Whatever. Either way, my basic point about these proxy studies still stands.
Again, my basic point stands. At a minimum, there is no basis to be reasonably confident that anything tangible about the current climate or weather is unprecedented in any meaningful sense.
Meanwhile it seems that Stern admits that his panel may have made some errors.
Unfortunately not reassuring errors.
That doesn’t make it circumstantial so much as inconclusive.
Frankly, I disagree. On skeptic web sites, I see plenty of attacks on GCMs, for example. And look at this thread – a pro-AGW individual raised the “unprecedented” argument, and I responded.
I’m skeptical, but let’s cut to the chase:
In your own words, what is the strongest argument and evidence for the CAGW hypothesis? (And if you aren’t qualified to make such an argument, please just say so rather than simply linking to the latest IPCC report.)
intention: Thanks for your reply.
And, I am sure that you are aware that Osburn and Briffa published a reply to Burger’s comment where they explained where they argued that Burger was incorrect and concluded:
This is the way things work in science. And, presumably the discussions will continue. I am not claiming that Osburn and Briffa are the word of God, but neither is Gerd Burger (or Steve McIntyre).
Well, I suspect that you will never be happy with what is done in these climate reconstructions. And, quite frankly, no proxy series is perfect. They all have their problems. It is the nature of science. If we had perfect data then it would be easy. It is worth noting, however, that in the Supplementary part of their paper, Osburn and Briffa show how their results are robust to the removal of up to any 3 of the 14 proxies. So, if you don’t want Mann’s PC bristlecone proxy in there, you can look at the results without it.
Well, you refer me to two ClimateAudit posts that say pretty much what you did here, which brings up an interesting question: Why are we supposed to not have any trust in the peer-reviewed literature but supposed to take what is said on an unreviewed blog as the truth? Do you think that Steve McIntyre is unerring in his analysis and interpretation of these things? If not, could you give me some examples of what you disagree with that Steve has written?
Well, I am not asking you to pay attention to my claims. I am actually basically just defending the reviews of the IPCC and the NAS. I think more to the point is why we should pay attention to your and Steve McIntyre’s claims when they seem to disagree with much of what these reviews conclude.
Two comments additional comments on this part: First, I am confused by your and Steve McIntyre’s claim that the bar on correlation was set low to be sure to include the Mann PC1 bristlecone proxy. If I look in the supplementary materials for Osburn and Briffa’s paper, the proxy that I am pretty sure you are referring to (#3 in Table S1) has the 4th highest correlation to temperature of the 14 proxies. So, in other words, in order to exclude it, they would have had to set the bar to the point where all but 3 of their 14 proxies would have been excluded.
Second, your statement about it being good to set the bar high is precisely in contradiction with the Burger comment which argues that if you choose just the most highest correlated proxies from amongst a much larger pool, you run the risk of choosing ones that are highly correlated by chance…and this make your results much more subject to the issues that Burger identifies. In fact, it is precisely by setting a weaker criterion that Osburn and Briffa were able to avoid the statistical problems that occur when you set the bar such that you end up choosing only a few of the proxies from a much larger pool.
Whoops! Sorry, in the above, I meant “#1 in Table S1” not #3. #3 is in fact the proxy with the lowest correlation of the 14 but that is not the one that is from Mann…nor is it identified as a PC, so I assume it cannot be Mann’s PC1.
jshore, the discussion continues with my appreciation.
Naw, I’ve never heard anyone say that the case for AGW collapses if the proxies are wrong. However, it is an important question. If that line of evidence is wrong, as the preponderance of the evidence suggests, then the idea that the current climate is historically unusual collapses.
Before we can say “the cause for the recent unusual warming is” too much CO2 or not enough beer or whatever, first we have to determine if the warming is unusual. If the warming is not unusual, then there is nothing to explain. The globe has been warming for about 400 years, and it has warmed fast at various times during that
When the AGW folks realized that the warming from 1970-1998 was not statistically different from the warming 1910-1940, they jumped on the “it’s unusual because its the WARMEST IN A THOUSAND YEARS!!!” bandwagon.
w.
PS - You say:
My point remains. If you are unwilling to do the hard work to dig into these studies and find out the details, what makes you qualified to decide the NAS or the IPCC is doing a good job? Your faith in the IPCC, while touching, is badly misplaced.
Finally, as you would know if you read the specialist literature and the discussions, Steve McIntyre has done the shovel work to see if these studies are worthwhile, and has shown clearly that they are not. The NAS examined his claims, and did not find fault with a single one. If you believe otherwise, if you think they disagred with a single claim of his, give me chapter and verse and we can discuss it.
