The issue is complex, almost without understandable limits. It is entirely unlikely that anyone in the world will have a binary yes no testable hypothesis with an unambiguous outcome in less than a hundred years. The issue also may be entirely beyond our ability to change already, but that too is not likely to be subject to that sort of test.
Global weather systems are more energetic now than they were thirty years ago, and that is not a theory, or hypothesis. It is a measured fact, reliably examined, and reviewed by many diverse methods, including direct instrumental observation. Anthropogenesis is a theory, and it is the portion of the issue that does resist simplistic statement of opinion. Given the undeniable involvement of human activity in every other aspect of the world’s natural systems the likelihood that human activity is not a very large element of that change seems absurd.
However, absurdity is no barrier for self interest. If it costs me less, and only my descendents have to deal with the consequences, it serves my short term personal interests better to search for anything that can be cast as evidence against the possibility that we might change things. The fact that the consequence of doing something with be primarily economic loss, primarily to the very richest among us, and the consequences of doing nothing will have devastating, and eventually mortal losses to a huge majority of us, primarily the poorest pretty much guarantees the outcome.
I doubt that the world political systems are up to the challenge. The ocean cycles, and the solar cycles have been at the bottoms of their range for the last election cycle. So, of course the evidence is less compelling than it might be. I think the evidence will become very much more compelling over the next election cycle. But, it won’t make the answers more politically palatable for the people who can actually implement the changes needed.
Instead, we will listen to another round of “Look, it’s snowing! How can there be Global Warming, if it’s snowing?”
It takes heat to make storms.
Shoot, it takes heat to make weather of any kind. The more heat, the more energy, the more stuff happens, in the aggregate, worldwide. Which might include more snow, sometimes.
An actual meteorologist explained it to me this way, and it made perfect sense. Physics 101, meet Meteorology 101.
Actually, they’re kind of related…
Please show me where I have attacked the motivations of the IPCC or the NAS. Although I may have done so a few times, it’s normally in response to an alarmist who says something like “what possible bias could the IPCC have?”
In other words, it’s generally the alarmists who raise the issue of motivations.
Further, when skeptics discuss motivations, it’s normally a secondary argument. There’s a big difference between saying
(1) The IPCC is wrong on the merits for reasons X, Y, and Z. And by the way, the IPCC has an interest in exaggerating the likelihood and danger of global warming.
(2) The IPCC has an interest in exaggerating the likelihood and danger of global warming. Period.
By contrast, many alarmists completely ignore the actual substance and focus solely on motivations.
Strictly speaking, no hypothesis can be tested unambiguously. However, I’m pretty confident that CAGW will have been completely discredited within 10 to 20 years.
I’m pretty confident that global temps will fall outside the predictions on that graph within 10 or 20 years. Actually, it looks as though temps are already either outside of the range or very close to the lower edge.
Cite?
Could you give me a few examples of these other systems?
Yeah . . . just look at the consequences of the recent oil shortages. Obviously the rich are bearing the brunt of the higher prices of corn. (that was sarcasm)
That’s just Pascal’s Wager with a 21st century gloss.
Of course? Then please show me where your authorities predicted these things (with confidence) well before they happened.
And we’ll also listen to another round of “That’s consistent with climate change!” No matter what the weather.
Hmmm…It may look that way to you but not to the people who are actually publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. In fact, the temps are running near the high end of the range. [Of course, as intention has claimed, this is due to the fact that part of the period since 1990 is a hindcast so apparently those guys diabolically “tuned” their models so that they come out this way.] Sea level rise is even more clearly running at the high end of the projections.
Oh really? The high end of the range is about 0.3C above levels in 2000. I’d love to see a peer-reviewed article showing that global surface temperatures have risen by 0.3C between 2000 and now.
Sorry, your response made me realize that I forgot my link in the last post…Here it is. I don’t know how you get your number about the high end predicting a 0.4 C warming since 2000…It looks like it predicts about a 0.4 C rise since 1990.
Sorry, I should have said 0.3 C when I quoted what you claimed rather than 0.4 C. However, that value isn’t clear from the graph at all, which goes over too large a time range to see in detail. Look at the graph in what I linked to or look at Fig. 1.1 of the latest IPCC report, which also shows the range of the projections for the Third Assessment Report (TAR) on an expanded graph focussing on 1990 to 2007. It clearly shows the high end of the TAR predictions for the period from 1990 to 2007 to be ~0.4 C.
