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The term "pause" is itself a bit of another PR victory, there certainly hasn't been a "cooling period", just some slowing of surface warming... ...

Well post-hoc explanations are fine, but to a lay-person they sound like rationalizations because the obvious question is: How come the scientists warning of much higher temperatures did not see all this coming? Instead, we were presented with the "hockey stick". Did those presenting it -- at the time -- say that this was a bit of a short term anomalous spike and that we will see much slower rises shortly? Why did they not say this? Did they not know? How come they did not know? Should I have trusted them then? Or now? Edited by softwareNerd
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I don't understand the 11,700 years reference

That means you just used the name Holocene without knowing what it means. Add in the rest of the superficial "knowledge" you presented us with, and it also means this persona you're trying to pass yourself off as (as the science expert who is here to enlighten us ignorant anti-science folk on the error of our ways) is a big fat fraud.
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Waxliberty, thanks for correcting me.

There is definitely a lack of clarity here that creates the illusion of disagreement where there is none. Earlier in the thread you used the phrase, "mainstream anthropogenic global warming." To me that means there is a "greenhouse effect" and that humans contribute. This particular fact is recognized by virtually every climate skeptic. This fact is precisely where the the scientific consensus is. Claims to a consensus about anything more, for instance that climate sensitivity is high, result from a misunderstanding of the current state of the science. Even the IPCC says climate sensitivity is "likely" to be 1.5-4.5 degrees Celsius. This 1.5 bottom is the result of adjusting sensitivity down (from 2) to correct over predictions made 5-10 years ago with AR3 or AR4. The current doomsday scenarios from working groups 2 and 3 invariably assume high levels of equilibrium climate sensitivity.

 

Let's take a quick trip into the world of ideological climate science. This is a post from a skeptic blog (Wattsupwiththat) that heavily quotes from the Cato institute. It shows that the CMIP5 climate models are at risk of being statistically falsified by observations. The globe must warm faster than any observed rate since the industrial revolution began or the models are exposed as false in about 20 years. If the current pause continues the models all fail in 9 years. EDIT: This doesn't mean that there is no global warming, only that if models fail then the warming is much slower than predicted... Which means humans have time to adjust as long as we still have access to cheap energy.

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Longer discussion from Rahmstorf here

 

I pasted the wrong link (that's a longer signal/noise exercise by Tamino that uses the data available for solar, volcanic and El Nino to show the leftover warming trend.) Sorry for noise; meant to post this summary by Rahmstorf of his view on causes/interpretation of "pause" all up – the Global Temperature Jigsaw.

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From the Real Climate link in Post #44

 

"Recently, Cowtan & Way have shown that recent warming was underestimated in the HadCRUT data. After using satellite data and a smart statistical method to fill gaps in the network of weather stations, the global warming trend since 1998 is 0.12 degrees per decade – that is only a quarter less than the  long-term trend of 0.16 degrees per decade measured since 1980. Awareness of this data gap is not new – Simmons et al.  have shown already in 2010 that global warming is underestimated in the HadCRUT data, and we have discussed the Arctic data hole repeatedly since 2008 at RealClimate. NASA GISS has always filled the data gaps by interpolation, albeit with a simpler method, and accordingly the GISTEMP data show hardly a slowdown of warming.

 

This "smart statistical method" to fill gaps is a fabrication of data where none exists.  Whether it's biased towards hot or cold irrelevant to the fact that this is highly unusual in the practice of science.  And the warming is occurring in a place where there are no temperature records.....

 

And your reference to Tamino's extraction of forcing from historical temperature records to show "leftover warming" is an example of how data is routinely changed in climate science.   This too, is highly unusual.

 

And as an aside, Real Climate is run by Michael Mann of the hockey stick fame.

Edited by New Buddha
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Temperature data are adjusted.  This is not an accusation of fraud - it is just a fact.  And I'm not implying that those making the adjustments are doing so with the intent to deceive. 

