Note: Dr. Schmidt argues points he doesn’t seem to fully grasp, perhaps purposely, then again, Schmidt is no stranger to pettiness. – Anthony
Guest essay by Steve Koonin
Gavin Schmidt has posted a commentary on the video of a talk I gave recently at Purdue University. I’m grateful for his attention and comments, as I’m always trying to improve my presentations. It seems that I failed to get my points across in some crucial places, so I’ve got work to do.
As part of that work, I offer below some responses to Schmidt’s comments . I have reformatted his original text as block quotes and removed figures to improve the readability of this response. I’ve also, without changing meaning, removed some of his snark, which has no place in a serious discussion.
Steve Koonin, June 17, 2019
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In the seemingly endless deliberations on whether there should be a ‘red team’ exercise to review various climate science reports, Scott Waldman reported last week that the original architect of the idea, Steve Koonin, had given a talk on touching on the topic at Purdue University in Indiana last month. Since the talk is online, I thought it might be worth a viewing.
…
The red team issue came up a few times. Notably Koonin says at one point in the Q and A:
The reports are right. But obviously I would not be pushing a red team exercise unless I thought there were misleading crucial aspects of the reports.
55:55
Schmidt doesn’t get my wording quite right, and truncates an important follow-on statement. The full quotation as transcribed from the video is:
A lot of the reports are right. But obviously I would not be urging a red team exercise unless I thought that there are misleading crucial aspects of the reports. What I like to say is I believe, to be determined, that they are written more to persuade than to inform. And, you know, having thirty years’ experience in providing advice to policy makers about science, that’s not where we want to be. It’s OK to write an advocacy document, but not one bearing the mantle of science. I believe the reports have that problem.
But in over an hour of talking, he doesn’t ever really say what they are.
Instead, there are more than a few fallacious arguments, some outright errors, some secondhand misdirection, a scattering of dubious assumptions and a couple of very odd contradictions. I cannot find a single instance of him disagreeing with an actual statement in the reports.
I said up front (at 4:00) that my focus was to point out the disconnect between what the reports actually say and the public/political dialog. It would be a different talk to point out exactly how the reports promote that disconnect (such as by burying the lede or failing to provide historical or quantitative context); that would be the focus of a red team exercise. However, the economic impact discussion (at 36:40 and below), where Schmidt seems to agree that NCA4 has a problem, is an example of the kind of thing I’d expect that a red team would highlight.
First, the fallacies
Three examples:
“Until you explain variability on all the scales relevant to the alleged human warming, you haven’t really nailed it down.”
21:10
Nope. This is basically claiming that until you know everything (an impossible task), you know nothing.
Having quoted me explicitly, Schmidt then provides his own interpretation of what I “basically” said. I did not say “until you know everything”, but rather said “on all scales relevant.” Nor did I say “you know nothing”, but rather said “you haven’t really nailed it down”; there are big differences in both cases.
The basis for the thought should be obvious. Unless you understand natural variability on the relevant scales, you’re in danger of misattributing observed changes to anthropogenic influences and so, for example, misjudging sensitivity.
I try to be careful with my words (even in an unscripted talk) and am disappointed that they’re not read with comparable care. I’m also disappointed that Schmidt didn’t address the point I made, rather than just dismissing what he thinks I said.
33:00. Apparently, Koonin “doesn’t think” rapid sea level rise is going to happen in the future because it hasn’t happened over the last 100 years at the Battery in NYC.
Again, Schmidt is criticizing an “interpretive” quotation. The transcript from the video is:
I don’t think that’s going to happen [a one meter rise by 2100]. I’m not certain, but it sure looks discordant with what we’ve seen for the last 150 years.
For sea level to rise 1 meter by 2100 would require an average rate of 12 mm/yr through the end of this century. That’s about six times the rate we’ve seen for the past 150 years and four times the rate we’ve seen in recent decades (and likely also in the 1940’s). So I don’t see much reason to change my quote.
35:40. Koonin skips his slide on why Arctic sea ice trends aren’t anything to worry about, but his point was going to be that people noticed warming in the Arctic in 1923. This is of course another fallacious argument (and we’ve dealt with it before).
I’ll pass on responding to this one. Since I didn’t talk to the charts, Schmidt doesn’t know what I would have said.
Contradiction Central
There are two glaring sets of contradictions in the talk, first, involving attribution of past change and secondly, his stance on normative judgements in discussing science. Starting around 7:29 he discusses attribution of recent trends and states:
“You had better have [natural influences] under control before you can attribute what you see to human influences.”
This is fair enough (assuming he means that one should have a good handle on natural variability rather than ‘controlling’ it), and one might read this as a statement that attribution is complex and deserves careful attention – an opinion with which I fully concur. But this is illustrated with the most useless kind of pop attribution. He makes a blanket statement that any changes prior to 1950 must be purely ‘natural’ without any analysis at all (a stance completely at odds with the literature, for instance, Hegerl et al., 2018), and supports it with an uncredited graph from, of all people, Bob Tisdale, a frequent blogger at WUWT, showing running 30 year trends of the (now obsolete) HadCRUT3 data. That’s an interesting choice of metric because it is the longest trend period you can use that allows the ~1940 rise to almost match the more recent decades. With 35 year, or 40 year, or 50 year or 60 year trends, the exceptional nature of the recent change is obvious.
The data shown in the left panel at 8:00 are indeed an accurate representation of HadCRUT3. I appreciate the suggestion that I use more up-to-date data in future presentations. However, the quantitative 30-year trends shown in the right hand panel are those I determined from GISS’s own LOTI data (recently downloaded); they make the point even more powerfully.
Yes, I should not entirely dismiss the role of human influences in the first half of the 20th century, although the anthropogenic forcing used in the GISS CMIP5 simulations pre-1950 was no more than about 25% of what it is today. I do show (at 13:11) quantitatively the evolution of forcings over the past 250 years and at 20:50 do discuss the IPCC statement that includes anthropogenic forcing as one of the contributors to the early 20th century warming. The Hegerl et al. paper Schmidt cites does not appear to warrant changing that statement.
WMO defines climate as a 30 year average, which is what I used. It’s poor practice to be changing one’s definition a posteriori. The problem with longer averaging intervals is that there are then fewer independent periods upon which to base the claim of recent “unusualness” and whatever response there is to human influences in the recent decades is also diluted.
His second contradiction concerns his statements about normative values. He, of course, claims to make no normative statements, while implying others (unnamed) are perverting their science to do so. And yet, not only is his talk filled with his opinions, he has a remarkably different approach to the climate science results than to the results from economic modeling. For the former, he is hyper-critical (mostly without any valid cited reasons), while for the latter he appears naively credulous. This, at best, is incoherent, since the economic projections are rife with embedded normative values.
For instance, he uses a standard contrarian argument that future damages associated climate change will be a small fraction of the expected economic growth and therefore do not need to be mitigated. But the models that produce that result simply assume that no amount of damage from climate change can effect the exogenous growth rate. Additionally, they assume that damages themselves are simply proportional to the square of the temperature anomaly. You can judge how credible these assumptions really are. Of course, if we are to be ridiculously better off in the future without any effort, then the estimated costs of mitigation (also a few % of GDP) are also irrelevant.
Yes, the economic modeling is at least as uncertain as the climate modeling and compounding the two is even worse, as I noted in my Wall Street Journal OpEd on the subject. I’m glad Schmidt now agrees, since he seemed quite taken with the economic modeling when Volume II of NCA4 was officially released. Perhaps he now shares my opinion that this should not have appeared in NCA4? (How did it survive peer review?)
However, my point in the talk was that these economic projections did appear in NCA4 (the alleged “gold standard” of the science) and were highlighted in headlines by the media and politicians. But NCA4 failed to provide proper quantitative context, which would have shown that the impacts (as projected) are minimal. How did that get past peer review?
Koonin gives his summary around 47:00, after spending a fair bit of time correctly describing the size of the challenge involved in stabilizing climate. But then he just shrugs and assumes that it is too big to ever be dealt with. This is not a conclusion that “just comes from the numbers”. He clearly has a normative preference for adaptation (seemingly oblivious to the point that it is very hard and very costly to adapt to a continuously changing, and even accelerating situation). Whether or not mitigation will be too hard, it is undoubtedly a normative decision to give up trying.
I used the word normative in the sense of prescriptive- “the world should …”, which necessarily involves tradeoffs based upon values. That’s very different from giving an opinion on what “will” happen, which is necessarily a judgement.
In the talk, I’m careful to avoid any “should”, but have no hesitation in making judgements about “will.” Only with apologies do I reluctantly stray into normative language in my last slide (48:00).
But even there I do not advocate that we “give up trying’; perhaps my failing in Schmidt’s view is that I do not advocate for urgent mitigation. Of course, Schmidt might have a different opinion about what will happen (his judgements) or about what should happen (his values), and I’d be happy to engage on those. But that shouldn’t be confused with a science discussion.
Errors galore
Some of these are trivial, some are more consequential, but all are illustrative of someone who is not well-versed in the topic.
At 14:40, he claims that climate models take time steps of 6 hours. It would be a little hard to resolve the diurnal cycle with that. The correct value is more like 15 to 30 min for the column physics, and more like 2 or 3 minutes for the advection routines. Curiously, even the slide he is talking to says this.
Mea culpa. My point was that many timesteps are needed for a useful model run. Citing the smaller time step makes the point even more powerfully (1.8 million 30-minute steps over a century).
18:45. he says that Figure 9.8 in IPCC AR4 (2013) was ‘misleading’ because it showed anomaly temperatures alongside the range of absolute mean global values. This is odd. If the sensitivity of the model is not dependent on the base state, this is a good result.
That’s a pretty big “if” in the last sentence. Schmidt explored the issue some years back, likely stimulated by a discussion he and I had had a month or two earlier. The results presented there are far from persuasive – indeed, on average the 2011-2070 trend of the CMIP5 models under RCP4.5 decreases about 20% for every degree C increase in 1951-1990 absolute GMST. Perhaps there has been further work on this subject?
20:34. he claims that the CMIP5 models were tuned to 20th Century trends, which is why without anthropogenic forcings they show no trend. This makes no sense at all. First, it is just untrue that all the models were tuned on the trends. And second, if there is no big trend in the natural forcings, you just aren’t going to get a big long term trend in the response. Nothing to do with tuning.
21:06 Another graphic borrowed from Bob Tisdale. This one makes the classic error of confusing the forced trend (as estimated from the mean of model ensemble) with the actual trend (which includes the actual forced trend and internal variability). For someone who claims to be interested in how internal variability is represented in models, that’s an odd lacuna.
It’s good to see acknowledgment that the models under-represent multidecadal variability. But it is stunning for Schmidt to say that it is “a classic error” to compare the forced ensemble-mean trend with the actual trend. Schmidt first tried to justify ignoring model absolute temperatures and paying attention only to model anomalies. And now he’s saying it’s an error to compare trends in those model anomalies to the observations. If that’s the case, what’s left if we want to compare simulations with the real world GMST?
