By Andy May
I have a new op-ed in the Washington Examiner today that questions whether “climate change,” as commonly defined today, is a scientific concept. The op-ed is a very brief summary of a longer post on the topic here. The longer post contains all the references and links to supporting material, including a link to Karl Popper‘s famous book on the definitions of science and pseudoscience, called Conjectures and Refutations.
From the op-ed:
“Tornados, nor’easters, hurricanes, mid-winter thaws, 100-degree days, cold snaps, droughts, and flooding creeks all are presented as evidence of human-caused climate change, “proof” that human emissions of carbon dioxide are leading to an overheated planet.
However, Karl Popper, the famous philosopher, would say that these meteorological events do not support human-caused climate change because none of them can falsify the idea. If every event supports an idea, and no event can falsify it, the idea is not a scientific hypothesis.Washington Examiner.
Popper’s examples of pseudoscience included Marx’s theory of history. He observed on page 35 of his famous book, that “A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page, confirming evidence” for the theory. Freud’s theories were the same; every clinical case confirmed his ideas. A hypothesis that is not refutable by any conceivable event is not scientific.”
I have asked all UK Government bodies and then up to the IPCC for the burden of proof, i.e. the scientific method, and none of them can answer. I take one step further for clarification of the precautionary principle via the closure problem, and they don’t even understand the question. Pure pseudoscience.
Paul,
The scientific training of our youth is appalling. They are simply taught to “believe,” not to question. I learned the basics of critical thinking and the scientific method at the age of 14 at Milburn Junior High School in Shawnee Mission, Kansas! And, as a result, I am miles ahead of most graduating PhDs today. Back to the basics people, what do you know and how do you know it?
Andy,
the foundation should be laid in the home by the parents encouraging their children to think and reason carefully and logically, observe closely and of course promoting a love of reading from the earliest years. If they do a good job this compensates for the failure of teachers and is better guarantee of success later in life than a posh school, though good teachers will build on these home foundations.
I’m with you Michael!
Andy if you are a thinker then why this statement from your WE article:
Current epigenetic research shows that Darwin and Lamarck were both right and that evolution involves both processes.
Anybody that has read Stephen C. Meyer’s book “Darwin’s Doubt” knows that epigenetic research has demonstrated the exact opposite. Suggest you stick to petroleum and physics in which your knowledge base is solid.
Carbon Bigfoot, Nonsense, epigenetics and evolution are intimately related, see here:
Epigenetics and Evolution | Integrative and Comparative Biology | Oxford Academic (oup.com)
As well as other references in my original post here:
Facts and Theories, Updated – Andy May Petrophysicist
Home schooling is the answer.
Trouble is Michael those foundations have not been laid so what will the following generation learn from them. Scary. My generation (68 yrs) has not realized what the current generation is being subjected to and they are the ones who will teach the generation after them. The downside of the internet and social media is a really dark place. Not an unsalvageable situation but not easy to manage. In our retirements we have to make an effort to steer a sensible course and teach straight versus crooked thinking, for their sake, not ours. By the way there is a book called “Straight and Crooked Thinking” which even a leftie economist professor friend of mine thinks is terrific. I might push for a re-issue!
There are historical accounts of even illiterate fathers and mothers being a real help to their children by encouraging them and taking an interest in what they are learning. These children have been able to overcome deficiencies in their schools and become responsible and productive adults. One of our biggest hurdles in the Western world is the nanny state that hates the idea of the parents being “the primary educators.” Schools should be there only to assist and build on the home foundation and not decide on their own foundation.
Andy, I am a full time lurker here and never posted. Both my wife and daughter went to Prairie Elementary, Indian Hills Middle School and Shawnee Mission East High School. Small world, I suppose.
Interesting, Shawnee Mission North for me, then KU.
The problem is not just science.
As a child, back in the 60’s, my dad, an engineer by training, gave us a desk plaque which said, simply “THINK”. It puzzled me at the time, exactly what it meant, but I do believe it had an influence on me. Today’s desk plaque would instead say “FEEL”.
The PHD’s teaching students are hopelessly brainwashed. I’ve had many discussions with them over the years providing the peer reviewed science, empirical measurements , geologic history, logic and the limitations of climate models. No amount of real world evidence can shake their faith in modeled reality.
There’s also that other factor, the understanding that grant funding and ‘career’ advancement come with doing the Climate Goose-Step, the old “it’s very hard for someone to understand something whose salary is dependent on him not understanding it” issue.
That’s why it’s us oldies trained in the scientific method who are leading the charge against CAGW because we are out of the system, can be free with our comments and we have the long term experience to recognize bullshit when we hear it and read it.
We were puzzled at first why our peer institutions all paid lip service to the climate scam, and came to realize the environmental movement had become a defacto religion whereby God had been replaced by Nature that was being threatened, and so the usurper mankind and his industrial works had to be punished. Attenborough and his BBC crowd are redolent of this creed.
These environmental attitudes can be worked on and gradually neutralised, however the politics is another creature altogether that rarely responds to reason and scientific fact, because they don’t understand the issues involved and seek advice from the meteorologists at the UK Hadley Centre. NASA/ IPCC the very groups that are fomenting the climate scam in the first place.
Nevertheless, the truth will out by the climate record as it emerges the planet is not warming anywhere near as fast as the dodgy and very expensive models are promoting, so the rising CO2 is not causing significant warming, and so the Net Zero emissions process is a total waste of time, money and effort! What a total global cockup this has been, with us innocent humans, general prosperity and science in general all suffering.
It’s time to wake up from this self induced nightmare, and live normally again.
I graduated in chemistry in 1959. The most important things that I got from my university degree course were: (1) don’t subcontract your thinking, (2) don’t be overwhelmed by people who have letters in front or after their name.
I cannot understand how anyone who is familiar with the methodology and work of one of England’s greatest scientists, Michael Faraday, or the way the extraordinary 20th century Mathematician, George Polya, approached and solved problems can fail to see the claims of climate alarmists depend on pseudoscience. Perhaps the problem is that people are as ignorant of history as they are of science and mathematics?
Michael, you are right, even many scientists are ignorant about the history of science. For example, my late neighbour who was professor of mathematics was unaware that logarithms had been invented as long a four centuries ago.
Climate change is predictions of climate doom in 10 or 20 years.
Not reality.
How can anyone prove a prediction … that never changes?
A prediction that began in late 1950s scientific papers, without a specific date.
And with uncertainty.
Uncertainty has disappeared from climate science.
Meaning a global warming crisis has been “coming” for the past 65 years.
So where is it that global warming crisis?
I know: It got lost in New Jersey,
which I have done several times myself,
back when I lived in New York.
Sorry, I am unable to take predictions of doom seriously!
Wrong exit!
And always a long way to the next “U-Turn.”
Sorry to be the thick one, but I don’t even understand the question either. There are a few things that are called a “closure problem”. The only one I know much about is from graph theory and I don’t see its applicability to the so-called “precautionary principle” (which is just the fallacy of Pascal’s Wager in a new guise).
Serious request: can you explain your question?
One cannot prove a negative. One can demonstrate that an extensive search for Ivory Billed Woodpeckers did not find any, but one cannot prove them to be extinct.
Rubbish that is an often quoted fallacy in your case remove every tree and piece of wood on the planet and you can guarantee the woodpecker is extinct. Just for the record you can’t prove any absolutely positive trying looking at classical physics and gravity.
“you can guarantee the woodpecker is extinct”
By the time all of the trees are removed the woodpeckers would have evolved to be somethingelsepeckers.
Or, more simply, are my car keys in my pocket? Put hand in. No they’re not. Negative proven.
The point that Popper makes is that you can prove a negative, you cannot prove a positive.Inductive Knowledge may be refuted, but never proved.
Keys in pocket is not inductive – it is factual.
Until you sort out the difference between facts, deductive knowledge and inductive knowledge, the argument will make no sense.
The keys are in my pocket – factual.
The keys are in my pocket therefore my pocket is capable of holding keys – deductive.
The keys are in my pocket because that’s where I put them – inductive. This is not proof that you put them there. In fact the infamous and invisible Bugblatter beast of Traal, did, and implanted a false memory in your brain… Etc.
All causal relationships are inductive, and science is all about causal relationships, so all science is inductive propositions. there are no ‘scientific facts’ – only facts.
Anthropogenic Climate change is an inductive proposition – it is proposed that modern climate change is caused by human activity via rising CO2 levels. It is not a ‘scientific fact’
Two points: firstly is there actually any modern ‘climate change’ at all , and secondly if there is, is it in anyway different from ‘historic’ climate change?
Those facts have to be established before the phrase ‘modern climate change’ has any meaning.
The first is trivial – there is always climate change.
The second is key – is modern ‘climate change’ different from say any of the great extinction events that have happened in pre history? Yes, it’s not a huge extinction event. However it is no different from multidecadal changes that have occurred even in recorded history.
So even the fact of modern climate changes as distinctly different, cannot be established beyond reasonable doubt.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think Gödel’s incompleteness theorems fit in somewhere in this argument. Mathematics is not a tidy package.
The fallacy reveals itself nicely when you consider all the diametrically opposed outcomes that BOTH supposedly are the result of “climate change.”
“The children are not going to know what snow is” – during a period of relatively mild winters with little snowfall.
“Heavier snowfall is ‘consistent with’ global warming” – during a period of severe winters with record-setting snowfalls.
When their “hypothesis” can only seem to ‘predict’ current weather outside your window, you know it’s pure pseudoscience.
That’s the question I’ve asked for 20 years knowing that the Alarmists have claimed every possible kind of climate as EVIDENCE, “what kind of climate is unexpected” and I already know that no rational answer will ever be given…
A very fundamental problem with the term “climate change” is that nobody, and I do mean nobody, has offered up a clear, objective, quantitative definition of exactly what that term means . . . at least, not a single definition that all scientists would agree upon.
“If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.”
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
How very true.
It’s like you think doubt-mongering and disinforming is going to turn this trend around? “meteorological events”, lol, is the flea on the tail of the dog. But, yeah, keep pointing at the flea.
“There is, in fact, no formal difference between willful blindness and stupidity.”
And that chart in degrees Celsius is a number less than the error levels of the measuring equipment.
Making your alleged chart all bombastic silliness.
Alleged? Lol. At the surface almost 1C of bombastic silliness.
I know, I know, it’s cooling, any time now. Or, but, but warm is better anyway right.
Ooops . . . I see a pause in the temperature anomaly from 1940 to 1975 . . . one that’s hiding behind the red linear trend line that is obviously established by cherry-picking the graph’s starting date of 1890.
Both NOAA and NASA define climate as weather over a specified geographical area averaged over a period of 30 years or more.
So, there was no temperature-metric-based climate change for 35 years as show in the graph you present.
BTW, is it fair to state that the 0.7 °C temperature change over 130 years, as indicated in the red trend line on graph that you presented, is “almost 1C” (your words)? There is a 42% increase in going from 0.7 to 1.
Loydo- “At the surface almost 1C of bombastic silliness.”
Now tell us how we got that data for ALL OCEANS between 1890 and 2010? All I ever heard of were a few, very few measurements here & there and a lot of measurements along trade routes.
Fact is that WE DO NOT HAVE THE DATA to say what the Earth’s or Ocean’s temperature was before WWII. Go back to the 1920s and we ONLY have good data from US & Europe, a tiny fraction of the Earth!
Great graph of upwardly adjusted urban temperatures.
Nothing to do with “Global” though, is it !
Say you are right, for the sake of argument. How significant is this Global warming? Is it newsworthy???
Well your graph gives us 1°C warming in 100 years.
The temperature at any given place can vary on any given date by at least 10°C.
So society and nature have adapted to cope with 10 times the temperature change at 100 time the rate.
How significant is this Global warming? Not at all according to your graph.
Now let’s focus on real problems.
No, it’s more like you telling us that the flea is a dog.
Also, convert that y-axis energy into degrees Celsius and you will get a sea water temperature rise over the last several decades of a few hundredths of a degree… Where’s the “crisis”? Just because something is increasing doesn’t mean it’s bad and we are the cause.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/01/16/the-ocean-warming-enigma/
“sea water temperature rise over the last several decades of a few hundredths of a degree”
Yeah, if you disingenuously take the average of the entire volume down to the botton of the oceanic abyss. Instead look at sea surface temperature – where the ocean affects “meteorology”, in some places it’s an abrupt multiple degrees of warming.
“in some places it’s an abrupt multiple degrees of warming.”
Total rubbish ! Just make up crap as you go !
Loydo
You prove yourself wrong, if it’s the warming of the oceans then it’s not CO2 in the atmosphere. For CO2 to have any effect on the ocean there would have to be a large warming trend in the atmosphere first then a slow warming trend in the ocean. Your chart shows the exact opposite, so you have proved Andy correct by your own idiocy.
Yeah but in his defense he’s too stupid to know that.
You have committed the same logical error:
“multiple degrees of warming” -> Is that good/bad? Has it happened before? Is it a cycle? Do you have enough data to show that it isn’t a long/short/natural cycle? Is this normal for those places? Explain and prove the mechanism by which this happens -> are humans the cause? Simply stating that something “unusual” has happened does not imply catastrophe, you need prove several things first.
“in some places” -> Is this unusual for these places? What is the mechanism of warming for these places? Has it been root-caused to human activity, or is it natural? We can’t oversimplify what we see and then claim a crisis is coming.
And you are using circular logic:
“Meteorology” cannot simultaneously cause ocean surface warming and be itself caused by ocean surface warming. And if you claim a positive feedback mechanism is at work here, you must also believe that 1+1=3. Either the energy is in the air or it’s in the ocean. You can only pick one. And further claiming that the ocean is ‘storing’ the energy so that it will come back to cause a crisis is just pseudoscience. Why didn’t the previous 1 degree of temperature rise cause a catastrophe?? Like CMoB has stated, the most recent temperature rise is not “special”.
“temperature rise over the last several decades of a few hundredths of a degree…”
Worse than the tiny amount of measured warming is the lack of wide coverage of sea measurements. One can pretty much say there is NO GOOD WORD WIDE data before the satellite era.
Of course, Loydo, you don’t dare to state:
1) How “energy change” in zeta-joules relates to equivalent degrees-C temperature change. Why is that?
[I note that to first order d(E) = d(m*Cp*T), yielding (dE/E) = dm/m + d(Cp)/Cp + d(T)/T, so while one can measure d(T)/T with a vast array of instruments, that is not the case with d(Cp)/Cp, given the phase change latent heats between ice-liquid water-water vapor, nor with d(m)/m for ocean and ice parameters since thermally-variable mass, m, for ocean waters and ice are not well-established, depending on subsurface ocean currents and ice depth, respectively.]
2) The error bars associated with each of the regions defined in the chart’s legend. Why is that?
3) The source/author(s) of the plotted data. Why is that?
