Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
Al Gore even made some hardened liberal journalists sit up and question when in 2007 he told a joint session of the House Energy Committee and The Senate Environment Committee that the climate debate was over, “the science was settled”. The journalists knew, as any moderately informed person does, that science is never settled. But, what does “settled” mean in this context? The most reasonable definition is linked directly to a simple definition of science, namely the ability to predict. If you can’t predict then your science is wrong, as Feynman and others made clear. Failed predictions prove that the science isn’t settled. Gore and the supporters of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) version of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) claim the science is settled, but their climate predictions (projections) are consistently wrong. The problem is wider because the weather predictions of national weather agencies who are, through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) the IPCC, don’t work either.
The climate is the average weather, which raises the question; when does weather become climate? Since climate is an average of the weather, the average temperature for a 24-hour period is the climate of the day. If the science is settled, then the weather forecasts should also be accurate, but they are still increasingly unreliable beyond 48 hours. One use of the millions of weather data points created for my doctoral thesis was by a statistician, Alexander Basilevsky. He was working on Markov Chains defined as follows:
A Markov chain is collection of random variables 
(where the index 
runs through 0, 1, …) having the property that, given the present, the future is conditionally independent of the past.
He needed a continuous long-run data set derived from nature. He wanted to address the issue of probabilities and accuracy of predictions in nature, particularly weather predictions. I never spoke with him about his results but assume, since the work was done 20-years ago, they achieved nothing applicable because prediction accuracies didn’t improve.
In fact, weather forecasting accuracy has not significantly increased since it began officially in 1904. In that year, Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862-1951) introduced the idea of numerical weather predictions by solving mathematical equations. This assumes you have adequate and appropriate data to put into the equation, but that is still not the case, and that is the root of the problem.
Prediction failures are a situation obvious to those who make empirical observations because their lives and livelihood depend on the weather. Robin Page, farmer/author in his book “Weather Forecasting: The Country Way,” wrote,
“Yet it is strange to record that as the weather forecasting service has grown in size and expense, so it’s predictions seem to have become more inaccurate.”
New Scientist reports that Tim Palmer, a leading climate modeler at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading England said:
I don’t want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain.
Then in an apparent attempt to claim some benefit we’re told:
…he does not doubt that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has done a good job alerting the world to the problem of global climate change. But he and his fellow climate scientists are acutely aware that the IPCC’s predictions of how the global change will affect local climates are little more than guesswork.
Roger Harrabin, BBC Reporter, made a comment about a climate conference in Reading:
So far modellers have failed to narrow the total bands of uncertainties since the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990.
Koutsoyiannis et al., confirmed this in April 2008 where in an article they found:
The GCM (General Circulation Models) outputs of AR4 (FAR) as compared to those of TAR, are a regression in terms of the elements of falsifiability they provide…
Is there a common denominator here? Weather predictions don’t work, especially if you consider their accuracy for severe weather, and climate predictions don’t work either. The common denominators for the failure are the lack of spatial and temporal data and little understanding of the mechanisms. It is assumed that if we knew those, then accurate predictions would occur.
The IPCC were the first official group to make climate predictions that caught world attention and they were wrong from the start. Because their objective was political, they deliberately chose to separate claims about the accuracy of their forecasts. The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) deliberately misleads and as Figure 1 by Roy Spencer shows they increased the misdirection as the gap between their claims and reality widened.
Figure 1
The IPCC Physical Science Basis Reports of Working Group I all identify the problems and severe limitations of the data and knowledge of the mechanisms.
The only thing predictable is that as their forecasts fail the claims of success are magnified and amplified.
In the 1990s, one segment of the climate debate involved the US and western nations support for Chaos Theory. The other segment promoted by the Soviet Union, China and Eastern nations supported the cyclical explanation of climate change. Many, especially the western media saw the division as a Cold War ideological difference. In fact, it was a legitimate scientific difference and debate. It was fuelled by the establishment of translation services of Soviet science by Jewish scientists who escaped to Israel.
