We’ve seen the “If 99 doctors said…” argument, or facsimiles, used often by global warming enthusiasts in recent months. George Clooney used it when interviewed at the Britannia Awards. (See the Open Letter to Lewis Black and George Clooney.) James Cameron used it in the trailer for the upcoming ShowTime series “Years of Living Dangerously”. (Refer to the open letter to Mr. Cameron and the other executive producers of that show.) And on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart included a clip of Dan Weiss of the Center for American Progress using it (See the Open Letter to Jon Stewart.)
I responded to those arguments and discussed many other topics in the posts linked above, with links to more-detailed explanations and examples…and, of course, with links to my ebooks.
The following is something I wrote for my upcoming book with the working title The Oceans Ate My Global Warming (or another possible title CO2 is Not a Control Knob). I thought you might use for it when you see the “If 99 doctors said…” argument again.
# # #
Imagine you’re running a persistent slight fever. You visit a new clinic. The nurse takes your vitals and enters them into a computer program. A short time after the computer model completes its simulations, the doctor arrives, advises you of the computer-diagnosed ailment, and prescribes controversial high-cost medications and treatment.
You’re not comfortable with the service, diagnosis, prescription or treatment, so you check out online the computer model used by the clinic. It is proclaimed to be wonderful by its programmers. But, the more you research, the more you discover the model’s defects. It can’t simulate circulation, respiration, digestion, and other basic bodily functions. There are numerous research papers exposing the flaws in the model, but they are hard to find because of all of the other papers written by the model programmers extolling its virtues.
Of course, you would not accept the computer-based medical diagnosis from a model that cannot simulate basic bodily functions and processes. But that’s the position we’re faced with climate science.
We need a second opinion for the slight warming the Earth had experienced. Unfortunately, it is not likely to be coming anytime soon, not until there are changes to the political agendas that drive climate science funding.
# # #
Enjoy your Super Bowl Sunday…for those celebrating. For everyone else, enjoy your day.
Even as a believer in the consensus of climate science, I’ve always been slightly dubious of this medical stat due to my background as a health professional. Anyone who has worked in health over the years will know that we faithfully believed for many years that Tonsils were best removed, and acidosis in cardiac events should be treated immediately with Sodium Bicarb, we are also guilty with with such issue s as thalidomide and victim blaming in family therapy and incorrectly treating gastric ulcers.. We truly believed in certain things, until someone pointed out we were wrong using good peer reviewed science. But we are still not by any means perfect. Neither is climate science, but from what I can see, the overwhelming body of evidence points in one direction and that is what I will believe until substantial studies show any different conclusions.
Whenever a doctor provides his diagnosis, ask the following simple question: “Doctor, what else could it be?”
Gareth Phillips says:
February 2, 2014 at 5:41 am
You must, at the very least then, be somewhat puzzled by the fact that temperatures have not risen whilst CO2 levels have gone up 5%. The consensus says it shouldn’t happen, the climate models definitely says it shouldn’t happen. Time to apply the scientific method.
“… the overwhelming body of evidence points in one direction and that is what I will believe until substantial studies show any different conclusions.”
What’s “substantial” in your terms? Can you correctly analyze and judge a study, not by its abstract, but by its data, method, conclusions?
If the “conclusions” can be shown to be completely off reality (such as temperatures from climate models), would you consider that as a “substantial” argument ahainst the studies conclusions?
Gareth Phillips says:
February 2, 2014 at 5:41 am
“…we faithfully believed for many years that Tonsils were best removed”
And what were the substantial study conclusions that made you change your mind? Wasn’t it just simple observation?
Look,
If you go to 99 medical researchers who all feed the same bio data into the same computer model which diagnosed you had breast cancer or say testicular cancer, and then you went to one real doctor who took an MRI, you know, that pesky empirical evidence and said you were OK would you believe the 99 using the computer models or the one using the MRI pictures?
Also, let’s say 99 doctors said you have incurable cancer and you are going to die in a year, please go home and die quietly, because the consensus says so, and one doctor says, there is no such thing as a consensus in science, we will examine all the empirical evidence for cures and test them all. Which doctor would you choose? Which doctor is going to make the breakthrough that cures your cancer, one from the consensus or from the sceptics?
Ok, I’m with you on the part about having a slight fever and using a computer to diagnose it, but the prescribed treatment isn’t just controversial, it’s a bit more like it’s recommending you receive the world’s first brain transplant.
TRG, actually at the moment its a bit like removing a lung because your oxygen saturation has gone over 80%, they want to starve the biosphere of CO2, dial CO2 back so crop tields fall.
Gareth Phillips, The logical conclusion is the null hypothesis…That the rise in temperature is mostly if not fully natural because it has done so throughout history, even before we were here.
Just because the proponents of AGW wail that ” we can’t find any explanation other than mankinds activities” doesn’t mean it’s so.
yeilds, not tields … damn virtual keyboards
Your argument would carry no weight at all with a believer. The vast majority of them don’t seem to understand that the whole theory rests on models and not on actual physical evidence. So your talk about the doctor using a computer model to diagnose your illness would be a silly argument in their eyes, because obviously real scientists are using actual observations and measurements.
They trust their scientists in the same way that a religious person trusts their religious leader.
Which is why the eventual fallout will be so harmful to Scientists in general.
Gareth, I would not want to be your patient. You would likely have bled patients to death with leeches back in the day in the name of your consensus. You would have rejected Lister and all of that antiseptic clap trap, like the leading consensus in America did for many years. My doctor is amenable to reality. If the consensus solution is not working on a problem, he looks outside the consensus. When I kept complaining about muscle pain and weakness (myalgia) while on Lipitor, even though they were the “wrong muscles” (according to the consensus at the time) for Lipitor side effects, he took me off statins and put me on what has turned out to be far better treatment, which includes niacin. I have regained my strength and now my lipid profile is fantastic. Much better than it ever was from Lipitor. And now after years of patient suffering, the consensus recognizes that statins can cause frequent myalgia and other serious side effects.
http://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/side-effects-of-statin-drugs
Your analysis that leads you to accept the climate consensus is quite simple. It reminds me of the saying that simple minds like simple solutions, frankly.
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”
Albert Einstein
I cannot help feeling that if 99 doctors said you were dead, but you sat up and disagreed with them, this one experiment would have proved them wrong.
If 97% of climate scientists say that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide means that the atmosphere’s temperature will increase, and the atmospheric carbon dioxide increases but the atmosphere’s temperature does not increase, this one experiment has proved them wrong.
Or am I arguing from authority?
Hello Gareth,
The “consensus” of the IPCC and the global warming alarmists is that atmospheric CO2 strongly drives global warming and there would be much more global warming in the future.
BUT there has been essentially NO global warming in the past approx. 10-20 years, despite significant increases in CO2.
In fact, every major dire prediction by the IPCC and the global warming alarmists has failed to materialize.
In science, the quality of one’s predictive track record is, I suggest, the best objective measure of one’s competence.
The IPCC has NO successful predictive track record – and hence no demonstrable competence.
In 2002 I was asked by my Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (“APEGA”) to debate in writing the issue of catastrophic humanmade global warming and the proposed Kyoto Protocol.
[PEGG debate, reprinted at their request by several professional journals, the Globe and Mail and la Presse in translation, by Baliunas, Patterson and MacRae]
http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
We knew with confidence based on the evidence that global warming alarmism was technically false, extremist and wasteful.
We clearly stated in our 2002 debate:
On global warming:
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
On green energy:
“The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.”
On real pollution:
“Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment – it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution.”
On squandering resources:
“Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity.”
I suggest that our four above statements are now demonstrably correct, within a high degree of confidence.
I suggest that we, and a few others like us, have been essentially correct in our predictions to date.
How did we accomplish this? We studied the science and we therefore rejected the “consensus”.
Repeating, to set your mind at rest:
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
I also wrote in an article in the Calgary Herald published on September 1, 2002, based on a phone conversation with Paleoclimatologist Dr. Tim Patterson:
On global cooling:
“If (as I believe) solar activity is the main driver of surface temperature rather than CO2, we should begin the next cooling period by 2020 to 2030.”
If you need to worry about something, worry about global cooling.
Regards, Allan
TRG says:
February 2, 2014 at 5:57 am
Ok, I’m with you on the part about having a slight fever and using a computer to diagnose it, but the prescribed treatment isn’t just controversial, it’s a bit more like it’s recommending you receive the world’s first brain transplant.
bobl says:
February 2, 2014 at 6:05 am
TRG, actually at the moment its a bit like removing a lung because your oxygen saturation has gone over 80%, they want to starve the biosphere of CO2, dial CO2 back so crop tields fall.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Brain transplant (political) and lung removal (physical) for starters. They’re going with a heart substitution with a proven nonfunctioning Rube Goldberg pump for the economic follow-up..
99% of doctors were into bleeding as a cure. You get consensus because of professional indoctrination, not because of science.
The following was posted on Bob Tisdale’s blog:
Well done, Bob! In countering the same argument, I’ve used the example of total agreement in the Egyptian Pharaoh’s physicians recommending consumption of frog’s entrails to ameliorate his toothache – the best that then current medicine could offer, and a second opinion was not even available.
Your example is far better, even though the Pharaoh provided government funding!
Other great scientific consensuses (and their Skeptics):
– Geocentric theory, Sun revolves around the Earth (Copernicus)
– Spontaneous Generation, maggots generate from meat for instance (Snow)
– Miasma, replaced by the Germ Theory of Disease (Pasteur)
It is easier to point out the ignorance of history when dealing with the consensus argument.
Professional Therapist says:
Your exactly right. I work with Psychiatrist who go looking for certain criteria to justify their diagnosis, such as bi polar disorder and thus they can get more money for the prescription and treatment of such when in fact it is PTSD but since the psychiatrist cannot or is unwilling to treat or accept that, they ignore those symptoms, etc. I must add I have worked with some of the best psychiatrist and we agree completely about this. Models are based on what we want to find and “forcing” is evident in all human relationships through things like projection, denial, assuming, and the use of anger, etc. or addictions are only strategies to reach their objectives or goals. Climate since models are strategies to reach their goals, period.
I think a more simple analogy would be one where 99 out of 100 doctors agree on a diagnosis, but all but one of the patients that they diagnosed died. I don’t think I would believe anything they said. I would sneak out the back of door of the clinic as soon as posssible. I believe at this point 99% of climates models are incorrect.
Even as late as 1904, years AFTER Dr Gorgas successfully killed the mosquitoes hovering around Havana and stopped the yellow fever and malaria killing US sailors and troops after the Cuban War (1898), the world’s doctors, builders, politicians and leaders refused to accept the mosquito-carried theory of yellow fever or malaria!
Seldom recognized, but it took the President’s (Theodore Roosevelt) personal intervention in the Panama Canal administration process to get Gorgas the authority and budget to do simple things like cleaning water, killing mosquitoes, clearing brush and trees back from the construction, getting screens installed to prevent the slaughter of the many tens of thousands who died during the French attempt …
But, you see, that only goes to show you that President Obama does not have the intelligence and wisdom to know when to listen to “the experts” and when not to listen to “the experts” ….
Who lives by the 97% consensus dies by the 97% consensus. They’ve taken enough rope to hang themselves.
==============
I like the first one much better. Perhaps accompanied by a front-cover cartoon of a schoolboy attempting to baffle his skeptical teacher with BS regarding his missing homework by pointing to his dog. This cartoon could be wordless if done right. (Maybe the dog could be large and intimidating, giving the teacher pause.)
Yet another counter example: You have a slight fever, you go in for a checkup, and 99 doctors (who all belong to the same club, and whose collective incomes depend upon very expensive treatments) tell you that you MUST have both legs cut off immediately, even though you think you really only need a couple of aspirin.
I submit that at this point, every rational person will realize that the “Doctors” have become more deadly than any disease they’re claiming to be able to treat, and one’s best option is to ignore them all and take your chances on your own.
Climate zombies are immune to doubt. They believe in the thing because it fits into the deep ruts of their settled world view. That a few slivers of science allow them to claim a basis in fact is a happy coincidence.
But we are making some progress as time passes and the world does not end. The roll back in Europe although hidden behind weasel words is an epic event. Already China is being advanced as the green standard but that only speeds the erosion of their arguments.
Super Sunday in the US today. Should be a good game.
They don’t even believe that.
If we are to assume that dogmatic climate scientists are doctor’s and they (in one fashion or another) are patients, we would then have to ask, “Why do you continue to smoke, drink, and consume illicit drugs?” These fools still fly in private jets, own big (multiple) homes near the ocean, film nearly anywhere in the world. Their idea of penance is to buy carbon offsets (Here, take this big pill. It will make you feel better!), while telling us to change our lifestyles, and please, still buy the product they produce. I’d say that if the physician says that they are sick, then maybe they should give it a rest.
Gareth Phillips says:
February 2, 2014 at 5:41 am
—
There is an overwhelming body of evidence that the earth has warmed.
Where is the overwhelming body of evidence indicating that CO2 is responsible for the vast majority of this warming?
Here’s an amusingly relevant quote from 64 years ago:
99% of doctors were 100% wrong about stomach ulcers.
Another man seen as fringe until,
Barry Marshall drank bacterium, developed stomach ulcers, and won the Nobel peace price in medicine.(R.6) Incoherent title (en.wikipedia.org)
I like fringe scientists,
“When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” – Jonathan Swift
THE LIST: scroll down
To add: B Belousov, Carl Woese, Gilbert Ling, John C. Lilly
Arrhenius (ion chemistry)
Alfven, Hans (galaxy-scale plasma dynamics)
Baird, John L. (television camera)
Bakker, Robert (fast, warm-blooded dinosaurs)
Bardeen & Brattain (transistor)
Bretz J Harlen (ice age geology)
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (black holes in 1930)
Chladni, Ernst (meteorites in 1800)
Crick & Watson (DNA)
Doppler (optical Doppler effect)
Folk, Robert L. (existence and importance of nanobacteria)
Galvani (bioelectricity)
Harvey, William (circulation of blood, 1628)
Krebs (ATP energy, Krebs cycle)
Galileo (supported the Copernican viewpoint)
Gauss, Karl F. (nonEuclidean geometery)
Binning/Roher/Gimzewski (scanning-tunneling microscope)
Goddard, Robert (rocket-powered space ships)
Goethe (Land color theory)
Gold, Thomas (deep non-biological petroleum deposits)
Gold, Thomas (deep mine bacteria)
Lister, J (sterilizing)
Lovelock, James (Gaia theory)
Maiman, T (Laser)
“Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as ‘conceptual necessities,’ etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors.” – Einstein
Margulis, Lynn (endosymbiotic organelles)
Mayer, Julius R. (The Law of Conservation of Energy)
Marshall, B (ulcers caused by bacteria, helicobacter pylori)
McClintlock, Barbara (mobile genetic elements, “jumping genes”, transposons)
Newlands, J. (pre-Mendeleev periodic table)
Nott, J. C. (mosquitos xmit Yellow Fever)
Nottebohm, F. (neurogenesis: brains can grow neurons)
Ohm, George S. (Ohm’s Law)
Ovshinsky, Stanford R. (amorphous semiconductor devices)
Pasteur, Louis (germ theory of disease)
Prusiner, Stanley (existence of prions, 1982)
Rous, Peyton (viruses cause cancer)
Semmelweis, I. (surgeons wash hands, puerperal fever )
Shechtman, Dan (quasicrystals)
Steen-McIntyre, Virginia (southwest US indians villiage , 300,000BC)
Tesla, Nikola (Earth electrical resonance, “Schumann” resonance)
Tesla, Nikola (brushless AC motor)
J H van’t Hoff (molecules are 3D)
Warren, Warren S (flaw in MRI theory)
Wegener, Alfred (continental drift)
Wright, Wilbur & Orville (flying machines)
Zwicky, Fritz (existence of dark matter, 1933)
Zweig, George (quark theory)
What if 97% of your doctors recommended bloodletting in preparation for the trepanning to let out the evil spirits in your head.
“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” -Paul Johnson
“If 99 doctors…” is a very weak analogy and pretty indicative that the person proffering it knows nothing about the topics. Doctors are practitioners not scientists…they are trained (and obligated) to prescribe treatment based on observations, test results, etc. (aka “facts”). And why their education and certification is based on standardized texts and protocols. The goal is that if I see multiple doctors (e.g. an ER doc, my GP, and a specialist) they should agree otherwise the system would break down.
