by Eric Martin
While it depresses me to no-end that so many on the Right side of the spectrum insist on obfuscating the nature of the climate change crisis by making sophomoric arguments - like pointing out that sometimes it snows in February, and that the presence of snow in winter supposedly disproves climate change – at least the science remains…well, based on the scientific method.
"January, according to satellite (data), was the hottest January we've ever seen," said Nicholls of Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science in Melbourne.
"Last November was the hottest November we've ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen," he said of the satellite data record since 1979.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000.[…]
Scientists say global warming is not uniform in all areas and that climate models predict there will likely be greater extremes of cold and heat, floods and droughts.
"Global warming is a trend superimposed upon natural variability, variability that still exists despite global warming," said Kevin Walsh, associate professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne.
Anyway, just as a heat spell in summer would not prove global trends in warming, neither does a cold spell in winter disprove global warming. Importantly, weather is not the same as climate, and global trends are not manifested uniformly or instantly in all areas at once. The fact that those sentences need to be typed in order to counter prevalent GOP arguments about climate change is, as I wrote, depressing.
And when a group resorts to such arguments, it usually indicates a lack of faith in their ability to make fact-based, coherent arguments. It's quite a tell, really. Or at least it should be.
“shooould we talk about the government?”
And when a group resorts to such arguments, it usually indicates a lack of faith in their ability to make fact-based, coherent arguments
their argument is, as always: libruls are baaaad mm-k. everything else they say derives from that catechism. and if a particular derivation leads into what appears to be a logical impossibility, that’s OK – the faithful understand that the fundamental truth remains true. and thus a falsehood becomes a way to speak the truth.
… sophomoric arguments – like pointing out that sometimes it snows in February …
They’re also parochial arguments. It’s summer in Australia right now.
Naturally, parochialism and hypocrisy are not mutually exclusive. If we have a record heat wave in July, the same sophomores will no doubt sputter that it means nothing because, hey, it’s snowing in Chile.
–TP
And even if they are going to conflate weather with climate, they can’t even figure out how weather works. Here’s a clue, guys: When air is warmer, it carries more moisture. As hotter, wetter air moves across the US from west to east, and collides with the cold air, you’re going to get snow in places you don’t normally get snow, and more snow in places that do get it.
It’s a tactic of distraction and the only counter is a slow accumulation of facts and respect for facts.
I will say this, though: the tendency of people to be very skeptical about apocalyptic scenarios that demand immediate, sweeping responses is in general a very good one.
We could have used a lot more of that skepticism when it came to Iraq and to terrorism and to the bank bailouts, and I appreciate that a skepticism that doesn’t come into play for fake apocalypses but does when they’re real is not the most useful, but I don’t think it’s that simple.
Leaving aside the specific case at hand, people think that predictions of imminent apocalypse tend to be pretexts for pushing an otherwise unattractive agenda. That’s not always the case, but unless you know enough to make a truly informed decision for yourself, that’s the way to bet.
I think it’s good to keep that in mind when figuring out ways to persuade people about something you really think is very dangerous. In particular, I think that it’s important to make clear that the response you’re seeking is not in itself so unattractive that it could never be adopted without the threat.
For global warming, in recent years I think that there has been a mixed record on that. On the one hand, the increasing polarization of the debate (driven by resistance from entrenched interests that stand to lose from change, but do not represent most people) has seemed to me to drive an increased harshness of tone and far less tolerance of ordinary skepticism or even simple ignorance, to the detriment of persuasion.
On the other hand, the description of the desired response as something that is gradual, does not have to involve harsh changes, and does not mean the end of industrial society, has meant that even while “belief” in global warming has dropped, acceptance of the actual measures needed to combat it has grown. The mountain west is full of wind turbines (if you’ve driven cross-country in the last few years you almost certainly will have seen 100ft turbine blades being carried on trucks); overall fuel efficiency of the vehicle fleet is up; opposition to new coal plants is strong; cap-and-trade is supported even by people who aren’t 100% sold on global warming, and it’s likely to pass in the next year or two.
To me those seem like instructive experiences. Practical, not apocalyptic, is the tone to take. Emphasize the incidental benefits of the approach you want to follow, try to find paths that minimize disruptive change, and have respect for people’s skepticism even as you politely disagree with it.
What is the difference between climate and weather?
What is the difference between climate and weather?
climate is weather over time.
C=W/T?
climate is weather over time.
So it’s how fast the weather is?
Slarti and hairshirt keep thinking division.
Cleek was talking integration.
–TP
Climate is meteorological conditions over a long period of time. Weather is those same conditions over short periods of time. That’s why it is possible to predict climate with better accuracy than weather.
Hey, I’m all for racial equality.
On the one hand, the increasing polarization of the debate (driven by resistance from entrenched interests that stand to lose from change, but do not represent most people) has seemed to me to drive an increased harshness of tone and far less tolerance of ordinary skepticism or even simple ignorance, to the detriment of persuasion.
I think what this analysis misses is the fact that for many people, policy questions like climate change responses are more about tribal affiliation than debates about facts. In my experience, lots of climate change skeptics aren’t amenable to information: every bit of information that doesn’t match their world view is disregarded or twisted. Besides, they “know” that climate change is just a crazy scam cooked up by the leftist elites. In my experience, trying to discuss these issues rationally is sort of like trying to convince someone to change their favorite football team. I mean, people argue about football teams all the time, but how often does anyone change their minds based on one of those arguments? Not very, because team loyalty has a lot more to do with tribal identification than it does with facts and figures.
Another way of looking at it is that there are lots of legislators representing flyover country who could bring a lot of cash to their constituents if they pushed for cap and trade and a smarter electrical grid, but they’re not doing that. There are lot of towns in the midwest that are really struggling as the young people and jobs flee, leaving behind an economic base insufficient to support those who remain.
You need to find better sources of right-wing AGW denial, Eric.
the tendency of people to be very skeptical about apocalyptic scenarios that demand immediate, sweeping responses is in general a very good one.
I don’t disagree with this, but I also don’t see anybody insisting on immediate, sweeping responses.
Kyoto, in 1997, called for a reduction in the emission of four greenhouse gases by 5.2% of the 1990 levels by 2012.
Fifteen years, 5.2% reduction. Basically any way you want to get there, including market-based options like carbon credit trades, was fine.
I think what people object to is *any change whatsoever* in their existing way of life.
That’s not skepticism, it’s utter denial.
Slarti, don’t you mean that the right wing needs to find better sources of AGW denial?
–TP
You need to find better sources of right-wing AGW denial, Eric.
Huh? Please explain. Or I’m tempted to just say: What Tony P said.
No.
Refuting hottest January ever (ever meaning: in the last 30 years) with “just look at this blizzard” is probably not convincing, but if for instance someone showed that snow accumulation for a whole winter or more was globally more heavy and widespread (I don’t know of any such, this is just an example), that’d tend to be a more effective of an argument. “sometimes it snows in February” isn’t one of those persuasive arguments, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only argument, or the best.
Slarti,
I was responding to specific, and repeated, arguments from leading conservatives (pundits, journalists and legislators) that the recent snow storm refuted global warming. If you want better GOP/conservative arguments, don’t blame me. I’m with you.
Increased snowfall, even in record numbers, would never (on its own) be indicative of a cooling trend absent…an actual cooling trend.
As mentioned upthread, increased snowfall could, in fact, be a manifestation of a warming trend (increased moisture in the atmosphere due to increased evaporation). In the end, temperature readings are what matter – not snow or rainfall or hurricanes.
Refuting hottest January ever (ever meaning: in the last 30 years)…
Yes, yes, the data from that one source is indeed limited in terms of years. But then there’s this from the same piece:
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000
160 years.
Buffalo gets more snow than the South Pole, ergo Buffalo is colder than the South Pole.
See how easy that is?
Agreed!
I think the most important current argument is over what those temperature readings mean, after they’ve been adjusted for shipping & handling, and over the reasoning behind the removal of goodly chunks of non-urban station data from the database used to compute global temperature trends.
There are either justifiable reasons for what has been done to the raw data, or not.
Looking to pundits or reporters of any political stripe for decently informed discussion of AGW is, well, overly hopeful.
Looking to pundits or reporters of any political stripe for decently informed discussion of AGW is, well, overly hopeful.
Totally agree.
That’s why I stick with the scientists that are experts in these areas. That’s my motto.
And the overwhelming consensus for such scientists is…well, an overwhelming consensus for man made warming.*
There are either justifiable reasons for what has been done to the raw data, or not.
See, above, re: stick with the scientists.
(*as published in the Tautology Club Weekly)
but since the scientists are all in on the conspiracy (cause they’re all looking for that sweet sweet grant money that only comes when you support the consensus!), you can’t trust them either.
Looking to pundits or reporters of any political stripe for decently informed discussion of AGW is, well, overly hopeful.
Why? Can’t they read?
Slarti wants a better class of right-wing AGW deniers.
Good luck with that. You are stuck with the ones Exxon bought.
And the fact that they don’t have anything less inane to say than “gee, it’s awfully snowy” is a sign of how little substantive basis they have for their views.
At the end of the day, it is clear that their views are driven by the politics or by narrow economic self-interest, not by science. Hence the lack of science in their talking points.
But they can’t just say they oppose doing something about AGW because it is bad for their bottom line: they know that argument is a non-starter. So they talk about snowy days and hope for the best. It’s working pretty well for them so far.
There’s more to understanding than reading and regurgitating. Or so one would hope.
There’s more to understanding than reading and regurgitating. Or so one would hope.
Again, stick with the scientists that can do more, as requested.
Why? Can’t they read?
Many journalists are incapable of adjudicating competing claims, despite being literate. This problem increases dramatically when evidence involves numbers. After all, only the most innumerate of people could possibly look at the journalism industry, look at the cost of going to J-school, and decide to get a J-school degree in preparation for a career in journalism.
Slarti,
There’s people like you, and then there’s people like Sean Hannity. With you, one can have a good-faith argument. But first you have to agree that Hannity is a spokesman for the “right wing” and you’re not.
As an engineer, you probably agree that “global” temperature is a theoretical construct. There is no one place on Earth where we can stick a thermometer to measure it. (Jokes about this or that place being the armpit of the world aside, of course.) But, also as an engineer, you probably agree that “global” temperature is nevertheless a real thing. You would not argue that it’s meaningless to call the Earth a warmer planet than Mars.
So, one question is whether global temperature is going up, down, or sideways. A separate question is how global temperature change in either direction would affect the to-and-fro we call “the economy”. A third question is how any change to “the economy” would affect global temperature.
Maybe the answers are: sideways, very little, and not at all. I’m not qualified to say. (Hell, I’m not qualified to say that matter is made of atoms.) I venture to suggest that neither are you.
But I’d still like to know your answers to those three questions. No doubt they are tentative answers, in the true spirit of science. I can live with that.
–TP
There’s more temperature data than just since the 1850s as well. The Greenland Ice Sheet carries seasonal records going back 100,000 years like rings on trees and has captured layers of dust from known eruptions that allow scientists to calibrate the data with admirable accuracy. The fossil record and the oceans also capture climate data, though with less precision.
Looking to pundits or reporters of any political stripe for decently informed discussion of AGW is, well, overly hopeful.
For a value of AGW equal to, well, damned near anything.
Today’s hearing in the UK was live blogged by the Guardian here Interesting.
Blogged, quoting(?) perhaps paraphrasing Phil Jones:
Jones says CRU made the list of weather stations was available 6 months after the first FOI request.
But Jones pushes back – it is not “standard practice” to publish all the data and methods. But then concedes, “perhaps it should be”.
Jones makes a mea culpa: “I have obviously written some really awful emails.”
Jones is emphasising what David Adam pointed out earlier – that the divergence of the tree ring temperature data was in the open – in the Nature paper, which I have the link for now.
Well, I thought it was interesting, anyway.
The CRU thing was embarrassing for me – I’m from Norwich & love the University of East Anglia, where the CRU is based. I don’t think there was a smoking gun there, but there was some stuff unworthy of ethical scientific behavior.
On the resistance of people to taking the word of scientists as a call to action, I think it’s worth remembering that A) the fallacy of scientism exists, and B) people are aware that it exists. It should not be a surprise that “Trust me, I’m a scientist” is not regarded as dispositive.
I think there’s a lot of tribalism in a lack of belief in AGW, but it’s not the whole story – there just aren’t enough rabid liberal-haters out there. I think a lot of people adopt the strategy that has worked pretty well for the entirety of human existence, which is “Wait and see.” When I hear railing against the immense stupidity of those who don’t believe in AGW, I don’t think it’s particularly fair. The fact is, convincing visible evidence of climate change isn’t here yet. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an individual who isn’t an expert saying that they’ll believe it when they see it.
The inoculation against taking the words of experts at face value is also our protection against Jonestown and Christian apocalyptic cults and [GODWIN VIOLATIONS] and a lot of other really dangerous things.
But that’s why I think it’s a mistake to rely on mass persuasion as to the reality of AGW as the mechanism for addressing it. If it genuinely needs to be headed off before its effects are visible, then we have to look for measures that are acceptable to a population where solid belief in AGW is a minority view.
“I think it’s good to keep that in mind when figuring out ways to persuade people about something you really think is very dangerous. In particular, I think that it’s important to make clear that the response you’re seeking is not in itself so unattractive that it could never be adopted without the threat.”
Got that precisely backwards. When the response you’re seeking is something it’s obvious you’d want anyway, the natural suspicion is that your danger is just an excuse for doing what you wanted done anyway.
What really provides people who claim a disaster is impending with credibility, is when the proposed response is something you know they WOULDN’T want if they didn’t think there was a freaking emergency. An admission against interest, as it were.
You can demand all the photovoltaics and windmills you want, and it won’t help your credibility one iota. Ask for nuclear power plants, and people will start paying attention. Because they know the people who are yelling about global warming don’t LIKE nuclear power. So they’ll figure you wouldn’t make that concession if you weren’t serious.
“Another way of looking at it is that there are lots of legislators representing flyover country who could bring a lot of cash to their constituents if they pushed for cap and trade and a smarter electrical grid, but they’re not doing that.”
James Inhoffe comes to mind.
I just accused Jim Bunning of being nuts in the “Dick” thread. All of the hot air Inhoffe and Bunning spew must account for an inordinate amount of global warming. (Both have very reddish faces, too, which must be a sign of somehing.)
Because they know the people who are yelling about global warming don’t LIKE nuclear power.
Oh, really? All of them? Every single one? And just how, pray tell, do “they” know that? (Whoever “they” are, which I’m assuming are “global warming deniers,” in which case, who cares what “they” think, as they’re either liars, morons or some combination.)
Ask for nuclear power plants, and people will start paying attention.
Obama is at least not opposed to nuclear power plants. Fat lot of difference it makes to the Limbaughs of the world.
The thing about nuclear power plants in particular is that they are necessarily too big for anyone but large corporations or government to build and operate. I have a sneaking suspicion that if Obama came out for the Department of Energy to launch a massive program of government-built, government-run, nuclear power plants — something like a latter-day Inerstate Highway System — we would hear the right wing caterwaul about that, too.
–TP
What really provides people who claim a disaster is impending with credibility, is when the proposed response is something you know they WOULDN’T want if they didn’t think there was a freaking emergency.
A good point if your goal is to convince people that there is a freaking emergency. But I could care less, since what I was saying is that convincing people that there is a freaking emergency should not be the goal of global warming science or policy, because a large number of people – probably the majority – aren’t going to believe it until they see it, and when they see it they aren’t going to care – and it isn’t going to matter – what someone said about it 20 years earlier.
The goal of global warming science and policy should be finding ways to preempt it that are palatable to a world where most people don’t believe in AGW and/or don’t personally care about it very much. Ideally 50 years from now most people still don’t have a firm opinion on it and don’t care that much – they just drive in electric cars, use power from wind turbines, and conserve energy because, duh, everyone does, what are you, stupid?
Speaking for myself, I’m happy to spend some money on nuclear power where the numbers add up. I have yet to see any case where they do, partly because nuclear power is really complicated, dangerous, and therefore expensive, and partly because the way we do nuclear power in this country is really dumb. The way they do it in France is pretty smart – stamp out a kajillion of the same conservatively-designed reactors – but involves a lot of state intervention and little opportunity for private featherbedding, so it’s not very popular here among the kind of people who push for nuclear power. Funny how that works.
My support for wind & solar isn’t because I’m a giant hippie who just wants to, like, draw power from nature, but because they’re relatively cheap, non-polluting, well-proven, scalable methods that demonstrably have the potential to replace coal, and don’t have failure modes that involve spraying radioactive debris across an entire continent. (Coal’s normal operational mode involves spraying radioactive debris across an entire continent, which why getting rid of it is so important.)
I also favor expanded use of natural gas for power generation and as a transport fuel, energy efficiency measures, CAFE standards, and infant-industry subsidies for electric cars and other clean technologies. Pretty boring stuff that we would get benefits from doing even if AGW was the figment of a drug-crazed hippie’s imagination.
“Oh, really? All of them? Every single one?”
Nah, that’s just a general observation, but given the extent to which global warming alarmists DON’T promote nuclear power, it’s a fairly safe one.
“Obama is at least not opposed to nuclear power plants.”
Yup, one of the few points in his favor.
“The thing about nuclear power plants in particular is that they are necessarily too big for anyone but large corporations or government to build and operate.”
That’s not really true, you know. It’s really more an artifact of the regulatory environment; If you’re going to spend a gazillion bucks just getting the permit, you’d better build the biggest plant you can, to amortize the regulatory costs across more megawatts. But there’s been something of a renaissance in small nuclear plant designs lately, with some of them expected to get approval in the next few years.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22867/?a=f
Or even smaller,
http://hyvin.nukku.net/no/toshiba.html
What really provides people who claim a disaster is impending with credibility, is when the proposed response is something you know they WOULDN’T want if they didn’t think there was a freaking emergency. An admission against interest, as it were.
You can demand all the photovoltaics and windmills you want, and it won’t help your credibility one iota. Ask for nuclear power plants, and people will start paying attention. Because they know the people who are yelling about global warming don’t LIKE nuclear power. So they’ll figure you wouldn’t make that concession if you weren’t serious.
I’m more than a little astonished by this.
Not least because it’s my impression that large swathes of “those who claim disaster is impending” do indeed support responsible use of nuclear power. Myself included.
The only way they don’t is if you’ve circularly defined the “believes in AGW” group to only include people that were already opposed to nuclear power – e.g., “hippies” or hard core green groups of one kind or another.
But then, that would be really stupid, because you really, REALLY shouldn’t be making up your mind about whether to believe in AGW based on what those groups say anyway, should you?
You should instead be listening to what various rational scientists say. Or the IPCC. Which is probably about as pro-nuke as their organizational mandate probably allows (they’re not a policy body, after all).
But then, I guess it doesn’t count, because the IPCC wasn’t anti-nuke before it existed, so it can’t “prove that it is serious” by changing its mind and making “an admission against interest” now?
Global temperatures during the Holocene period. For “Holocene”, read, “approximately the duration of settled human culture”.
From about 8,000 to about 3,000 years ago, the earth was apparently warmer than it is today. On average.
There was no industrial human culture then. So human activity, or at least human industrial activity, was *not* responsible for that relatively warm period, which lasted some 5,000 years.
Does this prove that human activity is, or is not, a significant factor in the current apparent warming?
No, it does not. It just means that, as best we can figure out, the earth has been significantly warmer, and cooler, than it is now during different periods since the stone age.
The earth appears to warm and cool according to its own crazy planetary logic.
That neither proves, or disproves, that human activity is the cause of the warming we seem to see now.
We don’t really know. So we make our best guess and act accordingly.
Here’s what the conservative position on warming sounds like to me:
DOCTOR: your liver enzymes are elevated. How much do you drink?
PATIENT: six beers a day and a double bourbon for a nightcap.
DOCTOR: maybe you should cut it back.
PATIENT: is there any other possible reason that my liver may be crapping out?
DOCTOR: well, you could have hepatitis or liver cancer. or the test could just be an anomaly, sometimes that happens.
PATIENT: ok then, unless you can prove to me that the *only* possible reason my liver is going south is the booze, I’m gonna keep on drinking my daily six and whiskey.
Know anyone like that? We call those people drunks and junkies. They die young.
We do know that the global climate appears to be warming up. We do know that the level of certain greenhouse gases are increasing at historically amazing rates. We do know that increased greenhouse gas levels are one of the *possible* causes of increased warming.
There are other possible causes as well. Increased greenhouse gases are one of them.
If we had half a freaking brain, we would be proactive and dial it back. Just in case.
Instead, our policy is held captive by people whose basic perspective is that nobody is going to tell them what to do, they are going to do whatever they like, live however they like, no matter what, and screw you if you don’t like it.
In 1997, the Kyoto protocol called for a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of 5.2% relative to the 1990 levels. That’s not a radical goal. It doesn’t call for the disassembly of industrial culture, it doesn’t call for masses of people to head back to the farm, it doesn’t mean you can’t drive your car or eat a hamburger when you feel like it.
It’s 5.2%.
There is one nation on earth that has signed, but not ratified, the Kyoto Protocol.
One.
That nation is the USA.
We’re ruled by drunks and junkies.
Nah, that’s just a general observation, but given the extent to which global warming alarmists DON’T promote nuclear power, it’s a fairly safe one.
Ah, so it’s something you made up. Noted, and moving on.
It’s really more an artifact of the regulatory environment;
And if there’s one thing the Bush years have taught us, it’s that we need less regulation.
And that’s on top of the obvious fact that it would also be perfectly rational to think AGW is a real thing that needs action, but also believe that nuclear is a little more risky than is necessary, and that other solutions might not be especially painful. They could be easily comprised of CO2-tax induced efficiency gains, salted with some solar/wind/wave/etc. expansion.
Especially if the action is, you know, prompt, since the sooner you start, the easier it is.
I just got back from France, where yesterday they had what was essentially a temperate out of season hurricane in which 45 people died.
Just thought I’d bring that up.
russell: There is one nation on earth that has signed, but not ratified, the Kyoto Protocol.
I agree with most of the thrust of your argument, but the main reason so many countries were willing to sign the Kyoto Protocol is that it didn’t place any restrictions on them.
That isn’t to minimize the commitments made by those countries that were restricted by the treaty, but the fact that it was signed by (in particular) China and India means absolutely nothing, because they didn’t give anything up.
In fact China followed up signing the treaty with a massive coal-plant binge and is now the world’s largest CO2 emitter. And Europe took advantage of Eastern European integration to lighten the burden of compliance by quite a bit. Doesn’t absolve the US of its responsibilities, but let’s not get too far down the road of “The US is unique in rejecting Kyoto.” It’s pretty easy to be in favor of something that doesn’t require any sacrifices from you.
Phil:
You’re so right:
[…]
Since Bush took office in 2001, there has been a 13 percent decrease in the annual number of new rules. But the new regulations’ cost to the economy will be much higher than it was before 2001. Of the new rules, 159 are “economically significant,” meaning they will cost at least $100 million a year. That’s a 10 percent increase in the number of high-cost rules since 2006, and a 70 percent increase since 2001. And at the end of 2007, another 3,882 rules were already at different stages of implementation, 757 of them targeting small businesses.
Overall, the final outcome of this Republican regulation has been a significant increase in regulatory activity and cost since 2001. The number of pages added to the Federal Register, which lists all new regulations, reached an all-time high of 78,090 in 2007, up from 64,438 in 2001.
[…]
Bush’s Regulatory Kiss-Off: Obama’s assertions to the contrary, the 43rd president was the biggest regulator since Nixon.
That’s not really true, you know. It’s really more an artifact of the regulatory environment;
I was under the impression that every single nuclear power plant constructed in the last decade had construction (not licensing) costs that were way over budget.
In any event, there are good reasons for people concerned about climate change to be skeptical of nuclear power. As I’ve explained before, it is far from clear that nuclear power is a sustainable low carbon energy source in the long term. Assuming reactor designs that have actually gone into production, it appears that there is insufficient supplies of sufficiently high density uranium to power global consumption for very long. When you run out of high density uranium, you can still use low density uranium, but the energy costs of processing and refinement go up very fast as density goes down. Now, there might not be any problem here, but there are some worrying indications. And there has not been sufficient research into the GHG emissions over the entire fuel cycle to really have confidence in nuclear power as a sustainable energy source.
Now, if you presume we have awesome breeder reactors that consume much much less fuel, then all our problems might go away. Except for the fact that these awesome breeder reactors have been talked about for the last 40 years and have gone precisely nowhere. No one has ever made a production breeder reactor, and the research prototypes have proven to be….problematic. It turns out that the engineering challenges in getting a breeder reactor to work are far more difficult than the simply physics might suggest.
We’re ruled by drunks and junkies.
Don’t forget the innumerates.
Turbulence-
Don’t you think that’s a little too pessimistic? What about designs like CANDU, for example? That’s a design from the 60s, with 42 in operation and more being build. And they’re apparently happy to eat all kinds of funky fuel.
And, while I’m no expert – gleaning most of what I know from Wikipedia – to me it seems like the problem with advanced breeder reactors isn’t so much technical as commercial/political. It looks like there just hasn’t been any particularly urgent demand for them because, for the moment, there’s still plenty of good uranium.
the main reason so many countries were willing to sign the Kyoto Protocol is that it didn’t place any restrictions on them.
How many is “so many”?
No country in the world signed on to Kyoto in good faith, or has made progress in reducing emissions?
The two biggest sources of greenhouse gases in the world are China, at a bit above 20% of the world total, and the US, at a bit below 20%.
China also has about 20% of the world’s population. Their per-capita annual emissions of greenhouse gases are about 4.6 metric tons, just slightly above the world average. The US is about 19 metric tons, per capita, per annum.
Next up after China and us are India and Russia, each of which is around 5.5% of total emissions, and it goes down from there.
We didn’t sign Kyoto because we didn’t want to take the economic hit, and because we don’t like the UN telling us what to do.
In other words, I got mine, screw you.
I am not required to agree to anything. Sean Hannity speaks for Sean Hannity. Some people agree with most of what he says; I am not one of them.
I would venture to suggest that the only relevant question that captures the AGW debate is: is the Earth’s temperature increasing any nontrivial amount due to human activity?
What the Earth’s temperature is doing at any given time is irrelevant to the debate, without first supposing that mankind has any kind of controlling influence. What the temperature is doing is not uninteresting, but it’s not something we can attempt to control, unless you suppose that we can (and indeed, do) control it.
My own private opinions in the matter are: 1) It’s gone up, but is currently rather flat; 2) Depends on how much change, and 3) Anything we do on the scale of what’s being discussed will have a huge impact on our economy.
Which is not to say that we should not look to make efficiency improvements, and pursue new technologies. Or even look for some way to achieve a quite lower equilibrium population. Those are (IMHO, of course) worthy ends, irrespective of how the debate turns out.
Now what?
Ice sheet records are not temperature. Greenland temperature is not global temperature. Tree ring widths are also not temperature. Calibrating temperature with admirable accuracy is not, as far as I am aware, possible with only the aid of volcanic dust deposits.
Don’t you think that’s a little too pessimistic?
