Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[aleCcowaN]

The easy art of rehashing propaganda in a convenient pocket edition.

Some constants in it: Everything that falsifies my point is uncertain; everything that confirms my weak point is certain. You can suppress positive or negative feedbacks every time you need to show some reasoning as "out of whack". Custom remakes of "Antitrust (2001)".

We all know that a successful reasoning in the public arena doesn't need to be true, it just needs to look plausible or it just needs a couple of well chained arguments and a false inference.

It's just the lawyers acting in front of a jury. Everybody knows the drill.

Let's better analyse the social phenomena of denialism and its ethnic associations.

 

[DC]

"Accounted for" with varying degrees of success. "Predict" with varying degrees of success. The net effect of feedbacks is uncertain. The Earth has been hotter with lower CO₂ levels and colder with higher CO₂ levels. The Earth has been only mildly hotter with far higher CO₂ levels. Terrestrial life has been around for over 400 million years. If positive feedbacks like CO₂ + =>water vapor + dominated, geologists would not need celestial impacts or massive volcanism to explain mass extinctions. Every tiny perturbation would send the system into a skid.
They don't. That was the issue with Steve Macintyre's FOI.

There's another "crushing" indication of insecurity, seems to me. Yes. The UEA emails.

you mean the case where that Macintyre requested data from the wrong people, from people that didn't own the data? yeah pretty much showed what a clueless clown the guy is.

 

[lomiller]

"The fundamental physics is rock solid" refers to some of the relevant factors, but not to all.

So what "relevant factors" are being missed?

CO₂ absorbs solar energy at some frequencies ("light")and emits it at others ("heat").

CO2 is mostly transparent to visible light and I'm not sure what you mean by emitting heat. A CO2 molecule that has absorbed a photon in the Infra-red band will re-emit a similar photon in a random direction if it doesn't lose the energy do to collisions with other molecules first.

Fact. Okay. Ocean warming raises the level of water vapor in the atmosphere. Fact.

The amount of water vapor int he atmosphere rises because warmer air can hold more mater vapor, not because the oceans are warming.

Fact. Plants absorb CO₂ and expand their range as temperatures rise (within the range between arctic temperatures and tropical temperatures).

Plant ranges do not expand, rather their ecological zones move. Their current local gets to warm for them and given time their descendants will grow someplace else where it's cooler.

This can take a very long time however, because even if the temperature is right it doesn't mean the soil is. The cooler areas you think plants will "expand" into are shield rock and taiga which are not really suitable for most plants to grow in.

Also fact. These last two considerations are among some negative feedbacks.

Wrong on both counts. Clouds are a net positive feedback and accelerating ecosystems due to warming releases large amounts of stored carbon.


Why should we take your word that there are relevant factors being missed when you don't even understand the basics of what is already known?

 

[lomiller]

hey don't. That was the issue with Steve Macintyre's FOI.

Wrong. McIntyre's FOI request were for:

data already made public

data that did not belong to the people he was asking and could not legally be released by them. (In much the same way I can't legally sell you someone eases property)



This is why the freedom information officer who reviewed his requests ruled that the requests did not qualify under FOI laws

 

[manofthesea]

The state of California will apparently need to respond to 'current' global warming.
The foreseen installation of millions of 'air conditioners' in areas not previously in need of them must be accounted for by increased power supply to meet demand.

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Heatwaves_to_Move_Toward_Coasts_999.html

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere rises because warmer air can hold more mater vapor, not because the oceans are warming.

Not either/or. Evaporation will be greater from warm water and the air above a warm ocean will gain heat.

Plant ranges do not expand, rather their ecological zones move. Their current local gets to warm for them and given time their descendants will grow someplace else where it's cooler.

Not either/or, again. Plants thrive within a range of temperatures. No latitude or altitude on the Earth's surface is too hot for plant growth. Some are too cold.

Wrong on both counts. Clouds are a net positive feedback and accelerating ecosystems due to warming releases large amounts of stored carbon.

Cite? I doubt the first, but I'll accept a correction. The second is obviously false. How'd all that carbon get into plants anyway? It's atmospheric CO₂ that plants scrubbed from the atmosphere back in the Carboniferous.


Why should we take your word that there are relevant factors being missed when you don't even understand the basics of what is already known?[/QUOTE]

 

[lomiller]

The state of California will apparently need to respond to 'current' global warming.
The foreseen installation of millions of 'air conditioners' in areas not previously in need of them must be accounted for by increased power supply to meet demand.