Hi:
As predicted by state-of-the-art scientific sports models from the turn of the last century, Superbowl XCVIII (98) will be won in an upset victory by the London Beef Eaters vs. the Barcelona Moors to much acclaim on February 3, 2064 at the newly reconstructed Bremer Brücke Stadion, Germany. The margin of victory will be so near the predicted score of 31 to 24 as to raise serious suspicions of tampering, collusion or insider fixing such that the sports book will ask the King’s court for intervention in spite of the scientific models’ certainty. Conditions will be 16 degrees C (66 F), partly cloudy, winds out of the west at 10 KPH (6 MPH) with 95% certainty.
Fortunately, to accommodate both teams, a dome will have been constructed and built to accommodate air-conditioning barely three years earlier, just-in-time for the two teams, one thousand nine hundred and nineteen news people and all thirty-two local fans without a working telly (praise be to Allah, the most merciful).
The grain farmers on the former western Thames will have had the usual two annual record crops of summer corn and winter wheat, for the twentieth consecutive year; from Windsor all the way east to Barrier Park, Eton’s skulls be damned. All this prompting Londoners to paraphrase Browning by singing, “Oh to be in England now that winter’s here, with amber waves of grain”. All this occurring while Americans still embargo British haggis until the Lombardi trophy is returned to its rightful home, the purple mountains majesty above the fruited plain (AKA Denver).
In the mean time, officials are still at loggerheads after 50 years of negotiations as to who decides what to call football or fotbal or even how to spell it, Americans are as adamant and pigskin headed as ever and as expected since Obama outlawed the US legislature in naught 14. God save the King, from sea to shining sea!
In 1949 Walter Hess won the Nobel Prize for the Lobotomy! Yes, the ‘scientific consensus’ was the Lobotomy was a great cure for mental illness
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
bobl, a better analogy would be to say that MRI/ultrasounds/xrays says its cancer. But the biopsy is what tells us wether its malignant or benign.
“Whenever a doctor provides his diagnosis, ask the following simple question: “Doctor, what else could it be?””
What if doctor tells you it’s top secret, and he could be in trouble for telling it loud?
Information is power, and psychopaths always use their adventages no matter how many lives it would cost.
As a non-climate scientist, I look to Earth’s long history as the strongest evidence that negative feedbacks must overwhelm any posited positive feedbacks built into the models. Otherwise, given the many catastrophic events in Earth’s past, we would have surely gone the way of Venus long ago. We don’t even know of all of the negative feedback mechanisms that exist. Who would have imagined just a couple of years ago that thunderstorms were capable of ejecting gamma rays and antimatter into space!
If 99 doctors told me ephemeral humors were clogging up my humories
(1)I’d check and see how many of them ever had the term “quack” used near them or the people they associated with. In the real world the finest of any art or science associate with the finest: the dopers and cheats associate with the dopers and cheats.
(2)I’d check to see
if even one other field of science tried to tell me about fundamental reality
using “quack” level pseudo-scientific “facts”
they claimed were true in their field,
but not one
single
other field
on earth.
Things like
“Spheres heated to full temp in vacuum,
growing warmer
when the sphere is immersed and spun
in frigid nitrogen/oxygen,
phase change refrigerated with water.
Warmer than when there was heating in vacuum alone.
Warmer than the cold nitrogen bath itself.
In climatology it is regularly taught, that “It is possible to heat an object that was already pre-heated to full temperature in vacuum, by immersing and spinning it in frigid nitrogen/oxygen gas.”
Statements incorporating such bizarre claims are obvious, instant tips:
Is there any real science that teaches this?
If not, then it’s quack pseudo-science.
End of Story.
In climatology it’s regularly taught that it is possible to suspend reflective insulation
between a fire illuminating a rock, making that rock hotter because of energy kept from the rock.
Is there any other field which teaches it’s possible to suspend reflective insulation between a light from a fire, and a rock, and cause less light to reach the rock,
but make every heat sensor on the surface of the rock show more energy from the fire arriving on the rock?
Of couse not. That’s two strikes – big strikes – easily compared to real science –
– making it quack pseudo-science.
I’d check those doctors’ thinking against the real scientific facts of the universe.
against the dictionary definitions of “delusional” and “quack” and “charlatan” and “fraud.”
Particularly I’d look at them against the definitions of those words.
(3)I’d check to see what people generally thought of what being a doctor in that field actually meant to others. How good is their reputation for being right vs being corrected by people so often, they have code words they don’t tolerate associated with them or they storm out –
“code words” and phrases like ”fraud,” ”scam,”
”against laws of physics”
“against laws of science”
“against laws of thermodynamics”
“against laws of nature”
“against universally known law”
(4)I’d check to see what the quality of the review boards who ok’d the doctors’ credentials and work. If their review boards are widely reputed to be simply con games, I’d look for evidence.
If I saw evidence of them knowingly participating in scam science or, knowingly covering up errors, I’d know they were practicing scam pseudo-science.
(5)I’d check to see if they actually could predict what the instruments of their self professed field would do under test conditions.
If simply asking them to predict which way a thermometer would go under certain conditions made them lock up like petrified deer in midnight headlights – I’d seek expertise from a real doctor.
Just because you’re a witch doctor
Just because you’re with a witch doctor
Just because you’re a government doctor
doesn’t mean you’re a real doctor.
If 99 economists said that raising the minimum wage destroys jobs…
If 99 economists said that trying to stop the global climate cycle was more expensive than adjusting ourselves to it…
rogerknights: And the coloring of the dog’s fur resembles a couple of continents.
February 2, 2014 at 5:41 am
“… the overwhelming body of evidence points in one direction and that is what I will believe until substantial studies show any different conclusions.”
This is an odd statement. Perhaps Mr. Phillips can tell us what “evidence” points to AGW? I know of computer models, which are not evidence. I know of physics, which may or may not be appropriately applied but we know are incomplete and not evidence. I know little is understood about natural variability, again not evidence. I know clouds and water vapor, both natural and which should be major drivers of GW are poorly understood and certainly not evidence in support of AGW. I know there is considerable disagreement (lack of understanding) over the CO2 cycle and man’s contribution, which is again not evidence. There is no data that I am aware of which supports the theory of AGW. Hardly an endorsement of “evidence points in one direction.” And I assume we are talking about AGW caused by manmade CO2 and not other issues such as carbon black or albedo changes caused by man which perhaps should be discussed more.
Unfortunately we now find newspaper editors becoming climate experts and misleading all their readers just like George Clooney is doing. This is an article called “ Frigid weather doesn’t negate a warming trend “ which appeared in USA TODAY recently.
http://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/4345412-frigid-weather-doesn-t-negate-warming-trend/
I found this USA TODAY article biased and factually lacking. Global annual temperatures have not risen now for 16 years and there is a global warming halt since 1998. Northern Hemisphere winters have been cooling for the same period. Winters in Contiguous US have been cooling in every state since 1998. The same is happening in Canada. So this frigid weather is not just weather as the Viewpoint article implies but part of a winter climate change that has been happening for nearly 2 decades. The Northern Hemisphere Oceans are cooling especially the North Atlantic and the North Pacific which has ben cooling since 2005. Cooler ocean cycles can run for 30-35 years as we saw in 1880-1910 and again 1945-1975. Some scientists are predicting that during the next 20-30 years we will have colder weather, especially the winters. As we have seen across many parts of United States ,they are having shortages in natural gas and propane for winter heating. Many regions have inadequate road clearing infrastructure and emergency procedures to deal with the winters like they used to have during 1945-1980. Articles like this are not helpful as they give the public and the business community a false sense of climate anticipation. We should prepare for global cooling, not global warming as this current winter clearly shows. These colder winters do negate the warming trend that has been non existent for 16 years now and this is likely to continue for several decades at least and possibly until 2030/2040.
Coach Springer says ‘99% of doctors were into bleeding as a cure’. To be more precise, they were called surgeons, who were the medical establishment till the seventeenth century when they got academically trained doctors as rivals. They had a very good reason to trust blood letting, because after this treatment almost all patients recovered. This was not because of the pretty innocent blood letting but because sick people usually recover by themselves. The surgeons had overwhelming evidence for their therapy. Of course, they could not do anything about pestilence because this was usually considered a punishment by a supernatural being.
Bob,
You wrote this?
Must’ve sprained your typing finger(s.)
/s
Forging a consensus is the oldest political trick in the history of science. To denounce Einstein they wrote a book “100 against Einstein.” Would these same people thus denounce Einstein as anti-science?
steven says on February 2, 2014 at 7:16 am
“As a non-climate scientist, I look to Earth’s long history as the strongest evidence that negative feedbacks must overwhelm any posited positive feedbacks built into the models.”
Good comments Steven. The following comment is from 2011.
Please note Counterproof 3:
“If Earth’s climate system were so volatile, humanity would probably not have survived to this time, and yet behold, here we are.”
___________
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/05/08/lawrence-solomon-are-high-co2-levels-once-again-saving-the-amazon-forest/
We truly understand so very little about the science of “global warming”.
First, global warming theory starts with the observation that CO2 has (mostly) been increasing in the atmosphere since at least 1958, when rigorous measurement methods began at Mauna Loa. The first hypothesis Is that humanity is the primary cause of this increase in atmospheric CO2, due to the burning of fossil fuels.
Counterproof 1: Natural seasonal CO2 fluxes are much greater than humanmade emissions. CO2 lags Earth temperature in time at all measured time scales, that is, CO2 trend changes occur after, not before, temperature trend changes, so Hypo 1 states that the future is causing the past, a very significant flaw. Furthermore, there were brief periods of annual atmospheric CO2 decline during this period, consistent with global cooling that occurred up to about 1975. This all suggests that temperature may be the primary driver of CO2, rather than humanity.
Second, it is a commonly-accepted hypothesis, based on physical principles, that increased atmospheric CO2 will cause some global warming. The basic physics suggests a hypothetical doubling of CO2 will cause average global warming of about 1 degree C, hardly catastrophic, since this hypothetical doubling of CO2 is not imminent.
Counterproof 2: See Counterproof 1. These observations further suggest, ironically, that temperature may be the primary driver of CO2, rather than CO2 driving temperature.
Third, the global warming catastrophists further hypothesize that there are huge amplifiers in the natural climate system that will cause this 1 degree C hypothetical warming to be amplified many times by the natural climate system, and their climate computer models use this further “amplifier” hypothesis to predict catastrophic global warming consequences for Earth should society continue to burn fossil fuels.
Counterproof 3: There is absolutely NO EVIDENCE for these alleged huge positive amplifiers, called “positive feedbacks”, in the natural climate system. In fact, there is significant evidence of “negative feedbacks” that would diminish the hypothetical 1 degree C global warming “climate sensitivity” to a figure of 0.5C or less, based on satellite temperature measurement data that has been available since 1979. The predicted catastrophic global warming just is NOT HAPPENING AS PREDICTED by climate catastrophists. There is also the common sense argument: If Earth’s climate system were so volatile, humanity would probably not have survived to this time, and yet behold, here we are.
So what is actually happening?
IF the catastrophic global warming hypothesis is wrong, as strongly suggested above, what is an alternative hypothesis that better fits the observed data?
First, global temperatures and natural seasonal effects (such as photosynthesis and oxidation, Henry’s Law, etc.) drive atmospheric CO2; atmospheric CO2 does not drive temperature. Humanmade CO2 emissions may play a significant role in atmospheric CO2 concentrations or they may not, but they are certainly NOT the dominant factor.
Second, global temperature change is a predominantly a natural phenomenon, driven primarily by minor changes in solar output and other extraterritorial factors, and other purely natural variations. Earth warmed naturally from about 1850 to 1945, cooled from about 1945 to recently, and is EARTH NOW BEGINNING TO COOL AGAIN, PART OF A NATURAL CYCLE THAT IS POORLY UNDERSTOOD.
Science’s predictive abilities are quite poor in this subject area, and climate science has been badly degraded by the political agendas and greed that driven global warming hysteria.
99 doctors would have said it is good for you to smoke. Now they would not. The arrogance of “doctors” is astounding. Yes, of course we should listen to what they say. But no, they are not always right, in fact sometimes they are completely wrong. The same goes for “scientists”.
” but from what I can see, the overwhelming body of evidence points in one direction and that is what I will believe until substantial studies show any different conclusions.”
I prefer to look at the actual temperatures, not thousands of studies based on the rubbish that they get out of models.
It is simple. Look at the data. Is the earth behaving as the CAGW hypothesis predicted? No it isn’t. That in itself shows that thousands of papers, all based on “accepted” assumptions based on the output of models, are wrong.
Mushroom George used the blood letting example.
Yes, 99 out of 100 doctors in the 1700s would have recommended blood letting. So the analogy is what would you have done if you were diagnosed with a throat infection and doctors wanted to let out nearly a gallon of bad blood as treatment? It’s thought that George Washington wouldn’t have died of a throat infection had he lived in the late 1800s when the blood letting was being discredited.
Climate Science is at the same stage as medicine was when blood letting was a recommended remedy.
After the doctor inputs all of the measured data on your health, the model spits out a diagnosis. But the doctor soon discovers that no matter what the symptoms of the patient, his wonderful computer program still spits out the same diagnosis.
Then the wise doctor inputs parameters for a perfectly healthy individual, and the computer models still spit out the same diagnosis.
What’s a doctor to do?
Gareth Phillips says…..
“…the overwhelming body of evidence points in one direction…”
And so you decided to march in the other direction. Classic!
On this page there is an ad for Roy W. Spencers “Blunder ….. ” It contains a medical analogy on diet that I think is much like your 99 doctors question. Clearly explained connection of what the scientific method is and how the IPCC science speculations are stupid beyond belief is more effective in winning arguments. IMHO.
Do you agree that observations should suffice? Do we have to have peer reviewed observations? I am referring to the IPCC surface temperature projections compared to observations and the 16+ years of surface temperature standstill. Imagine 99 climate scientists saying temps will rise in the next 16 years and they did not?
Anyway here are some of the observations and peer review by those very same climate scientists.
99 doctors from a big drug company told me I urgently needed to take their new medication. One independent doctor told me they must be having a laugh. I know what i would do. CAGW scientists are the pharma industry doctors.
One funeral at a Time . . .
99 doctors of dreer in the ranks
99 doctors of dreer
If one of those doctors should happen to tank
98 doctors of dreer
The doctors analogy is pretty silly when you think about it.
The patient in this case is healthy as a horse and never asked for medical intervention. In fact, feeding the atmosphere CO2, an indisputable nutrient for plants and life would only contribute to the patients health.
Try this one:
If most of the doctors grabbed a robust and rapidly growing teenager and insisted that his parents need to severely cut back on his protein consumption because protein is poison to the human body, then we have a proper analogy.
IOW, the dog would be 75% blue?
Gareth, do you have the peer reviewed evidence that shows that the steepish rise in global surface temperature since the mid 1970s was mostly caused by man’s greenhouse gases?
Also can you provide me with an explanation (no peer review necessary here) as to the cause[s] of the steepish global surface temperature rise between 1910 to 1940?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/image/j/l/warmingtrend.gif
What about the other 661,301?
There are 661, 400 physicians and surgeons in the United States in 2008. This is according to the 2010 Statistical Abstract of the U.S. Census Bureau.
http://www.numberof.net/number-of-doctors-in-usa/
If 99 doctors said that Seattle will win the Superbowl, would you bet the ranch on it? 99 statisticians? 99 sportscasters?
Reminds me of the commercials in an Abott and Costello Radio Rerun Tape of “Who’s on FIrst”… one ad goes “More doctors smoke Camel than any other brand”…
eventually they got just as ill (lung disease,etc.) as the non-doctors, and the advert’s hypothesis (if there indeed was one, other than make more money) was falsified….
@Daffy Duck – I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy….good that that procedure is a thing of the past (whether or not “Frances” was true)…
Gareth Phillips:
I write to respectfully request a clarification.
You begin your post at February 2, 2014 at 5:41 am saying you are
Please explain what you mean by “the consensus of climate science”.
Several people have assumed your meaning, but such assumptions are likely wrong because the only “consensus of climate science” of which I am aware is that ‘Regions of the Earth have climates’.
At present your meaning is very unclear and I would appreciate a clarification.
Richard
Speaking as a physician, citing the majority of doctors’ beliefs about much of anything can be an exercise in worthlessness. . .
http://www.healio.com/hematology-oncology/news/print/hematology-oncology/%7B241d62a7-fe6e-4c5b-9fed-a33cc6e4bd7c%7D/cigarettes-were-once-physician-tested-approved
The great fear of the climate scientists is that they were wrong. They know full well what the implications of observations means and it is causing a blind panic. They are running around like headless chickens to explain the lack of warming and it’s fun to watch.