In the Third Assessment, Science Report the IPCC wrote,
In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.
Essex and McKitrick identified the chaos portion in their book Taken By Storm.
“Fluids are governed by nonlinear, as opposed to linear equations… … these represent major distinctions in times of great importance. However, the misleading averages can yield exact average equations of quantities describing fluids that are linear! This is especially remarkable because the correct differential equations for fluids are some of the most notorious examples of nonlinear differential equations there are. In a non-mathematical world, a differential equation being notorious seems hard to imagine, but some really are. They aren’t to be found in People magazine, but nonlinear equations have notoriety among those who know about them, because we cannot solve most of them. We are left to rely on computer approximations of solutions. Furthermore, unlike linear equations, they can and do exhibit a kind of peculiar unpredictability in their solutions, not unlike randomness, known as chaos.”
The most obvious difference between them (Kinetic theory and Navier-Stokes) is that we have no guide in the larger climate world to any key structures and relationships. There is no one living on climate scales to observe structures, do experiments, or establish physically meaningful structure for us. Without a climate structure analogous to Navier-Stokes to act as a beacon to climb toward in our averaging schemes, we are little better than bacteria in a test tube trying to deduce from first principles what the laboratory ought to be like.
I tease chaos theory supporters that their only hope is that chaos theory is correct so, when they are finally asked about their failed predictions by the mainstream media, they can then explain why their predictions consistently fail.
So, according to Essex and McKitrick, the theoretical approach is not possible because of internal mathematical problems. Actually, the problem is more basic. We don’t have the data on which to perform our “averaging schemes.” From the start, the data was completely inadequate. Lamb knew what was going to happen as he recorded in his autobiography (1997). He created the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) because
“…it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.”
Lamb told me that he determined the need for better historical records because of the failure of the weather forecasts he gave Royal Air Force pilots flying over Europe in WWII. He thought that a better understanding of past weather patterns could provide a base for improved forecasts. Unfortunately, the objective did not last long.
“My immediate successor, Professor Tom Wigley, was chiefly interested in the prospects of world climates being changed as result of human activities, primarily through the burning up of wood, coal, oil and gas reserves…” “After only a few years almost all the work on historical reconstruction of past climate and weather situations, which first made the Unit well known, was abandoned.”
As we know from the leaked emails, it was all downhill from there.
The cyclical approach is similarly limited by lack of data. How long and accurate a record is required to determine the existence of cyclical events? Apparently the mathematical answer is partly provided by the length required for spectral analysis, but that doesn’t address the quality and spatial resolution of the record. Cyclical analysis has a better chance of producing reasonably accurate general forecasts because it is based on empirical data that is somewhat independent of the small scale mathematical and physical problems Essex and McKitrick and others identify.
All the manipulation, corruption, and deception carried out in climate science were possible because of the use of mathematics and statistics with inadequate data. As Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said, “There are three types of lies; lies, damn lies, and statistics.” When the data was inadequate, the AGW proponents compounded the problems by making it up. The extent of the data fiasco was acutely displayed in Bob Tisdale’s recent article and reinforced by Werner Brozek’s article asking if two data sets, presumably from the same original data source, can both be right.
The 2001 IPCC Report, using data prepared by Phil Jones, Director of the CRU said the global temperature average, reportedly using the best modern instrumental database over the longest period of data available, rose 0.6°C over 100+ years. The problem is the error factor was ±0.2°C or ±33.3%. So, the modern instrumental temperature record, which is supposedly many times more accurate than any paleoclimate temperature record, is useless. Compare the Jones number of temperature change in a 100+ record with the difference between GISS and HadCRUT in any given year. If for the sake of argument, the difference is 0.1°C then it is one-sixth of the difference for the total change in 100+ years.
