It is indeed, well, implied metaphor, with a bit hyperbole thrown in.
Glad you appreciated it 
This GW stuff is getting on my tits, I don’t like being told what to do at the best of times, and I really don’t like having bogus science shoved down my throat.
I actually heard that we are in for a 70m rise in sea levels on the radio - I assume someone misread .7cm
Sure. For example, in the lunar theory of Tobias Mayer who was working on Newtonian celestial mechanics in the mid-eighteenth century, he used an empirically determined parameter that corresponded to a combination of what would be called the equation of center and the lunar evection. Celestial mechanics wasn’t sufficiently developed at that time to allow for modeling or deriving the relevant orbital constants theoretically. But Mayer was able to toss in an empirically derived value that he could adjust to make his calculations agree with observations.
That, AFAICT, is the sort of thing that you object to climate modelers doing with quantities like cloud albedo. If I understand you correctly, you feel that the models should be based only on constants rigorously derived from well-established physical theory, rather than including parameters that are empirically “tuned” to agree with observed values because they aren’t yet well enough understood theoretically.
That’s certainly a good goal to shoot for, and I hope that climate science will indeed soon become as theoretically solid as Newtonian celestial mechanics now is. But i don’t buy the argument that we need to attain that goal before we can consider provisionally accepting conclusions drawn from imperfect climate science models. After all, Mayer’s empirically-tweaked lunar theory was very imperfect too, but he nonetheless managed to come up with a computational model that improved the accuracy of astronomical predictions. Imperfect models relying on poorly-understood empirical parameters are, as I said, the necessary precursors of fully-understood mature scientific theories.
Says who? If the IPCC has altered some of their forcings categories from the 2001 report to the 2007 report, why should I believe you that they’ve done it just “to make things look better” and “to impress the credulous” and to set a “trap for true believers”, rather than because the new classification scheme actually better reflects the scientific importance of the categories?
You say that you just want people to figure things out for themselves rather than relying on assumptions, but you keep spraying your own negative assumptions all over AGW claims, without providing convincing evidence to back them up.
(And by the way, you omitted to point out that the 2007 report also combined two categories with a “Medium” LOSU into one category—exactly the opposite effect of dividing one category with a “High” LOSU into two—as well as improving the LOSU of other categories. Trying to pull a little sleight-of-hand here to impress the credulous and make the IPCC look worse, are you?)
See, this is where you depart from the realm of reality. In a field as complex as climate science, it is simply not possible for anyone—not laypersons, not scientists in other fields, not climate scientists themselves, not you, not anyone—to understand every part of the subject independently, without relying on anybody else’s authority whatsoever in any respect. Especially for non-scientists, there is absolutely no way we’re going to be able to address this issue without making some judgement calls about whom we’re going to believe concerning issues that we can’t fully understand all on our own.
Given that I have to make at least some non-scientific decisions about which sources should be considered trustworthy, why should I believe you when you say that the IPCC is not to be trusted? They’ve got a lot more professional expertise in climate science than you have.
Which is great, and don’t get me wrong, I admire your efforts and your achievements. However, since we are discussing professional credentials here (and as I noted, there’s simply no way for laypersons to address these issues without taking professional credentials into account at least to some extent), it’s worth while adding some details to avoid potentially giving a misleading impression. For instance, when the subject of your publications came up in a thread last spring, it was pointed out that your Nature piece was in fact a “Brief Communication Arising”, i.e., a short letter containing queries about a previously published article. We didn’t manage to establish in that thread whether “Brief Communication” items in Nature are peer-reviewed or not.
Believe me, Willis old chap, I haven’t the slightest interest in the length of any of your organs and have no intention of asking you any questions about them! However, since this is a thread about climate science, and since you are making a lot of very strong assertions about the worthlessness and unreliablity of mainstream climate science on the basis of your claim to be a climate researcher, I do think it’s reasonable to take into consideration your scientific credentials and the credibility of your evaluations of the work of professional climate scientists.
That’s very true indeed. However, based on some of the statements you’ve made that I’m capable of evaluating, and based on the evaluations by other posters of some of your other statements, I can already tell that you’re not always right about everything. Therefore, I need to consider carefully the likelihood of whether you’re right in your conclusions about climate science, especially on issues where you’re far outside the scientific mainstream.
But this attempted analogy with climate science suffers from the same flaw as intention’s analogy using the stock market. Namely, the design of road systems by human beings, like the stock markets constructed by human beings, is not a purely physical system operating in accordance with the laws of physics.
Attempting to model human desires and whims about things like infrastructure planning and financial investment is a fundamentally different problem from attempting to model macroscopic physical systems. Yes, global climate systems are definitely very complex and still quite poorly understood, but at least they are physical systems governed by physical laws.
I’m not quite convinced that somebody who considers human-designed road systems a useful “metaphor” for climate systems is a reliable judge of what constitutes “bogus science”.
This is an attempt, if I understand correctly, to estimate a physical quantity in an equation. Compare and contrast this, as I previously asked (and you have ignored) with limiting the pool melt time in the Arctic to two specified months by using a parameter which has no relation to physical quantity, but is simply a computer fiat designed to obviate the bad results from the model.
I have no problem with using our best guess of albedo in a model, instead of deriving it from physical principles. However, when we use dozens and dozens of these parameters in a model, we need to realize that each one reduces the dependence we can put on the model. So when people such as the Grist FAQ say that based on model results, there is no cloud feedback, I have a huge problem with that. Of course there is no feedback, if you use a guess about albedo instead of an actual calculation.
