Further to my earlier post on the “global cooling” myth, while looking for that early National Academy report I came across this other interesting review of the early scientific history. It notes that a cross-section of papers between 1965 and 1979 were – to the extent that it was possible to try to make predictions at all – either predicting warming (62%) or had no position (28%), and 10% hypothesized that the planet might be cooling. Today, more than 35 years of increasingly intensive research later, many of the major uncertainties have been dramatically whittled away, and there is virtually no doubt that GHGs from human activities are the dominant driver of rapid planetary warming, and that CO2 levels have risen with abrupt suddenness about 115-120 ppm higher (40% higher) than they have ever been in any interglacial in at least 1.2 million years, and most probably in 15 million years.
Interestingly, a well-known National Academy report from 1979 (the “Charney Report”) made this prediction:
That was extraordinarily perspicacious, as today’s most sophisticated climate models and observational constraints place this equilibrium at between 1.5 and 4.5°C, and the accelerated and destructive warming and ice loss in the Arctic is one of the most dramatic and visible consequences of anthropogenic climate change.
Other than that, the main points I wanted to make about this were in the previous post.
I’m trying to figure out why we’re discussing this here. It seems to be something like this: “somebody made a prediction about something once, and it didn’t turn out right. Therefore, no global warming!”
I appreciate that, but don’t go to a lot of work. That post had a lot of rhetorical questions in it that I think we both know the answer to, such as why CO2 levels come back down after rising above equilibrium and all that kind of stuff. I was more riffing on the notion that there are no negative feedbacks at all. Of course there are, and you and I both know it. That doesn’t mean they predominate. For that matter, we both know that it’s not as simple as figuring out whether there are more positive feedbacks or negative. It’s likely that certain feedbacks dominate during different time frames. The overall feedback may well be negative, but that might be on a time scale of hundreds to thousands of years and the short term feedbacks that actually matter to us could still be very positive. The system could oscillate between states, it could have hysteresis built into different responses, yada yada.
Again, I’m not arguing that there’s nothing to worry about, and I’m not arguing that the Earth will just counteract whatever we do. My argument is basically that we are uncertain, because complex systems don’t behave in straightforward ways. But that uncertainty could mean the result will be even worse than we think. When systems are evolved rather than designed, the mechanisms that make them work can be bizarre and almost inscrutable.
Ants build structurally sound and complex bridges with their own bodies, and build rafts out of their bodies to save colonies from flooding. None of this is designed - it’s just evolved behavior driven by simple rules. It’s an almost alien way of solving problems. Other complex systems have other complex mechanisms that can be harder to see. Complexity theorists are currently thinking of complex systems as calculating machines. Like universally programmable cellular automata connected together in giant networks. It’s a radically new way of thinking about the world.
See my other examples about the collapse of birth rates or the totally different response to radiation seen in Chernobyl as opposed to the aftermath of Hiroshima. Scientists still can’t figure out whether low doses of radiation are bad for us, because every time we try to measure the result of that exposure we get a different answer.
Something that I would find interesting is whether we have studies which show how much warming might be generated by a reduction in particulate matter in the atmosphere due to environmental cleanup efforts? We did an awful lot over the past 30 years to clean up industry and I believe global pollution levels have been reduced dramatically. I seem to recall that part of the global cooling scare was due to our pollution.
This is a serious question, and not an attempt to ‘blame’ global warming on something else. I’m just wondering if this has been looked at as a factor. Also, we reduced our CFC emissions dramatically, and I assume that would have had the opposite effect, since CFC’s are a strong greenhouse gas. Has that been factored in as well? Or is the effect too small to be measurable?
The common thread is that these were specifically predictions about the behavior of complex systems. I’m not sure how much you know about them, but ‘complex’ is not the same as ‘complicated’ or ‘difficult to understand’. Complex systems are made up of networks of interrelated nodes that all affect each other in some way. An ecosystem, the climate, human society, economies, a brain, ant hills… these are complex systems. Whereas a Space Shuttle is not - it’s merely complicated. The software inside one might be, though.
What we’ve been learning is that the traditional tools of science - reductionism, experimentation, learning from past behavior, building models, etc work great when analyzing simple interactions and simple machines and processes. But complex systems are far more than the sum of their parts, and they can’t be analyzed through reductionism. The system is something that exists as a set of emergent properties from all the interactions.
