Global Warming - solar radiation changes

Great Debates
121

[QUOTE=Mithrander]
I had this video emailed to me today, and watched it this afternoon. After I saw it, I had to bring this over here. I was going to start a new thread on it, but it seems that all the resident experts are here already. If this is too much of a hijack, I’ll start a new thread for it.

The video is from the BBC, and is called The Great Global Warming Swindle. Personally, I found it more convincing than the recent Al Gore flick. Anyone want to talk about it? Be warned, it’s about 75 minutes long.

Link is http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831
[/QUOTE]

There was already a thread on it here. Bottom line: The reason it was so convincing is that it wasn’t at all constrained by the truth…even in the graphs that were shown.

122

[QUOTE=intention]
jshore counters this by saying that decisions like whether we use coal or gas fired power plants have long range effects … which makes me wonder if he’s never heard of the thousands of coal fired plants which have been retro-fitted with a wide variety of pollution control technology. If CO2 does turn out to be a problem, the number of new coal plants will only be a small percentage of the total coal plants which will have to be retro-fitted to reduce their carbon emissions. Thus, the cost of the delay will still be very small.
[/QUOTE]

Well, the power companies seem to be coming to a different conclusion on the economics than you, which is why more and more of them are asking the government to step up to the plate and regulate CO2 emissions. One reason might be that, despite what you said, the cost of retro-fitting plants with pollution controls can be very expensive.

Have you ever heard of “new source review” and the controversy surrounding it during the Bush Administration? Basically, this was a law that grandfathered old power plants so that they did not have to comply with some of the new laws on pollution controls required of new plants. In particular, it said that as long as there were not major upgrades to the power plant, such new controls didn’t have to be installed. It turned out that there were major court battles regarding what constituted “routine maintenance” vs. major upgrades…and the Bush Administration tried (and I believe succeeded to a certain extent) in weakening the policy so that the plants could make upgrades without installing the modern pollution controls.

Moral of this story: It turns out to be considerably easier and less expensive to install pollution controls at the beginning…or at least to design your plant to more easily be able to retrofit the controls in the future…than it is to take a plant that was not designed for such controls in mind and retrofit them.

123

[QUOTE=intention]
The problems with kimstu’s analogy are:

  1. In the analogy, it is clear that a decision needs to be made in a split second, with no chance to gather additional information. This is not the case with global warming. I have asked both kimstu and jshore what the possible costs of let’s say a 10-year delay in making the decision would be, and they have roundly ignored the question.
    [/quote]

Well, it may be true that the analogy posits a situation where split-second decisions are more important than in reality. However, to be fair, this is true in both directions. I.e., in the analogy, you end up with an innocent person dead if you shoot when you shouldn’t have. If we instead embark on a course of action in regards to limiting greenhouse gas emissions that later evidence were to show is more draconian than necessary then it would always be possible to modify the policy later. Sure, we may have wasted some money…although given the fact that many of the proposed policies have a variety of other benefits (as mstay noted), it is doubtful that the amount wasted would be very large. What we should do is try to take some sort of stab on what a best policy is rather than erring on the side of doing nothing until we are completely sure we have to do something…and fast, preferably 20 years ago.

Also, there will always be people who want to delay until we are more sure. In 10 years, there will be some people (probably fewer than today but still some) who will say the science is still not convincing enough and we have to delay more. In the meantime, we will have dug our hole deeper, both increasing the economic costs of taking action and increasing the chances of going past some threshhold that will be hard to reverse.

For heaven’s sake, at this point even most of the industries that are going to be facing regulation are coming on board with the necessity of taking action. Why are we still going to delay further because 100% of the people are not convinced? You will never get 100% unanimity. Do we really have to wait until every single company in every single regulated industry and every single scientist believes that the science warrants action?

No…the analogy assumed very imperfect knowledge…probably more imperfect than what we are facing. For example, you didn’t know for sure if the intruder really posed a danger to your life or not. Presumably, you also didn’t know for sure if firing your weapon would kill the intruder.

