Climate-gate

[Trippy]

Moderator Note:
Wellwisher.

This:

Relative to the political divide, liberal or progressive tends to sides with the novel and new, which is what manmade is. Often liberal choices have not been tested in large scales before going right into production; Obama Care. While conservative tends to side with the longer term, test proven, that has worked for centuries stuff, which is the natural data; marriage. The political divide is another way to prove which has more established science tradition. Birds of a feather will flock together and sniff their kind out.

Politically, conservatives have given ground on many novel social changes, such as in education and family unit, with many of these leading to unintended consequences and huge cost overruns. The break-up of the family has led to many unintended social consequences with huge cost overhead. These consequences are not pitched at the beginning, when the consensus was forming around the ideal data. This social dynamics accounts for some conservative, ignoring sound data; They can sense the writing on the wall; create whole new problems during implementation stages of change in the liberal tradition. ​

Is political trolling. You are in the science subforum, this is a place for discussing science, not airing political grievances.

I've given you three warnings. I told you last time that it was your last warning, and that further infringements would result in a ban, however, I have decided not to issue a ban this time because you appear to have been making a genuine effort to discuss the science rather than the politics.

Discussion of a scientific issue that has been politicized is not an excuse to raise politics in a scientific discussion.

Make no mistake, bring politics into this again and I will ban you.

 

[wellwisher]

I was trying to include the science of human behavior patterns, but I will restrict myself to climate science in this topic.

Here is another angle that might be of use to the discussion.

The epilimnion depth of lakes is related both to lake size, which affects wind-induced mixing, and to water clarity, which affects the depth over which solar radiation heats the water.

The main point of this is water clarity will impact the how deep the solar radiation can penetrate bodies of water and therefore how much heat capacity the water will be able absorb over a period of time. The main sources of cloudiness (mixed by wind), which limits the water's clarity and absorption of solar heat, is single cell life like plankton and algae. As depth increases, there is also sinking and more clarity.

The angle is soluble manmade pollutions, due to say heavy metals and organic solvents, etc., kills single cell life allowing more heat in the worlds water. But beyond this is the citation below:

Ocean water clarity affects the distribution of shortwave heating in the water column. In a one-dimensional time-mean sense, increased clarity would be expected to cool the surface and heat subsurface depths as shortwave radiation penetrates deeper into the water column. However, wind-driven upwelling, boundary currents, and the seasonal cycle of mixing can bring water heated at depth back to the surface. This warms the equator and cools the subtropics throughout the year while reducing the amplitude of the seasonal cycle of temperature in polar regions. This paper examines how these changes propagate through the climate system in a coupled model with an isopycnal ocean component focusing on the different impacts associated with removing shading from different regions. Increasing shortwave penetration along the equator causes warming to the south of the equator. Increasing it in the relatively clear gyres off the equator causes the Hadley cells to strengthen and the subtropical gyres to shift equatorward. Increasing shortwave penetration in the less clear regions overlying the oxygen minimum zones causes the cold tongue to warm and the Walker circulation to weaken. Increasing shortwave penetration in the high-latitude Southern Ocean causes an increase in the formation of mode water from subtropical water. The results suggest that more attention be paid to the processes distributing heat below the mixed layer.

 

[Photizo]

"How could two teams of scientists come to such obviously contradictory conclusions on seemingly every point that matters in the debate over global warming? There are many reasons why scientists disagree, the subject, by the way, of an excellent book a couple years ago titled Wrong by David H. Freedman. A big reason is IPCC is producing what academics call “post-normal science” while NIPCC is producing old-fashioned “real science.” "



... http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspi...-and-misrepresents-important-climate-science/ ...

 

[Photizo]

Climate change? Ya'll mean how ya'll was sayin' it was gettin' warmer then it stopped gettin' warmer and started gettin' real cold? Cain't remember a colder winter than this last one we's just got through. I'll tell you whats changin...peoples attitudes about ya'lls nonsense. That's what's changin.

Ya'll are the same group whos found to be cookin' them weather books, right? An ya'll keep telling us we came from some sorta slop a quaa drillion years ago, right?

Ahm aimin' to tell ya, that dog don't hunt 'round these pahrts. No sir, yew take them 'fidd'ld with' facs an figgers an high tail it back to that puddle a slop ya'll come from. Gowahn, git!


http://climatechangereconsidered.org/

 

[rpenner]

I was trying to include the science of human behavior patterns,

Untrue. The science of global warming is not affected by what evidence and arguments conservatives refuse to consider. The assertion that humans acting in concert cannot alter the earth is untrue and runs contrary to basic science and history. (Newton's third law, Le Chatelier's principle, the historical practice of introducing chlorofluorocarbons with the consequent reduction in equilibrium ozone concentrations, the rate of species going extinct is 100-1000 times the usual background rate, humans now take more nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into nitrates than all other processes combined, populations of large ocean fish have declined 90% since 1950, the actual fact that human emissions more than account for the ongoing rise in global CO₂ in excess of all natural processes that eliminate and sequester CO₂, etc.)

but I will restrict myself to climate science in this topic.

Untrue. You didn't make a fact-based argument on the topic of the global climate in this post and therefore have not done any climate science.

Here is another angle that might be of use to the discussion.

By "angle" you mean adding noise to the conversation, as in "wellwisher will try any angle in an ongoing attempt to divert the conversation from the fact that all the science supports fully the statement that human activities are the primary causes for ongoing global warming." Just look at your long history of clutching at straws

The epilimnion depth of lakes is related both to lake size, which affects wind-induced mixing, and to water clarity, which affects the depth over which solar radiation heats the water.

Stolen without understanding from a non-climate source. http://www.aslo.org/lo/toc/vol_39/issue_4/0968.pdf
Asit Mazumder and William D. Taylor "Thermal structure of lakes varying in size and water clarity" Limnol. Oceanogr., 39, 968-976 (1994).

The main point of this is water clarity will impact the how deep the solar radiation can penetrate bodies of water and therefore how much heat capacity the water will be able absorb over a period of time.

No -- it's a statement about optical depth and ultimately albedo. To say it is about "heat capacity" betrays your lack of understanding of thermodynamics. Instead it is about how much and where direct illumination is absorbed by the lake and thus about where heat is transferred into the lake in addition to heat exchange at boundaries and internally, thus giving the lake a certain temperature profile which varies with the time of day and season. But at the level of climate science it matters not a whit about where in the lake the illumination is absorbed, only how much of it is absorbed by the lake. And lakes only make up about 3/4 of 1 percent of the surface area of Earth. So ultimately the point with respect to global climatology is very minor, is one of albedo, and is nowhere demonstrated as ignored.

http://www.usgs.gov/climate_landuse/land_carbon/pubs/McDonald_etal_2012.pdf

The main sources of cloudiness (mixed by wind), which limits the water's clarity and absorption of solar heat, is single cell life like plankton and algae.

