Science trumps politics and patronage: Al Gore is 'losing the bet' against scientific forecasting

Perhaps he meant to say TIPPER POINT rather than TIPPING POINT

Well, forecasting is hard; especially forecasting the future.

Chris y
“A model result is skillful if” ……. does not equal “no change” but rather a better prediction than the simpler alternative. That could be Lord M’s pocket calculator or me after a few beers.
🙂 michael

And, of course he will never say what “better” predictions are. “Better” than what???

We know life after death exists because the massive consensus of the men of cloth say it is so. We know God exists because the overwhelming consensus of Judeo-Christian-Islamic preachers say He does. Those unequivocal facts are confirmed by the people with their supernatural worldview or “ideology”.
That, forecasting-free, is the essence of scientific method foisted by the left and the Post Modern Scientists.

In an unfortunate collaboration with the increasingly uncomfortable religious establishment that is in direct conflict with actual scientific evidence and the methods of scientific reasoning taught in school and the misguided ideologues of the environment. It is a global partnership of many groups — the religious or spiritual who no longer can believe in religion and adopt the environment as a substitute, the actively religious who see in it the opportunity to destroy science, rabid environmentalists who view humans as a sort of plague attacking the planet rather than a part of the ecology of the planet that deserves consideration as well, and a large body of idealistic scientists who have let their idealism and perhaps a bit of self-interest suborn the requirement of science to be brutally objective even when the results one obtains are not the results one desires or that will guarantee future funding. And sure, the “commynists” masquerading as environmentalists, so-called “watermelons” that are green on the outside and red on the inside.
But even this collective would not succeed if it were not for the simple fact that people make ordure-piles of unearned moolah by promoting the illusion of future catastrophe. All one really needs to do to understand CAGW is to follow the money. Quite a lot of the trail leads back to Al Gore, or so I have heard — a major investor in carbon trading and alternative energy sources. But even this pales in comparison to the money made by the world’s energy companies from CAGW.
Who benefits from CAGW? The very companies that are demonized by the poor fools that are exploited to generate the “crisis”. Anything that raises the cost of energy raises their profits. The more artificial the better. What better way to make more money from coal in a totally inelastic global energy market than to artificially double the cost of electricity of all sorts? It doubles the net profit gained from selling the electricity to a world that will pay whatever it is charged for it but where it is also a regulated public utility. And do power companies care if they are required to use solar power or wind power to provide a fraction of the power they sell? Not at all. They’d sell us electricity made by harnessing hamster wheels if we passed laws requiring it. They’d make far more money selling hamster-power in a market heavily inflated by the scarcity of hamsters than they would make selling coal based power in a market dominated by an abundance of coal.
This is why it is nearly pointless to argue. The pockets behind this are infinitely deep, and we’re talking trillions of dollars in rake-off additional profits in the global energy marketplace over decades. If somebody were able to prove beyond any doubt that carbon dioxide is completely harmless, entirely beneficial, and that global climate is totally insensitive to it (whether or not that is plausible, just pretend) they’d be assassinated. Or, more likely, the record would be “adjusted” some more to disprove their claim. That’s a lot cheaper and safer than overt assassination.
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Having read Jonah Goldberg’s book entitled “Liberal Fascism” I’m inclined to think that the scientific method is being overridden by political correctness matching the pattern that Goldberg calls “fascism.” Fascists seek to destroy the existing order and to build a utopia upon the ruins under which the power to make decisions is removed from those ruled and bestowed upon smooth talking pseudoscientists in the employ of the ruler.

