Well at least we finally have one thing on the table at last. Global warming predicts warming at the poles, and an increase in global temperatures from positive feedbacks from this warming.
Or rather, the theory of global climate change from the enhanced greenhouse effect, caused by human beings increasing the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, by both deforestation and burning fossil fuels, predicts the greatest warming in the polar regions, which will lead to a positive feedback from both more open water to absorb heat, and less ice, both of which change the albedo of the polar regions, leading to even more warming.
That is a prediction of the AGW theory. Along with it there is also predictions that this warming at the poles will release stored methane (a very potent greenhouse gas) further increasing the warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.
This is a key prediction, as well as a key part of the theory of the greenhouse effect of climate. And the enhanced greenhouse effect theory. (the two are not the same)
It’s key because CO2 alone could not explain the rapid warming we know has happened in the past. It’s assumed that in the past amplification of warming occurs due to the poles warming, that in fact CO2 is the small forcing that leads to the much greater effect of warming from the polar regions warming up.
Would a cooling trend, rather than a drastic warming trend, would that disprove the theory?
We actually already have an answer to that. No, it would not.
The south pole has not shown the expected warming trend, the sea ice has increased rather than decreased, and the ice and snow there has increased (except for the most northern part).
It doesn’t matter. The cooling and increase in ice is explained away, ironically enough due to artificial greenhouse gases (CfCs) destroying another greenhouse gas, ozone.
One might assume that if the same thing happened over the north pole, a huge loss of ozone leads to arctic cooling, that that would also not matter. In essence, the theory can not be found at fault, just because a key prediction did not happen. There is some reason for it, and the theory is unaffected.
Once again, this has already happened, it’s not conjecture. The southern pole cooling does not matter. In fact, it is predicted that by 2065 the ozone will “heal” and all the global warming kept at bay by the loss of ozone there will happen, and very quickly. Why 2065 some might ask?
Because that is when current oil reserves are expected to run out.
Please, I didn’t make that up. That is actually what was published.
But back to the question at hand. Would arctic cooling disprove the theory? If, like Alaska and the Bering sea, which have been cooling for over a decade, the arctic showed a cooling trend, and arctic sea ice increased, for over a decade, would that disprove the theory?
Nope. There would just be some reason figured out, or the theory would be changed. And it exactly that sort of thing that leads some people to distrust the cocksure warmist who grandly proclaims doom, and changes the story to fit the facts, after it becomes obvious that the predictions didn’t happen.
Like the oh so obvious problem of the colder winters.
Global warming (or rather it’s ardent believers) predicted warmer winters. It’s a key predictions of global warming. When this was happening (and it certainly was), when snow and ice was decreasing, when winter averages were increasing, when winter came later and spring early, it was proof of global warming.
Now that it’s too obvious to dismiss any longer, colder winters are predicted by global warming. Your average person isn’t smart enough to understand how the same theory can predict warmer winters, then when that doesn’t happen, now the same theory predicts colder winters. And, if winters started trending warmer again, that would also be proof of global warming.
People are too dumb to understand how that can be so.
Nah, you are only continuing to show a complete failure to find good support for what you claim. Scientists at the same place you cherry pick still report that what you conclude is silly.
The basic problem of using the winter from regions of the northern hemisphere as just being sufficient to discredit global warming is really silly. For the simple reason that many other regions are not cooperating with the cherry pickers.
But since you claim to understand science, please tell us again how “It is assumed that more water vapor will cause more warming, which will cause more water vapor, which will cause more warming. Which is exactly where the wheels fall off and the entire theory falls apart.” That’s one of my favorites of your standard repertoire of denialist claims. I tried to explain to you earlier why this was utter nonsense, but most of your claims come around multiple times no matter how often they’re refuted, sort of like zombies that won’t die. So I’m expecting that one to come lurching back to life just about any time! :rolleyes:
This might actually be a new one you haven’t used before. Good to know that Antarctic ice is increasing. Too bad the evidence contradicts that ridiculous claim. Let’s start with this new research just published this week:
As for “sea ice has increased”, are you seriously suggesting that Antarctic sea ice is an indicator of anything? Do you know anything at all about the topography of the Antarctic?
