Bishop Hill Buckle up
Oct 14, 2013 Climate: Models Climate: Surface Climate: sensitivity 
During the Energy and Climate Change Committee hearing last week, Peter Lilley asked the men from the Climate Change Committee what evidence would cause them to change their minds about global warming, a question that was fairly studiously avoided. Interestingly, Simon Buckle of the Grantham Institute has written to the FT (not online) to suggest what the reply should have been:
As a physicist, I would modify my view that we are conducting a dangerous experiment with the Earth’s climate if one or both of the following hypotheses were strongly supported by evidence.
First, the identification of a major new process in the climate system that significantly and robustly, over time, moderated the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. At one point, cloud responses to climate change were thought to be a contender for such a “negative feedback” mechanism. Sadly, observations do not support this.
Second, if the timescale of change was much longer than we currently think. We could then perhaps take a century or two to make a transition to a low-carbon economy, instead of perhaps half a century. However, the unprecedented pace of change does not suggest we live in such a world.
While Buckle presents two different scenarios, it seems to me that in fact the two are identical. The only thing that could make the timescale of change much longer is a moderating mechanism of some kind, one that hadn't previously been included in the models. But Buckle is completely wrong to suggest that this mechanism needs to be identified. The models, and the hypothesis of rapid warming, can be falsified quite happily without knowing what factor is responsible. This is the scientific method after all.
Once that uncomfortable fact is taken on board it becomes clear that Buckle should already be questioning his position on global warming. But, not unexpectedly, he concludes that "Extremely well-established physics principles suggest that surface warming will resume and then proceed at a rapid rate". In other words "But the greenhouse effect".
Put in those terms, it becomes clear just how thin his argument is.
Reader Comments (121)
Snotty, if I had intended to use a swimming pool as my analogy I would have put the words "swimming pool" in the text.
Dave Salt, I am aware that my analogy was not planet sized, but it demonstrated very well that the Bishop's initial statement was incorrect. Doubtless you and you fellow readers have trouble accepting that "Bishopal Infallibility" is as unlikely as the Papal kind, but I am sure the Bishop himself would never be so bold as to claim such for himself.
- Good on him for entering the debate. Most of the DramaGreens don't cos they know their poor logic will soon be exposed.
- However he got only 3 words in before making a logical error : "As a physicist" ..It doesn't negate an argument, but it is the "fallacy of appeal to authority".
- Mate, It doesn't matter if you are a monkey if your argument is sound.It doesn't have any more weight just cos you say you are a physicist.
DNFTT
Chandra has been around before, in the Discussion threads. DNFTT.
Chandra: "Snotty, if I had intended to use a swimming pool as my analogy I would have put the words "swimming pool" in the text."</I>
In your initial essay into water-heating analogies, you actually said: "...my kettle always boils, however much water I put into it. You didn't actually specify the size or capability of your kettle. It's still a pathetic analogy. I'd stop digging if I were you.
Snotty, I've come across fake sceptics arguing for their preferred, private, meaning of words before, but you take the biscuit. Just to indulge you, if you did empty the content of a swimming pool into my kettle, most if it would spill. At the end, what you had successfully put into the kettle would boil - assuming the spillage didn't damage the electrics (which could be seen as a "moderating mechanism").
JamesG,
Please give the Amish some credit for their attitude to technology - it's far in advance of the green doomster lobby.
DNLATT (laugh at!)
Chandra,
I like your kettle analogy, it nicely demonstrates the effect of negative feedbacks.
When you double the amount of water in the kettle more water is in contact with the sides of the kettle so its loses more heat, through conduction, to the sides of the kettle and the sides then radiate it outwards. The end result it that a doubling of H₂O in the kettle will result in the boiling time more than doubling because of the negative feedback.
Someone (anyone) from the Grantham Institute believes in CAGW ???
Is the Pope a Catholic ??
"First, the identification of a major new process in the climate system....." The climate is chaotic, ie deterministic but unpredictable. Knowing all the individual processes doesen't mean you know what the results of their interaction will be.
"Second, if the timescale of change was much longer than we currently think....." See the above, we can't think what it will be because we can't predict because of chaos.
Paul Dennis,
"I'm constantly amazed, though shouldn't be, that many scientists including those in the 'hard' physical sciences are so strongly wedded to a paradigm that even when the data suggests that climate sensitivity is at the low end of current estimates they find reasons and excuses not to believe the data."
This type of thinking is all the rage at the moment. It's only a matter of time before Dark Warming is identified as the culprit. The warming is there, our theory says so. We can't detect it because it's the kind of warming that can't be picked up by thermometers. But it's there.
