# Leaked IPCC report: 90% confidence in AGW is now 95% -- and sea level will rise! **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 23, 2013, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002 "2013-08-23T20:36:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 21
**Author:** ![doorhinge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a5b964/32.png) [@doorhinge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doorhinge)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/401 "2013-09-25T03:03:36Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > You drastically misunderstand the purpose of the IPCC and the nature of climate science. Scientific knowledge is cumulative over time, especially in a very complex and rapidly advancing field such as climate science, and even the best assessment of the current knowledge of such a field soon becomes out-of-date. The IPCC’s multiple Assessment Reports are updates, not fixes. - THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED - remember that line? lol Have you ever heard that line being repeatedly parroted by a multitude of MMCO2GW zealots? I heard it after the 1st IPCC report, after the 2nd IPCC report, after the 3rd IPCC report, and after the 4th IPCC report. Since the IPCC is still struggling to determine if the “global” temp is increasing and if it’s the oceans that are the possible heat sinks that screwed up the previous IPCC “predictions”. The IPCC certainly doesn’t act like “The Science is Settled”. Hopefully, the new-and-as-of-yet-unvetted IPCC report will clear up any and all questions about global warming, climate change, and the inability of the IPCC to accurately predict the future. ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/402 "2013-09-25T03:12:59Z")
> [@doorhinge](#): > > - THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED - remember that line? lol > > Have you ever heard that line being repeatedly parroted by a multitude of MMCO2GW zealots? I heard it after the 1st IPCC report, after the 2nd IPCC report, after the 3rd IPCC report, and after the 4th IPCC report. Since the IPCC is still struggling to determine if the “global” temp is increasing and if it’s the oceans that are the possible heat sinks that screwed up the previous IPCC “predictions”. The IPCC certainly doesn’t act like “The Science is Settled”. > > Hopefully, the new-and-as-of-yet-unvetted IPCC report will clear up any and all questions about global warming, climate change, and the inability of the IPCC to accurately predict the future. Am I a zealot for believing the vast majority of trained scientists in the field, rather than ignorant people who have no relevant knowledge on the subject? I think the guys who think their _gut instinct_ is better than a decade in college might be the zealots. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/403 "2013-09-25T03:14:09Z")
> [@doorhinge](#): > > - THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED - remember that line? lol I do, do you? In this thread too already? As it was explained many times before, the ones making that affirmation are in reality a straw man from the climate change contrarians to what the scientists are actually saying. > **[RealClimate: Unsettled Science](https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/unsettled-science/)** > > RealClimate: Unusually, I'm in complete agreement with a recent headline on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page: "The Climate Science Isn't Settled" The article below is the same mix of innuendo and misrepresentation that its author normally writes,... > [@](#): > > The phrase “the science is settled” is associated almost 100% with contrarian comments on climate and is usually a paraphrase of what ‘some scientists’ are supposed to have said. The reality is that it depends very much on what you are talking about and I have never heard any scientist say this in any general context – at a recent meeting I was at, someone claimed that this had been said by the participants and he was roundly shouted down by the assembled experts. > > The reason why no scientist has said this is because they know full well that knowledge about science is not binary – science isn’t either settled or not settled. This is a false and misleading dichotomy. Instead, we know things with varying degrees of confidence – for instance, conservation of energy is pretty well accepted, as is the theory of gravity (despite continuing interest in what happens at very small scales or very high energies) , while the exact nature of dark matter is still unclear. The forced binary distinction implicit in the phrase is designed to misleadingly relegate anything about which there is still uncertainty to the category of completely unknown. i.e. that since we don’t know everything, we know nothing. > > In the climate field, there are a number of issues which are no longer subject to fundamental debate in the community. The existence of the greenhouse effect, the increase in CO2 (and other GHGs) over the last hundred years and its human cause, and the fact the planet warmed significantly over the 20th Century are not much in doubt. IPCC described these factors as ‘virtually certain’ or ‘unequivocal’. The attribution of the warming over the last 50 years to human activity is also pretty well established – that is ‘highly likely’ and the anticipation that further warming will continue as CO2 levels continue to rise is a well supported conclusion. To the extent that anyone has said that the scientific debate is over, this is what they are referring to. In answer to colloquial questions like “Is anthropogenic warming real?”, the answer is yes with high confidence. > > But no scientists would be scientists if they thought there was nothing left to find out. Think of the science as a large building, with foundations reaching back to the 19th Century and a whole edifice of knowledge built upon them. The community spends most of its time trying to add a brick here or a brick there and slowly adding to the construction. The idea that the ‘science is settled’ is equivalent to stating that the building is complete and that nothing further can be added. Obviously that is false – new bricks (and windows and decoration and interior designs) are being added and argued about all