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.
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.
Indeed, that is because the experts that IPCC uses are the scientists, some even from RealClimate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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 thestrongest el nino of the 20th century, 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you’re agreeing with me that politicization of the debate is affecting the science? Just disagreeing on which direction it’s being pushed?
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.
