As I read the points and counter points made by others on this forum, and myself, I come away with the following thoughts:
1) I know very little about climate science, as illustrated by Lamont's obvious knowledge and experience in this area. It's amazing just how much I don't know about the topic. I purposefully, therefore, don't *claim* to know a lot about it.
I'm only an interested amateur, though, and I've only been trying to find answers to these questions for about the past 6 months or so. I do have 19 years of experience on the internet and have an extremely strong b.s. filter and I spent way too many years in college studying actual hard science and spending too much time in the libraries. I can recognize that the realclimate.org guys generally know what they're talking about, I know enough physics and math to check some of their work against reality.
That's it, though. Anyone can get educated if they're wiling to spend some time at it and dig and read and make gradual process.
The martian ice caps are melting due to local changes in martian climate, not due to increased solar activity. I already posted the debunking of this earlier:
Unfortunately for Svnesmark, while the jury is out over GCRs influencing cloud formation, the flux of GCRs is another of those annoyingly well-measured variables and there is no correlation to climate change:
It'd be nice if the global warming skeptics would just take the authors names off the papers that they think prove anthropogenic global warming is wrong and type those names into the search bar on realclimate.org and then come up with a substantial criticism of RC's analysis that goes beyond screaming about the scientific establishment not being receptive to other viewpoints. There really should be a Law about that like Godwin's Law that when someone just slams the whole scientific establishment and has nothing to say of any substance that the argument is over and the other person wins.
You see this with physics cranks who think special relativity is all wrong and other completely bogus views as well. The RC link with the funny french title (above) has one brilliant sentence in it:
Like most work of this genre, it is carried out in an intellectual void — as if everything we know currently about physics of climate had to be set aside in order to make way for one new (or in fact not-so-new) idea.
This is a consistent factor of scientific cranks. They're not attempting to build upon any kind of known knowledgebase, but to disregard everything science has produced and present an idea in a complete vacuum.
When you look at actual scientific revolutions, scientists don't actually do this. The revolutions of special relativity threw away bad science, but it was bad science that never worked. Global Climate Models have been tested against historical records. CO2 as a GHG has been well tested for the underlying physics, well tested against 1-d climate models, and tested against current climate change, any of which could have invalidated those models. No experiment ever found the aether, and when Einstein did away with it, he was removing something for which there was no evidence of at all. If you want a current parallel, you might want to look at string theory. Until you get some experimental results from string theory it is on fragile ground. With AGW there are experimental results and lots of data, and any contrarian explanation needs to not occur in a complete vacuum, cherry picking a few favored datasets, ignoring other important ones (like the complete lack of GCR variability in the experimental record) and mangling the data when pieces of it don't fit the underlying hypothesis.
The skeptical claims, however, work from the premise that an intelligent, open-minded skeptic must first deny any utility has come out of any experiment related to the climate ever in history. And then the skeptic moves forwards and finds some datapoint or experiment which "proves" something that climate scientists are ignoring because it doesn't fit in with their politically-inspired AGW theories designed to crush global capitalism. Unfortunately there's usually a mountain of very good experimental data which crushes the "skeptics" theory dead, but which was conveniently discarded in the first step of this process.
A large part of this debate has boiled down to "how trustworthy is scientific consensus." Here's the thing, you (and I) are not an expert in most fields. Nobody is an expert in most fields. End of story. Therefore, when a system is in place where the experts can be fact-checked by peers, and where dissenting opinions eventually do percolate to the top, it is best to assume the results of that system are the "most correct" results. For that reasons, the most appropriate starting position in any of these disagreements is scientific consensus (if one exists).
That's not to say you should turn your brain off. Quite the opposite. When convincing, accurate information becomes available that counters the consensus opinion you need to weigh that against your original position (scientific consensus) and decide an appropriate new paradigm to accept. This rarely means discarding the scientific consensus however, because it was generally formed by experts and you are not an expert.
Let's consider a few case examples of very smart people (smarter than you and smarter than me) who stepped outside their expertise and proved to be very wrong.
Example 1: Linus Pauling:
He is the reason you probably believe that massive doses of vitamin C (a water soluble vitamin) can prevent or cure the common cold. Here's an article that accurate sums up fact-vs-fiction. Why did people believe him? He is a rare recipient of two Nobel Prizes: the chemistry prize and the peace prize. However, he wasn't a biologist.
Example 2: Albert Einstein:
Perhaps you've heard "God does not play dice with the universe" as being attributed to him. In fact, if you come from certain misinformed circles you may have even heard that quote incorrectly applied as an anti-evolution statement. It is in fact a statement of disbelief in quantum mechanics. Einstein was not only brilliant, but a physicist. Even in the domain of physics he was confronted by a truth that was beyond his ability to accept.
