The 'Pause' of Global Warming Risks Destroying The Reputation Of Science

It will be a tough job to sell Americans the AGW BS after a winter where they have run out of propane for heating their homes: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/26/22455731-prolonged-cold-blast-worsens-propane-shortage-across-midwest?lite#
Yes, I know weather is not climate…

US bombing sovereign nation when markets are falling???? http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-26/markets-are-falling-which-means-its-time-us-bomb-sovereign-nation#
Makes you wonder what Obama will do when AGW is frozen solid.
Anyhow I hope the Chinese and the Japanese for that matter don’t follow suit.
So many reputations to think about

R. de Haan says: ….
Yes, unfortunately you are correct.
As I said in my comment Clinton made sure China now has the military technology.
The Globalists are all yammering on about Interdependence but I very much doubt if China is with the program.
See: Geopolitics, Currency and Trade Wars: Why The Risk of World War Is Rising
Right now China Plans To Seize South China Sea Island From Philippines, Says “Battle Will Be Restricted”… It seems the Obama administration may have to ‘not take sides’ in another fight soon. sounds like we have another “”Peace for Our Time” (Neville Chamberlain and later Jimmy Carter with Iran)
– Gee thanks Clinton
“What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” ~ Thucydides
And Clinton made sure of the growth of Athenian (Chinese) power.

The Pompous Git says: @ur momisugly January 26, 2014 at 7:41 pm
…What makes you think farmers are stupid?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A stupid farmer becomes a bankrupt farmer in very short order.
Farmers are realists that is why they have been the target of all the hayseed and other jokes. Politicians always want to sell the next BIG SCARE so they do not want anyone with brains poking holes in their con.

John says: @ur momisugly January 26, 2014 at 8:51 pm
….If the absence of global warming continues, how should those in responsible positions who called for criminalization of sceptics and censorship of their beliefs, be dealt with?
Should those who have advocated totalitarianism, in support of a lie be allowed to continue their hold upon the levers of power?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The holders of power and their propaganda machines, the MSM will continue on to their next Big Scare for manipulating the masses. The problem for them is decreasing reliance on the MSM, blogs like this one and the increasing awareness that we are being consistently lied to.
Foreclosure Gate, Fractional Reserve Banking and the Fed had both the left and the right up in arms. 80% Favor Auditing the Federal Reserve and 72% Favor Free Market Economy Over One Managed by the Government and “think small businesses are hurt more than big businesses when the government does get involved.”
Rasmussen Reports December 20, 2013 Gallup reports that 72 percent of Americans see big government, not big business or big labor, as the biggest threat to the nation’s future — the highest number since the question was first asked in 1965.
Seems voters are not as dumb as I thought.

OK: If it’s a question of “all”, then there is no option. It has to be what is the most continuous supply – the cheaper biogas generator. But I guess I would not have got all SIX marks for that.
If we assume that this is a propoganda quiz, then you’re right. However, it’s entirely possible that this is part of the trick question. Does the student realize that average means sometimes it’s higher and sometimes it’s lower? Does the student understand that at times this may mean the farm has too much energy, and at other times it doesn’t have enough, and no way to get more?
Frankly, the question seems like a no-brainer… even if the average was flat with no swings on the eco-friendly generation, saving that much money on the biogas generator is still the better bet for the farmer. The farmer is concerned with the farm, not some nebulous “maybe the temperature will rise 2 degrees long after I’m dead, and that probably won’t have any impact on my sons anyway” arguement.

richardscourtney says:
January 26, 2014 at 11:04 am

RockyRoad:
re your post at January 26, 2014 at 10:44 am.
The models are wrong and they don’t work. There are several known reasons for this and probably some unknown reasons, too.
But your list of model faults is plain wrong. As you admitted, you have posted your misunderstanding before, and I am not the first person to tell you that your list is not true.
For example, the models do NOT emulate a flat Earth.
Proclaiming falsehoods does not help the AGW scepticism: it harms AGW scepticism.
Richard

Then I stand corrected and apologize for the harm to I’ve caused AGW scepticism!
It won’t happen again.