26:00. His slide 25 is just BS from start to finish. Note there are no actual quotes from any specific case – everything is a strawman argument.
No doubt I’d be accused of cherry picking were I to cite specifics. However, I invite interested parties to reread the NCA4 or AR5 extremes sections with my refrain in mind to judge for themselves whether I’m spouting “BS from start to finish”.
28:05. He quotes me! This is not an actual error, but I find it funny that my views on how the media treats extremes (at least in 2013) are worthy of inclusion, but not, say, my views on climate modeling or attribution (you know, my job).
I’ve no problem acknowledging when Schmidt (or anyone else) is right. Note, however, I use a literal quotation, not an interpretive one, since the latter can create confusion, as some of Schmidt’s criticisms demonstrate.
31:00. Satellite records of sea level rise (since 1992) “are commensurate” with the tide gauge estimates (roughly 2mm/yr). Sure, but Koonin mysteriously neglects to mention they are 50% higher than the long term trend from those gauges. Also missing from his commentary on longer term records is that even the modern tide gauge-derived rate is more than twice the Holocene trends since 6000 BP (see for instance, Ashe et al., 2018).
My chart at 32:20 displays the tide gauge trends over the past century (from the NCA4 primary reference on this topic, although not shown in NCA4). It clearly shows recent decades (and the satellite record) rising faster than the long-term average trend, and I remark on that fact. With regard to the past 6000 years, I do cover the geological context a bit, but it’s only a 50 minute talk. And as I remark, what really matters for attribution is what’s happened over the past 150 years as human influences set it.
34:10 “If you get all your climate information from watching CNN or reading the New York Times or Washington Post [the data on hurricanes] is a surprising statement”. Apparently, these outlets report on hurricane trends so frequently and so erroneously that no reference to them actually doing so is needed. Ok then.
I’m not sure what’s the gripe here. Even a casual search of the media shows that statements like “there has been no detectable human influence on hurricanes” occur far less often, if at all, than does coverage indicting “climate change” for every hurricane misfortune.
50:02. “I would do more when the signal has come out of the noise, which it has not yet”. This is complete rubbish. The signals of temperature change, sea level, sea ice loss, intense precipitation, heat waves, phenology, permafrost loss, Greenland melt, ocean heat content etc. have all clearly ‘come out of the noise’. What is he really waiting for?
I do mention some of these other indicators of warming at 6:50. Per my discussion at 33:05, there’s only about a ½ σ indication that sea level has come out of the prior multidecadal variability. Further, the AR5 quotes at 26:50 do not inspire confidence in significant changes in the majority of weather extremes. And certainly let us not confuse detection with attribution.
Is there anything new here?
This is what I don’t really understand: There is absolutely nothing new here. Every argument, point, and even some graphics, are old, stale, and previously rebunked. These points could have been made (and undoubtedly were) in official reviews of assessment reports going back years. The people making these points have undoubtedly been told this and shown responses. In Koonin’s case, I know this for a fact (for instance). And yet, they persist. There is no development of the arguments, no counter-points, no constructive back and forth, just the same arguments that they appear to have thought up once and never examined.
Personally, I like taking on smart criticisms. They help hone the science, clarify the arguments and point to areas of needed research. But there isn’t a single thing here worth taking on.
This was a talk for non-experts meant to highlight the disconnect between the reports and the popular/political discussion of climate science. I made no claim to introduce any new science.
Schmidt’s comments correct some real nits (thanks for that!), and attempted to correct some others he imagined. But he’s not successfully challenged my larger points (for example, as expressed in the summary at 47:20). So I’m mystified as to what he thinks has been rebunked [sic]. Appropriate to the purpose of the talk, my discussions of modeling challenges and deficiencies, temperature extremes, sea level rise, hurricanes, economic impacts, and the challenge of effective mitigation were all based upon what’s in the reports themselves, the refereed literature, or widely acknowledged data (like LOTI). So I’m not surprised that he “sees absolutely nothing new here”. However, much of my audience was wide-eyed and, I hope, inspired to investigate further on their own.
The reports continue to paint a demonstrably deficient picture of the science. The scientific community needs to fix that, both to better inform the decision makers and also to bolster the integrity of the people and institutions that produce the reports. A red team exercise would go a long way toward that end.
Here is the talk being discussed.
Dr Schmidt has a real talent for spinning clay birds from the thrower of authority. You’ll have to aim well. Good shooting!
Schmidt is an a posteriori.
He has a way to go before he reaches Nick Stokes ability of misdirection and trolling.
The alarmism is reaching new heights in recent times. Given where the AMO is headed they should enjoy what could well be the last hurrah of modern climate science.I strongly suspect history will not be kind to Schmidt ,Mann and their ilk,and yes, i do put Schmidt in the same bracket as Mann.
The public will never become aware of the severity of the dishonest climate alarmism t6hat has been hoisted upon the public until a red team-blue team debates are presented for all to see!
Out of context but very important data on Greenland ice available here.
https://www.sciencealert.com/greenland-was-40-degrees-hotter-than-normal-this-week-and-things-are-getting-intense
Complete with faked photo
I have always found that dogs and a sled is the best way of crossing a river.
What important there is? What is normal? Summertime in NH, perhaps?
Greenlanders, enjoy your warm. It´s gone in few months.
I live in Finland, and we don´t have very much warm here. Warmer is better, and more warm is more better.
IF sealevel rise accelerates, it indicates warming. If not, nothing is hotter than normal (whatever it is).
Looks like we’ve been down this road worrying about Greenland melting before.
It doesn’t look wildly out of line.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Heat waves happen.
Nothing at all unusual.
rd50, from your link, I find it deliberately deceptive to call temperatures 40 degrees “hotter”, when the temps we are actually talking about are still below freezing! And how you get all that melting snow from temperatures below freezing is a question yet to be answered.
Fully agree with you.
You will see how this will be cited again and again to blame carbon dioxide. Remember, it is “fully 40 degrees “hotter”. The fact that this is below zero is inconsequential!
These alarmist articles really do get around, don’t they? I first saw this one shared on Facebook from the Washington Post article, which notably reliable paper (sic) is where the article was originally published.
I wonder how many people who see the original headline realize that the article itself basically contradicts the article’s own headline near the end of the article?
Original headline:
“Temperatures leap 40 degrees above normal as the Arctic Ocean and Greenland ice sheet see record June melting.”
(– note that, “record June melting, we are setting some kind of significant record here)
This is followed early in the article by:
“Extent of ice over the Arctic Ocean has never been this low in mid-June during the age of weather satellites.
(so without my looking up things about satellites, I’d say the article is talking about a record low ice level, at least if you were to start the record keeping at the beginning of earth satellites, maybe mid 1970’s or so).
The contradictory bit comes near the end:
(Quote)
”
Whether the Arctic sea ice minimum is record-setting, like the Greenland ice sheet, will depend on weather in the coming months.
“There is no indication that this year will be as low as 2012,” when Arctic sea ice reached its lowest extent on record, Labe said. “If cloudy weather occurs, it would slow down the rate [of melting]. It’s really hard to predict.”
”
Er, um, didn’t the *headline* say that both land and sea ice were at record setting lows this year?
How can it be record setting when the low ice record was in 2012, just seven years ago, with not much prospect of that record being beaten this year, 2019?
Well, in this they (the propagandists writing the WaPo story) may be correct.
Yes, right now in mid-June 2019, Arctic sea ice extents are the lowest recorded “on this date” (during mid-June) since the satellite era began.
But the Sept 2012 record “low” Arctic sea ice extents was in September – at time of maximum sea ice melting. So, as always every year, the Sept sea ice extents are much lower than the June sea ice extents. And, as always, in 2019, Arctic sea ice will continue declining during June, July, and August towards some minimum point in mid-Sept. We don’t know what that low point will be.
By the way, the ONLY TIME in the past 16 years that Arctic Sea Ice extents were “positive” – were larger than the mythical 30-year 1981-2010 average for that day-of-year – was in May-June of … 2012! So the ONLY TIME Arctic sea extents were “above average” in June was followed by a record-setting all-time low sea ice extents four months later in Sept.
Over the course of an entire year, less Arctic sea ice from today’s values increase heat loss from the newly-exposed open ocean.
What I get from all this is that arguing w/a fool (Schmidt) threatens to make you look foolish.
Yes, you are right. As long as Schmidt escapes open debate, everybody should take his words like unicorns dream. It´s easy to write stupid opinions because this way he can save his face from ultimate knock down.
Schmidt has shown his true scare to stand behind his words to defend in open debate his “proven” vision against sceptical wiews.
WHAT IS DELAYING TRUMP’S CLIMATE SCIENCE REVIEW?
This review needs to be started NOW – it should have been started months ago.
The radical greens have so completely perverted climate science that this review will be a slam-dunk.
Here is my overview of the state of the science – enough to easily disprove the false global warming scare:
https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/co2-global-warming-climate-and-energy-june2019-final-.pdf
What’s delaying it?
Simple.
Business.
There’s a huge amount of money being made, being made globally too. Vehicle manufacturers tooling up to replace ICE vehicles, with electric ones, far quicker than the average buyer would consider replacing their vehicle. All the windmill & solar manufacturers & installers, the taxes being raised, the promised land of carbon trading, the huge academic machine, the scope for politicians & other “Celebrities” to virtue signal & be seen by voters to be “Doing something” about such an important problem.
Trump’s first & foremost, a businessman, he can see where the money’s being made.
I got a distinct impression from Schmidt’s statements that he really believes reducing anthropogenic CO2 would “stabilize the climate” which has never before been stable. That would be truly unprecedented, but then so is his (and his associates’) approach to the scruples of scientific research.
No, to believe that mankind is capable of controlling the climate is simply evidence of delusion driven by massive arrogance!
Repeatedly, chanting their beliefs(spells) and drowning us with their noise(rattling the bones), is also evidence of some ancient failed fake religion!
In order to control the climate you have first to control the weather. For 30 years!
Lets face it climate science got a big push along because the left and socialists piled on thinking it was an easy way to get global wealth redistribution. That idea is now officially dead it doesn’t even exist in what remains of the Paris rulebook and all you have left is a few politicians trying to grab some extra tax money.
The world is going to take CO2 levels even higher and we will see what comes and who was right. It is not something that needs debate you watch the data.
rebunked
1. To create/revive the falseness or hollowness of (a myth, idea, or belief).
2. To protect the sham or falseness of
A Proper noun is Rebunker.
The advocate of the Hollow Earth Theory went into the comments section of the video to have the theory rebunked using federal-funded websites and in a attempt to stop people from questioning it.
by The Painful Reality June 05, 2016
Shmidt’s own goal ? lol
As one of our local radio host likes to say, a typical tactic of the left is to misquote you then attack you for what you didn’t say.
It’s straw all the way down.
Well said.
A good example was Kathy Newman vs Jordan Peterson.
She brought a plastic spoon to a gunfight.
You mean like C3headlines’ class contextomies.?