The science of climate and weather predictions may be settled, but only in the sense that they are not possible? If you pursue either of the current practices, the climate physics of the IPCC and most skeptics or the cyclical approach favoured by most Russians and others, the data is inadequate. Despite my respect for the work of H. H. Lamb and his reconstruction of historical records, it is not possible to reconstruct weather records with the degree of accuracy claimed necessary for the IPCC or WMO approach to climate and weather predictions. It is why there was a tendency to leave out error bars in much early work. They underlined the severe limitations, if not the impossibility, of their work.
This brings us back to the cyclical approach that might allow for the educated speculations that climate change will continue, and the global temperature may go up or down. Right now, my more specific speculation based on historic records is that it is more likely to go down. Based on the evidence, I clearly have a better probability of being correct than the AGW and IPCC speculators.
There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain. – A. N. Whitehead (1861 – 1947) Mathematician and Philosopher
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
All the manipulation, corruption, and deception carried out in climate science were possible because of the use of mathematics and statistics with inadequate data.
===
I would say that was the justification…
The real trick was blowing up the scale so this looks scary….
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/616910main_gisstemp_2011_graph_lrg%5B1%5D.jpg
….when in reality, no one would even notice
It’s worse than that. The correct way to graph is on a scale with the zero visible. The zeros in the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales are not true zeros for thermodynamic purposes. You need to use the Rankine or Kelvin scales that do have the true thermodynamic zero. If you do that, the whole temperature variation of the last couple of Centuries looks like jitter.
Agree from a thermodynamic point of view, but still I think this scale is better as it approximately shows the lowest and the highest temperatures humans are experiencing except for some very extreme lows.
But! But! When God invented microscopes we could see so much more!
/sarc
This is off-topic and it is a continuation of a conversation on another story.
A website says that Dr. Mann’s suit against you has been pitched out because he hasn’t produced discovery. Is that true, false, or are you prevented from talking about it?
That is not correct. There has been no action for five years on the lawsuit brought by Andrew Weaver. It was brought nine days before the Mann lawsuit and is likely silent because Weaver is now leader of the Green Party and a sitting member of the British Columbia Legislature.
The Mann lawsuit continues and is scheduled for trial in the British Columbia Supreme Court on February 20, 2017. That will be some 6 years since it was filed.
I am preparing evidence and witness lists. All I will say here is that every high school math exam I ever wrote said “Show your work.”
Incidentally, I had a previous lawsuit to these two and all filed by the same lawyer. That lawsuit involved Gordon McBean, former Deputy Minister of Environment Canada who chaired the formation meeting of the IPCC in Villach, Austria in 1985. The lawsuit was dropped because I chose not to fight and withdrew what I wrote.
The Weaver lawsuit came next and I chose to fight because I was not going to be bullied anymore. As I said, the Mann lawsuit followed nine days later and is an action by an American in a BC Canada Court for something I said in the Canadian Province of Manitoba.
Thanks Tim. It seems to me that Michael Mann really, really doesn’t want to produce discovery. I hope that the recent judgment that his buddies have to produce FOIA documents is some help to you.
You are taking a hit for all of us. It is greatly appreciated.
Yes, greatly appreciated, Mr. Ball.
” The common denominators for the failure are the lack of spatial and temporal data and little understanding of the mechanisms. It is assumed that if we knew those, then accurate predictions would occur.”
I.e., if we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.
The science went out of the climate debate when Global Warming was replaced by Global Climate Change.
Weather forecasting was a big deal during WW2. Ever since the invention of the electrical telegraph, we have been able to do short term forecasts because we can see weather systems coming. wiki
The need for met information led to the North Atlantic Weather War.
Ever since the invention of the electrical telegraph, we have been able to do short term forecasts because we can see weather systems coming.
I’d argue the telegraph improved weather forecasts because we could talk to people upwind of us to find out was happening there, then project (given wind speed) what would be happening wherever we were 24 hours later with high confidence.
Which is, I suppose, a re-statement of what you wrote…
Once again Dr. Ball, you’ve made incisive and inarguable observations. The beauty of your argument is its certainly its simplicity and clarity.
