lolGlobalWarming?

[zoobernut]

what? No humans are directly causing climate change. Absent human CO2 in the atmosphere, one would predict global cooling right now. The added CO2 is a direct cause of global warming and it's not semantics, this absolutely, positively would NOT be happening right now without the effects of the industrial revolution.

More to the point, CO2 DIRECTLY influences the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun.

Global cooling IS global climate change therefore you just proved my point in your post. Also while there is a warming trend in some areas there are cooling trends in others. The global climate is in a balance and you cannot just cause a shift over the entire climate in the same direction, it will move in one direction in one area which will cause the opposite effect in others. Where did you read that one would predict a global cooling right now? Where is the evidence of that? The global climate was already trending towards warming before the industrial revolution before the major boom in human produced CO2 emissions.

[Tristam]

Global cooling IS global climate change therefore you just proved my point in your post. Also while there is a warming trend in some areas there are cooling trends in others. The global climate is in a balance and you cannot just cause a shift over the entire climate in the same direction, it will move in one direction in one area which will cause the opposite effect in others. Where did you read that one would predict a global cooling right now? Where is the evidence of that? The global climate was already trending towards warming before the industrial revolution before the major boom in human produced CO2 emissions.

Ok, let me try to break this down for you.

There is an overall energy balance of the earth that is a result of two components 1. Heat from the earth's core 2. Heat from the sun. The heat from the earth's core is roughly 3000 times less than the amount of energy from the sun so it can be disregarded. Much of the energy from the sun is reflected back out into space, however some of it is absorbed by the atmosphere in the form of heat (increased thermal motion of gas particles in the atmosphere). By adding CO2 to the atmosphere, you increase the amount of energy absorbed by the atmosphere so the net energy change is DIFFERENT over time.

Also, the paper I cited earlier shows data from practically all over the globe, the global average temperature is increasing. This is not a local phenomenon, as the energy budget of the entire planet has changed.

The evidence for a prediction of global cooling is from Milankovitch cycles. These are slight changes in the rotation of the ellipticity of the earth's orbit, combined with the slow change in the tilt of the earth on its axis relative to the sun. Put simply, the earth wobbles a bit. These cycles process over tens of thousands of years and are highly predictable over 100,000 year periods. It should be noted that the reason these cycles change the climate is not due to the energy the sun radiates to the earth, but rather the positioning of the poles relative to where most of the energy is being absorbed, and how easily that energy is transmitted throughout the globe. The earth is very sensitive to orbital positioning right now due to the presence of antarctica, which impedes the movement of warm water to the poles, hence ice ages.

Now, for ice core data for the past 6000 years, the data do in fact show a slow cooling at the rate one would predict according to the Milankovitch model. According to this model, the cooling would have persisted for another 23000 years or so. This cooling abruptly changed direction at the end of the industrial revolution. This is an entire shift in one direction, not a local phenomenon. Look at the paper I cited earlier to get a better feel for the data.

[Max™]

what? No humans are directly causing climate change. Absent human CO2 in the atmosphere, one would predict global cooling right now. The added CO2 is a direct cause of global warming and it's not semantics, this absolutely, positively would NOT be happening right now without the effects of the industrial revolution.

More to the point, CO2 DIRECTLY influences the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun.

Junk Science is bad, mmkay?

Find a good comprehensive model of the Climate before making claims like "if we weren't pumping out CO2, the globe would be cooling right now", could it be true? Oh, most definitely.

Is it backed up by something remotely resembling scientific evidence yet?

No, computer models based on incomplete knowledge of a system are not evidence. They are what you would usually call an educated guess, at best.

Keep in mind, I'm not arguing that the climate is changing (that is what they do after all, nothing remains in stasis), and I'm not arguing that we may very well be exacerbating this change.

I'm only arguing that if any other scientific discipline were treated the same way, it would be dismissed as junk science.


I don't know everything about the interactions of subatomic particles, I don't completely know how to account for the effects of the earths magnetic field on them, and I don't have a particle accelerator handy...

I built a computer model though, and it says if I collide two protons together at high velocities, it will produce a tear in the fabric of the Universe that will destroy the world.

I'm going to go tell Congress about it now, and see if I can get a bunch of money to scare people about particle accelerators based on my non-scientific findings!

Wish me luck.