You can't seem to find the point you want to make. Nowhere have you established that the albedo of the shallow or the deep lakes are a significant driving factor of climate change. But congratulations, you are actually making a factual claim supported by your source which reads:

Water clarity is particularly interesting from a biological viewpoint, because in most lakes water clarity is largely determined by the number and kinds of planktonic organisms. Hence, plankton communities have the potential to affect their microclimate (Mazumder 1990) as do terrestrial plant communities (Lowry 1969).

As depth increases, there is also sinking and more clarity.

This statement, however, lacks support. Indeed it is contradicted by other sources:

Algal turbidity varies seasonally and with depth in a complex manner as discussed previously in response to physical, chemical and biological changes in the lake. Inorganic and detrital particles from the watershed vary largely in response to hydrological events such as storms and snowmelt.

http://www.lakeaccess.org/russ/turbidity.htm​

The angle is soluble manmade pollutions, due to say heavy metals and organic solvents, etc., kills single cell life allowing more heat in the worlds water.

That's fact-free speculation that you have not begun to support. Indeed, it contradicts your earlier baseless claim that:

man has not be around that long and/or has the capacity to impact the globe.

The inconsistency with a statement you previously sought to advance as a commonly held postulate and now deny illustrates your intellectual dishonesty. You are never arguing for a fact-based principled position but at every turn seeking to deny the conclusions that experts reached in the field of their expertise.

But beyond this is the citation below:

Ocean water clarity affects the distribution of shortwave heating in the water column. In a one-dimensional time-mean sense, increased clarity would be expected to cool the surface and heat subsurface depths as shortwave radiation penetrates deeper into the water column. However, wind-driven upwelling, boundary currents, and the seasonal cycle of mixing can bring water heated at depth back to the surface. This warms the equator and cools the subtropics throughout the year while reducing the amplitude of the seasonal cycle of temperature in polar regions. This paper examines how these changes propagate through the climate system in a coupled model with an isopycnal ocean component focusing on the different impacts associated with removing shading from different regions. Increasing shortwave penetration along the equator causes warming to the south of the equator. Increasing it in the relatively clear gyres off the equator causes the Hadley cells to strengthen and the subtropical gyres to shift equatorward. Increasing shortwave penetration in the less clear regions overlying the oxygen minimum zones causes the cold tongue to warm and the Walker circulation to weaken. Increasing shortwave penetration in the high-latitude Southern Ocean causes an increase in the formation of mode water from subtropical water. The results suggest that more attention be paid to the processes distributing heat below the mixed layer.

It's not a citation. It's text stolen from an unnamed source where I had to dig for the citation: http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/cms-filesystem-action?file=user_files/a1g/jpo3935.pdf
Anand Gnanadesikan and Whit G. Anderson "Ocean Water Clarity and the Ocean General Circulation in a Coupled Climate Model" Journal of Physical Oceanography 39, 314-322 (2009).
And you neither make the case that this drives climate change or was ignored by the climatologists. Indeed this very issue was covered on page 750 in section 9.1.3.1.2 of the IPCC WG I AR5 report, so it is not being ignored. Why are you wasting everyone's time making 1000 bad arguments rather than making one good argument?

 

[rpenner]

http://climatechangereconsidered.org/

Like a South Seas Cargo Cult, the NIPCC is an example of Heartland Institute dressing up like scientists in the hopes that their outright denial of science will be accepted as factual and reasonable. But they aren't acting as scientists and don't deserve the respect that they attempt to appropriate.

The NIPCC is anti-science.

In short, the purpose of the IPCC report is to accurately summarize the most up-to-date state of climate science research and understanding, whereas the purpose of the NIPCC report is to try and poke holes in the IPCC report (unsuccessfully, as we will see below).

Second, unlike the IPCC report, the scientists contributing to the NIPCC report are paid for their efforts. ... $460,000 going to the lead authors and contributors ... Basically these scientists are paid with the specific goal of arguing against the scientific evidence in the IPCC report, whereas the only goal of the IPCC authors is to produce an accurate, comprehensive review of the climate science literature.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1295

Chinese Academy of Sciences has released a statement about Heartland's misrepresenting translation of NIPCC as endorsement.

he Heartland Institute published the news titled “Chinese Academy of Sciences publishes Heartland Institute research skeptical of Global Warming” in a strongly misleading way on its website, implying that the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) supports their views, in contrary to what is clearly stated in the Translators’ Note in the Chinese translation. The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS’ endorsement of its report is completely false...

http://skepticalscience.com/heartland-cas-fantasy.html

Much like creationists trying to get their material in the classroom when it has no chance of success in the scientific world, so goes the NIPCC:

By distributing the NIPCC report “Climate Change Reconsidered II – Physical Science” (CCR2) to teachers, Heartland hopes that the view they sponsor via the NIPCC – one that entirely contradicts the official findings of the IPCC – will prevail in the classroom, or at least feature in the curriculum.
...
The CCR2 report also exhibits a flaw so basic it would not be condoned in the submission of a 1st year science student. In all scientific documents where scientific papers are cited, it is standard practice to append a numbered list of the papers referred to, and to add corresponding superscript numbers to any statement that depends on a citation for validity. This is the only way it is possible to check that what the authors claim is supported by the science they claim it for.

The full NIPCC report fails to provide any numbered citations.

http://skepticalscience.com/us-schools-heartland-nipcc-report.html (emphasis in original)

 

[iceaura]

The angle is soluble manmade pollutions, due to say heavy metals and organic solvents, etc., kills single cell life allowing more heat in the worlds water.

As a rule of thumb single cell organisms as a group - at least a few available species among the varied hordes - will be found to have survived in some severely polluted body of water long after the complex organisms have been killed off.

Among the more complex organisms now eliminated, we find both major predators of those single cell organisms and the larger competitors for resources. They being gone, one sees population booms among the smaller organisms released from predation and resource competition. That often clouds the water.

Whether the increased upper layer cloudiness that normally accompanies increased "manmade pollutions" of a body of water (so reliably that inverse changes in optical depth are tracked as proxies for changes in pollution levels in my part of the world) results in significant changes in the absorption and retention of solar energy in the form of heat, by that body of water, is another matter - but your "angle" as described, for bodies of water so seriously polluted that they are actually poisoned, appears to have the basic setup backwards.

 

[wellwisher]

And you neither make the case that this drives climate change or was ignored by the climatologists. Indeed this very issue was covered on page 750 in section 9.1.3.1.2 of the IPCC WG I AR5 report, so it is not being ignored. Why are you wasting everyone's time making 1000 bad arguments rather than making one good argument?

