Why a compelling theory is not enough

Although the first two are only speculation, number two seemed more credible.

Wow. Mr. Hansen seems to be really alarmed.
He strongly believes a run away green house effect has made Venus inhospitable. Given the limited understanding we have of the climate developments on our own planet, it is astonishing that he grounds his fear on the hypothesized developments of another planet that we have hardly studied.
On the other hand: In the video Mr. Hansen is holding his head tilted all the time as if he wasn‘t sure about his claims. Awkward.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/10/why-a-compelling-theory-is-not-enough/#comment-1609630
Richards in Vancouver – a perfect analysis to illustrate the point!
Bravo.

And how do you stop the next generation of scientists from letting real world evidence get in the way of wild theorizing?
Well here’s a start:
“Science community dismayed at decision to axe lab work from A-levels
Plan to end coursework in science A-levels described as ‘death knell for UK science education’ by Physiological Society”
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/apr/09/science-community-dismay-axe-lab-work-alevel

Don’t forget rogue planets.

Absolute nonsense.
Did not the Institut in Paris, then the second most learned scientific body in the world after the Royal Society, declare in 1812 that the idea of stones falling from the sky was total nonsense.
So bah to that.
Except a few months later there was a fall of meteorites just outside Paris.
Kindest Regards

I explain the water vapor theory being nonsense, by showing what happen during the 1998 El Nino, the temperature shot up, so did water vapor, but came down just as fast, when the El Nino was finished, if water vapor was self perpetuating or exponential there would have been no cooling after

