Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is Yet to Come
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In GW/CC (whatever they are calling it this week) the hypothesis is a forgone conclusion and you merely search for evidence to support it.
So since we're having a 'warming hiatus' one concludes that the worst is yet to come, because the alternative is the model has not been validated by evidence and one should not make predictions based on an unvalidated (or more correctly invalidated) model.
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-mi...
Climate is so complicated. Of we're going to get things wrong. The trick is revising our theories in light of recent discoveries. Unfortunately, many people have a lot of money and clout invested in The One True Theory that they don't want to admit any mistakes at all. That is closer to religion than science.
I think you've never been in touch with the scientific method on climate change because your "how it should work" outline is exactly how I saw it go down in the literature.
Theory: Earth is warming ~1K/century, we have a bunch of models to project from here, most of which are bad news.
Observation: Temperature dips below predictions on enough models over enough time to be statistically significant.
Theory: Some negative feedback mechanism kicked in to reverse our forcing on the climate. We no longer have to worry about the previous trends.
Observation: Radiative flux measurements say that the difference in energy going in and going out of the planet is still positive. Whatever the negative feedback mechanism is, the energy is staying on Earth, so thermodynamics says the feedback mechanism must eventually fail.
Theory: The heat is being stored in the ocean. It's the biggest heat sink around.
Observation: If we adjust the models to use observed ocean currents instead of predicted average currents, we find that that the refined models reflect the observed heat storage.
Theory: Parts of the ocean are heating up, as seen in the models.
Observation: Yep, we went and measured them, and they're heating up. Corrected to reflect this evidence, the models still point to upward trends.
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> Climate is so complicated. Of we're going to get things wrong. The trick is revising our theories in light of recent discoveries.
Good thing that's exactly what happens. The real trick is in convincing people like you that it has happened. Clearly it's not enough to
1. Publish cross-referenced short summaries alongside detailed methodologies (papers) in a system where people compete to prove each other wrong
2. Provide high-level reviews to connect the dots established by #1 (the IPCC reports)
3. Have the thousands of scientists doing #1 sign off on #2 so that you know it's not misrepresenting how their #1 results fit into the big picture
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> many people have a lot of money and clout invested in The One True Theory that they don't want to admit any mistakes at all.
If someone can prove an alternative there is far more money and clout in it for them than if they had toed the line. There is a large social penalty for false alarms, but that's because there is a political party, monied industry, and media apparatus poised to turn a false alarm into actual counterproductive action.
How can the debate be considered fair if one side is censored? Easy: "false alarm" hypotheses are only ever stated in the context of research results that prove them wrong (i.e. as null hypotheses). They still get proposed, inspected, and analyzed, just not in a way that allows political forces to trivially misrepresent them. Research that could disprove the whole GW/CC theory gets done in the context of investigating puzzling nuances of GW/CC. So far, the overall theory has endured, even though the details have evolved to account for new information.
Consider a debugging analogy. Suppose you're convinced that you have a compiler bug, but you know that you'll get laughed at if you say so out loud. The social stigma is never an issue because you can do reductions without getting laughed at. If it really is a compiler bug, you will eventually have a "smoking gun" test case to prove it. If not, no harm done. Your social status hasn't suffered because you can claim you never really believed it was a compiler bug anyway.
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> That is closer to religion than science.
How many actual research papers have you read on this subject? Because if you think climate scientists aren't following the scientific process I suspect the answer is 0.
Start here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/what-o...
(notice how the discussion revolves around primary literature with links at the bottom)
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One choice quote from the link above:
> And a reminder: The warming trend of the 15-year period up to 2006 was almost twice as fast as expected (0.3°C per decade, see Fig. 4 here), and (rightly) nobody cared. We published a paper in Science in 2007 where we noted this large trend, and as the first explanation for it we named “intrinsic variability within the climate system”. Which it turned out to be. - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/what-o...
There is absolutely no social penalty for false alarms of that sort - not so long as the alarm goes in the right direction. Remember Schneider's "we have to offer up scary scenarios" quote - coming up with alarms (that might be false) is essentially part of the job of environmental activists, even ones who choose to do science for a living. If there were a large social penalty for false alarms, Ehrlich wouldn't have remained credible after all his past prediction failures. (predictions such as: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.")
The idea that our "missing heat" is hiding in the deep ocean is still a speculative hypothesis. It could potentially be correct but it's hard to be sure because the data coverage wasn't there until recently. The trend one gets depends on how one does the reanalysis.