Greenhouse gases are indeed one of the mechanisms that cool the earth. A lot of the earth’s cooling comes from direct radiation from the surface, however, in LWIR wavelengths that are not blocked by the atmosphere.
The greenhouse cooling does occur high in the troposphere, at the height where it becomes approximately transparent to LWIR in the absorption bands due to the thinning of the atmosphere. As greenhouse gas concentrations increase, the emission height increases just a little. Because of the lapse rate, emissions from the increased height are a little bit cooler. Because the rate of emissions is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature, greenhouse gas cooling works slightly less efficiently. However, since the incoming radiation is not similarly modulated, the Earth has to get rid of just as much heat (per unit time). Consequently the surface warms, just a bit, to increase the rate of loss directly from the surface.
It really is pretty simple. Sure, there is more internal complexity. The CO_2 molecule has a very complex spectrum in the relevant bands. The absorption/emission lines are (predominantly) pressure broadened through most of the troposphere, and hence they become narrower with increased height and reduced pressure, density and temperature. This means that the entire atmosphere column has some differential transparency as lower heights radiate energy that can “bleed” through the opening gaps in the lines of molecules above, so the picture isn’t quite as simple as raising the emission height as if that is a sharp number. It also means that the atmosphere’s transparency in the absorption band varies with the weather — on a clear high pressure day, it actually is more opaque in the CO_2 band than it is on a low pressure day, so the emission heights themselves vary dynamically and locally. It also means that there is a complicated nonlinear relationship between places with uplifting air (possibly carrying energy as latent heat in water vapor), air pressure and density, relative opacity, emission height, albedo, back radiation, and more that it is difficult to even mentally form a model of even though any given piece is understandable.
This is why the climate problem is so difficult. We have no “rules” that function in some separable way so that we can say “If this happens, then this will happen.” Our best models say “If this happens, anything can happen” and then people assume that the statistical distribution of anything is somehow a predictor, in spite of the fact that direct evidence obtained by trying this refutes the assertion.
I can’t solve the coupled Navier-Stokes equations for the ocean and atmosphere in my head out to climate-relevant times. You can’t either. They can’t even be solved with world-class computers at a resolution that is meaningful or likely to be meaningful. So why assert that you know that CO_2 is no risk or danger at all, that it cools the planet instead of warms it, etc. The best that we can say at this time is that looking at the direct relationship between atmospheric CO_2 and global average temperature over the pitifully short length of time represented by the instrumental record, even allowing for a certain amount of well-intended fiddling with the temperature record by world-saving zealots with a vested interest in the catastrophe, it is most likely true that the simple theory of CO_2 caused warming is correct with little or no feedback, and with a very modest total climate sensitivity just about where theory says it should be.
The one thing that has proven to be incorrect in the work of Hansen and others who built the first climate models is the feedback. Without feedback, there has never been a risk of catastrophe. Feedback has always been a sketchy proposition (in my opinion) because positive feedback usually indicates instability in dynamical systems and there is no evidence of a serious climate instability outside of one triggered by long-time orbital stuff or perhaps shorter but still long time ocean circulation stuff. There is direct evidence that climate models overestimate the cooling effect of aerosols, and hence exaggerate the water vapor feedback to compensate, and that this may well be why they continue to diverge from the actual temperature as aerosols remain roughly constant but CO_2 goes up without this positive feedback. There is also direct evidence that the models are overwhelmingly off in their treatment of the ocean — again IMO unsurprising given that the ocean is an entire secondary set of Navier-Stokes equations that are if anything even more poorly understood and which are coupled to the atmosphere. It would have been surprising, and would still be surprising, if any of the GCMs actually worked.
Without strong positive feedback, the risk of catastrophe is greatly reduced. It is not zero, because it isn’t zero even if we do nothing — the climate is chaotic and could slap us around for a century on a whim (look at the climate history of e.g. California, which was a desert for most of the last 500 years pre-anthropogenic CO_2 and could return to being a desert starting two years ago and it would be a decade before we even could tell). We cannot tell even if we are increasing or decreasing the risk by adding CO_2 — both are plausible, and the models are no help at all.