As I have noted before, the purpose of Kyoto is not to solve the problem in one fell-swoop (which is kind of obvious from the fact that it only regulates emissions over a 5 year period). The idea is to stop from digging the hole ever-deeper and, more importantly, to create a market economy that looks for solutions rather than ignoring the problem. We are going to have to wean ourselves off fossil fuels eventually anyway. The question is simply one of whether we do it before or after we have done what would likely be irreparable damage to our environment.

124

Well, let me review the recent bidding:

• A Minister in the British Government has suggested that scientists who doubt AGW should not be allowed air time on BBC

• Dr. Tim Ball, a prominent Canadian scientist and climate sceptic, has received death threats because of his belief that humans are not driving the climate to hell in a handbasket.

• The Governor of Oregon has threatened to strip the State Climatologist of his title for daring to question the AGW theory.

• Journalist Ellen Goodman says “I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny,” she proclaims, “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”

• A writer in Grist Magazine, which Al Gore thinks highly enough of to grant them a rare one-one-one interview, has called for “Nuremburg style” trials for global warming “deniers.”

• Heidi Cullen of the Weather Channel has called for meteorologist who question the received wisdom to be stripped of the professional credentials by the American Meteorological Society.

• Exxon Corporation has been threatened by two US Congressmen for daring to fund scientists who don’t toe the party line.

• Margo Kingston, an Australian journalist, write “David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial. Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence - it is a crime against humanity after all.”

• The British Royal Society, in its first official letter ever to a private company, wrote to Exxon demanding that the oil giant cut off its funding to groups that have ‘misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence’.

• When a correspondent for the American current affairs show 60 Minutes was asked why his various feature programmes on global warming did not include the views of global warming sceptics, he replied: ‘If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?’

• Author and columnist Mark Lynas writes: ‘I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put [their climate change denial] in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial – except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.’

• In “Warm Words”, the IPPR says that ‘the task of climate change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument but in effect to develop and nurture a new “common sense”…. [We] need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement…. The “facts” need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.’

• California’s attorney general, Bill Lockyear, last year asked a federal judge to force automakers to disclose any private communications that they have had with climate change skeptics, saying “The climate skeptics have played a major role in spreading disinformation about global warming”. So opposing the AGW theory is sufficient reason to have your private mail opened …

• Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner has directed Delaware’s state climatologist to stop using his title in public statements on climate change, simply because he doesn’t agree with the “consensus”

• Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology says "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges.

• Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist magazine, says: “Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system.”

Now in the midst of all of these threats and pressures, in the midst of hysterical condemnation and privacy invasion and slick PR firms selling the story and calls for skeptics to be tried for their beliefs (shades of Copernicus!), I’m very glad I’m not a junior professor of climate science at some university … because if I were, I’d shut up and parrot the propaganda … with the result that I would be counted as a member of the “consensus”

And if I were a businessman, no matter what I believed, I’d certainly pay lip service to all things green, just as BP has done, so that people would buy my products.

All of which, of course, only increases the appearance of a scientific consensus, or a business consensus, on the question. Claims that business has recently seen the light regarding global warming only reveal that businesses understand the person making the claim better than that person understands what drives businesses.

The only good news in all of this is that science is not decided by consensus, by the credentials of the person advancing a particular position, by the shrillness or the hysteria of one side, by criminal trials, or by who funded the research. It is decided by falsifiability, by replicability, by evidence, and by observations.

Oh, there is another bit of good news … when your opponents start saying that you should be put on trial for your beliefs, you can be sure that they are woefully short of arguments based on actual evidence.

w.

125

jshore, as always, you bring up interesting arguments, questions, and ideas:

[QUOTE=jshore]
Well, the power companies seem to be coming to a different conclusion on the economics than you, which is why more and more of them are asking the government to step up to the plate and regulate CO2 emissions. One reason might be that, despite what you said, the cost of retro-fitting plants with pollution controls can be very expensive.
[/quote]
Citation that “more and more” of the power companies want the Government to regulate CO2 emissions?

I can believe that if regulations are in the offing, that companies would want to know about them sooner rather than later … but that’s very different from asking the government to regulate CO2.

