Climate Change Authority Admits Mistake
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
Good on them, however, for admitting the problem.
But the boring truth is that there are numerous lines of evidence. If a few turn up sour or turn out to be poorly supported, the scientific process is to discard them (and this happens all the time in every branch of science, it's why things move slowly in research) and move on with the remaining lines of evidence. This is the model that most types scientific research follow: gather data, extrapolate, gather data and discard data, extrapolate, refine.
Consider this: a bunch of aggressively anti-climate-change folks, like yourself, are constantly digging at the IPCC. To the point of engaging in international data theft to try and dig up dirt. They've been at this for a few years now. At the same time, scientists have been checking and double checking results, throwing out bad data and challenging AGW models at every turn. What do you have so far?
1. An overhyped case of data smoothing and normalizing for a specific set of data. All of the original data is recoverable (claims it was "lost" were misinterpretations, big shock), all the operations are now public and seem relatively benign.
2. Some occasional errors in source validation (which evidence so far has only produced a few isolated cases of). This is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. It means that people _are_ fact checking their sources.
3. A consensus that climate is going to get weirder before it gets warmer. This is the inevitable conclusion for any changing complex system: "It's complicated."
Given the extreme paucity of data for some kind of climate conspiracy, I really don't see how someone can rationally arrive at the conclusion that the IPCC is corrupt in this regard. Who is paying them? The people with all the money are explicitly not happy about their findings. What's their agenda? Do you imagine them in a futuristic control center with C.H.A.O.S. uniforms, with Vega and M.Bison giving orders before they beat up married men and raise their children as assassins?
Okay, see, this is it. People get completely and totally convinced and it becomes an identity issue.
I excerpted you from above - you state your conclusions as premises, and preemptively ridicule and strawman the other side. You don't need people with an agenda if there's true believers with their identity at stake - their identity as scientists or good people. The boring truth is what you happen to believe, the other side primarily consists of aggressive anti-climate people who also associate with international thieves, and how could the side you believe possibly be doing corrupt, despite clear evidence of scientific misconduct and numerous errors and fallacies pointed out? Ah, forget the misconduct, the whole thing is going to get get weirder before it gets warmer.
Also - I'm a conservationist, for the record. I just think the whole damn thing is shameful.
While I might have been slightly sarcastic in my reply, I don't think I was attacking a straw man with the core of my argument. If you are drawing the conclusion that there isn't evidence for AGW you are either denying evidence or ignorant of it. The amount of invalidated evidence is dwarfed by the remainder.
This is the same kind of phenomenon in human cognition that leads people to believe that plane travel is less safe than car travel. We learn to fear memorable stories (SCANDAL IN THE IPCC! FOX NEWS SPECIAL TONIGHT! likened unto PLANE HIJACKED WITH FLAMING DILDOS! TSA TO BAN FEMALE ORGASM IN AIRPORTS!) more than we fear the statistically backed realities.
> despite clear evidence of scientific misconduct and numerous errors and fallacies pointed out?
"Numerous" being "a handful" and "scientific misconduct" being "data smoothing" and "nasty emails." This is _all you have_. After years of digging, this is the sum total. And it's unsurprising that a few cases of this exist. I mean, even particle physics has its scandals and you wouldn't think those people were likely to go there.
> Also - I'm a conservationist
Classic political/conversational trick. "Btw I am actually a member of group _____, so I can say with authority." It's bullshit, of course. No one cares if you are a conservationist, and it doesn't affect your correctness in any way. It's just a misleading kind of "argumentum ad populum" where centrism must be right because it appeals to the most people in a bar.
You know what I'm waiting for? "The average temperature and standard deviation of these 50 regions are X and Y. We expect them to increase by A and B over the next five years. If that didn't happen in at least 35 regions, that would cast doubt on our model." I'm looking for falsifiable claims, and not seeing any. This instills doubt.
As for what I think after looking at most of the mainstream accessible things on climate? The Earth seems to be getting slowly warmer, that's been happening since before the Industrial Revolution, and probably isn't a bad thing. Pollution is a bad thing, but not because it's going to bring on catastrophic amounts of global warming.
> This is _all you have_.
No. The burden of proof is on the people who are making the claims of catastrophe and calls for trillions of dollars. The argument is not settled, and the burden is on them. The general culture of "global warming is a big deal, so we need to sell it any way possible" is a bad thing.
