Personally I consider making a link between people who did not support Bush on Iraq and people who don’t buy into AGW is to say the least spurious.
What would happen in Iraq was perfectly obvious to anyone who knew anything about the area. In my view people who take or support decisions when they don’t know about the subject are very foolish.
You’ll notice that both Intention and I have knowledge of computers and modelling. Anyone with any experience in that area would dismiss predictive climate models out of hand. They would also be highly suspicious of models that purported to represent the NYSE.
We may or may not be experiencing GW, a small part of it may or may not be anthropogenic. We certainly have no control over what China and India get up to and carbon sequestration and trading stinks of a scam to me.
My view is that we don’t have enough information to make an informed decision about what is going on, and what if anything we can do about it.
The worrying thing is that the matter has been hijacked by a combination of gullible followers and cynical interests.
So does jshore, a PhD physicist who’s been working professionally on the computer modelling of physical systems for the past ten years or so. So do many professional climate scientists.
Obviously, that’s completely false. Lots of professional researchers with experience in the area of computers and modelling don’t “dismiss predictive climate models out of hand”.
I acknowledge that arguments from authority are not the most valid justifications for scientific claims, but such as they are, they’re almost all on the other side of the debate from you. You and intention don’t qualify as “the experts” on this issue (except perhaps in comparison with an acknowledged layperson like me, of course).
If I’m going to take the risk of believing assertions based on claims of “experience in the area”, I’m going to put my money on the people who really have the strongest “experience in the area”. And that’s the professional climate science researchers, not intention or you.
What’s odd is that you seem to be concerned about this possibility only on one side of the debate. According to the conclusions of most mainstream climate science, your own committed “climate skeptic” stance is itself a symptom of a gullible follower being misled by cynical interests. Are you entirely sure that you’re not just flattering yourself into confidence about a subject that you don’t really know very much about, based on your eagerness to think of yourself as an independent thinker immune to crowd hysteria?
Say what? I made absolutely no such claim. All I said was that this was an example of how inaccurate the estimates of climate averages are … my exact quote was it was “an example of the problems with temperature averages”. The rest is all your fantasy.
We survived it? Your judgement of whether a cost is large is whether we survived it? Say what?
Once again, you are off in your own world. You said climate change would not cost billions. I said it already has, and unlike your bland assertion, I provided places and numbers. Since you can’t dispute that, you pretend I said something else.
But since we are on the topic … perhaps you can provide us with an estimate of the total costs of Kyoto?
No, we don’t have to decide now. We can decide tomorrow, or next week, or next year. You think the evidence now is enough to justify a decision. I don’t.
Now I know that at some point in the past, let’s say 1970, you would have said there weren’t enough facts to justify spending billions of dollars … and someone could have made your same fatuous argument at that point that “we have to decide something now, now, right now” …
Would that argument have convinced you then? Probably not, if you felt there weren’t enough facts to make the decision. I think we both agree that it is the height of foolishness to rush off half-cocked, making multi-billion dollar decisions based on a little fact and a giant heap of supposition.
So the question is not whether a decision is necessary now, right now, or whether no decision is actually a decision … it is whether we have enough information to make an informed decision of that magnitude.
So if we learn more about how to survive droughts today, this knowledge will be useless tomorrow exactly how? My point is that learning more about surviving droughts, floods, storms, and all the rest will be valuable today and tomorrow …
Since you haven’t yet posited or detailed a single “early prevention effort” that will make any difference at all, I’m not clear what you’re talking about. In addition, you seem to ignore the idea that insurance needs to be cost-effective, or it’s not worth buying.
When you lay out your patented kimstu cost-effective solution that will significantly reduce the possible effects of increasing CO2, along with an estimate of the costs of implementing it, we’ll have something to talk about. Until then, you’re just spouting platitudes about a mythical cost-effective solution that our best minds haven’t been able to find yet.
Suppose we delay the decision for ten years, and then act. Perhaps you could give us an estimate of how much temperature difference that delay will make in 2050, along with an uncertainty estimate for your figure. Then we’ll have something to discuss. Until then … see my previous comment.
I have given a number of examples of what I consider unscientific practice, the main ones being hiding data, and not providing error estimates for projections or uncertain figures.
I note with some amusement (but no surprise) that, despite being long on accusations, neither you nor jshore have given a single example that shows I’m ignorant of “standard scientific practice”. Nor have you given a single example that shows that hiding data and not including error estimates is “standard scientific practice” (except in the climate science world, where they are all too common).
Show me someone who hides his data, and I’ll show you someone who is not a scientist. Show me someone who does not include error estimates in their projections of the future or in estimates of unknown quantities, and I’ll show you someone who is not a scientist.
