by Judith Curry
A comprehensive survey has been conducted of the American Meteorological Society membership to elicit their views on global warming.
Meteorologists’ views about global warming: A survey of American Meteorological Society professional members
Neil Stenhouse, Edward Maibach, Sara Cobb, Ray Ban, Andrea Bleistein, Paul Croft, Eugene Bierly, Keith Seitter, Gary Rasmussen
Abstract. Meteorologists and other atmospheric science experts are playing important roles in helping society respond to climate change. However, members of this professional community are not unanimous in their views of climate change, and there has been tension among members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) who hold different views on the topic. In response, AMS created the Committee to Improve Climate Change Communication to explore and, to the extent possible, resolve these tensions. To support this committee, in January 2012 we surveyed all AMS members with known email addresses, achieving a 26.3% response rate (n=1,854). In this paper we tested four hypotheses: (1) perceived conflict about global warming will be negatively associated — and (2) climate expertise, (3) liberal political ideology, and (4) perceived scientific consensus will be positively associated — with (a) higher personal certainty that global warming is happening, (b) viewing the global warming observed over the past 150 years as mostly human-caused, and (c) perception of global warming as harmful. All four hypotheses were confirmed. Expertise, ideology, perceived consensus and perceived conflict were all independently related to respondents’ views on climate, with perceived consensus and political ideology being most strongly related. We suggest that AMS should: attempt to convey the widespread scientific agreement about climate change; acknowledge and explore the uncomfortable fact that political ideology influences the climate change views of meteorology professionals; refute the idea that those who do hold non-majority views just need to be “educated” about climate change; continue to deal with the conflict among members of the meteorology community.
In press, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society [abstract] [preliminarysurvey results].
The introduction provides an interesting survey of previous analysis of scientific views on this topic, excerpts:
Research conducted to date with meteorologists and other atmospheric scientists has shown that they are not unanimous in their views of climate change. In a survey of earth scientists, Doran and Zimmerman (2009) found that while a majority of meteorologists surveyed are convinced humans have contributed to global warming (64%), this was a substantially smaller majority than that found among all earth scientists (82%). Another survey, by Farnsworth and Lichter (2009), found that 83% of meteorologists surveyed were convinced human-induced climate change is occurring, again a smaller majority than among experts in related areas such as ocean sciences (91%) and geophysics (88%).
I suspect that the higher level of belief among ocean sciences and particularly geophysics represents second order belief (i.e. support for a perceived consensus) rather than personal research on AGW detection/attribution or a careful survey of the literature.
How to square this with the oft reported 97% consensus? Well, ‘climate scientists’ in these surveys typically includes economists, ecologists etc., nearly all probably representing second order belief.
The article attempts to explain ‘disbelief’ in context of lower expertise, political ideology, and perceptions on the existence of a consensus. I don’t think the methodology used is particularly useful in distinguishing these influences, but here are the results:
Confirming all four hypotheses, the regression analyses showed that greater expertise, more liberal ideology, greater perceived consensus, and lower perceived conflict each predicted higher levels of certainty global warming was occurring, higher likelihood of viewing it as mostly human caused, and greater ratings of future harm. Together, the independent variables explained 37% of the variation in certainty that global warming is occurring, and 29% of the variation in views on global warming harm, which is considered a moderate amount of explained variance in social science research (Cohe 342 n, 1992). Due to the nature of logistic regression, an equivalent statistic is unavailable for the proportion of explained variation in views on global warming causation.
In terms of strength of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables, perceived consensus was the strongest predictor of all three types of global warming views – certainty, causation, and harm/benefit. Political ideology was the second strongest predictor of view certainty and causation, and was equivalent to perceived consensus as predictor of harm/benefit. Expertise and perceived conflict were both less strong predictors of global warming views. Expertise was the second weakest predictor of global warming certainty, and the weakest predictor of causation and harm/benefit.Perceived conflict was the weakest predictor of global warming view certainty, and the second weakest predictor of causation and harm/benefit. For details of the regression analyses, see the online supplementary material.
The most interesting finding is this table:
Table 1. Meteorologists’ assessment of human-712 caused global warming by area and level of expertise. Figures are percentages rounded to the nearest whole number. Numbers in the bottom four rows represent percentage of respondents giving each possible response to the follow-up email question, including non-response to the email (labeled “insufficient evidence – unknown”). These responses together add to the same number as displayed in the insufficient evidence (total) row; some differences occur due to rounding. Similarly, columns total to 100% if all numbers except those in the bottom four rows are added, and differences from 100 are due to rounding. Although 1854 people completed some portion of the survey, this table only displays the results for 1821 respondents, since 33 (less than 2% of the sample) did not answer one or more of the questions on expertise and global warming causation.
Look at the views in column 1, then look at the % in the rightmost column: 52% state the the warming since 1850 is mostly anthropogenic. One common categorization would categorize the other 48% as ‘deniers’.
The table seeks to discriminate between those whose expertise is in climate science vs meteorology/atmospheric science. In the context of the AMS membership, I think this distinction is ambiguous. With regards to myself, I would have checked atmospheric science (most of my research is related to physical processes, not to climate change per se). I suspect that those focusing on climate impacts would check the box for climate expertise (note, only 222 checked the box for climate science). The distinction between publishing vs non publishing members probably is meaningful; only 52% of the respondents held Ph.Ds. Non Ph.D. members may be in the private sector or government employees.
JC comments
Some background information about the American Meteorological Society. The website for the AMS is [here]. The Wikipedia has a good overview article, including the AMS Statement on Climate Change, and a list of journals published by the AMS. A list of Fellows of the American Meteorological Society is found at [link].
A year ago, the AMS issued a Statement on Climate Change, see my blog post on this. Excerpts from their statement:
It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and nitrous oxide.
The ongoing warming will increase risks and stresses to human societies, economies, ecosystems, and wildlife through the 21st century and beyond, making it imperative that society respond to a changing climate.
Mitigation will reduce the amount of future climate change and the risk of impacts that are potentially large and dangerous.
I was harshly critical of this statement, which was written by a group of volunteers and then approved by the AMS Council.
This study is an important one, in spite of its methodological flaws and not-quite-adequate list of questions.
Members of the American Meteorological Society generally have better expertise for assessing issues related to climate change detection and attribution than the AGU (with substantial numbers of geophysicists, geochemists, etc), the AAAS, the APS, etc. And this is in spite of the fact that a substantial number of members do not have a Ph.D. We have discussed previously on the Joe Bastardi thread the value of the perspectives of forecast meteorologists, including those without Ph.D.s — they certainly understand limitations of forecasting and general circulation models.
To their credit, the AMS is taking on the issue of disagreement on this topic, hopefully in a meaningful way. Information about the AMS Committee to Improve Climate Change Communication can be found [here]. I have also discussed this issue with Bill Gail, AMS President-elect – he seems to want to have a meaningful dialogue on this topic across the spectrum. Fingers crossed.
Dr Mrs Curry, From previous reading I have herd that IPCC position was that global warming started only around the 1950s ?
why now do they say it started at the end of the LIA ? is it really linked to CO2 disbalance, or simply to a manipulation to make people accept that the rate of warming did not substantially change from 1850 to now if you integrate recent stall ?
not talking of the reality, what is the position of IPCC about when the global warming really started to be noticeable ?
maybe is it the model who put the start about 1950?
Not a good survey question; agreed would have been better to use 1950.
The statement that 52 % state global warming is ‘anthropogenic’ could be considered mischaracterized! If you look at those who publish in ‘mostly climate’ only, the percentage jumps to over 70! That’s like asking geologists about groundwater quality, instead of hydrogeologists.
