Climatologist Dr. Michael Mann completely vindicated...again.

Great Debates
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Science is about creating models that are a good fit to nature. Models always start out rough and are gradually refined as more data are uncovered and analyzed. Copernicus’s heliocentric model was refined by Kepler in his three laws of planetary motion, then became even more established by Galileo’s work on the moons of Jupiter. Newton then swept in and refined planetary behaviour with his three laws of motion and the law of gravitation.

Were any of these scientists wrong? Of course not, but each man provided explanations that more closely approximated the behaviour of nature than the previous version of the model.

In the science of global warming or climate change (pick a name, it’s all the same) we may not have a completely accurate model yet (which is not unusual in any science, really). Yes, some questions remain. What it boils down to in the current crisis, though, is not how perfect the model may or may not be, but what is the best available information at our disposal that results from all this work put into the models.

That best available information and models - despite eight pages of equivocation trying to confuse the issue - indicate an extremely high probability that there is a warming trend and that it is (at least partly) anthropogenic. Despite what a couple posters would have readers believe, there is no **significant **disagreement on these points.

While it is very true, as you say Magiver, that limited resources should be used wisely to combat the problem of AGW, there are also other considerations that complicate the problem. For example, overcoming established business models, mindsets, policy, and misconceptions. Developing and educating markets. Pushing new technologies to become better and cheaper. Operating commercially viable businesses. And so forth. I have mentioned these in previous posts. None of this stuff really happens before market application. Even more importantly, one has to become established in a market before one can exploit it and be commercially viable.

This brings us again to the Volt

It is simply not correct to claim the Volt is not a “technical achievement in any form”. The Volt is one of the finest achievements to come out of north American automotive engineering in recent history. Yes, it is expensive, and yes it has not sold well after being introduced (in only 4 states), but we’ve already gone over all this in previous posts. Now let’s take a closer look at the actual engineering, which also helps explain why the Volt is pricey.

Probably helps to explain why the Volt won so many prizes and awards, including explict mentions of its fine engineering.

The problem with the example is that a 5 GHz processor serves virtually nobody’s needs and solves absolutely no problems. Beyond being able to play Metro 2033 at a faster framerate (I guess) or unzipping big files a little faster (I guess again) there is nothing a 5GHz can do that is not done much more cheaply and with less energy consumption than a 3 GHz processor. Even in the field of supercomputing it wouldn’t have useful application because of its high price.

The Volt (and electric/hybrid vehicles and alternative energy in general) exist primarily because of the problems that they are meant to solve - i.e., reducing carbon use for economic, political, and environmental reasons.

Merely by existing, these technologies are already addressing important problems. If everyone bought an electric car today - Volt or Prius or whatever - oil consumption and carbon emissions resulting from vehicle activity would immediately decrease, thus addressing some of the afore-mentioned problems. What problem would be solved if we all had 5 GHz processors?

The technology is there. Yes, some of it is still expensive, and yes, some of it will improve, but if you hold back on technology until it is perfected - well this is not generally a viable strategy in a competitive market, as already explained. Even the iPhone - one of the extremely rare examples of technology that seems to come out of nowhere fully-formed - started out expensive and improved in design, performance, and functionality with each iteration, to the point that buying an iPhone now gives you vastly better value than buying an iPhone in 2007, and makes the decision to purchase one of the devices back then somewhat dubious. The phones we’ll have 3 years from now will be vastly superior, and so forth.

GM moved smartly to establish itself in the electric and hybrid market to catch up with foreign competitors. The Volt is the first step in that strategy - not the last. It’s an investment. And we’ll see over the course of the next year whether it is an investment that pays off in the medium AND long term, or just in the long term. Things at the moment are actually looking quite promising for the Volt.

Your state has the right idea (I mean idea, not necessarily the exact implementation) to require that x percentage of power originate from renewable sources. This is how renewable sources are commonly measured as components of the overall energy market. Although I am familiar with neither your state nor their rationale, I must emphasize that requiring a percentage of power from renewables and building a coal plant with CO2 scrubbers would not actually accomplish the same things at all.

The “percentage” requirement and the coal plant solution both offer reduced carbon emissions. But the coal plant - no matter how hypothetically “clean” - perpetuates and supports the entire carbon economy which is the problem. A renewable energy policy looks at other sources of energy beyond carbon and thus stimulates the development of new industries that will eventually replace carbon. And that’s why your state was smart to follow that route. The technology becomes more relevant to people today, which allows them to prepare for tomorrow, which will make your state a leader in this field instead of a follower or (even worse) a lagger.

That transition will not be easy. There will be mistakes, false starts, unforeseen developments, setbacks, and of course strong resistance by entrenched interests. But the sooner an entity (state or company) invests in it, the more advantageous it is in the long term for reasons already discussed.