The problem is that the models contain not one, or two, but dozens and dozens of parameters, restrictions, best guesses, and kludges to force the model from going out of control that they are not useful for what people are asking them to do, like provide answers to questions like “is there cloud feedback” or “how much will the temperature rise in 100 years”. With that many assumptions, guesses, and parameters, all the current generation of models can show us are the underlying beliefs of the all too imperfect humans who wrote the programs.
Mayer’s model was immediately testable against competing models, and shown to produce better results. Because of that, it was used until the next better approximation arrived.
The computer climate models offer us no such means of comparing or testing their results. Should we believe the MIROC model, or the GISS model, or the HadCRUT model, or the CCM3 model, or what? They all give different answers. Because of that, there is no way to say that the MIROC parameterized estimate of clouds is better than the GISS parameterized estimate of clouds, and science doesn’t advance an inch.
The GISS model, as I mentioned before, gives a downwelling LW value which is wrong globally by about 10 W/m2, and over the tropics by about 20 W/m2. Despite that, James Hansen reports a top-of-atmosphere energy imbalance of “0.85 ±0.15 W/m2”, and says that this model result is a “smoking gun” that proves CO2 is the culprit. It is that kind of entirely unsupportable conclusion from these crude, highly-parameterized early models that is the problem.
Kimstu, you were the one who claimed that scientific understanding is now better, and you said that this was true in part because now "Two have a LOSU of “High” … so while I may well be wrong about their motives, the outcome is clear — you cited the extra “High” category as evidence of change, without noticing the split, and I suspect that you will not be the only one to do so.
They also report an improved LOSU of Ozone, as you point out, despite the fact that the ozone errors as a percentage of the reported value have increased, not decreased. Also, in the fine print, they say “Additional forcing factors not included here are considered to have a very low LOSU.”, meaning that they no longer are reporting on or even mentioning those as they did in the Third Annual Report" … why not? Finally, they give no explanation of how or why they changed either the categories or the level of scientific understanding.
Now perhaps you think those changes were all done for noble, pure, scientific reasons … and if so, I will not attempt dissuade you.
Well, clearly you didn’t bother to read what I suggested you read. In that series of articles, a variety of well known, well respected, highly educated climate scientists provide answers to many of your questions. If you insist on not learning the science required to read the underlying scientific papers, at least take a look at what those scientists have to say. Then come back and tell me why they are wrong, wrong, wrong, as you continue to claim.
Also, I find that most of the scientific articles in climate science are quite understandable, in part because the science is so young and so poorly understood. Perhaps you might have trouble understanding them, but generally I don’t. And when I do have trouble understanding them, I break out the books and read until I do understand them. I am a serious amateur scientist, a term which means someone who does it for love, not money, and I do my homework.
Finally, some of the papers, like Hansen’s paper claiming that a model with a number of acknowledged internal errors of 10 W/m2 or larger can calculate a top-of-atmosphere energy balance of “0.85 ± 0.15 W/m2” don’t require much science background at all, they simply fail the laugh test …
“Brief Communications” in Nature are indeed peer-reviewed, and quite severely, I might add. And they are not “short letters containing queries”, they are often, as in my case, scientific challenges to the basic claims of the article.
How many submissions have you gotten published in Nature regarding climate science? If as I assume the answer is “none”, then by your incorrect metric, people should believe me instead of you … but like I have said many times, science is not determined by credentials but by facts. That’s why I provide citations, and am always happy to provide more.
Unlike many posters on both sides of this subject, I have provided extensive citations to the work of climate scientists to support my points. I have not, as far as I know, made any attempt to get you to believe what I say, I am reporting on what I have learned in my research, I have provided citations to numerous scientific documents to back up my statements, and I am happy to provide more.
You keep insisting it is about me. It is not. It is about science, and I am not alone in my claims. If you want further citations for any of them, please let me know, but attacking the messenger is worthless.
Of course, I’m not always right, who is? But your claim that my statements are “far outside the scientific mainstream” somehow glosses over the fact that I have cited scientific documents to back up my points, and have offered to provide more as requested.
In addition, it neglects the forced orthodoxy in climate science. Ever since Henk Tenneke was kicked out of his position at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute for daring to question climate models, climate scientists have grown cautious about expressing anything but orthodox positions. Calls for “Nuremberg style” trials for climate “deniers” and false claims of a “consensus” have led to a situation where two US State Climatologists are currently threatened with losing their jobs for the crime of disagreeing with the “scientific mainstream”.
So pretty soon, we’ll have 100% agreement among state climatologist about climate science, any you’ll be able to say “You’re in disagreement with every single state climatologist”, as though that actually mean something. I have referred several times to the scientific studies of the actual attitudes of climate scientists. You claim to be interested in science, but never once have you acknowledged that the science shows your claims of a “consensus” to be false. I don’t care if you believe me … but to sustain your currently less-than-believable claim that you are actually interested in the science, you might take the trouble to read something other than the party line. Read the series of articles I referred to above, then come back and tell me why you think those ten eminent climate scientists are wrong.
Finally, Kimstu, thank you for the tone and tenacity of your discussion. You clearly believe fervently in what you are saying, have given it considerable thought, and discuss it in a genteel manner.