If you click on my “handle” on this site (Bartleby) you’ll be taken to a short essay I wrote on this subject about 10 years ago and published on a small (and now deceased) web log called “Intelligent Debate”, which presents many of the same points in its criticisms of “settled science” and particularly of those “measurements” and statistics derived from the so called paleo-record in the early attempts at climate modeling. I’m particularly gratified by your references to the Navier-Stokes equations and the intractability of modeling systems of dependent partial differential equations. The mathematical shortcomings alone should be enough to put the last nail in the coffin, but it seems few understand this. Perhaps repetition is our only hope?
I won’t bother amplifying each of your points, I’ll only say it’s very refreshing to read them and know they’re are still reputable scientists working ethically in the cesspool “climateology” has become. My hat is off to you sir.
Very Sincerely,
Bartleby
“…is its certainty, its simplicity and clarity.”
“…know there are still reputable scientists…”
…there are still…
Aren’t we due for a new IPCC AR?
If climate science is really settled then funding for climate research should end because there is nothing more that can be learned. According to their reports, the IPCC after more than two decades of study has learned nothing new about the climate sensitivity of CO2. They keep quoting the exact same range of possible values and ignore the research of others that indicates that the climate sensitivity of CO2 may in actually be far below the range that has been quoted by the IPCC.
“If the science is settled, then the weather forecasts should also be accurate, but they are still increasingly unreliable beyond
48 2 hours.”Fixed it for ya.
Oops, should have been:
“If the science is settled, then the weather forecasts should also be accurate, but they are still increasingly unreliable beyond
482 hours.”Fixed it for ya.
“In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible …”.
===========================================
It’s not just the future, in Climate Change™ ‘science’ even the past is unpredictable:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISS%20Jan1910%20and%20Jan2000.gif
There is a list of all the scientific bodies that supposedly endorse IPCC science and it’s puzzling.
Seriously how can people from other disciplines thoroughly trained in the scientific method take this pseudoscience seriously?
Seriously how can people from other disciplines thoroughly trained in the scientific method take this pseudoscience seriously?
Those of us who went through education in any branch of natural or applied science, have a default position when we read the conclusions of scientists in other disciplines than our own – we tend to assume that they used the scientific method and that their conclusions are based on evidence. It is really no different when we read about other scientists’ conclusions in the popular media, or semi-technical media. We just assume that they know what they are talking about.
It’s a long, slow road from that default assumption to the realisation that there’s a branch of science that seems to have been subverted or perverted into the service of political and/or radical environmental aims. It’s a very distressing realisation; it tends to make you feel a sense of despair for the future of human civilisation.
Knowing that it is funded by a torrent of public money, whose continued flow depends on “favourable” conclusions, makes it more understandable, but somewhat less deserving of sympathy. It’s one thing to be deluded by a superficially attractive hypothesis; it’s quite another thing to have to accept payment for maintaining that delusion. No doubt it’s easier when you’re surrounded by colleagues who share the same delusion.
There are other fields of science that are also corrupted by money – the pharmaceutical research filed is another obvious one where huge profits can result in tweaking test results from totally inconclusive to showing a miniscule benefit from a new product.
Being a geologist helps because it allows you to think in terms of long time intervals. The next glacial period will probably set things right, even though we won’t live to see it. Survival will become more important than academic advancement.
PS – just started using Opera and now WUWT doesn’t crash every 30 seconds because of something called shockwave, which I never asked for but can’t get rid of.
Screwed up the quote again.
It should have said
Trying to predict climate is like trying to predict what your own average body weight is going to be based on what it has been. The variables in life that affect weight are just as unpredictable and chaotic as the factors that drive climate. Weight tends to slowly rise but I could not have predicted the biggest looser challenge at work that gave me the will power to loose 8 pounds in a couple months. You just can’t anticipate climate when you can’t see when an if what unknowns are going to come along and change everything you expected to see.