Say CO2 does cause global warming, which then causes climate change, leading to more occurrence of severe weather. If global warming causes the weather to get nicer, there is nothing to worry about. Let us assume worse for the sake of worry.

If the weather gets worse, this results in more mixing of the earth's water, and thereby limiting the absorption of solar heat deep in the water. This lose of stored heat due to mixing can offset the increase by the CO2. If this mixing was a significant variable, one would expect temperature rise estimates to be too high, since they will not factor the loss of water heating due to mixing caused by climate change. If we average all the models they are all high for their 10 year projections for 2014.

I this case, I am not denying anything, but working under the assumption of CO2 based global warming and climate change for the worse, but adding another variable connected to water. Water is not a one trick pony like CO2 but has an impact as a gas, liquid and solid.

 

[rpenner]

Say CO2 does cause global warming, which then causes climate change, leading to more occurrence of severe weather. If global warming causes the weather to get nicer, there is nothing to worry about.

Actually simple ocean acidification from increased CO₂, simple ocean rise due to thermal expansion and ice melting, and simple heating of the biosphere are things to worry about regardless about how "nice" the weather might be on a given day.

Let us assume worse for the sake of worry.

It's not an assumption if one has a best-of-class empirically-vetted model that predicts it.

If the weather gets worse, this results in more mixing of the earth's water, and thereby limiting the absorption of solar heat deep in the water. This lose of stored heat due to mixing can offset the increase by the CO2. If this mixing was a significant variable, one would expect temperature rise estimates to be too high, since they will not factor the loss of water heating due to mixing caused by climate change.

Your argument is incorrect, because heat is transferred by radiation, conduction, convection and material transport. More mixing allows faster transport of heat to the deep ocean, not a change in how much total heating occurs or what the equilibrium temperature of Earth is.

If we average all the models they are all high for their 10 year projections for 2014.

This statement confuses physical models with time series projections, is mathematically incoherent and contains an unsupported factual assertion. This is April 1, 2014. How do you know what the 2014 average global temperature anomaly is going to be?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc-global-warming-projections.htm
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Cli...le-Agreement-with-Recent-Surface-Warming.html

I this case, I am not denying anything, but working under the assumption of CO2 based global warming and climate change for the worse, but adding another variable connected to water. Water is not a one trick pony like CO2 but has an impact as a gas, liquid and solid.

You are in denial that global climate experts have expertise in global climate physics and assert without evidence that they ignored that oceans are deep and filled with water. That's crazy pants denialism.

 

[Trippy]

This is a pity:

Conspiracy Theorists Get Paper Withdrawn Through Bogus Legal Threat

So much for freedom of expression, or some such.

 

[rpenner]

I have learned that the UWA's General Counsel has agreed that there is no risk of legitimate lawsuit and has authorized the hosting of the peer-reviewed paper on the UWA's website.

http://sks.to/recursivefury -> http://www.psychology.uwa.edu.au/research/cognitive/?a=2523540

The story in the lead author's own words (40+ minutes long) http://vimeo.com/89099432

 

[Trippy]

I have learned that the UWA's General Counsel has agreed that there is no risk of legitimate lawsuit and has authorized the hosting of the peer-reviewed paper on the UWA's website.

http://sks.to/recursivefury -> http://www.psychology.uwa.edu.au/research/cognitive/?a=2523540

The story in the lead author's own words (40+ minutes long) http://vimeo.com/89099432

Yeah, that was mentioned on the page that I linked to. Thanks for the vid. Dam shame it was withdrawn though, hopefully it won't set a precedent, and hopefully another journal will pick it up.

 

[wellwisher]

Here is another natural alternative to manmade global warming. Scientists have discovered an ocean of water, the size of the Arctic Ocean, under the crust in the earth's mantle. Below is the link in National Geographic. More recent studies, based on diamond samples, confirm this original study, as well as other water in the mantle. One theory for this water, is as the crustal plates, under the ocean, submerge (other crust will be lifted as balance), ocean water is being pulled down into the mantle.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070227-ocean-asia.html


Below are two diagrams. The first is from the EPA and shows the ocean surface temperature map. The second is a map of the under the mantle water, with the left side of the second map, associated with SE Asia. If you notice, the hottest spot in all the earth's oceans is nearby the SE asian mantle ocean. If the mantle is 900C, one gallon of mantle ocean water can heat about 900 gallons of ocean water, 1 degree C.

One thing I will add is scientists also found a gaping wound in the earth's crust, under the Atlantic ocean where the mantle of the earth is exposed. This exposure, in light of the mantle oceans, suggests sometimes this mantle water does more than seep, but can burst through the crust, eroding the crust to the mantle.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070301103112.htm

 

[rpenner]

Scientists have discovered an ocean of water, the size of the Arctic Ocean, under the crust in the earth's mantle.

Almost.

the interpretation of our seismic attenuation anomalies as the result of high water content remains highly speculative, but one that could prove to be very important in understanding the mechanisms of convection within planets.

http://www.agu.org/books/gm/v168/168GM19/168GM19.pdf

“It would still look like solid rock to you,”Wysession told LiveScience. “You would have to put it in the lab to find the water in it.” ... The researchers estimate that up to 0.1 percent of the rock sinking down into the Earth’s mantle in that part of the world is water, which works out to about an Arctic Ocean’s worth of water.
“That’s a real back of the envelope type calculation,”Wysession said. “That’s the best that we can do at this point.”

http://www.sunflower-astronomy.com/KCKCC_Docs/NewsArticles/Huge_Ocean_Discovered_Inside_Earth.pdf​

And it isn't just "under the crust" but in the mantle transition zone that they see this anomaly. Hundreds of kilometers of rock vertically separates the "China anomaly" from the bottom of the oceans.

One thing I will add is scientists also found a gaping wound in the earth's crust, under the Atlantic ocean where the mantle of the earth is exposed.

The mid-Atlantic rift, where plates separate is as far geographically and metaphorically as you can get from ancient hydrated rocks reflected traces of water trapped in subduction where plates dip under other plates.

Basically, you haven't proposed a heat transfer mechanism other than "Volcanos done it" which doesn't require discussion of water in the mantle transition zone at all.

The recent energy imbalance of the biosphere is about 250 trillion Watts. The latent fusion heat of molten rock is about 420 kJ/kg. The heat capacity of rocks is about 0.85 kJ/(kg * K). Rocks melt at surface pressures at about 500 K higher than ocean water. Thus 1 kg of molten rock going to the ocean transports (420 + ( 0.85 * 500 ) ) kJ = 845 kJ. To explain the energy imbalance of the biosphere via a process that's mostly lava, you need a new process which started in the last 150 years and currently transports on the order of 25 billion tons per day or 8.5 cubic kilometers of rock per day. That's 30,000 times the rate of Kīlauea's ongoing effusive eruption.

