The news that 2005 was the warmest year ever recorded in Australia comes at the end of a year in which, to the extent that facts can settle anything, the debate over human-caused global warming has been settled. Worldwide, 2005 was equal (to within the margin of error of the stats) with 1998 as the warmest year in at least the past millennium.
More significantly, perhaps, 2005 saw the final nail hammered into the arguments climate change contrarians have been pushing for years. The few remaining legitimate sceptics, along with some of the smarter ideological contrarians, have looked at the evidence and conceded the reality of human-caused global warming.
Ten years or so ago, the divergence between satellite and ground-based measurements of temperature was a big problem – the ground based measurements showed warming in line with climate models but the satellites showed a cooling trend. The combination of new data and improved calibration has gradually resolved the discrepancy, in favour of the ground-based measurements and the climate models.
Another set of arguments concerned short-term climate cycles like El Nino. The late John Daly attributed the high temperatures of the late 1990s to the combination of El Nino and solar cycles, and predicted a big drop, bottoming out in 2005 and 2006. Obviously the reverse has happened. Despite the absence of the El Nino or solar effects that contributed to the 1998 record, the long-term warming trend has dominated.
Finally, there’s water vapour. The most credible of the contrarians, Richard Lindzen, has relied primarily on arguments that the feedback from water vapour, which plays a central role in climate models, might actually be zero or even negative. Recent evidence has run strongly against this claim. Lindzen’s related idea of an adaptive iris has been similarly unsuccessful.
Finally, the evidence has mounted up that, with a handful of exceptions, “sceptics” are not, as they claim, fearless seekers after scientific truth, but ideological partisans and paid advocates, presenting dishonest arguments for a predetermined party-line conclusion. Even three years ago, sites like Tech Central Station, and writers like Ross McKitrick were taken seriously by many. Now, anyone with access to Google can discover that they have no credibility. Chris Mooney’s Republican War on Science which I plan to review soon, gives chapter and verse and the whole network of thinktanks, politicians and tame scientists who have popularised GW contrarianism, Intelligent Design and so on.
A couple of thoughts on all this.
First, in the course of the debate, a lot of nasty things were said about the IPCC, including some by people who should have known better. Now that it’s clear that the IPCC has been pretty much spot-on in its assessment (and conservative in terms of its caution about reaching definite conclusions), it would be nice to see some apologies.
Second, now that the scientific phase of the debate is over, attention will move to the question of the costs and benefits of mitigation options. There are legitimate issues to be debated here. But having seen the disregard for truth exhibited by anti-environmental think tanks in the first phase of the debate, we shouldn’t give them a free pass in the second. Any analysis on this issue coming out of a think tank that has engaged in global warming contrarianism must be regarded as valueless unless its results have been reproduced independently, after taking account of possible data mining and cherry picking. That disqualifies virtually all the major right-wing think tanks, both here and in the US. Their performance on this and other scientific issues has been a disgrace.
John Quiggin 
Okey-dokey, avaroo, you obviously aren’t going to engage on the substance of the debate, so I will stop wasting my and your time. I leave you with these stats from your fellow citizens:
•77% believe the country should do “whatever it takes” to protect the environment.
• 65% say the government should guarantee health insurance for everyone-even if it means raising taxes.
• 86% favor raising the minimum wage.
• 60% favor repealing either all of Bush’s tax cuts or at least those cuts that went to the rich.
Source: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0102-33.htm
Sounds to me like your fellow citizens think government has substantial role in regulating and mandating in at least some areas, against the wishes of the free market ideologues. Yet your current administration takes no notice of these wishes, and indeed is clearly moving in the opposite direction. And I thought governments were “…elected TO SERVE the people”?
Regards.
Pat – “There is zero evidence that the current climate warming is due to human-generated CO2. And here’s why: The GCM climate models, which must be the source of any general objective meaning applied to data, are inadequate to predict climate.”
This would be true if GCM models were the only evidence. What about the temperature record, satellite data, sea temperture measurements, species migration etc all co-incidentally happening while the measured CO2 has increased from 290ppm to 370ppm.
