Well, the issue is that all the natural forcings that one could expect to be driving the current warming continue to fall short of being the main drivers of it.
This one question shows how you are getting your information from “Pravda”. The thing that Mann did not originally release was his computer code, which the NSF (the funding agency in question) says is a researcher’s intellectual property and they are not required to release. Nonetheless, Mann did eventually release the computer code around the time of the Congressional witchhunt several years ago. And, in his more recent work, Mann has made the data (and I believe the code) available online.
Has that stopped the Peanut Gallery from continuing to talk about “Mann not releasing data”. No. Because this is not about truth but about convenient fictions.
As GIGOBuster says, the natural forcings do not appear to be even nearly sufficient over the last 40 years to account for the warming…In fact, most estimates are that the net natural forcings were probably slightly negative. And, furthermore, there is difficulty understanding how the known forcing due to our increase in greenhouse gases would not be causing the changes that have occurred.
So, basically, we are in the situation where we have the corpse, we have a suspect with the motive and witnesses placing him at the scene firing a gun in the direction of the victim’s residence, and we don’t have any other serious suspects. So, sure, it is always possible that the gun misfired and didn’t kill the victim and that someone else came along prior or subsequently and did him in, but it is not what the smart money is on.
It’s not a mere nitpick; it’s the crux of my position.
You stated the exact opposite of that position, and I corrected you; no discussion is possible if I do otherwise. My point is that I want folks like you to lay out how the warming theory could be falsified for at least two reasons:
- I want to use those criteria in falsification attempts; and
- I want to use those same criteria for the opposite claim.
That’s why I’d asked for whatever stipulations your side wants to spell out. It’s why I said I was fine with nuance, asked after the tolerance for error, and inquired as to how right the predictions need to be. And it’s why I said that “I hope you’ll be exactly as obliging when it comes to predictions of cooling, such that folks who endorse a cooling trend will get to deploy the same it’s-not-black-or-white wiggle room about tolerance for error right back at you” – because it’s true.
My role in the discussion takes the form of applying any given criteria in exactly that fashion. If warmists get to handwave away one year as a short-term shift in weather rather than a long-term climate-change trend, then a coolist should get the same rights. And if some margin of error is allowable in defending warmist theory against falsification, then it’s allowable in doing the reverse. And so on.
I’m okay with allowing all of that on both sides. And I’m okay with allowing it on neither side. My whole point is that I want your side to spell out whatever criteria they like – in black-and-white simplicity as per an idealized situation, or with real-world wiggle room, as you please – so that we can apply 'em vigorously across the board, making predictions that aim at falsification.
To say I’m “ignoring that the issue is indeed not black or white” is missing the point altogether; it’s not merely that I happen to be delighted to grant that the issue is indeed not black or white, it’s that my entire role in the discussion is predicated on granting the terms you stipulate.
Drowning in glass of water…
At least that means that once again you don’t have to deal with the science cited, but that is getting tiresome.
From my perspective, I’m dealing with it quite thoroughly. Possibly you could offer a specific.
There is no cooling trend, get over it.
Er, yes. And now I reply: “There is no warming trend, get over it.”
If you give me useful criteria by which to evaluate a hypothetical cooling trend, I’ll run with it; give me flat assertions and I’ll merely respond in kind. Give me science and you’ll get science; give me nothing of the sort and there’s nothing to work with. “Garbage In, Garbage Out” indeed.
Now that is something, unlike your ongoing game of obfuscation.
And that is why Dr Michaels gave you that warning, you only are **discrediting **skeptics by still claiming that there is no warming trend. Using 1998 to say there is a cooling trend is misleading.
That’s quite right. The quote correctly addresses, and then correctly shifts emphasis away from, the fact that “some information sources – blogs, websites, media articles and other voices – highlight that the planet has been cooling since a peak in global temperature in 1998. This cooling is only part of the picture, according to a recent study that has looked at the world’s temperature record over the past century or more.”
Yes, as per your quote some sources do highlight that the planet has been cooling since '98; they do so because, as per your quote, the planet has been cooling since '98. But – as per that quote – the cooling is only part of the picture. The question, then, is what else is in the picture.
Mere cooling since '98 isn’t enough to falsify the theory; it’s only part of the picture. Something more needs to be in the picture to falsify the theory; what is it?
Answer that question and we’ve got something. Handwaving away the cooling as “only part of the picture” is entirely correct, but it’s only useful if you spell out the remaining falsification criteria. Supply them and I’ll apply them.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/embarrassing-questions/
You still don’t get it huh? You have no good source supporting your idea that “there is no warming trend” so, when we’ll get science?
