1. We will never understand everything in any science. But we have a very good understanding of climate. And we have a very good understanding of how greenhouse gases impact climate. It's not arrogance to acknowledge the state of science. It's accurate.
Are you refuting the exact quote Harris made? Nope. You are taking a part of it and running of the cliff. Pay attention to details, please?
Harris said, "We would be arrogant to think that we understand and we control the climate of the earth." I am specifically saying that we understand and impact climate. Absolutely. That's what the science says.
2. Climate is based on energy balance. Earth warms until it emits as much energy as it absorbs. That's constant. Greenhouse gasses absorb and remit outgoing longwave radiation. That's constant. Glaciers reflect incoming radiation. That's constant. Also constant: CO2 and temperature rise and fall together.
I'll simply point out that your response is not at all inconsistent with Harris's quote.[/INDENT]
Harris said that "The only constant about climate is change." I pointed out a number of other constants. I am specifically saying that there are other constants.
3. Not all CO2 is the same. Not all plants can utilize the CO2 humans emits. Not only that, most most plants are constrained by other nutrients. Moreover, the negative impacts of warming and drought caused by human-caused CO2 will often exceed the limited benefits of increased CO2.
What question are you answering? You have not negated the simple statement Harris made. You are reframing and going off to lecture on something that you wanted to, right?
Soda is brown. Well, not always. In fact, a lot of soda is clear. Some is orange. Some is purple.
Do you still think it's accurate to say that soda is brown? It's dubious at best for a general audience. In a supposedly scientific setting, it's nonsense.
I attended a number of interesting lectures regarding the the impacts of climate change and atmospheric CO2 at the recent Fall AGU meeting. The contention that "CO2 is plant food" was absent. And there's a reason. And had I tried to comment on any of these lecture with such a silly meme I'd have been laughed out of the hall.
4. There is a consensus.
I already noted that this one would be arguable, depending on the context. Is there a consensus among people in the USA? Nope. Are there some surveys etc that indicate scientists feel mostly one way or another about some group of more precisely defined statements than the simple phrase "consensus"? Yep.
In some contexts? This is a scientific issue. The absorption spectra of atmospheric trace gases do not depend on public opinion. The scientific consensus is ridiculously clear. Every textbook affirms it. All major, high-impact, multidisciplinary journals are filled with articles that affirm it. Entire journals are dedicated to it. High volume journals (e.g., GRL) affirm it on a nearly daily basis. As does every national academy of science in the world. And just about every serious, scientific organization.
There are no qualifiers here. There is no context. The consensus is complete. It's extensive. It's severe.
5. Complete rubbish. All data indicate warming. No data indicate cooling. There is no reason to expect cooling.
Uh, duh?
The deep solar minimum was concurrent with the warmest year on record. The current energy imbalance from increased CO2 exceeds the decreased radiant forcing from decreased solar activity. And that's why global mean temperature has continued to increase-- even if at a slower rate as solar activity plunged to historically low records. That's why ice has continued to melt-- look at GRACE satellite data and try to conceptualize just how much ice is melting. That's why the biosphere is migrating poleward. That's why sea level continues to rise-- despite the temporary decrease from the ridiculously extreme intensification of the hydraulic cycle over during 2010.
No one who is familiar with the data can honestly claim that Earth is not warming. That's why the scientific consensus is so high.
6. Not changing; evolving. The conclusions remain largely the same; the resolution only increases.
Playing with words here. I don't think that constitutes a scientific refutation of the quote by Harris. Our understanding of the solar system is changing (evolving). Etc.
I am absolutely not playing with words. Harris is overtly trying to indicate that the science is unsettled. That it's in flux. That it's uncertain. That we really don't know what to expect.
Complete rubbish. And you know this. You may not agree with the consensus, but you can't expect me to believe that you don't know it exists. Quit trying to support the unsupportable.
7. No. Glacial and interglacial periods over the past couple million years or so have been caused by orbital cycles. We know where we are in our current cycle, but more importantly, we know the impact of human-caused CO2; we will miss the next orbitally-forced glacial period. Which is great. At least there's some good news-- in the distant future.
Again, an absolute truthie. Rather unscientific, isn't it? You have an energy balance computation on that one or just belief? Oh, and please don't respond with technical papers UNLESS you quote from the closing paragraph the "may" or "could" which negates your absolute. I know you want to be scientific here. Not just sciency.
I can list a number of papers off the top of my head that have quantified and computed the global energy imbalance (I'm guessing you can find many for free download through google scholar). The wonderful thing, haze, is that an energy imbalance makes a prediction about future change. When Hansen indicated the Earth was out of energy balance decades ago, his contention would have been demonstrably wrong had Earth failed to warm. But it did warm. It also warmed when Trenberth calculated Earth's global energy budget. And it's warmed when all others did as well. Warming isn't just consistent with the energy imbalance calculations. Warming confirms prior imbalance.