 

And in order to create a global temperature average, data is created by extrapolation from the sparse network of measuring stations to create a "grid".  Again, this fact does not imply that it is done to deceive.

 

And yes, in both instances, the major record keepers are starting to do a better of job of making the adjustment process more transparent.

 

What I'm trying to address is that in climate science, the historical temperature data is of a different nature than data in the applied sciences (for example engineering and medical research).  In the applied sciences replication (of data) and validation (of models) means something entirely different from replication and validation in climate science.

 

Software Nerd can probably see where I'm headed with this:  Climate science (both it's data and models) more closely resembles economics than the applied sciences.

 

 

Measurement challenges, data processing and signal/noise analysis are common to a pretty big number of problem domains. You mention medical research. In a previous reply I mentioned the kriging improvements to hadcrut to address the data gaps proposed in a paper by Kevin Cowtan. Cowtan is not a climate scientist – he is a data analyst and medical researcher who built up statistical expertise in contoured data sets working on "electron density functions in X-ray Crystallography", and was able to cross over and apply that expertise in a published contribution on climate data sets!

 

There are some unique challenges with the complexity of climate, but in terms of the type of data and the physical properties being studied it really is not very different from other physical sciences. Think about geology, plate tectonics etc.; the link I referenced in #46 refers to how the noisy data and large error bounds for dating the age of the world were used to attempt to debunk the entire process of radiometric dating and/or the entire discipline of geology. Think about oceanography. (Really both of these are components of climate science.) Think about cosmology, trying to infer physical truths about structures tens of thousands of light years away from an incredibly noisy panorama of data up and down the EM spectrum.

 

With uncertainty comes error bounds, part of why you see so many in the IPCC summaries. As with the dating of the earth, I claim critics react (defending a perceived attack on their world view) by seeking to aggressively (and erroneously) conflate "imprecise" with "completely meaningless", "unknowable", "incompetent" or "hoax".

 

It is an interesting thought regarding economics, though I certainly don't see a unique relationship with climate. I think the core thing that makes economics extra devilish is that you are trying to model the behaviors of economic actors who are fully sentient with a set of possible synaptic combinations that breaks math, such that the complexity of predicting their behavior in all circumstances can explode a bit (especially if they are self-aware you are studying them and seeking to game it, etc.)

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"It is an interesting thought regarding economics, though I certainly don't see a unique relationship with climate. I think the core thing that makes economics extra devilish is that you are trying to model the behaviors of economic actors who are fully sentient with a set of possible synaptic combinations that breaks math, such that the complexity of predicting their behavior in all circumstances can explode a bit (especially if they are self-aware you are studying them and seeking to game it, etc.)"

 

Let's build on this.  This is where all my previous posts were headed.

 

Do you think that the problems with modeling climate are attributable to a lack of historical data, data quality an/or a lack of computational power?  In a nut shell, I'm interested in your views on Determinism.  Do you believe, that with enough knowledge of the existing conditions it would be possible to construct models of extreme (infinite?) precision?  Would it be possible to construct models that could predict hundreds, even thousands of years into the future what the temperature anomaly will be?

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Well post-hoc explanations are fine, but to a lay-person they sound like rationalizations because the obvious question is: How come the scientists warning of much higher temperatures did not see all this coming? Instead, we were presented with the "hockey stick". Did those presenting it -- at the time -- say that this was a bit of a short term anomalous spike and that we will see much slower rises shortly? Why did they not say this? Did they not know? How come they did not know? Should I have trusted them then? Or now?

 

"How come the scientists warning of much higher temperatures did not see all this coming?" Their models provide big error bounds for these things, so they "saw them coming". I think most scientists would agree they haven't done a great job communicating all this, but of course a highly motivated (and well funded) oppostion saturating media with counter-narratives to exploit confusion doesn't help matters.

