Honda et al., 2009; Budikova, 2009;Francis et al., 2009; Overland and Wang, 2010; Petoukhov and Semenov, 2010; Serreze et al., 2011].
Cohen and Barlow, 2005; Cohen et al., 2009, 2012
Then there is the theory in the Nature paper quoted in the OP, that it is the Pacific cooling, and it is related to an increase in the trade winds.
There are others as well, the one thing they all have in common is recognizing that there has been both a cooling trend for NH winters, as well as an almost flat trend, or a slight cooling globally since 1995, 97, 98, 2000, or 2002, depending on which dataset is used.
Which is why I used GISS, as it shows the most warming of all the datasets. In actuality satellite data shows cooling since 97, with the NH winter trend showing up earlier than that.
Sam Stone is a content rich contributor, and I appreciate the thought and logic and reason evident in what ic clearly a well thought out and understandable post.
of course, and you would have to be deaf dumb and blind not to know this. My ironic thread (which was started in IMO
If it had been a record high, most people wouldn’t have been surprised at all.
you got that right. And flat out showing they have been wrong, really wrong, about a key prediction, that won’t earn you any friends at all.
You can’t even state the four conclusion thsat are in the OP, much less know if they are correct.
You didn’t define AGW at all. The theory of the enhanced greenhouse effect seems to be unknown to you, and every last person who keeps trying to claim everything they dislike is wrong. It’s quite amazing.
If it is indeed true that there is an extreme negative feedback from CO2, which is one of the theories we are discussing, that is huge. The models and theory will be changed.
The political problem is that the consequences as well as events predicted by the theory may be completely wrong. This places the cocksure prophets of doom in a terrible situation. Any admittance of fallibility, of being wrong, would seem an utter disaster to them.
Even discussing it is seen as defeat. So as each year goes by, with the winter trend getting more negative, makes the farther and farther away from having any credibility. Their hope of some huge disaster, or at least a big El Nino to cause a warming spike, is apparent.
And years back, when it was already obvious, somebody came up with “it has to be 17 years to be meaningful”, which now is the reality.
Meanwhile the denier sticks his fingers in his ears and repeats “it’s warmer than ever”.
Magellan: This is why. When we talk about warming, depending on the context, we’re usually talking about overall global temperatures or atmospheric global temperatures. When you start playing semantics with so utterly simple terms, then something has gone horribly wrong. That something is usually that someone is uninterested in real debate and wants to drag things into unnecessary semantics.
I didn’t expect we would ever get a straight answer from you on that simple question, and I know that we never will. Instead we get a new steaming turd deposited on the floor that CO2 now might have a negative effect. It might be fun to keep spinning total bullshit without ever actually saying anything coherent, but it soon becomes obvious just what it’s worth.
Sam Stone, I always enjoy reading your well thought-out posts, even though on this subject I often disagree with much it, and even though responding to it in detail is a lot of work. Still, it’s an opportunity to clarify important ideas. As always, my risk in responding is in getting too verbose and having no one read it so I’m just going to pick a few key concepts I want to refute for this first take. If you think I’ve skipped something you believe is important, please let me know. My main goal is clarity and brevity.
Not at all. Certainly when the temperature skyrockets for 30 years at the end of the 20th century it’s something worth noting, but even then, no legitimate scientific endeavor was putting a metaphorical ruler to it and claiming that the slope of the trend line told us everything we needed to know about future climate change, or indeed that the slope of this particular trend line was uniquely significant. Entirely the opposite. Science was exploring the underlying mechanisms, and in particular, major research initiatives were exploring every avenue to try to develop meaningful metrics for how the future climate would evolve under sustained CO2 forcing.
These metrics, today referred to as transient climate response and equilibrium climate sensitivity, are based on extensive studies of climate response in the paleoclimate, satellite data, the entire instrumental record, and a multitude of climate models eventually brought together in formal intercomparison experiments. The estimated values of these metrics were not influenced by the steep gradient of the late 20th century any more than they are influenced by the shallower gradient of the early 21st; indeed, the values have hardly changed at all.