Ants have simple rules. Nothing about studying an individual ant would lead you to believe that it might know how to build a bridge or maintain a precise incubation temperature inside an anthill. You can study it down to the cellular level and you’ll never see that. Only by observing the entire system do those behaviors emerge. And just when you think you understand the cause, you find out that there are many. Or that making a change just causes a reorganization that achieves the same thing through another mechanism.
I brought up the failure of predictions at Chernobyl and the failure of the predictions of the population explosion because they were both attempts to look at past behaviors and then build models to predict the future state of the system.
Population is probably the better example, because we didn’t really think there was a big mystery. Sociologists thought they had a good handle on why people have more or fewer children. They built models to predict global populations. The U.N. population council issued reports like the IPCC does, showing the results of those models. And every new report had to re-adjust the numbers downwards because the birth rates weren’t matching what was predicted. The causal relationships seemed fairly straightforward. That is, until the collapse in global birthrates caught everyone napping.
Yes. Your explicit declaration that NONE of the predicted cancers have been found.
I agree with your general point that there are systems that are too complex to permit extended predictions. I recall that very many prognosticators claimed that overpopulation was going to claim the world in our lifetimes. However, I also recall that that “very many” never amounted to a general consensus such as we see with AGW or ACC. (You pointed to Paul Ehrlich as someone who played Chicken Little, but just as with “global cooling,” it was a hyperactive media, not scientists, who spread his message. Scientists such as Julian Simon disagreed with him to the point of provoking a public wager on the topic.)
You appeared to get caught up in your own rhetoric and I thought you might want to temper your claim of “none.”
It seems to me like the men of the church telling Galileo not to point the telescope up there. It is not likely that Galileo said “and yet it moves” but the modern ones like Plass, Hansen, Schenieder, Gavin Schmidt and all the ones that got results before with the help of models in the cases of acid rain and CFC’s tells me that, sure it is complex, ‘and yet they still work’ when taking the limitations into account.
As I pointed before, this is at the level of carpenter ants on a barn, I would not listen to the ones that tell you that the barn ‘will be safe since no one knows where the ants will go’, many experts on the matter can give an estimate of what will happen if nothing is done to control them.
OK, this is my promised catch-up post to the unanswered points still outstanding. Maybe going forward we can do this one point at a time and keep the discussion to bite-size pieces.
Yes, they’re rhetorical questions, and obviously negative feedbacks that limit global warming exist, or earth would be hotter than Venus. The point that I’m making is that all our observations of the paleoclimate and modeling studies all point to the fact that no such significant negative feedbacks appear in any timeframe that is meaningful to this debate and to climate policy discussions. The basic scenario is that natural feedbacks limiting global warming are slow feedbacks that occur on geological timescales, and we see these in the roughly 100Ky glaciation cycles. Indeed all such natural cycles operate on geologic timescales, and the cooling feedbacks that bring about ice ages are even slower than the warming feedbacks that end them. The latter tend to run around ten thousand years, and the former several tens of thousands, sustained by the rise and fall of atmospheric CO2 between a low of about 180 ppm to a high of about 280-300 ppm, a difference of maximally 100-120 ppm.
But we have increased CO2 a further 115 ppm above that maximum since industrialization, and we’ve done this in the barely 100 years in which the majority of it was emitted. This is net new CO2, not part of the carbon cycle of the geologically modern era, but sequestered carbon from very ancient climates. This is the magnitude of the problem. Of course there are countless internal variations that influence the climate regionally or cyclically for short timeframes, but they don’t change the earth’s net energy balance, so while they’re important for modeling climate behavior they don’t change the long-term outlook from CO2 forcing.
The magnitude of CO2 forcing independent of feedbacks is a piece of data, a mathematical factor, not something that operates in isolation in the real world. There are many of them – the IPCC summarized all the individual positive and negative forcings in comparitive bar charts – this is one of them. In the real world, all these different forcings and the associated feedbacks operate together.
