By Andy May
I love visiting WUWT and Climate, Etc., but most of the visitors to these sites, like me, are skeptical that the current global warming is dangerous. I’ve often visited the notable alarmist websites, such as skepticalscience.com and realclimate.org, to gain an understanding of why they think the current warming is dangerous and man-made. I’ve even written posts on their views, like here, and I’ve cited their posts where appropriate. But, what about the regular educated population of people who believe global warming is dangerous and carbon dioxide is a pollutant? To be a well-rounded climate science writer shouldn’t I engage with the climate-scientist-on-the-street?
I was recently invited to join the facebook group “March for Science.” At first, I ignored the invitation, after all marching in the streets is a political thing and has nothing to do with science. But, “climate science” is also a political thing these days and has little to do with science, at least the science I knew during my 42-year career as a scientist. So maybe this is a forum I could benefit from, I was fairly sure I’d be bloodied a bit by the experience, but I might learn something. What is the caliber of the forum members? Would it be all ad hominem attacks and appeals to the so-called 97% consensus, or would some of them engage in a real scientific debate on the dangers or lack thereof, of global warming or climate change? Would they debate the evidence that CO2 concentration dominates climate change? I was curious.
Figure 1 is the banner page of the forum, click on the image below to go to the page. I’m not 100% sure this will work for everyone because the page is invitation only.
Figure 1
The photo at the top of the page is not very encouraging. They are not a very scientific looking bunch. The signs are not very scientific either, “speaking TRUTH to power” sounds more like a religious or political slogan than a scientific one. More scientific and more appropriate slogans would be like these:
Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable. Brian Greene, American physicist.
What seems to be missing in common discussions of climate change, whether man-made or not, whether caused by CO2 or not, is that science is a job and a learned skill, it’s a process. It most definitely is not something someone believes in or has faith in, it is not a set of facts anointed by self-appointed “climate scientists” and passed down to the great unwashed masses to be believed without question. Although, unfortunately, you find many who think that. You will see statements from my adventure in the March for Science that sound much like that.
To the best of my knowledge the great Columbia physicist Brian Greene has not spoken out about climate science, but he has stated that:
“… in order to have great breakthroughs in science, you’ve got to go against what the elders are saying.”
Or put another way, go against the consensus. As you might expect, the March for Science members talked a lot about the consensus. Brian Greene does discuss how science became a political prisoner here.
Figure 2 are the rules for posting. I found these encouraging, but quickly found out after my first post that they aren’t followed by many of the members.
Figure 2
But, many visitors to WUWT and judithcurry.com don’t follow the rules either, to be fair.
For my first post, I chose to write about Dr. Spencer’s excellent discussion of the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) criticism of U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry. See figure 3 below, click on the figure to read Dr. Spencer’s post or click here. Mr. Perry stated that he did not believe that carbon dioxide was:
“… the primary control knob for the temperature of the Earth and for climate.”
Perry continued that we should not be debating whether man affects climate, humans do affect climate, the debate is over “how much.” This is a very reasonable position to take and Dr. Spencer explains this quite well. The data we have today doesn’t show the amount of current warming attributable to man-made greenhouse gases, the man-made CO2 effect is too small to measure. Dr. Spencer writes about this problem in his book The Great Global Warming Blunder:
“Our satellite instruments still do not have the absolute accuracy to measure the small imbalance from Earth orbit that is believed to exist from more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so we cannot even directly measure the mechanism that supposedly causes global warming! As of 2009, it is estimated that humanity’s CO2 emissions …[have] caused an estimated 1.6 watts per square meter of extra energy to be trapped, out of the estimated 235 to 240 watts per square meter that the Earth on average emits to outer space on a continuous basis. We really don’t know the exact magnitude of the average flows of energy in and out of the Earth to better than several watts per square meter. It could be 235, 240, or 245 watts per square meter. I find it amazing that the scientific community’s purported near-certainty that global warming is manmade rests on a forcing mechanism–a radiative imbalance–that is too small to measure.”
Dr. Spencer is well qualified to make this judgement call, he is a co-recipient (with Dr. John Christy) of NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their pioneering work on global temperature monitoring using satellite microwave data. He is the NASA U.S. Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer, currently flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. If you are curious about how Spencer and Christy, and the others on their team measure atmospheric temperatures from satellites, I recommend the excellent and easy to understand post by Dr. Spencer (see here).
The estimates that man-made carbon dioxide is causing most of the current warming are based on computer models and not on measurements. More on this calculation from model output can be read on my blog (here) or in Chapter 10 of the AR5 report by the IPCC here. The AMS position is the usual:
“thousands of independent scientists and numerous scientific institutions around the world agree … that [human] emissions of carbon dioxide are the primary cause [of climate change]”
Thus, they simply say trust climate scientists and provide no evidence for their assertion. This is not surprising, since there is no evidence.
Figure 3
Figure 4 has the Like/Dislike breakdown after a few days.
Figure 4
I was a bit surprised that the likes outnumbered the dislikes. Reading the 420+ comments, one would think that the dislikes would be higher, but more likely they were just more vocal. With the basic background covered, I’d like to discuss key parts of the discussion. I participated in the discussion in my spare time over 3 days, but when it became very repetitive on June 25, I stopped. There were numerous threads in the discussion, I will deal with the major topics in turn.
Ad hominem arguments
Most of the comments were ad hominem attacks on either Dr. Spencer or myself, I’ll show a couple of these, then move on to the more interesting stuff. After several attacks on my manhood, mental health and qualifications and seeing nothing about Mr. Perry’s statement or Dr. Spencer’s post, I posted the following which I stole from David Middleton:
Figure 5
This led to 23 replies, a selected few are presented in figure 6.
