A more direct take on the bullshit by Easterbrook:
And this was known **before **Ferrara at Forbes decided to swallow the bait from Easterbrook.
Yeah, reading Easterbrooks paper made me laugh out loud. Excuse my french, but the fucking deniers are always bitching about the current models, models that rely on laws of physics and have actual explanatory power, that they aren’t real science. Then they hang their fucking hats on that. The guy is basically extrapolating from past events, but for whatever reason this retired geologist’s science is better than the hundreds of scientists worldwide, people who have spent their careers, in many cases decades of their lives, studying this issue and trying to advance the science. All because it goes against their anti-regulatory ideology. Sometimes ideology has to give to reason, but deniers won’t go there. Fucking amazing.
Speaking of the Heartland Institute, does anyone know what Lord Monckton’s been up to lately?
He is a birther now.
***No. I’m not making that up. ***
BTW, that is an article from **still **conservative Republican scientist Barry Bickmore from BYU, lately he is really letting the Republicans know that the denial act will, sooner rather than later, become a big albatross on the neck of the politicians that prefer to ignore science.
Anybody who has ever modeled ANYTHING knows the likelihood of an accurate prediction is in proportion to the simplicity of the data inputs.
We accept that the predictions 100 years from now are accurate yet we can’t plot out the weather more than a week and it’s iffy at best how accurate that is.
What is far far worse are the actions taken based on these predictions. There is no ROI mindset to any of it. We’re trying to smother a campfire with truck loads of money instead of 5 cents worth of water.
removing co2 is not the only solution to the problem but that apparently is the only one pursued.
Not accurate at all to say that there is no ROI
And the reason why controlling (“just removing” is the real of geo-engineering) is considered is because it also makes more economical sense.
As for the really silly points on model accuracy and weather predictions:
I never suggested a delay so that argument makes no sense.
The de facto “action” coming from the deniers in congress is to delay or do nothing. Under those constrictions the solutions coming from people that usually tell you that there is nothing to worry about will be on occasion ineffective.
The solution is to tell the powers that be to stop the delays and realize that there is a problem, as the saying goes, only when we get to elect people that are not blind that we will not be led to disaster, we should be able to employ better solutions based on the ROI already made by economists that took a look at the issue already.
Are you proposing genocide?
The quality of our air has been *continuously improving *over the past 30 years. At least in the U.S.:
I have spent many thousands of hours over my twenty-odd year career building and testing models and I don’t know what you are talking about. I even spent several hundred hours in grad school on a model based on the Lorenz equations (which were developed to model weather systems). The likelihood of a accurate prediction for a model depends on the ability to take into account all the variables in the system and the strength of the dependence of your prediction on the variables you incorporate into the model. For a chaotic system like the Lorenz system, the ability to predict is based on you knowledge of the initial conditions in the system and how far in the future you are trying to predict. Weather is chaotic (you do know what this means, right?) and thus difficult to predict with any great accuracy over the long run. There is ZERO evidence and no reason to believe that climate is chaotic and thus it is much easier to model. For example, if I double the solar irradiance, I can expect the temperature of the earth to roughly double. If I make the atmosphere opaque to light in the visible spectrum, I will make the earth colder as this is near where the solar irradiance curve peaks (you can model it with a black body curve at 5900 K). If I make the atmosphere more opaque to IR radiation, the earth will heat up as this is where the earth power spectral density is highest. These are pretty simple relationships that have a solid basis in well understood physics. Simplicity of the data inputs has nothing to do with it. What do you even mean?
Granted, modeling climate is difficult because of the number of variables in the system and the difficulty in determining their effects. Taking the effects of cloud cover and the reduced albedo of an ice free pole can add uncertainty to a model. Many of these effects are second order at best (when approximated via expansion) but however they may decrease or amplify the overall trend, making the atmosphere more opaque in the IR will tend to make the planet hotter. Simple physics.
Regardless, you do realize that Easterbrook is not even modeling right? He is fitting past data and extrapolating. He has nothing in his predications that describe how different variables in the system affect the system. He is simply plotting the temperature of the globe against different variables and fitting them and then extrapolating to get a prediction. This is not a model, but you seem to believe that it is more valid than a model based on actual physical laws though I have yet to hear you explain why. Is it because it is simple?
Data fitting and using it to predict future performance is fine if you can reasonably expect future conditions to be the same as past conditions. I have spent the last few months building a “model” of detector output vs. temperature, exposure time, photon flux, micro-channel plate voltage, and total integrated radiation dose for a detector flying on a future Mars mission based upon tens of thousands of images taken in various conditions. I expect it to hold up well. Easterbrook’s predictions on the other hand I don’t trust at all for the simple reason that future conditions are not the same as those used during his interpolation. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is higher now than it has been in probably at least a million years. Simple physics tells me that this will tend to heat the earth. This perturbation to the system is guaranteed to have an effect and nowhere in Easterbrook’s “model” does he take that into account. Why are you willing to accept his results but scoff at all the other models out there that are based on know physical relationships? Is it simply ideology? Or are they too complicated for you?