Your original claim was “Actually, it looks as though temps are already either outside of the range or very close to the lower edge” for the chart that you showed. The paper that I linked to shows the experimental data aligned to the predictions as it was in the IPCC scenarios, which start at 1990.
It seems that you are now changing your claim to say, “If I re-align things so that they agree in 2000, then the temperatures would be outside the range or very close to the lower edge.” The problem with this, besides it changing the goalposts from what you originally claimed (and you having provided no evidence that it is true at any rate), is that 7 years is so short that there are huge error bars on the trends over that time…So, one can’t rule out a wide range of possible trends over that time.
The simpler answer is that you are trying to read numbers off of a graph that is over too broad a scale. Try looking at this graph from the TAR. An even closer view can be obtained in the top panel here.
a) Define severity in a way that meteorologists and climatologists would accept, and
b) Define a timeframe greater than, say, the last time severe weather peaked. (a common trick of folks who try to say global warming is malarkey.)
In other words, statistically significant evidence.
BTW, I’m not claiming more snow = global warming. You’re trying to say more snow is evidence against global warming. Show me the evidence, backed by something more logical and less jejeune than “It has to be cold to snow.”
I graduated the first grade a while ago.
Ok fine, look at your second link, which you claim is more detailed. Look at the temperature for the very end of 2000. Then imagine a horizontal line to the right to the very end of 2007. That puts you right at the bottom of their range.
So it looks to me like your graph lends more support to what I’m saying. If global temps have been essentially flat for the past 8 years, it puts us at the bottom edge of the IPCC prediction, if not outside the range entirely.
I agree with this. Any hypothesis should be tested in an objective way. And the goalposts should be set in a neutral fashion.
No I’m not. Indeed, I’ve pointed out elsewhere that higher temps could indeed cause more snow. My point is that CAGW (as pushed by many people) is not an honest hypothesis.
(1) In the year 2000, the smoothed global average temperature was already running on the high end of the IPCC projections.
(2) The smoothed global average temperature has continued to increase since 2000, although the increase has not been as rapid.
These results are clearly shown in the latest IPCC report, Figure 1.1 and in this figure from that Science magazine paper (the former showing results through 2005 and the latter showing them through 2006). By 2006…and probably moreso with 2007 added in, it does look like at least the smoothed average for the Hadcrut dataset may be right back down to about the midpoint of the IPCC projections although the NASA GISS one is still probably running above the midpoint.
Why don’t you tell me what is wrong with those figures rather than just bullshitting your way into claiming something that is clearly counterfactual?
Looking this thread over, you are correct in re your contentions about snow, so I withdraw that.
However, your agreement with me in re the objectivity of the goalposts looks a bit insincere given how you’re arguing with jshore at the moment. As usual, you want to set the border at 2000, since during that time there’s been a stabilization of the trend.
Which, as jshore is pointing out, proves squat. If you were an active trader of stocks you’d know that this kind of thing is not unusual within a larger trend. Happens all the time. If you’re careful about how you do it, you can make some interesting bucks trading on the probabilities of things moving outside of their statistical ranges.
Of course, if I were a better trader, I’d be writing this from my yacht on the Mediterranean rather than from my house in a more-or-less drained swamp in northern New Jersey.
Still, short-term variations from a trend are silly to cite. Extremely silly.
That’s nonsense. Just click on the “plus” sign and zoom into the graph. It’s as plain as day.
More bullshit. Look at your own graph. The lines all converge at essentially a point at the year 2000. Which makes sense, because the predictions presumably started in the year 2000.
Perhaps if you average back far enough. So what? The fact is that temperatures are essentially flat for the last 8 or 10 years. The IPCC did not predict this. Which is why we are at the low end of their prediction, or possibly even outside of it.
As shown above, Figure 1.1 appears to be an attempt to re-write history with the benefit of hindsight.
What are you talking about? Why don’t you stop shucking and jiving and just admit reality is not cooperating with the IPCC’s 2001 predictions?
That’s not true either. I chose 2000 simply because that was the starting point for the predictions in the 2001 IPCC report.
Then perhaps the IPCC should have had a bigger grey zone in it’s graph. Perhaps it means nothing that we are at the bottom edge of the IPCC prediction or even outside of it. My money says that the divergence will keep growing.
Every global-warming thread descends into anarchic disagreement. I’m expecting name-calling any moment now. This is representative of why I believe only sheer luck alone will pull us out of any global-warming crisis.