Not true at all, for at least three different reasons
We are not “cooling”, we have for a relatively short time been warming more slowly. New high-temperature records continue to be broken, so that weather effects that derive directly from elevated temperatures of land, air, and sea surface would still be operative. Indeed we appear to have seen this just this winter with the polar vortex and record-setting snow and cold deep in the US south; while no event is unambiguously attributable to climate change, this is consistent with accelerated Arctic warming.
Some extreme weather events may be attributable to net heat uptake increases rather than observed land-atmosphere temperature increases; for instance, circulation changes attributable to deep-ocean warming. Unless there is a negative change in the energy budget where the earth is for some reason retaining less heat and radiating more, these effects will continue.
The effects of climate forcing on weather are far from synchronous or immediate; they could take decades or even centuries to manifest themselves.
The rest of your post is a very generic discussion about how little we supposedly know about climate. I’ll try to address it briefly by addressing this quote:
The claim of some kind of generic “stability” is true geologically and on geologic timeframes, but entirely without basis when dealing with any existing climate regime and ecosystem. The simple way of restating that is that the planet will survive just fine, no one is worried about it, but push the climate hard enough and humanity may not; or at least, more realistically, may suffer major privations in loss of life and property and quality of life.
The earth’s climate system is both continuously variable and metastable, depending on the timeframes in question and the strengths of the forcings. We see both in geologically recent times, namely the well-bounded quasi-regular ice ages of the past 1.2 million years, and the departure therefrom in the post-industrial era, where the CO2 spike sits like a towering skyscraper against the ice ages that define the existence of humanity on this planet. I really bristle at the kinds of broad generalizations about self-stabilizing systems that are sometimes uttered because that’s just not how the climate system works. Possibly the closest event in the paleoclimate comparable to what is happening today is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. The carbon release rate at that time was at least an order of magnitude less than what it is today even at its peak, and it was an event that transformed all life on earth.
Humanity came into existence during the modern ice age cycles, and civilization during the last few millennia of the Holocene. At no point in the only world we have ever lived in has CO2 been anywhere outside the range of 180ppm during an ice age and 280-300ppm during an interglacial. It has now soared more above the interglacial maximum than the entire differential between ice ages. Far from taking comfort in some generic euphamisms about self-stabilizing systems, we should be concerned about this entirely new climate era we are in, this uncontrolled experiment that is quickly taking us outside the adaptive capacity of the species that make up our ecosystem and have the potential to radically disrupt global circulation systems. Indeed it’s more than just continuous changes we need to be worried about. Albedo changes from melting polar ice and methane releases from both land and ocean are likely to accelerate the feedbacks; there is as much as 1800 GT of carbon locked up in Arctic permafrost and similar amounts in methane hydrates in the now-warming oceans. At some point both the ecosystem and the physical climate system reach tipping points; this is how these systems behave. Hans Oeschger was the first to recognize tipping points as the now acknowledged characteristic behavior of climate systems, and Anthony Barnosky and others have made a similar case for biological tipping points.
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I can’t help but feel that you’re confusing climate scientists with Greenpeace activists, and the practice of climate science with the exercise of backroom political campaigns. The scientific method and its processes are no different in climate science – which is in any case an interdisciplinary field – than they are in any other field of science. It’s replete with scientific skepticism and reticence to state conclusions without incontrovertible evidence, and you see this all the time in the legitimate journals. The consensus-driven IPCC is even more conservative, and they manage to say anything at all only because the evidence is pretty much overwhelming on the key issues.
Not so much in the denialist shadow press, where the authors do the rounds of conservative media and denialist web sites and lie about the meaning of their papers. Like Nic Lewis, who had a minor role in a minor NatGeo research letter that tentatively suggested possible new constraints on transient climate response. Lewis immediately went on the denialist virtual talk show circuit to proclaim a revolution in climate science. I don’t see real climate scientists doing that, particularly the lying part. For one thing, they don’t really have time, and for another, they have actual reputations.
While I find the very concept of “my opinions”, or “my beliefs” to be the subject of a scientific debate, that view certainly isn’t shared by many. It’s a two sided coin flip, with one side reading “waste of time” and the other reads “it’s a trap”, since it’s obvious to me the emotional response and intellectual dishonesty displayed means the last thing really wanted is my view of things, so what to do?
