The basics of AGW will take about 5 minutes to explain, less if your audience already knows a lot, and wants to learn new shit.
Like if you already know and accept that burning fuels and making cement and land use changes is the cause of the CO2 rise, even though some will argue against that. (not me)
But it’s the falsifiable parts that people focus on, and I would agree some people use this to try and deny that human beings are having any impact on the planet. People who don’t want their to be any impact, or people who deep down don’t care.
Or people who are scared enough already, but that isn’t the topic, is it? As Sam Stone pointed out, politics has so fucked this topic that a scientific discussion is pretty much impossible. Is that any reason to stop fighting ignorance?
Not in my mind. It just makes it harder. Grow a pair, get a thicker skin, and crack open a book.
It’s obvious that my analogy is too complicated to follow.
And of course now that the deep oceans aren’t warming, it falls flat. Sort of.
Remember we are speaking of global warming theory, and can it be shown to be in error. And also the supposition that any respected scientist who questions or attacks the theory will suffer professionally, and also that shouldn’t global warming be considered a religion?
Because if there is nothing that can disprove it, and people suffer for even questioning it, isn’t that more religion than science?
Like the example I tried to use, about the deep ocean heat content.
The story (now changed) was that using the Argo sensors, somebody declared that global warming had not paused, since the deep ocean heat content was rising, hence global warming has not stopped, or even slowed down.
That is the actual real story, presented as fact, by actual climate experts or something.
So even if the surface temperature stopped rising, if the ocean was warming, even where we can’t really detect it, that is also global warming. So the definition of global warming was changed to include “if the deep ocean warms a tiny tiny amount, that is global warming, even if surface temps don’t rise, or even fall a little”
My point is, was, that using that logic, one could say the opposite is true as well.
If surface temps are rising, but the deep ocean is cooling slightly, then global warming isn’t happening. Because the total heat balance is negative, the oceans being so much larger than the air. This is the exact same reasoning, turned around.
Of course it sound like nonsense. It actually is nonsense. That is the point. Saying that global warming didn’t stop, slow down, or pause, because the deep oceans are still warming is nonsense. That isn’t AGW, or what the greenhouse theory predicts at all.
If that were actually the case (they say now it is not), the AGW theory would be completely wrong. Nothing in the theory predicts the deep oceans warming while surface temps do not.
Of course all that was not from FX, it was from Raymond Pierrehumbert that was also called by FX a “nobody” in the past. What is clear is that the real lesson of the piece is missed:
Early I was noted by the mod that I should not refer to the ignorance shown as coming from creationists, and now we have FX willfully ignoring what the article is mainly about.
And of course, it is important to notice that one of the main theories should be the one that was proposed by Plass that was modified a bit for today, but FX refused to take it into account, just like we will see that it does not matter that I and others also accept what Pierrehumbert is saying here.
What we are seeing coming from deniers is that they are “motivated by ideology to deny a well-established scientific theory.”
That is the only post on the blog that actually explains the theory. Of course it’s not really about the theory, wouldn’t want to waste any space discussing that on realclimate.
That sounds good, but the irony of the last sentence is not lost.
So it’s “denial”, and not a single real scientist has ever published or spoke out, ever. Or everybody would be all over that. Pricelesss.
Does anyone ever speak out? Of course they do, all the time.
This easily understood point is just ignored by the warmer, or worse, they try and grab it and declare, “Who ever predicted warming would cause warmer winters?”. Climate models don’t predict on that level.
These people it seems, have never read the IPCC reports. much less understand what they meant.
Rubbish, especially the “countless” claim, that is pure rhetoric, it isn’t grounded in anything, much less science or evidence.
Same for the predictions. You are confusing the large numbers of claims about the “changes due to” expected warming, with the theory itself. AGW theory does not speak to biological/botanical changes, economics or even weather events. It is about changes to the global energy balance from the enhanced greenhouse effect, from increasing well mixed greenhouse gases.
What you are talking about would be climate change science, which is of course a huge field, but that isn’t the basis of the global warming theory.
It needlessly muddies an already shit filled stream.
The warming from CO2 is simple, it’s the other factors that are very much theoretical, or hypothetical if you will. The big ones are snow and ice changes, clouds, water vapor and circulation changes in the oceans and atmosphere.
The predictions are not “well established” still, especially the effect from an increased hydrological cycle, and the observed changes in snow and ice.
The steady increase in fall and winter snow for the NH is directly against the theoretical predictions from global warming.
A combination of distrust for policy positions that are perceived as “liberal” or “environmental” and an overconfident assumption that anti-“Big Science” contrarianism goes along with being an independent and original thinker.
There’s also a contributing factor of Dunning-Kruger effect, without which it’s pretty much impossible for nonspecialists in a highly technical field to convince themselves that the vast majority of specialist researchers who disagree with them are simply wrong.
As pointed by Pierrehumbert this silly point is really motivated by ideology to deny a well-established scientific theory.
There was previous talk about the heat that was reported coming back to the earth in the papers in post#4
Most is going to the oceans, and besides the report of the deep ocean not getting much of that heat another report found that in other levels the oceans continue to gain more heat.
The question here is a basic one then: What religion is involved here?"
Both studies do not contradict what was pointed out: all the extra heat is still going into the ocean in the top 2000 metres or so.
Of course we know that FX has called the new head of NASA/GISS as a nobody, but he and many others see both studies and conclude that there is now more evidence that the climate sensibility is higher than it was thought.
[QUOTE=Head of GISS]
Taking account of actual data used (AR5 total heat accumulation), Durack makes 15% diff. ECS -> 1.1-4.7ºC
[/QUOTE]
As Tim Minchin said, “Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.” The belief here is from you thinking that the deep ocean issue is as deep as you think it is.
When quoting someone else’s work it’s customary to put it in a quote block (or in quotation marks if it’s short) so that it’s not mistaken for one’s own work.
That isn’t a bad summary and it’s substantially the same as my one-liner here at the end of the first paragraph, and substantially the same as the “ten points of falsification” in my earlier post that I linked to there, or the more formal description I provided in terms of the hierarchy of climate models that I also linked to there. If one were to expand on that with all the latest evidence and appropriate citations one would have the IPCC WG1 report.
Too bad it contradicts just about everything you’ve ever said yourself. Your track record here is really quite something. I also note that you haven’t actually addressed a single one of the questions I asked in that post.
So does anyone trying put a basketball through a hoop, or fix a leaking roof.
There you go again.
Not only are your demands off topic, and I answered in the original post, and I expounded once again on several, you still just made something up. You simply must learn the difference between “he ignored me completely” and “I didn’t like his answer”, lest you be cast into the abyss.
So, as I suspected, no answers are forthcoming from FX about the questions I asked. I think it might be instructive to look at this in a bit more detail. Folks who don’t closely follow climate issues might even learn something here, not just about climate, but about the techniques of denialists.
I stated here that Cohen’s paper hypothesized three types of circulation perturbations to account for colder recent mid-latitudes, and corrected FX on his misconceptions about what high-latitude winter warming is about and what it isn’t. This was the FX’s response: “That sort of smug claim is hilarious, it tells me the author hasn’t actually read the papers, something that is obvious when you actually do read.”
I’m still waiting to hear how this shows that I didn’t read the paper or got the facts wrong. I was referencing Cohen’s latest paper in Nature Geoscience, which can be found here. I would draw the reader’s attention to the abstract in which Cohen describes the possible circulation changes that might be responsible for the mid-latitude anomaly, and the concluding paragraphs in which Cohen states that “more and better observations would not only improve our understanding of the Arctic and its climate, but also help to elucidate the mechanisms of atmospheric response to Arctic amplification and better constrain the models.”
Indeed. The expectation of “boreal winter warming” isn’t something magical or hard to understand; when we say that global warming theory “predicts” it we simply mean that (a) we expect warming in general due to increasing CO2, and (b) we expect the effects of Arctic amplification to become stronger as we go further north. Arctic amplification is most certainly occurring – visibly and dramatically so – and temperature increases at high latitudes are double what they are at lower latitudes. The effects are strongest in autumn and winter, and we would therefore expect boreal latitudes, on average – as a first-order approximation that ignores circulation systems – to have warmer winters because of the fringe effects of Arctic amplification. This is what Cohen correctly states. But in the real world, complex circulation systems can change these simple expectations from first-order approximations, and understanding these phenomena helps us refine our general circulation models, as Cohen also correctly implies. To suggest that this somehow “invalidates” what we actually mean by global warming theory or AGW so completely misses the point that it reflects either a profound misunderstanding of what global warming theory is or just simply peddling the denialist agenda.
So I’m still waiting for an apology from FX about how I was making a “smug claim” and obviously didn’t read the paper (I suspect I’ll be waiting forever).
We don’t need to look too far to see this agenda being peddled, which is why I asked the other questions that also weren’t answered, some of which I itemized below.
I read it. And now everybody else can, too. Link here and here. And no, I cannot follow the reasoning that says " ‘Water vapor is a feedback and not a forcing’, there isn’t any evidence that such a statement exists, except where somebody made it up. You won’t find it in a textbook, or any scientific paper, or even on a real climate science page".
I “cannot follow the reasoning” because there isn’t any “reasoning”. It’s complete bullshit. As I posted there, I found about 291,000 papers (and a textbook, FYI) that say exactly what FX claimed they don’t say, a climate principle so basic most of us learn it in high school.
As I’ve pointed out several times now, water vapor positive feedback is only about half of what the blackbody effect contributes to cooling via outgoing IR, so it’s a feedback but a self-limiting controlled feedback. That’s physics! A feedback is self-amplifying and out of control only if the sum of the gain factors is greater than 1. FX appears neither to understand that water vapor functions as a climate feedback, nor even what a feedback is.
Well, no, completely wrong on both counts. Neither is the global mean temperature “dropping”, nor would heat absorption by deep oceans make “AGW theory completely wrong” – what it actually would do is reconfirm that the earth’s net energy balance is exactly what we expect it to be. Of course some of us like to pretend that CO2 doesn’t actually cause any heat to be added to the earth’s energy balance.
In fact here’s an example of that kind of digression – it comes from a discussion where FX was trying to claim that changes in solar variations are what is actually driving climate change (first try to deny that climate change occurring, but if you can’t, hey, find something other than CO2 to blame!):
I responded to that here, setting him straight on the misinformation about solar variations – one of the favorite memes of denialists. But what I also wanted to point out was this remarkable statement FX makes at the end: “Scientists who have spent a lifetime in study and research of these matters are some of the biggest skeptics of the “climate” experts, as they can see how the “science” is agenda driven, not evidence based.”
As I also pointed out in that same response, climate scientists are “scientists who have spent a lifetime in study and research of these matters” – like those who write the climate science summaries for the IPCC. But of course, FX tells us that the IPCC is “woo woo science”.
OK, that’s about all the patience for dealing with this nonsense that I have for now.
Nah, we are only seeing avoiding manoeuvres so as not to touch the science; so, once again, what religion was involved in the studies that reported on the deep ocean and the accumulated heat that was missed in the upper regions of the south seas?
And the quote had another part: “Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.” So, do you deny that the deep ocean not gaining much heat does not refute the evidence of the heat gained in other areas of the oceans?
It is clear that just with like your sorry citation of Ray Pierrehumbert you do not realize that the study does not help you, it makes you look worst.
As I noticed, your answer had the sorry idea that everyone, scientists and the guys at Sceptical Science where ignorants, it turns out that many other scientists had the research to support them, you only had a misunderstanding of one researcher to support you; what it is clear is that you were wrong and there is a clear disconnect from you between what science is and your flights of fancy when you ignore what virtually all scientists and data are telling us about this issue.
And I have to notice that no religion needs to be invoked, there is indeed a big section of Americans who do think that ignorance is bliss.
Of course one can not help to observe once again how the cite by FX channelling Ray Pierrehumbert pointed at Roy Spencer and how he and a good number of contrarians do use faith to deny both evolution and human induced climate change.
This is a typical manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect I mentioned above. Sure, the fundamental principles of science do boil down in the last analysis to observation and common sense. But any non-scientist who interprets that as meaning that ordinary observation and common sense are all they need to successfully refute highly technical specialized research might as well be claiming that they can carve Michelangelo’s David because all it takes is chipping away marble with a chisel.
It’s a never ending source of entertainment, even when it looks like multi-train accident.
“We have to act now to stop dangerous global warming, and the cause is using fossil fuels, so we must reduce fuel use. Global warming is now irrefutable, we know with confidence that unless we take drastic steps, dangerous warming will continue.”
Hold up there Sparky. What do you mean by global warming?
“You are obviously a denier, the same as somebody who thinks the world is flat, smoking is good for you, and evolution doesn’t exist”
What the fuck are you talking about? I asked you a simple question.
“Go read the latest IPCC report, it’s all in there. I’m done trying to explain things to you”
As predicted FX will ignore even the definitions that he found and that we agreed with too. (Nevermind that the article he cited for that definition came with a big diss of what he is doing in discussions like this one)
Does it seem like a religion? Oh hell yes, or rather the adherents and the loudest strident voices come across that way.
Is that not just too much?
I ask what is meant, in a specific manner, and nothing but evasion, and of course “Go read the Bible you ignorant denier”, it’s beyond belief at times.
But the hubris of claiming Dyson must be wrong, because he states his mind about global warming, and you are sure he is wrong, that is the ultimate irony.
He is with little doubt one of the smartest men alive, if not the smartest. But you see it everywhere, on blogs and forums, tweets and whatever, that he knows nothing about climate research, and you shouldn’t be swayed by his opinion.
It doesn’t get much simpler or direct than the following.
“Does the global warming theory predict anything?”
What does it predict?
Is there any prediction that will confirm confidence in the theory?
The most obvious thing when it comes to warmer or colder, is cold, and snow. It’s one of those “in your face” things, that can be measured, that can be seen, felt, that effects our lives.
What does the theory predict about snow and cold? If you claim it makes no predictions about this matter, or that such a climate indicator does not matter, you are beyond even being wrong.
Well of course Dyson is making too broad generalizations, that he also agrees with the poles warming more is of no importance to FXMastermind anyhow.
And as pointed many times before, the moment the accusation comes that “it is like religion” is used in a discussion is like a Godwin. It only shows that the one making that claim is officially out of ideas and just following what pseudo scientists do.