Steve was a reviewer for the IPCC, pointed these difficulties out to the editors, and was resoundingly ignored for his troubles … yeah, that IPCC is really scientific all right, they’re so scientific that they not only don’t follow scientific rules, they don’t even follow their own rules.
Me, I’m not recommending that you believe a damn thing, not me, not the IPCC, not Steve McIntyre, not anyone. I’ve said this many times, I’m getting tired of repeating it, but I’m determined to fight ignorance.
I’m recommending that you either read the literature and do the shovel work, or you stop claiming the IPCC is right. If you haven’t done the shovel work, you don’t have a clue if the IPCC is right or not. That’s what I meant when I said “why should we pay attention to your claims”.
I basically agree. Anyway, alarmists have been trumpeting the “unprecedented” argument from the rooftops for some time now. So they really have only themselves to blame.
Thanks for your reply, intention.
First of all, while the propenderance of the evidence may suggest to you that this is wrong, it doesn’t seem to suggest the same to others who have studied it, like the IPCC or the NAS. Also, even if there are problems with the proxies that are sufficient to make things too uncertain to conclude anything with any degree of confidence whatsoever, that does not mean that the current climate is not historically unusual but simply that we don’t know whether it is or not.
The logic here doesn’t seem to make sense to me. If you were a police officer and they found the body of someone who had been shot, would you tell your fellow officers who wanted to investigate that there is nothing to explain here because it is not historically unusual to find people shot to death? Just because something has happened before does not mean that determining the cause of the current event is unimportant…And, in fact, just because natural causes have caused warming in the past does not mean that the current warming is due to natural causes.
jshore, your analogy here is quite good … but it misses out on one very critical thing.
If a police officer finds the body of a person dead by gunshot, they do not (as you suggest) immediately open a murder investigation.
Why not? I mean the body is right there, and the gunshot wound is plain to see?
Well, in the US at least, there’s this little detail first. The coroner has to determine the cause of death. There are many ways a person can die of an apparent gunshot without it being murder. The coroner may decide, for example, that the person actually died of some other cause, and then was shot after his death. Or he might have tripped and fallen on his gun. He might have accidentally shot himself cleaning it. He might have been the victim of a hunting accident.
So while the logic “doesn’t seem to make sense” to you as to why we first determine if there is any reason to open a murder investigation, and then and only then open the murder investigation, it seems to make sense to everyone else. In fact, the logic is so compelling that it has been codified into law by our judicial system. There is no murder investigation, nobody gets charged, until the coroner determines the cause of death.
And here in climate science, we need to follow the same careful steps. It is by no means enough to say, as Al Gore says, “The planet has a fever”. The planet has been warming for about four hundred years. Did it catch the “fever” in 1650? If the planet has had the “fever” for 400 years, is it really a “fever”? Until these questions are answered, there’s not much use calling for treatment.
I say lets wait until we determine if the patient is ill before shooting him up with dangerous antibiotics or packing him full of quack nostrums. The cure in this case could definitely be worse than the disease, particularly if there is no disease at all.
w.
There’s only one cure: more cowbell!
intention: You’ve taken my analogy and run with it in a nonsensical direction. What I am pointing out is that it is not necessary to show the current warming is yet unusual compared to what has happened in the past due to natural causes in order to show that the current warming is due to greenhouse gas emissions. You seem to be thinking instead that I am arguing that we should just assume that it is due to greenhouse gas emissions without any evidence of this. What I am saying instead is that we have lots of evidence that the current warming is in fact due to greenhouse gas emissions…independent of whether there were warmings in the past due to other effects. (In fact, by studying the changes in climate that have occurred in the past due to other effects, we can get an estimate of what sort of warming we expect due to the known radiative forcing due to greenhouse gases.)
A very poor analogy for what you are actually doing. In fact, you are the one who is advocating a path of continuing an uncontrolled experiment on the “patient”. We (being most of the scientific community, as expressed for example through the Joint Statement of the Scientific Academies on Climate Change) are advocating beginning to take steps to reduce (well, mitigate the increase of) the effects that we are causing.
In other words, the safe path from a scientific point of view is to reduce the known perturbation that we are putting on the climate system. It is not in any way akin to shooting a patient up with dangerous antibiotics. (That might be a better analogy if we were advocating shooting huge amounts of sulfate aerosols into the stratisphere to try to counteract the warming.)
