A Red Team to end the climate wars: fun but likely to fail.
By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: Team Trump has proposed a Red Team project to resolve the climate debates. It’s an exciting promise of an easy solution to the public policy gridlock. It will make the situation worse.
The climate debate has — like so many other policy debates — become dominated by a proposal by Team Trump. They suggest some kind of “Red Team vs. Blue Team” debate about climate change. These articles show there is little agreement about the structure or goals of the project.
- E&E News: “Pruitt will launch program to ‘critique’ climate science.”
- NY Times: EPA to Give Dissenters a Voice on Climate, No Matter the Consensus.
- Niskanen Center: Can a Red Team Exorcise the Climate Debate?
What is “Red Teaming”?
To understand these proposals, first turn to the Red Team Journal (founded 1997). Start with “A Balanced View” of Red Teaming.
“Defined loosely, red teaming is the practice of viewing a problem from an adversary or competitor’s perspective. The goal of most red teams is to enhance decision making, either by specifying the adversary’s preferences and strategies or by simply acting as a devil’s advocate. Red teaming may be more or less structured, and a wide range of approaches exists. In the past several years, red teaming has been applied increasingly to issues of security, although the practice is potentially much broader. Business strategists, for example, can benefit from weighing possible courses of action from a competitor’s point of view. …
“Despite the many advantages of candid red teaming, the practice is subject to various limitations and constraints. A red team cannot predict with certainty what an adversary will do, nor can it uncover all possible weaknesses in a concept, plan, or system. Red teams that claim these abilities overstate the benefits of red teaming and invariably mislead their clients. Decision makers who attempt to use a red team to divine specific events risk doing worse than nothing.”
Red Teams work well to analyze an organization’s positioning and actions vs. an adversary or competitor. It is a natural tool for the military and security fields, and works well for business strategy. A Red Team artificially creates divisions within an organization, breaking consensus thinking and facilitating growth of new perspectives. No matter what the outcome, there is little risk to the organization or its staff from these projects. For example, Army officers gaming the Opposing Force in a war game will not be seen as the real enemy (Nazis, Russians, etc).
But there is no enemy organization in the climate debates, no OpFor. The existing divisions in our climate science institutions are part of the problem. Climate science today has broken into two tribes (of unequal size). Worse, their work has become politicized and tied to the polarized politics of America. Now some advocate pouring kerosene on these flames by pitting the two sides in a head to head confrontation, like a World Series of Climate Science — with the crowds cheering “their” team. It would take divine intervention for this to produce anything useful — for either climate science or the public policy debate.
A Red Team is not a relevant tool to help resolve the climate debates. It is the opposite of what we need today.
Alternative Analysis
Red Teams are one form of Alternative Analysis (A. A.). From the Red Team Journal.
“Alternative analysis is the superclass of techniques of which red teaming may be considered a member. As with red teaming, these techniques are designed to help debias thinking, enhance decision making, and avoid surprise.
“According to Fishbein and Treverton, ‘alternative analysis seeks to help analysts and policy-makers stretch their thinking through structured techniques that challenge underlying assumptions and broaden the range of possible outcomes considered.’ They further clarify the term by specifying that ‘Alternative analysis includes techniques to challenge analytic assumptions (e.g. devil’s advocacy), and those to expand the range of possible outcomes considered (e.g. what-if analysis, and alternative scenarios).'”
I doubt any A.A. tool will advance the state of climate science. I have seen no historical examples of this, let alone successful examples. But some forms of A. A. are appropriate tools to break the public policy paralysis.
Call in experts to answer a question
How can A.A. methods be used in the climate wars? First, what is the key question to answer? The answer should make a difference in the debate. It should be doable with the time and funds available. Many of the proposals flunk one or both of these, such as calls to review the IPCC’s Working Group I report — the physical science. The time and money required to this adequately would be immense.
Since 2009 I have had recommendations to re-start the public policy engines. Especially this, which fits these criteria. Others have made similar proposals.
- A review of the climate forecasting models by a multidisciplinary team of relevant experts who have not been central players in this debate. Include a broader pool than those who have dominated the field, such as geologists, chemists, statisticians and software engineers.
Models are the fulcrum in the climate policy debate, turning theory and data into forecasts that are the primary input to the climate policy debate. There has been little work done to validate them (see this list of the literature and this example). Model validation is a well-established field. With money and time a group could investigate and evaluate one or more of the major modeling systems. Whatever the result, we would know more than we know today.
It is an operationally simple proposal, using people uninvolved in the climate wars, likely to produce useful results. So neither side will like it. That’s today’s America!
It’s not a silver bullet
Experts in alternative analysis warn that these are tools, not miracles. The success rate of these projects is unknown, but there are a lot of failures. Even simple projects often result in organizational discord or even chaos, as with the 2016 Red Team examination of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center.
Also note that this is not the first A.A. project in the climate wars. The Berkeley Earth project raised $2.5 million (including $150,000 from the Koch Foundation) to fund a group of scientists who reanalyzed the Earth’s surface temperature record. They published their initial findings in 2012, with no visible effect on either the debate among scientists or the public policy debate. See Wikipedia for details.
An ominous example of A.A. failure
An extreme example of a failure of A.A. is the 1976 “Team B” project. A group of hawks accused the CIA of underestimating Soviet military capability. They were given free reign to produce an analysis more acceptable to the GOP’s hawks. They did so, producing what became politically useful justifications for Reagan’s massive military buildup. The CIA later concluded …
“In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B’s criticisms of the NIE proved to be wrong. …While Team B was estimating a relentless, continuing buildup at a growing pace, it was later learned that, in fact, Soviet leaders had just cut back the rate of spending on their military effort and would not increase it for the next nine years {in response to the Reagan buildup}. “
The USSR never built directed energy weapons, mobile ABM systems, and anti-satellite systems. The Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989 and it died in 1991. In fact, the Team B conclusions were backwards, as later analysis with data from Soviet records found that US intelligence exaggerated Soviet aggressiveness and military capabilities. See the details here.
The members were selected for their politically useful views. Most were later rewarded for their false analysis by promotion to high offices.
This is what many scientists and politicians fear will happen with any “Red Team” project conducted by the Trump Administration. They will stack the Team B with people who will produce the desired conclusions, then use the report to drive new public policy measures. But this is not 1976, nor is Team Trump the hawk neocons at the peak of their cunning. In today’s politically polarized America, a stacked Red Team will be seen as illegitimate by most climate scientists and much of the public. It will further the politicization of science, resolve nothing, and accomplish nothing.
We can do better. But we probably won’t.
A a proposal for a “Team B” project
Dr. Roy Spencer (meteorologist, principal research scientist at U AL-Huntsville) proposes a “Team B” project for climate science in “A Global Warming Red Team Warning: Do NOT Strive for Consensus with the Blue Team” at his website. It’s designed to document the skeptic position on a broad array of climate-related questions.
His proposal has two potential problems. First, I doubt there is a consistent skeptic paradigm to contrast with that expressed in the IPCC’s WGI report of AR5. The skeptics’ have a wide range of beliefs, which will add up to a grab-bag of ideas. Second, this probably will polarize the climate science field into opposition to their work (that would be my reaction if I were a climate scientist). Also, it is unlikely to have the political effect he desires. I doubt politicians will stake their careers on theories which most climate scientists loudly oppose.
