Tuesday
Feb012011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill I am a number
Feb 1, 2011 Climate: Surface A propos of the post about the use of the word "denier", I was pondering the problems we have with referring to the different attitudes to global warming in the debate. Names like sceptic, warmist, denier are all bickered over endlessly.
Perhaps each of us should adopt a number, being the amount of warming we expect to see over the period 2000-2100. It would be more precise and less prone to use in a derogatory fashion.
It's an idea anyway.
What number are you?
Reader Comments (109)
BH
Not a bad idea ;-)
Stick me down as +1.5C
Interesting post - I gave -1.0C. But as a plea for internet neutrality can you please not use flash?
Flash is an abomination on this earth and disenfranchises a large portion of viewers. Not to mention it makes lots of money for someone else and in many cases will crash your browser.
What I want is a button called "Random..." that I can click to generate any value between, say, -2 and 2. That would better reflect my understanding of the current situation.
<= 0
"But as a plea for internet neutrality can you please not use flash?"
Feb 1, 2011 at 1:09 PM | Unregistered CommenterJerry
Or better still Jerry, persuade bloody Apple that they should allow it! ;-)
Bish, given your association higher powers, I suppose that by 2100 you will have a means of getting the result to me? Not sure if t’old t’interweb works where I will be by then?
. . . the amount of warming we expect to see over the period 2000-2100
I don't expect to see the period 2000-2100. I also think that, for well-known scientific reasons, the statistic is inherently unpredictable. You therefore need a different numbers category for the likes of us - call me N/A 001.
But your call to raise the level of the debate is very welcome - what any good bishop should be doing.
N/A 001
Love it. Note that even on this highly sceptical blog this is still a strong warming premise - at least at the moment, with 50% greater than zero and 20% less.
I at once chose 0.5. I almost quibbled to myself that it depends on carbon emissions, then thought it probably hardly affects it, given our inability to reduce emissions, what with China and all, plus the marginal effect they seem to have had 1850-2010, plus the logarithmic relationship Arrhenius discovered. So within twenty seconds I'd made my choice.
The current percentages give the lie to the stupid statement that sceptics deny that global warming is happening. We don't - and most of us expect it to continue. It's just that global warming of 0.5 in 100 years is a completely non-event. It's not remotely dangerous. Lindzen doesn't think 5 deg C would be dangerous, as he said in last night's film. In other words, we are danger deniers (if the d word has to be used). If more people got that, well who knows.
Great idea Bish. I hope the percentages stay in line with my argument!
Don't like it. I'm offended by my number, it has NEGATIVE connotations. lol
How the devil would I know how much the world will warm or cool over a hundred years? I'm a sceptic because (i) none of the mathematical models are worth tuppence, and (ii) no-one knows how much it has warmed over the past 100 years, since the "record" is of low accuarcy and, in part, fraudulent.
@Robinson: What I want is a button called "Random..."
Too true, I was thinking the same thing. The problem is that guessing at 2100 prediction is, as our Nobel laureates rightly insist, strictly the preserve of those who earn a living from it and, even then, only those offering predictions likely to enhance the financial prospects of themselves and their peers (see "review").
I am not a number. I am a free man.
I am not a number. I am a free man!
... but if I were a number, then I'd be +2
I'm going to ask the Met Office to help me predict some numbers with varying degrees of certainty....
I will therefore always be right.... even when i'm wrong!
Six (aka Paul Boyce) and Dreadnought:
Great numbers think alike!
Listen up you guys you really don't know the, erm, implications of catastrophic global warming. Don't believe me check this out.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?entry_id=82107
30yrs of cooling then maybe 30 warming, 30 cooling so maybe a bit cooler than 2000, but 0 would be my guess. Warmer would certainly be better than cooler.
CO2 will have only a very small effect.
Are these unadjusted or adjusted temparatures?
+1.5 would be my guess, unadjusted = a calamitous +4.5 adjusted
@ Green Sand
Probably no internet but it will be hot ;-)
Given that the GISP data shows us that the long term trend is for cooling (since 8000BC* at least) I go for -1C.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo2.png
(*BC = Before Climategate).
Enjoy the Holocene while it lasts!
Can't we make predictions using Met Office probability theory techniques?
+ 0.1 to +2 60%
-1 to + 1.5 60%
-0.5 to + 0.7 60%
I'm not a climate change denier, nor a sceptic (skeptic).
I'm a climate change heretic.
If you don't accept the entireity of the AGW carbon-reduction dogma - regardless of which particular scientifically-derived or politically-derived parts you don't accept - so are you.
Wear it as a badge of honour.
How the Hell should I know? Especially considering that our mighty MO doesn’t know to within 3 or 4 degrees what it will be in this tiny corner of the globe next week...
I'm a minus-oner ...