Perhaps. But looking over the history of the nuclear power industry, I see a great of arrogance, astonishingly brazen attempts to socialize risks while keeping profits private, and a fair bit of incompetence. The history of nuclear power has been full of broken promises.
What about designs like CANDU, for example? That’s a design from the 60s, with 42 in operation and more being build. And they’re apparently happy to eat all kinds of funky fuel.
Really? I thought CANDU was able to consume slightly lower density uranium than LWRs. Is that what you mean by “all kinds of funky fuel”?
And, while I’m no expert – gleaning most of what I know from Wikipedia – to me it seems like the problem with advanced breeder reactors isn’t so much technical as commercial/political. It looks like there just hasn’t been any particularly urgent demand for them because, for the moment, there’s still plenty of good uranium.
This doesn’t make any sense to me. Power from conventional reactors is more expensive than fossil fuel generated power AFAIK. Given that, I would expect that nuclear power savvy countries would have a substantial incentive to realize much more efficient reactor designs like breeder reactors. There have been several attempts, but they’ve all failed. How much failure do we have to witness before we conclude that this problem is genuinely hard and perhaps even beyond our abilities? Or does the nuclear power industry get yet another a free pass?
Ice sheet records are not temperature. Greenland temperature is not global temperature. Tree ring widths are also not temperature.
By this standard, it seems impossible to measure the temperature of anything. If I try to measure the temperature outside right now using a thermometer, then you might say “the height of a column of mercury is not temperature” or perhaps “the voltage across a diode is not temperature” or maybe “the angle described by a bimetallic strip is not temperature”. I don’t think this sort of thermodynamic pedantry does much to advance the discussion. If you have serious methodological objections to ice core or tree ring temperature reconstructions, please state them directly.
“By this standard, it seems impossible to measure the temperature of anything.”
Sure, you could just give up. Or you could use instruments designed to measure temperature to measure temperature, and accept that they have certain small, knowable error characteristics.
How many is “so many”?
Of the 187 countries that have signed and ratified the treaty, only 40 were Annex I countries required to reduce emissions levels below 1990 levels. All the rest were developing countries whose effective restrictions under the treaty were nil.
I don’t want to minimize the commitments made by those other developed countries that signed the treaty, I just want to be clear about what sacrifices were asked for from the other 147 countries, which is, basically, zip.
If you have serious methodological objections to ice core or tree ring temperature reconstructions, please state them directly.
Tree ring widths are a gauge of favorable conditions for tree growth. Temperature is only one of these.
This is not really a new issue. There have been some rather well-published discussions of the suitability of using, for instance, bristlecone pine rings as proxies for temperature.
Sure, you could just give up. Or you could use instruments designed to measure temperature to measure temperature, and accept that they have certain small, knowable error characteristics.
I see. So, you don’t have any specific methodological concerns about tree rings or ice core temperature reconstruction studies. You just don’t trust anything more complex than a simple thermometer. And you have no reason to justify that suspicion. Is that right?
I think it would have been easier if you just wrote that rather than going on about how “measurement proxy X for quantity Y is not Y!”.
Slarti, I’d like to suggest that you look at Jacob’s comments. I don’t always agree with him, but at least I have some idea WTF he’s talking about because he writes enough words to convey non-trivial ideas.
There have been some rather well-published discussions of the suitability of using, for instance, bristlecone pine rings as proxies for temperature.
Can you point me to any of them?
And for the love of pete, why didn’t you just write that in the first place? Seriously, do you just have contempt for everyone reading your comments? Do you think our time is worthless?
“o, you don’t have any specific methodological concerns about tree rings or ice core temperature reconstruction studies.”
I suppose There have been some rather well-published discussions of the suitability of using, for instance, bristlecone pine rings as proxies for temperature wasn’t sufficiently clear, was it?
“You just don’t trust anything more complex than a simple thermometer.”
Complex thermometers are ok, provided they’re calibrated. Trees are notoriously difficult to calibrate, because you actually need to have some more supporting information, environmental data, before tree rings can represent temperature.
More or less like a quartz rate sensor can be a decent thermometer if not rotating, or a decent rate sensor if it’s covered in thermocouples and temperature-compensated. Not an exact analogy, to be sure. Feel free to disregard.
“And you have no reason to justify that suspicion.”
As I said, this issue has been covered quite a lot in literature. You could start here, though, if Google seems to be broken. There’s more, but I’d have to do a lot more work than I think I need to do.
Because it’s not me that has anything at all to prove. I’m not concerned at all whether any of you agree with me. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I was simply asked what I thought, and why, and this is why.
“And for the love of pete, why didn’t you just write that in the first place?”
Isn’t it one of the bigger challenges to the notion that we’re at a historical high temperature? I thought everyone was aware of it.
Not contempt. Just the opposite, really; I’d thought if I was aware of it, most other interested parties would be as well. No contempt was intended.
Because it’s not me that has anything at all to prove. I’m not concerned at all whether any of you agree with me. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I was simply asked what I thought, and why, and this is why.
Why are you here Slarti? Seriously, why? If you’re not trying to convince anyone of anything, why bother write?
And I still don’t understand, why didn’t you just write that specific objection in the first place? A single sentence would have done. Again, do you think our time is worthless? Are you just trolling?
And now, unfortunately, it’s bedtime for me. More tomorrow, perhaps, if that check from Exxon doesn’t bounce.
Isn’t it one of the bigger challenges to the notion that we’re at a historical high temperature? I thought everyone was aware of it.
Um, are we at a historical high temperature? I didn’t think we are. I’m sorry, but I don’t understand your second sentence at all.
Not contempt. Just the opposite, really; I’d thought if I was aware of it, most other interested parties would be as well. No contempt was intended.
Ah, thanks for explaining.
Unfortunately, the paper you cited doesn’t say anything to call into question tree ring temperature reconstructions. So I really don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. In fact, it seems like the paper you cited rebuts a climate change skeptic argument.
Really? I thought CANDU was able to consume slightly lower density uranium than LWRs. Is that what you mean by “all kinds of funky fuel”?
A consensus of Wikipedians seem to think CANDUs can use anything from natural uranium, to unprocessed spent fuel, to thorium.
This doesn’t make any sense to me. Power from conventional reactors is more expensive than fossil fuel generated power AFAIK. Given that, I would expect that nuclear power savvy countries would have a substantial incentive to realize much more efficient reactor designs like breeder reactors. There have been several attempts, but they’ve all failed. How much failure do we have to witness before we conclude that this problem is genuinely hard and perhaps even beyond our abilities?
As far as I can tell, a large number of operational breeder reactors have been built, some operating successfully for many years. That really suggests a commercialization problem, not a fundamental physics one.
Initial engineering and construction of a new type of reactor is expensive and time consuming, existing light water designs were/are cheaper to build, and, at least a few decades ago, the cost of uranium just wasn’t enough to justify anything more expensive.
For example, again from Wikipedia, on the “Clinch River Reactor Project”:
Government funding was eventually cancelled (…restarted and cancelled again) because of cost overruns and proliferation concerns.
But high startup costs and proliferation concerns are not the same as insurmountable technical problems. Again, it looks like worldwide there are an awful lot of working testbeds, active R&D projects, and, apparently, at least a couple production designs.
Now, if you mean that the economics is fundamentally untenable, well, maybe. I mean, existing reactors are pretty marginal as it is compared to various renewables, so adding more costs make it iffy indeed. Still, it seems premature to rule it out unequivocally. If, as it appears, there’s no fundamental physics or engineering problem, a smart, easy to build design might easily overcome that.
Or does the nuclear power industry get yet another a free pass?
I don’t know why you’re asking me that. I’m not a nuclear fanatic by any means. Agnostic if anything. The history of the industry, at least in the US, has obviously not been exemplary, and in the short term at least, renewables/efficiency are clearly a lot cheaper and easier. I find attitudes like Brett’s pretty irrational.
I mean, I guess you can accuse me of being a little more sanguine about the basic safety, technical and waste-disposal aspects. But I’ll readily agree that there are obviously some nigh-insurmountable regulatory and economic issues to deal with before we can really have anything like what I qualified as “responsible use” upthread.
Slarti: I am not required to agree to anything. Sean Hannity speaks for Sean Hannity. Some people agree with most of what he says; I am not one of them.
I will settle for that, despite the dubious implication of the middle sentence. If Sean Hannity spoke only for himself, neither you nor I would have ever heard of him.
What the Earth’s temperature is doing at any given time is irrelevant to the debate, without first supposing that mankind has any kind of controlling influence.
Nah. Even if you think there’s no way we can influence global temperature by, say, limiting our oxidation of fossil carbon, we still have to deal with the consequences of global warming — if it’s real — no matter what the cause. I say “we” and I mean it literally. “We” make up The Economy; “we” elect The Government. If Earth warms up by a few degrees within our lifetimes, then, “controlling influence” or no, “we” would be better off knowing in advance that it will happen — or not happen.
So, no: the question of whether the globe is warming is NOT irrelevant to our future plans and expectations. The Economy will not somehow survive a global warming big enough to decimate us.
We’re extracting fossil carbon atoms from underneath the biosphere, oxidizing them, and dumping the CO2 into the atmosphere. We’re doing it on a huge scale, and in a geological instant. No other species has ever managed that.
Maybe we have made no difference to Earth’s climate despite our heroic efforts. Maybe the climate is utterly indifferent to our very existence, let alone our economy. But that cuts both ways: the Earth will get along fine with or without us. If we are, in fact, changing the climate, it’s not the Earth we’re jeopardizing. It’s us.
–TP
I think what slarti is talkingabout re tree rings is the fact that in the last 50 years the proposed relationship between tree rings and temperature has broken down almost completely. This is the focus of one of the most embarassing East Anglia quotes: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith [Briffa]’s, to hide the decline.”
By which, it is being explained to us, that he meant merely that he was normalizing the modern tree ring data to force it to show the actual temperature change (as measured by thermometers) rather than what would seem like an apparent decline in temperatures if you were to use the normal method of interpreting tree ring data.
Of course the fact that you have to do that for about a third of the modern climate measuring era (and for all of this generation’s measurements) might suggest to some scientists that the tree ring method wasn’t as good a proxy for temperature as had been previously thought.
But that would mean that the previous data couldn’t be relied upon. Which just won’t do you know.
And, for the record, I’m not particularly skeptical of global climate change as a whole, though I am skeptical of some of the bigger alarmists.
There is a slight (methodical) justification for the ‘deniers’s use of ‘snow in winter => global warming is a hoax’. Let’s assume there was a real case and that the majority of climatologists is really wrong. Then, I assume, the proof for that would rely on rather complicated scientific models that are even less easy to understand than the models used by the mainstream climatologists (otherwise it would likely not be a minority position). And since serious climatology is far beyond the horizon of knowledge/understanding of most people (me included), it would be close to impossible to make a public case arguing with one model against the other. I am a cynic. If one wants to persuade the public on anything beyond ‘water is wet’, simplification is needed, usually to a degree that would make most scientists cringe and refuse to sign (aka ‘lies to children’). ‘Science’ is in most cases used only as a backdrop (same as ‘experts’ on other topics) while the public discussion itself remains on the kindergarten level. Try to explain the special theory of relativity in a soundbite!
So, independent of the cause/case (and the truth) usually both sides use (scientifically) questionable arguments in order to persuade the public. And it seems that the more ignorant an argument the more likely it is to be persuasive these days. So the deniers ‘do it right’, if winning the argument in the marketplace is the goal.
—
I am very sceptical about nuclear fission power. In the last year there were quite a number of unpleasant revelations about the French nuclear industry, undermining the credibility of claims of their superior security standards. And I have far less trust in American companies on that. Even if the design is sound, corner-cutting by operating companies for the benfit of the bottom line remains a constant danger. And if oversight is close to nonexistent due to political ideology and favoritism, this is a recipe for a catastrophe sooner rather than later. Coal ash is bad enough (even without the radioactivity) but nothing compared to a runaway fission reactor showering huge areas with fallout. Fusion will likely come too late and is, although far safer, even more complicated and therefore expensive at least during the construction period. Imo, if there is to be nuke expansion, it should be made absolutely clear that it will be the last generation to be used only as a bridge because mankind has slept at the switch and has no other choice and that each plant going out of commission will not be replaced by a new one.
—
As I have said repeatedly, one main problem is that humans have too short a lifespan. Those that create(d) the disaster will not live to be confronted with the real consequences (and don’t give a damn about posterity or posterity’s opinion of them).
Try to explain the special theory of relativity in a soundbite!
If one wants to persuade the public on anything beyond ‘water is wet’, simplification is needed, usually to a degree that would make most scientists cringe and refuse to sign (aka ‘lies to children’).
But the thing about heavy snowstorms as an example of global warming is pretty much as simple as “water is wet”.
It’s like the theory of evolution: people don’t disbelieve it because it’s impossibly difficult or unprovable. Darwin’s Theory is a classic example of science so simple and so “well, duh!” you wonder why no one saw it before: a perfect instance of genius putting it all together and making clear and explicable something “everybody knows”.
Objections to the theory of evolution are religious and in the US political, not scientific.
Similiarly, global warming. No reputable scientist disagrees that the world is getting hotter, and that this is causing climate change: nor that mass release of long-buried CO2 into the atmosphere is likely to be a factor in global warming. (Obviously there can be proper scientific disagreement over the details.)
We should hope that it’s the mass release of CO2 into the atmosphere that is causing global warming, because that is the only factor that is under human control.
If we can slow down the rate of global warming by weaning our civilisation off its dependency on oil, that is a good thing.
Given that oil is a finite resource and our civilisation is heading for catastrophe if we simply use it till it’s gone, weaning ourselves off its use is a good thing too.
None of these things are hard to understand. All of them are based on facts that are easy to understand.
But they do interfere with the profits of the corporations which are reliant on our oil-based economy: not just the oil corporations, but pretty much all of them. Right-wingers repeat stupidly that global warming COULD be a myth because that’s what all of their reliably right-wing information resources tell them – and because their political mindset is all against perceiving that a corporation out for its own profit is providing lies to ensure that concern for human life doesn’t undercut its profits.
Except that this is all of human life on Earth, and to your average American right-winger, that means asking them to care about a mass of brown-skinned foreigners who aren’t proper Christians.
Like the joke about a KKKer being the one white person in a room slowly filling with water: if he holds still and drowns, all the black people in the room drown: if he pulls the plug out and lets the water drain away, sure he lives, but he’s also saved the lives of dozens of black people, and he’ll never be able to hold up his head under the hood again.
Global warming is killing people in poor countries first, and poor people in the US before rich people. And the whole right-wing mindset is against valuing the lives of poor people.
Here’s another one for your pile, Eric: Ann Althouse, who wrote this which went unremarked upon by all but a single of her commenters, as far as I could tell:
That’s pretty much the whole point of Eric’s main post, as I see it. If it isn’t, I’ve badly misread it.
Oh? The entire thesis of it is that bristlecone pines aren’t useful as temperature proxies. If you’re unaware to the degree that bristlecone pines are drivers of Mann’s famous hockey stick, I suggest you go start reading.
You could go here, and start reading. It’s not how I learned, but it does seem to deliver the gist of the problem.
The historical temperature reconstruction is chock full of error. Sometimes data are used upside-down.
I most carefully said nothing that disagrees with this statement. Sure, it’s important to know what’s ahead, if we can. But if we’re not the cause, then we have no control. Which is why I say it’s irrelevant, absent human cause, to the discussion of what humans ought to do as regards our CO2 production. If we’re not a prime cause, then varying our output does not provide a controlling effect.
The historical temperature reconstruction is chock full of error.
and the denialists are chock full of liars, bullsh!t artists, partisan shills and coal company PR flacks. if their consensus is X, it seems wise to give the benefit of the doubt to those who claim Y.
if their consensus is X, it seems wise to give the benefit of the doubt to those who claim Y.
They’re much like the WSJ editorial page in that way.
But if we’re not the cause, then we have no control.
Uh . . . I’m not sure your conclusion follows from your premise, here.
OT… ACORN cleared.
Why not use all that CO2 for the production of soda water?
Yes, that is a stupid question but not too stupid for some. And the answer is of course that CO2 from the stack is dirty while that from mineral springs etc. is natural and pure. No joke, a few years ago a breakout of food poisoning (originating from a carbonated beverage) around here was at first attributed in the media to ‘CO2 gone bad’ (as in far beyond its use-by date).
I am confused on several things. Do scientists who believe in AGW cite ice cores and tree rings as proof that past global temperatures were generally HIGHER or LOWER than they are now? I’m aware that there are climate shifts over long spans of time, but I don’t know what the asserted trend is for either side of the debate.
Secondly, if scientists agitating for belief in AGW are arguing that ice core samples and tree rings show a general rise in global temperature, why does that help the AGW side? Don’t those samples ostensibly show climate changes during a time in earth’s history that humans weren’t numerous or powerful enough to contribute to GW? I might be wrong, but it seems that way to me. Thirdly, if I am not wrong, Slarti, why does evidence against the validity of ice cores and tree rings hurt the AGW theory?
Fourthly, regarding a portion of Eric’s post:
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000.
Do you mistrust the climate records cited by the WMO? If accurate and measurements have been taken since 1850 (I assume they weren’t using ice cores and tree rings), then isn’t that sufficiently strong proof of at least the correlation between increased CO2 output and warming? I’m guessing you don’t dispute the correlation between the two, but I’d like to know how you attribute the temperature rise differently. Or, if you dispute their measurements, how you do so.
What those who are trying to make a convincing argument for global warming need is an example from everyday life of a noisy signal. That, for the non-engineers, is something that overall changes gradually, but from day to day bounces around a lot. Which, incidentally, is how climate differs from weather.
Anybody have a noisy signal to propose as an example?
wj: DJIA
–TP
One point often abused is that the correlation between CO2 and temperature is a wee bit more complicated in nature outside of a lab. The whole greenhouse effect works on the principle that certain substances act as control valves blocking a narrow band in the electromagnetic spectrum. But changes in one can influence the others. In the most simple case: CO2 rises => temperature rises => more water evaporates => water vapor acts as even more effective valve => even less radiation gets out => temperature rises. But clouds also increase the albedo => incoming radiation is reflected => less comes in => temperature goes down. These are just the most simple effects. Add to that that most effects are nonlinear and the system gets a wee bit complicated => easy to distort. The more radical deniers even dispute the physical interaction between radiation and gases the radiation passes through, some of them quoting weather data from Mars to disprove a simple fact of physical chemistry.
T = A*x + B*sin(x)
would be a simple example.
The sin function could symbolize the seasonal temperature changes while A*x is the ascent of the baseline over time.
If you want to include the higher seasonal fluctuation:
T = A*x + B*x*sin(x)
Now the changes between seasons get bigger over time too.
If A is small enough, the ascent will not be discernible easily over a long period of time.
I suppose, as usual, I need to unpack a bit.
The theory is that CO2 emissions generated by humans are responsible for X amount of warming over the last several decades, and that trend, if continued, will result in Y amount of additional warming over the next century. This is a general statement, not anything you are guaranteed to get Google hits on.
If it turned out, though, that human-generated CO2 was responsible for no statistically significant amount of warming, then we don’t have a controlling input on warming at current rates of production, and so literally nothing we could do, in the arena of CO2 emissions controls, would have the least bit of effect.
It’s a controllability issue. If your only inputs to a system aren’t firmly connected to the outputs, you don’t control it.
Now, I am not convinced that either AGW or !AGW is true, so I’m not making a statement of policy that I favor. It’s just that if it turns out that (the Earth is warming) AND (humans have nothing to do with said warming), then we have no controls that have anything to do with CO2 production.
wj: I’m currently reading Caro’s The Path to Power, vol. 1 of his LBJ biography, and the first few chapters include a very good example, in his description of the ecological trap that the Texas Hill Country turned into in the late 19th century. (With the thin topsoil and ground cover destroyed by plowing and grazing, the land was being eroded down to bare rock, but – at least early in the process – there were enough “good years” to mask the effect and keep people hoping that they could make it.)
Thank you Tony and Jim. One of those might work. Although if we can come up with one which happens to Joe and Jane Average routinely, that would be even better. I admit, I’m not certain that such a thing exists. For example, a farmer might get that the trend in total rainfall for the season is different from the rainfall per day that he sees. But outside of a major drought, the average suburbanite probably has no clue what total annual rainfall around him is, let alone what the trend is.
Hartmut, it’s certainly a good example of a noisy signal. But I’m betting that, while you and I get it instantly, the average person (who probably doesn’t do much math beyond basic arithmetic) is going to just have their eyes glaze over. And that, after all, is exactly what the example needs to avoid in order to have any useful effect.
What those who are trying to make a convincing argument for global warming need is an example from everyday life of a noisy signal. That, for the non-engineers, is something that overall changes gradually, but from day to day bounces around a lot. Which, incidentally, is how climate differs from weather.
How about climate and weather?
Weather is the fact that there might be a couple days in February when you can go out in a t-shirt, or a day in August when you decide you want a sweater. Weather is noisy: temperature can easily vary by several degrees from one day to the next.
Climate is the fact that you can still expect it to be warmer in August than in February, quite reliably.
And only an idiot would cite a cool streak in August as disproof of “summer warming”.
Oh? The entire thesis of it is that bristlecone pines aren’t useful as temperature proxies.
I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that’s quite an overstatement. The thesis is merely that growth conditions for certain bristlecones appear to have changed recently, and so there may be certain periods where they are not useful.
Also, since this was in fact discovered by way of routine critical examination of the proxy record and comparison with other data sources, and historical bristlecone data is now treated with extra scrutiny (which it has survived), Sebastian’s insinuations about scientists not wanting to question data falls very flat.
If you’re unaware to the degree that bristlecone pines are drivers of Mann’s famous hockey stick, I suggest you go start reading.
Mann’s hockey stick has been replicated numerous times, and has come through quite an extraordinary level of scrutiny and inquiry virtually intact.
I’d oh so humbly suggest that amateur skepticism based on a layman’s reading of a couple random papers or popular articles on bristlecone pines probably isn’t a good way to arrive at the truth here.
Now, I am not convinced that either AGW or !AGW is true, so I’m not making a statement of policy that I favor. It’s just that if it turns out that (the Earth is warming) AND (humans have nothing to do with said warming), then we have no controls that have anything to do with CO2 production.
I’m not sure that’s an especially tenable position. There is little doubt that CO2 plays a major role in climate regulation. There can be little doubt that human beings are responsible for a historically significant accumulation of CO2. There can be little doubt that there is indeed warming.
And the only credible explanation anyone’s put forward for the warming is the anthropogenic CO2. (And even if you had another one, you’d have to explain why all that CO2 wasn’t doing anything, because that would be weird.)
AFAICT, the only real remaining uncertainty–and it’s a small possibility–is about the potential existence of some large counter feedback that might somehow kick in after CO2 and temperature goes up a bit more. Maybe water vapor or snow or something.
But that’s not exactly the same as !(Earth is warming), nor is it the same as !(humans have nothing to do with it). It’s more like, Earth is warming, AND humans are doing it, BUT it might still coast to stop somehow without our intervention.
Anybody have a noisy signal to propose as an example?
Your health (or maybe how good you feel from moment to moment) as you age. Everyone gets sick now and again, but being 25 is still a lot better than being 90. I think people could very easily grasp that.
Slarti- you are correct that ice cores are not measures of temperature. They are records of the effects of climate upon arctic ice — which is, of course, one of the concerns that we have with climate change. Temperature is not the problem, but the apparent effects of that temperature within the system are.
I know people who are studying these things. They aren’t a particularly naive selection of the populace. They aren’t agenda driven, unless one counts the desire to get more reliable data and better models as an agenda.
I’ve asked these climate scientists about the blog you linked to above in the past as well as coyote blog and the like and about the criticisms of the ‘hockey stick’. All were aware of these criticisms and had robust reasons for rejecting them (which I am inadequate to summarize). realclimate.org addresses these things all the time, along with the reasons why climate scientists reject these objections.
As I’ve said many times in conversations with former regulars on this blog — there’s not a single scientist I know who would not leap at the chance to publish a paper that put a serious kink in climate change or showed that a fundamental part of the consensus had severe methodological flaws if they had the data and methodology to support it. They are a competitive, argumentative bunch. Grand conspiracy really does not fit the profile.
I’ve read Mann’s work, and McIntyre’s dissection of it. Do you have other material to recommend?
I’ve read Mann’s work, and McIntyre’s dissection of it. Do you have other material to recommend?
Maybe the National Research Council?
Anybody have a noisy signal to propose as an example?
the fact that prices are lower during Presidents’ Day sales does not refute the fact that, overall, prices continue to rise due to inflation.
Anything more specific? NRC is a council that has a very wide variety of publications; I was thinking more in terms of a specific paper or two that helps you make your point.
I’ve read Mann’s work, and McIntyre’s dissection of it. Do you have other material to recommend?
Or maybe Mann, et al (2008).
Anything more specific? NRC is a council that has a very wide variety of publications; I was thinking more in terms of a specific paper or two that helps you make your point.
I was referring to that big review they conducted of climate reconstruction, and Mann’s work in particular, in response to this supposed controversy.
That January was globally hot is not in dispute. It is a weather point. If it was globally coldest it would still be just a weather point. Quoting this as climate, is making the same mistake as those who point out any individual event as climate.
The article is also confusing the skeptics with warming deniers. The skeptics have scored real scientific points about gobs of lost scientific data (Lonnie Thompson’s ice core readings, for example) and statistical errors. Look around the climateaudit.org site. A good place to start is this article.
Having said that, there is still some warming. The issue is how much, what causes it, and how “Unprecedented” it is. And, of course, what the future will be.
Don’t look to politicians of either side to provide good info. The GOP folks you refer to are in a race to the bottom with Al Gore on scientific integrity.
As just one point, consider that the sea level has been rising for over a century. Yet C02 increases have been a factor in this for only about half that time. The science is neither settled nor simple.
jack lecou: even if you had another one, you’d have to explain why all that CO2 wasn’t doing anything
No, no. The direct warming effect of CO2 is pretty well supported but is very small (like a degree or so from doubling CO2 concentrations).
The predictions of much larger temperature changes from the AGW theory rest on the idea that the steady push in one direction from increased CO2 is the cause of feedbacks larger than the direct effect of CO2. Melting ice decreases albedo, permafrost melts, you get fewer clouds, etc. That’s the part that’s much less clear.
So if you had 1) a large warming trend and 2) an alternative explanation, you could quite consistently say “About one degree of this is from CO2, and the rest is from space aliens irradiating our planet from Mars.”
There’s a misperception that most skepticism about global warming stems from a lack of understanding of “basic physics”, but it isn’t really true. For starters, the “basic physics” isn’t that basic – the mechanism of absorption and re-emission of light & infrared radiation in the atmosphere is pretty complicated, it’s not nearly as simple as the popularizations make it sound. But even if we take the output of those physics as a given, which I think is sensible, the direct effect of that is a fairly small temperature change. As soon as you want to account for a larger change, you have to get outside of basic physics and into stuff like cloud formation and permafrost melting and vegetation and ocean absorption of CO2 and ocean heating and other very complicated things. That doesn’t mean we should say “This is way too complicated! Let’s give up!” but just to say that you can’t rely on basic physics alone to support the warming hypothesis.
