Leaked IPCC report: 90% confidence in AGW is now 95% -- and sea level will rise!

Great Debates
281

I glossed over your post. Understandably for it content-free-ness, but still.

Ok, whatever. I never said lies or anything remotely like that, but pparently the only way your wolrd makes sense is by stating that.

A nurse? Sure, if the other option is a baker, and architect or my half-paralyzed granny.
Therefore, an pretty-well-versed-in-math-and-statistics amateur can check a bunch of number and come to a conclusion that is more valid that linking to a webpage that contains informtation that, regardless of if veracity, is incomprehensible to the “linker”.

A person with one year of studying Chinese (me) understands it better to than a guy that point to the results of his googletranslate search.

Your opinion as to what the debate should are irrelevant for me.

Bring a PhD in climate science to this discussion, then.

No. Especially since I’ve never even hinted that you should believe me or that I care at all if you do.

More than a lawyer.

Ok, whatever.
Dunning-Kruger is an I’m-so-cool way of calling me an asshole, isn’t it?

Of the 12000 only fewer than 100 explicitely both endorse it AND give numbers.
By the way, maybe you don’t know this in your self-confessed ignorance, it’s only science when you actually give numbers.

282

Not quite, it is science when you then publish such astounding evidence and discredit the survey paper that was published in the scientific journal.

Not holding my breath for that one.

283

I think this post gets to the heart of the matter.

When people don’t automatically agree with people like you and GIGO, especially about pet projects such as these, you immediately go into attack mode and (wrongly) think that people disagree with the science.

What it does mean (rightly) is simple, you haven’t yet convinced them that your side is 100% correct.

I want you both to read and understand that before posting a bunch of links trying to convince someone who really doesn’t give much of a shit one way or the other.

I am glad that GIGO posts scientific data to back his claims as I am glad that people who form debates about varying subjects do so as well, all over this board. So I can form my own opinion (using the relevant expert collected data and opinion)

What I am not glad about is if immediate and complete agreement isn’t reached, some of you (general) go into all out attack which IMO just leads people into further disagreement BECAUSE of you.

284

Your post has inspired me to re-re-re-re-re-post my basic stance on AGW.

  1. That world has on averge warmed 1ºC since 1870.
  2. CO2 concentration has increased from about 300 to 400 ppm.
  3. Humans are responsable for most (if not all) of this increase).
  4. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, ergo higher concentrations mean more energy trapped.
  5. There are natural variations of climate that we don’t clearly understand.
    (for instance there is an almost identcal rise in temperatures in the 30s as we had in the late 90s).
  6. We don’t know the ammount or even the sign of most of the forcing due to the increased CO2.
285

Great post. I would add that some people might even agree with the science, or much of it, but then the question arises as what we should do about it. That’s where the “buy into the science 10,000% or else you’re an ignorant shill” often comes from.

But it would really benefit GIGO, and the debate itself, if he would make an effort to understand WHAT people are contesting or questioning before he responds with another wall of cites. I can’t count the number of times that he’s done that to me when the science is not the problem. Again, great post. And something I’ve mentioned in different words before.

Oh, it would also help if he took my suggestion and started that new thread in which he clearly stated his position in 50 words or less. Not that I
'm holding my breath.

286

The problem some of us have is that AGW proponents constantly play a shell game where they make whatever claim about future effects of warming they can find any kind of cite for, and then if people question it they respond by calling them deniers and claiming the science is settled. When pressed, they’ll point to surveys of scientists that show a high percentage agree that global warming is real. And that much is true.

There is a huge excluded middle here which the extreme AGW activists wish to hide or gloss over: There’s a BIG difference between accepting that man-made CO2 is causing a current warming effect in the atmosphere (the question that the vast majority of scientists agree with), and accepting claims about specific effects of this warming decades in the future.

It is entirely possible (and within the IPCC’s models) that global warming will result in a moderate increase in temperature of 2.5 degrees or less. The IPCC’s own models suggest that moderate warming like this would be a net economic benefit to the planet. It would suck for equatorial nations, but it would also open up new shipping lanes, lengthen growing seasons in the regions where most of the world’s food is grown, create warmer winter nights which would lower heating costs and energy requirements, etc.