skeptic science
As this fits in very nicely with an idea I have been developing it may be a good time to introduce it.
For many years I have tried to distinguish climate “science” by the use of quotation marks to show that I did not consider the work of most climate academics to fulfil the criteria I was taught for a science at school and university. I know many others share this view as I’ve seen similar views repeated many times, not least in this article, but also in comments regarding the failure of climate science to use “the scientific method” and for example in comments about “post-normal science”. I’ve no doubt those same views will be repeated again here.
However there is a huge problem with skeptics trying to tell scientists what standards we think they should work to. Although the majority of skeptics are perfectly qualified to comment on science being taught at degree level in the hard sciences most of us are not university academics and whilst many are “scientists” most of us are not. So, whilst skeptics may wish science to operate at a standard that we consider to be “science”, the reality is that we are a group largely outside of what most of society considers to be “science” demanding that those inside this group called “science” should meet the standards expected of us outside.
We may dislike the situation. But we are not in a position to demand. We might be able to demand if we were a body like government or in some other way had authority or control over those academics who self-identify as scientists. But the reality is that these days the criteria used to determine science is peer-review by other people who self-identify as scientists and have themselves been peer reviewed. This is in essence a self-perpetuating social group. I believe it is time we skeptics accepted that “science” is a social construct describing a group of people who set their own rules and as such as outsiders we have no right to dictate those rules for them. And irrespective of whether we might like those within this social group of scientists to use the “scientific method” I believe we have to leave that choice up to them. And as we have seen, that choice is that they have chosen to include within their group called science many thing like climate science which cannot be tested by the scientific method.
As outsiders we cannot realistically demand this group match our standards.
Instead, I believe it is time that we skeptics set out clearly what we mean by “science” and therefore I would like to develop a concept I suggest is called “Skeptic science”.
As it is mentioned so often by us skeptics, the key requirement would be that assertions are only stated as valid if and only if they are subject to the scientific method – or as many engineers will know it “it might work in theory but let’s see if it works in practice”.
But I would like to go further. As this could be described as a battle between the private and public-funded sectors, and the majority of skeptics work in the private sector where standards have to be much higher because real customers will take private sector scientists and engineers to court when there are problems, I suggest the ultimate test most skeptics would to the quality of sceptic science is this:
“That the assertions must be such that even if the assertion itself is found to be untrue, that the skeptic can show that the assertion itself was valid given the evidence then available”.
So for example if one were to say “the planet is certainly warming”, if it were later shown that the planet is not warming (almost in any period) then the assertion is not up to the standards of skeptic science. If however someone had said “based on this dataset, the temperature has warmed over the last 100 years”, that is skeptic science – because even if it were found that the dataset was a total forgery, the original assertion was that this dataset showed warming so it was not invalid. Indeed if we added to the assertion that it “… has warmed over the last 100 years and on average we expect rising CO2 to cause some additional warming”, given the hard science supporting CO2, this also would be skeptic science because it is based of substantiated evidence of the measured radiative properties of CO2 and as it includes “uncertainy” in the shape of “expect to … on average” rather than “unequivocably will”, this is a very robust statement.
In other words, this is the standard most private sector skeptics in engineering and science have to apply to their work. This is because in real life (outside academia) where there are real customers and real life and death situations which need reliable advice, when things go wrong, skeptics have to show that their advice was reasonable in a court of law. In the real world where time and resource is finite, advice has to be given knowing more data would improve it and so knowing there is a real risk that e.g. they fail to put the drill just where the geological fault is that make the whole mine uneconomic. So private sector engineers and scientists are naturally skeptics.
This is why scientifically trained engineers and scientists in the private sector expect a much higher standard.
So, whilst scientists like to portray their work as some paridigm of virtue, the reality is that in terms of quality of advice skeptics have to set themselves much higher standards. This I believe is why there has been such strong feeling. Skeptics work in an environment where they expect very high standards – just look at Steve McIntyre! In contrast scientists (i.e. academics) expect to be able to “float a few ideas and see where they fall”. They want, indeed, need, the freedom to explore ideas without worrying unduly if they are wrong. This is good within an academic context as it does allow ideas to be explored, but it clearly is not appropriate within the private sector nor when giving governments advice on policy.
So, if we skeptics stopped trying to tell scientists what they should do, and instead led by example and set out what we expected through the development of the idea of “skeptic science”, I believe much of the hostility might be reduced.
Practical examples
So, looking above.
1. Can Hansen argue he was right to say it would certainly warm ending in doomsday that that it is not currently warming? I’ve never ever seen anything that would justify that. Given that, I think that if he were sued by world governments for poor advice in a court of law (like skeptics might), on the evidence I have seen, he would be found guilty as he gave advice which appears to be unsupportable now we know it to be wrong.
So this is not skeptic science
2. Visitation by aliens. This is more difficult because we have to create a hypothetical situation where we know aliens don’t exist. But should that occur, could the wild ideation theories be argued to have reasonably led people to believe in alien visitation. I must admit I’ve never really looked at the evidence, but judging on what other says, this does not look anything like skeptic science.
3. Meteors expectantly hitting the earth. That there are meteors is a fact. That the earth has been hit is a fact. That we continue to be hit by small space objects is a fact. It is difficult to construct a scenario whereby this is proven as false, that the assertion “we will be hit in the future at some unexpected time, by a meteor (up to a reasonable size)” appears to be sufficiently robust to be skeptic science.

Wow This is looking extremely interesting. My bet is that this year we are going to see a massive increase in global ice as Antarctica seems to be going definitely in one direction as we enter winter in the Southern Hemisphere.

The two first would be considered fringe hypotheses.
The third suggestion has the makings of an actual theory until proven invalid.

skience says:
April 10, 2014 at 2:31 am
“Indeed, there may be many within climate science who are cautious in what they say and who would be skeptic scientists.”
Only that they do it secretly while publicly they go along with the UN’s globalist control schemes. “I have only followed orders”; an excuse that is in practice not nearly as good as it sounds.

Well Done Eric,
I do think that is a good article.
However some comments below.
Clearly the CATASTROPHIC Green House Gas Theory lacks observational evidence. But what about the GHGE theory itself? Could it be that so called Green House Gases actually help COOL the Earth? IS there any observational evidence for that? Well yes there is.
http://www.principia-scientific.org/greenhouse-effect-does-water-vapor-increase-or-decrease-the-lapse-rate.html.
So,actually the Inverse of Theory 1 has observational evidence.
Theory 3. Meteorites could destroy the Earth, has some backing but the recent example did not actually kill anyone!