 

You do have to ask when you hear this line of argument – see all what coming, specifically? La Nina? I explained that it is not easily predicted, tied up in chaotic large scale weather. They can also easily go wrong because predictions have to model in some economics as well: human CO2 emission rates, Chinese industrial output of smog aerosols, etc., things not known to be trivial to predict but that don't reflect on core physical theory. Many of the common talking points about Hansen's or IPCC predictions "failing" goes after that class of error.

 

The "hockey stick" is on the scale of the Holocene (Nicky's 11,700 years :-), so the "pause" is not really a detectable shift of a pixel on that chart, it would have to flatten out more and stay that way. In historical terms, even the "slow" pause period (say it is only 0.1deg C per decade; e.g. eyeballing UAH 1999 to 2013 looks like about 0.25 degree difference) would be extremely fast by Holocene standards, which doesn't look like it cooled a full degree in about 7,000 years of cooling. So what might look like uninteresting surface warming isn't obviously so; still spiking. (In truth, sampling a short period of time does not yield a statistically significant estimate of a trend easily – either to support "the trend flattened" or "the trend continued". Critics use this fact to argue that lack of statistical significance can only mean "not warming", one of the many other PR tricks.)

 

Surface warming should be looked at (all climate scientists will tell you, as many times as you would like to ask) on decadal timeframe. So the key question is whether each decade is significantly warmer than the preceding one, and so far that continues to be quite dramatically true.

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That means you just used the name Holocene without knowing what it means. Add in the rest of the superficial "knowledge" you presented us with, and it also means this persona you're trying to pass yourself off as (as the science expert who is here to enlighten us ignorant anti-science folk on the error of our ways) is a big fat fraud.

 

LOL. Well that's quite a sweeping rebuttal.

 

You wrote "However, the implication that this means industrial emmissions have caused the Earth's temperature to rise by 1 degree Celsius, isn't even close to true. Clearly. Such an conclusion would rest on the obviously false assumption that normally, the lowest and highest temperature over 11,700 years is the same." I was simply stating that I couldn't make sense of what you are trying to communicate with that bit with the 11,700 years. (I suppose it is something along the lines of 'what baseline are you comparing to'. Yes, it is a reference to the Holocene timeframe.) Points for desperation though.

 

(I'd say I'm a believer in science and scientific literacy more than an expert, but I appreciate the insults...)

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Waxliberty, thanks for correcting me.

There is definitely a lack of clarity here that creates the illusion of disagreement where there is none. Earlier in the thread you used the phrase, "mainstream anthropogenic global warming." To me that means there is a "greenhouse effect" and that humans contribute. 

 

For the record (just to clarify definitions), I would suggest something more along the lines of that offered in this useful here.

 
The working groups and all IPCC stuff is categorized by the different RCP scenarios, which are based on different emission outcomes and "a model set-up that probabilistically takes into account the overall consensus understanding of climate sensitivity uncertainty". The scenarios with little mitigation (4.5 and above) all project significant impact. That's the mainstream view.
 

1.5 would be the ideal obviously, but it is unlikely (it is the extreme low end, many lines of evidence indicate it is implausible at best) and it still drives negative impact with unmitigated emissions. It is not rational to assume the extreme low end, it is a very common cognitive bias to think uncertainty can only break in your favor. You can justify it on the presumption that the IPCC is irresponsibly alarmist ("because everyone knows that"), but so far it has really been more the other way, as arguably the biggest IPCC model failure to date is ice melt, which proceeded much faster than predicted. Criticisms of the IPCC as overly conservative (responding to pressure) run pretty hot among climate scientists. Hansen and others lobbied for including higher ranges based on a variety of research, including the evidence of so-called slow feedbacks being not as slow as assumed. I just mention to underscore the dubiousness of assuming the low end is more probable.

 

Your WUWT article doesn't quote from the Cato Institute, it's written by the Cato Institute (so, funded by Koch brothers and fossil fuels, sigh), and Knappenberger is somewhat infamous. I obviously would be happier with some scientific / reviewed source, as WUWT type hit pieces are legion, but let's not ad hominem *too* much, the general conclusion that "if" temperatures flatten or fail to warm models will be rejected is obviously not deeply objectionable. I would just watch the "if", especially with an El Nino brewing (which could fail to pan out, but if it doesn't we're highly likely to get our latest new record hottest year, maybe 2015.)

