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Manmade Climate Change: The Deeper Agenda

Cochise said:
How many people in the current government have relatives profiting from wind farms and the like?

It does tremendous harm to the credibility of any argument to maintain all one side are saints and all the other side are sinners - it makes it look religious.
An interesting question. I have no idea.

Firstly, it is unwise to confuse the politics, business and technology resulting from the interpretation of the results of the science of climate change with the science of climate change itself.

Secondly, Cashing in on possible solutions to a problem is not the same as hiding the problem to maintain profits. Investing in nicotine patches and vapouriser nicotine inhalers is not the same as lying about the effects of tobacco smoke in order to keep people smoking tobacco. Insisting on the validity of the science underpinning the anti-tobacco argument does not make one a religious maniac, either.

Cochise said:
...

As an aside, my scepticism on this matter was started when I was in Russia - Russia would benefit considerably from global warming since huge areas would become more inhabitable, and the extraction of natural resources from those areas would be a whole lot easier. But the Russian climate people believe it is going to get colder, not warmer, at least for the next 50 years.

Huge areas of Russia are frozen permafrost. Basically, swampland and quaking bog, frozen since at least the last Ice Age.

The permafrost of the Siberian tundra has started thawing already. Not only are roads and buildings collapsing, also gas and oil pipelines. The thaw is also releasing X amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a far more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2. The scientific debate as to what the release of trapped methane in the Arctic will mean for AGW, is still continuing. That's not even taking into account the methane trapped under the thinning ice sheet of the Arctic Ocean, itself.

If you don't believe that the Arctic, including the Russian bit, is getting warmer and that the ice is melting, then the growing arguments as to who owns what up there with the whole race between oil companies to start building rigs must be very bewildering.

The Thawing Arctic: Risks and Opportunities (Council for Foreign Relations. December 16, 2013)
 
Of the 2258 peer reviewed articles published last year, 1 rejected global warming.
(includes links to the data)

http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/01/0...y-1-9136-study-authors-rejects-global-warming

I have brought my previous study (see here and here) up-to-date by reviewing peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals over the period from Nov. 12, 2012 through December 31, 2013. I found 2,258 articles, written by a total of 9,136 authors. (Download the chart above here.) Only one article, by a single author in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, rejected man-made global warming. I discuss that article here.

My previous study, of the peer-reviewed literature from 1991 through Nov. 12, 2012, found 13,950 articles on “global warming” or “global climate change.” Of those, I judged that only 24 explicitly rejected the theory of man-made global warming. The methodology and details for the original and the new study are described here.

Anyone can repeat as much of the new study as they wish--all of it if they like. Download an Excel database of the 2,258 articles here. It includes the title, document number, and Web of Science accession number. Scan the titles to identify articles that might reject man-made global warming. Then use the DOI or WoS accession number to find and read the abstracts of those articles, and where necessary, the entire article. If you find any candidates that I missed, please email me here.
 
No-one - that I know of - is rejecting the idea that global warming or cooling is possible.

I certainly would not, since all the evidence available shows that the temperature of the planet has varied substantially over time, in both geological and historical time spans. Indeed, the evidence points to the conclusion that we are currently at an intermediate plateau (and have been for about 5000 years) between the normal warmer state and the alternative and periodic much cooler state.

Within that plateau there have been minor variations such as the medieval warm period and the several small cooling events that occurred in the Dark Ages and between about 1550 and 1850.

The questions for debate are

a) Is the next move up or down

b) what if any is the contribution of human activity to that move

c) of the various human activities, are CO2 emissions a principal driver of change?

Those questions could be subdivided - for example does animal grazing contribute? - but lets keep it relatively simple.

Most papers I have seen start with the assumption that human produced CO2 is to blame and attempt to prove that assumption by means of statistics and computer models - in which case the correct people to do the peer reviews are not other scientists but statisticians and computer software engineers.

I'm a systems software engineer concerned primarily with efficiency of data retrieval, an area in which statistical analysis of data plays a large part.

I am constantly alarmed by the misuse of statistical analysis in scientific and medical journals - not just those connected with AGW - and a computer model is useless unless you can identify (not necessarily quantify, that's what the model attempts to do) _all_ the relevant inputs.