In short, unless you are much much smarter than Einstein and Linus Pauling, it is unlikely you will be able to fully understand, let alone contradict, the state of the art in any especially complex science. That's why you're better off trusting the experts.
"Thanks to the intense efforts of a new generation of climate modellers, modelling capability has advanced in some instances by 12 to 36 hours, in others by several days. To extend the bounds further, the paper announced a major new research initiative, designed to bring the forecasting discipline to the 120-hour range.
Climate modelling is the basis of forecasts of climate change. Yet this modelling, Tennekes believes, has little utility, and "there is no chance at all that the physical sciences can produce a universally accepted scientific basis for policy measures concerning climate change." Moreover, he states: "There exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies.""
So climate modeling is the same thing as weather prediction/modeling? So, because we can't predict the weather terribly well beyond a few days, or a week, or whatever, we THEREFORE cannot predict what's going on with the climate in the longer term?
"Climate modelling is the basis of forecasts of climate change."
Is it??? Well yes. However, "Climate modeling" in the context of the article actually refers to "weather forecasting/modeling". I can't remember the last time the Komo TV weather guy told me that increased CO2 in the atmosphere *today* was going to create the warming trend that's making *tomorrow* look nice and toasty.
The article uses bait and switch tactics. It incorrectly refers to weather forecasting/modeling as "climate modeling", and then preys on the (obvious) understanding that most people have that you can't forecast the *weather* too far out. The unsuspecting member of the public now thinks that "climate modeling" can't predict more than a few days. So, therefore, climate change is bullcrap as they're trying to predict way more than a few days!!! YAY! Sigh...
ROB
The bull crap is thinking that climate models can predict the amount of warming out 100 years and using that to bankrupt our economy in an effort to literally challenge the SUN....
The bull crap is thinking that climate models can predict the amount of warming out 100 years and using that to bankrupt our economy in an effort to literally challenge the SUN....
Can you clarify?
1) Why can't they predict *climate* out 100 years? Is that because they can't predict the *weather* out more than 6 days? Are you making the same argument that the article makes about that?
2) Why will moving to alternative energy sources bankrupt our economy?
3) Do you think that climate scientists have ignored the role of the big hot yellow orb (the sun) in their modeling of climate? What non debunked research do you have that puts global warming exclusively in the sun's domain?
Simply declaring something as "bull crap" is easy and convenient if it happens to fit in with your world view and opinions.
The bull crap is thinking that climate models can predict the amount of warming out 100 years and using that to bankrupt our economy in an effort to literally challenge the SUN....
Energy conservation is GDP-positive, not GDP-negative. Similarly, switching to wind and solar power is GDP-positive (hence the stock graphs of FSLR and VWDRY.PK having a bias up and to the right). Same goes for electric or hybrid-plugin vehicles.
If you want to talk about crap predictions, lets talk about economics. Nobody is certain how much it'll cost GDP to reduce carbon emissions and cap the growth of CO2 levels in the atmosphere, it may actually not cost anything net in GDP and the switch to carbon-neutral technology could be the technology which lifts us out of the current housing-led recession.
So, this would suggest that we should see immediate and significant cooling. Which is a good prediction. If we don't experience that, it suggests the greenhouse gas portion of global warming is much worst than even anticipated.
In other words, give it a couple months and see what the MSM produces. If you see reports of "coldest autumn/winter in last 50+ years, then maybe global warming concerns are slightly exaggerated. But if you see reports of a slightly colder autumn/winter than usual (like if they call it a "La Nina") and nothing else, well that's very strong evidence that the GW watchdogs are right.
we're in a solar minimum and its entirely likely that poisson statistics conspired to give us a month with zero sunspots (given the average number of sunspots per month during a solar minimum, what are the chances that you'd see a month without sunspots in any given century?)
on the other hand we've already seen the first sunspots with a different polarity on them earlier in the year indicating that we're entering the next solar cycle.
so, its still way too soon to call a new maunder minimum.
and here's a much more scientifically valid, mainstream and less speculative estimate of solar cycle 23:
and even if we do get another maunder minimum, that buys about -0.2C of a total forcing, which would help to counteract the effects so far of GHG warming in the past 20-30 years or so, but would not plunge the Earth into a new ice age. if we didn't squander that 20-30 years arguing about anthropogenic GHG effects that would buy us some valuable time.
Ooooh. I love these threads! Can someone please post the editorial by the "founder of the weather channel" and also, the internet petition signed by 30,000 "scientists"?
And I love the "daily tech" link. Is that kind of like Scientific American, except for the interwebs?
So, this would suggest that we should see immediate and significant cooling. Which is a good prediction. If we don't experience that, it suggests the greenhouse gas portion of global warming is much worst than even anticipated.
There are lots more. I actually heard about this on KIRO on my way to work.
The interesting thing in the original article I posted, to me at least, was this part: In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.
The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.