Eric Worrall says:
April 10, 2014 at 3:43 am
“DirkH
I think what the climate models intentionally lack is the concept of thunderstorms.
Willis said something similar on several occasions 🙂 – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/07/emergent-climate-phenomena/
”
Very good link in this context! Yes, they cannot simulate exactly that kind of emergence due to their fixed coarse grid size.

After reading the comments so far, I can see a case made for number 1 being the odd man out as well. #2 is pure speculation, but there is no evidence against it. #3 is, as stated, an observed phenomenon. #1 however has evidence against it.

None of the three scenarios listed reaches the level of a scientific theory. At best they are hypothesis with some supporting evidence, except for hypothesis 2 for which there is a total lack of evidence, but absence of evidence is not of course evidence of absence.
The danger from asteroid impacts is in fact quite closely constrained by observation. Major events are much less frequent than the timescale of the development of human civilisation.
A runaway greenhouse effect is theoretically possible on the Earth but would take particular circumstances and is again constrained to time scales far longer than the existence of humans, never mind civilisation. However the observational evidence it is possible is obvious from the state of Venus.
The whole article of this post is undermined by the apparent indifference to the definitions of scientific theory, hypothesis and speculation.

@-dccowboy
Venus has no magnetic field to shield it, it has never had oceans, it has no large satellite, the composition of its atmosphere is not only far denser, but also very dissimilar to earth’s, and finally Venus receives a good deal more solar radiation than earth.
How do you know Venus never had oceans?
The surface of Venus actually receives LESS solar radiation than the Earth because the high cloud layer has a much greater albedo than the Earth. Although the time in the past when Venus became a runaway greenhouse was when the sun was much cooler. As the sun increases in output we get closer tot he Earth receiving the same sort of energy as Venus did in the Early stages of the solar system.
@- Col Mosby
Hansen’s problem is that he doesn’t knw the Earth’s climatic history. The conditions about which he warns have occurred before and there was no “runaway” warming, which is prima facia evidence that Hansen doesn’t understand the Earth’s climate and how it works.
The conditions that are similar in the Earth’s past occurred when the solar output was much {30%} lower than at present. Perhaps Hansen knows more about the Earth’s climate history than you think?

David L. says: But I think society at large is in a position to demand, because society pays for their research through tax dollars. That is the great misdirection of academics: Academics have it both ways, they dip into the public coffer and claim a cloistered existence answerable only to the inner circle.
There are many people in academia who aspire to the standard of skeptic science. But unfortunately, there are many, and by the way so most institutions failed to take action after climategate it is a majority, who are willing to accept the status quo and accept work as “science” which does not meet the higher standards we skeptics would like.
The problem at the moment is that whenever we criticise “science” it is taken as a criticism of both the good and the less good. We need a way to distinguish between the two.
But most importantly we need to be able to articulate what we want in a positive way instead of constantly being portrayed as attacking all “science”. Creating a positive vision of what we want may in itself cause academia to re-evaluate its standards and “pull its socks up”. But I doubt it as many academics who don’t meet the skeptic standard have been allowed to call themselves scientists, and I can’t see them willingly changing the standards of science in a way which would necessarily exclude them.
This is why I firmly believe we need to establish a new concept of skeptic science – which is science where assertions are only made which can be substantiated by the evidence.

Anyone remember Carl Sagan speculating that the burning oil wells were going to affect the climate? We all understand that when you dream up an alarming scenario you can get people to listen to you. Climate alarm has been going on for a long time. You might say it started with the story of Noah.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-01-23/news/1991023131_1_kuwait-saddam-hussein-sagan

re: The C of E’s climate advocacy:
The Church of England is dying – they know it, everyone knows it. Like all dying organizations, they are flopping around, desperately trying to find something politically popular to latch onto in the hope that those who have already rejected them may come back to the fold. It’s rather like a jilted lover thinking that a new tube of lipstick is all she needs to get her old boyfriend back – it never works.
And of course it has never occurred to the CofE to go back to the actual core of what was once their faith – that’s so old fashioned! And so they race and race and race after whatever their pollsters and political inclinations tell them might be trendy, never comprehending that today’s trend is always tomorrow’s bad joke.
And thus do great institutions with longstanding traditions die.
(and please don’t misinterpret my meaning, the “climate change” advocacy isn’t a cause of this, it’s just one more small symptom of the internal cancer that has now spread throughout the entire body of that church, and will kill it soon)