But what you did was take the isolated CO2 forcing without any of the intrinsic feedbacks and then extrapolated actual real-world temperature increases on that basis, stating (completely incorrectly) that “If we’re at 400ppm today, and increased it to 800ppm, we’d see a 1 degree increase in temperature” then going on to say (completely incorrectly) that “to get another 1 degree of increase we’d have to go to 1600ppm” and finally concluding that “if we restrict ourselves to the ‘consensus’, we’d never get to 3 degrees of increase. And we’d have to increase CO2 to over 1000 ppm before we even got to the point where it was a net negative to the global economy”.
There is no “consensus” that CO2 ever operates without feedbacks; there is a consensus on what the probable range of those feedbacks is, and it’s certainly not “1”. So regardless of your claim that you “didn’t calculate” anything, your conclusion is based on false premises and is just plain flat-out totally and completely wrong; as I pointed out, there is little doubt that CO2 levels anywhere even close to 800 ppm would result in widespread climate catastrophe.
Yes, I’m aware of what “complex system” means in system theory, and I’m also aware that this appeal to system theory as a debating tactic against climate change findings is often heard from those with a technical background who lack perspective on the strength and diversity of the body of evidence on which those findings are based.
The short answer to that criticism is that any such systems can have specific constraints associated with general categories of behavior, and to the extent that those constraints are meaningful and bounded we can say that we “understand” those systems in particular domains and can reasonably predict their responses to particular inputs. To say whether we have such an understanding or not we need to get into the specifics of what we’re trying to predict and with what level of probability and accuracy, otherwise it’s just blowing hot air and presenting an argument that is both pointless and not ever subject to refutation, because you can always argue that any given level of knowledge or evidence is “not enough” – which is exactly the arguments we get from climate skeptics.
Let’s take your example of the predictions of radiation-induced illnesses from Chernobyl, which may involve ecosystem behavior but has a lot to do with the human body itself – as you said earlier, “The prediction of leukemia deaths was one of the ones that turned out to be wrong and to not match our previous evidence.”
The human body is a complex system that contains within it many different complex adaptive systems in their own right, and the field of medicine has to deal with all of it, with varying levels of success. The field of pharmaceutical research would certainly be the first to agree with your complexity theory; it’s not only almost impossible to accurately predict the effects of a new drug, it’s actually frustratingly difficult to empirically verify them. For instance there’s a metric called the Kaplan-Meier curve which is supposed to show the relative therapeutic benefits of a cancer drug over a control. This curve can not only show inconsistent results in different studies, but worse, after some years it can suddenly reverse itself, whereby the efficacy of certain drugs suddenly seems to vanish. This effect is so perplexing that Harvard recently created an program in pharmaceutical studies just to study it. It’s called “Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter”, and its director, Ted Kaptchuck, has been quoted as asking the rhetorical question, “Do you think this entire field [of pharmaceutical research] is based on a foundation of magical thinking?”
I point this out to illustrate the fact that despite such problems arising from complex system behavior, no one could reasonably argue that modern drugs are useless, or that modern medicine doesn’t know what it’s doing. Your doctor can confidently tell you that if you eat too much and take in more calories than you metabolize and don’t exercise enough, you’ll get flabby and overweight (which is coincidentally rather analogous to the energy balance of the climate system). In other words, we have a sufficient level of understanding within certain constraints and behavioral domains that we can make useful predictions despite the complex nature of the system in question and our imperfect understanding of it. In climate assessments like those of the IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Climate Assessment, such predictions are commensurate with the body of cited supporting evidence and qualified by levels of uncertainty as appropriate. They are a statement of our current state of knowledge, no more and – most importantly – no less. To dismiss them on the basis of vague generic notions of complexity theory is baseless and foolish.
It’s generally acknowledged that anthropogenic aerosols like sulfates were a significant contributor to the relative flatlining of the climate between the 1940s and the 70s. But looking at it as pollution cleanup “causing” the warming is a bit backwards; we removed a factor that was temporarily damping the warming from CO2 accumulation, but whose impact would have been limited anyway and which was causing serious side effects like acid rain.
It absolutely has been factored in; not too small to be measurable, but small (see the above-linked forcings chart, and for more details, section 2.2.1.2 in the IPCC AR5 WG1, Ozone Depleting Substances (CFCs, Chlorinated solvents, and HCFCs). Due to CFC restrictions, its GHG contribution is now less than that of nitrous oxide.
