This is actually a pretty good point. Science thrives on controversy. The cutting edge of science can be pretty disputatious. But that surface temperatures vary with gas levels really isn’t in dispute: the fact that Venus is hotter than Mercury despite being almost twice the distance from the sun provides a vivid example.
FX. Firstly, I honesty had no idea what you were getting at and my best guess (China) may not have been correct. My brief answer is that US CO2 emissions are tied to US output and US energy product prices in understandable ways. If you want to understand the behavior of the rest of the world, you do a similar exercise for the rest of the world.
Generally speaking, I’m guessing you can divide world emissions into US, Western Europe, China and everyone else. But I want a link to what you’re discussing before I dive in further.
As scientists like jshore told me before I do understand the issue well enough, last I head of him is that he reported that he is doing the thankless job of posting more accurate information about the issue in one of the bellies of the beast that is Watts Up With That. What I noticed is that indeed it is mostly a generalist the one that could had some handle on the many fields that are involved but it is not really very hard to get a handle of it when one knows where to look for and has sources that are more reliable.
I’m interested the issue, but that is only because of a “the stupid, it burns!” point that was made years ago by a denier regarding the work of Mann and many others involved in paleoscience. Any issue that has so many experts in favor of, like space scientists against moon hoaxers gets me hook in. What I figured out early was there were no scientific groups of renown that disagreed with the main points of why human emissions are currently warming the planet.
It has been like having a cascade of multiple good sources that are available to use and all thanks to modern technology. What I have concluded is that faced with all that, the “solution” of many contrarians now has been to claim that they do grok science, but what we see is mostly efforts to misunderstand what scientists are talking about. What actual scientists are reporting is spinned to make them say just about the opposite of they report, or a lot of what they report is omitted from cites.
The way I see it, I see humor in taking down that kind of ignorance, but my main reason for doing so is to learn, a lot of what I do cite and point out is many times learned the day when I post it, but I do make a habit of not forgetting it after that. It makes me happy to learn a new facet of an issue. People involved in libraries and academia are like that.
It’s quite simple. I asked for your solution, if you had global dictator powers. How would you stop the rising CO2 levels? GIGO avoids answering.
I have no problem answering a direct question. I already stated many things I would cause to happen.
I asked a question. What is the answer to stopping the CO2 levels from continuing to rise? How do you reduce CO2 in our atmosphere? You are the all powerful leader of all the world.
I would show him a lot more than open water. I’d show him vast areas of unprecedented permafrost melt, huge sinkholes, collapsing roads and houses, eroding shorelines, and an entire Inuit village that had to be relocated because of these effects.
As for explanations, I don’t think you’d convince Joe about the age of the earth, either, just by showing him a hole in the ground in Arizona. You’d need to add some verbiage. It doesn’t take a lot of verbiage to explain that Antarctic sea ice is a completely different circumstance from that of the Arctic, or to explain that both the Arctic and the Antarctic are losing large amounts of ice mass from their respective predominant forms of multi-year ice. Hell, I could just show Joe the collapsing West Antarctic ice sheet.
You keep saying that, but I’ve shown you that the second factor is a huge influence on popular opinion. It happens to be particularly effective because it exploits human nature by telling people what they want to hear.
Good questions. Why, indeed, are the world’s climate scientists not persuaded by the vastly superior knowledge that FX claims to possess?
Perhaps it’s because, as I’ve shown many times in many threads, his other-worldly interpretations of the facts he presents, when indeed they are facts at all, bear no relationship to reality, or directly contradict reality. Sometimes, indeed, FX even contradicts himself.
We see this again right here in the last couple of posts. Let’s have a look, because it’s always amusing.
We are regaled with a story about how in Nome, Alaska, they had to hire a Russian icebreaker to break through all the ice to bring them emergency supplies. Clearly, then, there is no global warming! Furthermore, FX informs us that this is because of the record cold winter.