Clearly, you think that hiding data and not putting error bars on your projections is a standard part of science … perhaps you could provide us with a couple dozen examples, since it’s so standard?
Me, I don’t think that hiding data is a part of science, in fact it is antithetical to science because it prevents the replication which is at the core of science. And unlike you, I trust that the lay reader is wise enough to understand that.
I’ve known Economists who have spent far longer trying to model the economy
if JShore were a computer programmer then I would be highly surprized
Possibly they are caught up in their own models ?
You put your money where you like, but keep your hands off other peoples’ money - just because you think some researcher has a possibility of coming up with a cure for cancer, does not entitle you to pick peoples’ pockets because you reckon that there is a possibility that his hunch is correct.
Ad hominem.
If we are in for AGW then I’m all in favour of doing sensible things, but I’m not in favour of doing things that are daft.
Actually last night I was dozing when I woke to a radio debate called ‘The Moral Maze’ - which was on GW this week. One of the exponents has been quoted as saying that using an aircraft was as bad as child molestation. Unfortunately I did not catch his name. Amusingly one of his interrogators said that we have a long running situation of a ‘Solution in search of a Problem’.
Strange bedfellows.
Incidentally, here in Europe we’ve gone a lot further down the path than the USA, so it is possible that you don’t see what you are getting into.
jshore, since you are a physicist I’m surprised that you seem so blase about using averages of intensive variables. You say:
No, it doesn’t stop us from measuring it, or from averaging it. You seem, however, to underestimate the difficulty with the fact that there are a number of ways to average temperature, none of which is theoretically preferable to any other.
For example, you say:
Much ado about nothing? You think that different ways of averaging are no problem? Here’s a quote from the documentation of the GHCN dataset :
Does that sound like something that doesn’t “matter one whit”? This is not “an extreme or contrived example”, it’s a real problem with real data.
Note that it’s not just one or two methods of averaging, or ten or fifty. Over one hundred ways of averaging monthly temperatures have been used in the historical record, and there’s no way to say that one or the other is right … this is not just a theoretical problem, or much ado about nothing. It is a real and unsolved problem with using averages of intensive variables.
What are you trying to claim here…That Africa’s weather patterns don’t depend on anything except the Himalayas? And, on what time scale do you think the rise in mountain heights affects the African climate? I could believe this is true on a timescale of, say, tens of thousands of years or more…but I doubt less than that. (The Himalayas are rising about 5mm a year, which means it takes 1000 years for them to rise by 5m ~= 17 feet).
You seem to be quoting from a source discussing the issues of automatically detecting duplicated data series from different data sets. There, a slight difference in the averaging method could presumably make such detection more challenging. However, I don’t see them concluding that everything is hopeless and therefore it is impossible to get any estimate of the average global temperature.
Yes, intention, science is hard and data is never perfect. However, what McKitrick and company have come up with is a contrived example. There is no justification for looking at doing an average using the 50th moment of a data set of temperatures. Maybe if they showed that taking the root-mean-squared gave a dramatically different result for the trend than just averaging, then we would have to think a little harder about whether we can justify one as better than the other. However, I think one can very easily justify not computing an average in the way that they did it (i.e., with moments ranging from r = -125 to 125).
Well, actually, I would correct kimstu and say I’ve been doing computational modeling for about 25 years (I started young…summers in high school, in fact) and have been doing it essentially fulltime for ~18 years (counting the time from a grad student done with courses on through postdocs and, for the last 10 years, in an industrial job).
And, while I wouldn’t call myself a “computer programmer” as a job title, writing computer codes (in C, Fortran, or MATLAB) to do the computations is a healthy part of my work.
Well, you keep your CO2 emissions out of our collective atmosphere and we’ll keep our hands off your money. You don’t have any inalienable right to dump your emissions in the atmosphere for free.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. The deserts of Africa will continue to grow larger over time as the mountains grow taller. There was a PBS segment on the phenomenon. They showed the changes over time as the mountains grew. To clarify, we’re talking about the arid parts of the continent. And the time line would be quite long.
Well, again, you are entitled to your opinion. But you should hardly be surprised if we give more weight to the opinion of most of the active scientists in the field, the IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Their opinion is also essentially shared by BP, Shell, most of the American automakers, DuPont, Duke Energy, … Even Exxon, long the shame of the major oil companies, is starting to slowly change its tune. After a while, you and your fellow ClimateAuditors are going to find yourselves mighty lonely!
