Bob Park and Global Warming

[Phaycops]

What do you know about climate studies?

I know quite a lot about climate studies, and Diamond is quite right.

Diamond, could you give me the reference for the paper? Author, title, journal volume? I'm having a hard time just searching for it using the author's name (Soon is really common!) and "climate" as keyword. I'd like to read it and maybe comment here on it. Since, you know, argument from authority carries such weight

 

[arcticpenguin]

Bob Park's column for 8 August 2003 is now up: http://www.aps.org/WN/WN03/wn080803.html

It includes this:

2. POLITICAL CLIMATE: WHAT’S RIGHT FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE?
One of the purported abuses cited in the minority staff report involved the insertion into an EPA report of a reference to a paper by Soon and Baliunas that denies globl warming (WN 1 Aug 03). To appreciate its significance, we need to go back to March of 1998. We all got a petition card in the mail urging the government to reject the Kyoto accord (WN 13 Mar 98). The cover letter was signed by "Frederick Seitz, Past President, National Academy of Sciences." Enclosed was what seemed to be a reprint of a journal article, in the style and font of Proceedings of the NAS. But it had not been published in PNAS, or anywhere else. The reprint was a fake. Two of the four authors of this non- article were Soon and Baliunas. The other authors, both named Robinson, were from the tiny Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in Cave Junction, OR. The article claimed that the environmental effects of increased CO2 are all beneficial. There was also a copy of Wall Street Journal op-ed by the Robinsons (father and son) that described increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere as "a wonderful and unexpected gift of the industrial revolution." There was no indication of who had paid for the mailing. It was a dark episode in the annals of scientific discourse.

Could help explain why Park is pre-disposed against anything Soon & Baliunas have to say on the topic.

 

[davefoc]

Here's a link to an article about the kiliminjaro glaciers which says they are disappearing at a rate that suggests they may be gone by 2020. The article suggests that they have been around for at least 14,000 years.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/010222/010222-14.html

This is not to say that Diamond's premise that the risk of global warming from human activity has been overstated is not true, but there is certainly some scary stuff going on out there. I am looking forward to reading what Phaycops has to say about the report referenced by Diamond.

 

[Diamond]

I know quite a lot about climate studies, and Diamond is quite right.

Diamond, could you give me the reference for the paper? Author, title, journal volume? I'm having a hard time just searching for it using the author's name (Soon is really common!) and "climate" as keyword. I'd like to read it and maybe comment here on it. Since, you know, argument from authority carries such weight

Willie Soon sent me the paper directly, so PM me your e-mail address and I'll send it to you.

The title of the paper is "Reconstructing the climate and environmental changes of the past 100o years: a reappraisal"

 

[Diamond]

Here's a link to an article about the kiliminjaro glaciers which says they are disappearing at a rate that suggests they may be gone by 2020. The article suggests that they have been around for at least 14,000 years.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/010222/010222-14.html

This is not to say that Diamond's premise that the risk of global warming from human activity has been overstated is not true, but there is certainly some scary stuff going on out there. I am looking forward to reading what Phaycops has to say about the report referenced by Diamond.

Unfortunately it was based on several photos showing a snow melt up to 1997? Then the snow cap started growng again. Shame about that.

 

[Diamond]

Bob Park's column for 8 August 2003 is now up: http://www.aps.org/WN/WN03/wn080803.html

It includes this:

Could help explain why Park is pre-disposed against anything Soon & Baliunas have to say on the topic.

Actually it doesn't at all. Nowhere, as far as I can tell, does Bob Park actually explain his position on global warming, nor why he takes such a visceral dislike to scientists who are skeptical of the "human-induced global warming" claim.

And no, he hasn't replied (although I'm paranoid enough to believe the bunch of old hearsay that he wrote recently was directed at me)

 

[Phaycops]

Here's a link to an article about the kiliminjaro glaciers which says they are disappearing at a rate that suggests they may be gone by 2020. The article suggests that they have been around for at least 14,000 years.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/010222/010222-14.html

This is not to say that Diamond's premise that the risk of global warming from human activity has been overstated is not true, but there is certainly some scary stuff going on out there.

