Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[spin0]

at what cost?

A very good question. I wish I had an answer but jury's still out so to speak. And I am contemplating. Being a slow person it will take week to month to form an opinion on this matter and will welcome any insights or opinions provided.

every work-day he is not doing science is a "win" for those who aim to retard the advance of the science.

Yes, and they surely have done their best to try and retard to this day. Those who aim to retard have been effective in their aim with their despicable methods. And it is not a tradegy of just a single scientist or science but that of modern western society.

defending the name a science in the courts makes him an actor.

This is true, but he has already been the chosen target for public and personal attacs, and in that sense nothing changes. Just the public form and venue. Another ring of the same "circus" perhaps? But this time it has the potential of a Dayton. Therefore I wish this goes to trial and then has the widest publicity possible. The scientist and science has nothing to loose.

delays the revised edition of his book.

I loved his book. (*

scares the young wanting to focus on research away from climate research.

WHO? WHO causes and spreads such fear? WHO scares the young from doing benefical research? Certainly not the scientist but the very people who aim to retard the advance of the science!

a sad day. (that knowing all of the above, he decided it best to act.)

For me the sad day is only when scientists have all been silenced. They're working on that, i hear. Or maybe not. Maybe they just want to silence only one or two chosen scientists and then all others will be just fine.



*) Apparently this reviewer did too:
"I have no idea why I bought this book. Before I read it I was a denier extraordinaire. All I ever read about the issue was articles that bashed the pro AGW side. Articles that said how evil the IPCC scientists were. And repeated those things every chance I got.

After I read this book, I hope I am a much humbler man. My mom always told me there are 2 sides to every issue, hopefully I've learned that lesson for the last time. I am actually ashamed that I believed all climate change scientists were conspiring to keep the truth away from the public just to keep the research grants coming in. I actually e-mailed Dr. Mann to apologize for the things I mindlessly repeated.

I have now joined the ranks of the skeptics, and will look at both sides of the issue, and follow the evidence where ever it goes.

If your a denier like I was, join the ranks of skeptics. Read this book and let the evidence take where ever it goes."

[and as amazon reviews goes, don't know if genuine]

 

[bit_pattern]

If anyone is bored and would like a brief diversion they could help me out by having a look at this post and suggesting a few angles to approach with my reply.

http://www.bigfooty.com/forum/index.php?posts/26238219

Is anyone familiar with the denier argument that the Australian bureau of meteorology data has been manipulated by HADCRUT? I'm posting from my phone so it makes background research a bit cumbersome, especially as I can't access skeptical science at the moment, when I'm pretty sure they've debunked this canard in the past.

 

[Reality Check]

http://www.bigfooty.com/forum/index.php?posts/26238219

Is anyone familiar with the denier argument that the Australian bureau of meteorology data has been manipulated by HADCRUT?

The "argument" seems to be:

Your response was to try and divert from that by pointing to some amateur bloggers analysis of two individual temp stations in WA, without any kind of context to show exactly what relevance it was supposed to have to anything.

The relevance is that they are comparing the temperature recorded by the BOM with what they end up being in the HADcrut database.

I am not familiar with this argument but it seems really ignorant. All meteorology data is manipulated by every global temperature dataset.


And they are talking about 2 stations !

This seems to be a variant of Anthony Watt's debunked argument that some US weather station data was invalid and thus global temperatures were invalid. At least he had many stations that he felt were incorrect!

That argument was debunked immediately by NOAA (the temperatures found from the high grade stations was comparable with those found from all stations), the agreement with satellite data and the BEST analysis.

 

[aleCcowaN]

If anyone is bored and would like a brief diversion they could help me out by having a look at this post and suggesting a few angles to approach with my reply.

http://www.bigfooty.com/forum/index.php?posts/26238219

Is anyone familiar with the denier argument that the Australian bureau of meteorology data has been manipulated by HADCRUT? I'm posting from my phone so it makes background research a bit cumbersome, especially as I can't access skeptical science at the moment, when I'm pretty sure they've debunked this canard in the past.