Some people have the idea that just because climate is a chaotic process, and hence it’s impossible to predict what the weather will be a long time in the future or that the weather prediction is extremely dependent on initial conditions, that that makes it impossible to forecast global average temperature in such chaotic conditions. This is the same as saying that because climate is chaotic, there is no practical concept of climatic averages. Well you can believe there is no such thing as average temperture on earth in any shape or form if you want to but that pretty much sums up the difference between those who believe there is a greenhouse effect and those who don’t. The climate models may produce different weather from one run to the next but the issue is the average temperature produced by each run, not whether the weather always turns out the same at the same time. Climate modelers know very well that climate models are not good predictors of the detail of climate a long time into the future but that’s not what they’re meant to do. They’re meant to predict climate averages (such as the sensitivity of global average temperaure to CO2, or climate sensitivity) and for this they do a usefully accurate job. I should also point out that it’s not just computer models that are the source of estimates for climate sensitivity. Records of temperature and CO2 in ice-cores from times of stable climate can be used to give a cross-check of climate sensitivity. For an introduction to climate sensitivity refer to James Hansen’s paper at http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2003/2003_Hansen.pdf . It’s interesting Googling “climate sensitivity”. Most of the websites are educational institutions but there’s the occasional one from skeptics organizations such as the Marshall Institute. Even the Marshall Institute doesn’t try to assert that the climate sensitivity is zero. It just states what the minimum sensitivity must be from the physics of carbon dioxide and then glosses over the fact that this minimum still means there is a serious risk from global warming.
Global energy imbalance might not tell us exactly what things are causing the imbalance but it’s easy to work out how much of the imbalance is caused directly by human-generated CO2 from the properties of CO2. As educational websites describe, 280ppmv of CO2 added to the atmosphere (like throwing a blanket on a bed) will stop 4W/square metre of heat from leaving the atmosphere. Humans have added 100ppmv of CO2 to the atmosphere so that addition is responsible for holding back 1.4W/m2 of heat flux. One website reports the imbalance as 0.85W/m2. So the human-generated CO2 is responsible for more than the existing imbalance. Bear in mind that a lot of imbalance has been conteracted, or taken up by, the 0.7 degrees C rise in global mean temperature since humans started adding lots of CO2 to the atmosphere, by my calculations the 0.7 degrees C rise in temperature increased the exiting heat flux by 1.49W/m2.
The 0.85W/m2 imbalance is going into heat sinks on the earth, mainly the oceans and second-most into melting ice-caps. (Interesting bit of trivia: if the whole heat imbalance was directed to melting glaciers, it would melt them fast enough to raise the oceans at 10metres/century.)
I find I have to keep reminding Dogz and other people that we don’t need computer models that give us global average temperatures to 3 digits of accuracy or whatever to know that human-generated CO2 is making a substantial contribution to the greenhouse effect. Even ignoring feedbacks completely give a climate sensistivity of between 1.5 and 2 degrees C of warming for a doubling of pre-industrial CO2. Ignoring feedbacks completely is extremely conservative because the positive feedbacks are much stronger than the negative ones. Even with a climate sensitivity of 1.5 degrees C per CO2 doubling we have a serious problem on our hnds.
How do you “know that human-generated CO2 is making a substantial contribution to the greenhouse effect”? If you can substantiate that statement _without_ reference to a global climate model then you are way ahead of every other climatologist on the planet.
Assuming that you cannot so substatiate your statement, the veractity of your claim depends critically on the accuracy of the climate models (and no, you don’t need three decimal places). That’s why I prefer arguments that rely on directly measurable quantities, not complex modeling (of course at some level it is all a model; eg Newton’s laws are just a model. So to refine: I prefer arguments that rely on measurable quantities within models whose predictive power has already been verified).
If you’ve ever done any modeling you’ll know that you can model anything with a sufficiently complex model. However, the more complex the model, the less predictive power it has. Go to climateprediction.net and look at the range of scenarios they can get by varying only the currently poorly understood parameters in the GCM models. And that’s after they hand-filter “wacky” parameter setting such as those that lead to rapid freezing of the planet. You know how they know those settings are wacky? Not by inspecting the parameter values themselves (because they have already ruled out unphysical paraemeter settings) but because the model exhibits physically implausible behaviour. I suggest you think about how that might bias the predictions of the models.