[Tristam]

Junk Science is bad, mmkay?

Find a good comprehensive model of the Climate before making claims like "if we weren't pumping out CO2, the globe would be cooling right now", could it be true? Oh, most definitely.

Is it backed up by something remotely resembling scientific evidence yet?

No, computer models based on incomplete knowledge of a system are not evidence. They are what you would usually call an educated guess, at best.

Keep in mind, I'm not arguing that the climate is changing (that is what they do after all, nothing remains in stasis), and I'm not arguing that we may very well be exacerbating this change.

I'm only arguing that if any other scientific discipline were treated the same way, it would be dismissed as junk science.


I don't know everything about the interactions of subatomic particles, I don't completely know how to account for the effects of the earths magnetic field on them, and I don't have a particle accelerator handy...

I built a computer model though, and it says if I collide two protons together at high velocities, it will produce a tear in the fabric of the Universe that will destroy the world.

I'm going to go tell Congress about it now, and see if I can get a bunch of money to scare people about particle accelerators based on my non-scientific findings!

Wish me luck.

For at least the fourth time now.

The model is not the evidence, the data is the evidence, the evidence shows that the globe WAS cooling according to ESTABLISHED CLIMATE CYCLES PRIOR TO the industrial revolution. The CO2 effect on energy budget is a first principles argument based on BASIC laws of energy absorption. This is not up for debate and should be common knowledge. The model is the BEST FIT OF THE DATA TO THE KNOWN PARAMETERS IN ORDER TO MAKE PREDICTIONS. ALL models do this because no dataset is 100% (Hence the need for a fucking model). Your "comprehensive model" is ideological BS because all people will do is push back the goalposts when something more comprehensive is established. I bet you couldn't define for me what a comprehensive model would have as parameters could you? Have you ever seen protein binding data to determine a dissociation constant? You can generate a curve based on a fit to a few concentration points to predict how that protein would behave at any concentration of binding partner. That's a much better analogy to the real world scenario then your proton collision whatever.

You have no concept of what constitutes good science.

[thatwasnifty]

Tristam is my hero

[Max™]

For at least the fourth time now.

The model is not the evidence, the data is the evidence, the evidence shows that the globe WAS cooling according to ESTABLISHED CLIMATE CYCLES PRIOR TO the industrial revolution. The CO2 effect on energy budget is a first principles argument based on BASIC laws of energy absorption. This is not up for debate and should be common knowledge. The model is the BEST FIT OF THE DATA TO THE KNOWN PARAMETERS IN ORDER TO MAKE PREDICTIONS. ALL models do this because no dataset is 100% (Hence the need for a fucking model). Your "comprehensive model" is ideological BS because all people will do is push back the goalposts when something more comprehensive is established. I bet you couldn't define for me what a comprehensive model would have as parameters could you? Have you ever seen protein binding data to determine a dissociation constant? You can generate a curve based on a fit to a few concentration points to predict how that protein would behave at any concentration of binding partner. That's a much better analogy to the real world scenario then your proton collision whatever.

You have no concept of what constitutes good science.

Can Global Climate models accurately predict past climate changes to confirm their accuracy?

Whether or not you believe I know what good science is, doesn't matter.

The accelerating effect of human co2 emissions on global warming is a hypothesis.

Deny if you will, it doesn't change the scientific method. If these climate models were good science, they would have been peer reviewed, list accurate error margins, and contain the methods by which they could be falsified.


A major step in deciding whether something is a scientific fact, is showing how it could be proven false.


Did you overlook that part of science? Scientific integrity they call it, disclosure of the flaws in your theory, and providing the ways in which it could be wrong.

If you can't first show how something could be wrong, you can't claim it is right, I don't know how to get this across any clearer.


Can you show me where climate scientists openly disclosed the ways their models could fail, the ways that one could go about trying to disprove the human co2 > global warming connection?

[thatwasnifty]

I'm pretty sure papers about climate change (and there are lots, as I listed a few comments back) wouldn't be published in peer reviewed journals if they weren't falsifiable.

[Max™]

Oh, I know they're falsifiable, the problem lies in the scientists producing the papers, and whether they openly disclosed the errors and methods by which their theories and models could be wrong.

