I never thought the day would come that I’d be reposting something from David Appell. Yet, here I am, in agreement with him. I keep looking over my shoulder for a lurking quantum singularity or some other such rift in the fabric of spacetime. Appell writes on Quark Soup (bold mine, h/t to Dr. Ryan Maue):
Hyping Hansen’s Paper
Eric Holthaus at Slate wrote:
I’m sorry, but this is complete bullshit.
No single paper, by Hansen or anyone else, becomes part of the “canon” a day after it is published. (Nor does it based on the version published in July of last year.)
I haven’t even read the new version of Hansen et al in detail yet. But it is certainly not part of the canon, for the same reason that a play of Shakespeare’s wasn’t part of the literary canon less than a year after it was first published — only time can tell. It takes a good bit of time for scientific papers to be anointed, and this paper’s conclusions are certainly far from the mainsteam.
There are some extreme and improbable scenarios in Hansen et al. Sure, maybe we could pass a tipping point by 2050 — but I think it’s more than likely we will not.
Hansen anymore seems interested in promoting alarmism at all costs. There’s been a whiff of this throughout his entire career, but this latest paper is just too much to take seriously.
Doubling times of 10, 20 or 40 years yield sea level rise of several meters in 50, 100 or 200 years.
But there’s no evidence of a doubling time of 10, 20 or 40 years. The latest Aviso sea level data now shows, over the satellite era, an acceleration of 0.026 mm/yr2 over a sea level rise of 3.36 mm/yr — that’s an acceleration/SLR of 0.72% per year, or a doubling time of 97 years.
Relative to sea level today, that works out to a rise of…16 inches.
(CU’s data is even slower, showing an acceleration/SLR of 0.45%/yr.)
And the reactions Holthaus gets from other scientists, who weren’t co-authors on the paper, aren’t very convincing:
In an email to Slate, Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist who was skeptical of the initial draft, calls the final study “considerably improved.” Mottram, who specializes in studying the Greenland ice sheet, said “the scenario they sketch out is implausible, though perhaps not impossible … it’s frankly terrifying.”
“Perhaps not impossible” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement that says the paper deserves to be part of any “canon.”
Read his full post, here: http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2016/03/hyping-hansens-paper.html
I had originally thought about responding to the Holthaus ‘canon’ declaration, but he’s just so “out there” I didn’t think it mattered much, because most intelligent people could see what it is for themselves. As Appell says, “this is complete bullshit.”
My take on the paper is here.
Might be a good time to revisit Popper. From here: http://www.peakprosperity.com/forum/97443/what-makes-theory-scientific-karl-popper
These considerations led me in the winter of 1919-20 to conclusions which I may now reformulate as follows.
It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.
Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.
Every “good” scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of “corroborating evidence.”)
Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a “conventionalist twist” or a “conventionalist stratagem.”)
One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.
Great quote from Popper.
One does not, however, have to be skeptical per se to make observations. They can just be made and considered. I hope the mods will indulge me with a digression that has more to do with Popper and risky predictions than Hansen and his faulty ones.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016/03/25/stargazers-have-chance-to-see-bright-green-comet-next-week.html?intcmp=hpffo&intcmp=obnetwork
If you get up early this morning and train your unaided lying eyes on the sky between Mars and Saturn you can locate the comet 252P/LINEAR. This comet passed the Earth on the 21st, a Naw Ruz comet you could call it. It switched on like a light bulb recently and as your lying eyes can confirm, is glowing a beautiful shade of green. Your lying eyes can also see that it is larger in diameter than the moon though very faint. Still, it is visible without a telescope.
“You’ll have to be out at least 90 minutes before sunrise and in a location as free of light pollution as possible. Once you have managed that, locate the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius low in the southern part of the sky. The comet is expected to move between those two constellations.”
What your lying eyes are seeing is confirmation of a risky prediction, as described by Popper, made by the EU Theory that the glow from comets is a Corona discharge (and that is why it is emitting xrays). If there ever was a consensus >99% it is the Standard Model and this is your chance for your lying eyes to provide ‘other evidence’. If a circle of glowing green plasma larger in diameter than the moon and visible to the unaided lying eye is not enough to make one skeptical about the Standard Model, nothing will.
A conceivable, conventional alternative, that there is a diesel powered generator inside the comet lighting up the corona, is shaky at best because of the well-established fact that there is no air in space. Unless my lying eyes are lying about that too.