I’ll bet dollars against donuts the best predictor of belief in CAGW by climate and/or weather experts is simply whether the person being asked is employed by an educational institution or not.
Obsolete phrase: doughnuts now cost more than a dollar.
just how the creationists argue
“of course those scientists accept evolution, they would lose their funding if they didn’t”
“of course those scientists who ever accepted a dollar from any energy company deny CAGW, they would lose their (already spent, meager?) funding if they didn’t”
Give me your dollars, I’m keeping my donuts.
Other than a short stint as a Teaching Assistant, and three summers cleaning and painting school houses, I have not been employed by any educational institutions.
What qualifies you as a climate or weather expert, Bob? Perhaps a refresher course in reading comprehension would be of benefit to you.
Dunkin Donuts 5 bucks a dozen
http://www.wegotcoffee.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/DSC07343.jpg
“I’ll bet dollars against donuts the best predictor of belief in CAGW by climate and/or weather experts is simply whether the person being asked is employed by an educational institution or not.”
Yes, that or employed by the federal government.
–e.g., CAGW… a belief of convenience.
Not even Iolwot has suggested man has affected climate since 1850
The concentrations of co2 caused by man were tiny back then. If we did cause the climate to change due to our puny input, mankind can not really live on this planet without making a catastrophic impact on it.
Tonyb
log effect.
Don’t get peavey Steve
log true dat
1850 is rather early for trying to measure large anthropogenic effects beyond natural background variability, but we should keep in mind that the biosphere in general has been affecting climate for hundreds of millions of years and given that humans now dominate the primary productivity of the biosphere in so many different ways, we must look back in time to see how this dominance has scaled up over the centuries. Some have made the contention that as soon as agriculture began and the clearing of forests we began the larger anthropogenic effect, and that the Anthropocene may have begun many centuries ago:
http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/
Humans don’t dominate the biosphere except in geographically tiny areas you dimwit. Wise up.
Of course, in any poll, it is the wording of each question that dictates the outcome.
R.Gates…the ‘hockey stick’ confirmed by Berkley E.S.T. project showed no upturn until after 1950. The ‘industrial revolution’ may have begun around 1850, but huge industrial growth, coupled with deforestation, didn’t significantly raise CO2 levels until after WWII, and air pollution controls didn’t begin until after 1970. The BEST ‘hockey stick’ conforms closely with these times.
” air pollution controls didn’t begin until after 1970.”
Not true. Parliament passed the Clean Air Act in 1956.
Anyone who uses the word Anthropocene should be ignored.
There is an Anthropocene. It started about 13,000 years ago. Burn the plains and the forests to drive animals to their death and you affect the climate. In lots of ways… Later, raise large herds of animals that change the face of plains on a continental scale. You change the climate again.
Then comes agriculture… then large scale deforestation… then dams… then large quantities of greenhouse gas emissions at the very end of the story.
And it’s colder at the end of the Holocene than at the beginning. What are we doing wrong?
===========
Isn’t the year 1850 generally understood to be the end of the Little Ice Age? If so, it is also a convenient starting point for a positive trend line. 8-)
Lots of people have suggested it. Black soot was produced in large quantities before 1950 and in fact larger quantity than today since we don’t burn as much biomass these days. As well the efficacy of CO2 to cause warming declines at about the same rate anthropogenic production increased since 1750 or so suggesting we should observe a linear rise in warming due to it. The “started in 1950” meme is an ad hoc invention to fit the facts to the theory instead of fitting the theory to the facts. And the reason is ostensibly that cooling aerosol production prior to 1950 negated much or all of the warming effect of GHG production. You must have missed the memo. Pay attention and of course write that down.
Hi Tony
Daily CET max & min temperatures suggest that forthcoming winter may not be as cold as the last one.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-dMm.htm
Vuk
Let’s hope you are right, what with the cost of energy over here.
Tonyb
@Tonyb: Not even Iolwot has suggested man has affected climate since 1850. The concentrations of co2 caused by man were tiny back then.
Indeed. One can quantify this using the CDIAC’s tables for fossil fuel emissions and land use changes. From 1850 to 1900 this amounts to 75.45 gigatonnes of carbon. More recent figures suggest that 44% of this remains in the atmosphere, so using that percentage for the 19th century indicates an increase in atmospheric carbon of 33 GtC, or 15.5 ppmv based on an atmosphere mass of 5148 teratonnes and a CO2-to-air molar mass ratio of 12/28.97. Assuming total CO2 was a tad above 280 ppmv back then, that represents a rise in atmospheric CO2 of a little over 5%.
The rise in temperature would then be s*log2(1.05) = 0.07s where s is the climate sensitivity. So if s were 3 °C/doubling that would be 0.21 °C, or if s=2 then 0.14 °C.
Taking a 10-year moving average of HadCRUT4 for 1850-1910, we see a natural long-term fluctuation of around 0.15 °C over that period. Fitting a linear trend to 1850-1900 we observe a very tiny net decrease of 0.013 °C over that period.
These numbers suggest that AGW and natural fluctuations roughly cancelled out during the latter half of the 19th century. This would make it pretty much impossible to observe any sign of AGW over that period.
Ouch. I inadvertently summed the CDIAC numbers twice. The correct total for CDIAC’s estimate of fossil fuel and land use changes is only 41.5 GtC, not 75.45! (Thought something looked wrong.)
44% of 41.5 = 18.2 GtC or 8.5 ppmv, a 3% rise. log2(1.03) = 0.043, which translates to 0.13 °C at a climate sensitivity of s=3 or 0.086 °C at s=2.
The conclusion however is not terribly different: natural fluctuations and AGW are close to a wash for 1850-1900, with the correction putting natural fluctuations a bit further ahead.
Hope I got it right this time.
The large T excursions at solar minima suggest that enhanced transport barriers were in operation ( the polar vortex)
The significant volcanic excursions Krakatoa and Tarawera both occurred during proceeding el nino events.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850/to:1900/mean:12/normalise/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1850/to:1900/mean:12/normalise
I applied a 10-year moving average to 1850-1910, which should have erased most or all of any one volcanic eruption however large, as well as ENSO-type events. AGW rises sufficiently slowly that only the multidecadal fluctuations are able to mask it. The 60-70 year period of the AMO is problematic even today for separating AGW from natural fluctuations.
By masking are you suggesting symmetry breaking (anti persistence) or interference in the signal.
Marvin (1919), suggested that
“each striking feature on a long record is, therefore, no evidence of the persistent recurrence of peculiar irregularities, but is simply the residual scar or imprint of some unusual event, or a few which have been fortuitously combined at about the time in question.”
Marvin, C. F., 1919: Normal temperatures (daily): Are
irregularities in the annual march of temperature
persistent? Mon. Wea. Rev., 47, 544–555.
Carvalho suggests anti persistence in the global field .
http://www.nonlin-processes-geophys.net/14/723/2007/npg-14-723-2007.html
Vaughan Pratt, “I applied a 10-year moving average to 1850-1910, which should have erased most or all of any one volcanic eruption however large, as well as ENSO-type events. ”
If you assume that 10 year moving averages remove volcanic then has a problem reconciling the AMO, maybe volcanic is more than ten years. Then that would require looking at regions and latitude bands to follow the impact through the system.
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/9/6179/2013/cpd-9-6179-2013.html
This paper in discussion is about modeling volcanic and solar impacts prior to ACO2. It is a complex system separated by Coriolis effects with an imbalanced and slow THC to restore hemispheric imbalances.