Again, none of that casts aspersions on the scientists who are doing that research. Understanding complex systems is very worthwhile. It’s just to say that when I hear someone say that the AGW theory relies only on “basic physics” it’s a pretty safe bet that their understanding of the science is extremely shallow and that they probably shouldn’t be going around telling other people that they don’t understand it.
Supposed? The link you supplied acknowledges it, cites McKintyre, and states outright that strip-bark trees should not be used for temperature reconstruction.
Thanks for the link. I’ll read it fully later tonight.
Supposed? The link you supplied acknowledges it, cites McKintyre
A scientific back and forth about appropriate statistical methods and the interpretation of particular data sources is normal and healthy. That’s how science works, and doesn’t qualify as a “controversy”, at least not in the sense the denialist industry would like you to believe.
…and states outright that strip-bark trees should not be used for temperature reconstruction.
Which is a well known problem these days, and in any case only a small portion of the tree ring data (which in turn is only one portion of the data more generally). This is not a peg you can hang any kind of global warming “skepticism” on.
As for the tree data, the problem is that if a big chunk of your calibration period shows a big divergence from correlation with instrumental temperature, it makes it very difficult to go back before the period where you have instrumental measurements and use tree data as a proxy for temperature, especially if you haven’t figured out why the divergence in the calibration period occurred. If it doesn’t correlate now, how much confidence can you have that it does correlate a thousand years ago?
An analogy: let’s imagine you have about 150 years of known correlations between the passage of years and number of tree rings. One ring = one year. You’d be pretty well justified in going back well before the measured period and using counts of tree rings as a proxy for the passage of years.
Now let’s imagine that you find a divergence in your recent measured data. You find that since 1960, there have been some years when no tree ring appeared. You don’t know why yet.
That would cast some doubt on the use of tree ring data to measure time in the past. I mean, if sometimes 10 rings = 10 years and sometimes 10 rings = 20 years, that’s a problem.
And if you tried to fix this problem, still not really understanding why it happened, by applying a fudge factor to the data since 1960 – let’s say, multiplying the number of rings since 1960 by 1.2 to get a good match with the actual passage of time – you wouldn’t have really solved the problem when you use that data as a proxy outside the calibrated period. Who knows if in the year 1200 the conditions that caused your trees to skip rings since 1960 were also in effect? Should you apply the fudge factor there? You really have no idea.
Worse, if you publish the data with the fudge factor applied but don’t really explain it, you make it look as if the certainty of using it as a proxy outside the calibration period is much higher than it actually is. You’re really misleading people by omitting a big source of uncertainty.
The same applies if you publish the data but decide to just drop the divergent data since 1960 from your graphs. And again, if you chop off the later tree ring data and graft on the measured data to get a straight-line fit for that period, now you’re into some very dubious territory.
Again, just one dataset, not that important in the grand scheme of things, but in its own terms, not a shining moment for science. It doesn’t matter if the person pointing out those problems is an Eeevil Oil Industry Shill, the problems are still there. Science doesn’t care who you work for.
Why the scare quotes, jack?
wj,
I can’t say that the Dow Jones Industrials Average happens to most people every day, but I am hard-pressed to think of a news source that doesn’t tell them about it every day.
As an example of a noisy signal with an underlying trend, the DJIA is hard to beat. But more importantly, it can serve as an analogy to the climate-change issues in several ways.
One obvious way: individual stocks, like the weather in individual places, can vary with or against the average. You can’t tell whether the Dow went up today from just looking at one particular stock today.
Another: if you’re making long-term financial plans, you need to believe something about the general trend in the Dow — even if you can’t affect it.
Furthermore, you have to at least think about what happens if you’re wrong about the Dow’s long-term trend. “Experts” may be telling you it will go one way, and you may think there’s a 99% chance they’re right. But you do have to worry about how big a hit you’ll take if the 1% chance transpires.
Finally, there’s an implicit connection between the trend of global temperature and the trend of the Dow. “Cap and trade will hurt the economy” implies this: the Dow will go up more, in the long run, if we do NOT restrict CO2 emmissions. That proposition may seem 99% probable, if you think global warming is only 1% likely to be real. But ONLY if you think so. For if global warming is real, it will depress the Dow in a big way, long term.
I may be overestimating the incongruity of taking financial “experts” seriously but NOT taking climate “experts” seriously. It does seem to me, however, that some people have more faith in long-term market forecasts than they grant to long-term climate forecasts.
–TP
The predictions of much larger temperature changes from the AGW theory rest on the idea that the steady push in one direction from increased CO2 is the cause of feedbacks larger than the direct effect of CO2. Melting ice decreases albedo, permafrost melts, you get fewer clouds, etc. That’s the part that’s much less clear.
Right. And we can model those effects, and validate the models against their predictions of things like snowfall and wind patterns, and see that the predicted domino effect of CO2 corresponds to what we see happening.
If you had your “space rays from mars” explanation you couldn’t just say “CO2 is minor” and sweep all that model correspondence under the rug. You’d also have to explain in detail why the space ray was somehow causing sea ice accumulation (for example) to behave in a particular way, and why it is that the models can–by some weird coincidence–predict the same patterns using only the CO2 assumption.
Now let’s imagine that you find a divergence in your recent measured data. You find that since 1960, there have been some years when no tree ring appeared. You don’t know why yet.
Which is exactly the reason that there has been so much investigation into the WHY, and also the reason that tree ring data has been subjected to some extra scrutiny, and the particular data in question (a small portion of the total) is removed or qualified in more recent reconstructions.
And that’s why this is a non-controversy. Just FUD to try to gin one up from nothing.
nd if you tried to fix this problem, still not really understanding why it happened, by applying a fudge factor to the data since 1960 – let’s say, multiplying the number of rings since 1960 by 1.2 to get a good match with the actual passage of time
This, AFAIK, is a misrepresentation. There is no “fudge factor” involved: if you see that the rings aren’t behaving as you expect (because you check against other measurement sources), you just DON’T USE the data. Nobody would just “fudge it” because it’s basic dendrochronology that tree growth has a variety of inputs and complex lags, so the assumption would be that some other factor must be dominating the growth.
Now, depending on how well you understand exactly why the those trees aren’t working in that period, you may or may not want to use the same trees for periods where the data does seem to be good. See below.
Who knows if in the year 1200 the conditions that caused your trees to skip rings since 1960 were also in effect? Should you apply the fudge factor there? You really have no idea.
If you decide to use it, you do so because you can (and have) validated your growth assumptions for those periods against other data like ice cores, or less problematic trees.
If you had your “space rays from mars” explanation you couldn’t just say “CO2 is minor” and sweep all that model correspondence under the rug.
Sure you can. Because your model is not calibrated on a control system unaffected by outside factors – there isn’t one. Your model is calibrated on the real world, and if the real world has been pushed by some factor you don’t yet understand, your calibration will be to the system with that factor included, and your correlations will be spurious.
This kind of thing happens all the time in the physical sciences. You can have a pretty model and a good correlation and a good theory of why something is happening, and be completely wrong about all of it.
Let’s say you’re sitting in a windowless trailer with no furniture, and it’s getting warmer at a steady rate. Now, you can come up with a physically plausible theory that it’s getting warmer because the sun has come up, the trailer is outside in the sunshine, and it’s absorbing heat, and you can produce a model of how that works, and calibrate it against measurements of temperature and time, and think you’ve got a pretty good understanding of what’s going on.
Then you open the door and step outside and find that the trailer is actually inside a huge warehouse with one tiny window that provided 10% of the heating and all the rest came because it’s sitting next to an enormous electric heater.
In that case, your model of heating by sunshine, despite its excellent correlation with measurements and despite its physical plausibility, turned out to be junk. No shame in having a good theory that didn’t turn out to be true. But let’s not pretend it’s impossible.
This, AFAIK, is a misrepresentation. There is no “fudge factor” involved
You’re not going to like this source, but from what I can tell it’s accurate – look at Figure 1:
http://www.climateaudit.info/pdf/mcintyre-scitech.pdf
If there’s a better term than “fudge factor” for applying a linear correction to one part of a data series to achieve better correlation with instrumental data, I don’t know what it is. In point of fact, if such fudge factors are allowable, you can make virtually any data series correlate pretty well with any other data series. You can take a series that shows no trend at all or a trend inverse in sign to the one it’s supposed to correlate with and make it fit.
I agree entirely that this is a minor matter, but I don’t agree that there was nothing funny about what they did.
Why the scare quotes, jack?
Which ones?
The ones on “controversy” are to distinguish a sober scientific controversy (i.e., debate), from the phony denialist media-#$%storm kind. The “Oh noes, global warming is all just a math error”-type “controversy” that a “skeptic” usually refers to.
The ones on “skeptic” are because, while being skeptical of things in a knowledgeable and deferential way is a noble enlightenment tradition, there is also a modern virulent breed of anti-scientism that merely masquerades as “skepticism”. A breed frequently sighted in conjuction with global warming “controversy”.
there is also a modern virulent breed of anti-scientism that merely masquerades as “skepticism”
Yeah, but you know the really funny thing is how this “virulent breed of anti-scientism masquerading as skepticism” correlates so closely with “people who disagree with me”.
Personally, I also find a very close correlation between “idiots who pass off their prejudice as informed political opinion” and “people who disagree with me”. There’s some kind of pattern here, but I just can’t put my finger on it…
In that case, your model of heating by sunshine, despite its excellent correlation with measurements and despite its physical plausibility, turned out to be junk. No shame in having a good theory that didn’t turn out to be true. But let’s not pretend it’s impossible.
Except you’ve obviously picked an example where you’re basically substituting one form of radiant heat for an equivalent one. In fact, you’d actually have to go to a lot of trouble – place the radiator so it radiates in the same direction as the sun would, for example.
The real world is more complex than that, and offers many more opportunities for verifying things or ruling them out. For example, based on the spatial pattern and rate of heating, you might be able to conclusively rule out the possibility that the heat could be coming from a jet of live steam directed at the trailer.
In the real world, there are lots of subtle distinctions and non-linearities like that that can be exploited to distinguish one kind of cause from another.
With global warming you have, on one end, basic physical properties that are well understood, like the way CO2 absorbs and emits various em spectra, or the specific heat of water. You plug a bunch of those basic, solidly founded properties and processes into a model, they interact in complicated non-linear ways, and then out the other end comes some predictions we can validate against the real world.
The room for any unknown factors in that middle part is not nonexistent, but it is quite tightly constrained. It’s a situation where you may not know everything, but you can have a lot of confidence that you at least know what you don’t know. You’d have to tailor your “space rays from mars” theory very carefully indeed to fit into that existing interlocking puzzle.
Well, it was a pretty crude example. Maybe we should talk about a more physically realistic one.
By the way, I don’t think the models are junk, and I’m reasonably content to think that their predictions are good. What I object to is the idea that they absolutely rule out unknown factors as the cause, because they don’t.
So, let’s say that aliens from Mars have been irradiating our atmosphere with Q-trons for the last 150 years to the tune of a 0.1 degree per year warming. We don’t know about this, can’t model it, can’t account for it.
Now someone assembles an atmospheric model based on a perfect physical understanding of the world system (except for the Q-trons, which he doesn’t know anything about). Now any model has a large number of parameters – numbers that have to be supplied to initialize it. Some of those parameters come from direct physical measurements, but a lot of them don’t.
Now the model is likely to behave in different ways depending on those parameters. So how do you know which values to put in for them? Well, you have to calibrate the model. You have to look at the actual data you have from the real world, and see what kinds of parameters cause your model to accurately correlate with the real world. There is nothing illegitimate about this process! This is how you come to build a good model, that’s all. The physical basis of the model is not undermined, it’s just that you don’t know exactly what value these parameters should take.
So, this calibration process involves trying out different values and looking at the model output correlation with real-world data. If your model output with some parameter set some way shows the world system dropping in temperature 5 degrees a year until everything freezes, that’s a pretty good sign that’s the wrong value for it.
Here’s the problem: you don’t have a control system to calibrate against. You only have the real world. And so you could come across the exact, perfect values for all these parameters, but then you’d find that your correlation to real data was off by 0.1 degrees a year. You don’t know about the Q-trons, all you know is that your model doesn’t fit the real world. So you change a parameter until it does fit – no 0.1 degree/year divergence. Great!
Now the Martians land and explain about the Q-trons. Your model is still a good model, it still has a good physical basis, but because your calibration was to a system that was subject to an unknown outside influence, your parameters are wrong. Your prediction of 0.1 degrees/year warming from the model may have had a physical basis in your model, but it wasn’t the actual basis for the warming.
Of course this a pretty silly example, and I think that the current models are pretty good. All I want to say is that they don’t rule out the possibility of a currently unknown influence.
Here’s the problem: you don’t have a control system to calibrate against. You only have the real world. And so you could come across the exact, perfect values for all these parameters, but then you’d find that your correlation to real data was off by 0.1 degrees a year. You don’t know about the Q-trons, all you know is that your model doesn’t fit the real world. So you change a parameter until it does fit – no 0.1 degree/year divergence. Great!
Well, I’m honestly not sure how many free dials current models have, but I’m sure it’s something they try to minimize. For most of them you’re going to at least have something like an appropriate range.
And the behavior of your Q-trons is going to be more complex than just uniform heating by 0.1 deg/year (or, even if that’s what they do, that uniformity is highly complex itself). There’s going to be all kinds of ripple affects. It’s not just that you have to tune your model for 0.1 deg/year, you’re going to have to tweak your dials back and forth to iron out wrinkles all over: anomalous variations between the surface and the stratosphere, or the poles and the equator, anomalous evaporation here and there, etc. We’d have to be talking a big input here, so unless all that stuff matches up in really surprisingly coincidental ways, you may well notice.
I know your Q-trons are not a serious example, and I’m not saying that something slipping by is impossible. Just that the chances of some simple explanation with a sufficiently good match to the conditions escaping notice is getting really, really implausible at this point.
Scientists, despite their insistence to the contrary, are human. Therefore they make mistakes. And, because they’re operating on the frontiers of human knowledge, they make a lot of mistakes.
In less-controversial fields, this is resolved by dueling papers, heated conversations at conferences, hurt feelings, and overall scientific progress.
But in climate change, a small cadre of scientists and pseudo-scientists have decided that every small mistake serves to invalidate the entire endeavor. The controversy over the Mann paper is a perfect example. Mann tried to do something that no one had done before. He made some mistakes, but his work was a good idea and subsequent analysis has both refined and corrected what he did. Yet even someone as well-educated as Slarti seems to believe that the M&M criticism of the Mann paper has any relevance to the larger picture.
Yet, because scientists are human, the manufactured outrage and name-calling (and, quite likely, actionable libel as well) gets their back up. So they become much more resistant to cooperating with that group which has treated them badly and, instead, they close ranks. This leads to such things as the contents of the CRU e-mails.
None of this changes the underlying truth of the science, which is that we are warming our planet in a way that has never been done before. The most serious short-term consequences of this behavior are, I suspect, going to be: 1. changes in the productivity of fisheries due to ocean acidification; 2. reduction in the productivity in farmland due to changes in rainfall patterns (see, eg, California) and 3. reduction in the productivity of farmland due to drought.
but (a) I don’t have kids, (b) none of this should get serious until about 2050 and (c) I’m american, so my direct family shouldn’t be affected by global food shortfalls. wheee! let’s party!!!
(your mileage may vary.)
Just that the chances of some simple explanation with a sufficiently good match to the conditions escaping notice is getting really, really implausible at this point.
In particular, the existence of some physical phenomenon that (a) has heretofore been unnoticed and undreamed of, (b) has sufficient amplitude to effectively nullify anthropogenic CO2 as a significant concern, AND (c) dovetails with CO2-based predictions so well that no significant anomalies have been detected seems quite remote to me. Much too remote to seriously consider.
“The fact that those sentences need to be typed in order to counter prevalent GOP arguments about climate change is, as I wrote, depressing.”
The interesting aspect of all of this “science” is that global trends are being deduced(?) from 120 years worth of records which is exactly as accurate as deducing it from how cold this winter was.
Now that the Chilean earthquake has shortened our days by tilting the earth we should be fine, everything should cool off quickly.
The interesting aspect of all of this “science” is that global trends are being deduced(?) from 120 years worth of records which is exactly as accurate as deducing it from how cold this winter was.
Actually, no. Even the cited material stretches back 160 years (not 120), but there is other evidence that stretches back tens of thousands of years.
And all of that is more accurate than one winter.
Which is an opinion you’re perfectly entitled to, but others can come to a different conclusion without being motivated by stupidity, overt conflicts of interest, or sheer partisan bloodymindedness.
I think the models are a good attempt, but I don’t put nearly the stock in them that you do. When you have a system with a lot of random fluctuation and a broad trend, and you declare that all the short-term random fluctuation is irrelevant, it’s pretty easy to come up with a model that matches the broad trend and has a lot of plausible-looking noise in the short-term. For instance, low-amplitude white noise with a linear biasing trend added in by hand is a model that “fits” any noisy data with a linear trend, so you have to make sure your model isn’t actually just generating white noise with a linear trend.
To be fair to them, the current climate models do a bit better than that, but they’re a long way from perfect correlation.
(Oops, replying to Jack re: his confidence in climate models, not Eric or Marty.)
You’re not going to like this source, but from what I can tell it’s accurate – look at Figure 1:
http://www.climateaudit.info/pdf/mcintyre-scitech.pdf
If there’s a better term than “fudge factor” for applying a linear correction to one part of a data series to achieve better correlation with instrumental data, I don’t know what it is. In point of fact, if such fudge factors are allowable, you can make virtually any data series correlate pretty well with any other data series. You can take a series that shows no trend at all or a trend inverse in sign to the one it’s supposed to correlate with and make it fit.
The code McIntyre is all excercised about does not appear to have ever been used to adjust data or in any published graphs. See here.
It looks to me like a snippet of code that was probably used while futzing around with things pre-publication, maybe just to visualize how the actual data diverged from ideal, or to simulate an alternate data set or something.
Jacob and Jack,
You guys sound way better-informed than I am, so perhaps one of you can answer a simple question.
Suppose I have a big ball floating all alone in empty space. Its surface is at a certain average temperature. Its only mechanism for getting rid of heat is radiation. Does the rate at which it sheds heat depend on any property of the surface other than its temperature?
–TP
For instance, low-amplitude white noise with a linear biasing trend added in by hand is a model that “fits” any noisy data with a linear trend, so you have to make sure your model isn’t actually just generating white noise with a linear trend.
That’s not really a “model” at all in the sense we’re talking about. Getting a good fit is not so trivial with a physical, first-principles type model.
Even taking the temperature trend alone, it is not simply linear. And that trend is not the only thing being modeled. Reasonably accurate predictions are made in literally hundreds of dimensions, along a span of decades.
Suppose I have a big ball floating all alone in empty space. Its surface is at a certain average temperature. Its only mechanism for getting rid of heat is radiation. Does the rate at which it sheds heat depend on any property of the surface other than its temperature?
Hmm. It depends on what you mean by “average”, because the rate is going to depend on the distribution of the temperature over the surface. That’s because the relationship between temperature and rate of radiative heat loss isn’t linear (I think it goes up with the fourth power of absolute temp).
For example, a ball with a uniformly hot hemisphere and a uniformly cold hemisphere wouldn’t radiate at the same rate as a ball with an overall uniform temperature that was the average of the two: If the nonuniform ball has side A @ 500K, and side B @ 1000K, and the uniform ball is @ 750K, then I think the nonuniform ball radiates ((500^4+1000^4)/2)/750^4 ~= 1.68 times faster.
Jack,
You’re at least one step ahead of me. The thrust of my question has to do with how radiated heat depends on things like the color, or the chemical composition, or some other physical property of the surface.
We can get around to illuminating the ball on one side, or having an internal source of heat, next round.
For now, say the ball is at uniform temperature. Does it matter whether its surface is white or black? Aluminum or carbon?
–TP
For now, say the ball is at uniform temperature. Does it matter whether its surface is white or black? Aluminum or carbon?
Assuming we’re still talking about just radiation from a fixed temperature body here, not absorption or reflection. And assuming that whatever the color or material, the surface is essentially smooth, then no. I don’t think it matters.
But I’m not really interested in playing “physics 101 quiz” all day, where are you going with this?
Jacob get it almost precisely right in his 4:14 and 4:42. If the last 50 years of tree data (under your normal analysis of tree data) would show a cooling trend while the last 50 years of thermometer data show a warming trend, it is difficult to trust the previous hundreds of years of data that you are getting largely from the tree data if you don’t know why the thermometer data and the tree data aren’t in harmony now.
Since we have no idea why they diverged in the last 50 year (which is to say we don’t know why as our thermometer readings got more accurate, the tree readings seem to hav gotte less accurate) we have *no way of knowing whether or not there might be other periods where they diverge, or frankly if the correlation was just spurious all along.
On the contrary. It was discovered, and the response has been essentially: A) well the old data must be ok, and B) we will apply a large and increasing linea fudge factor to the data for the last 50 years. And that is a methodological practice that deserves a bit of insinuation.
Perhaps the reason the old data is ‘ok’ is because we have less to check it against. And definitely adding a fudge factor to the more checkable modern data is a sketchy statistical practice.
Now. I’m not enough of a climate scientist to know how important this dataset is in the scheme of things. But I do know that this dataset has junk statistics.
Tony P: A body in the vacuum of space will radiate energy at precisely the rate it receives it, unless there is something about the body which causes a lag in the time needed to come into energy balance (oceans, an atmosphere, etc.).
On the contrary. It was discovered, and the response has been essentially: A) well the old data must be ok, and B) we will apply a large and increasing linea fudge factor to the data for the last 50 years. And that is a methodological practice that deserves a bit of insinuation.
This is simply false.
There is (A) no assumption that the old data “must just be ok” (as was explained above – older, apparently well-behaving data from the–small subset–of potential questionable trees is either not used, or carefully checked and, and it’s use noted and qualified).
And (B) no “fudge factor”. The latter is simply a myth (or a lie), apparently based on a poor reading of some old computer code. (Again, see above.)
Now. I’m not enough of a climate scientist to know how important this dataset is in the scheme of things.
I am fairly certain that you’re not any kind of climate scientist at all and are, in fact, a paralegal or somesuch, is that correct?
Since we have no idea why they diverged in the last 50 year (which is to say we don’t know why as our thermometer readings got more accurate, the tree readings seem to hav gotte less accurate) we have *no way of knowing whether or not there might be other periods where they diverge, or frankly if the correlation was just spurious all along.
It’s also not correct to say that we have no idea. I believe there are a number of possible explanations, although I don’t know that any of them have risen to the top yet.
Now. I’m not enough of a climate scientist to know how important this dataset is in the scheme of things. But I do know that this dataset has junk statistics.
I’m not sure what dataset you’re referring to (ALL proxy data? ALL tree ring data? The small subset representing the questionable bristlecones?), but I’ll reiterate yet again that (A) Mann’s original methodology been subject to an extraordinary level of scrutiny, and essentially come through intact. I believe he’s taken a few pokes for some of his statistics, but mostly because the methods have advanced since then, not because he did anything that could even be called “incorrect” exactly, let alone “junk”. (B) The potentially problematic data is a tiny subset, and (C) every reconstruction that I’m aware of, including new ones by Mann and others, with entirely new data sets, bear out the essential character of the original “hockey stick”.
Bottom line is that the “divergence problem” is simply not even a blip for global warming as a whole. Bringing the former up to call the latter into question is like trying to cast doubt on someone’s integrity or intelligence by pointing out that they once might (in some grammarians’ opinions) have slightly misplaced a comma in a sentence they wrote once somewhere. It’s noise at best, and ignorant or dishonest at worst.
I will happily admit that the science involved in the climate change stuff is many miles over my head. I try to keep up, but I get left behind pretty quickly.
What is kinda clear to me is that, if there’s anything to the proposition that human activity is causing, or even significantly contributing to, climate change, then we are well and truly f**ked.
Because it’s been close to a generation since this stuff started to come up in public discussion — 22 years since Hansen’s testimony to Congress — and bugger all has been done about it.
We don’t even pick the low-hanging fruit.
Most of us reading this will be dead before things get really ugly, but it seems to me that we owe the folks who are coming after us to at least take the *possibility* that we could be part of the cause seriously.
It will harm our economy? We’ll get over it.
Americans have this weird blind spot. We think we’re not just special, but unbelievably special. So special that we can do whatever the hell we want.
We’re not that kind of special.
I’m sort of hoping the global warming guys are mistaken, because otherwise the sh*t is well and truly going to hit the fan.
Yeah, but you know the really funny thing is how this “virulent breed of anti-scientism masquerading as skepticism” correlates so closely with “people who disagree with me”.
I think we can be more specific in our definitions than that.
For one thing, true skepticism is NOT the same thing as simply “remaining agnostic”, which appears to be the way it is used by a few here on this thread.
It’s true nobody is an expert in everything, but that’s why a vital part of skepticism has to be recognizing your own limits, and appropriately gauging when to apply it. That means that in many circumstances you ought to be essentially delegating some of your opinions to the relevant experts. Simply saying “I don’t know who to believe/I don’t believe anybody/I’m skeptical, period” is NOT skepticism or critical thinking. Just laziness.
The other side of that is that it smells rather funny when one’s “skepticism” appears to be rather selective. People claim to be “skeptics”, but then proceed to parrot the same old, rotten, widely debunked factoids about, say, “problems with tree rings”, without apparent irony. Factoids they appear to have gotten from the same usual–rather suspect–suspects.
So, a real skeptic is (A) not going to be so full of hubris as to assume that what they think they learned in an afternoon on “ClimateAudit” is sufficient to call into doubt the findings of an entire branch of science with thousands of vastly more knowledgeable practitioners, and (B) ought to learn quickly to be increasingly skeptical of guys like McIntyre, whose claims have been conclusively debunked more often than restless sleeper at scoutcamp (eh? eh? Thank you, I’ll be here all week).
And, reading that over, I should probably clarify that not every “false skeptic” is necessarily a virulent anti-scientite.
I think it’s obvious that a lot of people are sincere, but just doing it wrong. Or maybe sincere, but unconsciously letting other biases (e.g., political ones) influence who they’re more inclined to credit (which, after all, we ALL do).
“It’s also not correct to say that we have no idea. I believe there are a number of possible explanations, although I don’t know that any of them have risen to the top yet.”
That isn’t what they said during the British inquiry. They said they have pretty much no idea why they have diverged.
And I don’t see how you can dismiss the ‘correction’ so easily. They just fit it to the thermometer data.
“The potentially problematic data is a tiny subset”
That isn’t really true. The reason it is problematic is because it isn’t behaving the way the theory clearly states that it should, and we have no good explanation (even after tenty years of looking for one) for why.
It isn’t good scientific technique to just say “oh well” and then just alter the numbers with a fit to thermometer adjustment that varies from year to year based on what you need to match the expected results. (See epicycles)
I’m not saying that all of global warming is in trouble or anything. But I would certainly take a triple look at anything from this particular scientist in the future.