the time. However, while the science may not be settled, we can still tell what kind of building we have and what the overall picture looks like. Arguments over whether a single brick should be blue or yellow don’t change the building from a skyscraper to a mud hut. > [@doorhinge](#): > > Have you ever heard that line being repeatedly parroted by a multitude of MMCO2GW zealots? I heard it after the 1st IPCC report, after the 2nd IPCC report, after the 3rd IPCC report, and after the 4th IPCC report. Since the IPCC is still struggling to determine if the “global” temp is increasing and if it’s the oceans that are the possible heat sinks that screwed up the previous IPCC “predictions”. The IPCC certainly doesn’t act like “The Science is Settled”. Indeed, that is because the experts that IPCC uses are the scientists, some even from RealClimate. > [@doorhinge](#): > > Hopefully, the new-and-as-of-yet-unvetted IPCC report will clear up any and all questions about global warming, climate change, and the inability of the IPCC to accurately predict the future. And once again, repeating this does not make it accurate, you are still trying to claim that the IPCC is not actually reporting what the scientists are telling us is the best of what those scientists are reporting. ---
**Author:** ![FXMastermind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fxmastermind/32/7289_2.png) [@FXMastermind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FXMastermind)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/404 "2013-09-25T03:32:18Z")
One thing I imagine everyone can agree on, is this. We want accurate and solid evidence, measurements and mechanisms, a real and useful understanding and theory of climate. And how things effect it. What can be done (if any) to change it, the consequences of doing so, and computer models that can predict the future. Nobody rational is against any of that. That has never been the controversy. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 3:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/405 "2013-09-25T03:50:04Z")
Except that the “controversy” on one side is led by McExperts. It is just false equivalency. > **[Search - The Encyclopedia of Earth](https://editors.eol.org/eoearth/wiki/Special:Search)** > [@](#): > > A Closer Look at Climate Change Skepticism > > Debate over climate change is nothing new. Scientists have been arguing about whether greenhouse gases released by human activity might change the climate since the late nineteenth century, when Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first proposed that industrial emissions might cause global warming.1 > > Fueled by partisan bickering, this dispute now is more bellicose than ever. > > Skeptics in the media (typically conservatives) deride global warming as a monumental hoax, while those who believe in the evidence for human-induced climate change (typically liberals) accuse the skeptics of being industry-funded hacks. Meanwhile, efforts to impose cuts on greenhouse gas emissions are failing to get off the ground. Global leaders attending the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009 were unable to negotiate a binding agreement on how to reduce these emissions.2 And despite President Obama’s campaign pledge to make climate change a priority for his administration, bills aimed at transforming U.S. energy policy are stuck in Congress. > > But a closer look reveals that what conservative bloggers, pundits, and politicians say about climate change isn’t reflected by what even the more skeptical scientists actually believe. Indeed, scientist-skeptics no longer deny that global warming is actually happening, according to Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Instead, they have shifted their attention to attribution—meaning what’s causing the warming to occur—and whether mandated cuts in greenhouse gases can ever reverse it or should even try. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/406 "2013-09-25T04:04:41Z")
What we see now is the result of more than 100 years of science, the confidence that is there among the current climate scientists was not the result of armchair research, most is based on empirical evidence. > **[University Corporation for Atmospheric Research | University Corporation for...](https://www.ucar.edu/)** > [@](#): > > Isn’t there still a lot of debate among scientists? > > The scientific method is built on debate among scientists, who test a question, or hypothesis, and then submit their results to the scrutiny of other experts in their field. That scrutiny, known as “peer review,” includes examining the scientists’ data, experiment and/or analysis methods, and findings. > > The spirited debate around remaining uncertainties in climate science is a healthy indicator that the scientific method is alive and well. But the fundamental elements of climate change are not in dispute. To take just a few examples, we understand > > ``` > how greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide trap heat (see FAQ: What is the Greenhouse Effect?) > how much carbon dioxide we have added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution (see FAQ: How much carbon dioxide is already in the atmosphere?) > how observed warming has been affecting plants, animals, the ecosystems they live in, and us, the people who depend on them (see article: Impacts on Natural Systems) > > ``` > > **The questions on this page represent many of those raised by debaters who are not actively engaged in climate research. These questions have been answered here and elsewhere with evidence from research that has been tested by the scientific method.** > > \*\*Science is a human activity, and no human is infallible. Science is also a community activity, and scientists rely on each other to question, challenge, and improve one another’s work. When corrections are made, this is not a sign that the system is broken but rather that it’s working as designed. > \*\* > The science reported by researchers at NCAR and our collaborating institutions around the world is built on decades of investigation and represents the current state of our knowledge on climate change. > > Our understanding of the particulars of climate change continues to evolve, and predictions of specific impacts may be revised upward or downward. However, the majority of climate scientists who specialize in understanding the complex interactions of our atmosphere, Earth, and Sun have concluded that: > > [ul] > [li]Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced (U.S. Global Change Research Program, citing its 2009 report on Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States).[/li] > [li] Changes in the atmosphere, the oceans, and glaciers and ice caps now show unequivocally that the world is warming due to human activities (United Nations, citing the IPCC 2007 report)[/li][/ul] ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/407 "2013-09-26T13:59:28Z")