Figure 6
Most of the 23 replies are along the lines of Tom Stark’s comment. I think Lorcan McGuinness is in a class of his own. Scott McDonald’s comments are quite good. By the way, “OP” stands for original poster (me). So, there are gems to be found in all of this.
Does CO2 dominate climate change?
Besides the ad hominem thread, we had several others of interest. Many presumed to know my motives (sinister, of course) or my interests, like in the following:
Figure 7
So, Ms. Oomen’s professor asserted that we would be insane to deny the existence of radiative forcing. She does not say what radiative forcing she is talking about, but presumably she means CO2. She supplies no evidence or references supporting her assertion, only her MSc in Physics. There were a lot of comments like this, I ignored them.
The effect of solar variability and is the Little Ice Age global?
Then there was this comment by Gilman Ouellette that I thought was quite good, it was the first comment with any substance. I include my reply.
Figure 8
Mr. Ouellette’s first link is to a composite graph of TSI from several satellites from 1975 to June 2010. See figure 9.
Figure 9
The point he is making is that the variability of total solar irradiance (TSI) is too small to matter. This is the same claim that is made by the IPCC in AR5. However, there is vigorous debate on the issue. Soon, Connolly and Connolly have challenged the TSI reconstruction used by the IPCC here and claim the Hoyt and Schatten reconstruction is better and fits the climate record better.
Khider, et al. (2014) compared a very quiet TSI record by Steinhilber et al. (2009) to a western Pacific Ocean temperature reconstruction and determined that the sensitivity to solar variability is 9.3°C to 16.7°C/Wm-2, if Steinhilber is the correct record of TSI. This is very high, much higher than the IPCC estimate of 0.7 to 1°C or the Tung et al.(2008) estimate of 1 to 1.5°C. They offer two possibilities for this:
“There remains the possibility that (1) the Steinhilber et al. [2009] reconstruction underestimate actual TSI variability and (2) the response to small changes in solar irradiance was locally enhanced in western tropical Pacific.”
As discussed in more detail here, Steinhilber et al. (2009) is the TSI reconstruction used by the IPCC to compute human influence on the climate. They believe, as Mr. Ouellette does, that solar output varies very little and, as a result, does not influence climate change. Yet, there are many other, equally likely and peer-reviewed TSI reconstructions that show much more variability. These are shown on the left side of figure 10:
Figure 10 (source: Soon, Connolly and Connolly, 2015)
The top TSI reconstruction by Hoyt and Schatten as updated by Scafetta and Wilson (2014) actually explains most of the warming in the past 150 years, reducing the calculated human influence (Soon, Connolly and Connolly 2015).
Mr. Ouellette’s second reference refers to a paper that proposes that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did not happen around the world at precisely the same time. This is true, but between 1500 AD and 1900 AD every part of the world experienced their respective coolest period in the Holocene, see the world-wide Holocene temperature reconstructions here. Below you can see a blow up of the period 2000 BC to 2000 AD in figure 11:
Figure 11 (source here)
The Northern Hemisphere has a very long and deep Little Ice Age that covers the full period from 1500 to the late 1800’s. Each of the other regions also has its coolest period in this interval, but slightly offset from one another and the cool period is shorter than in the Northern Hemisphere. Thus, the world is at its coolest point globally during the period 1500 AD to 1850 AD, but the severity of the cold is not uniform and the depths of the cold are not synchronous around the world. The tropics and the Southern Hemisphere have their cold period earlier and the Arctic later than the Northern Hemisphere.
The Earth’s emission spectrum
Mr. Ouellette had another very pertinent post that I want to address. See figure 12.
Figure 12 (click on the figure to see a larger version of the graph)
Mr. Ouellette is correct that amplitude changes in the Earth’s infra-red emission spectrum depend, in part, on the temperature of the air emitting the radiation. It also depends upon the greenhouse gas concentration and CO2 is an infra-red (IR) active gas, so changes in CO2 will matter, but water vapor is far more important. Also, water vapor is the primary transporter, through latent heat of evaporation, of heat energy from the Earth’s surface to altitudes high enough that CO2 and other greenhouse gases can emit radiation to space. While it is true, that the NASA AIRS satellite has shown that IR radiation emissions have decreased as CO2 concentration has gone up, this does not prove that CO2 absorption was the only cause of the decrease, although it is likely one of the causes. There are too many unknowns to claim CO2 is the major cause, there is some evidence that global precipitable water in the atmosphere has decreased (see here), solar activity has certainly decreased (see here), ocean heat content has increased (see here) providing more energy storage. So, as I say above, Mr. Ouellette has overstepped his data a bit.
He switches to another topic next and points out that we can tell how much of the CO2 in the atmosphere is from fossil fuels and how much is natural by monitoring how the ratio of carbon-14 and carbon-13 change with time. Quite true, but again he hits the causation wall, is CO2 changing the climate? We still have no evidence for that, there are too many other plausible possibilities. As noted by Mr. Perry in the post, the question is, how much of the warming is due to CO2 and how much is due to other factors?
The so-called 97% Consensus
This is the myth that will not die, and any discussion of climate change will eventually degrade to a discussion of the so-called 97% consensus. It has been very thoroughly de-bunked by Professor Richard Tol here and here. Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer also do a good job of blowing up the myth here. So, I will provide no more commentary, but will show a representative comment to prove that some people still believe that nonsense.