Well, there have been some economic estimates of the costs of climate change and of mitigating it. Admittedly, the economics is on much shakier grounds than the physical science aspects. However, historically, the costs of environmental regulations (especially when flexible, such as cap-and-trade) have been much lower not only than the industry estimates (a no-brainer really) but even than the estimates due to, say, the EPA. By contrast, the after-the-fact cleanups of environmental disaster have generally been much higher than estimates. See here.
Also, see this paper in Science regarding the robustness of the conclusion that it is wise to hedge against an uncertain climate future.
We’ve already delayed longer than we ought to. We could delay infinitely long if we wait until all the ClimateAuditors are convinced we have a problem. Decisions need to be made now in regards to electrical generating plants that will operate for like 50 years, which is why many of the power-producing companies want the federal government to step in and set up some cap-and-trade system so that they know what to expect and plan for.
I must admit that I am not up on most of the supposed claims of “hiding data” that you ClimateAuditors are exercised about, so I can’t comment on each individual case. However, in regards to Mann, the main issue was the release of his code, which is his intellectual property and is recognized as such by the NSF. As I noted to you, I published a paper last year in a physics journal and if I released our code, which is proprietary to my company, in response to a request from someone, that could likely be grounds for them firing me. They allowed me to publish a paper with enough information on the code that someone working in the field could, with considerable work, duplicate the basic method. That is all that the journals generally require.
No, that wasn’t all you said. You also said, for example, that “Averages of temperature are simply not mathematically meaningful” and “We don’t know the temperature of the past”. That seems to imply very clearly that you question even the basic conclusion that there has been a global average warming trend in recent decades.
Well, the Stern report, an economic evaluation of climate-change prospects commissioned last fall by the British government, estimated the overall costs of effective carbon reduction at about 1% of global GDP. It estimated the overall costs of unchecked anthropogenic climate change at about twenty times that, or one-fifth of global GDP.
Deciding to delay a decision is in itself a decision. If continuing to increase our atmospheric carbon levels at present rates is accelerating climate change and increasing the risks and severity of future environmental disasters, then waiting till tomorrow or next week or next year to do something about carbon levels is making the problem worse.
But maybe not valuable enough, and maybe not as valuable as taking action to reduce carbon emissions to mitigate the severity of droughts, floods, storms, etc.
For example, the Stern report that I mentioned above suggested that “drought and floods could render swathes of the planet uninhabitable, turning 200 million people into refugees to create the largest migration in history.” Environmental disaster on that scale is simply not something we could prepare for with the resources that you suggest spending on environmental disaster on the scale of today.
“Learning more about surviving” environmental disaster is a good thing, and we should definitely invest in it to some extent. But we can’t count on being able to learn enough quickly enough to cope with the magnitude of disaster that anthropogenic climate change might bring. If prevention will be cheaper than cure in this case, and we follow your advice to ignore prevention strategies entirely and concentrate only upon cure strategies, we’ll have made the wrong decision.
Similarly, if prevention will be more expensive than cure, if we follow my advice we’ll have made the wrong decision. The trouble is, as everybody in this situation has freely acknowledged, that we simply don’t know for sure. But that doesn’t absolve us from the responsibility of making a decision, nor does it justify us in pretending that inaction doesn’t count as making a decision.
I don’t agree with the “insurance analogy” in this situation (and I’m not the one who suggested or discussed it in previous posts). To my mind, what we’ve got is less like a risk assessment of a future danger (which is what insurance is basically about) and more like a sudden confrontation with what might be a severe present danger. In the latter case, you have to choose more quickly, based on less reliable information about the comparative risks and payoffs.
A more apt analogy might be the situation of an armed householder suddenly discovering the presence of an intruder. You hear a noise, you quietly slip out of bed and get your gun, you silently go downstairs and see somebody moving about. You think you see a gun in his hand, but you’re not sure. He hasn’t seen you yet, but he’s turning your way and he’s about to spot you. Do you shoot?
The stakes could be very high whichever way you decide. If you shoot him and he turns out to be unarmed and harmless, you will have made a choice that could have ruined multiple lives. On the other hand, if you hesitate and it turns out that he is armed and violent and he shoots you, you’re in diastrous trouble, if not dead outright. You don’t have a no-risk option; you’re in a high-stakes situation with inadequate information to make a fully justified decision in either direction, and whichever choice you make could turn out to be disastrously wrong. The uncertainty is extremely high, but the choice is unavoidable.
That’s the type of situation we’re in now. We’re not pondering whether we ought to buy insurance to guard against some future danger; we’re noticing that we may already be in severe danger in uncertain circumstances we don’t fully understand, where action and inaction might both have disastrous results. Acknowledging the magnitude of the uncertainty won’t protect us from the disastrous consequences of inaction, if inaction turns out to have been the wrong thing to do.