For the interested reader: The Antarctic being essentially a large land mass surrounded by ocean, it’s topographically almost the exact opposite of the Arctic, which is largely ocean bounded by land. The predominant ice mass in the Arctic is sea ice, which is a long-lived semi-permanent ice mass, though its extent changes with the seasons, and its mass and extent has been dramatically shrinking over the past decades as the Arctic warms.
In the Antarctic continent, the predominant ice mass is land ice. These continental ice sheets have lost (conservatively) at least 1350 Gt of net ice mass between 1992 and 2011, and possibly much more, though not uniformly, and some areas have gained due to increased snowfall. But the trend is net loss of ice mass, and it’s a significant contributor to global sea level rise. Antarctic sea ice, however, is mostly just a seasonal phenomenon; it forms in winter and tends to float away in open water and disperse in summer, and forms again the next year. It has about as much significance to climate change as the winter freezing of a Vermont pond, and there tends to be more of it precisely because of freshwater outflows from the melting ice sheets mixing with coastal waters, and from increased precipitation.
I see that GIGO – whose patience never ceases to amaze – has already responded to the rest of the nonsense you posted.
The source is me, from information pulled from numerous places plus my own thinking on the subject. I’ve already cited Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise” for a rudimentary discussion of the difficulties in modeling and predicting complex systems. If you want more information, I suggest the Santa Fe institute. They have a great MOOC on complexity theory. I also highly recommend Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell - a great introduction to these issues. Aside from climate science, it’s a fascinating topic that is growing in relevance every day as the world becomes more networked.
Again, I don’t give a rat’s ass about his ‘reputation’, since his article is perfectly capable of standing on its own. And no, it’s not perfect but it is a reasonable approach to a statistical analysis of the cause of increased damages from extreme weather, and a good counterpoint to extremist claims on the other side. His conclusion was a little strong, but no more so than the conclusions of many of the articles you would approve of, so long as their strong conclusions are in the direction you support.
In fact, this insistence that some people are not fit to be published regardless of what they are actually writing is a perfect example of the evidence you were looking for that some scientists are being punished for stepping outside the orthodoxy. Judith Curry has done fine work in climate science, but now she’s persona non-grata who shall be attacked whenever possible. And she’s not even a ‘denier’. She’s very concerned about climate change. She just doesn’t march in lock-step with the approved orthodoxy.
In most other fields of science it’s possible to take a contrary position without being subject to these kinds of attacks. It’s even possible to write the occasional bad paper and still be allowed to work and publish without being branded a heretic and excommunicated from polite society. But not in climate science. There, you either support everything the IPCC says, and stay silent over the things you might not agree with, or you risk the dreaded ‘denier’ label.
Sources of funding like the heavily biased Greenpeace organization are totally fine, but if you accept any money from industry, you’re automatically suspect. If an error is found in a paper that biased it towards more warming, there is much forgiveness. If the error goes the other way, Michael Mann pens an op-ed demanding that you be fired. If a journal publishes a paper that goes too far in its warming claims, a mild retraction is in order. If a journal publishes a paper that goes too far in the other direction, a bunch of scientists start a campaign to have the journal editor fired.
By definition, there is no evidence for future harm. All you can do is extrapolate from the past, and the way you do that is to build models. What other method are you proposing?
And I did NOT say that climate scientists do not know what happened in the past - I’m aware of the historical evidence. But when it comes to understanding a complex system, it’s not enough to gather a few proxies - the system itself matters, and there are large gaps in our knowledge of the distant past when it comes to interactions at a systemic level.
And that NEVER happens on the pro-AGW side. All of those scientists are pure as the driven snow, and would never, ever, let their own biases blind them to evidence.
NO. Jeez. The point is that these systems are quite opaque to us, and we need to calibrate our forecasts with that knowledge.
So, complexity theory isn’t scientific?
You don’t understand what I’m talking about. It’s not about gathering evidence. Or not exclusively, anyway. It’s about climate being a system that has so many feedbacks and interactions between its components that may be fundamentally unpredictable within certain ranges.