“when you hear hoof beats, you look for horses, not zebras.”
In this case the alarmists are looking for the zebras. (along with unicorns, garden fairies and leprechauns.)
What if 99 out of 100 doctors told you that you had a fatal disease that would have very mild symptoms for 10 years then suddenly kill you. The treatments they proposed are very painful and expensive. They want to put you on a daily regimen of very expensive drugs (snake oil), which makes you violently sick shortly after you take it, but is habit forming and causes hallucinations. On researching the issue you discover that almost all 99 of those doctors have a financial interest in the makers of the drug they want to prescribe for your treatment and you discover that they spend most of their time on the seminar circuit pitching that drug and the rest of their time defending against numerous malpractice lawsuits most of which are quietly settled out of court by them making large payouts from the drug maker.
Would you still submit to their diagnosis without asking any questions or would you have a long talk with the 1 doctor that says you are just fine and the symptoms you are having are caused by the drugs the 99 doctors have been giving you for your supposed illness.
You missed the two most important points:
— Spectrum of expertise: Both a pilot and a chemist have a high degree of expertise: If they (99%) said “don’t mix those two chemicals” or “don’t move the flight controls like that” then you definetly shouldn’t do it. But, if a PhD stock analyst said “you should buy these investments” or a veteran political analyst said “you should run on these campaign points” you wouldn’t be crazy to go against them. Note: All these professions are impressive people (like doctors) but on this latter end of the spectrum, their expertise is demonstrably no better than a blind ape throwing darts, meaning that are often wrong where a lay-man is correct.
— What factors influence the spectrum of expertise? Independent and (close to) identical sampling. While chemical mixing under controlled conditions always produces the same outcome (making the chemist a strong expert) the investment environment changes from the 70’s to the 80’s and 90’s, and so even the best forecasts are presented with a high degree of uncertainty
I think people understand all this, it’s just a matter of where climate science fits on this spectrum, probably further toward speculative side than medical doctors.
If earth’s temperature increases 1° C based on a few hundred ppm of CO2 increase, then what do the models say earth temperature ought to be if it increases 20 times to the level it was in the geological past? How does it backfit much less how well does it project? What explains the backfit variance? How does that apply to projections? How do you fix the models to reflect reality? Once the variables have been incorporated properly and completely, we can have 97% confidence in the projections.
What if this chap had decided that the consensus was overwhelming and gave up? Science would be worse off. This is where we are with the IPCC and the related Climastrologists and consensus. They want everyone to give up and go with the flow. Not me Sir.
rogerknights says: “IOW, the dog would be 75% blue?”
Brown continents on white will be sufficient.
“All professions are conspiracies against the laity” (George Bernard-Shaw)
Again, speaking as a Physician and their expertise. . .
Surely, the question should be: “Doctor, if I had an unknown disease, what would the prognosis be?”
If 99 doctors told me that my headache will go away if I take an aspirin, I’d probably take an aspirin. But if 99 doctors told me that my headache will go away if they amputate both my arms, both my legs, put out my eyes and cut out my tongue, I’d be unlikely to do anything but seek out additional information and expertise.
However, this analogy is worse than that.
In effect, 99 doctors are telling me to to amputate all my limbs, put out my eyes and cut off my tongue for a headache I don’t even have but might have in the future.
However, this analogy is even worse than that
Not only are 99 doctors telling me to cut off my limbs, blind myself, and cut out my tongue for a problem I don’t even have, they have the exact same symptoms I do (as in none) yet not one of them has, to protect the future of their children (their own children!) acquired land in Alaska, or northern Canada or Siberia which will be the only “safe” places in Canada.
And as bad as that analogy now appears, it is even worse than that. Because it turns out that thousands upon thousands upon thousands of doctors have said the exact opposite, but they aren’t “headache” doctors so the 99 say the thousands don’t count. In fact, the 99 doctors have presented their headache models and quietly added a footnote to the effect that their own expertise says that the headache models are probably wrong (see Monkton’s article on AR5). But they figure we should accept their treatment anyway, while exempting themselves from it.
yes we all know much clooney nos about globle warming
acquired land in Alaska, or northern Canada or Siberia which will be the only “safe” places in Canada.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
only “safe” places in the world Dave. Siberia and Alaska aren’t in Canada you bleeding moron.
Mike wrote:
Actually using doctors is the perfect analogy. If you think doctors prescribe treatment that is based on science then you’re ignorant of how medicine actually works.
Take heart disease as an example. Just recently the American Heart Association released new guidelines to prevent heart disease. Along with the release of these guidelines they actually admitted that cholesterol levels have no correlation with heart disease which would be shocking to most doctors to learn. I was blown away to see the AHA finally admit it. But the funny thing is that the new guidelines would actually put more people on statins, a drug that’s function is to lower LDL-C. Now doctors don’t want to get sued or run out of the business so I fully anticipate they will follow the new guidelines and end up putting even more of their patients on statins, a drug that’s only function is to lower LDL-C which is proven to not have a correlation with heart disease but does cause a host of side effects in patients and makes the drug companies billions each and every year.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/11/13/health/new-guidelines-redefine-use-of-statins.html
The way I see it, the inherent presumption behind this argument is that one is dealing with an issue too difficult to assess for yourself. Now, perhaps for an actor, who has looks but no brains, this is true.
But for many people, it is not an impossible task to assess the evidence for themselves. What people need to understand is that climate science is not high level. The claims don’t require advanced training to check or understand.
A more analogous situation would perhaps be if a teachers union were lobbying for class size restrictions. Don’t you think you ought to just defer to their expert judgment? After all, they know how to educate, you don’t, right?
Except almost anyone could read research on how effective or ineffective a smaller class size is at the margin.
Except, I suppose, actors.
The mistreatment of the many highly skilled skeptics over the years has been equivalent to the smearing of whistle blowers through a plethora of accusatory dismissals to silence or neutralize their impact.
The most disturbing part is the widespread, multi-layered and uniform government involvement in doing so.
No other topic has ever been so elevated to government advocacy at every and all costs.
AGW is the ultimate exposing of how government can run amok with a severity most believed was previously impossible.
I’ll wager that all of the contributors and visitors to WUWT, if asked 25 years ago what they thought was possible, few if any, would ever had imagined how wide and deep the dishonesty in governments has become.
The severity has shaken and challenged every confidence that governments can be crafted with adequate protections.
To watch so many politicians, bureaucrats & academics produce and spew forth (with straight faces) such large doses of indescribably grotesque falsehoods is so disappointing.
Where is humanity heading when something so wrong can grow so large?
Before I go here are some things to think about. We don’t know what it is so it must be co2. Bad climate has literally led to witch hunts in the past. Many women lost their lives due to our bad assumptions.
If the Met Office of activists performs literally worse at future prediction than a monkey throwing darts or a random number generator (which would at least average being right on the basic direction of a warmer/cooler question 50% of the time), they continue to be employed.
Physicians versus activists are utterly not comparable, as reward for the latter has next to nothing to do with actual performance.
The hidden core fallacy in the “99 doctors” comparison is trying to get the reader to falsely think of activists as equivalent to physicians. The “scientists” who are the cornerstone of the CAGW movement and related allies (Mann, Hansen, Ehrlich, etc) are blatantly activists. Not everyone who is a self-proclaimed scientist deserves the title; having a college education, as most people here do, is not that special today.
An activist who correctly predicted the “pause” in global warming 2 decades ago (as some skeptics did) would have been shunned and wouldn’t have been a CAGW activist in the first place.
The strength of an appeal to authority depends on whether the presumed authority has any real meaning, whether it passes actual tests versus reality:
For engineers it does. For economists (less often demonstrative of actual net-beneficial results) it means far less. For activists, it means nothing. Activist groups are the extreme on that spectrum, where towing the party line and not reality is what gets rewarded.
I am not convinced by any of this.
I did not go to the (climate)doctor in the first place. He came to me
When was the last time a doctor came around , unsolicited, to diagnose me and offer me an expensive and disruptive cure?. Under those circumstances, I would certainly ask for a second opinion.
I would ask who the h*ll he thought he was , intruding and wrecking , based on some whacky theory that he could provide no evidence or symtoms for
@gareth Phillips at 5:41 am
we faithfully believed for many years that Tonsils were best removed, and acidosis in cardiac events should be treated immediately with Sodium Bicarb, we are also guilty with with such issue s as thalidomide and victim blaming in family therapy and incorrectly treating gastric ulcers.. We truly believed in certain things, until someone pointed out we were wrong using good peer reviewed science.
Great examples. Here’s another one: Swine Flu vaccine 1976. Viewed as a successful intervention by some:, as a first class SNAFU by others. Indeed, it is a prime example of the situation we face to day in the climate political debate. How do you know you prevented a crisis at great cost if it is debatable that the crisis was real in the first place?
And here we have the experts. A gangster, a comic actor and an inexperienced student.
PMHinSC says:
February 2, 2014 at 7:30 am
February 2, 2014 at 5:41 am
“… the overwhelming body of evidence points in one direction and that is what I will believe until substantial studies show any different conclusions.”
What evidence are you referring to?
1) Is it that sea level rise is rapidly accelerating?
Lets see… tide gauges clearly say NO.
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/news-cache/wo-bleibt-der-meeres-anstieg-verlangsamung-statt-beschleunigung (in German)
English version here…. http://notrickszone.com/2013/12/12/veteran-meteorologist-old-and-new-data-show-sea-level-rise-deceleration-alarmist-projections-contradicted/
And the east side of Manhatten is not underwater….
2) Maybe its the “hot spot” in the air over the tropics, which should be there if the models are right.
Uh… nope not there.
3) Surely, since CO2 is steadily rising, temperatures are steadily rising too.
Wooo……. big problem here… temperatures flat for 17yrs and counting. According to some experts the heat must be hiding in the deep ocean, and according to some others… the missing heat is in the Arctic, and still others claim its still warming globally, its just not showing up on the thermometers we have in place.
4) Arctic ice is completely melted in summer?
No help for the CAGW types there.
5) Antarctic sea ice must be melting according to the models.
Nope, its growing… in fact it is at the highest level in the satellite era.
Overall, global sea ice area is currently above the long term average.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
Perhaps good doctor, you could please point out the evidence (not models) that clearly says
CAGW is a problem we must address? I’m having a real problem here….
UK Global warming forecast for 2014. Fen Beagle cartoon…
http://fenbeagleblog.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/2014/
“peter says:
February 2, 2014 at 6:09 am
Your argument would carry no weight at all with a believer. The vast majority of them don’t seem to understand that the whole theory rests on models and not on actual physical evidence”
##############
wrong.
The theory was developed in 1850, before models.
In 1896 the first prediction was made:
If you double C02, temperature will increase by 5C
No models. Physics.
nobody believes in the theory BECAUSE of models. We believe in the theory– more c02 means higher temps- because THAT is what fundamental physics dictates.
Now, REFINING the theory, estimating the EXACT amount of warming we will see from doubling
is possible in TWO WAYS
A) run a controlled earth experiment where you double C02 and hold everything else constant
( haha)
B) run a model.
You might also try to narrow down estimate on sensitivity. Those are observational studies
But to do that you have to make assumptions about the linearity of sensitivity. You can make that assumption and answers come out to be 1-6C.. not much progress from the initial 5C estimate, but SOME progress
The last part of my prior comment could be open to misinterpretation, but, to clarify:
Some professions allow being greatly wrong rarely to never, like an engineer can lose his license. Accordingly, engineers are most reliably true scientists in mindset.
Other professions are intermediate on a hard to soft scale. For instance, some of what gets stated by media-highlighted economists is relatively rock solid (especially basic microeconomics), but some isn’t, with some influenced heavily by dogma and with authors unlikely to lose their jobs either way.
Activism is a profession far worse than that.
Steven Mosher says:
Now, REFINING the theory, estimating the EXACT amount of warming we will see from doubling
is possible in TWO WAYS
A) run a controlled earth experiment where you double C02 and hold everything else constant
( haha)
B) run a model.
You forgot one: empirical observations.
Observations show conclusively that any warming due to a rise in CO2 is minuscule.
Sorry about those models… ☹
If anybody, anywhere, at any time ever uses the “if 99 doctors said…” argument I swear I will be before a court of law and pleading involuntary manslaughter.
Due to the results of a test conducted in September 2003 a primary care doctor told me that nobody lives beyond 5 years. Thus I should’ve been dead 5 years ago. This was not a fly-by-night doctor who made that prediction. She was a professor of medicine at a renowned, big city, university affiliated hospital.
In June 2006 I met with a surgeon who performs transplant operations for which I would qualify. According to the literature such operations were performed with a life expectancy of 2 years or less. This surgeon asked me if I would consider the “risks” of that operation at that time. I told him, “No.”
Later, the guideline for that operation was changed for people with a life expectancy of 1 to 3 years.
In early 2007 I asked a specialist to provide me with a range of life expectancies. That doctor (who I will always remember and respect) told me it was very difficult to do but he would attempt to give me an answer. He sat back, thought, and said, “Anywhere from a few years up to 10 to 12.”
He cautioned me that it was more likely to be a few years however.
In 2008 the aforementioned surgeon told me the most critical of my test numbers had not changed and, for the first time, rescheduled the usual 6 month follow up appt. to a year.
That same year I read a quote from someone with the same medical condition who said, “Most people go to a dumb doctor who tells them, ‘you have … so just go home and die. That is not true. We need to get the word out.”
In early 2011 I again met with the surgeon and told him I didn’t think I had the courage to undergo the transplant. He told me there were good reasons not to undergo it and said, “I could shorten your life.” (If only our global warriors were so introspective about what they propose society do.) I have since declined the operation.
In July of 2011 I was hospitalized. That “dumb” doctor told me I had 6 months to a year left to live.
In October 2013 I met with a new specialist who asked me if I had prepared a living will. (Rank amateur.)
I may not be the smartest person on the face of the earth. I’m not good at argument. But if some sniveling dweeb wants to tell us we should transplant the mechanisms of society with an unknown replacement from an unproven source, and then use the infantile, ‘…if a doctor said…” argument, I will meet that person on any stage, in any venue they like, and I will explain a little medicine to them. Bring it on.
Mr. Watts has my e-mail address.
Mosher is mistaken.
There were models for millenia before computers.
Chess is a model. not much use for predicting the outcome of battles, but has lots of uses for training the brain , passing time and explaing basic tactics.
A model is a set of rules applied to some sort of sequence. usually time
Mosh
In quoting Arrhenius you omitted to mention that he did not take int account clouds and in 1906 drastically revised down his estimate of warming from a doubling of co2 to 1.6c
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius
Tonyb
Then there are strange happenings like the Chair of the AGU Ethics Committee using wire fraud and probably forged documents to poison the climate debate. John Beale guiding the US governments climate policies while lying about a secret position at the CIA.
These are the “doctors” making the diagnosis in the first place.
Steven Mosher says:
Now, REFINING the theory, estimating the EXACT amount of warming we will see from doubling
is possible in TWO WAYS
A) run a controlled earth experiment where you double C02 and hold everything else constant
( haha)
Sorry Mosh, even if you COULD do this, it wouldn’t suffice. Our real Earth has many parameters that interact with one another. Even if you did do that, you would only show that you probably have the equations correct for CO2… nothing more. You still would not know whether the real earth would warm by only a miniscule amount or catastrophically, due to CO2. Afterall, it’s the feedbacks that lead to the catastrophic possibilities.
Empirical observations to date indicate that the net feedbacks are negative. Thus, the amount of warming we should expect based on empirical evidence so far is that net warming will be LESS than that of CO2 effects alone. Pretty much exactly one would expect to find in a stable climate system that has been around for over a billion years.
The 99 doctors argument is indeed disconcerting. This is probably because it is presented by offering a class of participants who enjoy a strong presumption of considerable infallibility. Some years back I was discussing this with an engineering student, and offered “cross-culturally”, the suggestion that I thought the average doctor isn’t any smarter than the average engineer. “I don’t either,” he replied, “they just have stronger stomachs.” Broadly considered, and justifiably, they get cut some slack for this.
However, I believe it was the redoubtable Lewis Thomas, author of “The Youngest Science – Notes of a Medicine Watcher” (1983), who wondered with regard to illness, at what point in history, one was better off going to a physician rather than staying home and letting Nature fix things Herself, as She often would do. Tough question (100 years? – argue as you will). But I think medicine (strong stomachs considered) is over that hump.
