they are measured.
Proving assertion that a blackbody would be 5 C at Earth distance is difficult as there is not anything which is a ideal blackbody- it’s mathematical construct as you say.
I don’t choose to argue whether ideal blackbody would be 5 C or not.
I will argue about whether a ideal blackbody is warmest non greenhouse object. If the contention is a greenhouse effect only refers to greenhouse gases and not liquids. Which is what is argued
in the greenhouse theory.
So I think it’s important whether a airless earth would be -18 C or as you claimed -40 C.
Quote from wiki:
“If an ideal thermally conductive blackbody was the same distance from the Sun as the Earth is, it would have a temperature of about 5.3 °C. ”
So not going to argue with this. It could be wrong, particular when they claim the precise of 5.3 C,
rather then saying around 5 C.
It’s this part:
“However, since the Earth reflects about 30% of the incoming sunlight, this idealized planet’s effective temperature (the temperature of a blackbody that would emit the same amount of radiation) would be about −18 °C.”
and this part:
“The surface temperature of this hypothetical planet is 33 °C below Earth’s actual surface temperature of approximately 14 °C.”
Which I believe is wrong.
The premise of greenhouse theory is atmosphere gases are responsible for precisely 33 C
of warming. No more and no less. If was instead of -40 C rather than -18 C then greenhouse theory would be incorrect.
I think greenhouse theory is incorrect, but not because earth would colder than -18 C without
greenhouse gases, but rather it would be warmer than -18 C without greenhouse gases.
So if greenhouse gases add 30 C instead of 33 C to -18 C, the greenhouse theory is wrong-
as it also for wrong if greenhouse gases add 54 C to -40 C.
In other words there is certainty [ill founded] on the idea that greenhouse gases and only greenhouse gases can rise the average global temperature from -18 C [without the greenhouse gases] to 14 C with greenhouse gases [adding precisely 33 C of warming].
Now there is a huge uncertainly in the amount of each component of entire greenhouse mixture, but there is no apparent uncertainly about the 33 C added from greenhouse gases.
Nor is it disputed [according to this crazy theory] that water vapor is a major factor in this 33 C of warming. As indicated later in wiki article:
“By their percentage contribution to the greenhouse effect on Earth the four major gases are:
water vapor, 36–70%
carbon dioxide, 9–26%
methane, 4–9%
ozone, 3–7%”
So how warm rock in space would be is important.
But I think is more important is what would a can of water be at Earth distance.
Or the theoretical global sphere is just H20, would be. What we missing is other planets or
bodies which are covered in water.
@john port. 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.