Receding Swiss glaciers incoveniently reveal 4000 year old forests – and make it clear that glacier retreat is nothing new

It obviously ain’t true unless you can create a computer model for these forests!

I can no longer stomach reading Stokes posts. They contributing nothing but confusion, and are clearly intended to derail any constructive discussion. His intent is only to attract attention to himself. Like a child.

John Finn says: August 8, 2014 at 6:46 am It wasn’t.
Twas. http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1945/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1965/to:2000/trend

Nick Stokes is a Trollolololol
Please, stop feeding the trolls. They get their pleasure and paycheck by getting you all riled up. He was going by some other name on a CBS thread yesterday. The tactic is: throw out some pathetic challenge, watch you run in circles, then throw out another pathetic challenge. His one minute post takes an hour to research and respond to. Once you realize their game, you will stop feeding them.

Yes, that is based on the rapid rise consistent with AGW, and with no alternative explanation from present data. But it is not the proof of AGW, which is based on radiative physics.

What? First of all, the present data is not consistent with the modelled AGW. That’s why everybody is worrying so much about “the pause”, to the point where it got its own box in AR5 and is up to 30 possible alternative explanations, all supported by, nay necessitated by present data. The problem isn’t that there is no alternative explanation, it is there are too many and we have no way of resolving any of them in a complex, nonlinear, multivariate system where linearization of response is almost certainly impossible.
Second, even the climate record of just the last 100 years — if you want to call that “present data” — refutes the assertion that most of the warming is probably due to CO_2. CO_2 is not a plausible explanation for the warming observed in the first half of the 20th century, which was within 0.2C of the warming observed in the second half. In both cases the warming was limited to a single stretch of roughly 15-20 years (1920-1940 and 1980-2000 in ROUGH terms). In both cases the warming was followed by a plateau or weak cooling, encouraging yet another linearization fantasy as you well know trying to assign a “simple cause” to two whole “cycles”. But how are the models any better, or even different, from connecting this to e.g. the PDO, a plausible cause with roughly the right timescale at a macroscopic quasiparticle level much largers than the supposed “microscopic” dynamics in the GCMs?
Truthfully, we cannot explain either one of these cycles — the individual models in CMIP5 are laughable when compared to the data, and the meaningless multimodel ensemble (MME) mean skates right over the 1930’s warming showing that collectively they don’t have a clue about natural variability of the climate either. Assigning the cause to an even larger scale dynamic is surely no worse, and of course it fits these two cycles pretty well even if it fails miserably everywhere else and still explains almost nothing (and, of course, neglects the possible effects of other things that surely — well, probably — contributed to the climate, more CO_2, varying aerosols, big volcanoes, the varying solar cycle, the slow/steady orbital progression that makes tiny but possibly significant changes in just where things like perigee and apogee happen relative to the oceans and continents, the manifold timescales of oceanic turnover, and various nonlinear feedbacks). However, the existence of the former cycle reduces the plausibility that CO_2 is the dominant cause of the second.
Indeed, the only place that the CMIP5 MME mean works is in the reference period used to parameterize the models! which just happens to be the single stretch in the latter half of the 20th century where rapid warming occurred. I cannot begin to tell you how dumb it is to initialize/validate models on a short data segment exhibiting a rapid change that is not fully characteristic of the full set, especially not when one has the full set to work with. It isn’t even surprising that the models fail almost immediately thereafter. Confounding, ignored causes abound, the models are almost certainly incorrectly balanced in their gain vs loss terms (that had to cancel out to fit the rapid rise in the reference) and even small errors in this sort of balancing of large, opposing terms in a nonlinear model often lead to divergence from reality downstream.
Finally, while I (as you know) fully acknowledge that the GHE is real and that there is likely to be an approximately linear first order partial derivative in the total climate response to increasing CO_2, in this sort of system that sort of information is nearly useless in terms of estimating the total derivative. The system might do anything from nearly completely cancel it via nonlinear feedbacks to enhance it via nonlinear feedbacks to wash it out in much larger terms that dominate the dynamics and make the response irrelevant. Given the general stability of the climate system and the fact that in past data glacial epochs have occurred on numerous occasions when CO_2 levels were 2 to 10 times its current level, it is at least plausible-plus that the feedbacks will tend to cancel, not augment, the linearized CO_2-only partial derivative. Which, by the way, we only know at best approximately, making a number of egregious assumptions (one of which I’ve been discussing on another thread, others of which relate to the marginal response over, say, ocean water as opposed to land).
We not only cannot seem to build plausible, verifiable physical models of climate evolution, we have rather excellent reasons to believe that we cannot build such a model at an operational scale five to seven orders of magnitude larger than the known Kolmogorov scale of the nonlinear chaotic dynamics, which is order of a few millimeters. The models we are using are not “physics based” in the sense that we can derive that physics. They are semiphenomenological models where ad hoc approximations are applied all over the place to get them to where the computations can proceed at all, even at the absurdly large length scales. They are justified only because related ad hoc models have been sufficiently tuned that they can predict the weather a few weeks in advance before the prediction becomes too random relative to eventual reality to be of much use. We have no reason whatsoever to think that these models, that egregiously and visibly fail in roughly 90% of the time record outside of the reference period in the last 130 or so years (to the extent that we actually know the data they are trying to fit, which is itself rather dubious), will magically become predictive still later. Given the non-Markovian nature of the climate, this is almost certainly not going to be the case — even the models themselves will give a different prediction if re-initialized to fit a reference period now relative to what they predicted initialized to fit a reference period back in the 80’s.
Of course, the models themselves — one at a time — produce a dazzling array of possible futures from any perturbation of the initial state — clearly illustrating the strong nonlinear chaotic nature of the dynamics even at the current resolution. Quite seriously, I would challenge you to demonstrate to me with any counterexamples a single case of a deterministic highly multivariate nonlinear system exhibiting chaos that can be accurately solved by a phenomenological replacement integrated at a scale a million times larger than its Kolmogorov scale. Why is it that we, as theoretical/computational physicists, should even think that such a thing is possible, even with far simpler systems?
Why is it that when I tell my classes to try to integrate even very simple chaotic systems to numerically “observe” chaos in e.g. a driven oscillator consisting of a mass on a rigid rod or a “bender bouncer”, I caution them to use a very small stepsize and rigorous tolerances because if they don’t, the chaotic nature of the dynamics can actually be erased by de-facto introducing stronger damping and at the very least will give you incorrect patterns of oscillation, a false idea of the phase space that is accessed. Should I be telling them to just use a large stepsize, that will work just fine? Should I tell them to use Euler’s method to do the integration (which AFAICT is more or less what climate models do implicitly) rather than a halfway decent ODE solver, perhaps one capable of dealing with local/limited stiffness?
Again, the thing that is hard for me to understand is how anyone could think that we have actually solved the problem correctly with GCMs at all. This is a hard problem, a “grand challenge” problem, in general nonlinear dynamics long before one tries to build a climate model as arguably the most extreme and most difficult exemplar of the general class of nonlinear dynamical models. Sorry, but it isn’t even about to be solved by climate scientists and computer science geeks (speaking as a card carrying member of the latter class and diligent amateur in the former) — they seem to be cheerfully oblivious to the difficulty and what we’ve already learned from far simpler problems. Even if we had a perfect model, one that could integrate the entire system down to the millimeter/millisecond scale, we’d still have the enormous problem of simply not knowing the initial state at anything like that resolution, and requiring still other models to generate plausible initial conditions from the pitiful set of observations at the even courser grid of spatiotemporal locations available at any given instant. We have to use models just to start the models out, and the data those models are built on is terrible and inadequate.
So please — let’s not — ever, ever again — bring out the tired old wheeze that “only CO_2 can explain the recent warming” which is no longer all that recent. We have almost no idea at all of how much — or little — of the one burst of 20th century warming that occurred when CO_2 was increasing was caused by the CO_2. That is because we cannot predict with the slightest bit of confidence what the temperature would have/should have been without that CO_2, and because even if we had a believable answer for that for one set if initial conditions, if a butterfly beat its wings in Brazil to slightly alter the initial state, we’d get an entirely different answer in as little as a single year.
rgb