I actually don't regard most of the mistaken use of statistics and models as deliberate conspiracy - it is more commonly down to people using tools whose limitations they don't fully understand, being from a different discipline. Such misuse then reinforces their own and their peers belief in the theory until you have a sort of mass delusion which is then forced to make the figures match what they believe or simply gloss over 'inconvenient facts'.

The EA memos made it clear that exactly this process was occurring. Self delusion is neither fraud nor necessarily evil, but it is not science either.

I have seen first-hand the exact same process occur in other fields, not least in large computer system development. I had better not name examples, but I am talking about failed UK government projects. And as a consequence I know that, even if you demonstrate physically to the committed that the system does not match their assumptions in front of their faces, they cannot change those assumptions. My company was thrown out of one such project - which eventually failed for exactly the reasons we had prophesied - after one such demonstration.

Of course, they may just have thought we were arrogant clever dicks who could be safely ignored.
 
Round and round the garden
Like a teddy bear
One step, two step...


Round and round we go. :lol:
 
Ring a Ring a Rosies might be more appropriate in this case. Eventually we all fall down, dead.
 
Cochise said:
...

Most papers I have seen start with the assumption that human produced CO2 is to blame and attempt to prove that assumption by means of statistics and computer models - in which case the correct people to do the peer reviews are not other scientists but statisticians and computer software engineers.

I'm a systems software engineer concerned primarily with efficiency of data retrieval, an area in which statistical analysis of data plays a large part.

...

disdain for science as such is displayed with greatest impunity by the technicians themselves.

José Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses (1929)
 
Cochise raises some relevant points. I mean - has an expert (or experts) in statistical modelling examined the climate scientists' methods in great detail? To ensure that they are not flawed?
 
Mythopoeika said:
Cochise raises some relevant points. ...
Only, if you overlook the apparent complete inability to grasp or accept the basic chemistry physics, or math. Something understood since the middle of the 19th century and which has been covered on these threads many, many, times. :)
 
Nevertheless, a quality check never goes amiss. Scientific rigour, etc.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Nevertheless, a quality check never goes amiss. Scientific rigour, etc.
Or CC Denier nit-picking! :twisted:
 
rynner2 said:
Mythopoeika said:
Nevertheless, a quality check never goes amiss. Scientific rigour, etc.
Or CC Denier nit-picking! :twisted:

Or the inability to join a religion. ;)
 
Mythopoeika said:
Or the inability to join a religion. ;)
Eh! Wot! You lost me there. :?

But when I was at Uni in the 60's studying physics and maths, statistics were included in the courses. For example, in physics practicals we had to conduct experiments, recording our readings of various parameters, and then combine the average readings in such a way as to produce a final figure for some parameter that couldn't be measured directly.

But this final figure had to have error limits specified, which were calculated according to statistical rules. So we couldn't say the result of our experiment was just 9.811 (whatever units), but had to specify the accuracy, eg, 9.811 +- 0.015 units (or some such, which referred to the spread of the possible results). Now, most of the details escape me - I'd need a refresher course just to get back to what I once knew!

Anyhow, this is what undergraduates learned in the 60s. Those with doctorates and professorships obviously knew a lot more. So to suggest that modern scientists, in whatever field, don't have a good grasp of statistics is probably libellous!

Plus, there are many computer programs now that simplify all the statistical calculations (it was pen, paper, and log tables in my day!), and scientists are not so compartmentalised that thay can't turn to colleagues with more specialised knowledge when necessary.
 
Regardless of whether climate change is real or man made, whatever we do to mitigate the situation in this country is meaningless if countries like China and India keep churning out poison into the atmosphere, it's a lost cause.
 
Climate change is inevitable anyway, anthropologically generated or no. Far better to prepare for it than keep pretending we can stop it. I'd use Canute as an example, but most people didn't listen to him either.
 
Cochise said:
Climate change is inevitable anyway, anthropologically generated or no. Far better to prepare for it than keep pretending we can stop it. I'd use Canute as an example, but most people didn't listen to him either.
All those years of denial lead tothis.

