You are right about many of the other "mega" eco-scares. However some of the predictions have happenned:
fishery depletion
ozone layer depletion (only stopped because governments got together in colective action of the sort you think is impossible and banned CFCs)
The resource depletion scares didn't factor in better extraction technology.
The food scares did not factor in better agricultural technology.
AGW is different. The science has been studied and refined over 30 years. It has got better - and I don't believe that all the climate scientists are collectively deluded. You assume that they all agree. they don't. There are many outliers - the get tested and thrive or sink.
Of course, you are old enough to know that just because scares usually are untue, you can't assume that all scares are untrue.
Lets hope we have a tech solution to AGW. Many have been proposed but as yet none seem to pan out.
Your argument assumes that GCMs claim to account for the various decadal forcings, oceans, solar, etc. They are developing, and the newer ones do this, the older ones did not. Not surprisingly, predictions from older models do not match where the unmodelled forcings are dominant.
Fine. That is my point exactly. How do we know that decadal forcings were not aliased into CO2? After all that is the IPCC mandate: to ascribe to CO2 all unaccounted for forcings.
Sounds like an agenda to me. Not science. And the PDO ect. have been known since 1997. Why did it take them 12 years to get around to accounting for known data? Might they have been afraid that they would come up with an inconvenient truth? Like maybe that the CO2 forcing is .1 deg per decade and not .3 or .5?
And that .1 deg per decade has been going on since the end of the Little Ice Age so might it not be possible the whole deal is natural variation? That would really be inconvenient.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Fine. That is my point exactly. How do we know that decadal forcings were not aliased into CO2? After all that is the IPCC mandate: to ascribe to CO2 all unaccounted for forcings.
It is not. The GCMs are physical models, they are run to work out expected temp change for different CO2 levels. They do not just look at temp rise recently, CO2 rise recently, and say OK it must be caused by CO2
That argument is the popular one, and used in polemics. The climate scientists are more sophisticated. So, if you read the documents rather than just the summary of summaries, are the IPCC reports.
AGW is different. The science has been studied and refined over 30 years.
Ah. Yes. The era of a positive PDO.
And this time it is different. Do you know how many times I have heard that in my 64 years? Not a compelling argument for me. In fact when I hear that it detracts from the argument being made.
BTW what else on the amelioration front is not being properly accounted for by the current extrapolations from "if our technology stays the same and things keep going the way they are" folks?
After all had things kept going the way they were going in 1900 it was predicted that New York would be six feet deep in horse shite by 1920.
It makes me very wary of horse shite predictions.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Nope. They are parameterized physical models. Not the same thing at all. For one thing the area chunks are too big. About 100 mi. on a side. In a 100 mi you can have mountains and seascapes. What is the parameter for that?
For instance UV radiation is parameterized because it is too complicated. What are the odds that they got it right?
Water vapor (WV) is parameterized because it is too complicated. What are the odds that they got it right?
And why do they have to parameterize WV? Well you have small ice crystals and large ice crystals. Which behave differently. And which will show up in any given situation is not well understood. It makes a big difference in albedo. You get it 1% too low and warming is predicted. You get it 1% too high and cooling is predicted. And you know even the AGW folks admit that when it comes to WV they don't even know the sign let alone the magnitude. So what are the odds of getting the number wrong enough to invalidate the predictions?
I do find your faith touching.
Bono Discovers Sustainable Development Isn’t Sustainable
by Phelim McAleer & Ann McElhinney
THE BIG problem with renewable energy is that it just doesn’t renew itself. The sun does not shine enough and the wind doesn’t blow enough to power the towns, cities, factories, hospitals and schools that make our lives so livable.
No environmentalist would ever allow their child to be treated in a hospital fully powered by “renewables”. They would not take the risk that the wind might stop whilst their baby was on the operating table. They would insist that the hospital and the life support systems had a fossil fuel powered back-up.
Nope. They are parameterized physical models. Not the same thing at all. For one thing the area chunks are too big. About 100 mi. on a side. In a 100 mi you can have mountains and seascapes. What is the parameter for that?
The issue here is subtle but crucial. And has been much discussed if you look.
Are the free parameters adequately cross-validated, against data other than the global temperature time series which are model outputs?
For example atmosphere transport parameters can be cross-validated in various ways. From detailed measurements of nlocal atmosphere conditions. By running the same GCMs but at a much finer grid so that the parameters can be determined from the model rather than given to model. etc.
So your questions about WV & UV are simple - one way to validate both is to run local GCMs with much smaller grids. Similarly, the approximations for heterogeneous terrain are tested by cross-validating against identical models with much finer grids.
It gets very complicated and you can see that whether the models are physical in a meaningful sense or not is not answered by blogs!
You want the details - go read the literature where validation methods are described and model approximations discussed, then reach your expert judgement. To guess based on partial information is not a clever strategy.
And you know even the AGW folks admit that when it comes to WV they don't even know the sign let alone the magnitude. So what are the odds of getting the number wrong enough to invalidate the predictions?