Two things: -the "great pause"in global warming: from 1998 to the present, warming has stopped-why is this ? In view of the increase in CO2 emissions during this time, this is quite odd. -Why are the oceans only NOW acting as a heat sink? As far as I know, the specific heat of water hasn’t changed-so why is this effect only now included? Yes, the model is very sophisticated…but if it requires more and more additions, it looks more and more like the Tychonic Model of planetary motion. And we know where that ended up. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/408 "2013-09-26T17:51:40Z")
In my opinion, the blame for the current state of the global warming debate is at least equally the fault of the people on the ‘pro’ side. Like many politicized scientific debates (evolution is another good example), the existence of many ‘lay critics’ causes some scientists to harden their positions and claim a certainty that doesn’t exist, out of fear that honesty about what isn’t known will be used as weapons by people who don’t really know what they are talking about. You can see this in evolution debates today. The impression that most lay people get from scientists is that evolution is a problem completely solved, that there are no unknowns or uncertainties regarding genetic mechanisms and evolutionary processes. “The science is settled”. But in fact there are still things we don’t understand about how genes work, whether natural selection fully explains diversity, and all the rest. If genetics and evolution weren’t intertwined with contentious moral and political issues, scientists would be more open and objective about this. The fact is, the only place where the ‘science is settled’ in climate science is in the basic atmospheric chemistry and the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increasing it in the atmosphere should cause an increase of heat trapping in the atmosphere. From there, it starts to get fuzzier. The IPCC admits this: the number of predictions that are ranked as ‘somewhat likely’ or ‘likely’ far outweighs the number of predictions marked as ‘virtually certain’, and those predictions are generally milder and shorter-term. The frustration I have is that many on the pro-AGW side attempt to treat all these claims as equally certain, and furthermore treat the policy responses to them as obvious and beyond dispute. And anyone who disagrees with _any_ of it is labeled a crank and a ‘denier’. That’s because this debate has become more about political tactics than about the science. There is no question that all of this has created a chilling effect that is hurting the science. Science thrives in an open, honest, non-judgmental environment. But when you have a situation where serious scientists are scared to voice contrary positions or editors of journals fear for their jobs if they stray off the ‘consensus’ by publishing a paper that doesn’t fit within the orthodoxy, you have a recipe for bad science. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/409 "2013-09-26T18:09:09Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Two things: > > > [@](#): > > > > -the "great pause"in global warming: from 1998 to the present, warming has stopped-why is this ? In view of the increase in CO2 emissions during this time, this is quite odd. This doesn’t invalidate global warming theory, because the warming signal is small compared to random noise and temperature changes induced by other cycles. There have been other ‘pauses’, including some much longer than this one, during periods of obvious global warming. On the other hand, there have also been periods of warming that are much faster than the overall trend. You can bet that if we were in one of those phases (and we may have just come out of one), AGW activists would not be saying, “Well sure, the Earth is heating up really fast, but it could be just noise.” They’d be claiming that a decade of warming is absolute proof that the AGW theory is correct. That’s because their goal is ultimately political, and not scientific. The science is just a useful tool for achieving the goal. And on the ‘denier’ side, their goal is also political. Neither side really cares that much about the science. If the proper response to global warming was to encourage more Capitalism and get rid of big government, you’d see the two sides flip overnight, with Republicans claiming the science is settled and the big government types becoming the ‘deniers’. > [@](#): > > -Why are the oceans only NOW acting as a heat sink? As far as I know, the specific heat of water hasn’t changed-so why is this effect only now included? I agree with this. It also strikes me as possible data-mining - this effect wasn’t predicted by the models, so finding it after the fact when the models fail is always suspicious. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but that it should be taken with a grain of salt because it wasn’t predicted. It makes you wonder how many other interactions haven’t been discovered, and it makes you wonder if more effort was put into finding effects that would re-validate the models over effects that make the models even more invalid, leading to selection bias. Again, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong - just that good science demands that post-facto ‘discoveries’ that repair broken predictions need to be treated more carefully. > [@](#): > > Yes, the model is very sophisticated…but if it requires more and more additions, it looks more and more like the Tychonic Model of planetary motion. > And we know where that ended up. Our record of being able to build predictive models of complex adaptive systems is incredibly poor - almost nonexistant. And that includes systems that are far more understood than is the climate system. Complex systems have stochastic processes coupled with high sensitivity to initial conditions which makes them very hard to predict. Look at our track record at predicting the future of the economy, another CAS. No one predicted the last recession, and all the predictions of when we’d come out of it were wrong. The best economists routinely fail to predict GDP growth even a couple of years into the future. Hell, they fail to predict quarterly changes. And this is despite there being billions of dollars at stake every day and billions being invested in attempts to model this stuff. And yet, the CAGW crowd is relying on models that combine predictions of what the economy will look like 100 years from now with predictions of how much CO2 that economy will emit, and what the climate response to that will be over the next 100 years. It’s absolutely nutty. So the more serious bodies like the IPCC couch their predictions in error bars so large as to be almost meaningless. The range of predictions the IPCC endorses includes predictions that climate won’t warm any more than would be predicted from the natural climate cycle to predictions that there will be catastrophic heating. That covers all the bases, but isn’t very useful in formulating policy. ---
**Author:** ![Farin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e79b87/32.png) [@Farin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Farin)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/410 "2013-09-26T18:19:29Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > I agree with this. It also strikes me as possible data-mining - this effect wasn’t predicted by the models, so finding it after the fact when the models fail is always suspicious. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but that it should be taken with a grain of salt because it wasn’t predicted. It makes you wonder how many other interactions haven’t been discovered, and it makes you wonder if more effort was put into finding effects that would re-validate the models over effects that make the models even more invalid, leading to selection bias. They began to predict it in the mid 2000s when the stall was getting worrisome. It’s possible that they proved a hypothesis, but I’m dubious that we’ve had a long-enough deep-sea picture to really know. Most of the temperature floats were upgrade into going to the 1750 meter range in mid 2004. Before then, it was spotty to 500 meters and generally to 250-400 meters. Further, the big study about these issues actually mentions in the data and methods texts that they didn’t have good data for the 1750 - 2000, but that the data they did have met with their projections…and they included it anyway. If you have uncertainty about some data, you don’t include it with sane data. That’s crazy talk. ---
**Author:** ![Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aji_de_gallina/32/260_2.png) [@Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aji_de_Gallina)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/411 "2013-09-26T20:44:51Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Two things: > -the "great pause"in global warming: from 1998 to the present, warming has stopped-why is this ? In view of the increase in CO2 emissions during this time, this is quite odd. > -Why are the oceans only NOW acting as a heat sink? As far as I know, the specific heat of water hasn’t changed-so why is this effect only now included? > Yes, the model is very sophisticated…but if it requires more and more additions, it looks more and more like the Tychonic Model of planetary motion. > **And we know where that ended up**. (my bolding) We all get gold noses? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/412 "2013-09-26T21:11:54Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Two things: > -the "great pause"in global warming: from 1998 to the present, warming has stopped-why is this ? In view of the increase in CO2 emissions during this time, this is quite odd. It’s because its a noisy system. Why did you use 1998 as cut point? The answer it that that particular point was at the peak of the[strongest el nino of the 20th century](http://climate.nasa.gov/interactives/warming_world), it was an anomalously high temperature. If instead you looked at 1997 to present or 1999 to present you would see that temperatures are still increasing. Also a single year or even a few years in a row don’t mean anything. For example the Dow Jones is below the high that was observed August 1st. Does this prove that all investors are idiots for thinking that stocks increase in value over time? ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/413 "2013-09-26T21:41:58Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Two things: > -the "great pause"in global warming: from 1998 to the present, warming has stopped-why is this ? In view of the increase in CO2 emissions during this time, this is quite odd. And you are not looking at the cites. **The scientists are not seeing that as odd,** it is the mainstream, and then the denier one that should know better who ignore that it was not expected that the warming was going to be constant, particularly the surface temperature as reported by Latif and others. [http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press\_release/contrarians-misrepresent-mojib-latif-0347.html](http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/contrarians-misrepresent-mojib-latif-0347.html) > [@](#): > > Contrarians Misrepresent Mojib Latif’s Research on Short-Term Climate Variation > > For years, Environment and Public Works committee staff attached to Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and other climate contrarians have been misrepresenting the work of Mojib Latif, a meteorologist and oceanographer at the Leibniz-Institute for Maritime Sciences in Kiel, Germany, despite Latif’s repeated attempts to correct their misinterpretations. > > Sen. Inhofe’s office and others incorrectly state that Latif’s work supports their unscientific belief that global temperatures are decreasing. In fact, Latif and his colleagues are analyzing relatively brief natural temperature variations in specific regions, not