That’s way too much wiggle room. It’s entirely possible that, in time, we’ll have plenty enough evidence for a falsification attempt that includes “at least a look at” decadal variation and makes “a reference” to the moving average – at which point I’ll say You Were Wrong and you’ll be able to say That’s Not What I Meant.
It’s that whole “The US will do better than China at the Olympics” thing again. Do I get to say You Were Wrong if it’s in fact China that wins the medal count, or the gold-medal count, or some kind of weighted medal count, or a per-capita count, or what? It’s not enough to sweepingly make vague mention of how there are lots of things to take into account; you’re the one making a prediction, you’re the one who should name the prediction.
It’s impossible to say, until you provide a replacement criterion. You first picked a stupid criterion, and my point was relevant to it; I don’t yet know what your replacement criterion is, and so don’t know whether the point remains relevant.
I’m sorry, but the question seems reasonable to me. I believe that AGW is virtually certain. But I also think it’s fair to say, specifically, what future events would disprove your claim.
When Randi confronts a dowser, he does not compare cites showing how dowsing can’t work. He simply requires the dowser to agree, in advance, to a specific set of criteria. Randi knows that if the test is run first, and fails, the dowser will claim negative energy or the presence of overhead electrical lines or the fact that the test was run during a waxing moon caused the problems.
By getting the dowser to agree, beforehand, that his ability is to locate water underground on this field at this time with these observers present, the dowser’s ability to wriggle out of a failure is eliminated. And conversely, of course, Randi agrees that a successful test shows the dowser can do what he claims.
Randi’s methods have been applauded and defended on this board for years. As well they should.
Can someone explain why someone who makes a claim about AGW should not be able to offer some sort of definite prediction along the same lines?
Meh, I expected that, since you cavalierly ignored even the condemnation of independent statisticians to not do those games of yours. It is clear that you are not linking the answers, and this was already pointed out many times before, you are clueless if you think that wiggle room is not important.
And you want to pretend it was not your stupid point to begin with. You have to dismiss the cherry picking of 1998, otherwise you will continue to ignore that what you call wiggle room is just basic statistics to identify trends.
Tens of thousands? are you telling that tens od thousands of Ph.D level scientists with degrres in relevant areas of scince have looked at the studies and models and found them OK? or those scientists have simply expresed their opinions saying they agree with the general principle of AGW?
Do you know my education in the field? I can assure you that is a much than yours.
I hold this statements to be true.
Man can alter the atmosphere and my sincere belief in God has nothing to do with it.
Man can alter the atmosphere big time.
Man has altered the atmosphere.
Man has altered the atmosphere in ways that will be bad for some people and maybe many.
Man has altered the atmosphere in ways that will be good for some people and maybe many.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas and therefore the increase in CO2 levels means that more energy is not radiated back into space. The consecuence of this effect alone is a raise in the earth’s temprature.
Several other variable come into play if we want to consider that total, final effect of a CO2 increase.
The fact that AGW can be (or is) a problem doesn’t mean in itself that effort to combat it are good in themselves. I furthermore hold that AGW is not even remotely in the problem-level for humanity as access to clean water, childhood vaccination, human rights.
Many CO2 abatement schemes (effective or not) are going to hurt people of my country more than any real or imagined effects of AGW.
It isn’t. You yourself have shown models with different climate sensitivities reaching the same results by plug variables.
No, I simply didn’t concede the facile joke.
The horse is actually Henrik Svensmark and his study, not Kirby’s article.
Caution is, of course, more than necessary. The “last nail” comment is stupid, no matter who or for what reason said it. Even if the study were a sceptic’s wet dream, it wouls still mean more and more studies.
Kirby, by the way (and I tend to agree), goes for caution and not overblowing the results.
I don’t know what PR campaigns I may have been subject to. I eat with my own fork.
By “tweaked” I mean “plugged so that they could work”
The models have been made to fit reality. The model should not be tweaked into submission. ANY model can be made to fit ANY reality.
“if we do not curb greenhouse gas emissions over the next fifty years, the climate system (and related localized weather patterns) will show observable changes.”