> Classic political/conversational trick. "Btw I am actually a member of group _____, so I can say with authority." It's bullshit, of course. No one cares if you are a conservationist, and it doesn't affect your correctness in any way.
It does matter. Three reasons:
1. I believe there's local solutions to improve Earth's ecosystem, including managing nitrogen cycles, precipitation cycles, reforesting, irrigating, and increasing soil quality, and the (relatively small) amounts of warming can be managed that way.
2. Improving local ecosystems seems to give a much better bang for your buck than some set of global regulations managed by bureaucracy.
3. I wanted to preemptively let you know that I wasn't on Big Oil's payroll, or something like that.
Environment - good thing. Improving the environment - good thing. Catastrophic amounts of global warming? Unproven at best, strongly looking like false.
You want precise predictions involving immediate weather features? Sorry, you will not get those. No one is claiming you should be able to get those. But lots of predictions are being made, you're just not aware of them.
> As for what I think after looking at most of the mainstream accessible things on climate? The Earth seems to be getting slowly warmer, that's been happening since before the Industrial Revolution, and probably isn't a bad thing.
The Earth's climate naturally varies based on a variety of things. The question we have to ask is, "How much has our practice of un-sequestering epic amounts of CO2 affected the elasticity of this cycle." No one of repute is claiming that AGW is the sole cause of global warming, they're saying it's the majority cause. For us to see such profound changes in the global environment during a Solar minima is, even without a boatload of collected evidence, very disturbing.
> No. The burden of proof is on the people who are making the claims of catastrophe and calls for trillions of dollars.
The burden of proof is indeed on the shoulders of the scientists. But remember that that burden is not synonymous with convincing you, personally. A mountain of data is out there, complete with multiple interpretations. If you want to join the conversation, pony up and start reading.
> It does matter...
No one gives a shit how you feel about this. This isn't me being mean, this is a defensive measure. The exact words you've used could easily be contrived by any one of dozens of people who have a counter agenda. Fortunately, what you say about your personal emotional state is of little import to the science going on.
Stop trying to make an emotional appeal for your position. The time for that is past, we have hard data now.
If you don't mind me asking where are you from? (I'm from Iowa).
I'm not sure how to express this to show disgust with the putative "scientists" while only casting skepticism on their work (rather than outright rejection). But it would seem that they are so caught up in their agenda that they believe that the end justifies the means, and are willing to compromise their work and mislead the rest of the world in order to realize their goals.
But I have to note that impeaching the source doesn't necessarily invalidate the conclusions. Still, it means that we must subject their claims to increasing levels of scrutiny.
Therefore very few people will ever have seen the claim until now.
I'm not trying to excuse the mistake, but its consequences may have been overstated.
I wouldn't bet on it though.
If they were merely saying: there's a huge body of scientific work supporting AGW, and claims to the contrary are consistently found to be the result of error or dishonesty ... well, then, I don't see how this makes the slightest difference to that.
We are now discovering that if there is, indeed, such a consensus, then it's partly due to derailing the literature (see Hadley) or selling to us media sources as if they were scientists doing real research.
I think they've got a lot to apologize for, and they now have a lot of work to try and prove their views to a world that has every reason to be critical.
Your last paragraph simply isn't justified. Do you think any action or conclusion lives up to that standard? In particular, why do you think those that argue that AGW is not happening should be given more of a benefit of the doubt?
AGW is the conclusion of applying simple physics to the problem. In my mind, if you are going to argue that it's not happening, you have much more justification to do.
Because the scientific method dictates that the burden of proof is borne by the one proposing the theory. The opposite is impractical, because for most questions it's not possible to prove the open-ended negative.
(All the claims I'm going to list should really be made in a quantitative form. They all can be; I'm just too lazy right now to look up the numbers.)
Theory 1: More CO2 in the atmosphere tends to produce warmer climate. This is, on the face of it at least, a consequence of well-established physics. The burden of proof here is on anyone wishing to deny it, just as it would be for "if I drop a dachsund from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it will fall to the ground".
Theory 2: Human activity over recent decades has increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Yup, the burden of proof here would be on those who advocate this theory. As it happens, there's no shortage of evidence. See, e.g., http://www.gcrio.org/ipcc/qa/05.html .