Here we once again have pre-Copernican climate science on full display - CAGW and the 'low-carbon economy' are still canonical at the Church of Grantham, and so while you may have the book-carriers and water-shakers of that institution claiming to be scientists, and they may nibble at useful stuff around the edges, their only defense of their core beliefs are in terms of scriptural reference.
Video podcast from Buckle on AR5. Usual stuff.
http://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/imedia/content/view/3905/dr-simon-buckle-on-the-fifth-ipcc-report-
I don't know about anyone else but I don't live in a kettle.
Oct 14, 2013 at 4:35 PM | Unregistered CommenterTinyCO2
Back in yer teapot.
"Back in yer teapot." Martin A
LOL. I'm in a lid rattling mood.
Is there not a Nobel Prize up for grabs for the first person to produce a paper showing the derivation of global warming from first principles?
It has not been done yet, to my knowledge, but with all the certainty professed in many quarters it must be easy enough to draw all the strands together.
I would have a go myself if I had more time and zero integrity.
Oh Bishop, pray tell your disciples that you erred. Tell them that forsooth thou knowest the difference between a moderating mechanism and inertia. And, I pray, tell the poor unfortunates, with kindest emphasis on poor deluded TerryS, that radiation from the kettle in the scriptures of thy blessed blog hath absolutely effing nothing to do with negative feedback!
Really you guys should be ashamed of yourselves. Call yourselves climate change skeptics? You don't know feedback from frostbite. You're a disgrace!
I know I shouldn't, but I almost enjoy the epithet "fake sceptics". It implies the user has at least accepted that there are real ones. That's progress, of a sort.
Sorry Bish, I got cross, please feel free to delete that intemperate comment.
What I want to know is how many years will tip the scale for people like Buckle? You could say that warming didn’t finish till the start of 2001 but then you can’t say the post 50s warming started until 1976. 25 years, not enough to be classed as climate? 25.5 years no warming. 25.5 years warming. 12 going on 13 years no warming. Each year without warming makes the warming phase less ‘unprecedented’. Will another 10 years be enough?
James Evans
I reckon he's half that age, certainly in worldly experience.
Stuck-Record wrote: "These positive feedbacks only exist, at present, in a raft of very expensive computer models. No 'proof' one way or the other yet in reality."
Surely there *is* proof that they don't exist in the fact that small temperature increases in the past (of the same magnitude as is supposedly caused by CO2 alone) have not resulted in further temperature increases, which would have caused even larger increases, and so on, in a (positive) feedback loop. The GISP2 ice core temperature reconstruction shows small temperature increases of this magnitude...followed by decreases, rather than further increases caused by positive feedbacks.
Will another 10 years be enough?
Oct 14, 2013 at 7:21 PM | Unregistered CommenterTinyCO2
The current goalpost is 30 years (well maybe as you can never get a straight answer) so 30-13=17 more years before they question the theory but the goalposts have moved before and will no doubt be moved again. Think we are just going to have to wait until the priests (sorry climate scientists) are dead and there is another activist led scientific theory to take its place.
Strange thing is if we do have another cold spell which links to the current low sun activity the sun worshippers in the bronze age knew more about the climate than todays IPCC. Hows that for irony ;)
The AGW true beleivers seem immune to the long list of failed predictions:
Temperatures....now it is hidden heat in the ocean
SLR.....they ignore that one.
Storm frequency/intensity.....the believers only shout more loudly
The lack of positive feedbacks.....they are suddenly hard of hearing
Paleo records shwing much more rapid warmings in the past with no climate catastrophes.....huh?
The failure of their own models......rewrite the record
And on and on and on.
Remember: in the early days of the church, the fahters of the Church who hammered it all out at Nicea were the best and brightest available.
These days of AGW's transition to state religion are supervised by the best and brightest of the age.
JerryM +1
It is a constant source of disappointment to me that many with some narrow expertise (or status - probably either) think that success in one area qualifies them to pontificate on everything without evidencing their assertions.
Mr Buckle is working - i.e. being paid by an advocacy outfit to lend the letters after his name to the aims of that enterprise - he's paid for - there should be no surprise that he witters the tune put in front of him and apparently has niether the appetite nor the exprtise himself to defend his assertions in the customary scientific manner.
A shill. a stooge
and as for our pal with the south asian nom de guerre बकवास बंद indeed
hunter,
'best and brightest of the age' ?
Good grief, they struggle to be the best in *Norwich*...
@ stuck-record
As a lifelong fan of Feynman I've always worked under the assumption that it is not necessary to have a counter-theory in order to falsify a theory.
If I am told that the reason the sun shines is because of magic fairies, it is possible to falsify that theory by showing that fairies don't exist.
It's not necessary to come up with the mechanism of thermonuclear fusion first.
This is correct, yes?
That is correct. If someone proposes something and it doesn't match observation, it's wrong. Period.