Yes, I followed it quite closely at the time, it was an interesting and (to me) surprisingly complex debate … particularly since the science on the ground was so thin. The NRC, which opposed the Bush rules change, said “It is impossible to quantify with certainty the changes’ impact on emission levels, human health, or energy efficiency, because existing models have limitations and data so far are scarce.”

At issue was what would trigger the requirement for new controls. Environmentalists said, with good reason, that requiring more pollution controls when machines were upgraded would reduce pollution. The industries said, again with good reason, that requiring controls when upgrades were done would encourage businesses to not upgrade, with the result that older, more-polluting machinery would stay in use longer, increasing pollution … like I said, a complex question.

I’d have to see a cite for the claim that it is “considerably easier and less expensive to install pollution controls at the beginning” as well … to me, it seems this is also a very complex question, and depends sensitively on things like how expensive it is to install the controls vs. retrofit them, how much the controls cost to operate, how long the plant operates before the controls go into effect, whether the targeted pollution contains elements/compounds with market value, the time value of money, opportunity costs, and the like. But since you have stated this with such certainty, I’m sure you have a citation to hand and I’ll be proven wrong.

Finally, any plant built these days without consideration of making it easy to retrofit for future changes in the regulations is being built by very near-sighted people.

Best regards,

w.

126

When a company asks the government to regulate its industry, the reason is usually because said regulation would give the company at a competitive advantage. They’re not in it for the betterment of mankind - they are in it to make money for their shareholders.

127

Well, y’all might remember from another thread we had discussed the Santer et al. paper “Amplification of Surface Temperature Trends and Variability in the Tropical Atmosphere” on tropospheric warming in the tropics.

This was the famous paper that found that the climate models disagreed with three different datasets, and the most reasonable explanation was that the datasets were wrong … which I thought was a totally unwarranted conclusion given the facts of the study. jshore advanced a number of arguments to show I was wrong and the paper was right, and kimstu was of the opinion that jshore had clearly proven his case, and that this showed that my overall level of scientific knowledge and judgement was poor.

Turns out my judgement has just been supported by a new paper in JGR, “Tropospheric temperature change since 1979 from tropical radiosonde and satellite measurements”, Christy et al. The abstract says:

[QUOTE=Christy et al.]
Temperature change of the lower troposphere (LT) in the tropics (20 S–20 N) during the period 1979–2004 is examined using 58 radiosonde (sonde) stations and the microwave-based satellite data sets of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH v5.2) and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS v2.1). At the 29 stations that make both day and night observations, the average nighttime trend (+0.12 K/decade) is 0.05 K decade 1 more positive than that for the daytime (+0.07 K/decade) in the unadjusted observations, an unlikely physical possibility indicating adjustments are needed. At the 58 sites the UAH data indicate a trend of +0.08 K/decade, the RSS data, +0.15.

When the largest discontinuities in the sondes are detected and removed through comparison with UAH data, the trend of day and night releases combined becomes +0.09, and using RSS data, +0.12. Relative to several data sets, the RSS data show a warming shift, broadly occurring in 1992, of between +0.07 K and +0.13 K. Because the shift occurs at the time NOAA-12 readings began to be merged into the satellite data stream and large NOAA-11 adjustments were applied, the discrepancy appears to be due to bias adjustment procedures. Several comparisons are consistent with a 26-year trend and error estimate for the UAH LT product for the full tropics of +0.05 ± 0.07, which is very likely less than the tropical surface trend of +0.13 K/decade.
[/QUOTE]

The significance of this is that all of the models agree that the troposphere should warm about 1.3 times as fast as the surface. All three of the datasets in Santer’s study showed less than this predicted warming.

After removal of the identified errors in the radiosonde (balloon measured) dataset, the radiosonde dataset agrees quite closely with the UAH result, and both of them disagree with the RSS dataset. The study also identifies the location and probable source of an error in the RSS dataset, which causes it to be too high. But even if the RSS dataset is correct, it still doesn’t support the idea than the model results are right and the data wrong.

The model-predicted amplification of the warming in the troposphere has, to my knowledge, never been observed anywhere on the planet. That is why the Santer paper was considered a real blow to those of us who doubt whether the models accurately represent reality.