4) The obvious fact that scientific capability to use models to compute (but not to actually measure) energy change has progressively and vastly improved from 1960 through 2019, including a massive increase in temperature measurement areal resolution of each of the ocean, land, ice, atmosphere and TOA parameters plotted in the graph via implementation of land-based temperature measuring station networks (e.g., USCRN), the ARGO float-based ocean temperature profiling system, and the use of orbiting satellites with high accuracy remote radiation (temperature)-sensing instruments. Why is that?
[Note that one can easily and logically conclude that your hockey-stick graph thus reflects only better computations of energy change happening over time, but nothing that is an actual physical effect.]
5) Given the facts of Item 4, how in the world it is possible for anyone to believe that, as plotted, the band of energy change “uncertainty” in 1965 was less than the energy change uncertainty plotted for the years 2005-2019? Why is that?
6) The graph starts at 1960, thereby excluding the period of 1940-1959 where “unadjusted’ temperature measurements at those times showed a pause/decline in global atmospheric temperatures, which actually extended through 1975. Why is that?
Now, you were paraphrasing something about blindness and stupidity . . .
If in your opinion the change in thermal energy content of the oceans surfaces is negligle and that even if it wasn’t, any change would have a minimal impact on atmosphere energy content (without breaking the laws of Physics), then don’t mistake your opinion for facts and leave it at that. Post some evidence to support your opinion.
Your fundamental mistake is your strawman statement about my opinion . . . I never stated or implied “thermal energy content of the oceans surfaces is negligle (sic)“.
Want to try a second attempt at deflecting my questions to you?
Your fundamental mistake is that you think I am going to engage in a debate with you about your opinions and not the evidence.
Loydo,
Your fundamental mistake is assuming that the scientists posting here are going to take you seriously.
loy d’oh… We know full well you will never present any evidence. !
Loydo, you were presented with evidence regarding using the Cp of the ocean to try to calculate temperature changes. That is not opinion.
Show that you know something and discuss whether Gordon’s point #1 was valid.
Well, if ‘evidence’ is what you’re all about, the provide some empirical evidence for the notion that atmospheric CO2 drives the Earth’s temperature. And explain all the historic climate data that says it didn’t and couldn’t.
“Post some evidence to support your opinion”
Like you never do !
Which “laws of physics” do you claim would be broken?
Tiny fractions of a degree.
And since CO2 cannot warm the oceans, it has to be the sun
Also, please indicate how these teeny tiny values were measured in 1970, when there were basically no measurements for most of the worlds oceans.
“no formal difference between willful blindness and stupidity.”
Yep, you exhibit both, in droves. !
We could of course look at that in more historic terms, using proxies.
See that little red squiggle at the end..
You need to correct that exhibit – should read “This bit SUPPOSEDLY caused by human CO2”
How about “If the various areas specified by the Koppen climate classification are changing by more than twice any previous natural rate in the recent geological past, then unnatural climate change is possible”. Of course this is not the case, so I for one am a denier.
Sorry, Peterg, I have heartburn (and resulting gas) upon seeing the somewhat ambiguous terms: “various areas”, “any previous”, “natural rate”, “recent geological past”, “unnatural” and “possible”.
In particular, “possible” includes a range of probabilities of, oh let’s say, .000000001 to 0.999999999.
Peterg
The Koppen climate classification speaks of 30 climate zones and sub-zones. Do we know enough to say how weather conditions in one zone influences that in the adjacent zones and even those further afield? I think not. If not how can we then know how the climate in one impacts on others? When do climate changes make an area more livable and when are changes likely to make it more inhabitable? Trying to engineer the ideal climate for each zone is a fool’s errand when we cannot describe the ideal for each zone. I never hear alarmists discussing these important aspects of climate.
When it was 2 to 3°C warmer than today only 5000yrs ago Koppen Climate zones were many hundreds of km shifted from the recent past.
Here is proof that this was so and is a classic observation that falsifies alarmist science. To build a hypothesis of disaster on 2°C+ above 1850 (we are half way there already!), knowing we have been ~4C above 1850 5000 years ago, and humans could not have been responsible, it a dishonest thing to have been done! Q.E.D.
Outside of Tuktyaktuk on Canada’s far NW Arctic coast ~100km N of the present treeline and another couple of 100km N of where trees of this this size (same species), White Spruce live today.
I’ve shown this photo to a number of CAGW believers, and, without exception, they go silent.
I showed this picture to my 12yr old grandson and he arrived at the correct conclusion of its significance. I believe this kind of evidence is the key to bringing understanding to those who are not scientists that alarmists are wrong!
This kind of evidence abounds, but for some reason sceptics seem more inclined to let the consensus folk define the rules of engagement. Ancient trees like this can be found around the global tundra. There is even a living pine in N Sweden with a continuous tree ring record 9500yrs old!
https://www.boredpanda.com/worlds-oldest-tree-old-tjikko-sweden/?utm_source=duckduckgo&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic
Dark Side dendroclimatologists hate these trees and even the science would rather do voodoo statistics on the thicknesses of tree rings (that don’t just depend on temperatures). Does Michael Mann even acknowledge the existence of these trees?
There is even a wave formed sand beach with 5k -8k yr old driftwood on the N coast of Greenland, which has been ice locked for several thousand years. It obviously formed during the Holocene Optimum when much of the Arctic was ice free.
And what about the dispute over the existence of the Medieval Warm Period. Well, we can settle this here and now. A retreating glacier on Mt Garibaldi, British Columbia today reveals an ice buried forest dated at 1000yrs ago!
Then there is recorded history. Hannibal invaded Rome by crossing the Alps with elephants – a feat not possible today. Etc. etc. A nice book using such compelling stuff easily interpretable without scientific knowledge would do the trick.
One of my very favorite books.
Not true.
Climate change is a prediction of a coming global warming crisis.
The cause is claimed to be CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels.
The specifics are claimed to be +3.1 degrees C. ECS,,
with a range of +2.1 to +4.7 degrees C. per CO2 doubling
I would say that definition of “climate change” is clear.
But:
There is no evidence humans can predict the climate
There is no evidence CO2 emissions will cause a global warming crisis
And the ECS range does not match observations,
even if you cherry pick 1975 to 2020 for analysis,’
(CO2 emissions did not begin in 1975).
You posted: “Climate change is a prediction of a coming global warming crisis.”
So many people here at WUWT—and indeed, around the world—will breathe a great sigh of relief to know that “climate change” IS NOT something happening right now, but instead is something to be forevermore relegated to future, day after day after day.
BTW, you also stated: “The specifics are claimed to be +3.1 degrees C. ECS,,
with a range of +2.1 to +4.7 degrees C. per CO2 doubling
I would say that definition of “climate change” is clear.”
So many people around the planet will be likewise be happy to know that “climate change” only involves temperature change as a function of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Hence, no more worries about:
— flooding or droughts being due to climate change
— forest fires being due to climate change
— ocean pH shifts and coral bleaching due to climate change
— too many insects (pests) or too few insects (species extinction) due to climate change
— too much wind (claimed increase in storms of all types) or too little wind (for windmill power farms to be reliable) due to climate change
— the existential threat posed by climate change right now
/sarc off
Clear as mud.
And did I fail to mention no more worries about:
— climate change related to AMO, PDO and other ocean/atmosphere interactions
— climate change related to variable volcanic activity (and associated greenhouse gas and particulate/aerosol emissions) on planet Earth
— climate change related to the Sun’s longer term (>30 year periods) sunspot/luminosity cycles known as “Gleissberg”, “deVries”, “Eddy”, “Bray” (formerly “Hallstatt”), and “Sanchez-Sema”
— climate change related to variability in Earth’s geomagnetic field and how such, in turn, affects cloud formation in Earth’s atmosphere (theory, with supporting evidence, put forward and advanced predominately by Henrik Svensmark)
— climate change related to Dansgaard-Oeschger events (~ 1500 year interval)
— climate change related to the five major Milankovitch cycles of Earth’s ephemeris with respect to the Sun
How careless of me.
Another fundamental problem with climate change is that it is always founded on a mythical “average” of measured temperatures in a specific sliver of Earth’s atmosphere,excluding 99.99995% of Earth’s total atmosphere, and comparing it to another average that was poorly and sparsly measured in the past. On top of that, we are supposed to infer causes for any changes without understanding the causes of past changes. It’s like trying to establish the average compass direction that cars drive in, then claiming to know a cause, and then comparing it to a supposed average direction that horse drawn vehicles traveled 100 years ago, then claiming to know the average direction vehicles of the future will travel 100 years from now. Useless and silly beyond reason.
Until we decide to track actual daily highs and lows separately and locally, we aren’t tracking anything real. It’s no more meaningful than tracking the average length of a piece of rope.
Or one’s average body temperature with feet in a block of ice and head in a hot oven…
This is actually by design. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” For the Climate Believers, every day is Alice in Wonderland Day.
Gordon,
I believe the problem lies in the deceitful misuse of language. Strictly speaking, a word without a context does not have a meaning. A dictionary does not give us the meaning but only a list of the most frequent ways a word is used. One of these may fit the context where we read or hear a word or perhaps none – we usually work out the meaning using the context.
Consider the use of climate and change in the following sentences:
The climate scientist has change in his pocket.
He is outspoken on the threat of climate change.
• The word pocket indicates that change refers to coins.
• In the second sentence climate qualifies change, which is believed to be a threat and agitates certain people. This is insufficient to tell us what the phrase, climate change, means.
• The first sentence – about the same person – does not help by describing the subject as a climate scientist. A biologist will study a particular science, biology, and then focus on one area. However, various sciences are needed with each examining a different aspect of climate. The best a climate scientist can hope is to be a jack of all trades but master of none. He does not have the expertise to address the scientific concerns coming from each. Describing him as a climate scientist is as misleading as the phrase climate change.
When we read article after article, where the context does not give us an unanimous indication of what is meant by climate change or refer to a clear definition, I wonder if this is not deliberate. Perhaps they cannot or will not because it may be used to undermine their arguments.
Climate alarmists are disingenuous in their use of language. They love adjectives and emotive language. If I were to use language the way they do in any other discipline, I would be roundly criticized.
Thank you and I hope this language discussion may be helpful. I believe it relevant and necessary as we strive to refute climate alarmism. We need to counter both their scientific flaws and misuse of language.
Another gross misuse of language – every time I hear reference to “NORMAL” temperatures, when all that really refers to is some relatively arbitrary 30-year period AVERAGE.
Using the word “normal” invites the suggestion that any departure is, by definition, “abnormal.” Pure nonsense, since the AVERAGE temperature they are talking about is little more than a midpoint of extremes.
Perhaps one of the worst is the description “extreme weather.” High or low temperatures, drought or floods, a hurricane or windless day all describe different weather conditions. Why does it suddenly become extreme only when I feel I cannot cope with this weather?
“Climate Science” is perhaps the only field of inquiry that fails all three of testable, refutable and duplicable.
But it passes Duplicitous
Add in when the data does not fit, adjust the data, not the hypothesis.
Or simply exclude it. Or ignore it.
They are specialists at all three.
CliSciFi
And is therefore…NOT SCIENCE.
Unfortunately, the falsifiability criteria is no long accepted. Aside from its overtones of tautology, there are branches of science to which it does not apply, particularly in their farther reaches. Experimentation is not always possible, and data-crunching wedded to statistical analysis now rules the day. Moreover many will claim CAGW is happening scientific or not, with essentially a faith-based belief. Obviously, warmers don’t play with a full deck. One does not need to be a philosopher of science to see that there’s nothing much to a theory that takes its own anomalies as evidence.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. As one who has a lot of training in statistical analysis, I have a very deep distrust of it. If you can’t clearly see it in a proper plot of the data, or a simple derivative, after detrending, it probably isn’t there. More advanced techniques (and I’m looking at you EOF’s!), are probably BS.
As time goes on, I’m less confident in P-values as well, they are too easily manipulated.
True — but that’s what passes for science now. There really is no gold standard for scientificity. The famous demarcation is elusive. As Habermas says, ‘The borders of truth are movable.’ No one has a sense of immediate political agency anymore, so people believe in CAGW out of primitive salvific longing.
EOF’s? “End Of File” marker?
It is a fancy name for principal components analysis or PCA, it stands for “empirical orthogonal functions,” with the emphasis on “empirical.” It was the methodology behind Mann’s hockey stick.
See here for more details: Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) Analysis and Rotated EOF Analysis | NCAR – Climate Data Guide (ucar.edu)
Thank you. That was my question, as well.
Now I wish we had left it at End Of File.
Tony, I wish it could be left at end-of-file as well.
Lies, damned lies and statistics.
That’s one hockey stick that should have remained a tree.
I don’t think the problem is statistics per se, Andy, but how they’re used and understood. An extraordinary number of scientists don’t understand probability and, as you rightly say abuse p-values and R-squared, especially. This is a serious problem in today’s academic world across many disciplines, but particularly climate.
One point I always raise — and to date not a single person has been able to address it, including very senior climate scientists — is why predictions based on climate models NEVER show any form of confidence interval.
I then point out that any model of a non-deterministic system, such as climate, with so many variables — many of which are co-linear — inherently means the confidence intervals would be zero.
Despite this, we still see climate predictions looking years into the future quoted to absurd levels of accuracy, with no confidence interval ever provided. This isn’t science.
I would like someone — you perhaps — to challenge the academic statistical community as to why they never raise this fundamental issue when it comes to climate science. Maybe they’re too afraid of losing their jobs. Whatever the reason, this is a very sad reflection on today’s standards of academic research.
You are quite correct and explain it well. Unfortunately, explaining that the statistical reasoning is nonsense is not as exciting as using statistics to show we are all going to die from human-caused climate change.
We can only count on the fact that “truth will out.”
Figures don’t lie but liars figure. – Mark Twain
Yes, I still like Shakespeare.
“…why [climate] predictions based on climate models NEVER show any form of confidence interval.’
That’s because they have almost no verification on independent data and therefore their accuracy is completely unknown. Backtesting can not give a reliable confidence interval. Sophisticated climate models first emerged in the 1970s. That’s less than 50 years. A standard climate interval is 30 years so we effectively have less than 2 verification cases. Combine that with ever changing data quality, many complete unknowns, and rapidly changing computing power and you have a chaotic, unknown spaghetti mess. Weather forecasts, by contrast, have millions of verification cases and the error bars are almost perfectly understood.
The best weather forecast models get the most attention.
The best climate model, meaning the Russian INM model that
over predicts global warming by less than all other models,
gets almost no attention — it’s averaged with dozens of other models
by CMIP. Lost in the mix. Does that sound like science to anyone?
The climate computer games are not intended for accurate predictions.
They are intended as a prop to back up scary climate predictions.
A tool to increase climate fear
That is exactly what they are used for, and they work for that purpose.
The scientists here who are critical of the computer games
are making the wrong assumption on what they are really intended for.
They are intended for politics, not science.
…and the 30-year “standard climate interval” is totally meaningless, since it is far too short. Lots of climate forces operate on much longer, differing and unrelated time scales, which makes the 30-year period akin to attempting to analyze the content of a movie based on what can be observed from a single frame.
That is why you will never see a reputable statistician as author on any of these CliSciFi papers.The alarmists don’t want to be reined in from their flights of fancy.