Climate science? Not so much.
I really like the tonsils analogy. If anyone is confronted by the “99 doctors” argument, just point down your throat and say, “See, I don’t have any tonsils. My kinds had the same problems and they have their tonsils. What changed?”
The warmist belief is a little more complicated. Their allegiance is primarily to the prescribed treatment rather than the veracity of the diagnosis. In fact, they believe the medicine will make the patient better regardless of whether the diagnosis is accurate or not.
Skeptics have primarily engaged in the debate of the diagnosis. It may be more productive to attack the treatment. Lomborg, as a statistician and economist, appears to have done just that.
The big problem is the 99% or 97% number is a lie right off the bat. If you let your opponents define the argument you will lose. The best approach is to show the 99% number is a lie. Once that is done you are showing your opponent is dishonest and then you win.
Another counter-argument is that it wasn’t so long ago that 99% (or so) scientists prescribed to the theory of eugenics. There are countless other examples, but you get the point.
In the early 1950s doctor were advising people to take radiation. Before that mercury was good and then sulphur.
Gareth, You would really worry me. Any one that would go through the logic that you espouse and come out the other side believing the same as before …. well suffice it to say that I would not want you near any thing I was doing.
The best approach is to show the 99% number is a lie. Once that is done you are showing your opponent is dishonest and then you win.
Been done Richard. Made no difference.
Steven Mosher says:
Now, REFINING the theory, estimating the EXACT amount of warming we will see from doubling
is possible in TWO WAYS
…
B) run a model.
Shouldn’t that be:
B) run a properly constructed model?
Has that been done?
Stephen Hawking had been incorrectly predicted to enjoy the last months of his life almost 40 years ago – indicating that medicine isn’t quite at the same level of precision and reliability as physics (h/t Lubos Motl). Now we have alarmists suggesting that the climate “science” is at the same level of precision and reliability as medicine.
Albert Einstein:
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
If somebody has already posted this today, my apologies for repeating you.
Jimbo wrote as part of an excerpt –
“Images of the metals showed their atoms were arranged in a way that broke well-established rules of how crystals formed, a finding that fundamentally altered how chemists view solid matter…..”
That is actually a good example, as long as climate is being discussed within the confines of carbon dioxide it is certain that genuine climate research is not being discussed.
In 1990 I discover a hexagonal form with pentagonal features based on the antecedent Penrose tiling which naturally bumps up to quasicrystals and I asked for assistance in putting the helping to put the diagram in context of the tiling and crystal patterns –
http://fac-web.spsu.edu/math/tile/aperiodic/penrose/kites/goldenrhombs.gif
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Quasicrystal
There is such a great story behind 432 Degrees and the non periodic formation of the crystals as indicative of the background conditions which prevail but this has not resonated with anyone else to my knowledge no more than the climate spectrum between equatorial climate (zero Degree inclination) and a polar climate ( 90 degree inclination) at the other end of the spectrum.
If “the 99” were always right or “the consensus” (real or fabricated) was always right then we’d still be bleeding people as a treatment for anemia.
While everything from the 1 or 3% isn’t always right or an advance, every advance started with the 1 or 3%.
Who believed Louis Pasteur at the start?
Oh, and are these “99 doctors” MDs or witchdoctors?
for me the bottom line is nobody can give an answer as to what the temps should be. man causing warming is bad but man stopping all warming is good. either it’s bad to affect the climate or its not.
and with no baseline to strive for its all a huge waste anyways.
theres a huge difference between being environmentally responsible and being a retard. and many have gone full retard on this.
I have always thought that the folks who claim CO2 was such a sensitive greenhouse gas could demonstrate that to the common folks by a simple experiment. A cheap one too as far as these things go.
Go into the desert where it is nice and flat (not sure desert really needed, just sounds like fun) and build two identical cubical structures — small houses with no roof such that the sun can shine down on them inside for several hours a day. Now put a table in the middle of both. Put on both tables a thermometer as sensitive as our technology can make that sends a continuous record out of the house via cable or something else that is automatic.
Record both setups for many days to make sure we can calibrate the two and that they are in sync. Now, introduce 1500 ppm of CO2 into one of the setups and watch the temp readings rise — or not.
I wager no rise in temps at all, but would really like to see someone try to set up a fair experiment to prove CO2’s warming capability out in the real world.
In the US at least, doctor errors (misdiagnosis, unnecessary drugs and procedures and unintended consequences) are the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.
http://www.health-care-reform.net/causedeath.htm
http://chriskresser.com/medical-care-is-the-3rd-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-us
I use this simple retort, whenever I am accosted with the doctor analogy.
dmacleo wrote –
“for me the bottom line is nobody can give an answer as to what the temps should be. man causing warming is bad but man stopping all warming is good. either it’s bad to affect the climate or its not.
and with no baseline to strive for its all a huge waste anyways.”
There is an energy budget for the planet across it orbital circuit however the way latitudes across the globe spend that budget is dependent on the degree of inclination. A planet with zero degree inclination will experience benign effects across latitudes whereas a planet with a 90 degree inclination will experience extreme variations,at least if it had the same orbital traits of the Earth and the same daily rotational speeds.
What is missing from climate research is making planetary comparisons irrespective of planetary composition and distance from the Sun so therefor is a baseline even if it is ,unfortunately, ignored.
Correction to my above post at 7:48am today
Second, global temperature change is a predominantly a natural phenomenon, driven primarily by minor changes in solar output and other extraterritorial factors, and other natural variations. Earth warmed naturally to 1945, cooled from about 1945 to 1975, warmed until recently, and EARTH NOW BEGINNING TO COOL AGAIN, PART OF A NATURAL CYCLE.
markstoval:
Your proposed experiment at February 2, 2014 at 11:17 am is faulty.
Your two structures each needs to extend up to the top of the atmosphere and they need to be transparent to IR.
The IR emitted from the ground in the 15micron CO2 absorbtion band is effectively all absorbed in the lower ~100m of the atmosphere so your proposed experiment would demonstrate nothing.
Richard
I think this is the wrong approach in analysing the 99% doctor analogy. The analogy is wrong even if you are in the climate change “consensus” so lets look at it from that perspective.
The first problem with the analogy is that it typically involves death as the cost of being wrong yet I don’t think there is a single scientist that claims climate change will wipe out every single human. So, for the analogy to be representative in this respect, it cannot involve the patient dying.
The second problem is that the analogy never includes any negative repercussions of following the doctors advice. While many climate scientists claim this is also the case when implementing GHG mitigation, I doubt any economist would claim that. Therefore the analogy must include some negative consequence of following the doctors advice.
So what doctor-analogy can work under these criteria? One might be a patient with a bad knee that is getting slightly worse over time. The doctor says they can give a shot of cortisone. What is the obvious choice? There is none. It will depend on the age of the patient, how bad the pain is, how many previous injections they’ve had, etc, etc.
No doubt there are better specifics but the point is, even under the “main stream” belief in climate change, a simple analogy doesn’t fit the reality of the situation.
Some points about “99 doctors” and consensus:
“99 doctors” or “97 percent of scientists” is a classic logical fallacy, taught in freshman philosophy courses: the argumentum ad verecundiam, or appeal to authority (and you can almost always be sure that the authority appealed to is dead wrong).
In this case the argument is false to begin with, because literally hundreds of times as many scientists reject the AGW superstition, as accept it (31,000+ signers of the Oregon Petition, vs. 75 of 77 “scientists” [the “97 percent”] = that’s a 450 to 1 majority of skeptics over believers).
As for “consensus”, this is a term that has no place in scientific discourse. The most one can ever say is “I am inclined to agree with theory X, based specifically on Y and Z, so long as it hasn’t been falsified, but I will no longer believe if evidence against it emerges.” Any more definite statement of any theory is dishonest on its face.
Finally, comparing medical practice to climate science is a rather gross mismatch of utterly different subject matters and processes – not even apples and oranges, but more like apples and flatworms – another dimension to the Clooney fallacy – and ignorance.
Dudley Horscroft says “I cannot help feeling that if 99 doctors said you were dead, but you sat up and disagreed with them, this one experiment would have proved them wrong.”
No, the 99 doctors would declare you a “denier” for going against the infallible consensus.
Stephen Richards says:
February 2, 2014 at 10:48 am
The best approach is to show the 99% number is a lie. Once that is done you are showing your opponent is dishonest and then you win.
Been done Richard. Made no difference.
No, this has not been communicated to the masses. There needs to be an easy to understand, documented refutation. I have never seen that done.
Richard M –
See my post, just before yours.
Why 99 doctors, why not 364 economists?
In 1981 364 leading economists signed a letter to the London Times forecasting that Mrs. Thatcher’s fiscal and monetary policies would lead to disaster. When she attempted to defend herself in a debate she was challenged to name two economists who agreed with her. She replied that she could, and named Alan Walters and Patrick Minford. On returning to Downing Street, a top civil servant said to her, “It is a good job he did not ask you to name three!”’
Margaret Thatcher was proved right and the 364 economists were proved wrong. Because they were successful her fiscal and monetary policies are now regarded as mainstream.
Unfortunately, while economic hypotheses can be disproved in a relatively short period, it will take many decades before the ghosts of the more vocal and well-funded “Climate Scientists” arise from their graves to admit that their hypotheses to have been falsified by the evidence.
For those not interested in Super Bowls, SyFy has four dreadful “global cooling” movies, followed by Day After Tomorrow. Al Gore wrote that last one, right?
The sides need not be transparent as the measurements come with the sun overhead for several hours and so the sides are not part of the deal other than keep in the CO2 for the duration. As to extending up all the way to the top of the atmosphere, I don’t know what to say. CO2 only works in columns all the way up to space? Frack, ain’t that convenient for those who don’t want to see experimentation? Surely such a powerful, magic molecule as CO2 would show us some warming even if the walls were only 20 feet or so. Perhaps we could increase the CO2 concentration to 3000 ppm to give it more of a chance to show its stuff.
But if there is not anything left in the 15 micron band by the time the sunlight gets to earth then let us put up massive light sources overhead that emit in that band to compensate. (real world experiments can get complicated I was once told)
By the way; mother nature has been doing something like I ask for now for about 17 years and her results are that CO2 increases don’t seem to do anything.
“when you hear hoof beats, you look for horses, not zebras.”
Ah, but if you are in NorthEast Africa, don’t bother the horses, and ignore zebras be on the lookout for camels, … cause those are relatively quiet on sand…..
But if you are in the high plains in Africa, look for zebras and dodge wildebeests and antelopes, ’cause there ain’t no horses …
And if you are on the south Texas coast, the cows might be dangerous, but its the ze bra’s that will get you in trouble on Padre Island and Hippie Hollow .
This whole issue is simple for me–if 99% of those making handsome paychecks off their snake-oil franchise tell you their elixir is the universal cure for any malady, but, then, never touch the stuff themselves, then you can be pretty sure you’re dealing with quacks, rip-off artists, con-men, flim-flammers, and/or agit-prop flunkies, employed by the hive.
You know, like, how those hive-promoted loud-mouths, who put on a big show of being convinced of the CAGW peril, are, at the same time, those with the biggest tenured-troughs, NGO gravy-trains, green-washed rentier-incomes, yachts, mansions, limousines, private-jets, and standing invites to the hive’s interminable, taxpayer rip-off, party-time, blow-out eco-confabs, that could easily be video-conferenced with vast savings in CO2-spew, but won’t–possibly because videoconferencing might crimp our betters’ carbon-piggie good times.
As for the Hollywood, sell-out phonies, in on the CAGW deal, let me just urge them to PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH!–SHOW YOUR CONVICTION IN THE NEED FOR CARBON-AUSTERITY BY LEADING FROM THE FRONT AND BY PERSONAL, REDUCED-CARBON EXAMPLE. You know, use your trend-setter “star-power” to personally show the fashion-conscious, imitate-their-betters-prone peon-nobodies the way to the Agenda-21, rabbit-hutch hell-hole promised land. Otherwise, buzz-off!
This discussion with progressives pushing their catastrophic warming agenda reminds me of this scene in 2001 A Space Odyssey, called “Open the Pod bay doors, HAL”:
To me it illustrates what happens when you abuse computer programs with an agenda.
markstoval:
At February 2, 2014 at 11:53 am you ask to me
Firstly, CO2 does NOT “only works in columns all the way up to space”.
In your post you quoted from my post which you claim to be answering
And as for your asking
Perhaps, but it is damned inconvenient for people who – including me – have tried to conduct experiments. You see, one needs to use tethered balloons and sensors at intervals up to altitude and to assess with and without sunlight at short time difference (e.g. at start and/or at end of solar eclipse totality). This is required because an effect of GHGs is to change the lapse rate, and…
Oh, what’s the point!?
Richard
“Nature can, selectively, buffer human-caused global warming, say scientists”
What?! You dont say… who knew…
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140202111055.htm
for irritable climate syndrome, climate doctors prescribe economic thalidomide because they are thinking of the children
Bob,
I loved your 99 doctors on the wall analogy. How apt; the patient’s bodily function aren’t being modeled.
Well, I checked up on their model and there ARE some bodily functioned being modeled quite accurately. The excretion functions are very realistic, in their emulation of the real thing.
The reason you are seeing the “99 doctors” line is because they are using the same tactics used to attack the tobacco industry since it is progressives only real victory over their opponents. Read their blogs and comments on HUffPo and you will see the back discussions.
I remember having a conversation in 1996 with a doctor at our university hospital were I had to inform Him about the real causes of ulcers. He was still stuck with type A personality as an explanation. The fact that I knew about the real cause since the early 1980s was stunning for Him and horrifying for me. Transfer this argument to issues around global warming and I am almost apoplectic at the ignorance people display. I am only 60 years old and have zero confidence the global warming meme will be put to bed before I pass.
hunter says:
February 2, 2014 at 6:10 am
@ Hunter. Gareth, I would not want to be your patient. You would likely have bled patients to death with leeches back in the day in the name of your consensus. You would have rejected Lister and all of that antiseptic clap trap, like the leading consensus in America did for many years.
Hunter, patients were never bled to death with Leeches, they could not drink that much. You are confusing things with bloodletting. And yes, If I had lived in mediaeval times I would have believed those things, as would have most people, and believed the earth was flat and the sun revolved around the earth. Thats the way it goes, they were not bad or good people, they were just ignorant. Treatment changes by observing patient treatment outcomes, this can be through blind trials or mortality rates as well as many other more qualitative issues. Unfortunately we can’t do that in climate science. We can’t observe our world and see what would happen in the long term if we did this or that. However, in a medical trial, if a patient was deteriorating before the end of the trial, or if there was a strong correlation between a certain drug and a patients temperature rising we would stop the trial. The correlation may be false, but to continue would be highly unwise.
Exactly the propaganda ploy used by Alcoa, Monsanto and the Mellons to get people to accept a dangerous neurotoxin (fluoride) in their water for the false promise of no cavities. Let’s see if anyone wakes up to the fact that it is 60 years of fluoridation that is creating all the new conditions for children, the ADD’s and the rest. Fluoride opportunistically combines with aluminum to cross the brain-blood barrier. A legacy of our Manhattan project, which also injected people with Plutonium, mostly blacks and poor whites. See The Plutonium Papers, which won a Pulitzer. The same people ran the fluoride project. See the Great Fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson.
Chad Wozniak- Great posting.
per Mark Stoval.
“””””…..But if there is not anything left in the 15 micron band by the time the sunlight gets to earth then let us put up massive light sources overhead that emit in that band to compensate. (real world experiments can get complicated I was once told) …..”””””
Well there’s not a hell of a lot left in the 15 micron band by the time the “sunlight” as you call it, gets from the sun to this planet.
My favorite black body radiation graph, says that less than 1% of the sun’s radiant energy is longer than 4 microns wavelength, at which point the solar spectral irradiance (at earth orbit) is about 0.3% of its vale at the peak (0.5 micron). At 15 microns the spectral irradiance is 0.003%.
And I suppose that the atmospheric CO2 is going to eat all of that before it reaches the surface.
The sun is not a good source of 15 micron radiant energy. Some people still claim we can feel it, as “heat”.
I’ll take the 1 micron solar irradiance, if I need a little warmth, any day, over the 15 micron.
Gareth Phillips:
At February 2, 2014 at 12:26 pm you explain to hunter things you say you would have “believed” in the past and why.