The you could focus on the ocean and avoid the land and polar amplification noise in the surface temperature see that while the NH oceans from 45N to 65N recovered quickly from the early 1900 volcanic activity, the equator and SH lagged that recovery by ~20 years. The AMO and actually the 30N-60N ocean oscillating trend a recovery pattern started by long term hemispheric imbalances all the way back to 1700 AD.
There is also another paper in discussion on the pitfalls of assuming you can remove solar/volcanic/ENSO influences with any confidence.
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/1065/2013/esdd-4-1065-2013-discussion.html
I am not sure who is in charge of deciding what and when “normal” is, but if the current rate of OH uptake requires ~316 year per 0.8C regain and the period formerly known as the LIA was about 0.9C cooler, it is fairly logical to assume that some recoveries can be at least on the order of 316 years per degree.
Kinda like CO2, it will take about as long to drop as it did to rise.
@maksimovich: By masking are you suggesting symmetry breaking (anti persistence) or interference in the signal.
I was referring to the well-known difficulty many researchers, bloggers, etc. have experienced in trying to apportion the 1970-2000 rise between the AMO and AGW. Google
separating AMO AGW
for examples of papers and blogs addressing this problem.
While Marvin’s assessment is fine as far as it goes, in the AMO I see two cycles of a sine wave. Perhaps a coincidence, but if not then the questions of what is the AMO and did it rise more in 1970-2000 than in 1910-1940 become interesting. I for one am interested in both questions.
I’m fine with everything Carvalho says.
@cd: If you assume that 10 year moving averages remove volcanic then has a problem reconciling the AMO, maybe volcanic is more than ten years.
Maybe, though both the papers in discussion you cited seem to deny this. Maybe we’ll learn more after some discussions are posted there.
it is fairly logical to assume that some recoveries can be at least on the order of 316 years per degree.
Sounds like a very interesting topic for a post, if Judith or someone can suggest the relevant literature. Glaciations taking 90,000 years are obviously way slower than this, but perhaps there are examples of faster recoveries from warming. There’s also the dual question of recoveries from unusual coolings. How would you describe the Younger Dryas’s ups and downs, for example?
Vaughan Pratt, “How would you describe the Younger Dryas’s ups and downs, for example?”
Glacial mass instability. If you think of the precessional cycle as four seasons instead of just the 65N TSI peak, you have Hot Summer/Cold Winter, Warm Spring/Cool Fall, Mild Summer/Mild Winter Cool Spring/ Warm Fall. There are ~5000 year pulses associated with these seasons in the paleo data along with ~1470 +/- 500 year. A cool fall would tend to increase snow accumulation leading to instability. Of course the Younger Dryas could have been an impact event or a super volcano in the right spot, but they aren’t required, just gravity and snow accumulation.
The papers I linked by the way just get into the complex synchronizations of solar and volcanic forcings. The 30N-60N land amplification and SST oscillation is just due to the more rapid reduction of ocean to land area. There is twice as much land area in the 60N-65N latitude band than ocean. So instead of AMO you can used 30N-60N SST which has a total SST area of 47mkm^2 being backup up by the 60N-65N bottleneck. You end up with NH ocean being 3C warmer than SH oceans plus “super recovery” from volcanic forcing in the NH, but that is only a fraction of the ocean area.
If you look at the 45N-65N SST you can see the peak volcanic impact ~1918 and the more rapid recovery peaking in ~1940 while the SH lagged 20 years. Then you can look at the Oppo 2009 indo-pacific warm pool reconstruct which has an excellent fit with the instrumental oscillations and that recovery pattern extends to 1700 in that reconstruction.
There is pretty much no way 1900 – 1920 was “normal” as far as average global SST.
@cd: There is pretty much no way 1900 – 1920 was “normal” as far as average global SST.
Agreed. Ditto for LOD which reached an “unprecedented” maximum right in the middle of 1900-1920. Coincidence? Tune in again next month for the next exciting episode of Climate Wars.
“Doran and Zimmerman (2009) found that while a majority of meteorologists surveyed are convinced humans have contributed to global warming (64%)”
Within this narrow framework I’m amazed at how low this number is, if I’m understanding it properly.
It’s worth reading the D&Z paper, and seeing all the numbers. In particular, how they arrive at the much-quoted 97% figure.
It ought to be routine to poll an organization’s members on a contentious issue before the organization takes an official position.
What one must ask is, what is the leadership afraid of? Otherwise, I’m sure they’d be falling all over themselves to take such an internal survey.
Study the career of Lenin.
“Study the career of Lenin.”
Currently reading up on Stalin. Lenin’s next on the list.
This survey was taken almost two years ago. I would think that the numbers of non-believers would be higher now considering the publicity given the pause in the last year.
You might be right Charles, and that would further indicate how generally uniformed this particular group might be in terms of a more accurate perspective on climate change as issue of energy imbalance, and not just the narrow metric of measuring sensible heat in the troposphere. It goes back to the even broader issue that even so called “experts” latch on to the sensible tropospheric heat as the best metric and miss a much more accurate perspective on climate change as an energy (in all forms and in all spheres) imbalance issue.
Ouch, what a difference onne letter makes! There’s a missing “n” out there somewhere!
“You might be right Charles, and that would further indicate how generally uniformed this particular group might be in terms of a more accurate perspective on climate change as issue of energy imbalance, and not just the narrow metric of measuring sensible heat in the troposphere.”
RG, this is distinctly Webberesque, the insistence that anyone lacking a ph.d in physics is a benighted moron who can’t be trusted to have a valid opinion about AGW. Is that really your belief?
All opinions are valid, only some come from a more informed basis, and thus have a greater likelihood of coming closer to matching up with reality. This may or may not have anything to do with having a PhD or not, but it sure helps in specialized areas. Richard Alley knows more about glaciers than most 7 year olds, but that does not mean their opinions are not valid, simply not as informed.
A PhD employed by academia, the anointing body for the credential, isn’t a reliable expert anymore in politically controversial subjects. Never was. Asking an academic if CAGW is real is like asking a Catholic if God is real – the answer in each case is both predictable and equally grounded in empirical evidence. LOL
Re: (undefined NaN NaN:NaN),
R. Gates.
You mean now that the entire AGW team is now retreating to the position advocated by that denier Dr. Pielke Sr.?
I’m surprised the Goal Posts can still stand after having been moved so many times.
Gates, only Green Vermin like you is left to believe in the phony GLOBAL warming
gates aka whatever,
And that makes the gratuitous opinion of your silly little anonymous butt worth about what?
They wear uniforms?
Brown shirts and jack boots.
Yes you could say she was attractively built. Yeah yeah yeah.
If you want to waste a Sunday, post info about this survey on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change#Surveys_of_scientists_and_scientific_literature
Watch it disappear. Better yet, it will disappear except for one single result from the survey: More expertise means more acceptance of the consensus.
Anyhow I tried. Actually my post is a little bit one-sided itself, cause I was hurried. We’ll see what happens to it.
Keep us posted. It’s quite interesting.
Gone! https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change&diff=581097775&oldid=581090325
Comment on the revert: “Misleading cherry-picking”
Cherry-picking it was, but not at all misleading!
On the talk page, look who showed up:
Seems to be making the usual rounds of the usual places [17] William M. Connolley (talk) 22:39, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Quick work!
Continuing on the talk page. Pretty obvious that it won’t lead anywhere.
Well, I’ve had enough fun there. Conclusion: Mosher, I know you’re leery of references to Feynman, but I think one is appropriate here. The gentlemen who oversee the page (Connolley, Kim D. Peterson) have exacting standards for anything on the page that does not support the 97% meme. Anything that does support it, a very different set of standards. Guess what the result will be?