“predictions based on climate models”
You’ve got this backwards.
Predictions of climate doom began about 20 years before GCM computer games.
The computer games were programmed to MATCH the predictions.
Confusers “predict” whatever they are programmed to predict.
Since all the computer game predictions / projections / simulations are wrong,
and have become less accurate over the past 40 years, they are not real science, and have no value at all, except to waste the taxpayers’ money.
As the saying goes, “Computers are very stupid machines – they do EXACTLY what you tell them to do.”
And what you tell them to do is stupid, invalid, wrong, baseless, etc., you have a microcosm for…climate “models.”
I spent my whole first career (31 years) forecasting things in the telephone company. Calls, length of calls, equipment, people, budgets, sales, etc. I’ve tried all kinds of regressions, time series analysis, and statistics.
The one thing I learned was that when you take that first step into the future you are treading into an area where things you never thought of occur. Forcasts get less and less accurate the further you go into the future. Why do all the models turn into linear equations as you go into the future? Averages and the loss of cyclical behavior! Is it any wonder they have never been accurate?
Climate and weather is cyclical. From sunrise/sunset, seasons, tides, AMO, PDO, ENSO, glaciations. When was the last time you saw a trig function for any of these? These cycles slide around sometimes coinciding constructively and sometimes destructively. Peaks and valleys. If climate science ever wants to become “science” these cyclical behaviors will need to be modeled correctly using trig functions instead of simple averages of temperature, rainfall, clouds, etc. Ask yourself this, can any of the GCM models predict the what the parameters will be when the start of the next glaciation occurs? Or, do they just forecast a 4C rise per century ad infinitum?
It really bugs me when AGW adherents use the logical argument supported by “averages” that “if temps are rising and CO2 is rising, then they must be connected”. They can even show graphs where scaling is used show how they coincide. What a joke! Linear regressions on time series do not prove causation at all! EVER! Basic statistics rely on the data having pretty constant parameters. When another location or time has vastly different distributions, statistics, especially means, fail to capture what is occuring.
The only ‘linear regression’ that matters is when “x” predicts “y” and the result can be modeled with a line. Then you can say that “x” causes “y”. Because of all the cycles in global climate, I seriously doubt that there will be a simple “x” that predicts a simple “y”.
That should be a permanent fixture on the blackboard of every science class, until the “fantasy world” modeler becomes a quaint historical reference to how primitive “climate science” was before it finally advanced into something remotely scientific.
Climate change is predictions (of climate doom), not reality.
There are no data for the future.
How can one do a statistical analysis when there are no data?
This couldn’t be more true. Using statistics to forecast what will occur in the future is a fool’s errand.
As I like to say it, “We have too little information of too poor a quality over too short a period of time to say anything reasonably ‘scientific’ about what is happening to the ‘climate’ and where things are headed in the future.”
“Complex climate models, as predictive tools for many variables and scales, cannot be meaningfully calibrated because they are simulating a never before experienced state of the system; the problem is one of extrapolation. It is therefore inappropriate to apply any of the currently available generic techniques which utilize observations to calibrate or weight models to produce forecast probabilities for the real world.”
Stainforth et al ‘Confidence, uncertainty and decision-support relevance in climate predictions’ Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2007) 365, 2145-2161
One of the other authors was Myles Allen latterly an IPCC Lead Author
Agree.
But being a Stand Up Philosopher helps
“Unfortunately, the falsifiability criteria is no [longer] accepted.”
Unaccepted does not make falsifiability wrong. Knowing in science requires a unique answer. Falsifiability is immediately entrained.
“data-crunching wedded to statistical analysis now rules the day.”
Just don’t call it science.
Face facts. It simply won’t do to just stamp your
foot and say “This is science — that is not!” There’s true and there’s false and I know the difference and you don’t! Arguing about whether or not CAGW is scientifically true is simply no longer the point. Action cannot be coerced at the point of a truth gun, it must be negotiated. There is no supreme court of science.
Science isn’t the end result, truth or falsehood, it is the process of discovering the truth, or least as close to it as possible at the time.
What science IS is endlessly debatable — evolving — self-correcting (i.e. always wrong) whatever. More to the point, what science is taken to be is whatever the dominant political power at the time wants it to be.
Just like Ike warned the US in his farewell address, before I was born – this is the consequences of government being the source of funds for greater and greater portions of scientific inquiry.
“What science IS is endlessly debatable…”
No, it’s not. Science is falsifiable theory and mortally dangerous experimental test.
It’s been that way since Thales of Miletus.
The method never finds the true but it efficiently weeds out the false.
The sun is blue 😉
Within a rather large confidence interval.
There is no CAGW
There may be some AGW.
But CAGW does not exist.
That is reality.
Reality can not be negotiated.
I hereby stamp my foot.
And declare that you are a dingbat.
Which is also reality.
Your naive foot-stamping conception of ‘reality’ does no good. People don’t want reality — they want happiness and salvation, neither of which exist in reality, only in the mind.
Reality imposes itself no matter what people want.
I don’t know a single person who denies that CAGW is scientifically true. The fundamental question is to what extent this is driving climate change and therefore the extent to which it should be addressed. This is where the pseudoscience comes in, with absurd claims made on the back of models predicting future scenarios that are no more reliable than if you tossed dice to get an answer. Yet results from these models are taken as gospel, which is about as far from proper science as it’s possible to get.
MarkW2 I introduce myself. My name is mkelly.
I hereby deny that CAWG is scientifically true.
There now you “know” one.
Count me in too. You first sentence is rubbish MarkW2, the rest is reasonable, why fight yourself?
You’re being far too kind. The claims of so-called “climate science” are no more reliable than blindfolded, dart-throwing monkeys.
Congratulations on doing exactly what you decried. Stamping your feet and declaiming.
Science is a well-established methodology: theory and result.
The only way to know something, is if physical theory provides a unique answer.
The only way to know an explanation from theory is wrong is if it is contradicted by experiment or observation.
A physical theory can be proved wrong only if it predicts a unique result. Unique results are testable. Guess the one-word description of that condition. Hint: it starts with falsifi and ends with ability.
Neither computer numerology nor statistics achieve that state. They’re not science.
Feynman on science. And on the Social Sciences — your field?
Karl Popper got his falsifiability criterion from Einstein, who wrote that if the redshift due to the gavitational potential did not exist, then general relativity would be wrong.
Falsifiability is not philosophy. It’s how science has worked from the beginning.
Negotiated action is politics. Not science.
As to AGW — no one knows what they’re talking about. And that’s the clear verdict of science.
Nothing a leftist claims can ever be falsified, except
for the purpose of moving further left.
Claims will not be debated.
Unless you consider character attacks to be debate.
Contrary information will be censored or “revised”.
Contrary people will be cancelled.
Welcome to fascism !
Good work, Andy.
Two general observations in this vein:
The IPCC was created in 1988 and the two C’s stand for Climate Change.
I understand the shift in popular usage, but it wasn’t “invented” to cover the change.
And prior to that was the UNFCCC.
I might be misremembering… But I think IPCC’s original charter was to look exclusively for anthropogenic causes of climate change.
You did not ‘misremember’. It explicitly was exactly that biased charter. Read the UNFCC founding charter. It is there.
Mmm and looking for anthropogenic causes of topsoil loss, well that would be biased too right.
Absolutely nothing to do with CO2 though… is it. !
Looking only for anthropogenic causes is certainly biased.
Hey we haven’t heard from you in ages.
Then why are they not doing anything about that? Oh! Right no money in that
That is true. But to appear more scientific, the IPCC waited until 1995
to arbitrarily dismiss all natural causes of climate change as unimportant noise.
After 8 years of intensive research, the IPCC decided that if they eliminated all
natural causes of climate change, almost all climate change could be blamed
on humans. Which made climate “science” simple.
Every IPCC report says the same thing:
— Assuming global warming is man made and dangerous,
we predict future global warming will be man made and dangerous.
Of course that is circular reasoning, but no one at the IPCC noticed.
The Intergovernmental Propaganda on Climate Control.
A more accurate and honest meaning for the IPCC abbreviation.
Okay Istvan, let me learn you some real science.
A tipping point of 2.0 or 1.5 is baloney
Real science requires at least three decimal places,
and four decimal places is even better !
So I don’t believe +1.5 or +2.0.
But if they claimed the tipping point was +1.874 degrees C,
I would sit up and listen. Pack my belongings, sell my home,
and move from Michigan to Alaska, to get away from that
global warming boogeyman. But +2.0 with one decimal place
causes no fear — that number is just a pile of baloney.
I happen to know the proper definition of tipping point:
That is when Moderator Charles Rotten has has too much whiskey,
sitting in his office chair, a bar stool at a seedy bar down by the docks,
and falls off the chair. That is what tipping point really means.
I’m not sure how it applies to climate science.
By the way, “climate change” is so 1988, with the IPCC.
The current tern is climate emergency.
There is a contest for a scarier name to replace
climate emergency in 2023. The Climate Howlers
are really excited about the contest.
“It used to be called catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW).”
Now it’s Computer Aided Global Warming.
Consensus climatology is not only non-science, it’s not even scholarship.
AGW climatology is a subjectivist narrartive that assumes what it ought to demonstrate. It’s culture studies decorated with mathematics.
First of all, Climate Change is of course a real, natural, and constantly occurring process. One really needs to separate real Climate Change from the religion of “man-made CO2 driven climate change” or “Catastrophic Climate Change” if they want to be taken seriously.
Once you make certain that people know the difference, it is fairly obvious that the claims made by climate activists are mostly lies, exaggerations, or just plain wrong.
The trouble is that “Catastrophic Climate Change” is a religion, not a science. Good luck arguing logic against faith.
Robert,
Thanks for mentioning this. “Climate Change” does not equal “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change.” This was a topic of discussion when working on this op-ed. You might notice that I make that point in the original “Facts and Theories” essay linked in the post. However, the public has been indoctrinated to believe the two phrases are equal and synonymous. Thus, we see the result of this misinformation in the final op-ed, which draws no such distinction.
“Catastrophic” is a purely subjective term and therefore cannot be scientific. What units are used to measure catastrophe anyway?
We can’t use Hiroshimas or Olympic Swimming Pools as units, can we? But I do suggest that however it is measured, it should be call the “Mann” in honor of the greatest Climate Alarmist ever.
Exactly right.
The coming climate change crisis belief
was not created with facts, data and logic,
so can not be refuted with facts, data and logic.
Good point. Imagine the U.S. Supreme Court holding the executive branch imposition of climate doctrine, through its regulatory powers granted by Congress, as a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
Critical Race Theory is a “forced perspective” investigation into life and culture.
It’s windy today, HOW MIGHT RACE be responsible?
The waiter at lunch only refilled my water once even though I was thirsty, HOW MIGHT RACE be responsible?
I ate too much fast food and I gained weight, HOW MIGHT RACE be responsible?
A great example of this is the 1619 Project, a “forced perspective” retelling of American history.
The other place where “forced perspective” is often used is in photography and art. With the right forced perspective, we can pinch the sun or the moon or the Eiffel Tower between our fingers like superhumans. We can squash tiny Lilliputians under our foot like Gulliver. Something that is very unrealistic appears to be true (with photographic evidence!)
Climate Change is just a “forced perspective” view of the earth and weather that surrounds us, and is no more realistic than a camera trick that we are all amused by but know isn’t actually true.
And then there’s the ubiquitous lament of the ‘entitlement voters’ –
“I’m dumb, fat, ugly and unemployed. What’s the gubmint gonna do about it?”
I saved that comment! Now to find a picture to go with it.
When this all started in 1988, I believe it was approached scientifically to see if it might be true. At least that was my impression. Since then, real science has refuted the catastrophic claims and science was jettisoned, being replaced by pseudo-science and what appears to be religious dogma.
Appears??????
I think you are being more than a bit naive. The UN IPCC charter plainly stated it was established to examine the human influence on climate, not “climate change” from any cause. The “game” was rigged from Day 1.
And the US government “hearings” where the AGW propaganda was kicked off in that year were pure theater. They cynically chose the date that is historically the hottest day of the year in Washington DC, turned off A/C to the meeting room where the hearing was held and opened the windows to let the hot sticky summer air in, so that everyone sitting there listening to “trains of death Hanson” bleat about “gobal warming” would be mopping their brows of perspiration.
Approached scientifically?! NOT!
Climate is always changing, and always has been. The debate slipped from global warming caused by human emissions of CO2, to climate change when the warming stopped. Now we are called ‘climate change deniers’. Nothing could be further from the truth. I (we) debate whether CO2 can cause climate change of any kind. One CO2 molecule per 2400 non-CO2 molecules is merely a trace. That’s why it’s called a ‘TRACE’ gas.
This isn’t the tail wagging the dog, it is the louse on the end of a flea on the end of the tail wagging the dog and the tail and the flea.
It is frankly beyond belief that so many people have been hornswaggled into believing this preposterous proposition.
The funny part is that that trace gas is why life is on earth. All life on earth is carbon based, all that carbon comes from CO2. We don’t have excess CO2 in the atmosphere we have a lack of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Even funnier – plants emit over 10 times the CO2 of human activities:
Plants use photosynthesis to capture carbon dioxide and then release half of it into the atmosphere through respiration. Plants also release oxygen into the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
Professor Owen Atkin from ANU said the study revealed that the release of carbon dioxide by plant respiration around the world is up to 30 per cent higher than previously predicted.
He said the carbon dioxide released by plants every year was now estimated to be about 10 to 11 times the emissions from human activities, rather than the previous estimate of five to eight times.
Plants release more carbon dioxide into atmosphere than expected – ANU
If humans stopped emitting ALL Co2, even by breathing, the earth would not even notice.
“If humans stopped emitting ALL Co2, even by breathing, the earth would not even notice.”
Sorry Shotsky, but your claim has long been known to be wildly incorrect.
The part your sources have left out is that, although nature emits lots of CO2 into the air, nature also takes all the CO2 that it puts into the air right back out again. In contrast, humans put CO2 into the air but take essentially none of it back out again.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are currently rising at a rate over 100 times faster than at any time in millions of years. Human emissions are the sole reason.
These are well established scientific facts. Sorry that you were not aware of them.
Get on your meds dude. Sole reason indeed 😉
Sorry to see that you are unable to accept well established scientific fact, Derg.
We are waiting for you to provide evidence
Your so-called facts are scientifically unsupportable.
You obviously don’t understand the carbon cycle.
You obviously don’t understand any atmospheric physics or heat transfer physics.
It all just you regurgitating the same old FAILED mantra.
What part of “atmospheric CO2 levels are currently rising at a rate over 100 times faster than any naturally occurring increase in millions of years” are you unable to comprehend? There’s no natural event occurring now that could possibly make that rate of increase happen. It is completely due to human emissions.
And by the way, elsewhere in my comments here I provided a reference to the supporting research data published in the scientific literature. But did you bother to investigate it? No, of course not. You sadly prefer to continue living in a world of complete and utter anti-science delusion. That’s what WUWT does to people.
Lol
Established by what?! You have those measurements of all CO2 sources and sinks? Didn’t think so.