However, at February 2, 2014 at 8:37 am I requested a clarification of what you say you “believe” now. The thread is long so you may have overlooked my genuine request which is here.
Richard
Me personally, I’d go with the one doctor who removed the pump handle myself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak
As a surgeon, let me point out a few things. . . just for the sake of accuracy.
“You would likely have bled patients to death with leeches back in the day in the name of your consensus. You would have rejected Lister and all of that antiseptic clap trap, like the leading consensus in America did for many years.”
1) As previously mentioned, patients weren’t bled to death with leeches. As a matter of fact. . . .leeches are still used in medicine by surgeons doing finger reattachment; in fact, there are FDA approved leeches available for that particular use.
2) “Blood letting”, which is what the “surgeon-barbers” of antiquity did and is where the “barber’s pole” has it’s origins, is not completely useless. It is the treatment of choice for certain blood conditions, and can also be used in emergency situations for patients with congestive heart failure.
3. As far as Lister is concerned. . . he was an English surgeon, and published his treatise in Nature in 1867, well before radio and TV. much less the internet. By 1875 his precepts were widely accepted in Europe; in 1877 he was appointed Professor of Surgery at the King’s College Hospital in London, and by 1879 his theory — and practice — was universally accepted.
So we’re talking about 12 years for surgical antisepsis to be universally accepted. . . .somewhat less than the 17 years and counting for the “pause” that we all know about. . . .
“If 99 doctors said… That means that money is involved.
More like unicorn farts.
@gareth Phillips
“the overwhelming body of evidence points in one direction’
I recently found out that I have been ignoring this overwhelming body of evidence. Could you please tell me where it is so that I can stop ignoring it?
I found Gareth Phillips’ post interesting.
He teased us tantalizingly with; “”.. but from what I can see, the overwhelming body of evidence points in one direction and that is what I will believe until substantial studies show any different conclusions….””
But he never does tell us what it is ; that direction we are pointed in.
Well I believe that climate changes; I also believe that what we call “green house gases”; H2O, O3, and CO2, do absorb long wave (>5 micron) infra-red radiation (both coming and going). I also believe that absorption helps warm the atmosphere; along with conduction and convection.
But other than that; and I have been around for several “climate significant intervals”, and so far I haven’t seen anything untoward happening. It warms, it cools, and it stays the same, and on, and on.
And so far, I have seen, not even one credible climate model. What is a credible climate model ?
Well I don’t need a model, that goes all the way back to the Cambrian era. I’m quite happy to see a model, that can only replicate the climate, as it happened right before my eyes, since the day I was born. Now izzat too much to ask ??
We can discuss my future climate experiential evidence; after they replicate what is already in my data set.
Phillip Tetlock of UC Berkeley examines the performances of people in forecasting the
outcomes of political events in the book “Expert Political Judgement” (2005). He finds virtually no correlation between a forecaster’s “calibration” and whether he or she has a doctoral degree. “Calibration” is a measure of the agreement between the forecasted and the observed relative frequences of the outcomes of events. A theory that lacks a high calibration score is falsified by the evidence. These and other findings of Tetlock’s study suggest that preferential trust in the forecasts of “doctors” is misplaced. Statistical models perform much better than humans of all stripes.
I’m sure 99 out of 100 doctors would have told a 21 year old Stephen Hawking to give up, that he only had months to live.
I should add, that I consider my experiential climate data set, to include anything that happens inside a 1,000 km radius circle of anomaly correlation, around my location; and I have spent those years, in a good number of climatically distinct experimental locations.
No I’ve never been to Vostok Station, or the new yuppie low Temperature site; nor the mid Sahara tropical desert; but I have been bloody cold in my time, and also goodly warm. I have spent a lot of time outside the anomaly limits for my local climate.
.
=============================================================
That is a good retort. But who came up with it? Trial lawyers?
Gareth in your top comment you said
Would you (if you were / are a doctor) prescribe a drug to a patient that was not clinically trialled but tested / trialled using a computer model? The model failed, the drug was administered anyway and the patient got worse. What drug company would be allowed to market THAT drug???? NONE is the answer, yet this is what is being asked of us.
Your patient is now stable (no surface temperature rise for 16+ years), a small minority of doctors predict his temperature will fall during the next decade or longer. What if they are right?
Gareth Phillips: Perhaps you may want to take a short peek at the Wiki re scurvy: “It was a Scottish surgeon in the Royal Navy, James Lind, who first proved it could be treated with citrus fruit in experiments he described in his 1753 book A Treatise of the Scurvy,[1] though his advice was not implemented by the Royal Navy for several decades[when?]. The consensus of the Royal Navy could not possibly accept anything from a “non-navy” doctor. As late as the Nares polar expedition in 1875, more than 120 years later, people were still dying of scurvy. Because the consensus of “all” the major polar explorers was that fresh air, cleanliness and personal propriety were sufficient to ward off this disease. Oddly, some seaman did not listen to “the consensus” so that while others suffered and died, they came home. You may call those independent souls the 3 percenters.
Jimbo says:
February 2, 2014 at 8:52 am
What if this chap had decided that the consensus was overwhelming and gave up? Science would be worse off. This is where we are with the IPCC and the related Climastrologists and consensus. They want everyone to give up and go with the flow. Not me Sir.
Guardian – 5 October 2011
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for dogged work on ‘impossible’ quasicrystals
Daniel Shechtman, who has won the chemistry Nobel for discovering quasicrystals, was initially lambasted for ‘bringing disgrace’ on his research group
Jimbo,
Thanks for that reference! If others are interested, I found a .pdf file of his 1984 paper.
VOLUME 53, NUMBER 20 PHYSICAL REVIE%’ LETTERS 12 NOVEMBER 1984
Metallic Phase with Long-Range Orientational Order and No Translational Symmetry
http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v53/i20/p1951_1
Mac
Hi, in view of many requests I’ll summarise my beliefs regarding climate etc. I believe that our climate is warming faster than would be expected, and we are likely to be the cause of that due to our trashing of the environment through the excessive production of greenhouse gasses. I also am a big fan of renewables in all sorts of forms, like Anthony I have solar generated energy, and I like growing my own food etc. I’m a left wing hippy who really enjoys Glastonbury and other festivals and would love to join Willis at the burning man. I must admit I did have skeptic opinions till a couple of years ago, till I really looked at some of the things Lord Monckton was saying which led me to reconsider those beliefs and become more convinced that the mainstream climate science was probably pretty accurate. However I never, ever believe science is 100% correct, or wrong in any field, it’s generally a concept which trends to one conclusion or another along a spectrum. I’m sure many people will be outraged and choke on their breakfast cornflakes as a result of this post, but hey ho, I have broad shoulders. By the way, I also question how valid the idea of a ‘pause’ in the rate of warming is. If the temp has not gone down it has still warmed so the trend is still up and I believe, a tad subjectively I’ll agree, that we are starting to see the results of that climate shift in the appalling weather affecting the UK at present. I’ll just go and get my crash helmet, I have incoming Exocets on the radar.
==================================================================
They might also want to check out the “Freezer Bowl”. it was a playoff game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the San Diego Chargers in 1982.
Wind chills on the field were between -50 and -60 below zero Fahrenheit.
If 99 doctors that were on the dole (or receiving spivs) of the drug manufacture recommended a very expensive drug treatment and 1 doctor that was not receiving any dole or spivs from any manufacture I would talk the one doctors advice and so would any sane person.
When your being paid to deliver a conclusion you must deliver it.
Is it the shortcuts we take on our iPads and iPhones that drives the abuse of the contraction ” you are” into “your” (vs the correct form: ” you’re “)?
/pedant
.
Uh— didn’t doctors once say that smoking was GOOD for you??? I remember old radio ads extolling the health benefits of a certain brand of cigarettes, and that doctors agreed that this brand was soothing to your throat and tasted good. So— 99 doctors saying something is true doesn’t necessarily mean it is, in fact, true. Things have changed a lot in a lifetime, those same doctors who said that brand of cigarettes was so good back then couldn’t be paid to say the same thing today.
Yeah– I’m an old-timer.
If 99 Orthopedic surgeons tell you that you should have exploratory surgery on your left wrist because they cannot figure out why it is painful and stiff (MRI was clean), but they have no knowledge that rheumatoid arthritis is prevalent in your family history wouldn’t you go to a Rheumatologist first to see if that is the cause ? Happened to me, not with 99 doctors but 2, my Primary Care IM and an Ortho consult. Had to argue with them but they finally relented (probably to just shut me up), and guess what? Yep, positive test for rheumatoid arthritis but we caught it early enough before there was joint damage. Medication works, no exploratory surgery needed.
If those 99 doctors don’t know all the facts their remedy may not be appropriate.
“””””……Jimbo says:
February 2, 2014 at 8:41 am
The great fear of the climate scientists is that they were wrong. They know full well what the implications of observations means and it is causing a blind panic. They are running around like headless chickens to explain the lack of warming and it’s fun to watch.
“The top 10 most spectacularly wrong widely held scientific theories”……”””””
Well I checked out your top 10 Erroneous science theories, and the guy was wrong hisself, on the very first example.
Which was the erroneous “Geocentric Earth hypothesis.”
I believe the current standard model of cosmology, would say that the earth is indeed the center of the universe.
The universe (only one of those) started out as a point singularity, and then space itself expanded (inflation). So everything is still at the center of the universe, including the earth.
So Jimbo; what’s your guess, as to which way to head, to get to just the nearest edge of the universe ??
I think you are misinterpreting a lot regrading the Planck curve and the amount of LWIR one feels from the sun …
.
Joe Prins says:
February 2, 2014 at 1:35 pm
Gareth Phillips: Perhaps you may want to take a short peek at the Wiki re scurvy: “It was a Scottish surgeon in the Royal Navy, James Lind, who first proved it could be treated with citrus fruit in experiments he described in his 1753 book A Treatise of the Scurvy,[1] though his advice was not implemented by the Royal Navy for several decades[when?]. The consensus of the Royal Navy could not possibly accept anything from a “non-navy” doctor. As late as the Nares polar expedition in 1875, more than 120 years later, people were still dying of scurvy. Because the consensus of “all” the major polar explorers was that fresh air, cleanliness and personal propriety were sufficient to ward off this disease. Oddly, some seaman did not listen to “the consensus” so that while others suffered and died, they came home. You may call those independent souls the 3 percenters.
Indeed Joe, in fact scurvy was well treated much earlier using scurvy grass and onions. It was not a major problem though until the advent of long sea voyages. The causes were debated as being salted food, poor water and many other things. Captain Cook was sufficiently convinced to encourage his crew to drink citrus juice, an idea seen with great derision in the US, hence the derogatory name ‘Limey’ for English sailors. Healthcare evolves like that, there is a few people who question, then gradually the idea gains more and more support through evidence till it becomes mainstream. It’s a good system. remember, that for every brilliant scientist who made a breakthrough discovery, there were many who were just quacks and could do great damage if they were all given credence. For every James Lind there is an Andrew Wakefield who publishes dodgy research causing the death of people who would have otherwise lived. In medicine, as in life in general, just because you are in a minority does not make you right. It occasionally happens, but in healthcare, the mavericks are just that, and the majority are usually right. If you think I am wrong, maybe you should heed their advice and drink your own urine in the morning and celebrate with homeopathic whisky?
Is there a doctor in the house?
Your guess is as good as mine. Ask the author.
As you point out there has been a warming trend. You forgot to add that there has been a warming trend since about 1860. Further, I asked you for the cause or causes of the 1910 to 1940 steepish rise in temps? I am now asking you again? See these graphs.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/image/j/l/warmingtrend.gif
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/_nhshgl.gif
I find it very telling that whenever you ask someone who believes in CAGW to give even one piece of empirical evidence that strongly supports the possibility of CAGW, they always ignore it and pretend they never read it. Doesn’t seem to matter who it is, not Gareth… and not even our esteemed friend Mosher.
You would think they would at least say something like “the previous three decades have all been getting progressively warmer than its predecessor, and the most recent 2000-2010 decade the warmest ever”. But, I’m sure they don’t want to use THAT as their evidence because it is extremely weak at best. Plenty of evidence to suggest the MWP was at least as warm as present if not warmer; there have been plenty of examples in the recent past where there have been three or more decades in a row of either warming or cooling; and the current decade in progress 2010-2020 is looking highly likely to be colder than 2000-2010. I really am curious, just what evidence WOULD any of you use as your strongest piece of evidence?
Jimbo says:
February 2, 2014 at 1:34 pm
Your patient is now stable (no surface temperature rise for 16+ years), a small minority of doctors predict his temperature will fall during the next decade or longer. What if they are right?
Hi Jimbo, the metaphor is mistaken. A patient who’s temperature remains high has not stabilised, he is still pyrexial and action is required. If one Doctor said “Let’s keep going with the trial’ and 10 Doctors said ‘no,stop the trial, this Pyrexia is worrying’ , The trial would in all probability stop. If it continued and the patient died, the medical staff involved would be culpable and likely be sued for malpractice and struck off. If against the odds the patient recovered, the one Doctor would be a hero. But would we risk a 10-1 shot on an unknown outcome when lives were at stake? Even if there were a safer but less dramatic option? I think you will agree that it would be pretty unlikely.
You look to have ‘worked’ to answer your own question; regardless of ‘ads’, common sense should kicked-in when the negative side effects began to show themselves, side effects like the smokers cough which appears even in the first year of smoking.
I don’t recall any such ads BTW.
.
My apologies Gareth, I did see after my last post you DID reply to what you thought was your strongest piece of empirical evidence. Seems I basically guessed right on what your evidence would be though.
@Jimbo As you point out there has been a warming trend. You forgot to add that there has been a warming trend since about 1860. Further, I asked you for the cause or causes of the 1910 to 1940 steepish rise in temps? I am now asking you again?
@gareth Hi again Jimbo. You’ll note from the essay below that there was rapid industrialisation in the US during that period, as there was in the USSR and many other countries. However I don’t think anyone is claiming that there are not natural variations in climate which can inhibit or enhance the rise. Without greenhouse gasses we would still see those variations, but at a lower temperature. In reality you will probably challenge that idea in a response I fully expect to see. But nothing I can say will persuade you of the validity of my stance, and likely nothing you say will convince me. As you you say, we have to agree to disagree, and I would add, appreciate having the freedom to do it. Cheers G.
http://www.antiessays.com/free-essays/337588.html
Hi Alcheson, no problem, I’m responding to multiple posts so they get slightly mixed at times.
The political line is that 97 % of doctors believe premature death is real therefore we are going to tax breathing. The models show that all people who breathe are the ones who die prematurely and via adjustment of statistics the people who live at sea level in smog ridden cities die more, nothing to do with inactive lifestyle and eating habits.
Gareth Phillips says:
February 2, 2014 at 12:26 pm
if a patient was deteriorating before the end of the trial, or if there was a strong correlation between a certain drug and a patients temperature rising we would stop the trial. The correlation may be false, but to continue would be highly unwise.
You really should learn the subject better and do some independent thinking.
The fact are that the Earth was warmer, at the peak of this Holocene inter glacial period, a few thousand years ago.
Since that time there has been a significant increase in CO2 and temperatures have reduced since then.
So what correlation are you talking about? Do you believe that increasing CO2 causes temperatures to go down?
Do a Gedanken experiment. If these scientists had been alive at that moment in the Holocene with lower CO2 levels and produced their models at that time what do you think their models would have said today’s temperatures would have been given today’s CO2 levels?
Still confident that they know what they are talking about?
If so please elucidate, based on facts and observations not models.
If it is the models, if you send me a thousand random roulette spins and some money I will send you a model showing how you can win money at roulette by varying your bets. I can do it every time, over and over again, so it must be true,right?
Alan
Flow says:
bobl, a better analogy would be to say that MRI/ultrasounds/xrays says its cancer. But the biopsy is what tells us wether its malignant or benign.