Ok, I've said it once, I'll say it again. NObody is saying that global warming and its effects are not occuring and being observed. What is unclear is the extent to which human activities is causing global warming, and the extent to which ceasing human emission of CO2 gas will mitigate global warming. Also up for grabs is the effects we can expect as a result of increased CO2 and global warming. If studying paleoclimate for several years taught me anything, it's that climate is incredibly complex, with many different factors affecting it simultaneously. To say that we can expect effects X, Y and Z from a Q% increase in CO2 is a vast oversimplification, IMHO. And the fact that global climate models can't even agree with one another is troubling, considering that climate models are what we are basing our policy on. It should raise some red flags that both sides of the debate can produce climate models that say what they want them to say. If the models were really as accurate as everyone wants the public to believe they are, they would all agree, because they'd be getting at some kind of truth. Instead, all the models are getting at is agenda.

I am troubled to find that the two authors of the paper in question were part of that fake paper debacle. Before I make any assumptions, were they in on it and did they know their names were being used on the phony article? Just gettin' all the facts, you know

 

[Morchella]

There was an article this week (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/08/07/global_warming/index.html) at Salon.com about the Bush administrations effort to promote the idea that there is still much uncertainty about the FACT of global warming and the human influence. Bush cites the Marshall Institute and Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon as the proponents of the fringe view that there is not a human cause to the present global warming.
The Marshall institute is funded by the Exxon Mobil Corporation. Surprise Surprise. Bob Park is right. The consensus among mainstream science including the National Acadamy of Science agree that there ia a human componant to global warming.

 

[Diamond]

There was an article this week (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/08/07/global_warming/index.html) at Salon.com about the Bush administrations effort to promote the idea that there is still much uncertainty about the FACT of global warming and the human influence. Bush cites the Marshall Institute and Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon as the proponents of the fringe view that there is not a human cause to the present global warming.
The Marshall institute is funded by the Exxon Mobil Corporation. Surprise Surprise. Bob Park is right. The consensus among mainstream science including the National Acadamy of Science agree that there ia a human componant to global warming.

Surprise, surprise what?

The notion that humans are causing dramatic climate change is the fringe view in my opinon.

There are lots of scientific papers published which are paid for or partly paid for by industry. Are they discounted? Do papers published under the UN have a "Get Out of Critical Scrutiny" card attached?

Once again we get back to the perjorative statements when equate oil companies with the denial tactics of tobacco companies.

As I pointed out to Bob Park (and which he took not the slightest bit of notice) no-one believes anything other than we are in a slight warming phase stretching back to the 1880s (with a decline 1940-1978 thrown in for good measure). The question is whether climate, a horrendously complex chaotic system, can be studied for "human influence" when the flap of a butterfly's wing may be just as significant.

It is not simply the Bush administration which wants to convey the great uncertainties of climate science, its right there in the papers from Working Group 1 which contains phrases diametrically opposed to the "certainties" of the summary (which was written by civil servants, not scientists).

For example Dr. Philip Stott, Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London (England), explains, "The whole feel of the IPCC report differs between its political summary and the scientific sections. It comes as a shock to read the following in the conclusions to the science part: "In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate is not possible." - quite a contrast to the alarmism of the Summary for Policymakers.

also

Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the lead authors of the science sections of the IPCC report, has scathingly described the summary as "very much a children's exercise of what might possibly happen," prepared by a "peculiar group" with "no technical competence." Professor Lindzen further described the inept and unethical behaviour of the IPCC in preparing their reports in his May 2, 2001 testimony to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee - the full transcript of that testimony can be viewed at http://www.senate.gov/~epw/lin_0502.htm. On hearing about Canada's Minister of the Environment David Anderson's confidence in the dramatic conclusions of the IPCC summary report, Dr. Lindzen laughed, "There is a certain charm when politicians are so certain of the science when the scientists are not."

"The UN IPCC WG1 Summary for Policymakers of the Third Assessment Report is not an assessment of climate change science, even though it claims to be," sums up climate specialist, Dr. David Wojick. "Rather, it is an artfully constructed presentation of just the science that supports the fear of human induced climate change. In short, this is advocacy, not assessment."

Is Dr Richard Lindzen, one of the lead scientists in the IPCC and one of the most respected climate scientists in the world, a fringe scientist?

 

[LucyR]

The question is whether climate, a horrendously complex chaotic system, can be studied for "human influence" when the flap of a butterfly's wing may be just as significant.

What a fatuous remark.

 

[Diamond]

What a fatuous remark.

Why thank you. Are you qualifed to able to make such a conclusion or is it from personal experience of being fatuous?

The earth's climate is a coupled non-linear system. As such a system is extremely sensitive to initial conditions, such as the flap of a butterfly's wing. That's why it cannot be modelled.

 

[shanek]

Both authors are associated with the conservative George C. Marshall Institute,

I just love it when pundits make idiots out of themselves like this.