Now, if you’d just take the time to read some of the science that disagrees with your fervent beliefs, rather than just the science that agrees with your beliefs, you might arrive at that blessed state where you can honestly say “we don’t know enough to spend billions yet based on unproven models” … Or, since you want to believe professional scientists rather than believe my “very strong assertions about the worthlessness and unreliablity of mainstream climate science”, let me quote from a well-known and respected expert on climate models and modeling, the former director of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, “We only understand 10% of the climate issue. That is not enough to wreck the world economy with Kyoto-like measures.”
“We only understand 10%” … scientific enough for you?
w.
Kimstu, I forgot one thing. You say you are guided by the scientists. I provided you three of the world’s most eminent scientists (Freeman Dyson, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann) speaking very strongly against believing the results of models with a number of parameters … and you totally ignore them and claim the models are good enough to base billion dollar decisions on.
What’s up with that? It seems to me that you only believe the scientists who say things that you agree with … yet you yourself say that you are not competent to judge the questions on scientific merit, which is why you believe scientists.
So how have you decided that Dyson, Fermi, and von Neumann are wrong, and you are right?
w.
Sure, I think it’s perfectly fair to say that the use of parametrized values for ill-understood quantities makes models more uncertain. However, I’m not convinced that such parameters automatically make the models completely meaningless or useless, even when there are dozens and dozens of them, as you seem to be arguing.
No, I did not. (See, it’s precisely this kind of inaccuracy and/or misinterpretation on your part when dealing even with simple statements in a non-technical discussion that makes me so wary about your evaluations of more complicated scientific claims.) What actually happened is that I noted that your “nine out of twelve forcings Low or Very Low LOSU” claim was outdated as of the 2007 IPCC report. You then asserted that the changes in the IPCC’s forcings assessment were made deliberately to mislead and deceive their audience. I then asked why I should believe your assertion is true, rather than believing that the changes reflected a better understanding of the science. I did not claim (nor would I claim) that I know for sure whether or not the understanding of the science is now better.
You’re wrong, as it happens; I did read your linked series of articles on “climate deniers” by Lawrence Solomon, while I was writing my previous post in response to yours.
But I found that those National Post newspaper articles don’t actually consist of climate scientists providing answers to my questions about whom I should believe concerning climate science, and why. They’re simply a bunch of assertions about those various scientists, and a few dissassociated quotes from each of them, woven into a narrative by a journalist. No cites of the scientific literature or anything like that. Heck, if I’m not going to take your word about which scientists to believe—and you at least are willing to link to the research—I’m certainly not going to take Lawrence Solomon’s.
Fine by me. I freely admit that I’m no climate scientist, not even an amateur one, and I have never claimed any independent expertise or authority for any of my statements on climate science; all I do is offer up my best attempts at understanding and explaining in layman’s terms what it is the real climate scientists are saying.
Fair enough. What I don’t understand is why, if that’s true, you seem to get so upset when I tell you frankly that I don’t believe what you say. If you don’t care whether or not I believe you, then why do you keep arguing?
Now this sounds just plain weird. Why on earth should I consider Fermi (who died in 1954) or von Neumann (who died in 1957) authorities on the validity of modern climate modeling?
Looking over the thread so far, your fundamental problem with this debate seems to be that you mistakenly think I believe that the climate models are certain. I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I think that therefore the models must be worthless.
I do agree, and I’ve said so many times already, that a partially-understood model with lots of empirical parameters is much less reliable than a fully-developed physical theory. I sure do wish that climate science were already a mature science whose physics we understood perfectly; it would save all of us a lot of work and worry. But you go to the voting booth with the climate science you have, not with the climate science you wish you had.
After all, when it comes to issues of policy, we make billion-dollar decisions based on poorly-understood models loaded with dozens and dozens of empirical parameters all the time. We’re constantly making major policy decisions based on economics, based on medicine, based on sociology, and so forth. None of these counts as a fully-understood and reliably predictive theory; they involve at least as much seat-of-the-pants empirical reasoning as climate science does.
Yet we don’t demand that policymakers and voters stand frozen into immobility until we’ve worked out all the remaining uncertainties in the theories underlying medicine and sociology and economics. Nor do we consider that criticisms of mainstream theories by a few researchers in medicine or sociology or economics automatically makes those theories invalid and useless. AFAICT, there’s no sensible reason why we should treat climate science as a special case where we’re not allowed to make decisions just because the models are still imperfect.
Since you want to get Ad Hominem take a look at the bolding.
Do you actually know anything about modelling ?
Have you ever heard of Goodhart’s Law ?
Have you ever done any computer modelling - writing the algorithms yourself ?
Not counting the SDMB, what I read and what I hear on the radio is a bunch of sanctimonious opportunists who have no scientific understanding, busily telling us what to do.
Did you know that in the UK they are seriously looking at ‘road pricing’, which means charging people $3 per mile at what is deemed ‘peak times’. You ought to see what we already pay for petrol and annual road tax.
They slap taxes on airline travel, and then double them.
In a few months time selling a house will involve getting an ‘energy efficiency’ report. Another nice little earner.
‘Green’ and CO2 has become quite an industry over here.
I had said:
Can we depend on models with dozens of parameters? I said that if you parameterize the albedo, you cannot then use the model to claim that there is no albedo feedback, because the model is using a guess about the albedo rather than calculating it. Because the albedo does not depend on physical conditions, the model is incapable of simulating feedback.