Dogz – why is a GCM needed to say “know that human-generated CO2 is making a substantial contribution to the greenhouse effect”? The research that lead us to believe that this statement is true was done well before GCMs were possible.
My understanding is that GCMs are used to model possible consequences of global warming not prove AGW itself.
Read this link which is a history of the discovery of AGW and you can see that GCMs played virtually no part in the proof of AGW.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm
Ender, the operative word is “substantial”. Without that word Chris’s claim just restates well-understood physics, as you rightly point out:
“human-generated CO2 is making a contribution to the greenhouse effect�
But a “substantial contribution”? No-one knows how to establish that without modeling.
Ender wrote: “This would be true if GCM models were the only evidence.”
GCM’s aren’t evidence of anything, Ender. GCMs are explanations.
Ender: “What about the temperature record, satellite data, sea temperture measurements, species migration etc all co-incidentally happening while the measured CO2 has increased from 290ppm to 370ppm.”
All of the things you mention are data. What the data mean is given by theory. The point is that GCMs as theory are inadequate to tell us what those data mean because they are inadequate to explain Earth climate. Just because things happen coincidentally does not mean one of them is causal.
The question to answer is, how does anyone know that the changes you list (except CO2 increases) are not all just due to spontaneous swings of Earth climate? GCMs can’t definitively answer that question.
Atmospheric CO2 is known to spontaneously follow air temperature in past records. It may even be that some of the CO2 increase we see in the atmosphere today is due to a natural increase in CO2, following a natural rise in temperature.
Pat F if you want to be extremely critical you can pretty well pick apart any theory, Germ theory, Evolution etc take your pick the creationists have become pretty adept at that. You can postulate a theory that we are on the inside of a globe that has enough ad hoc twists and turns that it cannot be disproved.
The climate scientists -those most qualified- are saying that it is now human induced and the worlds leading scientific from G8 from the likes of the Royal Society are backing them.
I would think it reasonably rare for someone outside a discipline esp in the physical sciences can just blown in on blogs say ah but this, no this doesn’t prove anything when you have the leaders of that disciple reaching a working consensus plus have the backing of these prestigious institutions.
Yes I know about the fallacy from authority but it will take more than lay rules of thumb or even a few posts on a blog from those with knowledge with science backgrounds in other fields, to think they can just dismiss that accumulation of authority and work.
Pretty easy to say this or that doesn’t prove anything, with this working consensus extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, back it with something solid. The Australian scientist that went against the establishment with ulcers did; with the harm GW could cause you are going to have to come up with something better than its to complicated to model and the like or set unrealistic degrees of certainty.
Excuse my skepticism when often this skepticism often comes from those with an ideological bent that favors business and often in general don’t think humans are having any adverse impact on the environment at all and want environmental regulations rolled back.
I’m lay person with an interest in science but I still wouldn’t bother to argue with a creationist , someone who disagrees with the Germ theory or a AGW skeptic, such arguments don’t tend to get anywhere, but given who’s in my corner while I cannot be 100% certain I rather go with those most qualified and in the know than an extreme minority mostly populated with an ideological bias.
Pat, really the science is all there on this stuff. The difficulty, as SimonJM alludes, is that it requires a considerable knowledge of climate science to answer the type of objections you throw out. Climate scientists themselves generally don’t bother with this since they obviously have better things to do, which means semi-informed amateurs like me are largely left with the job. (I should take the opportunity to put in a plug for http://www.realclimate.org, a blog run by climate scientists that tries to fill some of the information gap for the interested public.)
That said, to understand why you are wrong would involve spending a fair amount of time reading about the science. The evidence goes way beyond the models. Try this for starters (relative to your comment about CO2 following air temps): http://www.geol.ucsb.edu/faculty/lea/pdfs/Lea%20JCLI%202004.pdf. Certainly warmer water holds less CO2 and this does result in a positive feedback that operates whenever climate is warming, but as this paper demonstrates that’s not the main thing going on. The paper is part of just one of several lines of evidence that has convinced climate scientists that we should be very worried indeed about the pulse of CO2 presently being added to the atmosphere.
