A Cooling Consensus via Climate Depot.
… if the consensus climate models turn out to be falsified just a few years later, average temperature having remained at levels not even admitted to be have been physically possible, the authority of consensus will have been exposed as rather weak.
Related: Consensus tracks the temperature trend.
100% of climate models are wrong.
Now that is a consensus we can actually believe in.
Mark Steyn: Global Warming Assumes Room Temperature (cont)
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/351762/global-warming-assumes-room-temperature-cont-mark-steyn
Few things give me the pleasure of watching The Economist’s slow climbdown on this subject. I remember when The Economist was good, and that makes me feel old.
The New Republic article that The Economist article is commenting on [fair play; the NR mentions them] mistakenly calls 1998 the warmest year on record, but it ends this way —
// The last decade is proof of climate change, not a cause for reflexive skepticism. It was the warmest on record, despite a laundry-list of mitigating factors like prolonged La Nina, a wave of modest volcanic eruptions, and an ebb in solar activity. As those attenuating factors subside, climate scientists anticipate another round of rapid warming. //
a bit that The Economist doesn’t get around to quoting.
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In addition to repeating his guru’s mistakes he adds his own when he ventures into interpretation —
// Isaac Held, a Senior Research Scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, says “no one has ever expected warming to be continuous, increasing like a straight line.” Those much-cited computer models are composed of numerous simulations that individually account for naturally occurring variability. But, Meehl says, “the averages cancel it out.””
Isn’t this transparently ad hoc. The point of averaging is to prune off exceedingly unlikely possibilities. It does not vindicate a model to note that it gives no weight—that it “cancels out”—its only accurate constitutive simulations. //
A natural variation like La Nina/El Nino cancels out because no more heat is being added to the system. So, when it is warmer than average one place, it is cooler somethere else. [Warming [or cooling] everywhere requires the a change in the amount of heat in the system — a forcing.]
Others, like the cooling effect of Volcanoes or changes in solar activity, are measured and removed so that what remains is owing to the effect of greenhouse gasses.
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And why would The Economist want to miminize the problem?
The stated aim of the politicians is to limit temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsiius. To do that, it is calculated that no more than 565 gigatons of carbon can be produced by humans from here on — [which would add up to 1 trillion gigatons total]. But petroleum producers claim to have, in conventional reserves, some 2,795 Gigatons.
So
// If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off $20 trillion in assets. //
Christy Clark still believes, as do most of the caged rats infesting Metro Vancouver. They will continue to believe even when their tongues freeze to each other’s backsides and their peckers freeze clean off.
// Mark Steyn: Global Warming Assumes Room Temperature (cont) //
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Did you read the article? And the one it is (cont) from?
Neither mentions “room temperature”. That provocative headline is presumably meant to attract readers who might contribute to NR’s defense of Michael Mann’s lawsuit. [There are links to the begging letter in both parts]
So the real headline is We Need Your Help
“Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries.”
Yup. Sorta like the 30,000+ who died from hypothermia last winter in lesser Britan.Damn that warming.
And the only one’s who are screwing the poorer countries are the eco-whores.All part of Agenda 21 though,so no problem.
And note the weasel word “may”. Riiiiiight. And we all “may” have sex with the girl next door.
Consensus isn’t science (sarc)
What TrueNorthist and Justthinin said. Christy Clark et al still want to believe, at least publicly, so they can continue to scam more taxes based on the fear factor and institute more control over business and people. A green soviet system.
And to think at one time I seriously considered subscribing to The Economist. Even today’s Pravda is more balanced.
Dizzy, you raise a string of very good points. In your discussion of models it needs to be added that no model is evidence of anything. Models are only illustrations of what we think is the truth. Evidence lies only in the physical observations brought forward to justify them. Any reference to models as evidence is by definition ad hoc.
As to why the Economist seeks to minimize the problem: the Green climate change agenda is a moral imperative. In specific, the remedies it calls for: lower consumption, restricted energy use, renewable energy and all the rest of the laundry list. Global warming is nothing more than justification for what the Greens had already established more than two decades prior as moral imperatives for society. The drones at the Economist bought into this moral view a long time ago. And the response of any group when its faith is threatened is to seek to minimize or deny physical evidence to the contrary. This is why they’re having such trouble with the whole topic.
Paging Lorrie Goldstein, paging Lorrie Goldstein…..
Agree. I can’t read it. Not even this article. My frustration boiled over from the first paragraph.
I don’t think the global warmists really care any more on having to sell their lies to the public because they’ve sold the load to political leaders and the weight of national governments will push this load down our throats.