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Heatwaves_to_Move_Toward_Coasts_999.html

Here is the paper the article is based on

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2012GL052979.shtml

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Wrong. McIntyre's FOI request were for:

data already made public

data that did not belong to the people he was asking and could not legally be released by them. (In much the same way I can't legally sell you someone eases property)



This is why the freedom information officer who reviewed his requests ruled that the requests did not qualify under FOI laws

You're still conceding that data were not shared.

 

[lomiller]

Not either/or. Evaporation will be greater from warm water and the air above a warm ocean will gain heat.

Water vapor is limited by atmospheric temperature, any evaporation above that turns into this stuff called rain...

Not either/or, again. Plants thrive within a range of temperatures. No latitude or altitude on the Earth's surface is too hot for plant growth. Some are too cold.

There is no single plant that grows everywhere in all climate zones and if their were how would expand it's range, grow on the moon?

I note that you have move the goalpost from plant ranges to the range in which some type of plants grow, but again you are mistaken. Plants grow everywhere there is water, and except for a parts of Antarctica that are not expected to warm any time soon there is no place so cold that there isn't water at some point during the year.

Expanding deserts would certainly limit plant life in hotter climates.

Cite?

http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/dessler10b.pdf

I estimated the magnitude of the cloud feedback in response to short-term climate variations by analyzing the top-of-atmosphere radiation budget from March 2000 to February 2010. Over this period, the short-term cloud feedback had a magnitude of 0.54 T 0.74 (2s) watts
per square meter per kelvin, meaning that it is likely positive.

How'd all that carbon get into plants anyway?

Photosynthesis.

It's atmospheric CO₂ that plants scrubbed from the atmosphere back in the Carboniferous.

CO2 absorbed by plants is released when the plant dies and decays unless something prevents that decay. There are vast amounts of carbon tied up in frozen northern soils for exactly this reason, soils that are now thawing out...

 

[BenBurch]

You're still conceding that data were not shared.

Wow, I've seen some stunningly wrong arguments in my time, but that is down there with the worst of them.

It does not matter if you have THAT dataset. We have literally dozens of different datasets all of which paint the same picture. All of them say the planet is warming. All of them say CO2 is rising. All of them say there is a change in radiative balance, which lengthens the hysteresis between when energy enters the system and when it radiates away from the system.

One of the very few things in ALL of science where all of the data agree so strongly.

How, my jingoistic friend, do you explain away THESE data sets? https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/

 

[CapelDodger]

"The fundamental physics is rock solid" refers to some of the relevant factors, but not to all. CO₂ absorbs solar energy at some frequencies ("light")and emits it at others ("heat"). Fact. Okay.

Not a fact. Barely even wrong. You must have been on the AGW case for years and you don't even have a basic understanding of the Tyndall effect, nor even the basic physics behind absorption and emission (which is the simplest, most accessible part of quantum physics. Entry-level stuff for ten-year-olds).

Ocean warming raises the level of water vapor in the atmosphere.

The point is that AGW warms the oceans. They don't just warm themselves.

Fact.

You should avoid that word in favour of something more circumspect. Something like "in my perception of the matter and of what the matter is". Or omit entirely, since that's how we're reading you already.

Snow cover and clouds reflect sunlight. Fact.

Ice too, where it still survives.

Plants absorb CO₂ and expand their range as temperatures rise (within the range between arctic temperatures and tropical temperatures). Also fact.

Also not stopping either the increase in atmospheric CO₂ or the warming.

These last two considerations are among some negative feedbacks.

Evidently small if they exist at all. There's been plenty of time for them take effect and AGW is clearly overwhelming them.

Anyway, I initially objected to "crushing", which I see as an expression of enthusiasm for the rhetorical contest that undermines calm assessment of the science.

Making claims about what some people said in the 70's is nothing to with science (which, by the way, is a subject you're right to avoid). Neither are slanders of scientists, inferences that the truth is being hidden by a cabal, or references to stolen emails. These are elements of a completely different type of social intercourse known as debate.

In debate a crushing response is delivered with maximum efficiency (hence no rhetoric), minimum emotion (calm), undeniable facts, straightforward logic and precise targeting on a presented opening. Huxley v Wilberforce is, of course, the paragon example.

