Bishop Hill A chat with Graham Stringer
Apr 10, 2010 Climate: Parliament A few days ago I wondered how the Science and Technology Select Committee had managed to exonerate Phil Jones on several of the charges against him without actually having any evidence for the defence. Despite having previously expressed a willingness to discuss the report, committee chairman Phil Willis subsequently refused to explain this extraordinary set of circumstances.
Somewhat exasperated, I dropped a line to Graham Stringer, who, readers may remember, was the only member of the committee who seemed to have any great interest in probing for answers to the questions raised by the Climategate emails. He was also the sole dissenter from the majority opinion represented by the report.
I was very gratified to get a swift response from Mr Stringer, particularly now we are in a general election campaign. He said that he was happy to talk about the committee's findings and suggested we speak by telephone.
We spoke yesterday and I found him very engaging. He was keen to emphasise the time constraints that the committee was operating under and also the fact that several members of the committee are utterly convinced of the CAGW case, although he also said he thought that they were not dogmatic in their beliefs.
I particularly raised the question of Ross McKitrick's allegation that Phil Jones had inserted into the IPCC report some statements that had no basis in the scientific literature. I came away with the impression that the committee had not specifically examined this issue, and that their exoneration of Jones was presumably therefore limited to the specific questions that they had looked at. It appears to have been a case of "if in doubt find him innocent".
Of course, innocent until proven guilty is a principle I'm sure we are all right behind, but in these circumstances Phil Willis's declaration that Jones emerged from the inquiry with his reputation intact looks less than a straightforward declaration of the truth.
It is not that Jones has been found innocent; on many of the charges he just hasn't been tried yet.
Reader Comments (100)
Icarus
Perhaps you should have a word with Jo Abess and join her campaign to canonise Phil Jones. Your views are remarkably similar. Comment no. 5 here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/04/climate-scientist-bashing/#more-3690
Icarus do you know anything at all of what has gone on at UEA? The emails are all on line, if you would like to read them, and I challenge you to plough through them and then come back here and say that Jones is a scientist of honesty and integrity. Do read them yourself, though - don't just let Realclimate or Desmogblog or Deltoid do your thinking for you.
"Personally I've seen zero proven evidence to support man-made global warming - you provide it, and we'll discuss it."
The evidence is widely available and you must be well aware of it, so what we would need to discuss is what part (or parts) of that evidence you dispute. For example, is carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas? Have we increased atmospheric carbon dioxide by around 40% since pre-industrial times? Are we therefore responsible for an enhanced greenhouse effect? If you accept the anthropogenic enhanced greenhouse effect, what global temperature change can we expect to result from it? These are all very basic parts of the science which anyone who has any familiarity with the climate at all must know about, and have a view on. Tell us which bit(s) you don't believe and we can go from there.
waxing eloquent, again
Geronimo, you write: "... a sign that there is a re-positioning among the scientific community..... if I were Ciccerone or Rees, I would be concerned that I had been led up the garden path by a bunch of activists..... both are at risk of having their scientific reputations repudiated because of a lazy acceptance of "consensus" science. Now they appear to have woken up..."
I sincerely hope you're right. The Royal Society's website still links to their "Preventing Dangerous Climate Change" document which contains this outrageous poppycock: "Once our actions have raised concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, levels will remain elevated for more than a thousand years." They need to withdraw this alarmist claptrap.
Methinks Icarus stumbled in here, not fully understanding where he is or the general level of understanding of the subject that commenters here have.. so we should go gently! :o)
Icarus, I'm probably one of the more dumb readers here. I'll have a look over your points. I apologise in advance, I sometimes talk officiously - I use bigger words than I really should, and sometimes I use the wrong ones! :o)
Honestly, Icarus, the evidence isn't widely available. I can't find any that proves that global warming is caused by man, and I have been looking for a long time now. The BELIEF that the evidence is widely available is widely spread, however. You've heard that it's there, though I'm pretty sure that you haven't seen it for yourself. Ammarite? Hmm? :o)
The theory (or, more accurately, the untested hypothesis) is there, but the science to support it isn't. The truth is that we don't honestly know what forces are at play. We know some of them, but we don't actually know whether other forces react negatively or positively. If they react, will they create a feedback loop? (a feedback loop is where a thing happens, which causes a cascade of things happening, which causes the first thing to happen more). We truly, honestly don't know.. and if anyone tells you that we do, that's because they HEARD that we do and not because we actually do.
Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. And yes, we have increased carbon dioxide levels since the days of the Luddites. But you have to remember that plants eat CO2 for breakfast. They grow better when there's lots of it, and they suck it out of the air. Don't forget, you breathe out CO2 as well. CO2 isn't necessarily bad stuff, and it is one of the things that life on earth depends on and couldn't get by without.
This is a good question, and it's a very important question to ask, but before we can answer it, we need more information. Correlation (two things that seem to go together) is not the same as causation (one thing happening causes another thing to happen). Put very simply, if CO2 increases directly caused temperature increases then some things that HAVE happened shouldn't have. For example, in the 1940s the world got colder, and just recently (the past 15 years or so) the world stopped getting warmer, and back in the days of Robin Hood it seems that it was just as warm as today, even though we didn't have any power stations pumping out CO2 back then. We have to consider a thing called "natural variability". Just as some days are warmer than others in the summer, and some weeks are colder than others in the winter, some years are warmer or colder and on average some decades and even centuries are warmer than each other... and the truth is we don't fully understand why. And until we do, we can't say for sure that man-made CO2, and not natural variability, causes global warming.
Even if you were to accept AGW, it's impossible to know what will result. As I mentioned earlier, there are a great many different factors. Some forcings cause positive feedback and some cause negative. Some can cause both, depending on the situation. If the world heats up enough then sea water will evaporate. Some of that water will form cloud, and when that cloud passes over land before sunrise it will reflect sunlight back into space and prevent the ground underneath it from heating up, by several and sometimes a great many degrees. Conversely, if the cloud drifts over land in the evening it can trap the heat of the day and prevent it from escaping into space. This can trap heat and keep the ground warmer by several degrees, for several hours.. sometimes all night. This is a really REALLY crude example of complex variability, but the point is that nobody can predict what cloud will form where or when (yet) and cloud is just one of hundreds or thousands, possibly millions, of things we can't predict more than a few hours ahead of time, and we still don't properly understand, but which will all work together to make the world's temperature go either up or down in the future, whether or not we make CO2.
As Socrates said, the only thing we know is that we know nothing. And on the rare occasions we know something, my mum used to say "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Not because knowledge is bad, but making big decisions when you only have a tiny bit of the story is never the best thing to do.
Well done SimonH. Hopefully Icarus has learned something from that. I was going to emphasise the uncertainty over feedback - even the most dyed-in-the-wool warmist has to admit they simply can't model it with any faith. Take a look over at wattsupwiththat, Icarus. There's a recent look at feedback models and the tracks of them simply have to be seen to be believed.
RT...
"1. Phil Jones was not being accused of doing 'bad' science"
Actually, he is, (along with the rest of the gang) and he is being accused by a whole lot of people!
"2. Since he received poor advice from the university over the FOI requests, the fault lies with the university not Phil Jones"
Simply not good enough RT! Ignorance of a law is not an excuse, that is a simple fact in law. What would you expect a judge to say if you said, "I did not know it was against the law to exceed a speed limit", if you were in court? As head of the CRU, Jones has a responsibility to ensure HIS department operates withing the law, as does any manager working in say, a factory or company. Remember the emails and his comments on how he would evade the F.O.I requests.
To me, Jones may or may not be a good scientist but, for sure, he should not be heading a department. He certainly understood the F.O.I. whilst chatting in emails and bragging how he would break the law to foil McIntyre etc!
j. ferguson
Reference to your earlier post.
I would not go as far as to say this is a conspiracy more an accidental coming together of selfish minds which started many years ago as independent influential factions in a couple of organisations. They jumped on the Global Warming hypothesis as a vehicle to advance their own ambitions. Unfortunately those couple of factions 30 years on have multiplied and morphed into a multi-disciplined, multi-national unstoppable bandwagon all wanting own their slice of the booty.
Now all we need to do is convince the authorities who are not just after the loot that AGW is not quite bull excrement but still only a hypothesis not worthy of bankrupting the first world countries. And that i believe can only be done by scientists, lots of them.
SominH, thanks for answering Icarus for me - you made a far better job of it than I could! I hope his wings don't fall off...
Martyn,
forgive that this is not a better ordered analysis. I accept your description of the evolution and characterization of this "mania." It might be, though, that the solution will be found in one or two scientists convincing a credible politician (hopefully not always an oxymoron) that the present science is an insufficient base for sweeping, expensive policies. That politician would, in turn, influence the easing off of the mania.
The mania seems mostly faith-based and much more likely to be curable via faith-based counter-arguments, with apologies to His Grace.