And as far as ROI, you and I could very probably agree on many things with regards to mitigation. I am a capitalist and pretty conservative economically. Unintended consequences are easy to come by and it would be relatively easy to make the cure as bad as the disease. But that’s not what we are talking about, is it? We are talking about simple fucking physics and whether the Earth is warming or not based on some article by a highly partisan lawyer for a highly ideological think tank that you linked to. You want to talk about what is smart to do and ROI, I am willing to have a discussion about it; start another thread. I bet we could see eye to eye on many things. You want to try to deny science because of your ideological bent and the data fitting of a retired geologist and a think tank funded by oil companies, let’s talk about how stupid that is right here.
Am I correct in my understanding that actual measured global warming is within, say, an order of magnitude of what would be expected under the solidest laboratory conditions, i.e. shine a light on a sealed box of CO2 at concentration X and temperature goes up by Y?
If so, then it is ridiculous to even doubt the fact that if we dump more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere then it will get warmer. The theory says so, reality says so. Even if reality differs from theory by a fraction, humanity is already on a track to make these errors irrelevant. By the end of the century we will bust through any possible discrepancy between theory and reality and get into some truly bad shit, unless there is some heretofore unknown miraculous counterforcing phenomenon.
you’re making assumptions about what I’ve said. I started with a simple premise that the current cooling doesn’t fit the models. I’m not dismissing that the earth is warming but I am suggesting that the models of the rate are based on a great number of variables, all of which can skew the end result radically with very little change in the data. It might be warming up faster than the models predict for all we know. There is no way anyone can say with certainty that we understand all the nuanced factors that go into predicting the rise or fall in temperature and it’s arrogant to think we do. We should plan as if we don’t and spend money efficiently toward that goal.
We could cut co2 emissions radically with a few simple policy changes and focus of tax money. If we rolled back EPA diesel numbers we could be driving 65 mpg diesels right now. Nothing has to be invented. The cars already exist in Europe. If the federal government would focus on bringing down the cost of biodiesel we would drastically eliminate direct release of co2 from fossil fuels. The technology to do it already exists. The end cost needs to be dropped roughly in half and I have to believe that is doable with the proper focus of research funds. The benefits of this are many. Fuel costs would stabilize which would stabilize transportation costs. We would benefit directly from the taxes that would be generated from fuels created in our own country. We would be sending less money to countries that pose a terrorist threat to us.
Look at the technological changes that have occurred in the last century. It’s been an exponential change in virtually every aspect of our lives. We went from cars that got 13 mpg to 40 mpg in 20 years. I literally can’t imagine what transportation or energy production will be like in 90 years.
I will leave this conservative that was booted out of office for thinking that the scientists are right to explain why it is not recommended to just stand and expect that change to come easily:
I doubt there are any models that are really very accurate. Do you have examples with data showing level of accuracy?
Here is one example of a problem:
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-models-fail-to-predict-us-droughts-1.12810
This is a state of the art climate model, and here are comments from a scientist:
"The problem may lie in the models’ inability to reproduce the cycling between the ENSO’s El Niño and La Niña phases, especially given that many scientists think that La Niña is the major driver of drought in the southwest. The ENSO “behaves much messier in the real world than in climate models”, says Jessica Tierney, a climate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who has investigated the role of the ENSO in East African rainfall variability2. “We’re not sure how it has varied in the past, and we don’t know how it might change in response to climate change. This is really one of the big uncertainties we’re facing.”
What you are talking here is more weather than climate.
Once again, it is climate that they do better, the point that is missed is that the models do what they are supposed to do, the the climate of the past can be simulated on average, but not as precise as planners would want to, however it is silly to then dump the whole thing, because as one important point is missed: the simulations can and do work at replicating the number of droughts and intensities, there is still a problem on looking for more definition, but this complaint sounds like the creationists one and the intermediary fossils, it does not matter that we identified many intermediate fossils, “evolution is false if we can not find now the intermediate of the intermediate forms”.
The uncertainty by the way goes to another point: why do then we should not do anything and gamble on our future?
What I see here is that the scientists are correct when they report that on average the climate will change, and how often the extremes will come, not exactly when, but the issue is well understood that being uncertain of when, is not an excuse to not do something now. It would be like telling a smoker to ignore the dr. advice on quitting now since the date one will die of smoking is uncertain.
BTW most of the examples and cited science are in the link offered early, coming with that reply leads one to conclude that no cite is being checked.