Moderated Global Warming Discussion

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lomiller said:
What I presented were basic facts and definitions regarding feedback. These do not change as complexity increases.

Actually, unless you hit a tipping point you can assume linearity which means you can apply superposition. One reason why climate tipping points tend to scare people is that you can’t easily predict what the final outcome will be.

I didn’t see any such constraints in the blog post being referenced. Regardless, the posing is quite simply wrong on a number of basic facts regarding feedback. This type of basic error doesn’t go away no matter how much you cherry pick.
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Given the number of obvious errors in your post on feedbacks, I don't see any reason to trace back your criticism of Spencer. That "you didn't see any such constraits" does not mean they were not there or implicit in the background of understanding of those in the discussion. This should be obvious because Spencer's work is very constrainted geographically and that is a necessary part of the issues studied.

But as mentioned, if you think you are right and I am wrong (and my criticism is on more general grounds than Spencer) then you are welcome to invite Spencer into the discussion. He's quite approachable.

lomiller said:
What I presented were basic facts and definitions regarding feedback. These do not change as complexity increases......
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Right, the total lack of relationship of your facts to planetary energy balance do not change as complexity increases.

Vainly we struggle to implement simulations of small parts of that energy balance using Naviar Stokes. And embedded within a tiny part of such a network in the interaction between a couple of nodes you'll find feedback effects. They do not aggregate in linear fashion or as any arithmatic sum.

Your logic was inappropriate to the presented issue and flawed in it's application.

lomiller said:
...Actually, unless you hit a tipping point you can assume linearity which means you can apply superposition. One reason why climate tipping points tend to scare people is that you can’t easily predict what the final outcome will be....
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Nonsense to the first part (assumed linearity "unless tipping point") regarding a set of non linear equations. Why? You've actually said "it's linear unless it's not". Other people have studied long ago physical issues where something was "linear unless it's not" and came up with mathematics to handle such situations.

The minimum you could use your simple feedback loopiness with climate would be with a 3 part solution and with a great many stated reservations and limits at the start.

And as for "scaring people", that's done with emotional arguments typically based on propaganda methods. Yes, these are typically used in climate scare tactics. But that is a duck and a dodge into a little side slip from the argument, so we can ignore that.
 
refamat said:
What people always forget is that as long as there are glaciers and ice sheets on the surface of the earth, we are technically still in an ice age.
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Techincally, an ice age is one cycle of glaciation and interglacial. Interglacials do not imply a complete absence of surface ice. The Antarctic and Greenland ice-caps have survived a number of ice-ages, after all.

You may be confusing ice-ages with ice-epochs : ice-epochs are periods which contain ice-ages.

And as long as the governments can put up smokescreens they can divert attention away from more serious problems because that might affect someone's pocketbook.
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The nature of governments is more appropriate to the Politics thread, I think.

I see no reason to cry about something that would have happened anyway when what is really a problem are the smoke screens put up by people to cover up for what is killing everything. but, you'll most likely say that cigarette smoke is the main killer of all of man's vices and that your drinking water is safe because the government says it is.
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But then some people will tell you that tap-water isn't safe so they can sell you bottled water (or sell the advertising that goes with it). Some will tell you smoking isn't harmful so you keep buying cigarettes (and the tobacco sellers keep buying advertising).

The skills required in advertising and politics are not very different, if at all. Makes you think, doesn't it?
 
Another AGW sceptic jumps ship.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...Yes-global-warming-real--deeply-worrying.html

Because while across most of the world evidence for current climate change is often inconclusive and anecdotal, the huge ice sheet which sits atop this, the largest island in the world, appears to be cracking up before our eyes. And on a timescale of decades rather than the millennia many predicted.
Just five days ago, a 'superberg', measuring 100sq miles broke off the Petermann Glacier in the north-west of the island and floated into the ocean - the largest chunk of ice to break off Greenland for nearly half a century.

'I used to be a sceptic about Greenland melting,' says Dr Alun Hubbard, my host and Britain's leading glaciologist studying Greenland, 'but now I'm keeping an open mind.'

Dr Hubbard and his team have been working 20-hour days for the past two months in a frantic effort to find out as much about the shifting icecap as possible before the winter deep-freeze sets in. The statistics are mind-boggling and paint a picture of a world changing month-by-month.
The Greenland ice sheet covers an area of 667,000 sq miles - seven times the size of Britain, and at its centre it is two miles thick. After Antarctica, this is the greatest single chunk of frozen water on Earth, constituting 10 per cent of all the fresh water on the planet. It has existed for more than a million years, but some say its time may soon be up.
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If one needs a mechanism to explain rapid melting of the Greenland ice cap, this would be it. Amazing pictures as well.
 