But here’s the bigger point: The climate is a complex adaptive system. Our ability to model and predict the behavior of such systems is extremely limited. In the short term effects are predictable, but as the changes propagate and feedback results and the process iterates, small errors in understanding of initial conditions result in large changes in outcome. And the fact is, the feedbacks and interactions in the climate system are still somewhat mysterious. Even large effects like oceanic absorption of heat and how it is transferred around the world are poorly understood.

And because climate is an adaptive system, there are even limits to what you can learn about it by studying its past behavior. At best, all you can learn is how the previous iterations of the climate system responded. But because it adapts and changes, its response to the same input this time may be very different.

In addition, long-term predictions of climate change and its effects require long-term predictions of other complex systems such as the global economy, the growth of technology, social organization, birth rates, you name it.

Futurists are constantly being surprised when predictions of such systems fall apart. In the 1970’s, there was a scientific consensus that the world was heading for an overpopulation crisis. No one predicted the sudden and dramatic drop in birth rates around the world, and no one can really explain them even today. They are an emergent property of a complex system.

Other examples: The projections of future climate in 2006 totally missed the sudden worldwide recession just two years away that caused CO2 output to plummet. Twenty years ago no one would have predicted that we would have the ability to make 500hp gasoline engines that could get 30 mpg in a 4,000 lb car. Thirty years ago no one predicted the rise of telecommuting.

The truth is, the future gets very fuzzy very quickly. Just go find any list of ‘futurist’ predictions from any previous decade and see how accurate they are. The answer: not very. Hell, go look at the CBO’s or the World Bank’s predictions for GDP growth and size just five years into the future. They’re almost always very wrong.

This doesn’t mean you have to throw up your hands and just let the chips fall where they may, but it does mean you should have some humility about your declarations regarding what will happen 50 years from now. You’re very likely to be wrong.

The other fact that AGW activists don’t want to admit is that their preferred solutions will not work. Local carbon taxes do nothing but shift production and energy consumption from one region to another Global carbon taxes are impossible. Russia, China, and India have no incentive at all to go along with them, and everything to gain by ignoring them. So draconian intervention to ‘stop’ global warming is a pipe dream and a waste of time. Better to expend your energy working on ways to cope with the warming or on new technologies that can displace hydrocarbons for valid economic reasons.

The only way you’re going to get China and Russia and India to stop burning carbon is to create an energy source that is cheaper so they move to it voluntarily. Or conversely, to wait until hydrocarbons are so expensive that existing alternatives will be cheaper. Until then, every drop of oil and gas that can be profitably extracted from the ground will be burned. You can count on it. It might be smart to start the debate with this as a working assumption.

287

Excellent commentary. Thank you.

288

You need a cite for that, we had this conversation before, the one example of research that you pointed to before actually had the expected rise in temperature within the limits mentioned by the IPCC and in the end the researcher recommended that we should control our emissions because even when he was in favor of expecting the low end of the warming, he did not wanted to see us emitting much more as he does not want to see higher numbers in our future as further releases will indeed make the warming go to dangerous levels.

And once again, as one of the biggest consumer of China products we do have a lot of leverage on the technology that we adopt. in the end it will be the demise of the Communist Party in China if they do not implement the changes.

And that takes us to a straw man added to all the mild good points. (what a surprise) Almost NO scientist or economist involved in this are recommending draconian intervention.

The alarmism is really on your side regarding the “dangers” on the recommended paths of action.

289

I don’t understand your objection, or what kind of cite you’re looking for. You mean you want a cite showing that a consensus of scientists do not agree with some specific claim for future warming? I’m not sure how to do that. My point was that the ‘scientific consensus’ that I’ve seen revolves around the statement that the earth is warming and that man’s emission of CO2 is contributing to it. There is indeed a wide consensus on that issue, including some prominent climate ‘skeptics’. But that’s a far cry from a consensus that the earth will warm by x degrees by 2100, and therefore the steps AGW activists call for should be enacted.