One thing I thought was interesting was their insistence that we only use conclusions stated explicitly by the authors. Wikipedia standard, of course, but that wasn’t their point. It means that they wouldn’t let me use conclusions found inside the paper; they prefer the ones in the overall summary. That means that if the authors try to make their summary more palatable for the consensus (which is industry standard for papers in this field), that’s the ones they’ll pick.
I didn’t find this frustrating because I expected the result; I’ve done this before. But someone who honestly wants to contribute to Wikipedia would probably be frustrated and disappointed.
“In School, I once got an F on a question that asked my opinion.”
– Gallagher (comedian)
The above survey appears to be nothing more that correlation of opinions and biases. That a person’s opinions correlate with political and professional environments is hardly surprising.
In this paper we tested four hypotheses:
Good heavens, they didn’t even get that right.
By my reconning there are 12 hypotheses, all based upon personal perception and biases.
Given clauses (a), (b), (c) below
(a) higher personal certainty that global warming is happening,
(b) viewing the global warming observed over the past 150 years as mostly human-caused, and
(c) perception of global warming as harmful.
then there are 12 hypotheses on the combinations of (a), (b), (c) with the clauses 1,2,3,4 below.
(1) perceived conflict about global warming will be negatively associated with
(2) climate expertise will be positively associated with (a), (b), (c)
(3) liberal political ideology will be positively associated with (a), (b), (c)
(4) perceived scientific consensus will be positively associated (a), (b), (c)
(Ye gods! 4 is An opiinion about the opinion of others!)
Only #2 appears to be a remotely objective measure, but since it is self-selective, i.e. you choose to develop an expertise in climate, it has embedded in it a great deal of bias.
This study must have been done before the AR5 was agreed and released. One wonders what this load of scientific garbage may have on the results of a similar study if it were to be conducted now.
“We suggest that AMS should: attempt to convey the widespread scientific agreement about climate change;”
I suggest that AMS should accept that it’s members are not all convinced that “we dunnit” and should adjust their “statements” on the matter accordingly.
Is most of the global warming since 1998 due to natural or human causes?
I don’t like the word “most” in the survey. In my own analysis of the CO2 and HadCrut4 data since 1850 AD, I conclude that, at most, about half of the observed warming is due to GHG and the rest due to natural phenomena. 0.3 deg C of the 0.7 deg C global average surface temp warming in the 100 year period from 1907-2007 can be shown to be related to a natural temperature cycle in the HadCrut4 temperature dataset with a period of about 62 years.
“Most” implies a larger CO2 climate sensitivity to many readers. More importantly, an Upper Bound for CO2 Transient Climate Sensitivity, supported by these same CO2 and HadCrut4 data is 1.6 deg C. This is not alarming to me, as transient temps will start to come down once we peak in our use of economically recoverable fossil fuels in the next 100-200 years. The global warming alarmism is overblown and there is no justification in any physical data for the IPCC Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity uncertainty range as high as 4.5 deg C. Moreover, Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity is not well-suited for predicting near-term temperature trends of the earth for the next 100-200 years.
Transient Climate Sensitivity (TCS) is a more realistic way to evaluate the actual global warming effects of CO2 that can be validated with actual data, but TCS is rarely reported in peer-reviewed paper or media articles, because the sensitivity is about half the ECS value and is not so alarming. Climate Science needs to grow up and do a better job of seeking the TRUTH rather than seeking research grants to play with un-validated computer models. If after 30 years of study and billions of research dollars spent, Climate Science cannot narrow their range of ECS uncertainty, then it is time to bring in a new team of TRUTH-seekers.
Harold D. PhD said:
“Transient Climate Sensitivity (TCS) is a more realistic way to evaluate the actual global warming effects of CO2…”
___
A better way is to measure that actual energy being stored by the global climate system. TCS as measured by tropospheric sensible heat as a way to evaluate global warming as a way to measure climate change as a way to measure the energy imbalance caused by increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases is a very poor and round-about way of measuring. Hence, efforts to expand the ARGO float program will yield the most direct and accurate to way to measure Earth’s energy imbalance caused by increasing GH gas concentrations.
Agree. For a full picture the program needs to cover all depths. Also, it won’t show the cause, only the temperature.
I should have said, “the actual global average surface warming effects”. Surface temps were the big concern, and when their increase “paused” in the last 15-17 years, the game was changed to “energy stored in the climate system” or “energy stored in OHC”. Clearly our vast oceans are big heat capacitors and that is what oceans do for the climate to help regulate earth surface temps. The key question in a defining a PROBLEM, if one exists, is deciding on an appropriate metric and then defining its harmful deviation from a normal range. I see nothing deviating from the normal range of the last very stable climate of 10,000 years.
I think the science is in a state of evolution (as it should be) because of “the pause”. We are learning more and more about how the ocean does act as “heat capacitor” on shorter and longer time frames. A cyclone is very much of a relatively quick and focused discharge of a bit of energy in this capacitor to the atmosphere, and it would be absolutely invalid to measure the energy only in sensible heat! The ocean capacitor has a relatively steady flow or discharge to the atmosphere, which has the greatest short-term fluctuation seen in the ENSO cycle, but there are other cycles in this capacitor, such as the PDO and AMO. A great many things ahead to learn, and we should well expect the general metric of “climate sensitivity” to increasing greenhouse gases to change as we learn more and more about how energy is stored and flows between various parts of the climate system. The metric of using only sensible tropospheric heat for measuring the entire climate sensitivity needs to be examined and updated as the science evolves.
This paper is in discussion at Climate of the Past and has some interesting things to say about Solar/Volcanic forcing difference between hemispheres and how some lags may be a tad longer than some might have suspected.
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/9/6179/2013/cpd-9-6179-2013.pdf
Timing seems to be pretty important.
Anet suggest
Generally, a significant cooling of the surface occurs in the first weeks after major volcanic eruptions, lasting for one to two years and leading to modified patterns of precipitation, surface pressure and the teleconnection patterns,such as the Arctic Oscillation (AO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)
The emergence of dissipative structures such as the AO is the relevant metric in both the analysis and forecasting (within its temporal limits) dynamical systems and not proportionate forcing response arguments used by primitive tribes eg Ruzmaiken.
Linear and non-linear systems respond differently to external forcing. A classical example of a linear system response is the Hooke’s law of elasticity that states that the amount by which a material body is deformed is linearly proportional to the force causing the deformation. Earlier climate change studies used this linear approximation to evaluate the sensitivity of the global temperature change caused by external forcing. However the response of non-linear systems to external forcing is conceptually different; the issue is not a magnitude (sensitivity) of the response. Non-linear systems have internally defined preferred states (called attractors in mathematics) and variabilities driven by residence in the states and transitions between them. The question is what is the effect of an external forcing: change of the states, residence times or something else?
Answer to this question is critical to our understanding of climate change.Based on the model studies mentioned above we can formulate the following, updated conjecture of the climate system response to external forcing: external effects, such as solar, the QBO and anthropogenic influences, weakly affect the climate patterns and their mean residence times but increase a probability of occurrence of long residences. In other words, under solar or anthropogenic influence the changes in mean climate values, such as the global temperature, are less important than increased duration of certain climate patterns associated say with cold conditions in some regions and warm conditions in the other regions
Maks, It is an interesting paper. The Super-Volcanic compensation and Super-OHC recovery terms are not your standard Gates discussion points :)
R Gates @ 5.35 pm: you say that “I think the science is in a state of evolution (as it should be) because of “the pause”. We are learning more and more about how the ocean does act as “heat capacitor” on shorter and longer time frames.” In short, as many have pointed out, the CAGW threat was being pushed not from a position of “settled science” but a position of ignorance, with the “irrefutable claims” on which demands got massive GHG reduction were based being undermined as we learn more. The recommendation of the survey authors does not reflect this. They would be better directed at having AMS members pursue better understanding of the science than propose that the AMS gets them to fall in line with the CAGW view.