 

I don't see an analysis of this newer post, but if you like the back and forth you can get the idea what some climate scientists think of Chip Knappenberger's analysis from Tamino's series of responses e.g. here, including his assessment that Knappenberger's attempt to reason from Tamino's own published paper is "some of the most ludicrous nonsense ever written" and general discussion of model performance, more here and here, somebody's snarky parody article here...

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From the Real Climate link in Post #44

 

"Recently, Cowtan & Way have shown that recent warming was underestimated in the HadCRUT data. After using satellite data and a smart statistical method to fill gaps in the network of weather stations, the global warming trend since 1998 is 0.12 degrees per decade – that is only a quarter less than the  long-term trend of 0.16 degrees per decade measured since 1980. Awareness of this data gap is not new – Simmons et al.  have shown already in 2010 that global warming is underestimated in the HadCRUT data, and we have discussed the Arctic data hole repeatedly since 2008 at RealClimate. NASA GISS has always filled the data gaps by interpolation, albeit with a simpler method, and accordingly the GISTEMP data show hardly a slowdown of warming.

 

This "smart statistical method" to fill gaps is a fabrication of data where none exists.  Whether it's biased towards hot or cold irrelevant to the fact that this is highly unusual in the practice of science.  And the warming is occurring in a place where there are no temperature records.....

 

"fabrication of data where none exists" – no. It's calculating the best "average global surface temperature" possible, in this case applying data from satellites to improve the interpolation that is implicit in the entire enterprise. At the extreme this is just saying "if you can't actually measure every molecule's heat, you don't actually know what the 'average temperature is'." Who cares.

 

Can you validate the statistical assumptions? Why, you can. You can apply the technique to areas where you have data coverage, temporarily withholding that data. Then you can compare the method to what you get from the direct thermometer coverage. That's what the paper is about – the validation of the technique and what it says when applied to the data gaps.

 

For tracking global warming, the actual precise-to-n-digits temperature of the surface at a particular instant is not particularly critical to anything. We're tracking warming which means deltas and trends, so if you use a consistent measurement technique you expect to see trends you can meaningfully analyze over time. The heat swirls around the planet, and it's not reasonable to assume that a grid won't work because the cold air will always snake around the measurement points or some such. It's only a problem if you have a big gap in a geographically interesting region, like say the entire arctic.

 

And your reference to Tamino's extraction of forcing from historical temperature records to show "leftover warming" is an example of how data is routinely changed in climate science.   This too, is highly unusual.

 

Tamino's post is just an exercise in separating "noise" you understand relative to a "signal" you are interested in, for whatever reason. It is completely straightforward.

 

Let's take an example from software. Let's say you are tracking the availability of your servers and targeting a very high degree of uptime. You have active monitors (other servers) which ping your servers regularly to record their availability. This gives you some figure for their uptime – say 99.85%. (Which is deceptive – when the monitor wasn't pinging, we don't know whether the server was up, so we are essentially making up data where none exists!) Let's say you also have data that tells you when your monitors were down – i.e. the monitor service itself wasn't running, so it gives you some spurious false negatives during those periods. So to improve your measurement you remove the data from those time periods, which improves your uptime measurement to 99.97%...  hold it right there! Cover the children's eyes, reprehensible data molestation. Highly irregular. Just delete any data you like, and think this is acceptable engineering?

 

And as an aside, Real Climate is run by Michael Mann of the hockey stick fame.

 

Yes, poisoned well, ad hominem etc. Realclimate was formed by 10 or so active publishing climate scientists, explicitly for the purpose of explaining the science to the public, and the material presented is meticulously sourced to published research. Contributors include Mann but also NASA's Gavin Schmidt, German oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf, U.S. geophysicist Ray Pierrehumbert (as referenced above), and others. But yes, if we've got people believing one guy is a fraud, even if we don't have evidence of that, definitely best to try to tar as many scientists as possible...