We have already been visited by aliens, who most likely continue to monitor us. The alternative is to believe the preposterous proposition that we are the only intelligent life inhabiting any of the planets…

Theory 2 also presents the ever popular False Choice fallacy. You are given two choices, one must be true. Usually one is absurd, therefore the other must be true. Obama is particularly fond of a variant on this where he presents two obviously false alternatives, then proposes his third way, which must be true.
CAGW presents its own false choice: we must choose between saving the planet and using fossil fuels free market capitalism.
Whenever I see this fallacy I know I am being handed a nice hot steaming bowl of horse manure.

Item 3 could make Item 1 plausible.
A sufficiently large rock travelling thro our atmosphere would certainly produce Travesty Manns missing heat, especially if it impacts an ocean..
Nice Posting, the appeal of item 1&2 is religion.
The organized churches have been jumping on the CAGW meme as they recognize their own schtick being used.
Parasites always disguise themselves as do-gooders.
The louder the offer to help, using your resources, the greedier the leech.
I say;”A Tax on all do-gooders” 150% of their gross income.

Eric Worrall says: The other two theories, however compelling they seem, are just speculation.
This entire ‘essay’, and most of the nearly identical one from a couple of days ago, can be reduced to this: “In my opinion there is absolutely no evidence supporting human caused climate change.” The rest is round-about illustrations of your certainty about this. Mainstream climate science is no better than a theory about aliens (again). What’s more, doubling atmospheric CO2 poses no greater threat than an alien invasion. Effectively zero risk.
Try to appreciate the irony of climate scientists being the ones routinely accused around here of underestimating uncertainties.

Skience, thanks for a well-reasoned essay. I would add another observation regarding the current business of academics:
The customers (taxpayers) do not directly recieve the products they are buying (research) and hence are not in a position to separate the good from the bad. That job is left to the service providers (universities) who have demonstrated little incentive to criticisize their own brand.
Is it any wonder that science has been contorted under this business model? In its worst examples, we have a tribute system like the days of old.

Journals are in the business of making money, so they will publish all kinds of crap. Just because it passes peer review and gets published does not mean much as far as I am concerned. And it doesn’t make it science either, because it can still be crap or fraud. Unless you go to the researchers office and check his records, you have to take their word for it. Autism and vaccines anyone? Lewinsky should test the correlation between belief in that hypothesis and belief in CAGW.

Actually we have strong empirical evidence of alien presence.
They must be intelligent enough to appreciate the value of not being seen and they also have the technical means to attain it.
And sure as hell we can’t see them, which proves the point.
The same way the fact a runaway greenhouse never occurred on Earth proves the grave danger we are in. As Dr. Hansen puts it

“We’ve never had a runaway greenhouse effect, because if we did, that would have been the end. That’s a permanent situation. In the case of a snowball Earth when the Earth becomes ice covered, then the planet can escape from that situation, because volcanoes continue to go off, but the weathering process is greatly reduced, so volcanoes put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that builds up more and more until there is enough to melt the ice. But we can’t push the planet off of the runaway greenhouse, that’s the end for everybody if we do that.”

In other words, had our remote ancestors not escaped that fate, we would not have to worry about a runaway greenhouse, because there would not be anyone left to worry in the first place. However, as it is now, our situation is completely different.
Is logic not wonderful?

Calling Venus a “runaway greenhouse” is a bit odd. Venusian climate, from what we can tell, has been remarkably stable for a really long time. With no plate tectonics as we know it, current tinking is that Venus undergoes periodic curstal turnover from below over a period of several million years on a very long term periodic basis. This idea is supported by the apparent lack of old cratering. Venus, with a surface pressure of ~90X Earth’s implies that good ol’ pV=nRT plays a huge role in the temps on Venus. Getting Earth’s atmosphere to 9000% of present pressure is not a plausible outcome, unless one has taken a lot of drugs. Human industry, except to the extent that it has come up with psychotropic drugs, plays no role in making Hansen’s biazarre idea a reality.

izen
April 10, 2014 at 5:39 am
‘The surface of Venus actually receives LESS solar radiation than the Earth because the high cloud layer has a much greater albedo than the Earth…’
So, why then, is Venus a good comparison?
‘Although the time in the past when Venus became a runaway greenhouse was when the sun was much cooler. As the sun increases in output we get closer tot he Earth receiving the same sort of energy as Venus did in the Early stages of the solar system…’
I thought the CAGW mantra was that the sun didn’t change in energy? Are you having it both ways?
BTW: I think a fourth scientific proposition is that James Hansen is an alien.