Which of my statements would I jettison? Not sure. Let’s see:
[ul][li]Greenhouse gases are translucent to ultraviolet radiation.[/ul] If this were demonstrably false, a lot of our current understanding of climate science would be wrong (as would large sections of other sciences). However, this is easily testable in a lab. Are you suggesting that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas? [/li]
[ul][li]Greenhouse gases are relatively opaque to infrared radiation.[/ul]Similarly fundamental to climate science. Also easily testable in a lab. Do you have a cite that shows the opposite? [/li]
[ul][li]Greenhouse gases trap energy in the atmosphere.[/ul] Another fundamental, and also integral to climate science. Not very difficult to test. While other conditions also affect the amount of energy contained in the atmosphere, there is nothing to suggest that the greenhouse gases’ combination of translucent/opaque properties do not create the greenhouse effect, nor is there any credible or competing theory that accounts for the Earth’s temperature difference. While duplicating the Earth and stripping away its twin’s atmosphere may be the only way to conduct a planet-wide test, there are mountains of evidence and simple to complex laboratory tests underpinning the theory. Yes, if somehow there is an alternate mechanism for the Earth’s temperature and some flaw was found in the general theory, and the vast numbers of repeated experiments supporting the theory were shown to exist, then the premise that greenhouse gases trap energy in the atmosphere would have to be thrown out as with all climate predictions based on it. Are you suggesting that the greenhouse effect is not real?[/li]
[ul][li]Over the past two hundred years, we have measurably changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere. [/ul]There is a wealth of independent (i.e. the data, collection methods, etc. are not interrelated) sources of information supporting this premise, from dendrochronology to direct measurements over time (not for the past two hundred years, but for recent decades showing an increasing concentration). This too, if you were to raise credible objections to, I would concede would mean that the threat of global climate change is groundless. Are you rejecting this premise? [/li][ul][li]Climate, including global average temperatures and large-scale weather interactions, is affected by the amount of energy in the system.[/ul]Lacking a weather control device, this is impossible to rigorously test under laboratory conditions. However, large bodies of data have been collected and scrutinized such that changes in the amount of energy in the climate system have had direct, observable effects. Are you suggesting that climate systems and generalized patterns are wholly random and do not effect each other? I would have to throw out most of my understanding of climate science if the climate system was not affected by the amount of energy it contains. [/li]
[ul][li]Climate is a complex system, such that climate and weather patterns are affected on a global scale by relatively small-scale perturbations in interlinked mechanisms (e.g. El Niño events).[/ul]This is pretty much answered in the ‘e.g.’ of the original, and is also similar to the previous point. [/li]
[ul][li]When the climate system has reacted to various changes in its constituent parts, the resulting short- medium- and long-term periods of homeostasis have significantly differed from previous periods of relative homeostasis. [/ul] Similarly ‘unfalsifiable’ without cloning the Earth, nonetheless there is overwhelming evidence that demonstrates that the climate system does not have a One True State that is close to the climate system we are currently experiencing. Are you suggesting that over geologic time scales, the global climate and regional weather patterns (including average temperatures, rainfall amounts, etc.) have remained very close to what they are today?[/li]
[ul][li]China, India, and the rest of the developing world’s populations are six to seven times that of the developed world (figure very general, feel free to correct).[/ul] Do you have a problem with this statement?[/li]
[ul][li]As China, India, et al pursue a carbon-dependant development path similar to the West (i.e. absent any consideration of emissions), the amount of greenhouse gas emissions will be at least an order of magnitude greater than today’s—if not more.[/ul] Given the sheer numbers, is it possible to credibly challenge this premise? Is there some sort of peak oil or other slight of hand out there suggesting we don’t need to worry about climate change because our usage of fossil fuels is about to end? [/li]
So … “if we do not curb greenhouse gas emissions over the next fifty years, the climate system (and related localized weather patterns) will show observable changes.” Where does your understanding of the fundamental science differ?
Sorry but you are missing a mess of context, besides a pathological need of getting quotes out of context for evidence and a misrepresentation of simple answers in the past TOWP is following the same. On top of that, as it should be clear, no sooner one tries to start the steps needed to get to the more complex explanation TOWP ignores those first steps too.
I pointed before at the evidence that reports it is really stupid to claim that there has been no warming, it has been ignored repeatedly.
