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I agree with your points here. The thing that struck me as more interesting about this case is that it seems like it should lead to a more concrete testable prediction, with a deadline. If this is right, we should see a rapid increase in temperatures when the cycle that's currently pumping heat to the bottom of the ocean starts to pump it back up to the top.

If it's as they say, then it seems to me like the next oscillation should be much more dramatic (for some measurable definition of dramatic) than the historic ones because most of that "stored warming" will come up in a rush. On the other hand, if we get to the time when the cycle reverses and it's no big deal (after giving it time to get into full swing), perhaps we should reconsider our premises.

This also makes it much more of an interesting bet as in survival terms it has actual teeth, especially since the cooling period hasn't really cooled but has stayed pretty flat instead. I suggest at least hedging that it might in fact rise, given the loss if it does. Nothing wrong with making some hedge funds after all, honest foundation of the economy and all that.

Besides, other than saying that the climate is just too complex to make these predictions, I haven't ever heard a plausible argument against extending the simple observation that a volume of air enclosing an absorbing and emitting solid when exposed to a wideband source of light (the sun being a good example) will trap heat in different amounts dependent on the concentration of the gases in the volume and that CO2 is one of the gases that increases this effect if you start with a mix the same as our atmosphere.

Yes, that's all true. But I've also never heard a plausible argument against the simple observation that if I kick a football it will accelerate away from me. F=ma and all that... Unless I'm standing at the bottom of a hill, in which case it will roll straight back to my feet. See, the wider system may be more complex, and have negative feedbacks that overwhelm any perturbation you introduce. The onus is on the climate scientists to show that the system as a whole will behave as they've predicted, which is a great deal trickier than your simple observation... since it's just about the most complex system imaginable. I model for a living, and I'd dead-set rather model the human brain than the climate of our entire planet. At least you've got 6 billion of those to gather data on. Or experiment on. They've got one.

If you kick a football it will accelerate away from you, but only while you are kicking it and it does that in both cases. And if you have got as far as F=ma then you will presumably be bright enough to apply it to gravity and the shape and material of any hill as well as the action of your foot.

Besides, the people who are saying that the system is too complex to make a prediction are not saying that there will be no effect. There is an increase in the energy going into this system and saying that things are so complex that we should bet on there being no effect is not saying that there is no global effect, but that there is a global effect that more or less exactly counterbalances the initial effect and that to me sounds like wishful thinking from the viewpoint that nature is somehow magically in balance.

I haven't ever heard a plausible argument against extending the simple observation that a volume of air enclosing an absorbing and emitting solid when exposed to a wideband source of light (the sun being a good example) will trap heat in different amounts dependent on the concentration of the gases in the volume and that CO2 is one of the gases that increases this effect if you start with a mix the same as our atmosphere.

Things that come to mind immediately:

1. The solid can change colors (amount of vegetation, amount of snow/ice cover).

2. Cloud cover at various altitudes. (I think I heard this one tends to annoy the model-makers, since they don't have a good way to predict it yet.)

3. How much of the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs, is already at 100%? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_band has a picture that seems to imply "most of it".

Item #1 I've heard should make the effect stronger than your simple model, #3 would probably make it weaker, and #2 I doubt anyone knows.

ok, ok, this I have thrown into the basket marked 'complexity'.

I think it is unlikely, but definitely not that unlikely that reality will nicely balance for a wide range of values of CO2. I would like us to plan against that but it would be nice if it were so.

We are probably somewhere near a local minima, in terms of temperature stability, however we have no fucking idea really where the edges are or how deep the next valley may be.

The future doesn't have to be like the past, especially if we kick it.

I guess the drastic reshaping of our planet has some people worried. Maybe its unscientific to blame it on human activity. But that at least has the possibility that we can fix what's clearly, pervasively broken in our weather.

How do you explain folks who pick at the science but ignore the melting of every ice pack on the planet in a few dozen years? What principle are they exhibiting, to ignore overwhelming data for the sake of scoring some points on a web blog?

What overwhelming data? The arctic ice cover is nowhere near record lows [1] and the antarctic ice cover is very well above historical averages [2]. This could be because other factors affect ice cover, but in that case we shouldn't be using it as a proxy for global warming.

I feel the science is complex and not yet understood and we shouldn't treat questions about climate science as having nefarious motives.

Ironically, my comment here is the kind of science nit-picking that think JoeAltmaier is commenting on and I think he makes a good point. Something is bound to be happening to our climate and it would be remarkable if it wasn't at least affected to some degree by human activity.

[1] http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_std...

[2] http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_std...

Yeah. Siberia melted. All glaciers are in retreat. Antarctic ice shelf is irretrievable melting as fresh water infiltrates the borders and seeps underneath. Whatever we've done, there's no stopping it now - the oceans WILL rise and we'll have to deal with that.

Doesn't this tie into the idea of falsifiability? All these "theories" cannot really be disproven, only re-modeled. They're so focused on tying everything to human-caused climate change that they're leaving behind scientific rigor. As you said, bring on the accurate models and data!

I guessed I missed that part. How does modeling oceanic current become partisan? Which measurements are falsified if any?

Measures are not falsified. Hypothesis are (or should be). When you have a hypothesis, or a theory, that can't be deemed false by new data or new experiments, you don't have science.