You will not ever get an honest debate from Schmidt. This isbecause he isn’t defending science, but rather pseudoscience, and will use every trick in the book to do so.
Indeed.
Let’s hope Koonin’s suggestion of a Red vs Blue Team is ‘eventually’ followed through on by Trump. It is, after all, the only hope of permanently arresting the relentless assault by activism that’s masquerading as science. Without this contest, activism will return to the driver’s seat as soon as Trump exits the stage.
That said, I think Koonin’s response here to Schmidt’s criticism is unduly benevolent. Neither Schmidt nor the national climate assessment were nearly so bridled. If Trump ever gets around to it, a Red Team will have to be far more candid to discredit the wide ranging claims made in this and other self-serving reports. If Trump doesn’t get around to commissioning the contest, it will be just a matter of time before we’re doomed to the yoke of activism – championed by the likes of AOC and Co (not to mention the Pope).
Trump has said many times (in so many words) that he doesn’t believe the climage change conclusions. “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” Is typical Trump rhetoric and he misquoted Patrick Moore. But
if Trump truly wants to advance the debate he might have the power as President to call for a Red Team – Blue Team debate. It could clear the air by forcing the climate advocacy to make and defend their case and points in a debate format in which they would have to support their views and opinions, and criticism of those who do not agred with them … with factual arguments. .. avoiding the “hold up your hands if you believe in climate change” propaganda techniques. Why the climate advocacy resist having such a debate. Climate change is happening, it always has and it always will. Climate model project out millennial times frames but are deterministic, focusing on greenhouse gases, but not including known (and unknown) factors that are important such as solar variability, particulates, etc. The concept is an anachronism – select the variable you want to prove and then model it. My dissertation committee would have hung me out to dry…. but that was back in the day when we insisted true science.
A climate red team – blue team debate as interesting as the Bohr-Einstein debates on quantum mechanics.
“Einstein was the first physicist to say that Planck’s discovery of the quantum would require rewriting the laws of physics. To support his point, he proposed that light sometimes acts as a particle which he called a light quantum (see photon and wave–particle duality).
Bohr was one of the most vocal opponents of the photon idea and did not openly embrace it until 1925. The photon appealed to Einstein because he saw it as a physical reality (although a confusing one) behind the numbers. Bohr disliked it because it made the choice of mathematical solution arbitrary. He did not like a scientist having to choose between equations.
In his last writing on the topic, Einstein later refined his position, making it completely clear that what really disturbed him about the quantum theory was the problem of the total renunciation of all minimal standards of realism, even at the microscopic level, that the acceptance of the completeness of the theory implied. Although the majority of experts in the field agree that Einstein was wrong, the current understanding is still not complete (see Interpretation of quantum mechanics). There is no scientific consensus that determinism would have been refuted.” (Wiki).
It’s my contention, that if science had not stagnated in the last 50 years, that the wave-particle duality theory of light would have been long ago extinguished from the text books.
We don’t accept wave-particle duality because it is right – it certainly is not – we accept it because science has become about orthodoxy and as part of the orthodoxy that idea is unchallengeable.
We accept wave-particle duality for what it is. A model that enables us to describe what we measure.
Stephen Richards, I agree. We go w/it until another credible explanation does better.
Here was Lysenko’s Red vs Blue team debate (from https://www.famousscientists.org/trofim-lysenko/ :
The difference then was that Lysenko wasn’t working for the folks who controlled the media.
Would not the current Lysenko be William Happer?
Jack Dale no William has actual science on his side the climate cabal that you worship at the feet of are the modern Lysenko’s.
All in favor of Will Lysenko Happer, say aye !
Honest debate is not what an activist seeks. That factor is the tell-tale indication of when a scientist has crossed into the political zone. Does he not get that?
It’s laughable that the denier cultists here are hitching their wagons to Trump’s take on on AGW. This should give pause. And you wonder why the scientific community doesn’t take you seriously?
Note that Heartland, AEI, CEI etc. are all political groups and are not doing any legit climate science and that they are primary (political) advocates for the crud you believe.
At least Koonin is smart enough to be deceptive-ish (while still being full of it).
As Gavin says, his talk was just the same old stuff and not really interesting or challenging:
“But there isn’t a single thing here worth taking on.”
Happer’s statements on climate (especially his CO2 gaffes) are just plain dumb.
In the above article, Dr Schmidt is quoted as saying “[p]ersonally, I like taking on smart criticisms. [t]hey help hone the science, clarify the arguments and point to areas of needed research. ” Yet this is the same Dr Schmidt who refused to appear on the stage with a skeptic.
Schmidt is not a fan of open debate since the 2007 debate with Schmidt, Somerville and Ekwurzel vs Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen and Philip Stott. The warmist team thought they would carry the day by an exhibition of climate righteousness but ended up being thoroughly whupped.
Gavin Schmidt is reportedly bad-tempered, arrogant and full of himself.
Gavin is, like, I mean, y’know… full of Schmidt.
If we were in serious danger of thermaggedon, any and all examinations of the science proving this would be entirely welcome.
If CO2 were causing said themaggedon, any reasonable and proven technology to reduce CO2 emissions would be welcomed.
So far, from day one, no examination of the science has ever been allowed, let alone welcomed, and nuclear power has been shunned vigorously (by most). That’s all you need to know.
Most cogent analysis on the thread, IMO.
This is what really matters.
They offer solutions that solve nothing, even if one concedes, just for the sake of discussion, that the problem exists and is due to the cause the alarmists claim it is.
Zigackly.
It is the refusal to consider nuclear power that convinces me that they are not certain.
“That’s about six times the rate we’ve seen for the past 150 years and four times the rate we’ve seen in recent decades (and likely also in the 1940’s). ”
Faster in recent decades? The Battery tide gauge shows a very steady rate for the past 150 years. I certainly cannot see any acceleration “in recent decades.” Another solid gauge is at Baltimore which shows the same steady rate for the past 120 years with no indication of any recent acceleration. If one wants to use a “Mike’s nature trick” and truncate the gauge readings at about 1980 and append satellite measurements, one can get a knee, but the gauges continue on with know knee. Thus something appears wrong with the satellite numbers.
On greening and increased food production
NASA also indicates that CO2 fertilization will be short lived.
“The beneficial impacts of carbon dioxide on plants may also be limited, said co-author Dr. Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Gif-suv-Yvette, France. “Studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising carbon dioxide concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time.””
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
CO2 fertilization will also be subject to Liebig’s Law of the Minimum.
Food production increases are more likely the result of increased use of pesticides, fertilizers and irrigation.
This one is just beyond stupid. I’ll just quote the first two sentences of the abstract which contradict each other, impressive even for climastrologists.
“Global environmental change is rapidly altering the dynamics of terrestrial vegetation, with consequences for the functioning of the Earth system and provision of ecosystem services1,2. Yet how global vegetation is responding to the changing environment is not well established.”
This is the study to which many folks refer when they speak of the advantages of increased CO2 on vegetation growth.
The increased use of pesticides, fertilizers and irrigation is unsustainable as well.
Pure assertion, with no facts to back it up.
http://old.grida.no/graphicslib/thumbs/1805c933-493c-4b85-be16-ad06eb342332/large/global-trends-in-cereal-and-meat-production-total-use-of-nitrogen-and-phosphorus-fertilizers-increased-use-of-irrigation-total-global-pesticides-pr_ef80.jpg
What does that have to do with whether it can be sustained?
Irrigation is draining aquifers and increasing the salinity of soils.
https://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/ba3468a2a8681f69872569d60073fde1/42131e74693dcd01872572df00629626/$FILE/irrsalin.pdf
Pesticide and fertilizers run off is fouling water supplies.
So it was someones decision to change Sahel (South Sahara) green again? Nature is doing that by itself, and all what is needed is sand, pure sand. And that is advantage by CO2 alone.
Jack, please don´t mix unsustainable strawmen to nature.
obviously someone is sneaking out at night, watering & fertilizing, and will soon (when there is significant vegetation) be forced to be throwing out thousands of pounds of pesticide every night to keep the locusts from eating everything.
(Help me out here Jack, I don’t think they will believe me, alone)
Anthropogenic Mediterranean warming essential driver for present and future Sahel rainfall
“Anthropogenic warming of this region has driven the shift from the tropical Atlantic and Indo-Pacific oceans, which historically were the main driver of Sahel drought. The wetting impact of Mediterranean Sea warming can become more dominant in a future warming climate and is key to understanding the uncertainty in future Sahel rainfall projections.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3065
Only if you make certain assumptions about world population trends which are not supportable.
So greenhouse owners are wasting their money by increasing CO2 levels to over 1000ppm?
Just cause NASA claims there are studies, doesn’t mean there are studies, or these so called studies aren’t full of holes.
As I pointed out, many folks who cannot read past headlines (Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds) have presented that study as showing that NASA believes that increased CO2 is good. They never get to the caveats. I suspect some do not get past the URL.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
Repeating a bad study, doesn’t make it better.
The problems with that study have been shown to you, but like most acolytes, you don’t care. You just keep repeating what you are paid to repeat, hoping for a good bonus this month.
MarkW: Jack is obviously in the run for “Bobblehead Troll of the Month” award from some Soros foundation. Global warming studies in Nature touch Jack’s head and he just keeps nodding.
PS: The caveats are nothing more than speculation, put in so that the authors don’t loose their membership in the club.
Utter bogosity.
Waffle words are not statements of science. They are statements of prejudice, assumption and ignorance.
Commercial greenhouses have been raising crops year round with CO₂ levels well above 1,000 ppm.
Commercial greenhouses have also learned to keep their greenhouses sterile of pests, disease, fungi and contaminants.
Commercial greenhouse increased yields are from:
• High levels of CO₂,
• proper watering or hydroponic conditions,
• warm temperatures with slight dips at nighttime
• and proper levels of nutrition and minerals.
“Justus von Liebig’s Law of the Minimum:”
Right now, with CO₂ levels near plant starvation, the upper bounds for CO₂ boosted growth are unknown.
A fact that is the reverse of what Jack Dale implies. Until CO₂ levels reach a level that maximizes plant growth, yields will continue to increase.
USDA has experimented with high CO₂ levels going back as far as the 1950s. Their experiments were all positive results for increased CO₂. Only research constrained by closed experiments inside of laboratories ran into limiting factors.
Why NASA would make agricultural claims regarding CO₂ is curious given agriculture is not within NASA expertise.
“Right now, with CO₂ levels near plant starvation, ”
Pure unadulterated bull do do. Several times over the past 800,000 years plants survived 180 ppm CO2.
Concentration camp victims survived starvation too.
As have many victims of famine.
No they didn’t. In fact, that is the very argument that gives the lie to the ice core CO2 proxies because it demonstrates that they must be wrong.
Plant stomatal records don’t show these low levels and are also inline with the temperature reconstructions. The ice core CO2 records are completely disconnected from the temperature record along with being almost monotonic they have barely any range.