You see? If I try to correct such misinformation, it’s like slapping a sticky mass of tar with a stupid grin on it. Then there is the effort ot frame the debate, which means a debate about something not even about the topic of course.
Sidetracks and avoidance. There are multiple issues, scientific and such, that the opening salvo clearly speaks of. The Loxodonta africana cyclotis in the parlor if you will, would surely be understanding why the greenhouse theory predicts the greatest warming in winter, at high latitudes, and what it means that we are not seeing this at all. It’s a logical next step after one accepts that in the real world, we are seeing winter cooling trends, and no minor change in both the length of cold periods, but also the very meaningful increase in snow.
Does the NH winter trend have meaning? If the theory that decreased sea ice, from CO2 forced warming, is the cause of it, that is a death blow to the part of the greenhouse theory that states the feedback from arctic warming will be increased winter warming. If it’s the Pacific cooling that is the cause, that is a different set of problems. If the solar decrease in both UV and magnetism is a cause, it’s a different issue. It’s it’s dimming from volcanoes, or increased coal use, yet another factor. And it could be all of the above at once.
Once again, there is no reason to even acknowledge your adversarial stance, as it allows you to try and control the conversation, and avoid the many things already on the table.
If the important thing is science, facts, measurements and looking at the actual world, my beliefs are meaningless in regards to these things. It’s a classic fallacy to think a scientists work is meaningless because he, like Faraday, has religious convictions, so his discoveries and invention of the electric motor should be ignored. Balderdash and tomfoolery at work.
If you want a topic that explored people’s convictions and beliefs about climate change and fossil fuels, go start a topic about it.
But once again, you are complicating and obscuring and confusing, rather than dealing with some relatively simple issues, as raised in the OP. If there is no agreement on our ability to measure and calculate temperature trends, to know what is happening, moving on to the much more complex and politically confused other issues is a waste of time.
The stark reality isn’t going away, no matter how quickly hands are waved or how much eyes are rolled.
People can’t ignore brutal winters. No matter how much you tell them the earth is warmer than ever, it won’t matter. Telling somebody in Chicago that is crippled by the cost of record cold and extreme snow and ice, that “it was really warm in walla walla this winter”, to counter there reasonable questions or anger over the winter, is only going to make “climate science” an extreme joke to them
Seriously. It’s not the way to deal with reality at all.
All the insults and dismissive snorting in the world won’t cause the ice storm to not matter, or the damage to farmers to somehow not have happened.
I’m not trying to seek out some ‘middle ground’, so the middle ground fallacy or false equivalence fallacy do not apply. I do not subscribe to the belief that the ‘middle’ is more correct than the extremes. For example, in the anti-vaccination debate, the ‘middle ground’ between anti-vax nuts and science is simply a slightly weaker version of nuttery. When truth is on one side and error on the other, there is no ‘vital middle’. There’s only the truth. Any compromise to that is just wrong.
That said, when I read the literature on climate change, I see huge assumptions being used as bedrock formulations on which to build other assumptions. I see a complex system being treated as a machine rather than as a complex network of effects and agents.
One of the reasons modeling has failed so badly in predicting complex systems is that modeling is an exercise in simplification. That works when coming up with resultant vectors for multiple forces or when the effects of a complicating variable are so well known that it can be dismissed or modeled with a simple equation.
In modeling complex systems, you simply don’t know what’s important and what isn’t. So any simplification you make is a potential source of uncertainty. When the system is best described as a massive network of nodes, each with their own rules, understanding the inputs to the system is not nearly enough to make any predictions regarding the output. It’s not like modeling a spring or an electric circuit.
For example, what do you think happens when you introduce 30 wolves into Yellowstone? Any elementary school biology student can make some guesses as to the immediate effects: The population of animals that wolves feed on will probably decline, and that will have effects on other predators that feed off those animals, etc. Ripples down the food chain.
But how many people would guess that introducing 30 wolves would cause the course of rivers and streams to change, and perhaps cause flooding in some regions? But it looks like that’s happening. It works like this:
The wolves kill the elk, the elk become more fearful and spend less time grazing at watering holes. This allows aspen trees to grow larger along the banks of the streams, which in turn stimulates the population of beavers, which causes an increase in beaver-dam related flooding. And that’s just a second-order effect. What happens when all these changes reverberate around inside the ecosystem for a few generations? It is totally unpredictable. In hindsight it may look obvious, but that’s because we see the path taken by the system. There could have been many other possible paths that didn’t happen.