But actual facts tell quite a different story. As the article itself points out, climate change has opened up the Arctic and increased the scale of human activity. There is more volume of shipping than ever, and as the historic Northwest Passage opens up there will be more still. That’s why we’re running up against ice, because it turns out (in case anyone didn’t know) that it’s cold up there! So there is still ice around, especially in winter! But soaring temperatures in the Arctic have resulted in dramatic year over yearreductions in ice cover. And it’s not just summer ice. By all measures – summer ice extent, annual ice cover, or total ice volume – Arctic ice is in dramatic decline.
As for record cold winters, that’s hilarious because the few cold winters we’ve had have been a mid-latitude phenomenon, not an Arctic one. Nome, Alaska, which is what this story was about, just had one of the warmest D-J-F winter temperatures on record, and last winter was even warmer. And its annual average temperatures have been soaring. Last year’s annual average temperature was 6.63 Celsius degrees (12 Fahrenheit degrees) warmer than in 1920, and last year’s winter (DJF) temperature was a whopping 8.6 Celsius degrees (15.5 Fahrenheit degrees) warmer than in 1920.
Next we are regaled with a story about Great Lakes ice and the need for icebreakers.
Again, the actual facts are that Great Lakes ice has been in a slow decline over the decades, but mainly it’s a phenomenon that shows tremendous inter-annual variability. Some years there will be lots of ice, other years there will be almost none at all.
A few words about this business of cold mid-latitude winter, a subject about which FX believes he has a lot to teach the world’s climate scientists. The actual facts are, again, that FX has no idea what he’s talking about. This has been beaten to death in other threads. There have been some unusual Arctic circulation patterns in some recent winters driving Arctic cold further south than usual and longer than usual, and these may (or may not) be systemically related to amplified Arctic warming and loss of sea ice. That’s it, that pretty much sums it up. It has nothing to do with some fatal flaw in “global warming theory”, nor, according to most hypothesized causes, is it likely to persist over any significant long term.
Nor does it have anything to do with any fatal flaw in climate models, as I just finished discussing in the other thread. Global climate models have not typically had sufficient resolution to accurately predict those kinds of regional short-term circulation-driven changes, but there are regional mesoscale and statistical models that show a relationship between Arctic sea ice decline and extreme mid-latitude weather.
I addressed this upthread. You responded with some economic assertions which I apparently didn’t follow properly. (And still don’t: my latest guess is that you think a 2008 rise in oil prices led to the Great Recession- but that can’t be right. We both agree that US CO2 emissions declined from 2008-2013.)
All of this is ok. I’m just saying that I’ve lost the thread of the conversation.
Just to clarify, the MOOC covers a lot of climate science, which you don’t need. It’s the part about science communication that I thought would be of interest. But yeah, chumming through the course wouldn’t be a very time-efficient way of picking up that sort of knowledge.
Some of this reflects economic interests and hired guns. But other aspects touch upon a weird form tribalism, the pride of the middle aged crank, and more generally motivated reasoning. The latter is a general problem, but Cook’s studies indicate that it affects some demographics more than others, at least on the AGW issue.
In the economic context, Krugman’s take is that you can’t help the partisans: it’s the bystanders that you are really addressing. But economics isn’t as hard a science as meteorology or climate research. There’s more agreement among mainstream economists than among sociologists, but they typically don’t reach consensuses that top 90%. So the analogy is rough.
To emphasize the point, that scientific consensus may be the only worthwhile validation of the theory. The very nature of atmospheric science defies strict experimentation, the gold standard of falsification doesn’t apply to the weather. So a consensus derived from analyzing large sets of data for patterns and probabilities is as significant at it is likely to get. Where certainty is impossible, the very probable becomes the true, and consensus gains value. Of course, even a unanimous consensus of scientists could be proven wrong with a single well-planned experiment. But if that isn’t feasible, then high levels of consensus is as far as we can get to proof.
And let us not forget that the consensus was hard won, AGW didn’t become an overnight sensation unless mockery and derision qualifies. The converts were wholly unwilling, but dragged into it by sheer force of data. And lots of time. Alas, too much time.
