95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong
drroyspencer.com
drroyspencer.com
https://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Roy_Spencer.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)#Views
Another interpretation of this post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/1xuccb/95_of_climat...
(also see ovis's link in a reply below)
Regarding very similar claims:
https://www.skepticalscience.com/curry-mcintyre-resist-ipcc-...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc-model-gw-projections-do...
Ban gym class! Ban exercise!
[1] http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2005/06/time-for-ac...
It's been speculated on RealClimate that Roy Spencer is continuing to use the highest emission scenario for these comparisons, which is not made clear on his site.
The graph from the last article you linked to: http://skepticalscience.com//pics/ProjvsObs.png
The graph from the OP: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-90-mode...
In both cases the actuals are at the low end of the predicted range. They disagree as to how low, obviously, but not as much as I expected.
"If the deep ocean ends up averaging 4.1 deg. C, rather than 4.0 deg. C, it won’t really matter." He must be blissfully unaware of how badly the oceans are being affected right now by our impact.
This sentence really needs to cite actual data. "The oceans" are a pretty big place. And "localized" and "average" data are not comparable in any relevant sense given the scale.
Even if you could measure the energy in the ocean to that level of precision (unlikely) your time series data would be so limited so as to present caution in its reference, when discussin the context of global climate history.
It wasn't that long ago when John Muir was fighting the academic climate orthoxy over the sources of Yosemite valley. Its not a partisian or intellectual issue, its merely that data talks and bullshit walks. Muir did alot of walking to get his data, and argued alot with people that sat around theorizing talked alot of bullshit.
Its always worth a little bit of perspective.
Conceived in 1999, this program has been running for more than 10 years now and we do have precise measurements of the energy in the ocean. We also do have less precise measurements before the program.
Sure, it would be better if we had more robots and more observation history, but we do have enough data to do the analysis.
"The total volume is approximately 1.3 billion cubic kilometres (310 million cu mi)[7] with an average depth of 3,682 metres (12,080 ft).[8]"
> 3x10^8 cubic miles vs 3x10^3 instruments
> Instrument cannot reach even ~average depth
> 10 years of data
Certainly, it is a start. But...
There is a huge amount about the oceans that we do not know and cannot measure with requisite precision. Understanding the difference between surface temperatures and the actual thermal potential of the earths oceans are two different tasks. EG, due to sub-surface thermal venting there are many areas of the deep ocean that don't at all look like surface temps. {etc} So there is huge potential for the oceans to do unexpected things. For all we know, plate tectonics may be driving huge amounts of thermal energy variation in the deep ocean...and a "proper climate model" would likely need to understand this at some stage. This really goes to the core of the question of the oceans as a heat-sink.
I also think, while imperfect, our information is good enough to support "Earth is heating, the heat is mostly(>90%) going to the ocean" claim.
[#] In general, a useful thought experiment is consider the same way that the fin's on an air-cooled ICE are relevant to the thermal dynamics of the cylinder of a 4s motor. In other words, an air-cooled ICE and a water-cooled ICE with a busted radiator are going to do different things going forward from the same datapoint. That forward looking understanding presumes the mechanic has a handle on what type of engine his thermostat is hooked up to. None of this is intended to belittle the value of the data. But to emphasise the meaning of context and actual expertise in how it is used.
We all know politicians and scientific data tend not to mix objectively.
Clever.
Most notably, the link on "climate models" says "Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean." and goes on to discuss hindcasting. But the argument here is about forecasting - how well the models did after predictions based on them were first published. How successfully do they turn out to reproduce temperatures since 2000? Not nearly as well as since 1900. Bringing up 1900 in this context seems like a red herring.
Further note: There's a difference between disagreeing and debunking. It can be assumed that skepticalscience will disagree with this sort of sentiment, but that doesn't make them correct to do so.