However, I have found that if someone proposes something and it does match observation, but they can't explain why, and they can't propose a mechanism for it which can be tested, then that proposal is also likely to be wrong. That makes me suspicious of the smoking/cancer link - because it's been around for a long time, the link seems to exist and people have been looking hard, but they still can't come up with an indisputable mechanism....
So not just any old physicist, but Policy Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change (shouldn't that be against Climate Change?) formerly at the Bank of England and Ministry of Defence and a former diplomat (CMG).
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/AP/faces/pages/read/Home.jsp?person=simon.buckle
Not to be confused with the Policy and Communications Director at the other Grantham Institute.
Chandra (Oct 14, 2013 at 4:53 PM), the Bishop's original statement was "The only thing that could make the timescale of change much longer is a moderating mechanism of some kind, one that hadn't previously been included in the models."
Changing a model's response timescales logically implies changing something in the model, which therefore implies either adding a new mechanism or changing significantly something(s) that were already there in a way that effectively creates another moderating mechanism. The oceans absorbing atmospheric heat would be an example of the former, while increased daytime cloud cover would represent the latter.
Given this understanding, I see no problem with the Bishop's statement and regard your contributions to this thread as either your misunderstanding or your deliberate nit-picking in order to derail the discussion. Either way, I see no point in continuing this particular line discussion.
Dave Salt, you have it as wrong as the Bishop. Moderating means making less severe. Changing the response time does not achieve this. The two are distinct. Either the Bishop misread, misunderstood or misrepresented Buckle's words. I'm feeling charitable so I'll go with misreading. You've had all day to reconsider it and have not altered your view, so I'll assume misunderstanding on your part. Since, remarkably, nobody here appears to recognize feedback when then see it (or don't), that is no surprise.
So would the field of climate science look any smarter if the Bishop had instead said:
"The only thing that could make the timescale of change much longer is inertia, something that hadn't previously been included in the models."
A bunch of highly trained scientists with sophisticated models missing the concept of inertia.
Really?
Stop feeding the troll. He has nothing to contribute.
BH said
The only thing that could make the timescale of change much longer is a moderating mechanism.
Chandra said
Moderating means making less severe.
Dictionary
Lessening in intensity or strength
So
The only thing that could make the timescale of change much longer is a Lessening in intensity or strength (of a) mechanism
Can someone over the age of 16 please explain what Chandra is arguing about, as he seems to be arguing black is black?
Chandra, if I put twice the amount of water in my kettle it will take (at least) twice the time to boil. We're agreed on that.
But you maintain that putting twice the amount of water in isn't a 'mechanism'. I say it is a way of making the kettle boil slower. In that sense it is a 'mechanism' - and that is a reasonable way of understanding what the Bishop wrote. You are entitled to say that you understand 'mechanism' in a different sense (for example, as something with cogs in it) but not to insist others do the same.
Personally, I welcome the contribution of non-sceptics to this blog. When they make (what seem to me) good points, my agnosticism is shaken, at least temporarily. When they are politely refuted, my previous position is strengthened. Abuse (by anyone) simply suggests the writer has nothing more useful to say .
Chandra (Oct 14, 2013 at 9:00 PM), if I moderate a pendulum's length by making it longer (i.e. less short) it's period slows down. Similarly, if I moderate the damping rate on a car's suspension, via the shock absorber, I can change its behaviour from critical damping to overdamping, whereby the system will take longer to return to equilibrium.
This is all basic physics, though I'm sure you can torture the meaning of the words to make them appear to say something different... bu then, why would you want to do that?
It is fair that Buckle is asking for solid evidence to... err, debunk his beliefs on something for which there is no solid evidence.
steveta_uk wrote:
Chandra, you are quite right - the Bishop completely neglected that the effect that doubling the mass of the atmosphere would have, as you suggest in your posting.
I'm not sure how you'd go about doubling the mass, but never mind.
You do Chandra an injustice. If I read his comment correctly, he did not suggest doubling the mass of the atmosphere. He proposed doubling the mass of the oceans!
I am going into my back garden first thing tomorrow morning and will start building an ark!
" Understand, however, that the basic physics of CO2 says a
doubling only results in ~1C warming,"
as has been asked many times before by several people where is the basic Physics explanation written down for this?? I'm happy with a nice simple Earth model that only needs to have a day/night cycle and convection included.
Good to see Paul Dennis commenting again here, including on paradigm changes in acceptance of geological processes. Continental Drift was a big one, but there have been and continue to be others, completely out of the blaze of publicity. In my youth I worked as a lab technician at Imperial College on sediment samples from the Persian Gulf - which was at that time a recent sediment research area for a number of postgrads under the supervision of Doug Shearman and Graham Evans. Names such as Butler, Kendall, Kinsman et al probably mean nothing to anyone now, but back in the 60's their papers based on detailed fieldwork, in a small way, transformed thinking on the sedimentary processes involved in the formation of evaporites, and the importance of the supratidal sabkha environment in evaporite deposition.