Imagine a scientist studying this and coming away with the conclusion that the number of wolves correlates to flooding, and uses that as an input to ‘improve’ the ecological model. Do you think that would be an improvement? Or just noise? The latter, because with a complex adaptive system, measuring its past behavior just tells you how the system responded when it was in that exact initial state before the change was made. If you come to the conclusion that the way to lower flooding rates is to lower the wolf population, you might be in for a rude surprise, because in the new state wolves might not have that effect any more.
And yet, in climate science past behavior of the system is used to predict what future behavior will look like. Models are built using past data, and then validated by looking at other historical data sequestered from the modelers as a control. If the model predicts the second dataset, it’s considered to be validated. And if it fails, the search goes on for more effects, and they are plugged into the model to ‘tune’ it until it starts to show patterns similar to the sequestered data.
But all that model is doing is predicting how that particular system would have reacted - or at worst, the model found one possible path that leads to behavior that matches the sequestered data. It’s no wonder that these models often fail when extending their predictions into the future. Such ‘tuned’ models have a horrible track record for predicting complex systems.
Think of all the factors we know of today that affect global climate. There are la nina and el nino events, ocean re-uptake and emission of CO2, biologic processes, mechanical and chemical processes, cloud formations, etc. The ocean itself is not in thermal equilibrium - its layers rise and fall, exchange nutrients and chemicals. There are global currents that move energy around, and which we don’t fully understand. Earth’s albedo shifts due to numerous interrelated factors, which changes the energy budget of the planet. The sun is somewhat variable, and also emits particles that interact with our atmosphere in ways that are not fully understood. Random shocks like volcanos, meteor impacts, major solar events, and even man-caused CO2 emissions cause it to constantly shift and mutate.
And all these effects communicate with each other - La Nina may behave differently when the other variables change, and that change feeds back into the system and causes even more change. As the system iterates, the permutations rapidly become gargantuan.
This just scratches the surface of known effects. But with a complex system it’s not enough to know all the requisite parts of the machine. You have to understand how they are linked together, and the rules between the nodes. Complex systems are a combination of hardware and software.
Take, for example, algal blooms. A single algae bloom can contain as much carbon as the U.S. emits in a year, and sequester a percentage of it in the deep ocean for a long time. Yet we still don’t well understand the global pattern of formulation of these blooms - that may itself be a complex system driven by numerous variables. I recently read of a paper that suggested one factor might be iron-rich soil blown from large deserts into the ocean, and acting as a pump for algae growth. If so, that’s a negative feedback - if it gets hotter, and that causes more desertification, you might see an increase in algae blooms, speeding the rate of uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere, helping to cool the planet back down. Of course, if so it’s one that would operate on a time scale that might not help us much, but you get the point. Biologic systems interacting with chemicals which in turn vary based on climatic factors.
There may be hundreds - thousands - - millions - of feedbacks. Some positive, some negative. Some may only kick in at certain temperatures, or as secondary or tertiary responses. Some may look small in the first iteration, but trigger much bigger feedbacks. Some may respond at rates that won’t help us at all. Some may be so opaque that we’ll never know them until they happen and we can study them, like the increase in beavers from wolves being introduced to an ecosystem. What happens to the pattern of La Nina and El Nino events 50 years after a temperature increase? We have no idea, because all we can measure is what’s happening to them now, and that may not be particularly relevant.
If this sounds like hand-waving anti-AGW rationalization, it’s really not. I work with complex systems, and try to predict and control their outputs. Even in very small systems like an assembly line, it can be nearly impossible. When a system is highly sensitive to tiny changes in initial conditions as complex systems usually are, trying to model it can be very difficult.
In process engineering, we have entire processes around modeling the system, and other entire processes that we use to control and validate the measurements we take of that system. Even a person using a micrometer to measure wear is subject to error and our predictions break down if the measurement error rises above extremely small values. So we go to immense effort to constantly control for and minimize measurement error.