I'm reading Macaulay's wonderful "History of England from the Accession of James II" and noting the ebb and flow of religious manias in the 17th century - those manias actually were religious. One might ask His Grace what a Bishop is doing in Scotland - an exile perhaps?
To be briefer, countering a faith-based mania seems to me to require a countervailing faith-based effort.
J ferguson
That’s it then we just need to find a scientist with the name of Oliver Cromwell, give the gallows a fresh lick of paint and sharpen the axe. I think religion in the 17th century was at the point of a sword but it may work well in the 21st century too. Oh hold on James II may have been a bit later than Cromwell. Enjoy your book my history is awful.
Martyn,
Macaulay starts earlier than James II and Oliver comes off far better than I would have expected. I continue to think we have a political problem albeit based on "science" so we need a political solution.
J ferguson
I think this goes back to my earlier post
“convince the authorities who are not just after the loot that AGW is not quite bull excrement but still only a hypothesis not worthy of bankrupting the first world countries. And that i believe can only be done by scientists, lots of them.”
I think politicians are quite happy to go along with AGW because it gives them an opportunity to introduce new taxes and the climate scientists are happy because they get the funding. Enter scientist Cromwell.
Martyn and j ferguson, I think there are several propellants that you haven't really touched on, behind the myth of AGW.
[this is largely waffle.. hopefully you can derive something useful from it...]
On climate faith - i.e. unsound science being sold in gnostic terms; that scientists know, and we should believe.. Contemporary thinking in the westernised world is that science trumps religion. We are resistant to new and old religions, when they are presented as faiths, but we are susceptible to faiths that are presented as science. We believe that a scientific "fact", presented and verified by a scientific authority, is irrefutable. The irony is that we forego the critical examination of the idea being proposed, that we would afford a religious proposition, because we believe by default that, being science, it must be infallible, verified fact. While it has recently very publicly transpired that this is far from being a given, this needs reinforcement in the public's mind.
Climate science is what one might describe as a "trojan belief". Those who embrace science and reject religion on principle, having "fallen" for the climatology story, that have invested energies in promoting their virtuous, intelligent and forward-thinking stance on environmentalism (either by investing in eco-products or boasting to friends in the pub) are resistant to losing face by publicly losing faith. In short, it is easier on the ego to perpetuate a belief and stance that you know or suspect may be fallacious than it is to accept that it is false, and publicly renounce that faith. People with such investments need an "easy out".. something near-tangible, that they can point to and say - correctly - that they were tricked, that we all were tricked, and that there is no shame in having been fooled by something that seemed so convincing.
I'm at risk of running into a whole load of stuff that I think is pertinent, but I think would be better worked through piecemeal. I'll end short for now with this point.. I don't think the solution to climate faith is another faith. We're pre-disposed these days to be suspicious of religions, and we are much more appreciative of, and willing to accept scientific assertions. What needs to be done is to establish in the public conscience that, in the wrong hands, science can appear to prove anything, and accordingly that a proven scientific fact is the product only of the scientist purporting to prove it. Most people, despite their embrace of science and rejection of religion, are forced - largely through time-constraint - to still operate on a level of faith in sciences. It is essential to establish the differentiation between a hard science, such as physics, and a soft and/or faith-based, science such as climate science. Break that egg, and I think we're rolling.
Thanks much SimonH for some very useful thoughts. I need to munch on what you say.
BTW, does His Grace object in any way to a continuation of this discussion here?
SimonH, thanks for your reply.
If CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and we have increased atmospheric CO2 by about 40%, then that increase will have a warming effect - a positive forcing. Agreed? You cannot accept the first two points and then dispute the conclusion that flows from them. Now, this is not the same as stating that the world will therefore warm up - it's perfectly conceivable, for example, that the positive forcing from an enhanced greenhouse effect could be counteracted by a cooling sun, or higher albedo, such that global average temperature remains constant or even declines - i.e. that the net climate forcing is zero or negative. What you cannot claim, without denying the physics of greenhouse gases altogether, is that the enhanced greenhouse effect doesn't exist.
If the planet is warming, then that warming is due to the net effect of all the anthropogenic and natural forcings. You can't say "well yes, the world is warming up, but maybe it's all due to natural variability and none of it is due to the increased CO2". Whatever global temperature change we see has to be the product of both the anthropogenic and the natural forcings. That's why the 'correlation is not causation' fallacy doesn't apply here - no-one is using the argument that "we're increasing CO2 and the world is warming up, so the former must be causing the latter" as proof of AGW.
Hope to write more later...
Icarus,
I do truly love the way you and others who misuse science for their agendas, whatever they may be, hide behind the "Science of Physics" to "prove" their bombastic statements.