That isn’t what they said during the British inquiry. They said they have pretty much no idea why they have diverged.
Were those dendrochronologists saying that? Or climatologists. The suggestions I’ve seen include changes in moisture, CO2 itself, or light availability. Those are the ones I recall at the moment. There might be others.
And I don’t see how you can dismiss the ‘correction’ so easily. They just fit it to the thermometer data.
What correction are you talking about? The “fudge factor” Jacob linked to above is debunked garbage. Is there some other one you’re talking about?
That isn’t really true. The reason it is problematic is because it isn’t behaving the way the theory clearly states that it should, and we have no good explanation (even after tenty years of looking for one) for why.
The “theory” only says that tree growth is determined by a whole complex of region and species specific conditions. IF trees in a particular area are temperature limited, they might make good temperature proxy candidates. The “theory” does not claim that that condition can never change, so I really have no idea what you’re talking about.
I note that the paper Jacob (I think it was) linked to puts a couple of theories forth itself, including the possibility that the “divergence” does not indicate a problem with the trees response at all, but instead just an acceleration of the difference between high and low altitude in the area as temperature has risen. I’m not following all of it, but I think there’s also some discussion of other micro-climate effects of altitude. They don’t seem especially pessimistic about using these trees for temperature proxies.
“I think it’s obvious that a lot of people are sincere, but just doing it wrong. Or maybe sincere, but unconsciously letting other biases (e.g., political ones) influence who they’re more inclined to credit (which, after all, we ALL do).”
Or perhaps some of us understand the likelihood of any of this being statistically accurate within any reasonable bounds. I rather think a huge number of scientists believed the world was flat and the center of the universe at least tens of thousands of years more recently than the last major climatological event.
Their statistical models are questionable without any data to actually correlate to, because we just haven’t been collecting it long enough to matter.
The best thing they do is make the model match the “common sense” answer that we must be doing some damage.
There are limits to accurately projecting specific results from incomplete data. All of their science falls into this category
Then they start doing the one thing scientists should not do, saying things that can’t be proven to create impetus for actions they think should be done.
Then defending it against all skepticism by declaring every criticism politically motivated or anti-scientism.
“The “fudge factor” Jacob linked to above is debunked garbage. Is there some other one you’re talking about?”
Where is it ‘debunked’? The previou links on this thread don’t show any debunking. They show that the adjustment was made, and that it was made to fit the temperature readings from thermometers without any other explanatory fit offered (much less validated).
“IF trees in a particular area are temperature limited, they might make good temperature proxy candidates. The “theory” does not claim that that condition can never change, so I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Well we can’t very well demonstrate how they were functioning 500 years ago. So why are you so certain that we have a clear understanding of the unobservable phenomenon when we can’t even explain the observable one with the current theories?
Where is it ‘debunked’? The previou links on this thread don’t show any debunking. They show that the adjustment was made, and that it was made to fit the temperature readings from thermometers without any other explanatory fit offered (much less validated).
No adjustment was ever made. It’s just McIntyre and others misreading some commented out graphing code. See my comment at 6:20.
Well we can’t very well demonstrate how they were functioning 500 years ago.
Why not?
This is basically a microcosm of the same things I was talking about with Jacob. Here you have a model of tree growth, and correlations between ring properties and conditions like moisture or temperature. Then sometimes you have constrained conditions where you can measure ring thickness, or thinness, or density and then use your model to pull out some data about moisture or temperature or something. (RE: thinness, thickness, density, etc.- AFAICT, sometimes you use one, sometimes you use others, sometimes you use the same one, but the meaning of thin and thick are reversed. It’s complicated.)
You also have lots of interlocking data. Not just completely different data like ice cores (which is limited, because it’s probably on the other side of the world), but also other trees in the same area, at slightly different altitudes or locations, or a slightly different species, etc. If you’re lucky, I think you certainly may be able to use that interlocking data to get an idea of what conditions were like nearby and where your proxying is likely to be accurate.
For example, if I’m understanding this correctly, the “divergence problem” is itself not so much a divergence between the trees and the instrumental record, but between some trees and some other trees in the same area, but at a slightly different altitude.
It’s therefore actually very easy to verify that such a divergence problem has never happened before, at least in the last 3500 years. It hasn’t.
“The best thing they do is make the model match the “common sense” answer that we must be doing some damage.”
That’s just false. There exists ~150 years of instrument data on temperature and there are many different types of proxy data (here’s a brief overview) and multiple streams of each.
Furthermore, very-long term variation (due to Milankovitch cycles have been predicted theoretically and are supported by observational evidence.
Your argument applies as easily to the theories of gravity, evolution, plate tectonics, or germ theory, as it does to paleoclimatology. As a matter of fact, the late 19th-century critisisms of aseptic technique were founded on just such out-of-hand dismissal (What’s a germ? I’ve never seen one. Lister just wants surgeons to wash their hands to satisfy his own ego.)
Hi, delurking (and typing with my thumbs) to make a small point. TP, jack is holding his own okay here, but answered wrong about radiative properties. An object’s spectral emissivity can deviate from a blackbody thanks to “color” or other surface properties. Aluminum, say, will be non-emissive at the wavelengths where it’s reflective, which could change its equilibrium temperature in the case where it’s hot, uniform and floating in space.
That’s not how co2 works in the atmosphere though (co2 is actually more emissive than air). Rather the co2 acts like a radiation shield cutting down earths *net* blackbody radiation from the earth’s surface in those slices of the spectrum. The planet absorbs energy in one band (visible mostly) and emits lower energy radiation.
Can’t link just now, but you can find a pretty good refutation of mcintyre et al at realclimate.org. They claim that mci used fewer components in their reconstruction. They’re a bit friendlier, which may only be because I agree with them, but do courteously have things like faqs.
I get really frustrated with all the “but didja think of” arguments. A proper analysis of all those factors is exactly what a dynamic climate model is.
russell:
“Most of us reading this will be dead before things get really ugly, but it seems to me that we owe the folks who are coming after us to at least take the *possibility* that we could be part of the cause seriously.”
Based on the case studies highlighted by Jared Diamond in Collapse, I’m very pessimistic on this score. It seems that humans are just not wired up very well to deal with slowly developing problems with very long stimulus-response lag times.
I’m wondering if some of the AGW mitigation efforts should be focused in areas with shorter lag times such that we can deploy solutions quickly if the worst should come about, e.g. like figuring out what we can do to re-engineer the global economics and logistics of food production and distribution on short notice if we have to deal with an abrupt crisis in agriculture. Perhaps it would be better to start talking about this now and planning how to deal with it rather than waiting until a threshold event happens such that much of the world is suddenly and potentially without much warning thrown into an existential state of panic. Especially if efforts to prevent us from ever reaching that stage are likely to fail, at least in the sense of delaying climate change mitigation efforts until it is too late to have much of a short-term impact.
Good to see you again, TLT.
I’d say you’re right to be pessimistic about us doing anything serious to mitigate climate change — or even prepare for the possibility of it.
But what can you expect when intelligent people are willing to believe that climate scientists must have ulterior motives for wanting restraint of CO2 emmissions? Those scientists fudge some of their own data to convince us that we need cap and trade, goes the story, because cap and trade is just something they like. Why they should like it is left unexplained. It can’t possibly be that they actually believe CO2 emmissions are warming the planet they themselves live on. Why should they believe it? They know their data doesn’t actually show it! So they want cap and trade merely to annoy conservatives. Or something.
–TP
Tony P.: “Suppose I have a big ball floating all alone in empty space. Its surface is at a certain average temperature. Its only mechanism for getting rid of heat is radiation. Does the rate at which it sheds heat depend on any property of the surface other than its temperature?”
I’m going to idealize heavily here and assume that unspecified factors are uniform. The answer to your question is yes. A dimensionless quantity called emmisivity (which can have values from 0 to 1, excluding endpoints in the real world) characterizes how quickly/slowly such an object would rid itself of heat. The final formula in this section characterizes its influence.
An interesting but related question is this: would a surface characteristic affect the final temperature of a big ball in space if that ball was subject to a constant input of black-body radiation (like that of a sun).
The answer to this question is also yes and it’s very closely related to the first question/answer pair. This analysis assumes uniformity and high-enough thermal conductivity.
1. Ceteris paribus, emission corresponds positively with temperature (higher temperature implies a higher rate of emission). From this, we can conclude that equilibrium temperatures exist.
2. At equilibrium temperature, total_power_in == total_power_out. Taking item 1 into consideration, if the temperature was below equilibrium, total_power_out < total_power_in and temperature would thus rise. The opposite applies if temperature is above equilibrium. 3. total_power_in == power_reflected + power_absorbed. 4. total_power_out == power_reflected + power_emitted. 5. power_absorbed == power_emitted
6. power_emitted = emissivity * sigma * area * temperature ** 4. sigma being the Stefan–Boltzmann constant of 5.670400e-8 Wm-2 K-4 (apologies for nomenclature).
7. Rearrange terms as temperature = 4throot( power_emitted / (emissivity * sigma * area)).
Plug in some numbers. For both examples, total_power_in = 1000W and area is = 1 square meter.
For a black (emissivity = 1) sphere plug numbers into 7 to get: 364K.
For a shiny (emissivity = 0.1) sphere plug numbers into 7 to get: 204.93K.
So a lower aggregate reflectivity (== higher absorbtion == higher emission) leads to a higher equilibrium temperature.
As keifus notes, an analysis like mine (above) doesn’t capture the greenhouse effect. A useful analysis of that must be more complex, accounts for spectrum dependence, and the interaction between planet and atmosphere.
The wikipedia description covers the basics and mentions some of the complexities.
elm,
Thanks! (For both comments.) I vaguely remember this stuff, having “learned” it but not had to use it over the years.
I assume you chose 1000 W/m^2 to correspond roughly to solar flux at the Earth. It’s interesting that a black Earth comes out at around 90C and a shiny Earth at around -70C. Of course, that’s for an Earth that’s sunlit all over. A spinning Earth, sunlit on just one side, is more complicated but probably comes out at a realistic temperature too.
If I remember right, the Earth itself generates heat in (or liberates heat from) its own interior. I don’t know how much that is, compared to the incoming solar flux, but that enters into the energy balance as well. I assume that generated (or liberated) heat is not believed by anybody to change on a less-than-geologic time scale. But variations in that could certainly take the place of Martian Q-trons as a confounding factor in surface temperature modelling.
In any case, I’m off to look at the link in your 2nd comment.
–TP
Tony: You’re correct, I picked 1000W/m^2 because it’s of the right order of magnitude for solar power input on earth and I wanted a couple of properties for my example: I wanted both temperatures to be something a person could relate to, I wanted the difference to be appreciable, and I wanted any units error to be obviously apparent. If the temperatures had come out at 0.01K and 0.1K, that wouldn’t have been interesting.
Internal heat generation would knock those equations out of balance a little. It would add extra power to the sphere, which would (to maintain equilibrium) require extra power outflux. A higher temperature would be necessary to radiate away that extra heat, but the temperature calculation is unchanged.
A point about modelling most people rarely are aware of (if not professionally dealing with it) is that even perfect models can on occasion be pretty useless for practical purposes because of parametric error ranges.
In my own diploma thesis I had an example where the exact mathematical solution had the difference between two variables in the denominator. In reality those two variables had very similar values with the error margins being in the range of the difference. Nature (as far as we know) is not hampered by error margins or mathematically unsolvable problems*, so it did not matter for ‘her’. But I had to use a ‘wrong’ equation that lacked that potential division by zero in that critical area. So a ‘denier’ could cherrypick my thesis and complain about that fitting function (while ignoring that the explanation for its use was on the next page).
*According to some very reliable source (that wants to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal) there are only two material bodies in the universe because the three-body problem cannot be solved and God does not play dice but uses pencil and paper and algebra**. Every other body must therefore be an illusion (likely a conspiracy involving the devil).
**
.
“Your argument applies as easily to the theories of gravity, evolution, plate tectonics, or germ theory, as it does to paleoclimatology”
This is true, based on what you assume the argument is. My argument is that you certainly can make projections from observable data to some degree of confidence. Gravity is pretty observable, measurable and I haven’t heard lately of anyone telling us exactly when it will be going away based on these observations.
No one pretends to be able to predict earthquakes (accurately yet) based on plate tectonics, although the amount of data is increasing all the time.
Evolution occurs, again no one is predicting the end of the world based on this.
The challenge with climatologists is they are extending the predictions of the effects beyond the accuracy of their supportable models. The science is fascinating but the projections of the effects are simply not supportable.
And your germ example supports my point, as the majority of scientists were not convinced at the time.
Originally an Onion idea, some cre(a)ti(o)n(ist)s have seemingly taken up the idea of a theory of intelligent falling replacing the godless Newtonian gravity.
Btw, there are still some people that consider the germ theory a hoax. Among them the heads of some African states.
Whether organized flat earthers still exist is an open question since it is impossible to discern between real ones and hoaxsters on the net on that topic.
None of the above is a joke btw.
I’m wondering if some of the AGW mitigation efforts should be focused in areas with shorter lag times such that we can deploy solutions quickly if the worst should come about, e.g. like figuring out what we can do to re-engineer the global economics and logistics of food production and distribution on short notice if we have to deal with an abrupt crisis in agriculture.
I agree, not least because if the climate is warming we’re going to have to deal with the effects regardless of what the cause is.
We may end up heartily wishing we *could* influence climactic warming by doing something as simple as emitting fewer greenhouse gases.
I’m extremely — extremely — pessimistic that we will do anything about any of this here in the US under any circumstances short of imminent calamity. Anything requiring concerted public effort is going to get bogged down in an endless argument about whether the government is overreaching its proper scope. If you extend that to an international effort, even more so.
Either we’ll be really lucky and discover that all of the members of scientific community who are concerned about the effects of warming (regardless of cause) are wrong, or we’re in for a parade of train wrecks.
My money is on train wrecks.
Here’s the link from realclimate.org discussing the argument of McKitrick and McIntyre. I’m sure the latter have a response buried somewhere in there too, among the pile of previously-shouldered chips, which perhaps some reader can recommend. RC seems to be making an argument in good faith, and to be correct, but I can’t get too angry at anyone for scrutinizing the underlying data.
Principle component analysis seems interesting as a generic data processing tool. Kind of like Fourier transforms, but without all that pesky theoretical implication going in.
Did I just lose a long comment? How annoying.
Anyway, I followed on to worry that carbon resource limitations are the more obvious, and may well be the more imminent trainwreck, which happens to require the same response as AGW. Alternatives (solar in all its forms, nuclear, and geothermal) make sense in this regard, as does aligning consumption with what those alternatives can actually provide.
And I’m praying for tokamaks.
According to a leading scientist on fusion research in Germany (I attended a lecture recently) he does not expect fusion power to really enter the market before 2050, i.e. until then it will still be mainly research and pilot plants. And this under the assumption that there is actual effort to push it. We will need lifeboats before that ship arrives.
Well, prayer seemed like the appropriate appeal for a miracle. I’m not actually optimistic.
K (I’m also praying for zero point energy.)
I don’t like relying on silver bullets. And cheap new nuclear plants come into the same category as fusion – “Great if it works.”
I have my questions about how much stock to put in predictions of calamity, but I’m a believer in reasonable precautionary measures, and there are independently excellent reasons to invest in wind, solar, and natural gas.
To a first approximation addressing CO2 emissions means ending the use of coal and radically cutting back on the use of oil. Everything else is window-dressing. Those are things that can and should be done anyway – coal is a horrible pollutant, oil is a source of uncontrollable economic instability and gets us into lots of stupid stuff in foreign countries. The costs of renewable replacements will fall with further mass production, and isn’t very high anyway; some subsidies (or more taxes on coal/oil) are a small price to pay for the reduction in direct (non-global-warming) harm from coal & oil.
I don’t share the pessimism about the US lagging the rest of the world on renewables – the US has far more potential for renewables than most of the rest of the developed world, and even though it has issues with grid infrastructure, it doesn’t have to cross national borders to get wind and solar energy from the places that produce it to the places that need it.
The real question is what China (and to a lesser extent, India) are going to do. If the worst predictions of global warming turn out to be true, China is the country with the most to lose. It has 20% of the world’s population living on less than 10% of the world’s arable land, and horrible pollution problems from coal already. I don’t know that a treaty is going to be necessary to get them to cut back, it’s more like a simple question of survival. There’s only so far that the reductions of other countries can take you when you have that many people wanting air-conditioning and refrigerators (which are entirely reasonable things to want, and things I hope everyone in China gets to have in the next few decades… but I’d like them to have breathable air, too.)
(And no, I don’t accept for a second that “But China is doing it!” as an excuse for inaction in the US. If nothing else, the pollution and geopolitical consequences of coal and oil use should motivate us to move away from them.
I also don’t accept the “Fossil fuels bad!” line, though. Natural gas is a fossil fuel, but it’s much less polluting than coal or oil, it’s much less carbon-intensive for the same amount of energy, and there’s a lot of it in the US. It’s not going to last forever but it’s a good transition fuel, and those environmentalists who reject it are (in my opinion) making the perfect the enemy of the good. Natural gas ought to be a big help in getting rid of coal & oil – you can build conventional power plants that use it, you can use it as a transport fuel in conventional gasoline engines with minimal technical changes, and you can transport and distribute it with well-proven pipeline technology – unlike the pie-in-the-sky idea of hydrogen.)
jack … answered wrong about radiative properties. An object’s spectral emissivity can deviate from a blackbody thanks to “color” or other surface properties.
Heh. What can I say. Wikipedia failed me. Or I failed Wikipedia. It’s been a long time since physics 101…
That’s a lot of qualifiers at the end. And it turns out you’re wrong. They haven’t been lucky, they spent about thirty years trying to come with a reliable reason or set of reasons to explain the divergence, and they haven’t been able to.
There is a reason why these trees were chosen in the first place, they are one of the few very stable, very long lived species that is still around in large groups(ie not used up in the European shipbuilding days).
Further, it is the problematic series which was used to bash people who had questions about the medieval warming period in the late 90s and early 2000s. And Mann was doing it, in he mid ninties. And his emails show that he knew of the problems in the series at that very time.
(The Medieval Warming period is apparently back to being accepted after a one decade hiatus).
Gravity is pretty observable, measurable and I haven’t heard lately of anyone telling us exactly when it will be going away based on these observations.
That’s because nobody thinks it is going away (aside from the obvious cases, like freefall). If the behavior of gravity, or modeling of galactic evolution DID suggest that gravity would be going away someday, I’m sure you’d hear about it.
Speaking of which, climate models are almost exactly in the same vein as, say, a simulation of a galaxy’s evolution (albeit with a few more physical relationships than gravity).
No one pretends to be able to predict earthquakes (accurately yet) based on plate tectonics, although the amount of data is increasing all the time.
That’s a bad analogy. Nobody can (yet) predict a specific earthquake, but we can very definitely and accurately predict that, for example, further earthquakes will occur in Chile and Peru, where a couple of plates are colliding.
Likewise, climate scientists don’t claim to be able to predict the specific temperature on July 15th, 2062, or whether it will rain that day. But it is much easier to say quite confidently that temperatures that year, or at least that decade, will be higher than they are now.
The challenge with climatologists is they are extending the predictions of the effects beyond the accuracy of their supportable models. The science is fascinating but the projections of the effects are simply not supportable.
Comments like this lead me to believe you don’t understand what a climate model actually is. See above.
The concept of greybody radiation, emissivity, etc. probably would not have been covered in Physics 101, jack.
But I’m aware of it, and have even used it, so calibrate accordingly.
That’s a lot of qualifiers at the end. And it turns out you’re wrong. They haven’t been lucky, they spent about thirty years trying to come with a reliable reason or set of reasons to explain the divergence, and they haven’t been able to.
The qualifiers were for the GENERAL case. I.e., you can’t just use any old tree anywhere, but in some circumstances you have enough dimensions constrained that you can make inferences. So these specific trees ARE lucky, because of the way the growing conditions are constrained.
Your specific question was about how we can know that a ‘divergence’ hasn’t occurred before, and the answer is that it hasn’t – you can see that by comparing trees to other trees, which is the same way we see the modern divergence.
And I don’t claim to be an expert on this, but it does look like some of the recent research hasn’t just “solved” the divergence problem, it’s largely gone away with larger, more carefully collected data sets and better analysis. There may be nothing to explain.
There is a reason why these trees were chosen in the first place, they are one of the few very stable, very long lived species that is still around in large groups(ie not used up in the European shipbuilding days).
It’s not clear which trees you’re talking about. Mann and others have used a lot of trees, from different regions of the world. And even where and if there are ‘problem’ trees, those are typically not ALL the trees there, but only specific types at specific altitudes.
Further, it is the problematic series which was used to bash people who had questions about the medieval warming period in the late 90s and early 2000s. And Mann was doing it, in he mid ninties. And his emails show that he knew of the problems in the series at that very time.
Whose emails? Mann? Briffa? Which series?
(The Medieval Warming period is apparently back to being accepted after a one decade hiatus).
The medieval warming period has, AFAIK, always been widely accepted. Perhaps you’re confusing that with the question of whether it was a global phenomenon, or something largely confined to western and central Europe.
But I’m aware of it, and have even used it, so calibrate accordingly.
Calibrate?
(FWIW, I had thought that emissivity depended on color, but then was misled by Wikipedia’s lack of an article on anything but blackbody radiation, so figured I was wrong – or that maybe it affected wavelength, but not total energy. This is the problem with studying math, not physics.)
“Comments like this lead me to believe you don’t understand what a climate model actually is. See above”
Or I understand them better than most.
Marty — “Or I understand them better than most.”
…especially those climate science poseurs, for they are Elves and hopelessly effete. We Dwarves, however…
Or I understand them better than most.
Including the modelers themselves, apparently. Truly, I am convinced.
Re AGW: The real problem here is Al Gore and the natural pessimism on the right, only reinforced with his recent book cover.
Re Tree Rings: Sebastian said it well. IMHO, Anyone following Climategate with any objectivity should know about the tree ring issue.
I’d oh so humbly suggest that amateur skepticism based on a layman’s reading . . .
Yes, a problem. I’ve looked at both climateaudit and realclimate and it just makes my head hurt. But when people smarter than me see it as a problem, I question it. Also, I remember one of the CRU emails being from a leading tree ring scientist calling into question the use of the tree ring data in general. Can’t find the link right off hand.
No reputable scientist disagrees . . .
Lots of qualifiers here. Are you saying that no reputable scientist questions AGW? That’s certainly not true.
How about Dr. Akasofu? He’s the director of IARC, formed to study climate change in the Arctic before it was as big a deal as it is now. Even Al Gore was behind it. Here is a recent paper from Dr. Akasofu.
Is he anti-AGW? No. Skeptical? I’d say yes.
Do you mistrust the climate records cited by the WMO? If accurate and measurements have been taken since 1850 . . . (
See Akasofu, above.
I’m not sure that’s an especially tenable position. There is little doubt that CO2 plays a major role in climate regulation. There can be little doubt that human beings are responsible for a historically significant accumulation of CO2. There can be little doubt that there is indeed warming. And the only credible explanation anyone’s put forward for the warming is the anthropogenic CO2.
See Akasofu, above.
A scientific back and forth about appropriate statistical methods and the interpretation of particular data sources is normal and healthy.
Then you agree that Climategate is a real controversy, right? I’m referencing the emails that show the effort to stop publication of papers contrary to the CRU position.
BTW, Akasofu’s office is only about three miles from Ice Alaska (Ice carving championship) which served up this lovely Frozen Gore. I grew up in Fairbanks and worked with the founders of IARC and also rode Ski-doo. Hence my familiarity with both.
Weird. Had to refresh to post and it messed up the links.
IARC here .
Akasofu’s paper here
bc, I wrote: “No reputable scientist disagrees that the world is getting hotter, and that this is causing climate change”
You claimed that Lots of qualifiers here. Are you saying that no reputable scientist questions AGW?
No, I’m saying what I said, above.
That’s certainly not true. How about Dr. Akasofu? He’s the director of IARC, formed to study climate change in the Arctic before it was as big a deal as it is now. Even Al Gore was behind it. Here is a recent paper from Dr. Akasofu.
Sadly, the very paper you cited by your claimed reputable scientist opposing the concept of global warming and climate change, is about global warming and climate change.
Bzzzt! Try again. To quote just one line from the paper you cited without reading “Based on Figures 3a-3e, there is little doubt that the temperature has been increasing almost linearly from 1800 (or a little earlier) to the present.”
So; global warming is real. No reputable scientist disagrees. Climate change caused by global warming is real. No reputable scientist disagrees.
Reputable scientists may and do disagree over what causes the present trend of global warming.
But anyone with any interest whatsoever in their children living to grow up should hope that the present trend of global warming is caused by the heightened CO2 emissions caused by our oil-dependent civilisation, because if that is true, then we can do something about it.
If it’s not true, there’s nothing that can be done and we’re all doomed. Is that what you want, bc? Doom?
And as the clear and obvious thing to do is to wean our civilisation off oil-dependence, and as we have to do this anyway if civilisation is not to collapse in a megacatastrophe that will wipe out more humans than any other catastrophe known to us, it makes sense to do it.
Of course (as I noted already) it does not make sense for corporations whose quarterly profits are completely dependent on oil, and as right-wingers take their politics from corporations, it makes sense for right-wingers to agitate for the mass deaths of their grandchildren.
I guess.
anyone with any interest whatsoever in their children living to grow up should hope that the present trend of global warming is caused by the heightened CO2 emissions
The line about your children “living to grow up” was rather commonly used during the Malthusian/resource-limits scares of decades and centuries past. You’re descended from the children who previous generations thought weren’t going to have a world to grow up in. You seem pretty alive to me.
But that’s peripheral. I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make with saying we “should hope” that reality is one way or another. The reality is that it either is or isn’t caused by CO2 and what we hope for is perfectly irrelevant. And if we get very attached to the hope that it’s caused by CO2 because at least we know how to deal with that, we’ve effectively adopted a strategy of searching for your keys under the streetlamp because that’s where you can see.
As a matter of my opinion, for whatever it’s worth since I’m no expert, I think it’s very likely that the increased levels of CO2 from industrialization are the main cause for whatever warming has been measured, although I’m not going to rule out that other unknown or overlooked mechanisms are responsible for some or all of it. What I am not so convinced of is that, 1) the amplifying feedbacks that are supposed to increase the effects of CO2-induced warming by a multiple of the direct effect will really work that way, and 2) that the temperature changes will have the catastrophic effects predicted.
But as I’ve said I think there are independent good reasons to take the most important actions that would be needed for CO2 emissions reductions, and I believe in a reasonable level of precautionary action. I have no time whatsoever for people who dismiss the consequences of mountaintop-removal coal mining, spreading radioactive coal ash across the country, having a world-spanning supply line for our most critical transport fuel, and having to make deals with dictatorships around the world for oil. I don’t care if you don’t believe in global warming, I don’t care about your partisan affiliation, if you think the coal & oil industries are working out just fine for us then you are letting a desire to stick it to the hippies overrule a common-sense assessment of what is good for America.