Then one has to look at the benefits of the CO_2 (and the energy produced burning coal to make it). They are substantial. Indeed, they are both crucial to our civilization. A billion people dine every day on the increased plant productivity of the additional CO_2. Civilization itself was built on top of the burning of coal.
Is it wise to invest, perhaps even invest heavily, in alternative energy resources that do not rely on coal? Absolutely. A number of them require no fuel at all, or require things like Deuterium or Thorium that exist in such abundance that human civilization could continue, based on them as a fundamental energy source, for millions of years instead of (at most) hundreds of years, and with atmospheric CO_2 no longer being a concern either way. In fifty or a hundred years, we may understand the climate system and biosphere well enough to deliberately move atmospheric CO_2 towards some optimal concentration. That optimum could easily be higher than what it is now, even if it is lower than what it will be then. In the meantime, wise investment in the technology and science that might one day produce ways of generating energy that cost less than coal and hence are the obvious choice for a free society seems strongly indicated.
What is not indicated is nonsense like “Carbon Trading”, or treating CO_2 as the harbinger of a future disaster. It is most probable that it is no such thing, and it is absolutely certain that so far it has been an unmitigated blessing to the human species and general world ecology. It is rather likely that it will continue to be net beneficial for another 100 to 200 ppm. Beyond that it is difficult to be certain. We haven’t done the experiments or the science, and sometimes comparatively small changes in an ecology can have large effects. But there is every reason to think that a strong investment in the technology of alternate energy production over the 20 to 40 years required to reach these concentrations with no demonization of coal based power at all is sufficient to push us over the hump to where coal is deselected not because of CO_2 risk but because there are much cheaper alternatives that use no fuel at all or comparatively abundant and energy rich (nuclear) fuels.
Organic chemists I know despair over the fact that we burn oil and coal. They are so valuable as feedstock to the entire organic synthesis chains that make countless materials of great value to our society, feedstock that would be enormously more expensive to generate from raw CO_2 and water and air (or even from plant material where at least some steps have already been accomplished by nature). We are burning the wealth of the world when we burn oil and coal. So far, that burning has been an investment, one that has uplifted the human species from abject global poverty (even in the heart of pre-Enlightenment “civilization”) to a state where even the poorest amongst us in energy rich countries are wealthier than the nobility of the feudal world 400 years ago. It has been the basis for human freedom, as cheap energy reduces the incentive for human slavery by devaluing unskilled human labor. But we would be most unwise to continue burning our capital in this way indefinitely. We only get one shot at transforming global civilization to an energy basis capable of going the distance, or we risk falling back to comparatively primitive sources and which would almost certainly entail the death of enormous numbers of humans.
Imagine the die off if a coronal mass ejection of unprecedented magnitude slammed the Earth in two days and blew the entire continental electrical grids of the world by frying every single transformer in the system, so that it would take years to rebuild — no air conditioning or refrigeration or lights or heat in all of the world’s cities, no transportation into those cities, a complete breakdown in delivery and services. But at least in this case there would be light at the end of the tunnel and after several billion deaths, we would turn the lights back on. If we burn all of the coal and all of the accessible oil and do not have alternatives waiting in the wings or have any sort of CME-based event or nuclear war even that brings down civilization for a single decade, it might never rise again with all of the cheap and readily available carbon-based energy used up.
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“0.3 C” sounds like a value for “the equilibrium climate sensitivity” (TECS). The artful placement of “the” in the phrase “the equilibrium climate sensitivity” implies that TECS has a unique numerical value. However, there is no reason for belief in the proposition that it does. Thus, the issue of Earth’s atmosphere’s response to a change in the CO2 concentration cannot be settled by assignment of a value such as “0.3 C” to TECS.