It might help to think about ecosystems instead. How much evidence would you need to be able to predict what will happen if you add a few dozen wolves to an ecosystem that didn’t have any before? Could you predict that it might cause flooding or a change in the direction of rivers? And how much would you learn from studying past ecosystems that had wolves in them? The problem with doing that is that the past ecosystems adapted with the wolves in place, and therefore the response to new wolves may be completely different. Or perhaps there was a different species of tree growing near watering holes which prevented this specific effect.
You can always see the effects in hindsight, and when you do they often look pretty obvious: The wolves chased the grazing animals off the land, changing erosion patterns. In the meantime, the animals left current watering holes, allowing beavers free reign to cut down the trees along the banks, causing the shoreline to erode and flooding from new beaver dams. Change any one of a thousand influences on all that, and maybe you get an entirely different effect.
When a system feeds back on itself and has many nodes of interactions, very tiny changes in initial conditions can have large and unpredictable effects on output. When the system is adaptive and mutates with each change, the amount you can learn from its past behavior diminishes.
I’ll give you an example of that from economics. Economists try to figure out what an economy will do under different policy prescriptions by examining how it behaved in the past. Let’s say a real-estate bubble caused a ‘wealth effect’ because everyone was convinced that real estate could never go down in price dramatically, so they borrowed against their wealth and grew the economy. Then real estate crashed.
So what happens if you decide that one way to regenerate all that wealth is to re-inflate a real-estate bubble? You could come up with a lot of fancy models to show the historical response of economies to real estate bubbles and make a good case that all you have to do is put into place policies that will inflate real-estate and you can pull the economy out of the doldrums.
Will it work? Probably not, because the economy adapted to the last crash. All the data in the world about the historical response of the economy won’t help you predict the future. Maybe this time banks won’t be so quick to give out second mortgages. Or perhaps people won’t be fooled into believing that an inflation in their house price represents a permanent wealth increase. Or perhaps the rent-seekers and institutional buyers will have worked out a strategy to capture the gains from that bubble. Or maybe even the knowledge that the government is intentionally inflating it is all the people need to avoid the trap.
The climate system is constantly changing. The pattern of sequestered carbon changes. Species die off and new ones are created. Weather patterns cause changes in vegetation patterns, as does the evolution of species. The mere fact that the Earth is now populated by sentient creates who modify the environment makes it fundamentally different in response than the earth of 500,000 years ago.
This doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and just do what we want. If anything, it could be an argument for not mucking about with the climate with CO2 emissions at all because we can’t predict what might happen.
But what it does mean is that we should be highly skeptical of complicated computer models that purport to give us meaningful predictions of the cost of global warming to society 100 years from now.
I think that the best evidence we have is that we are inducing an additional radiative forcing in the atmosphere due to an unprecedented rise in CO2 emitted by man. I think in the short term that is almost undoubtedly going to cause additional warming. I also think it likely that the warming will be amplified by the water vapor feedback, because that happens rapidly.
What I’m not sure of is what the result of that will be after several decades when other feedback mechanisms kick in. It could be worse or better.
I also think we can reasonably predict human CO2 emissions growth over the next decade at least, and probably over the next 20-30 years, because even if we invented alternatives it would take a long time to change out the infrastructure.
I think after that it becomes extremely speculative, because the economy and our social organization are also complex systems, and the history of the economy is that it is punctuated by paradigm shifts due to technological innovation. We don’t know what those innovations will be by definition, but we know they will be coming, and that they will radically change the world.
In the past hundred years we’ve seen society-changing shifts like this numerous times. The automobile, the airplane, mass communications, the computer, the internet…
In 1890 one of the major perceived risks of the future was the rise of pollution due to horse excrement.
In the 1970’s, one of the primary concerns of the environmental movement and social scientists was the ‘obvious’ coming catastrophe of overpopulation. ‘Everyone knew’ that the future was going to be crowded and millions would starve. No one saw the demographic collapse that was already underway around the world.
In the 1980’s, only a handful of people thought that the Soviet Union was near collapse.
In 2000, no one thought terrorism was going to cause a massive shift in geopolitics and the way we live and travel.
In 2005, no one in the climate science community predicted the large drop in U.S. CO2 emissions due to the discovery of large natural gas formations available through fracking.
In 2007, forecasts of future CO2 emissions didn’t take into account the large reductions caused by a recession that was only one year away.