For More Information
Climate scientists Judith Curry has some valuable insights about this proposal at Climate Etc.
For more information about this vital issue see the posts about the RCPs, about the keys to understanding climate change and these posts about the politics of climate change…
- Important: climate scientists can restart the climate change debate – & win.
- We can end the climate policy wars: demand a test of the models.
- How we broke the climate change debates. Lessons learned for the future.
- A story of the climate change debate. How it ran; why it failed.
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¿Has really Team Trump proposed a red team exercise “to resolve the climate debates”? In any case, whatever the exact proposal it has already done good. AGW Team has strongly refused the idea, falling into the usual bunch of lies: peer-review and the Academies do the same work, etc.
The warmist narrative has many faults. Things that could be, but not necessarily are right (as they say), and their “solution” is as risky and costly as you can imagine AGW to be (which they hide), besides being ineffective. Stronger scientific consensus have been utterly wrong many times, quite recently. And so on.
A formal and “official” red team exercise could very well make this public and visible, of course without “resolving the climate debates”. Maybe it could suggest there are more sensible policy options, and more than one.
Good Piece Larry,
Most folks spouting off have never been on a Red Team and never been through a murder board.
In The war gaming world “red team” refers to the guys who play the enemy. I was lucky enough to serve for a couple of full birds who served as commanders for the Aggressor squadron at Nellis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggressor_squadron
In addition to imitating red forces we were also expect to come up with ‘innovative” tactics for red forces of the future. I was also exposed to what DOD “imagined” for the red forces of the future. In 1985 they had to project or guess or estimate or imagine what the soviets would have in 2000. This imagination drove the design of the F117, B2, and F-22.
The threat of the future was modelled.
Our response was modelled.
Not of single one of these models could ever be validated. They represented the quantification of the best understanding, best estimation, best guess about FUTURE RISK. Risk that could not be estimated from the past. All we knew was bad shit was POSSIBLE. We prepared accordingly.
That dark view of the future never materialized, because at the same time we tried to adapt to the future risk by improving our forces, we also tried to Mitigate against the future risk by undermining the soviets.
There is a lesson there for the climate problem.
Rolling the clock back to the 1980s, it was clear that there was a potential risk. Nobody could calculate this risk. We could draw up scary scenarios. A two front war: One in the Fulda Gap and the other in North Korea.
What’s was probability of that? a two front war with both the soviets and the north Koreans? That catastrophic vision of the future, that black swan, DROVE THE PLANNING. Not only of force sizes but of the actual design. The B2 was designed specifically to penetrate the actual physical laydown of soviet air defense assets. Same for the ATF ( to be the F-22 in the end) The actual physical layout of the actual soviet systems ( in some cases we had actual captured equipment) was modelled and the simulations of the airacrft had to fly through these defenses. And then folks had to imagine how this laydown would change over the next 15 to 20 years. The scenarios were pretty alarming and there was next to no evidence that the future would look like the one planners projected. But we built planes that were adapted to the worse case we could imagine. Nobody building these planes or constructed these plans attacked models as “unverified” NOBODY suggested that we run a war to “test the models.” They were accepted as a planning tool. The best planning tool we could devise.
In addition to spending boat loads of money to plan and adapt to a future that would never materialize, we also tried to mitigate against that future. That is, change the current conditions such that the catastrophic future would never happen.
I view climate change in the exact same way. Its a mistake, I think, to focus too closely on what any model says or what the collection of models say. As they stand they are good enough to provide all the guidance we need to start the process of setting policy. They are constantly being improved, but its a mistake to give them too much weight. That’s the technocrat dream. That political governance can be replaced via algorithm.
We face a potential risk. The magnitude is dependent on projections of emissions and projections of physics.
Our projection of physics, like our projections of soviet capabilities can of course be on the high side. Predicting .2C per decade and having the actual figures be .17C is not a problem. If we predicted .2C and only saw .05C that would also Not be a problem. We didnt need our projection of soviets ( untestaable at the time) to be that accurate. It was a worse case and we wanted to be able to adapt to a worse case, however unlikely. knowing that models run hot, is simple for policy makers to handle.
We are already making decisions about how we will adapt to future climate change and how we will mitigate against it. Models are a tool that inform that process. But nobody who uses models suggests that models should write laws. Policy judgment is required. We could not afford to build and maintain the defenses to counter a worse case soviet threat in the 1980s. We spent what we could to mitigate and to adapt.
So many logical fallacies, so little time.
“Nobody building these planes or constructed these plans attacked models as “unverified” NOBODY suggested that we run a war to “test the models.” They were accepted as a planning tool. The best planning tool we could devise.”
You contradict yourself.
This statement
“Nobody building these planes or constructed these plans attacked models as “unverified” NOBODY suggested that we run a war to “test the models.”
and this statement
“They were accepted as a planning tool. The best planning tool we could devise.”
Are completely at odds. In the first statement you argued that no one “attacked the models as unverified”. Yet in the next statement you admit everyone knew before hand and AGREED they were completely unverified…. so really the reason they weren’t “attacked” was because everyone was already in agreement that they were wrong.
Temp:
Masher is like a dog chasing his tail — good work pointing out how he writes without thinking — so he manages to contradict himself in the same post — and shows us he has no idea what a real model is !
A “model” of how future wars would be fought is not a real model.
Real models are not based on guesses of the future (only so-called climate “models”).
A real model used to design a plane, or components of a plane,
must be accurate — based on reality, not a wild guess, or even an educated guess.
Lol agreed I was going to make a second post and point out the airplane issue… its one of the best to shut down “the models are always right crowd”. “Hey if the models are always right why have real world testing for planes? They should be able to fly right out of the factory with the only issues being parts failure because it wasn’t built to the model spec.”
To S. Masher:
You almost sounded like you knew what you were talking about, with airplanes …
until you started talking about climate, and then all four wheels fell off your science truck!
“We are already making decisions about how we will adapt to future climate change and how we will mitigate against it.”
My Comments:
— We have no idea what future climate change will be, so it would be foolish to make ANY policy based on no knowledge. Future global cooling is just as likely as future global warming.
— No one predicted the flat average temperature trend from the early 2000s to 2015, that may still be in progress — so much for the CO2 drives the climate fantasy.
— There was no understanding of the temperature decline from 1940 to 1975 using the CO2 controls the climate “model” — until the bizarre aerosol theory was invented — aerosols dominated big, strong CO2, starting suddenly in 1940, and suddenly all the aerosols left town in a hurry in 1975 — only a fool would believe that, or you.
“Models are a tool that inform that process”.
My Comments:
— Except that global circulation models are based on a wrong climate physics model, and that’s why they have been making WRONG temperature predictions for 30 years.
— If the GCMs were real models, they would be based on the correct climate physics model, and make CORRECT temperature predictions.
— You talk about airplanes as if you contributed something in that area, yet don’t even recognize the difference between a real climate model and a climate computer game merely called a model (GCM)?
