How many people take Global Warming totally on faith?

[intention]

@jshore

Thanks for the reply, intention. Please let me clarify my position since there seems to have been a misunderstanding about it. My response to you was: “Well, I thought you might actually have a recent well-documented example. Instead you dredge up a controversy some 12 years old that was raised by an industry group and where the authors involved backed the changes that were made.”

What I was trying to say is that not only did you have to go back 12 years and 3 IPCC reports (i.e., back to the 2nd when we are now on the 4th) to find an example but that it was not in fact an example of what you claim. It was a case where the scientist who was the coordinating lead author made the changes to the report in response to various editorial suggestions (from scientists and from the various nations) and the other coordinating lead authors subsequently completely supported what he had done, as did a good number of his colleagues in the scientific community (see here). In fact, the scientists were “in an uproar” only because of the unfair attack on Ben Santer orchestrated by the industry consortium Global Climate Coalition. Since you say “Scientists at the time were in an uproar because their conclusions were changed”, I would like you to say which scientists who were actually involved in writing the report said that their conclusions were changed.

Lots of words, and very interesting, but you still haven’t provided a single example of any other scientific body whose policy is to write the summary first, and then change the technical sections to match the summary. Should we conclude that you can’t find one?

@jshore

Well, you are entitled to your opinion about the hockeystick but it is not an opinion shared by most of the actual climate scientists, certainly not those who wrote the NAS report. (It is also worth noting that the two quantitative statements that came out of the third IPCC report based on the temperature reconstructions, namely that temperatures were likely warmer in the 2nd half of the twentieth century than at any time in the last millenium and then a similar statement about the rate of rise of temperatures over the last century in comparison to the last millenium, both had the statement “likely” which meant that it was their expert judgement that they had a 66-90% chance of being correct. While the truth value of neither of these statements is yet definitively known, most scientists in the field would still say that these statements are quite likely correct.)

The NAS report that you are so fond of certainly did not endorse the statement about the current temperatures being the warmest in the millennium. I can’t find the comment in the IPCC report about how the most recent century’s rise is the largest in the millennium, nor can I find anyone who agrees with it … cites?

@jshore

The IPCC’s job is not to produce a body of independent science but rather to summarize the state of a body of science. As such, they do render scientific judgements but they do not replace the normal scientific process. Basically, you are complaining that the IPCC doesn’t do stuff that, for the most part, it is not supposed to do.

The IPCC, as you point out, is charged with summarizing the science. Not summarizing the legends. Not summarizing the unsubstantiated claims. Not summarizing the unreplicated and/or unreplicatable studies.

To do that, they must first differentiate between those things. They have failed in that, utterly and completely. That’s what the IPCC is supposed to do, and what it hasn’t done. They have accepted the results of the models, and the results of the “Hockeystick”, and even used unpublished results with unseemly alacrity and without any checks or balances to distinguish them from real science.

@jshore

I am surprised that you haven’t found lots of holes in that paper as others have (problems that, if it were a paper on the other side, would certainly render it utterly invalid, if not a fraud, in your eyes).

RealClimate (your cite above) did not make a single substantial claim about the paper - in fact, they didn’t discuss the subject matter of the paper at all. Instead, they made up a rating score specifically for this paper and … guess what, surprise of surprises, the paper didn’t pass.

Gosh, that convinces me … don’t discuss the subject matter of the paper, don’t discuss the claims or ideas presented in the paper, just make up a rating and declare the paper as a failure. I guess that must seem like science to you, since you cited it … but to me, it looks like a copout. Perhaps the paper is incorrect, perhaps not, I don’t know, that’s why I called it “interesting” rather than established or proven.

But the RealClimate method doesn’t even discuss the contents of the paper, much less establish that it is incorrect. What kind of science is that?

w.

[intention]

jshore, the other citation you referred to (Trenberth’s ) main point was that the IPCC doesn’t do “forecasts”, and the models don’t do “forecasts”, they do “projections”, so the idea of “scientific forecasts” doesn’t apply.

I’ve never understood that argument … and apparently, neither does the IPCC. Chapter 10 of the FAR contains the following quotes:

@IPCC FAR Chapter 10

…
This projection is consistent with the large increase in coal burning forecast as part of the A2 scenario.
…
For example, studies that constrain forecasts based on model fits to historic or present-day observations generally allow for a somewhat wider ‘response uncertainty’ (see Section 10.5.4).
…
To the extent that simulation errors in different AOGCMs [climate models] are independent, the mean of the ensemble can be expected to outperform individual ensemble members, thus providing an improved ‘best estimate’ forecast.