Figure 13
Detection and attribution of man-made climate change
The attribution of climate change to human activities was a widely discussed topic. The posts on this topic are too long to include here, but if you can get to the thread (try here) some are worth reading. I will summarize the discussion. Generally, the idea that CO2 is the control knob for climate was explained using “what else could it be” logic. The proponents, like Chris Colose, acknowledge that solar variability and ocean transport and storage of heat energy could be factors, but claim they cannot account for all the temperature change, so CO2 emissions must account for most of the change. They do not question the low estimates of ocean or solar forcing that the IPCC uses, but others do. There is a discussion of the attribution of climate change to human activity here.
In short, their argument boils down to this: the world is warming, we know precisely how much nature contributed to this warming, so we subtract that from the total and remainder must be due to man’s CO2 emissions because there is nothing else that could have done it. A very weak case indeed.
What should be done about global warming
There was considerable discussion about what to do, if anything, about global warming. Most of the discussion was like the following:
Figure 14
So, one argument is, global warming may lead to a disaster and it may be due to fossil fuel emissions and solving it by reducing or eliminating the use of fossil fuels might be possible, so we should reduce our use of fossil fuels anyway, even if we are not sure. There are a lot of ifs and maybes in there. The opposing argument is, if we stop or reduce the use of fossil fuels, it might ruin our economies and what if warming continues anyway? Wouldn’t we need energy from fossil fuels to help us adapt to warmer temperatures? What if we are wrong about all of this? That was pretty much how it went.
Conclusions
Most of the 420+ comments were vacuous ad hominem attacks or assertions made without any support or references. But, a few were interesting and thoughtful by people who had obviously studied the subject and knew what they were talking about. I tried to touch on them above to give the reader a flavor of the more knowledgeable alarmist positions. It was a bit difficult at times to wade through the ad hominem attacks on Dr. Spencer and myself, but I still found the experience worthwhile. It gave me more of a perspective on the other side of the debate. There were also more people supporting my position than I would have expected. You can see some of their comments in the figures above. These are just a few of the favorable comments I received. So, even at web sites like this one, skeptical thinking can intrude. Maybe the climate science community isn’t quite as polarized as we often assume. Something to think about.
An interesting article, as I am myself a visitor to the ‘opposite’ side of the argument…
I wonder, do posters here consider this site is more about the science than politics -and does it have less ad hominem attacks?
Discussion/debate – an exchange backed by interesting links – is always a good thing in science.
To Grifter:
This site is about science and politics.
The coming global warming catastrophe is 99% politics and 1% science, IMHO.
I say 1% science ONLY because some people with science degrees are involved.
Wild guess predictions by computer gamers are not science.
After 30 years of wrong predictions, I can only wonder why anyone,
other than CO2 is Evil Cult members like yourself, take them seriously.
Your “team” says a climate disaster is coming in the future,
as if anyone could predict the future climate.
And then you say the same thing the next year,
and the next year, and the next year.
Meanwhile the climate is wonderful.
It barely changed since 1880.
It barely changed from the early 2000’s to 2015.
Grifter, you are here as the punching bag for for people who are scientists,
or are skeptical like a good scientists.
You are the comic relief here.
Now, you may not like my prior two sentences
but I consider them to be my attempt to communicate with you
in your native language: Ridicule and character attacks
PS: Grifter:
I recommend you get the gondola concession in NYC’s financial district.
After all the streets flood from global warming, Wall Street businessmen
will have to get to work on your gondolas.
RICHARD GREENE
So Griff points out that this site has its share of ad hom attackers and your thoughtful response is to call him names. Could this be funnier?
Reply to SIMON (ON JUNE 27 AT 12:43)
I spoke to the Grifter in his own language
— the language of leftist “debate”.
You probably didn’t notice, Simon,
but a novice politician
used that Alinsky strategy
and became president.
At a climate change cult website,
if we go there to discuss science,
they fight us with character attacks to AVOID debating science.
At this website,
if the Grifter comments and does NOT discuss science,
I fight back with character attacks to PROMOTE debating science.
My response was thoughtful,
to show the Grifter if he criticizes this website,
then I will criticize him.
If the Grifter wants to comment on science,
my response will focus on science.
Debate with leftists requires ridicule and character attacks
in response to their ridicule and character attacks.
I wrote an article in my economics newsletter in 2014 about Saul Alinsky,
and advised Republicans to follow his strategies if they wanted to win
in 2014 and 2016.
That’s what Trump did in 2016, and he won.
Glad I made you laugh.
(GREENE, only problem is that griffie ain’t a “leftist”)…
Richard Greene
“Debate with leftists requires ridicule and character attacks”
Really? What a wonderful world you must live in. But thanks for being so honest. It explains why so many here are happy to play the man and not the ball.
Emotional arguments are not won with facts and logic.
And being polite to people who insult your intelligence and impugn your education with their every utterance is no virtue…it is just being soft.
Menicholas
“Emotional arguments are not won with facts and logic.”
This is only an emotional argument because there is so much riding on it. No one gets up set about the science of why bumble bees fly, but they do about climate change because the stakes are so high. Facts and logic should still win the day. Unless you get a blow hard like Trump, who knows nothing of the science, mouthing off.
Simon,
And yet the ignorant Trump is right and the charlatan Mann wrong.
Go figure.
afonzarelli, to a communist, socialsts are conservatives.
There’s a wide range of thoughts at this site. Here’s my own response to your question. This site doesn’t represent a unified view on the answers you are asking about. But what it does represent is a fairly unified view on the PROCEDURE of proper science, which involves a lot of questioning, a lot of sharing data, and a lot of proposed investigation and validation. Take nobody’s word for nothing. All as opposed to popular consensus science.
