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Global warming

a_unique_person said:
My guess is it's another 'reds under the bed' scare.

I can actually point you to these people if you want. They are a motly collection of lost souls who stand on a street corner in the city from time to time, and are ignored by 999 out of a 1000 people who wander past. That they are the secret driving force behind the IPCC and the scientific research is laughable.
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There are people out there who still mourn the loss of the USSR - and not just the sad few who waste their Saturday mornings pushing The Morning Star in the High Street. After the euphoria of beating the Marxist menace dies down there's a hole left in their lives. With no menace to combat, where's the meaning?

David Rodale recently linked to a right-wing editorial that connected the emergence of AGW as a force with the Fall of the Wall. The new menace to fill the hole. And there was I thinking the post-Marxist menace was Islamist Terrorism (which, for the mainstream, it is).

Marxist eco-fascists (which I get the feeling includes me and thee) are the menace of choice for some. Dogmatic Marxist eco-fascists, even. Scary. The capitalist system will be hard-put to survive that onslaught.
 
a_unique_person said:
They are only looking at the tropics, and only at the troposphere. As I said, why are they only looking at this one particular area of the atmosphere? Presumably, the other areas agree with the model predictions.
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Cynical. Good on yer, mate :).

Contrarians are getting backed into tighter and tighter corners. It must be frustrating. I like to think so, anyway.

Lurkers take note :eye-poppi An R squared over the last ten years is going to be meaningless.
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If it has any meaning I think we should all be told what it is.
 
mhaze said:
Yes! You definitely have the answer there.

RC predigests those annoying facts and spits them out for people who want such. A Climate Nannyblog. Only the bottles of warm milk for the readers are lacking.
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http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument/langswitch_lang/in

That's hardly regurgitated pap, is it? You can probably find some annoying facts in it if you look hard enough.

If you still have the stomach for it you could move on to

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument-part-ii


More annoying science, and at east this annoying fact :

"The discussion here is based on CO2 absorption data found in the HITRAN spectroscopic archive. This is the main infrared database used by atmospheric radiation modellers. This database is a legacy of the military work on infrared described in Part I , and descends from a spectroscopic archive compiled by the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory at Hanscom Field, MA (referred to in some early editions of radiative transfer textbooks as the "AFGL Tape")."
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The military work on infrared :

"The breakthroughs that finally set the field back on the right track came from research during the 1940s. [US] Military officers lavishly funded research on the high layers of the air where their bombers operated, layers traversed by the infrared radiation they might use to detect enemies. Theoretical analysis of absorption leaped forward, with results confirmed by laboratory studies using techniques orders of magnitude better than Ångström could deploy. The resulting developments stimulated new and clearer thinking about atmospheric radiation."
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US military research in the 40's is a pristine source, wouldn't you say? No reason for it to be manipulated. Everybody involved wanted the right answers, after all.
 
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/langswitch_lang/in

Some old-timers will remember a series of 'bombshell' papers back in 2004 which were going to "knock the stuffing out" of the consensus position on climate change science (see here for example). Needless to say, nothing of the sort happened. The issue in two of those papers was whether satellite and radiosonde data were globally consistent with model simulations over the same time. Those papers claimed that they weren't, but they did so based on a great deal of over-confidence in observational data accuracy (see here or here for how that turned out) and an insufficient appreciation of the statistics of trends over short time periods.

Well, the same authors (Douglas, Pearson and Singer, now joined by Christy) are back with a new (but necessarily more constrained) claim, but with the same over-confidence in observational accuracy and a similar lack of appreciation of short term statistics.
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"Necessarily more constrained". Nice. Makes my "backed into corners" seem doltish :o.

To be sure, this isn't a demonstration that the tropical trends in the model simulations or the data are perfectly matched - there remain multiple issues with moist convection parameterisations, the Madden-Julian oscillation, ENSO, the 'double ITCZ' problem, biases, drifts etc. Nor does it show that RAOBCORE v1.4 is necessarily better than v1.2. But it is a demonstration that there is no clear model-data discrepancy in tropical tropospheric trends once you take the systematic uncertainties in data and models seriously. Funnily enough, this is exactly the conclusion reached by a much better paper by P. Thorne and colleagues. Douglas et al's claim to the contrary is simply unsupportable.
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The "systematic uncertainties in data and models" are, I suspect, the reason why Singer et al are drawn to this particular "fingerprint" of AGW. Fertile territory for obfuscation and the blinding by the science ...

Much like climate reconstructions, from which Singer - a busy and multi-skilled chap - extracts a 1500 year (+/- 500) climate cycle that, you know, just happens. He may have some solar thing going as well, it's hard to keep track of someone that frenetically engaged. Remarkable for a chap his age. Probably never a heavy smoker, which helps.

There are two fingerprints of AGW that are rather more obvious, and have nothing to do with models. Night and winter lows will increase faster than day and summer highs. And the poles will warm faster than the tropics. Both derive from the nature of AGW, but not from (for instance) the nature of solar warming.

Both are very evident.
 
CapelDodger said:
Originally Posted by a_unique_person
They are only looking at the tropics, and only at the troposphere. As I said, why are they only looking at this one particular area of the atmosphere? Presumably, the other areas agree with the model predictions.
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Cynical. Good on yer, mate :).

Contrarians are getting backed into tighter and tighter corners. It must be frustrating. I like to think so, anyway.If it has any meaning I think we should all be told what it is.
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No corner at all, its the upper troposphere at the equator that matters for this issue.

If Douglass et all are right, climate sensitivity backs out to perhaps 1C for co2 doubling. See Motl http://motls.blogspot.com/
 
mhaze said:
No corner at all, its the upper troposphere at the equator that matters for this issue.