I couldn't find something specific in SkC, just some scattered mentions in the comment section without backing data. I really can't find a problem with the phrase "the Australian bureau of meteorology data has been manipulated by HADCRUT" other than the obvious affective charge the word "manipulate" has attached, the kind of charge that makes zealots to call the police when a specialist tries to help an autistic child to enhance their ability to discriminate. All countries' data have to be brought in agreement methodologically -most of all, the normals-, what, no matter how just common sense it is, it's used by denialists to flag that the data *must* have been forced to match an expected pattern. I'm not telling this to you as you are well aware of these circumstances and more.

The problem you have there is a denialist much more intelligent and trained (relative terms) than the ones we have stood here during the last couple of years (in fact, an intelligent denialist should see no reason to participate here because of the extremely bad cost-benefit ratio). This makes me think that there are no arguments that your opponent in the debate cannot effectively neutralize. I was reading carefully the post you linked and that chap is what I call "a tamer": he has to obtain some results on the beast -be it the lion or the public watching the show- so he carefully keep his goals in mind and build a deflective field meant to scatter the argumentation in all directions. He only have to be cold enough and have good memory in a similar way those chaps who memorize a thousand of jokes and have the ability to select a pretty appropriate one with an acceptable timing and tell it without laughing when they approach to "it's[sic]" punch line, and by that approach they become the soul of every party and everyone wants to be friends.

So, your opponent here has just a collection of preformatted arguments that have underwent different kind of processes to become useful to his kind. For instance, you have there the trick of quoting a small part of a neutral or opponent-like source stripping it from its context: Germany building coal power plants as a signal of "this scare has run it's [SIC] course". The fact that a circumstantial concentration of new projects -part of them to substitute old coal power plants, part of them to compensate the mad abandonment of nuclear power plants- seems to have been accidentally kept aside. It's the strategy of a fish hook: you have to harm the tissue of the debate to get rid of it. Conveniently not only the source is "warmer-like" but the couple of lines of information extracted is lost in the middle of a very long text.

In another part of the post he uses the technique of "a chain of cherries long enough will be taken for a consistent pattern". It's enough to replace "note" by "pick" and the trick becomes more obvious. Additionally, most of the "picking" most probably include inexact or misquoted information, as again, each cherry is disjointed from its tree. I suppose it can follow a pattern like:

cherry A!
cherry B!
cherry C!

Would you mind to provide evidence of A, B and C?

cherry D!
cherry E!
cherry F!

...

(keeping cherry-picking below a 50% rate will help to hide it)

...

cherry ST!
cherry SU!
cherry SV!

You have there more dialectical techniques, some of them exquisite, for instance the "Now whose[sic] being alamist" -isn't this chap using an excess of popular scripting? what doesn't match his command of the language, I mean-. A real refinement (no intended).

You know, my friend, that I am not prone to debate climate science with deniers in fora like these because once they are thrown into the deep water of climate science they grab you and try to sink you in order to survive. For them is just who is still alive in the end, as they don't know of any collaborative way to knowledge -not only science-. But you know that I love to analyse the ways of deception in an open fashion, so people become aware of that (hence my signature: "If [the moment] the horse reasons, horse riding is gone!")

 

[lomiller]

the fallacy is in that quoting an authority is NOT providing an argument. period.

It most certainly is an argument. (a syllogism). What seems to be confusing you s that it's an inductive one. In an inductive argument the conclusion can be false even when all the premises are true which can throw people sometime, but for most real world topics inductive arguments are vastly more practical and productive. Science itself is inductive in nature so the rejection of induction is in fact a rejection of science.

If, as you suggest, the opinion of experts carries no weight then why do we have expert testimony in court cases? Why not just have the lawyers argue out the details of genetics and forensics themselves?

 

[lomiller]

i
we have specialists in forecast evaluation, evaluating forecasts

They have no experience evaluating the forecasts from physical models and even less in running the models themselves as they attempted to do. When they don't even have the physics background to understand the model output how can they evaluate it?.

how do you come to classify the International Journal of Forecasting as an "off discipline"

Because none of the editors have any experience in physical models.

an editor is not restricted to selecting reviewers from a tribe that belongs to that journal. in a case like this the editor would undoubtedly send the paper relevant reviewers from the physical simulation camp as well as some from the statistical evaluation camp.

