Global Cooling

[tomclarke]

This summary is qualitative and therefore very subject to bias.

It is, technically, wrong, because "they" have not been getting "everything" wrong.

But I do not believe you have evidence for how much of the science has been right and wrong over the years, or how much is changed by the recent hiatus. It is easy to highlight every apparent (or sometimes real) change in understanding as "getting it wrong and ignore all that has been got right.

When you say "storms they were predicting". There was no such definite prediction. On the one hand you correctly see there is much uncertainty on what is known about climate. On the other you turn speculative "it is likley that" comments about effects into exact predictions, and protest when they do not happen.

Show me the "settled science" predicting more storms? There is none, just an untested more energy => more possibility of storms correlation with some evidence.

If you are interested in effects of AGW look at the fascinating (still speculative) analysis of how jet stream changes have weirded UK weather in the last 5 years - which BTW is not nice for those in the UK. Some of this applies also to the US weirding. The point is that the science on why and how these changes happen is new, and not simple. Nor could it easily be predicted beforehand that these things would happen. But the high warming at the N pole is likely to alter weather around it - and indeed that happens.

"You are conflating warming, with effects"

Warming is the only effect used to justify the worst of the warmist's economic policies.

Now there has been no warming for over 15 years, they have for several years been harping on droughts and storms, but there have always been droughts and storms...

...although there haven't been the storms they were predicting were the inevitable result of human released CO2.

They keep on getting everything wrong, tomclarke.

Not some, everything, and outside the margins of error they published, at that.

[TDPerk]

"If you are interested in effects of AGW look at the fascinating (still speculative) analysis of how jet stream changes have weirded UK weather in the last 5 years"

I can recall a Dr. Clayton in the book "Life After Doomsday" citing a Rand report to the effect that the weather had, statistically speaking, been unusually calm for the preceding 60 70 years--at that point, the whole of the 20th century. The reported stated how we should be prepared at any point for the weather to become statistically normal.

Much more variable.

Nothing weirded the UK weather, it's just becoming normal.

When you know history, you can insulate yourself from the wilder claims of the AGW fraudsters.

[tomclarke]

"If you are interested in effects of AGW look at the fascinating (still speculative) analysis of how jet stream changes have weirded UK weather in the last 5 years"

I can recall a Dr. Clayton in the book "Life After Doomsday" citing a Rand report to the effect that the weather had, statistically speaking, been unusually calm for the preceding 60 70 years--at that point, the whole of the 20th century. The reported stated how we should be prepared at any point for the weather to become statistically normal.

Much more variable.

Nothing weirded the UK weather, it's just becoming normal.

When you know history, you can insulate yourself from the wilder claims of the AGW fraudsters.

That does not look like a science argument to me.

Also, no climate scientist is claiming to know what has caused recent UK weirding - but there are some clever new ideas that explain the facts well. Maybe they will not pan out, but they tick a few boxes.

The reference to AGW fraudsters appears to be an idee fixee.

If this response if your reaction to somone quoting new science has it occurred to you that maybe you will be missing things?

[TDPerk]

"That does not look like a science argument to me."

Because you accept the AGW fraudsters idea that history should be discarded, and what they have adjusted the temperature/weather record to be is the truth. It isn't.

You now what's really weird about the UK's weather? You could grow recognizably Med wine grapes in Scotland once.

Then it got to too cold to do that for around 1500 years. Now that's weird.

"Also, no climate scientist is claiming to know what has caused recent UK weirding - but there are some clever new ideas that explain the facts well. Maybe they will not pan out, but they tick a few boxes."

You just implied CO2 had something to do with it. Did you come up with that on your own, or did you read somewhere where an AGW fraudster suggested it had something to do with human released CO2?

"The reference to AGW fraudsters appears to be an idee fixee."

Maybe the fact the AGW fraudsters have repeatedly been caught out in their lies has something to do with that. There is no evidence to support the idea. They made it all up, sometimes cherry picking data, sometimes inventing it from whole cloth.

"If this response if your reaction to somone quoting new science has it occurred to you that maybe you will be missing things?"

You have quoted no science. You've mentioned papers by people who are invested in the idea human released CO2 has warmed the planet--and it hasn't.

It hasn't for 17 years.

