Here’s an interesting commentary on the falsifiability of climate science, well worth a read in its entirety. For the impatient, this is the short version – the basic tenets of climate science could be falsified through any of the following – I’ve paraphrased some of them to make them (IMHO) clearer:
A drop in global temperature for longer than any pause seen in the instrumental record, without explanation, say 50 years or so; or proof that this heat accumulation isn’t true.
A drop in global sea level
An unexplained change in atmospheric CO2
The discovery that climate forcings in the past were much larger and/or temperature changes much smaller than presently believed
The discovery that the stratosphere is warming instead of cooling, stratospheric cooling being a signature of CO2 IR absorption in the troposphere
Satellites failing to detect outgoing longwave radiation absorption by CO2 and water vapor
Failing to detect increasing water vapor with rising temperature
Discovery of a new source of heat in the climate system
Discovery of a fundamental flaw in the scientific understanding of radiation physics or thermodynamics
Discovery that CO2 molecules behave differently in the wild than they do in the laboratory
Another take is this excellent excerpt from comments by Eric Wolff, a British paleoclimatologist, which begins with a list of 10 things that we should all be able to agree on. Wolff also makes a number of other insightful comments that are worth a read and careful consideration in light of some of the recent denialist postings in this thread:
That last statement is rather poignant in its naively academic innocence, where a climate scientist thinks it’s possible to have a civil and factual discussion on the denialist wackosphere, and gets smeared and insulted by the lunatics that inhabit it.
This goes right over the collective heads of the warmers, who can’t seem to understand what is being said. Of course nobody actually responds to the point made.
citizenschallenge Says:
March 27, 2014 at 16:57
After a few more avoidances, she seems to get to the heart of the matter.
heathergirl1234 Says:
March 27, 2014 at 17:22
Of course that point isn’t ever answered. How can it be? The person claiming to know what global warming will cause, is faced with that moment of truth. You have to answer, or admit you don’t know.
But this is no problem for the warmer, as anything can change, depending on the needs of the moment.
But this ignores the best part of all. The inevitable claim, that I spoke of early in the topic. Making a theory predict something so far in the future it is impossible to ever say if it was true. Not just because of the time, there is the added caveat as well.
It’s brilliant, just fucking brilliant. To understand, you just replace global warming with some other pseudoscience claim, one that threatens us all, and has to be acted on right now.
But back to that wonderful comment section.
heathergirl1234 Says:
March 29, 2014 at 20:53
Yes, a regular person, especially if they are at all skeptical, might just ask questions. Of course she never got an answer to any of the questions.
Which of course brings us back to the issue so avoided here.
What does the global warming theory predict? It certainly isn’t a simplistic claim of “over a long period of time the earth will get warmer, if nothing else happens”. That’s not a theory, it’s not even scientific.
The warming has to be of a sort that we can say “this much of the increase is from human changes to the atmosphere”, or it’s useless. Not that we even know if such measurement is even possible. It’s exactly like people using a single hurricane as evidence of human caused climate change. It’s not scientific at all.
Hurricanes, especially ones just like Sandy have happened before, so it’s pseudoscience to make a claim like that. Same for claiming one blizzard means anything. It’s pseudoscience, it’s absurd.
Either you can say over a certain period of time “these changes will happen”, due to the increase in CO2, or it’s not a theory. Warming and cooling always happen. It has to be something different, to qualify as evidence.
Now if we hadn’t seen any really cold winters in hundreds of years, a trend towards extreme cold and snow could actually be considered evidence of climate change. Same for if the planet hasn’t been as warm as present for thousands of years. Then just warming could be evidence.
But since these thing happen already, that isn’t going to satisfy as evidence of AGW.
As Jon Steward said, you need to look at the science rather than the comment sections.
As mentioned before it is now wilful ignorance when a commenter reaches for misunderstandings from YouTube rather that to look at the explanations that were reported many times before.
So, no, what we do have is evidence that the one that really does not know is heathergirl1234 and FXMastermind.
Full stop here, as pointed many times before, deal with the predictions that were fulfilled and the observations that should be falsifiable from post #4 or just continue to pile up the clear evidence that you do not know what a scientific theory is even if it bites in the pants of your ignorance.
Just thought I should point out that FX completely ignores the commentary from Eric Wolff, Royal Society Professor of Earth Sciences at Cambridge, or the other scientists I quoted, much as he ignores the entire climate science community. His authority here is heathergirl1234 from the comments peanut gallery, whose stated expertise is “I am a common citizen, I sit and watch the news …”. You tell 'em, heathergirl1234!