However, the AGW claim relies on the CO2 record derived from ice cores, without this particular choice of low resolution proxy, it is completely busted!
Jack, you can proof your stupid claim. Rent a greenhouse, with plants in it. Make it airtight and put CO2 meter inside, where you can see it. Look what happens when CO2 goes to 180ppm.
Ward et al., 2005
Jack, you really don’t know how to do logic, do you.
The fact that the plants survived is not evidence that they were near starvation.
Photosynthesis stops when plants get down to around 150ppm. Dropping from several thousand ppm to 180 is most definitely “near starvation”, even if you are paid not to believe it.
Qiao et al has shown that when temperatures are raised by 2 degrees C, and CO2 is raised to 700 ppm:
Corn (aka maize) increases yield by 25%.
Soy bean yield increased even more — by 31%.
Increased temperature raised the oil content of both crops.
Both crops had more phosphorus, potassium, iron, and zinc.
There was a statistically small decrease in calcium in maize
Manganese declined in soybeans,
Maize likes warm weather. But soy likes extra CO2.
Maize being a C4 plant with hot newly evolved genes for using CO2 and soy being one of the common old-model plants on C3 .
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30802656
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/06/in-a-warming-world-we-may-get-overun-by-cheap-soy-and-corn/
“The results suggest that crop selection is important to maximize yield benefits and to maintain grain quality to cope with elevated CO2 and temperature of future climate change in this temperate region where the temperature is near or below the optimal temperature for crop production.”
We know that some crops will grown in areas where they were not grown before. Other crops will not be able to be grown in those locations.
I guess where you disagree with us is that you believe climate change is a one-way street and the warming will certainly continue. I’ve lived in the same area for over 60 years and lately I see weather that reminds me very much of the 1970’s when doomers were claiming an ice age was coming. I know the Arctic ice is low due to warm oceans and high humidity, just as it was in the 1920’s and again in the 1940’s according to history. We are experiencing a river flood similar to the one documented in 1927, but not exceeding it even though there have been many levees built upstream since then which raise the flood levels of both the Illinois and Mississippi rivers.
I cannot accept the blanket application of climate change as a cause of weather I’ve seen in my youth or was told about by folks now posthumous. To do so would be willfully ignorant of my experience.
Sure …. the fossil record of the carboniferous ….showing a world flourishing in carbon consuming vegetation just shows how high levels of CO2 create a desert (not).
Plants love CO2 – within limits
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-co2-climb-millions-nutritional-deficiencies.html
Things that fifth graders shouldn’t even fall for?
Today’s food crops were domesticated in an atmosphere that never exceeded 300 ppm CO2. I would not expect a fifth grader to know that.
Do you have any concept of what an actual “Green House” is ? It’s those REAL places that force plants to grow faster by pumping 1,000 ppm CO2 into the air surrounding those plants…Why would they spend money doing that ? hmmmm…..D’OH !
Greenhouses are used to grow a limited variety of crops such as tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and cucumbers. Wheat, rice, soybeans, etcc are among the crops affected by high CO2. Those are crucial staples.
They may have been domesticated recently, however their biochemistry was set back when CO2 levels were well over 1000ppm.
Only an idiot believes that the basic characteristics of plants have been radically changed in just a few hundred years.
Assuming that the ice core records of CO2 are correct. That is a mighty big assumption. However even if true the % of nutritional decline with elevated CO2 levels is not more than 15% in any one nutrient in any 1 crop. Of course this is all strawman arguments over the real question og non existent warming. The real total temp anomaly over last 140 years = 0.6 C. However the error bar is +/- 0.46 C because of measurement precision. So you cannot state wirh any matematical or statistical certainty that there has been any warming at all and even if there was 0.6C over 140 years is a laughable amount to be scared of.
Nice deflection into temperature increase. The topic was CO2 effects on plant nutrition.
Considering that the world has more people than ever, and also more food than ever, and more food per person than ever, and more food per acre than ever, and that even in poor countries, obesity is now a major problem, even though as much as 1/3 to 1/2 of all food grown is wasted and never consumed, the idea we are in some sort of predicament regarding our food supply is disingenuous in the extreme, and laughable as a matter of fact.
And then there is all that food that we are using for motor fuel instead of feeding people or livestock.
Jack
When temperature rise, CO2 rise follows.
When topic is CO2 effects, temperature increase is related, because it´s the cause to CO2 rise.
You are not very good strawman seller.
They may have been domesticated, but that’s not how they evolved.
Glass house growers have been using enhanced CO2 levels (that could never be reached on earth by burning fossil fuels) to boost crop production since gawd knows when.
It has never meaningfully negatively affected the quality of the food or reached a point where the plants evolved and stopped responding!
It’s just standard climate alarmism industry procedure to react to any reported positive consequence of rising CO2/climate change with a flood of ‘yes but it will still be a disaster’ garbage papers.
Excellent comment, MrGrimNasty!
Jack Dale
That link you provided is complete nonsense.
I offer you my own summary of a 57 study meta-analysis that says nutritional deficiencies are yet another lie about CO2 by the leftist climate alarmist cult — why would you think they would tell the truth about ANY aspect of CO2 ?
https://elonionbloggle.blogspot.com/2019/06/dong-et-al-2018-elevated-co2-improves.html
Back in the ’70s, environmentalists were expressing similar concerns about chemical fertilizers and nutrients. Nothing seems to have materialized from the “could,” and “might’ pronouncements.
N, P, and K are plant food. Use too too much and your plants will suffer.
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2453
JD
Too much wasn’t the issue. What was being addressed was commercial operations that were well managed and producing healthy plants. The claim was that because the plants were producing larger, juicer plants/fruit than were possible without supplementary chemical fertilizers, the nutrients per ounce were less.
The world grows fatter by the day, and the cornucopia of foodstuffs that are available for a small fraction of a daily wage continues to increase year over year, with no sign of a slowing trend upwards, let alone any sort of indication that we are approaching an upper limit.
And yet the alarmists report breathlessly that climate change is cutting into the food supply, nothing is sustainable, and we are all on borrowed time.
Same as it ever was…fact free assertions that are contradicted by plain facts.
Back in the ’80s, I recall being required to write an undergraduate essay on the topic of how we were all going to run out of the basic chemical resources (phosphates, etc) required to sustain modern agriculture that would feed the worlds growing populations.
After wading through much tedious literature in the university library I realised that this theory was complete garbage in every case. To be fair, the Lecturer may have known this when he set the class, but he was certainly one of the crazy activists on other topics.
Well he’s got science degrees but has actually never done any serious science, a real armchair scientist employed by the armchair academy of NASA they call GISS, so what do you expect?
I am truly amazed he still has that job.
Why hasn’t he been replaced by someone who can get to the bottom of the malfeasance that has been ongoing for at least 20 and more probably over 30 full years?
“Why hasn’t he been replaced by someone who can get to the bottom of the malfeasance that has been ongoing for at least 20 and more probably over 30 full years?”
Doing that would be even better than setting up a Red/Blue Team! 🙂
Someone should suggest to Trump that he replace the NASA GISS management.
Can you imagine the outcry from the alarmists if he did so!
Yes, the Keepers of the Data have politicized their jobs and should be replaced by scientists without a CAGW agenda.
As a reminder of how the Keepers of the Data bastardized the surface temperature record, here is a link to a U.S. surface temperature chart (Hansen 1999) and a modern-day Hockey Stick chart.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/
The chart on the left is the Hansen 1999 chart which shows a completely different temperature profile than does the Hockey Stick chart on the right. The Hansen 1999 chart has an “up and down” profile (as President Trump describes it) where the temperatures warm for a few decades, and then cool for a few decades and then warm again for a few decades. The manipulated Hockey Stick chart on the right was fashioned to make the temperatures look like they are getting hotter and hotter every year and that the current day is hotter than anything in the past. A huge lie, but necessary to sell the CAGW fraud.
The Keepers of the Data took the chart on the left and transformed it into the chart on the right in an effort to erase the high temperatures that occurred during the 1930’s, which were as high or higher than current-day temperatures. If they did not erase the high temperatures of the 1930’s then they couldn’t claim that we are currently experiencing “unprecedented” warming caused by CO2. CO2 was a minor factor in the 1930’s, yet today we are no warmer than then, so why should we assume CO2 is the major factor now? The CAGW promoters had to eliminate that way of thinking so they dishonestly changed the temperature profile.
Admitting it was as warm in the 1930’s would of course blow up their CAGW theory, so they had to change it and change it they did. The Climategate emails detail the conspiracy they entered into where they changed the temperature records to make the high temperatures of the 1930’s disappear.
The chart on the left is the real temperature profile of the Earth. The one on the right is made up out of the fevered imaginations of the Keepers of the Data.
Unmodified surface temperature charts from around the world and in both hemispheres show that the 1930’s were just as warm as the temperatures today. They all resemble the temperature profile of the Hansen 1999 chart on the left. NO unmodified surface temperature chart resembles the bogus, bastardized Hockey Stick chart on the right. What does that tell you? It ought to tell you a lot.
Spot on.
And I think the US surface temperature database is only the tip of the malfeasance iceberg.
Tom, you said: “As a reminder of how the Keepers of the Data bastardized the surface temperature record, here is a link to a U.S. surface temperature chart (Hansen 1999) and a modern-day Hockey Stick chart.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/”
either you’re missing a link or you’ve completely misread those charts. The one on the left is US temp and the chart on the right is the global temp. They’re different things.
“either you’re missing a link or you’ve completely misread those charts. The one on the left is US temp and the chart on the right is the global temp. They’re different things.”
Yes, they are different things. The text on that webpage tries to make that case. It says that the U.S. temperature record is completely different from the global temperatures. Does that make sense to you?
The bogus, bastardized Modern-era Hockey Stick chart is certainly different. My point was that the Hockey Stick does NOT represent the global temperature profile, it is a bastardization of the global temperature profile.
The reason I say the U.S. temperature chart is the *real* global temperature profile and the Hockey Stick is a bastardization of the global temperature record is because if one looks at surface temperature charts that have not been bastardized, you see that their temperature profiles are very similar to the U.S. temperature chart which shows the 1930’s as being as warm as today.
NONE of the unmodified surface temperature charts resemble the bastardized Hockey Stick chart profile.
We know the bogus, bastardized Hockey Stick chart is a fraud because we have historic records and climategate emails that tell us so.
Here’s an example of an unmodified surface temperature chart from Finland that shows the 1930’s as being as warm as subsequent years:
And look at the TMax charts from around the world in the article below, all of which show the 1930’s as being as warm as subsequent years.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/15/it-is-the-change-in-temperature-compared-to-what-weve-been-used-to-that-matters-part-2/
The Bogus, Bastardized Hockey Stick chart is the Big Lie in climate science. Without it, the CAGW alarmists would have nothing to hang their hat on.
The Climategate Keepers of the Data conspired to make the warmth of the 1930’s disappear so that they could perpetrate the CAGW fraud. It’s all right there in the climategate emails. They took all the old historic records and turned them into science fiction. Scary, expensive science fiction.