Me, I’d say the quality of my scientific judgement has been entirely vindicated by this latest study … but of course, YMMV …

w.

128

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
When a company asks the government to regulate its industry, the reason is usually because said regulation would give the company at a competitive advantage. They’re not in it for the betterment of mankind - they are in it to make money for their shareholders.
[/QUOTE]

It is nice to see that someone else can smell the same rat.

(However companies actually hate their shareholders, they correctly know that they would sell them as dog meat)

Your post Chimes a Bell - good PR is buying into the side that is winning.

:slight_smile:

129

Thanks for your interesting posts, intention.

[QUOTE=intention]

Citation that “more and more” of the power companies want the Government to regulate CO2 emissions?
[/quote]

Here is one although it is almost a year old and I believe there has been some addition news since then:

Well, I agree with you that there are coming around to this because of several reasons such as the fact that they realize that it is inevitable…and also would prefer it be done at the federal level rather than through a patchwork of state regulations. However, the inevitability is clearly driven by the science. Many of them had fought against it for a long time but now they realized it just isn’t feasible anymore to claim that the science is so uncertain that nothing should be done.

130

jshore, thanks for providing the link I requested

[QUOTE=jshore]

…
Well, I agree with you that there are coming around to this because of several reasons such as the fact that they realize that it is inevitable…and also would prefer it be done at the federal level rather than through a patchwork of state regulations. However, the inevitability is clearly driven by the science. Many of them had fought against it for a long time but now they realized it just isn’t feasible anymore to claim that the science is so uncertain that nothing should be done.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see a scrap of evidence in the link that “the inevitability is clearly driven by the science”. Here’s a quote from your cite:

This is what I said before, a desire to reduce uncertainty in decisions affecting the future. It’s hard to make choices if you don’t know what the laws will say tomorrow. Note that she didn’t say it was “critical that we start now” because of the science, but because of the uncertainty.

And of course, the fact that General Electric is the largest manufacturer of nuclear plants wouldn’t have affected their stance on the carbon matter, it was driven by pure science as well …

The cited article also says

and

which makes it very clear that their concern, far from being science-driven, is related to stability and foreknowledge of regulations.

Finally, this is hardly a representative sample. The cited article says:

In fact, I didn’t see a single quote in the whole article that any of the attending company representatives were basing their decisions on science. It seems to me that a mix of

• concerns about uncertainty

• acceptance of the fact that widespread public misconceptions about the reliability of the science will likely lead to regulations, and the companies clear desire to influence those regulations

• public relations concerns (the desire to seem “green” so people will buy your product", and

• (for GE) a push for nuclear power

were the major concerns of the company reps … not one mentioned science.

w.

131

A company like GE doesn’t even have to sell alternatives to gain a competitive advantage. Regulations like this cause billions of dollars of spending on new machinery, new computer and monitoring systems, new software to meet regulatory requirements, etc. Any company that sells that kind of technology stands to gain from a regulation that causes massive infrastructure change. That goes for companies like SAP, Rockwell, Siemens, IBM, or really another other company that makes, sells, or supports industrial equipment. Sarbanes-Oxley made a lot of money for a lot of consultants and software companies.

It’s funny how, when a company agrees with AGW, it can be for no reason other than honesty and acceptance of truth. But if they disagree with it, they are craven scum trying to protect their interests at the expense of the people.

132

[QUOTE=intention]
jshore, thanks for providing the link I requested

I don’t see a scrap of evidence in the link that “the inevitability is clearly driven by the science”. Here’s a quote from your cite:

This is what I said before, a desire to reduce uncertainty in decisions affecting the future. It’s hard to make choices if you don’t know what the laws will say tomorrow. Note that she didn’t say it was “critical that we start now” because of the science, but because of the uncertainty.
[/quote]

Yes…but the point is that many of these companies were fighting against such regulation as long as they thought the science was uncertain and thus that the regulation was not inevitable. Now the science has reached the point where they realize that they are only delaying the inevitable.

I guess the alternative explanation is that they think the scientific view is wrong but the regulation is inevitable because these corporations are just powerless pawns in the face of the awesome might of the environmental groups fighting for such regulations. However, I don’t think this is a view many people would find very credible…maybe you do.