Well here is one of those fundamental facts you can test in your own garage. What happens if all the ice in the Arctic Ocean were (please note subjunctive mood) melt tomorrow? How many feet, meters, or whatever would the seas around New York City, London, or any city near sea level rise?
Answer: Zero change. Melting floating ice causes no change. Basic fact of Physics.
The other day Jack Hughes pointed this out, and I actually tried it. I got a wash tub, filled it about half way with water, dropped in 50 pounds of ice and marked the water level. Next day, the ice was gone (melted by anthropomorphic heating) and the water level remained the same
Unlike most sites you visit, you have run into one which is populated by enough Ph. D.s to start a good size university. Most of us have a real understanding of Science, the Scientific Method and "How to think" as Jack so nicely put it.
Your Voodoo Science is starting to get annoying.
Find me anyone of any significance who says otherwise. Just one.
I thought the theory of sea rise from loss of arctic ice wasn't from displacement which as you say wouldn't happen but from radiative effects associated with change in albedo. This would tend to increase ocean temperatures, causing that water to expand in more or less lateral confinement and hence rise in level.
One of the parts of this I've wondered about is what is the geometry of the beach surrounding all this water. It isn't v vertical in most places so the sea extent would also increase and thus the rise spread out over a greater area and hence less.
Gotta be careful with this stuff. it isn't always obvious. Please come back with more Icarus.
Icarus, unless I'm missing something really fundamental, you seem to have talked the theory of AGW into thin air, like it doesn't exist. AGW (anthropogenic global warming - global warming as a result of man/global increases in temperature as a result of CO2 emissions), you say, is an argument that no-one is making?
I might cautiously, but respectfully, disagree with you there Icarus. In fact I'm pretty damn sure I'll disagree with you. :o)
Find me anyone of any significance who says otherwise. Just one.
Well -- for starters, ME. I did the experiment. Have you?
Icarus, please go away and find some other group to annoy.
And Icarus,
Don't let the spring door hit you on your back side as you go out, and please be careful of flying to near the sun as you fly away. You gotta be careful of flying too near the Sun with an understanding of physics and science like yours. You might melt your wings. It happened before. Or at least they say.
Wait, wait, Don Pablo. He agreed with you.
No. What I said is this: No-one is using the argument that "CO2 and global temperatures are both rising, therefore the former causes the latter". If that was all we had then it would indeed be a 'correlation is not causation' fallacy. The actual argument is a bit more robust than that.
We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that increasing atmospheric CO2 therefore results in a positive climate forcing. This doesn't *necessarily* mean that the planet will warm up, as I explained - the enhanced CO2 greenhouse effect could be counteracted by some other, negative forcing. Indeed, it is - it's counteracted to a certain extent by the increased albedo due to anthropogenic aerosols, for example. See here for a summary of the main forcings (it so happens that all the other, non-CO2 forcings virtually cancel each other out, but I'm sure you get the point anyway).
The crucial point is that the enhanced CO2 greenhouse effect will manifest itself regardless of whatever else is going on in the climate system. Do you see? If the net effect of all other forcings is of equal magnitude but opposite sign to the enhanced CO2 greenhouse effect then global average temperature will remain constant (but still with natural interannual variability of course). If, on the other hand, the net effect of all the non-CO2 forcings is zero, then the world will warm up. Other forcings can counteract or reinforce the enhanced CO2 greenhouse effect but they can't stop it happening.
This is how we know that the net natural forcings are close to zero - because if they weren't, we wouldn't see the steady global warming that we are in fact seeing. If they were negative, the planet would be warming less. If they were positive, the planet would be warming more. This is illustrated here - natural forcings are approximately zero, and only anthropogenic forcings are responsible for the warming of the last half century or so.
Hope this helps.
Welcome back Icarus.
But we are in fact NOT seeing steady global warming. Far from it. Agreed?
I'll cut to the chase, Icarus, essentially you're trying to argue a signal in the noise - one that you can't find because it isn't there.
In short: No, Icarus. There is daily, weekly, monthly, annual, interannual, decadal, multi-decadal, millennial and greater natural variability. There is no determinable pre-industrial historic constant global average temperature that can be distinguished amid the noise of natural variability. You can hypothesise that it exists, but you cannot assert its existence unless you can offer substantive evidence in support. And you cannot.
