Need proof of Global Warming

Great Debates
321

jshore, I asked you to stop the accusations of handwaving.

The prevailing hypothesis is that the world does not have an equilibrium temperature, and that it has a high climate sensitivity.

I have presented two papers showing a very different model of the planet, one by Ou and one by Bejan, showing that it does have an equilibrium temperature, and thus must have a low climate sensitivity.

Now, Dr. Ou is not well known, so I suppose that you could describe what he says as “handwaving” … however, if so, it is peer reviewed handwaving, with lots of scientific references.

Dr. Bejan, on the other hand, is one of the *most-cited living scientists on the planet.*The fact that you had not even heard of Bejan, may still have no idea of who he is, and just “skimmed” his paper, the fact that you admit that you don’t understand the implications of his paper regarding climate sensitivity, tells me much more about you than about handwaving.

Here’s an example. Almost all scientists, faced with such a lack of understanding of how Bejan’s paper relates to climate sensitivity, would say “Willis, I don’t understand how Bejan’s paper relates to climate sensitivity, what is your understanding of how they relate?” Then, I can explain my thoughts on how they relate, and they can either agree or disagree with me, with Bejan, or with both of us.

You, coming from the opposite pole, say “Willis, I don’t understand how Bejan’s paper relates to climate sensitivity, so you must be handwaving.”

I have provided heaps and heaps and heaps of scientific papers to show that the current climate paradigm is in error in various places.

Since you seem to want to ignore or just “skim” the science and stick to the accusations, I don’t see this going much further.

When you provide citations, I read them end to end. I study them. I try to understand them. You do not return the favor.

If you want to discuss the subject further, when you are willing to do more than just “skim” the citations, when you are willing to pull your socks up and dig in and do the spade work to determine whether your favorite ideas are true or not, I’m happy to return to discuss it with you. Until then, talking with you is like talking to a parrot. It’s an interesting diversion, and a pleasant way to spend a slow afternoon at home … but at the end of the day, since the bird is only mindlessly repeating what someone else said, it’s hard to have a real discussion of scientific issues with them.

As an example, I said before, you can’t discuss the proxy studies without understanding the proxies. I said that when you know enough to tell the Yamal proxy from the Polar Urals proxy, when you can discuss the reasons to include one and not the other, then I’ll know that you actually care enough about proxy studies to discuss them scientifically. But rather than accept that challenge, rather than change your ways and take up the subject seriously … you simply repeated the claims made by Mann and Osborn and Briffa and Thompson and the like, and then changed the subject.

Which is fine, that’s your choice, a man is free to study or not study what he wants to.

Until you do that spade work, however, I fear your arguments are just so much handwaving. Your belief in the entire IPCC report is a case in point. The IPCC report, as has been demonstrated by many experts in many of the fields covered, is like most reports - right in some places, and wrong in others. I have provided citations to a number of these experts. You, however, continue to treat the IPCC report as though it were monolithic revealed wisdom graven in stone … heck, I’d lay you big odds you have not even read the IPCC reviewer’s reports, as I have advocated more than once. Have you? They demonstrate clearly that the vaunted IPCC review process is no more thorough than your “skimming” of Bejan’s work.

Until you can explain the difference between Yamal and the Polar Urals and why one gets selected over the other, until you understand the relationship between climate equilibrium and climate sensitivity, until you do more than endlessly repeat things along the lines of ‘I believe everything the IPCC and the NAS said because they’re the best we’ve got, here’s another citation to their brilliance, read Chapter 33, it has all the answers’, it’s no fun discussing this with you.

I discuss these ideas with climate scientists on a daily basis. Some of them agree with me, some disagree … but none of them call it “handwaving”, and all of them have the interest, the curiosity, and the common decency to read and understand the scientific papers we are discussing, to be very familiar with the issues and the arguments. Come back when you have done the same, when you have done your homework, and I will be happy to discuss this further. Until then, I fear my patience has run out with your lack of interest in doing the hard work.

I regret saying this, because you are obviously very intelligent and you have been reasonable and courteous throughout. What you have not been is sufficiently interested to do the digging, the spade work, the independent research, the hard yards necessary to discuss the issues. You think this can all be solved by appeal to authority, to the IPCC or the NAS or the like. Science is never solved or settled by committee. It is solved by the digging and the spade work and the research and the hard yards that you are not willing to undertake in this particular field.

Don’l misunderstand me. I don’t fault you for not undertaking that work. Every person has to decide where to put his or her own energies.

It’s just much more fun and interesting to discuss this with folks who are willing to undertake that work, who are willing to look behind the IPCC curtain to see whether or not there really is a Wizard of Oz, who are willing to both notice and understand the implications of the fact that the GCMs are tuned to the historical record, who are willing to discuss the ideas without appealing to authority …

My best to all, thanks to the other posters (and the lurkers), and my particular thanks to you, jshore, for the discussions.

w.

322

Wow.

Intention, if you are bowing out, allow me to say that I very much appreciate your contributions here. Without the discussions between you and jshore, the climate change debates would be little more than politics and evangelism, and I have no stomach for either. Thank you, and keep watching those clouds!

323

I’ve noticed that jshore does tend to argue from authority when pressed. essentially “none of us is qualified to evaluate this stuff and the IPCC says X, so you should accept it.”

However, I don’t see that he has much choice. The fact is that there are some rather large holes in the emporer’s tattered clothing.

324

Okay, I since you have such an adverse reaction to the word, I will try to explain the problem that I have with what you have been saying about climate sensitivity without using that word.

First of all, I will repeat once again that the issue I had was not primarily with the speculative hypotheses of how the climate system behaves. Speculative hypotheses are fun to consider…but ultimately they need a reality check against the experimental data. And, the best data we have regarding climate sensitivity comes from some of the more recent climate shifts in the past.