Well yes and no. The effects of “willow bark” have been known for thousands of years. It was just not understood why.
Thanks, you saved me the trouble. And not just willow bark tea — people can actually become allergic/sensitive to aspirin (salicylate), but it is found in greater and lesser quantity in most foods. See the following list:
http://salicylatesensitivity.com/about/food-guide/vegetables/
Note that many of the foods thought to be broadly protective of things such as colon cancer or heart disease are high in salicylate, and probably constitute the moral equivalent of the baby aspirin a day physicians currently recommend to the over-30 crowd who are past the primary risk of Reyes’ syndrome. Of course many of the vegetables and fruits have other protective elements — antioxidants, bioflavanoids, roughage — as well. So eat your vegetables and fruits; don’t suck down coal tar.
Seriously, do we have to reach this far to find reasons to love coal? Personally, I think it would be lovely if we could leave the coal mostly in the ground unburned, and look forward to the day we can do so — mining it is dirty, expensive and dangerous, and once you burn it it’s gone and takes a few hundred million years to “recycle”. Even more so oil — one day our descendants will be very sad that we used up most of the readily accessible cornucopia of raw, ready to process organic molecules and then burned it when it is so very useful to make stuff with. Or maybe not — with enough, cheap enough energy people might care less, since energy is all that is required to run reactions backwards and build the molecules from scratch, but it is a lot cheaper to start with petroleum IIRC.
That doesn’t mean that I think we should lie to anybody about CAGW and the possibly overblown risks of atmospheric CO_2, or that we should try to shut down all coal burning power plants tomorrow, only that I sincerely do think that we as a civilization should look aggressively for alternative energy resources that don’t involve burning things, especially things in comparatively finite supply that have other uses. Don’t confuse two issues. One is the objective scientific question: “Will increasing atmospheric CO_2 to 600 ppm cause a global climate catastrophe?” (Note well that I do not even assign a cause to the increase.) The other is: “Is it economically, politically, and socially desirable to stop burning coal as a primary source of electrical energy, and to eventually transition from the burning of petroleum products (diesel, fuel oil, kerosene, gasoline) as a primary energy source of heat and the motive power for transportation?”
One can consider these two questions entirely separately, and can even contemplate different answers for different time frames in the future. The scientific question is currently open. It is entirely plausible, even probable, that increasing CO_2 to 600 ppm will cause some increase in global average temperature, although empirically the increase is likely to be less than the various GCMs are predicting as the GCMs are failing and are likely to be significantly flawed and both overestimate climate sensitivity and underestimate the range of natural variability and the natural contribution to past warming. It is an open question as well even if some warming occurs whether or not it will be “catastrophic”, and one cannot even rule out global cooling in the absence of a believable predictive model capable of quantitatively and temporally explaining past global climate variations such as
the MWP, the LIA, the recovery from the LIA, and more broadly the entire Pliestocene.
The political/economic/social question I think has a fairly clear answer. There is a risk of future catastrophe associated with burning carbon for fuel, but there is the absolute certainty of contemporary catastrophe if we stop. We are already paying a substantial penalty in human misery and death (as well as lining the pockets of those very corporations that sell us energy that are being “demonized” in the political sell) because draconian measures are being proposed and implemented before the scientific question is even resolved and well before any alternative technologies are sufficiently developed to be plausible alternatives.
That could easily, and even rapidly, change — there is a lot of research being conducted, and a new battery technology was announced yesterday that could plausibly bump the energy density of batteries by close to an order of magnitude compared to gold-standard the lithium oxide batteries of today. There are even multiple approaches capable of yielding factors of five or more, some of them potentially less expensive than lithium oxide and mass producible with minimal memory effect. This may put battery technology well within an order of magnitude of being as energy dense as gasoline, and differences in conversion efficiency could reduce the gap still further.