And this is the problem with those "a posteriori" explanations of the hiatus. They are saying that the models that predict a global warming catastrophe can't be wrong, instead of recognizing that the models lack predictive power and they must be adjusted. But if the models can't be wrong they are not science.

>They are saying that the models that predict a global warming catastrophe can't be wrong

Who said that?

The incompleteness of climate models isn't something that has just come up recently - they have always been incomplete (they can't be anything but - 'all models are wrong') and that is well understood by anybody who develops or uses them. There are large sub-systems that global circulation models don't even really attempt to model at this stage. Others where they are widely recognised to do a very bad job (e.g. ice sheets). Others that are just modelled stochastically because we don't know how to predict those processes on a year to year basis (e.g. ENSO).

Finding inconsistencies between the models and reality is one of the ways that they are improved.

I don't know where you are getting these ideas about how climate modellers think, but they don't bare any relation to how climate models are actually developed.

OK, it was a figure of speech. They are not saying that. They are acting like that. The climate scientist who are trying to find the "missing heat" instead of reconsidering their models and revising their predictions of warming.

Why do you think 'find the missing heat' is different to 'reconsidering their models'? If ocean circulation is transporting more heat into the deep ocean than we thought, then that is something to change in the models.

If you are asking, why have they not thrown out our entire understanding of the climate system and started over, then I would argue that isn't a way to actually improve our understanding of the climate. We would be starting over every day. Out understanding clearly isn't all wrong. There are all sorts of other lines of evidence used to develop our understanding of the climate system. From things that are reproducible with simple experiments (or just application of basic physical laws), to things that have taken large investments and long term study to work out.

There can be all sorts of reasons that the model got it wrong (assuming it did, I don't think we really have enough evidence one way or the other yet for the idea proposed in the OP - it seems like a bit of a curve fitting exercise at the moment). Not only is our understanding of the systems incomplete, our measurements are incomplete as well (and that gets much worse even just a few years ago - we've only had the Argo network of floats taking ocean temperature for a bit over a decade for example). Often there is just as much reason to suspect that it's our measurements that are wrong than that it's our understanding of the system. It's just the nature of working on a system the size of the entire planet. It's not easy to measure everything, and ever harder to measure what was happening in the past. There have been real issues where it was the data that was wrong and not the models.

See the UAH troposphere temperature record for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAH_satellite_temperature_data... It contradicted other data sets and the models, and it turns out there were errors in the way the temperatures were calculated. That is a record run by scientists very much on the skeptic end of the spectrum by the way, if you were getting worried about any kind of conspiracy.

I think you give some good explanation of why climate modeling is very difficult. However, the mainstream message I hear makes it sound like the predictions that come out of these models are certain.

Thanks. Maybe it's not climate scientist then, but the version of climate science that we get through the media which runs as "science is settled, scientist already know what will be the mean temperature on Earth in 2100".

At some point models have to be built from experimental data. I guess the fundamental problem is, we have just one dataset (one planet) so any model is going to be 'overtrained'. Hard to beat that.

Of course the theory can be disproven. Burn all of the coal and all of the oil and then see what happens. If we are right, we drown and if we are wrong, we die of smoke inhalation.

I think that given the physics, global warming is probably true. That said, one of the things I find annoying about it is that there are many good reasons not to burn stuff and global warming has all the focus.

How about building stuff like solar based electric transportation, just because our city atmospheres are killing people right now, never mind in several decades.

Falsifiability is just a lot harder at a macro scale like the planet. It's more like astrophysics than classical physics. Perhaps even harder because you don't have discrete bodies and large spaces, you just have one heavily intertwined body of interactions.

I don't think that makes it strictly non-falsifiable, it just makes it a little fuzzier where you have to accept that there are too many variables to isolate, and you need to take clues and relative changes to be worth something even if there isn't a controlled scenario that science would prefer.

The worst part of climate change science isn't the uncertainty, it's the fact that any uncertainty will be grasped upon by the oligarchy to create FUD in favor of the status quo that generated their fortunes. That systemic bias could well be the end of the species as we are collectively unable to pull our heads out of our asses.

any uncertainty will be grasped upon by the oligarchy to create FUD in favor of the status quo that generated their fortunes

Ah, but it will also be grasped by researchers to create FUD in favor of sensationalism so they can get more grants and maybe become famous for Saving The World.

That systemic bias could well be the end of the species as we are collectively unable to pull our heads out of our asses.

Sure. Or equally unlikely, the opposite systemic bias causes the end of the species as a result of banning all effective telephone cleaning chemicals since they react with water to produce greenhouse gasses.

Maybe they want to save the world for the world's sake. I am generally in favour of the world.

There is a war against Terra.

Or terror.

Can't be terror though.

You can't have a war against terror.

That's obvious.

Must be Terra then.

We surely aren't led by idiots.

After all.

I too am generally in favour of the world.

---

satellitecat:

Release the kittens.

I repeat:

Release all the kittens.

"Hypothesis" and "theory" are scientific jargon for different degrees of confidence and integration into extant theoretical frameworks. But hey, Bayes, Popper, Lakatos.

I mean, get off it. "Theory" means something in "critical theory", something else in formal logic, etc. etc. There's nothing to say that applied scientist's uneasiness with tentative conclusions should dictate natural language. You don't want to be misinterpreted, you don't leak to the press before it's been in a few peer-reviewed journals.