Thus, I was surprised that you had apparently arrived at a conclusion regarding what these climate shifts imply about climate sensitivity that is in contradiction with the prevailing view in the paleoclimate field. I was curious how you arrived at this conclusion, e.g., in order to conclude that the climate sensitivity is very low, you would presumably have to argue that either the forcings for these climate shifts were much larger than what the paleoclimate scientists generally believe them to be or that the temperature changes were much smaller than what they believe, or some combination of both. Or, maybe you doubt the whole idea of a forcing producing a climate shift and think that the shifts occurred spontaneously…I don’t know.

Since you feel the need to lecture me about being “willing to pull [my] socks up and dig in and do the spade work to determine whether [my] favorite ideas are true or not”, I would return the favor and advise you that if you want to try to displace the prevailing theory in the field with a new hypothesis, you must do the hard work of showing how the hypothesis better explains the data…and you should do so in detail and focussing on that data which is most detailed and thus most severely constrains hypotheses.

Okay, I’ll bite: You’ve already talked in general terms about how you think the Bejan paper relates to climate sensitivity, so that me ask the question you pose but in a more pointed way: Since Bejan has not directly himself stated in that paper the implications the he thinks it has regarding climate sensitivity, I tried to go to the web and see if I could find more discussion by him of this. And, I found this article that quotes Bejan and his co-author regarding their application of constructal theory to climate:

It is hard to tell exactly what Bejan and Reis’s own opinions are regarding climate sensitivity from that, but it seems clear that they don’t, as you do, feel that the obvious implications of their theory are that climate sensitivity is very low and we don’t have to worry about greenhouse gases. Rather, they seem to feel that more hard work will need to be done before they can conclude what their theory has to say about this issue (unless they have their own hunches but are “palying their cards close to their chests”). In fact, the author of that particular piece that I linked to, admittedly expressing his own interpretations of what Bejan and Reis are talking about, goes on to say:

So, my question to you would be that, in light of the fact that the very authors of the paper on constructal theory of climate don’t seem ready to draw the sort of conclusions that you seem to draw from it, and this other person whose discussion I linked to draws very different conclusions, what makes you so confident of your own interpretation of what constructal theory says about AGW?

Gotta go now but I may try to add a little more addressing other aspects of your post later. As always, thanks for the interesting “food for thought”.

325

jshore, this is a perfect example of what I spoke of in my previous email. The problem is that once again you have evaded the spade work. Instead of carefully reading and thinking about the study and drawing your own conclusions about what it means for climate sensitivity, you have quoted from a commentator, who in turn is quoting from a ScienceDaily article, that in its own turn is “adapted from” a Duke University press release about the original study.

But jshore, what is your opinion on the question? I have my opinion, which is that the study clearly demonstrates that the climate system operating point is not set by the amount of system losses/gains as conventional theory claims. Instead, the climate system operates at the point where the maximum power is produced/dissipated, which is a very different animal. I don’t care what the three times removed talking heads or the Duke University Public Relations Office think about the study. I want to know what you think about the study.

This is the frustration I spoke of before. I ask you for your opinion of a study, and you give me quotes from an unknown (and unknowing) commentator, who is quoting from another unknown commentator, who is commenting on a public relations press release which is commenting about the study in question.

Not exactly what I had asked for.

My best to you,

w.

PS - you quote from “the author of that particular piece” above, but it appears that you didn’t read the comments on the piece. In the comments, the author admits that he doesn’t know much about the subject … but I digress.

326

intention, this seems like a lot of verbage you have used here to obfuscate the fact that Bejan and his co-author on that paper on the constructal theory of climate are quoted in that press release as basically not holding the same view as you on the implication of their work for AGW! (Basically, the quotations suggest that they do not yet feel that they can predict the implications but are interested in looking into it more.)

It sort of amuses me that when you had a paper from Bejan that you felt could be read to support your point of view then he was “one of the most-cited living scientists on the planet” (although actually, the precise statement seems to be that he is among the top 100 most cited engineers). However, once he is quoted as saying something that is sort of inconvenient to you then what we are talking about is just “a public relations press release” and so on and so forth.

More on the rest of your post later…

327

intention: I agree that this example illustrates a difference in approach between us, but not surprisingly I see it somewhat differently. You seem to believe that your ability to have an independent opinion on nearly everything you read is based on doing “the hard spade work”. However, from what I have seen, it frankly seems to be based in large part on having a considerable degree of overconfidence, combined with preconceptions and biases that lead you to the expected conclusions given your point-of-view.

This has been most obvious to me when it has involved papers that I feel I could get a reasonably good understanding of myself, such as the Santer et al. paper, and where I found your understanding to be quite shallow. You are clearly very intelligent and I think that you had the ability to understand that paper too, but it seems like your own preconceptions and biases prevented you from doing so. On the other end of the spectrum, another paper that I was able to form a confident opinion on was the McKitrick et al. paper about the existence of global temperature. And, in that case, I again found that your opinion of it did not impress me. To be honest, it seems to me that the best predictor I have of what your opinion will be on any particular climate science paper seems to be much more strongly correlated with whether or not its conclusions agrees with your point-of-view than on any real assessment of its quality that I can determine. (Yes, this is not a perfect predictor, as even you are not defending the Gerlich paper, but these exceptions seem to be few and far between.)