The basic idea is: that given our limited resources how can we do the most good? The answer is that focusing that effort on climate change is frivolous even by the most optimistic predictions. Now that doesn't mean we should ignore it entirely. I'm generally of the mindset that problems aren't solved by "steady progress" rather by radical innovation that changes the game. To that point... it can be seen as a waste of time to enforce rules today that really won't make a difference tomorrow. Instead today's effort should be spent to enable the rapid innovation that when applied will actually make a significant difference tomorrow.
Sure it might make more sense from a NPV perspective to spend a given number of dollars on say improving the water treatment in poor countries rather than stopping GHG emissions, but only if we know the maximum cost of climate change. The problem becomes how do you do a NPV calculation on the possibility of a positive feedback warming event that causes the Earth to become uninhabitable. This is effectively an infinite cost event. Even if such a risk is small, no NPV calculation has any value.
Never having taken place, thinking about such events would seem to challenge to both frequentist and Bayesian schools of thought.
Catastrophic climate change may very well be one of them. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Evolution
There are also arguments against Pascal's wager that do not apply to climate change. For example, you can postulate an anti-Christianity Hell, where only non-Christians are spared. This poses a new Pascal wager. There's no reason to think this wager has any different odds than the original: they have the same prior, hence cancel out in an expected value calculation.
Could one not also postulate that we are approaching a new ice age, and that carbon emissions are keeping the world from freezing over?
Given that there is no similar evidence for the Anti-Christianity you postulate, the odds don't cancel.
Another interesting result of this line of thinking: a rational Buddhist/Hindu should convert to Islam/Christianity. If Christianity is correct then you avoid burning in hell forever. If Buddhism is correct you reincarnate and get another shot at enlightenment.
Why doesn't such a person show up in Roman records or any one else's records besides Christians then? This is not evidence.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidence_for_the_historical_exi...
I'm not convinced this is true. Certainly the story of Jesus is evidence, but it's not clear which direction the evidence should push us. Someone making a claim does not always mean our posterior estimate on the claim should increase.
Here's a simple example:
I hand you a small bottle filled with medical-looking pills and a nice label. I ask you, "What's the chance these pills cure malignant melanoma cancer?" You think for a moment, then answer, "Very small. There may be a cure eventually, but I've never seen evidence. I'm not on the cutting edge of research though, so perhaps this is a new breakthrough I haven't heard of. Plausible, but unlikely."
I then say, "Well, let me reassure you by showing you the website I ordered the pills from."
I bring up the website, which shows testimonial after testimonial of people claiming the pills cure malignant melanoma cancer. You then respond (correctly), "I've decreased my estimate. There is still a chance, of course, that the pills work, but I now know these pills are not from a legitimate medical breakthrough I hadn't heard of yet. In fact, this website pattern matches as a scam, so I'm decreasing my posterior to an estimate even lower than my completely uninformed prior."
P(Pills work | testimonials) < P(Pills are a scam | testimonials)
Of course, the testimonials would be positive evidence if the pills had passed clinical trials.
Now, which is bigger:
P(Jesus is the son of God | Jesus said he is the son of God)
or
P(Jesus is was just a guy | Jesus said he is the son of God) ?
Honestly, this is not clear to me at all. But I think once we start taking in all the other evidence related to (but not necessarily in favor of) Christianity things become more clear. Just like the pill's website pattern matched for a scammy website, it seems to me that the evidence related to Christianity pattern matches to the evidence related to other man made religions. So I conclude:
P(Christianity is man-made | evidence) > P(Christianity is correct | evidence)
Hence P(Christianity is correct | evidence) may very well be less than the uniform prior that a particular god exists.
Edit: The above symbols aren't right, as yummy points out below, but the argument and analogy is sound. What we care about is the change in probability of each possibility. If
P(Christianity is man-made | evidence) > P(Christianity is man-made)
then we can conclude that Christianity is less likely due to the evidence.
My argument is only that any semi-mainstream religion is more likely to be true than some random arbitrary belief system. I.e., Christianity and Islam are both more likely than Anti-Christianity.