But, even if we went with your analogy, flawed though it is, I would note that doctors do not always advocate being sure they know exactly what a patient has before starting any sort of treatment whatsoever. If the patient is in bad shape and may die or worsen considerably without treatment, the doctor is likely to start treatment based on his assessment of the likely problems. In a hospital run by intention, it seems that patients might not received any treatment whatsover until we can determine with 100% certainty what the exact cause is, exactly how large an effect it is causing, and exactly what will happen in the future if we do nothing. Needless to say, a lot of patients would die waiting in the interim.
If I get it intention is saying that it is absolutely necessary to wait and see if “** the current warming is yet unusual compared to what has happened in the past**” before any costly and economy destabilizing steps are taken “to reduce (well, mitigate the increase of) the effects that we are causing.”
And I say the **safe path from a scientific point of view **is not the best path. Recalling the moral stand taken by scientists against the use of the atom bomb was over ruled and the bomb was used to bring a quick end to WWII.
The analogy requires that the patient (the planet) be sick. And there is no evidence that the patient is sick Oh, you point to Katrina and eastern bat behavior and grasshopper hatchings and say thats new and different. They must be due to AGW without proof and it is just hysteria. Oh and the rest of the world is miffed because we use so much energy but that is their problem not ours.
Take a lesson from history. Recall the river and lake pollution of the 60’s. Now these were symptoms of a very sick patient. And then in 1972 the EPA was tasked to mitigate them through regulation.
The best course of action is to monitor the climate as we now monitor the near earth asteroids and wait for a clear and present danger before taking action.
The whole alarmist movement is analogous to advocating surgery for someone with the symptoms of a common cold.
The problem with the wait-and-see attitude is that there is a huge amount of inertia associated with this system. First, there is considerable inertia in the climate system itself, which means that even if we stabilized the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere tomorrow (i.e., dropped our emissions down close to zero!), the warming would continue as the climate continues to adjust to the current level of greenhouse gases. Furthermore, the oceans will continue to warm for centuries to millenia, with associated sea level rise. The glaciers and land ice would continue to melt.
Second, of course, there is also considerable inertia in our society. I.e., it is not realistic to stablize the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere tomorrow. In fact, it does not yet seem to be realistic to yet stabilize the amount of emissions into the atmosphere, as they continue to grow. And, for example, the life cycle of a new coal-fired power plant is something on the order of 50 years. The longer lead time we get on this, the more gradual and less disruptive the actions could be.
Third, what we are arguing about is not really whether there is a problem at all but how big it would be. I.e., I think there is essentially no evidence that we could raise CO2 levels to 4 or 8X pre-industrial levels with no severe consequences. So, the question really is mainly whether we have to try to keep them under 400ppm, under 450ppm, under 550ppm, … All of these limits suggest that we need to take actions to put a price on emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Furthermore, we know that we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels anyway, as they are a finite resource, and we also know that there are other benefits to cutting, for example, our consumption of foreign oil. And, of course, there are other environmental benefits to reducing our use of coal.
We’ve already been waiting-and-seeing longer than most scientists think is wise. The fact is that there will always be a few people who, because of their political philosophy and economic self-interest, are going to want us to wait longer. We are now at the point where even many of the oil companies and power companies no longer cling to the notion that we should wait and see, which just shows how ridiculously long we have kept on that path. In fact, even the most recalcitrant of the oil companies (Exxon/Mobil) is no longer really publicly defending that position although there is evidence that they continue (or at least, until very recently have continued) to fund the “skeptics” behind the scenes.
Cite? And how many years would it take to realize substantially all of the warming effects of CO2 being emitted today?
[QUOTE=jshore]
The problem with the wait-and-see attitude is that there is a huge amount of inertia associated with this system. (snip)
Second, of course, there is also considerable inertia in our society. (snip)
All of these limits suggest that we need to take actions to put a price on emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (snip)
We’ve already been waiting-and-seeing longer than most scientists think is wise. The fact is that there will always be a few people who, because of their political philosophy and economic self-interest, are going to want us to wait longer. (snip)QUOTE]
One of the most difficult issues that will have to be addressed is that even if we were to implement a major greenhouse gas mitigation policy tomorrow and were exceptionally successful in keeping the temperature rise to a minimum, the best that could be hoped for is that people would only see a few adverse impacts of climate change. The consequence of spending billions, if not trillions, of dollars to reduce emissions would largely be to keep something from happening at all. Most of us want to see some measurable change - fewer smoke-belching stacks, rivers that have been cleaned up, and so on. The changes that will occur because of a successful mitigation strategy won’t be evident for decades, and maybe not at all because the argument will be that we prevented something bad from happening. There are going to be a lot of people who will liken this to the proverbial tiger repellent that someone uses in the office - it must be working, because there aren’t any tigers in the office.