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"It is an interesting thought regarding economics, though I certainly don't see a unique relationship with climate. I think the core thing that makes economics extra devilish is that you are trying to model the behaviors of economic actors who are fully sentient with a set of possible synaptic combinations that breaks math, such that the complexity of predicting their behavior in all circumstances can explode a bit (especially if they are self-aware you are studying them and seeking to game it, etc.)"

 

Let's build on this.  This is where all my previous posts were headed.

 

Do you think that the problems with modeling climate are attributable to a lack of historical data, data quality an/or a lack of computational power?  In a nut shell, I'm interested in your views on Determinism.  Do you believe, that with enough knowledge of the existing conditions it would be possible to construct models of extreme (infinite?) precision?  Would it be possible to construct models that could predict hundreds, even thousands of years into the future what the temperature anomaly will be?

 

This gets into philosophical questions of determinism not really central to the topic at hand. In terms of the potential for infinite precision – quantum mechanics says this is extremely non-trivial, to say the least.

 

Weather is exceptionally difficult because it involves chaotic factors per chaos theory, which basically concerns the fact that underlying deterministic mechanisms do not guarantee that a system is predictable. 

 

Climate is hard to model because the earth is complicated. For predicting just its balance of heat energy specifically, you can make some set of assumptions on the major variables (solar, human, and so forth) and make some projections with some stated error bounds, in the same way you can conceptually make calculations about how long a pot of water is going to boil if you know key variables like the volume, the temperature of the heat, and so forth. The thermodynamic problem is not inherently chaotic, in the same way weather modeling is. The further out in the future the uncertainty increases because more and more dynamics may come into play that you didn't have the opportunity to study from where started. (However, paleoclimate data is a huge rich store of information that is continually being mined to try to answer questions about "what does the real climate do in response to conditions X, Y and Z".)

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[...]

 

The "hockey stick" is on the scale of the Holocene (Nicky's 11,700 years :-), so the "pause" is not really a detectable shift of a pixel on that chart, it would have to flatten out more and stay that way. In historical terms, even the "slow" pause period (say it is only 0.1deg C per decade; e.g. eyeballing UAH 1999 to 2013 looks like about 0.25 degree difference) would be extremely fast by Holocene standards, which doesn't look like it cooled a full degree in about 7,000 years of cooling. So what might look like uninteresting surface warming isn't obviously so; still spiking. (In truth, sampling a short period of time does not yield a statistically significant estimate of a trend easily – either to support "the trend flattened" or "the trend continued". Critics use this fact to argue that lack of statistical significance can only mean "not warming", one of the many other PR tricks.)

 

I think my comparison here reads like it is stating more than intended – there can be shorter term ups and downs within the Holocene and the proxy data just doesn't have the resolution to capture, it wasn't necessarily so smooth. (Certainly see Younger Dryas etc. near the volatile beginning.) Sustained and global warming at such a rate would be unusual relative to the Holocene, and a ten year slowdown doesn't very detectably mess up the 'spike' or hockey blade effect underway.

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In reply to #64.  I believe I agree with you.

 

As I would state it:  Historical temperature records are non-replicable time series - and past results do not guarantee future returns.  Climate science is largely concerned with discerning trends in the historical data by constructing models that parameterize the known cycles and forcings (solar insolation, aerosols, sunspot cycles, AMO, PDO, albedo, CO2 emissions, clouds, etc) to match the historical record.  From this, future projections are made.

 

Does this sound like a reasonable assessment of the science?

 

I hope you don't think that I'm taking this post in baby-steps to spring some "irrefutable trap" on you (lol) - I'm trying to make sure that we have a shared vocabulary.  This is very hard to do on forums.  And I do appreciate your participation.

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In reply to #64.  I believe I agree with you.