Griff, I tried to comment at the ‘opposing side’, but my comments invariably disappeared. That was a very one-sided discussion. I don’t waste my time any more.
Griff, You are very welcome here. But, I’m afraid we have impolite people as well. You may need a thick skin. However, we do appreciate visitors with opposing views. We used to have a very distinguished commenter from the other side, Nick Stokes. I haven’t seen any posts from him in a while, so we miss him. He caught all of my mistakes and was merciless in pointing them out. I wish he would come back. Please join us.
Griff, if this site was like the cult-warmer sites, you would have been banned a long time ago.
Griff, if you would actually present some science instead of links to various propaganda sites, it would be a first.
Griff,
I would prefer to see more science and less politics here. Unfortunately, the essence of the debate is how to deal with the politics supported by corrupted science. It is, therefore, necessary to expose the motivations and tactics used by those who want to dictate how everyone is to act. As I see it, those who believe in the climate being controlled by humans are attempting to force changes in behavior and economics. However, the ‘evidence’ they are appealing to is weak and controversial. They therefore usually attempt to shut off debate with ad hominem attacks and appeal to consensus. So, yes, it has been my experience that this site has fewer attacks than liberal sites like The Conversation. And, I get censored very rarely here, unlike other sites.
I think that you get teased and insulted a lot because you make claims that seem like little more than propaganda and are topics that have been addressed and shown to be false. By the way, did you ever apologize to Susan Crockford for your insults to her?
CO2’s most important absorption wavelength is 15 um. It corresponds to a peak emission temperature of -80 °C. link, link
The effective radiation temperature of our planet is -21 °C. link That’s looking at the Earth from outer space. As we go lower in the atmosphere, temperatures increase.
I wonder if Mr. Ouellette is aware of the above. CO2 absorbs energy at a temperature that mostly exists nowhere on the planet.
Thanks commieBob, very good point.
And then there is that darn missing hotspot…
commieBob,
The earth in average does emit IR in a large range of wavelengths, where the peak and range is modulated by the average effective earth/air temperature. Thus while the peak is not at the most effective wavelength for CO2, still some 4.7 W/m2 are absorbed for a doubling of CO2, or a warming effect of ~1 K for 2xCO2, prior to any positive or negative feedbacks.
As the absorption is in a band where water vapor and other GHGs are not active, the CO2 effect is additional to the effect of all other GHGs.
See fig.12 in Andy’s essay…
I’m beginning to wonder about the conventional explanation. Here’s a blog post by Clive Best where he digs into it and comes away dissatisfied.
The most common graph shows “Upgoing Thermal Radiation 15 – 30% Transmitted”. Hmmm. To a close approximation, 100% of the radiation the planet receives from the Sun is re-radiated to outer space. Direct radiation from the surface is clearly not the main way heat leaves the planet. It appears that several times as much energy leaves as radiation from the upper atmosphere.
I would not at all be surprised if someone recalculates the greenhouse effect due to CO2 downward.
From the article:
“the science I knew during my 42-year career as a scientist.”
If you were a real scientist, why would you want to get involved with modern climate ‘science”?
Modern climate science is different — it starts with a conclusion, and works backwards.
A TRADITIONAL RELIGION
A religious leader might try to control people
by telling them God will see that they go to hell
if they don’t follow orders / commandments
I consider that old-fashioned nonsense.
A MODERN “SECULAR RELIGION”:
A political leader might try to control people
by telling them someday the Earth will turn into hell
(from global warming)
if they don’t follow orders / rules
I consider that modern nonsense.
I consider the modern nonsense to be an alternative
for people who don’t believe the old fashioned nonsense,
but still want to believe in something.
If you believe in the old-fashioned nonsense,
based on faith,
which is anti-science,
then is it right for you to criticize believers in the modern nonsense,
based on faith,
which is also anti-science ?
I guess I’ve just criticized all people with religious beliefs.
As an atheist for my entire life, I see little difference between
traditional religions and modern religions such as leftism,
or its subset — CAGW.
— Beliefs based on faith.
— Alleged punishment for being “bad”,
already mentioned above
— Alleged rewards for being “good”,
such as going to Heaven,
or saving the Earth for the children.
The global warmunists make predictions of runaway warming
and the end of life on Earth.
You ask how they can predict the future climate,
and they say “climate models”.
You point out their climate models made wrong predictions for the past 30 years,
and they say there was a slight typo in the code, but they have fixed it.
You ask how they can be sure there are not other “typos”?
Then they call you a “science denier”.
You ask them how they know the 1910 to 1040 warming had a completely different cause
than the 1975 to 2000 warming, and suddenly you are a “science denier.”
As soon as you realize politicians and government bureaucrats
had taken the lead
… including Al “The Blimp” Gore …
you know it’s not real science.
As soon as they predict 100 years into the future,
you know it’s not real science.
As soon as they refuse to debate,
you know it’s not real science.
As soon as they “debate” with character attacks,
you know it’s not real science.
As soon as they claim they have climate models,
but all the model’s predictions have been wrong for 30 years,
so you know they are not real models,
and you know it’s not real science.
So why would real scientist get involved
with wild guess climate computer gamers,
who make wrong predictions of the future climate for a living,
because that’s what their boss wants to hear,
yet keep making the same predictions year-after-year,
and raising the “confidence level” higher again and again?