Europe is headed for economic deline and a main reason is the cost to prevent “global warming”. Obama in his Berlin speech is still claiming that he’ll make it a lead item on his agenda when its clear that average temps are dropping. The UK was pretty much ready to let citizens freeze this winter/spring because the government was willing to follow the dictates of the EU parliament and in our own case we have Ontario, deep in debt, largely ignoring hydro power (the greenest source of energy on the face of the earth) and still pushing at any cost wind mills and solar. The Liberals continue to increase energy rates to consumers all in the name of renewable power and polls show that if an election were held the liberals would probably get power again. In the west we’ve got energy to spare from oil, coal & natural gas and the warmists/enviro crowd are sucessfully shutting down the most economical method of getting it to those who need it.
I’m not sure what it would take to get a critical mass of the western world’s population to stand up and scream we’ve had it, perhaps an ice age but then we’d be prepared to pay any cost and get power from any source to keep from freezing to death, even multimillion dollar wind mills.
// In your discussion of models it needs to be added that no model is evidence of anything. Models are only illustrations of what we think is the truth. Evidence lies only in the physical observations brought forward to justify them. //
O.K.; if you define evidence that way & if you replace “what we think” with “what we deduce” [As Sherlock Holmes said — “When you have eliminated the impossible ….”]. A model or simulation attempts to make a mathematical construct based on the evidence & accepted theory & then go beyond the evidence [predict or retrodict]. The ad hoc part comes because if it doesn’t replicate the actual observations you have to redo it until it does. Then you can have more confidence going beyond the observations. So models interact between observations & deductions.
The guy quoted, Isaac Held, has a web page for students in which he constructs & explains models.
// Global warming is nothing more than justification for what the Greens had already established more than two decades prior as moral imperatives for society. //
It depends on how you mean this. If you go back to the admonitions to save paper bags, step lightly on the land, abjure consumerism, then AGW presents a justification [indeed an imperative] against what you have protested on other grounds [pollution, make-work consumption, the rat race etc.]
But if you are saying that AGW science is itself a confected argument in order to achieve green objectives ….. nope.
AGW is real; that is why it serves so well as a justification — save paper bags becomes “save the planet”.
In fact, the traditional green objectives are not enough to solve the problem.
I know people here will appreciate this good Canadian take on what is necessary —
// Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”
Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: […], the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science.
But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the [Heartland] crowd […] may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution. //
Capitalism vs. the Climate
The side The Economist takes is a given.
Dizzy, that’s precisely what I’m saying: the AGW science as laid out in the various IPCC assessment reports is a confection. Simply dealing with the science and leaving out all the policy implications, it makes no sense from a purely physics perspective. The actual hard evidence that the AGW phenomenon exists is surprisingly small and highly questionable.
“Blinded by consensus.”
That was in an ’80s song, wasn’t it?
The collapse of CAGW will depend on how much various populations remember of the past. While I don’t read newspapers, I do save significant front page stories for future reference. For S-central BC, there was a story 5 years or so ago of how the future would be one of deadly extreme heat and extreme drought and how local governments would need to carefully husband water resources as most likely the area would run out of water.
Fast forward 5 years and it’s the wettest spring that I have seen in 30 years in this area. Rivers are at record heights and more rain is in the forecast. I’m sure that if I confronted the climate “expert” whose predictions were the focus of the 5 year old newspaper story that he’s likely concoct some ad-hoc explanation of why it was so wet. The CAGW is starting to have a remarkable resemblance to the increasingly complicated models to explain the motions of the planets and sun when the fundamental assumption was that the earth was stationary and all other celestial bodies rotated about it. Kepler and Galileo were two of the historically remembered names of individuals who smashed the celestial middle ages equivalent of CAGW. The treatment of Galileo is an indication of how far fanatics will go to defend their religions.
Right now we have more than sufficient observational data that CO2 is not a primary climate driver. This was predicted ages ago when it was noted that warming activity of CO2 was related to the logarithm of its concentration and hence we’d have to go to rather impressive atmospheric CO2 levels to observe any significant warming.
Unfortunately most people have short memories and, in this age of digital information, changing the past is trivial given the impermanence of data stored as a series of malleable bytes. While paper is cumbersome, it’s far more difficult for the state to find every copy of an inconvenient document and alter it to conform to the current reality. This is one of the most dangerous aspects of information technology. When I was originally looking at storing everything digitally 30 years ago, I naively assumed that WORM (write once read many) drives would be the way of the future. On a WORM disk, one can’t erase data, just add new data. I had started to write an EMR program based on unalterable WORM drives when they suddenly vanished from the marked to be replaced by writable CD’s and DVD’s. However, the cost/byte of disk storage has dropped far faster than even my most optimistic estimates and thus I no longer use immutable media when I can buy a 1 Tb HDD for $70 in the US. Most organizations have made the same financial decisions. Great for storing lots of data but now nothing is permanent.