And even then, our predictive models are not perfect and so we resort to using them as just another input into human judgment. “Our model says this might be happening, so we’ve identified these steps you can take to validate that, or at least you can use the model as one more data point in your subjective analysis of what’s going on.”
Then I look at the state of climate science, where even the inputs to the system are still subject to debate, the ‘unknown unknowns’ are many, and the raw data used in the models is often from thin datasets (paleo reconstructions), incomplete, and extrapolated, and I have to wonder if we’re not fooling ourselves as to what we can predict. It would kind of like me trying to assume the vibrational characteristics of a current machine by looking at a proxy like the pattern of stress cracks in the concrete underneath a machine that was there 50 years ago, and using that as an input into my model of the current machine because that’s all I’ve got.
If all I’ve got is a number that is itself subject to interpretation and which has large error bars around it, I’m just fooling myself by continuing to build a model which uses it, if that model is dealing in precisions greater than the error range of my initial input. And yet we’re doing that in climate modeling too - ‘adjusting’ old temperature values by amounts greater than the size of the effect we’re looking for, making sweeping conclusions about historic climate based on isolated proxy data, etc.
And yet, the pro-AGW people think we understand and can model this system with enough accuracy to be able to predict what the system will look like 100 years from now based on a change of a hundred ppm or so to one constituent chemical in the atmosphere. Not only that, but that we can predict the economic effects of those changes on the society that exists 100 years from now. In just the past 10 years we have seen totally unexpected economic changes that radically affect those predictions. We’ve also seen technological changes that were not predicted and which affect our CO2 output. Those 100 year estimates may represent the absolute best we can do, but if the error around them is 10X larger than the effect they are forecasting, they’re useless - and they’re certainly not a basis for fundamentally restructuring our world today.
The problem of building simplistic, mechanistic models of complex systems and then treating their output as truth is not unique to climate science. Macroeconomics is another such area, where a complex system is reduced down to a bunch of aggregates then run through traditional models to make predictions. Those predictions almost always fail spectacularly, but it doesn’t stop us from treating every 10 year projection of GDP from the CBO as if it actually means something, or treating a multi-year model of employment effects based on a stimulus as something other than modern economic phrenology. And yet, there’s a ‘consensus’ of macroeconomists that such models have predictive value despite the plain evidence that they don’t. You’d do just as well as the CBO in forecasting future GDP by simply drawing a regression line from where it is today back to the historical mean - but that would almost certainly be wrong too.
Or look at the state of financial modeling. Despite gargantuan amounts of money and effort being spent on financial models, they utterly fail to predict price movements, financial crises, or other financial events at the macro level. The best investors in the world, using the best models available and high-speed data collection, cannot do much better than chance when predicting stock movements, GDP growth, or other macro events. Hence the constant news of ‘unexpected’ results from just about every new economic measure - usually followed by a post-hoc explanation of why, perhaps from the same economist or financial analyst who failed to see that effect until after it happened. Just before the crash of 2007 there was a consensus in the financial community that the system was under control, well understood, and that no crisis was on the horizon.
Population dynamical modeling has been around for a long time, and it predicted global famines and 12-17 billion people on the earth by now. All of the models utterly failed to predict the global collapse in birth rates, because human society is complex and the models were simplified.
Both sides of the political fence understand this, but they selectively apply it. The left will agree wholeheartedly when it comes to ecology or financial modeling in the private sector, and their embrace of the precautionary principle and government regulation of the financial industry is the result of that belief. The right trumpets the law of unintended consequences, showing that governments cannot control an economy or predict the result of their central commands once the complex system absorbs it and mutates in response. Generals have the maxim that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.
I’m guilty of it too - I made all kinds of pronouncements about the effects of the Iraq war, totally failing to recognize at the time that the long-term effects of such a major change are utterly impossible to predict. I’ve learned to have a lot more humility about our ability to change the world, build societies, or forecast the long-term effect of a war. I knew it then too, but was just as guilty of selective application of my knowledge as everyone else is. Motivated reasoning is dangerous, which is why I am skeptical of the state of climate science, or any other science carried out in a politically charged environment where the stakes are high.