Yes and no. If you stick to what is most cost effective, then that will be carbon, carbon, carbon. The ideology to reduce carbon usage is both sound and essential (sound because we have to deal with increasing liberated carbon and climate change; essential because carbon is, unlike solar or wind energy, clearly finite and very unevenly distributed). It is now a question of how to adapt the ideology to the market conditions, and there unfortunately carbon has a massive advantage in purely market terms, being cheap and very highly developed. Therefore countries and states must step in and encourage or enforce market applications of the renewables technologies; they realize without these essential adoption baby steps, the tech in their area will simply remain academic and experimental until who knows when. They also recognize that there is an opportunity to reap considerable benefit in the future, which goes back to my argument about nature of investment.

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in one ear and out the other. You might as well be Al Gore’s shadow.

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As it turned out, I did, but you did miss it once again. It was you who denied what researchers did with the code, and on a thread about Mann, this accusation does not work, both by the fact that his past methods were investigated to death, and his latest work has been released to the public.

And calling it a religion just betrays again who is depending on ideology when making points.

Already mentioned: It is mostly our kids and their kids who will have to deal with this. Although the data is here reporting that the expected effects are beginning to show up.

I’m sorry, but you do have to deal with this silly contradiction, if researchers are wrong on their reports that we have to act now, then all your talk of reductions of CO2 are a solution for a problem that does not exist.

To say it in other words: your efforts at supporting denier political talking points are a monumental waste of time (as their narrative is to claim that there is no problem). And as much as you try to claim that I ignore the progress that has taken place I’m not. The magnitude of the change is not enough if we want to prevent the costs of relying on more expensive solutions in the future. The commons of the atmosphere should not be a convenient dumping ground for CO2 emissions. And the efforts that are being made by deniers on the political front are made to delay concerted efforts to deal with the issue, efforts that the same deniers continue to claim will be widely expensive, but they do so by usually missing the costs that future generations will encounter for us not being more proactive.

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Accusing others of what you are doing is not a good tactic. :slight_smile:

Point here is that, once again, you are not dealing with the evidence but just coming back to tell others that a distraction is a good way to make an argument.

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A response as clueless and unsubstantiated as your other posts in this thread, but expected.

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uh huh.

The President was forced to deal with the reality of his proposed energy tax hikes and killed them. He;s doing exactly what I said needed to be done regarding short and long term planning.

Whose the clueless one. Unless GM pulls a rabbit out of their ass they have a serious money loser on their hands. The Volt is nothing but a Prius with batteries and there is already an established market of hybrids that they failed miserably at with the Malibu. On top of that they want to void pre-bankruptcy warranties which is leaving a bad taste in peoples mouths.

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As it turns out most have criticized Obama for his lack of action on this subject, this is just the latest example.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/broken-windows-ozone-and-jobs/

So much for saying before that no one was buying it, the whole truth is more complicated, but it gets in the way of simple political sound bites.

368

Nice “debating”. Vague hand-waving and allusions, clumsy and intellectually lazy and frankly uninformed conflation of business and science and politics, and tired assertions of being correct while at all times avoiding any substantiation. You sure got all of us.

Heh. you have been systematically proved wrong on almost everything you’ve posted here so far. Much of what you posted above is already discredited by existing posts. By all means, do try to convince us again that “China is not a leader is anything” or that the Volt is an insignificant engineering accomplishment, or that “there is no emergency”. Or just stick with the defer the problem to a brighter future FTW, perhaps? None of it new, all already addressed.

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Well, you could reverse the time series…you have a cooling trend backwards in time. :wink:

I’m not sure what you want here. If you have data showing decreasing temperatures it will show a cooling trend. The problem with the current temp data is that it isn’t decreasing. If you mean “how much data would you need to show cooling”, well, it depends on who you ask. I’d be happy with the latest 10 years being significantly cooler than the 10 prior to those, even though I know historically that I’d be proved “wrong” with that: I’m just impatient and can’t be bothered waiting for 20!

Of course, a cooling trend would open up a whole new set of questions. We know CO2 traps extra energy that would otherwise escape the earth. If CO2 levels are increasing and you see cooling, the energy has to be going somewhere - it doesn’t just magically disappear. So where has that extra energy gone?

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Seems to me that if you have a model which makes predictions no better than chance expectation, then it’s reasonable to say that the model is “wrong.” As far as I know, none of the climate models in use have been shown to make interesting, accurate, bona fide predictions on a consistent basis.

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It is not reasonable, since climate predictions are hardly “no better than chance expectations”. I’d like to see a cite supporting this claim about random results.

What is true is that there are a nigh infinite number of variables to consider when modelling, and countless confusing factors (like global dimming) plus the fact that we are still in the comparatively early days of this field, all of which means there is no climate model as reliable as Newton’s laws of motion, which I used as an example to show how models are refined over and over without actually being proven wrong. Heck, you **know **there never will be a model as accurate as that because the sheer chaos involved is huge. However, even at the simplest level, climate science predicted the warming trend, and the warming trend is observed.