The essence of your argument, Icarus, seems to be that we are contributing to the atmosphere. We've established that long ago. However I can't find in your post anything, really, that says anything much more than that. At least anything that amounts to anything. If you're asserting that the C20th change in global annual temperature averages, as charted by IPCC, is evidence of AGW and not natural variability then I'd have to demand that you to explain both the LIA and the MWP. You cannot make the 19/20C AGW argument stick without explaining an alternative to CO2 and natural variability as causes of the LIA and MWP.
Is that your assertion?
Wait, wait, Don Pablo. He agreed with you.
My bad, if true, but that does not seem to follow -- What he said is
No. What I said is this: No-one is using the argument that "CO2 and global temperatures are both rising, therefore the former causes the latter".
Well, I have no idea who "no-one" is, but there are plenty who do make this argument. Icarus is, however, being very cute.
His argument is still fundamentally unproven which is:
The crucial point is that the enhanced CO2 greenhouse effect will manifest itself regardless of whatever else is going on in the climate system.
Gee, jolly, could you demonstrate this, Icarus? What about the effects of methane, or just good old fashioned water? Like the clouds. And then there are all those plants, eating up the CO2 like greedy little buggers. Not to mention the trillions of tons of CO2 dissolved in the oceans of the world, being made into carbonate by the algae. You sound a lot like our friends at the IPCC and their propaganda machine.
Let's us dissect the arguments:
We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that increasing atmospheric CO2 therefore results in a positive climate forcing.
Whose data? IPCC's?
If the net effect of all other forcings is of equal magnitude but opposite sign to the enhanced CO2 greenhouse effect then global average temperature will remain constant (but still with natural interannual variability of course).
This is true, simple math.
If, on the other hand, the net effect of all the non-CO2 forcings is zero, then the world will warm up.
Okay, but this is the CRITICAL point Icarus. Just where do you get this? Let me guess. AHH, I guess the IPCC!
In fact. I guess your [here| button.
http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig2-4.jpg
Sorry Icarus, I looked at the URL.
Please take your Voodoo science elsewhere.
SimonH
I must admit Icarus is a lot more fun than Frank and Cedric. Perhaps we should keep him around?
SimonH
You have raised 3 points:-
“Climate faith” …. I think the public are aware that any hypothesis may take many years to verify and indeed evolves over time but any reinforcement is always a good thing.
“Trojan belief”….. I am not sure that people involved in anything climate related want an “easy out” at the moment. There has been opportunities missed in the past and currently various committees set up to investigate climate issues but the opinion seems to be that they are just papering over the cracks, well chasms in my opinion. We have an election next month and the topic of climate change so far seems to have been avoided by all parties. So who is actually looking for an “easy out” I would say nobody but I agree it should be available.
“Separating hard science and climate science”….. I would have to disagree totally here. That would be seen as a “divide and conquer” attitude and certainly would not motivate all scientific disciplines into policing the scientific world. AGW is a problem created by a scientific hypothesis and will only be resolved by scientist, collectively.
Just a quick point on your discussion with Icarus, you may want to throw into the mix Phil Jones’s comment regarding no significant warming in the last 10 or 15 years. I’m sure that will prove somehow that cap and trade is working;-)
Icarus: "That's why the 'correlation is not causation' fallacy doesn't apply here - no-one is using the argument that "we're increasing CO2 and the world is warming up, so the former must be causing the latter" as proof of AGW."
I beg to differ, what they are saying is that the models can account for 50% of the rise in GTA and as they can find no other cause for the other 50% it is "very likely" caused by human emissions of CO2. By any scientific method I know of that's a guess. Add to this a paper, I'm sorry I don't have it to hand but Richard Halley talked about it at the AGU and it's on YouTube. Anyway, the paper said that it had looked at the historical records, where there is little sign of CO2 driving temperature and come to the conclusion that to achieve past temperatures in their models they needed more CO2 forcing. Their conclusion is that the records are wrong! Now we have to instances of the models being unable to explain temperature increases through the natural forcings in place, so they decide that the observations are wrong and fail to question their models.
Nobody denies CO2 is a GHG, the problem we have is that what we can do empirically is to calculate the increase in temperature for an increase in CO2 and all the calculations show only a 1C increase (+/- 0.2), hardly earth shattering, so in order to cement the panic, the modellers tell us that this will produce cloud that will give us a positive feedback. I don't know how technical you are but positive feedback is unstable, and once triggered should carry on without stopping if there is nothing to stop it, so the increase in temperature in those circumstances is effectively infinity. Well, let's go back to the observations, CO2 has, in the recent geological past been many times higher than the forecast which is causing the panic among the politicians and there is no sign whatsover of the a runaway positive feedback in the records.