This makes two assumptions. One is true only if silly green policies are enacted. The other is false regardless.
1) The ability to adapt to something takes resources. Our resources are constantly changing. And they also are accelerating due to economic growth. This assumes that we will give up and accept disaster by avoiding economic growth. The policy that would have led to mass deaths in the third world if we had listened to the Malthusians instead of developing agriculture. Green policies assume that we are willing to die.
2) Most of the costs of adapting have to be met whether we try to mitigate or not. Even if we do develop weather control through trace gas emissions (that would surprise me but let us imagine) we would still need to adapt. Infrastructure needs maintenance. Flood defences need rebuilding. Irrigation channels need clearing. That cost happens anyway. Adding an inch to a flood defence every thirty years would be more than enough and most of thee cost is built in already.
Whatever policy we choose we will still face a continuously changing, and possibly even accelerating situation. We should plan for that. That means keeping resources in reserve to adapt. Waste nothing on mitigation and use them as required.
If Schmidt even hinted that a “denier” was right on something, his own overlords and cronies would sacrifice his ass in a heartbeat. He knows that. He also has NO IDEA what effect restricting human made carbon would have on the climate ore anything else for that matter, but is willing to bet trillions. Where the hell is the “science” in that? Freaking hogwash, the man cannot be believed, his science is settled.
Dr. Koonin,
You continue to provide an exemplary example of how a scientist should think and conduct honest discussion of inquiry. It is not easy to maintain clear, rational, and questioning thinking and behavior when subjected to more venal minds, but you do. I do not envy you the path you have taken into this needlessly contentious area, but sincerely hope you have some impact on avoiding catastrophic economic mistakes. Others of us simply wait for nature to show her hand.
Best.
The Battery is such an obvious cherry pick for sea level rise. It is Tony Heller’s favourite as well.
A short distance away Bergen Point is 4.3 mm per year.
Are you that clueless? The point is not the rate of change in tide gauge measurements, since that is different for every site due to ground movement. The point being discussed is the absence of any change in the rate (i.e. acceleration). Neither Battery Park nor Bergen Point show and change in their respective rates.
Yep…clueless.
Citizen Alarmunists rarely have any “science” acumen.
If SLR were accelerating, every tidal gauge record would show it.
OK – global sea level rise.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
You kicked an own goal with that ==> derived from coastal tide gauge data
Got to admire derived data a climate science speciality.
So subsidence is a bigger issue at Bergen Point?
FYI, valid records are only available for 65% of the 1980-2010 timeframe at Bergen Point according to:
Piecuch, Christopher Gilbert, “Understanding Tide Gauge Mean Sea Level Changes on the East Coast of North America” (2016).
Open Access Dissertations. Paper 472.
http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/472
Seems like a sketchy candidate.
You probably would not like the conclusions of that dissertation, either.
So is subsidence and issue at Bergen Point? You imply it is.
As a semi-professional sailor (Yachtmaster Ocean Instructor Evaluator) I am well aware of the meteorological effects on sea level, and its measure measurement. I am also aware of of the effects of isostatic rebound and subsidence. What conclusions do you think I would not like?
You don´t like your strawman sale is negative.
Solar minimum will soon make everyone forget this crap.
Any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected anthropogenic warming.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535
50% or more of Journal articles prove to be false over time.
42.3% of statistics are fabricated.
Are yo sure it is not 42.4%?
You should know.
Wrong – its 87.6%
You use more than your fair share.
Jim:
I believe the percentage of fabricated
“global warming”,“Anthropogenic global warming”,“climate disruption”,“climate disaster”, “climate change”,“sea level rise acceleration”, “sea level rise”,“permadroughts”,“droughts”,“end of snow”,“less snowfalls”, “snow fall”,“disappearing Arctic sea ice”, “Arctic sea ice”,“collapsing Antarctic glaciers”,“rapid Antarctic ice melt”, “Antarctic”,“collapsing Greenland glaciers”,“massive Greenland ice loss”,“disappearing Greenland glaciers”, “aggregating Greenland ice”,“climate caused extinctions”, etc. etc. etc. articles published in Nature approach 100%.+ a whole bunch of plusses.
All the way down.
We will soon see just how large 25 is……..I expect it to be 1/2 of 24. It’s a great time of observation, we are 400 years from the last great minimum.
The association of the solar Maunder minimum and the Little Ice Age is also not supported by proper inspection and ignores the role of other factors such as volcanoes. Together these mean that, although the LIA covers both the Spörer and Maunder solar minima, it also persisted and deepened during the active solar period between these two minima. The latest science indicates that low solar activity could indeed increase the frequency of cold winters in Europe, but that it is a phenomenon that is restricted to winter and is just one of a complex mix of factors.
https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/58/2/2.17/3074082
Speaking of volcanoes, we are one strong eruption away from having a GMAT that is right where we started back in 1880.
And one moderate one away from being back to 1979.
Then what will the trends show?
BTW, we are overdue in numerous locations from just such eruptions.
And we can hardly be sure we will get only one and only when it will not cause massive disruption when the planet cools markedly.
Since projected warming caused by CO2 by everyone who isn’t being paid to be an alarmist is only a few tenths of a degree, so what?
It is really sad how the integrity of so many people evaporates away to nothing when some money is on the table.
Of course, those people likely had a deficit of it to begin with.
“projected anthropogenic warming”
Using words such as “likely” is not only a waffle word, it is an opinion.
And basing opinions on projections that have never once yet come close to be verified by subsequent reality is what alarmists have been doing all along, and is “likely” why they have never been right about anything, and “likely” never will be.
“projected anthropogenic warming”
Anyone can use broken models to project anything.
Reality doesn’t support the “projections”.
Once you have that nailed, you can insist that people deal with what you actually said. The classic example is Jordan Peterson’s very successful defense against Cathy Newman. link
Newman repeatedly tries to twist Peterson’s words and does not get away with it in the least.
Schmidt’s name is all over ModelE which is the GISS GCM and is nothing but a heap of untestable, unsupportable and unmaintainable spaghetti code written in a 60’s dialect of Fortran and which is currently being ‘upgraded’ to a 90’s dialect of the language by replacing some of the spaghetti with do loops and case statements. The most critical part of the code, RADIATION.F, contains thousands of baked in floating point constants, many of which are completely undocumented, even many of those most relevant to atmospheric absorption by GHG’s. I doubt that anyone who worked for me would produce something this bad as I probably wouldn’t have hired them in the first place.
Based on my interactions with him on Real Climate and my review of his work, he’s in way over his head. His position under Hansen was as the minister of propaganda running the RC web site. He did such a good job of misdirection and spinning lies that he was hand picked by Hansen to succeed him as the mouthpiece for the anti-science supporting climate alarmism. No wonder climate science is so intractably broken.
re. spaghetti code
Go To Statement Considered Harmful wasn’t published until 1968. Even into the 1970s, some people were still advocating that assembly language should be used as it produced more efficient programs.
At some point, it’s more efficient to throw out the old crap and start fresh. In terms of verification and validation, the old stuff is completely useless.
ModelE was written long after 1968 …
I wrote some Fortran back in the 80’s, but even this was F77 which had some of the more modern constructs.
Now I use object oriented languages like C++ or Java. Speaking of efficient programing languages (or not), except for the lack of ability to control how data structures are stored in memory, I prefer the object oriented semantics of Java over C++.
So, no excuse for spaghetti code.
It has been obvious for a long time that any non-trivial program has to be maintained. It’s the sign of an amateur to write code that nobody else can figure out. Indeed anyone who writes such code will find that, after a year, they won’t be able to figure it out either.
Nowadays Fortran is a ‘object oriented language’, too.
As for C++, it’s a multi-paradigm language.
Personally, I would never refer to C++ as an efficient language.
If there’s no reason to use any particular language (eg. for something embedded), I prefer Python. It’s very readable and lends itself to self documenting code. As a result, I can pick up something I wrote a couple of years ago and be up to speed with it rather quickly.
This very description of reused and lightly verified Fortran modules no doubt written by grad students of the past, with little in the way of deep documentation is how I picture these models. Hopefully I am wrong.
I have no direct experience with climate stuff but have been one of those Fortran kids in another life and another field.
Is there a way to verify the validity of each Fortran module segment by segment?
The possibility for error in such a project, executed with many iterations to amplify such errors approaches certainty.
Recall, in decades past, how even Intel unknowingly manufactured a Pentium processor that made multiplication errors under certain conditions. .. massive recall… and they weren’t using PhD candidate labor from sustainability classes, they had people who actually deeply understood the hardware and algorithms used. Even so, those who actually used the processor to run the output of compilers uncovered the problem at the user end of things. What methods are Schmidt and his crew using to verify the output of the simulators they tout?
Answer: Does it show warming in the final result?
Each time I want to have a good laugh I look into such a state-of-the-art climate pure crap computer model. You find something excruciatingly stupid each time, starting with spelling ‘Celcius’ instead of Celsius and all sorts of idiocies, like converting back-and-forth between units of measure during computations, or all sorts of non-physical bounds that prevent the state-of-the-art bullshit for crashing too often.
Where is the source code RADIATION.F available? Is there a list of floating point constants baked into the code? I’d love to look at that code.
You can access the source from here:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/
The subroutine TAUGAS has a lot of baked in constants and is the code that establishes the amount of forcing to apply based on GHG concentrations. There are 2 versions in RADIATION.f (an old version and a new version).
Schmidt: ” The signals of temperature change, sea level, sea ice loss, intense precipitation, heat waves, phenology, permafrost loss, Greenland melt, ocean heat content etc. have all clearly ‘come out of the noise’.”
Here Mr. Schmidt, refresh your memory about what, your bible says:
*** “Confidence remains low for long-term (centennial) changes in tropical cyclone activity, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities.”
pg 178 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
*** “Confidence in large-scale trends in storminess or storminess proxies over the last century is low owing to inconsistencies between studies or lack of long-term data in some parts of the world (particularly in the SH). {2.6.4}”
pg 178 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
*** “When a 60-year oscillation is modeled along with an acceleration term, the estimated acceleration in GMSL since 1900 ranges from: 0.000 [–0.002 to 0.002] mm yr–2 in the Ray and Douglas (2011) record, 0.013 [0.007 to 0.019] mm yr–2 in the Jevrejeva et al. (2008) record, and 0.012 [0.009 to 0.015] mm yr–2 in the Church and White (2011) record. Thus, while there is more disagreement on the value of a 20th century acceleration in GMSL when accounting for multi-decadal fluctuations, two out of three records still indicate a significant positive value. The trend in GMSL observed since 1993, however, is not significantly larger than the estimate of 18-year trends in previous decades (e.g., 1920–1950). “
Page 306 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
*** “AR4 WGI Chapter 3 (Trenberth et al., 2007) did not assess changes in floods but AR4 WGII concluded that there was not a general global trend in the incidence of floods (Kundzewicz et al., 2007). SREX went further to suggest that there was low agreement and thus low confidence at the global scale regarding changes in the magnitude or frequency of floods or even the sign of changes.”
pg 230 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
*** “Confidence is low for a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century, owing to lack of direct observations, methodological uncertainties and geographical inconsistencies in the trends.”
pg 178 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
**** “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. “ https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/501.htm (IPCC third Assessment Report (2001) Section 14.2.2.2, page 774)
What I would like to have from alarmists like Schmidt is for them to list their top ten reasons for believing CO2 is a problem for humanity.