As for me, I have an independent opinion on papers that I feel I have a good enough understanding of to have an independent opinion on, with the Santer et al., the McKitrick et al., and the Gerlich paper being 3 examples. Other papers I read with interest but do not really feel I understand deeply enough to have a strong independent opinion on. The Bejan and Reis paper falls into that category for me…and the fact that the authors of that paper themselves didn’t feel ready to draw conclusions of how their paper might apply to the issue of AGW and climate sensitivity tends to re-enforce that I am correct in not trying to have an independent opinion on something that I do not understand yet to really have such. You, on the other hand, seem to feel that you already understand that paper well enough to have a more definite opinion regarding its implications than the authors themselves do. I think it is pretty impressive if you have the ability to understand these implications better than the authors themselves, one of whom, as you noted, is an extremely well-cited engineer who has spent years developing this “constructal theory” for various different applications. However, I imagine you might understand if I am a bit skeptical regarding your independent opinion even while not claiming to have a strong independent opinion on the paper of my own. (I focus here on the issue of the implications of that paper, assuming it is correct; however, obviously another possibility is that Bejan, as bright and well-regarded as he is, is overselling his constructal theory somewhat…and it is really too simplified a view of the climate system. Again, that is something that I don’t really have an opinion on.)

You consider your willingness to read the literature and form your own opinion of things, independent of (and usually contrary to) the opinions that most others in the field have reached, as a great strength. Alas, while respecting your willingness to go out and investigate these things for yourself (well, more precisely within your Climate Audit mini-community…since clearly a lot of your opinions seem to have been shaped by Steve McIntyre and others there), I also tend to see it as a great weakness. There are few people in the world who can do this sort of thing successfully and they tend to be not just very intelligent, but actually amazingly brilliant (e.g., Albert Einstein). Unfortunately, for every one of them, there seem to be about a thousand who have the confidence without having the incredible brilliance that is necessary to really pull this off successfully.

My best to you, as always.

328

jshore, let me review the bidding here.

I ask you for your opinion on a scientific paper.

You send me the opinion of a commentator, commenting on someone else’s comments on a publicity release.

I ask you again for your opinion.

You reply that relying on my own study of climate is … what was it, hold on … oh, yeah, a “great weakness”.

Right, that thinking for yourself is a great weakness, it’s a big danger in this world. Much better to take the IPCCs word for things …

jshore, you think the word of a third-hand commentator is worth more than your own opinion.

Well, bro’ … I’m going to take you at your own opinion of yourself, I won’t ask you a third time. If you think your scientific judgement should be ignored in favor of a third-hand pundit’s opinion, I’m more than happy to accept that. I personally think your opinion is worth more than that, that’s why I asked you for it twice … but heck, it’s your life. If that’s all you think your scientific judgement is worth, who am I to argue?

Which is why, as I said before, I’m bowing out here. If you don’t value your own scientific judgement … why should I?

w.

PS - My opinion on the Santer study has been vindicated by the Douglass study, I don’t understand why you continue to say you were right there …

PPS - you say the quotes from the authors (Bejan and Reis) show … hang on, where is it …

Here’s every single quote from the authors in the press release:

“We now demonstrate that the constructal theory of organization in nature predicts many characteristics of global circulation – the grandest of all flow systems on Earth,” said Bejan.

“While other very complicated empirical models predict the same basic features, constructal theory does this in a much simpler way,” said geophysicist A. Heitor Reis of the University of Evora. “This is an entirely new kind of approach to climate.”

“The Earth with its solar heat input, heat rejection, and wheels of atmospheric and oceanic circulation, is a heat engine without shaft,” Bejan said. “Its maximized mechanical power cannot be delivered, but is instead destined to dissipate through air and water friction and other forms of heat loss. It produces maximum power, which it then dissipates at a maximum rate.”

“To my surprise, a simple theory anticipates the latitudinal boundaries of the three zones – the Hadley, Ferrel and Polar cells – which comprise the main global circulation on Earth,” Reis said.

“We cast doubt on this idea by showing that the circulation patterns can arise based solely on the optimal structure of global heat flow,” Reis said.

“If the properties of the atmosphere change as people say they will, we could anticipate what that might mean for global climate,” Bejan said.

“By playing with the Earth’s greenhouse factor, we could determine what it would take to get another result,” Reis added.

Now, out of those quotes, you somehow conclude that Bejan and Reis “didn’t feel ready to draw conclusions of how their paper might apply to the issue of AGW and climate sensitivity” … given that bizarre conclusion, I can see why you are willing to trust some anonymous PR guys judgement over your own judgement. You are quite ready to draw curious conclusions on the motives and feelings of Bejan and Reis based on your esoteric interpretation of what they didn’t say to some PR person, but you are unwilling to draw scientific conclusions based on what they did say in their study, or even what they did say to the PR person.

PPPS - I loved the way you try to cut Bejan down, saying he’s not one of the most cited scientists on the planet, he’s only “among the top 100 most cited engineers.” Oh, yeah, that will put him in his place all right …

The guy only discovered the first new fundamental thermodynamic law to be found in centuries, he’s written 18 books and over 400 peer reviewed articles, he’s got more prestigious medals, awards, and honors than you and I have socks … but you can’t resist pointing out he’s just an engineer, not a real scientist like you …

PPPPS - You falsely claim that I agree only with the science that agrees with me … but then you mention the Gerlich paper, which as you point out agreed with me but which I thought was nonsense. It’s that funny thing about doing the work myself, I don’t necessarily agree with what I read.

jshore, I do my best to evaluate what I read fairly and honestly. If I think it’s crap, I say so. I have done so many times, to papers from both sides of the aisle. I may very well be wrong at any given instant, but when a man is over sixty, being wrong doesn’t seem to matter as much as giving it my all.

The Bejan paper is a good example. When the paper came out, to expand my understanding of Bejan’s ideas I created a spreadsheet that duplicated his theoretical work, only using the real-world values in the formulas. As you might imagine, it was a fascinating piece of research, full of unexpected insights and fully supportive of the claims made in his paper.