Tom J says:
April 10, 2014 at 11:44 am
BTW: I think a fourth scientific proposition is that James Hansen is an alien.

So, not only aliens cannot predict climate but also they do not know how to cure male pattern baldness.
I am so disappointed in alien science. 😛

izen says:
April 10, 2014 at 5:02 am
…………………….
A runaway greenhouse effect is theoretically possible on the Earth but would take particular circumstances and is again constrained to time scales far longer than the existence of humans, never mind civilisation. However the observational evidence it is possible is obvious from the state of Venus.

Can the burning of all the fossil fuels in the ground do this? The IPCC and Sir John Houhtton (former IPCC authore AR1,2,3) say No way. Hansen backtracked on the oceans ending up in the atmosphere, see below in his own words.

Dr. James Hansen – 15 April 2013
“Making Things Clearer: Exaggeration, Jumping the Gun, and The Venus Syndrome”
…..At least one sentence in “Storms” will need to be corrected in the next edition: even with burning of all fossil fuels the tropical ocean does not “boil”. But it is not an exaggeration to suggest, based on best available scientific evidence, that burning all fossil fuels could result in the planet being not only ice-free but human-free….
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdf

I have been examining all this again over the last few years and the extremity of the things the people who believe and tell anybody who’ll listen –
‘Oh, the basic science of this, is sound!’
The claims made by the effect itself: just the official story – is enough to make anyone trained in energy mechanics laugh out loud,
in their face.
1% of the gases are responsible for every degree of heating past the hottest vacuum surface conditions No atmosphere at all with 100% impingement and zero removal through other means than radiant?
A cold bulk gas nitrogen oxygen bath refrigerated with water is responsible for making an object it is washing of heat
hotter than it was,
than if it weren’t there.
And not only that but only the infrared interactive gases – the main one being the atmospheric refrigerant – are the sole ones responsible for any of that heating.
The things, the people who will claim, “Oh, I firmly believe that’s real science,”
Are the same people who didn’t know for 15 years James Hansen and his friends’ global climate models
don’t represent the atmosphere behaving according to Ideal Gas Law.
The Green House Gas Theory that couldn’t be a theory because it was too magical to falsify with actual experimental evidence.
Wouldn’t you be happy with that as your scientific legacy? My God… LoL.

“dccowboy says:
April 10, 2014 at 4:24 am
“He strongly believes a run away green house effect has made Venus inhospitable. ”
I don’t know if Dr Hansen does believe this, but many of my acquaintances on the AGW do. They constantly cite this as an example of what we face. I find the idea ludicrous. The only thing Venus and earth have in common is relatively close size. Venus has no magnetic field to shield it, it has never had oceans, it has no large satellite, the composition of its atmosphere is not only far denser, but also very dissimilar to earth’s, and finally Venus receives a good deal more solar radiation than earth. ”
When the solar system formed, the sun was only about 70% as luminous as it is now.
Since Venus is about 70% as distant from the sun as earth is, 4.5 billion years ago Venus was getting about the same amount of radiation from the sun as the earth gets now.
Unfortunately for Venus, the sun has been heating up. When the luminosity of the sun increased by 5%, there was a runaway greenhouse effect.
Google “Goldilocks and the Three Planets”
http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/cjohnson/climate.html
“This is the complete carbon cycle: rainwater removes CO2 from the atmosphere and puts it in the crust, and volcanic action releases CO2 from the crust and puts it back in the atmosphere.
What happens on Venus? Venus has no water! Early in its history Venus may have had water, but it is too close to the Sun to retain it. When water molecules rise high in an atmosphere, ultraviolet radiation split the water molecules into its component gases, oxygen and hydrogen, and the lighter hydrogen molecules escape into space. While Earth’s lower atmosphere is about one percent water vapor (although it seems much higher in the humid Louisiana summers), the upper atmosphere, where ultraviolet radiation can penetrate, is very dry: a cold trap, a combination of pressure and temperature, prevents water vapor from rising high in the earth’s atmosphere. Venus has a cold trap, too, but because Venus is closer to the Sun its cold trap is much higher in the atmosphere and any Venusian water molecules rise high enough to be broken apart by ultraviolet radiation. ”
The Sun has increased in luminosity not quite 1% every hundred million years. When the luminosity increases to 1.05 current luminosity, in about 500 million years, Earth will suffer a runaway greenhouse effect and wind up as Venus’ identical twin.
If our planetary system orbited a star only about half as luminous as the sun, say Tau Ceti, Venus’ evolution could have been similar to Earth’s. After about 7 billion years, Venus would be getting about the same radiance from the sun as the Earth gets now, and the Earth would be getting the same amount of radiation from Tau Ceti as OUR earth received 4.5 billion years ago- a system with the potential for TWO lifebearing planets!