Oh, by the way, I’ve heard the IPCC just had a vote of “scientists”
and the result is a 99% consensus, with the following asterisk***
*** There would have been a 100% consensus,
but Professor Schnably’s dog ate his ballot.
The confidence level for the 99% consensus
is 102%, up from 95% in the last IPCC Report.
How can the confidence level exceed 100%, you ask?
Well, any number is possible in modern climate “science”!
Thanks! What a great contribution.
Thank you.
I consider you a “culture war hero” for trying to engage with leftists.
You really can’t debate with many of them on climate change.
You might as well debate a religious person on whether God exists.
I suppose you can fight with leftists if you enjoy fighting with them
— but they usually know so little about the things they believe in,
that there’s no chance of a real debate lasting over a minute.
If I want to fight with someone for fun,
I just tell the the wife the new coat / dress she just bought
makes her butt look HUGE.***
She’ll go berserk, since she is Greek,
and they tend to do that about once a week.
But later she returns the dress,
and I get a credit on my VISA bill.
*** I would never say that if her butt really WAS big.
I never criticize people’s appearance to their face,
or behind their back, unless they have an unusual
amount of hair on their head, causing me to whisper
to the wife a classic Greek saying:
“Big Hair, No Brains.”
The earth’s global temperature spikes and the drops over a 1000 year cycle. We are now coming out of the latest low temperature trough called the Little Ice Age. From a statistical standpoint, shouldn’t we first determine the causes of the historical natural variation as seen since the end of the last Ice Age, and use this as the null hypothesis. Then, and only then, can we determine the effect of man-made factors, be it CO2, UHI, deforestation, increased agriculture, damming rivers, etc. How can we blame all global warming on man without knowing the underlying natural factors?
I don’t believe proxy data are accurate enough, or global enough,
to claim there is a 1,000 year cycle.
Based on ice core data, it would be reasonable to say
there appears to be an irregular warming / cooling cycle
that averages 500 to 2,500 years.
It would be more accurate just to say the climate appears to vary all the time,
sometimes by a lot in a short period of time.
You forgot to mention the Mob Family Analogy
of modern climate science:
“Mr. Natural Changes” ran the climate action mob for billions of years.
In 1940 he was executed by Mr. Man Made CO2,
who took over the Family.
Mr. Man Made CO2 struggled during his first 35 years,
from 1940 to 1975, when Mr. Aerosols on the other side of town
was taking a bigger piece of the climate action.
In 1975, Mr. Man Made CO2 bumped off Mr. Aerosol,
and turned on the heat across the whole city.
In 2000, Mr. Man Made CO2 was arrested for tax evasion,
and had to spend the next 15 years in prsion.
During his 15 year sentence, various Family members
fought so much with each other for a piece of the climate action,
that there was no climate action at all.
Source: The internet.
Here is how I see it. Science is a process which, when followed, allows accurate prediction of improbable future events, as well as allowing the future to be shaped in both amazing and predictable ways. There is no other process that comes close to the success of the Scientific Method in this. The key to the success of any branch of science, is the feasibility of making and testing improbable predictions in a short time frame. This is a major difference between “hard” sciences and “soft” sciences. In climate “science” it seems this fundamental process is infeasible. Climate scientists have been unable to demonstrate reliable repeatable ability to predict improbable events. But this has not deterred them from making bold claims. Which is why this so called “science” is closer to a faith-based religious belief.
The left should look closely at what is happening to the DNC, they have been doing nothing but attacking, committing slander and embellishing fake news stories towards anyone that does not subscribe to the leftist viewpoint, only to see their party continually losing ground. On the AGW debate, the masses could care less about global warming and are beginning to take note of all of the ifs, maybes and possibilities interwoven in all of the Global Warming doom predictions and are beginning to not take the AGW crusade seriously. The whole AGW crusade is already losing public support and is in danger of losing substantial funding, and if the attacks do not stop they will soon be treated as the cultist they are by the public as well as politicians that wish to get reelected.
Every day they keep ranting and raving is another rock on the landslide that’s going hit them come late 2018. With any luck, it will be big enough to give Republicans a super-majority in at least one of the houses and make the second half of Trump’s term a much smoother ride.
Only in the senate does a super majority matter.
Luckily, most of the senators up for re-election next year are democrats, and there are enough of them from states that Trump won to make next years elections look mighty promising already.
Dems have little chance of pulling a 2010 style turnaround of congress.
I remember Dan Rather describing the election in the late 1980’s, when the Republicans took control of both houses of congress for the first time in 60 years as “The voters throwing a temper tantrum”.
I recently had a debate with a very religious older person “from Mexico” who believed the AGW alarmists predictions about sea level rise flooding the coasts of the continents in the not to distant future and causing havoc. I explained to her that sea level is only rising around 3mm per year and is not accelerating, but she still chose to believe in the alarmist viewpoint. Then I reminded her that if she believes what the bible says, It very clearly indicates that God promised to never destroy the world again with water. Now she no longer believes in Global Warming. Just one example of how fragile the Alarmists foot hold on the masses viewpoint really is.
“Then I reminded her that if she believes what the bible says, It very clearly indicates that God promised to never destroy the world again with water. Now she no longer believes in Global Warming.”
That’s an angle I never thought of. 🙂
But fire! That’s the ticket.
Man-made global warming will surely cause the world to burn.
The usual nonsense about TSI. It’s sunspot cycles, coronal ejections and the resulting magnetic field interactions in conjunction with terrestrial axial tilt, procession and lunar cycles that drive climate.