So the crux of this argument isn't whether CO2 is a GHG, it's what effects increases will have and there is no evidence outside the models that suggests there will be CAGW because of CO2 emissions.
martyn, thanks! :o)
The problem with "faith in climate science" is science's near-instantaneous assimilation, particularly among the vulnerable. But when I say vulnerable, I mean the average cynic in the street. The desire to be rational, intelligent and forward thinking is not always matched by intelligence, time to digest information, or an ability to rationalise. Climate science is complex, and that's unfortunate, and the majority of the populous is forced to rely on sound-bite-sized "science" to assimilate someone else's opinion or assertion.
The "trojan belief", that I hypothesise, is the process of assimilating a religious (i.e. faith-without-proof) belief because it's packaged as scientific (i.e. proven) fact. The religious notion - that climate change is man-made - is allowed in to the individual's conscience and afforded the status of proven fact.
In counter to this, the notion of god's existence is easily identified as a religious notion, and for those who consider themselves scientifically minded, it is an automatic response to deflect the notion from assimilation, and with the retort "Yeah? Prove it!" This deflection doesn't happen with religious notions packaged as scientific fact - for example climate science.
I appreciate that it's not attractive (though it is effective) to divide and conquer. But I think the distinction between climatology, astrology and biology is more a western contemporary distinction than some appreciate.
We're familiar with the historic term "witch doctor", and the recent resurgence of homeopathic remedies for western-medicine-treatable conditions. There is variability in acceptance of softer-edged "science".
I've asserted for some time that there is more in climate science that is in common with astrology than with biology. With climatology and with astrology, the principle purpose of chart creation is in identifying characteristics and projecting future behaviours accordingly. Both deal with prediction and prophecy, using very limited data and disregarding swathes of influences that cannot be plotted or properly comprehended. Though my comparison between climatology and astrology is a little bit tongue in cheek, I think it's important to recognise that there are parallels, most particularly in the public's desire to know the future - even some of those who profess to reject such notions will, at least just to SEE, have their astrological charts drawn up.
hehe! Yeah! :o)
No. The warming trend is very clear. You just have to analyse the data in a way that minimises the 'noise' (as you rightly call it) of short-term natural variability, such as ENSO and the solar cycle, so that the 'signal' of a genuine and long-term climate forcing becomes clear. This is what you see here, with a 5-year running mean to minimise the ENSO and an 11-year running mean to minimise the solar cycle.
Not quite sure what your point is here. No-one's arguing that global temperature changes hundreds of years ago had anything to do with human activity. It's only in recent decades that the 'signal' of anthropogenic global warming has clearly risen out of the 'noise' (as illustrated here).
I think you need to decide what exactly it is that you're disputing. You say you accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that we have increased atmospheric CO2 by 40%, but then you seem to balk at the conclusion that derives from those facts - that anthropogenic CO2 is causing a climate forcing which in turn is causing the planet to be warmer than it would otherwise be. You seem to want to do some handwaving at that point and say that actually the current global warming might not be due to human activity at all, but some other, unspecified, natural forcing. My point is that the anthropogenic forcing exists *regardless* of whatever natural forcings might also exist, so if the current global warming is what we expect from the anthropogenic forcing alone, then the net natural forcings must be roughly zero. How can you disagree with this? I suppose you could argue that we have grossly under- or over-estimated climate sensitivity of ~0.75°C/W/m², but in that event it's very difficult to explain what we know of palaeoclimate (e.g. the ~5°C of global warming from ~7W/m² of forcing at the end of the most recent glaciation). If you argue that climate sensitivity is low enough for the current anthropogenic forcing to have little effect, then you can't really explain the large swings in global temperature, from ice age to hothouse world to interglacial, from fractions of a percent changes in insolation over the course of Milankovitch cycles. A forcing is a forcing - the world doesn't distinguish between man-made and natural ones. Is it the forcing itself that you dispute? Perhaps you're arguing that that extra ~100ppm of atmospheric CO2 doesn't really cause as much of a forcing as we think... but in that case you can't explain why the Earth is ~30°C warmer than it would be if there was no greenhouse effect.
Let's clarify what it is you're disputing, and we'll discuss it.
[Snip - don't be rude]
Let's clarify what it is you're disputing, and we'll discuss it.
Icarus, you have been dismissed. You are arguing that the IPCC is right because the IPCC's data says so. I have demonstrated that above. Please take your voodoo science somewhere else. We are not interested in your "theories". We know better.
You are now at stage three of the Kübler-Ross syndrome, negotiation. Depression is next. Then you will feel better. Please come back when you do.