But however much we may regret the time lost, the process churns, that facts are in and the consensus is formed. So the very fact that AGW was so much an orphan of science and grew up big and strong attests to its validity.
Aside:
In loyalty to our kind, I cannot turn aside this opportunity to point out that us countercultural types…hippies, vegans, tree-huggers…were right. You all should have listened to us, because we were right. Took a lot longer than we expected.
Still, we got here, young voices united and resolute can change things for the better! And that’s something to be proud of, something to tell our grandchildren. Tomorrow, when they come over…
That is IMHO a good point to make in general, one needs to go a little bit deeper to make it clear that besides the consensus there is real empirical data to show that that consensus is not based in just armchair pondering, it is based on experiments and published results unlike what many contrarians base their positions with.
(Science writer Peter Hadfield on the "feelie method" contrarians use.)
As one can notice, there is a lot of those pondering armchair “scientists” among the Republicans too.
As Frontline explained, that position from the Republicans is influenced in great part thanks to all the money floating around from fossil fuel interests. Consequently you can notice many politicians like Newt Gingrich that began accepting the science then flipped around as the ones supporting the science began to be sacked among the Republicans. No matter how conservative they were. There is a lot of a carrot and stick approach going among the ones giving the money to conservative causes right now.
I agree too, one item to notice is that though more people are getting it the interest groups that oppose the changes proposed are so powerful that like in the case of prohibition the Republicans can still win a round in the political arena, but then again prohibition also tells me that eventually the people does realize that a political party can be so hung up on a stupid idea that it will turn into a factor for a huge defeat of a party in an election.
That’s a very good and important point, GIGO. Lots of physical sciences are observational and not primarily experimental (astronomy, geology, paleontology) but they’re nevertheless empirical, evidence-based hard sciences. The consensus on AGW is not like a consensus of philosophers or pundits – the consesus exists because many different lines of evidence, in fields of physical hard sciences, are together overwhelmingly strong. When this wasn’t the case, back some 40 years ago, climate science had a very different attitude. There was not only an absence of consensus, there was no prevailing view about where the climate was heading. The National Academy of Sciences stated in a 1975 report that:
"Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data. Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions. What are the most important causes of climatic variation, and which are the most important or most sensitive of the many processes involved in the interaction of the air, sea, ice, and land components of the climatic system?
… The increasing realization that man’s activities may be changing the climate, and mounting evidence that the earth’s climates have undergone a long series of complex natural changes in the past, have brought new interest and concern to the problem of climatic variation. The importance of the problem has also been underscored by new recognition of the continuing vulnerability of man’s economic and social structure to climatic variations. Our response to these concerns is the proposal of a major new program of research designed to increase our understanding of climatic change and to lay the foundation for its prediction."
That was the humility of science, its intrinsic skepticism in the absence of overwhelming evidence. So when science does finally say it knows something, and says it strongly and definitively, it would bode well for us to listen. And what it’s telling us now – the consensus in the broadest sense – is that the planet is warming because of anthropogenic GHGs that are predominantly from human activity, and that the consequences will be negative in almost every respect and will become increasingly serious the longer we procrastinate. This is the essence of the policy guidance that’s been issued by every major national academy of science in the world and many other major government and scientific agencies. And this is supported by a solid body of evidence from multiple disciplines and thousands of peer-reviewed studies that is consistent, scientifically validated, and scientifically persuasive.
And this is why, as Measure for Measure astutely notes in #240, denialists or contrarians, or whatever one wants to call them, have taken a scattershot approach that not only lacks a scientific basis but completely lacks consistency. They basically throw everything at the science with the general intent of discrediting it any way they can – they don’t know what the science got wrong or why, but they do know for sure that we don’t have a problem and don’t need to do anything. As Measure has noted, first they’ll claim the earth isn’t warming, then that humans aren’t the cause, then that we can’t do anything about it anyway.