This is demonstrably the case:
http://acutedisorder.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/WeatherCycle1.png
What exactly decreased so significantly since 2003?
TSI changes only slightly, but the spectrum of that irradiance varies by quite a bit more, and the atmosphere is not equally transparent to all wavelengths.
TSI changes only slightly, but the spectrum of that irradiance varies by quite a bit more,
Nothing special happened in 2003 in the UV and EUV:
http://www.leif.org/research/EUV-Magnetic-Field.pdf
Dr. Svalgaard, there are a lot of acronyms in the linked article that I am not familiar with. Is there a legend or a list or somewhere to look up what each ones stands for?
thanks,
You PhD’s really over think things. I have solved this imaginary problem with a government approved method. I know identify as natural variation. Problem solved, not a penny spent.
Another way to spot who the liars are and hence who is telling the truth is the simple social skill of knowing how to spot a liar.
in this case, the warmistas have massively tipped their hand…you do not even have to catch them in their lies or observe the changing storyline and the evasive mannerisms.
All you have to do is look at how they are altering history…even the history of what they themselves have said.
An excellent post with which I identify. For my part I trawl the comments with the wisdom of the Romans in mind: 1): Argumentum ad populum: By consensus.: The Lemmings? 2): Argumentum ad verecundium: By reputation. Doubt not my word?. 3): Argumentum ad Verum: By truth?. Or attempt thereof.
To which I have added my own: Argumentum ad vituperatere: By vilification?. Enough said.
I find it speeds up the process so I can tickle the grey cells on the “ad Verum” comments.
Mind you I have been known to have had a dig, or a touch of humour; but I do find that my attempts to generate further “ad Verum” discussion often fail.
It would be interesting to analyse the comments in the various climate websites with these criteria in mind. (Not me chief, too lazy!) It would give a good insight into the mindset of the respective visitors to these sites. Could there be a them and us factor here where we all seek to re-enforce our views?
Pure science is on nobody’s side, else it’s not pure science. >]
Agreed. I stutter on its edges and hope for help.
You are both here at WUWT? because you smelled a rat. Something that was going on made you step back and go “hang on a minute”. Cudos, gentleman/ladies. You have pulled back the curtain.
All people have to do is pull a single thread to unravel the IPCC tapestry.
I hope we are on the verge of the public becoming aware of the level of the deception foist upon them.
I lament I may never see it in my lifetime, but live in hope.
It does no good to analyze comment sections that have been heavily redacted and edited.
They simply erase comments they do not like, or alter them, or just ban the commenters.
Just like theoretical astrophysics ignored the bogus maths that spawned black holes and just went on with theory as if that never happened.
AGW has gone regardless of the fact the hypothesized mechanisms have not manifested (and or we cannot detect them)
This amnesia is annoying, and as such every discussion on attribution, CO2 levels, warming and so on are massive misnomers, failed predictions mean you don’t have a theory, you kinda need to ram that home time and time again.
Focus on the hypothesis, Climate Change is not a scientific theory after all. It’s a collection of misleading claims based on weak to no evidence for any of it.
When this is the focus, you shred arguments that try move past this to “other evidence” of “other things”.
Don’t get side tracked, stick with AGW’s mechanisms and whether they manifest or not. Forget the rest
I find arguments melt rapidly upon such examination. Pun intended
Are you saying black holes don’t exist, they are somehow invented by bogus mathematics?
Bogus math. It was the perennial favorite grant money maker long before CAGW came along. Every now and again you’ll see a paper by someone like Mersini-Houghton of UNC though most such are met with swift and merciless ridicule by the “scientific community”. NoBlackHoles.com has some rather rudimentary papers on the subject.
Most people brought up with the terror of black holes find it hard to grasp that they only exist in models. (Sounds familiar, huh?)
Has anybody calculated the effect of air conditioning on the temperature readings in cities. All the potential heat that is between 72 and outside temperatue Is put in the outside air plus the energy that is put into the various air conditioners. It makes sense that this would affect temperature readings. If you put you refrigerator in an enclosed box and you put a thermometer in that box the temperature would increase as the refrigerator ran to keep the temperatures inside the constantly lower.
I believe the key is in showing where the warming is coming from, as you cannot currently have any real way to disprove AGW directly. By solid evidence of other causes, we can do it by proxy, “if this holds true then that cannot”
This is why the IPCC has a restraining order against natural warming research
A good point. I was surprised to learn that the temperature between panels of a photovoltaic solar power plant was higher than outside the plant. You take some energy away, the temperature should be lower. It would be worth repeating.
Photovoltaic panels are dark. They absorb a lot of energy, but convert only a small portion of it to electricity. The rest gets converted directly to heat.
(The electricity also gets converted to heat eventually, just somewhere else.)
All the energy used by human civilization in one year is equivalent to what the sun delivers to the earth’s surface in one hour. It doesn’t even count as noise with respect to temperature readings, unless your met station is in the path of air discharge from the condensing coil (been known to happen). Overall, the urban heat island (UHI) effect has a lot of contributions, most of them related to the changes in the landscape and the installation of square miles of concrete and asphalt and high-rise buildings. The energy consumed in these locations is unlikely to be even a third order effect.
True, but what does happen is that paved surfaces and solid materials like buildings drastically alter the way heat is stored by day and retained overnight.
Cutting trees causes massive changes in heating, near surface moisture, etc.
It is not only about the actual heat exhausted from buildings and other sources.
The UHI is very real.
You can measure it or even see the effect on plants on a single slab of concrete in the middle of an open field in a rural area.
Andy, facebook is one of the worst places to get into a scientific debate on anything let alone AGW.