AGW is a demonstrated false concept, where it hasn't in fact been shown to be literal fraud by faked data.

[MSimon]

tom,

Look up the de Vries cycle. It is so well known it has a name. But perhaps you don't know about it because you think CO2 has ALL the answers.

OK. You agree about ocean cycles. Now do you suppose that if they were in the models the heating imputed to CO2 would be a lot less?

================

Your faith is charming. And you will do everything your mind allows to keep it. Doubt is your friend.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning. - Aleister Crowley

===============

If there is room for mavericks you should study them. It is possible they are correct and you are not.

WUWT is not uniformly good. True. But neither is the literature you point to.

In fact events will show that which you have put your faith in is uniformly bad.

===============

Re: Lysenkoism. Ah. We do it differently in America. We do not suppress alternatives to the official theory. But officials do make sure the official theory pays much better. Human nature being what it is.... And keeping a few disbelievers around is a good thing. It shows that the science is "open". Until the call goes out to hang them.

As to science - I prefer the open methods at WUWT and other such sites to the methods you prefer. The UEA papers revealed a LOT.

The science against CO2 has gotten better over time. And now we are on the cusp of events that will shatter that whole theory. Except among the very faithful. Be patient.

[TDPerk]

WUWT is not uniformly good. True. But neither is the literature you point to.

That's leap more charitable than I think you ought to be.

As to science - I prefer the open methods at WUWT and other such sites to the methods you prefer. The UEA papers revealed a LOT.

Open Methods. The work is shown.

Exactly why AGW is not science. Ought to get an Ignoble, every one of them...

...Except for the ones who by rights should get prison terms. They tried to bring about the deaths of millions.

[djolds1]

And BTW the "science" is not separate from the politics. Lysenkoism.

Yup. The money made available to pro-CAGW researchers and boosters has been MASSIVE. Hundreds of billions of dollars disbursed by multiple state entities across the entire Western world, not just in research but in "socially responsible" subsidized Green Energy Industries, financial-regulatory power grabs like the attempt at creating Carbon Markets, the emotional payoff of being a participant in "saving the planet," and so on. That is a huge and widespread motivation for rational self-interest in shading the truth.

From MSimon
" In 10 years or so sociologists of science will be discussing "how could it happen?""

I know technically aware, competent people who still haven't heard of the Milliken oil drop fiasco.

Unwinding the influence of those now emotionally committed to taking the fraud seriously will take multiple decades.

Agreed.

The kindest thing I can wish for tomclarke is that he is a very old man, and won't live to see irrefutable proof of the nature of what he put his faith into.

Unkind and unjustified. Certainly the likes of Mann, Hansen and Jones will never admit their knowing culpability - for them the promotion of CAGW is "The Cause," and there are no holds barred in their 1968-Neverending "war" to save the planet. But well-read people who are knowledgeable albeit deceived like tom? They are a separate issue, and tend to "click" when the weight of the evidence passes the tipping point and can no longer be denied. That is no different than a paradigm standing until it can't anymore. Its only been five years since Climategate 1; the accelerating collapse of CAGW is palpable, but not all the way there yet.

Of course scientists are human, the scientific process is not perfect. That applies to both sides of this debate, except the wuwt posters you seem to think likely correct do not have the discipline of exposure to scrutiny and correction from 1000s of other scientists with different ideas that the mainstream guys do.

There is no aspect of this debate where you do not find variability in the published science, with a range of views. Over time the ones that fit facts better predominate.

That does not look like Lysenkoism to me.

So - yes scientists are imperfect, published science is imperfect.

But, no, it is not state controlled like Lysenkoism, there is variation and room for mavericks, as well as strong debate about key issues with different people pulling in different directions.

See Dr. Richard Muller's critique of "The Team" in the aftermath of the 2009 Climategate leak.

Five minute synopsis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk

Fifty two minute full presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbR0EPWgkEI&src

Muller remains a committed Warmist, and is trying to salvage the Warmist case through Berkeley Earth nee "BEST" database.

And even Muller is trying to read "The Team" out of Establishment Climatology as a threat to the field's credibility.