Nor do the references the IPCC cites, which include:

@IPCC FAR Chapter 10

Allen, M.R., D.J. Frame, J.A. Kettleborough, and D.A. Stainforth, 2006a:
Model error in weather and climate forecasting. In: Predictability of
Weather and Climate [Palmer, T., and R. Hagedorn (eds.)]. Cambridge
University Press, New York, NY, pp. 391–427.

Allen, M.R., et al., 2000: Quantifying the uncertainty in forecasts of
anthropogenic climate change. Nature, 407, 617–620.

Frame, D.J., et al., 2005: Constraining climate forecasts: The role of
prior assumptions. Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L09702, doi:10.1029/
2004GL022241.

Smith, L.A., 2002: What might we learn from climate forecasts? Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 99, 2487–2492.

Since the IPCC calls them forecasts, and the scientific literature calls them forecasts, I think the authors of the study that you dislike are justified in analyzing them as forecasts …

w.

PS – Eduardo Zorita, a well known and published climate scientist (and believer in AGW) said about Trenberth’s thesis that there are no climate forecasts:

This is in my opinion a very interesting, and at the same time somewhat troubling, comment by one of the leading climate scientist. Climate models are believed to incorporate our best knowledge of the physics and chemistry of the present climate. When used to simulate the effects of increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse trace gases, they represent a theory of anthropogenic greenhouse climate change, i.e. a theory that explains the observed increase in surface temperatures in the last decades, along with other related phenomena, like sea-level rise, stratospheric cooling, trends in seasonality amplitude and changes in daily temperature range. As all scientific theories, it should offer the possibility to be falsified, and successfully passing these tests, strengthening itself in the process.

The troubling aspect of Trenberth’s comment is that if the IPCC climate simulations do not represent real predictions for the future, how can the theory be falsified? The most obvious alternative , as with other theories in geosciences where experimenting is almost impossible, is to identify not-yet-observed phenomena predicted by the theory, which should be finally observed. Unfortunately, – although others may correct me here- I am not aware of one clear example of this. Along the past years and decades, the theory of anthropogenic greenhouse climate change has explained ’ a posteriori’ an impressive observational body, to an extent that other competing theories have not attained. To some extent, however, these explanations rely on ad-hoc factors – for instance the effect of aerosols to explain the observed lack of warming between roughly 1940 and 1975. The effects ad-hoc factors usually contain large uncertainties, so that a ‘devils advocate’ could argue that these factors have been tuned to reproduce part of the observations. Other example is the European heat-wave in summer 2003. Before this date, a dearth of papers were devoted to summer heat-waves – after this date, the mechanisms leading to such heat-waves appeared crystal-clear in simulations with climate models.

I think this state of affairs is not satisfactory. My question to those interested and with more knowledge than me would be: beyond explanatory power, has the theory made testable predictions of unobserved phenomena?

[brazil84]

@Czarcasm

You provide the link first, and I’ll tell you what I do and do not dispute.

See, for example, Post 435 in this thread.

[intention]

@brazil84

@Czarcasm

You provide the link first, and I’ll tell you what I do and do not dispute.

See, for example, Post 435 in this thread.

In post 435 in this thread (page 9), Askance said:

@Askance

The most recent ICC report raised the probability that human activity contributes significantly to the current episode of climate change to 90%, from, IIRC, 75% in the previous one. And that was after the influence of government evaluators from Saudi, among others, toned it down from 95%.

Do you have a citation regarding Saudi pressure and the 95% question? Not that I doubt it, I’m just curious.

If true, it certainly points out how the IPCC is a political rather than a scientific organization …

Finally, in the TAR, they said (emphasis mine):

@IPCC TAR SPM

There is a longer and more closely scrutinised temperature record and new model estimates of variability. The warming over the past 100 years is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone, as estimated by current models. Reconstructions of climate data for the past 1,000 years (Figure 1b) also indicate that this warming was unusual and is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin.

In the TAR, “very unlikely” meant a 1-10% chance of it being true. This means that in both the TAR and the FAR, the claim is made that the human influence is given a 90% chance of being the cause of recent warming … what’s the difference?