IMHO the pressure was just to tell a scientist the king of organization he was joining and he realized that he was making a mistake. I guess some scientists have more backbone than Pielke or Judith Curry. The Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank is to climate science as Answers in Genesis is to a biologist. (Some contrarians like Roy Spencer do not mind giving their support to both groups or think tanks.)
Here is the take from Greg Laden at Science Blogs:
Not sure about FXMastermind on this one either, there are threads out there about this issue in many denialist sites like WUWT and others, but the name of the scientist and The Global Warming Policy Foundation only shows in this thread and I did several searches in Google and here.
That last link from FX links to WUWT and Climate Gate… again.
This was posted early here too:
The fact that WUWT continues to harp on a debunked talking point is enough to dismiss them, as it is the fact that their reason for being: the attempt at discrediting the data from surface stations in the USA; came up empty and was discredited by Muller and the Berkeley team. Until I see a retraction of that and this latest dumb talking point, I will put them in the discredited sources column.
That misses both the point, as well as the facts about global warming. Global warming currently means “human caused global warming” (AGW), which is not the same thing as all the other global warmings we know have happened, and can happen. The main difference being AGW is claimed to be an never ending increase due to CO2 rising, so that the warming will be un-natural. See here for long science based informative post.
It has happened many times in many places. From the previous great debate-
The link no longer works, but the pdf is available through the wayback machine I’ve never seen this document before, but it seems Vincent Gray was actually an expert who worked on the IPCC reports, from the start. An actual authority, with access to all the materials.
He makes a key point =
It’s a valid an interesting point, to ask if the global warming claims are actually scientific at all. Even a regular person suspects something fishy when they hear the exact same person change their story, their claims, based on how the weather has changed, in essence, whichever way the wind blows.
Now, just 5 years later, after the first two shockingly cold winters, the warming suddenly might be causing it to be colder.
At which point your thinking person might start to wonder. Warming is thought to cause the vortex to be stronger, making it warmer, because the the cold air is bottled up. But then one might wonder, how the exact opposite can be true?
Now warming causes the vortex to “break down”, letting the cold air out, making it colder.
But when it was warm in winter we heard:
I know, I know tl;dr
Who can blame anyone for not reading? Much less following the links and reading everything? It’s a lot of effort.
So is the effect of warming on the polar vortex a scientific thing? Can anything about this be shown to be actually observable? Was any of it predicted? Does global warming theory predict cold as fuck winters? Of course not.
Certainly the IPCC and all the people warning us about the terrible warming haven’t been warning us about colder winters, with a shit ton more snow. The dire predictions about global warming haven’t been “warming will cause it to snow a fuckton more, the winters will start earlier, last longer, and be way fucking colder”. There ain’t nobody who has been alive and aware for the last thirty years who will believe that line of complete horseshit.
Of course this hasn’t stopped the very same people who proclaimed “the warm winters, with little snow, were sure signs of global warming”, from now saying “global warming is causing the extreme winters, and it may be what we will be seeing, because of global warming”.
Is this science? Well, that’s the cold irony. In one sense, it is. It’s the science of global warming.
Is it science that we think of when we think of actual science? Fuck no. Predicting something after it has happened isn’t science. A theory that can claim colder winters and warmer winters are both caused by global warming, that’s a goddamn joke.
But wait, there’s more.
In the Antarctic, after it’s become impossible to keep saying it’s warming there, because the goddamn sea ice just keeps growing, and is lasting longer each year (some places two and half months longer), the new explanation is that global warming has made it colder.
And there are actually multiple reasons claimed for it. There’s the warmer water reason.
And there is the stronger winds reason.
I advise reading all the linked articles, as it’s not simple.
In a very simple explanation, the LOSS of ozone makes it colder, which makes the winds stronger, which makes Antarctica colder, with more sea ice. The polar vortex around the south pole is stronger, because it’s colder, which keeps the cold in, and the warm out. Of course it’s because of greenhouse gases, or global warming.
But wait, there’s more!
Confused yet?
If you aren’t wondering “what the fuck?”, you probably aren’t paying attention.
Of course if you are actually still reading this far down into the wall of text you are either vastly interested in this shit, or have another reason.
How is this related to the topic at hand?