>>Ooooh. I love these threads! Can someone please post the editorial by the "founder of the weather channel" and also, the internet petition signed by 30,000 "scientists"?<<
An look at the solar activity graphs from Lamont's and my posts and compare it to the actual global temperature charts. More and more it appears the sun matters. Which, I suspect, is what scentists thought for a long time until the recent crop of public school graduates. Maybe we SHOULD overhaul our schools.
Here's an interesting book by the same author, btw:
Yes, actually. It's the only system we have today that actually works. It might come to consensus slower than we would like. The vast majority of situations where a good hypothesis is dismissed occurs only because the researchers involved haven't put in the face time yet.
Let me put this another way, what alternative would you suggest? Undereducated bloggers harping on something they disagree with viscerally at an emotional level without any actual understanding of the proof?
More and more it appears the sun matters. Which, I suspect, is what scentists thought for a long time until the recent crop of public school graduates. Maybe we SHOULD overhaul our schools.
That's a silly assertion and a straw-man. Anyone who says the sun doesn't matter lacks either the sense of touch to feel warmth on a sunny day, or the mental acuity to correlate that warmth with the sun's rays. This, like all the other pseudo-scientific "debates" comes down to one side producing evidence and proof, while the other disagrees because they dislike the ramifications. The side that disagrees then trumps up old/out-dated quotes. <sigh/>
Yes, actually. It's the only system we have today that actually works. It might come to consensus slower than we would like. The vast majority of situations where a good hypothesis is dismissed occurs only because the researchers involved haven't put in the face time yet.
Let me put this another way, what alternative would you suggest? Undereducated bloggers harping on something they disagree with viscerally at an emotional level without any actual understanding of the proof?
More and more it appears the sun matters. Which, I suspect, is what scentists thought for a long time until the recent crop of public school graduates. Maybe we SHOULD overhaul our schools.
That's a silly assertion and a straw-man. Anyone who says the sun doesn't matter lacks either the sense of touch to feel warmth on a sunny day, or the mental acuity to correlate that warmth with the sun's rays. This, like all the other pseudo-scientific "debates" comes down to one side producing evidence and proof, while the other disagrees because they dislike the ramifications. The side that disagrees then trumps up old/out-dated quotes. <sigh/>
C'mon. It's not a straw man. I was bein funny.
Nobody is gonna be convinced here because we all have a ton of information on which we have based our personal opinions. The main difference is basically who each of us chooses to believe, based on a myriad of factors. I just like to throw a bit of levity in from time to time.
Nobody is gonna be convinced here because we all have a ton of information on which we have based our personal opinions. The main difference is basically who each of us chooses to believe, based on a myriad of factors. I just like to throw a bit of levity in from time to time.
My bad. Earlier on this thread, some suggested - in a serious tone - that we all need to recognize the sun as the primary source of global climate. In that murky pool, it was unclear to me that your comments was in jest as opposed to others who make such statements as though nobody else can see the obvious. So, I didn't catch the joke.
So, this would suggest that we should see immediate and significant cooling. Which is a good prediction. If we don't experience that, it suggests the greenhouse gas portion of global warming is much worst than even anticipated.
I've addressed this before, numerous times. The heat content of the pacific ocean is substantially more important than the heat content of the atmosphere. Then ENSO oscillations in the pacific ocean overwhelm the global warming signature on a year-by-year basis. Removing the ENSO signature, however, the earth is still warming:
Since the oceans are also more important of a heat reservior than the atmosphere it also makes sense to look at the global ocean temperature directly rather than the global atmospheric temperature:
There's also satellite data showing the thermal budget for the earth is out of balance (solar input exceeds radiation emitted from the globe).
By 2012, we will back in a new solar maximum, and any el nino year we have around then will blow away the 1998 temperature record conclusively.
Yes, we had a cold winter, but that is due to winds near the ecuator pulling up colder water from the pacific ocean. The pacific ocean isn't a perfectly static heat sink and it changes phases between when La Nina's are pulling up colder water and when El Ninos are radiating that heat back into the atmosphere.
There are lots more. I actually heard about this on KIRO on my way to work.
The interesting thing in the original article I posted, to me at least, was this part: In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.
The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.
Don'cha just love peer review.
It was probably rejected because it was crap science not because it was "controversial".
Nobody is gonna be convinced here because we all have a ton of information on which we have based our personal opinions. The main difference is basically who each of us chooses to believe, based on a myriad of factors.
When did the conservatives get infected with the 1960s-era relativism?
Nobody is gonna be convinced here because we all have a ton of information on which we have based our personal opinions. The main difference is basically who each of us chooses to believe, based on a myriad of factors.
When did the conservatives get infected with the 1960s-era relativism?
Isn't it a very funny kind of argument? Those who argue that too much is politicized often turn around and try to politicize more things. Often, everything is absolute until suddenly it's relative, and it usually becomes relative the instant all the blatant contradictions and falsifications become clear.