Now in the heat engine which is the climate, albedo functions as a throttle, increasing or decreasing the amount of solar fuel that the engine receives. A tiny 2% change in albedo changes the solar forcing by about 4.8 W/m2, more than a doubling of CO2.
This, of course, means that until we can determine the albedo to about 2%, we won’t be able to say much about changes of that magnitude from the model results, because they may be either swamped or amplified by a tiny albedo change. At present, the models do not function at all if the albedo is calculated, which is why they all agree on the albedo — because none of them calculate it, they all put in a best guess. I have provided a citation for this statement, from the people who write the models, so no need to believe me.
Is such a model useless? No, we can still use it for limited purposes. But it is useless for claiming that there is no albedo feedback … which is what I said. And because of this, it is also useless for making long-term predictions in a system where the presence or absence of albedo feedback is of utmost importance … like the climate.
Next, I had said that “Kimstu, you were the one who claimed that scientific understanding is now better”, because you said the new, AR4 estimate of LOSU showed that the level of scientific understanding had improved over the old TAR results I cited. You replied:
Ah, I see my mistake. You didn’t say that the scientific understanding was better, you said the UN said the level of understanding was better, and I mistakenly assumed that you believed that they were correct in that statement. I quote:
So, when you said that, you didn’t mean that you believed it, just that the UN believes it … my mistake. So, are you saying you don’t believe it? I want to avoid a further misunderstanding here. Are you now saying you don’t believe the IPCC when it says that scientific understanding has increased, or you do?
If you don’t believe them, please let us know why you don’t believe them. On the other hand, if you do believe them … well, in that case, there was no misunderstanding, and my statement was correct.
My apologies for thinking that you hadn’t read them, I assumed that was the case since you didn’t have any questions about them, or find any fault with them.
So, since you don’t seem to question their statements (not the assertions about them, but their statements), am I to assume that you now agree that there are eminent scientists out there, not bee-in-the-bonnet folks but MIT professors and heads of departments and experienced, well known scientists and PhDs at major universities with dozens of papers to their name who believe that we only understand 10% of climate science, that CO2 may not be the main driver of climate changes, that cosmic rays have an appreciable, major effect on climate, and other such “heresies”?
[…]
I’ve been asking you, over and over, to read the science I cite. You keep replying, as you just did above, that you don’t believe me … which is why I get, not upset, but concerned about whether you are interested in fighting ignorance. You keep evading the questions I ask, like how restricting melt pools to two months is going to bring us greater understanding as you claim parameters do, or how models that don’t calculate albedo can establish that there’s no albedo feedback as the Grist FAQ claims. Instead you keep repeating, right up to the preceding paragraph, that you don’t believe me … which I why I keep talking about it.
We were talking about the use and the pitfalls of parameters in descriptions of physical reality. You brought up an example from Thomas Mayer (died in 1761) regarding the moon, which was relevant to the question of parameters in describing and modeling physical systems.
Your attempt to now claim that the views of people who died in the 1950s are meaningless, and that the subject was climate science, is interesting, but not relevant. What is relevant is their view on parameters, about which they knew more than either of us.
I’ve never said you thought the models were certain, just that you think that they are good enough to base billion dollars decisions affecting millions of peoples lives on.
Whether we should use a model in a certain situation all depends on how uncertain the models are, and how uncertain our understanding of the underlying science is. Given that we know so little about the climate, and that the climate models are extremely uncertain, with known, acknowledged errors which are an order of magnitude larger than the signal we are looking for, depending on such a model is not done in any field of science, medicine, or economics that I know of. If I went to an economist and said “I have a new computer model that will predict the effect of a gradual increase leading to a 1% change in exchange rates a hundred years from now … and by the way, the internal errors in the model are 10% … and oh, yeah, I’ve put in my best guesses for some of the major internal monetary flows”, I’d get laughed out of the room.
But that’s exactly what you’re saying we should do, believe that a climate model can predict the effect of a gradual increase to a 1% change in about 325 W/m2 of downwelling radiation over the next 100 years, when the acknowledged internal errors in the model are ten times that much, and critical parts of the system are just best guesses. No branch of science does that.
And we’re not just talking “criticism of mainstream theories” in well-established branches of science here, we are talking about untested, unproven models in a new field of study which is poorly understood. Henk Tenneke, one of the world’s leading experts on climate and climate modeling, says we understand 10% of the climate system. I have cited a new discovery just in the last year of a totally unknown major feedback mechanism, DMS. I have cited the recent experimental verification of the large effect of cosmic rays on clouds. Neither of these are present in your models, but you still want to claim that somehow the models are still good enough, and climate is understood well enough, that we should act now on what the models say … there is no scientific field other than climate science where this outrageous claim would receive anything but well deserved scorn.
Should this paralyze us? By no means, I have never advocated that and you know it. The possible ill effects of a warming climate are all with us today — droughts, floods, heat waves, cold spells, changes in disease patterns, hurricanes, rising sea levels, we have them all. What we should do is redouble our efforts to solve the effects of these problems today. That way, if we do end up with increases in any of those, we will know much more about how to deal with it.
What we should do is perform the normal V&V and SQA testing of the model software, testing which is done on every other piece of software that we use where people’s lives and well-being depend on the software being correct.
What we should do is set up some baseline tests so that we can tell a better model from a worse model, rather than treat them all as if they were equal as we do today. Name me one other branch of science where every model, from the best to the worst, is given the same weight in scientific deliberations.