Did you read Feinman's You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feinman? Remember the chapter about his presentation of some incomplete results as a grad student? Word spreads and some prominent people decide to attend. So he has to present half-baked results with people like Enrico Fermi and Einstein in the audience. They let him down gently. No "crushing". Secure people don't do "crushing".

I wouldn't be where I am without some crushing by very secure people. You can't really do crushing unless you're feeling very secure.

They also share their data. And they don't sabotage the peer review process.

Anything but the here and now. (All that data is available in the here and now, by the way, except for Poland's - historic weather data remains behind a paywall. When they went Thatcherite they went all the way.)

Sabotaging the peer-review process probably refers to the "over my dead body" email which actually connects climate scientists with suicide bombers. Not just with paedophiles. Denial rhetoric really needs to up its game with all this inconvenient weather, disappearing snow and ice at an almost startling rate, and no-show negative-feedbacks. The retro stuff just isn't going to cut it.

 

[lomiller]

You're still conceding that data were not shared.

Do you think it's ok to just go and give away other peoples stuff, what's theirs is yours eh comrade




Anyway, as per my last post, the data was already publicly available and the rest was available on asking the people who owned it. This is more than sufficient sharing of information.

 

[Acleron]

Do you think it's ok to just go and give away other peoples stuff, what's theirs is yours eh comrade




Anyway, as per my last post, the data was already publicly available and the rest was available on asking the people who owned it. This is more than sufficient sharing of information.

When I worked in research and people were interested in my data I was only too pleased to share it and discuss it. Mind you, that was my data, I understand the data involved here was produced by many workers.

But if someone came and demanded my data (it happened once), my response was too impolite for these columns and they didn't get it.

I wonder what approach the denialists took?

 

[supaluminal]

It's well past time that the denialists stopped talking and started doing some science. I know I'm not saying anything new here, but it's time to go on a bit of a rant after reading the last few pages. Apologies in advance to those who have heard it all before.

AGW is a comprehensive theory, based on a large number of diverse and independent records, both instrumental and proxies. The level of independence does vary, but there are a lot of records to go on, and removing a few doesn't change the overall picture. So knocking out one dataset because of an issue doesn't render the rest of them invalid. All datasets have their issues, that's why they have error bars. Taken in concert, the error bars are reduced. As an example, it's not as if the entire knowledge of paleoclimate comes from tree-ring proxies, there's plenty of other records to go off.

In addition to the observational record, the physical science makes sense, and is internally consistent. There are some factors that we don't know about, or haven't quantified, but we are well past the point where the error bars from the factors that we do understand explain the majority of what we are seeing at present.

No longer can it be acceptable for a denier to say that there is a problem with one component of the AGW edifice, and so the whole thing is invalid. You've got to come up with a comprehensive theory, that does a better job of explaining what we are seeing in climate science at present, and accounts for all of the other areas of the physical sciences that would be impacted by the invalidation of the theory (for an example from chemistry, IR spectroscopy).

Start doing science, not taking potshots from the cheap seats. Recycling old canards about global cooling from the popular media in the 1970's serves no-one, just because somebody said something doesn't make it true, it was apparent not too long after that it was wrong. On the other hand, the last 40 years of data points in one direction. Up.

And what we are seeing now is the tip of the iceberg (pun intended). This is the warming from the 20th century emissions, had we magically stopped emitting CO₂ in 2000, 2012 would probably still look pretty similar. But we keep on emitting and the trajectory we are on is simply not conducive to the continuation of our present way of life.

So to the deniers. Go away, learn how science works, and come up with a theory that explains everything we are seeing better (remember, both in climate science and other areas that are a part of climate science). Until that day comes, and I'm willing to bet a very large sum of money that it doesn't, we have to assume that the evidence we have put together, and the consequences that will flow from it are correct. And there just might be a glimmer of hope we'll squeak through. We're only at the beginning, and it doesn't bode well for the future

</rant>

Quite cathartic that.

 

[CapelDodger]

Hogwash! No replicates

No hangs. No downtime at all, in fact. No overheads. Unhackable source code. Not designed by a committee. There's a lot to like about the Big Bad Analogue Model.

It's relatively slow, true, and lacks save-points and data-dumps (that's analogue for you, it comes at the price of precision), but think back ten years or so and it's given us quite a show. This season's climax (about the next two years in BBAM terms, with an overlay of next season's opener) is building up to be a doozy.