And by the way, the expertise of scientists ends where the science ends. I’m not sure why you think their opinions on what the solution should be have any relevance at all. Climate scientists are not economists and may be way out of their depth of understanding when it comes to the economic effects of, say, carbon taxes.

And the problem there is that economists may not have the expertise to determine the effects of carbon taxes on global CO2 output. Again, we’re talking about complex systems here that respond in unpredictable ways, and a full understanding of what carbon taxes would do requires not just an understanding of economic principles like Pigouvian taxes (the basis for the economic argument for carbon taxes), but also understanding of the industry being taxed.

Today we can’t even come to a consensus on a small but critical part of the issue: the discount rate. When paying money today to avoid losing money in the future, you have to consider the discount rate. We don’t even have a decent framework for discussing that issue, as some people think the discount rate should be the rate of money growth, while others think a ‘social discount rate’ which is more about political values is correct.

The problem for the AGW side is that if we treat the costs as a monetary hedge against future losses, any reasonable value for the discount rate implies that we should do nothing for most of the warming scenarios - the opportunity cost is just too great for the amount of mitigation we could feasibly manage.

And the problem with the ‘social discount rate’ which some people propose is valid (and which has a very small or zero value) is that it implies that we should spend $1 today to prevent $1 in damage 100 years from now, which has terrible implications for growth. It’s basically an advocacy for the ‘fully sustainable’ model in which a person living today does not use up any resource or otherwise impose costs on future generations. I know some of the hard-core environmentalists believe this, but in my opinion it’s just nutty. Quite frankly, I’m glad that the Romans used up some of our land to build roads and cities, and I’m glad the Army Corps of Engineers used up a lot of steel and concrete and land to build the interstate highway system long before I was born. Economic growth has value, and it’s generally a greater value than the resources used to generate that growth.

290

It’s not about ‘dangers’ - it’s about cost-benefit. How much warming can we avoid, how much will it cost us to do so, and what’s the economic benefit of doing that?

The problems with doing that calculation are many: we don’t how much warming there will be, we don’t know how much of it we can stop, and we don’t know how much it will cost to do so. We don’t even know if we CAN. Australia imposed a carbon tax a few years ago, and it doesn’t look like it did any good at all other than cost a lot of people a lot of money and shift wealth around. They just elected a new government that has promised to eliminate the tax.

You know, I haven’t even seen a coherent model that explains how carbon taxes are supposed to fix the problem. I understand the rationale for a carbon tax - you place a tax on a good that has an externality, equal to the cost of the externality. That makes the market more efficient, and the money is by definition sufficient to both reimburse the sufferers of the cost of that externality while reducing production of the good that caused it in the first place. If the tax is set right, it restores peak efficiency to the market.

But that has a lot of assumptions - that the tax can be set correctly, that the money will be used to mitigate the externality or reimburse the people damaged by it. But the carbon taxes I’ve seen aren’t being used for any such thing - they’re just taxes that are going into the general revnue funds of governments, to be spent on social programs. This does not mitigate or prevent global warming. It may not even lower carbon emissions, because production will move to avoid the tax. It may even make CO2 emissions worse if it pushes manufacturing from more efficient countries to less efficient countries.

So if California institutes a carbon tax and uses the money to raise the salary of public employees or shuffles the money to cronies in the alt-energy racket, just how does that do anything to help global warming? If the demand for oil is inelastic in California, it might not even lower CO2 emissions in that state much. And in the meantime, it might just drive production overseas to countries like China where the CO2 footprint for products is generally higher and control over emissions will be lost to the Chinese government.

291

You’re going to have to expand on this. Do you mean the U.S. could use protectionism to force China to impose carbon taxes or CO2 limits? If so, that would be a terrible idea. Have you forgotten that China holds a tremendous amount of U.S. debt? Or that they could just as easily play the protectionism game? How do you think voters in the U.S. would respond to a government that imposed trade sanctions on China and China retaliated, resulting in $500 iPhones and major price increases on everything from consumer electronics to clothing? Somehow I think the Chinese Communists could weather that storm a little better than could a politician in a Democratic country. Ask the former government of Australia how well their carbon tax worked out for them.