Global warming theory predicted extreme warming at the poles. At the north pole, warming either makes the polar vortex stronger, keeping the cold air up north and making winters warmer, with less snow. Or global warming makes the vortex break down and makes winters colder, with more snow.
At the south pole, global warming is making it colder, because the warming makes the winds stronger, which makes it colder, Or the ozone hole makes it colder, which makes the winds stronger which makes it colder. Except that it’s warmer, because the ice is melting faster. So it’s actually warming up, even when it’s colder.
How can anyone argue with that sort of science?
You simply can’t falsify global warming. No matter what happens, it’s global warming. The obvious point is raised that if the entire global temperatures go down instead of up, that would falsify global warming. Or if it just doesn’t get warmer if course.
Not so. There has been no warming for over 17 years now. And in fact, NH winters have become much colder. So much that it brings the global mean down, in effect cancelling the warming in the summer months. (this is all explained in a different topic)
But that doesn’t mean global warming isn’t happening either. The oceans are still warming. And that is global warming.
Even if the winters become much colder, and the ice caps grow from the extreme snow, an ice free arctic year round becomes a reality, leading to unexpected and unbelievable winter snowfall, that is also global warming.
Even if the glaciers start advancing and the winters produce so much snow it doesn’t melt in the summer, and the northern climate becomes colder, that is also global warming.
You can’t falsify global warming. It’s like evolution or gravity. Sure some unscientific person might argue that if it’s getting colder it can’t be warming, but remember what we learned about Antarctica. Global warming can make it colder. It can even cause an real ice age to begin. In fact, based on the history and evidence we have from past ice ages, a warm planet always precedes an ice age.
So for many reasons, it’s impossible to falsify global warming. No wonder any scientists or researcher who dares challenge global warming finds themselves in the same boat as a holocaust denier, a flat earth believer, or a paid shill for fossil fuel companies.
Nobody could question the science based on the science.
Clearly the effort ion that post was to confuse, it is clear that the only way FX has made the IPCC declare their efforts unfalsifiable comes from what one contrarian is claiming.
I’m afraid to ask so I will not, looks like even that is not science for this fellow.
This is even funnier in light of the latest reports, while the ice is increasing in Antarctica it is inland, and not enough to counteract the loss of ice that is taking place in the north, but what the reports are telling us is that the Antarctic ice shelf can not ignore the warming of the ocean that is around it and it is bound to collapse in some areas and accelerate the ocean rise. Hence the latest reports that show that the ones telling us that no problem was coming to be the ones that never learn and the advise they are giving is just to ensure that all coastal cities will eventually be lost. (And all the cropland at that level)
The relevant part on this is to simple analyze what the new reports are telling us and falsify them simply by showing that the ice shelf in the Antarctic will not fall and that global warming caused by the release of human made greenhouse gases is not the reason.
And here it is clear that FX ignores history, the Galileos of climate science were poopooed in the past like Calendar, but then he and others brought more evidence to demonstrate that human made greenhouse gases were accumulating and nature was not getting all. Hence the current warming.
Nah, in reality you are the one that is confused, or you are also claiming that Darwin and Newton can not be falsified too.
A large number of Paleontologists will be bemused to learn their discipline is not a science.
Meanwhile, even I know enough physics to comprehend how both colder winters and warmer summers can be a consequence of overall global warming. Hint: there is another hemisphere. Even though Minneapolis is having a cold winter…remember that Adelaide is having a very hot summer at the same time.
What part of “average” don’t you understand?
Global warming means a larger amount of energy passing through the atmosphere. This energy can drive temperature and pressure in both directions.
The whole thing might be wrong: that’s the nature of science. It is falsifiable. Some earlier ideas have, in fact, been falsified, and discarded.
(Newtonian gravity was falsified; Einstein shows it to be inadequate. Some of Darwin’s ideas have also been shown wrong, although only in fairly minor details. Darwin’s basic theory still stands up pretty well today. It, too, is falsifiable: there are several conceivable observations that would explode evolution. True, no one expects those observations, but they are conceivable and would do the job.)
GIGObuster does a very good job of demolishing your nonsensical claims at an expert level, but even I, no better than an undergraduate student (and a mathematics student, at that) can see how incredibly flawed your arguments are.