And, then there is Duke Energy which produces 70% of its power from coal:

Also, you cite a statement in the article that says: “Of course, there are still plenty of energy companies that oppose caps, and the conference didn’t hear from anyone in the auto industry, a major contributor to greenhouse-gas emissions and a major opponent of moves to curb them.” However, in the past few months, even the auto companies are moving away from that position.

I think Republican pollster Frank Luntz’s memo a few years ago most honestly expressed the strategy on climate change, which was to delay the acceptance of the science as long as possible as the scientific evidence continued to accumulate against them:

More and more companies and politicians seem to be concluding that even that opportunity no longer exists.

133

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]

It’s funny how, when a company agrees with AGW, it can be for no reason other than honesty and acceptance of truth. But if they disagree with it, they are craven scum trying to protect their interests at the expense of the people.
[/QUOTE]

That is not the really the argument that I am making. I know that they are doing this out of their own self-interest. However, I think the reason their perception of their self-interest has changed so dramatically over the last 10 years is because the regulation of carbon has become inevitable…and this is true in large part because the science has become much more certain. (Remember, it was only like 10 years ago when BP and a few other companies started this trend by dropping out of the now-defunct “Global Climate Coalition” that fought tooth-and-nail against acceptance of AGW.)

134

[QUOTE=intention]
Well, y’all might remember from another thread we had discussed the Santer et al. paper “Amplification of Surface Temperature Trends and Variability in the Tropical Atmosphere” on tropospheric warming in the tropics.

This was the famous paper that found that the climate models disagreed with three different datasets, and the most reasonable explanation was that the datasets were wrong … which I thought was a totally unwarranted conclusion given the facts of the study. jshore advanced a number of arguments to show I was wrong and the paper was right, and kimstu was of the opinion that jshore had clearly proven his case, and that this showed that my overall level of scientific knowledge and judgement was poor.
[/quote]

First of all, I don’t think the argument was over whether the paper was definitively right. I didn’t claim to be able to determine that. The question was more what the basic argument of the paper was and whether it was a quite good paper or a poster child for how bad papers in climate science can be (as you seemed to argue). What I was surprised about was what seemed like a mental block on your part in terms of understanding their arguments; I basically felt like you were creating a straw man version of the paper and arguing against that. I also pointed out that the paper’s conclusions were echoed in that report of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (with Christy of the UAH group being one of the people on the panel that wrote that report…with one of the RSS group also on the panel).

Well, it will be interesting to read this whole article and see how strong their evidence really is. As you know, Spencer and Christy are trying to salvage something correct out of their original analysis of the satellite data…as they have had to make one correction after another and the sum total of these corrections (along with getting more years of data) had drastically altered their conclusion over time. (Their first analysis of the satellite data showed the lower troposphere was cooling both in the tropics and globally.) The U.S. Climate Change Science Program report basically concluded that the satellite data has now been reconciled with the surface record on a global scale…with the only remaining possible significant discrepancy being over the tropics.

And, by the way, it is worth noting that the Santer et al. paper has already been shown to be partially right in that they noted that the UAH data over the tropics seemed to be particularly suspect as it showed cooling at the time…And, shortly after that, the UAH folks admitted to an error and made a correction. Note that their new value for the tropics just barely excludes the low troposphere warming as fast as the surface outside of their error bars. I.e., their trend with error bars is -0.02 to 0.12 C per decade and the surface trend is 0.13 C per decade.

Actually, the model-predicted amplification in the tropics has been seen. As the Santer paper showed, the amplification of fluctuations in temperature on monthly to yearly timescales is seen in all four of the data sets, as well as in all of the models tested (which had a wide variety of things that they included and ways they parameterized clouds and such) and is derived from quite basic theoretical considerations. It was only when one looked at the multidecadal temperature trend that one failed to see this amplification in 3 of the 4 data sets (with the 4th, the RSS analysis I believe, showing such amplification at least within the error bars).