Nope, in reality you are adept on not finding valid sources that support your sorry points. (come to think of it, none have been produced by you) There is no need to add anything else because you are wrong regarding your “there was no warming trend”
Useless when you do not produce science to support your first point.
You supplied my source; I’d quoted it in my latest post, the one you’re now quoting in response. Your quote established that “some information sources – blogs, websites, media articles and other voices – highlight that the planet has been cooling since a peak in global temperature in 1998. This cooling is only part of the picture, according to a recent study that has looked at the world’s temperature record over the past century or more.”
“This cooling is only part of the picture,” you copy-and-pasted – and I agreed. And I also restated the part about how “the planet has been cooling since a peak in global temperature in 1998.” – because it has. The planet has been cooling, sure as the cooling is only part of the picture. That’s from your good source.
And so it goes; so long as you quote a source who establishes that “surface temperature records show 1998 as the hottest year on record”, then I don’t need another source; you’re my source.
Why the heck would I produce any? You (a) produce ones that I find completely satisfactory, and they (b) have a built-in advantage; you might reject my sources, but you can’t reject your own.
Likewise:
I don’t need to produce science for that first point; you’ve already granted the first point. You produced the source that says the cooling is “only part of the picture”; how could I possibly improve on your own agreement? All that remains is for you to supply the second point: since you’ve established that “the planet has been cooling” and the “cooling is only part of the picture”, I can but request the rest of your picture by asking for your remaining falsification criteria.
Likewise,
But I’m not trying to do that. I’m saying that you can pick whatever timeframe you like – whether more or less than fifteen years – and I’ll apply it to both sides. If “much less than fifteen years” is unacceptable, then I’m content to wait fifteen years. Require twenty and I’ll run with twenty. Name any falsification terms you please, and I’ll take them to heart.
Er, no; it IS, in fact, true. How warm the first half was relative to the second is irrelevant to whether one could say “it’s gotten cooler since '98” in '99, and in '00, and in '01, and in '02, and in '03, and in '04, and in '05, and in '06, and in '07, and in '08, and in '09. It’s neither wishful thinking nor deception to answer that question on its own merits, regardless of whether hundredths of a degree separate the second half from the first.
You can eliminate the rolleyes at any time. They contribute nothing to the discussion and just serve to poison the well.
You act like those of us who are not satisfied with the current accuracy of the science are the equivalent of holocaust deniers or believers in crystal power or creationism or something. But in fact, there are MANY scientists who are uncomfortable with some of the sweeping conclusions being drawn by the pro-AGW political movement from the current state of the scientific debate.
I understand the tree ring data is not reliable after 1960. It may even be valid to show measured temperatures after that point. What Mann did, however, was dishonest. He spliced measured temperatures onto the same line of the graph as the tree ring proxy reconstruction, making it appear that it was part of the proxy data. This made it look like the proxy data correlated perfectly with temperature. He then used this to justify the use of the proxy data. In fact, the Briffa series does NOT correlate with temperature after 1960. The honest thing to do would be to show the proxy data on the graph, and then explain why it falls off after 1960. Instead, Mann chose to ‘hide the decline’ in a dishonest way.
If an undergrad turned in a paper with that kind of shenanigans in it, I’d flunk him.
This is what happens when science gets politicized. Mann probably felt that the proxy data was good enough, but showing the decline on the graph would be used as evidence by ‘deniers’, and therefore he felt the science was better served by leaving out that inconvenient fact. This is the same logic the CRU people used to stonewall FOIA requests - they felt it wasn’t in good faith, but was just part of a fishing expedition by ‘deniers’.
Unfortunately, this is also how bad science happens. Once you’re sure the science is ‘settled’, then everyone else becomes the enemy, and your theories become something to defend zealously, rather than something that’s willingly offered to the give and take of alternate viewpoints. Your cute little rolleyes in this thread are a perfect example of the kind of mindset that dismisses criticism of any sort as being so obviously wrong that your whole modus operandi is to simply find anything at all that you can that can be offered as an alternate explanation, then to declare that this closes the issue and we’ve been ‘schooled’ and therefore any further debate is obviously just politically driven. You wear your bias on your sleeve.
Mann’s initial hockey stick showed virtually NO warming during the MWP and virtually no cooling during the LIA. He smoothed it all away, leaving what looks like a smooth but slightly declining temperature line until a big uptick in the 20th century. He really had no justification for doing that.
As for your cute little cartoon - it’s completely irrelevant. In fact, it’s just an ad-hominem argument, and a weak one at that. I laid out the facts behind the concern that nothing can really be done. Your response was to essentially say that this argument is a last-resort after one loses the debate over the science. Even if it were true, the fact is that the argument still exists, and still needs to be refuted. I have NEVER seen anyone offer a reasonable refutation. Usually at that point the argument moves along the lines of “Well, SOMETHING has to be done.” Which is about as useless an argument you’re likely to find.