It’s good to have a look into this particular group
I have found the same, the proponents of AGW have a free reign to slate and slant and ad hom but should you engage, boom, you are gone
to gain an understanding of why they think the current warming is dangerous and man-made.
In short that because that approache brings in the bucks,
Let us look at insurance, hear is a product which is bought not because of want you know will happen but because of what you ‘fear ‘ will happen , now the more urgent the seller of insurance can make that ‘fear ‘ the more likely you are to buy it. But in seller creating this ‘urgency ‘ there is no effect at all in the likelihood of the event increasing.
AGW is a fear based ideology because it cannot sell itself on the facts lone , it needs the ‘buyer ‘ to feel the ‘urgency’, hence its ‘dangerous’ warming , its climate ‘doom ‘ , its cities under water , there is ‘no time to waste ‘ etc etc .
Its the same reason they need to have ‘unprecedented’ when scientific terms the lack of data means this claim is rubbish. They simply have nothing but poor and problem filled proxies for the the temperature of anywhere on earth older than about 300 years . Whilst even now ‘smearing’ need to be used over vast scales to deal with the lack of data for such issues as ocean temperatures.
You can give climate ‘science’ one thing , no other science has perhaps managed to achieve so much , in finical and status terms , with such utter rubbish . They really have built castle in the air , if a CO2 rich air .
People with power and that hold the purse strings know how to buy people and hence buy the results that will gain them more power and larger purses.
Very true
Look at the money from US political right and fossil fuel interests which goes to think tanks and organisations sceptical of climate change…
Griff June 28, 2017 at 5:12 am
Very true
“Look at the money from US political right and fossil fuel interests which goes to think tanks and organisations(sic) sceptical of climate change
And you say WE’RE the conspiracy theorists?
Poor Griff, despite the fact that government spends thousands of times as much buying the science it wants, he’s still upsite that we skeptics have all the facts on our side.
@Andy May,
Andy, you concur with Ouelette’s claim that isotopic measurement of carbon allows to discriminate natural (from ocean outgasing) from antropogenic (from fossil fuel emissions) CO2. But it’s a false claim, like any of AGWers’ pretense to scientific certainty. Check it out, data are far far from having enough accuracy for that (and forget about C14 whose baseline is indeterminate because of nuclear atmospheric tests)..
Thanks for that, I was wondering what else puts C14 there.
What else is I think cosmic rays.
Oil contains ancient CO2, but so do the oceans.
This is why you can’t use carbon dating to date anything that has been soaked in water.
Frederic,
Isotopic measurements are extremely accurate and the difference between (deep) ocean CO2 (zero to +5 per mil δ13C) and fossil CO2 (-24 per mil) in the atmosphere (currently – 8 per mil and fast dropping) is so large that it is quite easy to make the distinction. One can even calculate the deep ocean – atmosphere exchanges due to the “thinning” of the human fingerprint. The same for the 14C decay after the bomb tests. That curve is known, as good as the influence of 14C-free human CO2 before 1945 and 14C decay counting still can be used for carbon dating if one knows that the object is from before 1945 or after 1960.
The only isotopic distinction one can’t make is between fossil fuels and decaying vegetation as the latter also is around -24 per mil, but the oxygen balance (and satellites) shows that vegetation is a net, growing sink for CO2, thus not the cause for the huge drop in δ13C over the past 165 years.
The drop in δ13C is spectacular as even large changes in temperature and CO2 levels didn’t change the δ13C levels with more than a few tenths of a per mil in the past 800,000 years. In the past 165 years the drop is over 1.6 per mil both in the atmosphere and in the sea surface as measured in coralline sponges:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sponges.jpg
Bravo Andy May !!
That there has been a sharp warming swing of a full degree Celsius globally in the last quarter of the 20th century is undeniable. But comparable swings–in both directions–have been commonplace throughout the Holocene. They occurred without any dramatic changes in CO2 concentrations, such as developed since WWII due to human emissions . That is the crux of the AGW attribution problem, which effectively assumes that CO2, rather than the little understood mechanisms of the historical proxy record, was the modern driver.
Try as they might–including disreputable ad hoc efforts to make the instrumented GAST record more strongly coherent with CO2 measurements–AGW proponents have failed, however, to obtain the vital cross-spectral relationship between the two variables that would make CO2 concentrations a plausible driver of the recent global temperature rise. Wittingly or not, they maintain their causal claims in the face of contrary empirical evidence from the well-established methods of “blackbox” system analysis.
Collected over 2,300!! views on my WriterBeat papers which were also sent to the ME departments of several prestigious universities (As a BSME & PE felt some affinity.) and a long list of pro/con CAGW personalities and organizations.
NOBODY has responded explaining why my methods, calculations and conclusions in these papers are incorrect. BTW that is called SCIENCE!!
SOMEBODY needs to step up and ‘splain my errors ‘cause if I’m correct (Q=UAdT runs the atmospheric heat engine) – that’s a BIGLY problem for RGHE.
Step right up! Bring science.
http://writerbeat.com/articles/14306-Greenhouse—We-don-t-need-no-stinkin-greenhouse-Warning-science-ahead-
http://writerbeat.com/articles/15582-To-be-33C-or-not-to-be-33C
http://writerbeat.com/articles/16255-Atmospheric-Layers-and-Thermodynamic-Ping-Pong
As long as we discuss issues of global warming as climate change as defacto global warming, it provides little sense. At least here we should separate the use of climate change as defacto global warming instead let us use the word global warming.