I'm bookmarking this one.
 
i,m sure some pockets of mankind will survive to wreck the newly made climate in 100,000 years time....
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
Cochise said:
Climate change is inevitable anyway, anthropologically generated or no. Far better to prepare for it than keep pretending we can stop it. I'd use Canute as an example, but most people didn't listen to him either.
All those years of denial lead tothis.

I'm bookmarking this one.

Not quite sure what you mean by that. Do you think the climate won't change if we reduce our release of CO2? So why did it change - and keep on changing - before humans even existed?

Canute was trying to illustrate nature (or whatever you believe in that is behind nature, if anything) in actuality controls us, not the other way round.

He was right.
 
Cochise said:
Pietro_Mercurios said:
Cochise said:
Climate change is inevitable anyway, anthropologically generated or no. Far better to prepare for it than keep pretending we can stop it. I'd use Canute as an example, but most people didn't listen to him either.
All those years of denial lead tothis.

I'm bookmarking this one.

Not quite sure what you mean by that. Do you think the climate won't change if we reduce our release of CO2? So why did it change - and keep on changing - before humans even existed?

Canute was trying to illustrate nature (or whatever you believe in that is behind nature, if anything) in actuality controls us, not the other way round.

He was right.
He was demonstrating the power of a force of Nature when faced with man's stupidity, so yes he was. Probably not the way you mean though.

However, I'm more interested in your sudden volte face after years of insisting that the World was either cooling or at least no longer warming. Also that released fossil CO2 wasn't a significant greenhouse gas.
 
Isis has posted an interesting point, too.

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1386895&highlight=#1386895

Not much that I can find at the Herald Sun site:
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/brekkie-wrap/story-fni0xs61-1226805093034

However, despite much mentioning of the Maunder Mimimum's cooling effects and of mini-ice ages, things are not so simple.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/201...tivity-“has-consequences”-for-global-warming/

Newsnight and the Daily Mail ponder the effect of low solar activity on the climate

The Carbon Brief - blog. Roz Pidcock. 17 Jan 2014


Update - 20th January: The Daily Mail has written up the story this weekend, covering some very similar ground. The main thing to remember is that scientists think the effect of lower solar activitity will be regional rather than global.

Colder winters in Europe aren't inconsistent with a world that's warming up on the whole. See this guest blog post from Professor Mike Lockwood for a clear explanation of what scientists think is going on.

Last night, BBC's Newsnight delved into a question that seems to fascinate the media. A six-minute report entitled "What's happening to our sun?" asked how much a drop in solar activity could affect the climate here on earth. The answer from scientists is very little.

We've written about the sun's effect on climate many times. We recently had a guest blog by Professor Mike Lockwood - solar scientist at the University of Reading - about the many myths, misconceptions and misnomers about the topic.

It's well worth a read. But here's a summary of the main points.

A declining sun

Back in the 17th century, the sun went through a period of prolonged low activity, called the Maunder Minimum. This coincided with the beginning of what's become known as the Little Ice Age, when parts of the northern hemisphere cooled by as much as two degrees Celsius. (Incidentally, read Mike Lockwood's blog for an explanation of why it wasn't a 'Little Ice Age" at all.)

Scientists think the next low point in solar activity could be low enough to rival the Maunder Minimum, which often leads to the question of whether we could see a return to freezing conditions. In the Newsnight report, presenter Rebecca Morelle asks:

"Does a decline in solar activity mean plunging temperatures for decades to come?"

Consequences for Europe, but a small effect globally

But the link between declining solar activity and freezing temperatures is far from simple.

Morelle talks to Lockwood, who explains that a pronounced low in solar activity could cause a drop in temperature across Europe. It does this by affecting the position of the jet stream, a rapidly moving ribbon of air high up in the atmosphere that controls weather patterns in the northern hemisphere.

But Lockwood points out temperature changes in the northern hemisphere are only a small piece of the global picture, warning:

"One has to make a very clear distinction between regional climate and global climate. If we get a cold winter in Europe because of these blocking events, its warmer in Greenland for example. So the average is almost no change. It's a redistribution of temperature around the North Atlantic."

But despite Lockwood's point that global temperature is unlikely to be affected much, Morelle follows up by asking:

"The relationship between solar activity and weather on earth is complicated, but if solar activity continues to fall, could the temperature on earth as a whole get cooler? Could there be implications for global warming?"