No. This is a diversion from what people care about, namely the temperature on the surface where they work and live. Fractional degree changes in the cold ocean are not the “global warming” that motivates mitigation policy. If surface temperature variation is dominated by non-forced variations in how fast heat goes into the ocean, then the observed forcing is just a minor drift term in the range of weather we experience. Stop trying to move the goalposts.
Little gates aka whatever says the settled science is evolving. He/she didn’t get the memo from HQ.
It’s actually referred to as Transient Climate Response (TCR) and it is only half of ECS if it is measured over the ocean. Over the land, the TCR is much closer to the eventual ECS, as little heat capacity exists for the heat to transiently sink into. Transient, get it?
If this is proportionally allocated over the globe with the ocean covering 70% of the surface, the TCR comes out to about 2/3 of the ECS.
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
aka G.S.W.,
You seem have found some very good rose colored glasses?
Fifteen years of actual temperature pause during a period of CO2 increase creates a question which remains an open question. Why argue over the reality? “CAGW cannot be disproved” but those wild predictions will take “a lot of years” to reach given the observed temperature trend this century?
It seems that a moderate perspective better match’s our current climate reality.
Webby
Why is the sea surface temperature decreasing more rapidly than the surface temperature over land?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to/trend
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vgl/from:2002/to/trend
-0.063C over sea
-0.022C over land
Max
There is no reason to attribute imbalances to GHGs. The storage system is probably a natural oscillator.
Because there is no way to upwell dirt and rock.
As for water, Looky here, no blue on the surface.
The excuse for your nonsense is going away at about .8C per decade.
The current Argo float program already answered the question. The trouble is that nobody believed it, not even the guy running the experiment. Any objective scientist would have to conclude that the top of the ocean is not warming so no energy imbalance, so no apparent manmade warming. Or in other words there must be either negative feedback or the CO2 in the air is from the ocean, not manmade and they just have to seek land CO2 sinks. In fact there are many reported already.
“Is most of the global warming since 1998 due to natural or human causes?”
Of course we;ve had no warming since 1998. That said, such queries are actually no more than solicitations of opinions.. Which is to say, guesses. Any attempt to ascribe certainty is either ignorant or disingenuous.
Of course pokerguy, you’d like to focus on only sensible tropospheric heat as that is what your viral memeplex would have you do. The way to rid yourself of this particular memeplex is through education. As Huxley so nicely put it: Education for Freedom!
“Of course pokerguy, you’d like to focus on only sensible tropospheric heat ..”
You’ve got me wrong RG. I’m focusing on heat because that’s how the discussion’s been framed. As you know I’m no scientist, but my common sense tells me that if the pause were easily and tidily explained away as you seem to propose, the IPCC would have done so. All I see from them is hand waving and speculation.
I have no axe to grind, and no great investment in ego in my current view. If I’m shown to be wrong, I’ll say I was wrong and change my mind, just as I did a few years ago as a warmist.
AGW says that the warming comes in two forms: increase of surface temperature and increase of ocean heat content. It is only invalidated if both of these stop while the forcing continues to increase. That is not the case, which is why you see no concern about the continuing validity of AGW from those that properly understand it.
pokerguy
Your comment is spot on.
There has been no “global warming” since 1998 (HadCRUT4), so it is absurd to ask whether this lack of global warming was caused by humans or is natural.
Gates tries to fog up the issue by bringing in suspected warming of the ocean, which has really only been measured since around 2003, since ARGO came on line. These measurements first showed slight cooling of the upper ocean, then (after some corrections to the raw data) slight warming, but it is still too early to say whether or not these measurements really mean anything.
Over the same period of time as the upper ocean is supposed to have warmed by some 0.05C (according to ARGO), the sea surface temperature (HADSST2) has cooled by 0.063C.
So if the air immediately above the ocean is cooling, it seems difficult for me to readily accept that the water just below it is warming.
I think we need a lot more data before we can make any broad statements such as Gates is making.
Max
Possibly of relevance–when the AMS became more strident on AGW I dropped my membership. I know I am not the only one who did so, though I don’t have a good sense for the overall number of people who did. But I bet if you included me (Yes; insufficient evidence) and the others like me, that 52% would drop below 50%.
Evan brings up a good point. In the American Chemical Society (ACS), of which I am a long time member and the subject to a recent post by Prof. Curry, the membership is 164,000 but the ACS has almost 25,000 non-renewals every year, a full 15% of membership. This appears to be a very high attrition rate. ACS membership numbers would be down significantly had not an expansion of membership criteria not been opened up a few years ago.
Much, if not most of those annual 25,000 losses of members are due to deaths, retirements, economic factors, etc. However, the aggressive embrace of CAGW by the Executive Director and the editors of Chemical and Engineering News have annoyed more than a few members who then dropped out of the ACS, a course of action (leave a scientific society whose policies you cannot tolerate) suggested by Prof. Lindzen a few years ago. I have no data on numbers but there have been many heated chatroom discussions over the years.
The paper tests the association of four factors with (a) GW, (b) AGW, and (c) DAGW. (D for Dangerous). The four factors are (1) perceived conflict [about global warming], (2) climate expertise, (3) liberal political ideology, and (4) perceived consensus.
(4) appears to be (1) reversed. So their strengths as predictors should be equal (but opposite). Yet, in its findings, the paper says that perceived consensus was the strongest predictor of climate certainty and perceived conflict was the weakest. What have I misunderstood?
Good catch. Clearly the respondants did not feel these questions were opposite. I suspect the word “consensus” in this context isn’t carrying its usual meaning as this is a highly charged word in the climate debate. This renders its use in the survey suspect.
Belivers use the word consensus as a shorthand to refer specifically to the oft quoted 97% – a consensus among a very small group of selected “qualified” “climate scientists”. Hence believers may assert that there is a consensus using the word in this manner and yet see no contradiction in also asserting that there is considerable disagreement within the ranks of the meteorological society on climate issues.
The puzzling thing to me is why the survey is focussed on opinions as to whether or not there is consensus. This seems to be a rather bizarre and highly indirect approach. Why don’t they simply look at the range of beliefs about the climate among members of the meteorological society and directly measure the extent of agreement.
A good observation.
My take is that (1) is about your perceived conflicts about global warming vs the evidence. (4) is your perception about the opinion of others, i.e., the consensus. So (1) can differ from (4) in the sense that “Everyoneelse seems to believe in DAGW, but I’m skeptical.”
However, your observation that 4 is strong and 1 is weak is not to be minimized. A valid explaination is that many are privately skeptical, but believe the consensus is strong. Yet if many are privately skeptical, then a strong consensus is unrealistic.
Maybe – but “privately skeptical” doesn’t really match “perceived conflict”?
0.263*0.52 + (1-0.263)*0 = 0.137.
0.263*0.52 + (1-0.263)*1 = 0.874.
The only thing you can conclude about the population is: The actual proportion of the population that believes that there is global warming and most of it is caused by humans is somewhere in the interval [0.137,0.874].
If it had been me, I would have randomly chosen (say) 100 of the email addresses and then worked like hell to get virtually all of them to respond. My confidence interval would be a lot tighter than the interval about, and hence more informative. Same goes for all of the correlations and multiple correlations.
A 26.3% response rate, with self-selected responders, is basically catastrophically low if you want to make sound inferences.
Meh. They can never get high response rates on these things. Most people won’t do surveys; 26% is pretty good under the circumstances. Surveys just aren’t as accurate as a nice random sample, but they can be useful.