Now, I can understand you not being willing to do this. It’s a personal choice of where we each put our energy and time.

And certainly, some of my conclusions from reading the study and building the model of Bejan’s work may be incorrect.

However, for you to sit on the sidelines, not do the research yourself, and then have the balls to criticize my temerity in actually drawing conclusions from the work that I have done … well, let me say that’s not my style.

I’m quite happy to have my science proven or disproven, either one advances my understanding. But to have someone who is not willing to do the work criticize me, not for my conclusions, but for doing the work and drawing my own conclusions … that’s a bridge too far.

Like I said, that’s why this is not much fun. I want to discuss the science. You want to discuss press releases and tell me why I’m a fool to believe my own lying eyes …

329

I value my scientific judgement enough to only actually make a judgement when I am sufficiently well-versed in the particular aspect of the science to have one. Maybe I will some day have time to read the Bejan paper and his earlier work on constructal theory thoroughly enough to form an independent opinion, but I frankly don’t now. Some things I can read and quickly have an opinion on, but this is not one of them.

First of all, the Douglass study, even if correct, does not show the Santer study to be wrong because they also caricature the Santer study…In fact, they say things about it that are frankly sort of bizarre. Second of all, there are serious problems with the Douglass study, not the least of which is that they don’t seem to understand that we are living in a world where we are following one particular realization of the climate and not an ensemble of climate realizations. Third of all, even if Santer was shown to be wrong, that would not make your misunderstanding of what the Santer study said any more correct. The problem that I had was not that you thought that Santer et al. were wrong to conclude that the disagreement between the model and the data on the multi-decadal timescale was most likely due to problems with the data, but rather that you didn’t seem to be willing to even understand their argument for saying this and could only express a ridiculous caricature of their argument (in this way sort of like Douglass…although your caricature was actually quite different from theirs; I am not sure why everyone seems to have such a hard time understanding that paper since it is pretty clear to me).

Well, because the only discussion regarding the effects of climate change seems to be talking about how they are going to look into these questions in the future. I don’t think this involves very much interpretation on my part…particularly when you consider what I originally said:

It is interesting how you go from accusing me of making unwarranted assumptions about what someone meant based on what they did or did not say and then in the next paragraph make such assumption about what I said. Where did I say anything derogatory about Bejan? I just noted what the technically-correct statement about his citation record appears to be. I didn’t editorialize about what this said about him. He is clearly a very smart guy.

What I noted was my own observation of how I feel that I can predict with quite good accuracy how you will come down on any particular scientific paper. The Gerlich paper is the only paper from a skeptical point-of-view that I have explicitly seen you take a negative stand on, at least as I recall. I’d be happy to hear about others though!

330

jshore, did you even bother to read the UnRealClimate piece you cited? If so, did you catch the stupid mathematical error made by Gavin? Perhaps not, you don’t seem to read these things with a very critical eye …

Gavin’s error has been discussed at William Briggs site as well … Briggs is an eminent statistician, who did not agree with Gavin. Nor did the other statisticians who posted on the question, both there and elsewhere.

In addition, Gavin stupidly repeated his base, vile canard there about Douglass deliberately not using the appropriate data. He can do that on RealClimate, because he just censors anyone who might point out his nasty claims and his stupid errors. But he must have forgotten that on Wm. Brigg’s site, he can’t censor people he doesn’t like. In the event, Douglass called him on it, and politely asked Gavin for an apology.

And surprise, surprise, guess what? Gavin didn’t have the balls to apologize … but you will do well to note that he backed off of the lie immediately and didn’t say another word about it.

And you think that this is a man we should pay attention to? A man who will tell a flat-out lie to buttress his point, and then when he is caught in the lie, refuses to apologize? That’s your numerical mentor in this matter?

If you think the Douglass paper is flawed, we can certainly discuss that. But since you obviously approve of a man who will undertake a vicious, false attack when he feels threatened, since you take that man as your main mathematical citation, it does make me wonder just exactly how far you will go to prove a point …

… or perhaps, like the Bejan study, you don’t have opinions on these matters yourself, you depend on the opinion of others, so since the IPCC hasn’t reviewed it yet to give you something to say, perhaps we can’t discuss the Douglass paper after all …

w.

331

First of all, while Briggs is a PhD statistician, it is unclear to me whether he is particularly “eminent” or not. He seems to be primarily famous for being an AGW “skeptic”…but that’s neither here nor there. Second of all, I don’t see where in that piece Briggs says that Gavin is wrong in his point about the Douglass paper. Third of all, reading through the comments (admittedly not every one), the only thing I could find disputing Gavin’s point was your own post #108. And, that post is very clearly misguided. You say:

In support of this, you quote the following from the IPCC (where I am providing a less full quote than you, just quoting the part you bolded and a bit more):

However, you and the IPCC are in fact saying very different things and I am rather surprised that you didn’t realize this. The IPCC is not saying that the ensemble mean approaches the observational data. It says that the ensemble mean is a better estimate of the forced climate change of the real system. Alas, however, the real system does not include only forced climate change; it also includes a component due to natural internal variability.

This is a very basic point about the climate system that is important to understand. The reason why we have to wait so long to get good estimates of trends due to climate forcings in the climate system is precisely because nature is not doing an ensemble average! I.e., what the actual evolution of the climate is following is akin to one particular run of a climate model, not an ensemble average. If we could run an ensemble average for the real earth, it would be much easier to pick out trends in the data more quickly because with enough different “runs”, you could essentially average out the noise and just see the forced signal. Alas, while this is possible in the modeling world, it is not possible in the real world, where we are stuck in one particular “run” with all the natural internal variability that entails.