To be fair, the report goes on to answer this question - arriving at the conclusion that the earth is likely to continue to warm. But raising the notion that earth could "as a whole get colder" is a little too reminiscent of media declarations from time to time that "Britain faces a new mini-Ice Age".

Global warming outcompetes solar effect

In the BBC report, Lucy Green from the Mullard Space science Laboratory in the South Downs explains why the context is very different now than in the 17th century. She says:

"The word we live in today is very different from the world that was inhabited during the Maunder Minimum. We've had human activity, we've had the industrial revolution, all kinds of gases being pumped into the atmosphere. So on the one hand you've got perhaps a cooling sun, but on the other you have human activity that can counter that".

But while Green says it's "quite difficult" to know how the competing effects of a cooling sun and global warming will interact, other scientists are much clearer on this question. Lockwood, for example, says:

"[My research with the Met Office's Hadley Centre shows] the likely reduction in warming by 2100 would be between 0.06 and 0.1 degrees Celsius, a very small fraction of the warming we're due to experience as a result of human activity".

In other words, the slight drop in global temperature coming from a drop in solar activity may be just about detectable if we weren't having a much bigger impact through carbon dioxide emissions. While the BBC could perhaps have been clearer on that point, Morelle concludes:

"So even if the planet as a whole continues to warm, the future for northern Europe could be cold and frozen winters for decades to come."

So the report strikes the right note at the end, highlighting that colder winters in Europe aren't inconsistent with a world that's warming up on the whole. Let's hope everyone stayed tuned in till the end.
Full links at site

So, cheer up, with the sun cooling and off setting a little of the greenhouse effect warming, things could always be a lot worse.
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
He was demonstrating the power of a force of Nature when faced with man's stupidity, so yes he was. Probably not the way you mean though.

However, I'm more interested in your sudden volte face after years of insisting that the World was either cooling or at least no longer warming. Also that released fossil CO2 wasn't a significant greenhouse gas.

I don't know what the world is doing temperature-wise right at the moment. Or over the next 100 years. But it is reasonable to assume the current plateau cannot continue indefinitely. I forget which author drew my attention to it - Toynbee maybe, it was definitely a historian - that the whole history of civilisation has taken place in this unusual lull between the Earth's two normal - or at least long term - states (Warm and ice age).

I don't think human released CO2 as a result of the Industrial Revolution is a significant contribution. If humans have had any effect on the climate I believe it is caused by sustained deforestation which has gone on far longer.

But you clearly do, so I was pointing out that even in the unlikely event of there being a reduction there will still be the likelihood of significant climate change. I don't know when or what direction - we won't know until it happens because we simply do not know all the influences.
 
Cochise said:
I don't know what the world is doing temperature-wise right at the moment.
I linked the raw data from 16 different sources previously, is your analysis still running?
 
SHAYBARSABE said:
Cochise said:
I don't know what the world is doing temperature-wise right at the moment.
Going up, here's a link to NASA data http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
Quite so. It involves an ENORMOUS amount of data.

Anyone who thinks that a few hours perusing the 'raw data' will enable them to give a thumbs up or down to AGW is sadly deluded.

First of all 'raw data' does not mean 'accurate' date - usually the opposite! All raw data has to be calibrated, to get near the true values. This means compensating for systemtic errors.

A very simple example - take two mercury thermometers and compare them across a range of temperatures. Do they always agree? Probably not. Minor difference in manufacture will introduce errors. So they have to be compared with more accurate devices, and calibration tables produced.

Atmospheric temperatures are measured in many ways - by simple thermometers, by balloons, satellites, ships and aircraft, etc. All these readings will be subject to different errors, and all these have to be compensated for by calibration. Only then can we think about comparing a satellite reading with one from a thermometer in a Stevenson screen.

And to handle all these figures requires a good understanding of statistics.

This is why it's taken so many people on the IPCC so many years to reach conclusions - it ain't easy!
 
rynner2 said:
SHAYBARSABE said:
Cochise said:
I don't know what the world is doing temperature-wise right at the moment.
Going up, here's a link to NASA data http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
Quite so. It involves an ENORMOUS amount of data.