I’m also aware that this whole argument could be a result of motivated reasoning on my part, and I try as best I can to be my own devil’s advocate and keep my mind open to the other side’s arguments - I’m sure you’ve seen the evolution of my beliefs on this issue over the years. It’s an extremely hard topic to understand, made harder by the noise generated by the non-scientist activists on both sides of the argument.
An still it does not make it better, remember the ants… It is not just probability and past behavior that is used, but the physics of what CO2 does.
I notice that for all that prose, you are still ignoring that there are many other lines of research that convinced scientists that this issue can not be ignored.
That are just a case of iffinitis aguda. It would had been more valid indeed when the original research of Mann was published, but climate crocks put it a long time ago, we have now a hockey team of reconstructions not just one hockey stick, and more recent and detailed research show that that what you said is less of a valid criticism nowadays.
The point that I made is still there, there are groups dedicated to drive the conversation to a level of controversy that are not really as high as they want it to be. For sure there is still debate on some aspects of the paleo climate data, but not at the implied levels that the contrarian sources are claiming. They are the ones that are not giving you the whole picture and eventually, regardless of your political leanings, one will have to tell them to take a hike or one should demand them to be more realistic about the levels of support paleo climate has.
We know the physics of CO2, for sure. I am totally comfortable with the notion that man is adding CO2 to the atmosphere, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that the immediate effect of that should be a warming of the atmosphere.
In the same way, I would be comfortable accepting that we understand that introducing wolves into an area will have the immediate result of reducing the population of the animals they prey on. First-order effects like this are obvious, even in complex systems.
However, if you came to me and said, “I have a model of the forest that says if we don’t introduce some wolves today, it’s going to cost us $1,000,000 50 years from now because of the increased cost of damage from the growing elk herd”, I’d have to ask you what you were smoking.
I would then check if there is other research that supports that, and that is what is happening. No need to smoke.
Really, just like you claimed before that the ones that refuse to knowledge the notion “that man is adding CO2 to the atmosphere, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that the immediate effect of that should be a warming of the atmosphere” are just of hot air (FX really does not agrees much on this too.) It is time to also add the notion that palo climate has more support than what those same pushers of hot air are telling many on the right nowadays.
Ran out of edit time, what I meant to say was that:
Really, just like you claimed before that the ones that refuse to acknowledge the notion “that man is adding CO2 to the atmosphere, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that the immediate effect of that should be a warming of the atmosphere” and that they are just full of hot air (FX really does not agree much on these points too.) It is time to also add the notion that palo climate has more support than what those same pushers of hot air are telling many on the right what they should think nowadays.
Okay, so one of the difficulties in having this debate is separating where the state of the science is today vs the pronouncements of activists, politicians, and lay people. It makes the debate much harder.
For example, in the past I was accused of using ‘fringe science’ whenever I quoted from a paper that deviated from the IPCC’s consensus. So, I made the conscious decision to accept the IPCC’s science and also use that as part of my argument. But then the IPCC’s projections became more conservative, and suddenly I was being told that the IPCC was ‘old science’ and that you had to read the latest papers to understand how dire the situation is.
Likewise, ‘peer review’ is the gold standard - until you offer up a peer-reviewed paper that in some way validates the ‘denialist’ side. Now suddenly the debate shifts to the motivations of the authors, whether the journal is legitimate, yada yada.
I’m perfectly happy to reference only the research accepted by the IPCC. Because if you actually dig into the science and look at the error bars around the estimates, you get a different picture than the alarmist one many activists present.
My point about complex adaptive systems is that they evolve. Is the Paleoclimate at all useful in understanding the current one? I’m not sure, or at least I think the correlation is overstated. The correlation may work for some measures, while being totally wrong for others.
As an example, human population models were based on population models of other animals and of historical population growth. Those models extrapolated from what we knew about population growth and made predictions - which utterly failed. The thing about extrapolating the past into the future is that you never know where the inflection points are until they happen, and in complex systems there are many inflection points. Things move linearly until suddenly they don’t. Response curves suddenly move from linear to exponential, or vice versa. Or completely unexpected behaviors emerge that never emerged in the past. It’s a vexing problem.