All the posts regarding Nick Stokes reminds me of discussions I used to have with an ex wife. Never will it make him see the error in CO2 worship.

Nick Stokes says: August 8, 2014 at 6:01 am “The AGW theory is that adding CO2 will make it warmer. It does not say that warming could not be caused by something else.”
You are blatantly avoiding the fundamental basis of contention in that remark. The AGW theory claims that tiny amount of CO2 humans add is a MAJOR cause of warming. It claims that if humans were not burning FF that CO2 would be “substantially” lower than it is now. You will find no one here claiming humans have no affect on the climate, the question has always been HOW MUCH? (Recall Sarah Palin being hounded by Charlie Gibson in 2008 and excoriated by vile leftists in LSM afterward just for hinting at the idea that humans might not have as much influence on the climate as people are being led to believe?)
I think it was Brother Christopher who proved that less than 1% of climate scientists actually believe that human CO2 is responsible for more than one half of late 20th century warming?

Trees under glaciers is not news here in British Columbia.

Oatley says:
August 8, 2014 at 3:43 am
“Good stuff, but be reminded that the EPA is marching forward on GHG emissions. If we don’t find a way to stop it, this country will be shackled.”
With 82% of the energy produced in the US being carbon based fossil fuels, I have been trying to get my state, one of the eight that produce most of these resources, to start the ball rolling and get together with the others to push back against the EPA. How about a nice sales tax to enrich our states and raise energy prices throughout the country? Call it an “EPA Tax”. We need to get the attention of the American people. Can’t think of a better way to do it than to make the EPA’s policies REALLY hurt.

tadchem says:
August 8, 2014 at 7:31 am
“he Minoan Warm Period and the Roman Climate Optimum were not only warmer than the current warm period”
John Mason says:
August 8, 2014 at 7:36 am
“the official web site used to proclaim the glaciers there are only about 3000 years old ”
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Only one of you can be right. Which one?