How is that conclusion reached? How can a GHG, a weak non-bipolar GHG lead to warming when it is excited by IR between 13 and 18 microns? That means CO2 is trapping IR consistent with a black body of temp beween -50 degree C and – 110 degree C. CO2 doesn’t trap heat in the 15 to 18 Degree C Range or 10 microns. How can CO2 cause the warming if it is trapping only cooler temperatures? Can you warm a house by trapping the air conditioning? Doesn’t CO2 have to trap heat of shorter IR to warm the earth? Just how does a GHG that traps -50 degree C temp warm something that is 15 to 18 degree C? Also, how is CO2 warming the Oceans? Something is missing in the CO2 is causing warming conclusion. Repeat it as many times as you like, it just doesn’t pass the stink test.

Are you at all serious in these objections? Surely you jest. Or are simply ignorant, which is more likely given the language you use, “trapping only cooler temperatures” for example. Indeed, almost all of your language is literally unintelligible.
Look, the atmosphere is almost completely opaque with a damn short mean free path in the primary CO_2 absorption band inside the general blackbody radiation power curve associated with the Earth’s surface temperatures. There is absolutely no question that there is substantial power radiated away from the surface (say) outside of my window in the band absorbed by CO_2. This energy is absorbed within the first two or three meters of the surface and almost immediately is transferred to the surrounding air (N_2 and O_2) helping to keep it warm. The atmosphere itself reradiates this energy (Kirchoff’s law) in roughly the same band, and some fraction of this reradiated energy does indeed go back down and hits the surface of the Earth and counts as part of its total energy input.
However, a lot of the energy thermally radiated from the Earth’s surface goes straight up and out through the atmosphere. As the temperature rises, the rate at which the surface loses energy directly increases and the rate at which energy is absorbed and returned increases. Some energy is not returned, and diffuses up through the atmosphere to where it becomes transparent (enough) in the greenhouse gas bands to escape to space. It does this at much colder temperatures than the surface of the Earth because of the lapse rate, it does it from a comparatively narrow band, and hence is relatively inefficient as an energy loss mechanism.
Are you with me so far? Energy comes in from the sun, and some fraction of it is absorbed by the (say) land surface. On average, to maintain a constant average temperature, just as much energy has to be lost to space as comes in. Some of the lost energy is radiated away from the surface at comparatively warm surface temperatures. Some of the lost energy is radiated away from e.g. CO_2 at top of the troposphere temperatures. The total has to balance in order for the average temperature to remain constant, over however long a time you like. There isn’t the slightest doubt that this crude description is empirically correct because we have ample spectrographs of energy being radiated away from the Earth at the top of the atmosphere and its spectrum is entirely consistent with this description, quantitatively consistent with this description.
Note well that I haven’t said anything about “warming” or “cooling” due to CO_2. All I’m doing is describing a state of detailed balance in an open system. The split I describe doesn’t require me to refer to “back radiation” or to describe in any sort of detail internal heat transfer mechanisms, because it is a spectroscopic split that is clearly observable in the actual measured spectra of the energy that is actually being radiated away from the Earth to balance the energy delivered by incoming sunlight. I don’t care what’s going on with latent heat, with albedo, with lateral heat transport. They can certainly have effects, and those effects on the climate may dominate greenhouse gas modulation some or even all of the time, but the spectra are the spectra and there is absolutely no arguing with the split between LWIR surface radiation intensities at surface temperatures and greenhouse gas radiation intensities at top of the troposphere temperatures because we have numerous photographs of it, because we routinely measure it, because it has been verified in such a complete way that it is literally insane to assert that it doesn’t exist.
All that is then left is the need to assess the effect of an increase in CO_2 concentration on this balance. And we don’t need to work very hard — all we really care about is the sign of the effect. Does it a) increase the rate of radiation from the CO_2 absorption band (which means that there must be less energy radiated directly from the surface, which in turn means that the surface is relatively cooler in steady state); or b) decrease the rate of radiation from the CO_2 absorption band (which means that more energy must be radiated directly from the surface, so it must be relatively warmer in steady state). I don’t address in any way how the energy moves around in the meantime — it does not matter. All that matters is that ins must equal outs.
If you need a metaphor, imagine a hose with two nozzles. Water is being pumped into the hose at a fixed rate. The rate it comes in must equal the rate it comes out. The rate it comes out of either nozzle depends on the pressure inside the common hose and the aperture inside. We can label one nozzle “surface radiation” and the other “greenhouse gas radiation at the top of the troposphere”. Both rates depend on the pressure inside (the temperature) and the pressure/temperature itself is determined by the requirement of balancing the flow out of a fixed flow pump (the sun). If you reduce the aperture of the greenhouse gas nozzle, you will decrease the flow out of that nozzle, increase the pressure in the hose, and increase the outflow from the other nozzle. It is that simple.
So which is it? Adding more CO_2 to the atmosphere without any question at all reduces the mean free path of photons in the LWIR bands it absorbs in. This in turn without any question raises the average height where the atmosphere becomes sufficiently transparent for LWIR photons in the CO_2 band to escape to space. It is colder higher, so energy loss is less efficient. It reduces the outflow through the CO_2 mediated channel, and the outflow through the direct channel must increase to maintain detailed balance. And in order for that outflow to increase the temperature must go up, and does until balance is re-established.
This at no time violates any laws of thermodynamics, any more than closing a tap and raising the pressure in your house’s pipes does. Net heat flows from hotter to colder (on average). Entropy increases as net heat is transferred from the hot sun to the cooler earth, from the cooler earth to the still cooler atmosphere, and from the cooler atmosphere to cold outer space. Statistical mechanics is happy. There are microscopic quantum models for this entire process that are based on sound physics and that produce results that are in good agreement with observation. This isn’t even exciting science, it is well-known.
However, it is just one component in the enormously complex process of absorption, reflection, and heat transfer that determines the climate. It may not be true, for example, that energy input is truly constant, because albedo might vary in ways that are coupled to the CO_2 gas concentration. There can be negative feedbacks, positive feedbacks, and more in the many transport processes and processes that contribute to total energy outflow compared to total inflow (albedo determines energy outflow in the visible spectrum, not LWIR, and hence all by itself complicates things enormously). But the CO_2 component per se — indeed, the greenhouse gas component in general — is without any reasonable doubt a warming, not cooling, component, and one that causes an overall warmer average surface temperature as its concentration is increased, not cooler or neutral surface temperature.
Other things may well overwhelm it. We have good reason to believe — from direct computations not from complex climate models but from simple radiative transfer models — that the direct effect of CO_2 concentration on change of temperature in the vicinity of the current concentration and temperature is a function like:

In this expression, is the log-linear response, and is reference concentration at a presumed “perfect equilibrium” where everything else is stationary (on average). Yes, such a thing doesn’t exist, but this function still describes the direct effect of CO_2 on temperature, all things being equal. A doubling of concentration (as any good engineer should know) increases the log by around 0.3. We expect a temperature change of per doubling of concentration. This works out to be a number in the ballpark of 1 to 2 C (the models cannot specify it much more accurately than that for a variety of reasons).
This is certainly not likely to be a catastrophic number, especially if it comes in anywhere from the middle to the lower end of this likely range. The entire assertion of catastrophe comes not from the CO_2-based greenhouse effect and rising CO_2, but from hypothesized positive feedbacks in the highly nonlinear and complex climate system, primarily from water vapor. These feedbacks are supposed to multiply the direct warming by a factor that used to range from 2 to 5 — the latter a figment of Hansen’s “overheated” imagination and little else — and that now is believed to almost certainly be less than 2. The IPCC is trying hard to hold out for a value close to 2 so that they can claim a total warming order of 3 C per doubling, arguably damaging if not exactly catastrophic. Most current papers, however, are putting it down well below 2 simply because the data itself no longer supports the higher values.
There are a minority of papers that assert that it is anywhere from one (as a multiplier) to slightly less than one — net negative feedback. In my own opinion — based on actually fitting this function in a reasonable way to actual anomaly data — we can expect ballpark 1.5 C per doubling, very close to a no feedback result, but IMO the uncertainties are high in part because the data I fit almost certainly has a warming bias (p well over 0.95) and because the data I fit systematically underestimates past error bars in the temperature anomaly relative to errors in the current temperature anomaly (this is “certainly” true, not just probably true). As a consequence my best fits are corrupted by a systematic warming bias in the data and are less reliable in any event because we simply know past data a lot less precisely than is claimed. Even so they are pretty good fits, and the best fit yields a temperature increase of 1.8 C per doubling, which is likely an upper bound on the sensitivity.
Is this number correct? Who knows? The climate is enormously complex, and even if CO_2 does have a simple, direct warming effect that effect could easily be swamped, cancelled, augmented, altered etc by natural variations or by important nonlinearities that we do not understand (yet). The “pause” IMO is not an issue, because it is part of the 67 year sinusoid that best fits the modulation of the temperature around the CO_2 only curve for the last 165 years and whether or not that sinusoid has any causal basis we can understand, it is empirically a measure of the possible natural variation making the pause very reasonably a natural variation around the CO_2 warming curve. In any event, current temperatures are dead on my best fit with the sinusoid, and are remarkably close with it or without it since 1850.
So please, stop asserting that there is no greenhouse effect, or making the usual noises about how it is impossible for a “trace gas” to have an important effect on climate. Both are pure nonsense. There is, and it can, and it does, and we have direct spectroscopic evidence of the process in action whereby it does. It also fits the temperature data in a very believable way, although this is hardly conclusive or even strong evidence for any given estimate of sensitivity, it is absolutely not evidence against it.
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Richard Greene:
Good question. We try to predict as when we are successful we gain a degree of control over the outcomes of events. Sometimes we are sucessful in doing though information needed for deductive conclusions is partially absent.
For global warming climatology the events have yet to be described. Thus, it is inappropriate to state that global warming models (including Armstrong’s and Gore’s models) “predict.” The correct term for what these models do is “project.”

“OK, I think I have an experiment that can actually settle this man made climate change nonsense, and I will use the Climate “Scientists” own data to expose them.”
Congratulations. You’ve just “exposed” the concept that CO2-induced warming should be most effective at higher latitudes, at night, and in the winter, which is–surprise!–exactly what those evil scientists on both sides of the CAGW issue have been saying all along.
Well done, sir, well done. For your next feat, perhaps you could “expose” an even more heinous conspiracy, perhaps the government cover-up of actual manned moon landings! 🙂

Do the math.

Again, please, you are making my head hurt. It isn’t the energy of the individual photons that matters. It is the total power. And arguing that there are multiple greenhouse gases and that water is more important than CO_2 is preaching to people that know and understand this already much better than you do and doesn’t mean that CO_2 is not still important and that increasing it doesn’t still cause warming.
Try to read the wikipedia article on blackbody radiation, and learn what the power curve actually is and what it means and how to use it. Please? Do you want people to actively make fun of you when you ask them to do the math?
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Super. I hereby declare you a Good Student. Now if I could only get a few others on the list to become Good Students…;-)