The "who will you believe" argument is flawed; it is an argument that attempts to pit reason with proof against the personal authority of the speaker. Those who use this argument, don't seem to realize that they are the only ones relying on personal authority. Ironically, it is often implied or stated outright that the source that was "divinely inspired" is the most trustworthy one! As if those who hallucinate are more trustworthy than the actual facts.
So, this would suggest that we should see immediate and significant cooling. Which is a good prediction. If we don't experience that, it suggests the greenhouse gas portion of global warming is much worst than even anticipated.
I've addressed this before, numerous times. The heat content of the pacific ocean is substantially more important than the heat content of the atmosphere. Then ENSO oscillations in the pacific ocean overwhelm the global warming signature on a year-by-year basis. Removing the ENSO signature, however, the earth is still warming:
Since the oceans are also more important of a heat reservior than the atmosphere it also makes sense to look at the global ocean temperature directly rather than the global atmospheric temperature:
There's also satellite data showing the thermal budget for the earth is out of balance (solar input exceeds radiation emitted from the globe).
By 2012, we will back in a new solar maximum, and any el nino year we have around then will blow away the 1998 temperature record conclusively.
Yes, we had a cold winter, but that is due to winds near the ecuator pulling up colder water from the pacific ocean. The pacific ocean isn't a perfectly static heat sink and it changes phases between when La Nina's are pulling up colder water and when El Ninos are radiating that heat back into the atmosphere.
There are lots more. I actually heard about this on KIRO on my way to work.
The interesting thing in the original article I posted, to me at least, was this part: In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.
The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.
Don'cha just love peer review.
It was probably rejected because it was crap science not because it was "controversial".
Heh, heh. This post is why I left until I saw that sunspot article. And that was because of the report I heard on KIRO this morning. You keep arguing this stuff. Have fun.
Oh yeah, the ocean stores more heat than the atmosphere. Mmmhmmm. That's why it is faster to cool your soup with an ice cube instead of by blowing on it.
Ocean trumps atmosphere, but Sun trumps ocean. And reality trumps scientists, whether they are talking about Ptolomy's solar system, Darwins finches, or the latest crop of government grant wannabe crop of scientists that say the earth is warming due to human activity and they MUST have more grant money to study further.
The earth is baking, except it's freezing. The arctic is warming, except it's bed is a volcano.
Agreed! Every scientist would agree with this, which is why the results of science are the most accurate by far. When reality interrupts, science accommodates. That's why if you want to understand how something works, you apply the scientific method.
Compare that with say religion, where faith trumps reality; or pseudo-scientific claims (Sasquatch/alien abductions) where the emotional aspect of the claim trumps any real evidence.
Heh, heh. This post is why I left until I saw that sunspot article. And that was because of the report I heard on KIRO this morning. You keep arguing this stuff. Have fun.
Oh yeah, the ocean stores more heat than the atmosphere. Mmmhmmm. That's why it is faster to cool your soup with an ice cube instead of by blowing on it.
Ocean trumps atmosphere, but Sun trumps ocean. And reality trumps scientists, whether they are talking about Ptolomy's solar system, Darwins finches, or the latest crop of government grant wannabe crop of scientists that say the earth is warming due to human activity and they MUST have more grant money to study further.
The earth is baking, except it's freezing. The arctic is warming, except it's bed is a volcano.
Etc.
Unfortunately total volcanism/geothermal heat doesn't have a fraction of the heat necessary to cause global warming, and the arctic's "bed" is not a volcano. There are volcanoes in the arctic. Their global impact is insignificant.
The total amount of geothermal energy flux is scientifically known quantity and it isn't enough to melt the arctic. Reality is consistently trumping you, and the right wing blogosphere echo chamber that you live in.
We can also accurately measure the Sun's flux. The sun is a variable star, but that variability is low enough to not significantly matter. We know that the variability in the Earth's orbital parameters exceeds the intrinsic variability of the Sun itself because of the relationship of the Milankovich cycles to the Ice Ages. We also know the magnitude of the effect of the Sun's variability during the Maunder minimum. A lot of scientific work has been done studying the Sun because that is the *obvious* first step to explain variability in the Earth's climate. Why do you continue to stick your head in the sand and believe that climate variability *must* be due to the Sun while excluding the mountain of evidence (collected from the "Reality" which you claim trumps everything else) that shows that the Sun is actually not sufficiently variable?
And here's a new publication on reconstructions of the global temperature historically back almost 2,000 years:
See Figure 3. Note that if you attribute the whole decline in temperature around the 1600s to the maunder minimum what the upper magnitude of the effect of the Sun's variability is. Even if Livingston and Penn wound up being correct that sunspots were disappearing it would not mean a new ice age (although it would be about equivalent to the total anthropogenic warming so far).