But in the absence of evidence of this new phenomenon, the most parsimonious attribution of the energy imbalance is a 0.144% greater tendency to hold on to the 173,000 trillion watts of incoming sunlight for the reasons that have been well understood since the 1940's.

Why are you constantly clutching at straws?
What evidence would it take you to convince you that you are wrong?
Why won't you read the IPCC summary of thousands of scientific papers?

Don Cheadle explores drought impacts in the US Southwest. Maybe not so surprising – the very people who are being crushed by the impact of climate change, lower class rural folk in Texas, are unable to make a connection between global climate and their problems. They prefer to believe the problems come from God, or natural cycles. Climate Scientist Katharine Hayhoe is profiled in her battle against entrenched attitudes and scientific ignorance in that part of the world.

http://skepticalscience.com/episode1-years-of-living-dangerously.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brvhCnYvxQQ​

 

[rpenner]

In response to Paul Mulshine's ridiculous post comparing climate and cholesterol.

The statement "Climate science is infinitely more complicated than human physiology." is a red herring in a discussion of anthropogenic global warming, because of the correspondence principle. Simple conservation of matter means the CO₂ in the atmosphere is held at an equilibrium between sources and sinks. Simple conservation of energy means the heat content of the biosphere is held at an equilibrium value between sources and sinks. Thus complete knowledge is not required to both identify anthropogenic causes as the primary cause of CO₂ increase and identify CO₂ increase as the primary cause of energy imbalance. All that is needed is bounds on ignorance which are tighter than knowledge of the identified effects.

To deny anthropogenic causes are sufficient of themselves and in fact the primary cause of global warming is not supported by any empirical observation. Indeed, the reduction of outbound heat has been directly measured by comparing satellite observations with those of the 1970's confirms directly the theory of global warming from anthropogenic increase of well-mixed greenhouse gases that dates to the 1940's with earlier roots.

In contrast, public health management has always been in the intersection of economics and medicine, two of the more "dismal sciences." Keeping people happy and keeping people fit may not even be compatible goals.

The problem Mulshane seems to have is with the issue of culpability. It disturbs his philosophy that humankind could damage all known parts of the universe capable of supporting human existence. It taxes his need for immediate gratification in that there are no easy solutions being offered. But the problem Mulshane should confront is liability, for causing future damage isn't negligence but willful negligence and reckless behavior. Mulshane doesn't offer a rational reason to doubt the 1700's ideas about physics, the 1940's idea's about global warming, or the modern strides to cut back ignorance to the point the known anthropogenic causes stand head and shoulders above all other candidates.

 

[Aqueous Id]

Absolutely the best most energizing reply to any climate science denialist I have ever read.

:bravo:

In a perfect world, a helicopter would now descend on rpenner's front lawn, for a trip to the White House, followed by a Rose Garden announcement that we now have a new Secretary of Science.

 

[rpenner]

Follow-up to the original author:

On the evidence of your two replies, I doubt that you understand that a medical or scientific ethics panel is unlikely allow your 200-human experiment to proceed. I doubt that you understand the existing physics that demonstrates that the Earth is warmer than it would be if it didn't have pre-industrial levels of CO₂ and methane or that it's the total amount of atmospheric CO₂ (not the tininess of its percentage) governs the magnitude of the atmosphere's optical depth near 10µm (i.e. near the peak of outbound greybody emission).

And your betting that high CO₂ is good because you anticipate a happy accident of a century of greatly diminished sunlight not predicated on any physical model causes me to doubt you hold your opinions for rational and communicable reasons or that you have a background in risk management.​

To objections:

I read a number of abstracts. Nowhere do I find an intervention in the lives of 100 human beings where the expected outcome is to worsen their health. (That's Nazi experiments on survivability and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment -- mid-twentieth century examples of what _not_ to do.) Please cite a specific recent paper where the non-control was people encouraged to adopt a behavior or ingest substances that a consensus of experts believes harmful. The typical control is a population which receives either no intervention or no instruction. This the ethics panel allows under limited circumstances. (For example, where there is no consensus on the harmfulness of the treatment, the non-control group will be monitored and the experiment halted early if evidence of harm arises.)

Surface temperature is just one phenomena associated with a heating biosphere. A more reliable picture of global warming will come from studying the heat content of the largest heat reservoirs in the biosphere.

Because of the interplay of the oceans, the volumetric ice loss from both hemispheres, rather significant effects of volcanic eruptions and the chaotic motion of the winds, there is considerable year-to-year variation in even global averages of surface temperature even absent any natural or anthropogenic causes to depart from equilibrium. (That's called weather.) Sensitive techniques such as comparing El Niño years to El Niño years and La Niña years to La Niña years or looking over multi-decadal trends are needed to separate weather's chaotic noise from actual global warming trends.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Enso-global-temp-anomalies.png

Did you even know that the UK Met Office's HadCrut timeseries ignores the temperature on 20% of the Earth? This is just one way noise creeps into the discussion. Another is cherry-picking 1998 as the start of the analysis, as it was a particularly strong El Niño year. (Cherry picking is intellectually dishonest avoidance of good statistics.) But if you really want to use the most recent 14 years (2000-2013) I have no strong objections for you computing the warming, provided you realize that it won't have the statistical strength of 28 or 56 years. When the topic of debate is the signal, it is futile to waste too much time talking about details of the noise.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-s...ase=10&firsttrendyear=2000&lasttrendyear=2013

While it is obviously true I am ignorant of what the consensus will be, because of the correspondence principle I have bounds on my ignorance. I know that the primary cause of global warming won't be attributed to volcanoes, or the sun, or El Niño or foreseeable shift in Earth's orbit or inclination. I know that people of the future will not regard the current climate consensus as hasty or willfully ignorant of well-established physical and chemical principles.​

To someone criticizing a recent paper for examining how IPCC models fare when fed the actual record of ENSO and volcanic eruptions:

Louise Nicholas,
I don't think you are being fair to climate science. Any scientific hypothesis is a precise, communicable and useful description of the behavior of phenomena. Physics hypotheses have physics inputs and climate hypotheses have climate inputs. The hypotheses predict the outcome of those inputs and by comparing hypotheses against each other in the crucible of reality we keep only the best ones. The forward-facing climate predictions aren't responsible for guessing specific volcanic eruptions or weather events like the polar vortex making an excursion to North America in 2013 or specifically the chaotic ENSO pattern. Neither are they responsible for guessing that the Kyoto treaty would be signed and there would be pressure to reduce global emissions versus the "business as usual" forecast. So when the IPCC makes forward-facing predictions they make a range of reasonable guesses and extract the long-term trends and averages.

The IPCC forward-facing predictions weren't wrong, their inputs didn't match reality except in the average.