Not true; such an example is exactly what jshore was giving when he commented on your having “a very unusual view of what constitutes replication that is completely different from the accepted view across all of the physical sciences as far as I know.”
Your reiterated assertions that Michael Mann, for example, was “hiding data” simply don’t fit with the assessment of the scientific community in general, as per the NAS report that jshore cited in a previous post.
Mind you, if you want to argue that your standards of scientific rigor are better than those routinely used by the scientific community in general, that’s fine by me. If you want to maintain that anybody who doesn’t supply error estimates for every data point, even in data tables provided on a public-education website, is falling short of your standards of proper scientific practice and in your opinion doesn’t deserve to be called a “real scientist”, you have every right to do so.
But in that case you should acknowledge, as jshore suggested, that your opinion doesn’t reflect the views of mainstream professional science researchers as a whole. When you flatly assert that researchers like Mann or Hansen “are not scientists” on account of procedural issues that the vast majority of actual real scientists appear to consider comparatively trivial or correctable, that’s when your complaints, as I noted, start to look less like scientifically informed criticism and more like crackpot amateur nitpicking.
I’m sure you know that the Stern Report has come under serious criticism, not just by politicians, but by respected members of the scientific community. For example, about that 1% figure…
A problem with the Stern Report is that it habitually uses high-end ranges for numbers that it wants to come out a certain way, and low-end ranges for numbers it’s trying to ignore. I tried to find an article I read a while ago by a scientist who’s work was quoted by Stern. The scientist is firmly in the pro-warming camp, but claimed that the Stern Report was seriously flawed because it habitually took his numbers, and used the highest values within the range of the error bars instead of the median which you would expect, or by expressing its conclusions in terms of the upper and lower range estimates, as the IPCC report does.
But the biggest problem with the Stern Report is with its cost-benefit analysis - the thing used to justify dramatic action now. The problem is that the Stern Report ignores time-value-of-money, using social discount rate of almost zero. This has a HUGE impact on the numbers. 1% of GDP spent today is not the same as a 1% GDP cost from global warming 50 years from now. If that 1% is invested in production that grows GDP, then the net present value of the future risk will be lower.
With a zero social discount rate, you can justify ANYTHING. We might as well start paying for building a big ship to get us off earth when the Sun burns out. It’s going to cost us one way or the other - might as well pay it now.
Fifty years ago, U.S. per-capital GDP was about 1/3 the size it is today in real dollars. 1% of GDP invested and compounded over 50 years means the world will be much wealthier, and the cost of global warming damage will be much easier to bear.
So think about what Stern did - he took the highest estimate he could find for the cost of greenhouse damage in the future, the lowest estimate for the cost of CO2 reduction today, and then added in a social discount rate of zero to come up with the figures he needed to justify the political policies his government had already drawn up.
If he had started with the upper limit of cost of maintaining CO2 at 550ppm, and the lower end cost of global warming at some point in the fairly distant future, and added in a reasonable social discount rate, the picture suddenly looks very different. Then the numbers say you shold just pay for the damage when it happens.
The Stern report was wildly out of step with other economic studies of global warming costs and benefits. But the same people who are always telling us that the consensus opinion on AGW must be respected jumped onto this report and embraced it immediately. For the same reason Stern wrote it - it justified beliefs they already had.
kimstu, while your posts are always welcome, the lack of specifics is becoming frustrating. I said:
and
You keep saying we have to act now, right now, this very minute, without telling a) what you want to do, b) what it will cost, c) what difference it will make, or d) what the cost of delay might be …
Which leaves me with nothing much to discuss regarding action versus inaction. I’m very willing to act if there is a reasonable action, but I haven’t heard of one yet.
jshore, please feel free to chime in on this question, as I have not heard your plan, cost estimate, projected benefits, or delay cost either.
Yes, you are clearly not up on the question of Michael Mann’s transgressions. Here is a good introduction to the issues for the non-specialist, which are by no means restricted to his code as you claim.
And your example of a business not releasing proprietary code is very different from a government scientist not releasing code. Yes, his code is his property, but surely you are aware that science operates differently than business. In business, you don’t want people to replicate your methods, and your code may have great commercial value.
In Mann’s case, his code had no commercial value, and his refusal to reveal it meant that no one could replicate his work no matter how hard they tried, which means that it is not science, just his unsupported claim. In addition, until his code was revealed, the fundamental flaw in his mathematics could not be discovered.
I’m actually quite surprised that you choose to defend him.