I just don't buy your argument that the evidence for all possible religions (including ones you made up for this argument only) cancel out. That's a massive coincidence. And if the evidence only cancels out 99.9999999% rather than 100%, you find yourself back in a Pascal's Wager situation.
Admitting the possibility that god (or god-like beings) exists does not require throwing away belief in empirical reality. See, for example, simulation theories.
In any case, my reasoning is merely a continuity argument. TheEzEzz asserted that the very small probability of Christianity and Anti-Christianity, and Islam+Anti-Islam cancel exactly. I'm asserting that if the distributions are continuous then this has probability 0 - it takes a ridiculously tiny amount of evidence or an infinitesimally different prior to put you back into Pascal's wager territory.
Obviously I'm not saying that it doesn't (well it was obvious to me...). It's a stand-in for everything you'd use. The point is, it's beliefs that stuff you see working will continue working, be it radar or temperature gauges, the laws of physics, or mathematical simplifications or approximations. There is presumably some reason why some seemingly totally made up constants aren't actually 10 times the chosen values, or why it doesn't matter, or how likely that's the case. The difference between this and beliefs about God is that if you don't have reasons why you think the CO2 reading are wrong or why physics will change or why certain mathematical simplifications will stop working, you have to give reasons, you're, epistemologically speaking, discarding empiricism from your toolbox. You can't simply go "Laa dee daa I'm picking different priors than you." There has to be some reason (though it might be that they're going laa dee daa).
> Admitting the possibility that god (or god-like beings) exists does not require throwing away belief in empirical reality.
That's what I said. The difference is that unlike science and measurements of reality, there's no endless stream of evidence to beat your initial priors out of you. Unless you have 100% faith that past events can't be used to predict future outcomes, you'll get dragged over to the empiricist side. But you could have 90% faith in Christianity and maybe that'll only get beaten down to 40%, because there's just no evidence. (Not to mention the more practical way to get people to change their beliefs, no visible consequences for being wrong, either.)
> it takes a ridiculously tiny amount of evidence or an infinitesimally different prior to put you back into Pascal's wager territory.
Sure. But the same goes for putting you into anti-Christianity territory. The expected displacement a tiny amount of evidence would push you is 0 (if we regard the continued absence of new evidence to be evidence itself (e: and assuming potential "big" evidence is neglible, of course)). The whole argument against Pascal's wager is that it's about what your priors are.
And yeah, I don't know what TheEzEzz's 50/50 symmetry is all about.
This is actually a fantastic point. Given the real, quantifiable health effects pollution has on humans (and other species), it seems more beneficial as a whole to deal with more immediate issues. Rather than quibbling over something that might, maybe, possibly reduce global temperatures by a few tenths of a degree. Maybe.
Great video, by the way. Thank you for sharing! Bjorn's basic premise could apply to so many things beyond simply world problems, which is what makes his talk fantastic.
Judging by the emotional investment some people have had in this thread, it'd be shameful if your post is missed. But, reasonable, balanced, rational measures seldom get people quite as excited as those that evoke emotion.
So, if we don't fully understand what's going on, what do we do? Nothing? That's idiotic. It's utter paralysis. Would you invest in a tech company that refuses to do anything unless it fully understands the outcome? Sadly, human existence is lived in a perpetual state of trial and error. What we can do is weigh the consequences our actions could have based on our current, best understanding of the situation and then make the best choice we can.
Climate change might not fit our models, but our limited understanding of what's going on indicates there could be dire consequences if we do nothing. Action always has a cost, however. If indeed efforts against climate change have caused poor people to starve (evidence please!), how do we weigh this against massive famines that may occur in the future because of climate change?
Dr. Spencer is jumping to conclusions far more spurious and unsupported than any of the climate scientists he derides. We would do well do ignore him. As such, I am flagging this article. If this is an abuse of the flag feature, please let me know and I will unflag it.
After that you don't really win me back.