Have you ever seen a functional MRI of the brain? The brain is another complex adaptive system. In theory, it should be much easier to understand the basic functioning of the brain than of the climate, because the brain can be instrumented, multiple brains can be used to find commonality of behavior and to create controls for experiments, etc. The brain operates on time scales that allow us to watch it work in detail as wer apply stimuli, and to repeat those experiments.
We know far more about the ‘nuts and bolts’ of brain chemistry and the way different parts communicate with each other than we do about the underlying mechanisms of the climate. And yet, when we finally developed the ability to see the patterns of neuron firing, we see something that looks completely chaotic and impenetrable. A stimuli will cause bursts of neuron firing, then suddenly a ‘wave’ of firings will propagate across the brain… Flashes of activity start and stop apparently randomly. We have no idea what these patterns are doing, because they are the ‘software’ of the mind and the mind is an evolved, massively parallel supercomputer and we don’t have the source code.
If we could see the climate system or an ecosystem or evolution itself on a time scale similar to the brain, and we could somehow instrument it so we could see all the communication pathways and feedbacks, we’d see something similar. Change something here, and you get a burst of activity somewhere else. Waves of information propagating throughout the system, causing it to mutate and change.
It’s very important to study this stuff, and climate models would be valuable even if we couldn’t predict future climate, because models are a great tool for hypothesis testing. It the long-term, multigenerational predictive value of those models that I question.
I understand all that. My point was that you can’t point to a specific weather event and say, ‘That’s because of global warming’, or even "that’s stronger than it would otherwise be because of global warming’. And my further point was that if we happen to be in a period of very localized cooling purely due to randomness, it makes it even harder to blame specific weather on warming.
But I think we both agree that short term weather events should not be used as proof for or against global warming. A few years of cooling doesn’t really mean anything, and a year of higher or lower than average storm activity is also meaningless in the context of the larger debate.
I already corrected myself to say I was really talking about metastability. I’m totally cool with the notion of tipping points and failure cascades. It could happen. I believe the climate is stable to minor inputs on geologic timeframes, but it could still get mighty uncomfortable for humans in a shorter time frame.
Still, even in the last 50,000 years there have been some pretty big shocks to the climate system, and it seems to keep trucking along through a fairly narrow range of temperatures. Going back further, even massive events like extinction-level impacts didn’t cause the climate system to go completely out of control. I have to believe it’s fairly robust.
And yet, here we are with an order of magnitude larger carbon release rate, with nary an extinction in sight. Now, maybe that will happen over a longer timeframe, but maybe it won’t. Again, the climate system today is not the same one that existed in the Paleocene, and extrapolations of that system’s behavior need to be carefully weighted.
While true, and certainly a factor that should give us pause, it’s really meaningless by itself. I’m sure we can find lots of measures of things that are at all-time highs or lows, yet kind of irrelevant. I will accept that having a CO2 excursion outside of historical norms means we can’t take the historical stability of climate for granted going into the future.
But one thing you also have to remember when throwing around comparisons like that is that climate response to CO2 is not linear, and neither is the re-uptake rate. Increases in CO2 have diminishing effect, and the re-uptake rate increases as well. That doesn’t mean we can ignore it, but it does mean that 400 ppm is not twice as bad as 200ppm.
That’s a fair argument, and it’s similar to the precautionary principle - we’re making changes we don’t understand to a climate system we rely on and which we also don’t understand. That carries risk.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to sway public opinion and generate political action based on nebulous risks. So the AGW movement goes farther and starts making sweeping claims about our certain knowledge of a horrible future to come unless we act now, and then treats anyone who questions this as a heretic to be expelled from civilized debate because the science is ‘settled’.
I’m not convinced we understand the albedo change mechanism. It seems to me to be just as likely that before the poles melt and the methane is released the increase in water vapor will trigger an increase in cloud formation that will reduce the amount of solar forcing. Or that an increase in moisture will result in more snowfall in cold climates. Or that the additional heat will be sequestered in the ocean for a long time. Or that it will cause some other negative feedback. We just don’t know at this point - certainly not well enough to make the kinds of specific predictions some AGW activists make.