Weather and climate prediction are different problems. Weather prediction is sensitive to the initial conditions, climate to the boundary conditions. Weather prediction is severely limited by the exactness to which we measure the initial conditions from our scattered and unreliable balloon network. The worse the initial conditions we use to initialize the model, the worse the weather forecast. This is why bigger computers that run at finer resolutions will not help weather forecasts much if at all. Climate prediction is an ill-posed problem that will not be solved in my lifetime. I have no idea why anyone with any scientific training would believe climate models. I learned from my short stint at the Climate Prediction Center that climate models have no skill at making even short-term forecasts. Dr Feynman would be horrified.
“I have no idea why anyone with any scientific training would believe climate models.”
+100
David, you should look at the Tim Palmer lecture Steve Mosher linked up above.
Tim Palmer is a Ph.D. physicist, who trained in relativity mechanics. He represents himself as completely convinced of the danger of CO2 emissions. He even surmises an existential threat for humanity.
For him it’s apparently radiation physics all the way.
Although he acknowledges uncertainties, he never recognizes the fact that large uncertainties in the physical theory of climate means that no one knows how, or even whether, CO2 emissions will cause a rise in air temperature.
This apparent inability to be modest in the face of obvious ignorance seems to perfuse consensus climatology.
That isn’t an explanation for why it happens, but it seems that everyone in that culture is submerged within it and can’t see outside it. Group coherence and bounded thinking seems to be a common human failing (cf. Progressivism). The fact that even the APS buys into it is the real conundrum for me.
Truly IR-transparent containers (mylar balloons) full of CO2 cast no heat shadow. Game, set, …
Unfortunately for us, the initial conditions affect the attractor basins, actual and calculated, that become boundary conditions. Both weather forecasting and climate forecasting are initial and boundary condition problems. Climate is a statistical summary of the previously realized weather. You are correct about the problem being ill-posed. It doesn’t help that people are asking the wrong questions.
When forecasting future climate useful accuracy for advising policy makers is attainable by identifying just those major and most obvious natural cycles which are reasonably obvious by simply eye-balling the temperature record. These are the millennial and sixty year cycles. These both happened to peak more or less simultaneously in about 2004.This millennial temperature peak correlates with the millennial solar activity peak seen in the neutron count low at about 1991. The 13 year delay is due to the thermal inertia of the oceans.The temperature projections of the IPCC reports – UK Met office and NASA models have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently incomputable and specifically structurally flawed models. For estimates of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling see .
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-imminent-collapse-of-cagw-delusion.html
Let’s get even more basic here. I don’t think we even have a science. We have about 150 years of raw data, badly distributed geographically, for a planet that’s been around several billion years. We have proxy data that goes earlier, but its accuracy is questionable and by no means complete. We haven’t established what drives climate, most likely it isn’t one thing but a combination of things, and even if we knew what they were, we don’t have the mathematics to solve them. We don’t fully understand all the physics and chemistry of all the interactions. When you don’t have a science, the thing to do is gather data. Every “Climate Scientist” should be out there in the field, collecting and measuring things. But I guess this would be too much like work, when they could be in an air-conditioned space, looking at computer outputs.
Excellent discussion.
Is there an current version of Figure 1? It is nearly 3 years out of date.
Essex and McKitrick identified the chaos portion in their book Taken By Storm.
“
“Fluids are governed by nonlinear, as opposed to linear equations… … ”
I just wanted to point out that this statement is incorrect. Fluid behavior is described by an equation, not governed by it.
JohnKnight June 18, 2016 at 6:17 pm
” Mr Ball is really just playing with words when he says no science is settled. Technically he could be right, but in reality some science is beyond question.”
Wrong
Some science works really well in the conditions in which we apply it but it is never beyond question.
There may be circumstances in which it doesn’t work.
Newtonian physics worked well for nineteenth century applications, working out the trajectory of an artillery projectile for example, but can’t explain how a gps works.