— How many of the plane designs were based on models that do not make correct predictions?
“But nobody who uses models suggests that models should write laws. Policy judgment is required.”
My Comments:
— Only a fool would base government policies on wild guesses of the future climate, wrong for 30 years so far, based on a bizarre theory that man made CO2 will cause runaway global warming that will eventually end all life on Earth?
— Only a fool would believe a climate change fantasy of runaway global warming, backed by absolutely no science, no proxy studies, and no real time temperature measurements, or you.
Richard,
Not just “wild guesses,” but extreme, worst-case extrapolations intended to scare the general public.
Steven,
I agree with much of what you wrote. But not this:
“As they stand they are good enough to provide all the guidance we need to start the process of setting policy.”
Climate models have no peer-reviewed validation studies equivalent to those used in other fields. I discuss this in some detail in “Climate scientists can restart the climate policy debate & win: test the models!“. At the end are cites & links to three dozen representative papers about GCM validation. It’s pretty thin gruel to drive global public policy on the proposed scale.
For a brief and clearer snapshot of the evidence, see this describing the absurdly weak evidence Professor Mann gave the House to show climate models “have passed a number of impressive tests in the past”. It’s in section three.
Section One is also interesting, showing that the citations Mann gives in the footnotes don’t support his claims.
Stop calling them models.
If they make wrong predictions for 30 years, or 20 years, or 10 years,
then they are not real models.
They are personal opinions of what causes climate change
— personal opinions of the people who designed the so-called models
… that are obviously wrong based on 30 years of wrong predictions!
Calling them models does not make them models!
Models are a summary of a very well understood process.
Climate change is not a well understood process.
Therefore, there is no such thing as a “climate model”.
Before there can be a real climate model,
there must be a correct climate physics model.
“CO2 controls the climate” is not a correct physics model.
There is no correct climate physics model yet
— I suppose there could be one somewhere,
but no one yet recognizes that it is correct.
Even if there was a 100% correct climate physics model,
as the foundation for a 100% correct global circulation model,
that still does not mean the future climate would be predictable.
Greene,
“If they make wrong predictions for 30 years, or 20 years, or 10 years, then they are not real models.”
They are models whether they are correct or not. Science has to start somewhere, beginning the process of hypothesis and testing. Aristotle said that rocks that look like frogs start the process that turn into frogs (or something like that; I read this really long ago). It was wrong, but he was at the birth of science.
Editor of …,
Yes, whether good model or bad model, if the attempt is to simulate the behavior of a natural dynamic system, then it is a model. As the saying goes, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” A bad model is not as useful as a good model.
“Greene,
“If they make wrong predictions for 30 years, or 20 years, or 10 years, then they are not real models.”
They are models whether they are correct or not. Science has to start somewhere, beginning the process of hypothesis and testing. Aristotle said that rocks that look like frogs start the process that turn into frogs (or something like that; I read this really long ago). It was wrong, but he was at the birth of science.”
If your going to get snippy about it then you should know that a model is under science a hypothesis. Further as the saying goes… no matter how many hypothesis you have they are still unproven(and thus not correct).
They are models whether they are correct or not
=====
Exactly……
Models are an accumulation of all the knowledge known about something….
…but the models, whether they are correct or not…..will tell you something
The models total failure should tell you everything you need to know….
….they don’t even know enough to model it
Latitude,
Models CAN be “an accumulation of all the knowledge known about something,” but they don’t have to be. Sometimes things are left out to simplify coding or speed up computation. Sometimes things are believed to have negligible impact and unnecessarily complicate the models. What is important is to define what the model is expected to accomplish and how the performance will be evaluated against that goal. Remember that “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” To be useful, one has to know how a model is wrong and to what degree it is wrong. That is, it has to be validated against reality.
Clyde…you just agreed with me…..knowing what to put in/leave out…how much of this or that
That’s their best shot….”an accumulation of all the knowledge known about something…”
Models are their best shot…and the models suck
Steven Mosher July 8, 2017 at 12:36 pm
Good Piece Larry, Most folks spouting off have never been on a Red Team …
I was in a war game called “Red Flag” back in the ’70s, flying a B-52 down in the weeds with the intent of dropping a bomb on an airfield somewhere out in the desert. Flew right over a red team radar site and had it jammed before it knew what happened, then took out a red fighter jet that was trying to get lined up for a shot at us. Dropped our bomb and went home. Lotsa’ fun, you red team guys.
😉
Models weren’t needed to know that the Soviets were a threat. That was obvious from the evidence. So your efforts to mitigate those risks were warranted, and modeling was used to prepare, but models weren’t used to know that the Soviets were a threat.
There is no evidence that climate change is a threat to humanity. Zero. There are only model outputs that say such, and you are suggesting that we use models as evidence that there is a threat. You’re putting the cart before the horse. Trying to mitigate risks based on no evidence is unwarranted.
Its a mistake, I think, to focus too closely on what any model says or what the collection of models say. As they stand they are good enough to provide all the guidance we need to start the process of setting policy
====
We should set policy on backward third world voodoo witch doctor science….
After all this time and money….you guys can’t even get a simple model down
If you can’t get a model to come even close….you don’t have one f’in clue what you are doing, what the climate is doing, or anything else
Models are the heart of it all………..and you dismiss them, because they are so f’ed up…..and want to set policy anyway
What is needed is a: Well Funded Climate Challenge” —
3 Components:
1) new instrumentation and processing for gathering data such as ClimaCell HD WeatherLayer™ based on integrating ClimaCell’s proprietary wireless data with traditional sensors — prizes annually for best of class
2) search for long term climate in rocks, trees, price of oats, etc. — prizes every 5 years for the best historic tools, proxy sources and results
3) the Modeling Grand Challenge
Create a master development data set for a well diagnosed period from just before the 1998 el Nino until 20 years after
Make the first half of the data available to anyone who wants to proffer a model for the prize — they can do all the tweaking they want
Then let the models run [without stirring the pot] until the end of the 2nd part of the data set — say 2018
Compare their predictions to the data set — the winner gets the prize — say $10M
repeat every five years until either there is a clear winning trajectory toward realizing the “ideal model” or alternatively, Lorenz is victorious and the utter futility of the concept of decadal and beyond models is exposed?
I would submit that there is actually no need for a red team/blue team approach.
What IS needed is a thorough review of my on-line post “Climate Change Deciphered” , wherein I prove that man made climate change is real, but that it is caused solely by the removal of dimming SO2 aerosols from the troposphere (since circa 1975. primarily due to Clean Air efforts).
(It does need a bit of revision to include the fact that all El Ninos since 1850 are actually man made events, due to reductions in SO2 levels). (See my pre print at OSF.io –“The Cause and Timings of El Nino Events 1850 – Present)”. Earlier El Ninos would have occurred for the same reason (reduced SO2 levels) .
Climate Change is actually very simple and predictable.
Is there anyone reading this who can scientifically refute any of it?
All we need is a practical example of how solar can truly work. Build a plant for producing solar panels. Put in sufficient solar panels to power the plant. Stockpile enough raw materials for a year’s worth of production, at the plant. Remove all links to the electric grid. At the end of the year, see if there is a year’s worth of panels, and make sure they work. If so, then replace all of the solar panels with the new ones from the factory, and repeat for a second year.