Thanks,

w.

[jshore]

@intention

In post 435 in this thread (page 9), Askance said:

Do you have a citation regarding Saudi pressure and the 95% question? Not that I doubt it, I’m just curious.

If true, it certainly points out how the IPCC is a political rather than a scientific organization …

Well, you know it doesn’t have to be one way or the other. It is a scientific organization that is not entirely insulated from politics. However, the point that some of us have been making is that the political pressures on the IPCC are at least coming from enough different directions that they are likely to not result in any strong political bias. This is obviously not true of the small cadre of contrarian scientists many if not must of whom seem to be somehow associated with the fossil fuel industry or conservative / libertarian think-tanks.

I certainly fail to see how demonstrating that the IPCC has been pressured by politicians to tone down its statements about global warming advances your point of view on the subject.

In the TAR, “very unlikely” meant a 1-10% chance of it being true. This means that in both the TAR and the FAR, the claim is made that the human influence is given a 90% chance of being the cause of recent warming … what’s the difference?

First impression: The distinction is that this statement is essentially about humans having any significant influence on the warming whereas the other statement (that was made with >66% probability in the TAR and >90% in AR4) is a statement of most of the warming since the mid-20th century being due to man (and, in fact, I think to greenhouse gases in particular).

Second impression: In fact, this application of “very unlikely” in TAR referred specifically to whether the warming could be due to “internal variability alone”, which I believe they mean variability in the absence of any “external” forcing, including natural forcings such as solar and volcanoes. I’d have to read more closely to verify if this is the case.

[intention]

Thanks, jshore. I read “internal variability” as being opposed to human generated variability, but your reading may be correct. The text is not clear.

I still don’t find the statement in the TAR of >66% probability that the 20th century warming is due to human influence. Do you have a cite for that?

w.

[jshore]

@intention

I still don’t find the statement in the TAR of >66% probability that the 20th century warming is due to human influence. Do you have a cite for that?

Here it is:

In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

[intention]

@jshore

Here it is:

In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

Thanks, jshore, I had seen that, but I assumed that you weren’t talking about that statement, because it’s not even close to the statement in the FAR.

The FAR statement is:

The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment Report (TAR), leading to very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming …

These statements differ in three major ways.

First, the TAR statement you quoted refers solely to GHGs. Since the FAR statement about “net effect of human activities” includes many things besides CO2, such as irrigation, land use change, land cover change, aerosols, black carbon, etc., the two statements are not directly comparable.

Second, the time periods are different, with one covering a quarter of a millennium, and the other only fifty years. Again, not comparable.

Third, the TAR statement says the human influence causes “the majority of warming”, while the FAR statement is much weaker, saying only that the human influence causes warming.

Are we surprised that the probabilities are different? It’s apples vs. oranges, they are about different levels of effects, from different causes, in different time periods. Not comparable.

Guess that’s why I couldn’t find the statement in the TAR …

w.

[intention]

An interesting quote from Roger Pielke, Sr.:

… suppose a group of scientists introduced a new cancer drug that they claimed could save many lives. There were side effects, of course, but they claimed that the benefit far out weighed these risks. The government than asked these scientist to form an assessment Committee to evaluate this claim. Colleagues of the group of scientists who introduced the drug are then asked to serve on this Committee, along with the developers.
If this occurred, of course, there would be an uproar of protest! This is a clear conflict of interest.

Yet this is what has happened with the IPCC process! The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the assessment! There should be an outcry on this obvious conflict of interest, but to date either few recognize this conflict, or see that since the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda, they chose to ignore this conflict. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow.

Dr. Pielke is a Senior Research Scientist in CIRES, and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (PAOS) at the University of Colorado in Boulder (November 2005 -present). He is also an Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and has a five-year appointment (April 2007 - March 2012) on the Graduate Faculty of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Like I said before, many people think the IPCC is pure, unbiased science … me, I agree with Dr. Pielke.

w

[recessiveMeme]

@Roger Pielke Sr.

Colleagues of the group of scientists who introduced the drug are then asked to serve on this Committee, along with the developers.
If this occurred, of course, there would be an uproar of protest! This is a clear conflict of interest.

Yet this is what has happened with the IPCC process! The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the assessment!

I’m certainly not equipped to argue to argue climate science with you, intention (or jshore, for that matter), but I do find your posts on AGW illuminating. Thanks to both of your for your well-considered thoughts and dialogues on the matter.

