Cobb: Are we moving toward a fact-free future?

[kublikhan]

Depends on what your definition of climate change is. If it adheres to Pielke Sr’s definition which is basically the fact that , well climate changes and there are a host of controlling factors then yes I agree with you….but if you are suggesting a definition that equates climate change with AGW then you are dead wrong. In fact there is a host of empirical evidence that points to major discrepancies between what that model would predict versus what has happened and is happening with climate. As I’ve pointed out numerous times there is no direct evidence for AGW, it is all modeled based on theory and those models produce non-unique solutions which means they can not be proofs.

In each of the cases you spoke of scientists continued to test the theories and continued to refine them….there was no huge swell of scientists arguing the science was settled it was business as usual for the scientists involved….theorize, test, re-theorize and test again. This was in fact the way climate science progressed up until the late nineties when it all went sideways.

Before everything went sideways, what was the general consensus back in the 90's for an explanation of the unusual climate phenomenon observed? Is there an alternate climate model than AGW which better fits the empirical evidence? If so, do you have any suggested reading on it? I am not really interested in sources that merely poke holes in AGW, but rather an alternate theory that fits the data.

Also, I assume you agree with the observed data listed in my initial post from NASA. The point of contention is that you are arguing that it could be caused by a host of factors other than AGW?

[PrestonSturges]

quod erat demonstrandum

Oooo, you speak French!

[AgentR11]

Sheesh, I can barely manage English. My wife speaks several languages, including French, but me, I'm stuck with my mix of coonass and Texican, producing a very odd version of English which includes words like tacqueria, ahi, and crawdad, not to mention the abomination that is spoken as "Rio Grande River".

nb, for the humor impaired, someone asked what QED meant, I provided what it stood for. Basically it means, "tada, proof is done, I go have cookie now."
(and its Latin, not French.)

[rockdoc123]

Before everything went sideways, what was the general consensus back in the 90's for an explanation of the unusual climate phenomenon observed? Is there an alternate climate model than AGW which better fits the empirical evidence? If so, do you have any suggested reading on it? I am not really interested in sources that merely poke holes in AGW, but rather an alternate theory that fits the data.

If you just plough through the literature that goes from about 1980 through to 1998 you will see there were lots of researchers looking at all sorts of areas of climate science including solar impacts, green house gases, Atlantic Oscillation, ENSO etc. It was largely discussed amoungst themselves and argued at technical meetings such as American Geophysical Union annual meeting. It was the first IPCC meeting that started things in a politicized direction and opened up the gov't coffers for such research.
I will look through what I have and see if there are some good summary papers. But there was never a consensus and I would argue there isn't really one now....the press and certain scientists with beneficial interests would like you to believe there is one.

Also, I assume you agree with the observed data listed in my initial post from NASA. The point of contention is that you are arguing that it could be caused by a host of factors other than AGW?

My own viewpoints aren't far off the mainstream of scientists who are skeptical.
Yes temperatures rose from about 1980 to 2000, but since then they haven't risen and the point often missed is they rose and fell in the earlier part of the twentieth century as well.
Yes CO2 has continued to rise, but it has continued to rise for the last decade while temperatures have remained more or less flat.
Sea level is rising but one needs to be careful of how it is measured and whether or not proper corrections for eustacy and isostacy are being applied. Often these measurements are overplayed simply because the correction wasn't made (hence the argument by a number of people of sea level rise around pacific islands which are in fact subsiding). Relative sea level rise is the operational term.
Arctic ice is thinning partly due to warming of ocean waters but also do to adverse wind patterns. It shouldn't be surprising that ice would be retreating as we are still coming out of a glaciation. Although Arctic sea ice is decreasing Antarctic sea ice is actually increasing slightly.
The cause of all of this is obviously a combination of factors but my argument is the sensitivity applied to CO2 (and hence CO2 being the main important forcing) is overstated. The paleo literature which clearly establishes a lag time of several hundred years between temperature and CO2 is also often ignored. Feedbacks are not well understood and it needs to be emphasized that the IPCC dire predictions for end 2100 temps requires CO2 positive feedbacks, without them temperature increase is minimal. The impact of AO and ENSO are not handled properly in models at this time and some would argue they are more important drivers in climate than GHGs.

[kublikhan]

Then in your opinion, has it been a waste of time and resources to try and mitigate GHG emissions? Ignoring the price of coal/natural gas for the moment, as well as other emissions like NOx, so2, etc, it is a bad idea to tear down our old coal power plants and replace them with natural gas or new coal plants with scrubbers? Should we forge ahead with extracting all of the economical fossil fuels we can get our hands, ignoring GHG emissions?