This would prove that solar can be self-sustaining. A practical demonstration means more than all the words and arguments and debates that have been carried on.
Janice please contribute your own money for that solar experiment.
A manufacturing plant can’t run on 100% solar power even if the panels are kept very clean and the plant is located in a very sunny, dry area.
Did you ever hear of night and darkness?
Not many days of the year would have 16 hours of sunshine needed to support two shifts.
Three shifts would be impossible.
Would there be enough power / proper voltage on a very cloudy day?.
What happens if there is a brutal hail storm … or kids with rocks making trouble?
And please start working on how humans will dispose of all the old / obsolete solar panels, and all the batteries used for electric and hybrid cars when their lives are over, without making the environment worse,
I didn’t think I needed a “/sarc off” at the end. I’ve been posting about the idiocy of solar and wind for many years now. Guess I did too good of a job at satire. I shall rename it “A Modest Proposal”.
Reply to Janice the Older American:
It’s really hard for me to tell the difference between an educated person, like you, making a bizarre proposal with the goal of mocking the alternative energy cult …. and an alternative energy cult member making a proposal he takes very seriously.
… So, when is groundbreaking for the new solar plant you propose?
I hope you appreciated my Floyd R. Turbo-style reply to your original comment.
Richard Greene says: “Three shifts would be impossible.”
..
They can do it in Seville Spain: http://www.torresolenergy.com/TORRESOL/gemasolar-plant/en
Richard, the BP plant(listed below) ran for years, though never did have many cars in the parking lot. We drove by it a lot when we went to visit relatives.
http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Solar+breeder
I first entered the “climate change wars” when it was called global warming in the late 1970s through my analyses about using borehole temperature as proxy to establish long past temperature (it is a terrible proxy). After viewing a 1988 Bill Moyers “world of ideas” interview with Jessica Matthews, I got busy trying to counter what I viewed as misleading statements and misinformation. I wrote editors of newspapers and magazines. I wrote technical objections to papers in Science and Nature. Despite having relevant expertise I was routinely ignored. I learned that no matter what I proposed a blue team player could counter it with nothing more than “he’s wrong because I say so.” By the mid 1990s I had stopped what I viewed as futile effort.
What is most ironic is that those parts of the blue story which I viewed as problematic 40 years ago, still are. The signal is very close to being not resolveable still. The problem of attribution, because natural variations and man caused ones can’t be differentiated, remains. If anything Hansen’s 99% certainty in 1988 has not increased with great expenditures of money on research, but has regressed.
I suspect a red team exercise is pointless. The greatest enthusiasts for catastrophic global warming belong to one of two camps: one includes people who have a strong financial or other incentive (like power) to promote a panic if possible; and another group is composed of credulous souls. The credulous souls might be swayed with reason one might think, but climate beliefs for them are just part of a broader way of looking at all of life. They have no skepticism even in matters they know absolutely nothing about.
One should also give up hope that demonstrations that proposed solutions to the problem of global warming are worse than the warming itself. If such a thing we’re possible then people should have learned caution about collectivism and central control from the USSR, North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela. Yet, the infatuation with such grows stronger.
Sorry for my skepticism, but my guess as the most likely out come of a red team exercise is that the red team will too narrowly view the issue as a technical one, and simply drift blueward politically.
We’re should be were, of course.
+10
kilty
There is a huge amount of wisdom in your concise July 8 comment.
I suspect you are an example of ‘wisdom grows with age’.
For me it’s a rare “cut and paste and read again regularly” comment
from this website.
I’d never seen the word “blueward” before,
but knew exactly what you meant
Please find time to comment here more often.
How many warmists do it ‘for free’ ? How many Sceptics do it ‘for free’
Its clear to which team is in it for the money, whether they accept that or not. maybe we should recruit a blue team from unpaid alarmists and a red team from unpaid sceptics
OT/…. does anyone know why DMI has stopped updating the Greenland SMB page eight days ago? The last update was 6/30/17. …http://beta.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/
Answer, DMI added a post script stating “…We are experiencing some temporary operational problems and hope to get the ice sheet surface mass balance back online soon. …”. I missed that bit at first.
Your bottom line seems to be that we can”t trust a red team /blue team approach because a politically correct outcome will be wrong and an incorrect one will have no significant impact. Very depressing. but wrong.
To make this idea work we need two things:
1 – both teams must be instructed to make testable, reasoned, predictions for fixed time periods. Credibility then depends on the accuracy of these predictions, not politics or personalities.
2 – the existing climate models are mainly horrible – one I reviewed in detail was basically a 1960s Fortran card deck with watfor extensions added circa 1968/9; thousands of graduate student programming hours added afterward mainly to add bits in isolation, make outputs match historical data, or increase granularities in processing and/or applicablity, and an overlay added to use rdbms/parallel processing tech during the 90s and early 20s. At best these can be described as netting out to making the terribly simple stupifyingly complex without making any of it in any useful sense better as a mdoel implementation than the original deck.
To fix that we need a new kind of model entirely – one that reflects data rather than theory. Imagine dividing all of the space weather affects, from maybe 250 miles up to ten deep, into one cubic mile chunks. Then imagine putting a sensor suite in each cube – and collecting data by the minute. With this in place, the models would then be based on measuring and forecasting energy flows from each cube to all of its neighbors. Since those flows re well understood such a model would provide accurate data and easily understood, easily tested, forecasts that could be extended (fanned forward?) over time to look from minutes to decades ahead.
So can this be done? Yes: satelites can provide proxy sensor suites (or close enough to start with), and both Sun’s SPARC and IBM’s cell technologies provide the bandwidth needed for the collection, storage, and processing components.
Paul,
“Your bottom line seems to be that we can”t trust a red team /blue team approach because a politically correct outcome will be wrong and an incorrect one will have no significant impact. Very depressing. but wrong.”
That is not even remotely close to what I said.
I don’t have time to go into great detail, but the criticism on the 1976 “Team B” project here appears to be drawn *entirely* from its ideological critics. It strikes me as being like letting Oreskes and Mann write your encyclopedia entry on climate skeptics.
I encourage people to do wider reading on the subject. The Soviet Union *did* put their efforts into biological and nuclear weapons and strategies that would let them “win” an exchange, as opposed to faulty CIA assumptions that both sides sought parity, and post-fall records show this.
Arms control advocates’ description of Team B *eerily* mirror CAGW advocates’ descriptions of skeptics. Simply taking one sides’ description of the other as true is usually a bad policy if your goal is to understand the problem.
Merovign,
“I don’t have time to go into great detail, but the criticism on the 1976 “Team B” project here appears to be drawn *entirely* from its ideological critics.”
That’s just making stuff up. Not even remotely correct.
You quote only Team A, your following statements read like statements of arms control groups at the time (specifically mentioning directed energy weapons and ABM without mentioning bioweapons research and MIRV research directed at targeting launch facilities in a pre-emptive strike).