It’s all crap-for-“data” proxies compared to current instrument measurements and declaring that everything was in “balance” before we discovered coal,oil and gas.
The only current apples-to-apples comparison there is is current Mauna Loa CO2 measurements starting in the 50s compared with measured temperatures since the same time.
During which time, while CO2 levels have been rising all along, temperatures have been falling, then rising, then about flat. And the temperature changes precede the CO2 level changes, so CO2 clearly doesn’t “drive” Jack Shit.
Well established propaganda maybe; certainly not “facts.”
Yet another ignorant regurgitation of the tired old excuse that “historic temperature changes preceded CO2 level changes”.
Yes, historic temperature increases drove CO2 increases … which then drove more temperature increases.
Your “argument” is as silly as claiming that it is not gasoline that makes a car go, it is the act of closing the car door, because closing the car door occurs prior to the car starting to move.
Pure stupidity on tragically ignorant parade. But that’s what WUWT does to people.
Even funnier – plants emit over 10 times the CO2 of human activities:
Nonsense.
While most plants release oxygen during the day as part of photosynthesis, small amounts of carbon dioxide are emitted both day and night as a by-product of cellular respiration, The majority of plants also absorb carbon dioxide during the day for photosynthesis, and do so in greater amounts than what is released for cellular respiration.
“Human emissions are the sole reason.”
Again, just unmitigated anti-science.
What real science shows is that humans have been responsible for some 15% of the highly beneficial rise in atmospheric plant food.. that is greening the world. !
Sorry, b.nice, but it is not “just unmitigated anti-science”. It is indisputable scientific *fact*. There is no natural cause that has made CO2 levels in the air suddenly increase 100 times faster than at any time in millions of years.
Here’s what the published scientific research says on this matter:
An Accounting of the Observed Increase in Oceanic and Atmospheric CO2
Tans Oceanography 2009
“the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is 100% due to human activities, and is dominated by fossil fuel burning”
Rinse and repeat a lie
Sure, Derg, every major scientific organization in the entire world is “lying”. Merely because you say so.
Maybe try having an objective look at the evidence. It is beyond any rational doubt that the recent rapid increase of CO2 in the air, over 100 times faster than any natural increase in millions of years, is entirely due to human emissions.
Pretending otherwise is nothing but head in the sand foolishness.
MCG you provide no evidence for your absurd statements about human related CO2. Recent decreases in industrialization-related CO2 during covid in 2020-21 have not shown up in the accepted records such as Mauna Loa. Therefore the natural variation in CO2 has swamped any human related emissions, which are according to many physical measurements much less than 10% of total emissions from warming oceans and land/ plant sources.
Thus CAGW is a myth, we are not responsible for or in control of atmospheric CO2!
Bob, you sadly confuse short term variation with long term trend and thus arrive at completely false “conclusions”.
For starters, human emissions decrease during covid were not that much, only about 5%. But year to year variations in the CO2 rise rate are much, much larger than that. So that temporary emissions decrease could easily be lost in short term noise.
But over the long term, there is zero doubt that human emissions are 100% responsible for the CO2 increase. In fact, it is easily proven that nature has been taking more CO2 OUT of the air than it has been putting into the air, for many decades now.
Humans put over 30 gigatons CO2 into the air every year, but the amount of CO2 in the air increases by less than 20 gigatons per year. These are both easily verified facts. Where’s that missing CO2 going? Nature is taking it out of the air.
It would be obvious even to a grade school child that nature cannot possibly be causing an increase of CO2 in the air when nature takes more CO2 out of the air than it puts into the air. But then why is this so difficult for you to understand?
Bob Close says:
“MCG you provide no evidence for your absurd statements about human related CO2”
Seriously: what is wrong with you intentionally ignorant WUWT cultists?
A direct reference to published research in the scientific literature was provided, which easily demonstrates that the CO2 increase in the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is 100% due to human emissions.
Science really is an anathema to you isn’t it MGC.
You know nothing about science, that is becoming more and more obvious.
All you have a re baseless appeals to propaganda units
Actual real science shows that humans have contributed some 15% to the highly beneficial rise in atmospheric plant food.
That rise is what helps sustains all life on Earth, allowing for ever increasing crop yields, and helping cause large amounts of greening around the world,
Don’t be scared of it.
Yet another typical WUWT “Nuh uh because I say so”.
Sorry, but the real science, published in the scientific research literature, clearly demonstrates that human emissions are responsible for ALL of the CO2 increase since the Industrial Revolution. ALL of it.
In fact, nature is actually taking more CO2 out of the air than it is putting into the air. Another easily verified fact. Thus nature cannot possibly be the cause of the CO2 increase.
Since climate is defined as 30 years of weather in a given location, in order to change the climate, CO2 must first change the weather in a given location.
No one has ever shown how an increase or decrease in a trace atmospheric radiative gas in a non linear coupled dynamic system can do this. It is impossible to predict the weather precisely and for any extended period of time.
Nonsense.
It has been shown since the late 1800s that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
Adding a greenhouse gas to the atmosphere will impede Earths ability
to cool itself by some unknown amount.
The weather in the Northern Hemisphere is milder than 50 years ago
as a result of global warming that most affected the Arctic and
least affected the tropics.
The smaller temperature differential
between the Equator and the North Pole
has resulted in milder weather
in the Northern Hemisphere.
We have enjoyed the milder winters, with much less snow,
here in Southeastern Michigan where I live.
In a free convective atmosphere, adding a trace amoiunt of CO2 does not impede the Earth’s ability to cool.
Enjoy the mild winters while you can! The AMO is turning down. Brrrrr is on the way.
Wrong.. CO2 is a radiative active gas.
Greenhouse gas is a total misnomer.
Adding radiatively active gas to an radiative active atmosphere, if anything, lowers the energy impedance.
You make several errors.
There is no debate — the Climate Howlers don’t debate.
The name change from global warming to climate change
allows a wider range of scaremongering, nothing more
Whatever words are used, they all mean CAGW.
CO2 is a trace gas but the first 100ppm is a very strong greenhouse gas.
An increase of CO2 from 400 to 500ppm should cause a small reduction
in earth’s ability to cool itself.
If you debate whether CO2 can cause climate change at all,
then you will not help our effort to refute the Climate Howlers.
There is a greenhouse effect.
CO2 is part of it.
If you deny those facts, then you ARE a climate science denier.
The real argument is over the effects of CO2 enrichment.
I believe the effects have been good news, based on climate change
in the past 50 years. Predictions of climate doom ignore the
climate change in the past 50 years
— they are for global warming
2x or 3x faster than in the past.
That is not science.
That”s climate astrology.
When did this ‘name change’ occur? The IPCC was established in the late 1980s. Guess what the CC stands for. That’s some pretty far sighted name changing.
CC stands for what ever the climate does… naturally.!
Where did global warming come from 😉
Disingenuous much? you know darn well that they used global warming in all the press releases until it they found that it didn’t scare people enough to want to destroy their economies
Richard if what you say is true then thermodynamics is wrong. Specific heat tables only show one value for energy requirements for dry air or CO2. If infrared interacting with CO2 caused warming the another column would be needed to account for IR.
The Shomate equation would have to account for IR if CO2 involve.
When last I checked the NIST data sheet for CO2 said nothing about its ability to warm.
“It is frankly beyond belief that so many people have been hornswaggled into believing this preposterous proposition.”
Including “scientists” who are supposed to be objective, and are supposed to question such claims.
Yes Tom, but most of them are afraid of losing their jobs if they question CAGW, at CSIRO they have a to submit any queries to management before they can comment publicly, if at all. Very Sad, like Peter Ridd one of our hero’s.
Good point. Something to keep in mind.
Andy,
Thought provoking, as usual. Here’s where I’m struggling a bit with Popper; If ‘Climate Change’ is set up as the hypothesis, would Popper say it’s unscientific because none of the meteorological events given in support of the hypothesis can falsify it, or is it because of the inconsistency of the events themselves, e.g., wet / dry, hot / cold, etc.? Along this line of query, would ‘CAGW’ be more scientific because some events, e.g., colder / wetter could at least be considered to falsify the hypothesis? Finally, as someone who is skeptical of all the Alarmists’ nonsense, I think the real issue is that by somehow having managed to make ‘Climate Change’ the null hypothesis, the Alarmists have put the burden of disproving this hypothesis on the general population.
The PR experts, working for the Alarmists, have successfully made “Climate Change” = “Human-caused climate change.”
This is a strength, unless one realizes that if any weather event, hot, cold, flood or drought is evidence of climate change or human-caused climate change, it makes climate science equal to astrology. Then we have problems.
As I say in my original essay, “Facts and Theories,” human-caused climate change is a proper scientific hypothesis, it can be falsified. That is probably why the PR guys said, you need to change the argument to be about “Climate Change.” An assertion that cannot be falsified.
The hypothesis CAGW fails because it does not explain past observations and it has made no accurate forecasts. Therefore it is a failed hypothesis.
Sorry to be so blunt, Ed, but what fairy tale dreamworld are you living in?
“made no accurate forecasts” ?? Oh please. Your claim is an embarrassment of ignorance. The facts are exactly the opposite.
Pray tell us what these accurate forecasts are.
RUBBISH yet again
Not one of many “predictions” has ever come true.
Climate models are manifestly way too warm, they even say so themselves
You are again totally devoid of anything resembling actual science or evidence. A massive fail.
“Not one of many ‘predictions’ has ever come true. Climate models are manifestly way too warm, they even say so themselves.”
How tragic it is to see so many willfully ignorant rubes totally blinded by the lying propaganda spoon fed to them by WUWT.
Here’s just one piece of evidence from NASA that rips your lamentable screed of ignorance to shreds, b.nice:
Study Confirms Climate Models are Getting Future Warming Projections Right
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/
Lol…50% of time 😉
You and your dogma.
An ensemble mean to span a range. Nice. The models have demonstrated no skill to hindcast, let alone to forecast, climate change, or even warming, at local, regional, and certainly not the meaningless global statistic, which underlies the anthropogenic attribution claim/assertion.
n.n says
“The models have demonstrated no skill blah blah blah blah blah”
Yet another woefully inept WUWT “nuh uh because I say so”. NASA’s research study, referenced directly above, clearly demonstrates precisely otherwise.
“Getting future warming projections right..”
What a laugh.
They cannot possibly know that.
What they show there as “observations” is just a manufactured, highly adjusted urban based sparse dat fabrication, designed to match their models.
It bears absolutely zero resemblance to any sort of reality.
This is the most farcical of papers, from the foxes guarding the hen-house.
They have un-validated models that can’t even get basic temperature projections correct in the past or the present.. and pretend that they can “predict” the future.
You really do FAIL totally when it comes to basic comprehension, don’t you
More wildly crazed, entirely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory twaddle.
And how ridiculous that you ignorant brain washed rubes always trot out that one and only cherry picked graph, which shows just one particular slice of the atmosphere while disingenuously ignoring all the rest of the data.
One could also just as dishonestly cherry pick certain sections of the temperature data where temperatures are rising faster than projections. But real scientists don’t do that. Anti-science partisan hacks do that kind of thing.
Now now you are entitled to your “facts.”
So sad to see Derg’s willfully blind ignorance on such pathetic parade, trying to pretend away well established scientific facts simply by muttering “Nuh Uh because I say so”.
“I think the real issue is that by somehow having managed to make ‘Climate Change’ the null hypothesis, the Alarmists have put the burden of disproving this hypothesis on the general population.”
In a sense, yes and no.
“Yes” side of the argument:
People often complain that this causes them to have to “disprove a negative”, an impossibility. In general, yes. But in some cases, the negative can be shown to be wrong. The pause in Global Temp rise, often referred to as the Great Pause” was never supposed to happen. When it did happen, model after model was falsified until none were left.
“No” side of the argument:
No, you are not allowed to fold, spindle, and mutilate the scientific method just to fit an ideological agenda. The very attempt to do so fails your hypothesis.
Better luck next time.
Anyway, that is my take on it.
Actual science gets improved and refined over time. Climate Change gets less refined over time.
Case in point, in IPCC FAR in 1990 they projected sea level rise by 2100 to top out at 1.1 meter with a 0.8 meter uncertainty.
The 2012 AR4 projection says sea level rise tops out at 2.0 meter with a 1.8 meter uncertainty.
The 2017 projection says sea level rise tops out at 2.5 meter with a 2.2 meter uncertainty.
Clear evidence of pseudo-scientific meddling if not outright dishonesty from the so-called experts.
I am with you. Can you imagine an engineer building a bridge that will carry 6 tons ± 5 tons? Or an amplifier that outputs 10 watts ± 9 watts? This isn’t science, it is pure playing with numbers to help support a GUESS!
Not even a good GUESS.
Or a monitoring system with a confidence interval of 15 tons.
I was an engineer at a nuke plant when it closed. Someone had an idea of testing the spent fuel pool for leakage. While this is much less complex than the temperature of the planet, it required a test of 30 days to get a reasonable confidence interval assuming test instruments that stay calibrated during the period.
During the first run an seismic event required re-calibration. Finally I got a result of 0.5 gph, + 1.0 gph. Spent a lot of money learning what I already knew.
The earth has a very stable climate and warming is better than cooling.
How about 0.6 W/m^2 +/- 17 W/m^2?
Can you imagine an engineer being made aware of potentially large and costly future repercussions down the road, but not giving them due thought, instead just blindly laughing them away, pretending that they were mere “pseudo-science”, even though the projections thus far have been quite accurate?
Well, yeah, if it were a WUWT Gorman engineer, I could (unfortunately) imagine that happening quite easily.
“even though the projections thus far have been quite accurate?”
Rubbish.. the “projections” have been manifestly WRONG.
So wrong that they have to resort to continual upward adjustment of data to even get near their fantasy computer game predictions.
Yet another ridiculously ignorant claim from b.nice, based no doubt on years of being spoon fed anti-science lies by WUWT.
Climate models reliably project future conditions
National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine
https://www.nationalacademies.org/based-on-science/climate-models-reliably-project-future-conditions
LOL, just believe that propaganda.
Ignore the actual data.. That’s the way to FAIL.
Yet again, b.nice sadly trots out the dishonest propaganda vomited into his empty skull by his WUWT puppet masters.
The graph you reference is a cherry picked snippet of the entire dataset. It looks at only one particular slice of the atmosphere. So completely dishonest.
You need to look at the *entirety* of the data, as that National Academies study did, not just dishonestly cherry picked portions of the data. When you do that, you’ll find that, yes, climate models do reliably project future conditions.
Present your evidence that “projections thus far have been quite accurate”. How about the IPCC projections? Have any of the ensemble averages ever been met?
You may think your ad hominem is rather accurate, but it is still an ad hom isn’t it? Do you think that refutes anything I said?
Perhaps you need to have a higher goal for yourself than just being an online troll.
Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model ProjectionsGeophysical Research Letters Oct 2019
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL085378
We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model-projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.
The fox trying to explain away the chicken feather .. So funny.