(also note that the causes of the LIA are thought, by the scientific community, to be reduction in solar output and increased volcanism -- its not like they deny that solar variability has any effect at all on climate)
The point that I have not yet seen rebutted is the idea that high-energy radiation from the sun causes clouds to form. You mentioned previously that galactic radiation had been ruled out, but I haven't yet seen a rebuttal for solar high energy radiation. I just did a quick google, and the first article was yet another prime example of why there is so much disagreement. The first citation in http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-a ... arming.htm it summarizes an article as follows:
Solanki 2008 reconstructs 11,400 years of sunspot numbers using radiocarbon concentrations, finding "solar
variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the
strong warming during the past three decades".
And I think great, now I can be one of the cool kids and believe global warming just like everybody else. So I go to the article, and yes it does say that, but look what they didn't quote:
According to our reconstruction, the level of solar
activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous
period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years
ago.We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only
of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity
periods were shorter than the present episode.
That is from the abstract, and a quick skim of the article indicates that statement is well founded from their evidence.
In other words, not only didn't they debunk it, they provided evidence consistent with a force that would cause temperatures to increase at the same time that industrialization would, and yet that could left of out a website called http://www.skepticalscience.com. You can understand when I am less than interested in reading further from that website.
The argument that global warming is caused by human activity seems to depend on ruling out other causes, such as solar radiation, volcanoes, etc. The fact that such a fundamental part of current dogma is so radically incorrect is why skeptics such as myself are looking for real direct proof before we will agree do cripple the economy based on tenuous scientific arguments from people whose income depends on a heightened state of concern.
In other words, not only didn't they debunk it, they provided evidence consistent with a force that would cause temperatures to increase at the same time that industrialization would, and yet that could left of out a website called http://www.skepticalscience.com. You can understand when I am less than interested in reading further from that website.
here's more from that reference:
"Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot number may be taken as an indication that the Sun has contributed to the unusual degree of climate change during the twentieth century, we stress that solar variability is unlikely to be the prime cause of the strong warming during the last three decades (3). In ref. 3, reconstructions of solar total and spectral irradiance as well as of cosmic ray flux were compared with surface temperature records covering approximately 150 years. It was shown that even under the extreme assumption that the Sun was responsible for all the global warming prior to 1970, at the most 30% of the strong warming since then can be of solar origin."
That is a preprint, not a peer reviewed publication. You have to read everything on that archive skeptically -- it exists in order for physicists to publish their preprints and gather comments from their peers on them, and for informal publication and dissemination of ideas faster than the journals can do it. And the paper is a reanalysis of someone else's data, and its entirely possible that there were seasonal variations in detector performance in the data (and which the original authors may have discovered the reasons for and discarded those results, not realizing someone else would go sifting through their data looking for effects outside the scope of the original paper). Those results need to be peer-reviewed and validated independently and seasonal effects on the detection apparatus needs to be controlled for by the people doing the experiments.
I believe that Ephraim Fischbach also has previously found 'new physics' on other people's data that was subsequently found to not live up to scrutiny, but I haven't tracked down the specifics of that.
Comments
I'm only an interested amateur, though, and I've only been trying to find answers to these questions for about the past 6 months or so. I do have 19 years of experience on the internet and have an extremely strong b.s. filter and I spent way too many years in college studying actual hard science and spending too much time in the libraries. I can recognize that the realclimate.org guys generally know what they're talking about, I know enough physics and math to check some of their work against reality.
That's it, though. Anyone can get educated if they're wiling to spend some time at it and dig and read and make gradual process.
The martian ice caps are melting due to local changes in martian climate, not due to increased solar activity. I already posted the debunking of this earlier:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... g-on-mars/
One of the other linked to articles from this link discusses Svensmark's GCR hypothesis:
http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html? ... 332f1f&k=0
Unfortunately for Svnesmark, while the jury is out over GCRs influencing cloud formation, the flux of GCRs is another of those annoyingly well-measured variables and there is no correlation to climate change:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... /#more-476
I also found a good debunking of a solar forcing paper, which is a pretty good precis on how to skeptically read a scientific paper:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... excursion/
It'd be nice if the global warming skeptics would just take the authors names off the papers that they think prove anthropogenic global warming is wrong and type those names into the search bar on realclimate.org and then come up with a substantial criticism of RC's analysis that goes beyond screaming about the scientific establishment not being receptive to other viewpoints. There really should be a Law about that like Godwin's Law that when someone just slams the whole scientific establishment and has nothing to say of any substance that the argument is over and the other person wins.
You see this with physics cranks who think special relativity is all wrong and other completely bogus views as well. The RC link with the funny french title (above) has one brilliant sentence in it:
This is a consistent factor of scientific cranks. They're not attempting to build upon any kind of known knowledgebase, but to disregard everything science has produced and present an idea in a complete vacuum.