I don’t blithely accuse you of making things up (not being a mind-reader), I am accusing you of picking one side in a controversy and treating it like it’s the only side. I ask again for people to seek a broader view of history, perhaps of someone involved in the situation:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/team-b-the-reality-behind-the-myth/
The view that Soviet failure was inevitable and the implication that the Reagan (and Thatcher and other Western) administration had no impact is again the view of “Team A” and the arms control community, and not the *only* view. “Team B” was highly influential on these groups and helped form the policy of confrontation that deserves at least *some* credit for the weakening of the Soviet state. Obviously how much is also in debate.
It is unfortunate that almost everything is a political issue these days, but it’s axiomatic that most people tend to adopt the views of their political allies and not many people do their own digging on subjects that are, in fact, substantially more complex than they think.
Richard Green above says refusing to debate is an Alinsky tactic, and the Blue team have convinced lots of people regarding CO2 without any proof.
Fair comment, but it assumes that Team A should debate in an orderly logical fashion.
To take a different example, Mr Trump beats back the left not by debating them but by using similar Alinsky tactics. Alinsky rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Trump has just successfully brought CNN’s rating below that of kids’ TV, via ridicule and the reaction to it by the main stream media,
https://thefederalist.com/2017/07/06/ratings-collapse-cnn-now-losing-nick-nite-prime-time-ratings-war/
rather than by presenting his policy positions.
We don’t seem to be able to find a red team that can ever do that……you’re right
A good starting point would be to lay out what are the agreed facts. Then lay out the theories, projections and uncertainties.
I predict blue team will handle losing this slightly less well than HRC did in that event last November.
I am concerned about depending much on any computer models, I am skeptical that the Physics, Chemistry, and thermodynamics are not sufficiently known and any computer model is dependent on assumptions not real science. You will loose if you depend on computer models, which will claim whatever the modeler wants to claim.
I would first deal with significant claims like those listed below which can be more widely understood:
Do you still believe in the Mann Hockey stick?
Do you believe the 97% claim to be valid? explain why when so many disagree
Explain why the computer model predictions deviate so much from measured data.
Do you agree 100% with Karlization of the data?
Explain why old temperature data is adjusted downward thus exaggerating warming
Do you believe the Medieval warm Period existed globally or only locally in a few places like London
Explain why the reported warming is primarily in higher Latitudes, not in USA mainland, etc.support all the claims. Since the warming is mild outside the Arctic, why are dire consequences predicted where warming has been small.
Explain why so many dire predictions by some scientists has failed like more Hurricanes, more Tornadoes, demise of Polar Bears. Arctic ice free.
Are their any errors in the Gore movie, or do you support all his claims ?
Are there any IPCC claims in the latest report that cannot be supported with science and require change? Will there be any adjustments to the claimed range of warming for the next IPPC report.
Do you support the dire claims of a tipping point.
Do you agree that CO 2 is a poison?
Are their any benefits of increased CO 2 like increased farm production
Do you support the term acidification of the Oceans since the Oceans are not acidic.
Do you support the claims that the Antarctic collapse is in danger of increasing sea level dramatically. If so when?
Do you believe the sea level increase is accelerating considering the fact that sea level gauges do not support this claim?
What range of temperature sensitivity to CO 2 increase do you specifically support? How do clouds affect this?
Will the impact of increased CO 2 diminish or continue linearly with increased concentration?
What is the temperature impact of the USA withdrawing from the Paris climate accord.
How do they consider the documented fact that that the geological history of the earth has gone through numerous ice ages, flooding of lands now widely habituated, and extreme temperature ranges.
Do you subscribe to the Milankovitch cycles as having considerable impact on climate change
Please explain all impacts associated with expected climate change.
Of course there are probably other simple question to require the blue team to answer, preferably under oath.
Don’t get into the weeds too soon, try to debunk the current dire claims made by Obama and the overall MSM which many believe and pontificate about daily in their talking points to mislead the public. Although the MSM will ignore the exercise, I think it would be good to get the blue team on record early on what claims they support and which are false.
“A review of the climate forecasting models by a multidisciplinary team of relevant experts who have not been central players in this debate. Include a broader pool than those who have dominated the field, such as geologists, chemists, statisticians and software engineers.”
That sounds like a Red Team to me … this is just another nonsense post from another elitist academic who doesn’t have the balls to fight for the truth …
Kaiser,
“That sounds like a Red Team to me”
I suggest reading the post again, but slower. A Red Team explicitly takes the Opposing Force’s side. A review board as I (and others) have proposed starts from a neutral perspective and conducts an investigation.
It’s the difference between a fair judge and a “hanging judge”.
Does the investigation of the Challenger disater have any relevance here? Dr. Feynman, I believe, said he didn’t really solve the mystery, but that it was the engineers, who knew what had happened, that led him to the truth. They were either fearful of losing their jobs or other retaliation, but Dr. Feynman was willing to listen and be led to whatever the truth was. The others on the commission just went along to the Dog and Pony show, which was presented by the powers that be. Wasn’t it a whistle bolwer that gave us the Climategate emails, because he/she chould not take the destruction of science anymore?
Larry,
Once again I am struck by the sense that you don’t recognize the degree to which the CAGW side of the “climate wars”, in reality-land, is effectively chained to a “settled science” position, since this is not a purely intellectual debate.
To me, nobody special, you are essentially removing the “burden of proof” that demands for vast wealth and power logically accrue . . though you couch the removal in terms of solving a “gridlock” problem. There is no such problem, if one does not grant an a priori phantom legitimacy to those demands, since the “skeptics” are not demanding that vast wealth and power be appropriated from anyone, or demanding that “alarmists” take any particular actions on behalf of the skeptics “cause”.
It’s kinda like some guy walks up to you and demands your wallet, and when you refuse to hand it over, someone else says the “gridlock” is a problem that needs solving . . It’s not, unless the guy pulls out a gun or something . . And when things looked far bleaker for the climate crisis skeptics your characterization of the situation as gridlock that needed resolution (when I last tried to explain this “burden of proof imbalance” aspect to you), your position at least had some semblance of a “He’s got a gun!” rationale to recommend it. Now, it strikes me as little more than a plea to not hurt the feelings of a disarmed robber ; )
John,
“Once again I am struck by the sense that you don’t recognize …”
Perhaps you could quote something I wrote. Your comment doesn’t appear to have any relevance to this post.
“someone else says the “gridlock” is a problem that needs solving”
So you believe America is adequately prepared for a repeat of past weather? Such as a major hurricane hitting an eastern city? Sandy was just a storm and did massive damage to NYC. God only knows what a big hurricane would do to Miami.
I suspect America will test your theory. Hopefully it will not be too expensive in money and blood. Perhaps you will post a mea culpa afterwards.
big hurricane would do to Miami…..didn’t we just do that with Andrew?
Latitude,
“didn’t we just do that with Andrew?”
Hurricane Andrew (1992) only brushed Miami. From the NOAA report:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/1992andrew.html
Andrew was a major hurricane and hit two eastern cities……Homestead and Florida City….all the way up to most of South Miami….I was hit with the north side of the eye wall at 136 st
Latitude,
What is your point? You asked “didn’t we just do that with Andrew?” I gave NOAA’s answer. A direct hit on Miami would have been a catastrophe. It probably would be a worse today.