“Or I understand them better than most.
Including the modelers themselves, apparently. Truly, I am convinced.”
I am curious what you are (or obviously aren’t) convinced of?
The reality is that it either is or isn’t caused by CO2 and what we hope for is perfectly irrelevant.
Absolutely.
But regardless: the earth’s supplies of oil are still going to run out. It’s a finite resource.
I’m sure it makes you feel better to go “oh, but look at all those scares THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN – this one won’t either!” because sure, you’re right: I am descended from the people who did survive the economic and ecological catastrophes.
That doesn’t mean the people who died as a result of economic / ecological catastrophe didn’t die, though.
And if we get very attached to the hope that it’s caused by CO2 because at least we know how to deal with that, we’ve effectively adopted a strategy of searching for your keys under the streetlamp because that’s where you can see.
No. We’ve adopted a strategy of cleaning up the house because the house needs to be cleaned, and hoping that in the course of cleaning house, we find the keys.
We may or may not find the keys. But if we don’t, we do at least have a clean house as a result.
Weaning our civilisation off its dependence on oil is a fundamentally good thing: if it also works to prevent global warming, it’s even more of a good thing.
It’s a win-win situation – for everyone except the oil corporations.
But when people smarter than me see it as a problem, I question it.
Except a whole heck of a lot of other people (smarter than us) who actually do the science DON’T see it as a problem. Shouldn’t that count for something?
Also, it’s not clear who “smarter people” is referring to. Critics like McIntyre throw up a lot of noise, but an awful lot of it has in turn been debunked in turn by people smarter than them. (Which is not actually that hard. And McIntyre’s one the better ones – most of the leading “critics” are just plain silly.)
When the claims of “critics” are consistently shot down and shown to be superficial, shouldn’t that count for something too?
Also, I remember one of the CRU emails being from a leading tree ring scientist calling into question the use of the tree ring data in general. Can’t find the link right off hand.
Maybe something like this one? (Just something I happened to have open in another tab.)
If so, then that’s clearly a misrepresentation/misunderstanding of what he’s saying.
“Calling into question the use of tree ring data in general” would mean that someone thought it was completely useless. Clearly it’s not. Instead, what I think most would say is that it’s quite useful, but there are obviously limitations to using anything ALL BY ITSELF. It’s a lot more useful if you reinforce it and fill it in and cross check with all the other things: ice cores, isotopes, pollen, sediments, etc. etc.
Which is exactly what that guy’s saying, and exactly what the comprehensive reconstructions do.
“Your specific question was about how we can know that a ‘divergence’ hasn’t occurred before, and the answer is that it hasn’t – you can see that by comparing trees to other trees, which is the same way we see the modern divergence.”
This suggests to me that you haven’t been following the issue as carefully as you’ve been suggesting.
No you can’t. The whole reason the bristlecone pines were used in the first place was because they were one of the very few trees that were all of: A) old enough to be useful; B) stable enough in population to be useful; C) large enough sample size to be useful; D) long-lived enough species to be interesting. You can’t just compare them to lots of other tree samples, because most other tree samples are much less suitable.
Also it is very misleading to say “you can see that by comparing trees to other trees, which is the same way we see the modern divergence.” The divergence shows up between tree samples and thermometer readings. That is what Mann is talking about when he writes about doing the ‘trick’ on the graph. He is normalizing the (not trending the right direction) tree samples against the thermometer samples. He does that because he wants to say that the tree samples are accurate, because he wants to show a temperature trend from before we had widespread thermometer use. The problem is that for the last 50 of the 150 years we can compare the two types of data, the tree data doesn’t track well with the thermometer data.
“It’s not clear which trees you’re talking about. Mann and others have used a lot of trees, from different regions of the world. And even where and if there are ‘problem’ trees, those are typically not ALL the trees there, but only specific types at specific altitudes.”
There really aren’t lots of different trees that are super useful in this context. Most don’t have lots of individuals that live a long time. And of those that do, many were cut down by Europeans in the 16th-19th centuries. There are the Russian trees and the bristlecone pines. But Mann has statistical problems with the Russian trees too (there is the whole Urals cherry-picking controversy about him mysteriously excising samples groups that just happened to reduce the effect he was showing, and distributing trees from one group into other groups severely skewing the statistical analysis).
In your link, a great summary of the problem:
Weather and climate are complex enough that we will never be able to say with 100% certainty what the cause of any significant event is.
Recreating the climactic history of the earth back before human culture, or even humans, existed, likewise.
We make our best guess, and not everyone’s best guess will be the same.
When you are presented with risk and uncertainty, you make your best estimate of the cost of different actions you might take, and you make your best estimate of the risks involved in taking each one.
What will it cost us to reduce our impact on the environment?
What might it cost us if we don’t do so?
Run the numbers and see how they look.
Climactic warming is only one of many points at which we basically ignore the effects of how we live.
The lifecycle of the bristlecone pine is interesting, but I would like to see the numbers. And, by “the numbers” I mean an all-in analysis of the economic and human costs of doing something, and doing nothing.
What does it cost us if we act.
What do we risk if we don’t.
Those are figures we can probably estimate to a useful level of accuracy.
We aren’t going to get a definitive answer about whether it’s “our fault” or not until it’s too late to do anything about it. If then.
If we think the climate might be changing, for whatever reason, and that the changes might affect us in ways we don’t like, the time to act is now. Not later, now.
Did humans cause the little ice age? I don’t know. Probably not.
Were people profoundly affected by the little ice age? Why yes, they were.
And there weren’t 6 billion of us on the planet then.
He does that because he wants to say that the tree samples are accurate, because he wants to show a temperature trend from before we had widespread thermometer use.
There’s that meme again: scientists (or at least one scientist) want to find global warming even if it’s not in their data.
I ask again: why might they want that? If your theory is that they will get more research grants that way, I ask whether they would not get more and larger grants by “finding” global cooling and prescribing greater use of coal and oil.
–TP
Sebastian – I’ll try to do some more research get back to you later when I’ve had a chance, but a couple things I have handy:
That is what Mann is talking about when he writes about doing the ‘trick’ on the graph. He is normalizing the (not trending the right direction) tree samples against the thermometer samples.
I have yet to see a link showing anyone doing any such thing. Similar claims have already been debunked. If you provide a link to the specific claim, I can look at it.
But Mann has statistical problems with the Russian trees too (there is the whole Urals cherry-picking controversy about him mysteriously excising samples groups that just happened to reduce the effect he was showing, and distributing trees from one group into other groups severely skewing the statistical analysis).
This is another well debunked claim–primarily harped on by McIntyre on rather flimsy and misleading evidence. Here, for example. (PS: I think you might mean Briffa here, not Mann, though possibly McIntyre tarred them both, or implicated him by extension if he used one of Briffa’s series.)
“I ask again: why might they want that?”
Because like lot of human beings, they ge attached to something and defend it even when the evidence starts to turn against them. I do it. Other people do it. It is a really common human trait.
“If your theory is that they will get more research grants that way, I ask whether they would not get more and larger grants by “finding” global cooling and prescribing greater use of coal and oil.”
That isn’t my theory, but so far as I can tell, the answer to your question would be “no they would not”. If they get their funding from any of the large universities, most of the governments, and/or UN organizations, they will get more money by finding global warming.
But my actual theory is what I posted at the top of this comment.
Also it is very misleading to say “you can see that by comparing trees to other trees, which is the same way we see the modern divergence.” The divergence shows up between tree samples and thermometer readings.
I should probably have said something like “something we see in the modern divergence”. This paper is an example of what I’m talking about.
The divergence is usually characterized as being between thermometers and trees, but that’s not the whole story. What you actually see is a BIG divergence between thermometers and certain northern latitude trees. Trees elsewhere continue to track thermometers, or at least diverge substantially less.
Or in other words, a symptom of this divergence, whatever the cause, is a marked divergence between “Northern” trees, and the others.
Since we DON’T SEE such a divergence between the two groups at any other time in the record, we can be pretty sure the phenomenon didn’t previously occur.
P.S.: Another interesting thing to note is, for example, Figure 6 in Briffa 1998. You can clearly see the “divergence problem” in both ring width and density, but note how funny things also start to happen to the relationship between them.
I’ll leave the actual significance of that to the dendrochronologists–it may not have any in this specific case–but I wanted to point it out as an example of how you can often use interlocking clues to figure out when things might be wonky. This is data from the tree itself doing a sort of internal consistency check.
Because like lot of human beings, they ge attached to something and defend it even when the evidence starts to turn against them. I do it. Other people do it. It is a really common human trait.
I think this is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why a particular scientist will be attached to his or her results.
Obviously we see this all the time: scientists X and Y develop Theory Q and thus become it’s primary champions, and, if Theory Q turns out be in error, they’ll be some of the last ones to concede it.
BUT.
This doesn’t explain at all why science as a whole would stick to a particular theory with such a broad consensus. X and Y are predictably going to stick to their guns, but there should still be huge professional incentives for A, B, C, D and E to poke holes in Theory Q, or to come up with Theory R.
That isn’t my theory, but so far as I can tell, the answer to your question would be “no they would not”. If they get their funding from any of the large universities, most of the governments, and/or UN organizations, they will get more money by finding global warming.
What’s your evidence for this?
I mean, to start with, most studies that “support” global warming don’t specifically have anything to do with it. If you’re a dendrochronologist, for example, working at a university somewhere, you get money to go hiking in the woods collecting samples from trees and then carefully preparing them and looking at them through a microscope. There’s nobody asking you up front “are you going to write a paper for or against global warming”. You just do your low-level thing and it falls where it may.
So, given that, how do you distinguish that theory from the alternative theory that global warming is actually just good science? That is, when people get funded for a study to look into some little corner of it, the data they collect usually ends up supporting or refining global warming, rather than overturning it.
Seb — “Because like lot of human beings, they ge attached to something and defend it even when the evidence starts to turn against them. I do it. Other people do it. It is a really common human trait.”
So in your view almost all scientists involved in the consensus are misled by their pride or peer pressure into supporting work so shoddy that someone with only a passing knowledge of the field can find it in a casual reading? Because scientists are just such a collegial bunch they continue to fall for the old Emperor’s clothes routine? Because not one of the groups of scientists looking into the data reliability thought they might be able to advance their own career or get a grant by correcting a simple oversight or had enough professional pride to correct a misrepresentation of data?
Really?
Since we’re talking human nature here I’d expect a fair measure of dissent based on institutional pride or rival theories or having been snubbed at a conference, etc. and I’d expect that some few of those people have reputation and connections enough to find an outlet to publish their views, especially if the science, math, or modeling were as bad as critics claim — just based on the same stupid pride that you note.
Huh? I thought we were criticizing two or maybe three specific scientists over a narrow issue. Am I wrong?
Specifically Mann, Brifa, and maybe Jones?
Now lots of people relied on their work, and seem to be doing so less, now.
“I ask whether they would not get more and larger grants by “finding” global cooling and prescribing greater use of coal and oil.”
It’s not without precedent.
Because like lot of human beings, they get attached to something and defend it even when the evidence starts to turn against them.
Like, oh, I don’t, know, not wanting to admit that access to abortion in much of the US is severely limited because of the successful campaign of harassment, threats, and violence against abortionists?
Huh? I thought we were criticizing two or maybe three specific scientists over a narrow issue. Am I wrong?
Specifically Mann, Brifa, and maybe Jones?
Well, perhaps YOU are. Or think you are.
But the origin of these criticisms is not the academy. A few minor corrections or emendations might come from that direction, but that alone would be a non-event. Primarily they’re just more scurrilous attacks from McIntyre and his ilk.
And the destination of these criticisms is to feed straight into the likes of Climate Audit, McKitrick, and ultimately down into various kinds of bogus FUD and “silver bullet” scenarios against global warming feeding the whole denialist talking points chain.
At some point, you have to put two and two together: Look at the grasping and superficial nature of the “criticisms” on the one hand, and their inevitable ultimate use in the other, and conclude that maybe that IS their intended purpose from the get go.
Now lots of people relied on their work, and seem to be doing so less, now.
Where do you get that impression?
My own impression is that Mann’s perhaps taken a modest dose of valid criticism for some of his early methods, but nothing at all damning. That makes him a pioneer, not a pariah. His results have been proven out, updated, and widely duplicated — including by Mann himself. I’m not aware that Brifa or others have even really been seriously criticized.
All the really damning attacks — cherry picking, “fudging”, etc.– have been utterly without substance.
I mean, I suppose more and more researchers are replicating these studies and results, so you don’t need to rely on any one or two researchers these days, but that’s not quite the same thing, is it?
“And your germ example supports my point, as the majority of scientists were not convinced at the time.”
They were doctors and surgeons, not scientists. Lister’s theory suggested that surgeons themselves caused septic infection and, naturally, they didn’t want to accept that.
On the broader topic, whenever I read McIntyre is that there’s always less substance to his critiques than he’d have you believe. I’ve wasted enough time tracking down documents only to find those claims empty. One or two wild goose chases are sufficient to write him and his criticism off.
I’ll stick with the researchers, data, models, and reproducible results on this one.
“But the origin of these criticisms is not the academy. A few minor corrections or emendations might come from that direction, but that alone would be a non-event. Primarily they’re just more scurrilous attacks from McIntyre and his ilk.”
The ‘origin’ is irrelevant. And again you’re pretty much wrong anyway. The information I was looking at is from the British government inquiry. The precipitating event for that may have been McIntyre’s information requests, but the investigation itself has gone well beyond that.
See for example this statement of the Institute of Physics to the UK Parliament:
You should also note that the British Information Commissioner ruled that there was evidence of serious legal violations, but that they couldn’t be prosecuted because the complaint has to be made within six months of the violation.
That is not just McIntyre being a crank.
I thought that the institute had to walk back some of the comments, see here
From lj’s link:
It would be a shame for anyone to misinterpret the statement quoted above.
I think the problem is that climate change denial isn’t such big business in the UK as in the US. So British scientists are not as aware as American scientists how cautiously they have to word what they say in order not to get picked up by right-wing nutters who very much want to claim “hey, this reputable scientist SAYS global warming isn’t happening!” when no reputable scientist would claim any such thing…
Jes:
Mine was a clarifying question and you clarified. At least you understand the distinction. I wish more would distinguish between AGW and GW.
I know fully well that Akasofu is not arguing against GW (at least not necessarily). For that matter, he is not exactly arguing against AGW, but pointing out an important issue. The comments above talk about the temperature data going back to 1850. Akasofu’s article is spot on regarding what that means.
My point is that he is a reputable scientist that is not on the AGW bandwagon. Even though YOU may not be saying “no reputable scientist is against AGW” it is certainly being said above. So with your clarification that part of my comment is not aimed at you.
There really isn’t much controversy about coming out of the little ice age, so saying that most reputable scientists agree the earth is warming just isn’t saying much. Yet it’s bandied about to support AGW.
The ‘origin’ is irrelevant.
The origin is certainly not irrelevant. Evaluating the reliability of a source is a vital part of skepticism.
And McIntyre is not reliable — he’s a self-appointed generator of shoddy denialist talking points. If he’s right once in a while, it’s only the way a stopped clock is.
Science, on the other hand, IS pretty reliable.
And again you’re pretty much wrong anyway. The information I was looking at is from the British government inquiry. The precipitating event for that may have been McIntyre’s information requests, but the investigation itself has gone well beyond that.
Indeed. The investigations have been quite thorough.
And yet McIntyre’s complaints–the damning ones, anyway–have not been borne out.
See for example this statement of the Institute of Physics to the UK Parliament:
Do you have anything substantive? With all “concerned that”, “apparent” this hedging and so forth, this seems to be just a statement written by a committee of academic bureaucrats trying to cover their butts with politicians, very probably before they’ve really even evaluated the accusations. It is very evidently NOT a substantive scientific critique.*
You should also note that the British Information Commissioner ruled that there was evidence of serious legal violations, but that they couldn’t be prosecuted because the complaint has to be made within six months of the violation.
It should surprise no one that scientists sometimes get angry, exasperated, or close ranks. At worst, one or two (but, IIRC, not Mann, Brifa, or Jones) may have gotten angry enough to have said or done something particularly stupid regarding disclosure that was legally or ethically inappropriate.
Show me the part where the science is actually bad. (I see the part you bolded. Show me the actual emails or papers where that is purported to have occurred.**)
That is not just McIntyre being a crank.
Except he is. His criticisms of the science simply haven’t borne out. Not only that, many of them are transparent hackery–cherry picking, quote mining, etc. He’s a crank, or worse, a troll.
And complaints that scientists won’t share data with him, a crank, don’t count. They’re not criticisms on the merits, and they are essentially a self fulfilling prophecy. All he’s proved is that someone can abuse the system enough, and spread enough misinformation and scurrilous accusations, that a few of the scientists he’s firing wild shots at might get angry enough to actually break the rules in order to frustrate him.
—
*Just noticed LJ’s link. So. It was indeed premature butt-covering–as it transparently appears–and all the worst parts have been retracted. Color me…unsurprised.
** Ditto.
Jack:
Maybe something like this one? (Just something I happened to have open in another tab.)
I don’t think so. He emailed 2-3 times and wasn’t getting any response from (I think) Jones.
And here is the problem I have with your repeated “it’s been debunked.”
-I can read the emails and they smell. Whether or not I can completely understand the science, it’s clear to me that there was something to hide. The explanations to date have been rather lame.
-Many rely on the debunking done at realclimate. McIntyre, as I understand it, doesn’t delete comments. Realclimate, as I understand it, does. If McIntyre is such a crank, at least he leaves his site open to show that.
-McIntyre, when read, doesn’t strike me as a crank. He responds and analyzes critiques. Briffa responded to him somewhat accusing him on the Yamal data. I remember him replying and saying he wasn’t accusing Briffa of purposefully not selecting certain data, but simply pointing out that there was a larger data set that produced results not as indicative of warming and no explanation of why that set wasn’t used. Now I see McIntyre being accused of selecting data when he was just pointing out the issue. And then Briffa wouldn’t release his data. I don’t know if he has now.
I could go on, but you seem to be missing the simple instinct that something is wrong when reading the emails. Sure, that’s not scientific, it sure doesn’t inspire confidence.
bc: At least you understand the distinction. I wish more would distinguish between AGW and GW.
*shrug* As I’ve noted above: if you value the lives of your grandchildren, you should hope to hell that global warming is caused by humanity – because they we stand a chance of stopping it.
And so many right-wingers are happy to poke fun at the idea that global warming is happening. Given that, how should I know that a right-winger coming in to attack global warming is only attacking the idea that mass release by humanity of long-locked CO2 could have anything to do with it – the oil corporation position – rather than the idea that global warming is real – the Faux News position?
Why do you want so much to believe that our oil-dependent civilisation is not the cause of global warming – that we may as well continue burning up the world’s oil reserves? What benefit do you gain from espousing the policy of despair? It’s obvious what oil corporations and their political lackeys gain: but for you, there’s really no benefit but proving your Republican loyalty by toeing the party line. Is that enough?
Even though YOU may not be saying “no reputable scientist is against AGW” it is certainly being said above.
I’d note also (having looked up Akasofu’s biography) that while he’s definitely a reputable scientist, he’s also an elderly scientist – he was born in 1930. Elderly scientists tend to be the best defenders of the older scientific understanding against the new: this is valid and reasonable, since science is all about rigorously establishing the truth. But it doesn’t mean that he is likely to be right.
All the worst parts hav been retracted? Really? Please quote the part you believe LJ’s link retracted.
Was it the “the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.”?
The above is A) true, B) verified by the inquiry, and C) substantive.
And they didn’t retract that part. And non-incidentally that is what we have been talking about. (The Guardian reporter seems to think this is a contradiction with their statement that they believe the science of AGW as a whole is sound. I don’t see why that is a contradiction, but maybe he believes the tree data is more important than you do.)
Was it “Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers.”?
Because that is what happened.
“At worst, one or two (but, IIRC, not Mann, Brifa, or Jones) may have gotten angry enough to have said or done something particularly stupid regarding disclosure that was legally or ethically inappropriate.”
You’re recalling incorrectly, again. In a way that makes me strongly suspect that you haven’t paid nealy as much attention to the background as you’re pretending to.
A) The whole thing is largely about Jones and Mann. The British information commission strongly suggested that they would have criminally prosecuted Jones except for the fact that the proceedings have to start within 6 months of the violation. And they are seeking a change in that legislation to make the window longer. (I don’t know enough about UK law to know if that means that Jones himself should be worried).
The emails themselves suggest that both Mann and Brifa knew they were being misleading with the tree data. In fact they show Brifa suggesting that they need disclosure and they have Mann arguing that they shouldn’t with Brifa finally giving in.
Suggesting that some scientists may have been a bit out of control, but that it wasn’t Mann and Jones and Brifa, is exactly wrong.
All the worst parts hav been retracted? Really? Please quote the part you believe LJ’s link retracted.
I direct you to elm’s comment earlier.
Also, if you read LJ’s link, apparently no one at the Institute is actually wanting to take responsibility for writing the memo – suggesting that all the climate-change-deniers who jumped in and waved it about going “hey look, reputable scientists are agreeing with us!” will be left with rotten egg all over their faces.
Not that I think they’ll notice or care, given the layers of rotten egg thickly plastered there already….
I read elm’s comment, and I read the clarification itself.
The clarfication itself essentially says that the the initial statement shouldn’t be read as the Institute saying that it doesn’t support AGW as a whole, because it does support AGW as a whole.
Which doesn’t contradict nor retract any part of the original statement, because the original statement never said that.
It doesn’t retract any part of the statement that I quoted.
Which is why I asked jack to specifically quote the parts he think are retracted. Because so far as I can tell, none of it was.
Saying ‘see elms comment’ does not help that.
Jes, is there a part of the original statement that you believe is retracted? If so, I would like you to tell me which part, and why, so I can tell what you are talking about.
For reference, the statement is:
You could say something like: I believe that their statement effectively nullifies “The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of over 36,000 and is a leading communicator of physics-related science to all audiences, from specialists through to government and the general public.” because it suggests that they only have 35,000 members.
Or whatever…
Was it the “the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.”?
This is not “true, verified by inquiry, and substantive”.
1. At face value, this statement appears ignorant of the science. The nature of the divergence problem, the one we’ve been discussing all day, the one that is well reported in peer-reviewed literature and not exactly some deep secret, means that it would be inappropriate to include obviously valueless proxy data in IPCC graphs. The divergence ‘problem’ is that some trees are no longer indicating temperature. Just like thousands of other trees don’t. Or like craters on the moon don’t. So why would it be appropriate to include mis-interpreted data in an IPCC graph? If there was an instrument station that went offline in 1958, would you say we should graph “0” after that point?
Given the mysterious authorship of this memo, and it’s hedging tone, it’s entirely possible that whoever wrote that statement doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.
2. As I pointed out, you haven’t actually shown a link to any kind of scientific “inquiry”. Just one vapid letter written in service of a political inquiry. A letter that nobody is even willing to take responsibility for.
3. By the same note, you haven’t established either the truth value, or the substance of that claim. By “substance” I mean a link to the actual email(s) or papers, or detailed explanation of what exactly the claimed problem is here, not just a vague accusation.
Seb — when Jack and others say that treegate has been dealt with and the underlying science is not in question I don’t think they are advancing claims about Mann or Brifa in particular. The consensus is not based upon their data so much as it agrees with the conclusion that their work pointed toward, which is also borne out in the data and work of hundreds of scientists who have not been implicated in any shenanigans. So whether or not people are recalling details of the controversy wrong, those who keep pointing to the controversy as reason to be skeptical of AGW as a scientific proposition seem themselves to be unaware of the huge body of independent scientific work that supports these conclusions with no associated controversy.
All the worst parts hav been retracted? Really? Please quote the part you believe LJ’s link retracted.
…
So what we have is a board anonymously dashing off on a well-hedged, if strongly worded, statement saying, basically, that they disapprove of misconduct (should any of it have occurred, as it “appears”).
And then nobody actually willing to say they signed off on it. And no way to tell whether the three members that purportedly “strongly supported” it are even qualified to pass judgement (this was not a board of climate scientists specifically).
And the same board has issued a further bland statement saying they don’t want the memo to be misinterpreted, and it should not be taken as an indication that they think any of the science is flawed.
Yeah. Arguably, “retracted” isn’t exactly the right word, but you’re reaaaaally going to have to come up with something else to support any damning points you claim to find in that memo.
saying that most reputable scientists agree the earth is warming just isn’t saying much.
Actually it’s saying quite a lot. It’s just not saying anything controversial.
There are two basic issues:
1. Is the earth’s climate getting warmer?
2. If so, to what degree are humans responsible?
There’s much more of a consensus about (1) than there is about (2). Whether (2) is true or not, if (1) is true we really ought to be doing something about it.
And whether (2) is true or not, there are about 1,000 reasons why reducing greenhouse emissions is a good idea.
I understand that there are interesting questions about the science involved, but a lot of the discussion seems, to me, to be in “how many angels on the head of a pin” territory.
If the climate is warming, we’re going to have to make changes in how we live. We need to get our heads around that now, before it happens, so that we can be prepared for it, because the effects are likely to be quite large.
A single, simple case: if snowfall in the Rockies declines significantly, there will be much less water in the Colorado River.
The Colorado is a, perhaps the, primary source of water for seven Western states. It’s the primary water source for Las Vegas and Phoenix, and a significant water source for other large western cities.
It’s the primary water source for much of the agriculture in the West.
There’s nothing to replace it.
If the amount of water available in the Colorado declines by a quarter, or a third, or half, what happens? Where do folks in Phoenix and Las Vegas get water? Where do all of the people who now eat produce from the Imperial Valley get their food from?
Maybe the issue deserves a different kind of attention than arguments about the lifecycle of the bristlecone pine, and whether McIntyre is a crank.
it would be inappropriate to include obviously valueless proxy data in IPCC graphs
But the whole point of including the proxy data alongside the instrumental data within the brief period that instrumental data is available is to demonstrate a close correlation and therefore support the idea that the proxy record can be used to infer historic temperatures and therefore support the idea that the present warming is unprecedented in recent times.
Or to put it another way, if the last 50 years of data from this proxy is “obviously valueless” then how do we know that it isn’t equally obviously valueless 500 years ago?
If a big chunk of a data series is worthless, it calls into question the value of the whole. What kind of scientist, when preparing a popular presentation, cherry picks the part of a series that supports their thesis and throws out the rest of it? Forget climate science: if this was a drug company study and they treated data this way I think everyone here would be livid.
What they said in the literature is one thing; what they chose to present to the public is another. I’ve said before that this isn’t a major issue, but it’s not in itself defensible.
And I have no idea why anyone would be so casual about government-funded scientists blowing off FOIA requests or attempting to delete data from them. That’s perfectly okay now? What happened to freedom of information being a liberal value?
But it doesn’t mean that he is likely to be right.
Wait, are you seriously arguing that his AGE makes it more or less likely he is correct? Wow.
Why do you want so much to believe that our oil-dependent civilisation is not the cause of global warming – that we may as well continue burning up the world’s oil reserves?
