Warning: Climate Change Thread

For those sick of the debate.

For those who aren't, here's an interesting piece:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/041453.html

Interesting - lots of the critics of AGW aren't climatologists, they are physicists, statisticians, and geologists.

All that "not one model" says is that we, as humans, are still stupid and haven't figured it out.

Not being as economical with the alphabet as the good professor, I have two letters for the global warming enviro-nazis: F and U.

so we can spell Function and Fracture?

Oh dear...

What's his theory for explaining the reducing mass of ice?

Another fail


Former scientists do tend to get a bit cranky in their old age...

This global warming thing is spreading like some new religion, just as religions of the past have ravaged Europe and then made its way to the new world. The fact is that the climate, hell the weather at this moment is changing and will never be the same twice and there is nothing we can do to control that, though there are those who preach the weather should be the same every year and global warming is to blame. The fact is that the more greenhouse gasses the more the earth becomes warmer and with more co2 like a green house and the more plants will grow(not just trees, but weeds, etc) and eventually balance it back out. Reptiles once ruled the earth and it was not a cold earth.

Wait? The things are "facts", you say?!!! Well, that's me convinced. I'm glad you're hear to enlighten us about such things.

What's your objection? Surely you don't think climate change can have ONLY negative consequences?

Antartic ice (80-90% of the ice in the world) isn't decreasing; it's increasing.

So you don't believe that the weather is changing at this very moment or that things weather wise will never be the same year on year?

Until your words of wisdom, I was under the apprehention that the weather was the same all year long. How wrong I was! Thanks!

Well, then lets not use the excuse that the weather is different every year to justify raising the prices of everything and making life hard on working people throughout the world.

No, we are supposed to believe shit like this, no questions asked and throw our wallets at AlGore in repentance:

Where's the correct predictions?

*crickets*

Where's the correct post-dictions, at least?

I ask this every thread, and I still don't get answers.

Yeah, let's not, great leader! Tell us more!

Dumb argument. I think you will fin many fewer people who claim we know everything about the mechanics of climate change than you will peolpe who think we have narrowed down the likely results within certain bounds. So there is still debate over things like the role of cloud formation in any changes. So the presence of models is just an example that people haven't just drunk the Kool Aid and accepted some single version of events.

Cooling phase?

Uuuuuh. Obviously there can be other factors which come into play. If there is a significant change in the outputs from the sun then the fact there was loads of CO2 in the atmosphere would mean that it would always be like that. The point is that as we can;t control the sun we might want to try to control the CO2.

So it has risen in the past with no help from us therefore we can't be doing it now?
We can all presumably see the gaping hole in that one.

The record shows that when we come out of an ice age it is usually not mainly due to a rise in CO2 levels. But again that doesn't prove what he thinks it proves.

One current theory is that an ice ends of other reasons, like shifts in orbit or increases in solar radiation. A positive feedback system then develops where CO2 release and temperature rise are most definitely correlated.

This is one of the most stupid things I've yet to read on this subject. But individually is more fun...

Cretin. We are not talking about everywhere warming anyway, it's called climate CHANGE.
Plus, the suggestion isn't that everywhere gets a French Riviera style temperature. I presume he enjoys his vacations in the fucking Gobi desert?

Jesus. No, studies have suggested that temperature rise will have a negative impact on diversity and a limited impact on food production since other limiting factors - like water - may bcome more scarce.

He knows the ocean that the ice is in can't be below 0 right?

The subject of antartica ice is actually up for debate as far as I can see. The third IPCC report predicted it would thicken - although it might be that teh centre will thicken while the periphery melts with a net loss of ice. Again this is an area where there is ready admission that factors like the ozone hole are actually complicating efforts to understand exactly what will happen.

Or else, it's, you know, prove of the fucking scientific method. Predict, measure, re-assess.

You'll have to explain this for me.

They're idiots.

I posted a series of videos that walks you through the whole thing in molecular detail, the controversies, everything.

No interest.

Fuck 'em.

Ho-ho! Nice try, you're one of us bub, idiocy included.

Pearls before swines?

Since there is no them this statement is somewhat problematic, if not down right disturbing.

Who the hell do you folks think you are? He's a scientist!

He's smarter than you, so shut up and listen.

...yeah...

Like I said...

Global Warming: science argued by politicians and cable news talking heads.

The computer models, which nearly all of the alarmism is based on, make predictions. No one has shown me one that has yet made an accurate prediction. For that matter, no one has shown me one whose results for the past even match prior data (a post-diction, if you will).

5 years ago I posted a list of assumptions that the models make, in the form of things they exclude, given to me by someone who actually did computer modeling (of chemical reactions); it's a pretty damning list. I'd hope that most of the exclusions on there would have been fixed by now, but somehow I doubt it, otherwise, surely someone would have given me an answer one of the times I ask for a model that makes accurate post-dictions. Here's the list, as best I remember it: Rainfall (arguably the most damning omission), volcanism, cloud cover, the 1940-1970 cooling (I really hope they fixed this one - older models just ignored it entirely, post-dicting the temperature continued to increase every year during that period, or just had a gap in the model there, depending on the model type), every greenhouse gas besides CO2, CH4, and H2O, forest fires and the resultant particulate pollution (as well as the same from other sources), molecular pollutants (nitrogen and sulfur oxides), and ground-level ozone.