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on
the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag
something, please don't also comment that you did.What's missing from your reply is an answer to the data he's showing. A long time criticism of the IPCC is that, well, they're wrong. In the sense that if you compare their numbers with reality, their predictions turn out to be a pile of crap. In a truly absolute sense of the word. The IPCC's 95% certainty bands it gave for 5 years out have been violated EVERY single time (5 times) they made a prediction (for the 6th prediction, the jury is still out until the end of next year. However, it's not looking good).
If they really were 95% sure, that means they had a once in 16 MILLION years streak of bad luck (1/0.05^5 * 5 years) (and unless that 6th prediction works out, and global temperature rises by at least 1.2 degrees in about a year and a half, that will be a once in 320 million years streak of bad luck). That is significantly less believable, in my humble opinion, than the theory that they're just pulling numbers out of their ass (not necessarily intentionally), no matter how unflattering that claim may be to the many smart people working that field.
So in short : yes, I think doing nothing is the correct answer. You can't hope to do a better job doing something versus not doing something in this case, so the best course of action (least cost/maximum benefit) can only be to not do anything. So yes, nothing.
Either that, or switch to climate engineering (ie. change the question : no longer about how to restore "natural" climate, whatever that is. The question becomes : how do we fully bend the climate to our will. That and related questions, like what do we actually want the climate to be (I doubt the answer will be as simple as people think)).
So I don't agree with your flagging this, no. Yes, the article's author is probably not the right person to believe this claim from. But he's right (well, the first few paragraphs). And science is all about what is right, not who.
That said, we can still work on improving the world and cutting down CO2 emissions AND pollution. Global warming or not, no one can argue with the fact that air quality in large cities in US, India, and China is atrocious. Global warming may or may not kill us, but pollution is killing people, now, today. And that pollution is 100% man made, no argument about that.
I personally think we should work on innovation of power production, not conservation of said power. Better battery technology and better solar photovoltaic technology is the future, in my personal opinion.
UPDATE: updated for clarity.
You can argue with that for the US. "atrocious" compared to what? It's certainly a lot better than it used to be.
> And that pollution is 100% man made, no argument about that.
Not 100%, no. Some of our pollution is nature-made. Los Angeles was smoggy before there were any cars there - the Chumash indian tribe called Los Angeles basin "the valley of smoke". It has environmental conditions conducive to collecting particulates in the air - even pollen and dust and wood smoke from natural fires will collect and form a lingering haze there.
"The IPCC's 95% certainty bands it gave for 5 years out have been violated EVERY single time"
Alternatively, you could tell the truth that they've been accurate:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc-overestimate-global-war...
I disagree in methodology with the article on several fronts however. It basically boils down to them selecting IPCC predictions after the fact, and even after cherry picking what they compare with, they still adjust the data. Then they also cherry-pick what dataset to compare against. Even that is only enough to raise the observed level just above the lower bounds. Even then, I find that the data presented in their graphs does not look at all like a "remarkably good" prediction. But I disagree strongly with this way of evaluating the data. When evaluating a prediction made in the past you do not get to cherry pick out of a set of predictions, you ONLY get to pick the one you found most likely in the past. Second you most certainly do not get to adjust the prediction made in the past in any way. The article violates both. That means if you want to convince me, please unadjusted business-as-usual scenario only.
From the article:
> Figure 2 accounts for the lower observed GHG emissions than in the IPCC BAU projection, and compares its 'Best' adjusted projection with the observed global surface warming since 1990.
In case you're wondering, adjusted means adjusted by the author of the article (in december 2012). That's just unfair. Also "Best" does NOT mean the best scenario as set forth in the IPCC first assessment report, but the one he finds agrees with the data. This is bullshit. Cherry-picking predictions. Adjusting the results of you prediction AFTER the results are known. Sorry, but let me summarize my attitude here : fuck off.
Furthermore he cheats by omission : there are 2 major temperature records, and guess what, he uses the warmest measurement. Not mentioned anywhere in the article.