The only comprehensive study I’ve seen that attempted to work out the various costs in the future and apply reasonable accounting principles was the Stern Review. And for quite a while, it was used by the ‘action now!’ crowd to justify government action to regulate CO2. But a careful reading of the Stern Review shows that A) he used the most extreme predictions for global warming damage, B) he used the smallest cost estimates for mitigation, and C) he used a discount rate that makes no sense. He had to do this because otherwise the conclusion of the report would be that no action should be taken.
And since that report came out, plenty of evidence has come to light to show that many of the costliest proposed effects are probably not going to happen. We no longer think that global warming will necessarily lead to extreme weather events like increased tornadoes and hurricanes. The assumption that warming would cause a skyrocketing malarial death rate has been debunked. The estimates of sea level rise have generally been reduced. Etc.
I have brought this issue up many times. It’s not a side issue - it’s the CORE issue. We can debate the science all day, but in the end if there’s no feasible way to reduce CO2 without starting wars or wrecking the economy, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
This, by the way, is the attitude of Bjorn Lomborg. I’m pretty much in his camp. It seems to me that global warming IS occurring. It will probably have negative effects in the future. To me though, the science is not nearly as settled as you would have us believe - especially when it comes to longer term climate predictions after the earth has had time to adjust and various secondary feedback mechanisms kick in - mechanisms which are poorly understood.
To me, that means there is a lot of variability here. This is reflected in the IPCC report. And like all other risks, you have to take into account the amount of variance before you can make reasonable economic decisions. A 1% chance of catastrophic damage is not worth as much in mitigation investment as a 50% chance of catastrophic damage. Yet the pro-AGW side doesn’t seem to care whether it’s 1% or 50%. They fall back on something like the Precautionary Principle and seem to state that any risk is too much, and no price is too high to stop it.
And of course, as usual, the only possible answer to this problem is more government, more regulations, a stronger UN, and in general more of the same policies they want to foist on the world in any case. That tends to make me suspicious, just as you’d be suspicious if scientists affiliated with the Cato institute discovered a tragic problem for which the only solution was to dismantle the federal government. I daresay you’d be looking at that science a lot more skeptically than you do the science of global warming.
It is my experience that on a subject like this one the opponent may ignore the evidence or not ever end the discussion 
What I do believe is that sources and science have to be produced, when the opponent says that he will produce the science if “I get to it” and then the opponent says “sorry I’ll pass” I don’t think that is missed by others. Skeptical sources are not useless to me, they point to where one should direct the complaints. Many that come to these discussions just ignore that many of the “clever” points they bring have been debunked ages ago, so much so that one can play Bingo with the arguments:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/04/gwsbingo.php
What is important is that others learn from the science why it is reckless to get stuck with points like “it not warming since 1998”.
As far as the ‘science being settled’… There are new papers being published all the time which don’t just pick nits at the AGW theory, but attack the very core of some of it.
For example, take this peer reviewed paper, published last year in Geophysical Research Letters:
The PMOD and ACRIM are composite temperature models developed from satellite data. PMOD is the one cited by global warming adherents. This model has been adjusted to correct for perceived flaws in the satellite temperature data. ACRIM is closer to the actual measurements of the satellites, and also has a different result. If ACRIM is correct, then up to 68% of the current warming could be due to solar variation instead of CO2 forcing and positive feedback.
I understand that this paper has come under some criticism, as all papers tend to do, but I haven’t seen a peer-reviewed rebuttal to it. The paper may turn out to be wrong. Regardless, this is not the picture of science that has been ‘settled’. You’re not about to get a paper past peer-review if you try to defend intelligent design or Phlogiston theory. The science in those cases is about as settled as it gets. But an even cursory review of the literature shows many papers still being published which dramatically affect the conclusions about global warming and its severity - some showing it to be worse, some showing it to be less severe.
When the EPA was considering regulating CO2, one of its analysts prepared a briefing paper which argued against it. You can read the paper here. He summarizes the state of the science and the weaknesses of the current models quite well, from what I can tell.
Other people I highly respect are also ‘Deniers’. For example, Burt Rutan. Rutan is not a climatologist, but he’s a very good engineer who knows how to conduct experiments and read data, and who has an extensive track record of being right. He’s also an environmentalist who built one of the coolest energy efficient homes I’ve ever seen. I guarantee you that Rutan does not deny the holocaust, believe in creationism, or subscribe to any other forms of junk science.
Here’s Rutan’s statement about AGW.