What is beyond question is the process of heat energy effectively being captured by atmospheric gasses and that there is now an imbalance caused by extra gas, of anthropocentric origin, and that imbalance is causing the average temperature to rise.
Further that lag in temperature rise is of the order of decades behind the gas emissions – in other words today’s warming is in response to emissions from 30 years ago.
“What is beyond question is the process of heat energy effectively being captured by atmospheric gasses and that there is now an IMBLANCE caused by EXTRA gas..”
============================================================
What unscientific nonsense, IMV. The word “imbalance” is human opinion, non scientific, as is the word “extra”. Todays warming is in response to the recent El Nino, not the fact that I drove a gas hog SUV on a long trip 30 years ago. Also GHGs capture nothing, they redirect SOME LWIR energy lower into the atmosphere. The debate is on the feedbacks, and the observations support the skeptics.
Dr Ball
Thank you for yet another excellent article making sense of the complexities in a way everyone can understand.
I have myself tried to explain the same argument based on the Navies Stokes and mostly failed in getting the ideas and the beauty of the equations across, even when trying to explain the fluid motion modeled in i.e. computer games is based on an application of the equation.
Several years ago I spendt years in university trying to understand the equations, working from the theoretical side and the FEM side of the equations, implementing parametric models into the overall FEM framework. Just for the fun of it, I also did a two semester politically correctly called Air Pollution, which was basically atmospheric physics.
I used this knowledge indirectly in later work, doing physical modeling and later economic modeling based on the general insight it gave me, but I never believed I would actually need the knowledge directly as I have after I started following the GW debate some 30 years later.
Navier Stokes is in my opinion the very beatutiful peak of mechanics, possibly all physics, but unfortunately I found out that I would never get any of the two Noble prices embedded in the equation; proving continuity, and explaining turbulence.
Indeed my favourite joke is the alleged true story about Niels Bohr on his dying bed being asked: What will you ask Our Lord when you pass over to the other side, will you ask him about turbulence? The answer: No, I will not in any way embarass Him asking a question He can’t possibly answer.
There are no inductive inferences.
Karl Popper.
This is meant as a reply to Frank June 19, 2016 at 2:52 am:
I can’t seem to reply to the comment I wanted to reply to, so I’ll state it down here.
Michael Crichton states in his autobiography, Travels, that Newton’s Law has been disproved, and it isn’t correct to claim Einstein improved it, he disproved it is far more correct way of stating it.
I believe that is a correct assessment. E=MC^2 is correct even for speeds very much slower the speed of light, Just because F=MA works reasonably well for objects traveling at relativistic insignificant speeds, that does not mean that F=MA is correct, nor does it mean the science is settled and Einstein is right. All it takes is one particle to move faster than light and Einstein will be wrong, whether or not he is wrong is an unknown.
Science can give us useful working knowledge, but it can’t ever be settled. What Dr Ball is saying is that the divergence of the models from the data, shows that the models are not a useful tools for predicting the future climate, he is not saying everything about climate is unknown.
Tom Trevor: You are correct in believing that general relativity has replaced/invalidated Newton’s Law of gravity. However, my point was that science is not settled by the existence of a validated theory – it is settled by careful experiments for situations covered by those experiments. One can confidentially calculate the force of gravity on the surface of the earth because many experiments have measured this force. Both Newton’s law of gravity and general relativity and any new quantum law of gravity will all make essentially the same predictions about this force – and none of these theories would be accepted as valid if the did not. Theories can change, careful experiments should not. General relativity and Newton’s gravity only make different predictions under conditions far different from those normally found on earth. We can apply either theory in climate science without fear that a new theory will come along, because ANY new theory will need to make similar predictions about the force of gravity under conditions already studied experimentally. Science is settled by experimentation and those experiments can be summarized by an equation. Sometimes we use an equation to extrapolate predictions far outside of the range tested by experiment, but such extrapolation should not be called “settled science”.