The paper pointed out that there were two possibilities:

(1) Either some unknown physics comes in at these longer timescales so the behavior seen at the shorter timescale breaks down. While this possibility could not be ruled out, it seemed rather unlikely especially given the quite basic theoretical considerations that predict this amplification.

(2) The 3 of the 4 data sets that disagree with the amplification on these multidecadal timescales are all wrong. While this might seem a rather extreme conclusion, several things must be noted: First of all, while we talk of 4 data sets, it is really more like 2 data sets — satellites and radiosondes — and then two groups analyzing the data. Second of all, there are good reasons to believe that there are factors in these data sets and the analysis that would likely contaminate the long-term (multidecadal) trend while not contaminating the fluctuations on shorter timescales. Basically, neither the satellites nor the radiosondes were meant to measure long-term climate variations. The satellites suffer from various issues that have made the analysis very difficult (as Spencer and Christy have found out the hard way!), including orbital decay and synching up data from different satellites. The radiosondes have suffered from other issues, most notably problems with shielding the instruments on them from the sun; a recent paper (that came out around the same time as the Santer paper, I believe) showed that changes in the shielding had apparently produced an artificial “cooling” in the daytime radiosonde values as the shielding from the sun had improved. [A final point they noted was that there was another analysis of the satellite data set that showed a multidecadal temperature trend that was globally even larger than the RSS trend. Unfortunately, this analysis had not looked at the temperature trend for the tropics alone but one might expect that the trend for the tropics would also be higher than the RSS trend and thus likely in quite good agreement with the expected amplification.]

135

I am 100% with Sam Stone

You JShore are being taken for a ride

  • I’ll give you a tip, think crooked - and then give it a twist
    [sub] How can I make money out of those hysterical idiots [/sub]
136

[QUOTE=intention]
Well, let me review the recent bidding:
[/quote]

I am not sure exactly what you point is with this list. I guess you are trying to make some claim that scientists that don’t agree on AGW are being intimidated into silence. Let me respond to a few of the individual instances (with the note that you haven’t provided cites for any of them) and then make a more general comment.

Of course, it is horrible when anyone receives death threats and I agree that such actions are completely out-of-line and should be prosecuted. However, while not in any way excusing them, I think it is worth putting Ball’s role here into perspective: I.e., I would consider Ball someone more like Al Gore, who goes around proselytizing for a point-of-view than a serious working scientist in the field. Sure, he is trained in climatology. However, I don’t know in what sense you think he is “prominent”. He is prominent in the media and on his speaker tours but he is not very prominent in the field of climate research. He apparently has only 4 peer-reviewed publications over his career in the field, with the last one being 11 years ago. And, while he may have more scientific training than Al Gore, I think most scientists would say that Al Gore presents the science more correctly than he does.

I admit that you can call Richard Lindzen a prominent atmospheric scientist…and you could call Roy Spencer and John Christy prominent scientists. However, I think it is really stretching the use of the term to call Ball one.

Here is the full context of Heidi’s remarks. Readers can decide for themselves if your description is accurate. Basically, she questioned what the AMS credentials mean if a meteorologist has not demonstrated that at least he has some understanding of what the basic science regarding climate change.

Ah, intention, I believe the reason that this happened was because the automakers are suing the state over their new law that the automakers must reduce greenhouse gas emissions. When that happens, there is a process called “discovery”. It is perfectly legitimate for the state to want to know what connections exist between the auto industry and the skeptics. In fact, I believe that it was only through this discovery process during a defamation lawsuit that Patrick Michaels and 1 or 2 other skeptics had filed that the public was able to learn about what funding Michaels had received from the fossil fuel industry, such as the big coal conglomerate Western Fuels Association.

Now for the general comment: I think you have naturally told only one side of the story. The fact is that actual bona-fide publishing scientists in the field who are skeptics have been treated quite well. Richard Lindzen was a lead author on the IPCC report (I am not sure about latest 4th assessment but on the 2nd and/or 3rd ones). He was also chosen as a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel convened in 2001 in response to questions on climate change from the Bush Administration. (One might note that Lindzen then proceeded to behave pretty badly himself, writing a bizarre op-ed in the Wall Street Journal after that report came out in which he basically disassociated himself from the introductory summary and then proceeded to argue that the press was misinterpretting the rest of the report…and then proceeded to explain what he thought it said…which I think most people who followed the story would say is what it would likely have said if he had been the sole author.)