I’ll bet Schmidt’s first choice of “evidence” is the surface temperature record. 🙂
But I’m more than a little curious as to what his next nine choices would be. I would be surprised if he could cite nine separate pieces of evidence confirming CAGW or even hinting strongly at CAGW.
From what I can see the only “evidence” the alarmists can point to is the bogus, batardized surface temperature record. They can cite the Greenhouse Gas Theory but noone, including Schmidt, knows the ramifications of the theory as it pertains to our atmosphere, so no evidence there, just speculation. So what would fill out Schmidt’s list of evidence?
He can’t use “Extreme Weather” as any evidence since all that extreme weather talk is debunked in the post above that I am replying to, showing that extreme weather today is no more extreme than weather in the past..
So Schmidt, and all the other alarmists really have nothing to hang their hats on but the surface temperature record that has been so tampered with it is worthless for this discussion.
Yeah, I would like to see a top-10 list of evidence confirming CAGW. Would love to take a shot at debunking every item, as would most commenters at WUWT, I imagine. That’s probably why we won’t get any lists from the alarmists. No, the real reason we won’t get a list is because the alarmists don’t have any evidence to put in a list.
Schmidt and his like-minded alarmists could prove me wrong right here, right now. But they won’t becaue they can’t.
Kids, this kind of post ought to give you an indication of the state of alarmist climate science. When you see a direct challenge to alarmists to put up their evidence, or shut up, all we ever get is “crickets” from the alarmists. The reason we never get an answer is because they have no answers. That’s the lesson you should take here. The alarmists make a lot of claims and do a lot of speculation but they don’t have any evidence to back them up. They claim they do but when you ask for it all you get is silence.
Well, to be fair, sometimes we get a long stream of invective and assorted insults and backhand slaps.
+1
Thank you JIM.
Yeah, CO2 doesn’t really help plants – that’s why commercial greenhouses will spend the money to up the concentration of CO2 into the 1200-1500 ppm range…they do that just because they like to waste money in their business.
CO2 is just a pollutant, doncha know. All this “stuff” about plants dying (and thus animals dying) is just scaremongering – we need to get the evil CO2 down to about 100 ppm or even eliminate it altogether! Never mind the fairy tales about how it has been much much higher than 400 ppm in the past, with no correlation to temperature (except when temperature goes up, then later CO2 goes up – not the other way around)…
Schmidt’s reply clearly demonstrates why a Red Team exercise would be useful. When you don’t have to defend mis-statements and provide data to prove points, you can get away with any misconception. You can be 100% convinced of something false, and never discover that it is false. This applies to both sides of the exercise. I have a hard time imagining Schmidt convincing a red team that he is correct on most of these issues. Koonin on the other hand is rather persuasive, you know, showing real data and looking at both sides of an argument.
As noted above, he may be too accommodative and willing to give up ground not won by honest means by those on the opposing side of the argument, to have a hands down slam dunk win, which is what should happen when someone making stuff up debates someone sticking to what is known to be true.
So, what nutritional deficiencies have occurred from the 30%+ increase in productivity so far? The word “could” in the text should be a yellow flag to all.
There have been a few studies that found that even though produce doubled in size, there was a 1% decrease in nutritional concentrations.
It really depends on how the experiment is run. The big users of CO2 enhancement are greenhouse growers. I can’t remember any work that shows a decrease in nutrition for greenhouse grown CO2 enhanced vegetables.
A similar set of problems exists for hydroponic greenhouse growing. Again, the nutritional levels of the vegetables depend on the methods employed by the grower. Properly done, the nutritional levels are enhanced.
The effect isn’t big and so …
I strongly suspect that the motivation to find nutritional deficiencies in crops grown under elevated CO2 is to counter any idea that more atmospheric CO2 might actually be a good thing. It’s all about the narrative.
So there’s a 100% increase in size and the nutrition is 99% of the half size fruit. So, the total nutrition is 2x 99% = 198%. So a 98% increase in nutrition.
Isn’t that wonderful!
Yes it is.
While I have posted some concerns about some Dr Koonin’s assertions, I especially appreciate his cautionary comments about using the MSM as a source of information. They really blow it in the 1970’s with the global cooling myth, when science was 6:1 warming:cooling.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
https://www.insidescience.org/news/my-1975-cooling-world-story-doesnt-make-todays-climate-scientists-wrong
“I especially appreciate his cautionary comments about using the MSM as a source of information. They really blow it in the 1970’s with the global cooling myth, when science was 6:1 warming:cooling.”
I used to read the science literature of the 1970’s and my recollection is it was 6:1 global cooling studies reported during that time.
I wouldn’t call Science News a part of the MSM. It reported on the current state of science including climate science and in the 1970’s it reported on a lot of “global cooling” studies. Along with Scientific American and many other publications which focused on science.
As for the “myth” of global cooling, there is more evidence for global cooling being caused by injecting substances into the Earth’s atmosphere than there is evidence that CO2 is doing anything to warm the Earth’s atmosphere.
Did you bother to read the links?
The Schneider and Rasool paper was based on the assumption that industrial aerosls would increase. But they wrote that before the Clean Air Acts were enacted.
Oddly enough, they assumed that the warming that occurred when aerosols were decreased must have been caused by increasing CO2.
You are right. Global cooling was vast majority in science literature in the -70´s. And that cooling was real, not myth.
CO2 warming is very mythic warming, because it´s happening without warming.
Jack, why are referencing that obviously flawed study? It has been completely refuted. Anyone referencing it these days is proving they are completely dishonest.
https://notrickszone.com/285-papers-70s-cooling-1/
NTZ – whose principal correspondence is a children’s entertainer. Too funny. Are you Pinocchio to his Geppetto?
https://blog.hotwhopper.com/2018/01/when-97-becomes-996-climate-change-in.html?showComment=1515787517510#c8980560789650433135
Anyone who links to that site cannot be trusted.
You are correct. Anyone who links to NTZ cannot be trusted.
BTW from his own Twitter account.
More
Kenneth and Richard are my real names (first, middle). I have a Master’s and I work in mental health. I do diversity/tolerance/social skills training with children on the side. My wife and I take in/adopt foster children.
https://twitter.com/Kenneth72712993/status/1127397107747512320
This is him in action.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnHRZVruXtmAQ9MuQ6UHYOQ
Not interested in your diversions — I addressed YOUR linking to a vile, hateful, ignorant and bigoted site, hotcrap dot com.
There was a long presentation of the reality of the Global Cooling idea among scientists back in the 1970s in Climate etc., no?
Bizarrely, it seems that global cooling was real and man-made … from my analysis it appears that increasing SO2 in the atmosphere was leading to smogs and increased clouds which reflect sunlight and depress temperatures. So, the 1970s global cooling scare appears to have been genuine.
Also, I’ve now had confirmation that warming has strong negative feedbacks and cooling has positive feedbacks. So, whilst there’s ney chance of warming, rapid and catastrophic cooling remains very possible.
So,
1. Yes, the global cooling scare was real.
2. Yes, the late 20th century global warming was real (caused by the removal of cooling pollutants in the period 1970-2000)
3. No, the global warming scare is groundless
4. No, the 21st century “global warming” is purely fictional
“2. Yes, the late 20th century global warming was real (caused by the removal of cooling pollutants in the period 1970-2000)”
What caused the warming from 1910 to 1940? That warming was equal in magnitude to current warming and reached temperatures that were just as warm as today.
I don’t think there is any solid evidence that humans caused any atmospheric cooling. I do think there is good evidence that volcanic eruptions cause short-term cooling of the atmosphere.
Natural variation … indeed even the 1970-2000 warming is within the normal limits of natural variation – that could be attributed entirely to natural variation – but it is the closest we get to having “abnormal” change.
I remember the 1970’s cooling scare very well. Every newspaper in the UK carried it. Why do you think the MSM got it so wrong?
If the MSM were so wrong then about global cooling, why should they be any more reliable today about global warming?
Did you bother to read the links?
I do not rely on the MSM for science.
Your citations are garbage:
https://notrickszone.com/285-papers-70s-cooling-1/
You know that you are posting a website whose principal correspondent is a children’s entertainer who is “Geppetto” to a whole slew of “Pinocchios”.
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1127397107747512320
Jack Dale: You seem unable to refute the arguments.
Schmidt is one of those whose got a very good career out of very bad work , and he has ever intention to carry-on this was . For if not what then , well this is tiny market for ‘qualities’ he as and no other area of science would touch those with such anti-science methods.
Perhaps ‘gender studies ‘ is his best option should he lose his ‘cosy little number ‘
Personally, I like taking on smart criticisms. They help hone the science, clarify the arguments and point to areas of needed research.
Yeah, right. This from the man who ran from a discussion with Dr. Roy Spencer.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/28/spencer-ridley-and-gavin-on-fox-tonight/
Congratulations, CtM and AW. WUWT is now in the BIG TIME.
Dr. Koonin headed the APS global warming review (Dr. Curry’s Climate Etc previously posted the entire testimony with commentary) that got suppressed by APS because of Koonin’s preliminary negative findings. Now he resurfaces here (when RCS won’t post his GS reply) just as PDJT’s climate science review headed by Princeton’s Happer gets started.
Folks, contribute to WUWT. The tide has turned, the rebels (like WUWT) are gaining main stream adherents—Koonin here ‘over the Empire’. Sorry for the Star Wars analogy—not…
‘Luke, do or do not. There is no try.’ (SW ‘5’ [really 2], Degoba system, Yoda to Luke concerning his crashed in muck using the Force to lift his X wing fighter).
Relevance thought. Global warming aka climate change is a ‘scientific’ fable no different than Star Wars Empire. Needs to be fought the same way. Koonin tried science and failed. ‘Deniers’ need to channel the Force within us to fight the politics behind the fake ‘svience’.
A motive for this comment should be apparent to any long term WUWT readers given my many science fact based comments here and at Curry’s Climate Etc since 2011. Its politics, not science.
There was a Red Team / Blue Team debate during the APS review. Koonin chaired it. The transcript seems to have disappeared.
The transcript is still available.
https://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf
Merci mucho – bookmarked.
The reason why there is disconnect between what the public believes and what the reports actually say, is because the climate team, including Schmidt, want it that way.
I hope you talk a lot better than you write, Mr Koonin.
This “article” is disjointed, hard to follow, and hard to read.
If you do talk better, then please learn to “write as you speak”.
.
My two cents:
.
SUMMARY:
Leftists do not debate.