Do you honestly believe that there will be no more fundamental shifts like this? Do you really think we can see 50 years into the future any better than the people of 1890 could? Do you think that any of their predictions of what a 1940 economy would look like beared any resemblance to reality?
It’s useful to make forecasts sometimes. And because by definition we can’t predict the effect of unknown unknowns, we can’t do any better than come up with models based on what we do know. But that shouldn’t fool us into thinking that those models are likely to be accurate representations of the future. They’re almost certainly not.
Sam, considering some of the denialists here, I appreciate your well thought out posts and I apologize if my impatience leads me to be sometimes abrupt, but the fact is this. You and Nate Silver and Melanie Mitchell and for that matter the likes of Freeman Dyson and others are all making broad generalizations that are essentially meaningless without engaging in specific issues. It’s like the arguments about climate sensitivity. It’s a single number that encapsulates all the incredible complexity of the climate system at any given point. Do we know exactly what it is? No. But we know the very likely range within which it falls, we know the constraints around it with high confidence, and even the lowest bound of that range is exceedingly worrisome in its consequences – and it is likely actually a much higher value.
As we’ve just seen in both Arctic and Antarctic ice loss rates, we’re having to adjust those values upwards (toward “worse than we thought”). The point here is that, yes, the systems are very complex and full of surprises, but there are bounds on the limits of those surprises and we already know far more than enough to be actionable.
Moreover, as has happened so often, the things we don’t know may well turn out to be worse – not better – than we expected. The argument that “we don’t know everything with 100% certainty so let’s not do anything” has never been a winning strategy – not in business, not in public policy, not in environmental stewardship, and most assuredly not in any kind of crisis management.
In most other fields of science there isn’t a large population of fringe contrarians, because in most other fields of science there aren’t powerful financial vested interests and personal, media-driven and just ego-driven factors supporting and rewarding such a subculture.
Eh??? I’ve never known Greenpeace to fund any serious scientific research (or any at all, for that matter). Most climate science is funded by governments, and most governments in the industrialized world who can afford to do so have, if anything, a vested interest in industrialized economic growth. Findings of climate catastrophe are hardly politically palatable. The reality is that climate science proceeds despite all the economic interests lined up against it.
This is pure FUD. See my first point.
Two words: peer review. Climate science is a mature and well-published field.
At the first Earth Day in 1970 we were told that all the scientific evidence pointed to rapid global cooling. I’ve seen plenty of scientific contradictions in my life so I tend to take a follow the money/power viewpoint.
"During the first Earth Day in 1970 Kenneth Watt of UC Davis said, ‘If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.’ "
Because this was presented to me as a scientific fact I was naïve enough to believe it was true.
This isn’t an area of expertise for me so I wont be discussing. Just wanted to say that scientists have no magical power to predict the future and we humans probably have little power to control nature no matter how much money we spend. Haven’t got any investment in it either way but I take a skeptical viewpoint.
Really? So there are no corrective feedbacks at all? Tell me then - how come temperature ever comes back down? Why isn’t it a one-way ratchet?
How come CO2 levels come down? If all the feedbacks work in one direction, How did we ever get back to a low CO2, lower-temperature climate?
How come there are periods of higher CO2 in the past where temperature is lower than during some periods where CO2 is lower?
The answer is that CO2 is only ONE component of the climate system. Temperature of the Earth is regulated by many different factors - particulates in the atmosphere, the ozone layer, cloud formation, the size of the polar ice caps, albedo changes due to vegetation patterns, ocean currents… And I’m sure thousands of smaller effects I’m not aware of (and perhaps no one else is, either).
Any cursory glance at the climate record will show a lot of ‘noise’ at every time scale. There are numerous climate cycles and numerous ways in which the equilibrium temperature can change. Sometimes the changes are short, sometimes they are long. Sometimes they are driven by CO2, sometimes not.
There’s nothing magical or mystical about the fact that the Earth’s climate is remarkably stable and has been stable enough to maintain complex life forms for billions of years despite massive shocks that dwarf what we’re doing with CO2.
That’s not an argument for or against global warming. A stabilizing feedback that takes 10,000 years to kick in doesn’t help us much. Nor does the fact that a new equilibrium in a new metastable range might be 10 degrees warmer than it is today and have massive impact on our lives.