“26% is pretty good under the circumstances” No, it sucks. No, it isn’t useful. The entire strategy of surveying the entire population and then using the self-selected responses when they are a small fraction of the population is absurd, useless, wrong. No professional pollster alive tries to do this for ANY population. This kind of ignorant and useless survey procedure needs to end. It. Is. Not. Useful.
I imagine you’ve never done a survey. It’s okay not to like surveys, but they’re all like that. This one is tremendously useful, because it’s a significant fraction of the population, which most surveys are not. It is, for example, unlikely that 97% of AMS members agree with the Consensus. In fact, it’s impossible.
In addition, it serves a purpose beyond a survey: Since it comes from the whole population, it amounts to a vote. Those who didn’t answer the survey don’t care about their opinion being known. That’s a vote too. I think that the AMS is perfectly within its rights saying that it has done something that other professional societies have failed to do: checked with its members.
miker613, “Meh. They can never get high response rates on these things.”
Sure you can, just get Lew to do it :)
@miker613: This one is tremendously useful, because it’s a significant fraction of the population [even if a biased sample], … It is, for example, [impossible] that 97% of AMS members agree with the Consensus.
That is an important conclusion.
A sound observation. The self-selection of the responders bothered me, too. And I like your approach to dealing with it.
Let us not forget the nature of the hypotheses. They started with 4 (it is really 12) that they though were true. Statistically, they could reject none of them. Their data were consistent with the hypotheses, but that must not be viewed as confirming them.
It started as a bias guesses about biases. It reremains biased guesses with very wide error bars on probabilities of qualitative responses. Statistical mumbo jumbo cannot change the triviality of the experiment.
NW –
What about the inference that people who are relatively engaged in the debate about climate change are likely to express views about climate change that reflect a strong association with political ideology?
I think that is useful information for placing the views of the heavily engaged in context. I think it is informative, as a generalization, about those who are heavily engaged. Or course, it doesn’t explain causality, and there are no doubt, exceptions.
The magic of self-selection, illustrated. Most of you should be able to read the SAS program below even if you don’t use SAS, since the programming logic is pretty similar to many other languages.
Create a population of 7000 people (s=1 to 7000) and independently draws two potential survey responses x and y (from standard normal distributions) for each of them. z is a selection variable, equal to 0.5*x + 0.5*y + eps, where eps is normal with mean zero and standard deviation 0.5 (eps makes the selection variable somewhat noisy–a sharp selection variable is not realistic). When z exceeds 0.5, the potential respondents (s) become actual respondents–they are the ‘self-selecting sample that responds to the survey. Only their (x,y) pairs are seen by the survey researcher. This simulation results in a response rate around 28%, similar to the AMS survey above: The dummy variable sel=1 for 1972 simulated potential respondents in one run.
By construction, corr(x,y) = 0 in the population, since the normal variates x and y are drawn independently. However, the sample correlation coefficient amongst the 28% of the population that responds is -0.33, and that’s significant at p= .5) ;
output ;
end ;
proc sort ;
by sel ;
proc corr ;
var x y ;
proc corr ;
by sel ;
var x y ;
run ;
oops, the SAS program didn’t copy right. here it is.
data simul ;
alp = .5 ;
bet = .5 ;
do s = 1 to 7000 ;
x = rannor(-1) ;
y = rannor(-1) ;
eps = 0.5*rannor(-1) ;
z = alp*x + bet*y + eps ;
sel = (z >= .5) ;
output ;
end ;
proc sort ;
by sel ;
proc corr ;
var x y ;
proc corr ;
by sel ;
var x y ;
run ;
oops, and the -0.33 correlation in the selected sample is significant at p < 0.0001.
I’m not smart enough to figure out how that answers my question.
I think it is fair to speculate that those who responded are heavily engaged in the debate. And I think it is fair to speculate that the high degree of association between political ideology and views on climate change, among those who responded, is characteristic of those who are heavily engaged in the debate. The data don’t tell use about direction of causality. They don’t tell us about any one person, in particular. But I think it is information that can be used for making inferences, even if they are not the inferences people reflexively tend to make (that the poll results tell us much about a more representative sampling).
Think of it this way. Suppose x and y are underlying continuous opinions in the population (members of the AMS with working email addresses). It is the people who have a sufficiently positive combination of opinion on x and y who respond to the survey; we’ll call them the sample. In the population, x and y are completely unrelated (corr(x,y)=0). But to ‘select yourself into the sample,’ you had to have a strong + opinion about y, or a strong + opinion about x, or a strong + value of x+y. This self-selection will create a strongly significant negative association between x and y in the self-selected sample (corr(x,y)<0 in the sample), even though there is no relationship between x and y in the population.
You could define y' = -y, and get the opposite: A strong positive association in the sample, where there is none in the population. There is nothing here special about the negative 'phony correlation' in the sample. The main point is that a sample moment (means, variances, covariances, correlations) in a self-selected sample is a biased estimator of the same sample moment in the population, and we cannot sign the bias without knowing the nature of the self-selection process.
That means you can observe a positive or negative association in a self-selected sample, highly significantly different from zero in that sample, when the true association in the population is nil.
Does that help?
Jim D, it’s perfectly easy to insert some retests of previous questions, to ascertain the noise in responses (your random responding). Indeed this should always be done, because the noise is measurement error, which also biases estimates–unless it is appropriately accounted for, as it can be when retests occur in the survey.
Define the population you want to make inferences about, and then randomly sample it. It seems to me the authors of the paper wanted to make inferences about the AMS membership: On page 16 they make an attempt to claim their sample is representative of the population (it is nowhere near that, judging from what they report in that paragraph and the sample size).
Joshua finally realizes and admit he’s “not smart enough to figure out how that answers my question”. Something most everyone one reading this blog has known for years.
Brian –
Realized it long ago, and said it long ago. What’s interesting, however, is that someone with limited intelligence such as mine is, can spot such gaping flaws in the arguments of people as smart as you are.
When smart and knowledgeable people such as yourself make such bad arguments that someone like me can see their flaws, it should tell you that you need to rethink your arguments.
Joshua,
Bad arguments? Yours being proud examples of the fallacious sort (last comment is an excellent example). So let’s see, your last comment claims I’ve gaping flaws in my arguments , seems to be a bit of an irrelevant premise since you didn’t explain which argument has these flaws. Then there is the comment “smart and knowledgeable people such as yourself” seems to be a dubious premise since you’ve no information on my ability or knowledge. Oh then there is “someone with limited intelligence such as mine” a trifle enthymematic, don’t you think? Just saying…
If the rest are apathetic about climate change, I would be apathetic about what they thought of the subject, so self-selection is a good thing rather than some form of compulsory opinion-seeking which would dilute the opinions of those who cared.
We observe that 3 out of 4 surveyed are non-responders. We do not observe that they are “apathetic.”
Can you imagine some other unobserved things about the non-responders that might be true? I probably would have been a non-responder, and it would not have been because I was apathetic. Can you guess why I might not have responded, even though I might care a lot about the issue? It doesn’t even matter whether you guess right for me. The point is that you can make a guess.
The self-responding selection criterion is simply unobserved and unmeasured. Like all omitted variables, it biases estimated parameters for included variables if the selection criterion is correlated with variables included in the analysis.
If you want to study the non-apathetic, then you should come up with an operational definition of apathy that isn’t by definition correlated with your analysis variables and measure it in your survey instrument. Simply claiming that nonresponse equals apathy won’t unlike the door at Public Opinion Quarterly.
Let’s put it this way. Imagine you engineered a near 100% response by, for example, having a reward of some type. How believable would that poll be, or would a significant number of people just select answers at random to do it quickly invalidating the whole thing?