Well it would the be like a dowser that comes to randy and reports that he does not agree on the time allowed for the test, and the parameters, while at the same time saying that the experts Randi brought to observe the test should be expelled from the premises.
After a very long early thread it was agreed on what it should falsify this, but it is clear that he does not have the patience, and now he is even affirming that the wiggle room is not good enough for him, when the independent statisticians already reported how dumb it was to affirm that it has not warmed since 1998 under the context.
You are clueless, that we knew already. You are not dealing with the cite at all.
Who are you trying to fool? The current experiment results were the ones that the deniers twisted to mean things from political correctness preventing researchers from telling the whole truth to affirmations that AGW was discredited.
The BBC article and then the RealClimate one pointed at the reasons why this test showed at best that there could be something to the cosmic rays affecting clouds, but nowhere as close as Svensmark claimed.
Cite for the climate researchers doing this? It does look like you want to assign a nefarious reason for this, so is there are cite for that nefariousness?
I have no idea what the significance of 1998 is. I am not saying anything about 1998 or any other year.
I am just asking the simple question: “If AGW models are incorrect, what future event would show it?”
Right now it seems to me that you’re trying to say that no possible future event would show AGW models are wrong, but without actually saying it. But that can’t be so. So…
It has been a very common meme from the deniers that warming has stopped since 1998. TOWP claims he knows nothing of the sort.. When on his first post on the thread linked in the OP he spews several boiler plate denier points.
At its simplest, the future would show that, besides not warming, it would cool down to levels like on the 70’s as the current evidence shows what the temperature should be with no human made CO2 in the atmosphere. Also the future weather events should not be different as the ones of today when CO2 is projected to double from 280 ppm (Pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels) to 560 ppm sometime in the next 100 years, (currently it is at 390 PPM) of course there are fears now that we could expect more than 1000 PPM a few decades after the end of the century as almost next to nothing is being done.
There are future events that would show the models wrong. Concentrating on 1998 is done to ignore the mess of years and data in the hope of getting a misleading cooling trend. It would be like a dowser complaining ad naseum to Randi that he found one of the hidden streams and Randhi should give him the price. “What about the other 10 you missed?” Randi said. And then picture the dowser trolling the Randi message boards forever claiming that his hit was significant.
Do not throw bones to deniers, they are not interested in the science but on political points and to forever obfuscate.
Well, I may be unavailble, with a likely singing engagement with the choir invisible, but in my opinion it’s still an answer to the claim that there’s no falsifiable claims being made. It’s absolutely falsifiable.
I’ve got to agree with elucidator here, Bricker. September 2111 is a bit late in the day for you to be admitting that you were wrong.
I grew up in an age when it was posited that government standards of air quality and water quality would destroy the United States as we knew it. Oddly enough, the United States is still here, and air quality is better, and water quality is better.
I shudder to imagine what it would be like if we were still waiting for 2065 before we did anything.
OK, this is not nearly as specific as the criteria offered by LHOD. You have more specific measurements but an open-ended claim of “the future.”
By WHEN, if we see temperatures like the 70s? And what, precisely, do you mean by “like the 70s?”
And since we’re talking about warming, I’m not sure I’d accept a claim about CO[sub]2[/sub] levels alone. If the CO[sub]2[/sub] levels are high but the temperature is not, I’d regard that as a failure of the AGW model.
What are you talking about? Are you confusing me with someone else?
I’ve never said we should wait until 2065, or 2111, before doing anything. And I have acknowledged AGW is a real phenomenon, so if I admit I was wrong, it would be because AGW was proved wrong. Is that what you mean?
Obviously the specifics are still open to debate – killing off 75% of the world’s human population would put a nice dent in CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions, but I don’t favor that step.
I can play this game too.
Do you deny that the models you presented had different climate sensitivities?
Do you deny they reached similar temperatures?
Do you deny they used different aerosol levels?
I don’t speak for anyone but me. I will only debate what I say or what I present as evidence. What “deniers” say doesn’t interest me.
You mean the BBC article that was published 3 years before the results?
I repeat that it is an interesting test. It’s not the parting of the Red Sea.
Nefarious? No, that’s your word. I don’t respond to thing you want to put in my mouth.
Here are my cites. I hope that your answer is not simply “it’s a denier”.