 

As I would state it:  Historical temperature records are non-replicable time series - and past results do not guarantee future returns.  Climate science is largely concerned with discerning trends in the historical data by constructing models that parameterize the known cycles and forcings (solar insolation, aerosols, sunspot cycles, AMO, PDO, albedo, CO2 emissions, clouds, etc) to match the historical record.  From this, future projections are made.

 

Does this sound like a reasonable assessment of the science?

 

I hope you don't think that I'm taking this post in baby-steps to spring some "irrefutable trap" on you (lol) - I'm trying to make sure that we have a shared vocabulary.  This is very hard to do on forums.  And I do appreciate your participation.

 

"Past results do not guarantee future returns" – possibly more confusing than helpful. If you mean the "past is not the future", that's clear enough to not need to be stated. If you mean "the way the climate responded to a physical variable in the past is no guarantee how it will respond in the future" is more problematic; clearly it is believed that you can apply learning from how the system responded in physical situations in the past. But it is not a simple question of expecting the same end results or assuming situations are exactly analogous.

 

The statement from "climate science is largely concerned with discerning trends" through "from this, future projections are made" may put too much emphasis on "discerning trends" in context. Something like: climate science is concerned with understanding the physical mechanisms of the climate – informed by studying the paleoclimate record, directly applying principles from physics, chemistry and thermodynamics, and from empirical observations – from this, future responses are projected.

Edited by waxliberty
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I stopped reading the thread a while back (because after 7-8 posts, waxliberty was showing no signs of attempting to prove any of the doomsday predictions he's been making), but just curious, has the most obvious, and least fact based enviro lie been addressed yet: the one where extreme weather events over the past decade and a half are consistently claimed to be caused by global warming?

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What I know of kriging is very, very limited. My understanding is that it is a statistical technique developed by mining engineers to help interpolate sparse data about the best direction to explore for mineral deposits or veins. About the closest thing to kriging that I've dealt with would be reviewing geotechincal bore logs to try and better understand the sub-surface conditions prior to designing/constructing a building. We have to make assumptions to “fill in the gaps” between the bores.

 

I understand the logic behind statistically interpolating data to fill in the gaps. But in Engineering when construction begins (or as a mine is advanced) additional testing takes place - adjustments and/or changes in direction are made. The statistics allows you to make assumptions that are later verified empirically. A geotechnical engineer will be very clear that he's not responsible for what is found between the gaps. The assumptions are just that, assumptions, they are not data. There are many abandoned mines littered around the world and I've uncovered a lot of expensive unknowns between the gaps (leaky oil tanks, non-structural fill, abandoned drywells, methane producing organics, etc.).

 

The main issue I have with climate science is that it is not “engineering ready”. The gaps in the data, the non-linear and non-replicable nature of the data (historical time series), the lack of precision in measurement, the lack of timely, empirical feed-back that would allow us to make mid-course corrections (a reduction in CO2 emissions may not result in detectable temperature changes for 30 or 40 years), the lack of model validation (as understood in engineering terms) and the inherent difficulty in separating the non-arthropogenic from anthropogenic forcings – all this leads up to a science that is not yet ready to be applied to geoengineering. I also have serious doubts that that it will ever be due to the delayed feedbacks, and that we are trying to detect changes in global temperature anomalies of +/- 0.5 degree.

 

I'm not really going to spend to much more time on this topic. But I hope you take away from this that not all skeptics are Rush Limbaugh fan boys or Koch Brother dupes or anti-science and anti-reason. Many skeptics are engineers or work in the applied sciences.

 

And to touch briefly on why skeptics tend to fall along ideological lines. When I asked you about determinism it was for a reason. Those of us who believe in free markets (Objectivist/Libertarians) do so because we do not believe that the economy (or the climate) can be understood enough that it can be “engineered”. If you know history, you will know that Marxist philosophy claimed that the economy could. Marxism was to be an irrefutable scientific approach to social engineering and economic planning - and it was to replace the messy inefficiency of the “invisible hand” that guides free markets. That's the primary reason that free market economists are wary of climate change and its proposed solutions to global warming. They may not have the engineering/science background to understand the the issues in technical depth, but they see the similarity between the problems that climate scientists and economists face.