Icarus, perhaps it's my failure to communicate my point clearly. I thought I had, but you don't seem to be able to hear it. You say:
Not some other, unspecified natural forcing Icarus. Natural variability. I was really sure I made that clear. Strange..
Your logic doesn't work, Icarus.
I have a friend who swears that her house is haunted. Though I don't hear anything unusual - just the occasional creak in the night that seems perfectly in accordance with the house cooling as its materials are contracting, she asserts that the noises are made by a ghost. Her premise is that her house is haunted and accordingly she will inevitably attach whatever she can find as confirmation of her belief, no matter how irrational or unreasonable that belief is, and no matter how simple it is to dismiss rationally.
You remind me of her.
Yer Grace
I strongly object to Mike Borgelt's comment.
What is 'IPCC data'? The IPCC don't produce their own data. They review many hundreds of published papers from climate scientists around the world. If you want to argue with 'the data' then you have to be able to refute the actual papers that the science is based on. Can you do that?
Icarus
What is 'IPCC data'? The IPCC don't produce their own data. They review many hundreds of published papers from climate scientists around the world. If you want to argue with 'the data' then you have to be able to refute the actual papers that the science is based on. Can you do that?
I think you know exactly what was meant, Icarus, and it seems quite clear you know from whose work IPCC graphs are derived. The kind of posturing you are practising does your image and your position a disservice, Icarus.
We are not interested in the practice of arguing semantics. If the level of discussion you are interested in pursuing is similarly poised, this is very simply not the place for you to try to make your points.
Yer grace, you need a better regex processor for your comments! Embedded blockquotes don't work! :o(
Can source/author if needed.
Call me dense but I genuinely don't understand what you mean. The role of the IPCC is to bring together the research of hundreds of climate scientists in many different organisations around the world - the IPCC don't do the research or write the papers. It's not like there's one organisation who have huddled together and pulled a load of numbers out of a hat. Where are you suggesting that the 'IPCC graphs' come from?
Simon:
Yes, but I've explained why that can't be the case unless you can show that the anthropogenic enhanced greenhouse effect doesn't exist. If it does exist, then where is that 1.6W/m² of anthropogenic forcing going, if it's not what's causing the warming of the last few decades? You can say that it's counteracted by an equivalent negative forcing from clouds or some other natural phenomenon, but if you do that then you have to propose another *positive* natural forcing to counteract the *negative* forcing (such that net natural forcings are approximately zero) in order to explain the warming, which is just the same as saying that the anthropogenic enhanced greenhouse effect is causing the warming.
As I said, you have to decide what it is that you're disputing. Here again are some possible claims you could make:
CO2 is not a greenhouse gas.
CO2 hasn't increased by 40% since the pre-industrial due to human activity.
Climate sensitivity is so low that a 1.6W/m² forcing has no effect on global temperature.
Let us know which it is, and we can discuss your evidence for that claim.
Icarus,
Unscientific in the extreme, and you surely must know it. It is not for me to prove a negative. You have to prove that anthropogenic contributions are not absorbed by natural balancing effects in the climate's response to an increase of CO2 from 280ppm to 380ppm. To do this, I require that you address the causes of warming and cooling during the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age respectively. Obviously this would have to be an explanation that is extra to natural variability, since your justification for asserting the presence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas effect in the C20th is also wholly dependent on global average temperature changes being extra to natural variability.
But I made this point already, a few times now, and you ignored it. You're the one trying to make a case, now present it please.
On the contrary, Icarus. You are the one making a claim. With respect to AGW, the only assertion I make is that all the assertions you have made so far depend entirely on presumptuous caveat and wholly unqualified proviso.
And I have a duty to be frank, Icarus, I'm getting really bored waiting for you to qualify your assertions.
Icarus
I won't call you dense but admit that I'm surprised you don't know already that the IPCC assessment report authors are by and large the same people who are writing the scientific papers in the same field. Phil Jones, Susan Solomon, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa... and many more climate scientists.. all authors, co-authors, co-chairs etc of IPCC working groups. Climate science is an unusually close-knit field of study, suffering badly from nepotism.
Would that it were their HAT they'd pulled their numbers out of! ;o)
Clearly they're not, because the planet is warming exactly as expected from the anthropogenic forcing -
Current anthropogenic forcing is 1.6W/m².
At 0.75°C/W/m² we expect an eventual rise in global temperature of 1.2°C.
So far we have seen a rise in global temperature of 0.7°C.
If there was any 'balancing effect' then we wouldn't have seen that rise of 0.7°C.