The analogy that Gavin makes is exactly correct. What we do with climate models when we average over ensembles is akin to flipping that die many times (or, more precisely, simulating the flip of the die using a pseudorandom number generator)…and this allows us to get a much better estimate of the mean. (This analogy focusses on the uncertainty due to statistical fluctuations. In climate modeling, there are also uncertainties due to how good the climate model models the real physical system…which don’t come into our simple die flipping analogy if we assume the die is fair and the pseudorandom number generator on the computer is a good one.) However, all because we can estimate the mean from flipping a die to be 3.5 ± 0.001 (where the latter is the standard error) by doing enough simulated runs of the die flipping on the computer does not mean that we should expect that the experimental data from, say, one flip or 5 flips or even 100 flips to have a mean value that agrees with our estimate to within the standard error.

So, it looks like it is you who have made the mathematical error, not Gavin.

By the way, your other point in that post is wrong too in that you imply that the idea that the warming in the tropical atmosphere should be magnified above the surface is a prediction specific to the greenhouse gas forcing. As Santer et al. explain, this is a very generic prediction for the magnification of temperature fluctuations over a broad range of timescales in the tropical atmosphere, independent of the specific mechanism producing the fluctuations.

I really don’t want to get into these petty arguments where you try to destroy someone’s credibility by some perceived slight that they committed (this case) or something they said about the issues involving the communication of science (the case of Steven Schneider) or whatever. I’ll just say that those in the ClimateAudit community who have made “base, vile” claims in regards to Mann and his motives and actions would do well to follow the saying that “He who is without sin, cast the first stone!”

332

Case 1. Gavin Schmidt accuses David Douglass of scientific misconduct regarding the study data. Douglass immediately replies that it is a lie, and asks for an apology. Gavin refuses to give one.

Case 2. Steven McIntyre accuses Michael Mann of scientific misconduct regarding the “CENSORED” file. Michael Mann does not reply to McIntre’s accusation, then or ever. He does not ask for a retraction. He does not state that McIntyre is lying. He does … well … nothing.

Bro’, if you can’t see the difference between these two actions, you’re much further up there in the ivory tower than I had feared.

Do you want to know why Michael Mann has never said a single word about the “CENSORED” file, what’s in there, and why he put it there? Want to know why he never did what Douglass did, loudly proclaim his innocence, and demand a retraction and an apology?

Yeah, I suppose you haven’t figured it out yet …

w.

PS - If you really think that

then get up off of your dead … couch … and provide a citation for your claim. While not as egregious as your citing the IPCC as a whole, citing the Santer study as a whole is not very valuable here. I looked … I can’t find what you are talking about. I find the following:

I note that he doesn’t say that all different kinds of things will cause the lapse-rate to rise. But clearly you are not talking about that, so … what are you talking about?

PPS - Given your thoughts about stones and who casts them, I assume that means you categorically refuse your jury duty when you are called. After all, how could you sit on a jury and decide guilt and innocence when you are not sin-free yourself? So my question is, how do you convince the Judge to let you off of jury duty? I’ve never seen this in practice.

Or, is this reluctance of yours, this petrophobia, this “judge not lest ye be judged” idea, only a sometimes thing with you? Is it just something that you quote to make a point, and ignore in the real world?

333

intention: I really don’t want to get into the interpersonal issues between scientists with you. You guys at ClimateAudit seem to have your own reality in regards to this…and it is just not worth arguing about. However, I am more resistant to letting you have your own reality in regards to the science itself.

It is such a major point of the paper that I am surprised you have missed this point. I guess I keep overestimating the extent to which you have absorbed any of the ideas from the Santer et al. paper. I am amazed that you had such a strong opinion on that paper despite your lack of understanding of it…Or maybe it was because of your lack of understanding of it.
Anyway, it is inherent in the whole idea that, not only is the multidecadal trend in temperature due to greenhouse gases expected to be amplified, but also the temperature fluctuations on shorter timescales are expected to be amplified (independent of whatever might be causing them)…And, in fact, such amplification is clearly seen in the data on these shorter timescales. It is stated most directly in these statements:

You can also find Gavin, who is one of the authors of Santer et al., explaining this to another confused person in response to comment #82 in this RealClimate post:

But, like I said, the concept is implicit in the fact that they expect the amplification to occur for temperature fluctuations on a variety of timescales and that they even have a simple theoretical expression that they use that apparently makes reference to the basic properties of the tropical atmosphere and doesn’t make any reference to greenhouse gases.

By the way, can I assume at least that you now understand your mistake in regards to the Douglass paper and the die-throwing analogy? It is pretty important to understand the basic differences between a specific realization of either a climate model or the real world on the one hand and an ensemble average on the other.

My best to you, as always.

334

Well, no d’oh … if the main guy I was depending for my statistics lied to support his case, and then refused to apologize for his libel, I wouldn’t want to get into the interpersonal issues either …

Look, bro’, putting in citations from Gavin, who is known to lie to support his point, just proves your naiveté … you can skip them, it just makes you look foolish. For example, in the abstract of the Santer paper, they say (emphasis mine):

So despite your claims and citations, Santer et al. obviously think that it is possible for the planet to warm without the expected amplification, and that it is also possible that the models fail to capture it. Fred Singer has offered several ways for this to happen:

Four, count 'em, four different possible ways to do what Gavin said is impossible, including the one I have talked about, negative cloud feedback, plus the abstract of the paper itself says it’s possible … like I said, depending on a man who has publicly demonstrated that he will lie to make his point can lead you to down roads you might not want to travel. Gavin’s been dealing with models for so long he seems to have forgotten that just because something happens in every model doesn’t mean it happens in reality.