A point lost on so very many.
It’s important in fields other than climate science too. For example, we’ve suffered under the delusions promoted by Einstein’s General Relativity Theory for decades, over a century now, mostly because it’s so well supported by confirmation, even though one of its central tenants, that nothing can travel faster than light, is inherently impossible to falsify since it would require us to disprove a negative. How exactly does one design an experiment that disproves the existence of faster than light communications? Quantum experiments are dancing around the edge of that one even now, and the results so far aren’t looking too good for GRT.
That we can’t perceive things that travel faster than light doesn’t mean nothing can, that’s observer bias plain and simple, what Dicke and Weinberg called the Anthropic Principal (which’ by coincidence. also isn’t falsifiable).
It’s special relativity which points out there is no other measure of distance or time than electromagnetic phenomena . And neither time nor distance can be measured independently . The simple trigonometric Lorentz transformations fall out of that observation and the metric of space-time can be express by the simple matrix where c is taken to be 1 and all actual “speeds” a fraction of it .
1 0 0 0
0 1 0 0
0 0 1 0
0 0 0 i
It’s hard to argue against something with such profound simplicity . Furthermore , and this is something I wish I understood better , it is deeply implied by Maxwell’s equations so is deeply entangled with virtually all of classical physics . It is not some sort of separable add-on .
And it must be pointed out that if something were found to propagate faster than electromagnetic interactions , then that would largely take em’s place and the essential relationships would remain unchanged .
Of course , it’s not the whole story as quantum entanglement shows arbitrarily separated events can be “instantaneously” interdependent .
But there is no barrier to disconfirming special relativity . In fact it explicitly states that the observation of a causal action faster than light would falsify it .
Note to scientists who are skeptics about global warming / climate change. Good for you, but remember — this alarm-ism has never been about global warming, or climate change, of scientific inquiry. It is about the justifications needed to support a redistribution of national wealth and the implementation of global control.
Glossary
Redistribution = Theft
Going to be a lot easier when there is no more paper money and the possession of gold or any other commodity hoarding is outlawed.
I have some hope that David may one day recover from his delusions.
Here is a reply I made to a David Appell post concerning my recent guest post at . http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/24/collapse-of-the-cagw-delusion-untenable-past-2020/comment-page-1/#comment-2176068
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2016/03/them-that-cant-learn-doctor-dr-norman.html
“David
You are being ,shall we charitably say, disingenuous ,in presenting the GISS data as a proof that my 2012 forecast was wrong. You are in fact acting as a propagandist for the Orwellian gate-keepers of the Land /Sea data who have steadily
manipulated the past to the point that their outputs no longer provide any basis for intelligent discussion of climate.( See also comment 2 to your post). The actual situation shows that my forecast is alive and well in the real world. See Fig 5 at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/24/collapse-of-the-cagw-delusion-untenable-past-2020/
Obviously the current El Nino peak is a short term interruption of the decadal trend.
However I am happy and surprised that you agree with me about climate models. You need to draw the logical conclusions which derive from that agreement which again surprisingly the IPCC does but then ignores. Here is what my post said.
“Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings,feedbacks and climate sensitivity.It recognizes the short comings of the models. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which concludes:
“Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections, consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed”
What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that it doesn’t even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability (i.e., we don’t know what future temperatures will be and we can’t calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2). This also begs a further question of what erroneous assumptions (e.g., that CO2 is the main climate driver) went into the “plausible” models to be tested any way.
Even the IPCC itself has now given up on estimating CS – the AR5 SPM says ( hidden away in a footnote)
“No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies”
Paradoxically they still claim that UNFCCC can dial up a desired temperature by controlling CO2 levels .This is cognitive dissonance so extreme as to be irrational. There is no empirical evidence which proves that CO2 has anything more than a negligible effect on temperatures. ”
As to the thousand year cycle you say ”
“A thousand-year cycle? Based on what? Page doesn’t say. Instead he is stuck in the past, not realizing that manmade forcings have changed everything.”
This is entirely false – I presented evidence of the millennial cycle and its peak in 2003 +/- in Figs 3,4,5 and 6.The fact is that man made CO2 emission forcings have changed very little with regard to temperature but have substantially enhanced food production.
Are you certain you won’t find Appell jumping out from behind a plastic palm tree yelling “Candid Camera!”
No.
The title “Schism on the Left” is completely misleading. It is a schism among scientists.