From the IPCC first assessment report (policymaker's section):
> under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0 3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0 2°C to 0 5°C per decade), this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1°C above the present value by 2025 and VC before the end of the next century The rise will not be steady because of the influence of other factors.
If you simply take the recommendation from the policymaker's section, and evaluate the temperatures against that, an entirely different picture emerges. I don't intend to make a graph here, but let's summarize :
IPCC prediction in BAU scenario :
0.2 to 0.5 degrees rise per decade from 1990 to 2010
Now obviously there's various ways to calculate the actual temperature difference, but none of them see 0.2 degrees rise:
1990 vs 2000 : 0.03 degrees warmer in 2000 (and no, 1990 was not particularly warm, although 2000 appears to have been a relatively cold year. Taking 1999 or 2001 or even 2002 still doesn't fix their prediction though)
Average of the 90s versus average of 2000-2010: 0.13 degrees rise (this I find the "fairest" way of measuring, but it doesn't allow us to evaluate 2000-2010 yet)
Average of the first 2 years of the decade (meaning you can check accuracy for 2000-2010 as well)
1990 -> 2000 : 0.15 degrees warmer in 2000 2000 -> 2010 : 0.05 degrees warmer in 2010
I have made my own graphs of the situation (Ipython rocks !), and overlayed them on the actual pictures from the IPCC publications, and the simple observation is : we are currently below the 95% certainty interval of the BAU scenario in the IPCC FAR. And it is a matter of 0.9 degrees in 2010 (that is, the real observed temperature was 0.9 degrees below the lower bound set forth in the IPCC's report), which is more than the predicted rise during that period (in other words : the error is bigger than the prediction).
So sorry to say, but this article fixes up the data by cherrypicking from the FAR, adding in "adjustments" and yes, it seems to be able to come to a reasonable picture. I call bullshit on that methodology though, for obvious reasons. If you're defending your prediction made in 1990 you do not get to revise said prediction in any way. You also don't get to make 5 predictions in 1990, then pick the "average" from 2 of them and show it matches the data.
So perhaps I should be more explicit : comparing the current satellite temperature record to the IPCC FAR report's "Business as usual" scenario, without adjusting it, the temperature has been below the lower bound of the 95% certainty interval since 1994. After 1996 there hasn't been a single temperature peak in the IPCC's predicted bounds. They were wrong, and not just a little bit.
A similar problem occurs between my own evaluation of the IPCC's second third and fourth report (and the article doesn't look at the fifth, probably because there's not that much data to evaluate it). I find this article woefully unconvincing.
People either listen to the vast majority of scientists (global change is happening; global change is almost certainly driven by human activity) or they can listen to scientists who do not work in climate and who have been paid by industry to create FUD - some of these scientists are the same people who ised to work for the tobacco industry.
"And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats."
No, there's the exact same amount of reason. This isn't a morality play, who's "fault" it is doesn't matter. If there were a meteor heading towards us on a collision course, would we reason against sending Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to stop it because it wasn't caused by us?
Of course it matters -- in terms of the amount of impact human activity has on the climate. The less impact it has, the less beneficial you can expect energy policies to be to the environment. Since these policies have a non-trivial cost in terms of human suffering (less energy for heating, growing food, etc.), it is crucial to estimate their effectiveness.
The linked article I was rebutting wasn't making that utilitarian case, they were making a moral case about not being obligated to avert warming at all, which I think is thoroughly bullshit, because I live here.
They aren't? Wait, let's make the claim more specific. Biofuel mandates that had been justified in part based on CO2 concerns have driven up the cost of corn and other grains - crops and farmland is being needlessly diverted from food to fuel. Making grains more expensive has indeed been a cause of starvation in the third world.
Um, here:
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62609/c-ford-runge-an...
Are you really saying, that the Energy industry is a starving baby?
They are the richest companies in the world, they can easily afford ALL of the changes that have been suggested, but it isn't about 'affordability' it is about profitablity.
Making things more efficient, and encouraging more self/clean power generation runs contrary to Energy companies profit motive, so of course they will resist it and even run marketing to say that the world will be worse off if it is more efficient and "cleaner".