John Christy and Roy Spencer have been treated quite well…Christy was on the panel of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program report on reconciling the satellite and surface observations. And, despite the fact that their original analysis of the satellite data, which provided strong ammunition for the skeptics for several years, turned out to be riddled with several errors, they have never been forced by a Congressional committee to answer all sorts of intimidating questions in the fashion that Michael Mann and his colleagues were!

As you might recall, the inquisition-like nature of the letters to Mann and colleagues was so bad that even a fellow Republican, Sherwood Boehlert, at the time Chairman of the House Science Committee, wrote his colleagues who had sent those letters this letter that I quote from:

I must admit that I am not a student of communications between Congresscritters but my guess is that this is an unusually direct reprimand for one Congressman when talking to another when both are members of the same Party!

137

[QUOTE=FRDE]
I am 100% with Sam Stone

You JShore are being taken for a ride

  • I’ll give you a tip, think crooked - and then give it a twist
    [sub] How can I make money out of those hysterical idiots [/sub]
    [/QUOTE]

Hang on a bit… I didn’t say Jshore was being taken for a ride. I happen to agree that the preponderance of scientific evidence to date supports AGW.

My concerns lie more along the lines of wanting to make sure that dissenting voices are not squashed. This is an extremely important topic - eventually, trillions of dollars are going to hinge on how we deal with this problem. If any scientific question called out for maximum diligence in making sure we are correct, this one does.

And yet, because the issue is so highly politicized, there is increasing pressure to demonize anyone who doesn’t follow the consensus viewpoint. People who challenge AGW with good science should be treated as heroes for working on unpopular ideas, not vilified as being tools of special interests. If Exxon wants to fund studies attempting to disprove AGW, GREAT! Let them. Support them! More money going into global warming research is a good thing, especially on the skeptic side, because there is already plenty of funding on the other side. You need opposing viewpoints. You need challengers to keep people honest. As long as the science is good, the source of the funding is irrelevant. Anyone who brings up the fact that Exxon or anyone else funded a study is engaging in ad-hominem argumentation. If the science is bad, show where. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter if little green men from Mars funded it.

What got me started with this latest round was Jshore’s using industry spokesmen who support AGW as an example of how widespread the consensus is. In my experience, industry does not behave that way. Even companies that make 70% of their revenue from coal may have competitive advantages if global warming is accepted - they may be companies more heavily involved in ‘clean coal’ technologies than their competitors are. Their coal sources may be cleaner than their competitors’. Or they may have decided that the politics are set in stone and they’d rather be on the inside of the movement where they have a chance to influence the form of regulation than on the outside having it imposed on them without their input.

So citing an industry spokesman as proof of a widespread acceptance of the science of AGW is just as foolhardy as citing an RJ Reynold’s spokesman as evidence that smoking isn’t harmful.

I guess what bothers me most is that this is just a variation of appeal to authority. “Hey, even industry agrees, so shut up and get in line.” Let the damned science speak for itself.

The problem the environmentalists have is that, while current AGW science tends to support the point of view that the earth is warming and humans are contributing to it, it is not a slam-dunk case, and the error bars around estimates of the actual magnitude of the warming caused by humans are so big that it’s difficult to base rational policy on it. So they’d rather just shut down the debate entirely and use the mere fact of the existence of AGW as justification for sweeping changes to society. To many of them, AGW is just a handy justification anyway - they see taxing and punishing of industry, conservation, and other green initiatives as an intrinsic good - something we should do anyway. The problem they’ve had in the past is that they can’t get the rest of us to go along with them. AGW gives them that lever, and they aren’t going to let go of it.

So we have to be very careful. There are a lot of powerful voices who are hugely invested in AGW coming out a certain way. They will not want to hear opposing evidence. Their attitude is fundamentally unscientific - they only use science because so far it’s agreeing with what they want to believe. Actual scientists should steer FAR clear of the political debate and just go where the data takes them.