I guess if you don’t know….Homestead and Florida City up to South Miami are all part of Miami. Miami Dade County…a suburb..they’re not some little podunk. they are just as built up and populated as the rest of Miami.
So if you say “major hurricane hitting an eastern city”….Andrew did….It just didn’t hit downtown Miami directly.
That’s all…..nothing to get worked up about
Sandy was not a Hurricane when it made landfall, period
The impact of Sandy was more severe because NJ and NYC was taking a beating by a lingering NE storm that caused Sandy to linger and add to the flooding already underway in many areas. Absent a blocking NE storm, Hurricanes normally zip past the NJ coast quickly. Sandy lingered a long time and piled more water on the coast on top of that already caused by the NE storm. Remarkably New and bigger homes have replaced those damaged by Sandy. If you were not already aware, NJ has had even worse NE storms that actually wiped out the barrier Islands divided them into multiple islands. Of course the financial impact was much greater this time because almost every lawyer and Doctor from Phily and North Jersey have expensive summer homes on places like Long Beach island NJ and all along the coast
Larry,
“Perhaps you could quote something I wrote. Your comment doesn’t appear to have any relevance to this post.”
I told you the relevance, it’s in this (to me) bizarre insistence that “gridlock” is the problem that must be solved, rather than insisting the alarmists convince enough people to vote for whatever the hell they want done, like anyone else in a representative governmental system.
Framing it as “gridlock” because they can’t get that level of support, and acting like that’s not a situation many “causes” face every day, is just plain “special snowflake” treatment for a certain advocacy group (you happen to agree with), as far as I can tell.
You want that vast wealth appropriated and given to some people? Get the support needed like anyone else with a request for funding/legislation, I say.
John,
I don’t understand your reply. I said why gridlock is a problem. Was I unclear?
You said: “I told you the relevance, it’s in this (to me) bizarre insistence that “gridlock” is the problem that must be solved”
Let’s replay the tape from my comment.
Larry,
“I don’t understand your reply. I said why gridlock is a problem. was i unclear?”
No, clear as a bell. You just don’t seem to grasp how a representative governmental system works . .
“The climate debate has — like so many other policy debates — become dominated by a proposal by Team Trump.”
Of course, just as it was “dominated” by the previous Admin . . that’s how our system is designed to deal with what you call “gridlock” . . we vote . . . Any of the “so many other policy debates” you refer to could be re-framed as a “gridlock” problem, by those who want their way and can’t get it through the democratic processes available, but that’s what those systems are designed to address.
Many Dems (and establishment type Repubs) were obviously not satisfied with the recent National election results, and some went into tantrum throwing mode, and insist that terrible things will come to pass if we don’t depart from the Constitutional Republic’s proscribed way of dealing with our societal disagreements . . and re-framing the matter as a “gridlock” problem is possible, but it’s just fancy bitching about not getting their way, to me.
PS ~
“So you believe America is adequately prepared for a repeat of past weather?”
America is a very big place, with many potential “weaknesses” . .
“Such as a major hurricane hitting an eastern city?”
What city(s)? Make your case(s) if you feel some need further preparedness, I suggest. Such things are always worthy of consideration . . and not “officially” accepting the CAGW does not mean dismissing the potential value of further preparedness for proven weather risks . . or even more “extreme” ones if it becomes clear the potential is sufficiently probable at some point in the future.
“Sandy was just a storm and did massive damage to NYC.”
Not really, it seems to me, but I have no objection to the inhabitants taking further defensive and or responsive measures . . I just don’t think everyone in the country ought to share the expense equally, owing to the concept of CAGW. My roof might not hold up to hypothetically stronger winds due to “Climate Change”, but I see no point in people in NY paying for re-enforcement of roofs in the California . . just in case . .
All Trump has to do is to require all taxpayer funded institutions, grants and all, to cost in detail their stated climate policies to comply with the Paris Agreement specifically and require that a record of their dependence on fossil fuels be transparently made public as they implement the policy.
Whether this leads to research ships being required to be wind and solar powered, or whether these green scientists will take kindly to struggling to work in their compulsory EVs remains to be seen. However this should concentrate the mind to the huge increase in government expenditure that will entail.
He can then require the Senate to sanction the funding required and the resulting increases in taxation. That should put the cat amongst the pigeons.
From my point of view there are two things that need vetting.
One is to establishing a chain of custody for the proof that CO2 is the control knob. I have not seen this from either side of the argument. I have seen some references here at WUWT about the proof being established with models but that is opinion without audit.
The vast amount of evidence through research appears to all accept that CO2 has been established beyond doubt as the control knob. If CO2 is not the control knob the vast amount of established work falls apart because the basis was not robust.
The second problem is, are the constant adjustments to temperature data sets justifiable given the raw data and nature of the raw data. Can warming actually be established. This is important beyond just climate change because we could be setting ourselves up for weather/climate disaster in the future. At best we are wasting research dollars if the temp records are not robust.
PDM,
We know that the historical temperature records are not as robust as modern records. However, the alarmists use this less robust data to make the claim that the Earth has warmed x.xxx deg F in the last century.
Simple solution – declare all state, government and council funding for CAGW is to cease and instead be diverted to institutions studying, identifying and mitigating against cooling (the greater threat to the people).
See how long the consensus remains for warming then…… 🙂
The red team approach actually would include, as Larry recommends, a critical evaluation of the climate models and their forecasting skill. (I don’t know why he assumes it wouldn’t.) Also, part of the problem with the science in the IPCC report is the overconfidence with which its science is presented. I do not believe it can in any way be proved “wrong”…instead, it can be demonstrated to be biased in the direction of a specific outcome, with overstated confidence. The Red Team can point out that there is considerably more uncertainty in the report itself than is portrayed in its Executive Summary. I don’t view the Read Team as saying anything like “this is what we believe the climate system will do”, because (as Larry says) we would lose that pissing contest. Anyway, this is something like the direction I will recommend if I’m involved.
I would hope you would be imvolved…
“climate models and their forecasting skill”…models are the accumulation of everything that is known about something…all knowledge is put into them
The models lack of forecasting skills tells you everything you need to know.
Roy,
“I don’t know why he assumes it wouldn’t.”
That is not my objection. Alternative analysis methods (such as a Red Team) can examine almost any question. In the post I said the us-vs.-them framing used by a Red Team is not only inappropriate for the climate change question, it would almost certainly exacerbate the political polarization that has made it so toxic.
I suspect that many of the people advocating a Red Team don’t understand that this is not a buzzword, but a well-developed methodology. It’s idea for competitive situations — from war to business strategy.
Instead I propose a review board of neutrals — experts from a wide range of relevant fields, people who are not front-line combatants in the climate wars. Prestigious experts whose opinions will carry weight. Mathematicians, software engineers, people using models in other fields, etc.
This is a standard tool in public policy. For example, a Presidential Commission. They have often been influential.
Roy, I too hope you would be involved.