[dohboi]

Thanks for the post, pops. Kurt Cobb usually has something interesting to say.

[dorlomin]

Arctic ice is thinning partly due to warming of ocean waters but also do to adverse wind patterns. It shouldn't be surprising that ice would be retreating as we are still coming out of a glaciation.

I am trying to stay out of this and not turn an interesting thread into yet another rerun of the same tired old arguments.

But this is so obviously wrong that I just cant shut my mouth.

Over the past 11000 years the earth should have been cooling very significantly. We were coming out of the glaciation the 11000 years before that true enough, but the process should long ago have reversed.



There are three main variations in the earths tilt and orbit that modulate glaciation\ deglaciation. Over about 22000 years the precession of the perihelion is very important. That is the earths orbit is eliptical (it varies between being eliptical and more rounded over a period of 100 000s of years). About 11000 years ago the earth was closest to the sun during the nothern hemisphere summer. Nothern hemisphere is key because it has the most landmass where snow can lie and thick glaciers can form. The summer is key because the cooler the summer the further south a snowpack can lie and begin to form glaciers. As the earth got closer to the sun during NH summer the glaciers were slowly melted back over 1000s of years, the melt back of glaciers reduced the amount of energy reflected into space and allowed the earth to warm up and the atmosphere to hold more water vapor. A rough cross over point happened about 8-6000 years ago when the increasing distance from the sun during NH summer and the melting of glaciers meant the recent warm period, the Holocene reached its warmest. We have been cooling since then. The energy difference at the equator between SH and NH summers is not small, its is roughly 1411wm^-2 and 1329wm^-2 respectively c. 6% difference.

You can all argue about the climate, but you cant argue with astronomy.

[smiley]

@dorlomin, @rockdock

With due respect, but you just demonstrated what is troubling me about the whole GW debate. When the issue came up my first reaction was to ignore this tread, however I do feel compelled to react.

Disclaimer I am by no means a specialist in GW.

My personal stance is that something is happening to the climate and that that is going in a direction and at a pace that warrants attention. And I am more than willing to admit that human activity must have an influence on the environment.

But what is troubling me that I find the current hypotheses all rather shallow, gut feeling is that we're still missing some important parts of the puzzle.

What is compounding to this problem is that on the different sides of this debate, people are dug so deep in their trenches that the debate reaches almost a religious intensity.

And to me it seems there is little incentive to providing real insights outside of the established positions. Moreover the scientific method and the basic principles of fact finding seem to have been abandoned in a lot of the research surrounding GW. Al Gore is a politician, he can be forgiven, but when a scientist shows a graph showing two lines moving in roughly the same direction (CO2, T) and claiming that is proof of causality, well it makes my stomach turn.

Same goes for the debate. People are throwing the same arguments at each other over and over again,until it starts to look like a slapstick boxing scene. And woe, to those who bring in a new viewpoint, they get hit from both sides.

So how do we get out of this?

[Lore]

It bares repeating, because we don't know everything that doesn't mean we don't know something's and we know enough to understand that we have a real and fatal problem in development. The level of intensity is proportional to the seriousness of the issue. This isn't cheering on your favorite baseball team.

[AgentR11]

So how do we get out of this?

We don't, and its irrelevant anyway.

If AGW is not causing massive climate change, we will do nothing about it.
If AGW is causing massive climate change, we will do nothing to stop it.

[rockdoc123]

But what is troubling me that I find the current hypotheses all rather shallow, gut feeling is that we're still missing some important parts of the puzzle.

What is compounding to this problem is that on the different sides of this debate, people are dug so deep in their trenches that the debate reaches almost a religious intensity.

And to me it seems there is little incentive to providing real insights outside of the established positions. Moreover the scientific method and the basic principles of fact finding seem to have been abandoned in a lot of the research surrounding GW. Al Gore is a politician, he can be forgiven, but when a scientist shows a graph showing two lines moving in roughly the same direction (CO2, T) and claiming that is proof of causality, well it makes my stomach turn.

Same goes for the debate. People are throwing the same arguments at each other over and over again,until it starts to look like a slapstick boxing scene. And woe, to those who bring in a new viewpoint, they get hit from both sides.