Edited by New Buddha
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What I know of kriging is very, very limited. My understanding is that it is a statistical technique developed by mining engineers to help interpolate sparse data about the best direction to explore for mineral deposits or veins. About the closest thing to kriging that I've dealt with would be reviewing geotechincal bore logs to try and better understand the sub-surface conditions prior to designing/constructing a building. We have to make assumptions to “fill in the gaps” between the bores.

 

I understand the logic behind statistically interpolating data to fill in the gaps. But in Engineering when construction begins (or as a mine is advanced) additional testing takes place - adjustments and/or changes in direction are made. The statistics allows you to make assumptions that are later verified empirically. A geotechnical engineer will be very clear that he's not responsible for what is found between the gaps. The assumptions are just that, assumptions, they are not data. There are many abandoned mines littered around the world and I've uncovered a lot of expensive unknowns between the gaps (leaky oil tanks, non-structural fill, abandoned drywells, methane producing organics, etc.).

 

The main issue I have with climate science is that it is not “engineering ready”. The gaps in the data, the non-linear and non-replicable nature of the data (historical time series), the lack of precision in measurement, the lack of timely, empirical feed-back that would allow us to make mid-course corrections (a reduction in CO2 emissions may not result in detectable temperature changes for 30 or 40 years), the lack of model validation (as understood in engineering terms) and the inherent difficulty in separating the non-arthropogenic from anthropogenic forcings – all this leads up to a science that is not yet ready to be applied to geoengineering. I also have serious doubts that that it will ever be due to the delayed feedbacks, and that we are trying to detect changes in global temperature anomalies of +/- 0.5 degree.

 

I understand this all sounds good to you on a superficial level, but it's not defensible or actually well-formed. Despite the fact that you can't reproduce a globe in your lab, physical science lends itself quite well to reproducible validation.

 

I'm not really going to spend to much more time on this topic. But I hope you take away from this that not all skeptics are Rush Limbaugh fan boys or Koch Brother dupes or anti-science and anti-reason. Many skeptics are engineers or work in the applied sciences.

 

I'm well aware. It's something of an internet cliche – engineers animated by their ideological presumptions decide their engineering skill renders them an instant expert in any field of science they like, able to dismiss whole fields via ill-formed and strikingly shallow argument.

 

And to touch briefly on why skeptics tend to fall along ideological lines. When I asked you about determinism it was for a reason. Those of us who believe in free markets (Objectivist/Libertarians) do so because we do not believe that the economy (or the climate) can be understood enough that it can be “engineered”. If you know history, you will know that Marxist philosophy claimed that the economy could. Marxism was to be an irrefutable scientific approach to social engineering and economic planning - and it was to replace the messy inefficiency of the “invisible hand” that guides free markets. That's the primary reason that free market economists are wary of climate change and its proposed solutions to global warming. They may not have the engineering/science background to understand the the issues in technical depth, but they see the similarity between the problems that climate scientists and economists face.

 

I'm aware that you think those things are related or analogous.

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Assuming the IPCC and its activities and research are amoral and nonideologic, if the maths describe accurately the results of natural processes, what then?

Other than a scientifically detailed understanding of the physics of the paleoclimate, whats all the hubub?

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Waxliberty, thanks for the detailed reply. I didn't read the entirety of Pierrehumbert's article because I'm not willing to entertain discussions of Intelligent Design any longer than I have to. But I did read his definition and skim the rest. Here's his definition:

 

 

 

 An increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and other long lived greenhouse gases requires the surface temperature to ultimately increase so as to maintain a balance with the absorbed solar radiation. The increase is amplified by water vapor (also a greenhouse gas), which increases with temperature in such a way as to keep relative humidity approximately constant. Melting of ice will further amplify the warming, particularly in high latitudes. The resulting widespread warming corresponding to a doubling of CO2 will be large enough and rapid enough to be well outside the range of past experience of the human species, by an amount comparable to the difference between a glacial and interglacial climate. Changes in atmospheric cloud properties may somewhat reduce or increase the sensitivity, but do not substantially alter the conclusion.