In exactly the same scattershot fashion, they’ll come up with a vast array of other explanations for the warming: it’s solar variations, it’s cosmic rays, it’s volcanoes, it’s unknown natural cycles that no one understands. They’ll attack the scientific methods, they’ll attack scientific institutions, they’ll attack the scientists personally and accuse them of fraud and malfeasance. They will take uncertainties and exaggerate them out of all proportion into a flat-out condemnation of the entire field. At the same time scientific papers will be misinterpreted and falsely presented as completely different from what they’re actually saying. I’ve seen all of these things so many times I can’t even count the number – we’ve seen it right here in GD.
I think where you and I are speaking past one another is this:
I am suggesting that human nature is such that an opinion on whether or not AGW will create substantial future harm will not promote current action, especially where such action requires personal sacrifice.
I am of the opinion that it’s very naive to think Al Gore and I will mend our ways if only we could get out the message that anthropogenic climate change is real.
Mr Gore and I will not mend our consuming ways, and if we don’t, surely you cannot believe Joe Average will.
Human nature prevents–on average–placing a future public good in front of a proximate pleasure. This is (mostly) due to the tragedy of the commons.
It is not evil corporations successfully promoting an inaccurate message that the earth will not be irreparably harmed in the future.
It is I–and Mr Gore, and Joe Average–putting the value of our personal desire to live richly above the value of others living richly in the future.
A call to arms will never mobilize an army if the cause is too far off, and the benefit too far removed.
To get any action on a meaningful AGW response you will need:
Lots of proximate Sandy-type harbingers, hitting populations with the means to execute change,
A minimum of (putatively) anti-harbinger events such as nasty winters requiring a post-hoc Polar vortex-type explanation
A broader suite of Alarmists personally sacrificing
If the Pope calls for celibacy but maintains some in-house concubines, the populace will not be persuaded that celibacy is called for.
I don’t think there is any damage to the Alarmist message greater than wealthy celebrities living well and proclaiming the alarm. Peabody Coal doesn’t need fake anti-science nearly as much as they need Al Gore.
Until we are all willing to sacrifice in a real way–or until we find painless, marketable solutions–AGW will remain a hobby outrage, good for getting elected, funding studies, or creating a career in TEOTWAWKI speaking engagements.
I’ll stop believing in the tragedy of the commons when we pay off our public debt.
Seems that Chief Pedant only wants to show how right **wolfpup **is.
It was shown before how silly it is to set Gore as a straw man by misrepresenting what he is doing, and using politics to do so is the main reason why several fall for human nature and think that this will be effective and so that illogical attack continues.
Incidentally the tragedy of the commons originated as a concept in England in 1833 by Loyd, and it is not surprising to me that the English were among the first to figure out how to get a handle to a problem that was similar for the modern age, suffice to say the Chief is demanding that the cart be put before the horse by demanding purity before action that makes the greatest difference.
As the case of the dirty water in London showed, it may had been useful as a tool to oppose and delay the change to remind many of how the lords and rich people that where in parliament were more responsible for the problem, but during and after the solution was constructed and set those most responsible for the problem ended paying more.
Demonstrating that it really was just a tragedy of the **unregulated **commons.
I see major serious action on a scale I’d have thought quite unrealistic just a few years ago. In Europe/USA, and not least in China/India. With renewable energy, solar power, wind power, even electric vehicles. Even yesterday Tesla revealed their latest, the home and business battery storage system, which apparently undercuts current systems by as much as 50%, and which some speculate could be a real game changer.
The groundswell activists have been calling for is happening just as we speak. They may not like it, since it doesn’t include the social engineering and consumer austerity they’ve been on about. But it’s here.
Well actually not news, I also know that among the “just so” tall tales that many conservatives tell each other about all environmentalists (There are some that indeed can be like that, but not even liberals accept their radicalism BTW) is that the ones that propose change are doing it to undermine capitalism. Not accurate at all. And so it is this one, your sources are not telling the whole picture. Read what I and many others posted before, the solution does include private industry. The point of that “just so” tale misses is that we can still do much better to ensure that the problems we will face in the future are manageable.