Theory 3: Human activity such as we've seen over recent decades is likely to lead to warmer and warmer climates, if CO2 emissions aren't reduced and other drastic steps aren't taken. It seems to me that, given Theory 1 and Theory 2, the burden of proof is on anyone who wishes to reject Theory 3, because it's basically a consequence of those two.
(If you strengthen Theory 3 to include the claim that human activity over the last several decades has in fact led to warmer climates, then I agree that the burden of proof is on whoever's making that extra claim. It seems to me that the evidence for that claim is in fact very strong, and with that evidence in place the rest of Theory 3 becomes even more the default position in the absence of strong disconfirming evidence.)
Simple physics can not prove that the current warming trend is caused mostly by humans, which is what AGW claims. To do that, you need very complicated physics to prove that CO2 (and nothing else) caused the warming trend.
To differentiate between your plausibility argument and mine, you need vastly more than "simple physics".
For example: the ether, higgs particle, various cutting edge medical stuff.
My point here is they aren't voting on what is true so much as agreeing on the most likely scenario given the evidence and deciding how to further persue investigation.
100 years to rise a foot? Millions and millions of people dead? Sure....
All glaciers melting is going to cause sea level rise? I see someone's missed the lesson on buoyancy and displacement.
(Fortunately for us, the antarctic ice sheet is thickening.)
The Hadley emails do not in fact show that the consensus on climate change was the result of "derailing the literature", whatever exactly that is supposed to mean. And this glacier thing looks to me much more like a confluence of cockups than a deliberate attempt to mislead anyone.
Everyone should be critical about everything. That applies not only to the claim that humans are causing climate change, but also to the claim that we are not. It seems to me that the former claim wins easily in (1) plausibility on the grounds of basic physics, (2) weight of scientific evidence (so far as I or any other layman can tell), and (3) historical honesty/dishonesty of proponents.
Are you suggesting that AGW needs to be "proved" whereas not-AGW does not? If so, why?
Climate change denialists use provide misleading reports all the time but they never admit their mistakes.
You couldn't have made up a more alarming factoid if you tried. I'm a skeptic (not a "denier"), but when I read this particular prediction I was alarmed. 2035? That's within most peoples' lifetime. 100s of millions of people? Yikes!
After a minute or two of thinking about it, I concluded that it sounds pretty unlikely and they probably either don't really know how to get from current data to melting glaciers and were merely guessing, or they were lying, or they were bumbling.
In general I don't worry about global warming. I believe there is some. I believe humans contribute to some of it. I believe that the scientists and politicians understand almost every little bit of detailed data that they have (isolated incidents notwithstanding). And I believe that their ability to effectively predict broad results based on that data is no better than Popular Mechanics back in 1940 predicting that we'd all have flying cars in 2000 (and where's mine?).
The relevant question is whether there are more errors in the papers that support the idea of global warming than those that don't. Just judging from what I've seen, the complete crackpot papers (like this one: http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161v4) are in the second category.
It seems to me like items in the first category need to be held to a higher standard. Indeed, the scientific method itself tells us that those putting forward a theory (such as AGW) bear the burden of proof.
Oh, come on. Really? Sure, most people won't question the IPCC. But most people also won't question other similar institutions. The real question is whether scientists feel that the IPCC is their bible. And I don't think they do.
To substantiate what I said, check in the documents folder: ipcc-tar-master.rtf ipcc-tar-master2.rtf
The article I linked, if you actually read it, does not advocate skepticism at all. It claims in no uncertain language that the greenhouse effect violates all kinds of established principles, but it's hogwash. I saw that article cited in The Nation, and it aggravated me enough that I wrote up a response (http://www.familjenjonsson.org/patrik/research/greenhouse, if you are interested).
I'm sorry to be blunt, but this is just plain wrong, and shows a profound misunderstanding of the scientific method.
First, do you think that Einstein was just making stuff up from whole cloth? No, he was working from well-established physical principles, building onto it using logical reasoning. Despite the fact that his reasoning was logical, there was still every reason for requiring verification (and indeed, Einstein insisted on it) because there could be alternative explanations.
Similarly, AGW builds on known principles like the "greenhouse effect". But the way it seeks to apply these to a hideously complex, chaotic system requires extensive verification. What's known to be true at the micro level might not be applicable to the entire system at all.
Thus, the theory of AGW is precisely like that of General Relativity in that it absolutely requires verification. (Unfortunately, it's unlike GR in that it's not so easily experimented upon)
The scientific method requires that the burden of proof is on the claimant. The one proposing a theory has the responsibility to prove it; the world at large need not disprove it. It must work this way, because it's generally not possible to prove the opposite. When you say you saw Elvis, you can't require that I prove that you didn't.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof#Burden_of_proof...