This from someone whose question has already been answered about five times in this thread alone but it went right over his head and was ignored, just like the concept of what a positive feedback is, which last I checked he still didn’t understand. Or my five-time request (at least) to describe exactly what I supposedly got wrong when I explained Cohen’s research.
Rubbish old bean, I can’t be expected to read, think about, research and respond to every blog post you slap into a debate, all the while you avoid answering, in your own words, straight up direct questions.
It might take days.
Meanwhile, you still avoid answering simple direct questions.
Like, what does the global warming theory predict?
First, he calls it a hypothesis, while others call it theory. Theory in a scientific sense is something quite different than hypothesis.
Second, he commits a fallacy, he shifts the burden of proof, as we see happen so often, somehow turning the ordinary debate and questioning of claims made by a hypothesis/theory into a situation where “claims” are used to reject a hypothesis.
That’s not how it works. If you claim “rising CO2 levels will result in ____________”, then that must happen, or the claim is false. Or the hypothesis must be rejected, changed, that’s how science advances. Claims do not invalidate a theory, evidence is what matters.
Plus he is talking about “climate science” rather than global warming, but we know he really means global warming. Calling it “climate science” and insulting all opponents as “deniers” is bad form, and just wrong.
An example of a claim, and one actually made by people, is that the arctic will be “ice free in summer”, which has been made several times now. This is attributed to global warming, or AGW.
At some point the arctic will actually have to be a much warmer ocean, free of pack ice, or that claim is simply wrong. But if you keep extending it out in time, it’s impossible to be able to falsify the claim.
I could claim the arctic will be ice free and palm trees will grow in Alaska, and it will happen by 2130. There is no way to prove me wrong. I win, and anybody who doesn’t believe me hates science, and is a fossil shill.
And this item is really tiresome, the effort here is to discredit opponents as if they do ignore important issue, the failure and silliness of this comes when one does point out that we will accept his definition like I did on the global warming and climate change definitions from NASA, but that is not important for him because he will ignore the conclusions that NASA also reported when talking about those definitions.
However, since it does contain a scientific claim, it’s a good point to repeat. The real issue is, are we observing the effects of an enhanced greenhouse effect? All quotes from 10 Indicators of a Human Fingerprint on Climate Change
[ol]
Yes, some people, but among scientists this is a straw-man, the prediction was that ice was going to be less during the summers in the Arctic, the problem was that it turned out to be worse than expected.
Hence the realization to investigate more and conclude that indeed a lot of heath in the poles was missed and so we have the adjustment that show that indeed even the so called pause in the land surface temperatures is not real.
The falsification anyhow was already talked many times among the deniers out there, that the ice was going to recuperate in the following years, the deniers were wrong.
And if your idea is that repeating it does change the result, you are as usual mistaken. Those are indeed linking or referring to the scientific papers that report the already observed results of an enhanced greenhouse effect, and several of them were predictions of the result of it, just like the loss of the ice in the north pole and regions like Greenland.
So yeah, you are still ignoring the science, and that this can be falsified, only that the experiments talked about confirmed what what the scientists were expecting.
The problem with trying to debate the questions/issues in the OP, is that people want to make every topic into an argument over global warming in general. This is self evident, and I think it happens so often, the Mods are reluctant to enforce any off topic rule, which is a shame really.
It’s so easy to get sucked into the general topic, since there isn’t an actual “debate global warming forever here” topic. But it’s red herrings all the way down.
No, that is why I am specific and careful when I explain my reasoning, and why I provide scientific sources, to explain the logic behind it all.
No, and in fact if you actually read what I write, you will see that I fully support an open exchange of ideas, challenges and new theories about climate change, all of which is how real science works.
Exactly, and when you say “a better theory that will over time improve the success of its predictions”, that is exactly right. If there are no predictions, it’s not even a hypothesis.
Why does it seem we disagree on so much then?
Exactly. I usually note that I am against rampant and increasing fossil fuel use, deforestation, destroying the oceans, turning the remaining rain forest into cattle pastures, palm oil plantations, or deserts, cutting down the boreal forest and the general fuck over of our shared world. I live carbon neutral already, but that is mostly due to benefiting from safe nuclear power, and living in the tropics. It’s much harder in the north to live with out fossil fuels.
But back to the topic.