And as a collective we have and continue to be stupid enough to buy into their narrative.
In your metaphor, this is like blaming the drug dealers for the "drugs being sold on the street" problem. The drug dealer has no interest in selling you a 'drug manufacturing kit' for your home, he/she wants to keep you coming back.
I was pointing out, that given it is a humanistic/moral issue. The corporate 'profit motive' has nothing to provide. We have the resources to do everything we want to do, and it makes ethical sense. But a rational organisation (which is, by definition driven by profit) would never invest in this, because it would reduce its profit.
This isn't an argument of convenience, this is a "point out the fucking obvious"
"I was pointing out, that given it is a humanistic/moral issue."
It may very well be indeed. But in the context of the submitted article and its discussion, it is proving the point about the use and abuse of data and science. There is a difference between a "moral use of science" and dressing up a "moral/political special interest position" as a <position of science>.
As I am sure you would appreciate.
That is factually untrue, and my response was based on fact, there is money, and it could be used, no babies would stave.
But I pointed out it was never considered because if the profit motive.
You seem to be railing against a position I am not holding.
To simplify:
"We could do everything we thought was needed to decrease global warming and no baby would need to starve".
I'm not saying:
- We need to do something
- We are the cause of global warming
- Doing the things we think will reduce global warming will actually reduce global warming.
I re-read the article and I don't understand how you arrive at this interpretation. This appears to be something you're assuming. The article is precisely about the utilitarian argument: the trade-off between the expected effectiveness of energy policies and their cost.
In the end global warming might be better than we're expecting but it is the political and social inferences, like in the quote you included, that belie his true intent.
Whose behavior does that not describe?
It's not necessary to bend in every wind, but I look for some signs of adaptability.
No, it does not imply that, not unless we know of a linear relationship between "warming" and "impact." From what I understand, the relationship is far from linear, i.e. our changes can have disproportionate impact.
You've made a great point - if we've really reached a tipping point at some of the more extreme global warming alarmists, you wouldn't spend any money at all. So they've inadvertently caused logical people to decide we shouldn't do anything.
The other end of the spectrum would try to convince you that global warming isn't real (global warming and cooling has happened for eons - without man's help) and that it's therefore not worth doing anything.
As an ecologist, I drive my wife and kids nuts with my need to recycle ... and take it a step beyond. I've repaired all sorts of "throw-away" household gadgets (most recently my wife's straightening iron) and try to give away working items we no longer need (freecycle). So I still believe we should each do what we can to minimize our impact on the planet, whether or not global warming is real.
Maybe you'd have to spend twice as much to have the desired effect.
Think of it from a programming perspective. You've suddenly discovered that your program runtime wasn't near as slow as you thought. Plus you've shown that most of the runtime is driven by systems external to your code. It makes sense to reconsider how much effort to invest in for code optimization.
The argument is akin to saying "your program slowdown is - and I'm making up a number out of thin air - 50% caused by systems outside of your control so you should definitely spend 50% less time optimizing the things you can optimize".
The logical flaws are blatant: the % is an invention, and the truth or otherwise of the premise has no bearing on the action you can and should take.
If humans caused 100% of the change then we can stop causing it. If humans caused 0% of the change then we can't stop causing it and must adapt to it. If humans caused 50% of the change, then we can stop some of it but will have to adapt to the rest.
Obviously the premise has a huge bearing on the action we can and should take.
But since I'm forced to attack the strawman: let me put it another way: if humans are responsible for less warming than 100%, then we're going to have to do more to mitigate our effects, because we have to mitigate more human behaviour for the same outcome.
Until we're making meaningful changes - yet to happen - it's utterly irrelevant if we've caused 50%, or 100%.
Yes. Of course I am. We make those sorts of bets constantly, because Pascal's Wager doesn't work. We can't not make those sorts of bets.