You really do fall for the most egregious propaganda, don’t you.
b.nice what a laughably ironic comment!
That graph you posted so tragically demonstrates that it is *you* who is the one who “falls for the most egregious propaganda”.
That graph is a dishonestly cherry picked portion of just some of the data. One particular slice of the atmosphere only. The entirety of the data tells a completely different story. A story that the dishonest liars here at WUWT will, of course, never tell you.
And by the way, why do the observations data in that graph stop at 2015? Oh that’s right: there was a MASSIVE increase in warming starting in 2016.
What a tragically epic FAIL.
Michael Mann type fraud.
It’s been almost a quarter century now, and yet you are still trying to pretend away Mann’s hockey stick study as “fraud” ?? Even though his results have been verified over and over and over again by dozens of researchers from all over the world?
Sorry, Derg, but the “fraud” here is you and your fellow WUWT cultists.
you are the only person here approaching religious fanaticism here
Paul, I’m merely pointing out provably incorrect propaganda, misinformation, and falsehoods, and replacing them with actual, verifiable facts.
If you want to claim that this constitutes “religious fanaticism”, then yes, I am guilty as charged.
MGC, you really are a sad case mate!
Any respectable scientist knows that Mann is an incorrigible liar with respect to his publications record on climate science and specifically his lamentable tree ring data that fails to match well established historical temperature data from multiple peer reviewed sources. His misuse of statistical data was clarified by Ross Mckitrick, so he is an embittered man after being showed up as a fraud more than once!.
Bob, I see you totally ignore the fact that Mann’s results have been corroborated over and over and over and over and over again, by many different research teams from all over the world, using a variety of different research techniques.
The accumulated research evidence over the past quarter century points to Mann’s original hockey stick results being correct, and your whining being little more than biased bloviation.
Not only have Mann’s hockey stick results never been corroborated, Mann’s own lawyer denied the hockey stick in court and it has been revealed that Mann derived the original results from intentional deception.
Lol…back on your meds dude. I am still waiting for global warming.
KTM, it is your own comment that is the prime example of “outright dishonesty” here.
The larger sea level rise uncertainty levels are due to examining different paths that human emissions may follow.
For any single given emissions scenario, sea level rise uncertainty is no where near what you have disingenuously claimed.
No, the uncertainty is because they don’t actually have a clue !!
It all just from un-validated un-scientific models.
Yet another blind “Nuh Uh because I say so” screed from b.nice.
Lol..when will be underwater 😉
Have yet to see any evidence from you to counter tha fact that CO2 warming exists only in models.
We can wait..
Stop failing !
Troll bait!
Robert Conquest made a similar point (paraphrasing):
‘Marx saw himself as the “Darwin of society”, as the originator of a historical science to match Darwin but deriding Darwin’s “crude English empiricism”; Darwin accumulated facts before developing his theory against the supposedly superior German academic method of inventing the theory first and then finding facts to support it’ (Reflections on a Ravaged Century 2000).
In many respects a process followed by climate ‘catastrophists’.
It is pseudoscience. Because a) daily-weekly changes in the solar wind drive Northern Annular Mode (NAM) anomalies causing heat and cold waves, irrespective of the global mean surface temperature. And b) ENSO and the AMO change inversely to changes in the solar wind strength (via NAM anomalies), and are warmer when the solar wind is weaker. Internal variability is more to do with the state of the science than the nature of weather and regional climate change.
Nice article. My pet peeve are people who want to claim that the SEM as determined by a “sample” lets you extend the precision of the mean beyond resolution of the actual measurement. IOW, you can “average” temps measured and recorded to the nearest 1 degree and somehow get precision out to 4 decimal digits. I’ve asked many to justify that with references and they all try to say that dividing the Standard Deviation by the √N lets you do that even when they also tell you they are dealing with samples.
This doesn’t even begin to deal with the uncertainty propagation!
Counts can be averaged, measurements cannot BECAUSE measurements are ALWAYS estimates. You cannot get more precision when averaging measurements than the least precise measurement. You must understand significant figures, and if you do, you can dismiss most ‘scientific reports’ because they offer more precision than was present in the measurements. Stupid.
I agree. Counts encompass many things from stock/commodity prices, to finite integer outcomes, polls. They are unique and discreet counts.
Measurements are analog, even if displayed on digital readouts, and can ultimately have an infinite number of possibilities. Therein lies the uncertainty and error.
The resolution controls how precise a measurement may be and the number that is recorded conveys how much information IS KNOWN about the measurand at the time of measurement. Even if I make 1,000,000 measurements of the same thing with the same device, that device will only provide me with the same amount of information on each measurement, for example, the nearest 1/100th. Averaging those 1 million measurements will not give me any additional information. New information simply will not be created through mathematical calculations. The mean will still be limited to that 1/100th precision. If we could create precision in this manner, there would be no need for micrometers or digital thermometers. Just perform lots of measurements with a 12 inch ruler or any old Liquid In Glass thermometer to get the precision you need.
Far too many folks here and in climate science (and even other professions) confuse Standard Error of the sample Means (SEM), which is also the standard deviation of the sample means, with the precision available for the estimated means. They do not understand that it only tells you the interval within which the estimated means lays. In other words how narrow the distribution of sample means actually is. All that really means is that you know the estimated means very closely. For example, 10 ± 0.0001, doesn’t mean you know the mean is 10.4951± 0.0001 (assuming 10.4951 is the number your calculator gave you).
“Even if I make 1,000,000 measurements of the same thing with the same device, that device will only provide me with the same amount of information on each measurement, for example, the nearest 1/100th.”
That maybe true if you are measuring the same thing with the same instrument and the only errors are from rounding to a specific decimal place. (Weren’t you claiming before that averaging only works to increase precision if you measure the same thing with the same instrument?)
But averaging multiple different things to get the best estimate of the population mean can increase the precision and resolution beyond what you’ve measured for any individual sample.
“They do not understand that it only tells you the interval within which the estimated means lays.”
You keep confusing yourself when you talk about means. There is only one mean and there is usually only one estimate of that mean.
But you are are correct – the standard error of the mean tells you the interval within which the estimated mean may lie. That’s why the smaller it is the greater the precision.
Your claim is that no matter what the sample size it’s never possible to know the mean to a higher precision than any of the individual measurements. Correct? So given the subject of this article, how would you falsify your hypothesis?
I can see a number of ways of doing this, and they all succeed. (For example, run a simulation with a known mean). But for past experience I know you will reject any such falsification on the grounds that it doesn’t agree with your rules.
Or your rules 😉
Exactly when will we warm? Pause
Not relevant to my question but we’ve been warming for the last 50 years, and to a lesser extent the 50 years before then.
“we’ve been warming for the last 50 years”
Except that we haven’t.
No warming from 2000-2015, cooling since the peak of the 2015/2016 El Nino
That series of strong solar cycles through the latter half of last century, is subsiding, and with it will die the zombie nonsense that is AGW and CO2 warming.
Warming for the last 50 years.
Lol
When it’s not scientific, then ideas are in the realm of belief. In the realm of belief are the true believers. Their minds are already rigidly made up and any attempt to persuade with logic or evidence to the contrary is a waste of everyone’s time.
The science of climate change flies south for the winter going “Quack Quack Quack”
Welcome to the world of leftism: belief/feeling/”your truth” > fact and don’t you dare tell them otherwise!
I assert that to change minds all one needs are natural gas and electric power shortages and inflation (pain at the pump). FJB did that!
Andy,
Awesome job of boiling this down to an editorial, comprehensible to a widespread audience.
The QED here is that the climatic effects of GHG emissions could be treated as a scientific hypothesis… However, it isn’t, because the scientific hypothesis would be little more than a curiosity, that maybe, posed a slight problem 500 years from now.
The alleged scientists hawking the climate crisis make Lysenko look good.
Good point Dave.
As a hypothesis, it has little impact. As a religion it can change the world.
It has changed the world, for the worse.
Our delusional leaders, living in a CO2 false reality, are bad for our health and finances.
I made some changes to my original post, but I waited too long to save it, so I’ll post it this way.
It has changed the world, for the worse.
Our delusional leaders, living in a CO2 false reality, are bad for our health and finances.
The climate change brainwashing is so bad that I haven’t heard one person on the Fox News Channel come out and say that Human-caused Climate Change is a Hoax. All the talking heads seem to give it credence of one form or another. None of them say there is no evidence CO2 is causing the climate to change.
And this pretty much goes for our Republican leaders, too, who all lend some sort of credence to the idea that humans are causing the climate to change and that humans can do something to stop this change.
Trump is about the only politician on the planet calling Human-caused Climate Change a hoax.
I think the only cure for all this massive Climate Change disinformation and propagada over the decades, is a decade or two of cooling while CO2 amounts continue to increase.
That should Break the Spell the alarmists have on the Public mind.
We may be in the beginning stages of such a cooling period now, going by the historical, written temperature record. Alarmists expect the temperatures to continue to rise. We’ll see who has it right.
Yes, CO2 is Up, but temperatures are Down. The alarmists are getting nervous. Just think if this went on for a few more years. The alarmists would be on the run! 🙂
Don’t worry. We may cool off to the levels of the late 1970’s, but I lived through the 1970’s and it wasn’t so bad. Not much different than today with the exception of a little colder, snowier winters.
It’s all good. CO2 is a benign gas essential for life. Noone has ever shown that CO2 is dangerous to humans.
Fully agree Tom, we are just waiting for the penny to finally drop, as the post 1998 Millennium Pause levels have been reached again globally, whereas we in Australia have experienced cooling for the past 6 year since the 2016 El Nino, according to UAH data but not the corrupted BoM ACORN ground data.
It is past time further questions be asked in the Senate about the biased and inaccurate climate advice our government receives from the CSIRO, BoM and other self appointed climate ‘experts’ like Flannery.
Consensus science appears to be winning the day. If enough people believe in something then it must be true. That is why the “greenhouse effect” gets to be the key factor in Earth’s energy balance and deep convection is not even incorporated in climate models.
Deep convection is why water remains as liquid on Earth’s surface. There might still be ice but that requires poles to remain where they are.
Andy: Read the complete piece at WE. Very well presented. I hope that Real Clear Politics will link to it. Einstein’s genius was not just that he came up with his theories largely through “thought experiments” but he also made precise mathematical predictions and described experiments and observations that could disprove his theories. Physicists and astronomers have been diligently trying to falsify Einstein’s theories ever since.
The way climate science is practiced by adherents these days is like predicting that CO2 caused climate change will result in a solar eclipse some time in the future. Then claiming, when an eclipse occurs, it proves you were right.
It doesn’t matter what philosophy says. There’s much scientific evidence that this claim is greatly falsifiable. Bottom line is that the structure and function of the molecule of CO2 chemically cannot do what they say is causing and will cause.
“Bottom line is that the structure and function of the molecule of CO2 chemically cannot do what they say is causing and will cause.”
Merely because I, the great and powerful Jimmy, have decreed it to be so. Never mind that *every* major scientific organization in the entire world says otherwise, and they have decades of abundant evidence backing what they say.
Pathetic call to “consensus” ..
Try using actual science instead. !
There is actually no scientific evidence at all showing that increased atmospheric CO2 causes warming. If there is.. then present it.
It has never been observed or measured anywhere on the planet.
CO2 warming exists only in un-validated models, .. that is NOT science.
“There is actually no scientific evidence at all showing that increased atmospheric CO2 causes warming”
Thanks for so sadly demonstrating, b.nice, how pathetically brainwashed you’ve become from lying WUWT propaganda.
It has been known scientific fact since the 19th century that CO2 causes warming, dude. And there are literally boatloads of evidence. There is so much evidence, that there is not a single major scientific organization, anywhere on the planet, that disputes this fact.
Pretending otherwise as you are doing is every bit as ridiculous as pretending that oxygen does “not” support combustion. It’s that dumb.
You could present some of this “boatload of evidence.”
But you wont.
Mindless yapping on your behalf is a complete fail !
It has been know that CO2 was a radiative gas..
… other than that, any warming was pure conjecture, because they were unaware how the atmosphere actually works.
Pity you are unable to comprehend actual science, and have to rely on what you have been brain-washed with
Bring science.. not mantra regurgitation.
Apparently you are unaware of the Arrhenius research of 1896, which predicted reasonably accurately, even back then, the warming that would ensue from adding CO2 to the air.
Ah, the old Argument from Authority again. The opinion of scientific organizations is NOT evidence.
Ah, the old “who cares what all the very best experts in the entire world have concluded from mountains of evidence” spew of willful ignorance.
I and my fellow WUWT cult members “know better” … because we say so!
So sad.
Back on your meds dude.
Love the way you avoid producing anything that even remotely resembles actual science.
Bring science.. we can wait.
But we all know you are incapable of doing so.
I’ve posted at least 5 different direct references to “the actual science” in this comment stream. But the tragically inept WUWT puppets just keep blindly babbling “where’s your science” “where’s your science” “where’s your science” “where’s your science”.
So pathetically clueless. And dishonest. But that’s what WUWT does to people.
Troll bait.
Show mathematical relationship between CO2 and temperature and you’ll have a lot of adherents, even from here. Simple regressions of two time series won’t suffice. The x-axis needs to be CO2 ppm and the y-axis needs to be temperature with an equation showing the relationship.
Another sorry example of intentional Gormanian ignorance.
The data linking CO2 and temperature has been around for decades. Why do you try to pretend that it does not exist?
Wrong. There have been some short term correlations
…. and some anti-correlations. (cooling 1940-1970, zero trend 1980-1997, zero trend 2000-2015)
Only actual warming in the satellite era has come from EL Nino events. So, no CO2 signature there.
There is actually zero evidence of warming by atmospheric CO2,
… as you keep showing by your utter failure to produce any.
MGC attached is some data that creates doubt about CO2 causing atmospheric temperature change.
Figure 5c. HadCRUT5 monthly global surface temperature estimate plotted against the monthly Moana Loa atmospheric CO2 content, after Humlum 2022 – Climate4you.com.
Figure 5c above shows the lack of a consistent relationship between surface temperatures and CO2 levels, during recent warming events, this leads Humlum to suggest that “CO2 cannot have been the dominant control on global temperatures since 1958. Had CO2 been the dominant control, periods of decreasing temperature (longer than 2-5 years) with increasing CO2 values should not occur. It might be argued (IPCC 2007) that the CO2 dominance first emerged around 1975, but if so, the recent breakdown of the association around 2000 should not occur, either.” Consequently, ” the complex nature of the relation between global temperature and atmospheric CO2 since at least 1958, therefore represents an example of empirical falsification of the hypothesis ascribing dominance on the global temperature by the amount of atmospheric CO2. “
A degree 5 polynomial? How did they establish that that was the best fit? I attach a graph showing the difference between a linear fit, in blue, and a 5th degree polynomial in red. Only real difference is at the ends, which are usually unreliable for a high polynomial.
r^2 for a linear fit is is 0.843, for the polynomial it’s 0.853.
Here’s the same but using annual values.
r^2 for a linear fit is is 0.919, for the polynomial it’s 0.922.