If I’d been a non-responder, it would have been because of the futility of the survey presented, not because of lack of interest in or opinion on the topic. Others might simply have had higher priorities at the time.
Jim D, it’s perfectly easy to insert some retests of previous questions, to ascertain the noise in responses (your random responding). Indeed this should always be done, because the noise is measurement error, which also biases estimates–unless it is appropriately accounted for, as it can be when retests occur in the survey.
Define the population you want to make inferences about, and then randomly sample it. It seems to me the authors of the paper wanted to make inferences about the AMS membership: On page 16 they make an attempt to claim their sample is representative of the population (it is nowhere near that, judging from what they report in that paragraph and the sample size).
Simpler to simply drop representativeness, as the survey will get the same ice time anyway. Just drop the appropriate caveat somewhere in the page.
Simple.
Willard, so what is the population of interest? Just the people who responded?
The sample is representative of the sample, so we can make inferences about the sample. Yuk yuk.
> What is the population of interest?
Denizens.
I will repeat that this study is an important one, in spite of its methodological flaws.
Jim D
Those who believe strongly in a premise, are those who are more likely than not to respond to an opinion survey on that premise.
Those who are apathetic regarding this premise are more likely not to respond.
Right?
Now we have to differentiate between those who believe strongly in the premise from those who believe strongly that the premise is false.
Here we have to see if we can find external reasons for individuals to either believe in or not believe in AGW or, even more importantly, the CAGW premise, as outlined by IPCC.
If someone is getting paid to support this premise, this would be a clear external reason why that individual would be biased toward believing in its validity.
Likewise, if someone is being paid to rebut or falsify this premise, this would be a clear external reason why that individual would be biased toward not believing in its validity.
So the question arises: of the respondent group (atmospheric scientists and meteorologists) is there a greater number who are being paid to support or to rebut the IPCC GAGW premise?
I would submit that there is a far greater number within this respondent group who are being paid to support CAGW that to rebut it.
Therefore the survey is skewed by definition toward thjose who support the CAGW premise, rather than those who rebut it.
Pretty simple logic, actually.
Do you see this otherwise?
Max
Good on the AMS for letting members speak for themselves. It would be good if all the professional science societies would follow suit.
Boy, there’s a shocker.
It’s almost as if there might be some kind of a relationship between: (1) political ideology and views on climate change and (2) political ideology and views about “the consensus.”
I wonder if anyone has studied whether there might be a relationship between ideology and views on climate change?
There might even be a connection with groupthink – a psychopathology with characteristic attributes – and claims of a consensus.
Who are you calling “boy” you misogynistic POS?
“perceived consensus was the strongest predictor of all three types of global warming views”. Kind of scary, really. Sheep. Sounds like Dana and Cook are right on some level – it’s important to own the consensus.
> Kind of scary, really.
Your tenderness is speaking:
I thought of that too. You do realize, of course, that who owns how much of the consensus is a bi-lateral argument.
Well done Judith. You are having a lot of influence, and it having an effect.
Perhaps Mann, Lewandowski and Cook could run an objective, impartial, high qualiuty survey to measure how effective you have been and are being. Even better, make projections on the results of your effectiveness out to 2100, 2200, … up to 2500.
‘Our results demonstrate how synergistic use of satellite TOA radiation observations and recently improved ocean heat content measurements, with appropriate error estimates, provide critical data for quantifying short-term and longer-term changes in the Earth’s net TOA radiation imbalance. The apparent decline in ocean heating rate after 2004 noted in other studies 2,8 is not statistically significant, nor is it observed by CERES. Differences in variations in ocean heating rate and satellite net TOA flux are well within the uncertainty of the measurements and, therefore, cast doubt
on the argument for `missing energy’ in the climate system. Our results indicate that energy is continuing to accumulate in Earth’s oceans.’ http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~sgs02rpa/PAPERS/Loeb12NG.pdf
Groupthink is not merely people having similar ideas or experiences but a disorder having a characteristic psychopathology. Gates is an example – and consequently misses key facts. The most obvious changes in CERES is in SW as a result of secular cloud cover changes – a moderate decrease obviously. Indeed the biggest changes by far – much bigger than changes in calculated greenhouse gas forcing over the same period – in all the instruments is SW. Something which is recognised in the AR4.
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ s3.4.4.1
Equivocal evidence is land based cloud observation – which is not really the point. The only way to get handle on cloud changes is with satellites.
The reduction in cloud cover could also be a positive cloud feedback to warming.
It could also be fairies and unicorns. The atmosphere hasn’t warmed – what changed in the CERES and ARGO period is sea surface temperature.
Jim D,
Such a suggestion upsets Chief’s memeplex. Might as well spit into the wind.
‘It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.
Assigning all change to greenhouse gases is excruciating nonsense.
Chief said:
“Assigning all change to greenhouse gases is excruciating nonsense.”
____
And since I know of no climate scientists who do this, then you don’t have to be to too much pain.
But equally painful is listening to the constant “CO2 has no effect at all” crowd.
The naturally variability cancels out over long periods of time, naturally.
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
Lockwood has also recently completed a similar analysis [1]:
[1] M. Lockwood, “Solar influence on global and regional climates,” Surveys in geophysics, vol. 33, no. 3–4, pp. 503–534, 2012.
Webster, The naturally variability cancels out over loooooooooooong periods of time, natchly :)
WebHubTelescope,
I presume you have forecast the past with great accuracy and precision, back to when the Earth’s surface temperature exceeded 5000K, by means of your no doubt physically based model.
Notwithstanding this wonderful, if pointless, exercise in curve fitting, what makes you think your “model” has any utility whatsoever?
I can’t see any, but I assume you have some reason to believe your efforts have some use, other than the type of personal satisfaction one might obtain from playing Solitaire on a computer.
Might I enquire as to your motives?
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Lockwood [1] uses the ENSO 3.4 Index instead of the SOI and he achieves the fit in the top panel.
http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/1683/xij.gif
I applied the SOI since it goes back to 1880 and one can see the cumulative trend of CO2 forcing together with the natural variations, the latter which largely cancel out as they go +/- around a reversion to the mean.
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
[1]M. Lockwood, “Solar influence on global and regional climates,” Surveys in geophysics, vol. 33, no. 3–4, pp. 503–534, 2012.
R. Gates
Agree with you that attributing ALL past warming to CO2 is just as silly as saying there CANNOT have been ANY past warming due to CO2.
But attributing “most” of the past warming (since 1950) to increased GHG concentrations (with 95% certainty) as IPCC has done is also very dicey (especially in light of the pause, which has occurred despite unabated human GHG emissions and concentrations reaching record levels).
As the Chief tells us, clouds have changed from the late 20thC to the early 21stC, resulting in a greater reflection of incoming SW radiation (the prime source of our planet’s warming).
This coincides with a reversal of a warming trend to a trend of slight cooling.
And we have Met Office and others telling us that “natural variability” is the cause of the current pause.
This also fits with what the Chief is telling us, and it seems to contradict the IPCC claim that “most” of the past warming was caused by human GHGs.
So it’s not a question of “ALL” or “NONE”.
It is simply a challenge to the IPCC claim of “MOST”.
Max
What we have is space cadets attributing all change to CO2. Disingenuous to claim otherwise.
Variability occurs on scales of interest – it added to temperatures between 1976 and 1998 and has damped GAT and is overwhelmingly likely to do so for decades to come.
ENSO is a major source of variability and increased in frequency and intensity over the last century – considerably above the average for the last millenium.
e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Vance2012-AntarticaLawDomeicecoresaltcontent.jpg.html?sort=3&o=90
This should be fairly clear to other than space cadets.