That all being said, as I responded in a previous post, we can't know anything with 100% certainty. Of course, you attacked that part of my response, indicating that it demonstrated that I wasn't really countering Harris' claim. And that was a disingenuous response, just as is your facetious request for the requisite language of scientific uncertainty. Shame on you. Really.
8. We have a very good idea that warming will continue. Claiming what we have no idea is simply wrong. And I thought this was an Earth science perspectives course, not a Greenlanders' perspectives course.
Well, I have NO idea the context from which the Greenland quote was pulled. Neither do you. The "Report" doesn't tell us. But you have not addressed the specific quote #8, have you.....
Please explain, therefore, how your response is anything but irrelevant.
Which point is that? That Greenlanders want warming? That we don't know if warming will occur? I addressed both. What Greenlanders think is completely irrelevant to an Earth science perspective course, and for all intents and purposes, we know Earth will warm.
9. Wrong. The IPCC did not conclude that warmer weather will cause more extreme events; the IPCC drew from the scientific literature and reported the consensus. The consensus is robust. It is supported by the conceptual understanding of what drives drought and storms, the output of virtually every climate model experiment, and empirical data over the past few decades. Extreme precipitation events are becoming more frequent and intense. Heat waves are becoming more extreme and intense. Droughts are becoming more extreme and intense. There is good agreement that these trends are due to multiple factors that are changing due to increased temperature. And citing the "Great Global Warming Swindle" is just ridiculous.
More wild claims. I will grant you though, that if we have more people living on the coastline, that economic damages from hurricanes could go up.
Not wild claims at all, haze. I know how IPCC drew its conclusions. It's common knowledge. That, and a lead author lectured on it at the AGU fall meeting. I understand the basic concepts from reading multiple Earth system science textbooks. And from attending multiple lectures concerning climate change and extreme events. And empirical data on extreme hydrological events? Multiple papers. Seriously. There's been half a dozen or so in GRL alone over the past year. And multiple presentations at AGU. Rain gauges measure it. Satellite data measure it. Stream gauge data measure it.
I didn't mention tropical cyclones, but since you did, I'd love to help your understanding. Tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic basin has indeed increased substantially. Maximum power dissipation here has been well correlated with higher SSTs and potential intensity. While there's still some real scientific uncertainty here, Emanuel argues the SSTs are less important than the temperature divergence between the lower troposphere and stratosphere. The beautiful power dissipation and SST correlations are only found in the Atlantic basin. For now.
You are engaging in meta-meta-conclusions or theorizing in this paragraph. And with each successive extrapolation, any possible correlation is reduced. At the end, your argument isn't very defensible. You don't really have a scientific hypothesis here that precisely defines the problem and then address it, do you? So this is sort of an...unscientific statement?
Pish posh.
I can back up everything I've written with numerous papers and textbooks, and I'm confident that my interpretations are correct because they've been affirmed repeatedly by the world's leading experts. It's that simple.
I'd caution against that sort of theorizing on a number of grounds and agree with Harris on this.
And here you are, arguing that a scientific course should ignore science. It's one thing to disagree with the science. It's quite another to advocate for science courses to be based on non-science.
I view this as an interesting subject, incidentally, and am quite familiar with meterology. This article has a rather amusing analysis of the "perception" that "extreme weather events are increasing". Skip to the last to see the conclusion if you are time limited.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/...ata-shows-otherwise-a-historical-perspective/
1. WUWT is crap. Seriously. If you find this interesting, please do yourself a favor and read an Earth system science textbook, and then subscribe to some accessible journals, e.g., Nature or Science.
2. The article cites a "paper" that was presented at the EGU. Follow the link, and it appears to be a poster. Conference posters are not well scrutinized. The idea behind the poster session is that works-in-progress can be vetted with peers before papers are written and published. The poster is interesting. What's most interesting is that while these folks write in their very poster that, "Because of strong climate variability, records of less than 30 years are almost certainly too short for detection of systematic trends. A minimum of 50 years of records is necessary for trend detection...", they actually calculate a trend from 1970 to 2000. More importantly, though, is that by cropping all datasets less than 50 years old, they introduce bias against modern data-- all datasets started after 1950 are discarded by their rules. They refer to their database as a "...World Catalog...", but over 80% of their data are from either North America or Europe. South America is represented by only 1 dataset. Even more interestingly, it turns out that this poster was affiliated with an engineering department-- the same department that has "published" such wonderful material as "Climate is changing ... since 4.5 billion years ago, Climate change: natural or human-induced," and "God and the arrogant species: Contrasting nature's intrinsic uncertainty with our climate simulating supercomputers." Predictably, there's author overlap.
3. The article shows a graph depicting trends in the strongest tornadoes. I'm not sure why. There is no clear consensus that climate change will increase or decrease the strongest tornadoes. There's no clear consensus how climate change will impact tornadoes.
4. The article shows a graph of global tropical cyclone activity. I'm not sure why. The interesting stuff is in the Atlantic Basin.