long-term global climate change. Their work does not contradict the overwhelming scientific consensus that human-caused emissions are driving up the Earth’s average temperature. > > For example, “Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector,” a May 2008 study by Latif, Noel Keenlyside, and others examines short-term climate patterns in the North Atlantic that affect the United States, Great Britain and other densely populated North Atlantic countries. It found that despite long-term global warming trends, natural variations in ocean cycles may contribute to a cooler climate in North America and Europe over the next decade. The paper, however, did not project North Atlantic temperatures over the next 30 years, as erroneous media accounts have claimed. > > Latif and his colleagues are studying the natural cycles that lead to ups and downs in temperature over a period of a few years at the local and regional level. Accurately predicting such shifts has been a boon to fishing industries and other businesses that are often affected by such short-term climate shifts. In the Pacific, these ocean cycles are known as the “El Niño Southern Oscillation.” Scientists are studying similar ocean cycles in the North Atlantic, which also have significant economic consequences. > > In any case, studies on short-term natural climate variation should not be characterized as having any impact on the broad scientific consensus that the Earth’s average temperature will rise dangerously over time as heat-trapping emissions from burning oil and coal and destroying forests accumulate in the atmosphere. In the same way winter weather in the United States does not tell us much about climate change, regional natural climate variability is just one small part of our global climate. > [@ralph124c](#): > > -Why are the oceans only NOW acting as a heat sink? As far as I know, the specific heat of water hasn’t changed-so why is this effect only now included? > Yes, the model is very sophisticated…but if it requires more and more additions, it looks more and more like the Tychonic Model of planetary motion. > And we know where that ended up. Why is the 70’s always forgotten except for the popular media reports that were wrong regarding an ice age coming then? Oh well, this was also forgotten: > **[Global Warming’s Missing Heat: Look Back In Anger (and considerable disbelief)…](https://skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=2177)** > > Probably the most frustrating argument on climate science in the public discourse is about the hiatus in surface temperature rise, and the failure of the models to predict it. The persistent hyperbole, the seeming logic validated largely by a... > [@](#): > > And then we come to the part so relevant to topical argument: > > > [@](#): > > > > ``` > > “One of the major uncertainties has to do with the transfer of the increased heat into the oceans. It is well known that the oceans are a thermal regulator, warming the air in winter and cooling it in summer. The standard assumption has been that, while heat is transferred rapidly into a relatively thin, well- mixed surface layer of the ocean (averaging about 70 m in depth), the transfer into the deeper waters is so slow that the atmospheric temperature reaches effective equilibrium with the mixed layer in a decade or so…It seems to us quite possible that the capacity of the deeper oceans to absorb heat has been seriously underestimated, especially that of the intermediate waters of the subtropical gyres lying below the mixed layer and above the main thermocline. If this is so, warming will proceed at a slower rate until these intermediate waters are brought to a temperature at which they can no longer absorb heat. > > > > “Our estimates of the rates of vertical exchange of mass between the mixed and intermediate layers and the volumes of water involved give a delay of the order of decades in the time at which thermal equilibrium will be reached. This delay implies that the actual warming at any given time will be appreciably less than that calculated on the assumption that thermal equilibrium is reached quickly. One consequence may be that perceptible temperature changes may not become apparent nearly so soon as has been anticipated. We may not be given a warning until the CO2 loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable. The equilibrium warming will eventually occur; it will merely have been postponed". > > > > ``` > > The capacity for taking up heat is also discussed: > > > [@](#): > > > > ``` > > “…the upper-thermocline reservoir communicates effectively with the mixed layer on time scales of several decades. Therefore, the effective thermal capacity of the ocean for absorbing heat on these time scales is nearly an order of magnitude greater than that of the mixed layer alone”. > > > > ``` > > Damn, that sounds like a lot of heat storage to me. A lot of energy down there with nothing to do. Yet. > > Anyway, it’s a good report addressing topical issues clearly. What it doesn’t address is why the oceans might have started taking up more heat recently, and there’s a good reason for that. > > **It was published in 1979.** > > It’s the Charney Report; “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment”, drawn up by a National Research Council study group led by Jule Charney, at the behest of the US National Academy of Sciences. They also took advice from experts in the field, James Hansen and Richard Lindzen among them. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/414 "2013-09-26T22:09:04Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > . . . You can bet that if we were in one of those phases (and we may have just come out of one), AGW activists would not be saying, “Well sure, the Earth is heating up really fast, but it could be just noise.” They’d be claiming that a decade of warming is absolute proof that the AGW theory is correct. . . . Basing an argument on a contrafactual hypothetical is a variant of the straw man attack. It is logically invalid. You don’t know, in fact, what they would say. They might say what you predict…or they might not. In any case, even if some did, others would certainly step up to correct them. That’s the strongest part of the scientific method: scientists gain status by exposing error…even among their closest allies. Our own **GIGObuster** has never been slow to point out errors among claims that have been too strong or not properly founded in evidence. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/415 "2013-09-26T22:24:19Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > In my opinion, the blame for the current state of the global warming debate is at least equally the fault of the people on the ‘pro’ side. Like many politicized scientific debates (evolution is another good example), the existence of many ‘lay critics’ causes some scientists to harden their positions and claim a certainty that doesn’t exist, out of fear that honesty about what isn’t known will be used as weapons by people who don’t really know what they are talking about. As the examples of how contrarians treat people like Latif (the expert) and Gore (the lay proponent) shows, the current political environment is to prevent the discussion of even more dire possible outcomes. [http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/09/2577331/naomi-klein-denialism/](http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/09/2577331/naomi-klein-denialism/) The certainty does exist, what you miss here Sam is that it is never enough for the contrarians and they are driving the politics in the USA and other locations. > [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > You can see this in evolution debates today. The impression that most lay people get from scientists is that evolution is a problem completely solved, that there are no unknowns or uncertainties regarding genetic mechanisms and evolutionary processes. “The science is settled”. But in fact there are still things we don’t understand about how genes work, whether natural selection fully explains diversity, and all the rest. If genetics and evolution weren’t intertwined with contentious moral and political issues, scientists would be more open and objective about this. As pointed before the “science is settled” is mostly a straw man that contrarians apply **even to the scientists** , what I see so far is mostly a false equivalence going here. > **[What is this "settled science" of which you speak? | ScienceBlogs](https://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2010/02/17/what-is-this-settled-science-o)** > > In the past couple of days a pernicious little meme has appeared in two leading North American newspapers. I refer to the notion that there is such a thing as "settled science." First, on a column about climatology Monday the Globe and Mail's... > [@](#): > > More troubling, though, is the fact that both writers just don’t seem to get the nature of the scientific process. Science is never completely “settled.” Of course, much our understanding of the way the universe works has long been nailed down to the point where there’s little to no controversy among scientists. But even on the most fundamental matters generally taught to students as an established fact, there are always scientists poking around the edges, looking for flaws in the ointment. Nothing is ever settled. Indeed, almost every scientist makes his or her living challenging what others have already agreed. > > Read through the archives of magazines like New Scientist, for example, and you’ll find plenty of features investigating such things as modified Newtonian dynamics (maybe F doesn’t always equal ma), or theories that suggest the speed of light might actually change over time, or that Darwinian natural selection might be in need of some rethinking. Papers are being written every day that remind us that our understanding of nature is an evolving and neverending process. We’re forever refining and reforming our model of reality. Anyone who suggests that the science is “settled” is missing the point. > > So if ever there was a straw man in climatology circles, it would be that the science of anthropogenic global warming is “settled.” It isn’t and never will be. > > That doesn’t mean that there isn’t widespread agreement on the basics as currently understood. We’ve known since the early 19th century that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. We’ve known since the middle of the 19th century that CO2 could be warming the planet. The first estimates of how much warmer a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels would make the planet are more than a hundred years old (and surprisingly similar to current calculations). > > The precise details of the physics and chemistry are always changing, of course, as technology and techniques and theories improve. But we don’t wait for the science to be settled before taking action based on scientific understanding, because that would mean never doing anything. If the Wall Street Journal and Margaret Wente believe otherwise, perhaps they should restrain their pontificating to less serious subjects. > [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > The fact is, the only place where the ‘science is settled’ in climate science is in the basic atmospheric chemistry and the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increasing it in the atmosphere should cause an increase of heat trapping in the atmosphere. From there, it starts to get fuzzier. The IPCC admits this: the number of predictions that are ranked as ‘somewhat likely’ or ‘likely’ far outweighs the number of predictions marked as ‘virtually certain’, and those predictions are generally milder and shorter-term. > > The frustration I have is that many on the pro-AGW side attempt to treat all these claims as equally certain, and furthermore treat the policy responses to them as obvious and beyond dispute. And anyone who disagrees with _any_ of it is labeled a crank and a ‘denier’. That’s because this debate has become more about political tactics than about the science. > > There is no question that all of this has created a chilling effect that is hurting the science. Science thrives in an open, honest, non-judgmental environment. But when you have a situation where serious scientists are scared to voice contrary positions or editors of journals fear for their jobs if they stray off the ‘consensus’ by publishing a paper that doesn’t fit within the orthodoxy, you have a recipe for bad science. Nah, what you are doing is mostly blaming the