I would suggest not getting into the weeds in the beginning but have the blue team reply to a list of questions, since there are so many claims out there that need to be sorted out during the first stage. I think it would be well for the public to see first which of the claims the Blue team actually supports before getting into details. Although the MSM will hide the results where possible, it would be beneficial that the public realize which are false and which deserve further debate.
Below is a possible list of initial questions:
I would first deal with significant claims like those listed below which can be more widely understood by our Senators, and some of the public:
Do you still believe in the Mann Hockey stick?
Do you believe the 97% claim to be valid? explain why when so many disagree
Explain why the computer model predictions deviate so much from measured data.
Do you agree 100% with Karlization of the data?
Explain why old temperature data is adjusted downward thus exaggerating warming
Do you believe the Medieval warm Period existed globally or only locally in a few places like London
Explain why the reported warming is primarily in higher Latitudes, not in USA mainland, etc.; causing problems with many of the claims. Since the warming is mild below the Arctic, why are dire consequences predicted where warming has been small.
Explain why so many dire predictions by some scientists have failed, like more Hurricanes, more Tornadoes, demise of Polar Bears, Arctic ice free.
Are their any errors in the Gore movie, or do you support all his claims ?
Are there any IPCC claims in the latest report that cannot be supported with latest science and require change? Will there be any adjustments to the claimed range of warming for the next IPPC report.
Do you support the dire claims of a tipping point.
Do you agree that CO 2 is a poison?
Are their any benefits of increased CO 2 like increased farm production
Do you support the term acidification of the Oceans since the Oceans are not acidic.
Do you support the claims that the Antarctic collapse is in danger of increasing sea level dramatically. If so when?
Do you believe the sea level increase is accelerating, considering the fact that sea level gauges do not support this claim?
What range of temperature sensitivity to CO 2 increase do you specifically support? How do clouds affect this?
Will the impact of increased CO 2 diminish or continue linearly with increased concentration?
What is the temperature impact of the USA withdrawing from the Paris climate accord.
How do they consider the documented fact that that the geological history of the earth has gone through numerous ice ages, flooding of lands now widely habituated, and extreme temperature ranges.
Do you subscribe to the Milankovitch cycles as having considerable impact on long term climate change
Please explain all impacts associated with expected climate change.
If you are the Roy Spencer the scientist,
then thanks for applying real science to climate change.
If the Red Team was staffed with only educated scientists like yourself,
I’m sorry to predict the “debate” would be lost by the Red Team.
Thirty years of brainwashing in schools, and in the press, guarantees
the Blue Team would have a significant edge.
Plus, all the Blue Team predictions are for a catastrophe in the future —
how can you thoroughly refute that without waiting to see if it happens ?
… and it will be a long wait, because the catastrophe date
is always getting pushed forward into the future.
Here’s what I envision would happen:
Blue Team: CO2 will cause runaway warming and kill everyone
Red Team: CO2 might cause some warming, but not dangerous warming.
Blue Team: We can’t afford to wait and do nothing !
Audience Conclusion:
– We have to do something in case the Blue Team is right.
The Red Team admits CO2 causes global warming too.
Even if the Blue Team is wrong, it’s a good thing to stop using fossil fuels
and not hope they are harmless.
The “debate” would be junk science versus real science,
and real science doesn’t impress people like junk science does,
because real science has:
“we’re not sures”
“we don’t knows”
“uncertainties” and
no 97% consensus
The IPCC Report is not real science — it is junk science.
Real science does not start with a conclusion like the UN did
before forming the IPCC — a conclusion that will never change.
Real science wouldn’t have the IPCC staffed with so many “climate activists”
Real science wouldn’t let politicians write/edit the final draft of a Summary Report.
Real science doesn’t release back up data months AFTER the Summary Report,
hoping no one will read it, and spot big differences in stated uncertainties.
Real science wouldn’t ignore data concerning natural climate change,
… and be tricked by The Mann Hockey Stick Chart,
… and repeatedly “adjust” historical data to show more warming,
… and use wild guess “infilled” data for a majority of Earth’s surface grids,
while ignoring more accurate satellite data as much as possible,
… and claim GCMs are real climate models, even after 30 years of wrong predictions,
rather than calling them failed hypotheses,
or personal opinions of goobermint scientists,
or computer games,
… and then claim the future climate is predictable,
with no idea of the exact causes of climate change,
and to prove that — 30 years of wrong predictions!
Red Team vs. Blue Team would be a waste of Green money !
My first choice for government spending on climate
would be to fire everyone involved with GCMs
and compilation of the global average temperature.
That will never happen — governments always seem to expand, not contract.
My second choice would be firing half the “Blue Team”
(existing government bureaucrat scientists),
and replacing them with a PERMANENT Red Team
who would be paid to second guess the Blue Team
and prove the obvious — the climate is wonderful,
getting better, and not changing in any unusual way.
The government gets the science it pays for.
So either pay for no “science” (wild guesses of the future average temperature),
or pay for both a junk science (existing) Blue Team
and a new real science Red Team.
Not a one-time debate — a permanent job for the Red Team.
The Red team, could of course, provide data which proves that there has never been any warming due to greenhouse gasses., thus winning the debate.
This data is available.
I just want an audit of the data. All of it.
My position from the very beginning has been that the atmosphere and land and ocean and ice and ALL those molecules and photons is just too complicated. You have to measure what is really going on from all facets.
Yes you can build a complicated model of what “should” happen, but what “should” happen is just based on your biased theories. Maybe your biased theories are only half right. Maybe they are all wrong. There is no sense having a blue team versus a red team arguing about biased theories because that goes nowhere.
We have to “measure” what is happening and then understand what is likely to continue happening. BUT climate science has done nothing with the data except adjust it to their biased theories and or hide all the raw data.
Bring in the real statisticians. Freeze the adjusters out of the process. What does the “real” data say is really happening and what is likely to continue happening.
Maybe we can even give Mosher and Nick a real job with this audit team so that they can be more objective for once.
You can’t audit leftists:
Their paper files disappear until after the statute of limitations is up
Their historical data on computer files disappear.
Their memory fades away just before questions are asked..
They take the 5th amendment — the only part of the constitution they like!
Their computer hard drives “fail”
They smash their old phones with hammers.
Their computer files get “BleachBitted”.
People who could squeal are threatened.
People who do squeal are found dead.
You need to study the masters: Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Leftists may know squat about science,
but they know how to stifle an investigation / audit.
Kenneth Caldeira wrote an article at his website criticizing Pruitt’s proposal. Caldeira is an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology (Wikipedia).
Here is the money paragraph, showing that he does not understand why the consensus of scientists can provide an inadequate basis for public policy — and why decision-makers use Alternative Analysis methods (such as Red Teams) even when their experts are certain (sometimes especially when their experts are certain).
Here is another article by a climate scientist giving the same misrepresentation of Pruitt’s proposal as did Caldeira: Victor Venema makes the same mistake in “The Trump administration proposes a new scientific method just for climate studies.“.
This is of course not what Alternative Analysis is about.
This is a standard tactic of alarmists. In my opinion, it is the most commonly used one. When in doubt, misrepresent what the other side says. Give a devastating rebuttal. Declare the win!