I had said that replication in mathematics means getting, not just a similar answer, but the same answer, and that Michael Mann’s work was just a mathematical transformation of the raw data into a new form.
jshore disagreed, claiming that this was not true “across all of the physical sciences” … but as I said above, neither he nor you gave any examples of “kinda close” being good enough in mathematics.
I agreed with him that laboratory experiments often give close answers, which is all that you can expect … but claiming that 2 + 2 = 4.0003 doesn’t cut it in mathematics, and mathematics is all that Mann did. He took proxy data, and mathematically transformed it into a temperature estimate. In that case, close is not good enough.
jshore, your posts are always interesting. You say:
You did notice that NASA agreed in the other citation I gave you that there is no unique way to average temperature? They say, for example,
Note the part about “drastically different results” … exactly how are “drastically different results” not a problem?
In addition, while there is nobody using the 50th moment, there are often very valid reasons for averaging the fourth power of the temperature, which is proportional to the “radiation temperature”. This also gives drastically different results than directly averaging the temperature.
In all of this, however, my original point has been lost - which is that because ocean heat content is an extensive variable rather than an intensive variable, it is a much better metric for the changes in climate than the SAT. There is a good discussion of the issue here.
As a final problem with the surface air temperature, in a solid substance the temperature is proportional to the total energy content of the solid. In the atmosphere, however, this is not true, because of the presence of water vapor. This complicates the problem immensely, with large amounts of energy being capable of entering or leaving the atmosphere without the temperature changing at all.
For all of these reasons, SAT is a very poor metric to use in our quest to understand the climate.
Sam: I think it is a bit naive to suggest that Jerry Taylor of Cato tried to the right calculations. He isn’t paid by Cato to do the calculations right but rather to do the calculations to support Cato’s views on the subject. I believe we’ve met Jerry in past discussions of various topics and his track record for presenting things as honestly and unbiasedly as possible isn’t very good, to put it mildly.
In this case, I would question his high discount rate (5%!) in combination with his estimate of a 1% GDP hit presumably starting immediately. (Since his discount rate is so high, the near-term costs will dwarf the costs further out in time.) This 1% GDP “hit” would amount to somewhere around $130 billion dollars per year in the U.S…which seems like a very high estimate for anything actually being proposed in the near term.
As for discount rates, that is a subtle thing that depends on many assumptions and philosophical considerations besides pure GDP growth, as a couple of the commenters in that “The Business” article you linked to note. With a high discount rate, you will essentially come to the conclusion that we should just rape the planet and lead all the attendent problems to our richer descendents to deal with.
I will admit that the Stern report is not the last word on the subject and there does seem to be some legitimate criticism in regards to some of its assumptions. However, I think it has more credibility than a counterestimate from the Cato Institute.
Um, your link is to an opinion piece by the novelist Orson Scott Card in the Mormon popular magazine Meridian. That really doesn’t count as evidence that mainstream scientists in general consider Mann guilty of serious “transgressions” against standard scientific practice.
If you’re insisting that your assessments of the quality of other people’s published research are in line with mainstream scientific views on proper scientific practice, then you ought to be able to find cites indicating that the majority of professional scientific researchers actually, you know, agree with your assessments.
You are perfectly entitled to personally consider Michael Mann completely disqualified as a scientist because his research doesn’t meet what you personally consider proper standards of replication. But you and Orson Scott Card seem to be pretty much out in left field on this one. The vast majority of professional researchers in the field simply do not agree with you.
Yes, some economists have argued that Stern has underestimated the potential costs of emissions reduction strategies. On the other hand, others have argued that his report underestimates the potential costs of climate change:
I have freely admitted throughout these discussions that there’s a lot of uncertainty involved, and naturally the economics is even more uncertain than the climate science. Unfortunately, as I noted, recognizing the uncertainty won’t save us from suffering the costs of inaction, if inaction turns out to have been the wrong thing to do.
intention, as always it is interesting to read your posts.
This is by way of their explanation of why it is better to deal with temperature anomalies than with the absolute temperature, as I already noted in my last post.
It depends what you mean by “drastic”. If you look at the data of McKitrick et al. that was used to generate their Fig. 2 (and I do give them kudos for making it available online, BTW), one finds that the trend is reduced from ~0.060 C/decade for r=1 to ~0.056 C/decade for r=4, a reduction of about 7% in the trend. And, of course, this is for an example of their own choosing…and one involving only 12 stations. My guess is that as one included more stations in the averaging (and ones that are presumably not chosen to illustrate the effect that they want to illustrate), this effect would likely get smaller (although admittedly that is a conjecture).
I agree that ocean heat content might in principle be a better metric in some ways. However, there are limitations with it such as that at the moment in that the data quality is probably not as good as the surface temperature record.