Meanwhile we're still being instructed on the water-vapour feedback just as we were ten years or so ago (and twenty, and thirty ...) but with no reference to the extreme rainfall which has become such a feature in recent years.

 

[CapelDodger]

Do you think it's ok to just go and give away other peoples stuff, what's theirs is yours eh comrade

Intellectual property rights stifle capitalist enterprise, apparently.

Anyway, as per my last post, the data was already publicly available and the rest was available on asking the people who owned it.

And perhaps paying for it. Or at least for the cost of transmitting it. Or an exchange agreement. That's what the CRU had done. What they hadn't done was keep an ordered record of what agreements they had with whom; they set things up with the payments department via legal's oversight and that was that. The payments department didn't categorise it. Legal was oriented towards the things that happen when thousands of young people live away from home for the first time in a fairly tight space, and the PR department exists to sell the University to potential students and their parents.

Is it any surprise that an FoI blitz launched on such a structure bounced around like an IR photon in a smokestack? I don't think so. What is also not a surprise is that the data was made available in a reasonable period of time. The problem was that the contracts were drawn up for data, which can, of course, be saleable in the short-term. There was no distinction drawn between useful near-term data and historical data when it came to passing it on.

The solution was, effectively, to ask every source "Do you object to us releasing very old news?" and releasing everything unless they got a prompt No. From, apparently, Poland.

Anyhoo, there it is, and so much of the Arctic's white bits aren't where you'd expect them.

This is more than sufficient sharing of information.

Enough for BEST.

 

[BenBurch]

No hangs. No downtime at all, in fact. No overheads. Unhackable source code. Not designed by a committee. There's a lot to like about the Big Bad Analogue Model.

It's relatively slow, true, and lacks save-points and data-dumps (that's analogue for you, it comes at the price of precision), but think back ten years or so and it's given us quite a show. This season's climax (about the next two years in BBAM terms, with an overlay of next season's opener) is building up to be a doozy.

Meanwhile we're still being instructed on the water-vapour feedback just as we were ten years or so ago (and twenty, and thirty ...) but with no reference to the extreme rainfall which has become such a feature in recent years.

Speaking of which, I think I could actually build an analog computer that would capture most of the current climate models. I'd need a couple huge banks of capacitors though, and a really beefy sine wave generator.

Some things would be best modeled with motor-driven potentiometers.

 

[a_unique_person]

"Accounted for" with varying degrees of success. "Predict" with varying degrees of success. The net effect of feedbacks is uncertain. The Earth has been hotter with lower CO₂ levels and colder with higher CO₂ levels. The Earth has been only mildly hotter with far higher CO₂ levels. Terrestrial life has been around for over 400 million years. If positive feedbacks like CO₂ + =>water vapor + dominated, geologists would not need celestial impacts or massive volcanism to explain mass extinctions. Every tiny perturbation would send the system into a skid.
They don't. That was the issue with Steve Macintyre's FOI.

There's another "crushing" indication of insecurity, seems to me. Yes. The UEA emails.

The overall history of the earth's climate is one of extremes. This all takes place, in absolute temperature terms, in a relatively small range of temperatures.

From wikipedia[url=http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/vbimghost.php?

 

[lomiller]

When I worked in research and people were interested in my data I was only too pleased to share it and discuss it. Mind you, that was my data, I understand the data involved here was produced by many workers.

But if someone came and demanded my data (it happened once), my response was too impolite for these columns and they didn't get it.

I wonder what approach the denialists took?

They publicly announced they were going to "audit" the results to look for fraud, demanded not just the raw data but every scrap of document, email, notes, intermediary code version, etc. When they were told that the raw data was available form the various national weather organizations the CRU had obtained it from they ran a web campaign to flood the CRU with so many FOI requests they wouldn't have the man hours to continue operating.

 

[a_unique_person]

When I worked in research and people were interested in my data I was only too pleased to share it and discuss it. Mind you, that was my data, I understand the data involved here was produced by many workers.

But if someone came and demanded my data (it happened once), my response was too impolite for these columns and they didn't get it.

I wonder what approach the denialists took?

They take the typical, calculated approach of bullies. Provoke a reaction, the act all amazed and offended at the reaction. They then proceed to get the boot in.