It is a great shame that in climate research, so public, has no chance to wash its dirty linen in private and move on like the rest of science, because of course it is so compromised by political agenda.
It's funny, what I read here. Strikes me as having remarkabke similarity to tbe position the 'slayers' at PSI hold, that there is no clinate sensitivity to CO2 (the null hypothesis that should test if CO2 does in fact cause any warming, which the hiatus suggests is the case), and that water vapour causes cooling.
Perhaps Mr Buckle should put his true physicist hat on (i.e. take his warmist/preconceptions hats off) and honestly and without any bias, i.e. objectively test these zero-sensitivity and water-vapour-cools hypotheses. He might be sprised and have to change his mind. But of course, he won't.
Oct 14, 2013 at 4:00 PM | JamesG
The day I see all the greens driving around in horse-drawn, hickory-wheeled buggies will be the day I start believing in global warming.
Brilliant work, Bish. Warmists have always assumed that all causes are known. This guy just politely explained that the last such cause, clouds, is now known to be ineffective. In so doing, he simply reiterates that all causes are known. That position implies that there is no natural variability that can be known independently of Warmist theory and that all Null Hypotheses have been falsified. Such a position reeks of metaphysics and is anathema to science. Science is fallible and genuine scientists are committed to the principle of fallibility. The Warmist position, as stated, does not admit of fallibility.
Simon Buckle has given you two opportunities to convert him.
1) "the identification of a major new process in the climate system that significantly and robustly, over time, moderated the effects of greenhouse gas emissions."
Sceptics talk a lot about unknown effects or natural variability. Here's your chance to demonstrate your good science.. Dont forget proper evidence.
2) "the timescale of change was much longer than we currently think. We could then perhaps take a century or two to make a transition to a low-carbon economy, instead of perhaps half a century."
Again, the spin sceptics produce a lot of hot air about" no warming since 1998". As Roy Spencer points out, you are creating a hostage to fortune for yourselves. When warming resumes, what will you say?
Consider that, before the Tea Party shut down their website., NOAA were giving January to August global land and ocean figures for 2013 of +0.58C and +0.57C. If this sustained to the end of the year it would put 2013 in the GISS record as the second warmest year behind 2010 (0.58C) and ahead of 2005 (0.57C). 1998 (0.52C) would be pushed back to fourth.
Annual figures for the last 30 years are at the end of this page.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/surface-temperature
Incidentally, here's another paper for the spin sceptics to "debunk"
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12580.html
"At one point, cloud responses to climate change were thought to be a contender for such a “negative feedback” mechanism. Sadly, observations do not support this."
I think this man needs a long sit down with Dr. Spencer!!
kuhnkat.
Low cloud has a negative forcing effect. High cloud has a positive forcing effect. Both have increased slightly, giving neutral overall forcing.
You'll find a summary of the current understanding of cloud effects in Chapter 7 of AR5.
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5_WGI-12Doc2b_FinalDraft_Chapter07.pdf
Pharos,
You say that most people will not remember names but I do. Doug Shearman and Graham Evans taught me sedimentology and I later became a colleague of Kendall. I remember Doug's lectures were models of clarity with elegant diagrams detailing the growth of evaporite minerals in sabkha environments.
Thanks for bringing back memories of those days at the RSM in the 70's
lapogus Oct 14 3:18 PM "I understand and agree that clouds do have a positive warming effect at night"
lapogus, I think you are confused. Everything cools at night. Clouds do no more than moderate the rate of cooling. A blanket (wool or cloud) can't keep a corpse warm at night and definitely doesn't provide any "positive warming effect".
Regards, simon
Oct 14, 2013 at 3:45 PM | steveta_uk
...
Expand the atmosphere ?
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/greenhouse-gases-and-the-ideal-gas-law/
Entropic man
Here we go again.
"the identification of a major new process in the climate system that significantly and robustly, over time, moderated the effects of greenhouse gas emissions"
Before even doing that you need to have tested said effects of greenhouse gas emissions. Not relied on theory of emission and assumed perfect absorption at the surface. You need to have characterised the effect, a word that often bypasses theoreticians. The kettle is a good example. It's power rating includes losses. If it had been built by climate scientists then the water would not boil, seeing as they wouldnt appear to consider that the energy input by the element may dissipate through conduction losses to the walls.
Moller's models are what modern climate science is built on. They don't correct for thermal losses including surface conduction, scattering and free evaporation. These effects will be in a real system so you should use real system characterisation data.