Absolutely not. This is an important point, I’ll address it in a separate post, it deserves careful attention.

My best to you as well, jshore.

w.

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Actually, I think it makes you look foolish when you go around dismissing the well-respected scientists in the field (Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Ben Santer, Steven Schneider, and Jim Hansen). And, then in their place you put Fred Singer! I mean that is embarrassing! You ClimateAudit folks really do exist in an alternate reality.

Glad that you are finally reading the abstract of the paper that you claimed to know well enough to have such a strong opinion on these last couple of years. No one research paper is going to definitively eliminate all possibilities. The point of the Santer paper was to significantly sharpen the argument. I.e., if you want to believe that the models are getting this wrong, then you have to believe that a very basic piece of physics, which can be derived from simple principles and is experimentally verified to operate over a broad range of timescales, somehow breaks down due to some unknown new phenomenon only at the longest timescales studied…which coincidently happen to be the timescales at which the satellite and radiosonde data sets are known to have various issues. And, at any rate, you have to propose feedbacks that explain this breakdown and how it occurs only on such long timescales and not on shorter timescales.

Everyone can dream up some half-baked ideas from now 'til when the cows come home (especially when being paid to do so). The question is whether they match experiments…And, in particular whether they can explain why they would lead to a breakdown of the model physics only a multidecadal timescale and not on shorter timescales. Alas, it is hard for me to see how cloud feedback effects would not operate on the shorter timescale but would on the longer. The whole point that makes clouds challenging for the GCMs to model is their relatively short length and timescales. In fact, the recent paper by Spencer et al that claimed to find some new feedback on the timescale of days that they claimed could supposedly be of importance as a negative feedback if it also occurred on much longer timescales seems very unlikely to fit the bill in this regard.

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I don’t “go around dismissing” anyone’s work. I have looked at and analyzed the work of various climate scientists.

Which is what scientists do. They propose theories, they discuss and analyze competing theories. I look at each new study as just that - I don’t dismiss it or believe it, I don’t do either one. I analyze it.

Now, if you have scientific objections to my analysis (which I agree is controversial) of say Hansen’s “smoking gun” paper about ocean heat storage, we can discuss them. If you have theoretical problems with my showing, in Nature Magazine, that the claimed effect of climate change on Lake Tanganyika was not there, that it was simply a one-year step change, we can discuss that.

But to say I “dismiss” anyone is simply not true.

(As an aside, linking first to three William Connelley/ Kim Petersen controlled hagiographies of your climate saints and then to an attack piece on Fred Singer, is balancing honesty with effectiveness … but I digress.)

Finally, all Fred Singer did was point to the work of three other scientists, Hugh Ellsaesser, William Gray, and Richard Lindzen. You are attacking the weathervane and ignoring the wind.

This is the dificult part about conversations with you, jshore.

I post that increasing temperature trends aloft is a prediction of a theory of a GHG driven climate.

You post that no, Gavin says increasing warming trends aloft in the tropics is true of the climate in general, it’s always true, or somesuch.

I post the abstract of Santer and Gavin’s paper, which says that the observations could be right and the models wrong … I post four theoretical ways it could happen.

At that point, replying with nothing more a snide and untrue aspersion that I’m just getting around to reading the abstract is a wholesale evasion of the issue. I’ve read the paper, and run the numbers on it myself, and you know that already.

The Santer paper itself says:

Funny how they didn’t say anything about it overthrowing atmospheric physics if the disparity is real. Funny how they make no claim that the observations disagree with established atmospheric physics … just that if the observations are right, then either the climate models (which are proxies for the theory) or the forcings are wrong. Which is what I say as well.

You and the modelers seem to think, for some reason, that the models or the forcings being wrong is so unlikely, so highly improbable, that the reasonable conclusion is that the observations are probably wrong.

Me, I’ve written computer programs for forty years now. I know better than to say that computer models being wrong is improbable. And the history of science is littered with theories that are wrong …

Whoa, slow down … I have to propose feedbacks?

You propose a theory, that GHGs are warming the planet.

We’ve recently found out that the theory doesn’t match observations. Your response is to say that the observations are wrong, without putting forward a single shred of evidence to show that they are wrong.

Now you say it’s my responsibility to propose an alternate theory that does explain the observations!!! We’ve just in the last couple of months shown that the GHG driver theory doesn’t match these particular observations, and immediately I should whip out my Powerpoint charts revealing my complete theory of everything, to show how it explains the mismatch??? I’m gonna say this real soft, so I don’t offend any of your climate saints …

… ssshhh … we don’t understand the climate very well yet … we have no general theory of climate … we don’t know whether or not the earth has an equilibrium temperature, and if it does, what governs it … we don’t know how much humans are affecting the climate … we are not clear how we are affecting the climate … our datasets are sparse, inaccurate, and spotty … our models have gridcells many orders of magnitude larger than critical phenomena … we don’t know if the net feedback is positive or negative … we don’t have one agreed upon historical dataset of any climate variable, in particular global temperature …

But at the end, sorry, no, I’ll pass. I’m under no obligation to explain why your theory doesn’t fit the observations. That’s your job.

To quote you again, from directly above,

“Everyone can dream up some half-baked ideas from now 'til when the cows come home (especially when being paid to do so). The question is whether they match experiments.”

My friend, I couldn’t have said it better. That’s the problem - the theory that the change in GHGs is driving the temperature rise doesn’t match the experiments. It doesn’t agree with the balloon data. It doesn’t agree with the satellite data. The question as to why is an unsolved puzzle right now.