Venema is scientist working with the Benchmarking and Assessment Working Group (BAWG) of the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI).
Victor Venema makes the same mistake in “The Trump administration proposes a new scientific method just for climate studies.”
Perhaps this is becoming the consensus climate science response to Pruitt’s proposal: misrepresent alternative analysis methods as a way of doing science. This is a common — perhaps the most common — tactic of alarmists.
Venema is scientist working with the Benchmarking and Assessment Working Group (BAWG) of the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI).
Most of the areas of agreement and disagreement are well known. Opening debate probably won’t accomplish much other than to invoke WWI trench style fighting. Actions speak louder than words. Here, the POTUS has lots of options. He could reduce the funding to the 20 or so centres all running projections. He should make them decide which computer models are closest to reality and fund only those in 2 or 3 centres At least one should be government run, and one university based. This would cause heartburn for many and force them to debate who is the best. Making them criticize each other would bring a lot of issues to the fore.
There also is agreement about several aspects of the issue that are lacking and are essential to improving the models. The two most obvious issues are the role of clouds and associated impacts, and the role of ocean currents (including ENSO). That’s where the research funding should be directed.
The multi-millions of dollars wasted on species research based on flawed models is where the real waste lies. Shrinking cod- really? A massive extinction event – really? Virtually none of these ridiculous studies are based on the known tolerance limits of the organisms supposedly impacted. How can one expound on the impact of climate change on anything if tolerance isn’t known? What about adaptation? What about range expansion?
Trump can do a lot – effectively- but he should avoid setting up another dog and pony escapade of trench warfare.
Enter the real universe and its unguided hand Chaos!
I am unsure of the merits of a RED Team BLUE Team approach. I consider that a back to the drawing board approach is needed.
What is clear is that no one can agree on the temperature of the globe, not only between data sets, but also over time (eg., the temperature for the 1930s/40s has been altered a dozen or more times) . If we cannot agree on that, what hope is there of resolving issues?
Science is about experimentation and it is about time that an experiment was carried out to see how reliable the present day temperature data sets truly are. Just a simply SANITY CHECK could quickly determine whether AGW is over hyped.
The most sensible approach to making progress would be to identify say the 100 to 150 most pristine weather stations (best sited, no station moves, no encroachment of UHI/material change in land use/planting of trees, best reporting/record keeping practices etc), and retro fit these stations with precisely the same type of thermometer used by the station in the 1930s/1940s (calibrated in Fahrenheit or Centigrade as per the historic usage at each station) using precisely the same type of shelter and then observe the temperatures using precisely the same practices as were used by that station in the 1930s/1940s (eg., the same TOB as historically used at the station in question). We could then compare RAW observational data with RAW observational data, with no adjustments whatsoever (since there would be no need to adjust for UHI, station moves, equipment change, TOB etc).
These stations would only be situated in the Northern Hemisphere since there is no worthwhile historic data of the Southern Hemisphere. There would be no attempt to produce a Northern Hemisphere data set. There would be no need to produce an ideal spatial coverage merely a representative sample, say 20 stations in the US, a couple in Greenland, 6 or 8 in England and Scotland, 10 in Germany, France etc 30 or so in Russia and China etc. Just go across the Northern Hemisphere using a broadly representative sample of mid and high latitude stations.
One would simply compare each station with its historic record and see how much the station had truly warmed since the late 1930s/early 1940s.
These would be a SANITY CHECK. let’s see with the bulk of these stations show significant warming (eg. 0.5 to 0.8 degC above 1930s/1940s high), or only insignificant warming say 0.3degC or less since the 1930s/1940s high). Within a short period such as 5 years, we would have a very good grasp on the extent of warming from the highs of the 1930s/1940s.
if the majority of stations do not show significant warming since the highs of the 1930s/1940s, we can quickly rule out alarm over AGW since we would be fairly sure that over a period during which man has emitted about 96% of all manmade CO2, there is little if any warming.
I would suggest that such a simple experiment is the best approach to get to the heart of the issue. The surface station project has already done the US audit so it would be very easy to identify the 20 most pristine stations in the US. It would not be difficult for each Met Office in each country to carry out a similar audit so as to identify the most pristine stations in each country.
Richard,
You are assuming that any modern mercury thermometers would have the same calibration as the historical thermometers, which they probably don’t. Unless someone saved the original thermometers and put them back in service, your elaborate scheme wouldn’t tell us any more.
Climate science today has broken into two tribes
By definition the consensus side is all on the same page. That is one side.
The skeptic side has many different theories. Many are some percent on the consensus side. Some skeptic who promotes 1.6 degrees warming from doubling CO2 is an 80% consensus climate person.
Bill Gray said that is way too high. Dr Neil Frank says CO2 will not and has not caused the natural warming.
You are assuming that any modern mercury thermometers would have the same calibration as the historical thermometers, which they probably don’t.
Modern thermometers and historical thermometers are calibrated to the boiling point of water and the freeze thaw point of water. That has not changed. It is linear in between and beyond. The modern thermometers are likely more accurate, but the conditions at each location likely causes more unknowns than any error in the thermometer readings.
popesclimatetheory,
The point that you missed is that is used to be common practice to determine what the thermometer read at the calibration temperatures and then apply a correction for air temperatures. However, that wasn’t always done, particularly in some backwater locations. Lacking the original thermometers, or at least metadata to verify that they had been calibrated, and corrected temperatures were recorded, you can’t be certain of what the actual temperatures were.
I don’t see any problem with calibration.
The retrofit thermometers would be calibrated as per the standards and practices that each country used in the 1930s/1940s.
The 1 atmosphere melting point of pure ice and boiling pure water has not changed over time. Some countries might have used the triple point of water for calibration purposes, one would just need to check what practice and procedure was used in each country and replicate it.
Any calibration error is likely to be measured in hundredths of a degree, and likely to be equally distributed thereby not presenting any significant problem
I have suggested 100 to 150 pristine stations, but it is probable that it could be done with as little as 50 stations.
What is needed is good high quality data, rather than the sow’s ear of endlessly adjusted and smoothed data.
As per the recent article, it is clear that all or almost all the ‘observed’ warming is due to the endless adjustments to the data sets (by which I include the station drop outs and the growing usage of airport stations over time). Thus, the issue is essentially is simple: are the adjustments that have been made valid, are they improving the data?
I suspect that if e were to perform the experiment, it would be seen that very few stations had warmed by more than 0.2 degC since the station historic high of 1930s/1940s (as appropriate at each station).
Richard,
See my response to popesclimate theory. Yes, thermometers made in the mid-20th century probably only needed corrections of the order of magnitude of the precision of the graduations. However, going farther back in time, the manufacturing operations probably produced a larger variation. My point was, that without the original thermometers, there is an unresolvable uncertainty.
First off, the CAGW crowd is a suicidal cult. Their very existence depends on them being right.
(This is not original to me)
Arguing with a liberals like playing chess with a pigeon.
http://www.animalphotos.me/bird/bird-wood_files/wood_pigeon6.jpg
They strut around with their chest puffed out, knock over the pieces, and then shit on the board.
Good luck with debating them. I suspect that it is a fools errand.