But as a point of theory, when an emergent property of a complex system remains relatively stable for billions of years through major shocks to that system, it’s reasonable to suppose that there are negative feedbacks at work in keeping it stable.
Are you purposefully misreading what I write? The 1 degree thing was in reference to what the hard evidence shows, and what the ‘consensus’ represents. I’m fully aware that there are feedbacks and listed some of them in the same message. And please note that I listed positrive feedbacks and said that some of them were likely to be quite strong.
But when analyzing this, you need to separate out what we know based on hard evidence and experiment, and what we think we know based on computer models and extrapolation. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We know what the radiative forcing effect of it is in the atmosphere. That’s where the wide consensus of scientists lives. That’s hard, empirical data.
When it comes to the long-term effect of this on the atmosphere, we can build cases of varying strengths based on historical data, inference, modeling, and other tools. And the result may be strong enough for us to assign a probability of ‘very likely’ to our prediction. But it’s not empirical evidence, and there is no consensus around much of it. There are still many questions about feedbacks and other responses to the climate system that scientists are still unsure of. Even a cursory reading of the IPCC reports will show you the amount of uncertainty that still exists.
Because if you want to do science, it’s important to know what’s known through empirical evidence and what’s known through logical deduction, extrapolation, or other tools.
Yes they are, but all I was trying to say is that when it comes to analyzing the effect of feedbacks, the consensus stops. Some scientists assign more weight to some feedbacks than do other scientists. Some attribute more uncertainty to some models than do others.
That’s funny - I don’t remember making a calculation, or talking about climate sensitivity at all. I was talking about the effect of CO2 due to radiative forcing.
Why did you leave out the part where I said “Due to radiative forcing alone, not considering feedbacks”? Do you understand the value of separating the known physics from the atmospheric response? Even when trying to formulate your own opinion about global warming it’s helpful to separate the known from the not-certain.
In fact, where I usually bring this up is when I’m arguing with those who claim there is no global warming at all, or that man isn’t causing it. There it’s very useful to point out that at a minimum man must be causing as much warming as the basic physics shows must be happening. Why do you have a problem with that?
I’m not going to bother with the rest of your criticisms of my nonexistent ‘calculations’, since A) I never made any and B) none of this has anything to do with the point I was making.
Not sure what you are going then for, that it is complex it is a given and her book look good for the matter but this implies that the experts are not looking at issues like that, what it is clear is that you were wrong regarding your idea on relying on “climate gate” to disparage the progress made with modeling regarding this issue.
As you go later to throw a lot of dust against the feedbacks not going down but “always up” what you have to wonder is why your lines of thought lead you to sources that time and time again are not accurate, or that they miss their targets or support shady think tanks.
You repeat this but as I have seen before his does not stand to scrutiny.
And after all the points that sounded more reasonable you go for the full denial like posture, sorry but what I do know after many discussions and research on my own is that the evidence used to accuse the climate scientists of malfeasance is the pits. And if you are not aware of it, then what I said before stands, you are missing a lot because of the sources you rely on.
Then the point is wrong, because the systems are not opaque. Complex, yes, but well-understood to the point where existing models can very well provide an effective view into the future.
And it’s wrong. Again, you severely underestimate how much we can know about climate, to the point where you place that limit below what we actually do know about climate. You can have your doubts as much as you want, it doesn’t change what we know. The system is chaotic and noisy, but even a slot machine will establish a long-term trend.
Well, a very extensive record of numerous factors known to be important stretching back far into the past, including numerous times to when there were more wolves, less wolves, and no wolves… We’d probably be able to make a pretty decent guess. Now, obviously we couldn’t predict it perfectly, and if somehow all of our backtracing and examination missed a crucial factor (say, regular alien abductions) then we would of course end up with the wrong results. But we can make a pretty damn good educated guess. And all these claims of “we can’t possibly know X” just ring hollow, especially when we’re debating whether to release these wolves and in the past, doing so led to a complete collapse of the ecosystem and a mass extinction. It’s nothing but pointless FUD, which is basically what this paperback of a post comes down to. “We can’t know X”. We’ve got a pretty good idea of X, thank
It’s also worth noting that of the papers that did predict global cooling, they did so on the basis of Aerosols - that is, reflecting particles in the atmosphere that generally don’t stick around very long. What happened to Aerosol concentrations between the 70s and today? They dropped like a rock. So basically, they weren’t wrong because their models were hopelessly flawed in the wrong direction, they were wrong because they overestimated the impact of aerosols, and because they didn’t anticipate that aerosol pollution would basically stop within a few decades.