The Marshall Institute is libertarian, not conservative.

 

[shanek]

yes, you are just a spectator, and I think that your opinion on the subject is not relevant.

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." —Galileo Galilei

 

[davefoc]

Diamond with respect this sounds like BS to me.
"The earth's climate is a coupled non-linear system. As such a system is extremely sensitive to initial conditions, such as the flap of a butterfly's wing. That's why it cannot be modelled."

One of the ideas of Chaos theory is that systems are constrained by their physical nature. There is nothing in chaos theory that says it is not possible to make predictions on the limits of a system's behavior based on the physical nature of the system. So for instance the water flow out my tap might be a chaotic event but if one knew the water pressure, the size and shape of the pipe one could make reasonable estimates of what the total water flow is.

So what is the basis for your comment that it (climate) can not be modeled? Yes, it's difficult and so far large efforts have produced conflicting results, but you are saying that there is some underlying principle that makes it impossible and I doubt that there is any such principle. It may eventually be proven that day to day weather prediction is impossible, but I have not seen anything that suggests that the effects of gross changes on the environment like the solar output or the CO2 concentration will not eventually be modeled to the point of at least a scientific concensus.

 

[Diamond]

Diamond with respect this sounds like BS to me.
"The earth's climate is a coupled non-linear system. As such a system is extremely sensitive to initial conditions, such as the flap of a butterfly's wing. That's why it cannot be modelled."

One of the ideas of Chaos theory is that systems are constrained by their physical nature. There is nothing in chaos theory that says it is not possible to make predictions on the limits of a system's behavior based on the physical nature of the system. So for instance the water flow out my tap might be a chaotic event but if one knew the water pressure, the size and shape of the pipe one could make reasonable estimates of what the total water flow is.

So what is the basis for your comment that it (climate) can not be modeled? Yes, it's difficult and so far large efforts have produced conflicting results, but you are saying that there is some underlying principle that makes it impossible and I doubt that there is any such principle. It may eventually be proven that day to day weather prediction is impossible, but I have not seen anything that suggests that the effects of gross changes on the environment like the solar output or the CO2 concentration will not eventually be modeled to the point of at least a scientific concensus.

That't not my comment in isolation but also (as I quoted) the opinion of the scientists in Working Group 1 of the IPCC. Its also the opinion of climate scientists and mathematicians across the globe.

If solar activity and carbon dioxide concentrations could be modelled in such a way (so as to give a backward look at the climate of times past - and that's a big "if" - it would tell us precisely nothing about future events. The behavior of the Sun is inherently unpredictable on the timescale of decades and centuries.

In order to produce a chaotic system you need but 3 degrees of freedom, In climate models there are millions of independent variables.

Yes, in chaotic systems, on a gross level you can say that the system will vary between hard boundaries which it will not cross. But the hard boundaries of the Earth's climate appears to be the "Snowball Earth" of PreCambrian times and the hothouse temperatures of the Eocene. Also if you want to model the future behavior of the climate then you need to measure the flap of a butterfly's wing every bit as much as the solar cycle on the scale of centuries.

Such boundary conditions tell us nothing when you consider that the earth's atmosphere has warmed by about 0.6C in the last 100 years. Even so, the errors in that statistic are at least a magnitufe larger than the change itself, rendering any conclusion problematical at best.

 

[Diamond]

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." —Galileo Galilei

Thanks for the quote. I shall make it my signature.

 

[Morchella]

The reference to the butterfly effect, originally depicted in a Ray Bradbury short story is a grossly misplaced metaphor when used to compare the human component of global warming. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is something that can be measured and it is rising rapidly. The rise of CO2 is from human activity and no amount of denial can sway the common sense assessment. Models from the mainstream of climatology describe a warming effect because of all the added CO2. It has nothing to do with any environmental political agenda. It's just the facts. Perhaps a better metaphor would be depicting the global warming deniers hiding their head in the sand like an ostrich while they ignore the elephant in the living room.
Diamond, Perhaps Bob Park might pay attention to you if your writing wasn't so fragmented. If you can write with a little more clarity then perhaps you might not be written off as just another crackpot.

 

[Diamond]

The reference to the butterfly effect, originally depicted in a Ray Bradbury short story is a grossly misplaced metaphor when used to compare the human component of global warming.

1. I used the metaphor in the context of chaotic systems, which is where it belongs.
2. The human component of global warming may not even exist as a significant component. You beg so many questions without so much as any evidence, like the evidence that rising carbon dioxide causes warming in the atmosphere.