But actual events aren't an average -- history, weather and biological evolution all have extreme contingency on what happened before. The same forward facing climate model when replayed with the actual inputs will (to the extent that is a precise and useful description of the behavior of climate phenomena) well-model the global temperature average.

A physics analogy might be about a bunch of alpha particles being thrown at thin gold foil. The physical model is the same in the average of billions of particles and a single particle. But the single particle's final position is contingent on its initial position and velocity, while the average over a lot of nearby initial positions and velocities will give a smooth distribution of expected outcomes. Same (good) science, but the actual events of the one aren't equivalent to the average.

Ultimately, this is about the long term dynamic equilibrium heat energy content of the biosphere. Both CO₂ trends and global heat content trends have little year-to-year variation while global surface temperatures vary widely when averaged on the time scale of 1 month to 5 years. But global warming is about the long term trends which ultimately the global heat content trends will require the surface temperature average to keep pace with.​

To someone claiming global warming causes CO₂:

Actually, temperature is not driving CO₂ by releasing it from the oceans. The proof of this is the oceans are becoming more acid and anthropogenic activities more than account for the increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere so the facts show that the ocean (which is deep and slow to rise in temperature on the average) while heating is also absorbing some of the CO₂ at the expense of corals and other life which does not tolerate higher CO₂.​

And when they responded by cut-and-pasting a bunch of unsourced abstracts:

First of all, a citation and discussion would suffice. Instead we got no citation, some quotes, and no discussion.

The precipitating cause of the end of glaciation is not at issue as those drivers are understood. (Since the ice ages were pre-industrial, are you even making an assumption of rationality when you presume climatologists ascribe all warming to CO₂ ? Or are are you arguing against a straw-man?) The role of CO₂ would be to assist in deglaciation.
http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm

Likewise, your more recent studies are not more convincing.

"Hocker is claiming that his model shows that the long-term upward trend in CO2 is explained by temperature, when his methods actually removed the long-term trend." This is extremely problematic. Again you are assuming climate scientists are ignorant of the temperature-dependent solubility of CO₂ when in fact, they are aware of it. Were you aware that the CO₂ equilibrium concentration was also a function of CO₂ partial pressure. This is why even cold soda is fizzy and is the physical principle behind the empirical observation that the oceans are taking some, not all, of the anthropogenic CO₂ emissions.
http://skepticalscience.com/warming-co2-rise.htm​

I should have also added http://skepticalscience.com/co2-increase-is-natural-not-human-caused.htm but it follows up points I made before.

To someone claiming skepticalscience.com has been repeatedly "called out" as being full of "lies and fabrications" but without any specific claims or a claim that this "calling out" took the form of a rebuttal:

wellsitter,
You have made allegations of “lies and fabrications” without any attempt to distinguish the terms or more importantly support the allegations with facts and fact-informed argument. You present a leading question requiring me to choose between being an accomplice or dupe, but do not even specifically identify a factual inaccuracy advocated by my links or the authors you have some sort of undisclosed beef with.

I'm on the side of science and the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and believe that the cure to inaccurate science portrayal should be accurate science reporting. I appreciate that Skeptical Science site for their habit of citing specifically the scientific literature that they reference and in many cases linking directly to it. This gives me confidence that they will strive to portray it accurately for it would be easy to show if they were to quote it out of context or in an otherwise misleading way.

I literally cannot imagine any basis you might present to demonstrate on any specific issue you think John Cook, the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, may have miscommunicated. (Full disclosure, I am personally prejudiced against the people of Queensland due to the behavior of one of their expatriates. But I don't resort to name calling or childish misspellings as you have.) Likewise for Dana Nuccitelli from California.

If the totality of facts were on your side, in the time you took to compose your post of sterile innuendo and baseless vague claims, you could have taken me to task on any one of the points I raised in my comments. You could have shown me science was on your side and caused me to research the question better in the future. But this does not appear to be the case.

I'm on the side of science, rational dialogue, and fact-informed argument. You are welcome to join me any time.​

To someone who compared climate science with the position that the Earth is flat:

If by "back then" you mean 1492 and by "consensus" you mean "most prevalent opinion of people in a position to be well-informed on the subject" then you misstate the position of the royal advisers in that they thought that Columbus had no rational reason for assuming the circumference of the Earth in the east-west direction was vastly different from the estimate of Eratosthenes (circa 210 BC) of about 40,000 km. Columbus' goal of sailing to India and China failed due to his bad assumptions, but this failure was financially lucrative to Europe.

Good risk management should not entail betting on a happy accident.​

To someone who compared the consensus of 97% of all professional climate opinion with a much smaller set of relativity deniers:

jgfox, presumably then like the physicists who accepted Einstein, you would want a demonstration that those that deny anthropogenic global warming have better accuracy at predicting the behavior of global temperature given historical inputs than those that agree and thus form the scientific consensus. Is this correct?

Have you seen this comparison: http://skepticalscience.com/comparing-global-temperature-predictions.html

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critic...relativity#A_Hundred_Authors_Against_Einstein
Yes, a group laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. The difference is fact-informed rational argument.​

To someone who posted an hour of climate science disinformation by a lead author of the Heartland Institute’s NIPCC “report” :

According to Prof. Bob Carter, geologists, like himself, “hold the key to delineating climate history” and “many (though not all) geological scientists see no cause for alarm when modern climate change is compared with the climate.” But this doesn't explain why “the Geological Society of Australia, the Geological Society of America, the Geological Society of London and the American Geophysical Union have all recognised the reality of human-caused climate change and called for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” This lecture is disingenuous in many ways, especially in that it seeks to marginalize expertise -- the only rational reason to listen to any lecture.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/bob-carters-climate-counter-consensus-alternate-reality.html

It is irrelevant (a strawman) to the global warming debate if global temperatures are unusual in twentieth century as compared to the last six million years, as what is needed is a precise and reliable way of knowing why and how much and how fast. A secondary consideration is also how stressful to life and civilization will be the predicted change. Bob Carter's first graph shows that the temperature today (Holocene) is warmer than its been all but two times (Eemian, Holsteinian) in the past million years. But all human civilization happened during this Holocene warm period. We don't have to say "we" were warmer 2-3 degrees 5 million years ago because there was no "us" then.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hansen_PaleoImplications_for_Tomorrow.html

Neither do climate scientists argue that climate is a stable thing. It's from study of past climate changes that we learn to predict the causes and course of current climate change.

Near 5m43s, Prof. Bob Carter seriously misstates evolutionary biology and says all plant and animal life is pre-adapted to those warmer temperatures. Evolution is of course an ongoing process and there is no reason to believe humanity's ape-like ancestors of 300,000 generations ago are going to help smooth out the transition as we undo 6 million years of change in less than 100.