They are science deniers.
They focus on wild guess predictions of the future climate, which can not be refuted without waiting 50 to 100 years to show they were wrong !
You could point out their predictions, based on a high ECS for CO2 developed in the 1970s, that never changes, have been wrong for 30 years.
They don’t care.
Nothing can falsify any climate change claim they make !
Climate alarmism is a secular religion, not real science.
Sure, there are people involved who have science degrees, but consistently wrong wild guesses of the future climate are not real science.
.
.
.
DETAILS:
On climate science, there can be no debate because real climate science involves the present and past climate.
No matter what you say about the past climate, the climate alarmists will claim the future climate will be VERY different.
You could point out that the PAST 300 years of intermittent global warming was 100% good news … but the climate alarmists will claim the FUTURE global warming will be 100% bad news.
How can anyone debate an imaginary future climate change, that bears no relationship to the past climate change ?
And how about a debate over natural causes of climate change?
You can’t debate that either !
You can point out that we have had 4.5 billion years of natural climate change, with no known change CAUSED by varying CO2 levels.
They will claim natural causes of climate change are just “noise” now, because CO2 levels control the global average temperature.
And their proof of that is: “BECAUSE WE SAY SO” !
Wild guess predictions of the future climate are not real science.
Not when the wild guesses have been so wrong for so long.
The always wrong predictions are just computer game climate astrology.
The climate models, on average, excluding the accurate, perhaps by accident, Russian model, predict a future warming rate that is QUADRUPLE the actual warming rate since 1940.
1940 is a good starting point because the ramp up of man made CO2 started as the Great Depression was ending.
There was a significant CO2 emissions decline during the Great Depression period (the beginning of the 1929 Recession, through the end of the 1937 Recession), with no obvious effect on the global average temperature, or sea level rise.
1940 is an appropriate starting point for observations of the global average temperature, while CO2 is rising — not 1975, or 1979, which are much more common.
Using 1975 or 1979 as the start point is data mining, in my opinion, ignoring the significant CO2 emissions from 1940 through 1975, or 1979.
“I hope you talk a lot better than you write, Mr Koonin.
This “article” is disjointed, hard to follow, and hard to read.
If you do talk better, then please learn to “write as you speak”.
That’s a bit rough Richard!
Make you case but the good guys here don’t get personal.
Thanks . . .
Thanks Steve for responding. I read the first part of Schmidt’s screed before concluding that it was mostly nitpicking, a classic example of consensus enforcement. I then watched your lecture and it seemed quite a good summary of the actual science.
Wrestling with PIGS!
Does anyone know what that means?
Sometimes … it means pork chops are on the menu …!
😉
– This is nature:
https://www.google.com/search?q=strong+force+weak+force+electromagnetic+force+gravity&oq=strong+force+weak&aqs=chrome.
THIS is justice, philosophy, metaphysics:
https://www.google.com/search?q=normative+meaning&oq=normative+meaning&aqs=chrome.
_________________________________________________________
If I am acting against nature’s laws, e.g. gravity, I’m dead. Or at least hurt.
– If I violate judiciary, philosophy or metaphysics I take a good lawyer and may get away without damage. It is unfortunate to engage in a discussion of normative values - so Gavin Schmidt can tell “as you like it”.
_________________________________________________________
https://www.google.com/search?q=Shakespeare+as+you+like+it&oq=Shakespeare+as+you+like+it&aqs=chrome.
– here we should adhere to real existing nature.
“Blasts the errors” or “Tickles the nuances”?
A Red Team needs to combat the fundamental weaknesses of the Establishment suppositions. Matters like these –
The fundamental hypothesis that CO2 exerts a dangerous influence on atmospheric temperatures is DISPROVEN. What more evidence is needed?
Reliable tide gauge measurements show no acceleration of change in the last 100 years. There is no plausible mechanism to expect an acceleration in the next 50 years. so why the drama? More, the lack of acceleration corresponding to the alleged increase of anthro CO2 circa 1950 has to be explained. Does the ocean act like a thermometer, or not?
The effect of Urban Heat Islands has not been quantified adequately for correction of near-surface global temperature estimates of the popular kind. It remains that UHI might contribute half of the claimed T rise of 1 deg C over the last century.
The actual contribution of anthropogenic CO2 to the measured atmospheric concentration remains in doubt. There is too much remaining uncertainty about quantitative measures of sinks and sources of CO2, so there can only be low confidence in current attribution schemes.
There are many more major uncertainties. Some would be clarified by proper use of error analysis applied to measurements, climate science being particularly deficient in proper analysis of error and uncertainty. A major case is estimation of radiation balance at top of atmosphere, another is Argo float accuracy, a third is the useless range of ECS estimates.
The point is that any one of the above, properly understood, is capable of sinking the Establishment argument. While this possibility remains, the Science is not settled. Humanity is dealt a disservice if the current arguments prevail in the face of demonstrably poor and incomplete Science. Geoff
Jack Dale – did you even read that guest blog –
or were you already in the start holes for some show runs.
I read the guest blog, watched the video and read Gavin Schmidt’s blog.
And you?
Dieser Gavin Schmidt ist ganz einfach unehrlich, er schwindelt sich durch. Ein schmieriger Kleinkrimineller – NORMATIV ?!?
[This Gavin Schmidt is simply dishonest, he dodges through. A greasy petty criminal – NORMATIVE .mod]
Nailed it.
I love an honest assessment.
Bad enough that Gavin has basically run Real Climate on taxpayer time and $$$.
But we all know him for his ethics as the International Man of Mystery.
https://climateaudit.org/2009/02/04/gavins-mystery-man-revealed/
“Mea culpa. My point was that many timesteps are needed for a useful model run. ”
funny. what you meant to say was
“I was wrong”
is that really that hard?
me·a cul·pa
[ˌmāə ˈko͝olpə]
EXCLAMATION
an acknowledgment of one’s fault or error.
““Well, whose fault was that?” “Mea culpa!” Frank said”
At least he can admit he is wrong. Schmidt so far as I know is not strong in this department.
He is Climate Fonzie!
https://youtu.be/uwkU8-d1gIk
You can’t even get your major (English) right?
Latin is not English.
Yeah, obviously — point is an English major should be familiar w/commonly used phrases from other languages that English speakers use. Capeesh?
Doyeeeeee
¿qué?
whoop whoop whoop
Mosher, how’s Best model doing?
Eh?
What exactly did you think “mea culpa” meant, mosh?
You were wrong…how hard is it for you to admit it?
Tick tock tick tock…
Applause! Applause!
Authot! Author!
Slap Gavin around some more!
Why Gavin Schmidt has been invited into this country, given a job, a salary, research funding, and a soapbox are beyond belief. His actions can only be explained as though his goal is to destroy the country. His government employment should be terminated and his visa not renewed.
Gavin and the entire ‘climate science’ consensus do not properly account for the WV increase.
In the period 1988-2002 water vapor molecules increased more than 5 times as fast as CO2 molecules and about twice as fast as calculated from the average global temperature increase.
A red/blue team approach assumes both sides are honestly looking for the truth. Sorry, nothing could be further from the truth. The only way to handle the climate scam is to show it is a scam. This requires solid funding and work by skeptics. It then requires a forum for showing the results. I don’t see it happening even with Trump in charge.
It’s always bugged me that GS makes clearly political opinion tweets during work hours.
Also, where is it in his job description that says, on the public dime, he must refute presentations with which he finds fault? If his job description says that he should, how does he pick and choose which ones? Surely Koonan’s isn’t the only one out there.
He’s director of what? (sarc)
I think his display of political bias makes for an extremely lousy role model for young scientists, and is completely inappropriate for the position he holds.
The IPCC states that “… the approaches used in detection and attribution research described above cannot fully account for all uncertainties, and thus ultimately expert judgement is required to give a calibrated assessment of whether a specific cause is responsible for a given climate change …” (AR4).
Gavin Schmidt agrees:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/08/ipcc-attribution-statements-redux-a-response-to-judith-curry/comment-page-4/#comments
And Gavin Schmidt is such and expert, he admits it himself: “… climate modeling or attribution (you know, my job)”.
“Guest essay by Steve Koonin”
Never thought I’d see the day.
Now, if you can get Stephen McIntyre to do a ‘guest essay’ I’ll eat my hat whilst hitting the donate button.
Charles why don’t you push him for a WUWT essay on Antarctic Proxies . . .
1 Feb 2019 he posted an amazing new lengthy analysis on Climate Audit that deserves a wider audience:
“Antarctic d18O is one of the few proxies which can be accurately date in both very recent measurements and in Holocene and deep time. However, rather against message, Antarctic d18O over the past two millennia (as for example the PAGES2K 2013 compilation) has mostly gone the “wrong” way, somewhat diluting the IPCC message – to borrow a phrase.”
The climate cult is going to steadily fall apart over the next couple of decades. And unlike many people who fell for the cult, Schmidt CANNOT ARGUE he wasn’t in a place to know he was wrong.
He will end his days as a sad rejected individual knowing that his whole life’s “work” was completely wrong.
Indeed, as a leader of the cult, he may well end his days in jail.
Koonin: having thirty years’ experience in providing advice to policy makers
Doc: means that you are a lobbyist. Lobbyists are generally unqualified with regard to climate science. Given that your arguments lack any merit, I’d say that you are a typical lobbyist.
You mistake a lobbyist for science advisers. A lobbyist generally works for private industry and specifically advocates for the industry by which they are employed. The government accesses a wide range of science advisers to assist in obtaining information needed to consider policies. Typically science advisers are either employed directly by the government, or accessed on a short term basis via a contract. Also typically, they are employed by universities. Examples of science advisers are the Jasons, the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering, and also the many panels the EPA uses to evaluate various scientific issues. The latter has come under scrutiny for evolving into a private preserve for a few favored scientists, but generally the participants do not work for an industry (as a lobbyist would), in fact that situation would be precluded by the EPAs stringent rules on protection of proprietary information provided to the EPA for review of proposed new uses of materials. The vast majority of EPA science advisers are in the field of toxicology. While science advisers may not work to bring contracts to industrial concerns, they have from time to time been accused of providing advice that would favor certain lines of research, in which they might participate as grantees. But that is a very different beast from lobbying for the next big missile, or the next big cyber security contract.
IPCC
Mann
Schmidt
Hansen
Gore
Holdren
Jones
Etc.
Which of them has not attempted to provide “advice” to policy makers?
“(seemingly oblivious to the point that it is very hard and very costly to adapt to a continuously changing, and even accelerating situation).”
I think the good doctor Gavin, should try having kids. For humans, adapting to continous and accelerating change, it’s our speciality. He really should get out of the office and live a little. It would propably be really good for him.
“it is stunning for Schmidt to say that it is “a classic error” to compare the forced ensemble-mean trend with the actual trend“. Surely every model-generated trend should be compared with actual trend at the first available opportunity. Shouldn’t it?
But Schmidt also says “it is just untrue that all the models were tuned on the trends“. My understanding is that the models were all tuned directly or indirectly on the trends.