MikeB says:
April 10, 2014 at 4:15 am
“For example, let’s say that an increase in CO2 leads to a warming of 1 degree C. That warming produces a rise in water vapour and more CO2 (released from the warming oceans) such that the temperature rises a further half degree in response. That half degree rise in turn causes a further rise of one quarter of a degree, which causes another rise of one eighth of a degree and so on. This is a positive feedback series but it is also ‘convergent’.”
No, that is not a positive feedback.
The division of feedbacks into “positive” and “negative” categories is a legacy of continuous time systems theory. E.g.,
dx/dt = a*x + u
where a is a constant and u is an input. This differential equation has positive feedback if a is positive, and negative feedback if a is negative. If a is positive, the system is unstable, and vice versa.
A zero-order-hold discrete time difference equation approximation to that system is
x(k+1) = e*x(k) + ((1-e)/a)*u(k)
where e = exp(a*T), and T is the sample period. This system is stable if e is less than unity. That is the case if a is negative. The dividing line is no longer whether e is positive or negative (as an exponential function, it is always positive), but whether it has magnitude less than unity.
Your example is a discrete time system. It is stable because your increase is always a fraction of what it was before, i.e., your gain is less than unity. This is a negative feedback system.
Positive feedback is inherently unstable. It can only be stable if it is enclosed within a larger negative feedback loop which overwhelms it. E.g., in the system above, we could have two effects proportional to x
dx/dt = (a+b)*x + u
We can have b positive iff a+b is negative.
That, however, is not the system we have. What we do have is a hypothesized model of the form
1) dT/dt = -a*T + b*C
where a and b are positive constants, T is temperature anomaly, and C is CO2 concentration. Now, if C were an independent input, the system would be stable. If we had a system of the form
C = c*T + H
where H is human inputs, the system would become
dT/dt = -(a-b*c)*T + b*H
That system would be stable so long as a-b*c were greater than zero.
However, that is NOT what we have. Empirically, we have a relationship of the form
2) dC/dt = k*(T – To)
where k is a positive coupling factor, and To is the equilibrium temperature. This system, composed of equations (1) and (2), is always unstable for any b greater than zero. And, that ineluctably leads us to conclude that temperature sensitivity to CO2 concentration, in the present climate state, is at best negligible.
I went into some detail discussing this phenomenon here, if you are interested in further reading.

skience says:
April 10, 2014 at 2:25 am
skeptic science
“That the assertions must be such that even if the assertion itself is found to be untrue, that the skeptic can show that the assertion itself was valid given the evidence then available”.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Nice essay skience. I would hate to say how many times I have used the above in my career from the 60’s to the 2000’s when I “retired” to farming. The courts have (had) an expectation of use of the “standards” of the day in engineering, though that is being replaced by “Best Available Technology” which has variants relative to location, affordability and cost/benefit. Good documentation is the key. As it should be with science.
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Enjoyed you comments.