What’s worse, is that there will be adverse environmental consequences from many of the mitigation approaches. Although there will certainly be many benefits (and I believe the benefits will far outweigh the damages), people will be able to point to the consequences and the cost and argue that it’s all a sham. Climate change is an issue that is tailor-made for skeptics, at least until it’s far too late to do anything about it.
Figure 10.4 of the IPCC AR4 Working Group I report shows it under what is termed the “constant composition commitment”. Due to the scale of the graph, it is hard to make it out too well though. This paper has a much more detailed graph.
As for your question, it depends what you mean by “substantially all”. It is probably better to think in terms of a concept analogous to “half life”. When I look at Wigley’s Fig. 2, it looks like it takes about 20 years to get half the rise if the equilibrium climate sensitivity is 1.5 C and somewhere around 60 years if the equilibrium sensitivity is 4.5 C (hard to tell exactly because the 4.5 C curves haven’t really yet asymptoted even by 2400).
jshore, you keep claiming that there is “lots of evidence that the current warming is in fact due to greenhouse gas emissions”.
If there were “lots of evidence”, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. The OP started this thread because he couldn’t find evidence … but none has been presented. Yes, there have been lots of appeals to authority, citing the IPCC and the NAS … but that’s authority, not evidence.
And there has been much discussion of computer model forecasts … but if you think the results of computer models are evidence, you’re not the scientist you claim to be.
You were the one that claimed that if somebody is found dead by gunshot, the police should immediately open a murder investigation. When I pointed out that your scenario doesn’t happen in the real world, and for a very good reason (lack of evidence), suddenly I’m accused of twisting your analogy.
Now, you are making the claim that there is no need to show the current climate is unusual. We just need to show that humans are the cause of the recent changes … but that only leads us back to where we started, the lack of evidence for a human cause.
Look, I know scientists are often uncomfortable saying “We don’t know”, but I assure you, if you say it a few times you’ll get used to it. Your claimed level of human knowledge and surety about the climate, a subject which has only been intensively studied for only a few decades and a subject which is of the utmost complexity, only reveals a level of wishful thinking that is unbecoming in a scientist such as yourself.
How come we don’t see people saying “the science is settled” and “there is a consensus” about genetic biology? That’s another new science, but nobody is so stupid as to claim that we now understand the human body because we have a few computer models of how some of the human systems work.
But give a climate scientist a tinkertoy model, and first thing you know he’ll be evangelizing on TV, telling us we all have to change the way we live or in a hundred years we’re going to end up in climate hell in a handbasket …
Finally, you say:
From this, it is clear that you agree with me that before we take action, we first have to determine if something is unusual. In your example, if the patient is dying, that’s unusual. If the patient is showing symptoms, that’s unusual. So yes, in that situation we should act, provided the treatment is benign. But if the treatment is dangerous or extremely costly, a more cautious tactic would be advisable. Remember that the number one ancient rule of doctoring is “First, do no harm”.
But what if we have a patient whose symptoms are unremarkable? What if there is no indication that the patient has anything wrong with them at all? For example, should the doctor start treatment on me because I show up for my annual exam with a slight fever? I’ve had them suggest it in the past.
In some cases, yes, doctors should treat for a 1° fever … but you see, I’m one of those people who always has had about a degree of fever, it’s my natural state. So whenever the doc takes my temperature, I explain that I run naturally warm. Since he finds nothing unusual in my state, he doesn’t treat me.
As near as we can tell, the earth has been warming at about 05°C per century for about 400 years, after it had gradually cooled over about the same length of time to the depths of the Little Ice Age.
We don’t know why the earth cooled to get to the Little Ice Age. We don’t know why it has warmed half a degree per century since. We don’t know why it warmed a bit more strongly than that from 1980-2000 … and we also don’t know why the temperature has leveled off since then. In fact, much like with the human body, the list of things we don’t know about the climate is longer than the list of things we know.
So advocating costly and potentially dangerous treatment based on slight changes in half a degree per century of fever, a half degree fever that has been there for four hundred years, seems … mmm … well, “remarkably foolish” seems a bit strong, so let me call it a leetle bit premature.
w.
PS - let me make it clear that I think it likely that humans are affecting the climate … we just don’t know yet either how, or how much, we are affecting it. Until last year, for example, scientists were saying that the Arctic warming was due to CO2. Now, they say that a major cause is soot, plain old soot. If the cause is mostly soot, all of the CO2 changes in the world won’t help the Arctic much. So let’s take a deep breath, and before we rush in and blindly start treating the patient for tuberculosis, let’s make sure they don’t have meningitis instead …
Or, as Thomas Huxley put it:
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
w.