Not quite, two things there, MRIs are not computational in the same sense, Climate science is using a computational model. The best medical analogy are medical nomograms. Secondly, if the MRI evidence warrants it a biopsy would be done more equivalent to being harmful – eg is the rising CO2/warming harmful, In our case the MRi Empirical evidence has not shown a tumor, so there is no need go further, our climate has a mole,
Flow,
Let’s modify our analogy, you develop abunďant brown patches on your skin, 97 doctors feed your age and skin exposure into a computer program and the medical nomogram which is known to have little predictive ability says that 95 % probability at a person with your age and skin exposure has cancer, so using the same International Panel on Cutaneous Cancer , IPCC, Nomograms not surprisingly the 97 doctors say there is a 95 percent chance you have cancer. They also say we have an known treatment involving the removal of your left lung reduction of the extra weight of your wallet, reducing the stress of managing your bank account, and the reduction of burden of property ownership, but even cursory logic shows such a treatment will be totatlly ineffective on the lesions and harmful to your lung function. Not to mention, you’ll be so poor future treatment will be impossible. It is grudgingly admitted that this treatment will do little for your cancer, but might extend your life by an hour or two. Redistributing your money will do wonders for socialism and the plight of the third world… think of the children, you wonder how much of your property the IPCC will take for itself.
You also go to three financially independent retired doctors unaligned with the International Panel on Cutaneous Cancer who examine the actual lesions, which have not grown for 17 months who tell you, these lesions are natural, there is a remote chance that it might turn into a mild form of cancer which has no potential to kill you, it just looks unsightly. Furthermore they say, the International Panel on Cutaneous Cancer’s (IPCC) own data says if it was cancer it would steadilly grow, even the IPCC models show that there is less than a 5 percent chance of cancer growth pausing for longer than 10 months and no model runs have ever produced pauses longer than 15 months.
What do you do.
Immediately hand all your property over to the International Panel on Cutaneous Cancer, and have your left lung removed .
Accept you have freckles, keep your money so you can treat them later, should they become cancerous and wait and see.
Gareth: As a surgeon, I’d suggest you get a second, independent, opinion.
And as Richard suggested, the short answer is
“You mean the 99 doctors who said my stomach ulcer was caused by stress?”
Who in the name of all the false gods have got the time, and money, to see 99 doctors about a little sniffle – or any other minor ailment?
It is quite obvious that the “Cimate Modelers” who claim to be climate scientists (doctors) are nothing but quack-salvers with snake–oil remedies in their medical bags.
One simple question I have got to ask is: “Why is it necessary to have more than one ‘model’ to tell you what the temperature (T) will be in the year 2100 if you know what is happening in the “climate system”?
After all the IPCC have many different models showing that by the said year the increase of T can/may be anything from 1 to 6 ºC. – This alone is proof that they knowet not what they are doing.
They (the self proclaimed worlds best “Climate Scientists”) themselves have admitted that they could not “account for the warming” unless they added the “CO2 raise” into the equation.
– – – – –
So now that the warming has come to an end, “CO2 raise” is no longer influencing the climate by raising T but it is now affecting the weather. Every storm, deluge of rain etc. is set in train by CO2. – – – It is all your fault still – – – So, repent and pay up – because it is all your fault. (sarc) (asm)
Another aspect of this discussion is the 99% hypothesis. While this is the claim made, that there is a 99% consensus it does not stand up to scrutiny, Donna Laframboise showed this in her book The Delinquent Teenager. It is more that 60/40 which dramatically changes George Clooney’s example.
As a math physicist I fail to see why something that gets its models with 95% confidence wrong is called science.
That record shows that the practitioners failed to understand the basics – it is simply an unfounded pretense at predicting climate.
If your doctor has 95% of his patients die in the OR, you are better off, medically and financially, taking an aspirin.
Gareth, since it’s the current warmth and the recent rate that seems to have you believing the CAGW is real…. In addition to what I posted earlier consider these:
1) Half, if not more, of the warming observed over the past 70 years is due to adjustments to the data.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/04/ushcn-surface-temperatures-1973-2012-dramatic-warming-adjustments-noisy-trends/
Seems counter intuitive that if urbanization was the reason for the adjustments, that the past would be adjusted down and the recent adjusted up? Maybe it’s correct but doesn’t pass the initial “smell” test.
2) For sake of argument, let’s assume the adjustments are correct, and the world did indeed warm by 0.6 degrees since 1970. Of this 0.6 degree warming, it appears at most HALF is likely due to CO2. Since the 60s and 70s were a time of the global cooling scare, which later was decided the part of the natural 60-70 warming/cooling cycle, some of the warming from 1970-2000 must be due to the warming phase of the same cycle. Based on the fact that the cooling phase at least offsets the warming due to CO2, CO2 is likely not responsible more than half of the observed recent warming.
Thus CO2 is likely responsible for no more than 0.3 degrees of warming, and quite likely even less.
C02 has gone from ~300ppm to 400ppm in that amount of time. A 30 % increase in CO2 should have resulted in almost 50% of the expected temperature increase for a doubling of the concentration since it is a logarithmic function. This simple analysis results in an approximate sensitivity factor of 0.6C of warming for a doubling of CO2…. and this even assumes that all the adjustments to the data are valid.
Gareth Phillips says:
If the temp has not gone down it has still warmed so the trend is still up and I believe, a tad subjectively I’ll agree, that we are starting to see the results of that climate shift in the appalling weather affecting the UK at present.
———————————————————
But Garth, didn’t you notice, the trend where you live (UK) is DOWN. Quite sharply!
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
The last few years have been completely “average” and the “mean” of the past 10 years is a piddly .3C (a THIRD OF A DEGREE) above the average they use. So that .3C is what is causing your appalling weather??
When you said above ” I believe that our climate is warming faster than would be expected,”, I hope you were not referring to UK temperature. Because your temperatures have been on a sliding board the past ten years.
Gareth Phillips says on February 2, 2014 at 1:43 pm
“By the way, I also question how valid the idea of a ‘pause’ in the rate of warming is. If the temp has not gone down it has still warmed so the trend is still up and I believe, a tad subjectively I’ll agree, that we are starting to see the results of that climate shift in the appalling weather affecting the UK at present.”
Gareth, why do you question the pause? It is real and it is recorded by those “consensus” people of who would rather deny it if they could. And it has been going on for 16 years. In all these years, haven’t you had any thoughts about what it means? Do you know that according to those consensus people of yours global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide that we are constantly adding to the atmosphere? There is more carbon dioxide in the air now than ever before but it is doing no such thing as warming the atmosphere. As a scientist I can tell you that its failure to do any warming for 16 years is proof that the theory of greenhouse warming is just plain wrong. The theory your consensus uses goes back to Svante Arrhenius in the nineteenth century. It applies only to pure carbon dioxide, not to a mixture of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The correct theory for a mixture of gases in the real atmosphere was published by the Hungarian scientist Ferenc Miskolczi. It predicts that because our atmosphere has a mix of two greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and water vapor, it can not cause greenhouse warming. Exactly as it is happening today. You could, of course, ask why it began only 16 years ago. The answer to it is that it did not begin 16 years ago. The reason you haven’t heard of it before is that we have incompetent and dishonest people watching global temperature. As an example, there was another pause of 18 years in the eighties and nineties that was covered up by fake warming in the IPCC temperature records. I wrote a climate book “What Warming?” in 2010 that you could benefit from by reading it. In it I pointed out the fake warming in the eighties and nineties and even put a warming about this into the preface. Nothing happened for two years but then three temperature sources involved decided suddenly to not show it any more. They secretly and retroactively changed their data for the eighties and nineties and said nothing about it. As to the bad weather in UK, your friends the consensusists constantly tell us that weather is not climate. It has no connection with the existence of the pause. Bad weather happens everywhere and there is no way to change it, not even by an edict of the UK Parliament Energy and Climate Change Committee.
A doctor has a degree qualification which can be verified Do these 99% climate scientist have degree qualifications in relevant subjects which can be verified?
II we can track down this group
will we be able to verify their qualifications or Is the ” 99% group” merely a shorthand way of saying “Quite a lot of people I’ve read about who probably think this way ,if I remember rightly?”
Maybe actors or journalists are not given to clarity of language. ( It’s difficult to write clearly but it ” should be attempted by all candidates ” )
Gareth Phillips says: “the majority are usually right”.
I like your idea of a scientific progress by popular vote.
I’m sorry, what doctor makes a diagnosis solely on the basis of a computer model? What a stupid analogy.
If you have anything less than a PhD in climate science or a closely related field your deluded opinion on AGW is less than worthless.
There is a consensus, but from an unlikely source with an unexpected conclusion. Even the IPCC doesn’t believe its models anymore (the scientists, that is, not the politicians who write the “Summary for Policymakers”). The following is an excerpt from IPCC5, recently released.
ERRORS IN THE MODELS
The discrepancy between simulated and observed GMST(global mean surface temperature)trends during 1998–2012 could be explained in part by a tendency for some CMIP5 models to simulate stronger warming in response to increases in greenhouse-gas concentration than is consistent with observations… This finding provides evidence that some CMIP5 models show a larger response to greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic factors …than the real world. As a consequence, it is argued in Chapter 11 that near-term model projections of GMST increase should be scaled down by about 10% (Section 11.3.6.3). This downward scaling is, however, not sufficient to explain the model-mean overestimate of GMST trend over the hiatus period.
Let me translate – “the models don’t work and we don’t know why”
Does this sound like there is consensus that CO2 is warming the climate?
Link to the final draft full report
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5_WGI-12Doc2b_FinalDraft_Chapter02.pdf
What exactly constitutes a “degree” in climate science?
The worst doctors are the ones who think they can make the diagnosis by an exercise of the will, and this is what climate science has come to.
==================================
This is for the benefit of the likes of George “Looney” – I refer to the case of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren.
Contrary to the consensus of the entire medical profession, and the pharmaceutical industry, these two Australians, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, demonstrated the true cause of peptic ulcers. And they were right. Just click the following link:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2005/press.html
So, to the George “Looney” brigade and all the James Camerons out there, who believe in consensus science, there is no such thing as consensus science. The ’99 doctors thing’ is irrelevant to science.
Galileo once said, “The authority of one thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of an individual.” How right he was.
Einstein left us with some words of wisdom, “We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.”
Where does that leave George “Looney”?
99 doctors say that ulcers are caused by a poor lifestyle, stress, alcohol and that you need to get less stressed, drink less alcohol, get fit, take all of these medicines and you MAY get better. – The journals say so, the research says so, my peers say so – its right ok!
That’s what the consensus was not that long ago.
One doctor questioned, nay CHALLENGED the consensus. Who’s believed now?
“If 99 Doctors said ……”
–
Politely ask for the list of 99 Doctors.
If you see the names ;
–
M.Mann
…….
P.Gleick
…….
S.Lewandowsky
……….
Go to another hospital immediately!!!
Hi Tom,
I’m in the Uk, being treated on the National Health Service for an incurable illness. I am in my eightieth year.
My consultant didn’t wait to be asked – “look at the actuarial tables for life expectancy for a man your age and with a bit of luck and our efforts, you’ll match those figures”.
Happy with that, I went down to the pub for a pint……
Siberian_Husky said “If you have anything less than a PhD in climate science or a closely related field your deluded opinion on AGW is less than worthless”.
So Einstein’s opinions (as a humble patent office clerk) must have been “less than worthless” then – and what if you have no formal qualifications but observe (from actual data) that AGW has not occurred for at least 12 years, despite CO2 increasing? Doesn’t “climate science” (or your “closely related field[s]”) apply normal scientific method of stating falsifiable hypotheses – or do you suggest that my (non-qualified) observation here is also “deluded”?
Perhaps I should assume (hope?) that you missed a closing “\sarc” tag from your post…
If 99 doctors said I had a life-threatening fever, but I felt well and healthy,
then I would recommend the 99 doctors turn their thermometers sideways and go treat somebody who was actually ill.
TimC- you’d make the same school boy error like if you said the earth was cooling during 1940 to 1960 or whatever restriction of domain you want to make. The level of ignorance on this blog beggars belief.
Einstein was an outlier. You and your denialist buddies sadly are not…
Siberian_husky says “The level of ignorance on this blog beggars belief”.
Ah: I see where you come from – it’s just prejudice and name-calling.
Please state a falsifiable hypothesis as to global averaged surface temperatures in future years, to follow scientific method. Absent that your (sweeping) comments are worthless.
My own “restriction of domain” (as you call it) is principally the satellite records (the surface thermometers have been “homogenised” just too much), such as at:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
As you will see, there has been no (averaged) lower atmosphere warming since 1997.
And now I will leave this thread to your intemperate ravings.
Fabi says:
February 2, 2014 at 3:20 pm
Gareth: As a surgeon, I’d suggest you get a second, independent, opinion.
Thank you Fabi. As a surgeon I would hope you would be more specific, can you clarify on which part of the debate a second opinion would be helpful? Healthcare? Trials? Climatology? You need to be more specific in your points if you want me to respond, if the post was just satire, it’s very good!
Otherwise, many thanks to everyone who responded, we may have opposing viewpoints but I really appreciate the civility in which they have been expressed.
For way more than a hundred years it was the medical consenus to lay newborn children on their belly. By the end of the 1980’s this was reversed to lay babies on their back and the “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome” declined by a factor of 10 till 2005. Imagine all the babies killed by this medical consensus!! Fred in Switzerland
Just like with your patient with a high fever so did the industrialization. I vaguely recall terrible air pollution in the US (1970s) until the clean air acts made the air today much cleaner. Over the last 17 years China has also experienced rapid industrialization just like many other countries around the world too. Anyway, we will have to agree to disagree as the essay you showed me is not peer reviewed and there really wasn’t anything in it to explain my question. Cheers.
I always figured it was more like this:
CAGW is like 99 doctors all telling you that you can live a longer better life if you cut off your right hand and your left leg when you have no injury to either. To those of us who have the ability to think, this is unacceptable without a direct threat to our lives in the near-term future, and it goes against common sense to simply cut off the leg and arm of every person just because scientists said it is a good thing. Now, they do have this computer model that “supports” this assertion with people without those limbs living a marginally longer life, but why would you cut off half your mobility just because a computer model and 99 % of scientists said it was a good thing? They never ran the cost/benefit analysis, or proved the case that its actually a good thing, so do you still blindly trust those doctors with their saws to do the deed?
Its a huge crock of BS in the end because its a logical fallacy to believe in experts simply because of who they are. You are claiming that experts are unfallible and never make mistakes, and ergo that assumption completely misses every time in our past when the experts were wrong and the “alternate hypothesis” was correct.
And to add to that, the treatment that is proposed is stated as being the only alternative without several alternatives being trotted out, and the treatment involves putting more power into a central Government to solve the crisis. We are given no alternatives, only the tripe that if you don’t cut off the legs and arms of your industrial countries that otherwise you will all burn in hell. (and that is the symbolism these charletons generate as well.)
Climate Science is in it’s early stages, rather like medicine a while back – if 99 doctors had said leeches were good for a condition or mercury for another, most people would have taken them at their word – even if it was wrong advice which did no good or else killed them.
3 doctors said to me, you don’t have coronary artery disease only high bloodpressure. Fourt said you have symptoms that indicate coronary artery disease and wanted to make examination to prove that he is right. . . . . I wrote this 21 days after 5 veins bypass surgery. Still i dont believe GAGW. Climate chances and we have tiny fraction in warming, but it is mostly natural.
Siberian_Husky says at February 2, 2014 at 6:40 pm
Hmm, I don’t know what degree Siberian_Husky has but it clearly isn’t in a science.
In science, observations trump opinion.
Computer models are used to test hypotheses (opinions about how the world works) against observations of how the world works. But until the models are tested they are still merely opinions written in mathematical language.
And when the models are tested and they don’t match the observations then the opinions contained therein must be discarded.
But the problem with Climate “Science” is that the opinions are alwed to over-rule reality.
A Phd in climatology trumps a Phd in “climate science” (aka modelling). Dispute anything in here,..
http://drtimball.com/2013/many-climate-reconstructions-incorrectly-attributed-to-temperature-change/
Or this;
http://drtimball.com/2012/static-climate-models-in-a-virtually-unknown-dynamic-atmosphere/
Olavi says:
February 3, 2014 at 5:17 am
” I wrote this 21 days after 5 veins bypass surgery. ”
___________________
Good to see you are still with us.
If 99 doctors told you the cause of the pains radiating down your left arm was due to miasmas in the air and treatment was to draw 6oz of blood, then attach leeches to your left arm every day for a week, would you?
If it were 1750, you probably would, but that would not mean the 99 doctors were right.
We know that now because these days disease is determined by observation and empirical evidence, not what the group thinks.
Of course that is not entirely true. Doctor group-think insisted the primary cause of peptic ulcers was stress… with no empirical evidence… rejecting the cause being bacterial right up to just a few years ago, until by experiment empirical evidence showed a bacterium was indeed the culprit. There are numerous other examples where the medical profession looks like a point of reference to train ‘settled science’ consensus climate scientists.