Entire social science fields have flourished for decades based on nothing more than the consensus ideological convictions of their proponents, only to eventually be shown to be utterly worthless. Sokal Hoax anyone?
I wouldn’t accuse climatologists of that level of duplicitousness, but it is a lesson in how easily political ideology can be disguised as rational enquiry.
Pat Frank – “GCM’s aren’t evidence of anything, Ender. GCMs are explanations.”
I am not sure that you really know what GCMs are. GCMs are the only thing that climate scientists can experiment with. We do not have a convenient planet that we can vary conditions on so models in computers have to do. This is quite normal in most branches of science as diciplines like astrophysics do not have a convenient star to test theories of stellar evolution.
“All of the things you mention are data. ….” Yes that is what scientists do. They analyse data and draw conclusions. They do not just use GCMs to do this.
“The question to answer is, how does anyone know that the changes you list (except CO2 increases) are not all just due to spontaneous swings of Earth climate?”
Because the Milankovitch cycles that we see in the long term record in the ice cores shows that we in and interglacial period at the moment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
We have seen 8000 years of relativily stable temperature as would be expected before the cycle would swing down over the next 40 000 years into a new glacial period.
“Atmospheric CO2 is known to spontaneously follow air temperature in past records. It may even be that some of the CO2 increase we see in the atmosphere today is due to a natural increase in CO2, following a natural rise in temperature.”
This is true however the only increase in CO2 recently has been that emitted by humans unless you can suggest an alternative source. It also seems that in this case the rise in CO2 preceeded the temperature rise.
Wow, Dogz. Apparently the editors of Social Text caused the collapse of the entire field of climatology, who knew.
Guilt-by-extremely-tenuous-association is desperation, not a reason to take your argument seriously.
Dogz, if you’re worried about postmodernist relativism (and you’re right to be) you should be on the side of mainstream science in the GW debate. The sceptics have used postmodernist and social constructionist arguments (both implicitly and explicitly) in this debate, while the scientists have (in the main) stuck to the tried and true methods of peer-reviewed theory and experiment.
The obfuscation and delay continues. I note in today’s Herald that they sighted an agenda for the Stage 2 scenario (new technology vis a vis the old) so important that little Winnie and the Environment Minister were interupting their holiday for the bold iniative with Condy et al. Well each of the major participants gets exactly ten minutes (That’s right 10) to present a view and to assist there is a 3 hour discussion with business. The remainder of the two day fest is for photo ops and other business, usual hand shaking glamour shorts. Got to hand it to them they certainly made it sound like they were doing something important. Spin, spin, spin, spin. Arguments over but seems only a few a listening. Oh and if you want some real science, ask the CSIRO, oh that’s right they have been gagged while they are gutted as well.
John,
What are the other scientific issues that you were refereing to?
Regards,
Terje.
Chris O’Neil says (above) that without any feedbacks, the change in temperature from a doubling of CO2 will be about 1.5°C to 2°C. He says:
This is way too high, given that the change in forcing from a doubling of CO2 is estimated to be ~2.5 watts/m2.
Without feedbacks, this would increase the surface temperature of the Earth from about 390 watts/m2 to 392.5 watts/m2. Per Stefan-Bolzmann, this corresponds to a temperature change of 0.46°C, call it half a degree.
I would be very interested to see how Chris O’Neil gets a temperature change of ~1.75° from a 2.5 watt/m2 change in forcing, without feedback. My understanding of thermodynamics says that there is no way that it is that big.
w.
Chris O’Neill Says January 7th, 2006 at 6:34 am
“Actually some of my reading on feedback processes came from http://climateprediction.net/science/cl-intro.php where it talks about the greenhouse effect. It pointed out that Svante Arrhenius in 1896 used knowledge of how CO2 absorbs radiation to estimate a climate sensitivity of 2 degrees C per doubling of pre-ind CO2. ”
climateprediction.net is wrong:
Arrhenius calculated a climate sensitivity of 4 K/2xCO2, including feedback it was even 5.3K
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm
ref:
Svante Arrhenius, 1901, Ueber die Wärmeabsorption durch Kohlensäure, Annalen der Physik Bd 4. 1901, p690-705.