So how do we get out of this?

the issue is not about the scientists in general but rather the personalities. It is about the politicization of the work they do, the subsequent access to "rock star" importance that some of them can garner and the access to large amounts of gov't funding they also have at their disposal.
People are people...just because you have an advance university degree doesn't mean you aren't basically a scumbag at heart. It should not be surprising to any of us that there are individuals in the research community who do not have higher ideals. What I find appalling is the lack of integrity that is being shown. It is so different from the ethics that I learned to stand by in my grad studies many years ago.
.

[smiley]

The level of intensity is proportional to the seriousness of the issue. This isn't cheering on your favorite baseball team.

Indeed, when I look how the thread Kublikan started on the subject only took 2 pages to derail into personal insults towards Rockdock, It more resembles cheering an icehockey match.

It bares repeating, because we don't know everything that doesn't mean we don't know something's and we know enough to understand that we have a real and fatal problem in development.

True enough, again, I am not a GW sceptic or "denier" as you call them.

But allow me to take this to something I do understand. I build systems, pretty complicated ones. And unfortunately these things do not always function up to specification. And more often than not the cause is unclear. System engineering gives you a lot of tools to adress these issues: 8-d problem solving, dmaic, Ishihawa, fishbone... etc. The name of the method doen't actually matter and you don't need to follow the $5000 courses, because these things all work the same. They contain a few stages:

1) Problem statement
This is actually deceptive. Sounds easy, but actually is pretty hard and usually discovered that although you are certain that you have a problem, you may find that you actually have a few anadotical events and observations that you link together and may or not be part of a problem.
2) Data collection
This stage you secure all the data that you may or may not need, without even thinking about possible solutions or causes.
3) Hypothesis
Again there are a lot of methods here, but the idea is to generate as much hypotheses as possbile and sort them out based on the problem statement and the data.
4) verification
speaks for itself.

Anyway what all of these methods tell you is that you should not start with a taking hypothesis and run with that. Because then your data collection will be completely biased towards this hypothesis, and even your problem statement will be tuned to the hypothesis. And I have seen that happen many times.

To give an example. A couple of years back I was involved in a set of turbine failures. The head manager was convinced from the start that this was a dynamical issue. So he spend a truckloads of money fitting turbines with all kinds of dynamical sensors. And true enough every time sensors were added we found new abberations, which were corrected. And then they crashed again. Eventually after we took a step back we found that the problem was a simple manufacturing error in a seal. Easy to detect and and took about $50 to solve.

This anekdote for me shows, that when you start looking at something with a certain bias, you will always find things that enhance that bias. And unless you are looking at the right spot, you are bound to overlook things which are really important.I fear that the whole GW debate is in a similar shape.

[rockdoc123]

You can all argue about the climate, but you cant argue with astronomy.

would be great if you could prove each and every glaciation or pulse of glaciation was due to nothing more than "astronomy".
That isn't the case.

and you say I'm very wrong when I say we are coming out of a glaciation and then you say I'm right?
Perhaps I'm missing something here but the last glaciation regardless of when it would be is what we are coming out of and hence should be warming. Not sure what all of your diagrams on astronomy do to disprove what I said?

This is a bit like trying to place a bet at the race track and someone is bending your ear about the evolution of horses....it's interesting, yes, but it is not relevant to the problem at hand.

[SeaGypsy]

I have had arguments on here with people who say I am a 'denier' because I pointed out that most Australian climate data is less than 100 years old and comprehensive data only begins in the 1960's (hence very little if anything can really be extrapolated about long term climate here/ esp considering the massive non apmospheric changes wrought since swhite settlement/ deforestation in paralell with Brazil etc.) For this reason I feel that the debate has tipped over into the realm of religion. It's not that I don't think it is happening. It is that there is a frenzied need to fill gaps in the theory / science / data, and what fill those gaps is often translated into doubtfull policy.

There is an ongoing national debate here in Australia about our government's introduction of a carbon tax. The focus in the MSM is mainly on the fact that every few months China adds another Australia's worth of CO2 production to it's total; also that 'Why should our industries be weighted in a way our competitors are not?"
The Gov response is about median to long term competitiveness and setting an example/ at least making some attempt at redress of climateologists concerns about getting away from fossil fuels. All very sensible, except meanwhile we have state governments ramping up coal production for Chindia like there is no such thing as a climate debate, just a danged new tax. Hypocrisy is rife.

IMO what is happening with the oceans is enough reason to go with a global energy renaissance. IMO it won't happen, just because there is still too much cheap energy left in the black, brown and gaseous stuff and the industrial/ economic imperative is always lowest cost.
Even if the first world goes beyond current levelling out, industry will just accelerate towards countries without regulation. It's a massive catch 22. Meanwhile the debate about the science gets lost in the noise, layers of it. Peak oil will only increase noise about the economy. The social imperative is clearly in favour of continuing to burn. Climate debate, like peak oil/ peak resource discussion, becomes a 'talking heads' subject which pops up regularly; but has no centrality to what actually happens.