Actually, I’m in favor of becoming less oil dependent if we can do it in a way that doesn’t wreck the economy.
And now you seem to be saying it IS AGW. You just aren’t arguing no reputable scientists is against AGW? Right?
Here is where I come from, Jes. I remember the 1970’s articles about global cooling. I was a sci-fi buff as a kid and liked to read the apocalyptic novels as well, so I paid a lot of interest to those articles. My understanding is that we’re due for natural cooling. We’re currently in an interglacial. Based on history, that will end. I expect it to be warmer now than in the past. I get the claims that warming is happening faster than in history and that there may be a tipping point, but I am not convinced it will matter one iota when the cooling cycle begins again.
It’s not that I “want” to believe any particular way. It’s that I have a healthy dose skepticism. Especially when we’re talking about trillions of dollars in regulation.
Wait, are you seriously arguing that his AGE makes it more or less likely he is correct? Wow.
Nope. I note he holds a minority view. I look at reasons why he might hold a minority view – scientists are human too. I note that he is 80 this year, and while doubtless full of wisdom, if you had ever hung out with aged academics, bc, you would find there was nothing like an aged academic for hanging on to the theory he’s always known is right.
And as others have noted: it’s perfectly possible to consider that there may be some other reason besides the mass quantities of CO2 being released into the atmosphere why the Earth is getting warmer. But only a fool (or a very old person without children or grandchildren) would be indifferent to the idea that we ought to do what we can do to try to slow down or stop climate change, especially as it’s an obviously sensible thing to do…
I get the claims that warming is happening faster than in history and that there may be a tipping point, but I am not convinced it will matter one iota when the cooling cycle begins again.
Ah. You’re basing your cheerful optimism on 1970s skiffy.
That did tend to be a cheerful period in cataclysmic novels, yes.
I went on reading science and science-fiction well after the 1970s: hence my lack of optimism that all will be well just because.
It’s that I have a healthy dose skepticism. Especially when we’re talking about trillions of dollars in regulation.
Just to push back on this:
What do you think our dependence on fossil fuels costs us?
The price tag for just our military involvement in Iraq since 2003 is a bit over $700B, and counting. And that’s far, far, far from the whole of it.
I don’t know the degree to which human activity is affecting the climate. Nobody “knows”, in the sense of being able to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Scientists extrapolate from what they do know and can demonstrate, to what they don’t know. They create models of what would be likely to happen under certain conditions, and then see if predicted things happen, or not, and to what degree.
I think it’s fair to say that human industrial culture, and in particular the emission of greenhouse gases, is a possible to likely contributor to what appears to be a warming climate.
Anyone want to dispute that?
The US, in particular, is one of the two nations that emits, by a great margin, the most of these. Of those two, we emit them at a per-capita rate 3 or 4 times greater than the other (China).
Our economy is based on the profligate use of fossil fuels.
This might have made some kind of economic sense when we were self-sufficient in those fuels, but we no longer are. And so, it costs us in a very wide range of types of coin to continue to use them at the rate that we do.
Here is an interesting paper from the EPA that provides an interesting analysis of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. We could get enormous savings from stuff like how we handle our trash and our patterns of land use.
We could get enormous savings in greenhouse gas emissions from not trucking every thing we eat hundreds or thousands of miles from farm to plate.
A lot of the stuff we generate just comes down to inertia. Also known as, being lazy.
Here is where I come from, Jes. I remember the 1970’s articles about global cooling.
Debunking the “Global Cooling” Myth.
It’s not that I “want” to believe any particular way. It’s that I have a healthy dose [of] skepticism
Skepticism? I don’t think that word means what you think it means. You’re a Republican promoting Republican orthodoxy without questioning it, sure in a faith apparently justified by the sci-fi of thirty or forty years ago.
If you had healthy dose of skepticism, it would require you to ask why so much political effort – and coin – is being spent on continuing to be completely profligate with fossil fuels and that adding CO2 to the atmosphere cannot cause global warming. A healthy dose of skepticism would require you to look at who is funding the campaign against belief in global warming. A healthy dose of skepticism – or even the teeniest diluted homeopathic dose! – would require you to follow the money and ask yourself: who benefits by promoting the profligate use of fossile fuels, and denying that connection with a vast eco-catastrophe.
But evidently you have neither skepticism nor even curiosity in you…. or these questions would already have occurred to you.
1970s sci-fi reflected the mood of the times, though, and especially the mood of the environmental science of the time. Limits to Growth, 1972. The Population Bomb, 1968. So sure, Stand on Zanzibar, 1968; Soylent Green, 1973; Logan’s Run, 1976, those were reflections of the fears of environmental scientists.
By the 80s population growth was no longer the big boogeyman, although I think there’s a strong argument that the one society that truly followed a Malthusian path in the 20th century was China – that is, sharply increasing food supplies, without increasing household wealth, leading to population growth to the limits of what is supportable on the land supply – and we haven’t seen the last act in that play yet, because at the limits of supportable exploitation there are major problems with pollution and land degradation. Anyway, it was only in the 70s that they actually started to take that problem seriously; prior to that, population growth was seen as a positive good. They may or may not have gotten a handle on it in time. So maybe the 70s population scare will prove to have had a positive effect after all.
would be indifferent to the idea that we ought to do what we can do to try to slow down or stop climate change, especially as it’s an obviously sensible thing to do…
Where you lose me is “obviously sensible.” Or maybe I should say on “obviously.” And good luck stopping climate change.
I think it’s fair to say that human industrial culture, and in particular the emission of greenhouse gases, is a possible to likely contributor to what appears to be a warming climate.
Anyone want to dispute that?
Russell: I don’t disagree with you per se. And it’s easy to say it’s “possible.” Let me put it another way. I had a case recently where the standard of proof was “clear and convincing evidence.” Attorneys differ on whether that is higher or lower than beyond a reasonable doubt, but either way it’s close. The issue was whether the other side could prove “harm” by “clear and convincing evidence” if the court issued a particular order. The other side proved there was a “risk” of “harm.” My argument was basically that risk of harm wasn’t the same thing as proving harm. It didn’t even come close to meeting the burden of proof.
I see this comment and others as essentially arguing that there is a risk of harm. I’m not necessarily arguing that the risk isn’t there. It’s just that I think something more should be required before such drastic action is required. Either the risk has to be shown as really high, or evidence of actual harm as more likely than not. Or something like that.
On the other hand, I am open to efforts that have another benefit. As I said above, I’m not opposed to reducing our dependence on oil. Just don’t wreck the economy.
Anyway, the fact that I think environmental scientists tend to overplay their scenarios of doom is based on a long history of environmental scientists overplaying their scenarios of doom, going back all the way to Malthus, and on watching the global warming scenarios become ever more doom-laden over the past couple of decades.
I’ve seen this movie before.
As I’ve said, I don’t think indifference is the right approach. I think we can do a lot of things that would address CO2 emissions while also bringing a lot of other direct benefits in terms of pollution, waste, energy efficiency, long-term sustainability, and geopolitics.
Apparently that’s not good enough, though, unless I also agree that it’s a CRISIS!!!! and run around like a chicken with its head cut off.
Well I’m not interested in that game. I think it ranks well below other environmental problems, although as it happens, addressing many of them will also help reduce CO2 emissions. The way that global warming has subsumed all other debate on environmental issues really, really annoys me.
Because you are relying on the very same tree data going back 700 years for your graph. Of that 700 years, only about 120-150 are verifiable by comparing them to thermometers. Of those verifiable years 50-60 of them show a ‘divergence’ between the tree data and the observable thermometer data. For almost all of that period, the divergence is so extreme, that if you didn’t have thermometer data, you would say that the trees *showed* a cooling trend. But of course you don’t say that, because your thermometers show the opposite.
But for 550 of the 700 years on the graph (78% of the graphed time period) you don’t have any useful thermometer data. So you have to rely solely on the tree data. But the tree data actively contradicts the thermometer data for more than a third of the time that we can compare the two.
It isn’t good science to act as if the tree data is fantastic pre-thermometer (most of the graph) and then just drop the trees which contradict the thermometer data once you can get the thermometer data while keeping in the trees that don’t contradict the thermometer data. That is doubly true when you don’t understand why the trees and thermometers aren’t tracking. (Contrary to your assertion that it is easily explainable by rainfall and humidity, it turns out that when Mann tried to control for that, it was non-explanatory. Furthermore we can’t control for rainfall and humidity in the first 550 years because they weren’t observed then, so it would be unhelpful anyway). Picking the ones that support your graph while ommitting the ones that don’t, without any good mechanism explaining why you omitted them other than the fact that they disagreed with the thermometer readings, *is the very essence of cherry picking*. It doesn’t get much more cherry-picky than that.
You write “The divergence ‘problem’ is that some trees are no longer indicating temperature.” What you seem to misunderstand is that “no longer” isn’t the scientific way of answering a problem of an unexplained difference between how you think the trees should respond to temperature and how they are actually responding when they disagree for more than 1/3 of your sample–especially when it is the most recent (i.e. best documented) sample. When the last 50-60 years of data don’t support your alleged correlation, you don’t get to assume that you are ok for the unverifiable 550 years. At that point you have to at least entertain the idea that your proxy doesn’t track well with the temperatures you are trying find.
Now, does this mean that ‘warming’ is not happening? No. Our temperature records suggest some warming. Does this mean we should do nothing? No. Over time the earth is going to change in temperature (and if history is any guide a much scarier ice age is due at some point). We certainly should be so stupid as to believe that the weather we are most used to is the ‘norm’. But if we can, we’d probably like it to be the norm. And we may have to take steps for that to be reality.
That isn’t a reason to protect and propagate bad science.
It also isn’t a reason to protect and propagate the destruction of public data in response to a Freedom of Information request.
If the US government’s response to an FOI request was to destroy the tapes of interrogations, would you be ok with that? Would you say: “Oh well, it is for a good cause”. That isn’t how we want government, or science, or govenmental science) to work. (Be warned, I’m not entirely sure this a hypothetical).
It’s just that I think something more should be required before such drastic action is required.
What drastic action is being called for?
But the whole point of including the proxy data alongside the instrumental data within the brief period that instrumental data is available is to demonstrate a close correlation and therefore support the idea that the proxy record can be used to infer historic temperatures and therefore support the idea that the present warming is unprecedented in recent times.
You’re confusing an IPCC report with background material.
It would be misleading for a scientist to claim to be producing a chart based on tree ring proxies, and then to substitute some data points with thermometer data.
But, while this type of chart might be found in papers by dendrochronologists or whoever, it’s background science that’s not likely to be a featured part of the IPCC report itself. Instead, the contentious part there are the composite reconstructions like Mann’s, the ones that integrate a variety of proxies and instrument series.
And for those, if* there is established background science saying something like “this proxy is good from 1000AD to 1950AD, but not from 1950AD on” then it’s perfectly accurate to only include the good part of the data in composite reconstruction.
It would in fact be misleading to include the “bad” data. Every bit as misleading as including a series of “0 degree” data points for a weather station that had been offline since 1950.
Or to put it another way, if the last 50 years of data from this proxy is “obviously valueless” then how do we know that it isn’t equally obviously valueless 500 years ago?
This is not saying the same thing another way. It’s a completely different thing. See the footnote.
But, while this type of chart might be found in papers by dendrochronologists or whoever,
Just to be clear: I mean a chart of the raw proxy data, not a chart with hypothetical falsified data.
Some thoughts:
1. It seems a little presumptuous to me that a couple of people (at least one of whom is a lawyer) blogging on this site can invalidate the entire field of dendrochronology. According to the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, at U. Az, “The Bibliography of Dendrochronology is an archive of printed documents relevant to tree-ring research worldwide, that you can search for free. It was compiled and is constantly updated by Henri D. Grissino-Mayer. It currently contains 11,761 references dating back to 1737.” Looks to me like this is a pretty rich field that is actively addressing known problems. Both dark matter and dark energy are known problems in astrophysics, but very few people claim that these problems invalidate everything else in the field.
2. The oft-published claim of a finding by British authorities of a violation of FOIA by the University of East Anglia is A LIE. From its website: “Any assertion that the University has been found in breach of any part the Freedom of Information Act is incorrect. The ICO had not communicated with the University before issuing the statement and has still not completed any investigations into this matter. Media reports have been inaccurate.”
3. With regard to every single environmental contaminant, to the best of my knowledge we’ve discovered it’s a lot (make that A LOT) easier to keep it out of the environment than to try to recover it later. It simply doesn’t matter if Mann and Jones are both liars and frauds. There is enough other science to establish (a) an increase of about 2 deg. C per doubling of CO2 and (b) substantial danger to our way of life (like San Diego’s water supply) at an increase of 2 degrees.
And I have no idea why anyone would be so casual about government-funded scientists blowing off FOIA requests or attempting to delete data from them. That’s perfectly okay now? What happened to freedom of information being a liberal value?
I’m not excusing it. But at the same time, it’s a red herring. A sideshow battle between McIntyre and the scientists he lobs bombs at.
It’s a matter for UK authorities and University discipline boards, not people concerned about global warming. The accuracy of the science hasn’t been affected.
Apparently that’s not good enough, though, unless I also agree that it’s a CRISIS!!!! and run around like a chicken with its head cut off.
Speaking only for myself, I couldn’t care less whether you think it’s a “CRISIS!!!” or not.
The issue for me is respect for science. You appear to have come to the right answer, and good for you. Except…if you’re ignoring the science, or being “skeptical” in hypocritical ways, then you’ve arrived at that answer for the wrong reasons.
Next time you might not luck into the right answer.
But for 550 of the 700 years on the graph (78% of the graphed time period) you don’t have any useful thermometer data. So you have to rely solely on the tree data. But the tree data actively contradicts the thermometer data for more than a third of the time that we can compare the two.
Have you even been reading this thread? Read the paper I posted earlier.
The older tree data can be (and has been) verified against the tree data itself, and against other proxy data, like stalactites, ice cores, isotopic data, etc.
All those lines of evidence interlock and, within the error bars, agree.
It’s just that I think something more should be required before such drastic action is required.
I’ll answer my own question:
As I understand it, the obligations the US would have incurred, had we ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, would have been to reduce our emission of six greenhouse gases by 7% from their 1990 levels by 2012.
7% in 15 years. One half of one percent, per year, for 15 years. Approximately.
That is the drastic action we refused to take.
Was it impossible to do that without wrecking the economy?
We could likely have achieved much of that by reducing our use of plastic packaging. Or by recycling more paper, glass, and metal products. Or a modest increase in the CAFE standards. Or some combination of other, similar, non-economy-threatening measures.
We could have done it in a walk.
We could likely have achieved much of that by reducing our use of plastic packaging. Or by recycling more paper, glass, and metal products. Or a modest increase in the CAFE standards. Or some combination of other, similar, non-economy-threatening measures.
Exactly. And I’d point out that cap-and-trade or carbon taxes are likely to be very cheap to comply with, because there is a LOT of really low hanging fruit, efficiency-wise, that a carbon price will encourage people to find.
For example, when you go to the store, you might have practically identical products A and B. You don’t much care which one to buy, and maybe they’re the same price right now.
But suppose B is shipped further by an inefficient mode, or manufactured with an antiquated, more carbon-intensive process. With a carbon price, you, as a consumer, will suddenly be able to see that. Suddenly A is going to be a nickel or three cheaper, and you buy A. Easy. If you really want B, you still can, you just pay a few cents more for the carbon it’s using.
The estimates of the ultimate costs to consumers of a carbon price amount to peanuts. A little more for rich people, poor people actually come out ahead.
The notion that this is some risky, apocalyptic lifestyle change that crazy liberals are asking everyone to take on faith is just complete garbage.
“The older tree data can be (and has been) verified against the tree data itself, and against other proxy data, like stalactites, ice cores, isotopic data, etc.”
But the newer data is *no different than the older data*.
The only problem with the newer data is that it doesn’t track with the thermometers.
” Read the paper I posted earlier.”
What is the time stamp of the one you posted earlier? I’m pretty sure that I’ve read everything you’ve liked, and none of it helped.
But the newer data is *no different than the older data*.
The only problem with the newer data is that it doesn’t track with the thermometers.
That. Is. Wrong.
The divergence has a number of hallmarks–it’s not the simplistic formulation that all trees, and all types of ring data, diverge from the thermometers equally–and we can check for those hallmarks in the past. Again, see, just for example, Cook (2004).
Francis, yes, that is what the school says to protect its own reputation.
See here
What the ICO says is: “The fact that the elements of a section 77 offence may have been found here, but cannot be acted on because of the elapsed time, is a very serious matter.”
The ICO is now petitioning the government for the right to prosecute with a longer statute of limitations that the current 6 months.
Essentially the school wanted to testify to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee that they had been cleared. The ICO wrote that they had not been cleared, but that they had found evidence of serious violations which they could not prosecute because the 6 month time from violation to prosecution had elapsed before it came to light.
The notion that this is some risky, apocalyptic lifestyle change that crazy liberals are asking everyone to take on faith is just complete garbage.
What jack said.
The US generates about 20 metric tons of CO2 per person per year.
The only countries with a higher per-capita rate are some oil-producing Arab states, a couple of Caribbean islands, and (oddly) Luxembourg.
Most of the EU nations are right around 10 metric tons per capita per annum.
China, our carboniferous nemesis, is about 4.6.
I appreciate that the science is not absolutely, irrefutably conclusive, but we could make really, really significant improvements with one hand tied behind our back.
And if it turns out that greenhouse gas emissions are not a factor in warming, we’ve cut down on waste, cut down on pollutants, cut down on ocean acidification, etc etc etc.
No harm done.
I really think we (the US) are just too freaking lazy to do it, too arrogant and with too great a sense of entitlement to think anyone else has any right to ask it of us, and the rest of the analysis just flows from there.
My two cents, offered with all due respect.
jack: The issue for me is respect for science.
The issue for me is respect for science.
Respect for science does not mean taking the claims of scientists at face value. Science is a process, not an authority, and that process involves transparency, repeatability, disclosure, questioning of your own certainty, and skepticism. You can’t reject those core precepts and still say what you’re doing should be granted the imprimatur of Science. And if you’ve read the CRU emails at all, refusal to share data, methods, and algorithms, refusal to answer to criticisms, attempts to evade FOIA, attempts to discredit research questioning their results, and dismissal of skepticism were rife.
Yeah, we’re only talking about a few people; unfortunately they’re the exact people responsible for the popular understanding of climate change, which tends to cast a bit of a shadow over the whole endeavor.
russell: China, our carboniferous nemesis, is about 4.6.
If you look at the income distribution in China as dividing the country into two sections, a rich country a bit bigger than the US and a poor country about twice the size of the US, then consider how much energy consumption in China goes to support each part of the whole, per-capita CO2 emissions in Wealthy China (still much poorer than the US) would be right up there with Europe, maybe even headed for US levels – largely because Chinese power generation and industry are so inefficient and coal-dependent – and per-capita CO2 emissions in Poor China would be down there with the poorest countries on the planet.
If you took Bangladesh and Nigeria and welded them to the United States, you might end up with similar overall per-capita CO2 emissions and similarly unequal distribution of emissions.
You can do the same exercise within the US, of course. Rich bastards with 10,000 sq ft mansions who fly around all the time emit massively more than 20 tons per-capita, and poor bastards who live in 500 sq ft apartments and don’t own a car emit much less. But the difference is far more stark in China because so much of the population there still lives at subsistence peasant levels. Most people in America are middle-class or above, most of them live in decent-sized houses and own cars and fly around now and then. Considering that we generate $14 trillion in GDP from CO2 emissions somewhat less than those that China produces from $4 trillion in GDP, I’d say we weren’t doing so badly.
SH: have you read the govt’s letter? Primary sources are always better. Try here. If you want a quote out of context, try this language instead: “As stated above, no decision notice has yet been issued and no alleged breaches have yet been put to the University for comment.”
Your summary, which relies on a secondary source, is just wrong.
It remains entirely possible that the govt could decide that the e-mail comment about destroying files to avoid the law was sarcasm and that any actual destruction was lawful.
Rich bastards with 10,000 sq ft mansions who fly around all the time emit massively more than 20 tons per-capita, and poor bastards who live in 500 sq ft apartments and don’t own a car emit much less.
Relative to, basically, the entire rest of the world, we are, as a whole, those rich bastards.
I’m not here to defend China’s industrial policy, but I also note that they’re trying to pull a billion people out of a more or less subsistence agrarian way of life.
We could significantly reduce our emissions and nobody would miss a meal. Nobody would miss dessert.
I don’t disagree with any of that, although I do question whether China is on a sustainable path to real poverty reduction for the ~800 million people living at subsistence levels. Just getting GDP/capita to $15,000 – which means a total GDP about the same as the US today – at current carbon intensity would require quadrupling CO2 emissions to about 24 billion tons per year, or emissions of about 18 tons per capita. And just imagine the air pollution from a quadrupling of coal consumption in China.
I think there’s a real question of whether you can cloak yourself in the mantle of “poverty reduction for a billion people” when the path you’re on doesn’t go there; it dead-ends in environmental catastrophe long before a billion people are pulled out of poverty.
The difference between China and the developed world is that while all countries went through a phase where the pollution intensity of GDP was pretty high, they did so when their populations were much smaller, relative both to the world as a whole and to the land area available to them. It may be that “you can’t get there from here”, at least following the same industrialization path that the West did, not because the West is evil and trying to keep China down, but because at the scale China is operating at, there really are environmental & resource limits to growth.
Hopefully there will be other routes. There are some promising signs that China is taking renewables seriously, but the problem is that they’re still building coal plants like crazy. They seem to recognize that the air pollution they already have is so bad that it can’t be allowed to get much worse, but again, translating that into action is another matter.
Respect for science does not mean taking the claims of scientists at face value. Science is a process, not an authority, and that process involves transparency, repeatability, disclosure, questioning of your own certainty, and skepticism. You can’t reject those core precepts and still say what you’re doing should be granted the imprimatur of Science. And if you’ve read the CRU emails at all, refusal to share data, methods, and algorithms, refusal to answer to criticisms, attempts to evade FOIA, attempts to discredit research questioning their results, and dismissal of skepticism were rife.
This belies an excessively idealistic view of the way scientists must behave. Yes, it would certainly be nice if everything and everyone were perfect, but in practice scientists are fallible human beings like everyone else.
The great advantage of science is that it works regardless.
And the basic point here remains: it’s one thing to criticize some objectionable behavior you believe you see in the emails.
It’s quite another to use that as an excuse to give excessive credit to a dishonest crank like McIntyre, and/or as an excuse to be “skeptical” of the entire edifice of climate science.
That is not respecting science.
—-
P.S.: “Sharing data” doesn’t need to extend to going out of your way to accommodate any crank on the internet who asks you to hold their hand. It’s perfectly acceptable to maintain some standards, and only share it with, for example, reasonably credentialed colleagues in your field.
Also, part of McIntyre’s regular shtick is to claim people are hiding data or refusing his requests, when in fact he’s had it all along.
Yes, but we didn’t ratify. The Senate actually sent a message to Clinton that it would reject any attempt to ratify. Clinton signed it anyway, but:
In other words, Clinton knew when Gore signed Kyoto that we weren’t going to adhere to it until some other countries (I’m guessing China is probably prominent among them) cut back on their emissions.
Now, compliance would require that we cut back our CO2 emissions approximately 18% from their current level, to make that target of 93% of 1990 emissions. Not that we’re, at this point, likely to ratify Kyoto anytime soon.
That’s all good Jacob, but there’s not much folks in the US can do about Chinese generation of greenhouse gases.
There’s lots we can do about our own.
Not to beat this further into the ground, but basically my point here is:
1. Whether human activity is causing climate warming, or not, is impossible to know to a certainty
2. It’s certainly one of the possible, or even likely, causes. Certainly, some of the climactic changes we think are happening are consistent with increased greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
3. There are a lot of things we can do to improve that situation without doing ourselves significant economic or other harm
4. Those things would be great things to do on their own merits, apart of climate issues
But, we don’t really do them to any significant degree.
Instead we argue about what might have made annual rings bigger or smaller in bristlecone pines 1,000 years ago, or about whether the word “trick” in somebody’s email means they’re lying or just commenting on someone having been clever, or we argue about whether McIntyre is cranky.
These are all interesting topics, but IMVHO they’re kind of a distraction from the basic issue.
Our activities may well be having profound and detrimental effects on the world we live in. We could make significant, useful changes to them at little real cost to ourselves or our general way of life or standard of living.
But, we don’t.
We should.
The notion that pricing CO2 emmissions will “wreck the economy” has got to rest on the proposition that almost everything would become more expensive. Does that make a lick of sense?
We don’t pay money to either the Earth or the atmosphere. We pay it to other people. In the macro picture, “we” and “other people” are the same population. If “we” spend more money, “we” get more money.
Our shorthand name for this frenetic passing of money back and forth is “the economy”. If carbon pricing causes more money to pass back and forth among us, how does that “wreck the economy”?
–TP
jack: The great advantage of science is that it works regardless.
No, it actually doesn’t work when you abandon the basic principles of science, and I’m really tired of hearing that line. Malfeasance leads to mistaken results. Scientists are human and make mistakes, certainly; those mistakes lead to mistaken outcomes, they don’t magically fix themselves.
jack: It’s perfectly acceptable to maintain some standards, and only share it with, for example, reasonably credentialed colleagues in your field.
No, no, it’s actually not, not to me, nor to a lot of people, and you telling me it should be acceptable doesn’t change my opinion. Science requires publication and transparency, period.
russell: there’s not much folks in the US can do about Chinese generation of greenhouse gases. There’s lots we can do about our own.
Right.
I’m just not that impressed with the “pulling a billion people out of poverty” line re: China. It’s more like “pulling 300 million people out of poverty by generating just as much CO2 as the US, on a path that is physically impossible to follow for the next billion”. Put that way, it doesn’t sound so great to me.
those mistakes lead to mistaken outcomes, they don’t magically fix themselves.
But they are fixed, if not “magically”. Those mistakes are detected and fixed by OTHER SCIENTISTS.
NOT by we schmucks on the internet. And if you have pretensions of doing so, I would say you are exhibiting exactly the sort of hubris I criticized earlier.
And, in this case, the fact that after quite an extraordinary amount of scrutiny those “other scientists” are saying that they are satisfied that nothing is wrong, or at least that known minor mistakes or early false paths have been remedied, ought to tell you something.
No, it actually doesn’t work when you abandon the basic principles of science, and I’m really tired of hearing that line. Malfeasance leads to mistaken results. Scientists are human and make mistakes, certainly; those mistakes lead to mistaken outcomes, they don’t magically fix themselves.
And in case it’s not clear, yes, science is robust against even deliberate malfeasance.* It’s not an ideal result, obviously because time is certainly wasted detecting and revealing the fraud, but it works.
Now, I suppose it’s not robust against universal malfeasance, but I didn’t take you for one of the conspiracy mongers…
Jack: Those mistakes are detected and fixed by OTHER SCIENTISTS. NOT by we schmucks on the internet. And if you have pretensions of doing so[…]
This ain’t rocket science. Detecting basic errors in data-handling is not beyond the capacity of anyone but a specialist in the climatic science. The dude dropped 50 years of data off the end of a graph because it looked funny when it was left on. Do you need an advanced degree in paleodendroclimatological science to notice that?