:-)
Perhaps we should ask David Viner... :-)
Is there a button for "some places may get hotter, some colder, some stay the same, some could get colder winters and hotter summers, some may get cooler then warmer, ..."
We are getting very close to the un-posed question: is there such a thing as the "global climate" ?
The debate is turning into lots of pointless side-debates - like "is Delingpole a bad person?"
The heart of the matter is this question: is climate science advanced enough to diagnose a 'global climate problem' and is it advanced enough to design the climate cure ?
Or are the climate scientists at an earlier stage of development - like chemistry was in the 17th century ?
0°C ± 1° (with a 87.7% confidence)
I'm not sure calling me a zero is going to help my self esteem.
lapogus: Enjoy the Holocene while it lasts!
Sweet =)
Like the Met Office I posted a range of numbers covering the entire spectrum so that later on I can come back and claim that I actually had an accurate prediction!
According to my supercomputer there is a:
3 in 10 chance of warming
3 in 10 chance of average temperatures
4 in 10 chance of cooling.
I don't like the question as I'm not sure whether you are asking for a prediction of reality, or a prediction of what HADCRUT will fake the temperature to be, depending on the prevailing political situation in 2100.
@ Anoneumouse
Good, I am OK with hot!
PS - You are obviously a good judge of character!
Another brilliant thread with brilliant title. And converging interestingly with my own thoughts. For as well as being the number 0.5, as I now know, I am a minor, sporadic blogger on the hated Posterous platform. And in the last week I've been gearing up to do another blog post, my first since November, entitled "numbers matter - some more than others".
The film last night, for all its faults, made centre stage the fact that climate sensitivity - a single number - is at the heart of the climate debate. Christopher Monckton is sufficiently on the ball to have educated Rupert Murray on this point. James Delingpole didn't achieve the same with Paul Nurse, which is hardly surprising, for two reasons: Dellers is not as good a scientist as Monckton and Nurse is a Nobel Prize winning scientist, thus far more likely to miss the point than a more humble arts graduate, as I take Murray to be. Worth thinking about the paradoxes here a good deal more.
But my thinking about the importance of numbers went back more than anything to the Holocaust. What is Holocaust denial but a matter of numbers? Numbers matter - and such a number as this matters immeasurably. I spent an unforgettable Holocaust Memorial Day last Thursday reminding myself why it matters and thinking about how to communicate such horrors, which we instinctively wish to turn away from. (I met Janina, a heroic survivor, one of the 'hidden children', from Krakov, now from Croydon. It was her last public speaking engagement. Almost all the others have died now.)
Note that the Bishop wasn't asking us the sensitivity question - because nobody can know whether greenhouse gases will increase in line with a doubling of CO2, or the lags that may attend any energy increase becoming visible in surface temperature, or about a whole host of other factors, from aerosols to land use changes to solar activity, that may affect the globally averaged temperature anomaly in 2100. Our host was asking us to finesse all that and plump for a single number. Quite right too. More numbers please. Especially the important ones.
I'm a number ONE :)
I'm always number one in everything I do ;).
What a crazy idea, bishop. You say it's not derogatory. Just wait until someone comes here with the opinion that the climate won't warm at all. Is such a person a "zero"?
JH
>the un-posed question: is there such a thing as the "global climate" ?
Un-posed it may be, but it is the $64,000 one. If there isn’t, then all bets are off until some better way of expressing (let alone quantifying) the problem is found.
If it is cooler, it will be a local and isolated event, confined to the UK and Western Europe. (h/t Met Office)
The 3:14 pm Local Event comment is poking fun at Julia Slingo of the Met Office, of course.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/12/its-local-event.html
My number? I don't have a clue and neither does anyone else. There are only two types of people in this debate. 1) Those who understand that we are presently too ignorant of too much to make any intelligent guesses about "global temperature" (whatever that is) a century from now, and 2) those whose hubris causes them to reject this understanding and pontificate in ways that expose their foolishness.
The only sure thing in this debate is that people 100 years from now are going to laugh hysterically at the ridiculous predictions and stupid rationales presented by fools who didn't turn out to have a clue. And that's regardless of how the weather turns out.
I'll go for 30% warmer, 30% cooler and a 30% chance it will stay the same. As for the remaining 10% I have only told that to Roger Harabin and I will wait to read it in the Radio Times as an exclusive.
Agnostic on this one.
Do we know enough to know what we don't know? That is to say do we know the unknown unknowns? And how could we know them? There appear to be too many dynamics that we don't yet understand. Please ask again in the year 3000.
@Kevin "Please ask again in the year 3000."
Yeah. By then, they should have made all the adjustments to the 2100 record.
I suspect that the temps will continue to cycle up and down just as they have in the past but I will hope we do not have a return to the little ice age temps. What concerns me is that I know what the temperature was yesterday, it was cold, but I do not know how much yesterday's temperature will be adjusted in ten or twenty or a hundred years.