From the video —
At about 10:28
“And the basic argument is that pinning it all on humans over the last 40 years, is that there is no other cause we can think of that is responsible for the warming we see.”
And then at about 11:30
“we got to look at energy flows in the climate system, this is a picture again from one of the [IPCC] reports [showing a picture of K&T type energy balance diagrams], and the thing to take away from this first of all, it complicated. There are lots of arrows of flows of energy going on here. The big ones are that the solar energy comes in, about a third of it gets reflected, the rest of it gets absorbed by the surface … ”
And during that whole video at no point has life — the totally of life on this planet — been assigned any solar energy value to keep going. Why does this theoretical idea not have the ‘miracle ‘ of photosynthesis requiring a solar energy input?
Do not plants at their very essence sequester and use solar energy to make those HIGH energy sugars, starches, cellulose polymer, proteins, etc., by taking biologically useful but structurally useless CO2, water, nitrogen, and a few minerals and CONTINUOUSLY make high energy biological molecules. Solar energy that life continuously attempts to sequesters away in long lived chemical structures (some store away for centuries in soils, peat, etc.) Coal is the last vestiges of solar energy from millions of years ago bound up in its chemistry.
Also note that the totality of life on this planet is not a constant, therefore the required amount of solar energy to maintain this life is not a constant . Generally during the cooler periods life recedes as the carbon cycle slows, and usually during the warm periods it expands and the carbon cycle speeds-up. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere of the currently only moderately warm atmosphere should ensure that the carbon cycle expands — that life becomes more abundant to transform solar energy into biologically useful compounds and materials. And as life moves into previously deserted areas it will change the weather patterns and eventually the climate, in a manner similar to the way our land use changes affect the climate. As this video shows marginal and desertified areas can be changed https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI and the solar energy used in those locations increases to a new and expanding level.
Life on this planet is not a static entity and it takes and uses solar energy continuously.
Thank you for that link to that video. It is amazing to find a completely new way of thinking.
The population since 1800 to the present has (approximately) doubled 3 times to reach our present level. All during that time humans have been consuming food. Food that holds solar energy (solar energy + CO2 + nitrogen + water + some minerals converted to useful biological chemicals by plants). In essence we, like the plants and animals we cultivate, are storehouses of solar energy — solar energy that is stored in the chemical bonds of biological molecules.
If you were to take the total number of people that have lived from 1800 to the present, and render them all down to the elements from what the plants started the process from, subtract all thermal energy of the environment (over 200 years), then what you have left is the solar energy required in 200 years to grow the human population from 1 billion to 8 billion.
Life not just human life, the carbon cycle, uses, stores, and recycles solar energy continuously. Is the solar energy continuously taken and used by life so small, is it so insignificant that all these climate
worriersscientists can just ignore it? IMO no they shouldn’t. After all when it comes to the theoretical values for what CO2 and solar energy are said to do, aren’t those too very small numbers?“And the basic argument is that pinning it all on humans over the last 40 years, is that there is no other cause we can think of …”
No one denies that vast majority of the Earth’s energy come from the sun. This issue is the solar constant; solar activity varies 0.1%. That is insufficient to be a factor in climate change.
Milankovitch cycles, which were the dominant factor in climate change, do not produce changes in solar output. They change the amount of solar energy received by the Earth.
According to Milankovitch cycles we should be be in a period of long term cooling. For the most of the past 6000 years since the Holocene Optimum we were cooling. That abruptly reversed with the increased use of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution. Since then 1.5 trillion tonnes of anthropogenic CO2 have been dumped into the atmosphere, resulting in a nearly 50% increase in CO2 levels. The current levels have not been recorded in 3-5 million years.
For the most of the past 6000 years since the Holocene Optimum we were cooling. That abruptly reversed with the increased use of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution.
If so, thank the heavens!
Jack Dale
More distraction …
Why are you blathering on about Milankovitch cycles?
What I have written has nothing to do with them.
Jack Dale
I’ve missed the point entirely with your blather about Milankovitch cycles.
Just about all the energy for life on the surface of this planet comes from the sun.
What is the total solar energy required by all life on this planet (it is not zero, and no doubt will not be a constant!). Life that transforms elementary chemical + solar energy to chemical energy to make biological compounds.
Although IR energy is not a major requirement for plants, warmth is required for the enzyme process of photosynthesis. Plant leaves consists for the most part of water which will quickly absorbs and is warmed up by infrared radiation, this gets them quickly productive, especially after cold nights, and in the cooler temperate areas of the globe.
I both applaud and take issue with Koonin’s civility towards Gavin Schmidt. Gavin is not a moral, ethical or reasonable person and certainly not a credible scientist, so different rules apply.
A never ending barrage of wealth redistribution schemes masquerading as eco-catastrophes are a major threat to every rational civic minded citizen of earth. Because if we force authoritarian socialism on everyone, we will end up with a lot less resource and motivation to solve real catastrophes and the third world will suffer the most.
People like Schmidt must be stopped at all costs. Hopefully there are more Climategate like whistleblowers who will come forward to expose Schmidt et. al. for the huge fraud they have imposed upon all humankind.
All the models have been wrong which suggests the assumptions plugged into the models are wrong.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming
I’ll acknowledge there are many models, but snow is not a “thing of the past”.
And model after model projected such warming.
Global Climate Models have successfully forecast:
That the troposphere would warm and the stratosphere would cool.
That nighttime temperatures would increase more than daytime temperatures.
That winter temperatures would increase more than summer temperatures.
Polar amplification (greater temperature increase as you move toward the poles).
That the Arctic would warm faster than the Antarctic.
The magnitude (0.3 K) and duration (two years) of the cooling from the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.
They made a retrodiction for Last Glacial Maximum sea surface temperatures which was inconsistent with the paleo evidence, and better paleo evidence showed the models were right.
They predicted a trend significantly different and differently signed from UAH satellite temperatures, and then a bug was found in the satellite data.
The amount of water vapor feedback due to ENSO.
The response of southern ocean winds to the ozone hole.
The expansion of the Hadley cells.
The poleward movement of storm tracks.
The rising of the tropopause and the effective radiating altitude.
The clear sky super greenhouse effect from increased water vapor in the tropics.
The near constancy of relative humidity on global average.
That coastal upwelling of ocean water would increase.
Jack Dale,
As for your dim-wit models
It is nice to see the work from honest scientist occasionally gets through …
From https://www.sciencedirect.c…
Physica C. Essex, A.A. Tsonis, Model falsifiability and climate slow modes,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.p…
So the climate models are not a way to verify the actuality.
Be careful how you cut and paste.
“DOI Not Found”
I’m sure you can google (or whatever you use) for it.
It still exists, I’m reading it at
hŧtps://www·sciencedirect·com/science/article/pii/S0378437118301766
You may have to correct that too as I typo quite a lot these days.
From https://www.hoover.org/research/flawed-climate-models
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the established global authority on climate change, acknowledges this in its most recent Assessment report, from 2013:
[bold and italics in original]
What is the net effect of cloudiness? Clouds lead to a cooler atmosphere by reducing the sun’s net energy by approximately 28 Wm–2. Without clouds, more energy would reach the ground and our atmosphere would be much warmer. Why are clouds hard to model? They are amorphous; they reside at different altitudes and are layered on top of each other, making them hard to discern; they aren’t solid; they come in many different types; and scientists don’t fully understand how they form. As a result, clouds are modeled poorly. This contributes an average uncertainty of ±4.0 Wm–2 to the atmospheric thermal energy budget of a simulated atmosphere during a projection of global temperature. This thermal uncertainty is 110 times as large as the estimated annual extra energy from excess CO2.”
You left one out:
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/448339-nationals-announcer-says-global-warming-may-be-leading-to-record-home-run-pace
Jack Dale –
It is nice to see someone from the alarmist side defending the models with some statements that can be examined in detail. I would caution that many, perhaps most, of those ‘true’ predictions would follow from any warming, however caused, and doubtless others will be jumped on by the resident neighbourhood watch in fairly short order.
Nevertheless it seems to me that you have sufficient knowledge of the way the models work to educate us with regard to the statements you make and open each in turn up to a debate from which we all may learn something. Don’t be deterred by the offhand responses you will surely get. I’m a sceptic but I’m open to be converted.
Please don’t do it on this thread. If Anthony and his people will allow it, please ask to put it up as a guest post in its own right. I, and I suspect, most of the commenters here have only a very vague idea of how the models work, and I’d be really interested to have your take on it.
The first is a clear signature of the GHE. If the solar variability was a factor, the stratosphere and troposphere would warm and cool in synch with each other. They do not do so.
Warming troposphere
http://images.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/TLT_v40/plots/RSS_TS_channel_TLT_Global_Land_And_Sea_v04_0.png
Cooling stratosphere
http://images.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/C25/plots/RSS_TS_channel_C25_Global_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.png
Jack – only a few here dispute the GHE, but that’s a very different question as to whether carbon dioxide can modulate the GHE sufficiently for it to be regarded as a ‘control knob’ for the temperature, and whether the models describe that behaviour sufficiently well for us to trust the predictions they make enough to inform policy. The provisional answer is, no, they don’t. But I guess they might, over a longer period [I don’t regard Gavin Schmidt’s suggestion that anthro CO2 could be responsible for 120percent of the observed warming as being unreasonable, though if it were true it would indicate that models do not adequately capture other important climate drivers, of course!]
It’s a pity they didn’t predict what they were supposed to predict: global temperature. Nor have any of the numerous predictions of increasing severe weather proved correct. Indeed, the only way the climate models “work” is by adjusting the ground data to fit the models.
But keep trying to defend the indefensible.
I gather you missed this link.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming
Observed vs modeled (RSS V4.0 MSU/AMSU):
Observed vs modeled 20oN and 20oS since 1979 (HadAT and HadCRUT4);
http://www.climate4you.com/images/EquatorSurface300hPa200hPaDecadalTempChange%20BARCHART.gif
Jack,
An expected result. If you start with a very large list of possible effects then you expect to get a tiny list of successes.
Proper science, involving balance and full disclosure, requires a parallel list of forecast failures. It is rather longer than your list of successes. Indeed, it is so long that it becomes tiresome to create it for display here.
Why do you not show the failed forecasts as well? Geoff
Perhaps you could share some failures from the models. Please avoid “predictions” made by non climate scientists and those without some reference to the models.
F or a starter, I would also suggest that you not post John Christy’s bogus graph.
Remember that the claim is that NONE of the predictions have materialized. The list I posted refutes that claim.
JD
You said, “Perhaps you could share some failures from the models.”
How about this:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/30/analysis-of-james-hansens-1988-prediction-of-global-temperatures-for-the-last-30-years/
Jack Dale,
And then there are the problems with the each variant of computer climate model such outlined here in Impact of Physics Parameterization Ordering in a Global Atmosphere Model by Aaron S. Donahue and Peter M. Caldwell… (From https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017MS001067)