As a matter of fact, those errors were not detected and fixed by other scientists. They made it all the way to the IPCC report and were detected only after someone dumped a bunch of private email to the internet. The “self-correcting” nature of science requires public disclosure of data and methods. Withhold them, and surprise surprise, mistakes don’t get corrected.
You want to gloss over this whole thing and say everything went the way it should have gone. Well, there’s a saying that goes, don’t s–t in my hand and tell me it’s chocolate. Yeah, I don’t think it’s all that important overall, but the behavior itself was indefensible, and the more it gets defended, the less credibility the defenders have. You really want to say that the standards of science in climatology are so low that blatant misconduct is acceptable?
This ain’t rocket science. Detecting basic errors in data-handling is not beyond the capacity of anyone but a specialist in the climatic science. The dude dropped 50 years of data off the end of a graph because it looked funny when it was left on. Do you need an advanced degree in paleodendroclimatological science to notice that?
If you keep repeating this elementary falsehood, I’m going to stop taking you seriously.
jack: it’s not robust against universal malfeasance, but I didn’t take you for one of the conspiracy mongers
Believing that individual malfeasance can go undetected for periods of time long enough to make a difference is not the same as believing in universal malfeasance.
The technique used to reduce the period of time before individual malfeasance is detected and corrected is called disclosure.
You are the one arguing that disclosure is not necessary, even as you are talking about the self-correcting nature of science, even as you are talking about a case where non-disclosure led to misleading data being published. Why? Tribal affiliation with climate scientists? A personal dislike for schmucks on the internet? Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with “self-correcting science”, because if it did, you’d be saying that more disclosure was necessary, not less.
You really want to say that the standards of science in climatology are so low that blatant misconduct is acceptable?
This is begging the question.
With the possible exception of the alleged ‘FOIA’ (what’s it called in the UK?) request shenanigans (which is reprehensible, but also only affected the access of cranks, so I’m not especially broken up about it), I’ve yet to see you or anyone else present a single whit of solid evidence for “blatant misconduct”.
this elementary falsehood, I’m going to stop taking you seriously
Oh for god’s sake. You, in your comment at 12:31pm today, said that he dropped the data from the end of the series in the publication in the IPCC Third Assessment Report.
Here’s the graph from the IPCC report.
The green line is the Briffa data.
Here’s the original draft of that graph.
The yellow line is the Briffa data.
Emails from the period by the people who were involved in drafting the report plainly state that they debated dropping the last section of the Briffa data because it was “distracting”.
We can argue about how significant this was and whether it, in itself, constituted malfeasance. However, it is in no way an “elementary falsehood” to say that they dropped the last period of the data. And if you insist on contradicting your own comments from earlier in the day and claiming that a plain statement of fact is an “elementary falsehood”, exactly how seriously should I take you?
You are the one arguing that disclosure is not necessary, even as you are talking about the self-correcting nature of science, even as you are talking about a case where non-disclosure led to misleading data being published.
Disclosure good, but is also a self-correcting process.
If you don’t disclose enough for other scientists to work with, you’re eventually not going to be taken seriously. Others may simply ignore you, or try to replicate your results independently and find them lacking, which will leave you in the same place. Openness to those who actually need the information is built into the system.
Schmucks (and cranks) on the internet don’t actually need the information.
(Note that in the information age, it’s getting cheaper and easier to disclose reams of data and source code, and I think that’s a healthy and useful trend, and like all information technology, will probably lead to more productivity and faster progress.
But it’s not a necessity. In the old days, people published only papers, with summaries of their methods and results. If someone needed more, it required direct correspondence, cooperation, and maybe even expensive duplication and transfer of physical records. You really wouldn’t want to comply with every request from a crank under those circumstances. Science still worked fine.)
Jacob: And I have no idea why anyone would be so casual about government-funded scientists blowing off FOIA requests or attempting to delete data from them. That’s perfectly okay now? What happened to freedom of information being a liberal value?
This will give you some background that may help you understand:
Opposition to scientific study of climate change and the causes thereof, is politically motivated, Jacob. You just need a healthy dose of skepticism. Perhaps bc could lend you his, since he’s not using it…
However, it is in no way an “elementary falsehood” to say that they dropped the last period of the data.
The falsehood is the implication that there is something wrong with that omission. A “basic error in data handling” I believe you called it.
I believe I’ve established here that there’s ISN’T anything wrong there.
If anything, there would have been something quite wrong with including it. It’d be like including data from a thermometer, even though you knew it had been broken in 1950.
Perhaps it isn’t so elementary, but you are claiming that this is somehow easily detectable malfeasance. It may be easily detectable, but it is the malfeasance or scientific validity of the choice that is in question. You DO actually need expertise to evaluate that. It is indeed something that would require an advanced degree in paleodendroclimatological science to notice.
Here’s the original draft of that graph.
The yellow line is the Briffa data.
That’s not an original draft of the graph, it appears to be something off climateaudit, possibly some kind of “reconstruction” done by McIntyre to include the incorrect “missing” data.
Of course, it might well also be something copied out of a paper of Briffa’s, which is a funny way to hide something, isn’t it?
Wow, people have political motives for things they do? What a revelation! What an unprecedented situation! All the old rules are bunk! Circle the wagons! We never imagined that politically-motivated requests might be made under FOIA!
Most FOIA requests are probably “politically motivated”. So what?
(Criminal investigations are another thing. Do you see me calling for those?)
He said Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation created an atmosphere of intimidation.
Inhofe’s profile on Open Secrets.
For the record.
We never imagined that politically-motivated requests might be made under FOIA!
To give you yet more background information on what motivates Inhofe to call for a criminal investigation of climate scientists:
Follow the money, Jacob. Be skeptical and curious. Don’t just assume that because Senator Inhofe says it his motives must be pure…
“If anything, there would have been something quite wrong with including it. It’d be like including data from a thermometer, even though you knew it had been broken in 1950.”
Ummm, the trees aren’t broken. They are happily growing just the way they are supposed to. What is broken is our understanding of why they aren’t behaving the way we thought they should with respect to temperature. And until that is fixed you can’t just throw out the ‘bad’ data. The trees aren’t bad data. They are data that don’t fit with your hypothesis.
jack: The falsehood is the implication that there is something wrong with that omission.
A difference of opinion is not a “falsehood”. The sky is blue; you say the sky being blue is good, I say the sky being blue is bad, the truth of those statements is subjective. In this case, the question of whether the omission of the data was justifiable may be certain in your mind, but it’s not in mine; I am not stating a falsehood in saying that I disagree.
jack: That’s not an original draft of the graph, it appears to be something off climateaudit
It’s being served from climateaudit, it is described there as “IPCC Third Assessment Report Zero-Order Draft Figure 2.3.3a”. Since I can’t find an online copy of the Zero-Order Draft I can’t verify that, but so far as I know the provenance of that particular graph is not in question, only the significance.
Senator Inhofe is a scumbag and a villain, Jes, you don’t have to tell me that. What I am saying is that the FOIA system was not designed for a world where there are no scumbags and villains making bogus requests. It’s designed for the real world, where virtually everyone has political motives, with the idea that openness is a good thing even if it’s sometimes inconvenient to comply.
If it’s okay to blow off FOIA requests because they’re being made by your political opponents, we are in deep trouble.
Ummm, the trees aren’t broken. They are happily growing just the way they are supposed to. What is broken is our understanding of why they aren’t behaving the way we thought they should with respect to temperature. And until that is fixed you can’t just throw out the ‘bad’ data. The trees aren’t bad data. They are data that don’t fit with your hypothesis.
The trees are broken as thermometers post 1950 or so. That much is crystal clear.
Plugging the raw ring width or density data from those periods into a formula that outputs temperature is going to lead to a known nonsense result. Period. Why would do you want people to put nonsense lines on graphs that are supposed to be plotting temperatures?
Now, the REAL complaint seems to be not that post-divergence data was NOT included, but rather that pre-divergence data WAS.
But if that’s the complaint, say so.
I will happily point you back to the papers that explain why that data is still (with some caution) likely to be trustworthy.
What is broken is our understanding of why they aren’t behaving the way we thought they should with respect to temperature.
In some parts of the world. In others, they’re still behaving the way they always did.
Tree ring growth can be affected by a lot of factors. (Including, oh dear, increased carbon dioxide. It is entirely possible that humanity’s pouring CO2 into the atmosphere is what has “broken the thermometer”… but THAT isn’t something climate-change deniers want to hear about, oh dear no.)
At this point, however, non-scientists pointing at the data and going OH HAY I C WUT U DID THAR over ways in which the scientific experts in the field are interpreting the data, which other scientists have no issue with, are just making themselves look like lolcats.
The notion that an uninformed layperson googling on the Internet can come up with a fresh interpretation of complex data that will radically disturb the scientific understanding born of years of research, is one of those notions that belongs in John W. Campbell editorials for Amazing Stories.
Which is not to say that:
The enthusiast who devotes years of time and study to examining bristle-cone pines and recording the tree-ring data personally in order to figure out why the thermometer broke in the 1950s (I have no idea if such a person exists: it wouldn’t surprise me, though) might not, eventually, contribute something great in the field;
But this isn’t what Jacob’s doing (I don’t think so, anyway: Jacob?) when he claims that “Detecting basic errors in data-handling is not beyond the capacity of anyone but a specialist in the climatic science” – he’s claiming that although all of the specialists have had this data available to them, and looked at it, none of them spotted “basic errors in data handling” – that was left to untrained schmucks on the Internet who never looked at the raw data and have no background in this field”.
That’s a classic of 1950s science-fiction. It’s the Wesley Crusher moment on Star Trek. It’s a plot that John W. Campbell would have just loved. But if you know anything about how scientific research works, you know that if you look at a peer-reviewed paper and see looks to you like “Basic errors in data handling” this is because you don’t know enough about this field: not because the paper was so badly peer-reviewed that no one spotted some basic errors….
Jes: he’s claiming that although all of the specialists have had this data available to them, and looked at it, none of them spotted “basic errors in data handling”
No, I’m saying, the specialists who were involved in making this basic error in data handling knew exactly what they were doing and didn’t think it was an error, but that a reasonably-well-informed amateur can look at what they did and decide that it was an error.
You want to talk 1950s science fiction, it’s the Infallible Scientist Serving Mankind With His Superior Mental Capacities that is the archetype in play here.
jack’s claim that they took the 50 years of data off the IPCC report because they knew it was “a known nonsense result” contradicts the actual emails exchanged during the actual drafting of the IPCC report, in which the actual people who drafted it discussed their actual reasons for doing so, which were – actually – not that it was “known nonsense”, but that it made the graph look funny, which undermined the point they were trying to make.
They decided to leave them off to make the graph look nicer, not because they were concerned with scientific integrity. That may or may not be a defensible decision, but that’s why they said they did it.
Jack:
If anything, there would have been something quite wrong with including it. It’d be like including data from a thermometer, even though you knew it had been broken in 1950 . . .
Or including data you know is broken to make the MWP disappear . . .
Now, the REAL complaint seems to be not that post-divergence data was NOT included, but rather that pre-divergence data WAS.
But if that’s the complaint, say so.
I thought the issue was that they were doing a 50-year smoothing on Briffa’s data and had to use something after 1960 in order to “smooth” and so they added thermometer data, making it look like tree rings showed an upward rather than a downward trend. It wasn’t so much the pre-divergence data as the use of other data and calling it tree-ring data. That was what I understood the “nature trick” to be.
In ADDITION, what Sebastian says comes into play. How do you justify the use of data pre-1960? Just because it seems to correlate with other sources? That seems really lame to me. What would have been lost to scientific dialogue if they had just put it all out there as they had it?
I had a case once where a psychologist was trying to show the jury how few people commit suicide. It was a pie chart showing a pencil thin line at 12:00. But his sample had nothing to do with our case. I argued he needed a chart showing people who had a) seen a PA; b) been diagnosed with this particular mental illness, etc. etc. With the relevant data, the slice of the pie would have been most of the pie. It was excluded and the jury never saw the exhibit. All the data on the exhibit was correct, however. Presentation is everything and Jones et al knew it.
And that the graph had been previously published correctly earlier doesn’t change the fact it was published wrong later.
Just put all the data out on the graph even if you think it doesn’t track and asterisk that line. Or don’t use smoothed data. At least cut off the tree data in 1960 and say why you are doing that. Show an alternate graph and say why you think it isn’t a fair representation.
No, I’m saying, the specialists who were involved in making this basic error in data handling knew exactly what they were doing and didn’t think it was an error, but that a reasonably-well-informed amateur can look at what they did and decide that it was an error.
Sure, they can “decide it was an error”, but only in the same way as any old schmuck can “decide quantum physics is hokum”.
Back in the real world, the fact that this is a complicated question (as evidenced, if nothing else, by the length of this very comment thread), and all the specialists don’t actually seem to think there is any error, basic or otherwise, involved, ought to tell you something.
The idea that it is simple to look at this and see that there is an error is the basic falsehood I was talking about. (As opposed to the idea that you could look at this and see something that, in your ignorance, seemed like an error to you. That’s manifestly true.)
jack’s claim that they took the 50 years of data off the IPCC report because they knew it was “a known nonsense result” contradicts the actual emails exchanged during the actual drafting of the IPCC report, in which the actual people who drafted it discussed their actual reasons for doing so, which were – actually – not that it was “known nonsense”, but that it made the graph look funny, which undermined the point they were trying to make.
That’s probably exactly how I’d discuss it among peers who all understood the results, though. It looks funny and it’s distracting, and undermines the point I’m trying to make (because I’d have to note somewhere in the text or a footnote: ignore that yellow part after 1950). But I already KNOW what it means or doesn’t mean — that’s a background to the discussion, and wouldn’t be rehashed in every email.
but only in the same way as any old schmuck can “decide quantum physics is hokum”
No. No! Sorry, but … no.
I read the discussion they had about why to omit it, and the discussion concerned the desirability of the appearance of uniformity of opinion and data on the subject. This is not quantum physics. This is basic statistical presentation. Dropping parts of a data series from a graph to improve the uniform appearance of the graph: in my opinion, not okay. The difference between “That’s not a very honest graph” and “Quantum physics is bunk” is vast.
But I already KNOW what it means or doesn’t mean — that’s a background to the discussion, and wouldn’t be rehashed in every email.
This requires an extraordinarily generous reading of the emails in question, and completely ignoring their stated reasons for omitting that portion of the data, which were to improve the appearance of the graph. If we’re going to make up reasons for why they did things that are different to the reasons that they actually said they did things, why not say they took that section of the data off to, uh, save kittens in Mongolia?
When someone says “I did X because Y”, I don’t think it requires me to come up with all the alternative reasons they might have done X and ascribe the most pleasing ones to them. I tend to assume that if they said they did X because Y, they actually did do X because Y. Y, in this case, concerned the appearance of the graph and the desire to show a non-confusing, uniform, consensus viewpoint in the IPCC report. That may be a perfectly desirable thing to do, but why do you keep insisting that’s not what they were trying to do, and imagining other reasons for doing it, when that’s exactly what they said they were trying to do?
It clearly had nothing to do with the data itself, because they included the data in the first draft of the graph.
This is petty, petty stuff, which is why I don’t understand the fight-to-the-last-man defense of it that gets mounted. They fudged a graph to make it look nicer; BFD. Not the end of the world; why not just admit it?
In ADDITION, what Sebastian says comes into play. How do you justify the use of data pre-1960? Just because it seems to correlate with other sources? That seems really lame to me. What would have been lost to scientific dialogue if they had just put it all out there as they had it?
Not just because it correlates with other sources, although that’s part of it. There are a lot of other proxy sources, and although some of them aren’t as precise or high frequency as tree rings, they ALL show the same basic pattern.
But also other things. For example, as the Cook paper shows, the divergence effect is marked by certain odd patterns within the tree data: some trees diverge more than others, some hardly at all, so you can see when “divergence” is happening INDEPENDENTLY of thermometers. Now, without a thermometer, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which set of diverging trees was the closer to giving you a temperature, but you’d at least know you had a problem. And we don’t.
Also, despite the claims that the experts are totally in the dark on the divergence effect, that their “hypothesis doesn’t allow for this” or whatever Sebastian said, there are a variety of explanations for the divergence. Most of them give us little reason to believe that the same problem occurred earlier. Some of the effect might be warming itself, some might be man made problems, like air pollution reducing the light available. Things like that. (And it’s likely the effect isn’t from any one source, but a combination of factors, possibly with different weights in different locations.)
When someone says “I did X because Y”, I don’t think it requires me to come up with all the alternative reasons they might have done X and ascribe the most pleasing ones to them. I tend to assume that if they said they did X because Y, they actually did do X because Y.
No, you misunderstand me. It’s not that that they said “X because of Y” and I say “well, they mean X because of Z”.
It’s: they said “X because of Y”, which, because Z is common knowledge, means “X because of Y [because of Z]”.
As in, “Lets drop the divergence data because it is making the chart unclear [because it’s not really showing a temperature trend and we want to show a temperature trend here]”.
It clearly had nothing to do with the data itself, because they included the data in the first draft of the graph.
Which is totally serious evidence of malfeasance, isn’t it?
Don’t you think it probably has something to do with the fact that it’s also a line on a graph from an earlier paper, whose focus wasn’t “the best survey of temperature reconstructions we can do” but instead “here, check out my new data set”.
In the latter case, you want to show all the data, even where you explain that some of it is exhibiting divergence and doesn’t track temperature. In the former case, you drop that because it’s a distracting detail.
But you don’t necessarily realize that in the first draft, especially when you’ve got the guy who put all the work into that neat data set in the first place working on it.
It’s: they said “X because of Y”, which, because Z is common knowledge, means “X because of Y [because of Z]”.
As in, “Lets drop the divergence data because it is making the chart unclear [because it’s not really showing a temperature trend and we want to show a temperature trend here]”.
It’s not like we have to guess about this either. Here’s Mann on the matter:
Didn’t that Mann comment come from last year? It’s not what he said in the emails at the time.
I tend to trust the contemporaneous, private expression of the reasons for an action over what is said much later in public. To me it is pretty clear that the main concern was presenting a consensus viewpoint that wouldn’t confuse someone looking at the graph. That is not, in itself, a problem, as long as there is no misrepresentation. Quite possibly he didn’t think he was engaging in any misrepresentation, but you know, I beg to differ.
The problem is that the divergence in the Briffa data was important information that the viewer of that graph deserved to have. It may have happened for wacky reasons not especially relevant to the pre-instrumental period. But what it really signified was “This isn’t a simple process; you can’t just look at trees and read off the temperature in the past”. That wasn’t what the authors of the report saw in that graph, clearly; but it’s what they ought to have seen. (Actually, Briffa seems to have expressed some concerns about the degree of simplification at the time.) And when they decided that instead of dropping the whole series, or putting it in a separate graph with an explanation, they would just chop off the divergence without comment, I think they stepped over a line in regards to the honest presentation of the state of the art in paleoclimate reconstructions. They were worried that skeptics would “have a field day”, but that should not have been their concern at all. Their concern should have been presenting the data as best they knew. They knew there were problems with the Briffa series. They didn’t explain the problems, or drop the rest of the series; they dropped a portion without comment, for reasons that were essentially ad hoc.
And so if schmucks on the internet were incompetent to assess the honesty of a graph, given that kind of information, why even bother showing them graphs? Why not just say, “Do this, because SCIENTISTS SAID SO”? The fact is, anyone with a basic statistical background – which means a large portion of people who went to college, and that’s a lot of people in developed countries – is competent to have an opinion about this kind of decision. Do I seem like I don’t really understand the issue? Do I seem like I have a picture of climate scientists as conniving monsters? Do you think I am espousing a conspiracy theory that the planet is actually cooling and climate scientists are covering it up? I am not, and yet, I still think that graph was deliberately misleading, and I think that the discussion of deleting or hiding data in response to FOIA requests was unconscionable.
Oh, whatever shall we do?
Sorry to interrupt this meeting of the Society of Amateur Dendrochronologists but I think it is quite telling how often you can determine someone’s political leanings by their opinion regarding AGW. And then there’s the overlap among those in the US who not believe in evolution and who think AGW (of course at first it was just GW) is a hoax. And finally there are those astute folks who can poke holes in complex climatological models and historical recreations but who could not see through Dick Cheney’s 1% solution for Iraq, those who thought there was a very good possibility that Iraq had WMD even though there were UN inspectors in Iraq that the US could direct and who had virtual free reign over the entire country. Now why the heck is that?
Carry on.
No, I’m saying, the specialists who were involved in making this basic error in data handling knew exactly what they were doing and didn’t think it was an error, but that a reasonably-well-informed amateur can look at what they did and decide that it was an error.
Fine. Find and cite a reasonably well-informed amateur who can show that they were able to show with working how it was an error.
So far, all of the reasonably well-informed amateurs appear to be pointing out that it’s just uninformed anti-AGWers on the Internet who are trying, lolcat-like, to poke holes in the evidence.
“But also other things. For example, as the Cook paper shows, the divergence effect is marked by certain odd patterns within the tree data: some trees diverge more than others, some hardly at all, so you can see when “divergence” is happening INDEPENDENTLY of thermometers.”
No they can’t. Mann has spent more than a freaking decade trying to come up with a reliable explanation of why the trees aren’t agreeing with his theory on how they should correlate with temperature. And even he admits that he can’t do it. As for the some more than others, some hardly at all bit, individuals have always had a wide variation in these samples. That is why you tend to use an average and track the average. What you can’t do is drop all the trees from one side of the average and then still pretend you are using an average. And what super-precise trendline of comfirmation are you using for the 500 year old data?
The whole reason we were using the bristlecone pines in the first place is because they offered a more continuous series than almost anything else we had available (other than ice cores which have their own problems–even more sensitive to humidity and rainfall, and not particularly availalbe in most places that humans actually live.)
Sebastian: The whole reason we were using the bristlecone pines in the first place is because they offered a more continuous series than almost anything else we had available
“We”? Sebastian, I thought you were a lawyer with a background in pro-life activism. Now you’re outing yourself as a dendrochronologist? When was this, and how long were you in the field?
Though really: what RogueDem said.
I think peer-review works mainly as a longterm corrective but not necessarily shortterm. In my experience it is in most cases a smell test, followed by in-depths analysis only, if it looks really fishy. Also peers tend to think alike and often know each other well. The anonymity in many areas is an illusion. I am also regularly surprised by the lack of knowledge of basic arithmetics or at least of lack in accuracy in its use. Data often literally does not add up but few check those fine details, unless they lead to strange solutions.
This kind of sloppiness is of course easy prey for the ‘internet dudes’ that often will deny the existence of the forest because the number of trees is off more than it should be. The question is, how significant is it for the results.
There is no general answer for that but we should at least always be aware of the limits of both the eggheads and the internet dudes. Hey, I do not now how many people checked my PhD thesis but nobody detected the spelling error in the title(!) (which I myself noticed only after the publication when I received my certificate).
Mann has spent more than a freaking decade trying to come up with a reliable explanation of why the trees aren’t agreeing with his theory
Trees got a mind of their own.
Bristlecones especially, they are contrary SOBs.
“”We”? Sebastian, I thought you were a lawyer with a background in pro-life activism. Now you’re outing yourself as a dendrochronologist? When was this, and how long were you in the field?”
I meant “we” human beings. Which you know quite well. You’re just being an ass.
Your response isn’t to the point at all. You’ve just descended to attacking the speaker and appeals to authority.
I’m going to repeat the fact that you didn’t want to respond to:
It is still a fact.
Ooh, we’re repeating facts that the other side of the debate doesn’t want to acknowledge or respond to? I want to get in on that too.
No they can’t. Mann has spent more than a freaking decade trying to come up with a reliable explanation of why the trees aren’t agreeing with his theory on how they should correlate with temperature. And even he admits that he can’t do it. As for the some more than others, some hardly at all bit, individuals have always had a wide variation in these samples. That is why you tend to use an average and track the average. What you can’t do is drop all the trees from one side of the average and then still pretend you are using an average. And what super-precise trendline of comfirmation are you using for the 500 year old data?
The whole reason we were using the bristlecone pines in the first place is because they offered a more continuous series than almost anything else we had available (other than ice cores which have their own problems–even more sensitive to humidity and rainfall, and not particularly availalbe in most places that humans actually live.)
Read the paper, Sebastian.
Also, this one for a nice survey of the research, and some of the explanations.
I meant “we” human beings.
Oh. Well, in that case, Sebastian, we’re quite well aware that the “thermometer” in bristlecone pines in Northern countries got broken c.1950s, and we’re puzzled why you keep bringing it up as if it proved something.
We’re well aware that the Earth’s climate is changing because of steadily increased global warming, and we wonder why someone who is constantly faking a concern for fetuses is somehow totally unconcerned with the overheated and under-oiled world those fetuses that survive birth and childhood will have to live in.
We think that the minority who argue that the world isn’t getting hotter and that human intervention in the environment has nothing to do with it if it is, are taking their cue from the non-human oil corporations, who – not being human beings – have no reason to care if large numbers of humans die in a worldwide ecocatastrophe in two to six decades, so long as their quarterly profits for the next three years are projected to rise.
We wonder why you want to ignore facts instead of acknowledging and responding to them, just because they don’t suit you: but we don’t wonder long, because we remember that you’re just like that.
And when they decided that instead of dropping the whole series, or putting it in a separate graph with an explanation, they would just chop off the divergence without comment, I think they stepped over a line in regards to the honest presentation of the state of the art in paleoclimate reconstructions.
Okay let’s step back:
A) We appear to agree on the basic outline of what happened: The portions of Briffa’s series that exhibited the “divergence” phenomenon were ultimately omitted from the combined graph.
B) I don’t see you disputing it, so I’m guessing you also basically agree that those “divergent” data points do not track temperature as such.
C) As the Mann quote there illustrates, (B) is common knowledge within the field, and the recommendation and standard practice is to “hide” the non-temperature points and not represent them as temperature data points.
D) This is consistent with some graphs (“low level”, raw-data oriented graphs) presenting the complete series, while other graphs (“high level”, temperature graphs) omit the non-temperature points for the sake of not presenting an inaccurate picture of what the reconstructionists actually claim the proxies say about temperature.
E) Although Briffa’s complete data series, including non-temperature points, was present on an early draft of the graph, the non-temperature points were later removed because, according to email conversations, Mann and others thought they were making the graph messy and confusing.
From there we go to:
You believe this steps over a crystal clear line that anyone with a basic education in statistics can see. The graph is deliberately misleading now because it misrepresents the full state of proxy-reconstruction knowledge, and makes it seems like proxy reconstruction is a simple, straightforward process.
One extra section of squiggly yellow line on the graph–one that everyone agrees doesn’t actually represent the quantity labeled on the vertical axis–would have corrected that misimpression.
I’m not going to pretend that last part is a fair paraphrase exactly, but it’s what I’m hearing. Maybe you can clarify?