If Douglass et all are right, climate sensitivity backs out to perhaps 1C for co2 doubling. See Motl http://motls.blogspot.com/
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Once again, a blogger with no expertise in the topic, gives an opinion.

If you look at realclimate, the accuracy of the measurements is such it is far too short a scale to make such a claim, and another paper on the same topic comes to a different conclusion.
 
a_unique_person said:
Once again, a blogger with no expertise in the topic, gives an opinion.

If you look at realclimate, the accuracy of the measurements is such it is far too short a scale to make such a claim, and another paper on the same topic comes to a different conclusion.
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Motl is a world renowned Harvard physicist.
 
CapelDodger said:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument/langswitch_lang/in

That's hardly regurgitated pap, is it? You can probably find some annoying facts in it if you look hard enough.
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Yes, it is regurgitated pap.

If you still have the stomach for it you could move on to
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument-part-ii
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You may ignore everything Spencer Weart says.:) For your dose of pro AGW spectroscopy go to Eli Rabbet. He knows that stuff. Weart could not tell a differential equation from a cube root.
 
mhaze said:
Yes, it is regurgitated pap.

You may ignore everything Spencer Weart says.:) For your dose of pro AGW spectroscopy go to Eli Rabbet. He knows that stuff. Weart could not tell a differential equation from a cube root.
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Weart is a scientist who has been involved in AGW for several years now. Perhaps you could rebut his science.:D
 
CapelDodger said:
Thee's no doubt that critics of of AGW often describe it as dogmatic and a religion. What is very much in doubt is the ability of senior cardinals or Benny Da Pope to judge the validity of those acccusations.

While it's true that "A broad consensus is developing among the world's scientific community over the evils of climate change" (to put it mildly), the contrary message is not only pushed by "an intransigent body of scientific opinion" but by a multi-faceted lobby. It seems the vatican has been nobbled. Considering the ludicrous things they (presumably) believe, that can't be too difficult.

The cynic in me naturally wonders how much Church money is invested in the fossil-fuel industry.
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As it turns out, the reporter was actually indulging in some creative paraphrasing....(err, lying).

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/12/simon_caldwell_is_a_liar.php#more

I don't think I've ever seen a more dishonest piece of reporting than this whoppper from Simon Caldwell at the Daily Mail:
Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.
The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.
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Needless to say, this story was linked by Drudge and all the other denialists. But the Pope's actual statement is online, so we can see that Caldwell is lying about it. What the Pope actually said:
We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion. ... it means not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests, for future generations also have the right to reap its benefits and to exhibit towards nature the same responsible freedom that we claim for ourselves.
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Looks like he agrees with Stern about low discount rates.
Nor must we overlook the poor, who are excluded in many cases from the goods of creation destined for all. Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow. It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions,
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And he thinks you should listen to the IPCC.
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mhaze said:
Yes, it is regurgitated pap.
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Regurgitated from where? Which parts of it do you disagree with then? If you can tell so authoritatively that it's pap there must be some reasoning behind your opinion no?
 
fsol said:
Regional vs Global. There is a difference. Oh, that's probably "dogma" best ignore that then. Here of course we see that the models aren't good enough to predict AGW. Now in the other(? hard to tell without a reference) paper the model predictions seem to be good enough to disprove AGW.
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In looking at the two bloggers' critiques of the Douglass et. al. paper, I find that in large part, that they launch on to "self criticisms" made by Douglass et.al. as their "talking points". In a rush to immediately discredit a paper by climate skeptics (apparently, that is what is going on here) they do no real digging into the issue.

It should be noted that a good scientific paper does its best to point out possible alternative approachs; possible alternate explanations, and then goes further into explaining why the particular approach used was chosen, when these alternatives exist. Douglass etal does this, the two critiques are superficial at best, and more likley, unscientific and polemical.

The arguments presented in these two critiques and cut and pasted from those blogs to JREF seem to not be worth discussing. Perhaps I've missed something material, if so please feel free to point it out. Douglass et al. addresses an obvious problem, noted by the CCSP, that has been discussed at length in the climate community. The fingerprint of AGW predicted by models isn't in the tropical mid troposphere observations. Why?

Some say it is because the measurements are in error ("AGW is really there but the instruments are not sensitive enough to prove it). Okay, then you don't have a "fingerprint of AGW" demonstrated.

Others (Douglass, Christy etc) say that the measurements show exactly what they show - there is no fingerprint of AGW because CO2 and other greenhouse gases do not have the high climate sensitivty that would create that fingerprint. EG, no fingerprint, no AGW (at the modeled levels of climate sensitivity).

The upper troposphere AGW "fingerprint" is perhaps the single strong bit of evidence that would show the effect of greenhouse gases at the supposed levels of climate sensitivity. Without that, AGW must rely on circumstantial evidence ("unprecedented" arctic ice loss, glaciers moving (umm, but they are supposed to move..., ice shelf collapse here or there, a category 3 hurricane hitting the shore (yawn), the list can go on).

Fsol considers it ironic that the models might be used to discredit the models.

So do I.
 
mhaze said:
Fsol considers it ironic that the models might be used to discredit the models.
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No he doesn't.

The rest of your post "seems to not be worth discussing" as you clearly haven't made any effort to understand the criticisms of the paper.
 
fsol said:
No he doesn't.

The rest of your post "seems to not be worth discussing" as you clearly haven't made any effort to understand the criticisms of the paper.
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As I mentioned, most of the "criticisms" seemed to be pulled from the paper's self criticisms. Actually reading the paper helps.
 
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