victim, once gain, this is only possible when you assume a false equivalency that is not there, the ones that are making the discussion go for more conservative predictions (and it does not matter, even those conservative predictions are deemed alarmist by many contrarians) are indeed using underhanded political moves to keep the discussion off the view of the public and limited to only the conservative estimates. [http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/09/2577331/naomi-klein-denialism/](http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/09/2577331/naomi-klein-denialism/) > [@](#): > > Naomi Klein has given an extended interview trashing the environmental movement, “Naomi Klein: Green groups may be more damaging than climate change deniers.” As I will show, she is not just wrong, she is profoundly wrong. Her revisionist history is wrong, too, and contradicted by her policy prescriptions. > > Her interview with Jason Mark, published in Salon, is filled with contrarian “media bait” statements devoid of substance, like this: > > > [@](#): > > > > ``` > > Well, I think there is a very deep denialism in the environmental movement among the Big Green groups. And to be very honest with you, I think it’s been more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we’ve lost. > > > > ``` > > This is one of those blame-the-victim statements that is the exact opposite of the truth — it is literally a counter-factual. > > Seriously, who is more to blame? The people who put this issue on the national agenda in the first place by persisting for decades against a largely indifferent political elite and media — and who have tried to rally action, however non-optimally? Or the people who have spread lies, funded disinformation campaigns, poisoned the public dialogue, and blocked even the most modest action? ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/416 "2013-09-26T22:27:49Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > I agree with this. It also strikes me as possible data-mining - this effect wasn’t predicted by the models, so finding it after the fact when the models fail is always suspicious. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but that it should be taken with a grain of salt because it wasn’t predicted. It makes you wonder how many other interactions haven’t been discovered, and it makes you wonder if more effort was put into finding effects that would re-validate the models over effects that make the models even more invalid, leading to selection bias. > > Again, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong - just that good science demands that post-facto ‘discoveries’ that repair broken predictions need to be treated more carefully. Again, read post #413 the accusation of data mining is not a valid one. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/417 "2013-09-26T23:30:28Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Basing an argument on a contrafactual hypothetical is a variant of the straw man attack. It is logically invalid. You don’t know, in fact, what they would say. > > They might say what you predict…or they might not. In any case, even if some did, others would certainly step up to correct them. That’s the strongest part of the scientific method: scientists gain status by exposing error…even among their closest allies. Our own **GIGObuster** has never been slow to point out errors among claims that have been too strong or not properly founded in evidence. That’s a reasonable point. But the fact remains that when you look at who is on the side of ‘science’ here, it’s almost wholly the people who believe the science is pushing for policy changes that they already wanted long before they heard of global warming. Taxing energy, redistributing wealth, more government control of industry and behavior, more power to extranational organizations, etc. And the people opposed are generally made up of people who are opposed to those types of regulations and institutions. The science itself is caught in the middle of a larger political battle. That’s the point I was really trying to make. However, this doesn’t say anything at all about whether or not the science is correct - just about the nature of the debate around it. The only contention I’d make is that such a large amount of politicization of the subject raises the stakes for all concerned, and that can put pressure on good science - on both sides of the debate. If a scientist makes a claim that contradicts the AGW orthodoxy, he can expect to be pilloried in the press and pressure put on him and his institution to recant or risk standing and financing. On the other hand, if a scientist studying a subject can somehow link it to global warming, that person may get more press, more funding, and accolades from the community. Any time science has pressures on it that threaten objectivity, we have to be very careful. It doesn’t even have to be overt bias or dishonesty. It can simply be pressure that causes some conclusions to be re-checked over again and only published if they are rock solid, while other conclusions may get less scrutiny because they fit within the orthodoxy. That creates a certain amount of publication bias that can skew our perception of the ‘consensus’. This isn’t a new problem - it’s happened many times in the past, in many different fields. Plate tectonics, meteor extinction hypotheses, and other heterodox theories have found themselves facing a false ‘consensus’ simply because other scientists don’t want to enter the fray with the information they have. Then once a threshold if respectability is reached suddenly there is a flood of new papers reinforcing the new theory. This is especially likely to happen in areas that are receiving a lot of outside pressure due to politics, money, religion, etc. Again, I’m not accusing anyone of anything, or suggesting the science is wrong. I’m suggesting that a higher level of skepticism regarding the overall consensus may be warranted. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/418 "2013-09-26T23:43:33Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > As the examples of how contrarians treat people like Latif (the expert) and Gore (the lay proponent) shows, the current political environment is to prevent the discussion of even more dire possible outcomes. > > [http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/09/2577331/naomi-klein-denialism/](http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/09/2577331/naomi-klein-denialism/) > > The certainty does exist, what you miss here Sam is that it is never enough for the contrarians and they are driving the politics in the USA and other locations. So now we’re quoting ThinkProgress instead of the IPCC? And I note that the chart in that link suggests that the IPCC is now considered conservative as compared to ‘most informed opinion’? I can remember a time when you cited the IPCC as the unimpeachable source of information. Now that they’re backing off the more extreme predictions and their median models don’t look so scary, they’ve become passe’. I wonder how long it will be before they become tools of the right wing? Maybe you can find a Koch brothers influence in there somewhere. And I find the notion that we can stabilize CO2 at 350ppm for .12% of GDP growth to be laughable, since we haven’t even figured out what a workable framework for CO2 reduction would look like, and we can’t get the worst offenders to even come to the table for negotiations. And the notion that global macroeconomics can be predicted with that kind of accuracy is laughable. Get back to me when macroeconomists can predict the effect of policy changes in a single country within 1-2% of GDP. > [@](#): > > As pointed before the “science is settled” is mostly a straw man that contrarians apply **even to the scientists** , what I see so far is mostly a false equivalence going here. I’m not talking about the scientists, but about the presentation of their material to the public. For example, in the past the IPCC’s ‘guidelines for policy makers’ made claims that weren’t supported by the science in their own report. The actual scientists are more careful. The bureaucrats with an agenda - not so much. > [@](#): > > Nah, what you are doing is mostly blaming the victim, once gain, this is only possible when you assume a false equivalency that is not there, the ones that are making the discussion go for more conservative predictions (and it does not matter, even those conservative predictions are deemed alarmist by many contrarians) are indeed using underhanded political moves to keep the discussion off the view of the public and limited to only the conservative estimates. So you’re agreeing with me that politicization of the debate is affecting the science? Just disagreeing on which direction it’s being pushed? ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/419 "2013-09-26T23:47:13Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > Again, read post #413 the accusation of data mining is not a valid one. The ocean heating hypothesis is just that: A _hypothesis_. Scientists are still looking for the data to confirm it. And even if it’s been around a long time, that doesn’t preclude the possibility that it was seized upon as an explanation while other explanations that do not conform to the warming theory are ignored, or at least that not as much effort is being put into finding them. Selection bias and publication bias are real things, and they happen all the time. They’re also insidious and good scientists can fall prey to it. I’m not saying that’s what’s happened in this case, but that the conditions around the debate are such that the risk is high so we have to be careful. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002/420 "2013-09-26T23:47:27Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > That’s a reasonable point. But the fact remains that when you look at who is on the side of ‘science’ here, it’s almost wholly the people who believe the science is pushing for policy changes that they already wanted long before they heard of global warming. Taxing energy, redistributing wealth, more government control of industry and behavior, more power to extranational organizations, etc. And the people opposed are generally made up of people who are opposed to those types of regulations and institutions. The science itself is caught in the middle of a larger political battle. That’s the point I was really trying to make. > > However, this doesn’t say anything at all about whether or not the science is correct - just about the nature of the debate around it. The only contention I’d make is that such a large amount of politicization of the subject raises the stakes for all concerned, and that can put pressure on good science - on both sides of the debate. If a scientist makes a claim that contradicts the AGW orthodoxy, he can expect to be pilloried in the press and pressure put on him and his institution to recant or risk standing and financing. On the other hand, if a scientist studying a subject can somehow link it to global warming, that person may get more press, more funding, and accolades from the community. Any time science has pressures on it that threaten objectivity, we have to be very careful. > > It doesn’t even have to be overt bias or dishonesty. It can simply be pressure that causes some conclusions to be re-checked over again and only published if they are rock solid, while other conclusions may get less scrutiny because they fit within the orthodoxy. > > That creates a certain amount of publication bias that can skew our perception of the ‘consensus’. This isn’t a new problem - it’s happened many times in the past, in many different fields. Plate tectonics, meteor extinction hypotheses, and other heterodox theories have found themselves facing a false ‘consensus’ simply because other scientists don’t want to enter the fray with the information they have. Then once a threshold if respectability is reached suddenly there is a flood of new papers reinforcing the new theory. This is especially likely to happen in areas that are receiving a lot of outside pressure due to politics, money, religion, etc. > > Again, I’m not accusing anyone of anything, or suggesting the science is wrong. I’m suggesting that a higher level of skepticism regarding the overall consensus may be warranted. Suuuure. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002.md?page=20) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leaked-ipcc-report-90-confidence-in-agw-is-now-95-and-sea-level-will-rise/667002.md?page=22)