Andrew, this number game is rigged.
We need official public raw records and penalties for vandalizing official public records.
“year 3000”
Which reminds me that in Futurama (which starts then), Fry asks what happened to Global Warming, and Leela replies that it was cancelled out by the Nuclear Winter...
It sounds horribly plausible.
1.2 C.
I voted for +1.5 C. This puts me into top 4%, making me a warmist! I am not too alarmed about it. :D
I don't have any issue with the Global Warming hypothesis. It may be true or it may be false. This best and the least adulterated records we have, the satellite records, do show that we have had Global Warming in in the last 30 years.
I don't have issues with Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis, either. Looking at the evidence, I am prepared to concede that there has been human influence on climate. Aerosols has been shown to have cooling effect. Greenhouse gases, most prominently CO2 emissions, is known to have warming effect, and even skeptical climate scientists concede this point. The other anthropogenic causes of warming, urbanisation, deforestation and farming practices, have been much neglected, IMHO, to the benefit of GHGs as the primary cause.
How about Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming? Well, it is at this point that I part ways with the CAGW cult and the so-called consensus view. Quite frankly, I have not seen a single piece of persuasive evidence that shows temperature rise of approx 1.5 C between 2010 and 2100 will have catastrophic consequences for humanity or human civilisation, either at global scale or regional. Biosphere may be stressed out, but life is resilient.
The best evidence we have for the 'looming climate catastrophe' are computer projections, the so-called Global Climate Models. From the perspective of this skeptic, at this stage, GCMs are as skillful in predicting the future effects of AGW as the lovingly crafted charts of a horoscope scientist, one that takes every natural event as confirmation of his/her astrological predictions.
What adds to my skepticism is the evident diversity of life on the planet's warmer regions compared to its cold regions. Which one of these zones is hospitable to life, which one is hostile? A) the tropics B) the poles. Now, I am not a scientist so I may not be qualified enough to answer my own question with expert authority, but I have seen sufficient credible evidence to suggest that tropical climate is better than polar climate. Not far all life perhaps, but for most life.
I am also quite impressed by how happy plant life seem to be with high CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. They thrive in it. And if plants are happy, then so are animal life, including homo sapiens. Our industrial scale food production has benefited from the increase in CO2 concentrations. Warmth and CO2 are two of the key ingredients for the recipe of life on Earth, along with light and water. So, as far as I can see, the evidence from nature that CO2 and warmer climate will be a boon for life, is far superior to the 'evidence' from GCMs that they will cause catastrophe.
Aside from skepticism, I also occasionally dabble in atheism. This means, like most other pious atheists, I have a sensitive nose for religious nonsense. This Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis-caused human movement stinks of religious fervor, including elements that make up a religion. It has the original sin, sacred texts, knowledgeable high priests, ignorant laymen, sinful ways, and ways of redemption. And, if they all fail to persuade, it also has the day of judgment, sometime around 2100, that will descend upon us as drought, flood, famine, pestilence, war and death. The CAGW movement is a doomsday cult, dammit!
So even though I think global temps will increase by 1.5 C by 2100, and I think humans will have contributed to it, I am neither a 'warmist' nor an 'alarmist'. But because I refuse to consider the CO2 rise and warmer temperatures will have catastrophic consequences, and hence oppose the policy measures that will allegedly prevent catastrophe, I am a denialist. Worse, I am a gun-toting, tobacco-chewing, TEA Party-voting, ant-science, oil-shill and flat Earther.
Frankly, I get offended with the term 'denialist'. It not only misrepresents my position, but the term also seeks to smear my genuinely held skeptical position by associating it with the denial of an unrelated historical event
My solution to that is not to get defensive about it such name-calling but to go on the offensive. It is rare that I call the activists of CAGW hypothesis as 'warmist' or 'alarmist'. They are worse. They are cultists. CAGW cultists has always been my preferred name-call to describe those irrational, hyperventilating zealots that think they speak for the mainstream.
Put me down for +0.5C, but do keep in mind that you have forced me to be more definite than I feel.
42
I don't believe in the concept of a global temperature, so I cannot give an answer. I think the energy content of the atmosphere will be lower by 1teraziggyjoule (+/- a few BTUs)
@sHx
As a skeptic I couldn't possibly be an atheist. An atheist believes there is no god. I have no rational basis for deciding the question either way. One might as well as if there is a sprotzl. Or a meffing. Or gloon. The question is meaningless if I don't know what the word means, which I don't, and can't.
2.5 Deg C (A1B scenario and climate sensitivity between 2.5 and 3 - cos I'm an optimist)
http://www.climatechange.govt.nz/emissions-trading-scheme/building/groups/climate-change-leadership-forum/images/planning-for-sea-level-rise-2008-06.gif