CAGW was the statists ultimate wet dream which allowed them to act out their basest totalitarian fantasies under the guise of saving the planet. They won’t give up on this easily and expect things to get very ugly as the world refuses to conform to the disastrous future so carefully planned out by a consensus of climate “experts”. One way of preventing this crap to be taught in schools is to have CAGW defined as a religion and invoke the laws which prevent religious teachings in schools. CAGW meets all of the criteria for a religion and it’s time to get court judgements to this effect.
Unfortunately, the fraction of sheeple in the population increases steadily with time. At some point this fraction will be large enough that a statist dictatorship will be permanently entrenched; that is until the advancing arctic ice sheet covers the cities of the northern hemisphere. So, while there are still a significant fraction of people who aren’t afraid of statist tyranny in the population, it’s time to start pushing back hard against CAGW. That means dispensing with civil discourse when one has any interactions with watermelons and, for those in BC, making sure that Christie Clark never gets a seat in the legislation. It might mean holding ones nose and voting for the NDP to make a point but if she is rejected by the people, even the most dense backbencher will clue into the fact that this moonbat has to go. Write letters to your MLA telling them how much you resent the blatant tax grab from taxing plant food and the idiotic policy of no longer building hydroelectric projects.
// the AGW science as laid out in the various IPCC assessment reports […] makes no sense from a purely physics perspective. //
Well. apart from swapping contrary claims, there is not much one can do in this particular venue.
This article takes a “physics perspective”
Its to far along for the lib left to admit their war on terror side show “climate change” is nothing but a leftist (big government) pyramid scheme.. Bush 1 went off to war without their permission and they took their ball, went home and started their own (equally expensive war) to save the world from fart gas..
They feared a global scale right wing conservative victory in Iraq combined with the obvious liberalism = multiculturalism = police state connection.. They were reeling and needed a distraction they could all get behind asap..
This police state, multiculturalism, liberalism connection in regards to our western freedoms and democracy is unavoidable.. They even went so far as to toss out ole Obama to close the circle in a attempt to bring closure to multiculturalism.. The dead tree bore fruit.. Can we please move on to us saving the world with our pyramid scheme..
The last paragraph in the linked article gives the game away. Like the rest of the green science literature, it assumes a water vapour feedback mechanism which has been neither observed nor demonstrated. If anything, Svensmark’s cloud chamber experiments, reinforced by the research at CERN demonstrate that cloud formation has entirely different origins.
Also the article ignores the fact that the response of CO2 in atmosphere is logarithmic not linear.
// assumes a water vapour feedback mechanism which has been neither observed nor demonstrated. //
Really? Water vapour is a green house gas. As CO2 increases air temperature, the air holds more water vapour which is a feedback greenhouse effect. [I guess he assumes that his readers would know that ]
Clouds are not water vapour. Svensmark is a real scientist, but I a think even he would agree with Pierrehumbert that cloud formaion in incompletly understood. [Unless when he is wearing his cosmoclimatology hat]
// the article ignores the fact that the response of CO2 in atmosphere is logarithmic not linear //
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pp. 37-38
The greenhouse effect of CO2 on Earth and Mars is visually manifest as the ditch carved out of the Planck spectrum near 667 cm−1. That dip represents energy that would have escaped to space were it not for the opacity of CO2. On Venus, the CO2 greenhouse effect extends well beyond the ditch, owing to the opacity of the continuum associated with so much CO2. In the Earth spectrum, one can also see a broad region in which water vapor has reduced the radiating temperature to a value well below the surface temperature.
For Earth and Mars, the width of the CO2 ditch corresponds approximately to the width of the spectral region over which the atmosphere is nearly opaque to IR. Increasing atmospheric CO2 increases the width of the ditch and hence increases the CO2 greenhouse effect. But the increase occurs in the wings of the absorption feature rather than at the center (see figure 2). That LIMITATION IS THE ORGIN OF THE LOGARITHMIC RELATION between CO2 concentration and the resulting perturbation in Earth’s energy budget. It has been a feature of every climate model since that of Svante Arrhenius in 1896.
Per square meter of surface, Mars has nearly 70 times as much CO2 in its atmosphere as Earth, but the low Martian atmospheric pressure results in narrower spectral lines. That weakens absorption so much that the Martian CO2 ditch has a width somewhat less than Earth’s.
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Perhaps if he thought the likes of Anthony Watts would be reading his article, he would have included more detailed explanations.
My favourite part of the last paragraph [ love that calm distancing vew of physicists] —
Whatever the future holds for newly discovered planets, interest remains intense in maintaining the habitability of the planet likely to be our only home for some time to come.