3bodyproblem said:
:dl:

Except we're talking about statistics, not climate science. :rolleyes:
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Quite. They criticize climate scientists for not making more use of statistics experts, then go and make numerous errors because they don't make use of climate scientists to help their lack of climate science. They also accept without question criticism from blogs and other 'grey' sources.
 
a_unique_person said:
Quite. They criticize climate scientists for not making more use of statistics experts, then go and make numerous errors because they don't make use of climate scientists to help their lack of climate science. They also accept without question criticism from blogs and other 'grey' sources.
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I have the document saved so feel free to just quote the page and paragraph on any one of these numerous errors you've found and I'll take a look at them. Thanks.
 
lomiller said:
Only one of your links was from a published paper, and that was from a fairly obscure journal.
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And you suggested it should be ignored. The other is submitted to a peer reviewed journal, at least worthy of discussion.
 
macdoc said:
Gekko


It's hardly a logical fallacy....it's a necessary reality given the amount of funding provided by the fossil fuel companies to cast doubt on the reality of AGW.
http://www.care2.com/causes/global-warming/blog/exxon-is-still-funding-climate-change-deniers/
and it still goes on despite Exxon board room revolt.

I'm sure there were many "papers" supporting the Big tobacco position of "not addictive", "doesn't cause cancer".

those are/were rightly ignored as well - and in a number of cases it was the same players and institutions involved in that campaign and the anti-AGW campaign.

Just like the IDers - equal time and footing is sought to create a controversy where none exists. So too with papers like this.
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It is indeed a logical fallacy. Deal with the data/argument/logic.
 
Geckko said:
And you suggested it should be ignored. The other is submitted to a peer reviewed journal, at least worthy of discussion.
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It would be more accurate to say it will be ignored. There is a never ending list of bad papers in obscure journals that have been ignored and therefore have “never been refuted” in the peer reviewed literature. By you logic we need to spend endless hours examining bizarre unscientific claims just because mainstream scientists have never bothered to address them.

Ultimately peer review is just a filter to catch most of the worst BS so while it’s necessary condition what we are really interested in are the responses from others who actively research in that field.

The paper you linked will almost certainly be ignored for the reasons I have already given you, and even if that proves not to be the case it’s still not relevant to the discussion, again for reason I have already given. In the case of obscure publications, however, it’s entirely appropriate to tell someone they need to do better then that even without a detailed debunking of the article.
 
a_unique_person said:
Another AGW sceptic jumps ship.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...Yes-global-warming-real--deeply-worrying.html



If one needs a mechanism to explain rapid melting of the Greenland ice cap, this would be it. Amazing pictures as well.
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"I used to be a sceptic ... but now I'm keeping an open mind"?

That is seriously weird, but we only have the Daiy Mail's word for what Dr Hubbard actually said. He may have been sceptical about how quickly it was melting, or how quickly it might all melt, or the mechanics of the process, not about melting as such. Questions where there is nothing approaching a consensus, and every scientist involved is a sceptic.

Nobody ever went into glaciology expecting to get hurried for an answer. Not until quite recently, anyway.
 
Gekko
It is indeed a logical fallacy. Deal with the data/argument/logic.
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Okay

In logic and rhetoric, a fallacy is a misconception resulting from incorrect reasoning in argumentation. By accident or design, fallacies may exploit emotional triggers in the listener or interlocutor (e.g. appeal to emotion), or take advantage of social relationships between people (e.g. argument from authority). Fallacious arguments are often structured using rhetorical patterns that obscure the logical argument, making fallacies more difficult to diagnose.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy

The paper represents a logical fallacy regarding AGW - attempting to divert the readily apparent reality of AGW by appealing to statisticians as some sort of authority....when in fact they have none at all in climate science.

And so as mentioned - the paper will be ignored save for in the diminishing cadre of deniers....

I guess a paper from McKittrick et al may appeal to you emotionally ala the definition, for reasons known only to you.
The climate science community on the other hand rejects their gadfly approach en masse.

Reviewed, dismissed as immaterial.

Over turning the established science of AGW will require far more than tweaking numbers.
 
Also note they come up with their own hockey stick. Their blade points down at a slight angle, but the important point, that temperatures are rising very quickly now (in time spans of a 50 years or so, is quite apparent.
 
macdoc said:
Gekko


Okay


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy

The paper represents a logical fallacy regarding AGW - attempting to divert the readily apparent reality of AGW by appealing to statisticians as some sort of authority....when in fact they have none at all in climate science.