I’m with you , Frank . It’s extreme edge conditions where it’s found that perhaps a term is needed in an equation or a more general form of an equation covers a broader domain . But I like the view that the experiential results don’t change .
I don’t know an exception to fundamental physical laws having the property of elegant simplicity – such simplicity that there can be no near by neighbors . For instance , special relativity can be summed up in a single metric matrix
1 0 0 0
0 1 0 0
0 0 1 0
0 0 0 i
in
x y z t. It’s hard to contend that something as minimal as that might be a little wrong .Or the equation for the equilibrium temperature of a radiantly heated colored ball I’ve presented :
dot[ sourceSpectrum ; objSpectrum ] = dot[ Planck[ T ] ; objSpectrum ]which has to be classically known , tho likely expressed in integrals . That equation alone , when the Divergence Theorem is considered , is enough to “disprove” Hansen and the warmists’ contention that the bottoms of atmospheres are hotter than their tops due to some GHG spectral effect .
I strenuously dislike the science is never settled meme . I felt compelled to wade into this slough of nonscience as an APL programmer for whom claiming to understand something quantitative implies being able to implement it so I can explore the parameter space . Thus , I understand physics one parameter at a time as I code its relationship with previously implemented relationships . I am on Richtmyer’s side in this slide in my Heartland talk , http://cosy.com/Science/HeartlandBasicBasics.html ,
http://cosy.com/Science/QuantTrumpsQual.jpg
not Michael Mann’s .
That’s why I keep repeating in bold 278.5+-2.3 as the temperature of a gray ball in our orbit assuming an effective solar temperature of about 5780 . THAT is settled science . And it’s one of the few parameters measured to the 4th+ decimal place accuracy predict anything about the entire 0.3% variation in our temperature this Pinky & The Brain ( Gore & Hansen ) plan to take over the world is about .
( It’s nice to see Willis has just posted some analysis of this peri- ap- helion variation . It’s several times larger than the total estimated warming at issue . )
I do consider the science settled . The GreenHouseGas spectral hypothesis presented by James Hansen as the reason the bottoms of planets’ atmospheres are hotter than their tops is false . As can be proved by distinctly undergraduate classic heat transfer equations and confirmed by experiment . There is no material spectrum which can explain Venus’s surface temperature being 2.25 time the gray body temperature in its orbit . Our surface , under our much less dense atmosphere is only 3% warmer than the 278.5+-2.3 gray body temperature in our orbit , but no equations nor experimental demonstration of such asymmetric accumulation and containment of energy by spectral filtering has ever been presented .
On the other hand , I have never seen the necessary terms for the difference in gravitational energy from the tops to the bottoms of atmospheres included in any explanation other than some rejected as fringe because they reach outside of the spectral GHG paradigm .
Bob “That’s why I keep repeating in bold 278.5+-2.3 as the temperature of a gray ball in our orbit assuming an effective solar temperature of about 5780 . THAT is settled science.”
Settled is not a property of science. It is neither settled nor unsettled. It is only in your mind that a claim is settled (satisfies your curiosity) or not.
“And it’s one of the few parameters measured to the 4th+ decimal place accuracy predict anything about the entire 0.3% variation”
If you perform the measurements yourself then you have extra sauce on your settlement. If you verified the calibration back to a national standard then bonus points for you.
“I do consider the science settled.”
Science does not settle. People settle, and once they do, tend to become resistant to further unsettling.
“Science does not settle. People settle”(…)
What is “science”?
Frankly , I think this is pedantic . By “science” I mean physics . I generally describe my religion as math and physics older than I am . And we rely on its exact and timeless continuing truth — settledness — to the limits of our ability to measure every day , every hour , every minute , every second , every microsecond as we sit here depending on its continued state of settledness to communicate with each other over these globally connected devices making up the World Wide Web .