That said, I’ve seen people here on the SDMB and elsewhere argue along lines similar to the Pielke quote in the past and the analogy bothers me. Certainly, I wouldn’t want a pharmaceutical company or scientists employed by the company to have direct oversight where the safety of a drug is being tested. The conflict of interest on the part of the pharmaceutical company is obvious: minimize the apparent risk, get the drug into circulation, make big bucks.

But… the argument seems to work off the idea that both climate scientists and, indeed, the IPCC itself will somehow benefit from convincing people to buy into AGW. I’ve never understood exactly how this transaction is supposed to occur. When I ask for clarification, I usually get some specious-sounding arguments about how IPCC scientists are simply using fear of AGW in a crass attempt to secure tenure or funding for themselves. Or, on the crazier end of things, I get to hear about how the IPCC itself is actually a front for some sort of shadowy one world government. Given the obvious thought you put into the issue and the candor with which you express your ideas, I’m hoping you can provide for me an answer which sounds less conspiratorial and more reasonable.

So yeah… When people accept IPCC reports as valid, who specifically benefits and where does the money come from?

[brazil84]

I’m gonna guess that if you graphed research dollars for global warming over the last 100 years, you’d get a serious hockey stick.

Agreed?

Now, do you think that the recent trend in research funding is anthropogenic?

[recessiveMeme]

brazil84, I’m sorry, I can’t tell if you’re kidding or not. Surely “research dollars” are required for any endeavor which requires research. Can I conclude that, in your view, any researcher who has researched anything has done so solely for the sake of personal gain with no consideration for the validity of their own work? That’s a rather dim view of, well, everything…

[brazil84]

@recessiveMeme

brazil84, I’m sorry, I can’t tell if you’re kidding or not.

I’m making a serious point while poking a little fun at the “hockey team.”

Can I conclude that, in your view, any researcher who has researched anything has done so solely for the sake of personal gain with no consideration for the validity of their own work?

No, you cannot conclude that.

The question is whether climate researchers have an incentive to exaggerate the likelihood of AGW. Clearly they do.

[scr4]

@brazil84

I’m gonna guess that if you graphed research dollars for global warming over the last 100 years, you’d get a serious hockey stick.

Has funding for climate research increased disproportionately, compared to other fields of science, since “global warming” became an issue?

[brazil84]

@scr4

Has funding for climate research increased disproportionately, compared to other fields of science, since “global warming” became an issue?

I’m gonna guess “yes” to that too.

[jshore]

@intention

Thanks, jshore, I had seen that, but I assumed that you weren’t talking about that statement, because it’s not even close to the statement in the FAR.

The FAR statement is:

These statements differ in three major ways…

That’s a statement in the FAR but not the relevant one. Here is the relevant one:

Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. This is an advance since the TAR’s conclusion that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”.

@intention

Are we surprised that the probabilities are different? It’s apples vs. oranges, they are about different levels of effects, from different causes, in different time periods. Not comparable.

That’s because you were looking in the apples section in one report and the oranges section in the other.

[jshore]

@intention

An interesting quote from Roger Pielke, Sr.

I don’t really understand this quote. Is Dr. Pielke saying that an assessment should exclude all those scientists who have published in the field?!?! That would certainly be a novel scientific assessment process. Since you are big on examples from different scientific organizations, can you name a scientific organization that conducts assessments of the science by only having scientists who are not working in the field do the assessments?

[jshore]

Thanks for your interesting posts, intention.

@intention

Lots of words, and very interesting, but you still haven’t provided a single example of any other scientific body whose policy is to write the summary first, and then change the technical sections to match the summary. Should we conclude that you can’t find one?

You can conclude that (a) I am not interested in looking into the detailed bureaucratize of how each scientific body prepares reports and (b) I do not think that you description of the process is particularly accurate.

The NAS report that you are so fond of certainly did not endorse the statement about the current temperatures being the warmest in the millennium.

As for the NAS report, they did feel that uncertainties were greater beyond 400 years so the expressed less confidence in that conclusion but they certainly did not argue there was any evidence against it. Here is what they say in the summary:

It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.

Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600. Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900. The uncertainties associated with reconstructing hemispheric mean or global mean temperatures from these data increase substantially backward in time through this period and are not yet fully quantified.