“Had CO2 been the dominant control, periods of decreasing temperature (longer than 2-5 years) with increasing CO2 values should not occur.”
Unless of course, there are factors that have a bigger short term dominance, such as ENSO.
“Had CO2 been the dominant control, periods of decreasing temperature (longer than 2-5 years) with increasing CO2 values should not occur.”
What an utterly ridiculous argument. It demonstrates a total lack of any proper understanding of positive and negative ocean cycles, volcanic influences, solar cycles, etc., which can clearly create temporary fluctuations against the longer term trend lasting quite a bit longer than a mere “two to five years”.
Just one example that totally destroys this ludicrous “argument” – the 1998 El Nino, which produced a temporary extreme warming peak, well beyond the longer term warming trend. It took the long term trend 16 years to finally eclipse that temporary extreme. But it was eclipsed. In fact, mean global temperatures (as measured by HADCRUT5 as mentioned in your reference) now consistently remain above that 1998 peak.
Sorry, but I’m actually truly embarrassed for you, Bob Close, that you actually referenced this kind of garbage as an “argument”.
Lol every 😉
Somewhere I made a list of all the common approaches to science and posted it to this blog years ago. I think I had a list of about 15. They are all equally valid!
The concept of falsifying a hypothesis is only one approach and is no better than any other approach. Our side is frequently imposing a ‘falsifiable hypothesis’ standard on the other side when they use a different approach. Apples and oranges.
And yet CO2 rises and rise while I am waiting for Spring
I was working in product development of an auto manufacturer happily driving a company “muscle car” when I began wondering if cars like mine were bad for the environment. I had started using the internet at work in 1996. In 1997 I decided to research global warming by reading articles found in a list of links (which I still read) at: http://www.sepp.org/the-week-that-was.cfm
Within an hour I couldn’t believe what I was reading. There were scientists involved but almost no science. Global warming was wild guesses of the climate in 100 years. And there were computer games, obviously programmed to make the same predictions. They were all predicting climate doom, with no evidence of any ability to predict the future climate. I found out that every prior prediction of environment doom made on Earth Day 1970 was wrong. Tomorrow is Earth Day 2022, by the way. Try not to get too excited.
I had a few advantages in 1997:
My parents taught me as a child that predictions are almost always wrong.
As a libertarian since 1973, I didn’t trust government bureaucrat scientists.
And I knew that wrong predictions are not science.
So after one hour of reading about climate science, or maybe I should say “climate astrology”, I developed my first and only climate prediction in 1997: “The climate will get warmer, unless it gets colder.” And that is the last climate prediction I made. I’m still waiting for my Nobel Prize!
I did not take climate alarmism seriously from 1997 to 2014. I assumed with every decade, and no climate crisis, people would stop believing the predictions. I was wrong. A few years ago I decided to launch a climate science blog to share the best articles, by other authors, that I was reading every day. One of the authors was Andy May, who wrote this article, and many other good ones here. My blog has had over 305,000 page views so far, and I hope I’ve changed a few minds with those articles, and my own statement, that I believe is true, but blows a few minds:
We are living in the best climate for humans, animals and especially plants, since the Holocene Climate Optimum ended about 5,000 years ago. We should be celebrating our wonderful climate. Not living in fear of the future climate, like those smarmy leftists, based on always wrong, wild guess predictions of a climate crisis, that never shows up. I can’t prove that statement is true because climate information for 5,000 to 9,000 years ago is not that accurate. In fact, I have a theory that it’s impossible to prove anything, but I can’t prove it.
Ye Editor
Richard Greene
Bingham Farms, Michigan
Sorry, Andy, but I’d say that it is your op-ed itself that is a prime example of pseudo-science. You claim that
“Tornados, nor’easters, hurricanes, mid-winter thaws, 100-degree days, cold snaps, droughts, and flooding creeks all are presented as evidence of human-caused climate change”
These things are often touted as “human caused evidence”, yes, … in the popular press and in everyday conversation. But the popular press and lay conversation is not science.
For the vast majority of the research published in the scientific literature, your claim is simply not true. These things you list are not …. by themselves alone … considered to be definitive evidence of human cause. In particular, anyone who has read the IPCC reports can’t help but notice that they have been very careful about *not* making such generalizations.
Pointing to what lay people say about the science as “evidence” as to the validity or the falsifiablity of the science is simply wrong.
“Pointing to what lay people say about the science as “evidence” as to the validity or the falsifiablity of the science is simply wrong.”
Aren’t you a ‘lay person’ MGC?
Hoyt, the difference is that I’m pointing to what the scientists say, not to what lay people say. Why is that difficult to understand?
Obviously, you understanding of science is very limited.
Just keep calling to the AGW scammers as evidence.. that’ll do the trick.
Or maybe try to actually present some of this evidence that you say there is plenty of. 😉
Or not. !
We will see if you have even the vaguest clue what “scientific evidence” is. !
Another lamentable cultist screed, pretending that every major scientific organization in the entire world has been complicit, for decades, in some nefarious “scam”.
So, you have no actual science to back up your yapping.
We knew that. !
Just keep yapping.. its funny.
I haven’t seen one reference from you that substantiates your assertions. With no evidence, all you are doing is taking up space.
Troll bait.
Thanks for demonstrating yet another example of willful ignorance, Gorman. In my comments here you’ll find several substantiating references. You haven’t seen them simply because you haven’t looked.
The ignorance is all yours, MGC
We await your “science” but you have none. !
We also know that if you attempt to give links, you will expose the abyss of science that you base your mantra on.
Don’t be scared. ! Bring science.. not mantra.
I’ve posted at least 5 different direct references to “the actual science” in this comment stream. But this tragically inept WUWT puppet just keep blindly babbling “where’s your science” “where’s your science” “where’s your science” “where’s your science”.
So pathetically clueless. And so tragically dishonest. But that’s what WUWT does to people.
Sorry MGC,
There are numerous examples of peer-reviewed papers claiming individual events are evidence of human-caused climate change. There are too many to list, but I discuss several that blame Hurricane Harvey on human-caused climate change here: Global Warming and Extreme Weather – Andy May Petrophysicist
Andy, once again you’ve put false words into the mouths of the researchers.
Every single one of the examples you cited in the reference you provided looked only at the probability that Hurricane Harvey was more likely to occur because of human induced climate change. Not a single one of those examples explicitly stated that Hurricane Harvey was undeniably “caused” by human influence.
MGC: Once again you’ve put false words in my mouth. Read what I wrote and read the post. I did not say they said Harvey was caused by human influence, did I?
Andy:
Seriously? In your prior post you just said:
“I discuss several that blame Hurricane Harvey on human-caused climate change”.
Yes, you most certainly did make the claim that researchers were trying to say that Harvey was caused by human influence.
“researchers were trying to say that Harvey was caused by human influence.”
And it wasn’t.. just another massive fail on behalf of the AGW zealots.
Are you Griff?
Andy, I think you’ve flat out ignored a large number of clear avenues by which AGW could be falsified, per Popper, were it actually wrong. A good number of predictions were made decades ago about how the climate would change due to human CO2 emissions. Most of them have been spot on correct. A few examples:
1- overall mean global temperature has followed quite closely the mean projections found in the 1990 and 1995 IPCC reports.
2- the lower atmosphere has warmed while the stratosphere has cooled
3- the tropopause and the effective radiating altitude has increased.
4- observed changes in the earth’s IR signature as viewed from the ground and from space have followed projections
5- there has been greater warming at the poles.
6- there has been more warming during the night than during the day
7- there has been more warming in winter than in summer
Every one of these predictions was made decades ago. Most of them would generally not occur with other “natural” climate change mechanisms. If a majority of them turned out to be wrong, AGW would be falsified. But most every one of them is turning out to be quite correct.
Not happening, so far. North Pole. South Pole.
What do you mean “not happening”, Chris? The data reference you just provided shows almost 2 degrees C warming in the Arctic since 1980. That’s two to three times more warming than the global average over that same time frame.
Yet another typical WUWT fail.
CO2 has been rising in the atmosphere since ~1880 whatever the cause, noting the temperature trend since 1980 is ‘cherry-picking’.
The time-series I posted are the longest instrumental series available for both N and S poles and neither shows any significant net warming over the periods covered.
80% of the total CO2 increase since 1880 was from just 1980 to the present. So no, no cherry pick at all. Just an honest look at the timeframe when most of the CO2 induced warming would be occurring.
Sorry, but yet another typical WUWT fail.
And what do you mean “no significant warming over the period covered”? That’s total baloney. If we’d had that same rate of warming (2 degrees per century) occurring since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, the oceans would all have boiled away by now.
As usual, you haven’t a clue what you are talking about. But that’s what WUWT does to people.
You mean the period from 1940-1970 (new ice ages scare) when cooling was very evident ?
Or do you mean the zero trend from 2000-2015
Or do you mean the zero trend for the last 9 or so years?
There is no evidence of any human CO2 warming anywhere.
Talk about a fail.. just look at every one of your posts.
They are just mantra regurgitation.. devoid of any science or comprehension.
b.nice sadly continues his willfully ignorant “Nuh Uh because I say so” policy of pretending away decades and decades worth of well established scientific facts.
Well, where are these “well established facts” that you are yapping on about.
Surly you, must have the scietific links at hand…
Or are you relying on just brain-washed non-science
We can wait.. bring science, not mantra….
Until them, just a massive MGC fail. !
Why did global temperatures actually fall between 1940 and 1980?
I tell you what Troll Bait, show us some individual temperature increases sufficient to offset those that don’t have any warming or even have cooling.
Don’t you wonder why studies and papers declaring warming only show the so-called Global Average Temperature. They never show regional temperatures, they just assume that everywhere on the earth is changing by the GAT. How wrong they are. Getting regional temps isn’t hard but must exceed their capabilities as it does yours.
Gorman says:
“they just assume that everywhere on the earth is changing by the GAT.”
Oh please. What an utterly ridiculous, laughably stupid falsehood. But that’s what WUWT does to people.
Global Average Temperature is just a quick, single valued way to easily observe the trend over time.
Local and regional temperatures are, of course, also all completely available. And of course there are many locations where warming is much higher than the global average. Attached is just one example.
Apparently Gorman is unaware of how easily this kind of local and regional data can be retrieved and examined. Not that this is any surprise. Gorman has demonstrated a tragic lack of awareness of so many well known facts already.
Funny how Iceland doesn’t have a “hockey stick” since the Arctic is warming.
My God, Gorman, why do you so constantly insist on playing the willfully ignorant rube?
The long term temperature trend at that station you reference is not only clearly UP, but it is also rising faster than the global average.
Yet another tragi-comical WUWT Gormanian FAIL.
Look at the dotted line dude. Do you think that is constant growth?
Sorry, but I just can’t believe what a brainwashed fool you are, Gorman. I’m truly embarrassed for you.
All you’ve done is show one particular cherry picked timeframe that happens to give a concave 2nd order fit. The overall trend is still obviously UP, as can clearly be seen in the graph I posted.
Just another tragic example of egregiously dishonest nonsense. Was it WUWT that vomited this disingenuous distortion into your empty skull? Probably.
Come on MGC, you must know the AMO rolled over from its cool phase to its warm phase starting in the late 70s. The cyclic changes in the Arctic are well documented. At the same time, the Antarctic has seen statistically significant cooling. The fail is yours, not WUWT.
Come on, Nelson, you must know that there’s been tons of evidence gathered since the 19th century that implicates increased CO2 levels in the air as a cause of warming. Why are you trying to pretend this evidence away with flimsy “bu bu bu bu what about AMO” excuses?
No, there is no evidence at all that CO2 causes warming
You have shown that by your absolute inability to produce any.
Sorry you aren’t educated enough to understand the effects of AMO, PDO etc etc
Forget the mantra you have been brain-washed with..
Go and find all this “evidence” that you say exists.
All that was discovered in the 19th century was that CO2 was a radiatively active gas.. anything else was pure conjecture / fantasy.
“All that was discovered in the 19th century was that CO2 was a radiatively active gas”
Another easily proven falsehood that yet again demonstrates your ignorance.
Arrhenius published research in 1896 which predicted reasonably accurately, even back then, the warming that would ensue from adding CO2 to the air.
As usual, your comments only continue to demonstrate, over and over and over again, that you haven’t any clue what you are talking about. None.
But that’s what WUWT does to people.
Which matches the early 20th century, and has, in less than a decade, fallen to half that value, and has had little impact at the other pole, as atmospheric CO2, presumably anthropogenic, has progressed.
Wrong..
Did you know the Arctic actually cooled from 1980-1994.
And that apart from the 2015 El Nino, all gone now… (and not caused by CO2)..
There has been no warming in the Arctic this century !
“almost 2 degrees C warming in the Arctic since 1980”
That HadCrud, one of the AGW priests from limited erratic surface data.
Notice how many temps than now were higher around 1940
Another MGC fail. !
And of course, there has been no warming in the Antarctic in the whole satellite era.
😉
Urban Heat Island Effect via Wiki:
‘The IPCC stated that “it is well-known that compared to non-urban areas urban heat islands raise night-time temperatures more than daytime temperatures”‘.’
The urban heat island temperature difference is not only usually larger at night than during the day, but also larger in winter than in summer’.
Nice try Chris. Yeah, it must be all those “urban heat islands” up in the Arctic creating all that warming up there.
Another epic WUWT fail.
Arctic is no warmer than it was around 1940.
Its part of the AMO cycle.
Another epic MGC FAIL !!
MGC, The Arctic did not warm until 1997, when a major climate shift took place.
As shown elsewhere The Arctic was actually cooling from 1980-1994. !
b.nice,
True, but I was talking about winter warming in the Arctic, the winters have warmed, but the summers/fall/spring are flat to cooling.
Graph includes winters, Andy.
Cooling from 1980-1994. That is what the data tells us.
Stratospheric cooling is not unique to GHGs, decreases in ozone caused by CFCs has the same effect.
Decreases in ozone cannot fully account for the temperature drop seen in the stratosphere. GHG forcing is playing a role as well.
Nice try again, but all in all, just another typical WUWT fail.
Neither ozone changes nor the laboratory modeled “Greenhouse Effect”, as CO2 emission has, presumably, been a progressive process, can account for the observed and estimated anomalies, suggesting that CO2 has a weak or misinferred correlation with temperature changes.
Sorry MGC, As shown in the plot above, the stratospheric cooling is decreasing.
Because of the positive temperature gradient above the tropopause, any natural solar forced warming must lead to stratospheric cooling at a set height. All depends on where you measure it.
“any natural solar forced warming must lead to stratospheric cooling blah blah blah”
Ridiculously false. An increase of solar heat influx would warm all layers of the atmosphere. Not to mention that the warming would be mostly during the day, but what has been observed is more warming during the night.
Even grade school children would realize such things … but not WUWT cultists.
MGC and b.nice,
It doesn’t matter, the lower troposphere is warming now, but the stratosphere has stopped cooling. The so-called “atmospheric fingerprint” has disappeared. It clearly has nothing to do with CO2 or solar warming. The stratosphere has different drivers than the troposphere.