What "The Team" did was subvert the scientific process by trying to deny publication to your above-cited "mavericks," destroy the world's longest continuous instrumental land temperature record (the UK) leaving only their "adjusted" records in its place, and commit academic fraud by knowingly biasing their results in the manner Muller identifies above. They also created a peer-review round robin that made top-tier papers in IPCC climatology very incestuous and as a result TAINTED.

And "The Team" remain to this day the headliner researchers involved in the IPCC and "mainstream" climatological research.

There aren't thousands of top-tier "scientists" pushing CAGW Tom, there are somewhere between 20 and 50, all very well dug into academia. Everyone else is tacking the phrase "climate change" onto their grant applications to study the purple squirrel and self-castrating amphibious wombat, because they know the grant is more likely to be approved with that religious code phrase added onto the grant application.

Finally - the quality of the published science is far superior to the typical WUWT offering which is under-researched, over-speculative, and often just egregiously wrong. (I'm not saying every single post on WUWT is that, but many are, and where a decent paper is referenced the WUWT poster typically egregiously misunderstands its meaning).

WUWT takes some deep pleasure at times in skewering scholar-frauds, as well they should. Knaves should be held up for frequent and extensive humiliation; it is the just fate of knaves.

But I do not believe you have evidence for how much of the science has been right and wrong over the years, or how much is changed by the recent hiatus. It is easy to highlight every apparent (or sometimes real) change in understanding as "getting it wrong and ignore all that has been got right.

Basic gedankenexperiment.

If the Earth's climate is dominated by positive feedback mechanisms, why are we here to debate it?

If dangerous "run away" positive feedbacks dominate the Earth's climate, the Earth should've gone the route of either Venus or a permanent Icehouse Earth LONG before the dinosaurs.

If anything, the Earth has "run away" toward the COLD for the last 2.6 million years. And even in that, it has in fact maintained a generally stable global temperature range, +- 10 degC or so between Glacials and Interglacials. Even the Eocene Optimum of 65 Mya was at most 12 degC above the IPCC baseline. That is REMARKABLE stability, and strongly indicates that any climatological hypothesis which rests on positive as opposed to negative feedbacks is not credible. And seeing as the current Holocene Interglacial has at best a few thousand years left to it, we want to keep the Earth on the cooler side of (inter)glaciation WHY again? Precisely, please. Because farming on top of mile-thick ice sheets presents... challenges.

[hanelyp]

Basic gedankenexperiment.

If the Earth's climate is dominated by positive feedback mechanisms, why are we here to debate it?

A most enlightening thought experiment to those of us familiar with feedback and control system theory. To anyone else I'm not sure it registers as comprehensible.

When I look at geological period climate patterns it looks like a bi-modal chaotic system, and we're currently in the warmer of the major modes. It does not look like a system dominated by dangerous positive feedback of any sort.

[djolds1]

Basic gedankenexperiment.

If the Earth's climate is dominated by positive feedback mechanisms, why are we here to debate it?

A most enlightening thought experiment to those of us familiar with feedback and control system theory. To anyone else I'm not sure it registers as comprehensible.

Tom seems knowledgeable enough to know the basics:

Positive feedbacks have a strong tendency to run out of control to the extremes; nuclear fission chain reactions are one of the more typical examples.

Negative feedbacks run to the central tendency/basin attractor. I.e. when perturbed, they return to their equilibrium state/ stability conditions. They don't run away.

When I look at geological period climate patterns it looks like a bi-modal chaotic system, and we're currently in the warmer of the major modes. It does not look like a system dominated by dangerous positive feedback of any sort.

If the Earth's climate was dominated by positive feedback effects, it never would've broken out of the Icehouse phase, and would be a massive relative of the Galilean moons today.

Hell, consider Mars. It has a daily temperature range of 20 degC at noon to -153 degC overnight. A daily temperature range of 173 degC. Even the entirety of the Eocene Optimum saw at MOST a range of 25 degC; +- 12 degC - and that was spaced out over tens of millions of years, not a few hours daily.

[tomclarke]

Indeed I do know the basics. But it seems that folks here are so incredibly arrogant that they'd rather believe the whole scientific establishment - and 1000 PhDs learning atmospherics - are idiots are deceivers than bother to read for themselves.

The overall feedback is negative - obviously - or we'd get hysteresis.