The second issue is humans causing — humans role on climate change is different from global warming. This is a vast subject by itself. We rarely count this.
We mostly follow unscientific path in using terminology. This is bad science.
Let us not use climate change for global warming and let us not use humans for CO2. Specify the specific terms.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
I’m sorry but I don’t see any logic in claiming various time offset regional cold periods equals global cold. Moving energy or air with lack there of from one point on the globe to another does not create nor destroy energy. The total remains the same. Just like a polar vortex and a hot spot in the southern hemisphere cancel out.
Now if you are arguing that the time offsets are due to lack of granularity in the various models and likely occurred simultaneously, that makes sense. Might not be accurate but is logical. There are papers that claim global and others that claim local as you pointed out.
It’s not that there was a cold mass of air moving about. (A concept that is in and of itself, nonsense on stilts.)
The issue is that the start and stop times for various places around the world varied. However the entire earth was much cooler during this time than it had been previously and since.
I will repeat my prior comment: When real science can explain the natural variability of climate, then, and only then, can we determine the incremental effect of human activity on climate.
I still do not see how vapor could be a GHG. There are plenty subjects here..
1. The gap between the observed surface temperature of 288K and that of a PBB of 279 is 9 Centigrade globally. In the equatorial region this gap is about 5K only (27°C versus ~22°C). The greenhouse effect is at its lowest where vapor as the most important GHG has its maximum. This will not add up.
2. Average temperatures are even higher in the Sahara/Arabian dessert. That is despite less solar input, higher temperature variations (which cause more emissions during their peaks) AND far lower humidity. If vapor was a GHG temperatures would need to be much lower there than at the equator.
3. Daily temperature variation in the dessert is told to be extremely high, because of the lack of vapor. And nights would turn extremely cold. Sure, if vapor contains heat and it is lacking in the desert, that is just what you expect. The problem: it is simply not true! To give an example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faya-Largeau#Climate
Temperatures may drop by up 20 Centigrade from their daily peak in the desert, which is just the same as anywhere else, if the sky is clear, that is cloudless and in the absence of moderating water/ocean. A clear summer day with a peak of 35°C and a low of 15°C is a very common scenario in Europe or the USA. Despite much higher humidity. Again there is no identifiable role of vapor.
4. Daily temperature variations are completely depending on cloudiness, as I have already shown. As this typical example shows, nocturnal cooling is extremely closely correlated to cloudiness.
http://i736.photobucket.com/albums/xx10/Oliver25/parkersburg1.png
(starting with the hour of sunset, the initial temperature in K is set to 1, x scale gives minutes times 10, cloudiness from 0 (clear) to 8 (overcast), sample size in parenthesis)
5. It has been suggested this correlation was only reflecting the correlation between cloudiness and (relative) humidity. So I ran this test too..
http://i736.photobucket.com/albums/xx10/Oliver25/parkersburg%20rel%20humid.png
so this is the correlation of relative humidity and nocturnal cooling. Interestingly, but not unexcpected, there is no correlation between humidity and nocturnal cooling at all. Only scenarios in the 90%+ range show reduced emissivity, but these levels are strongly associated with rain fall, which again comes from clouds. The second lowest emissivity comes with the dryest(!!!) sample, which is small however. All other samples show no (reasonable) correlation at all.
Summary: vapor has no GHE what so ever, as it does not intefere with emissivity. Clouds however work extremely strong in containing heat by reflecting it back to the surface. On average cloud reduce emissivity by 35%, which would translate into a GHE of 398*35% = 139,3W/m2 by clouds alone. That is, if we assumed the 398W/m2 emissivity from the surface to be accurate (which it is not, as the surface is not a perfect black body..).
Andy May,
Nice experience!
I have been a regular commenter at RealClimate in the early days, until they didn’t publish about half of my comments, even completely on topic… Shame on them, as RC could have been a real good forum for real discussions, but with Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt at the steering wheel…
I had a similar experience with a complete different forum (dioxin-l) about dioxins, a forum of activists to ban all uses of chlorine in any derivatives as fear for dioxin formation. As I was working in a chlorine/PVC factory at that time, I simply put the observed dioxin releases of different processes on their forum, without any comment (chlorine/PVC was lowest in the list). I will not repeat the ad homs here, as I was worse than the devil himself for them… No matter that, the follow up was quite interesting.
My experience was positive, as you never can convince the fanatics, but there are lots of lurkers on every forum which never or only occasionally react but read what you write and make up their own mind. If you keep calm and only use valid arguments, you can convince them, despite all the howling of the fanatics… Ultimately I was banned, despite always on topic, because of pressure from Greenpeace in the background. After that I received a lot of personal wishes from lurkers, which did not always agree with my arguments, but didn’t agree with my ban.
The net result was that the dioxin-l forum ended in total disagreement between the fanatics and the moderate members…
Andy
I didn’t realise that Roy Spencer had talked about the uncertainties of measuring the radiative imbalance, as it’s called. I’d seen the lack of certainty myself when I read the papers and then followed the references.
Climate science is one of those things that people fill in the blanks and jump to conclusions. The problem is it has the same level of certainty as early cosmology. There are so many processes on the Earth that we don’t actually know about not to mention coupled interactions.
And of course we can’t measure any of these reliably. But we must take action now!!!
I compare it to forcing home owners all over the world, and especially in developed nations, to add many expensive friction tiles to their roof in order to mitigate the risk of Santa’s sleigh falling off and causing damage. There is an obvious Health and Safety risk there.
When asked about Santa, the reply is you have to prove to me that he doesn’t exist.