Also, it might help if I understood why you think the emails, and what they might reveal about the authors’ intentions, matter.
It seems to me that if the graph is so obviously misleading, all you should need to make that judgement is the graph itself, and then something with the “complete” line, e.g., Briffa (1998) or wherever that series was published.
That ought to be enough for your hypothetical modestly educated internet schmuck to see the problem.
But you seem to think the authors’ motives matter, and further, that if something like “they did this because all know this data doesn’t represent temperature” is true, then it’s a mitigating factor.
How does that work?
OK, this is the last comment I’m going to make on the IPCC report (a grateful nation rejoices, etc) so this will have to do…
jack: You believe this steps over a crystal clear line that anyone with a basic education in statistics can see.
No, I believe that this steps over an extremely fuzzy line that everyone will place differently. I will say that this conversation has me more convinced that the authors themselves didn’t think they were doing anything wrong.
But you want to make it all about whether they included 1/2″ of squiggly line on a graph, but the point is really the discussion which surrounded the decision to omit it, which had little to do with the quality of the science (whatever Mann says now), and everything to do with presenting, as Briffa put it albeit in response to a slightly different point about the same graph, a “tidy picture”.
The heart of the issue was a graph that was supposed to show that the present warming is unprecedented in recent human history. That’s quite an important point, since there were plenty of people living in, say, Northern Europe or coastal China in 1000AD and it does not seem that they experienced a climate catastrophe; it also brings into question the confidence in whether all or most of the present warming comes from CO2, or whether the unknown mechanism for warming in previous periods could also be in effect now*.
What I am saying is that the desire to have a graph that demonstrated that there was a consensus in the data that this was unprecedented warming led them to make a dubious – minor, but dubious – decision about how to present a particular data series.
And that given other evidence of extreme hostility to dissenting viewpoints and paranoia about critics, as evidenced in this case in the fear that including the data would lead critics to “have a field day”, I think there’s something rotten in the very people responsible for assembling the IPCC reports. Which I think is: a problem.
Discussion of how to evade FOIA requests, behind-the-scenes collusion on peer review, evident desire to keep out dissenting viewpoints from IPCC reports… the picture that gets painted is not very good. I understand that it’s stressful to be criticized, but you know, this is not campus politics. This is the UN IPCC report that will be used to influence economic and political policy for six billion people. You can’t treat it like a personal feud.
* You have great confidence that any, er, Q-trons that might be causing warming would show up in instrumental data, I do not share that confidence, since a non-CO2 warming mechanism is likely to look very much like CO2 warming since the driver for both is sunlight, and in any case the measurements are fuzzy enough and the temperature rise both small and irregular enough that you can’t just point to a blip on the graph and say “That’s it!”
———————————-
Anyway.
Personally I am also curious what AGW skeptics think is so dangerous about shifting from coal to renewable energy given the relatively small cost of doing so and the clear harms from coal power (air pollution, radioactive fly ash, mountaintop-removal mining)?
If the answer is “more nukes”, then I have a second question: if nukes prove to be more expensive than renewables, would you support renewables?
Third question: if strategic dependency on foreign oil can be reduced by renewables, electric vehicles, and substitution of natural gas, at a relatively low cost, why is that not worthwhile? The US currently spends a large fortune on military activities in the Middle East designed to ensure stability of oil supplies. What if unavoidable US strategic demand for oil (e.g. for aircraft) could be met by domestic producers – wouldn’t that be a good thing and worth paying something for?
None of those arguments has anything to do with global warming and they all seem pretty compelling to me (not that I count myself exactly as a skeptic anyway).
(I would also like to say thanks to jack for sticking with a very interesting discussion that gave a good account of another view of the events and their significance, and took the questions about them as worthy of serious consideration. As far as I’m concerned the last couple of comments give a pretty good summary of the different views, and if I never hear another word about bristlecone pines, it will be too soon.)
And that given other evidence of extreme hostility to dissenting viewpoints and paranoia about critics, as evidenced in this case in the fear that including the data would lead critics to “have a field day”, I think there’s something rotten in the very people responsible for assembling the IPCC reports.
Good grief. You really don’t pay much attention to current events, do you? Or even to the AGW-skeptics posting in this thread?
“If the answer is “more nukes”, then I have a second question: if nukes prove to be more expensive than renewables, would you support renewables?”
JD,
The challenge is that nuclear is the only proven source of energy that has the proven capacity to reduce our dependence ofn oil or coal. There are no renewable sources that have been shown to be economically feasible to create any dent in the energy needs. And, before we start accusing me of protecting oil companies or the nuclear lobby, they haven’t been proven to be economically viable at all, not just in comparison to anything else.
The challenge is that nuclear is the only proven source of energy that has the proven capacity to reduce our dependence ofn oil or coal.
Except for the tiny detail about how all nuclear power plants have to be expensively decommissioned thirty to forty years after they’re built.
Marty, here’s my argument about “economically feasible” for renewables.
Current US power production is about 50% coal amounting to about 2 trillion kWh annually.
Cost of new wind power right now is about $1,500 per kW. The capacity factor for wind is about 35% on average. After installation, the ongoing cost of power production from wind is about 1c/kWh, so pretty clearly the main impediment is the capital cost of replacing sunk-cost coal plants.
Obviously wind alone is not going to replace all of coal, but let’s look at the cost of replacing half of coal – 25% of US power generation – with wind. That’s 1 trillion kWh annually. With wind at a capacity factor of 35%, each installed kW of wind generation produces about 3,000 kWh annually.
So, producing 1 trillion kWh requires about 333 million kW of installed capacity. The current largest turbines are about 5MW, so you’re talking maybe 100,000 really big turbines. On the other hand, the US is kind of gigantic. And at $1,500 per kW, the cost of that would be about $500 billion. That’s assuming that costs of production are pretty constant.
That’s not a small amount of money. Some of it will be paid back, though, because the day-to-day costs of wind generation are much lower than those of coal generation (wind turbines need oiling and the occasional coat of paint, coal needs you to continually bulldoze mountains into railcars). But certainly that would take a very long time, which to me is an argument for the government funding the investment, since the government operates over an effectively infinite time horizon whereas private corporations are much more focused on the immediate future. $500 billion over 5 or 10 years is still a lot of money, but it’s less than (e.g.) the cost of the war in Iraq or the first Bush tax cuts or the stimulus bill.
And then my question is, can you really do the same with nukes for less? Nuclear plants also have low operating costs but they have enormous capital costs. Some figures here. The listed costs of construction are mostly over $3,000/kW, ranging up to $6,000 or more. Now the capacity factor of nukes is also much higher, 92% average in the US, so each installed kW gets you about 8,000 kWh annually, and so you only need about 125,000,000 kW of installed capacity to produce a trillion kWh annually. At $3,000/kW-installed that’s $375 billion; at $5,000/kW-installed that $625 billion. We’re certainly not talking about wholly incomparable numbers there. And those costs do not take into account somewhat higher running costs than wind, or the costs of waste disposal or decommissioning. Personally I think $5,000/kW is probably fair if you take those costs into account, and take into account the implicit cost of loan & liability guarantees from the federal government. Then you have to figure out where to site an additional 125GW of nuclear plants. Let’s generously say that each plant is about 2GW – that’s another 60 nuclear plants to be built.
I’m not saying they’re incomparable. Rather, I’m saying that the I think it’s a mistake to say that renewables are economically infeasible. (I also think you’re going to have an easier time putting up 100,000 giant wind turbines than in siting 60 new nuclear plants, although building them at sites of existing coal plants could work out if you could persuade people just how bad coal is.)
Do those numbers not add up for you? I think you can make the argument that it isn’t worth replacing half of US coal generation with clean generation for $500 billion, but I don’t see how you can make the argument that it’s worth doing as long as we build nuclear plant, but it’s not worth doing if we have to build wind turbines. I don’t get that.
(Those costs also do not take into account the fact that some percentage of coal plants need replacing every year – relative to replacing half of coal generation within a decade or so, it’s not a major factor, and in any case it makes no difference whether it’s wind or nuclear that replaces them.)
No, I believe that this steps over an extremely fuzzy line that everyone will place differently. I will say that this conversation has me more convinced that the authors themselves didn’t think they were doing anything wrong.
OK, this is the last comment I’m going to make on the IPCC report (a grateful nation rejoices, etc) so this will have to do…
Heh. \Me sighs with relief.
Seriously, I appreciate the conversation. I think we’ll probably have to agree to disagree on some of this stuff, but I think we understand each other better at least.
Just a couple last things (not trying to get the last word in, mostly these are completely separate debates we can probably save for another day…):
The heart of the issue was a graph that was supposed to show that the present warming is unprecedented in recent human history. That’s quite an important point, since there were plenty of people living in, say, Northern Europe or coastal China in 1000AD and it does not seem that they experienced a climate catastrophe;
That’s I think a very separate point from what we’ve been discussing. I believe the evidence so far is still that the medieval warm period was likely limited to the northern hemisphere, and mostly just Europe. That’s something very different from the modern phenomenon of global warming. I think everyone would agree that a Copenhagen and a Shanghai that was a few degrees warmer would not be any kind of global catastrophe.
The problem , as I understand it, is the energy in the system. Global warming indicates that the total energy is increasing. More localized warming, as in the MWP, instead indicates a mere shift of the same moderate level energy from one place to another (via ocean currents, probably).
Discussion of how to evade FOIA requests, behind-the-scenes collusion on peer review, evident desire to keep out dissenting viewpoints from IPCC reports… the picture that gets painted is not very good.
I think you might want to re-read some of those and try to me more generous in your interpretation. As in the tree-ring graph discussion above, remember that there is a lot of exculpatory background context that is an assumed part of those discussion, and also that the email conversations themselves were cherry-picked to remove that context by whoever hacked and released them.
— Specifically, any actual FOIA violations would be bad, but it’s still unclear what exactly happened, as opposed to what people talked about. People merely grumping to each other about especially galling FOIA requests is NOT especially worrying or surprising.
— I’m not sure what “collusion on peer review” refers to specifically. There’s at least one incident I’m aware of in the emails that might fit the bill, but that was obviously not a bad thing at all. There was a break down in the peer review process where a particularly shoddy paper got through–not from the pro-GW side–and people were angry and trying to fix it. Sounds good to me.
— And keeping out “dissenting viewpoints” from IPCC reports… Well, this really depends, doesn’t it? You can imagine that in some cases it might be entirely appropriate to keep out viewpoints, that, in the editors’ honest judgement, were either based on bad science, or that simply did not change the big picture in any meaningful way one way or the other, but might cloud it for lay readers.
But then, I don’t think I share your view that the IPCC reports should be some kind of exhaustive survey of the available science. That is still available in the academic literature, it’s not hidden, and I don’t think it’s the IPCC’s job to cover all of it.
I think the IPCC reports should continue to be focused on (fairly) presenting the evidence for the consensus position. Especially considering the growing degree of politicization in the debate, which I think is absolutely a thing that needs to be taken into account in a report that is ultimately targeted at an audience of policy makers and laymen.
Jack, I read the paper, and I don’t see how you think it helps you. They go through a vast number of possible causes of the divergence, and then they conclude that when tested, they don’t apply to enough of the trees to make a convincing explanation. So they then say things like:
This conclusion is a problem for your argument about the appropriateness of merely *assuming* that all the uncheckable data is ok. If there are so many variables that we can’t figure out the proper annual temperature to ring correlation *while we are looking at it happen*, why should we assume that the theory describing the correlation is operating properly for the 700 years where we couldn’t look at it happen?
Nothing in the paper you linked addresses that.
Seb — there are an awful lot of other papers cited in D’Arrigo et al‘s summary. Have you read through the ones that seem most relevant to see if any of them either address your concerns or offer explanations for their conclusions? Academics generally do not go into a lot of depth supporting these sorts of analyses in overview papers because the purpose of the paper is to point other academics towards the papers that do the majority of the heavy lifting and not to reproduce that heavy lifting in a more accessible form.* One might have to dig through older papers establishing the correlation in the first place to see the reason why they believe that the results are temperature correlated rather than something else. The agnosticism of their conclusion itself works against your belief that the earlier correlation is an article of faith.
It seems to me that a reasonable inference here might be that more reading is in order rather than your own apparent assumption that no one in the field has ever bothered to consider that something besides temperature sensitivity might account for growth patterns or that the convergence was itself a short-term anomaly.
This conclusion is a problem for your argument about the appropriateness of merely *assuming* that all the uncheckable data is ok. If there are so many variables that we can’t figure out the proper annual temperature to ring correlation *while we are looking at it happen*, why should we assume that the theory describing the correlation is operating properly for the 700 years where we couldn’t look at it happen?
Nothing in the paper you linked addresses that.
Look at the differences between northern and southern latitudes, and the Cook paper.
You also need to understand the distinction between being able to tell when something wrong is happening–which we can–and being able to tell what is wrong exactly–which is more difficult.
I was also hoping you might be able to figure out from that paper that this is not “Mann’s theory”, but in fact a more or less well-developed branch of science with a large number of practitioners.
Sebastian: The paper jack linked to shows that the anomalies that you’re concerned about are, in fact, matters of active scientific investigation in the field of dendrochronology. While ideally no field of science would have open questions that won’t ever be the case for any active field.
The fact that it’s under active investigation is relevant because to read your postings on it, a person would think that it’s being ignored or covered up by the scientists who should study it.
It’s inaccurate to accuse scientists of “assuming” that uncheckable past data is ok. Climate reconstructions incorporate several streams of data, there do exist tree-ring reconstructions that do not show the anomalies, work on evaluating and improving interpretation of tree-ring data is ongoing, and earlier citations in this discussion thread demonstrate that many reconstructions are robust (that they produce comparable results without strong dependence on the particular datasets used nor in reasonable variances in processing of that data).
I must ask whether you subject all scientific research to the skepticism you express here?
Do you, at least, acknowledge the consensus among climate researchers that (as phrased by the IPCC):
Note that I’m not asking if you agree with that, merely if you will acknowledge that this is the mainstream, consensus opinion of relevant knowledgeable experts?
“It’s inaccurate to accuse scientists of “assuming” that uncheckable past data is ok. Climate reconstructions incorporate several streams of data, there do exist tree-ring reconstructions that do not show the anomalies, work on evaluating and improving interpretation of tree-ring data is ongoing, and earlier citations in this discussion thread demonstrate that many reconstructions are robust (that they produce comparable results without strong dependence on the particular datasets used nor in reasonable variances in processing of that data).”
The large weight of the long lived tree species do show the problems talked about in the paper. The whole problem is that it throws the averages way off, and they haven’t found a legitimate reason to throw out the ones that don’t agree with the temperature (legitimate being a method by which you could also exclude historical samples that exhibited the same problems). Therefore you either include the trees that don’t fit with your theory until you can come up with a legitimate exclusionary technique, or you have to not use the tree data.
Either of those are legitimate responses. What Mann actually chose to do isn’t. What he chose to do was omit the trees that had results he didn’t like. That is cherry picking.
“The fact that it’s under active investigation is relevant because to read your postings on it, a person would think that it’s being ignored or covered up by the scientists who should study it.”
No. They are investigating and reporting the problem areas. Fine. Mann was reporting in a summary article. His summary glossed over the problems, and in fact didn’t even bother to footnote them. His graph is blatantly misleading because it either contains 500 years of data which is unverifiable, or it should contain 60 years of honest tree trending that is the ‘wrong’ way. Until you discover why the trees are trending the way they are, you can’t exclude the possibility that they have done so in the past. Assuming that 500 unverifiable years are pristine while 60 out of the 120 verifiable years trend the wrong way isn’t legitimate data analysis.
The linked paper doesn’t draw a trend line from 500 unverifiable years. It confronts the ‘problem’. Mann’s graph not only fails to confront the problem, it actively obscures it by fudging the trendline.
“I must ask whether you subject all scientific research to the skepticism you express here?”
I think people put way to much trust in dodgy statistics. Yes.
Either of those are legitimate responses. What Mann actually chose to do isn’t. What he chose to do was omit the trees that had results he didn’t like. That is cherry picking.
Read the literature, Sebastian.
The limits and capabilities of this data are clearly understood a lot better than you seem to think they are. Mann’s treatment of the data is the one recommended by the dendrochronologists who study both the trees and the “problem”.
Saying the data is “unverifiable” is plain ignorance. I just don’t know what else to call it.
“Mann’s treatment of the data is the one recommended by the dendrochronologists who study both the trees and the “problem”.”
Not by the study you linked.
What does the word unverifiable mean to you? Do you believe there were lots of thermometers available in the 1600s?
The trees still track the other proxies pretty well, so maybe you think the problem is with the thermometers?
What does the word unverifiable mean to you? Do you believe there were lots of thermometers available in the 1600s?
This is just really weird Sebastian. You seem like a basically smart guy. Not a troll anyway. And I keep pointing you to places where you can learn some of the nuances of this, or at least learn that such nuances exist. Yet you keep coming back with this same exact laughable talking-point version of what’s going on.
Now, the linked papers come right out and say that they can’t be absolutely certain (yet) that no such divergence has occurred. But they do say there are good indications that it hasn’t, and the data can therefore be used with that understanding: i.e., with somewhat less confidence, but still used.
Not tossed out completely as you seem to believe it must be.
So why is it that you hold this cartoonish view that thermometers are the only way to verify something? On what scientific basis do you make that blanket assertion? And no, appeals to “common sense” or “basic statistics” don’t count: much of what’s done in science is quite clever and counterintuitive, and my faith that you’re a world-class expert on all the intricate ins and outs of dendrochronology is very faint indeed.
So what is your response to the fact (attested in the Cook paper, for example) that the presence of a “divergence problem” in AD1600, say, can be checked for by looking for the hallmarks we see in the modern divergence? (Particularly, the marked divergence in very high northern latitude trees, but a lesser or non-divergence in other trees.)
Take a good hard look at Fig. 6. See if it soaks through.
Now consider that other kinds of data–tree ring density, isotopic data, stalagtite, ice core, etc.–all track the same, within their, admittedly sometimes wider, error margins. Is it your contention that ALL these data sources just decided to get their stories straight and start lying to us simultaneously?
And that’s before we even get into all of the other things, like statistical or micro-site sorting techniques, some of which, as related in D’Arrigo et al, might eliminate the “divergence” effect altogether.
Not by the study you linked.
I didn’t link to anything for that purpose, and I expect it’s one of those things that doesn’t need to be explained to experts in every single paper. But look at Mann’s quote above.
Also, you might want to try to explain paragraphs like this [my emphasis], from the linked paper:
Or this:
I mean, is it your contention that all this “truncation” and “empirical correction” (related in a thoroughly matter-of-fact, unshocked tone by the survey’s author) is malfeasance? Based on…your world-class expertise in dendrochronology?
Please.
The trees still track the other proxies pretty well, so maybe you think the problem is with the thermometers?
I don’t know what “track the other proxies pretty well” means. They clearly don’t. The trees don’t even track each other well where the divergence is observed.
But I’ll also note that in fact thermometers may be one of the problems. For the northern latitude trees where the divergence is most extreme, weather stations are sparse, and often at lower (warmer) altitudes or latitudes than the trees. You’d know that if you read D’Arrigo.
You don’t seem to understand what empirical correction means in these studies. It means comparing the rings to the thermometer temperatures and then correcting to the thermometers.
If we knew why this was necessary that may or may not be appropriate depending on what was causing the divergence. If it is caused by drought sensitivity for example (one of the proposed explanations), we can’t correct for that in the past because tree rings are one of the major ways we measure non-observable water access in historical forests. If it is solar radiation (another proposed explanation) we again can’t correct for that in the past because there aren’t good proxies for that available frm 1600. In fact almost all of proposed explanations are unfortunately not easy to check in the past record.
Correcting to the thermometers when you don’t know what is causing the difference, isn’t good though. Because you don’t know for sure that you are correcting an error at all.
And you don’t seem to be even willing to think about that problem. You are stuck in how perfectly ok these epicycles are because you are ‘correcting’ them against a real observation.
“They clearly don’t. The trees don’t even track each other well where the divergence is observed.”
The trees don’t track each other well *anywhere*. We have always had to use an average of the tree readings to get anything useful. The problem is when you start throwing out tree samples you don’t like *without any good theoretical reason* just to make it look like the average tracks your theory.
The average doesn’t track your theory. That is a problem with your theory not with the average, unless you can explain why it is happening.
Which, thus far, they cannot.
Now the paper you link is up front about that. In fact, in the middle of the paper they admit that if this continues without a good explanation, it calls into question the theory of using the tree samples as a proxy for temperature.
Mann is not up front about this. He still wants to use the historical tree data and present it as if there was no problem whatsoever.
You don’t seem to understand what empirical correction means in these studies. It means comparing the rings to the thermometer temperatures and then correcting to the thermometers.
Something like that, yes. Which is exactly what I understood it to mean. I was pointing to the fact that this, along with “truncating”, is an accepted practice, with well understood tradeoffs and regimes of acceptability. One performed by people who have studied this and similar problems for years. And who have collectively submitted hundreds of papers to peer review and critical professors. And face hundreds of hungry graduate students eager to take a piece out of them. And who in all ways understand the science, the data, the processing techniques and the problems far, far better than both of us put together.
To counter that, you’re coming at them with…amateur, handwavy backseat scientizing. Clung to tenaciously.
I’m sorry, but that’s not convincing, and that’s not skepticism. It’s treading dangerously close to crackpottery.
In fact almost all of proposed explanations are unfortunately not easy to check in the past record.
“Not easy” is science’s middle name. Seriously, how is this anything but an argument from incredulity? There probably all kinds of clever ways to check these things, to the extent it is necessary at all. (And, for the purposes of addressing your concerns, that answer is ‘not much’.)
And you don’t seem to be even willing to think about that problem. You are stuck in how perfectly ok these epicycles are because you are ‘correcting’ them against a real observation.
Not willing to think about it? I’ve spent pages addressing this supposed problem you see. Meanwhile I’ve said absolutely nothing about any such “correcting” against a real observation. I have no idea where you got that, or even what you mean by it…
The trees don’t track each other well *anywhere*. We have always had to use an average of the tree readings to get anything useful.
Feel free to clarify, but AFAICT, yes the trees DO track each other well, or did.
Although a temperature-limited tree in the Yukon and one in California obviously wouldn’t be expected to indicate the same exact temperature, they do track the same rises and falls going back hundreds of years exactly as we’d expect. Until the “divergence”, at which point some of the trees (maybe the one in California) continue to track thermometers reasonably well, while other (like the one in Alaska) don’t. Different trees in different regions, sometimes trees right next to each other, start going in different directions. It’s not simply that the trees are looking left when the thermometers are looking right, it’s that these trees have gone crosseyed, when they never have in the recorded past.
Really weird coincidence that the trees somehow magically jibe all those hundreds of years, then suddenly start swinging wildly in opposite directions just 50 or so years ago isn’t it? How do you explain that?
(I’ll add another thing here, yet another illustration of the unexpected things you can use to verify things: volcanism. We have independent ways of dating major volcanic eruptions, and their severity, and we can check a proxy record for the expected dips.)
The problem is when you start throwing out tree samples you don’t like *without any good theoretical reason* just to make it look like the average tracks your theory.
The fundamental problem is actually this: Who are you to judge who has a “good theoretical reason” for doing what they’re doing? That’s nothing but hubristic, amateur–literally ignorant–second guessing. And utterly unconvincing.
That goes double because characterizations like this make it clear to even me that you don’t particularly understand the “theory” at all. Your characterizations read like a cartoon.
To start with, it might be helpful to know which samples we’re talking about throwing out right now.
I mean, say we’re talking about a set of samples collected from a particular mountain in Alaska. The samples exhibit the divergence problem starting in about 1970.
So, (A) we might want to calibrate that data set with a period ending before the divergence starts, i.e., “throwing out” data points (not samples) after 1970, and building a proxy that’s good for, say, the period 1300-1970 rather than 1300-2010.
Or, (B) we might want to “throw out” that data set completely, and just limit ourselves to the large collection of data sets that don’t exhibit divergence, like the Siberian pines from the Sol Dav site in Mongolia.
I don’t see a problem with either, as circumstances suit, but it’d be helpful to know which one you’re criticizing.
The average doesn’t track your theory. That is a problem with your theory not with the average, unless you can explain why it is happening.
It’s not a problem with either the theory OR the “average” (which is a bizarre characterization itself: what “average” do you mean?).
This is what you don’t seem to understand. Tree’s not being temperature sensitive is not a “problem” at all for the theory. Most trees aren’t. The “theory” just says that trees require a number of conditions to be satisfied in order to add girth: water, light, soil nutrients, CO2, temperature. The exact details of the requirements obviously vary by tree and by region.
For good temperature proxy trees, you want ones that are “temperature sensitive”: perhaps trees that grow at some kind of extreme altitude or latitude, where they do any growing they can during a few short weeks of warmth in summer or something. (Again, the exact details depend on the region and the tree).
So, in a very real sense you know exactly what is happening when trees stop tracking temperature: they’ve lost temperature sensitivity. They’re limited by something else. This is not some gob-smacking challenge to the “theory”. It’s a pair of more minor puzzles we must use the theory to figure out: (1) what is the something else is?, and (2) have there have been any periods of similarly weakened temperature sensitivity in the past?
Although a good answer to (1) would certainly help with (2), and vice versa, they are also independent questions. Thus far the answer to (1) is that it’s complicated, and the answer will be in different combinations for different trees, but probably something to do with a combination of processing anomalies (e.g., microsite or sorting effects) and anthropogenic factors (warming, pollution, etc.). The answer to (2) is, we can’t say for certain (yet), but there don’t appear to be. The combination of the two lends support to the idea that it’s likely in large part a modern anthropogenic phenomenon that wouldn’t have affected trees in AD1300.
Now the paper you link is up front about that. In fact, in the middle of the paper they admit that if this continues without a good explanation, it calls into question the theory of using the tree samples as a proxy for temperature.
Which one? D’Arrigo or Cook? Point me to the page number. The former says the “principal issue” for proxy reconstructions is just that you can’t use recent decades to calibrate. The question of whether it’s occurred in the past is merely in “other important issues” (and, again, they conclude that it doesn’t look like it has, though we can’t say so unequivocally without more research).
Although the calibration problem makes it “more difficult” to directly compare past temperatures to very recent ones, it’s not impossibly by any means. They certainly don’t claim that these trees are useless…
Mann is not up front about this. He still wants to use the historical tree data and present it as if there was no problem whatsoever.
Assuming for the sake of argument that you can establish he really isn’t “up front” about it when he should be, how does this even pass the laugh test?
Is it your idea that Mann just kinda hoped nobody would notice the mile-long bibliography of literature on the divergence problem, some of which he himself has written about or contributed to? Seriously?
Isn’t the more probable answer that he simply used the data in a manner consistent with it’s published, understood limits, and thus didn’t feel the need to explain extensively?
Just to add a scientific observation of my own: Sebastian’s argumentative style in this thread strongly resembles in a surprising number of ways his style when defending the pro-life talking point that simply huge numbers of late-term abortions are being carried out in the US, unrecorded, for trivial reasons.
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