When somebody says "the end of the world is nigh!" it is almost always worth waiting a bit to see if in fact the thing they're worrying about is actually a problem. Hindcasting is nice and all but the real test is: Does the warming trend actually continue as predicted and if so, once it does get warmer, do we actually see negative effects from it that significantly outweigh all the likely positive effects of warming?
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/extreme-weat...
[1] http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2014/02/14/allianz-sto...
[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/partners/advinsurancetrends11...
[3]
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/what-happened-to-the-2013...
(Regardless, even if there were measurable negative effects you would need to balance them against the measurable positive effects to determine if the NET externality was positive or negative. It's silly to add up just one side - even the IPCC doesn't do that.)
Ever notice how climate change skeptics implicitly claim perfect economic foresight? They may not buy that the Earth is warming or what the cause is, but they're absolutely certain that trying to weatherproof our civilization is going to result in collective bankruptcy. Oh yes.
? This is hardly a deep economic forecast. If you force people to engage in expenditures they were otherwise never going to make, it's a pretty safe bet they're not going to be better off. After all, if they were better off for it, why weren't they already going to do it? We can maybe imagine a few scenarios to do with personal health and things like that where paternalism works, but nothing to do with global warming looks like that. Working against global warming is going to be expensive, there's no question about that; the question is whether working against global warming is less expensive than not.
Yes, because Tom Cruise could stop it better.
The supply of fossil fuels is absolutely limited. We don't know where these limits are exactly. But what we do know is that if we have no alternatives, our entire civilization will collapse when we run out of them. Billions of people will die. Centuries of learning will be forgotten. A new dark age will result.
Now that is "prosperity-destroying."
This is reason #1 to do everything we can to move beyond fossil fuels. Climate change may be reason #2, or maybe reason #3 after geopolitical concerns. But even if there is no manmade climate change at all, we must do everything we can to develop alternatives to fossil fuels now while we still have the time and energy to do so. The danger of collapse due to fossil fuel depletion is so great that I'm not even sure if climate change ranks.
So why are we still even arguing about this?
In that respect, the error here belongs entirely to whoever made that graph in the first place. They plotted all those models together to try to convince the reader that all models point to doom. But in doing so without error bars, they implied a level of confidence for specific years that was entirely absent from the models.
As if he gives a crap about poor people. People freeze not because of energy policies but because we have poor social welfare and exploitive foreign policy that itself is motivated by self serving right wingers who are exactly the people denying global warming. Pretending to care about the poor to make this point is frankly disgusting.
"And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats.
I am growing weary of the variety of emotional, misleading, and policy-useless statements like “most warming since the 1950s is human caused” or '97% of climate scientists agree humans are contributing to warming', neither of which leads to the conclusion we need to substantially increase energy prices and freeze and starve more poor people to death for the greater good."
For example: If 100% of climate models predicted a rise of 10-14C (mean 12C), and we observed a rise of 11C, this doesn't mean that the models are 'wrong', and it CERTAINLY doesn't mean that "the observations must be wrong."
It does mean that there's some potentially interesting correlation in the models' errors, I guess.
[Or, as cjensen said: 'Thou shalt not make a graph without error bars']
Simply put, there is no precedent in the entire history of the planet Earth for overall heating as pronounced and rapid as the past 100 years of AGW. There are really only two possibilities: either humans are responsible for basically all of the heating, or there is a giant demon who is trying to stir-fry the human race.
So if you think that the recent warming is not anthropogenic... find Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis, fast.
Making sweeping statements like this is not encouraged in the scientific community. Now, that's not say we can't learn something from this graph. But to learn more, detail is needed in how the graph was generated. There's more to this than meets the eye.
I'm willing to be wrong, but I'd like to see all the facts first.
The one exception to this is "humorous" situations. For example, when writing trite complaint letters or on a frequent flier memberships.
That's a different type of bias than driving the stake into a specific conclusion because the other stake moves. Frequently.
To be fair, I think this only because it agrees with my pro-reason bias.
And who decides who qualifies as a "scientific expert"? Isn't that problematic?