This is the primary reason I don’t think anyone — even the most devout of CAGW believers — should panic. Every single time the pundits of the past have predicted “inevitable” global disaster in the last 200 years, they have proven wrong. Various apocalyptic churches and cults predict the Rapture and Armageddon, but it fails to come to pass. Nuclear holocaust was supposed to knock us back to the stone age — but didn’t, at least not yet. Global pandemics (possibly due to bioengineered terror weapons) are still supposed to wipe out — but haven’t. Pollution was supposed to poison us and turn the entire planet into a wasteland — but life expectancy continues to rise, and if anything we are gradually bringing pollution under control with a hat tip to the same need to balance human fortune and misery against the control measures in developing countries. Overpopulation was supposed to turn the entire world into some sort of rabbit warren and precipitate mass starvation and other disasters — but the exact opposite has happened — food production has easily exceeded population growth, medical advances have stayed ahead of the disease curve, and slowly but surely mere education is pulling the world out of the rapidly reproducing impoverished dark ages and into the slowly reproducing comparatively wealthy present. One could actually envision world population peaking around 10 billion in the next 30 years and then dropping for a century or so to an eventual equilibrium of perhaps half of that — if we turned our attention from perpetuating energy poverty by panicking over coal-based energy to directly trying to fix world poverty and ignorance and misery — all of which require cheap energy!
So please, don’t conflate the two issues. There is the scientific question of what the global climate will look like in fifty or a hundred years quite independent of the moral and economic question of how we should best direct our resources in the present towards the resolution of long term problems. The problem of world poverty is, perhaps, within our grasp to solve and solve decisively in 20 to 30 years, if we concentrate our energy (both literal and metaphorical) there. The problem, if any, of burning carbon for fuel IMO should be addressed, as burning coal for energy is not a good truly long term basis for human civilization even if we are on the brink of the next ice age regardless of CO_2 level. But at the moment, the best thing to do is continue to actively invest in research into economically viable alternatives, and wait for capitalism and common sense to do their thing when and as they are discovered and developed to where they make purely economic sense. With or without subsidy, solar energy is quite close to being competitive with other sources of fuel-based energy. There is a lot we can, and probably will, do with both Uranium and eventually LFTR (Thorium) fission, where the latter will take order of ten thousand years to exhaust. Fusion, well, it’s always a possibility. But one can imagine any number of breakthroughs (such as an order of magnitude difference in battery energy density!) that would be game changers — enable solar power to function as a standalone source in much of the world, enable electric cars to be built that have range of 300 to 500 miles and that can be rapidly recharged. In the past, such breakthroughs seem to occur faster than the predicted disasters that they ameliorate because there is a lot of “energy” in human creativity driven by a strong incentive to do good and get rich while doing it (in equal measure:-).
I personally trust that creative energy. Let’s worry less about catastrophic SLR in 2100 (especially in the absence of anything vaguely describable as even unusual SLR today) and worry more about the 1 to 2 million people, most of them children under five, who die every year of respiratory disorders in India alone caused by the use of “biofuels” (a.k.a. dried dung, charcoal, wood or chaff) in closed mud huts for the purposes of cooking and heat. Elimination of dirty biofuels in the third world requires some mix of clean burning stoves, natural gas, or electricity produced as cheaply as possible, that is to say, by coal. Let’s worry less about “climate change” and more about providing water that is safe to drink and thereby eliminating the roughly two million deaths a year from diarrhoea caused by drinking water contaminated with fecal parasites, most of them the very young and the elderly. Clean water requires cheap energy, cheap energy at the moment is pretty much coal.
This is the true tragedy of the CAGW fiasco. When the cold war ended, the prospect for anything but comparatively minor wars faded. The Military-Industrial complex Eisenhower so eloquently warned us about risked being marginalized once they didn’t have a good reason to receive half a trillion or so a year of government money to build bombers and ICBMs and to maintain a huge fleet of expensive war machinery. A few good small wars stretched out their period of relevance and got them a bolus of a couple of trillion dollars to keep the wolf from their door a bit longer, but we are once again living in a nearly peaceful world.
We could actually take advantage of this stretch of, well, peace on earth to actually promote good will towards men, and take actions against global poverty and misery that would actually make future wars even less likely (at the substantial expense of the giant multinational corporations that thrive on cheap third world labor that would largely disappear if the countries involved became prosperous). Instead we have a new “war” — this time on the very means that those countries must rely on to lift themselves out of poverty, the fundamental resource, energy itself.
Anybody here think this is a coincidence?
rgb