“the lower troposphere is warming now,”
Well no, It isn’t
Its been cooling since the 2015/2016 El Nino.
The only warming in the satellite era has come at El Nino events.
Andy says: “the stratosphere has stopped cooling. The so-called “atmospheric fingerprint” has disappeared. It clearly has nothing to do with CO2”
Andy, you’re pointing to mere short term data in order to claim that it has “stopped”.
Gee, this sounds familiar. Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah .. it’s just like that old “bu bu bu bu bu THE PAUSE” excuse, now totally refuted by the latest upward warming step that started in 2016.
Sorry that you don’t have the scientific comprehension to understand basic science.
A massive fail on your behalf !
“GHG forcing is playing a role as well.”
There is no evidence of that whatsoever.
“There is no evidence of that”
Merely because I say so. Never mind that I’ve never bothered to actually check what evidence might exist in the scientific research literature.
You could bother providing a link to this non-existent science.
But you wont, because you can’t.
The ball is in your court..
Real scientific evidence…. except you need to figure out what that actually is, because at the moment, you obviously don’t have a clue.
More sadly typical WUWT lies. I’ve posted a multitude of research references throughout this comment stream. But this blind buffoon just keeps pretending otherwise.
That’s what WUWT does to people.
MGC, n.n, and b.nice,
Here is a graph from Judith Lean, 2017. The temperatures at 20 km are in the lower to mid stratosphere. Compare them to the surface or the 5km lower troposphere. As I said the so-called “atmospheric fingerprint” has disappeared as GHG are increasing. Compare also to the red ozone curve. There is little doubt the lower troposphere is warming overall, but that may not last long, I’ll grant you. Cooling may be on the way.
Andy says: “There is little doubt the lower troposphere is warming overall, but that may not last long, I’ll grant you. Cooling may be on the way.”
So-called “skeptics” have been making this same “cooling may be on the way” prediction for decades now. And they’ve also been wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong for decades.
There’s little if any rational reason whatever to believe them now.
Do you believe this UAH graph shows that temperatures have always returned to zero rather than continuous growth? Tell us what is really happening!
Gorman, what is it with you and your foolhardy hangup with the term “continuous growth” ?? No one ever claimed that temperature rise would not have any ups and downs along the way. Why are you trying to disingenuously pretend otherwise?
Yep, all in all, just another woefully ludicrous Gormanian “objection”, so easily ripped to shreds.
The IPCC First Assessment Report (FAR): ‘we predict: increase of global mean temperature during the [21st] century of about 0.3 °C per decade’.
The linear trend rise since 1990 is ~ 0.4C (UAH6.0).
Chris, you missed the fact that that 1990 FAR projection assumed much more rapid rises in ancillary greenhouse gases like methane, CFCs, etc…. which didn’t actually happen. So your point is (gee what a surprise) not valid.
And isn’t it convenient how you WUWT clowns always quote only the very lowest global temperature rise dataset.
You all used to quote only RSS satellite data. But RSS fixed their satellite drift errors and raised their temperature rise rates. So you threw RSS (and everyone else except UAH) under the bus, because all of their temperature rise rates don’t jive with your preconceived political propaganda mindset.
Such laughably transparent bias!
The temperature has been recorded as rising, falling, and, on a global average, paused, while CO2 emission has been asserted to be a progressive process, cannot explain the anomalies recorded and divergence from the models.
n.n.
Of course there are influences on the climate other than CO2 warming; but their existence is not a valid excuse to ignorantly pretend away the influence of CO2 warming.
A radiative effect proven in the laboratory, which may have a net-zero effect in the wild. The natural processes and phenomena can completely explain the temperature anomalies in local, and especially regional observation. Without a uniform forcing, the global statistic is meaningless, fit for marketing purposes.
“A radiative effect proven in the laboratory, which may have a net-zero effect in the wild”
The radiative effect has been measured and proven “in the wild”. Why am I not surprised that WUWT never apprised you of this fact.
Spectral signatures of climate change in the Earth’s infrared spectrum between 1970 and 2006
Chen et al Environmental Science 2007
“satellite observations of the clear sky infrared emitted radiation by the Earth in 1970, 1997 and in 2003 showed the appearance of changes in the outgoing spectrum, which agreed with those expected from known changes in the concentrations of well-mixed greenhouse gases over this period. Thus, the greenhouse forcing of the Earth has been observed to change in response to these concentration changes.”
“The natural processes and phenomena can completely explain the temperature anomalies in local, and especially regional observation.”
Merely because I, the great and powerful n.n, have decreed it to be so. Never mind that the overwhelming preponderance of the published scientific research literature demonstrates exactly the opposite:
A couple of examples:
Lean and Rind (2008) “None of the natural processes can account for the overall warming trend in global surface temperatures.”
Santer et al (2013) – “We present evidence that a human-caused signal can also be identified relative to the larger “total” natural variability arising from sources internal to the climate system, solar irradiance changes, and volcanic forcing. total natural variability cannot produce sustained global-scale tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling. Our results provide clear evidence for a discernible human influence on the thermal structure of the atmosphere.”
“The key features of this pattern are global-scale tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling over the 34-y satellite temperature record. We detect a “human influence” signal in all cases, even if we test against natural variability estimates with much larger fluctuations in solar and volcanic influences than those observed since 1979. These results highlight the very unusual nature of observed changes in atmospheric temperature.”
MGC => Nice references but don’t show what you claim.
Lean and Rind (2008)
Santer et al (2013)
This study uses models and the 8.5 growth pattern. Hardy har har!
The studies you show as “proof” are all comparative and do not have any causal mathematical basis. Statistics from the top to the bottom.
Lean and Rind’s study at 0.74C increase per century is less than catastrophic to say the least!
Gorman always has some flimsy excuse to disingenuously handwave away research results that are not congruent with his preconceived ideological viewpoint.
Bottom line is this, Gorman: none of your flimsy “objections” alter in any way the end result of these research studies, which is that natural influences alone cannot fully explain the warming trend observed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Show us a study that claims to have found a functional relationship between CO2 and temperature so that a scientific prediction can be made. Otherwise, everything you have shown so far is nothing more that inference and religious belief.
Thanks for yet another spew of woefully intentional ignorance Gorman. Such studies have been around for over a century. The first one was Arrhenius in 1896. Even way back then, that study made reasonably good estimates of the warming that would accrue from adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
Why is it that you ignorantly go on, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, foolishly pretending to yourself that such things don’t exist? Why? Answer the question.
“pretend away the influence of CO2 warming.”
One does not need to “pretend away” a fantasy.
You need to produce actual evidence, rather than regurgitated anti-science BS.
Warming by atmospheric CO2 has never been observed or measured anywhere on the planet.
Here’s b.nice once again ignorantly pretending that scientific research published in some of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world are merely “anti-science BS” and are “not” evidence. And how does he “justify” such statements? “BECAUSE I SAY SO”, that’s how!
Sorry, b.nice, but it is these kinds of comments you post that so totally demonstrate that you’re merely playing the willfully ignorant troll. A mindless buffoon just blindly parroting anti-reality talking point lies that have been vomited into your empty skull over and over and over again by your WUWT propaganda puppet masters.
I’ll likely not reply to too many more of your comments from here on. They’re just too juvenile, too willfully ignorant, too long proven to be false, and too laughably ridiculous to bother with.
“But RSS fixed their satellite drift errors”
RUBBISH, they still use the old wonky satellite, and then use “climate models” to adjust their once-was-data.
RSS has become another epic agenda-driven scientific FAIL.
Keep googling. You still haven’t shown a mathematical relationship between CO2 and temperature. Until you do, you have no proof, just conjecture.
Pauses of warming during increasing CO2 are falsification of your position.
“Pauses of warming during increasing CO2 are falsification of your position”
What a ridiculously stupid comment. Every bit as stupid as claiming that temporary outgoing waves are “proof” that the tide isn’t coming in.
Gorman’s “arguments” are such a shameful embarrassment. But that’s what WUWT does to people.
MGC =>
Nice ad hominem. You didn’t even show a reference or argument to the claim. That won’t get any points in debate.
Why don’t you show some math showing why pauses don’t falsify the claim that rising CO2 causes continuously rising temperatures.
If you cannot comprehend that simple analogy regarding ocean waves and the tides, Gorman, then there is simply no hope for you.
Outgoing ocean waves (“pauses”) are so obviously not “evidence” to falsify the idea that the tide is coming in. In the same way, temperature trend pauses are so obviously not “evidence” to falsify the idea of a rising temperature trend.
In fact, your pause “reasoning” is so ridiculously false, it wouldn’t even matter what the reason is that is causing the rising temperature trend. Because there is lots of “noise” in the climate system, pauses would not be “evidence” to dispute a rising temperature trend were it caused by CO2, were it caused by solar changes, were it caused by volcanic processes, or were it caused even by magical leprechauns.
I’m truly embarrassed for you that you can’t (or simply won’t) see what is so blindingly obvious.
First, there is no NOISE in the climate system. Noise is an extraneous signal that is similar to and interferes with the intelligence contained in a signal. Temperature does not have any interference from something that looks like temperature but is not temperature. The fact that it has variations in its analog life as a physical phenomena is something that must be dealt with just like the movement of the solar system bodies.
The fact is that climate scientists (and you) have tried to fit a periodic analog signal into a statistical domain that is designed to be used with discreet values that have discrete probabilities and use standard statistical techniques to deal with it. Things like linear regressions which are not designed to describe continuous time based periodic functions. Take a look at the attached UAH graph that shows a function that returns to zero and tell us how a linear regression truly describes such a phenomena.
To do this properly requires substantial work to develop an adequate representation of the temperature signal. What needs to be done is to use Digital Signal Processing techniques. All of a sudden things like Nyquist and sample rates become important. Read this document on DSP to get a smattering of knowledge about digitizing an analog continuous time varying signal.
The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing Statistics, Probability and Noise (analog.com)
“there is no NOISE in the climate system”
Oh please. You’re just playing laughably ridiculous word games, Gorman. “Noise” in this context is the same as “variations in its analog life” which you admit exist.
“Take a look at the attached UAH graph that shows a function that returns to zero”
“returns to zero” is in this context is totally meaningless. What is called “zero” on a graph like this is purely arbitrary. One could just as well label the initial starting temperature value for this graph as “zero”, in which case, no it does not “return to zero” at all.
“What needs to be done is to use Digital Signal Processing techniques.”
What really needs to be done is to understand the physics of the processes that have created the underlying trend … something you steadfastly refuse to even consider, because to do so would rip your fairy tale “skeptic” dreamworld to shreds.
In this context, digital signal processing merely creates pseudo-scientific mathematical representations of the data that are not based on nor tied to any physical reality.
And oh, by the way, you’re also staking your “argument” on a totally false strawman statement “the claim that rising CO2 causes continuously rising temperatures”.
No one ever claimed “continuously” rising temperatures. Unlike you, wallowing in your cesspool of willful ignorance, science acknowledges the existence of random noise that will of course create temporary short term ups and downs in the overall long term warming trend.
Yet another shamefully dishonest Gormanian FAIL.
If you believe in only positive feedback, then the growth in temperature will never cease. An ever increasing power will be sent back to the input with nothing to prevent a constant rise. Why do you think speakers howl when positive feedback occurs? The only thing that limits the volume is the power the the supply is able to provide. Which by the way, is exactly one of the problems with your positive feedback theory. Tell us where the ever increasing power originates!
I was waiting for someone ignorant enough to bring up this “believe only in positive feedback” so-called “objection”. Why am I not surprised that it was Jim Gorman, LOL?
You actually answered your own question with your howling speakers analogy, Gorman, and didn’t even realize it, LOL. Yeah, the volume increases rapidly because of positive feedback but it is eventually limited. Same thing occurs with temperature rise. Positive feedback initially raises temperatures in earnest, but that rise is eventually limited.
Hey, here’s a thought: maybe do some genuine scientific research for a change, Gorman, and find out for yourself why the temperature rise from positive feedback is eventually limited.
Ok dude, you are so brilliant, so describe where the energy originates for the original GHG warming. That is supposedly from a positive feedback and therefore requires extra energy. Where does it come from? Why is it limited?
Why does more and more CO2 keep manufacturing more and more energy?
Do you even understand where the energy in an amplifier originates? Do you understand that there is no negative feedback that cancels the positive feedback?
You are doing a lousy job of explaining anything. All I see is word salad from you.
Gorman, the power limitation of the amplifier is in effect a “negative feedback”. The mic-speaker-amp system tries to keep increasing the volume, but it can’t because power is limited.
And I’m sorry, but I’m not your remedial science tutor. These other questions you are asking are all basic climate science. So stop wasting your time here posting inane nonsense and instead go actually learn some real science for a change. From real scientific sources. Not from pseudo-science peddlers like WUWT.
And really, the biggest question of all here is this: how can you be constantly trying to pretend away CO2 warming due to human emissions when you don’t actually even know anything about it?
“I KNOW the science is wrong, even though I don’t actually know anything about the science.”
OMG LOL! That’s YOU, bro. What a disgrace.
Just one more response to the troll.
Sorry dude, it is not a “feedback”. It is a limit on the amount of energy available to the system. It is just like the sun in that the sun is the energy source.
Show us the math used to analyze amplifier feedback where the energy source is included in the analysis.
Read this paper and tell everyone where Vcc enters into the analysis.
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bora/publications/ISCAS98-Feedback.pdf
Gorman, you can play as many juvenile word games as you want. Doing so won’t change the fact that positive feedback which creates ever increasing volume in a mic-speaker-amp system eventually reaches a limit, and the volume stops increasing.
The same is true with climate change. Positive feedbacks which create ever increasing temperatures also eventually reach a limit, and the temperature stops increasing. Sorry that you are too willfully ignorant to know why.
And Gorman, you’ve never answered a question I’ve asked multiple times now:
How can you be constantly trying to pretend away CO2 warming due to human emissions when you don’t actually even know anything about it?
Your attitude is “I KNOW the science is wrong, even though I don’t actually know anything about the science.”
Answer the question.
1.. no, it hasn’t .. It is well below Hansen’s lowest “projection”
2.. No evidence of human causation, natural cycles and variability.
3.. Solar force warming will do that.
4.. OLR observations show big rise in OLR., that follows UAH data quite closely.. No sign of any human fingerprint
5.. Not the Antarctic.. Arctic is probably no warmer now than around 1940.
6.. Urban warming will do that, so will solar warming..
7.. Be very glad of less cold winters..
Yes, they knew about the AMO and PDO.. easy to make those predictions..
They also know that both are starting to turn downwards, as per their cycles.. hence the rabid attempt to get their agenda in place before cooling becomes even more apparent..
NONE of your points has anything whatsoever to do with atmospheric CO2
MGC,
1. Re Surface temperature on land, this is correct. According to AR6, SSTs are overestimated as well as mid-troposphere temperatures (page 3-24).
2. The stratospheric cooling has slowed a lot, not consistent with increasing emissions. Stratospheric cooling is now at the same rate as the middle troposphere. The “atmospheric fingerprint” has almost disappeared since the big climate shift in 1997. See attached plot.