Using basic physics the effect of CO2 Doubling amounts to 1 K/2xCO2
See also
http://home.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/howmuch.htm
http://www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=25003&start=1
As an exploration geologist with some success based on the scientific method, I find it interesting that the scientifically illiterate deign to opine on matters on which they have no experience. Not knowledge, of course, as any idiot can quote, mindlessly, the opinions of the mercantilists of two centuries past.
The problem is to work out who the credulous fools are. I suspect that posting a comment here I am more foolish than most!
Dogz as JQ knows quite well one of my pet interests in confirmation bias and institutional bias. I still think with the social sciences can still be contaminated by social values but think the physical sciences are less so due to the physical rather than social aspect of the work. Just like the astronomers regardless as to whether they were Christian or not the physical evidence said it was a heliocentric view and they had to go with it.
While one can understand the social situation that lead to Victorian physicians thinking females were non-sexual or that masturbation was a sign of mental illness, ones wonders whether you could stretch it so far to say for any scientist- across a number scientific disciples from many different countries- that the common thread connecting them saying that humans are having an adverse effect on the global environment is that they are anti-capitalists or closet greenies and not the evidence of their work.
Whether humans are having and adverse impact or not they don’t need to beat it up to keep their jobs, basic science will always be funded regardless of our impact on the environment. Not like lobby scientists and spokespeople whose livelihoods are dependent upon saying what their employers want them to say.
JQ, the moment you start judging thinkers by whether they are a “disgrace”, you cease judging their results by their correctness and turn the debate into precisely those subjective terms.
That’s the sort of thinking that set back the idea that cigarettes might be harmful, from the simple coincidence that early results were reported from the Nazi scientific establishment.
Willis, the TAR has 3.7 W/m2 as the forcing from doubling CO2, not 2.5.
Thanks, Tim. If we use the TAR figures (there is, as always, disagreement about the numbers, with values from about 1.3 to 3.7 watts/m2), we still only get a 0.7° response from a doubling of CO2 without feedback, which is less than half of the amount claimed by Chris O’Neil.
w.
Lousi Hissink: “As an exploration geologist with some success based on the scientific method, I find it interesting that the scientifically illiterate deign to opine on matters on which they have no experience.”
You mean like claiming the Asian Tsunami was caused by a meteor strike; that the Earth’s surface temperature is not determined by the incidence of solar radiation and that the Earth’s rotational period has changed significantly within the last couple of thousand years?
(These are just a couple of classic Louis-isms from Tim Lambert’s blog.)
>Dogz, if you’re worried about postmodernist relativism (and you’re right to be) you should be on the side of mainstream science in the GW debate. The sceptics have used postmodernist and social constructionist arguments (both implicitly and explicitly) in this debate, while the scientists have (in the main) stuck to the tried and true methods of peer-reviewed theory and experiment.
Next thing you know defenders of the Iraqi invasion will be using moral relativist arguments (“We’re better than Saddam because we torture and kill fewer innocent people”).
Lousi Hissink I find it interesting that many geologists turn up in the ranks of AGW sceptics Plimer, B Carker etc. Often these same sceptics don’t think it is possible for humans to have an adverse impact on the global environment.
One wonders whether the geological time frame and past mass extinction event dulls them to the consequences humans can have within our own time frame.
Any thoughts?
BTW Ian who needs postmodernist relativism when Dogz is happy with they do what they do, morals don’t have to enter into it.
“while the scientists have (in the main) stuck to the tried and true methods of peer-reviewed theory and experiment.”
GLobal-warming experiments? As in subjects and controls? I’d be fascinated to know how this was done.
Oh, wait, let me guess – computer models.
“Dave S – I try to answer your questions with what I think is reasonably accurate data and all I seem to get, is not an argument, but abuse and bluster. You have not responded to any of my answers with any contrary data or references.”