Yes, it is possible that both the satellite data and the radiosonde data is fundamentally flawed in the same direction somehow … but until that is shown, I’ve gotta vote in favor of the experiments over the models.

My best to you, and to everyone.

w.

PS - Regarding the difference in the short and long-term tropical trends aloft, as an example to ponder, consider the relationship between global albedo and total system losses. In the short run (months, seasons), they move opposite to each other. In the long run, however (years, decades), they run in parallel. So this kind of short/long term difference of a climate variable is not unknown in the climate system.

Go figure …

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intention: You know, one point that I am beginning to agree with you on is when in a post yesterday you called me “naive” because, frankly, I have held onto the naive belief that you are truly interested in looking for the truth and that if you were made to realize that you were wrong about something then you would admit it rather than just obfuscate.

As you would say, let’s have a review of the bidding here:

(1) You claim that “Gavin’s error has been discussed at William Briggs site as well … Briggs is an eminent statistician, who did not agree with Gavin.” Status: Claim apparently dropped. I could not find where Briggs claimed Gavin had made such an error in analyzing the Douglass paper and you have never provided me with evidence of this.

(2) At the Briggs site itself in a comment, you claimed that “The observed data is not just another throw of the dice. According to the IPCC, the observed data is the value that the models are supposed to predict/project/forecast, and that their mean is supposed to ‘approach’. Therefore, the proper measure of the fit between models and data is the standard error of the mean.” Status: I’ve explained to you how you are wrong and you have not responded, although you have said that you would in a future post. I am not exactly sure what you are waiting for; Are you asking Douglass himself what his response would be?

(3) At the Briggs site, you claimed that “The fact that all of the GCMs except a couple mutants show increasing temperature trends aloft is not a coincidence. Nor is it a result of model tuning, or of real world observations. It is the result of the theory that GHGs are raising the temperature of the planet.” Status: I explained how the Santer et al. paper shows that the amplification of temperature changes in the tropical atmosphere is a general consequence of very basic physics that has nothing to do with GHGs…and the theory applies not just to the multidecadal timescales of interest but to shorter timescales…and that the data clearly are in good agreement with the theory on these shorter timescales. It is only on the multidecadal timescales, where there are known issues with the data, that there seems to be a discrepancy between data and theory (and once one corrects the Douglass paper for their obvious error, the discrepancy probably isn’t even statistically significant).

In light of this, I would expect that at the very least, you would be wanting to correct the record by going back to the Briggs site and admitting that your two statements were hasty and everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Instead, you are just shucking and jiving and refusing to acknowledge your mistakes.

Well, actually, you seem to spend quite a bit of time telling us about supposedly horrible things that very eminent scientists are doing.

What you don’t say is that you were wrong about the increasing temperature trends aloft in the tropical atmosphere in the models being a prediction of a GHG driven climate. And, what the Santer et al. paper shows is that the observations agree well with the models on this point on timescales of months to a few years. The only place there is any evidence for a discrepancy is on the multidecadal timescales.

Finally, you have just thrown out 4 half-baked ideas without providing any observational support for them and, in fact, without even an attempt whatsoever to show that they resolve the discrepancy…i.e., that they fix the problem on multidecadal timescales without messing up the agreement that occurs over the shorter timescales.

Frankly, what I know is no matter how little I have assumed you understand about a paper that you made all these extravagant claims to have investigated, I have continually overestimated how much you actually understood of it. That is what I know.

Funny that you would choose now to quote from the introduction to the paper where they are setting up the problem, rather than from the conclusion of the paper where they explain the implications of what they have shown:

(By the way, it is worth noting that since this paper was published, a mistake has in fact been found in the UAH data trend and I believe that the corrected version now shows the same sign as the others, i.e., warming…although still with a lower value.)

Here is where you are wrong not just about the science but how science works. Once a theory is well-established, the responsibility shifts to those who are trying to replace it to show that they have a better theory that better fits the observed data. There is no theory we have that does not have some observational data that appears to be in conflict of it.

However, besides being wrong on the philosophy of science part, you are also wrong on the science part. Because the predictions of amplification in the tropical atmosphere is not a consequence of the GHG theory but of much more basic physics…and only a small part of it is in apparent conflict with observations and, given the uncertainties involved, it is not even clear that this conflict is statistically-significant.

Repeating a bogus argument 5 times does not make it right. So, I will repeat my response to these bogus arguments once again. The theory of amplification of temperature fluctuations in the tropical atmosphere is independent of the cause of those temperature fluctuations and only on the longest timescales measured is there discrepancy with experiment and it is not clear that this discrepancy is statistically-significant (and, there are known issues with both the satellite and balloon data over these multidecadal timescales).

I lost you here. Care to explain in more detail, this time with cites to the relevant literature?

My best to you, intention. I enjoy these discussions but I do hope that you will look critically at yourself and ask yourself the hard question of whether or not you are living up to your own credo of never compromising honesty for effectiveness.

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Just as a break from the sort of contentiousness of the debate and because after noting several times how Santer et al. argues that the magnification of temperature fluctuations with height in the tropical atmosphere is a consequence of what is apparently quite basic physics but without myself knowing the details of what this basic physics is, I thought it might be educational for myself and others to explore “simple moist adiabatic lapse rate (MALR) theory”.

However, because it often leads to deeper understanding if you have to work through it yourself, I decided not to search too hard for the answer but just to get a little guidance and figure it out myself. I will issue the disclaimer that, although I am reasonably confident that I have gotten the basic ideas right, there is no guarantee of this. I did find this general Wikipedia page on lapse rate to be useful in discussing some basic concepts.