The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is something that can be measured and it is rising rapidly.

3. Yes, its currently rising. Define rapidly. It has been rising since the end of the last Ice Age

The rise of CO2 is from human activity and no amount of denial can sway the common sense assessment.

That's what I like: dogmatic certainty in place of facts. CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising since the end of the last Ice Age.

Models from the mainstream of climatology describe a warming effect because of all the added CO2. It has nothing to do with any environmental political agenda. It's just the facts.

From the IPCC's Working Group 1 (the scientists, not the politicians:

"In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate is not possible." (my emphasis). So climate models are like arseholes: everybody has one.

Also using the word "mainstream" describes a subjective viewpoint that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics.

Perhaps a better metaphor would be depicting the global warming deniers hiding their head in the sand like an ostrich while they ignore the elephant in the living room.

Perhaps a better metaphor for global warming promoters might be a bunch of idiots who scare elephants into stampeding and then tut-tut over the resultant mess.

Diamond, Perhaps Bob Park might pay attention to you if your writing wasn't so fragmented. If you can write with a little more clarity then perhaps you might not be written off as just another crackpot.

I have written with great clarity. That's why the only crackpot is the one replying with so much rhetoric and so little logic.

 

[davefoc]

Diamond,
I share some of Mortellas thoughts with regard to your style. You are treating this like a flame war. OK, if that is what you are trying to do, but then you are not going to be taken seriously.

This statement is specifically the kind of thing I am talking about.
"3. Yes, its currently rising. Define rapidly. It has been rising since the end of the last Ice Age"

If you have been studying this at all you know that CO2 levels have been rising very significantly since the mid 1800's and are continuing to rise. This is an undisputed fact in the debate. Instead of acknowledging this, you obfuscate it with you rising since the last ice age comment.

This is a graph of CO2 concentration determinined from ice core samples:

source:
http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap01/icecore.html

Perhaps your point would be that the relationship between global warming and rising CO2 levels is poorly established. Then it would be reasonable to state that and to explain why you disagree with the position of many climate researchers who don't share your view.

 

[Diamond]

Diamond,
I share some of Mortellas thoughts with regard to your style. You are treating this like a flame war. OK, if that is what you are trying to do, but then you are not going to be taken seriously.

It's not a flame war, if people would stick to facts and to science. Instead its been:

1. I am not qualified to have an opinion (LuxFerum)
2. I make a fatuous remark which turns out not to be fatuous (LucyR)
3. I am a "global warming denier" whose head is in the sand while there's an elephant in the living room (winning this month's Bad Metaphor competition hands down) (Mortella)

Since I have not denied that the atmosphere appears to have warmed, why am I a "global warming denier"? Perhaps because the phrase is loaded with more meaning?

This statement is specifically the kind of thing I am talking about.
"3. Yes, its currently rising. Define rapidly. It has been rising since the end of the last Ice Age"

No.

Lets' begin again. Mortella makes a claim of rapid rise of carbon dioxide. Where are her sources? How rapid is rapid? Does rapid mean unprecedentedly rapid? Over how long a period has this rapid rise occcured? This is a science forum, why not a few facts to leaven the debate?

Instead YOU get critical of my questioning, but NOT her claim. What gives?

If you have been studying this at all you know that CO2 levels have been rising very significantly since the mid 1800's and are continuing to rise. This is an undisputed fact in the debate. Instead of acknowledging this, you obfuscate it with you rising since the last ice age comment.

What's obfuscation? Carbon dioxide has been rising since the end of the last Ice Age. In all ice cores taken, the ratio of atmospheric isotopes is used as a proxy to measure temperature,and the carbon dioxide is measured from the amount of gas trapped when the snow fell.

Problem is: EVERY ice core has shown that the earth warmed and THEN carbon dioxide rose some eight centuries later. How's that for obfuscation? Would anyone like to explain why the cause should follow the effect by centuries if carbon dioxide was this dread greenhouse gas that we are told about?

Further Mortella did not explain why carbon dioxide has been rising before the 1850s (and neither have you).

This is a graph of CO2 concentration determinined from ice core samples:

source:
http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap01/icecore.html

Perhaps your point would be that the relationship between global warming and rising CO2 levels is poorly established. Then it would be reasonable to state that and to explain why you disagree with the position of many climate researchers who don't share your view.

Perhaps it is. Why don't you ask Mortella to justify her claim with some science instead of bad metaphors to disguise poor reasoning.