If you either don’t know that is true, or you wish for it to not be true, or you can’t bring yourself to admit it, I understand. The politics have indeed made it very hard for anyone to simply look at the modern consensus theory on global warming. The one climate models use. Why this is so, is no doubt political, not scientific.
This is based on our sketchy understanding of both past climate, as well as past level of CO2.
Nobody knows, as in we don’t actually know why the glacial period returns, after the warm period. CO2 levels are high, why does it get colder? Why do CO2 levels not cause continued warming? Why doesn’t the warming ocean cause CO2 to increase, water vapor to increase, until drastic warming happens, in the past inter-glacial periods? What causes it to become cold again, when everything is so very warm?
The first ideas and hypothesis revolving around CO2 were about trying to explain the ice ages. Not AGW.
Actually, there is quite a bit of doubt about the last part. The physics of what happens is very theoretical, and far from settled science.
The big issues are what effect the very small amount of heating the extra CO2 will cause, and what the results of this will be. Hell, it’s fucking a huge area of dispute. The observations of what has happened, what is happening, are all about this.
Since all the heating occurs in the upper atmosphere, it is far from certain what will happen. If we already knew the answer to this, there would be no debate at all.
It is the theoretical issues that are the real bones of contention, with even very obscure and very technical issues still unresolved. Because the world and it’s oceans and atmosphere are so very complex, and we have to deal with so many variables, including biology, almost nothing about global warming is actually settled.
Except the part where we are adding a fuckton of CO2 to the atmosphere. At least we can all agree on that.
In case you’re interested, here are a few reasons that I’m not going to respond to that pile of gibberish – and I doubt anyone else will in any detail, since you’re clearly not interested in having a serious or honest discussion…
So let us all understand this: I summarized Professor Wolff’s main points in five short paragraphs which I put right in my post. You had no time to read that, and still haven’t, but you apparently had lots of time time to scan through a massive listing of 541 comments in the peanut gallery section of the other article – maybe 50 times the size of the whole original article – in order to pick out the wisdom of heathergirl1234, the “common citizen” who gets her climate training from watching the weather on television.
There are quite a few scientists on this board. Ever wonder why you have such a hard time getting anyone to agree with you? Now you know.
Yes, it’s a great example of the fact that you didn’t even read the damn article, the one where it says just a paragraph further down: “As a matter of fact, the ‘AGW-hypothesis’ is not a hypothesis in the Popperian sense. The human impact on climate is a theory, supported by many hypotheses, each of them tested according to widely accepted scientific standards. Just as Popper and his successors in the philosophy of science would have wanted.”
Looks like a meltdown with FX discussing with himself.
But the demand that everything is complex so therefore we should not worry is negated by the times science was not maligned for political reasons when the problem with CFCs and Acid Rain were identified they were essentially solved in good part by not adding politics into the mix.
Back then computer models also helped the scientists to deal with the complexities, it looks to me like the contrarians will never acknowledge that in the past complex issues could also be analyzed and solutions applied.
As mentioned in another thread the idea that all paleoclimate research remains sketchy is only made to deny that there was a lot of progress that was made, and the conclusion from the scientists stands, there is no reason to assume that CO2 has reformed from what it was doing in the past, and scientists do have very good data and research that shows what took place in the deep past.
Of course you won’t. Instead of direct answers to direct questions, you want to go and on about a blog somewhere else, or how I didn’t respond to it right away. I don’t blame you.
Faced with direct questions, an actual concerned scientist would never miss a chance to expound on a subject he knows well. That it’s a great debate, all the more fun.
What is the theory of global warming? Is it theory or hypothesis? In either case, what does it suppose? What does it predict? How can we know if it best explains what we observe?
These are the basic questions. Insisting we read the entire 2013 TS from the IPCC, rather than answering, well you know what that means. Slapping a blog post instead of answering, not a good way to win points.
It’s a little confusing sometimes.
The page says it’s by By Jos Hagelaars, but it’s a Guest post by Hans Custers, but you are angry because I haven’t responded to Eric Wolff yet.
The blog didn’t have much by Eric Wolff at all.
Can you quote the part you are angry about not being responded to?
As for "The human impact on climate is a theory, supported by many hypotheses, each of them tested according to widely accepted scientific standards. ", please list the hypothesis that are involved. As well as what is meant by “The human impact on climate is a theory”. What is the name of the theory? Is he talking about something besides the CO2 thesis?
Wolff’s pertinent commentary was right in my post, with a link to the full article – the second half of the same post that you were linking and quoting from.