3. True, this always happens when the surface warms, so what? It says nothing about the cause of the warming.
MGC,
4. The energy imbalance has decreased, not consistent with increasing emissions. See attached from Dewitte, 2019.
5. There has been greater warming at the North Pole, not at the South Pole.
6&7. Yes, the climate is now milder, again, what does that have to do with human emissions??
Remote Sensing | Free Full-Text | Decadal Changes of the Reflected Solar Radiation and the Earth Energy Imbalance (mdpi.com)
Andy, the authors of that remote sensing article you reference note that their results are influenced by the recent decrease of incoming solar radiation. So no, one cannot reliably conclude that their results are “inconsistent with increased emissions”.
Moreover, the authors also appear to admit from their textual statements and from the references they cite (going all the way back to Arrhenius 1896) that warming from human CO2 emissions is essentially a known scientific fact.
MGC,
CO2 is a greenhouse gas and all other things equal would raise surface temperatures about one degree if it doubled from 400 to 800 ppm. No one argues that one degree is a problem, it isn’t.
But everything else will not stay the same. So, the discussion is not about CO2 it is about the feedbacks to CO2 caused warming. Do the feedbacks help cool the Earth, as I believe? Are they neutral, as some believe? Are they positive feedbacks, as the IPCC believes? No one really knows, but most observation-based studies suggest they are negative to neutral. See the discussion here and in Part one of the series:
Climate Sensitivity to CO2, what do we know? Part 2. – Andy May Petrophysicist
“Do the feedbacks help cool the Earth, as I believe?”
Negative feedbacks make no sense whatever. If that were really true, then how was it that the earth was so much warmer during the dinosaur age?
“most observation-based studies suggest they are negative to neutral.”
Sorry, but completely untrue. In fact, the very first graph you present in your own referenced article shows most feedback values in the published scientific literature lie somewhere around 2 to 4, not zero and not negative.
MGC,
That’s easy, during the “dinosaur age” the world ocean could circulate in the tropics. The current ice age began when the Falklands opened, surrounding Antarctica with the Southern Ocean and Panama was created blocking the waterway from the tropical Atlantic to the tropical Pacific. The first event caused the Antarctic ice sheet to be created 30 Ma and the second formed the Arctic ice sheet 3 Ma. The world is unusually cold today. (Ma=millions of years ago)
Pacific freshening drives Pliocene cooling and Asian monsoon intensification | Scientific Reports (nature.com)
Sorry, Andy, but no. According to your prior comments, “negative feedbacks” should have inhibited that dinosaur age warming, regardless whatever handwaving cause for that warming that you want to trot out.
I’ll say it again: given the earth’s known climate history and the existence of much warmer conditions in ages past, negative feedbacks make no sense. If negative feedbacks were truly a reality, then those much warmer conditions should have been inhibited by negative feedback and should not have occurred, no matter what the cause of the warming influence.
But those much warmer conditions did occur. Negative feedbacks make no sense.
Moreover, the vast overwhelming preponderance of the scientific research finds positive feedbacks, mostly in the 2x-4x range.
It looks to me that you’re just trying to fool yourself into believing something that, almost certainly, simply ain’t true.
You really don’t have a clue do you? Without negative feedbacks just what do you think limits warming? If positive feedbacks is all that there is, what limits the growth of temps? Positive feedback continually “feeds back” ever increasing power from the output to the input, what limits that growth?
If it were not for negative feedbacks, none of us would be here today. For 600 million years the Earth has stayed between 11 and 28 degrees. Do you think that is by accident? It is all because of negative feedbacks.
Andy, really?
Of course, there is negative feedback which kicks in … eventually … to limit the temperature rise due to positive feedbacks. But those positive feedbacks can push things a pretty long way (much warmer dinosaur age temperatures being one example) before they are eventually limited.
There’s one limiting factor in particular that does most all the work. Anyone who understands basic physics should be able to identify it immediately. I won’t mention it just yet, as I’ve challenged Jim Gorman to do himself a favor, by going and doing some genuine research for a change, and find out for himself what it is.
What you are proposing is a cycle, up due to positive feedback and then down with negative feedback in a natural variation.
Can you show that has happened in the past? What is the process in mathematical terms?
If you know and understand basic physics so well then spit out the answer. Nobody plays guessing games here. If they know something it is asserted with references and data to see if others can poke holes in the assertion. You want to be a teacher, then teach, don’t play troll games.
Gorman says: “What you are proposing is a cycle, up due to positive feedback and then down with negative feedback in a natural variation”
First off, no, this is not “my” proposal. It is firmly established science, initially identified via experimental data way back in 1879.
Secondly, no, it is not a “cycle” and it is not “up then down”. It is up but further increase becomes progressively more and more limited, until the increase eventually stops.
“You want to be a teacher, then teach”
The best teachers prompt their students to teach themselves. I think you’ve been given adequate information to find what I’m talking about by yourself.
So stop wasting your time just blog chatting back and forth with some guy who you want to believe is just an ignorant troll anyway, LOL. Go spend some worthwhile time doing some real research instead!
More word salad with no content.
You are a troll.
I will no longer feed the troll.
Gorman sadly confirms his willful ignorance yet again.
“No content” ? Oh please. There were multiple pieces of relevant information provided. You’re just being too deliberately dumb to acknowledge them:
1- what we are talking about here has been known, experimentally verified science, since 1879.
2- what we are talking about here is not a “cycle” nor is it “up then down”.
3- what we are talking about here progressively limits temperature increase, until that increase stops.
Gorman still won’t do any genuine research of his own from any genuine scientific sources. He knows that if he ever did, his fairy tale dreamworld of denier delusions would be ripped to shreds.
So, you admit that the energy imbalance is not proof of human-caused climate change. We can agree on that. Besides, the estimate of an energy imbalance of ~0.5 W/m2, is an order of magnitude lower than the accuracy of our estimates, at least.
I would note that your original assertion was far stronger than “inconsistent with …”
Andy asks what points 6 & 7 (more warming during the night than during the day and more warming in the winter than in the summer) have to do with human emissions.
These effects are unlikely to occur via other natural warming mechanisms, such as changes in incoming solar radiation or release of heat from ocean cycles. They are more ancillary pieces of evidence that are congruent with human CO2 emissions being the primary cause of the current long term warming trend.
This is not true, see here:
Detection and Attribution of Man-Made Climate Change – Andy May Petrophysicist
I’m sorry Andy, but please identify to me where, if anywhere, in your referenced article you discuss more warming during the night than during the day and more warming in the winter than in the summer as possibly being caused by any natural mechanism. Those are the topics you have responded to with your reference.
Unless I’ve really really really missed something, I don’t believe you actually discussed either of these in your referenced article, anywhere at all. In fact, I key word searched your article. The words “winter” , “summer”, and “night” appear … nowhere.
Therefore, it appears to me that you’ve simply thrown out an irrelevant red herring. You’re just blowing more distracting tactics smoke.
Why am I not surprised?
MGC,
You are engaging in a classic strawman fallacy. I was clearly not addressing warming winters and nights, I was addressing your assertion that natural forces could not cause the weather to get milder, which is what is really happening. The latitudinal-temperature-gradient (LTG) is getting lower, due mainly to warming of winter and nighttime temperatures.
The most severe weather occurs in colder times like the Little Ice Age (aka the “pre-industrial”). These are times with high LTG. I am working on a post addressing warming winters and nights via natural processes with a friend as we speak, but it is not ready yet. Look for it before the end of the year.
“I was clearly not addressing warming winters and nights”
But those were the topics to which your comment was responding.
“I was addressing your assertion that natural forces could not cause the weather to get milder”
But the reference you provided did not address this either!
I’ll say it again: the reference you provided did not address the topic of discussion. Viewed from here, it had all the earmarks of an irrelevant red herring
Sorry, I did not realize that you are learning disabled, either that or you didn’t actually read the post I linked to, not sure which. A pertinent quote from the post:
“As part of their argument and to support their conclusion that man has caused most of the warming they write on page 869 [AR4]:
Wow! Talk about blatant and obvious cherry picking. A very similar rapid rise in global temperatures took place just over 1100 years ago during the Medieval Warm Period according to Richard Alley’s central Greenland temperature reconstruction here. Many other reconstructions also show similar dramatic temperature increases over the last 4000 years, see here. In fact, over the last 4000 years there have likely been several warming events similar to the one we are experiencing today in combination with an over-all declining temperature trend since the Holocene Thermal Optimum due to the Earth’s declining obliquity (see Javier’s Figure 9 here).’
Detection and Attribution of Man-Made Climate Change – Andy May Petrophysicist
Read before writing, you only make yourself into a fool.
Andy, the topic to which you responded for this particular thread was very specific: more warming at night and more warming during the winter as being earmarks of greenhouse effect influence (due to human emissions).
Yes, you addressed other possible indicators of human influence, and you made some general comparisons of current warming trends to prior warming episodes in your referenced article. But so what? These two very specific earmarks were not discussed.
Sorry if I did not make myself clear enough, but that was (and remains) my point.
MGC,
As I made clear previously, I am actively involved, with a friend, in researching natural causes for a milder climate, that is warmer nights and winters. I am not at liberty to discuss these issues here, but we will be publishing our results soon. Watch for my future posts, you will probably find them interesting if this is a topic of interest to you. I just cannot say more now, I wish I could.
Suffice it to say, warming nights and winters, at least in my opinion, are not evidence of human-caused global warming, quite the opposite. More later in the year. This applies double in the Arctic.
When you say “we will be publishing our results soon”, I assume you mean only in the blogosphere, not in the peer reviewed scientific literature.
There will be blog posts for sure. As for peer-reviewed journals, or other venues, that is unclear at this time. We’ll see. We aren’t at that point yet, still doing the research. We have a lot of material; it may be all of the above.
As far as I am aware, Andy, you’ve never actually published anything in the peer reviewed scientific literature in regard to climate change. I’m not sure if this is correct; but if it is, then it would seem unlikely that this new “research” would get published there.
Popper also said, “That which explains everything, explains nothing.” I think that sums it up pretty well.
Hello Andy,
By chance I am just reading Popper’s “Conjectures and Refutations” and also have his “The Logic of Scientific Discovery” to hand. But we must also remember Carl Sagan’s book, “The Demon-haunted World. Science as a candle in the dark.” Sagan’s book is, for me, the easiest to read, probably because its language is more colloquial and less steeped in the jargon of philosophy.
Keep up the good work.
Regards,
John.
This is a good, thought provoking article by Andy May. I believe the answer is that climate science is a composite of science and pseudoscience. To understand why this is, we must look at the evolution of its construction.
Maurice Strong, Boss of the UN environment Program in the Seventies, was concerned with the impact of capitalism on the poor and how to bring about the redistribution of wealth on a global basis. He recognised that the growing concern about AGW presented an opportunity for change. In simple terms, the rich created a climate emergency with their CO2 emissions, the poor were now suffering. The rich must reduce emissions by ending or changing their activities and must pay compensation to the poor. The UN embraced this idea. It fitted with their ambitions of global governance and control of global resources such as energy. Politically, it pleased the developing countries, socialist governments, environmentalists and green activists.
The IPCC was formed. The alleged warming role of CO2 was a given. Other UN agencies had a role, such as the WMO and WCRP. The latter includes management of the CMIP project that coordinates climate models.
The Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise published an account of how the IPCC operates. In effect, a huge literature review is conducted and its findings are distilled into a report. This provides scope for including alarmist material and excluding inconvenient stuff. Running parallel with this, governments get the advice for policymakers and academics receive funding from governments, as do the great and the good of the learned societies and institutions. The models they develop enter the CMIP program. In the UK, the Climate Change Committee digests the output from this process and advises the government on policy.
It seems to me that the IPCC science sausage machine produces a mixture of real and junk science having first filtered the ingredients to make sure they do not harm the project. This is how inconvenient science, e.g. the work of Happer and Wijngaarden can be prevented from entering the system. In theory, academia could stand up and blow the whistle, but I suspect that many are true believers, many need the job and the rest have been removed over the years.
In fairness, I need to declare that I am an observer, not an expert, but if the above description is about right, it explains the resilience of the IPCC campaign. The system is in place from the top of the UN to politicians. I can see only three vulnerabilities. The first is that the UN is becoming ridiculously alarmist. It is losing credibility, respect and authority. The second is that policies like net zero are raising public resentment and causing people to start questioning the justification. The third is that the science is being questioned by more and more people and sites like this are playing an educational role.
Sadly, those who oppose the alarmist science cannot seem to agree on a single alternative, as this site demonstrates regularly. We need to identify the things we agree on and then seek to resolve the issues that divide us.
One can not agree on a single alternative because there isn’t one. The world works on cycles of varying frequencies and phases. Until you begin to see trig functions based on varying magnitudes and phases, understanding climate is going to be nothing more than linear regressions showing correlations and never causation.
Thanks, Jim. You are right about that. I was thinking more about proposals about specific assumptions that can either be accepted or rejected. Some of these are potentially game changing (to quote their authors.) I refer to Monckton and his feedback theory, the work on saturation of the absorption bands by Happer et al. and the ideas of the Connollys.
I suspect that some rejection is based on NIH which is not invented here and grates on personal beliefs. Some rejection is linked to a blanket rejection of anything that accepts greenhouse theory. There are many other possibilities.
I suppose that my frustration is based on my belief that if the sceptical movement pinned its support on Monckton or Happer (for example) then we would stand a very good chance of challenging the IPCC position. While these ideas are rejected by many for whatever reasons, we remain governed by the IPCC via our governments.
Climate change is any change in climate, and if it isn’t defined like that, it isn’t climate change.
They adjust historical climate data to make their models look like they work, they don’t. So they take an average of all the wrong answers and call it the right answer. Strict BS.
How sad to see Craig blindly parrotting delusional conspiracy theory lies about “adjusting historical data to make their models work”. Delusional conspiracy theory lies that have been vomited into his empty skull by his WUWT propaganda puppet masters.
Ask a climate nut if they can provide any evidence that climate stasis has ever existed.
Essentially their predictions of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming have continually failed to come true from as far back as 1989 so climate change it had to become-
null | AP News
Now they find justification in every untoward weather event but not to worry net zero will fix all that just you wait and see. Only when net zero is achieved will the proof be obvious to us all with the weather and closure with their precautionary principle. You might think that’s somewhat ambitious but it’s not like they want to change the weather on the moon or the other planets and moons in our solar system is it Lloydo et al?
Psychotic delusion is what it is.
“A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page, confirming evidence” for the theory. Freud’s theories were the same; every clinical case confirmed his ideas. A hypothesis that is not refutable by any conceivable event is not scientific.”
But even Freud realized “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
The Church of Climate/Warming is just a denomination of the main religion of Secular Socialism, whose deity is the government. Climates scientists are little more than educated clergy and Al Gore is the Joel Osteen of faith.
Claims of human control of temperature fit the definition of pseudoscience, the real problem is that the term gives the liars too much credit.