[rockdoc123]

What is compounding to this problem is that on the different sides of this debate, people are dug so deep in their trenches that the debate reaches almost a religious intensity.

And to me it seems there is little incentive to providing real insights outside of the established positions. Moreover the scientific method and the basic principles of fact finding seem to have been abandoned in a lot of the research surrounding GW. Al Gore is a politician, he can be forgiven, but when a scientist shows a graph showing two lines moving in roughly the same direction (CO2, T) and claiming that is proof of causality, well it makes my stomach turn.

Same goes for the debate. People are throwing the same arguments at each other over and over again,until it starts to look like a slapstick boxing scene. And woe, to those who bring in a new viewpoint, they get hit from both sides.

You should go and spend some time at Judith Curry's site Climate Etc. She is a well known climate scientist with more publications behind her than most of her peers. She doesn't moderate her site very strongly so you do get a lot of opinionated whackos posting comments but you will also see a number of physicists and mathmaticians, geoscientists and climate scientists posting relevant comment. She was strongly on the side of AGW for sometime but then figured that rather than ignore or mock the critics it made sense to engage with them as they clearly had something to offer. She started out by engaging in discussion at Steve McIntyre's site Climate Audit and eventually decided that she would start her own site. She is now proclaiming to clearly be in a separate camp, one in the middle that sees that CO2 is playing a role but also understands that the climate sensitivity is likely overblown. She has taken her share of flak....first due to her claims a number of years ago that hurricanes had nothing to do with global warming (turns out that is now the mainstream view) and the folks at RealClimate have claimed she is now a traitor to the cause. As you say there are camps but my own view on this is the scientists who agree that CO2 has a role to play but that is is overstated (Pielke Sr as an example) have a very centered view. They are interested in the science and not the rhetoric. In the end information is where you find it and you often have to ignore what might be incorrect interpretations of that information. If you have a modicum of science background and are willing to think for yourself there are some self-evident truths that will arise as you work through the information.

[Lore]

This anekdote for me shows, that when you start looking at something with a certain bias, you will always find things that enhance that bias. And unless you are looking at the right spot, you are bound to overlook things which are really important.I fear that the whole GW debate is in a similar shape.

Good science looks at a question and let's the evidence construct the conclusion. There is also a peer-review process to help validate this against bias. A good example is the BEST study which led skeptics to arrive at virtually the same results as those in question.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Same goes for the debate. People are throwing the same arguments at each other over and over again,until it starts to look like a slapstick boxing scene. And woe, to those who bring in a new viewpoint, they get hit from both sides.

So how do we get out of this?

As AgentR11 says below, we probably don't. (Sadly, given human nature, this conclusion seems inescapable).

One individual who I respact, which has taken a different path - one down the middle, and gets much undeserved scorn (IMO) is author Bjorn Lomborg. He has written widely read books like "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and "Cool It - The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide To Global Warming".

This guy analyzes environmental scientific evidence and tries to come up with practical solutions that don't spend "too much" money BEFORE WE KNOW WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT, yet tries to do something far more meaningful than ignore the problem while we heat the planet.

He concedes AGW is likely a factor, but cautions we don't know nearly enough to assess how much. Far more importantly from a financial perspective, he points out that we don't yet have the scientific know-how yet to effectively react without bankrupting the global economy.

This to me, seems to be an honest, open, attempt at a rational starting point for compromise. For example -- he wants a carbon tax, but NOT a huge carbon tax.

Whether some offshoot of a policy using this kind of thinking as a starting point will "work" or not is hard to say -- but surely it's got to be better than both sides yelling the same things at each other more and more angrily and loudly -- while the powers that be churn out more profits and global heating continues apace.

[Lore]

Most people arn't aware of the facts because those facts are being 'swift boated' by the news, bias radio, websites and faux think tanks.

[Keith_McClary]

This is what makes me a climate sceptic.
...
The scientific method seems to have been shelved and I'm not sure why.

What exactly are you sceptical of? Can you state a testable hypothesis, pro or con?

[Lore]

This is what makes me a climate sceptic.
...
The scientific method seems to have been shelved and I'm not sure why.

What exactly are you sceptical of? Can you state a testable hypothesis, pro or con?

You're just asking for a string of gish gallop.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop