Is global warming falsifiable?

Great Debates
722

First, using the term “alternate universe” is not an argument, but snide and snarky. The multiple GISS maps are an obvious counter to the false claims climatecentral makes about THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES, which is obvious from their “paper” on the matter. They claim winters are warming faster than any other season. The GISS data shows this is false.

The last 25 years for winter, can be seen in this map.

The last 25 years for summer can be seen in this map

Nobody said anything about Louisiana, and the map shows the entire world. I’m using it to check climatecentral, and it clearly shows how they try to twist the facts, and present “winters are warming faster than any other season in the US”. Which is false.

Even the 30 year trend shows this clearly. (and also shows boreal winter not warming as much as boreal summer, globally)

30 year winter trend
30 year summer trend

I’m not making a claim, I am debunking climatecentral, who claims winters are warming even faster, for the US. There “paper” is both false, as well as misleading. The GISS maps clearly show this.

If you know of a blog that has discussed this, especially in regards to the climatecentral paper, please link to it, or if you fear giving them traffic, send it by PM.

I know of no blogs discussing either the climatecentral nonsense, or the boreal winter trends.

tl;dr I used a climatecentral propoganda piece and GISS data to show how difficult it is to falsify any claims made by global warmers. In this case “winter are warming fastest in the US”
The lack of any real claims makes it hard to even know what would falsify anything they claim.

723

Are you claiming this is something that increases our confidence in the CO2 theory?

In essence, is it something that can falsify part of the theory?

If winters start cooling, while summer still warm, would that falsify a prediction of the global warming theory?

Will not answering make your case seem stronger or weaker?

Have you seen these question on some blog anywhere?

724

I’m saying – very clearly – that you were wrong. Again. As always. That should definitely affect someone’s confidence in anything you have to say about climate change, which as documented previously has never been correct about anything as far as I can recall.

The numbers I posted from the NOAA NCDC corroborate what Climate Central was saying about both annual and winter warming and refute your typically supercilious claim that “They lied. It’s not true.” All the numbers I posted before, BTW, are in °F and directly comparable. (The NCDC reports US temperatures in °F and I typed °C in one place by force of habit.)

If you want to have an argument about whether 0.13°F/decade is or is not equivalent to 1.3°F per century, or whether 0.19°F is or is not bigger than 0.13°F, feel free. I won’t be participating.

725

Once again, the claim is made by climatecentral, that the US winters are warming faster than any other season. They show several images, which don’t actually show the changes.

And they cherry pick the coldest winter period to start their trend for now, which is deceptive. Checking the actual data is easy and fast with GISS, and it shows how they are trying to deceive, or more likely, how they are likely just wrong in this matter.

Winter trend for US is obviously warming, aside from the Pacific Northwest and a small southwest area

Winter trend is now cooling, for almost all the US

Long term trend show general warming for some of the US winters, aside from the very obvious (and well researched) area that has not warmed, but cooled in the last 100 years

726

According to the NCDC Climate at a Glance | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) US winter trend, 1995-2014 is - 1.13F a decade.

NH land trend is -.18 C

And just like the US trends, summer trend for NH land is postive + .22

US summer trend + .46F a decade
US winter trend - 1.13F a decade

What part of that do you not understand? This is debunking the climatecentral “paper”, which claims US winters are warming faster than ever, faster than any other season.

It’s just an example of how impossible it is to “falsify” anything global warming related. This is cut and dry, easy stuff, something anyone can see for themselves. The climatecentral nonsense. But notice how no matter what, the promoter of global warming insists climatecentral is right.

727

Suspect and not scientifically legitimate as usual.

And neither from 1995.

What FX did was just like the contrarians that declared that in the past that the slowdown of 1960-1970 meant that all scientists expected a cool down, that was not the case and the popular press article FX used was debunked a long time ago and also by the one who wrote it in the 70’s.

Climate Central already reported that they are looking at the big picture, not the misleading short one, and with better evidence nowadays virtually all scientists expect that the earth and most of the USA will continue to get warmer after this current “pause” that ignores other seasons, other hemispheres, the oceans and the world.

728

You introduced the repeated use of snide and snarky in this thread. You don’t get to complain when it is legitimatley directed toward your posts.

And here is an example of the way in which you are persuading me that you are actually trolling.

I quoted a passage from your post showing two maps followed by a claim that they demonstrated more cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in winter than in the summer.

I noted that the actual stated temperature rise in the two maps showed greater rise in winter then summer.

You responded, (with a fair amount of textual giggling), that I had missed the point that it was only the U.S. that you were talking about regarding the winter cooling.

So I went back and looked at the maps you had selected, again. It was true that there was a specific place in the Northern Hemisphere that showed a cooling trend for winter for the period you had chosen.
However, that cooling trend was specific to the valleys of the lower Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers, with the coolest location around Louisiana. I then pointed out that all the other regions of the U.S. had, according the the map that you selected, showed greater warming in the winter than in the summer.
Now you are disingenuously claiming that

So you are switching in mid-stream from discussing the U.S.–a point on which you had insisted–to discussing the whole world, which would confirm my observation that you did not correctly read the numbers. In fact, however, someone did say something about Louisiana. I did. Anyone who passed third grade American geography can see that the coolest place in the Northern Hemisphere on the winter map is centered on Louisiana.
That you “seem” to have missed that fact and have now jumped back and forth on whether you are discussing North America, the U.S., the world, or some fantasy universe of your own invention as if we could not read your text or view the maps, ourselves, shows a striking lack of interest in honest debate.

If you continue, you will be Warned for trolling.

[ /Moderating ]

729

Not really, I’m just not going to spend forever posting

You were never ahead. You guys simply strawman me by ignoring the qualifiers I include (see above, like I said, statistical methods to adjust for growing cities is bullshit when they could actually be visited, and you outright ignored I said that and just repeated your stupid statistical study)

Evidence for global warming was posted, but it was the same tired old evidence which is far from conclusive.

Other than that, it was claims that “every scientist beleives in global warming”, as though that’s how science works.

What it boils down to is you’re (and all the people pushing global warming) acting like mild evidence is super duper strong proof, which it isn’t.

730

Well, you wanna take a little of that “not forever” to admit you were wrong about solar cells?

731

In some cases, it is.

If a scientist had evidence that was convincing, other scientists would be convinced. Consensus in science doesn’t prove the case closed or the prevailing theory correct – but, for the time being, it demonstrates that the alternatives are not viable.

To revive the alternative theory, new evidence would have to be presented.

732

You certainly didn’t spend your time not posting actually looking up evidence to back your claims. Did you come to concede all of the things that you got completely factually wrong?

That’s quite an accusation. Please explain the strawman that was created - quoting it directly would be nice - and also please show us the evidence that anything you said was correct.

You posted no evidence, only a few comments, almost all of which were factually incorrect. Maybe responding “lalalala, I can’t hear you” when you are shown that, just to use one example, the cost of solar energy is considerably less than you thought works among your friends, but it won’t work here.

“If one person says you have a tail you can probably ignore it, however, if two or three people say you do, then you better turn around and look.” (Anonymous)

Some laypeople will defer to what a majority of experts believe when they lack the expertise themselves. It’s actually pretty smart to do so. I defer to what my auto mechanic says because I don’t know how to fix a car. When I sprained my ankle, I used the proscribed consensus from medical doctors on how to self-treat it.

But you are confusing the fact that some laypeople will say “a majority of scientists believe something, therefore I agree with them” with the scientific method, which is actually the opposite of what you suggest.

Something isn’t true because a majority of scientists feel it’s true. A majority of scientists believe something to be true because they have enough evidence that it is true.

Maybe you came back to present some evidence that this majority of scientists are mistaken?

Oh dear. No evidence from you, just a useless statement.

You take umbrage that someone would defer to a scientist who has evidence for their beliefs - evidence that not only swayed them but a vast majority of their colleagues as well - but you seem to want the readers of this message board to just believe you?

See, scientists will be happy to provide their evidence for why they believe something. In fact, they like to do it so much that they have other scientists chime in - it’s called peer review. It allows scientists to escape conformation bias or simply catch errors or maybe look at things a bit differently.

Thus far in this thread, you’re long on complaints but exceedingly short on evidence. And your batting average on things you assert seems to be quite low.

However, as was said before by a moderator, this thread is whether global warming is falsifiable, not about whether it is false (you do know the difference, right?) or is caused by man. So you’re not only proving yourself incapable of providing evidence for what you choose to believe, you cannot even stay on topic.

733

Read it again, virtually the same (or higher in the last years) percentage **of supporting evidence **appears in every paper published lately. When it was reported that there was also a consensus of evidence that is what we meant.

So far the “evidence” you pointed out was coming from gut feelings, not supported evidence or peer reviewed.

734

To be specific, James L. Powell, Ph.D. in Geochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did also check the evidence presented in recent studies that investigated the consensus of the evidence.

Unlike previous years, the evidence found by contrariness has allowed them to publish just 2 papers in 2012-2013

http://www.jamespowell.org/

The problem for one of the papers was that numerous other reports have studied the same phenomenon and drawn different conclusions. It tries once again to blame the sun for all the warming increases observed (Everyone should notice here that the author reports that the earth is indeed warming, but unlike what many scientists have found that lone scientist thinks that the sun alone is responsible)

Schurer et al. (2013) used multiple linear regression and found that the sun is unlikely to have caused more than 0.15°C of the observed approximately 1°C warming over the past 300 years. And so it is for other evidence that is reported in recent Journals.

As Powell reported:

Falsification is not well handled (or found) by the expert contrarians out there.

735

Any insight into ‘the great pause’?

736

Which part? The one where we’ve seen 38 years with"anomalously high annual global temperature[s]?"

Or the one where cherriestaste super good?

737

That it is more likely that it is a mirage:

And really? Using Watts Up With That as a source? That is like pointing to a link at Answers in Genesis in a Biology discussion.

738

Well, it’s an article by known scheister Christopher Monckton in well-established denialist rag WUWT, so take anything stated therein with a massive grain of salt. Or, you know, stick to the actual science, reported in places like RealClimate. Seriously, this lie of a [del]15-year[/del] [del]16-year[/del] [del]17-year[/del] 18-year slow-down has been crap from the start. It’s based on phenomenally shoddy statistics work and ignorance of recent developments that show, for example, that once we include arctic measures, recent temperature trends have been extrapolated lower than they should have been, or the massive amount of heat increase in the deep ocean (indeed, it would be somewhat bizarre if global warming stopped and the oceans kept rising). But what Monckton’s doing is basically just lying with statistics. As opposed to the numerous times where he lies with… Um… Lies.

739

It’s great to see WUWT using Christopher Monckton as an authoritative source on climate science, it definitely suits them. :smiley: One might kindly say that the estimable 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is a particularly eccentric representative of the extreme right and a complete scientific illiterate, and he is all those things and so much more. He’s really quite a delightful self-parody of the aristocracy and perhaps a cautionary tale against excessive inbreeding in certain branches of it.

740

Watts Up With That seems to be a clearinghouse for any arguments against global warming orthodoxy, without much quality control. So there is definitely stuff there that’s specious or outright incorrect. However, there is also stuff there that has been well thought out and supported with data and proper mathematics. Dismissing anything coming from there out of hand is not reasonable. You should address the merits or lack thereof of whatever the specific point is.

I’ve been one of the people arguing against a ‘pause’ on the ground that annual temperature variance is high enough that over a decade or two the overall trend could be negative without disproving global warming.

That said… There is also uncertainty that the models used to predict global warming are correct, and they have not earned the status of the null hypothesis. Therefore, we are analysing two possibilities that have uncertainty about them. The correct way to look at such issues is to use Bayesian inference. If the model predicts X, and the result is Y, the problem could be with the model, or it could be variance. As the ‘pause’ lengthens and becomes less likely to be pure variance (though still possible), a Bayesian approach would cast more and more doubt on the accuracy of the model.

741

And that was done, the dismissal came after the explanation I cited, and it also comes after hundreds of examples of terrible and bad researchers whose trash is allowed to remain in the blog.

That is not science, only a clearinghouse for denial, and the author of the piece on the pause is Monkton, himself also accused the proponents of the science as fascists and nazis.

That is… not relevant, what the article reports is a cherry pick of the past recent observed data, this is not coming from a model but actual data.