Actually, the holocene glacial/interglacial flip is an example of positive feedback, where (mainly albedo change) feedbacks flip the earth from one bistable state to another within a few hundred years.

But heating up from an interglacial we don't hit that. However, just because an extra positive feedback (ice) dominates at lower temperatures and pushes F > 1 (see below) does not mean that when we are in a metastable state F should magically be < 0. All we know is that F < 1 by definition. Those who expect hard clipping are thinking amplifiers not climate!

The whole system is nonlinear so it is always possible perturbing up from our holocene maximum temp we will hit some other unknown positive feedback - but let's not be alarmist - there is no evidence for that and current or a bit below temps seem pretty stable to forcings especially in positive direction (negative could hit the albedo change flip).

So then (I guess many here will know this) we can do a linear approximation and look at what happens as forcing (equiv W/m^2 at surface) is added to the climate system.

The way climate scientists look at this is to disconnect the BIG negative feedback - TOA radiation at T^4 - from all the other feedbacks. The T^4 radiation feedback is a stabiliser of course, and means that in absence of other feedbacks forcing on surface turns into temperature change linearly.

The presence of other feedbacks, positive or negative, amplifies or reduces that change. the system only gets unstable if the overall feedback amplitude is positive and approaches T^4.

You are thinking that day/night temperatures are affected by feedbacks. But of course that is a very short timescale - shorter than the large H2O pos feedback, and the much larger GHG content of the earth's atmosphere (there is more of it, and more H2O) means that surface swings on earth are much less.

The sensitivity of climate to forcings looks like a factor of:

1/(1-F) where F are the (non T^4 radiation) feedbacks scaled so that F=1 is a positive feedback of same magnitude as the T^4 radiation.

Any positive or negative feedback scaling of < 1 is stable, though near to one would be borderline unstable and also have a large amplification factor making the climate very sensitive to any forcing.

The IPCC expects feedbacks in the range: 0 to +0.7 I think. (I might have to revise those figures). There is a lot of uncertainty in many of the constituent factors, and overall observational evidence goes for a middle of range value, though with caveats - its a long story - too long for one post.

Basic gedankenexperiment.

If the Earth's climate is dominated by positive feedback mechanisms, why are we here to debate it?

A most enlightening thought experiment to those of us familiar with feedback and control system theory. To anyone else I'm not sure it registers as comprehensible.

Tom seems knowledgeable enough to know the basics:

Positive feedbacks have a strong tendency to run out of control to the extremes; nuclear fission chain reactions are one of the more typical examples.

Negative feedbacks run to the central tendency/basin attractor. I.e. when perturbed, they return to their equilibrium state/ stability conditions. They don't run away.

When I look at geological period climate patterns it looks like a bi-modal chaotic system, and we're currently in the warmer of the major modes. It does not look like a system dominated by dangerous positive feedback of any sort.

If the Earth's climate was dominated by positive feedback effects, it never would've broken out of the Icehouse phase, and would be a massive relative of the Galilean moons today.

Hell, consider Mars. It has a daily temperature range of 20 degC at noon to -153 degC overnight. A daily temperature range of 173 degC. Even the entirety of the Eocene Optimum saw at MOST a range of 25 degC; +- 12 degC - and that was spaced out over tens of millions of years, not a few hours daily.

[MSimon]

Those who expect hard clipping are thinking amplifiers not climate!

But we do get hard clipping on the positive side. The tropics never go much above 30C because evaporation increases and cools. Plus clouds.

And your point about going in and out of glaciation (tripping points) due to ice/snow albedo changes on land is IMO correct.

Your limiting factor - as you have stated - is that you can't believe that a bunch of criminals set up this whole game. You think it is science only. I gave you some things to look up. And evidently you didn't. I'm going to try again. Not because I think there is any chance you will study the matter but because there are lurkers who may benefit.

Maurice Strong climate
John Holdren population

[tomclarke]

It is certainly true that there are nonlinear effects of many kinds that come into play. This argument is qualitative and so not worth much. It is also wrong: evaporation absorbs heat due to heat capacity but puts more H2O in the atmosphere. As you know H2O is a very strong GHG so this increases warming. The evaporation cannot affect the overall long-term heat balance unless the H2O level in the atmosphere continually increases. That is not possible, but if it were, it would make a continually increasing forcing due to the extra GH effect from the water vapour.