What we should do is stop pretending that the UN IPCC is a scientific organization, by opening it up to more scientists, bringing sunlight on the procedures, closing it to politicians, releasing the science at the same time as the summary rather than changing the science to match the summary as is done now, and allowing for a minority report for those scientists who do not agree with the majority. You don’t have to even be a scientist to be part of the IPCC, you just have to be nominated by your government … what kind of “scientific organization” is that?
What we should do is stop pretending that there is a “consensus”, when there are brilliant, well-educated, respected PhD scientists who disagree with the “consensus” views about the climate sensitivity, the relative strength of various forcings, the economics, the physics, the models, and a dozen other central topics. It is a new science. There is no consensus, we need to get past that.
On the other hand, what we should not do is tell the poor of the world “Sorry, you guys can’t have electricity because it creates CO2, and carbon taxes have made fuel too expensive for you to buy, and you’ve already sold all your carbon credits so you can’t build anything but the newest, most expensive factories, … guess you’ll just have to deal with floods and heat waves and droughts and such without any energy source but your own bodies and your draft animals.”
w.
intention, as always it has been pleasurable to read your posts.
But, I don’t think you have come close to showing that. In fact, as Gavin points out, there is very adjustment of the parameters that can be done to make a difference in things like the global temperature record. And, there is tons and tons of data to compare to beyond the global temperature record.
Look, I will agree with you that there are ways to create models with adjustable parameters to fit data. If I wanted to fit the global temperature record, I would simply make a purely empirical model that determined T(t) where T is the global temperature and t is time and I am sure that with several parameters…maybe 4, certainly 5 or 6 or 8, I could do a bang-up job of fitting to the global temperature record in the last 150 years. However, I would not have any sort of model that I could run to simulate climate…i.e., it wouldn’t tell me the structure of the temperature in the atmosphere or across the globe and it wouldn’t show me the variability in climate or the seasonal cycle or anything like that. Such modeling would basically bear no resemblance to actual climate modeling.
To be honest, I find it a little bit ironic that someone who has come into a field with no formal training and essentially said that he understands it better than they do and they are essentially a bunch of idiots for making claims that they do then suggests to other folks that they need to have more humility! 
Of these scientists, I believe only Freeman Dyson has talked about climate modeling. The others are ones who you interpret as supporting your point-of-view, I believe incorrectly.
Do any of them suggest that we will not cause a significant perturbation to the climate with increasing greenhouse gases?
I do respect your willingness to dive into a field like this and try to learn the science. However, I find your characterization to be somewhat at odds with the understanding that I feel you had of the Santer et al. paper when we discussed it in a previous thread. This was an important paper published in Science whose conclusions were echoed by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program report issued a year or so later. Once I read it in full, I was able to understand what its contribution was. However, you seemed to have a sort of mental block on being able to understand it…almost as if you could if you tried but were instead simply refusing to do so. (Admittedly, that is my interpretation of what was going on inside your head…But, whatever the reason, you do seem to have an opinion of it that is at variance with how it has generally been received in the field.)
Cite?
jshore, good to hear from you. You say:
The citation I posted showed that using a couple of parameters, you can run the ice coverage up and down like a yo-yo. Are you claiming that would not affect the temperature?
The main parameter you can adjust is the value for the effect of sulfate aerosols. This is one of the less understood forcings, and has trended in one direction. Adjustments in that one parameter change the slope of the temperature trend in a very simple fashion. I just ran the experiment on a simplified model, and I can adjust that parameter within the IPCC uncertainty range and get a wide variety of temperature trends.
There are a number of PhD scientists out here who agree with me, I am far from alone in saying that climate science is hyped and overblown. While I have no formal training, I have published a peer-reviewed piece in Nature magazine, which suggests I might know a few things more than you seem to assume. Finally, Henk Tennekes says that we only understand 10% of climate science, yet many people on this site seem to think that the science is settled. That’s the assumption I was suggesting that we be more humble about, the idea that we understand climate well enough to make 100-year forecasts.
I have mentioned before that two very important climate mechanisms (DMS-cloud feedback, and cosmic ray-cloud modification) were only established in the last few months. No climate models contain these forcings, but they may well turn out to be among the most important ones. Which is just a couple more data points showing that we don’t understand the climate, that we need to be humble about how much we do know. I’m not saying I know more than them … I’m saying they don’t know as much as they claim.
Why is this so hard for you guys to understand? The question under consideration, as I stated originally, and as I repeated to Kimstu, regarded the effect of parameters on descriptions of physical reality. This is true whether the descriptions are simple, intermediate, or complex. Dyson, von Neumann, and Fermi’s point was that with enough parameters, you can get any result you want. It is as true in a business model as in a climate model, or, as Kimstu pointed out, in a model of the solar system.
Of course not, since the fundamental assumption of the people who wrote them is that increasing gases will cause significant perturbation. Models reflect the vies of the people who write them. Pessimistic economists write models showing the economy crashing, Paul Ehrlich’s models showed worldwide starvation in the 1980s, the Club of Rome’s models suggested widespread shortages of raw materials by the year 2000, current climate models show significant perturbation from GHGs … surely you don’t believe that the climate models operate on first principles, or are independent of the beliefs of the humans who created them?
There has been scientific dispute over the validity and meaning of the results of the Santer paper since it was published.