There definitely have been calls for dramatic social engineering including I’ve read several arguing for things like dramatic decrease of the human population through various totalitarian measures, such as those applied by the Chinese. How widespread such sentiments are or have been I don’t know. I’m just happy that I do see this dramatic environmental positive change in society. That we as humanity actually did rise to the occation, like we always do when the stakes are high enough. Not there yet ofcourse, but I’m confident we will manage.
I know, a few years ago Anthony Watts and a lot of the conservative denier bloggers tried to claim that Al Gore and others were pushing for that. It was false and a misrepresentation.
I’m also an optimist that we will make it, but then when I look at things like rampant xenophobia it tells me that a lot of the changes coming will be mishandled. Even James Burke 20 years ago commented on how the head in the sand behavior that is still being seen is bound to cause a lot of suffering when forced emigration will come thanks to this.
Rationalists accept the scientific consensus on global warming. Their opinions can differ regarding the prospects for political action on the subject. There are reasonable economic discussions as well.
With that in mind, I think I can refute one of Chief Pedant’s sub-arguments.
The assumption here is that meaningful AGW action will require great personal sacrifice. I don’t believe it would.
Let’s consider a crazy-high emissions tax and their gas tax equivalents. I base my calculations on a Wikipedia table:
Tax: $ per Tax: $ per Tax: $ per
gallon of ton of ton of
petrol Carbon CO2 Source
$0.11 $43 $12 Wikipedia
1.00 391 109 MfM Calculation
2.00 782 218 MfM Calculation
The first column is the implicit gas tax per gallon as it relates to carbon taxes calculated as a tax on ton of carbon or a ton of carbon dioxide.
Consider the equivalent of a $2/gallon gas increase and phase it in over 10 years. It would involve a 20 cent increase in the price of gas per year. That’s way more that me or XT are advocating. To give you an idea how outlandish this proposal is, this article discusses a plan for a $25/year carbon tax, which rises 5% per year. That would reach $391 - in 57 years. It would reach $782 in 71 years. So this plan extends way past current political reality. Wind, solar and nuclear would become wildly competitive.
How would this far out proposal affect the standard of living?
In 1973-74 we had an oil shock. Gas prices quadrupled. We has another oil shock in 1979: prices doubled from a higher base. Both shocks led to recession, but they didn’t turn the clock back to the 1950s, never mind the 1800s.
The crazy plan would have far milder effects. You wouldn’t get a recession because a) even by the end of the period, gas prices wouldn’t quite double, b) the effect would be spread out over 10 years, rather than focused in 1 year or shorter, and c) the extra revenue would stay in the country rather than being sent to the Middle East.
Again, the crazy plan would cream the US coal industry. But it wouldn’t call for the sort of great personal sacrifice that some seem to imagine. I mean, c’mon: the price of gas is currently about $2.40 in Arkansas and $3.70 in California. That’s a $1.30 differential right there. And California isn’t exactly a spartan state, far from it.
Merely as a mathematical/statistical gripe, three studies getting to almost exactly 97% just doesn’t feel right.
Scientific studies, of course, may have a sample size smaller than 77. Medical studies, especially before large-scale trials have, by definition, to be small. However, if you want to claim consensus of such a crucial and complex issue, 77 guys ain’t gonna be enough.
I’m so glad that you mentioned those three studies, because tearing them a scientific new one is so easy it’s almost embarrassing. Let’s see the problems.
a) Doran:
i) It’s a web-based by-invitation survey. I sincerely hope that AGW deserves more than that.
ii) 10257 invitations, only 3146 responses. A 31% response rate is OK, but you have the problem of ascertaining if you haven’t, at the very beginning, introduces a bias by self-selection.
iii) 90% Americans. Unless 90% of Earth scientists are American, this is also uncorrected bias.
iv) Question 1 “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” I am surprised that it isn’t 100%, particularly with the cherry-picked date of pre-1800, the tail end of a particularly cold spell of the LIA. Even if the industrial revolution hadn’t happened, temperatures would’ve gone up. All science-based sceptics I know would’ve said YES, so it fails as a litmus test. Also, 90%<97%.