Oh, that’s crap, Ender. It was really, really simple. I listed five results of “climate change”, from the benign to the apolcalyptic, covering both (a) scenarios I’ve heard spun by alarmists, and (b) scenarios I’ve heard spun by skeptics and “minimalists.” All I asked you to do was pick one. I even numbered them. All you had to do was pick the result that matched your belief as to what the result was going to be. And once again, you refused to, and then you have the gall to say that you try to answer my questions. What happens when you try to type in a number? Does your keyboard freeze?
As I have said before, you answer nothing. You are asked simple questions with simple answers, and you respond with tangential obfuscations. I’m sorry you think I’m abusive, but the fact is that you are either a bloviating fool or a disingenuous charlatan. Neither is admirable.
You are fixated on data, and utterly incapable of answering, or even ASKING YOURSELF, what it signifies. And your inability to answer a simple question is pathological.
I will note, though, that I’ve only gotten one half-answer to my question from one AGW-threat believer, so it appears the problem may not be individual, but systemic. And you resent when I call it a religion?
I said, “there are ALWAYS unintended consequences to actions, which is why the default position when one is not certain is, “Do nothing.â€? â€?
JC replied, “So Dave, how do you ever manage to do anything?”
Note the “when one is not certain” clause.
If I’m walking down the street and see a building on fire, and I hear a child crying, I go in to save it.
If I’m walking down the street and I think I smell smoke, I don’t rush into the nearest house and start chucking babies out the window.
Hang on: you need an EXCUSE to throw babies out of windows?!
So when you smell smoke you “Do nothing”?
Dave S – “As I have said before, you answer nothing. You are asked simple questions with simple answers”
You are not asking a simple question. It seems simple to you maybe, and I can give a simple answer (3) if you like, however that could well be wrong. I believe that the climate change will not be beneficial. It is a bit like asking a physicist a simple question like “Is light a wave or a particle?”. It seems simple however the answer in involves quantum theory etc and in the end the physicist probably could not answer the question.
If you care to read the post I wrote I have explained this a bit.
http://stevegloor.typepad.com/sgloor/2006/01/answering_a_que.html
Terje, other prominent examples of scientific issues on which rightwing thinktanks have disgraced themselves are passive smoking and the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer.
Didn’t the left-wingers tell us that socialism was based on science? I suppose they still do.
If you believe in individual liberty then it seems to me that you are going to require a much higher threshold of proof for collectivist action. Although I will agree that when it comes to invading countries like Iraq the threshold for some on the right of politics seems to have been pretty low.
Don’t forget their response to asbestos when denialism became impossible – ‘tort law reform’ ie socialise the costs and hang the victims out to dry (or in this case, die).
Here is a list worth watching for those that are interested in the progress of Hybrid Electric cars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hybrid_vehicles#Planned
SimonJM, you’ve missed the point. Germ theory and evolutionary theory are falsifiable. GCMs are not, because they’re starkly incomplete.
Scientists who themselves work with the models report in peer reviewed articles that GCMs are inadequate to predict future climate and should not be used to make policy. You can go off all you like with untrue analogies about creationists (I’ve argued science with those folks for years and published a refutation of ID theory), but no matter how often you indulge them, they won’t make GCMs more physically correct.
I’ve already posted two citations here that directly showed the advanced Had3CM model is unreliable.
Here’s a quote from the end of a comparative evaluation of three different state-of-the-art GCMs, taken from, Chase, et al. (2004) Climate Research 25, 185-190: “Such errors [in GCMs] argue for extreme caution in applying simulation results to future climate-change assessment activities and to attribution studies (e.g. Zwiers & Zhang 2003) and call into question the predictive ability of recent generation model simulations, the most rigorous test of any hypothesis.”
Does that conclusion seem ambiguous to you? The three studies I’ve cited are far from exhausting the list of cautionary evaluations.
Steve Bloom wrote, “Pat, really the science is all there on this stuff. The difficulty, as SimonJM alludes, is that it requires a considerable knowledge of climate science to answer the type of objections you throw out.”