Sure. My point is not really the climatologists, it is that there is a current climate of hysterical outrage against people who disagree with the revealed climate wisdom, and that because of this, climate scientists who do disagree are discouraged from speaking out. This, of course, reinforces the illusion of “consensus”, which increases the hysteria about dissenters, which …
Let me see if I can clarify where there is and is not consensus.
General consensus on this one.
Again, general consensus.
No consensus, with some people saying it will be generally beneficial. The record shows, and in this case the models agree, that the majority of the warming has been at night, in the winter, outside of the tropics … I have a hard time worrying about that.
General consensus.
As indicated by the 3-to-1 spread of the estimate, there is no general consensus about the exact number. In addition, some scientists think that the actual value is below the low end estimate.
Absolutely no consensus. Even NOAA says that landuse changes may have a larger effect. In addition, the correlation of cosmic rays with temperature over geological time is much better than the correlation of CO2 with temperature over geological time.
No consensus. The sun seems to be heading for a quiet period over the next 20-30 years, and a number of scientists think this will halt or reverse the warming.
Absolutely no consensus. Some of the world’s leading model experts say no. So does common sense, for that matter. On the other hand, modelers say yes.
No consensus. A large number of proxy datasets show that in Medieval times, temperatures were as warm, or warmer, than today. This is supported by anecdotal reports from that time. The “Hockeystick” has been shown to be fatally flawed, and subsequent studies by the same group of authors have relied on the same strip-bark proxies that created the false signal in the Hockeystick.
No consensus. A number of scientists have pointed to various problems with air temperature, including the fact that it does not measure the energy in the air because of the presence of water vapor. In addition, temperature is an intensive rather than an extensive variable, so it cannot be directly averaged. Oceanic heat content is a better metric, IMHO.
No consensus. In part, this is because of Phil Jones refusal to reveal the data and some of the methods used to create the HadCRUT global temperature dataset. In addition, there is very little information available on the state and history of each of the ground stations (location changes, instrumental accuracy, site modifications, local heat island effect, etc.)
Again, no consensus, with the interpretations of the three groups of scientists still having significant differences, and the model results disagreeing with all of them as well as disagreeing with each other.
As you can see, while there is clear consensus on some points, debate rages on other central issues. The questions are far from settled, the climate is far from understood, there are large grey areas, and a huge amount we simply don’t know.
w.
Regarding the oft-repeated claim that “the science is settled” regarding climate, let me offer up this quote:
w.
Unfortunately, the National Post’s crusade on climate change… and in general against Canada’s involvement in the Kyoto protocol…seems to be somewhat factually-challenged. For example, here is a discussion of how they have distorted the views of some of the scientists. One of them, Nigel Weiss, felt his views were distorted so badly that he issued this press release though University of Cambridge, where he works:
Compare this to how Weiss’s views were portrayed in the National Post article about him:
Well, if you don’t like Professor Weiss, try this quote:
You see the opening line there, that “The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.”? I know it’s a radical claim …
w.
The strange thing about that quote is that there is nothing about it that I disagree with. In fact, I think it more strongly supports our point-of-view that there is always uncertainty in science and hence to use the idea of uncertainty to paralyze you from taking any action on something is a bogus excuse. (By “any action”, I mean any action that might, heaven forbid, entail doing something that Exxon-Mobil sees as not being in its best interests. Yes, I know that you are in favor of the sort of actions…like adapting to natural or manmade climate changes…that don’t require any commitment to reduce greenhouse gases.)
And, I certainly endorse doing scientific research on better understanding clouds effects on climate (in fact I would push that as one of the most important areas to study); understanding if there is any connection between cosmic rays, clouds, and climate; understanding if DMS plays a significant role in cloud formation and whether this role could produce a significant feedback on climate, etc., etc. However, what I do not endorse is using the remaining sources of uncertainty as an excuse not to recognize what we do know and not to start acting on what we know, with the understanding that we may want to tune and modify our actions down the road…And, that we will be in a lot better position to do so if we have modified our economies so that the cost seen by the market for putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is not seen as being 0.
Look, you and Exxon-Mobil see any attempt to limit our greenhouse gas emissions as being so draconian and distasteful that you seem to want to see absolute certainty before taking any sucy action (although Exxon-Mobil seems to be starting to subtlely change their tune on this…see here). However, as a scientist I know that there are only degrees of certainty and that if we wait until we are certain to the extremely high level as you seem to want, we likely will have waited until it is too late (in the sense that there are consequences we can’t prevent or that will be much more expensive to prevent than if we start now).
So, are you actually trying to make the claim that James Hansen agrees with you? Yes, we don’t know them well enough to define future climate change. For one thing, we don’t know how society will evolve in terms of how much GHGs we will continue pumping out. For another, there are some significant uncertainties in forcings for things like aerosols. That is why the IPCC gives a fairly wide range of future projections for the climate. However, again, and Hansen…who you quote…would be the first to say this, one cannot conclude from this that we know nothing and therefore it makes sense to take no action to mitigate our effect on the climate.
[I would also note that the [paper](http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1998/1998_Hansen_etal_2.pdf) you quote from is now 8-1/2 years old. So, Hansen’s views on some of these issues may have evolved a bit.]
intention, though you have failed to attribute your latest quote, I Googled it and found it to be from a 9-year-old NASA abstract - James Hansen et al, available here.