Near 8m23s, Prof. Bob Carter alleges scientists have no sense of humor, in the middle of repeating a twee comment from Mark Twain. This is not the definition of climate used by science. He then goes on to mislead on the reason 30-year data intervals are used to look at climate (its a standard, not a definition) and conflates 30-years as a climatological data point. The 6 million year ocean core is not necessarily 200,000 independent data points because typically ocean cores of the type analyzed by Alan Mix are smoothed over thousands of years. No citation to a specific work is given to evaluate this claim. This is also a major failing of the Heartland Institute's NIPCC report (with lead coauthor Robert Carter).

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Bob_Carter_quote.htm​

 

[rpenner]

Wow, this is really interesting how much opinion is out there and how little of it rests on factual support. Additional followups:

To the author of the article who has always claimed science was on his side and who demands an answer to question "what the consensus will be 30 years from now":

Paul, Paul, Paul, Why do you persecute science?

You don't get to demand answers to questions predicated on untruths.

I replied to your challenge 19 hours ago. "While it is obviously true I am ignorant of what the consensus will be [30 years from now], because of the correspondence principle I have bounds on my ignorance. I know that the primary cause of global warming won't be attributed to volcanoes, or the sun, or El Niño or foreseeable shift in Earth's orbit or inclination. I know that people of the future will not regard the current climate consensus as hasty or willfully ignorant of well-established physical and chemical principles."​

The author of the article also attempted to shift the discussion to an alleged inconstancy in the priorities of the Sierra Club in refusing to endorse an anti-immigration measure:

Isn't restricting immigration a wholly unconnected topic? CO₂ and CH₄ are "well-mixed greenhouse gasses" and thus affect the whole planet regardless of where they are emitted while immigration is entirely about the "where" and respecting lines drawn on a map. Thus mitigating anthropogenic global warming and fighting pollution are populist causes undertaken for the average benefit of all while restricting immigration for the reasons you describe is about enshrining the privileges of the elite who already live inside of a particular line on a particular map.​

To someone who claimed that there has been no warming in 17.5 or 18 years and that the coyote blog empirical model has had a better fit than IPCC models:

Hello RK.

You state: "The real debate is how much humans have contributed to climate change." and then try to make the case with noisy data that there is no currently ongoing climate change. But what your cherry-picked choice of data and start of the analysis shows is that there is no long term linear signal which is statistically distinguishable from sampling noise and conflating factors. Why you use 1998 as the start of your regression is not clear at all unless you are cherry-picking an anomalously high point in the historical data (which historical data is also unclear from your source).

Working with the NOAA global data, we can compute both trend and statistical uncertainty for a given window size.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_ocean/ytd/12/1880-2014

For 1998-2013 we have n=16 years, ∑x=32088, ∑y=9.23, ∑x²=64352824, ∑xy=18512.12, ∑y²=5.3895 for a 95% confidence (using a t-test with 14 degrees of freedom and neglecting sampling error) that the slope is between 0.0395°C/decade and 0.0402°C/decade. We have nine-9's confidence that this data for this period says the best estimate of the slope is positive. (It's more positive for 17 or 18 years.)

But a funny thing happens when you plot the estimated slope for the whole dataset with a window size of 3 to 20 years. The estimated slope waggles all over the place but the waggles get less extreme as the window gets larger. This strongly suggests that the model used by simple linear regression (y = m x + b + normal distribution measurement error) is not a good model for global surface temperature at short time scales.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_linear_regression

This is consistent with the 1896 physical observations of Arrhenius and the c. 1960 observations of E.N. Lorenz that weather is chaotic. Even though the weather may be chaotic and heat energy can be shuffled around the atmosphere and oceans so that it is not all represented well by just sampling temperatures at the surface, if there is a long term trend in the heat content of the biosphere, it well eventually show up in the instrumental temperature record.

More comprehensive sampling of the heat content of the atmosphere and oceans shows that this heating is happening at a much more steady rate year-to-year than the global temperature record reflects. And this shouldn't be physically controversial given the elementary physics of (model-independent!) conservation of energy. Satellites can directly measure the heat emissivity of the Sun and Earth and even in these times, the Earth is sucking up more than it is spitting out. Indeed quantifying the heat energy imbalance of the biosphere is the most natural translation of "global warming" to a program of study, with estimates of global surface temperature simply being a convenient long-term surrogate record.

And _why_ is "global warming" attributed to human activities? Because human activities more than account for recent trends in the global CO₂ content of the atmosphere. Because human activities account for much of the rise of CH₄. Because an atmosphere which is optically dense near the peak of the outgoing thermal radiation predicted by Wien's displacement law will significantly interrupt the process of radiative heat transfer to deep space.

John Burn-Murdoch's temperature graph does not refute any of the above. Nor does it demonstrate the IPCC models are incorrect. The extreme variability of the temperature signal should be your first clue that you are attempting to compare the chaotic patterns of weather with long-term climate. (Indeed, the Financial Times graph compares the temperature record from a source that ignores 20% of the Earth with the average of a model that produces a confidence interval.) Accounting for the actual (rather than predicted) human activities, the actual short term transient aerosols by volcanoes and the chaotic heat transfer of the ENSO (El Niño), the response of the actual long term climate signal is very close to that modelled by the IPCC.

http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2013/09/23/how-the-ipccs-projections-match-up/

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/29/11790.full.pdf+html

Coyote Blog's unusual empirical fit is pretty uninformative in that it gives no scientific reason to believe that it has any extrapolative power. That would be the difference between the original Wein's law and the revised one based on a quantum thermodynamical understanding of Planck's law. In addition there is significant structure to the residuals.

The IPCC models don't do weather and they don't claim to predict perfectly the industrial activities of man or the timing of volcanic eruptions, but they do predict the relation between the non-climate inputs and the long-term climate signal.

http://skepticalscience.com/contary-to-contrarians-ipcc-temp-projections-accurate.html​

To someone who thought climate science said Florida would be underwater by 2012:

So someone told you a baseless scare story. That's a good example of why you shouldn't repeat stories just because you assume that the other person has a basis. But to assume that we cannot change the biosphere in significant ways is to ignore science and history.