Normal science converges . “Climate Science” has not because it has rejected the analytical approach of classical physics and masturbates in computational clouds of NavierStokes without ever having internalized , taken as absolute “settled science , groked to use Heinlein’s great neologism , the most basic constraints of classical heat transfer .
Again , from my perspective , it is absolute settled physics that the equationless experimental demonstrationless GHG spectral explanation for the bottoms of atmospheres being hotter than the space next to them in orbit is false . This is why “climate science” does not converge : http://cosy.com/Science/AGWppt_UtterStagnationShavivGraph.jpg . It does not even try to construct a quantitative step by by step “audit trail” from the output of the sun to our surface temperature . It is nonscience which is never settled .
Bob Armstrong wrote “Frankly , I think this is pedantic.”
Give that man a star! I am an equal opportunity pedant. Just ask our friends over on ATTP on the occasion that any of my comments go through. Science says nothing. People say things. Dogs also but their vocabulary is somewhat limited. Ravens can be unexpectedly articulate in their own language.
Well-repeated scientific experiments are settled for most or all practical purposes. I don’t need to know how many atoms of silicon is the new official kilogram.
Michael 2: Are you a practicing scientist? Philosophy asks us to think about how or why we know what we know. How do we know that we aren’t living in some kind of virtual reality, such as “The Matrix”? How do we know that the quantum and relativity revolutions in physics won’t occur again? Einstein believed that “God doesn’t dice with the universe”, but quantum mechanics is inherently probabilistic. What happens if QM is replaced by a deterministic theory? What about groupthink and other human failings? These overarching philosophical questions interfere with making PRACTICAL use of the scientific method. As the rapid progress of science over the past several centuries has shown, the scientific method is a vastly better way than intuition, logical deduction, religion or other method for analyzing SOME aspects (but certainly not all) of the world. The social sciences attempt to apply the methodology of physical sciences, but they often can’t perform definitive experiments. The harder it is to run definitive experiments and the more important the conclusions are, the greater the temptation to exaggerate what is settled science or claim that progress is being made.
In areas of physics that are well-studied experimentally, the next revolution will change nothing – except perhaps the explanation for some phenomena. The acceleration of gravity at the surface of the earth will still be 9.81 m/s^2. CO2 will still absorb and emit essentially the same amount of thermal radiation and create a forcing of about 4 W/m2 (2.5-5 W/m2) when it doubles.
Climate sensitivity, on the other hand, can’t be thoroughly studied experimentally. Every AOGCM (and AOGCM with one or more re-tuned parameters) is a different hypothesis about how our climate system behaves. Chaos and data limitations make it difficult to use the historical record to determine which of these models – if any – provides a reliable method for predicting how much warming a doubling of CO2 will produce. And these limitations could easily persist for several decades more. By then, we will be much closer to doubled CO2 and 2100 and simple extrapolation will narrow the range of possible answers.
Don’t say science isn’t settled! Ask about the uncertainties in the experiments have shown that an area of science has allegedly been settled.
Schrodinger’s equation will still hold . Because it does .
Looking at all named factors at once and maximizing R^2 allows determination of influence coefficients (and the combined influence coefficient/proxy factor) of each. This method, as shown at http://globalclimatedrivers.blogspot.com , predicted the smoothed 2010 trend within 0.03 K using data through 1990.
Some years ago I found myself joined on a golf course with a man who said he was a recently retired statistician with the National Weather Service. I said I hoped he could answer a question that had bothered me for awhile. The question was what it meant when the public was told there was a 90% chance of rain. I could imagine several answers. It could mean that every point in the area had a 90% chance of rain or it could mean that at least one point had a 90% chance of rain or it could mean that some percentage of the area had that chance of rain. It could mean something else entirely. I asked him what it really meant.
He said that it wasn’t really all that precise.
I notice that “Lurch” (John Kerry) is up in Greenland spouting his usual alarmist nonsense again. Seems he likes to display his ignorance on climate with his most publicized statements during the month of June as he did in 2009 and 2010.