In the expanded brief, though questions are raised about “the huge uncertainty in the forcings due to aerosols (fine particles in the air) and forced cloud changes”, where it comes to CO[sub]2[/sub] it also states that: “we maintain that convincing evidence has accumulated in the past 20 years that climate is indeed very sensitive and that Charney’s estimate of about 3°C for doubled CO[sub]2[/sub] (which causes a forcing of 4.3 Watts/m2[)] is approximately correct”. And furthermore: “it appears that the net climate forcing [by aerosols] is probably much less than the greenhouse forcing”.
So, perhaps you’d better find another cite?
Do you have cites for this? I tried to look quickly at what papers in the peer-reviewed literature have cited Santer et al. but couldn’t find any evidence of such dispute (from an admittedly cursory look).
jshore, I found the Hansen quote quite interesting. I didn’t attribute it because I wanted people to seek it out. I have taken a lot of heat here for saying that we don’t know enough to make long-term climate predictions … I found his statement (in a scientific paper) that we don’t know enough to make long term predictions to be at great variance with his public statements, both before and after that paper, that we do know enough, not only to make long range predictions, but to take action on those predictions … doesn’t that seem strange to you? Yes, it’s nine years old, but he had been advocating taking action, and publicly hyping the long-term accuracy of climate models, for years before that.
You say “to use the idea of uncertainty to paralyze you from taking any action on something is a bogus excuse.” However, as I have repeatedly explained, to accuse me of not recommending taking action is a bogus accusation. We differ on what action to take, but I’ll thank you to stop incessantly repeating your insinuations that I am recommending inaction. I have given a detailed listing several times of a number of actions that I think we should take, and your continued ignoring of that fact is growing distasteful.
Finally, you say that I find the idea of carbon limitation as “draconian and distasteful”, a mis-statement of my position. Aside from the fact that there is a lot of evidence that the climate sensitivity is much lower than the IPCC estimates, my true concerns about it are threefold.
The first one is that it is ineffective - even assuming IPCC climate sensitivity, any practical, achievable reductions in CO2 emission will make only a tiny difference. While fantasy programs could no doubt achieve fantastic results, despite having no Kyoto goal the emissions increase in the US has been lower than about a third of the Kyoto signatories, showing the practical difficulties such programs face.
The second one is that the developing world’s emissions are rising at a rate that will swamp any reductions that we might make. China is building a coal-fired multi-megawatt power plant every week. Perhaps you think that China and India will impoverish their people by agreeing not to use coal … I don’t.
The third one is that the plans proposed to date will hit the world’s economy, and in particular the poor of the world, very hard. Already, US policies subsidizing the US reliance on corn-based alcohol fuels is raising US fuel prices, and at the same time it’s causing unrest in Mexico due to increased tortilla prices … is reducing CO2 by putting food for Mexico’s poor into our gas tanks really a direction you want to go? We need to choose our responses with great care, and not rush blindly ahead with well-intentioned schemes while the poor suffer for our haste.
Rather than wasting money on carbon credits that allow Russia to sell England the right to emit CO2, or taxing the use of the very energy that keeps the world fed and clothed, what we should do is put money into every aspect of energy efficiency. That will help everyone, including the poor. In addition, we should take the actions I have already listed. All of those are “no-regrets” options, which will benefit all, whether or not CO2 is the problem.
w.
That’s fine; I don’t take it personally that you don’t take my abilities and/or bona fides on faith, and I’m glad that you don’t take it personally when I don’t take yours on faith either. To be more explicit about it, the reason I stress not believing you rather than not believing the science is because I’m not convinced that you’re interpreting or representing the science correctly. I realize that this may sound like a lot of nerve coming from someone who openly admits to not being a practicing scientist of any kind and who has read much less of the specialist literature than you have, but there it is. After all, you keep telling me not to put my faith in professional prestige or credentials, and I’m taking you at your word! 
Seriously, the reasons I frequently doubt your claims that the science bears out your anti-AGW conclusions boil down to the following:
This sort of thing, added to the misinterpretations and confusions that I mentioned that crop up in non-technical exchanges where I’m able to spot them for myself, reinforces my doubts about whether you always understand the issues as well as you think you do. My doubts are compounded further rather than alleviated by your confident assertion that you generally “don’t have trouble understanding” specialist literature in climate science, which I know is quite a complex subject. I have heard even prominent professional specialists in some area of climate science frankly admit that they sometimes have trouble understanding research articles in a different area of the same field. This makes your claims sound less like the mastery of the true expert, and more like the over-confidence of the amateur autodidact.
In particular, you seem to hammer away repeatedly at flaws in individual secondary issues, like parameters involving cloud albedo or melt pools, that AFAICT the authors of the cited research have been perfectly explicit and frank about. It just seems unlikely to me that, if these overt and acknowledged imperfections in the models really scientifically invalidate the authors’ conclusions as much as you claim they do, the referees and readers of these papers wouldn’t be all over them like hawks on rats. Physicists of all stripes are a pretty combative and competitive bunch, as I know from years of listening to jshore’s tales from the trenches, and I just find it hard to credit that a large majority of them would silently pass over such major and catastrophic flaws in each other’s reasoning.
Explaining such an odd phenomenon always ends up requiring appeals to some kind of conspiracy theory, or supposing phenomenally widespread and fanatical suppression of dissent. This seems to be the line you’re taking with your frequent ironic references to “heresies” and “crimes” and claims of ideologically-based firings of climate skeptics. Again, this sort of talk about downtrodden dissenters may be justified, but in practice it much more often turns out to be mostly grumbling by resentful oddball outsiders.