Then I stand corrected and apologize for the harm to I’ve caused AGW scepticism!
It won’t happen again.
Good, because Richard is quite right — your list is wrong in almost every detail. You might want to read through the documentation of an actual GCM before reposting about their flaws — CAM 3 documentation is openly available on the web here:
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/atm-cam/docs/description/
You will note that this GCM very clearly simulates a round, tilted earth, orbiting the sun in an eccentric ellipse, and has specific components to compute the real time changes in energy/state to the entire surface and atmosphere of the earth, decomposed into areal cells and vertical atmospheric cells, at a moderate (probably far too large, IMO) granularity, and with the explicit treatment/inclusion of all sorts of physics — clouds, convection, radiation, albedo, surface height, ice vs water in the ocean. Look at all of the “model physics” that is included!
They may well omit some physics that is important, but probably not from malice or intent. They may well get some physics wrong, as we simply don’t understand things like clouds and aerosols very well, or how the solar magnetic state might impact the climate. They may well not do the computation sufficiently precisely, because it is enormously expensive to do the computation at the current level of precision — note well that this like other GCMs essentially integrate the Navier-Stokes equation for the entire coarse-grained atmosphere (this is a nonlinear partial differential equation so difficult that mathematicians cannot even prove that solutions generally exist for it). It IIRC advances the solutions at a time-granularity of five minutes — measuring out the century in five minute steps describing the change in every stack of parcels over each surface cell covering the planet. This is not “instantaneous”, nor is it in any possible sense sloppy, ignorant, malicious, misleading, or anything else you might use to describe it implying some sort of evil intent. And CAM is probably not even the most developed or precise of the GCMs (although it is essentially an open source GCM, so you can download it and, with an enormous amount of effort, get it to build and run and then fix it if you don’t like it the way that it is).
It might, of course, still be wrong. Lots of sophisticated models turn out to be wrong. That’s why they call it research — if we knew the answers and could already predict the future precisely we wouldn’t have people working to improve them. The only real problem with GCMs is that they have been treated like some sort of modern Delphic Oracle even as they have been systematically failing all sorts of consistency and accuracy checks. Basically, sophisticated as they are they simply don’t work very well.
This is a hard problem. If it weren’t for the immense political weight that has been placed on their predictions (and yes, the possibility that confirmation bias has crept into their tuning, something that is so easy to have happen when you have strong prior beliefs and are tuning a set of parameters to fit a training set when the parameters are highly covariant and there is a large possible solution space that can “work” (so why not choose the one that conforms most strongly to your prior beliefs?)) it would hardly be surprising that the GCMs aren’t working well yet, and people would be far more willing to tweak them and change them so that they agreed with observation, almost entirely at the expense of the “catastrophic” warming the currently largely still predict.
rgb

Trap?
It wasn’t a TRAP it was TEMPTATION.
Being Human, their flesh was weak so they succumbed to the siren song of fame, fortune, power and glory.
It’s why so many cannot bring themselves to admit, on even the most obvious points, that they were wronged AND that they lied at least to themselves.
It’s actually good that this has been exposed to such a wide audience. Perhaps some now will begin to take a look at some of the earlier forays by science into the manufacturing of evidence and the hiding of the truth in the name of “settled Science”.
I can think of a couple of areas. 1)evolutionary theory 2) paleoanthropology
Just a review of nutrition and all it’s confusing results and industry paid for studies. would be upsetting enough.

What do you mean by “risks destroying the reputation”? It has shown me how corrupting agendas can be and how easily corrupted big science and big grant is. It shows how difficult it is for any line of inquiry that goes against the status quo can be. It explains why research into Low Energy Nuclear reactions was almost totally frozen for so many years despite its unspeakable benefit to humanity. It shows how vacuous the left its, and how worthless their credential monopoly is. The imposition of ideology to control true science makes me sick. I am so very glad that I declined to play their games and allow them to grant me credentials in my youth. I want no part with any of them.