In an off discipline journal the editor may not even know who is an appropriate reviewer. This is a common game used for getting crap papers published. Send it to an off discipline journal based on a vague tie in, and hope they don't know who to get to review it. Sometime it works sometimes it doesn't but it means you can never really trust something in an off discipline journal to have received an appropriate review.

again: what they did was analyze previously "published" forecasts from a met office model, i doubt they ever saw a line of the code from the model itself.

They say they used a used the model, not a specific data run. You do realize that for models of this type every run produces a different realization?

you seem to be saying that only those who understand the physical system are qualified to evaluate the forecasts of that system.

You can't evaluate output you don't understand. Physical models have outputs that conform to real things. If you lack sufficient understating of what those real things are than how do you know you are doing an apples to apples comparison?


For example, the authors of this paper say they are using a well established model. Which they are, but what they don't seem to realize is that the time frame and output they are selection from it are FAR from well established. Climate models are not built to provide point in time forecasts indeed such forecasts are largely impossible.

There is SOME work ongoing to try test them against over 1-4 year range, but this is bleeding edge science that is not even remotely "well established"

The fact that the authors are not testing what they thought, and are not testing what the models in question are normally used for is something of a problem. what's worse they don't know that this is the case and neither the editors nor reviewers caught the error.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I think there are extreme positions taken here. When the expert offers an explanation there's no ad verecundiam. The key point of ad verecundiam is an irrelevant appeal to authority, that is, when the authority is such regarding a different area, or offers no explanation in case some further clarification should be needed in a structured debate in good faith (asking always explanations, specially when the previous ones didn't satisfy the expectation of the counterpart, is far from proving there's an ad verecundiam).

Appeal to authority is crystal clear and doesn't require so much explanations: it's used just to suck from the prestige an authority has and to exploit the popular approach that authorities "can't" be wrong in everything they say: "Ask geniuses and they'll tell you the truth" (authority goes beyond diplomas).

 

[W.D.Clinger]

The fact that the authors are not testing what they thought, and are not testing what the models in question are normally used for is something of a problem. what's worse they don't know that this is the case and neither the editors nor reviewers caught the error.

You sound as though you still haven't read the paper. If you have, then you need to re-read section 2.7 with a little more care.

You seem to be missing my point. What we have here are people with little or no physical modeling experience playing with bleeding edge climate model research and publishing it in an off discipline journal that doesn’t have the reviewers or editors to properly asses what they have done with the model.

What we have here are people with little or no physical modeling experience pretending to speak with authority on bleeding edge climate model research and publishing their opinions at the JREF Forum, where there is no prior review or editing whatsoever.

We also have people here who work in climate science or in a related field. Their opinions are valuable.

The trick is to tell who is which.

 

[lomiller]

What we have here are people with little or no physical modeling experience pretending to speak with authority on bleeding edge climate model research and publishing their opinions at the JREF Forum, where there is no prior review or editing whatsoever.

All one needs to do is follow the literature to realize point in time predictions over short 1-4 year time spans are NOT what climate models are expected to do. I expect any serious paper doing something like this to be presented in a journal accustomed to looking at climate models and how they are used, not a minor (at best) publication with absolutely no such background. Suggesting anything else is downright silly.

 

[bit_pattern]

Thanks for the entertaining replies Alex & RC!

 

[lomiller]

A little more on the paper in question above.

Here is a response to it by Noel Keenlyside (who is himself somewhat controversial for his support of these shorter time scale predictions, which IMO is reflective of the division among climate models themselves on this topic, which is why I call it bleeding edge)

http://oceanrep.geomar.de/13240/1/Keenlyside.pdf

Among other things he argues that Fildes and Kourentzes misunderstand why decade scale predictions are important. These predictions, he says, are not all that relevant to the longer scale predictions used by the IPCC because they arise from different sources.

Both externally forced and internal variability may
be predictable, but this predictability arises from
external factors in the former case and the initial
conditions in the latter. Long-term climate change
projections, such as those which were performed for
the fourth IPCC assessment report (IPCC, 2007),
are designed to capture the predictability resulting
from external factors, which are dominant primarily
on centennial and longer timescales. These

The goal of decadal scale predictions is to search for areas current models can be improved, not the predictions themselves. (Which again goes against the entire premise of comparing their accuracy to statistical models over the same period.