…

The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years. Not all individual proxy records indicate that the recent warmth is unprecedented, although a larger fraction of geographically diverse sites experienced exceptional warmth during the late 20th century than during any other extended period from A.D. 900 onward.

Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium. The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming.

@intention

I can’t find the comment in the IPCC report about how the most recent century’s rise is the largest in the millennium, nor can I find anyone who agrees with it … cites?

Well, what the IPCC says in the latest report is:

Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1300 years.

As for the question about the rise itself, the statement in the TAR was “It is likely that the rate and duration of the warming of the 20th century is larger than any other time during the last 1,000 years.” I couldn’t find a statement in the new report and that may well be because some of the studies with “greater variability” lead them to now have less confidence in that conclusion (although there is certainly no evidence that it is wrong).

It is worth noting, by the way, that if all the statements that were made in the IPCC reports with the qualifier likely (meaning >66% of being correct) are in fact correct, then the IPCC would be guilty of overestimating uncertainties.

@intention

The IPCC, as you point out, is charged with summarizing the science. Not summarizing the legends. Not summarizing the unsubstantiated claims. Not summarizing the unreplicated and/or unreplicatable studies.

To do that, they must first differentiate between those things. They have failed in that, utterly and completely. That’s what the IPCC is supposed to do, and what it hasn’t done. They have accepted the results of the models, and the results of the “Hockeystick”, and even used unpublished results with unseemly alacrity and without any checks or balances to distinguish them from real science.

At any time in a scientific field, there are uncertainties, topics that are still being debated, etc. What the IPCC is supposed to do is summarize the state of the science; they are not expected to answer all the questions and replicate all the studies. That is not a reasonable thing to expect them to do.

RealClimate (your cite above) did not make a single substantial claim about the paper - in fact, they didn’t discuss the subject matter of the paper at all. Instead, they made up a rating score specifically for this paper and … guess what, surprise of surprises, the paper didn’t pass.

Gosh, that convinces me … don’t discuss the subject matter of the paper, don’t discuss the claims or ideas presented in the paper, just make up a rating and declare the paper as a failure. I guess that must seem like science to you, since you cited it … but to me, it looks like a copout. Perhaps the paper is incorrect, perhaps not, I don’t know, that’s why I called it “interesting” rather than established or proven.

But the RealClimate method doesn’t even discuss the contents of the paper, much less establish that it is incorrect. What kind of science is that?

Well, that paper isn’t science either. In fact, it was published in a multidisciplinary journal of rather low standards. The RealClimate post explain why the paper is completely misguided and wrong in describing climate science. I’ll let others read it and decide for themselves.

[jshore]

@intention

jshore, the other citation you referred to (Trenberth’s ) main point was that the IPCC doesn’t do “forecasts”, and the models don’t do “forecasts”, they do “projections”, so the idea of “scientific forecasts” doesn’t apply.

I’ve never understood that argument … and apparently, neither does the IPCC. Chapter 10 of the FAR contains the following quotes:

Nor do the references the IPCC cites, which include:

Since the IPCC calls them forecasts, and the scientific literature calls them forecasts, I think the authors of the study that you dislike are justified in analyzing them as forecasts …

w.

PS – Eduardo Zorita, a well known and published climate scientist (and believer in AGW) said about Trenberth’s thesis that there are no climate forecasts:

You and Zorita are getting bogged down by semantics. The point is that they are projections because they are not trying to predict how society will evolve in terms of its greenhouse gas emissions but rather what the consequences of various emissions scenarios will be. As Trenberth eloquently notes, it is indeed likely that the worst projections will not come to pass exactly because we won’t allow them to…i.e., we will (despite the best efforts of the ClimateAudit crowd) make efforts to limit our emissions.

Think of an analogy here, if a doctor tells a chain smoker that if he continues to smoke 3 packs a day, he will likely get emphysema or cancer and this causes the patient to quit, or at least drastically cut down his smoking so he doesn’t get those diseases, is the statement that the doctor made incorrect? The doctor can’t forecast whether the patient will get cancer but can only project what is likely to happen under certain scenarios involving the patient’s future actions.

In practice, this distinction in terminology is not always followed to the letter and thus you get to take great delight in the fact that you can find a few examples of the use of the word “forecast” in the IPCC report. Talk about making mountains out of molehills!

[scr4]

@brazil84

I’m gonna guess “yes” to that too.

I wasn’t asking for a guess.