So I personally would not trust the say-so of 99 doctors any further than I could spit them.
The fact that politicians and air-brain celebs unquestioningly would, just shows what a bunch of divvies they are.
Now, REFINING the theory, estimating the EXACT amount of warming we will see from doubling
is possible in TWO WAYS
A) run a controlled earth experiment where you double C02 and hold everything else constant
( haha)
B) run a model.
You might also try to narrow down estimate on sensitivity. Those are observational studies
Sensitivity is the problem, isn’t it? I agree with most of what you say (of course) — the issue is indeed physics. Physics predicts a straight-up warming of between 1 and 1.5 C warming for a doubling of CO_2. This prediction — physics based or not — isn’t the best one in the entire Universe because the greenhouse effect cannot be effectively approximated by a single slab theory — it involves a staggering synthesis of ideas some of which I find a bit dubious — level broadening due to increased (but infinitesimal) partial pressure especially in the wings of the absorption bands, change in the height of the thick layer where the atmosphere finally becomes transparent to CO_2-mediated radiative loss, variation in the DALR itself, lifting of the tropopause — none of which AFAIK can be or have been actually observed to occur as the concentration of CO_2 has increased by 1/3 of the distance to the goal line. But let’s go with it. Let’s say that if CO_2 goes to 600 ppm, global temperatures will rise by 1.25 C plus or minus maybe 0.5C to allow for our ignorance even about the physics, because even the pure CO_2-only GHE predictions are largely speculative and contingent on our understanding of the LINEAR responses of a highly nonlinear system to small perturbations.
However, “narrowing down sensitivity” is not a distinct activity from “running a model”. That’s because there is no such thing as climate sensitivity. It is not an input into climate models. It is a claim made about feedback-based amplification of CO_2-only warming DERIVED FROM climate models, although even calling it that is bending things a bit. In Hansen’s original papers he didn’t have particularly detailed climate models — they were really pretty crude, understandably given that my cell phone probably has more processing power than he had available to run the models back then. Climate sensitivity was at that time basically a fudge factor based on an assumption of pure positive feedback in an ill-understood coupling between CO_2 and water vapor. It has, sadly, persisted in being used in the precise sense that Hansen used it — a simple linear multiplication of the CO_2-only warming expected by the occult cause of a highly nonlinear and presumptive coupling between water vapor and CO_2 concentration, with water vapor being the much more powerful greenhouse gas.
It is this latter power that even now lets Hansen continue to predict 5 C “climate sensitivity” — an augmentation of the CO_2-only warming by two parts water vapor warming to every part of CO_2-only warming — with something approximating a straight face, and since 5 C is comparable with the warming that pulled us out of the Wisconsin glaciation and sufficient to restore conditions not seen on Earth in 60 million or so years when the continents were in completely different positions, sure, he can predict that the oceans do whatever he likes in response. He can even make his infamous “boiling oceans” remarks and subtly imply that we could tip the Earth right over to Be Like Venus with runaway global warming. Personally, I think this is shameless, unscientific, and the moral equivalent of shouting fire in a theater that is not, in fact, on fire, because you think that it might one day catch on fire and that would be terrible, wouldn’t it?
The existing GCMs do not really predict climate sensitivity — they contain various parameters for quantities that we cannot currently measure (such as the role and effect of aerosols and decadal oscillations on the climate) that effective fit it to a desired value associated with past observations of warming, and then turn around and produce a single, highly contingent number as if it is a “physics based” prediction. It is this number that is at issue here, since the GCMs that predict a climate sensitivity of 5 C by 2100 not unreasonably have predicted a rise in temperature of over 0.5 C in the first decade and a half of the 21st century — one 1/7th of the distance to the goal line. How much global warming has actually been observed over that interval? Would that be zero? It would.
Reasonable people — and really, I am not religious here, I understand the physics pretty well, I spend half my time on this list schooling people who want to claim that there is no such thing as the GHE or that it violates the laws of thermodynamics or other such rot, and I freely admit that the hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a legitimate scientific hypothesis that could be true or false — could look at this, consider the difficult of solving coupled Navier-Stokes equations at mediocre granularity across century time scales with significant parts of the underlying actual physics (such as the precise numbers and mechanisms associated with feedback, heat transport and reflection by clouds, the correct numbers to use for aerosols, the correct coupling to the vast oceanic reservoir) and conclude that if a given GCM robustly predicts 0.6 C of warming across a 15 year interval in which no warming is observed (while CO_2 inexorably ratchets on up) that at least that GCM might be wrong. It might be broken. It might be a bad model.
Bad models are hardly a surprise in physics in much simpler problems than this, after all. If one considers the mere probability that a physical model this complex would turn out to not be robustly predictive I’d assert that it is more likely not to be robustly predictive than to be robustly predictive, even before seeing actual results. This is a hard problem and I’m not at all surprised that many GCMs get answers in bad disagreement with nearly everything they are nominally supposed to predict. The best that can be said of them is that yes, they produce future patterns that do look like climates of a possible future Earth. There is little reason, however, to trust them to produce patterns that are likely to be the climate of this particular Earth.
What truly reasonable people might do when confronted with this sort of disagreement between their model and reality — what appears to be a serious failure of the model almost immediately when compared to observations over a substantial part of the interval the model was supposed to span — would be to go back to the drawing board, beginning by acknowledging that the model is not working. I’d even permit the weasel-phrase probably is not working to let people save face, although in science this should never be necessary as it is understood.
This is what would happen if one built a model for predicting hurricanes, and predicted a steady increase in hurricane frequency and violence that should be easily observable over a 15 year span and observed no such increase. This is what would happen if one built a model for the expected peak of the sunspot count in a given solar cycle that said that it would be much higher than the count in the previous cycle and it turned out to be much lower. It is what should always happen when one builds a model intended to predict something, even something as mundane as the probable time evolution of the prevalence of alcoholism in urban communities or as exotic as the precise date of the coming of the rapture you foretell on the basis of patterns you read in the stars. Modelling is one of my professional areas of strength, and successful models talk, bullshit walks. Models that fail literally have negative value to the extent that they convince people to alter a pattern of investment or activity on the basis of the failed prediction. They are risky!
Now I’m just going to throw this out there. If I were king of the universe, or if I “owned” one of those failing models, and were not heavily invested in the model making one prediction versus another, I would take my model (tuned to a stretch in the second half of the 20th century where there was nominally rapid, CO_2 linked warming even though there was a nearly precisely identical stretch of warming in the first half of the 20th century where CO_2 was irrelevant and my model would fail badly) and I would retune it semi-empirically until it was capable of fitting/predicting both halves of the 20th century using constrained inputs that track as many of the variables as we have semi-reliable measures of — solar activity, CO_2 concentration, likely aerosol contribution, phase of the decadal oscillations. This would probably not be very easy, and it certainly would not be possible to use CO_2, as Bob Tisdale points out, as the One True Control Knob. It would not be very easy because frankly, we have no idea why the Little Ice Age happened, and we have even less of an idea of why, or how, the Earth has systematically recovered since.
We do not have any predictive theory capable of explaining the warming of the first half of the 20th century or somehow differentiating it from the warming of the second half of the 20th century. And yeah, the data we have to input into our putative predictive model across this broad a training set sucks — it wasn’t until world war II that weather prediction became big business and airplanes capable of flying at the top of the troposphere or into the stratosphere were developed and were used to systematically sample the weather to the extent that crude models could be used to predict it in time for things like the D-Day landing, which was contingent on having a prediction of decent flying weather for at least a few days in a row and was postponed several times because that condition failed to materialize.
Still, difficult or not, that would be my primary chore — fixing the model I “owned” so that it worked, at the very least, across the 34 to 50 years that we have have not-so-terrible measurements. Including, of course, the last 15 years where it was failing.
Now here’s a simple exercise. Let’s supposed that I tune my model so that it both matches the 70’s through the 90’s and matches the observations through 2014 where before it predicted 0.6 C surplus warming by 2014. Note well — retune it to the actual observational data, without personal prejudice as to what “climate sensitivity” should really be or what the result should really be. Indeed, I have to make the observed climate the centroid of the span of model results due to the usual Monte Carlo perturbations of the inputs, as any other alternative is naked confirmation bias running amok — I have to presume that I do not know the answer, that Nature is the answer, and that my model needs to correspond to Nature and not the other way around.
What do you think is going to happen to climate sensitivity predicted by my now unbiased model?
a) It’s going to plummet. Indeed, given the stellar absence of any possibility of explaining the absence of warming by means of things like egregious increases in volcanic aerosols, my entire assumptions about aerosols in my previous version of the model are almost certainly wrong, badly wrong. This is going to force the model to de facto ascribe far, far more of the warming of the 80’s and 90’s to natural factors (in agreement with the observation that natural warming in the first half of the 20th century managed to happen at the same rate without CO_2 so natural variability CAN be substantial, and indeed might even be expected on the basis of fairly simple assumptions concerning a likely “rebound” from the LIA’s 9000 year minimum temperatures). It is going to make the feedbacks due to water vapor diminish to next to nothing, possibly even force them to be negative.
b) It’s going to leave them unchanged. Even retuned to fit the data, my model is likely to still produce 5 C warming by 2100 because hey, that’s the “physics”.
c) It’s going to make them even worse. All of that warming is still going on. My model is going to make the heat disappear into the “deep ocean” and then reappear, like a rabbit from a hat, to cause a huge jump in global temperature all at once. In fact, I truly expect the next ENSO event to bump global temperatures by 0.7 C to “catch up” to my original model predictions and get us back on track for even more than 5 C warming by 2100.
Personally, I’d bet on a). I’d be on a) even before I did other things, like compare the predictions of my model with the distinct GCMs belonging to Joe and Tommy and Sally from the same initial conditions, for a much simpler problem such as a pure untipped “water world” and note that the four models don’t end up with predictions that are even near to one another, so that at least three out of the four must be wrong. I’d bet on four out of four, wouldn’t you?
So Steve, with all due respect that’s what this is all about. Constraining the climate sensitivity, which is derived from the models, not from some elementary principle. The only thing that can constrain the sensitivity is enforcing a requirement that the models agree with reality. It cannot be done a posteriori or a priori independent of the models, and unless and until one acknowledges that the GCMs do not generally agree with each other (and hence cannot all be right) and do not generally agree with observation (and hence are unlikely to be right) and fixes the GCMs until these two things are no longer true, the best that can be said about CAGW is that the current evidence does not support the hypothesis of catastrophic warming.
That, at least, is unambiguously true. No observed warming for 15 years is not a track to catastrophe. No significant SLR (indeed, no significant variation of the rate of SLR over 140 years of records) is not a track to catastrophe. No discernible change in the frequency or violence of storms is not a track to catastrophe. The failure of the Arctic to become “ice free” is not a catastrophe. The increase in Antarctic sea ice to make the overall sea ice level of the planet exceed the 30 year mean is not a catastrophe. Be honest — aside from bullshit arguments made in papers desperate to ascribe any marginal variation in ecosystem to human derived climate change, there isn’t a single shred of actual evidence for any negative sequellae due to global climate change that can be positively attributed to human activity, much as one can find localities where we have indeed damaged the ecology and perhaps even the local weather — like the UHI and urban zone surrounding every city, like the deforestation of the tropics.
Humans did not cause the MWP, the LIA, the subsequent warming through at least the 1950s. They might be responsible for some fraction of the warming observed in the 30 year stretch from the 70’s to roughly 2000. Humans cannot be responsible for any warming from 2000 (if not earlier) to the present because there hasn’t been any, and it is almost certain that they were not, in fact, the principle cause of the warming observed over the 80s and 90s which so closely mirrored the warming of the first half of the 20th century that unless you know how to look for specific features in the graphs, the two graphs are indistinguishable from one another when presented on the same relative scale but without the time axis being labelled.
A reasonable person can, indeed, doubt the prediction of CAGW, and not place themselves in opposition with any of the laws of physics, especially when those predictions are without exception derived from models that are in serious disagreement with observation in nearly every dimension they might be expected to predict. And yet, nobody seems inclined to fix the models!
As they say, What’s Up With That?
rgb
Hats off Dr.Brown. A fantastic response, worthy of being elevated as a post by itself.
I have just had one of my friends tell me that I am wrong as she works at Uni (Exeter) with a Climate Scientist who has just been admitted a fellow of the Royal Society, & he believes in the 97% claim! I pointed out to her that Einstien said “A scientific theory can be undone by a single fact!”, & that when President of the Royal Society, Lord Kelvin said, “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible!”. Lengthy discussion ensued with mutual friend online, a true believer that Agenda 21 is nothing more than the benign UN’s environmental blueprint for the 21st Century! Clueless, absolutely clueless!
Venter:
re your post at February 3, 2014 at 7:57 am.
YES! I have suggested the same in a post on Tips&Notes.
Robert Brown’s post needs to be an article if only to enable simple link to it in future threads.
Richard
Nice one Robert Brown. Here is something very recent on water vapor indicating things might not be worse than we thought!
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jgrd.50772
C. I. Garfinkel, D. W. Waugh, L. D. Oman, L. Wang, M. M. Hurwitz. Temperature trends in the tropical upper troposphere and lower stratosphere: Connections with sea surface temperatures and implications for water vapor and ozone. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 2013; 118 (17): 9658 DOI: 10.1002/jgrd.50772
If climate activists were doctors:
Your temperature has clearly increased by .5F in the last 24 hours. We have no idea what is causing it and in the absence of a model that predicts it accurately we are going to assume it will continue to increase at the same rate. You will die of hyperthermia when it gets to 109F. If we do nothing you will be dead in 10 days. So we are going to treat it right now aggressively with drugs that have unknown side effects.
Patient declines treatment and gets better anyway because the body is usually quite good at repairing itself.
It’s only a pause. You will die one day. Possibly from a high temperature. Or cold. Or drowning. Or getting hit by an asteroid. Or something.
If doctors were climate activists:
We need to do a lot more tests before we recommend treatment. How can we give an accurate diagnosis and prognosis unless we have a good handle on the underlying cause.
Right now your temperature is not dangerously high but we will monitor it because we can’t predict it. Most patients presenting with a slightly elevated temperature recover spontaneously.
Dr. Brown says:
This prediction — physics based or not — isn’t the best one in the entire Universe because the greenhouse effect cannot be effectively approximated by a single slab theory — it involves a staggering synthesis of ideas some of which I find a bit dubious — level broadening due to increased (but infinitesimal) partial pressure especially in the wings of the absorption bands, change in the height of the thick layer where the atmosphere finally becomes transparent to CO_2-mediated radiative loss, variation in the DALR itself, lifting of the tropopause — none of which AFAIK can be or have been actually observed to occur as the concentration of CO_2 has increased by 1/3 of the distance to the goal line.
Dr. Brown, why partial pressure and not just the pressure? Any links I can trust? One case will double with a doubling of co2 and the other will barely budge the broadening so there is very little increase in the wings. Over the years I have never come across a definitive paper or text online showing this to be true and right there is why I doubt the AGW story-line. Might also be why we see no warming because the 1980-2000 increase was natural as the 1920-1940 increase.
For instance, I now have a very detailed 1000 foot horizontal IR spectrum at sea level with 5.7 mm precipitable water vapor thanks to an infrared astronomer. Shows the 100% opacity between 645 and 698 wave numbers (≈ 14.33 – 15.5 μm) and I hold that opaque is opaque regardless of any further increase in that band. You can see the pressure broadening due to the 103 kPa pressure. Use a program such as MODTRAN or HITRAN at 10 hPa and you see the toothpick lines with little broadening at low pressure. That’s what I would expect, pressure broadening near the surface. But the AGW story-line goes that if the concentration of co2 doubles you will also get a large increase of broadening not due to the absolute pressure as in the example above but now in addition due to the increase in the partial pressure as if that is some double counting of broadening and I’ve never found an explicit definition explaining this double counting.
Which one? Pressure, partial pressure, some mixture of both pressures? Still foggy on that picky point.
Dr. Brown, why partial pressure and not just the pressure? Any links I can trust? One case will double with a doubling of co2 and the other will barely budge the broadening so there is very little increase in the wings. Over the years I have never come across a definitive paper or text online showing this to be true and right there is why I doubt the AGW story-line. Might also be why we see no warming because the 1980-2000 increase was natural as the 1920-1940 increase.