There. I apologize if anything in that very frank explanation offended you, and I give you free leave to say whatever nasty things you like about me in return (watch out for the forum rules, though). But you wanted to know why I find it hard to believe you, and for the most part, that’s why.
However, I’ll keep an open mind, and perhaps as I learn more I’ll change my opinion. In any case, I don’t intend to keep harping on these personal impressions, and now that I’ve made my explanation I look forward to returning to discussing the specific issues involved.
Kimstu, thanks for your post, you have explained yourself well. Certainly, the denial by Weiss means Solomon should not have described him as a denier … but what about the other nine people described? None of them have raised any questions that I have heard of. If mischaracterizing one scientist casts doubts on Solomon, what does properly characterizing nine others make him? I’d say … human. Re-reading the article on Weiss, and reading his work, he is quite clear that he says the sun is cooling, perhaps to the same level as in the Maunder Minimum, as Solomon said. Weiss, however, says this will make little difference … time will tell.
If you think cloud albedo is a “minor” issue, that’s your privilege. But you still haven’t dealt with, or discussed, the obvious error in the Grist FAQ when they make a point that the models show no cloud feedback, when it is not possible for the models to show cloud feedback. What does that say about their understanding? Cloud feedback is central to climate, but you describe it as a “secondary issue”. Perhaps you could explain why albedo, which controls the total energy coming into the system, where a 2% albedo change is a larger forcing than a 100% change in CO2, is a “secondary issue”.
You obviously believe that the peer review system is strong, that if there were mistakes, the reviewers would be “all over them like hawks on rats” … I suppose that’s why both Science and Nature magazine have both recently seen egregious fraud slip right by their peer review system, and have published editorials discussing possible changes in it. The reviewers I have discussed this with say they spend very little time on an individual paper, they’re not being paid, and they’re busy men and women. In addition, they’re sometimes friends of the authors, or share the author’s beliefs and prejudices, and are not looking too hard. If you trust the peer review system, you’ll get what Science and Nature got — fooled.
You seem to misunderstand the peer review system. Peer review is not a guarantee of accuracy or truth, that comes later when other scientists find errors in the science. The fact that other scientists routinely find errors in peer-reviewed papers on both sides of the aisle should give you a clue about the strength of peer review. To consider a paper from each side, the glaring errors in Lassen’s paper, which had claimed good correlation between temperature and sunspot cycle length, were not caught in peer review, nor was the fact that Michael Mann had artificially extended one of his data series so it could be counted in the 1500s for his Hockeystick. They were caught by other scientists, not peer reviewers. That’s the arbiter in science, the discovery of errors by other people, not by peer reviewers.
You still haven’t commented on the huge errors in the models, other than to say “yes, there are uncertainties, but I still think they’re good enough to bet billions of dollars on” … perhaps you could explain why you think that a model with an acknowledged 20W/m2 error in downwelling radiation, a 15% error in cloud cover, and an artificial albedo, can tell us anything about a 3.7 W/m2 increase in downwelling radiation? I get no response to these types of questions about the science from you, just repeated claims that it’s all settled and the models are good enough. James Hansen says the climate can’t be forecast in the long-term. Does that mean nothing? I quote him, not because I particularly believe him in general, but because you seem to … and according to the IPCC, the level of scientific understanding hasn’t advanced much since Hansen made that claim.
Yes, there are papers in the climate science field that I don’t understand, I said that before. I also said I understand most of them. You keep saying you find that hard to believe … but then you haven’t spent the thousands of hours studying these issues that I have. My advantage is that I have no specialty, I am a generalist, and I have delved deeply into all aspects of climate. Most of it is not rocket science, I’m sure you could understand it yourself if you were to put in the hours that I have reading scientific texts and papers on the subject.
At this point, I think you and I will have to agree to disagree. You won’t answer scientific questions, even questions that I have asked you several times. You don’t dispute any point about my scientific citations, you just say I’ve interpreted them wrong. Well, I certainly might have, but you never seem to get around to pinpointing just how and where. You dismiss crucial questions like the albedo as “secondary issues”. I feel like I’m discussing this with a ghost, there’s no substance, other than a repeated insistence that the “consensus” is correct, that father knows best, that I’m alone against a world where the scientific consensus is a done deal.
I laid out very carefully where I see that there is consensus and where there is no consensus. I notice you didn’t comment on that at all … that’s what drives me up the wall. You read that, and ignore it, and come back and tell me that climate science is settled. It is not, there are huge areas of disagreement. I point out that two newly discovered major forcings, solar-modulated cosmic rays and plankton-derived DMS, are not in any known climate model … and you ignore that, and tell me climate science is settled, it’s a done deal, the models are good enough to spend billions and impoverish the third world because the models say it will be better for them in the long run. We discuss the benefits and dangers of parameters in describing physical systems, you bring up an excellent example from a man who died in 1761, I respond by quoting men who died in the 1950s … and you tell me they died before there were climate models, so what could they know?
So, unless you have comments on the science to offer in lieu of general statements and attacks on journalists, on me, and on men who died too soon to be of any use, I’m going to let it go. A man who thinks the albedo is a secondary issue in the Earth’s climate has his mind made up, nothing I can say will change that.
Finally, I would like to thank you for the civil tone of your postings. I tend to get a bit irate at times because I’m passionate about this question, and it is good to have calmer voices to model myself on.
w.