QED?
You're mistaken - No-one's arguing that global temperature changes hundreds of years ago had anything to do with human activity, as I said before. We hadn't put billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere then, but we have now. You agreed with me that this must be causing an enhanced greenhouse effect. If this enhanced greenhouse effect was counteracted by a negative natural forcing then we wouldn't be seeing a rise in global average temperature of 0.7°C, but we are.
The science is very clear and it only remains for you to decide which part of it you're going to dispute, as I said before.
No it isn't. The planet is warming and cooling exactly in accordance with historic natural variability. It is not warming in any correlative way with anthropogenic forcing, and more to the point for the last one and a half decades - just as in the 40s and 50s - it's not even perceivably been warming at all. This fact itself shatters your assertion and establishes mine.
No I'm not.
What you're arguing is that climate variability has stopped occurring, and anthropogenic forcings have begun. What I'm saying is that you're being irrational, unscientific and silly. It's also completely unqualified, unjustified and unproven.
Umm.. didn't we pass that shopping precinct already?
No I didn't. I said it was impossible to determine. I said that we don't know enough about atmospheric responses to increases in atmospheric CO2 to be able to assert a quantitative anthropogenic effect on annual global temperatures. Add the clearly documented variability of climate behaviour through the C20th and we have absolutely nothing anthropogenic to go on at all.
We've definitely been through this set of lights before. Are you sure you have the map the right way up?
The science is settled, is it?
All of it, Icarus. You still have to give us something firm to start with. I gather that this isn't going to happen.
[ding] Thanks for playing, Icarus.
Then your argument is that the anthropogenic enhanced greenhouse effect doesn't exist, so you're denying laws of physics which have been established for over 100 years, and which can be proven in simple laboratory experiments, and you can't explain why the Earth is 30°C warmer than it ought to be. This is a very bold approach. Can you support it with argument and evidence?
The warming trend is currently around 0.2°C per decade, as I explained here.
On the contrary, the natural climate variability is very clear, as I explained here - the interannual variability from ENSO, the solar cycle etc. is superimposed on the anthropogenic warming trend.
Yes, we do. We went through all this a few posts ago - Climate sensitivity is around 0.75°C/W/m², which means that the current anthropogenic forcing should lead to a warming of 1.2°C. So far we've seen warming of 0.7°C, with 0.5°C in the pipeline. Are you disputing the value of 0.75°C/W/m² for climate sensitivity? If you want to do that, fine, but hand-waving is not good enough - you have to actually produce an argument or some evidence for whatever you think the climate sensitivity actually is... and that value has to be able to explain the palaeoclimate evidence, which you're going to find very difficult. So, what do you think climate sensitivity is? Please stop avoiding the issue, and hand-waving, and actually give us some figures.
Earlier you said that you don't deny the physics of greenhouse gases but now, when I ask you to actually state what it is you're disputing, you say "All of it". You need to try to decide what your argument is going to be and stick to it, and be prepared to support that argument. Let's have some simple answers to simple questions:
Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? Yes or no?
Have we increased CO2 by 40% since pre-industrial times? Yes or no?
What is the value for climate sensitivity, in °C/W/m²?
If you're going to have any credibility at all in this kind of discussion then at some point you need to stop the hand-waving and vague unsupported assertions, and actually give some answers, and be prepared to support them. Are you ready to do that?
Icarus
For crying out loud, Icarus, pay attention! I'm saying that YOU can't demonstrate that anthropogenic enhanced greenhouse effect is distinct in the temperature record, and that in order to assert that man is causing global warming, you need to be able to do that. And as I've said before, you need to be able to distinguish AGW quantitatively from natural variability IN the global historic temperature record.
Can you do that? And I don't mean hypothetically. I mean.. CAN you DO it? No, Icarus, you cannot!
This is why I find interacting with the faithful believers in global warming ultimately becomes as tiresome an irritating as with any Jehova's Witnesses. They all require you to participate in their leaps of faith and presumptions of understanding in order to feign substantiation of their hypotheses in scientific terms.
Yes, here.
I'd given up waiting, Icarus. And you've just repeated yourself, linking to a graphic which you MUST KNOW is faulty because YOU KNOW the climate modellers admit that they don't understand and therefore cannot graph climate feedbacks. The positive feedback that is graphed is imaginary, completely unfounded and directly in conflict with what we know of natural responses to atmospheric CO2 in earth's history.
But you believe, religiously, regardless. I respect your right to hold a religious belief, but I don't share it. And I reject your aggressive and socially regressive determination to inflict your religion on me.