I’m a bit foggy there myself. I did spend a few years doing quantum optics, and the broadening of an atomic or molecular line comes from many things. There is doppler broadening, basically a doppler shift detuning of the line due to the relative motion of the molecule, that typically depends on temperature. There is collision broadening, broadening caused by the interruption of the phase of a quantum dipole in the process of emitting or absorbing by a collision, typically a collision that in and of itself is far too weak to actually excite a quantum level. Collision broadening should be related directly to the mean free time between collisions, which should depend only on the density and temperature of the gas in question: density determines the mean spacing between molecules, temperature determines the mean speed of the molecules. There would be some small variation with the size of the molecules in question (and hence their collision cross section) but all molecules in the atmosphere are approximately the same size — a couple or three angstroms — compared to intermolecular spacing that is much, much larger. Petty goes over all of this quite clearly.
I can’t really see any good reason in Petty (or think of one myself) to think that there will be any systematic change in CO_2 line broadening at all at any height due to an increase in its partial pressure, although there most definitely would be one if the absolute pressure were increased. Indeed he has a figure that clearly indicates that the reason CO_2 is such a good absorber is that at 1 atmosphere! it is pressure broadened out to where it reduces the mean free path of IR photons in whole bands of to order of a meter. That’s a pretty damn short mean free path for a dilute molecule. Clearly he is referring to real pressure, not partial pressure.
So I can’t say that I completely understand why CO_2 increases are supposed to produce such a pronounced increase in already saturated, already broadened bands. I keep hearing people say that it will increase absorption in the “wings” of the absorption bands, but I don’t ever hear a coherent explanation of why it would do any such thing at constant temperature and constant absolute pressure (and there is always going to be a tiny increase in line broadening for higher temperatures). Also, rather obviously the atmosphere is remarkably stable in both pressure and temperature (and varies considerably over time in both dimensions by an amount that greatly exceeds any possible variation with CO_2 concentration). If there were any instability or positive feedback here we’d see it. Instead we see the opposite, if anything.
If anyone listening in can post a coherent explanation of this, I’d be pleased to learn it. It isn’t that I doubt it; it is that I don’t understand it and am loathe to believe anything (especially something as subtle as this) without some pretty solid analysis. I don’t find it in Petty, and Petty’s book seems as though it would be just precisely the place one SHOULD find it if it is a real issue. I gotta say, his figure 9.13 — while utterly convincing to anyone that doubts that CO_2 is a powerful GHG — doesn’t provide much reason to expect any sort of variation in the line width with partial pressure changes, and to be honest it doesn’t provide much reason to think that changes larger by several orders of magnitude due to ordinary weather-based air pressure and temperature changes are relevant. As far as I know, none of the GCMs actually dynamically shift the absorptivity of GHGs locally with air temperature and/or pressure, although that’s a place where the effects could even be large and asymmetric (large compared to anything I can think of associated with variation of the concentration of CO_2).
Note that increasing CO_2 concentration will reduce the mean free path of molecules up and down through the air column, so it will reduce it high up in the troposphere where the absolute density is dropping to where IR photons in the absorption bands can escape without additional collisions/absorptions. This should make the atmosphere slightly more opaque up there and should indeed “lift” the region where this energy loss occurs to higher/colder temperatures. But at the same time, the lines are narrowing at those higher altitudes and the broad lines of lower altitudes are rapidly shrinking back to comparatively short lines. This serious compromises the coverage of the bands and actually compensates against any reduction of mean free path there. So again, it is by no means particularly clear to me that this is an important first order effect compared to all sorts of far more important things happening lower in the troposphere with e.g. clouds.
rgb
Once upon a time 99% of doctors smoked Camels.
Perhaps Mr Clooney can afford to ask 99 doctors. I can´t!
“I can’t really see any good reason in Petty (or think of one myself) to think that there will be any systematic change in CO_2 line broadening at all at any height due to an increase in its partial pressure, although there most definitely would be one if the absolute pressure were increased. ”
Same here. That claim that it is partial pressure has always bugged me too… greatly. You deserve a big compliment Dr. Brown, incredible… you are seeing further into all of my questions without me even asking! I’ve been a physics enthusiast for about four decades now so I’m at least familiar with nearly any area you lay out but a master of none.
“So I can’t say that I completely understand why CO_2 increases are supposed to produce such a pronounced increase in already saturated, already broadened bands. I keep hearing people say that it will increase absorption in the “wings” of the absorption bands, but I don’t ever hear a coherent explanation of why it would do any such thing at constant temperature and constant absolute pressure …”
Absolutely! That is exactly where I have been stuck for about three years now.
Yes you have factors such as the peak radiation (Wein) sliding to lower frequencies as the temperature drops with altitude, yes you have an opening of the lines as pressure drops with altitude, and yes you have water vapor dropping out with altitude and many more processes, but where exactly are you going to get this 3.7 to 5.5 W/m² to raise the surface 1-1.5°C by just by going from 0.0003 to 0.0006 fraction of co2 in the wings? There is only 8.2 W/m² at 216K in the wings to begin with. I can never find something on this that seems to make any sense, lots of assertions.
I think the central opaque band has something to do with the answer. Totally opaque gas bands are one area where I can see that you can apply the Planck integration (banded SB) as if it were a solid ‘surface’ and there the emissivity would be one without question either from the surface up or from above the TOA down. It seems temperature differences beween those two edges would rule inbetween.
If I were to pick one series of top-posts that absolutely needs to be thoroughly fleshed out… it would be in the radiation transfer area, deeply, in detail, down to the line and bands level of investigation without what seems AGW excuses, for that is where all of my questions seem to collect.
I could go on hours on this topic and just having you say you don’t totally understand a few things in this area lifts me up, maybe it’s not only me with such questions.
Indeed, I have direct knowledge of a case where supposed experts attached to a CT scan facility were sure that a lump on a person’s liver was malignant. The person’s internal medicine specialist was a strong skeptic, pointing to the apparent general health of the individual and other factors.
So he had a surgeon look in the person’s body with a laparascope (an optical viewing tube). The lump was a “hemangioma” (tissue and blood vessels, not uncommon, likely there since birth).
The lump had been discovered with ultrasound, but before doppler ultrasound was available (which might have detected flow) and before MRI imagers were readily available (an MRI detects water, whereas a CT scanner measures density. Perhaps today’s CT scanners are sensitive enough to see small differences in density, as they can distinguish tissue from infected gunk in the sinuses. One of the limitations is image enhancement – some people may be old enough to remember enhancement of pictures from the moon, which at least at that time tended to eliminate detail.
So there’s a real case as an analogy – experts didn’t understand limitations of their technology but were sure of themselves, skeptic was right, advances in the science might shorten the debate.
[snip – more slayers junk – take it elsewhere -Anthony]
“If 99 doctors said … . ” Reminds me of the TV ad when I was a kid that said, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”
In response to Robert Brown on February 3, 2014 at 7:44 am who said in part:
What do you think is going to happen to climate sensitivity predicted by my now unbiased model?
a) It’s going to plummet.””
_________
I agree rgb, but only IF you assume that CO2 is a significant driver of temperature, which I doubt. I wrote in 2013:
“IF you wanted to stick with the ECS concept, then you would have to (as a minimum) delete the phony aerosol data, drop ECS to ~~1/10 of its current values, add some natural variation to account for the global cooling circa 1940-1975, and run the models. The results would probably project modest global warming that is no threat to humanity or the environment…”
However, I am increasingly convinced that my 2008 climate heresy is essentially correct – that global temperature drives atmospheric CO2 much more than CO2 drives global temperature (I accept that human activities might also drive CO2). As I said below:
“I think you would agree that the use of “CO2 sensitivity to temperature” instead of “climate sensitivity to CO2” (ECS) would require a major re-write of the models.”
**********
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/28/models-fail-land-versus-sea-surface-warming-rates/#comment-1432696
Reposted below regarding evidence of aerosol fudging of climate models, from DV Hoyt, for Pamela:
Best personal regards, Allan
Please also see
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/27/reactions-to-ipcc-ar5-summary-for-policy-makers/#comment-1431798
and
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/19/uh-oh-its-models-all-the-way-down/#comment-1421394
[excerpt]
…– the (climate) models have probably “put the cart before the horse” – we know that the only clear signal in the data is that CO2 LAGS temperature (in time) at all measured time scales, from a lag of about 9 months in the modern database to about 800 years in the ice core records – so the concept of “climate sensitivity to CO2” (ECS) may be incorrect, and the reality may be “CO2 sensitivity to temperature”
I think you would agree that the use of “CO2 sensitivity to temperature” instead of “climate sensitivity to CO2” (ECS) would require a major re-write of the models.
If you wanted to stick with the ECS concept, then you would have to (as a minimum) delete the phony aerosol data, drop ECS to ~~1/10 of its current values, add some natural variation to account for the global cooling circa 1940-1975, and run the models. The results would probably project modest global warming that is no threat to humanity or the environment, and we know that just would not do. Based on past performance, the IPCC’s role is to cause fear due to alleged catastrophic global warming, even if this threat is entirely false, which is increasingly probable.
Meanwhile, back at the aerosols:
You may ask why the IPCC does NOT use the aerosol historic data in their models, but rather uses assumed values (different for each model and much different from the historic data) to fudge their models (Oops! I guess I gave away the answer – I should not have used the word “fudge”, I should have said “hindcast”).
.
[excerpt from]
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/15/one-step-forward-two-steps-back/#comment-1417805
Parties interested in the fabrication of aerosol data to force-hindcast climate models (in order for the models to force-fit the cooling from ~1940 to ~1975, in order to compensate for the models’ highly excessive estimates of ECS (sensitivity)) may find this 2006 conversation with D.V. Hoyt of interest:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=755
Douglas Hoyt, responding to Allan MacRae:
“July 22nd, 2006 at 5:37 am
Measurements of aerosols did not begin in the 1970s. There were measurements before then, but not so well organized. However, there were a number of pyrheliometric measurements made and it is possible to extract aerosol information from them by the method described in:
Hoyt, D. V., 1979. The apparent atmospheric transmission using the pyrheliometric ratioing techniques. Appl. Optics, 18, 2530-2531.
The pyrheliometric ratioing technique is very insensitive to any changes in calibration of the instruments and very sensitive to aerosol changes.
Here are three papers using the technique:
Hoyt, D. V. and C. Frohlich, 1983. Atmospheric transmission at Davos, Switzerland, 1909-1979. Climatic Change, 5, 61-72.
Hoyt, D. V., C. P. Turner, and R. D. Evans, 1980. Trends in atmospheric transmission at three locations in the United States from 1940 to 1977. Mon. Wea. Rev., 108, 1430-1439.
Hoyt, D. V., 1979. Pyrheliometric and circumsolar sky radiation measurements by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory from 1923 to 1954. Tellus, 31, 217-229.
In none of these studies were any long-term trends found in aerosols, although volcanic events show up quite clearly. There are other studies from Belgium, Ireland, and Hawaii that reach the same conclusions. It is significant that Davos shows no trend whereas the IPCC models show it in the area where the greatest changes in aerosols were occurring.
There are earlier aerosol studies by Hand and in other in Monthly Weather Review going back to the 1880s and these studies also show no trends.
So when MacRae (#321) says: “I suspect that both the climate computer models and the input assumptions are not only inadequate, but in some cases key data is completely fabricated – for example, the alleged aerosol data that forces models to show cooling from ~1940 to ~1975. Isn’t it true that there was little or no quality aerosol data collected during 1940-1975, and the modelers simply invented data to force their models to history-match; then they claimed that their models actually reproduced past climate change quite well; and then they claimed they could therefore understand climate systems well enough to confidently predict future catastrophic warming?”, he close to the truth.”
_____________________________________________________________________
Douglas Hoyt:
July 22nd, 2006 at 10:37 am
MacRae:
Re #328 “Are you the same D.V. Hoyt who wrote the three referenced papers?”
Hoyt: Yes
.
MacRae: “Can you please briefly describe the pyrheliometric technique, and how the historic data samples are obtained?”
Hoyt:
“The technique uses pyrheliometers to look at the sun on clear days. Measurements are made at air mass 5, 4, 3, and 2. The ratios 4/5, 3/4, and 2/3 are found and averaged. The number gives a relative measure of atmospheric transmission and is insensitive to water vapor amount, ozone, solar extraterrestrial irradiance changes, etc. It is also insensitive to any changes in the calibration of the instruments. The ratioing minimizes the spurious responses leaving only the responses to aerosols.
I have data for about 30 locations worldwide going back to the turn of the century.
Preliminary analysis shows no trend anywhere, except maybe Japan.
There is no funding to do complete checks.”
Jim says:
February 2, 2014 at 2:39 pm “I don’t recall any such ads BTW.”
Jim: I certainly remember the ads. Of course, I am probably older than you, too. It is interesting that pretty much all the politicians were taking money from big tobacco back then, and Al Gore’s family owned a tobacco farm. There is lots of blame to go around on the tobacco thing. Lots of people were involved in that gravy train.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/business/media/07adco.html?_r=0
“””””…..Hoyt:
“The technique uses pyrheliometers to look at the sun on clear days. Measurements are made at air mass 5, 4, 3, and 2. The ratios 4/5, 3/4, and 2/3 are found and averaged. The number gives a relative measure of atmospheric transmission and is insensitive to water vapor amount, ozone, solar extraterrestrial irradiance changes, etc. It is also insensitive to any changes in the calibration of the instruments. The ratioing minimizes the spurious responses leaving only the responses to aerosols……”””””
So why no air mass 1 measurement, sort of as a baseline ? And precisely what is being measured; if in fact water vapor, ozone, and solar irradiance don’t matter. We do know for sure, that water content in the atmosphere does significantly affect the solar spectrum energy that reaches the ground.
Now just exactly what do “aerosols” do to disturb incoming solar spectrum energy, that H2O, O3, and CO2 don’t do ? Remember you say on clear days, so no clouds are being nucleated by these aerosols, or anything else. Does the measurement, also eliminate the blue sky, Mie and Raleigh scattering ??
“””””…..RS says:
February 3, 2014 at 11:34 am
Once upon a time 99% of doctors smoked Camels……”””””
Wow; the doc has a vet practice on the side.
Much prefer to smoke salmon myself; camels are just too ornery for me.
“””””””……._Jim says:
February 2, 2014 at 1:56 pm
george e. smith says February 2, 2014 at 12:38 pm
…
Well there’s not a hell of a lot left in the 15 micron band by the time the “sunlight” as you call it, gets from the sun to this planet.
My favorite black body radiation graph, says that less than 1% of the sun’s radiant energy is longer than 4 microns wavelength, at which point the solar spectral irradiance (at earth orbit) is about 0.3% of its [value] at the peak (0.5 micron). At 15 microns the spectral irradiance is 0.003%.
And I suppose that the atmospheric CO2 is going to eat all of that before it reaches the surface.
The sun is not a good source of 15 micron radiant energy. Some people still claim we can feel it, as “heat”.
I think you are misinterpreting a lot regrading the Planck curve and the amount of LWIR one feels from the sun …..”””””
Well _Jim , I didn’t interpret ANYTHING regarding the Planck curve; simply recited the numbers right off the chart; so how does one misinterpret nothing ??
But don’t keep us in suspense. Exactly what is it I said about the solar; near black body spectrum, that you disagree with. Please give us YOUR numbers, that refute mine
So my ground level air mass zero chart of solar spectral irradiance gives 2066 W/m^2/micron peak at 460 nm, yielding a 1353 W/m^2 TSI (old value) The chart shows the air mass one (surface value at about 2/3 of that, or 1377 W/m^2/micron, and they tabulate the peak for air mass two as 1215 W/m^2/micron, at 500 nm, with a TSI of 1322 W/m^2 for that spectrum.
So taking that 1215 W/m^2 for the 500nm peak and extrapolating out to 30 times the peak or 15 microns, we get 3E-5 of the peak or 36.45 W/m^2/micron, but we now have 30 times the number of microns spectrum width, so that gives approximately 1.1 W/m^2 surface irradiance for a solar sourced spectrum centered at 15 microns, at ground level.
So who wants to claim they can detect (feel) the warmth from 1.1 W/m^2 of LWIR energy centered at about 15 microns, and covering about 7.5 microns (half the peak) out 120 microns (8xpeak) which contains about 98% of the energy in a BB spectrum.
And that presumes that your body even registers 15 micron radiation as “heat”.
Gareth;
You have a compendium of observational (vs. computer-simulated) evidence that you find more convincing than the Pause? Do tell.