But that’s not very helpful unless we know where those tipping points are. Fear of an unknown but possible tipping point could justify preventing any man-made change. Fracking? Hell, maybe there’s a tipping point at which major earthquakes will be triggered. Population growth? Maybe there’s a tipping point where suddenly a cascade will cause massive famine.
Preventing economic activity carries real costs, both financially and in terms of human life. You can’t stop it based on fears of cataclysmic change if you don’t know where the cataclysm is, when it will happen, or what it will take to get there.
Read any conservative financial blog, and you’ll see the same arguments you’re using, except against the government. We’re in new regimes never before seen in terms of debt, money printing, and other intrusions in the economy. We’re headed for a tipping point which will cause a global economic collapse, unless we stop what we’re doing right now, shrink the size of government, eliminate the deficit, etc. And hell, they even have plenty of historical examples of such tipping points to prove their case. But the same people arguing for CO2 restriction because of such an unknown risk completely discount it when it comes to government spending. How come?
As I said above, it’s hard in these debates to stay limited to the science. I’m affected by it too - I can’t count the number of times I’ve brought up a point from the IPCC and tried to talk about it scientifically, only to have the ‘other side’ come back with a strawman argument refuting something some idiot Republican political hack in Congress had to say about global warming. Both sides tend to go after the easy targets and avoid the hard ones.
There is a real debate going on today about how the scientific method applies to the study of complex systems. How ‘scientific’ is it when you can’t falsify results, replicate results, compare hypotheses against controls, and when the system you are studying by its nature does not lend itself to scientific reductionism?
Back in the 20th century when science was in its popular heyday and scientists were heroes, every discipline wanted to be ‘scientific’. But just because you have lots of numbers and can do math on them doesn’t mean you’re being scientific. Is macroeconomics a science? Or is it philosophy? How about psychology? You can do experiments in psychology and build models and collect data through surveys and cognitive tests and such, but if you look at the state of psychology it actually hasn’t improved much in a long time. You can give a survey to a thousand respondents and get enough data to generate some truly impressive P values in your regression analysis, but sometimes that’s irrelevant because the surveys themselves were riddled with errors or bias the outcome, or the thing they measured was irrelevant.
I have no knowledge of the particular case you’re talking about, but I’ve seen many climate scientists make pronouncements about future damage from AGW that are not justified by the underlying research. But again, it’s hard to separate the climate scientists from the activists - especially when the media itself doesn’t draw a clear distinction.
Sorry, still not understanding this. My point about paleo climate is simply that the measures we have are an incomplete picture, and that since climate is a complex adaptive system, extrapolations of its past behavior into the future need to be done carefully and with a certain amount of humility regarding what it can really teach us about the present system. That doesn’t mean it’s useless, or that it can’t teach us anything at all, but merely that we have to use a certain amount of caution before drawing sweeping conclusions.
For example, today we’re worried about positive feedback from methane clathrates being released. Do we have a measure of how much of that there was then as compared to today? Or is the amount we have today the result of a more modern sequestration?
If I came to you and said, “See? CO2 went up by X in the paleo record, and we didn’t see the kind of climate change you’re claiming might happen,” you might rightly come back and say, 'Yes, but now we have to worry about all those methane clathrates, and we don’t know if they existed back then." And unless I could show you a good proxy for how much of that stuff was sitting waiting to catastrophically be released into the air back then, you’d be right - my historical example would not prove anything about today’s climate response.
The same can be said for the biosphere, which was very different then. Even if the species were similar, the distribution was different. For example, if there was more new growth forest overall back then, the rate of CO2 sequestration would be higher. Or perhaps the ocean currents were different, and the mechanisms that shift heat around worked differently. Just knowing the historical relationship between CO2 and temperature isn’t enough, although it’s useful data than can help our understanding.
You’re missing that FX is not asking in places where the context is unclear, and he’s not quibbling about the difference between usages, but rather appears to have trouble confusing it with other things entirely. At least, from what I’ve read. I have him on ignore because if I didn’t I probably would get banned.
Still, it’s an opportunity to clarify important ideas. As always, my risk in responding is in getting too verbose and having no one read it so I’m just going to pick a few key concepts I want to refute for this first take. If you think I’ve skipped something you believe is important, please let me know. My main goal is clarity and brevity.