• The 1995 Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded for the chemical understanding of CFCs in the stratosphere which was behind the 1987 Montreal Protocol which guides nations to prevent further human harm to the chemistry of the ozone layer. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/hats/publictn/elkins/cfcs.html
• About 1/4 of all chemical energy produced by plants is now used by humans. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/30/1211349110.abstract
• The rate of species going extinct is 100-1000 times the usual background rate. http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Extinction#current_rate
• Populations of large ocean fish have declined 90% since 1950. http://wormlab.biology.dal.ca/ramweb/papers-total/nature01610_r.pdf
• Humans now take more nitrogen from the atmosphere and
convert it into nitrates than all other processes combined AND
• 8-9 times as much phosphorus is flowing into oceans than the
natural background rate. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/main.html#Interference
• In oceans, eutrophication has created about 400 dead zones,
from 1 to 70,000 km² in area. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5891/926.full
• Soil erosion from conventionally plowed agricultural fields is 10-100 times the natural background rate. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/33/13268

The above has been adapted from http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/balsillie/balsillie_what.pdf

So if you might be wrong in your belief that nature is too big for the activities of man to play an important and potentially detrimental role, might you also be wrong about the claims you assert with respect to anthropogenic global warming? In fact, instead of leaping to the polar opposite of the scare story, shouldn't the lesson to take away is to insist on a fact-based rational argument for any such "predictions?"​

The above post was largely recycled from what I posted earlier to a different someone who makes a foundational assumption :

To be scientific a claim like "Global warming is natural, inevitable and unstoppable." would have to be supported by facts and rational argument, not simply asserted. Here are some examples of supported claims:

• About 1/4 of all chemical energy produced by plants is now used by humans.
  http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/30/1211349110.abstract
• The rate of species going extinct is 100-1000 times the usual background rate.
  http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Extinction#current_rate
• Populations of large ocean fish have declined 90% since 1950.
  http://wormlab.biology.dal.ca/ramweb/papers-total/nature01610_r.pdf
• Humans now take more nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into nitrates than all other processes combined AND
• 8-9 times as much phosphorus is flowing into oceans than the natural background rate.
  http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/main.html#Interference
• In oceans, eutrophication has created about 400 dead zones, from 1 to 70,000 km² in area.
  http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5891/926.full
• Soil erosion from conventionally plowed agricultural fields is 10-100 times the natural background rate.
  http://www.pnas.org/content/104/33/13268

The above has been adapted from http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/balsillie/balsillie_what.pdf

So if you might be wrong in your belief that nature is too big for the activities of man to play an important and potentially detrimental role, might you also be wrong about the claims you assert with respect to anthropogenic global warming?​

The author of the article objected that the above haven't been traced to CO₂ increases.

It was never my point that CO₂ was the main culprit. My point was human activities was the main culprit.

Regarding anthropogenic global warming, by making the discussion just about CO₂ you ignore anthropogenic CH₄, sulfur, soot, albedo change from land use and aerosols, as well as natural vulcanism, orbital variations, ENSO and solar output. CO₂ just happens to be the biggest current driver of global warming and one that has long persistence in the environment.​

To someone who wishes government would only act on absolutely fixed science:

Science isn't about absolute certainty, it's about reducing ignorance and therefore uncertainty. But even today gravity still holds mysteries, albeit in ways that have little to do with human scale events, so the science keeps on going. However since the effects of man on the biosphere are finite, absolute certainty in understanding global climate is not needed to demonstrate anthropogenic global warming. All that is needed is to quantify the effects of man and put bounds on the remaining uncertainty.

But if you want your government policies to be driven only by science when science is absolutely certain, then either you don't understand government or science.​

The author of the article asserts that knowledge of science and government is on his side and rehashes his original red herring and trashing of Al Gore, to which I replied:

Medicine has long traditional roots which in some circles makes "science based medicine" a term of controversy. It's not clear that your 1970-1980 "consensus" is comparable to the 97% consensus of scientific papers that endorse or reject anthropogenic global warming.

From page 2 of your source: "Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still remarkably inadequate." This seems to weaken your claim that anthropogenic global warming is a harder phenomenon to study than "eating right."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/m...l-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?src=pm&pagewanted=2

Firefighters try to cash in on their willingness to bunk together and watch TV on the off chance that there might be a nearby fire or emergency to respond to. Do you impugn the value of their services because they want to get paid? Then why bring in Al Gore to the conversation at all?

Let me put it to you another way: No university, government or think tank is paying or rewarding me for posting here. You have that fancy blue affiliated poster background that makes me think you are being paid to post here. Should I disregard the facts and arguments of people that agree with you because you are presumably actually paid for the same reason that you want to marginalize my arguments for anthropogenic global warming just because Al Gore is seeking to someday potentially get paid?​

In a parallel reply the author also claims global warming has been "stalled for the past 14 years" (linked to a GWPF page) and wants to know how that will affect the 97% consensus:

Science isn't about absolute certainty, it's about reducing uncertainty by finding stuff out. Your January 2013 question comes with a July 2011 answer. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/29/11790.full.pdf+html​

"wellsitter" cast personal aspersions on the authors of that cited article and claimed without basis that it was logically fallacious:

Actually China is burning coal and it contributes sulfur as well as CO₂. Why would you expect all fossil fuels to be equivalent or elaborate name calling to strengthen your argument?

If you look at figure 1, the short time period of post-1998 data and chaotic ENSO natural weather variability (green line) dominate the temperature signal (black line) which is another way to say by focusing on short time series you are making the story about the noise, not the signal.

The blue line here is the anthropogenic global warming signal.​

To someone who attempts to smear climate science as "zombie science":

The journal _Medical Hypotheses_ is famous for not subscribing to the prevailing principles of scientific publishing in that the papers aren't peer-reviewed for supporting their arguments with fact-based reasoning. But even before I get that far in the paper announces that it is not even a normal article for _Medical Hypotheses_ but rather an editorial. It just happens to be an editorial with a lengthy "Summary" that looks a little like a scientific paper's abstract.

While railing against corruption (i.e. "enlightened self-interest") in keeping bogus theories alive (i.e. "zombie science") nowhere does it propose a clear test between science and propaganda.

Therefore, Doug Sterling, it falls to you to lay out a fact-based argument that anthropogenic global warming won't be catastrophic. After all, without a fact-based rational argument, labeling a position you disagree with as "zombie science" amounts to no more than name-calling. For example, are you certain that the definition of "catastrophic" that you are using matches the particular peer-reviewed scientific papers that you are railing against?

While there are some actual examples of "zombie science" (how brain parasites can control behavior, understanding the math of epidemics better by modelling zombie apocalypses, etc), some anti-scientific things have also been called "zombie science":
• Intelligent Design/Creationism http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1641/B570313 and http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/30/some-things-never-change/#comment-699842
• The claim that the MMR Vaccine cause Autism http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/08/14/an-zombie-antivaccine-meme-rises-from-the-grave-again/
​

Posts to someone who thinks scientific organizations aren't reporting the consensus of their peers and the 97% consensus is brainwashing (I don't see those as compatible hypothesis):

The Scratch,
I welcome any attempt that you would want to make to try and support your claims that a particular scientific society does not echo the position held by the majority of its scientist members. I have not known of a case where this was true.
The claim of a 97% consensus on climate science is not based on a poll but on analysis of climate article abstracts that endorsed or rejected anthropogenic global warming. Follow up surveys of the authors where they were asked to self-rate their papers as agreeing with or denying this endorsement as well as repeated studies with newer papers certainly seem to indicate this consensus is robust.​

Round 2:

Ok, that still leaves me in the dark over what region and what field of science this society covers, what their stated position is on any topic and polling results of their membership on their topic. Not sure why you thought this would support your claim as it appears just to be restating it.