When you look at actual scientific revolutions, scientists don't actually do this. The revolutions of special relativity threw away bad science, but it was bad science that never worked. Global Climate Models have been tested against historical records. CO2 as a GHG has been well tested for the underlying physics, well tested against 1-d climate models, and tested against current climate change, any of which could have invalidated those models. No experiment ever found the aether, and when Einstein did away with it, he was removing something for which there was no evidence of at all. If you want a current parallel, you might want to look at string theory. Until you get some experimental results from string theory it is on fragile ground. With AGW there are experimental results and lots of data, and any contrarian explanation needs to not occur in a complete vacuum, cherry picking a few favored datasets, ignoring other important ones (like the complete lack of GCR variability in the experimental record) and mangling the data when pieces of it don't fit the underlying hypothesis.
The skeptical claims, however, work from the premise that an intelligent, open-minded skeptic must first deny any utility has come out of any experiment related to the climate ever in history. And then the skeptic moves forwards and finds some datapoint or experiment which "proves" something that climate scientists are ignoring because it doesn't fit in with their politically-inspired AGW theories designed to crush global capitalism. Unfortunately there's usually a mountain of very good experimental data which crushes the "skeptics" theory dead, but which was conveniently discarded in the first step of this process.
Uh...actually the believe that lemmings march to their own deaths is entirely an urban legend produced by one of the true villains in modern society: Disney.
A large part of this debate has boiled down to "how trustworthy is scientific consensus." Here's the thing, you (and I) are not an expert in most fields. Nobody is an expert in most fields. End of story. Therefore, when a system is in place where the experts can be fact-checked by peers, and where dissenting opinions eventually do percolate to the top, it is best to assume the results of that system are the "most correct" results. For that reasons, the most appropriate starting position in any of these disagreements is scientific consensus (if one exists).
That's not to say you should turn your brain off. Quite the opposite. When convincing, accurate information becomes available that counters the consensus opinion you need to weigh that against your original position (scientific consensus) and decide an appropriate new paradigm to accept. This rarely means discarding the scientific consensus however, because it was generally formed by experts and you are not an expert.
Let's consider a few case examples of very smart people (smarter than you and smarter than me) who stepped outside their expertise and proved to be very wrong.
Example 1: Linus Pauling:
He is the reason you probably believe that massive doses of vitamin C (a water soluble vitamin) can prevent or cure the common cold. Here's an article that accurate sums up fact-vs-fiction. Why did people believe him? He is a rare recipient of two Nobel Prizes: the chemistry prize and the peace prize. However, he wasn't a biologist.
Example 2: Albert Einstein:
Perhaps you've heard "God does not play dice with the universe" as being attributed to him. In fact, if you come from certain misinformed circles you may have even heard that quote incorrectly applied as an anti-evolution statement. It is in fact a statement of disbelief in quantum mechanics. Einstein was not only brilliant, but a physicist. Even in the domain of physics he was confronted by a truth that was beyond his ability to accept.
In short, unless you are much much smarter than Einstein and Linus Pauling, it is unlikely you will be able to fully understand, let alone contradict, the state of the art in any especially complex science. That's why you're better off trusting the experts.
ROB
The bull crap is thinking that climate models can predict the amount of warming out 100 years and using that to bankrupt our economy in an effort to literally challenge the SUN....
Can you clarify?
1) Why can't they predict *climate* out 100 years? Is that because they can't predict the *weather* out more than 6 days? Are you making the same argument that the article makes about that?
2) Why will moving to alternative energy sources bankrupt our economy?
3) Do you think that climate scientists have ignored the role of the big hot yellow orb (the sun) in their modeling of climate? What non debunked research do you have that puts global warming exclusively in the sun's domain?
Simply declaring something as "bull crap" is easy and convenient if it happens to fit in with your world view and opinions.
That's a BS position to take. I for one can always accurately and without bias declare things to be BS and it is never convenient. :twisted:
Bull crap!!! :P
Energy conservation is GDP-positive, not GDP-negative. Similarly, switching to wind and solar power is GDP-positive (hence the stock graphs of FSLR and VWDRY.PK having a bias up and to the right). Same goes for electric or hybrid-plugin vehicles.
If you want to talk about crap predictions, lets talk about economics. Nobody is certain how much it'll cost GDP to reduce carbon emissions and cap the growth of CO2 levels in the atmosphere, it may actually not cost anything net in GDP and the switch to carbon-neutral technology could be the technology which lifts us out of the current housing-led recession.
EOL
So, this would suggest that we should see immediate and significant cooling. Which is a good prediction. If we don't experience that, it suggests the greenhouse gas portion of global warming is much worst than even anticipated.