Let’s start with the “dry adiabatic lapse rate”. We will consider a parcel of air rising up through the atmosphere. By “dry” it is meant that it is not saturated (i.e., relative humidity < 100%) and the “adiabatic” refers to the fact that we will assume there is no heat exchange with the surrounding atmosphere, a pretty good approximation because of the low thermal conductivity of air. Now, as this air parcel rises, the atmospheric pressure on it drops so it expands. This expansion means it does work on it surroundings, pushing the other air out of the way, which in turn means (along with the adiabatic assumption) that its internal energy…and thus it temperature…decreases. In fact, the “dry air adiabatic lapse rate” (decrease in temperature with height) can be worked out to be about 9.8 C per km…a pretty hefty drop in temperature with height!

Now, let’s consider the lapse rate for “moist”, by which it is meant saturated, air. The story proceeds in the same way. However, now when the air cools, some of the water vapor will condense out because the saturation concentration of water vapor is a strongly increasing function of temperature. This condensation releases “latent heat” which will warm the air. So, moist air will not have as large a lapse rate as dry air. Furthermore, since the saturation concentration of water vapor is not only an increasing function of temperature but also has a positive second derivative, the amount of water vapor that condenses when you drop from say 30 C to 29 C is larger than the amount that condenses when you drop from 29 C to 28 C, so there will be more latent heat released in the former case than the latter. Hence, the moist adiabatic lapse rate decreases with the temperature. (At low enough temperatures that the air doesn’t hold much water vapor, it should approach the dry adiabatic lapse rate.)

So, there you have it, we have derived that the moist adiabatic lapse rate is a decreasing function of the temperature. What are the implications for this when we consider moist air that starts at the surface at two different temperatures and rises up in the atmosphere? Well, the warmer parcel of air not only starts out warmer but it also cools more slowly as it rises because of its lower moist adiabatic lapse rate. Hence, when you consider the same two parcels of air at some point up in the atmosphere, the temperature difference between them will have increased. This is, I believe, the very basic physics behind the idea that the moist adiabatic lapse rate theory predicts a magnification of temperature fluctuations with height in the atmosphere.

Of course, I can think of a lot of questions that one might face in fleshing this out into a full-fledged theory. First of all, one might wonder why this process seems to be said to be particularly important in the tropical atmosphere. My guesses would be that it is because convective processes are important there and because the temperatures there are warm enough that the change in lapse rate with temperature is reasonably large. Second, one might wonder how important the moist adiabatic lapse rate is relative to the dry adiabatic lapse rate (which does not have the same interesting temperature dependence). I am not sure on this one, but it is important to note that even if the air starts out pretty dry, as it rises and cools rapidly at the dry adiabatic lapse rate, it will rapidly approach saturation…at which point the above arguments will start to apply.

So, that is, I believe the basic physics behind the prediction that temperature fluctuations in the tropical atmosphere will be larger as we go up in the atmosphere than they are at the surface. Note that it is a quite general argument and doesn’t make reference to the processes that lead to the temperature differences, i.e., whether they are due to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, changes in solar irradiance, changes in ocean temperatures, or whatever. It is just a generic consequence of the fact that the moist adiabatic lapse rate is a decreasing function of the temperature.

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I hadn’t commented on this in my first pass through your post, but I was thinking about it a little bit and thought it was worth a comment in and of itself.

I’ve done computational modeling in the physical sciences for almost that long (about 30 years…I actually started in high school) and what I have learned is each situation of disagreement between model and experiment should be handled on a case-by-case basis. There is no general rule to follow in regards to which you should trust more. In fact, I think it is one of my most important jobs as a modeler not only to give people results of my modeling but, when there is disagreement with experiment, to be able to give an informed opinion as to whether it is most likely due to errors in the model or errors in the experiment (or both…or if it just isn’t possible to venture a guess).

And, I will tell you that, if anything, I’ve usually erred on the side of trusting the modeling too little…not too much. I will also say, on a personal note, that I think one of the greatest joys of being a modeler is when you can confidently tell someone precisely what you think is wrong with their experiment (e.g., “You say you coated about 2 microns of that material but you actually coated about 3 microns”)…and then they go back and do further investigation and come back and tell you that you were right. It is the closest one can come to playing God. :wink:

In the particular case of the tropical amplification, there is some pretty good evidence pointing to the conclusion that, whatever statistically-significant errors might remain between the model and observations (and there is still some debate about how statistically-significant the differences are…but I am willing to grant that there likely are for some of the data sets), these are quite likely to be due to errors in the observational data. And, the Santer paper is really the one that laid out the evidence for believing this, namely: (1) The model predictions follow from some very basic physics considerations, independent of the mechanism causing the warming. (2) All the observational data sets are in good agreement with the model predictions for temperature fluctuations on the time scale of months to a few years. (3) The only discrepancy that occurs is for the decadal trends, with the data deviating from its behavior at shorter timescales whereas the model predicts the behavior seen at shorter timescale to continue. (4) The discrepancy…and quite likely whether or not it is even statistically-significant…depends very much on which data set one looks at. (5) These long timescales are exactly those timescales over which the observational data sets have known issues since neither the satellites nor the radiosondes were designed to prevent…or make it easy to correct for…a slow drift over time due to known instrumentation issues.

[And, even if Santer et al. are wrong in their conjecture that it is the observational data that has the problems, it still does not make you any more correct either on the issue of how well you have understood their paper or the the things that you have said at Briggs website in regards to ensemble averages or in regards to tropical amplification being a signal that is specific to the mechanism of the warming being due to greenhouse gas forcings.]

My best to you.

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I take it that your answer is “no.” Intention puts the bounds at +/- 2% on the Kelvin scale.

I think this is an important point, which doesn’t get nearly enough attention. There is a strong inference to be made that there are strong negative feedback mechanisms at work.