And so as mentioned - the paper will be ignored save for in the diminishing cadre of deniers....

I guess a paper from McKittrick et al may appeal to you emotionally ala the definition, for reasons known only to you.
The climate science community on the other hand rejects their gadfly approach en masse.

Reviewed, dismissed as immaterial.

Over turning the established science of AGW will require far more than tweaking numbers.
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You display an intellectual arrogance not proper in scientific discussion. Here is the subject of the paper in question from the abstract. I present first the subject, then follow with several questions for you which are related to the discussion.
We explain panel and multivariate regressions for comparing trends in climate data sets. They impose minimal restrictions on the covariance matrix and can embed multiple linear comparisons, which is a convenience in applied work. We present applications comparing post-1979 modeled and observed temperature trends in the tropical lower- and midtroposphere. Results are sensitive to the sample length. In data spanning 1979 to 1999, observed trends are not significantly different from zero or from model projections. In data spanning 1979 to 2009 the observed trends are significant in some cases but tend to differ
significantly from modeled trends.

​
  1. Do you understand panel and multivariate regression as is commonly used for climate data sets?
  2. What does it mean to embed multiple linear comparisons?
  3. What does Ross say about the restrictions and limitations of such methods?
  4. Why does it matter if results are sensitive to the sample length?
Through discussion of matters such as these, often with people of opposing viewpoints, some can gain greater understanding of science.
 
a_unique_person said:
Here is one review.
http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/08/mcshane-and-wyner-on-climate.html
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I was hoping you had your own critique, but we can discuss this one.

First they seem to fall victim to the same mistakes they claim the authors did.

"This error is not relevant for the paper itself, and this paragraph is unnecessary, but it does tell me a few things: the authors did not consult with any climatologist"

The similar claim would be that the climatologists don't consult with statisticians. Tit for tat.

"Although climate models contain parameters that may be tuned, climate models are not really fit to observations. If that were the case, the models would all reproduce perfectly the observed global trend."

That's false. The climate models don't have the fidelity to "reproduce perfectly the observed global trend". That's an absurd claim to be making. I don't see the semantics over the use of the word "tuned" of "fit". They seem to imply there is no iterative process in the models which would be patently false.

The rest is beyond my expertise, especially since I haven't read the other papers in question. The article does come to the right conclusion though, collaboration between both disciplines is essential. It would probably alleviate a lot of the skepticism as well.
 
lomiller said:
It would be more accurate to say it will be ignored. There is a never ending list of bad papers in obscure journals that have been ignored and therefore have “never been refuted” in the peer reviewed literature. By you logic we need to spend endless hours examining bizarre unscientific claims just because mainstream scientists have never bothered to address them.

Ultimately peer review is just a filter to catch most of the worst BS so while it’s necessary condition what we are really interested in are the responses from others who actively research in that field.

The paper you linked will almost certainly be ignored for the reasons I have already given you, and even if that proves not to be the case it’s still not relevant to the discussion, again for reason I have already given. In the case of obscure publications, however, it’s entirely appropriate to tell someone they need to do better then that even without a detailed debunking of the article.
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A classical case of argument from popularity, and it is being used precisely to avoid arguing the argument.

I have never heard an actual scientist say anything like this.
 
Spiking and more frequent El Ninos will be bad news for affected regions

NASA/NOAA Study Finds El Niños are Growing Stronger
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.c...10-277&msource=nino20100825&tr=y&auid=6878202

It's this kind of strong anomalies that will do a lot of damage long before the averages globally climb significantly.


speaking of anomalies....time to call it what it is....arriving consequences..

Time to blame climate change for extreme weather?


Editorial: Liability for climate change
IT IS time to start asking the hard questions. Countless people in flood-stricken Pakistan have lost families and livelihoods. Who can they hold responsible and turn to for reparations?
Less than a decade ago, these questions would have been dismissed outright. "Many scientists at the time said that you can never blame an individual weather event on climate change," says Myles Allen of the University of Oxford. But a small meeting of scientists in Colorado last week - organised by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, among others - suggests the tide is turning.


The aim of the Attribution of Climate-Related Events workshop was to discuss what information is needed to determine the extent to which human-induced climate change can be blamed for extreme weather events - possibly even straight after they have happened.
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more
http://www.newscientist.com/article...blame-climate-change-for-extreme-weather.html
 
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