v) Question 2 “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” The question is very hazy on the meaning of “significant” which can vary from “not statistically insignificant” to “very prominent”. With such a broad range of answer, I’m surprised it’s only 82%. Most/All science-based sceptics would’ve said yes. Another failed litmus test. Also, 82%<97%.
vi) This also means that at most 82% answered yes to both question, so the real headline should say 82%.
vii) The 97% come from 76/79 and 75/77 of those who “self-listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change”. An unrepresentative sample if there ever was one if your objective was to show broad consensus across Earth scientists.
So, “97% of scientists agree with AGW” is false.
b) Anderegg et al.
i) “Though our compiled researcher list is not comprehensive nor designed to be representative of the entire climate science community, we have drawn researchers from the most high-profile reports and public statements about ACC” (my bolding). If the authors themselves say “it is not comprehensive nor representative” the whole paper fail insofar as it tries to show its results as representative.
ii) Although many try to paint what they call UE (sceptics) as shills/ignoramuses without scientific relevance, the study show that the average number of citation is 105 (to 172 of CE (warmists)) and with an even finer-toothed comb it goes to 84 vs 133. Both numbers slightly higher than 60%. Not bad at all.
iii) “Our dataset is not comprehensive of the climate community and therefore does not infer absolute numbers or proportions of all CE versus all UE researchers. We acknowledge that there are other possible and valid approaches to quantifying the level of agreement and relative credibility in the climate science community, including alternate climate researcher cutoffs, publication databases, and search terms to determine climate-relevant publications.” (my bolding) Straight from the horse’s mouth.
c) Cook
i) “Despite numerous indicators of a consensus, there is wide public perception that climate scientists disagree over the fundamental cause of global warming ”. This is patently false. Even the most ignorant denier knows that the majority of scientists agree with AGW.
ii) They only read the abstracts, not the paper. C’mon!
iii) “this letter was conceived as a ‘citizen science’ project by volunteers contributing to the Skeptical Science website.” Volunteers on a non-scientific website ain’t very science-y.
iv) Their categories are cherry-picked and even then they get it wrong. For example “(2) Explicit endorsement without quantification” has as an example “Emissions of a broad range of greenhouse gases of varying lifetimes contribute to global climate change”. Does anyone with even the tiniest grasp of science believe otherwise? If that sentence gets an “endorsement” category then almost all sceptics are “endorsers”.
v) Or “Explicit rejection without quantification” gets “the global temperature record provides little support for the catastrophic view of the greenhouse effect’”. It doesn’t deny the Earth is warming, it simply denies catastrophe. With such categories they can prove anything they want.
vi) Even with glaring methodological errors and biases, their full result is that32.6% endorse and 66.4% show no position on AGW. So, double the amount of no position vs endorsement.
vii) They get a better result with an e-mail based survey with 14% response which almost flip the numbers. 14% response rate from scientists to a non-scientific website is bias, big time.
So, I suggest that all the 97% 97%97%97%97%97%97%97% guys actually, you know, read the papers.
Can you show science-based sceptics saying all those things? Two guys who can’t tell albedo from alpacas with a blog are not representative in the same way that those guys who said “no more snow” were also not representative. That look like the self-congratulatory crap at the SD’s favourite warmist website
Of course, the Aji de Gallina forgets that there is not just thee studies.
And the conclusion of why it is clear that the support of climate scientists is at super majority levels is based not just on polls or studies, but surveys:
Since “even the most ignorant denier knows that the majority of scientists agree with AGW.” this exercise from Aji de Gallina is as useful as trying to unboil eggs.
He also conveniently forgets that the overwhelming number of related or pertinent scientific groups agree too.
[Many more on the link]
As noted, the studies are many times mentioned not to deal so much with deniers that claim to know better but to counter the perception also defended by deniers that there is no such consensus.
But soaring temperatures in the Arctic have resulted in dramatic year over year