Curry discusses the question here: http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/21/ocean-heat-content-uncerta...
Pointing in particular at this paper (which I've only skimmed so far): http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/OHCA_1950_2011_fina...
However, I do think I represent a sizable portion of the population. I'm open to being wrong, but innately skeptical about the depth of our understanding of something this complex. If this was like most other science, then who cares what a lay person like myself thinks? No astrophysicist need worry what I think about black holes. However, climate scientists want don't want to just change their own fossil fuel use. They want to change the fossil fuel usage of the entire developed / developing world. If the goal is changing the behavior of many humans, folks in the field need to start convincing many people.
"In an authoritative report due out Monday a United Nations climate panel for the first time is connecting hotter global temperatures to hotter global tempers. Top scientists are saying that climate change will complicate and worsen existing global security problems, such as civil wars, strife between nations and refugees ... retired U.S. Navy Adm. David Titley, now a Pennsylvania State University professor of meteorology, wrote in an email. “The Arab Spring and Syria are two recent examples.”
They sully the real science with this kind of nonsense.
[0] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/warmer-temperature...
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08...
Food price inflation[0] is cited by Wikipedia as one of the causes (with just a single link). There are pages and pages of other much more important reasons[1]
Food price inflation is not necessarily connected to Global Warming/Climate Change.
The 2007/2008 World Food Crisis, which caused violence in Egypt[2], significantly raised food prices (which stayed high after the rapid rise). A major cause, according to the World Bank, was biofuels [2] which raised food prices by up to 75%.
Its easy to claim that X was the spark that made Y happen. All you need to show that X had some minuscule effect and people will readily agree, ignoring the big picture.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Revolution_of_2011#cit... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Revolution_of_2011#cit... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_pr... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_pr...
And don't get me started on biofuels!
http://judithcurry.com/2014/03/04/causes-and-implications-of....
I can see three main possibilities:
- their models aren't busted (Judith Curry is wrong, as are those whom she cites)
- their models are busted, and that increases the risk (i.e. risk increases as a result of forecasting being essentially impossible)
- their models are busted, and they're doubling down on a bad bet for political reasons
I mean, look at this silliness:
"It is pretty damn obvious there are positive impacts of climate change, even though we are not always allowed to talk about them."
This quote comes right after talking about them, so what's this idea that they're not allowed to? Ridiculous. It's a political editorial, and not even a good one, masquerading as a news article.
This seems to be a hard issue for people to discuss rationally.
Just 5 years ago, Al Gore claimed North Pole ice cap will be gone by now and instead we just had a record cold winter.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/16/editorial-al...
From the wiki page on doomsday cults: "Referring to his study, Festinger and later other researchers have attempted to explain the commitment of members to their associated doomsday cult, even after the prophecies of their leader have turned out to be false. Festinger explained this phenomenon as part of a coping mechanism called dissonance reduction, a form of rationalization. Members often dedicate themselves with renewed vigor to the group's cause after a failed prophecy, and rationalize with explanations such as a belief that their actions forestalled the disaster, or a belief in the leader when the date for disaster is postponed."
The variation of the extent of arctic ice is much less during winter than it is during summer. Since 2007 there have been three years where the minimum ice extent has been below 2 standard deviations of the 1981-2010 mean according to the National Snow and Ice Center. Since the 80s the volume of arctic sea ice has been halved.
Al Gore's predication was wrong. Arctic sea ice continues to decline and the arctic experienced an unusually warm winter. This is according to the National Snow and Ice Center. Here is a quote from their blog,
"While the eastern half of the United States has dealt with a cold and snowy winter, temperatures in the Arctic have been distinctly higher than average."
Everything will be fine for the planet as it is an inanimate object. Not everything will be fine for humans.
How... uncultured.
I really should get over my idea that comments here are any better than any other internet cesspool....
Can you imagine any other context where a political editorial would be accepted as fact in a discussion on science? Some people have such little shame.
In the case of the pot of water, you can observe the energy input into the system and combine that with some very generic, simple, and reliable physical models to determine when it will boil.
I'm not claiming that climate science is that simple, of course. My point is that some systems are more easily predicted at a larger scale than a smaller one.
Predicting the exact type of precipitation in a specific locale is one thing. Extrapolating a global trend based on past data is another.
They don't need to know whether it will be raining next month in Istanbul to tell you that the world is warming at a specific rate and what are the likely culprits.
I predict the next value thrown by a given fair die is _____.
Sometimes aggregate predictions are easier than fine-grained ones.