I’ve read some of the science, Steve. That’s how I’ve come to my view. Anyone can find the papers I cited on the web and read at least the abstracts, which are generally free. No one needs to restrict themselves to a blog for information.
Steve — “Climate scientists themselves generally don’t bother with this since they obviously have better things to do…”
The papers I cited showing the inadequacy of GCM models were all written by climate scientists. Your argument supposes that climate scientists are in uniform agreement. They obviously are not.
About your plug for RealClimate, if you Google “RealClimate censor” you’ll discover they have a reputation for censoring their blog and excluding real debate. That’s hardly reassuring.
And as you’ve recommended RealClimate, let me recommend Climateaudit.org. No one censors there.
I think that the best site about electric cars and plug in hybrids is http://www.evworld.com/. You do have to pay a subscription for some of it however I have found it worth it.
My comments at climate audit have been censored many times. Try writing something about McKitrick’s Bad Physics and see what happens.
PrQ,
There are also many issues where there have been strong pushes to punish a company where the scientific evidence has been lacking but the emotive argument strong – silicon breats implants, Vioxx, in fact many of the US medical torts. Cerebral palsy, as tragic as it is, may also now turn out to be un-related to medical negligence.
Even Hal9000’s comment on asbestos is doubtful – there were a number of companies who knew about the asbestos problem, but not all companies currently being sued did.
Dave S. Says: January 6th, 2006 at 4:51 am
”
1) No significance.
2) Beneficial warming (think Canada and Russia)
3) Non-beneficial warming (submerged islands, coasts)
4) Runaway greenhouse effect.
5) Prevention of naturally-occurring (and devastating, and close to overdue) Ice Age.”
Make that a 2 for me,
BTW the next regular ice age is more than 10000 years away “Other estimates (Loutre and Berger, based on orbital calculations) put the unperturbed length of the present interglacial at 50,000,” so it is not overdue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
Tim Lambert Says January 9th, 2006 at 7:48 pm ”
“My comments at climate audit have been censored many times. Try writing something about McKitrick’s Bad Physics and see what happens.”
Ehm.. it is McIntyre’s blog…
You are known for flogging dead horses, the “censorship” at climateaudit pales to the one at realclimate. And furthermore you wiggle out the M&M ambiguity all the time on your own blog.
JQ, with all due respect, it was left wingers who disgraced themselves over tobacco, way back when they rejected Nazi findings because of their source. There’s plenty of “disgrace” to spread around, and it simply doesn’t help to go all ad hominem like that, no matter what your personal reactions.
In’t it funny how the peopel who oppose spending on renewable energy research and object to government “picking winners” are so fond of geosequestration research:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200601/s1543933.htm
Quote:
Carbon dioxide storage trial set to start
A $30 million trial to store 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide underground will begin in the Otways, in south-west Victoria, within weeks.
The project is the first geosequestration trial in Australia and is being done by the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Emissions.
End quote
Wow, that’s a mere $300 per tonne of CO2 sequestered – only 15-30-odd times the current EU market price of a one tonne reduction in CO2 emissions.
Honestly, if you’re going to segregate CO2, using non-fossil energy to form steam and reacting it with the CO2 to form methane which can then be used to make synthetic motor fuels is probably a much more sensible approach.
You’ll have to do a lot better than that.
Firstly, John quite clearly said “passive smoking”, i.e. the recent concern. If you have some evidence that the Nazis researched this, well, cough it up. You might also like to cough up some evidence that “left wingers” ignored this passive smoking research.
Secondly, allowing that the Nazis actually did do research into the link between smoking and lung cancer, where’s your evidence that research was rejected by “left wingers”?
Please begin by refuting this paper from 2001:
I guess non-Nazi equals “left winger”.
I know that you’ve already stated in another thread that you just post stuff that you heard somewhere, and that you don’t check your facts, but how about you start now? Sheesh.
Yes Hans, McIntyre can can censor all he wants on his blog. But it is hypocritical for him to then complain about censorship on RC.