 

This is one specialist's explanation of the issue, in a nutshell. The first half of it seems to represent the broad consensus as I understand it, but the second half deserves scrutiny. He described climate sensitivity in terms of comparability to glacial/interglacial differences. That's about 10 degrees Celsius, right? Now he's probably not saying that ECS is 10 degrees. So what does comparable mean? Orders of magnitude don't strike me as comparable, so I would think 1.5 is about as low as you could get and still be comparable. This isn't anything controversial unless he means that he expects a 10 degree (or more) increase per doubling of CO2. The last sentence is where I think the "consensus opinion" is overextended, and he acknowledges as much later in the article. He also explicitly states that the costs and the behavior those costs imply are outside of the scope of his definition. As far as I can tell this is just a more detailed restatement of the one I gave, with the exception that he doesn't mention the human contribution at all. So I'll reiterate; you're imagining disagreement where there is none.

 

Your link to Schmidt's article redirected here, so I couldn't read it. I doubt it offers a meaningful refutation of the fact that the mainstream view includes all scenarios with ECS between 1.5 and 4.5. For the record, I haven't assumed ECS is 1.5. On the other hand, you seem to assume ECS is at the high end. Your 6th paragraph in post #61, as well as your entire history on this thread, imply as much. I merely pointed out the broad scope of consensus science. I did so to counter the picture you're painting that the scientific consensus is that humans are causing bad juju and we must act to stop it. So I thank you for your advice cautioning me against cognitive bias, but I suggest you take it to heart first. You said 1.5 ECS is the extreme low end (actually it's the likely low end, the extreme would be below 1.5 and above 4.5). You said assuming 1.5 ECS is "dubious." I hope you recognize that your appeal to James Hansen in the same paragraph is even more dubious, as any opinion which holds likely ECS to be higher than 4.5 is outside the scope of consensus science. 

You offered a couple of quotes to illustrate where you think climate science is at odds with my definition. They are:

 

 

 

"Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. It is now more certain than ever, based on many lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth’s climate."

-National Academy of Sciences and U.K. Royal Society

 

"Humanity is the major influence on the global climate change observed over the past 50 years. Rapid societal responses can significantly lessen negative outcomes."
-
American Geophysical Union

 

The first is completely in line with my definition. I might also agree with the second statement, depending on definitions for climate changemajor influence and societal response. You're reading something into them that isn't there.

 

Your link to the bit on interglacial cycles is interesting, particularly because the graph it uses is visually similar to the one in the reblogged Cato article. I'm not too concerned with the arctic Ice; antarctic ice is far more important because it tends not to displace as much water. And antarctic ice doesn't seem to be going anywhere, at least not quickly or not yet. I appreciate that you recognized your ad hominem dismissal of the Cato article, by the way. Unfortunately, recognizing that wrong doesn't make it any more right. Even if the expected El Nino brings record high temps, it is unlikely to force the trend of the next couple of decades higher than that observed between '77 and '98.

In short, I say, "Cool it. consensus science doesn't really know if ECS is low or high, and a wide range of scenarios are possible. Let's wait for more evidence and see where our understanding takes us."

You say, "You're only looking at the good stuff; you shouldn't do that. You should only look at the bad stuff. #Kochmachine."

Edited by FeatherFall
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Assuming the IPCC and its activities and research are amoral and nonideologic, if the maths describe accurately the results of natural processes, what then?

Other than a scientifically detailed understanding of the physics of the paleoclimate, whats all the hubub?

 

Do you mean "why, just because the science points to us triggering a new 'hot age', different than what we've seen before, is anybody talking further about it?'

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