NASA's chief climate molder, from his blog:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/08/cmip5-simulations/

The ‘decadal prediction’ simulations are mostly being run with standard GCMs (see the article by Doblas-Reyes et al, p8). The different groups are trying multiple methods to initialise their ocean circulations and heat content at specific points in the past and are then seeing if they are able to better predict the actual course of events. This is very different from standard climate modelling where no attempt is made to synchronise modes of internal variability with the real world. The hope is that one can reduce the initial condition uncertainty for predictions in some useful way, though this has yet to be demonstrated. Early attempts to do this have had mixed results, and from what I’ve seen of the preliminary results in the CMIP5 runs, significant problems remain. This is one area to watch carefully though.

Again, we see the same fundamental disconnect between the Fildes and Kourentzes paper, what climate molders are actually working on, and why.

 

[CapelDodger]

we have specialists in forecast evaluation, evaluating forecasts (make by climate modelling specialists).

Their expertise is in a type of forecast which does not derive from a physical model. Forecasting based on statistical models, used for policy purposes. This is quite distinct from such things as weather-forecasting, despite the coincidence of names. Hence the weakness of their case, quite apart from the remarkable progress of weather and climate forecasting over the last few decades. Progress which has come with computing power, not from any great new insights into how the system works.

The new insights are being revealed by the big bad analogue model, in real-time, which does make the whole forecasting argument a bit moot. Not to say lame, stale, tired, uninspired, and frankly just phoned in.

 

[CapelDodger]

Appeal to authority is crystal clear ...

As in the spurious introduction of Freeman Dyson to a rational conversation about AGW.

It's been clear for some time that denial isn't making any young recruits. Nobody's looking to found a career on it. In contrast, anything climate-related is attracting the most ambitious talent. I respect that authority .

 

[aleCcowaN]

It's been clear for some time that denial isn't making any young recruits.

Are you sure? Many of them look so juvenile.

 

[macdoc]

I'm going to be contrarian on this and especially in North America there is a dying away of opportunity for work in climate and environment. The idjit party ruining Canada has gutted our earth sciences program ....but of course if you are an oil petrologist there is lots of work.

My sense is given the poor economy - environmental responsibility has gone by the wayside - even Obama has backed away and that from a policy standpoint the deniers have won even tho nature is showing them wrong continually.

If you watch the PBS special Climate of Doubt you will come away depressed.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/

and mad.

 

[CapelDodger]

I'm going to be contrarian on this and especially in North America there is a dying away of opportunity for work in climate and environment. The idjit party ruining Canada has gutted our earth sciences program ....but of course if you are an oil petrologist there is lots of work.

Vandalism, no doubt, but parochial and not tenable for long. Serious policy-wonks are willing to put money - relatively trivial amounts, really - into physical research. Hands-on oportunities, rent-free for months breaking ground in some far-flung ocean, they are out there like never before. The upside to "more research is required" policy of yesteryear.

 

[CapelDodger]

Are you sure? Many of them look so juvenile.

They should be more sheltered than shown off, I'm sure of that. As far as I'm concerned they're being exploited.

To call today's denial half-hearted would be to leave out lame, tired, and defeated.

 

[macdoc]

A physics problem.

How much does a forest suck energy from a hurricane coming ashore? When you see the damage and how wild a forest reacts in terms of energetic motion -
So places like the Gulf coast around New Orleans are flat marshes with very warm water so the strength is less diminished.

Surely a forest must absorb a lot of energy - any ideas on magnitude.

 

[Mikemcc]

While it's significant in terms of energy absorbed (the mechanical energy required to vibrate each tree must be rather large), compared to the energy involved in the hurricane itself it's likely to miniscule.

Saying that, it's well known that storms lose energy once they move onto land. There's no more ocean heating and there is the frictional forces that you've asked about. In the case of the US east coast you also have the Appalachians acting as a land barrier, trying to lift a hurricane over then must involve a huge amount of energy. Hence why they take the path of least resistance and travel up the eastern seaboard. Which then has a feedback because it holds the storm out at sea...

 

[CapelDodger]

That's about it for the climate change debate then. Now we're just talking about the weather again. Welcome to the new normal. The banality of it all is quite striking.