WHERE are you getting this from? I never said a thing about climategate ‘disparaging progress made with modeling regarding this issue’. I swear, I don’t think you read my messages - you just skim through them looking for keywords or soundbites you can attack.
What I said about the ‘climategate’ emails was that they showed that their software management processes were horrible. And they were. This has nothing to do with the government finding that they didn’t commit scientific misconduct or misrepresent the science - it has nothing to do with that, and the government review had nothing to do with the engineering practices behind the software.
Nonetheless, in software engineering circles those emails made a fairly big splash because they showed that the maintenance and coding of the models was atrocious. And some of us who have done scientific programming before were not surprised b that. Scientists are not software engineers. The scientific software world is full of hacks, badly designed algorithms, etc. Your average research lab can not afford a dedicated team for maintenance quality assurance, yada yada. Normally, who cares? The code is often used to test a hypothesis or calcualate some intermediate variables and such, and is throwaway.
What I saw in those E-mails was consistent with my experience in consulting and working for a time as a scientific programmer. That does not give me the warm fuzzies about those models, but then that’s a long time ago and if all of this is open source now I assume that if there were serious problems in the code we’d be hearing about it.
Really? So I point out that scientists are human and that if bias is affecting research it’s happening on both sides, and to you this amounts to a ‘full denial posture’?
And I never said anything about malfeasance. Jesus. Bias is everywhere, and much of it is unwitting. Why the hell do you think we try to do experiments double-blinded? To defend us against crooked scientists? Or because we understand that scientists are human and bias is insidious?
For instance, I say “scientists on both sides can be biased”, and you read it as, “scientists are committing malfeasance.” I point out a potential issue affecting research in a highly charged and politicized environment, and you see that as a “full denialist posture”.
There is then only one reason why to keep mentioning that item then, and no, I had plenty of experience to know that it is really silly to think that seeding FUD is not the reason.
Bottom line: The many investigations made found no reason to impeach the science, for the simple reason that other researchers also came confirming the conclusions of the examples that you keep in your mind about the alleged malfeasance of the scientists there.
No, in reality it is you who is relying on the say so of others that have no evidence, I rely on the evidence from investigations by scientific organizations and science reporters that took a look and found that you really have a false equivalence there.
The reason why I’m not willing to follow your complaints is that this has been know for several years already, that you are not aware of how biased is the idea that “both scientific sides” do it is appalling.
The point here is that many times I pointed already at experiments done that showed how silly is to throw extreme doubts towards the scientists and their models, that were also subjected to experiments.
Nope, what I’m pointing here is that while I do see many examples about the bias that contrarians toss at the scientists that are the proponents of this, your examples of the bias that the climate scientists have are based on unsupported and misleading information. I see issues like: relying on “climate gate”, tossing irrelevant criticism to climate models, and many other items mentioned by you as boiler plate denialist points because they are and I have seen them many times before. The problem is that you are not aware yet of the levels of chicanery the right wing media and think tanks are doing here.
I find many of quotes regarding Mr. Watt’s speech but no definitive evidence. But that doesn’t make it a myth that the message in the seventies was that the earth was cooling.
It was a myth because the contrarians made it so, if they were sincere they would had told you already, and a long time ago, that only a minority of scientists thought that, most predicted warming even in the face of an apparent slowdown or cooling.
Any similarities with what contrarioans are saying today about the current “pause” is not coincidental.
And even the Wikipedia article you quote has this explanation:
Then as now, it is popular media (today mostly conservative media) the one that is telling you that an ice age is coming.
And as a teachable moment, and sticking to the subject, a big opportunity to falsify this was shown then.
One big reason why contrarians want you to not see what most of the scientists said, that warming was coming even though a pause or some cooling was going on, was that it was a big item that could had falsified a lot of what the scientists reported, the warming that came (and remains in the background) was a very dramatic confirmation of what the majority of scientists predicted back in the 70’s.