Who's an expert? Anyone who can convince other experts they are also an expert in a culture that glorifies reason and evidence and where the most status can be gained by disagreeing with everyone and then convincing them you were right all along.
You definitely seem to want an algorithm for this kind of thing, but there isn't one. It's an exercise in applied philosophy involving building an artificial culture made up of irrational human beings. It's incredibly problematic from your perspective I suppose. People are inherently problematic from that perspective, as is dealing with the unknown. From my perspective I'll take it until there is something better, because right now this is the way to get the best chance of being right about any subject.
If some cell biologist came in here and told HN that GOTO's were the only control structure you needed for programming, although he had never programmed anything but that doesn't matter because he's smart and he reads about programming a lot, people would tell him he's wrong and that this is pretty well established and universally agreed upon. If he responded with "What did you guys do? Vote on it? Who gets to vote?" you would see that there is a pretty big disconnect between reality and how this biologist thought the culture worked.
What I actually want is a different approach that rejects authority.
As to a different approach that rejects authority ... What would that look like? Would we not value expertise anymore? Would there be no expertise anymore? I like being allowed to get good at something by putting in effort ... and once I do I'm going to be right about the subject more often than those who haven't put in effort. And people will notice that and listen to me, they will value my opinion more than others.
I'm pretty lost as to how this dynamic could be broken in a non-nightmarish way.
Being right more often does not mean you're right in any particular dispute, so how exactly does it matter? Every dispute has to be resolved based on the actual ideas in question, not the authority of the person who said a particular idea.
The Earth's climate is an enormously complex mechanism that is barely understood, and there is a tendency to make models that confirm a hypothesis (just read this today - http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/02/15/rapidly_warming.... That sort of nuttery from the other side would get eviscerated, but it sells to an agenda).
1. Models are Right + Action = huge spending on energy but we save the planet
2. Models are wrong + Action = huge spending on energy that otherwise would be spent on defense, etc. but we are left with a renewable energy infrastructure.
3. Models are wrong + inaction = little money spent on new power sources, left with fossil fuel-based infrastructure. When fossil fuels run out in 100-200 years, have to build renewable infrastructure to replace it.
4. Models are right + inaction = little money spent on new power sources, left with fossil fuel-based infrastructure. When fossil fuels run out in 100-200 years, have to build renewable infrastructure to replace it. Also, dramatic weather changes, widespread famine, etc.
Does inaction make sense even if the models are wrong?
Ah, yes, like we do now, with the oil companies.
We can't predict clouds more than five days in advance, under our well-studied present climate conditions.
It is difficult to see why climate modelers are confident they can predict average cloud cover in the future when different climate conditions are in effect.
I don't say that lightly. I tried having long conversations with climate fake sceptics, and they are totally refractory to reality and its measurement.
Other effects of CO_2, like ocean acidification can be seen through both direct chemical measurement and by the observed environmental effects on coral reefs.
The issue of human contribution to climate change is much more complicated than that. This is an interesting contribution to the discussion, but it shouldn't be the only piece of information we go from.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Roy_Spencer
"One of the few AGW deniers with real credentials", Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama at Huntsville (also home to AGW denier John Christy) and is the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite.
Spencer is on the nine-member board of the antiregulation, Scaife- and Bradley-funded Marshall Institute, though he appears not to disclose this affiliation on his website.
"starve more poor people to death for the greater good"
Thank you for playing. No amount of "I'm a Ph.D., I'm a former NASA scientist" is going to help take you seriously after that.
http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/pdf/two_natural_compone...
As if there is some huge Excel spreadsheet in a supercomputer and the jerks just keep on putting in wrong numbers to scare us.
There isn't, and there won't be for (my estimate) at least another century - we don't even understand the Gulf Stream well enough to accurately model and then predict its behavior, much less everything else, including atmospheric dust.
Because there's been such a powerful political reaction in favour of all the scientists talking about warming? To the casual observer, it really looks more like Business As Usual.