In other words, give it a couple months and see what the MSM produces. If you see reports of "coldest autumn/winter in last 50+ years, then maybe global warming concerns are slightly exaggerated. But if you see reports of a slightly colder autumn/winter than usual (like if they call it a "La Nina") and nothing else, well that's very strong evidence that the GW watchdogs are right.
That, or I completely misunderstood this article.
on the other hand we've already seen the first sunspots with a different polarity on them earlier in the year indicating that we're entering the next solar cycle.
so, its still way too soon to call a new maunder minimum.
and here's a much more scientifically valid, mainstream and less speculative estimate of solar cycle 23:
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml
and even if we do get another maunder minimum, that buys about -0.2C of a total forcing, which would help to counteract the effects so far of GHG warming in the past 20-30 years or so, but would not plunge the Earth into a new ice age. if we didn't squander that 20-30 years arguing about anthropogenic GHG effects that would buy us some valuable time.
the cosmic ray stuff is also scientific garbage:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... smic-rays/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... te-driver/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... or-a-spin/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... w-clothes/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... so-easily/
And I love the "daily tech" link. Is that kind of like Scientific American, except for the interwebs?
http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Mo ... e10866.htm
There are lots more. I actually heard about this on KIRO on my way to work.
The interesting thing in the original article I posted, to me at least, was this part:
In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.
The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.
Don'cha just love peer review.
That's old news.
Speaking of old news:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/34939.html
An look at the solar activity graphs from Lamont's and my posts and compare it to the actual global temperature charts. More and more it appears the sun matters. Which, I suspect, is what scentists thought for a long time until the recent crop of public school graduates. Maybe we SHOULD overhaul our schools.
Here's an interesting book by the same author, btw:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB ... _middlebox
Yes, actually. It's the only system we have today that actually works. It might come to consensus slower than we would like. The vast majority of situations where a good hypothesis is dismissed occurs only because the researchers involved haven't put in the face time yet.
Let me put this another way, what alternative would you suggest? Undereducated bloggers harping on something they disagree with viscerally at an emotional level without any actual understanding of the proof?
That's a silly assertion and a straw-man. Anyone who says the sun doesn't matter lacks either the sense of touch to feel warmth on a sunny day, or the mental acuity to correlate that warmth with the sun's rays. This, like all the other pseudo-scientific "debates" comes down to one side producing evidence and proof, while the other disagrees because they dislike the ramifications. The side that disagrees then trumps up old/out-dated quotes. <sigh/>
Nobody is gonna be convinced here because we all have a ton of information on which we have based our personal opinions. The main difference is basically who each of us chooses to believe, based on a myriad of factors. I just like to throw a bit of levity in from time to time.
My bad. Earlier on this thread, some suggested - in a serious tone - that we all need to recognize the sun as the primary source of global climate. In that murky pool, it was unclear to me that your comments was in jest as opposed to others who make such statements as though nobody else can see the obvious. So, I didn't catch the joke.
I've addressed this before, numerous times. The heat content of the pacific ocean is substantially more important than the heat content of the atmosphere. Then ENSO oscillations in the pacific ocean overwhelm the global warming signature on a year-by-year basis. Removing the ENSO signature, however, the earth is still warming:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... -and-enso/
Since the oceans are also more important of a heat reservior than the atmosphere it also makes sense to look at the global ocean temperature directly rather than the global atmospheric temperature:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... revisions/
There's also satellite data showing the thermal budget for the earth is out of balance (solar input exceeds radiation emitted from the globe).
By 2012, we will back in a new solar maximum, and any el nino year we have around then will blow away the 1998 temperature record conclusively.
Yes, we had a cold winter, but that is due to winds near the ecuator pulling up colder water from the pacific ocean. The pacific ocean isn't a perfectly static heat sink and it changes phases between when La Nina's are pulling up colder water and when El Ninos are radiating that heat back into the atmosphere.
It was probably rejected because it was crap science not because it was "controversial".
When did the conservatives get infected with the 1960s-era relativism?
Isn't it a very funny kind of argument? Those who argue that too much is politicized often turn around and try to politicize more things. Often, everything is absolute until suddenly it's relative, and it usually becomes relative the instant all the blatant contradictions and falsifications become clear.
The "who will you believe" argument is flawed; it is an argument that attempts to pit reason with proof against the personal authority of the speaker. Those who use this argument, don't seem to realize that they are the only ones relying on personal authority. Ironically, it is often implied or stated outright that the source that was "divinely inspired" is the most trustworthy one! As if those who hallucinate are more trustworthy than the actual facts.
</rant>
Heh, heh. This post is why I left until I saw that sunspot article. And that was because of the report I heard on KIRO this morning. You keep arguing this stuff. Have fun.
Oh yeah, the ocean stores more heat than the atmosphere. Mmmhmmm. That's why it is faster to cool your soup with an ice cube instead of by blowing on it.