The IPCC report admits uncertainty and gives a range of sensitivities based on different models, assumptions, etc. All => GW. You can always find outliers but the best models (developed carefully over time and comprehensive) all indicate this range. Remember IPCC is evaluating the science, not doing it. And they don't give a single answer, they say this is the plausible 95% confidence limit range.
Simon - Have you read the technical bits of the latest IPCC report in context?
Re AGW is different.
Quantitatively - the effort put into evaluating the science and risks is unique. Fact.
Yeah. And they uniquely leave out solar scientists and geologists from the mix and their climate scientists are not very good at statistics. Other than that they are a fine bunch of fellows mandated to attribute everything they don't understand to CO2. MANDATED. You can look it up.
What is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) statement of purpose? Is the organization supposed to find the cause of global climate change and report on what can be done? Why no.
The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.
Hmmm. They already have their minds made up. Only human induced climate change is of interest to them.
And suppose the risk to climate from humans is negligible. Why the whole IPCC factory is out of a job.
Richard Lindzen has his suspicions as well.
So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. An example: Earlier this year, Texas Rep. Joe Barton issued letters to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and some of his co-authors seeking the details behind a taxpayer-funded analysis that claimed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the last millennium. Mr. Barton's concern was based on the fact that the IPCC had singled out Mr. Mann's work as a means to encourage policy makers to take action. And they did so before his work could be replicated and tested--a task made difficult because Mr. Mann, a key IPCC author, had refused to release the details for analysis. The scientific community's defense of Mr. Mann was, nonetheless, immediate and harsh. The president of the National Academy of Sciences--as well as the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union--formally protested, saying that Rep. Barton's singling out of a scientist's work smacked of intimidation.
All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists--a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.
Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.
And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.
Tom,
The whole enterprise reeks.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
They are mandated to determine what is the risk. Not to asume it is large.
Nothing in their mandate says they should assume all climate change is human-induced. In fact it is their job exactly to work out what if anything is human-induced.
They are mandated to determine what is the risk. Not to asume it is large.
Nothing in their mandate says they should assume all climate change is human-induced. In fact it is their job exactly to work out what if anything is human-induced.
I am not saying IPCC is pefect, just that if you judge it by this sort of mud-slinging from a biassed source you will not reach a fair judgement.
OK. The IPCC is not perfect. Are they even good enough? A number of former scientists on the IPCC team have criticized their methods.
Is Lindzen right or wrong about researchers who lose their positions for questioning AGW?
And how is alternative energy and cap and trade working for you Brits? And why is the term "wallet extraction" scheme so often connected to anti-AGW schemes in Britain?
Not to worry - the largest carbon emitter on the planet, China, is not buying it. They are very lucky. They are going to get all the world's heavy industry. Kiss your economy good by. That would lead to roving mobs.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now. Much of the alarm over climate change is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate. There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way, according to scientists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which released the second part of this year's report earlier this month). Indeed, meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing.
In many other respects, the ill effects of warming are overblown. Sea levels, for example, have been increasing since the end of the last ice age. When you look at recent centuries in perspective, ignoring short-term fluctuations, the rate of sea-level rise has been relatively uniform (less than a couple of millimeters a year). There's even some evidence that the rate was higher in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half. Overall, the risk of sea-level rise from global warming is less at almost any given location than that from other causes, such as tectonic motions of the earth's surface.
Moreover, actions taken thus far to reduce emissions have already had negative consequences without improving our ability to adapt to climate change. An emphasis on ethanol, for instance, has led to angry protests against corn-price increases in Mexico, and forest clearing and habitat destruction in Southeast Asia. Carbon caps are likely to lead to increased prices, as well as corruption associated with permit trading. (Enron was a leading lobbyist for Kyoto because it had hoped to capitalize on emissions trading.) The alleged solutions have more potential for catastrophe than the putative problem. The conclusion of the late climate scientist Roger Revelle—Al Gore's supposed mentor—is worth pondering: the evidence for global warming thus far doesn't warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate.
No coal? People will cut down forests. Very environmentally friendly that. Did you know that forests are carbon sinks?
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
After the last link I don't have to post more dirt on Lindzen? Whether or not you share his politics, it is established that whatever he says about sience is unreliable?
Let me know if you want a sustained Lindzen slur campaign here.
However in your post I see you have now abandoned the "AGW is not happenning" argument and moved on to the "corrupt governmental processes mitigating CO2 emmissions will do more harm then good" argument.
Logically, to think clearly about this issue. we need first to evaluate what benefit (or loss of harm) to the world, or to your local kin-group - since you perhaps would find this more relevant - continued unrestrained CO2 emmissions will do.
The IPCC has done a good job of quantifying this and stating the uncertainties.
Once we have some agreement on that we could consider what actions (whether it is working on a new Polywell or cap & trade limits) will actually help.
My problem with your position is that you conflete the two - and spend half your time (incorrectly) rubbishing science you have not bothered to look at with due care - assuming that your favourite politically sympathetic blog comment is authoritative. Just as ravingdave earlier on this thread.
As polemic - to convince the unthinking masses - this sort of subject switch works well. Not here, I hope?