Shall we do some simple quantified analysis? 3W/m^2 forcing would have to be balanced by the enthalpy of vapourisation of water: 2000kJ/kg. The mean water content of the atmospherewould cover the earth 25mm deep, giving a total mass of 25kg/m^2. So we need approx 50MJ /m^2 to double the H2O content in the air which at a radiation imbalance of 3W/m^2 would take around one year. (Very approx).

Looking at it another way, doubling H2O in the atmosphere, assuming constant relative humidity, corresponds to a temperature increase of 15C!

So for a 3C increase in temperature (what you might get from doubling CO2) we have about 1/5 of this time or 2 months to evaporate enough water given a 3W/m^2 forcing. Since the time of a CO2 doubling is maybe 100 years you can see the time constant here is insignificant.

Thus this folk science argument, when quantified with elementary physics a high school student could get from wikipedia, fails.

I don't criticise: I had no idea how it would pan out till I did the above calculation. I do criticise the arrogance that assumes every single scientist in the world looking at the atmosphere would get something as basic as this wrong. Its just stupid.

Those who expect hard clipping are thinking amplifiers not climate!

But we do get hard clipping on the positive side. The tropics never go much above 30C because evaporation increases and cools. Plus clouds.

And your point about going in and out of glaciation (tripping points) due to ice/snow albedo changes on land is IMO correct.

Your limiting factor - as you have stated - is that you can't believe that a bunch of criminals set up this whole game. You think it is science only. I gave you some things to look up. And evidently you didn't. I'm going to try again. Not because I think there is any chance you will study the matter but because there are lurkers who may benefit.

Maurice Strong climate
John Holdren population

[TDPerk]

http://talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.p ... 15#p114186

I've never gone for science by popularity contest.

http://talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.p ... 04#p114230

No, unless "your group of people" is a set of 10,000 scientists in diverse fields. You are at liberty to view all scientists as fraudulent, of course. Looks like you have to, to maintain your current mindset.

The stress of the cognitive dissonance must be terrific.

[tomclarke]

I think this is going from one extreme to another. True - I will back my understanding against 5 or 6 people posting here. Also, I will not accept what any number of other scientists say where I have clear evidence from my own working that they are wrong.

Which seems to be what people here think they have except every scrap of scientific evience so far posted on these three threads contrary to mainstream opinion has proven to be wrong. Mainstream opinion has a good deal of variation, some things are not known with any certainty, so maybe 10% of what is posted here has the nature of a straw man where you think you are contradicting what is established but in fact not doing so because there is no settled agreement.

My argument here though is slightly different. I'm saying that something which is simple and concrete - like instrumenting sea temperatures - cannot be spoofed by 10,000 scientists who know about it. It is just not sensible.

I'm not saying its imposssible there are systematic errors that affect the whole of a field where the evidence is fragmentary and a matter of interpretation. They will get ironed out in time by more evidence and the scientific process - but science operates by making lots of different mistakes, so to claim there are not sometimes things thought understood which turn out to be not understood would be stupid.

http://talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.p ... 15#p114186

I've never gone for science by popularity contest.

http://talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.p ... 04#p114230

No, unless "your group of people" is a set of 10,000 scientists in diverse fields. You are at liberty to view all scientists as fraudulent, of course. Looks like you have to, to maintain your current mindset.

The stress of the cognitive dissonance must be terrific.

[TDPerk]

True - I will back my understanding against 5 or 6 people posting here.

You don't have an understanding of the global climate, no one does. The ones with the best clue are the ones accepting what the thermometers are telling them, that the globe is not warming despite what AGW theory insists must be happening. These are not the AGW warmists.

Also, I will not accept what any number of other scientists say where I have clear evidence from my own working that they are wrong.

You have clear evidence the AGW theory is supported by fraud and not facts. Data is not made available for analysis, the Medieval Warm Period was disappeared, the UEA dataset is in hopeless unreplicable disarray, the decline was hidden, the Maunder Minimum happened. Hansen is fighting tooth and nail to keep his books from being analyzed, Mann has effectively retracted his hockey stock paper in the face of it's manifest "errors".