Anyone who thinks that a few hours perusing the 'raw data' will enable them to give a thumbs up or down to AGW is sadly deluded.

First of all 'raw data' does not mean 'accurate' date - usually the opposite! All raw data has to be calibrated, to get near the true values. This means compensating for systemtic errors.
Nevertheless, one argument has been that the raw data was not available for anyone to do their own analysis of. This argument has persisted despite the raw data being easily publicly available for quite some time, it wasn't just made available the day I posted it. It is one of the goalposts that keep getting moved. The other is that the analysis is being done incorrectly. It is up to those who claim this is so to show how it is, not to repeatedly question if they accounted for x or y without investigating if the scientists did account for x or y.
 
kamalktk said:
Nevertheless, one argument has been that the raw data was not available for anyone to do their own analysis of.
The bolded word highlights my problem with this statement! It implies that 'anyone' could do their own analysis, whereas only highly trained people actually have the the knowledge and background to do so. This is not a job for the man on the Clapham omnibus!
 
rynner2 said:
kamalktk said:
Nevertheless, one argument has been that the raw data was not available for anyone to do their own analysis of.
The bolded word highlights my problem with this statement! It implies that 'anyone' could do their own analysis, whereas only highly trained people actually have the the knowledge and background to do so. This is not a job for the man on the Clapham omnibus!

Yes! Only the elite mancurians have the keys to the gate of knowledge.
 
tonyblair11 said:
Yes! Only the elite mancurians have the keys to the gate of knowledge.

You mean the ones with the degrees in statistical mathematics? Those elites?
 
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a phrase describing the persuasive power of numbers, particularly the use of statistics to bolster weak arguments. It is also sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent's point.
 
kamalktk said:
rynner2 said:
SHAYBARSABE said:
Cochise said:
I don't know what the world is doing temperature-wise right at the moment.
Going up, here's a link to NASA data http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
Quite so. It involves an ENORMOUS amount of data.

Anyone who thinks that a few hours perusing the 'raw data' will enable them to give a thumbs up or down to AGW is sadly deluded.

First of all 'raw data' does not mean 'accurate' date - usually the opposite! All raw data has to be calibrated, to get near the true values. This means compensating for systemtic errors.
Nevertheless, one argument has been that the raw data was not available for anyone to do their own analysis of. This argument has persisted despite the raw data being easily publicly available for quite some time, it wasn't just made available the day I posted it. It is one of the goalposts that keep getting moved. The other is that the analysis is being done incorrectly. It is up to those who claim this is so to show how it is, not to repeatedly question if they accounted for x or y without investigating if the scientists did account for x or y.

Actually, the raw data is not available on that site. It's already merged (vetted?) and otherwise processed. 'Suspicious' records have been removed.

I know perfectly well that raw data has to be processed. That is precisely what a statistician does.

Bear in mind that, in establishing whether the world is currently warming or not, we are only looking for trends. Therefore systemic errors are unlikely to effect our deliberations, assuming that they are reasonably consistent over time. The whole set of readings could be out by 10 degrees, that doesn't matter as long as it is a consistent 10 degrees. We do of course have to eliminate any ground stations that have experienced abrupt environmental change, such as the encroachment of buildings. We have to decide what constitutes 'encroachment' - it may be natural as well as man-made, such as reforestation in areas no longer economic for agriculture.

As we can see we are already in the position of having to make 'assumptions' as we may have to on many other things.

Assumptions like the above made in the process of cleaning up the data are just one of the ways in which we can modify the presentation of the results in a way to fulfil any expectation our bosses might want ;) .

Demonstrably, through honest mistake or connivance or 'observer bias', the process can make the presentation of the data less 'accurate' as well as more 'accurate'. Where 'accurate' means our best reflection of the true state of a continuum that we are only analysing by point sample.

Only the original unaltered readings are in any sense 'true', although they may also be misleading. Each transformation or selection moves them further away from the genuine measurement, although if our assumptions are complete and unfailingly correct we may improve our 'accuracy' - however it only takes one wrong or omitted assumption to produce a misleading analysis.

So that is why I want the raw data. That is where you always start.
 
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