When climategate revealed they were lying about every tenth degree warming since 1998 in Phil Jones’ July 2005 email to John Christy (“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world cooled since 1998. Ok it has but it isn’t but seven years’ data and it isn’t statistically signficant.”
Then admitted he added every tenth to the data he built in his disastrous Feb 2010 BBC don’t go to jail interview-
When Homer Rowboat Hansen told the world for thirty years – even educators – there was a ‘runaway green house gas effect on Venus” when simplest of calculations proves there isn’t,
When Angry Bird Mike Mann lied to Congress telling them bore holes from trees whispered to him the world is going to end through a magic computer program he wrote,
and he subsequently accidentally released it to the public on an FTP and people who downloaded it showed the world it made
hundreds,
and hundreds,
and hundreds of hockey sticks,
they ceased to be scientists and proceeded to be f r a u d u l e n c e peddling Left-Wing political activists.
Honest people all know this.
It’s why when you bleat authority worship it sounds like another con man who had his intellectual reputation demolished
when people found out you think the sky is a giant, magic heater; and all your ”scientist” leadership admitted and were caught practicing ZILCH but
Quack-0-Dynamics.
Hallelujah! When honesty left the building it took those guys with it. They knew they lied and stopped being scientists.
Luke says:
It is a schism among scientists.
In that we agree. And the schism can easily be identified: there are skeptical scientists, which comprise all honest scientists. Then there are the alarmist scientists, who have sold out to Mammon. The self-serving alarmists have no skepticism.
Skeptics are honest. The others aren’t.
I hope Hanson keeps howling in the wind to himself.
The global warmies are out of puff .They have been generously paid but are no longer of useful service because they were merely props in a play called the Global Warming Caper . Global cooling can’t be far behind . Think of the movie possibilities . Lions freezing in central Africa . The horror . Polar Bears too cold to
go out of their dens ,whales unable to surface . There is no end to the fear potential .
Of course with no trees the few remaining newspapers will shrivel up and die . So sad .
Just more BS, payed by taxpayers, from Hanson and his clowns having a Merry-Merry in their clown-car.
Ha ha
1. For which tide gauges do we have station elevation history relative to a global frame or reference?
2. How long is this time series for each location where it is available?
3. What is their accuracy?
4. What method was used to obtain them?
5. Is this database accessible online?
Those sound like reasonable, intelligent questions. Better not let them loose in climate science polite company.
An acceleration of .026mm/year squared, no doubt determined by averaging, is extraordinarily difficult to measure in real life. There are few constants. The continents move, islands rise and fall. CA is crumbling which may manifests itself as a rising, the eastern seaboard sinking. Hawaii sinks, Kauai rises. likewise the satellite data shows regional ocean rise one year merely to diminish a few years later.
And then there is the extraordinarily suspect figures and “research’ from the leftwing, highly politicized Univ. of Colorado which should be ignored in their entirety.
All in all, this individual virtually conceded that even if one believes in AGW, the word ‘Catastrophic’ is misplaced in the phrase.
According to the paleoclimatic reconstruction of the Earth’s atmosphere, Hanson’s “tipping point” has been exceed for millions of years on end. Obviously, no cataclysm. And then there is the “minor” detail that Venus has about 92 times as much atmosphere as the Earth has had for 100s of millions of years.
Whenever it comes to that unbased lefties / socialist claims I’m wondering; let me try:
1. Socialists care about people
2. Greens care about wood
3. People ain’t made of wood
So
4. Greens are not Socialists
____________________________
What the greens want is leadership,
unauthorized, putschist commanding even states – they are fascists.
They want to comand what we
eat, buy, think …
vote, engage in …
our jobs – are they ‘ethical’ or should they get transferred / outsorced abroad.
Think a Lot of people able to elongate the list.
Ha!
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/one/
Dr Doom strikes again, give him a sandwich board and he would be happen walking around the street with a ‘repeat you sinners ‘ poster.
He long ago stop doing any science , its bout self promote and ideology all the way . Hence way climate ‘science’ is such a good home for him, he simply does not need to do any ‘science’ .
So besides all politic rants. Me belongs to the Elite.
As Munic Re stats: 20 % over 62, still living and having a Job is avantgarde.
Don’t know how much of my cohort’s still living.
and my Job is outsourced to Czech Republik.
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
“a whiff of this throughout his entire career” — ah understatement about the man who predicted the Hudson Expressway would be underwater
Aahahahahahahahahahaha