Ocean trumps atmosphere, but Sun trumps ocean. And reality trumps scientists, whether they are talking about Ptolomy's solar system, Darwins finches, or the latest crop of government grant wannabe crop of scientists that say the earth is warming due to human activity and they MUST have more grant money to study further.
The earth is baking, except it's freezing. The arctic is warming, except it's bed is a volcano.
Etc.
Agreed! Every scientist would agree with this, which is why the results of science are the most accurate by far. When reality interrupts, science accommodates. That's why if you want to understand how something works, you apply the scientific method.
Compare that with say religion, where faith trumps reality; or pseudo-scientific claims (Sasquatch/alien abductions) where the emotional aspect of the claim trumps any real evidence.
Unfortunately total volcanism/geothermal heat doesn't have a fraction of the heat necessary to cause global warming, and the arctic's "bed" is not a volcano. There are volcanoes in the arctic. Their global impact is insignificant.
The total amount of geothermal energy flux is scientifically known quantity and it isn't enough to melt the arctic. Reality is consistently trumping you, and the right wing blogosphere echo chamber that you live in.
We can also accurately measure the Sun's flux. The sun is a variable star, but that variability is low enough to not significantly matter. We know that the variability in the Earth's orbital parameters exceeds the intrinsic variability of the Sun itself because of the relationship of the Milankovich cycles to the Ice Ages. We also know the magnitude of the effect of the Sun's variability during the Maunder minimum. A lot of scientific work has been done studying the Sun because that is the *obvious* first step to explain variability in the Earth's climate. Why do you continue to stick your head in the sand and believe that climate variability *must* be due to the Sun while excluding the mountain of evidence (collected from the "Reality" which you claim trumps everything else) that shows that the Sun is actually not sufficiently variable?
And here's a new publication on reconstructions of the global temperature historically back almost 2,000 years:
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/a ... PNAS08.pdf
See Figure 3. Note that if you attribute the whole decline in temperature around the 1600s to the maunder minimum what the upper magnitude of the effect of the Sun's variability is. Even if Livingston and Penn wound up being correct that sunspots were disappearing it would not mean a new ice age (although it would be about equivalent to the total anthropogenic warming so far).
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2 ... stupid.php
another one reubutting the idea that the current warming is just a 'rebound' from the LIA:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2 ... om-lia.php
(also note that the causes of the LIA are thought, by the scientific community, to be reduction in solar output and increased volcanism -- its not like they deny that solar variability has any effect at all on climate)
The point that I have not yet seen rebutted is the idea that high-energy radiation from the sun causes clouds to form. You mentioned previously that galactic radiation had been ruled out, but I haven't yet seen a rebuttal for solar high energy radiation. I just did a quick google, and the first article was yet another prime example of why there is so much disagreement. The first citation in http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-a ... arming.htm it summarizes an article as follows:
And I think great, now I can be one of the cool kids and believe global warming just like everybody else. So I go to the article, and yes it does say that, but look what they didn't quote:
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
That is from the abstract, and a quick skim of the article indicates that statement is well founded from their evidence.
In other words, not only didn't they debunk it, they provided evidence consistent with a force that would cause temperatures to increase at the same time that industrialization would, and yet that could left of out a website called http://www.skepticalscience.com. You can understand when I am less than interested in reading further from that website.
The argument that global warming is caused by human activity seems to depend on ruling out other causes, such as solar radiation, volcanoes, etc. The fact that such a fundamental part of current dogma is so radically incorrect is why skeptics such as myself are looking for real direct proof before we will agree do cripple the economy based on tenuous scientific arguments from people whose income depends on a heightened state of concern.
here's more from that reference:
"Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot number may be taken as an indication that the Sun has contributed to the unusual degree of climate change during the twentieth century, we stress that solar variability is unlikely to be the prime cause of the strong warming during the last three decades (3). In ref. 3, reconstructions of solar total and spectral irradiance as well as of cosmic ray flux were compared with surface temperature records covering approximately 150 years. It was shown that even under the extreme assumption that the Sun was responsible for all the global warming prior to 1970, at the most 30% of the strong warming since then can be of solar origin."
That is a preprint, not a peer reviewed publication. You have to read everything on that archive skeptically -- it exists in order for physicists to publish their preprints and gather comments from their peers on them, and for informal publication and dissemination of ideas faster than the journals can do it. And the paper is a reanalysis of someone else's data, and its entirely possible that there were seasonal variations in detector performance in the data (and which the original authors may have discovered the reasons for and discarded those results, not realizing someone else would go sifting through their data looking for effects outside the scope of the original paper). Those results need to be peer-reviewed and validated independently and seasonal effects on the detection apparatus needs to be controlled for by the people doing the experiments.
I believe that Ephraim Fischbach also has previously found 'new physics' on other people's data that was subsequently found to not live up to scrutiny, but I haven't tracked down the specifics of that.