[Edit: spelling fix] [Edit #2: I'm really dismayed to see the parent post getting up-voted. I can't fathom how you can assert that AGW is not a "theory being put forth", and thus escapes the requirement of proof.]
Not that I ever said that you don't need to subject either to tests. You absolutely do. But if you think you can "prove" a scientific theory, I think it is you who is showing a profound misunderstanding of the scientific method.
You can never prove a scientific theory, you can only disprove it. You can confirm a theory a million times but that does not imply that it will work the next time. It does however give us some amount of confidence that it will.
My point is that as far as scientific statements go, that AGW happens is like saying "I think the ball will fall", while to say that it doesn't happen is to say "I think the ball will fall, but imperceptibly slowly.". Both should be tested, but given that one agrees with known physics and one does not, I think the latter should be viewed with more suspicion.
But maybe that's just me.
Your definition of "prove" is too narrow. From my online WordWeb dictionary:
Verb: prove (proved,proven) 1. Be shown or be found to be 2. Establish the validity of something, as by an example, explanation or experiment 3. Provide evidence for 4. Prove formally; demonstrate by a mathematical, formal proof 5. Put to the test, as for its quality, or give experimental use to ...etc...
Many senses of this word relate to subjecting something to a test, rather than proof in the mathematical sense.
Now the long term stability of CO2 vs. methane is based on simple chemistry, and water rains. As to why CO2 would increase the greenhouse effect see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_spectrum and its overall concentration in the atmosphere.
PS: Looking back in history the accumulation effect of CO2 works in reverse so other man made impacts could have easily dominated it.
Like most complex scientific theories there are several steps of logic involved. And while a few groups agree on which specific steps break the chain a slightly larger but still small group of people can agree that it's broken.
All modern climate "models" are horrible hacks. All contain one or more empirically determined "fudge factors". All gloss over numerous critical important elements of climate dynamics (such as clouds) because they are too difficult to model currently, or we lack understanding of their mechanisms.
The idea that anyone anywhere on Earth has some pristine from-first-principles climate model that you can input data into, turn some crank and spit out data on the climate of the future with any degree of certainty is just plain wrong. Nobody has an accurate model of climate. The AGW proponents have been claiming that they have created accurate climate models (to a degree), but the evidence to back that up is extremely thin. And, what's more, we've discovered recently that the evidence is even thinner than we thought it was.
This is why people object so much to the AGW doomsayers, because the evidence is very much lacking. At best, at best, there's a tiny window of a few decades where some models of climate show a similar trend in global average temperature to the actual trend. And on this tiniest thread of "evidence" so the entire catastrophic AGW theory and all of its proscriptives on human behavior and industry hangs.
I'm not saying global climate change isn't real and isn't a threat, but I think there's a lot more religion and faith behind the idea then there ought to be from the scientific community, and especially the media.
Your assertion that papers with less errors are more scientific, is not at all true.
Plus you are missing the point if you think counting errors has anything to do with this. Someone has successfully convinced the IPCC that it is RIDICULOUS to claim Himalayan glaciers will be gone in 25 years, and this is a victory for the scientific community.
I say that because Pachauri had been saying for a year that the Indian government was being arrogant by not agreeing to their "findings". And he rejected research such as this : http://moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/MoEF%20Discu... Compiled by people who have 3-4 decades of experience in Himalayan glaciology.
Please do check that review paper. It is not easy to find.
Sample from some climate emails: "Ammann/Wahl - try and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with." Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870477970457455...
Actually, that demographic is huge. Folks would love cheaper energy.
What they're being offered is more expensive energy and carbon mitigation.
Really? The folks who design cars disagree, so clearly you could make a lot of money by showing them how, or by producing your own cars and putting those bozos out of biz.
What? You can't do it yourself? How about you invest your money in folks who you think can? If you're right....
> Better transit options are available for a tiny fraction of what we spend on highways.
And yet, the folks who actually do transit don't manage to provide said options. Morons.
> Aluminum recyling more than pays for itself in energy costs
And we do it. We also do steel recycling.
> We can barely get even the most pathetically meaningless measures through our governments.
You don't need govt's permission or a mandate to be more efficient.