Admittedly, that was 5 years ago, on then-year-old information. Now, if you've got a model where all of that's been fixed, and which doesn't have any other glaring omissions, and which can accurately post-dict the temperature for a given past year for a reason other than the data point was input directly into it, I'll be impressed. I'll be really impressed if it's also* made an accurate prediction about the temperature for a given year that hadn't happened yet when the model was run.

*because if it can't get the post-dictions first, then the predictions are nothing more than guesses.

But I'd also bet many quatloos you don't have such a model to show me.

I don't have a model where all that's been fixed because as I said above we haven't reached the definitive truth on this yet. The detail is still being narrowed down.

As far as I am aware the 1940-70 'cooling' is now believed to have merely been a more gradual warming which measurement techniques obscured.

Cloud cover remains an issue as far as I am aware.

Other chemicals are worked in as far as I am aware since they know the likely effects of sulphates etc.

I've not had a chance to read this yet but it is meant to be a previous prediction which bears out. As I say, I've notread it yet...

Link?

Link?

So water vapor was ignored entirely. Given that it's the largest greenhouse gas by total effect by an order of magnitude, this seems like a rather glaring omission.

Now why might they have started in 1959? It wasn't for a lack of prior data. Perhaps because the prior data would have made their models make predictions wildly out of sync with reality to that point? Given the description of how the model works (input temperatures and GHG's, extrapolate out to the future, then use that to interpolate an estimate of the effect of CO2 doubling - that is the projections are the cause of the estimate for the warming effects of CO2, rather than the reverse. Hence, the predictions are very sensitive to the starting year), that's not an unreasonable conclusion.

That's not to say that the extrapolation is wrong - clearly it's not terribly wrong. But the methodology isn't terribly different from trying to predict the price trend of a stock. But even the accuracy is not all that important, as I'll explain below.

Volcanoes may be random, but it's completely illogical to discount them, as they do happen with some regularity. It'd be like discussing plate tectonics while ignoring earthquakes because they happen randomly. Random != irrelevant.

At any rate, ignoring the effects of water vapor means that any estimates of GHG's forcing abilities are going to be somewhat overstated, unless water vapor concentrations have held absolutely steady, as well as cloud cover (oops).

C reads to me to be something of a strawman - why would forcing start decreasing in 2000? It makes no sense. At the very least, a logarithmic curve should have been included as a lower bound. Right now, we'd be only a little bit more towards scenario B in the so-called 'observed' forcing, and GHG's only would put us well towards the logarithmic curve.

Missing anything about the urban heat island phenomenon. I'm guessing the 2006 paper covers it, given the conclusions it apparently draws. For this article's purposes, no, it's not important, but in general, it is.

The reason that it doesn't matter that the models match reality so well is that, well, they shouldn't! With the banning of CFC's, concentrations of them have started coming down. The ban could not have been accounted for in either model. So either the model has been edited over the years, rendering the whole exercise invalid, it was a lucky guess to begin with, or there's something akin to the "reversion to the mean" phenomenon at work, which Hansen unwittingly hit upon. My best guess would be a combination of the last two. In any case, no post-dictions were made - The question "Does the temperature model fit the GHG data absent the temperature data used to figure out the model?" has not been answered by Hansen or this article. This is why taking all the GHG components into account - most especially water vapor's contribution - is so important; it's the only way to model the past without assuming the past temperatures as a given; only Earth's temperature absent any greenhouse effect (estimated to be 255K, or -0.4° F (Peixoto and Oort, 1992)) and the effects of the various gasses need be figured out. Now it is the case that water vapor has been fairly constant, but the form in which it appears has not been - cloud cover varies quite a bit over time.

More generally, the article is lacking information on how accurate the model itself has been - has CO2 risen the way the model predicts (and CFC's haven't!)? If not, then regardless of how accurate the temperature predictions are, it simply fails to demonstrate any sort of causal relationship.

CFC's are themselves greenhouse gases, some of which are pretty potent; there's just not a lot of them, so their greenhouse effect is dwarfed by their ozone-destroying effect.

Yes, in addition the ozone hole itself has an effect on the melting of the ice.

http://www.newscientist.com/article...er-1940-shows-co2-does-not-cause-warming.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11649-climate-myths-we-cant-trust-computer-models.html

Yes, there's no period of cooling in the last 100 years that there hasn't been an attempt to eliminate from the record. Just like there's been no warm period in the last 2000 that there hasn't been a concerted effort to remove from the equation.

Can't have a hockey stick or climate alarmism if you see the natural variability in the record.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11649-climate-myths-we-cant-trust-computer-models.html[/QUOTE]

Interesting defense of climatology - an admission that they can't accurately forecast climate.

Isn't that what this entire thing is about?