Telling the public "This is definitely happening, it is absolutely proven." without even telling your peers "if this effect here were shown to be as follows, the changes to the rest of the data should prove fatal to this model" and so forth.

Do you know what the process of peer review involves?

[Tristam]

Can Global Climate models accurately predict past climate changes to confirm their accuracy?

Whether or not you believe I know what good science is, doesn't matter.

The accelerating effect of human co2 emissions on global warming is a hypothesis.

Deny if you will, it doesn't change the scientific method. If these climate models were good science, they would have been peer reviewed, list accurate error margins, and contain the methods by which they could be falsified.


A major step in deciding whether something is a scientific fact, is showing how it could be proven false.


Did you overlook that part of science? Scientific integrity they call it, disclosure of the flaws in your theory, and providing the ways in which it could be wrong.

If you can't first show how something could be wrong, you can't claim it is right, I don't know how to get this across any clearer.


Can you show me where climate scientists openly disclosed the ways their models could fail, the ways that one could go about trying to disprove the human co2 > global warming connection?

Ok, point by point.

1. The climate models were peer reviewed, all of them that were published in journals. There is the Michael Mann paper (which had to be reviewed by the editors of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as general peer review), amongst many others (cited in the paper and shown in the figures). And there are other models in other journals subject to similar review criteria. Peer review shows that the data and analysis were done in good faith and integrity, and that the conclusions logically follow from the data.

2. The error margins are there, did you miss them? The shaded area represents the error analysis (usually a 95% confidence interval or something like that) while the line is the linear fit to the parameters.

3. How could it be falsified? Are you joking? If the temperature patterns do not follow the model, the model is falsified!

4. The debate about the initial models raged but has settled. The flaws that were discussed included the "tree-ring" data described earlier as well as some mathematical issues that plague all complicated models, the mathematical corrections were made and shown to be minor in terms of predicting future temperature changes. This happened years ago by the way.

5. A good negative control (which has been done) is to use the SAME model but REMOVE the effect of CO2 forcing and see how the model agrees with the data. Guess what, that model fails. No model which has excluded the effect of increased atmospheric gases (CO2, methane, etc.) follows the data.

The anthropogenic CO2 effect WAS a hypothesis, there is no debate now. Welcome to the 21st century.

edit: The original Mann paper was what I referred to and which was subsequently proofed and mathematically corrected. This happend outside of peer-review, but peer review happened earlier in the process. The september Mann paper is a different model which was subjected to a different round of peer review, but I want to reiterate that there are OTHER models which were independently subjected to different peer review whose overall conclusions were the same. All papers published in reputable journals are subject to this process.

[thatwasnifty]

In addition to what Tristam said, I actually work at PNAS which published the Mann paper, so yes, I am intimately familiar with peer review. Do you know how scientific articles are written? The authors don't have to spell out all of the weaknesses of their arguments if they're due to methodology, since it's rightly assumed that the readers are familiar with a particular method's strengths and weaknesses and can identify them themselves. That's why the authors then provide data from other observations/experiments to cover whatever holes they left.

[Max™]

It isn't just about if the temperature patterns don't follow the model.

If the climate itself isn't properly represented by the model, if major forcing factors aren't accounted for...

If the effect of CO2 forcing is over accounted for, etc, etc, etc.

I saw the papers that said "Anthropogenic CO2 is the major driving force in global warming" as well, I also noticed the "we're 90 percent sure" and "it is very likely that human Co2 emissions probably did most of this" double-talk, did you miss that?


As an example of why I don't place much faith in the models: no model which I've heard of so far properly accounts for Clouds, Water Vapor, Co2 removal rates by soil, plant matter, animals. The effects of solar forcing are still poorly accounted for, the amounts of Co2 at various levels in the atmosphere, the integrity of the data from ground stations against the data from satellites, etc, etc, etc.

The error margins are generally obscured in the charts released to public sources btw, you have to dig into the papers yourself to find them, yet this should be open and common knowledge that "Hey, we could be wrong by as much as the effect we predicted".

You're still talking like the human Co2/global warming correlation has been shown as an absolute causal relationship, when it hasn't.

Welcome to the world of Science, there is a higher standard for truth here, than in political circles.

[Max™]

The authors don't have to spell out all of the weaknesses of their arguments if they're due to methodology, since it's rightly assumed that the readers are familiar with a particular method's strengths and weaknesses and can identify them themselves. That's why the authors then provide data from other observations/experiments to cover whatever holes they left.

Don't have to, maybe... but they should.

The weaknesses also aren't all due to methodology, and they should ALL be elaborated on. That is how you do science.

When you're releasing something for public consumption, and not stating openly the errors and weaknesses in your arguments, it used to be considered dishonest, maybe I missed something where it became ok to omit that sort of thing recently... who knows.

[thatwasnifty]

But they're not writing to a lay audience with little or no scientific background, they're writing to other professionals and experts who speak the same technical language and have the same knowledge. And there's your problem. Because you don't understand climatology and the expert vernacular, you assume that scientists are hiding something but really their target audience knows exactly what they're talking about. This is the same thing as when creationists harp on evolution, you know.

[BarthelloSylph]

I think that a logical stance would be the following:
We, as humans, probably do impact the planet.
We really don't know what that impact is yet.
It is bad to scare people about stuff that isn't widely accepted as fact yet.
It is good to try to minimize our impact on the planet until we know exactly what the hell we're doing to it.

I think I've tried to argue this point before, unsuccessfully, so I'll sit the rest of this one out on the sidelines. Have fun though.

[Tristam]

Don't have to, maybe... but they should.

The weaknesses also aren't all due to methodology, and they should ALL be elaborated on. That is how you do science.

When you're releasing something for public consumption, and not stating openly the errors and weaknesses in your arguments, it used to be considered dishonest, maybe I missed something where it became ok to omit that sort of thing recently... who knows.

There's a difference between being dishonest and what you're proposing. You equate dishonesty with not communicating the data in a way that *you* can understand. And why do you say these things were omitted? By my recollection they were out in the open and debated... again... YEARS AGO.

[Max™]

No, I don't have a problem reading the papers.

I have a problem with the papers being released without full disclosure of errors and the methods of disproof, I have a problem with ANY paper being released like that.

Just because they aren't aimed at laymen doesn't make it ok, and in the case of global warming papers submitted to government agencies, I would say it makes it a necessary requirement to consider the layman. Congressmen aren't usually hip with the lingo, but they should damn well know exactly how reliable the models they're about to pass major laws based on are.

You assume I don't know what they're writing about, I admit I'm not an expert, but I'm more than capable of reading something and cross checking facts, looking up terms I don't recognize, and making sure I understand something before I make a judgment about it.

[Max™]

Again, Trist, it's not written in a way that I can't understand, that isn't my problem.

Congressmen not being given this information in a way they can understand, when they're voting on bills which will have major effects on the Country I live in, that is a problem to me.

[Tristam]

No, I don't have a problem reading the papers.

I have a problem with the papers being released without full disclosure of errors and the methods of disproof, I have a problem with ANY paper being released like that.

Just because they aren't aimed at laymen doesn't make it ok, and in the case of global warming papers submitted to government agencies, I would say it makes it a necessary requirement to consider the layman. Congressmen aren't usually hip with the lingo, but they should damn well know exactly how reliable the models they're about to pass major laws based on are.

You assume I don't know what they're writing about, I admit I'm not an expert, but I'm more than capable of reading something and cross checking facts, looking up terms I don't recognize, and making sure I understand something before I make a judgment about it.

Lol, you sound exactly like the folks at conservapaedia when they didn't believe the evidence that bacteria had evolved to use a new food source. They kept asking for the "raw data", better resolution, in depth explanation, even the bacteria themselves. It's the same thing, you simply won't accept the evidence. That's the difference between being a "skeptic" and a "denialist", nothing will convince you, and the littlest nitpicking doubt about an esoteric mathematical computation in a model is enough for you to call out the entire field as "junk science". Yeah right.

[Tristam]

Again, Trist, it's not written in a way that I can't understand, that isn't my problem.

Congressmen not being given this information in a way they can understand, when they're voting on bills which will have major effects on the Country I live in, that is a problem to me.

Lol, yes it is your problem. And congressmen should have good people around them to explain the science behind the conclusions, if they don't then that again is their problem.

[Shinryusan]

I have to believe that Max is trolling. The opposite is too horrific to consider. By the way, did anyone ever read that paper Max had linked in his sig a while back? And he has the gall to lecture OTHER people on the peer-review process, lol.