292

So there is still NO reason for the IPCC to exist in the first place. Other organizations that actually do research can make a case for or against MMCO2GW. Then we no longer have to be concerned with the magical man-made inputs and computer modeling created for the IPCC or why/how it disappeared before a FOI request had to be honored.

*Quote:
The overall implication of the allegations was to cast doubt on the extent to which CRU’s work in this area could be trusted and should be relied upon and we find no evidence to support that implication. [1.3.1] *

When Climategate became public, it cast even more doubt on the MMCO2GW zealotry. In response, when East Anglia University was made aware that the East Anglia University Climatic Research Unit appeared to be blocking skeptics from recieving EAU CRU data and from publishing contrarian articles, the East Anglia University held their own investigation and discovered that East Anglia University wouldn’t do something like that. Hardly a convincing, or independent, investigation.

The FBI investigated itself and found it had done nothing wrong.
The Whitehouse investigated itself and found it had done nothing wrong.
The mafia investigated intself and found it had done nothing wrong.
Bernie Madoff investigated himself and found he had done nothing wrong.

Nope, it’s just not that convincing. Neither is calling everyone ignorant who has questions about MMCO2GW.

293

It is important to see who is telling that that is the case, yes. The point here is that already in the past you pointed at someone that you reported was from that middle, it turned out that it was not, in the end he recommended that we should control our emissions, so yes, a cite of the groups recommending to go slow or not do anything is important, because the conservative politicians in power have only one choice nowadays:

Assume that it is not happening and do nothing.

That is not the middle, and I do not think that even most of the skeptical scientists would recommend that choice.

294

Mexico and many others are considering it, I have not much of a respect for the Australian politicians that will follow the ideas of Rupert Murdock.

In other places, it is clear that the fear mongers are not doing so well.

The point is that if not a carbon tax, then other regulations need to come, the end result is that we need to add the real cost of releasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

295

You may have a point, if the investigation you refer to had been the only one made.

296

Because governments use tax monies collected only for social programs. Not for the military, law enforcement, infrastructure, medical research, food safety…

What about Tom Friedman’s simple proposal to replace payroll taxes with carbon taxes in a revenue-neutral way?

All good points. GIGO, ball’s in your court–can you do more than glibly gloss them over?

Right, this must be accepted as inevitable even if one finds it lamentable.

297

It was done before with the poster, and when a poster goes for straw-men:

“The problem some of us have is that AGW proponents constantly play a shell game where they make whatever claim about future effects of warming they can find any kind of cite for, and then if people question it they respond by calling them deniers and claiming the science is settled”

I rather wait until they get better support and less misinformed points to the plate.

298

Quote:
In July 2010, the University of East Anglia published the Independent Climate Change Email Review report.

LOL. The group calling itself the “Independent Climate Change Email Review” was created and funded by, … wait for it …

*About the Review
About | Biographies

Overview
The independent Climate Change Email Review was announced in December 2009 after emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were hacked and published online.

The Review was called for and is being funded by the University of East Anglia, but its work and findings are wholly independent.*

http://www.cce-review.org/About.php

Yes, the band calling itself “Independent Climate Change Email Review” is owned and operated by the University of East Anglia. The University of East Anglia found the University of East Anglia couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. Move along, move along. Nothing to see here.

299

Yes there are other ones to see, what you did was just pathetic. In any case, all the e-mails pumped up by the deniers have more mundane explanations and only the ones fooled by the denier media follow the idea that it is a conspiracy.

300

(shortened for clarity)

That’s exactly the way I feel about the IPCC.

I’ll wait for the IPCC’s “new-and-improved” report to see if they can finally put together a report that can stand up to a truely independent peer review and see if the IPCC will allow every other organization access to their data and processes.