If you are objecting to the science’s accuracy on the basis of chaotic climate variability and/or model response uncertainty I would understand. But that’s not what you’re doing, is it?

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Exactly what claim? I’m not aware of any climate models which have consistently made interesting, reasonably accurate, bona fide predictions. Possibly there is such a model out there, but I have never heard of it.

Are you aware of such a model? If so, please provide a cite. Seems to me you have the burden of proof on this point.

Perhaps an example would make things clearer. Since you have talked about cosmological models, it probably would not surprise you to learn that historically, many of those models have also included a component for modelling human character and behavior. For example, all people might be divided into one of 12 groups based on their birthdate. Predictions might be made about a person’s personality based on which of the 12 groups he falls into.

This type of modeling is known as “astrology” and there are many astrological models out there.

As far as I know, no astrological model has ever been able to consistently make interesting, accurate bona fide predictions. It’s not just a matter of making rough predictions which need to be refined; as far as I can tell the models are just plain wrong. Perhaps a better word to use would be “useless.”

At this point, much of climate modeling would seem to fall into the same category. Until climate models start consistently making bona fide predictions which are interesting and reasonably accurate, it’s silly to say we should accept them because they are the best models we’ve got.

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Still, that 20-year bit is a pretty good shot at what I have in mind – though I have a couple of quick follow-up questions. First, what amount of cooling would you hold to be “significant”? Second, my real curiosity involved the other question you’d copy-and-pasted; would you require significant cooling, or a mere plateau of insignificant temperature change, as the falsification criterion for warming?

I have no idea – but if such a “cooling trend” ever does materialize and we go searching for the extra energy, I take it we’d both start asking “a whole new set of questions” rather than just offering unfalsifiable answers?

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I was just thinking of P 0.05 that the difference was actual. Obviously the more the better!

I’m really not sure what you mean by “falsification of warming”. Are you asking if I think Earth temperature data will ever falsify the “adding energy to things makes them hotter” theory? Frankly, no. I still think my kettle will work no matter what the temperature record says!

Of course, there are ways the earth could cool. Perhaps adding CO2 will result in some effect that increases the earth’s albedo reducing the total amount of energy stored. So if the temperature record goes down, I might look for such an effect. But I’m not sure what exactly this falsifies. Perhaps you could state exactly what part of the global warming theory you think might be wrong?

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Well, the part where the globe is warming, for a start; I’d like to know exactly what amount X of “warming” is predicted over Y number of years, such that anything less would prove the prediction false. In more general terms, I guess I’d like to know what specific Z is being predicted period, so that we can see whether it happens or doesn’t.

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There’s nothing vague about what I’ve said or what the President did. There is no immediate global warming crisis, we are working toward a long term solution, and the true crisis is financial.

You can post cites and argue with yourself until hell freezes over and it won’t change anything I’ve said because in the real world global warming is way down the road and will be dealt with in a timely manner with technology.

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As a point of information, this is a misconception. The controversial issue is not whether CO2 is likely to cause warming. The central issue is whether any such warming would be amplified by water vapor feedback.

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I ask you for a cite and clarification about extraordinary claims of random results from climate science, and instead of obliging you provide nothing and request a cite that resets the conversation.

I am not a climate scientist but a few years back I did come across this Nature Geoscience paper discussing the predictions involved in climate science and also clearing up some confusion about warming expectations and trends - the refining mentioned earlier:

Can you show how you reached the conclusion that climatology offers no better than random results? Because all you offered was an underhanded reference to “models” like astrology that actually have nothing to do with science or the scientific method.

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Yes, one can post cites and argue different points that converge on a wider thesis, that is in fact, perhaps unsurprisingly, called debating. What you have been doing - and particularly what you’ve done the last few posts - isn’t.

I have addressed a number of the subjects on which you threw the weight of your opinion around. From the demonization of the Volt as “failure” of the green industry, to the dangerous claim that there is no climate emergency, to the wrong assumption that investment in renewables must absolutely represent a loss when it can actually be rather helpful to a strapped economy, another poster was kind enough to show how your vague allusion to Obama was wrongheaded, etc., etc… All. Already. Addressed.

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A cite for exactly what claim?

I have no idea what your point is here.

I’m not sure what you mean by “random results,” but I assume that if some climate models were able to consistently make interesting, bona fide predictions which were accurate enough so that they were very unlikely the result of chance, then the people behind them would be shouting about it from the rooftops. I’ve been following this dispute for a number of years now without hearing about any such model. So I assume that none exists (yet).

Are you claiming that such a model exists? If so, please tell me the details.