I do not “wiggle out the M&M ambiguity all the time” on my blog. Apparent you are gullible enough to fall for one of McIntyre’s fabrications.
Tim, you are guilty of the old guilt-by-association fallacy.
“McKitrick makes errors, so McIntyre must be wrong”….
What’s wrong with the science of McIntyre? Spell it out.
Hans Erren’s web page showing how to estimate the temperature rise from CO2 alone without feedbacks, http://home.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/howmuch.htm is equivalent to using the following model as its basis. The forcing from a doubling of CO2, 3.7W/m2, is added to the radiation that would raise a black body to the earth’s average temperature, 15 degrees C. He then shows that this additional 3.7W/m2 would raise the black body’s temperature by 0.68 degrees C.
The problem with this model is that the earth is nothing like a freely radiating black body. In the above model the amount of sunlight required to keep the black body at 15 degrees C is 63% more than the sunlight we actually get. It doesn’t correspond to what’s happening very well at all. A much more appropriate model for estimating the temperature rise is to add the forcing from CO2 doubling, 3.7W/m2, to the radiation forcing that is actually arriving from the Sun, 237W/m2, and then estimating the temperature rise from this change in forcing. Since this amounts to a 1.56% increase in radiation forcing, it would correspond to one quarter the percentage rise in temperatures, i.e. 0.39%. This is because of the fourth-power relationship in the Stefan-Boltzman equation, i.e. the relative rate-of-increase in radiation is four times the relative rate-of-increase in temperature. Applying this 0.39% increase to a temperature of 288.16 degrees K gives an increase of 1.13 degrees K.
OK this 1.13 degrees is not a lot more than 0.68 degrees but it’s significantly more. I’m also interested in getting a reliable figure for the water vapour feedback because part of this could be derived deterministically and so is not subject to the vagaries of chaotic climate models.
The strategy of skeptics who come up with relatively low climate sensitivity figures seems to be that they try to show that it probably won’t reach 2 degrees C above pre-industrial by 2100 therefore it’s such a long time into the future that we can ignore it for the time being. Trouble is, you can’t assume the sensitivity is low (
Part of my previous post got cut off because I erroneously used an escape character. Here’s the post:
The strategy of skeptics who come up with relatively low climate sensitivity figures seems to be that they try to show that it probably won’t reach 2 degrees C above pre-industrial by 2100 therefore it’s such a long time into the future that we can ignore it for the time being. Trouble is, you can’t assume the sensitivity is low (less than 2 degrees C per 2xCO2) without taking big risks and also, unless there is a big switch away from fossil fuel energy soon enough, the atmosphere will reach 560ppm CO2 long before 2100, given that it only has 180ppm to go, is currently getting there at 2ppm/year, the world population will increase 50% by 2050, China’s GHG emissions have doubled in 15 years, etc.
One other point I was wondering about with climate sensitivity is that if CO2, CH4 and N2O are directly or indirectly responsible for virtually all the existing greenhouse effect (because without them virtually all the water vapour would be frozen out) then how would the effect from doubling these gases compare with their effect now, which is to raise the earth’s surface temperature by 33 degrees C. We could plot a graph of temperature rise versus gas concentration and it would be non-linear, specifically, steep at first with lower and lower slope as the gas concentration and temperature rose. This could possibly be like the curve relating temperature and radiation in the Stefan-Boltzmann equation which is a fourth-root curve. The point about such a non-linear curve is that with the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, for example, the percentage change in temperature is one quarter of the percentage change in radiation, or in my hypothetical gas-temperature equation, the gas concentration.
The reason I’m considering this is because it may be able to give some answer to the question, “if the initial if CO2, CH4 and N2O cause a 33 degrees temperature rise, what percentage temperature rise would there be with a 100% increase in gas concentrations?” If this relationship was indeed like the Stephan-Boltzmann equation then the increase in temperature would be (2^0.25-1)*33 or 6 degrees C. To get a temperature rise of 2 degrees C the relationship between temperature and gas concentration would have to be like the twelfth root. I wonder how many natural phenomena are that non-linear? I can see that skeptics are hoping that the Greenhouse effect is very, very non-linear.