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Sam, thank you for your post in favor of scientific freedom, opposing attacks on scientists for their views, supporting anyone’s right to fund any scientific research they please, and opposing appeals to authority. I agree entirely.

However, I am curious that you say:

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
… I happen to agree that the preponderance of scientific evidence to date supports AGW. …
[/QUOTE]
In order to establish that humans are having an effect on the climate, we need to do two things. The first of these is usually ignored – before looking at why the climate is unusual or anomalous, it is necessary to show that the recent warming is unusual or anomalous. For that we need, not models or theories, but evidence. Facts. Observations. In this regard it is worth noting the following:

  1. The recent warming (1980 - present) is not statistically different from the 1920 - 1945 warming in intensity, duration, or total temperature change.

  2. The current temperatures are far from the warmest in the Holocene, or even in the last 1,000 years.

  3. The Arctic has experienced ice-free summers during the Holocene.

  4. Some of the predicted outcomes of the AGW theory, such as Antarctic warming and the troposphere warming more than the surface, have not occurred.

Only when we have established that there is something unusual about the recent record can we move on to the question of what is causing the anomaly.

So I’m curious, Sam … what is the “scientific evidence” that establishes that

a) The current warming is anomalous or unusual, rather than a natural fluctuation such as we have experienced for literally billions of years, and

b) If anomalous warming were scientifically established (which I do not see any evidence for to date), what evidence is there that humans are the cause of the anomalous warming?

The most common argument I see advanced for (b) is that we don’t know what is causing the recent warming, so it must be CO2 … I’m sure that you know too much about science to advance that claim, but I see it all the time.

My best to you,

w.

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@Sam Stone

I’m not sure whether we are in for/encountering GW, and if we are, then I’m not sure that it is AGW

If we are in for GW then it would be a good idea to make contingency plans.
If it is AGW then there is not much we can do about the anthropogenic bit, well short of shutting down China and India - and I really don’t think that is practical.

I see no harm in cutting down on use of energy, but I really resent being railroaded into daft things like carbon sequestration - and I’m really suspicious of carbon trading.

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Hi all, I’m back! England was very nice (okay, rainy, but the daffodils and hyacinths were out, which makes it a vast improvement over New England just now. “I demand crocuses!”)

Thanks very much, flex! :slight_smile: Very kind of you.

  1. How is this an argument against the AGW hypothesis? AFAIK, neither the early-20th-century warming trend nor the late-20th-century one contradicts anything in current climate models incorporating AGW.

  2. Hmm, do you have a cite for the claim that current global temperatures are not comparable to the warmest in the Holocene (i.e., the current interglacial period), or even the warmest in the past millennium? Because AFAICT, the current opinion of mainstream climate science holds exactly the opposite:

By the way, what do you mean by “temperatures” in this context? You’ve argued previously that you don’t consider the concept of “global average temperature” to be meaningful, so I presume that that’s not what you’re talking about. But in that case, what concept are you using to compare “current temperatures” with their counterparts earlier in the Holocene?

  1. Again, how is the existence of some ice-free Arctic summers in the early Holocene an argument against the AGW hypothesis?

  2. AFAICT, the absence of drastic recent warming in the Antarctic (there does appear to have been a slight average Antarctic warming over the last 40 years) doesn’t actually contradict current climate models incorporating AGW, as this article notes:

And the general opinion in mainstream climate science seems to be that the troposphere is indeed warming faster than the surface, as AGW models predict, although measurement problems in the upper-air observing systems cloak the effect. (In any case, as the linked article notes, it’s illogical to use lack of observed faster tropospheric warming as an argument specifically against anthropogenic warming in particular. If surface temperatures overall are rising, as the vast majority of climate scientists agree they are, then troposphere temperatures should be rising faster, no matter whether the warming is anthropogenic or not.)

So AFAICT, none of your points seem to amount to a persuasive argument against the AGW hypothesis. Incomplete and imperfect as it is, the AGW hypothesis still seems to do the best job of any model that has yet been proposed to explain the observed global climate trends in recent decades. So I think Sam Stone is accurately reflecting the state of mainstream science when he says that “the preponderance of scientific evidence to date supports AGW”.