Now, Rutan could be wrong, and I accept that he doesn’t have a Ph.D in climatology. And in fact he goes farther than I would and I don’t endorse everything he has to say. His Source List will probably make the AGW defenders on this board apoplectic. But his arguments are at least sound and are not hysterial ‘denial’. Rutan isn’t an idiot.
And there are plenty of scientists with such Ph.D’s who are still skeptics. That doesn’t mean that they deny everything about global warming, but that they disagree with some of the conclusions put forward by the AGW crowd.
And you continue to ignore that what the science say does not means that the proposed solutions don’t deserve criticism.
No source for this accusation.
Seems that Pravda is your source.
If the teacher told the students earlier that unreliable data should not be used in future reports, it would be deceitful to flunk him then. The denier media has done a number on you.
There is also no good evidence that the requests were valid.
Nope, your accusations have no good basis.
Sorry, but there is also no good evidence for what you are saying here.
If you want to accuse me of wearing a bias, you are right, but is not political.
You are really silly here, why should we worry if the science is wrong then? That implies that there will be no problem in the future so it is silly to say that nothing can be really done because there will be nothing to worry about.
This also seems to ignore what I said before, I’m not too concerned about secondary feedbacks (the main one is still the water vapor) the conservative position is to assume a raise of 3 degrees or 4 degrees before the end of the century if nothing is done. If scientists are uncertain about when the secondary ones would kick in, that does not mean that the expected temperature will be less.
Nope, it was thanks to statistical evidence that I got convinced that I was wrong regarding many items on the gun issue, good evidence does that.
When even one of the skeptic scientists that attends a Heartland Institute meeting tells the audience that global warming is happening and that humans are involved in it since the 1970’s, I would conclude that any source that tell you otherwise should never be relied upon, but that is just me.
Sam, regarding Rutan:
Regarding the EPA report, I knew before opening it that it was the Carlin one:
A cut an paste job, that did deserve a failing grade indeed. Even an MIT group found that the report was wrong, and the video also deals with how wrong the report was regarding the satellite temperatures.
The ultimate source of the report was “the Competitive Enterprise Institute” funded by Exxon.
The source is me, making my own conclusions. When you draw a chart, and you represent a dataset with a line, you don’t substitute a second dataset partway across the chart, without making it extremely clear to the reader what you just did.
Mann’s chart was tendentious - he wasn’t just describing data, he was trying to convince an audience on a highly charged issue. He worked very hard to make sure that chart presented his case in the best way possible. He choose smoothing intervals not based on the statistical correctness of the choice, but whether it helped make his case look stronger. He truncated a dataset and substituted another without making this clear, to help make his case. He agonized over how to achieve that. That’s clear in the CRU emails.
He could very easily have left that series intact, and explained the decline in response in a footnote. He could have left it on and dotted the line past the point where it was no longer reliable. Or he could have truncated it, and not added in the real temperature series. Any of those would have been preferable. At least one version of the hockey stick in fact does show the series truncated. But Mann thought long and hard about coming up with a way that could be defended scientifically (at least enough to squeak through a peer review by sympathetic colleagues), but which would make his case look stronger. This is simply bad science. Or advocacy science.
You’ve really got to stop with the little cheap shots. It doesn’t help your case.
Well, your case is not helped when it is just your say so.
It is clear that that you have decided to ignore the reasons of not using the tree ring data after the 1960’s and that they were discussed before and reported.
You are also showing continuous ignorance: Mann and others came back with more evidence in 2008, there were no issues like the one you are trying to continue to affirm, deniers had to look for other silly reasons to criticize the new reconstructions. Science marches on.
Yes, I said I wasn’t going to vouch for everything he said. I’m sure he’s got some of it wrong. I also suspect he has some of it right. But the point I am making is that those who are still skeptical are still asking good questions. Maybe it’s because they haven’t heard the correct answer, or maybe it’s because they have a point. But they aren’t ‘deniers’, cranks, or otherwise uneducated rubes.
There are a lot of people with Ph.D behind their name who still have not been satisfied with the science. Not all of them are evil members of the Big Oil conspiracy. Many of them are climatologists and other expects in the various fields cited by the IPCC. Including some of the authors of the actual reports, who feel they’ve been taken too far.
Carlin has a B.Sc in physics, and a Ph.D in economics. He is also an expert at exactly these kinds of reports. For 20 years he has been one of the guys the EPA assigns to survey a scientific field to determine consensus or spot research flaws. I’ll bet you’d have no problem with his analysis if it had been about the state of drug research, if that led to an EPA conclusion advocating more regulation, right?
But this is typical of your side. You go straight for the character attacks, credential attacks, and accusations of dark conspiracies by shadowy corporate forces. I hope you understand that such reaction makes some of us even more skeptical.
See above.