Also, as I pointed out, it has little to do with the reported 97% of published climate papers that weigh in on anthropogenic global warming. Picking on Hansen because you question his career path and not details of his research does little to disturb the thousands of scientific papers not co-authored by Hansen.

Your claim of dishonesty should also be supported because it looks like a fact-based opinion and yet the readers don't know what facts you might be referring to.​

To someone who denigrates peer review, expertise, and the idea that man can damage the biosphere:

Short answer: Scientific peer review operates as a filter to save scientists with the duty to keep up with the state-of-the-art and the economic limitation of finite reading time from having to read proposals that are trivially wrong.

Scientific peer review does not protect against incorrect hypotheses being proposed per se, but it does tend to cut down on the number of hypotheses and arguments published without good empirical support. (Like saying correlation implies causation or requiring the energy balance of the biosphere to be magical.) Science isn't about guessing -- it's about making good guesses informed from all the relevant data and then when you have more than one viable guess the scientific method requires you gather more data to distinguish which guess is best. In that way a hypothesis of what might be right is promoted to a scientific theory, the current state-of-art best synopsis of the behavior of all related empirically observed behaviors. (For example both general relativity and the standard model of particle physics are the best state-of-art scientific theories. Because of the correspondence principle, they overlap the domains of earlier theories where at best only sensitive measurements near the limits of usefulness of those older theories distinguish the two. This is why Newton's law of Universal Gravitation is good enough to plot the course of the Apollo missions, even though it was 50-years "out-of-date.")

So the main purpose of scientific peer review is to reduce the number of proposals that are frivolous (I measured the speed of light with an accuracy of ±27%), baseless (I'm the first one to say yellow + red = orange), fallacious (If evolution happened then why are there still fish?) or founded on empirically rejected predicates (Following Newton's optical theories, the fact that binary stars appear to follow Newton's law of Universal gravitation proves the exterior universe is just a projected simulation.) Because science is about using all the data, so you have to filter out the noise if human beings with their limited lifespans are to educated themselves from zero to the frontiers of human knowledge.

Part of your post seems predicated on the assumption that the 97% concordance of scientific abstracts that did express a finding on the topic of anthropogenic global warming favored that hypothesis were all "wrong." But you didn't choose to argue for that proposition, choosing instead to nakedly deny it: "We aren’t really the culprits anyway ... The whole thing is a scam." This may be patently obvious to you, but you haven't supported your claims with any facts or argument. Thus your above post is an example of writing that wouldn't pass scientific peer review. If you were right and could demonstrate that you did have a reasonable basis for such claims you would take the feedback from peer review and amend your post to support those claims. Otherwise, you would redraft the paper without the unscientific leaping to conclusions.

By using scare quotes to denigrate "peers" (and "climate scientists") what you are actually doing is denigrating expertise. This flies in the fact of all economic theory in that human beings have limited time on this planet and limited resources to do things and therefore cannot be masters of all subjects. Thus in order to have good car repairs, good medicine and good climate science, humans must specialize. Thus if you want to criticize the quality of car repairs, medical care or climate science, it behooves you to gain appreciable amounts of expertise in the field where you wish to express criticism. Being critical of the cost of proposed car repairs, proposed medical care or proposed climate mitigation strategies without viable alternatives seems like empty grousing without arguing with a factual basis that the repairs, care or mitigation were not needed in the first place.

It's not clear what specifically you are complaining about when you refer to "computer models" as being insufficient as armament. It can hardly be that you are computer-phobic in that you took the time (in the week of Heartbleed no less) to login and post your comment. It can't be "models" because all scientific theories are models and most scientific measurements are derived from observations in light of models. So I chalked this up to an expression of general mistrust of expertise. Please write back if I guessed wrong.

Climate scientists aren't proposing in their primary scientific papers that we need to "revolutionize energy production in this country." -- They are saying unless we radically change course _globally_, then the status quo won't be preserved. Economics and risk management experts are the ones who are responsible for the message that we must take action soonest because it's the cheapest solution in the long term. (The IPCC summarizes hundreds, perhaps thousands of these papers from all these experts because they have a wide charter.) Indeed, they have no viable proposal that I know of to lower CO₂ in the atmosphere. The main thrust of the conversation is how to limit the rate at which man's activities are adding to the CO₂ content of the atmosphere which is on course to double over content in pre-industrial times.

It's really not clear that any amount of money would "solve all the world’s major problems" but money costs are a big motivator for getting people to choose a course of action. So that's exactly why many economists propose a carbon tax because if the government makes the energy industry pay for "the right to release CO2" then people in the aggregate will tend to choose energy sources that release less CO₂. But dumping CO₂ from the burning of fossil fuels shouldn't be viewed as a natural right, but rather a customary right. A similar customary right was the right to allow sheep to graze on an English village commons. The problem is with too many sheep, you get too much grazing and the commons suffers from the aggregate behavior of people following what was allowed by custom. This is the "tragedy of the commons" if you wish to read about it. Arguably, enforcing fair laws to the benefit of village as a whole even if restricts the customary right to exploit the commons is a legitimate role for municipal government. On a global scale there is no such government to look to, so we have to hope for nations to cooperate with enlightened self-interest as they did in 1987 with the Montreal Protocol that drastically cut CFC emissions which is finally causing the level of CFCs in the troposphere to drop and hopefully allowing the ozone layer to recover.​

Whoops, this one didn't get posted because of a reported "network error" that lasted at least 7 hours. //Edit: Hah -- it's not a network error, it's a broken API that won't take posts over a certain length. Breaking it up into three posts worked. Yeah, science!

 

[wellwisher]

One of my biggest concerns with manmade climate change, is the way this particular area of science silences the opposition, more like mafia style politics than science. If you look at physics theories, for the essence of matter and energy, there are several theories allowed side-by-side. The consensus may prefer the standard or quantum model, but there is no political effort to silence those who accept string or loop theories. Why the difference? Normally science is open minded and not this way or the highway. I was wondering if anyone knows why this area is so different?

 

[Read-Only]

One of my biggest concerns with manmade climate change, is the way this particular area of science silences the opposition, more like mafia style politics than science. If you look at physics theories, for the essence of matter and energy, there are several theories allowed side-by-side. The consensus may prefer the standard or quantum model, but there is no political effort to silence those who accept string or loop theories. Why the difference?

There are NOT "several theories allowed." That's the sort of talk one only gets from deniers. The reason is quite simple - the standard models MATCH the data available. Case closed.