Chief confidently exclaimed:
“What we have is space cadets attributing all change to CO2. Disingenuous to claim otherwise.”
—–
Please show us how not to be disingenuous by giving just one example where a “space cadet” says all change (I take it you meant climate change) is attributable to CO2. If you can’t provide such an example, there is an even better word to describe you than disingenuous.
Much is due to the control knob of CO2. Several climate scientists will attribute more than 100% of the warming to CO2 — they can due this if the man-made reflective aerosols and ozone are canceling out a portion of the CO2 influence.
Hansen in his recent papers claims exactly that. The CO2 control knob forcing is close to double but then he asserts that aerosols knock it down by 1/2. See Figure 1 in [1].
[1]J. Hansen, M. Sato, P. Kharecha, and K. von Schuckmann, “Earth’s energy imbalance and implications,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, vol. 11, no. 24, pp. 13421–13449, Dec. 2011.
‘The reduction in cloud cover could also be a positive cloud feedback to warming.’
So all change comes back to CO2 – which gates agreed to. Or at least snidely appeared to. Anything but look at data.
The reduction refers to the CERES/MODIS/ARGO period last decade.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_MODIS-1.gif.html?sort=3&o=107
Although the data does show a much larger increase in cloud radiative forcing between the 80’s and 90’s.
The conceptual model based on the theory of synchronous chaos goes a great deal – beyond webby’s limited horizons.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/rc_fig1_zpsf24786ae.jpg.html?sort=3&o=30
Most warming was not CO2 – and warming is overwhelmingly unlikely to recommence anytime soon.
Doing the numbers based on theory.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/11/09/impacts-of-chinas-hydropower-boom/#comment-410991
Webby
In case you haven’t gotten the word yet, the “CO2 control knob” has dropped off.
We’re in free flight.
Max
Q “How to square this with the oft reported 97% consensus? Well, ‘climate scientists’ in these surveys typically includes economists, ecologists etc., Q ….Exactly what 97% ?
– Hang on what properly conducted surveys are these ? AFAIK that there is only one “97%” survey & that was manipulated to get that result from 79 scientists. It is true that in west the majority of climate institutions support an undefined consensus & some scientific associations do too (but none have actually surveyed their members).
The N. Hemisphere’s long term temperature variability is well reflected in Loehle’s temperature reconstruction. It is known fact that N. H’s. long term temperature variability is decisively affected by the N. Atlantic circulation. Its the large currents circulatory systems is known as N. A. Subpolar gyre (SPG), where overflow of the cold Arctic currents is mixed with the warm Gulf Stream’s waters. The circulatory period of the SPG is variable, mainly in range 20-30 years.
WHOI: “The North Icelandic Jet is a deep-reaching current that flows along the continental slope of Iceland. North Icelandic Jet (NIJ), contributes to a key component of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as the “great ocean conveyor belt,” which is critically important for regulating Earth’s climate. As part of the planet’s reciprocal relationship between ocean circulation and climate, this conveyor belt transports warm surface water to high latitudes where the water warms the air, then cools, sinks, and returns towards the equator as a deep flow.”
Continental slope of the North Iceland is tectonically vary active; however this is not an easy variable to reconstruct, but the surface magnetic records are a reasonable even if not very accurate proxy either in the intensity or timing.
Calculated 20 and 30 years delta for magnetic field change along the continental slope of North Iceland and the Leohle’s temperature anomaly reconstruction are shown here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CT.htm
This may be or not a coincidence, but if not, may not wise to dismiss, even if a direct operating mechanism is not readily recognised.
Regardless of who has legislated on the meaning of the expression “climate change”, it is a bit like the expressions “air breathing” and “water drinking”. You start with something undeniable as if that was the proposition which was at issue.
Someone needed to throw the abstract back at the authors and point out this laxity which takes all purpose and point from what follows.
If anyone wants to tell me that the expression “climate change” now has a consensual usage beyond its common meaning, I’d ask why people who are supposed to rely on specificity have never shown any interest in finding specific terminology for the very phenomenon which is at the centre of all their concerns.
More and more, I’m thinking science “communicators” need to go start their own language and leave mine alone.
mosomoso
Who are those “people,” exactly? Would it include the vast majority of “skeptics” who write comments on this blog about “climate change?” Would it include folks such as Judith and our much beloved “skeptics” who talk about the “pause in global warming?” How about “skeptics” when they tell me what “most skeptics” believe, and why they believe it?
Who are those folks who “supposedly” rely on specificity, and as a result, define their “specific terminology?”
Oh Moso old mate – as usual you couldn’t be more wrong. You got it wrong on girls in rags and feathers, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe Coffee, the 1960-61 dodge Fury and much else. Although all three have been discontinued for health and safety reasons – we can safely ascribe that to the nannification of the socialist ecostate.
Climate change of course goes well beyond the thermometer on the read out of your air conditioning. It encompasses such things as the progressive debeeficaton of society over this century to create a race of beings pure enough to greet the aliens when they get here. It includes peon chants to a man called James.
‘The man they call James!
He robbed from the rich and he gave to the poor,
He stood up to the man and he gave him what for.
Our love for him now, ain’t hard to explain,
The hero of Kyoto, the man they call James!
Our Jayne saw the mines climate breakin’
He saw the warmists lament
And he saw that death trains takin’
Every btu and leavin’ five cents
So he said, “You can’t do that to my people,
You can’t crush them under your heel.”
James strapped on his hat
And in five seconds flat
Stole everything boss coal had to steal.’
h/t Joss Whedon
Frankly – you have gone to far this time. I am reporting you to the Peon Workers Union Internationale – the statutory poonishment is winning a one way ticket to UNtopia Minnesota – where you will be reeducated – umm entertained – by webby with bicycle seat aversion therapy. We advise you to dress warm.
So does this mean that there is 97% confidence that the 74% that didn’t respond where CAGW kinda guys and Gals busily defining a new Super Duper Cyclone index? That could allow for up to 87.5% pro CAGW of the total population had the no shows responded, meaning only 12.5% of meteorologists might be climate change denying morons.
Exactly, Cap, exactly…. like I was sayin’…
http://judithcurry.com/2013/11/10/the-52-consensus/#comment-411343
Naw, everyone knows I can’t do stats :)
I will never grant you any formal know-how, Cap’n.
Insert your favorite joke about fishing.
Willard, Formal in the Keys is button shirt instead of tee.
That work?
The results of this poll appear to be consistent with the Lichter 2008 poll results to me.
Climate is nothing but change. The lax use – by anybody! – of the expression “climate change” is always unacceptable and usually a stunt. The fact that it is a very large, elaborate and wide-spread stunt does not make it less of a stunt.
“Global Warming” is almost as bad. AGW not as bad…but bad.
As for skeptics who concern themselves with the “pause in global warming”, it is baffling to me how anybody would think a bit of cooling, warming or “pausing” over two or even ten decades can indicate very much at all. We’re talking about climate here, not hemlines.
I assume that most people, when they talk of “climate change,” are referring to AGW, so I don’t agree that it is “usually a stunt” whether it is used by “skeptics” or by “realists.”
But I agree that the lack of specificity, frequently, adds noise. It is unfortunate.
It’s not “unfortunate”, it is intentionally misleading. It’s dishonest.
Wot’s in a name?
A rose by any other
still smells the same,
(was wont ter say.)
Wot’s in a name?
Those with intent
ter win un-thinking
bogans ter their opinion
know changes in
slogans ter conceal
changes in data
are necessary …
‘globul warming’ ter
‘climate change’
‘four legs better
than two, or vice versa.
– It’s what yer haf’ta do.
Oh, you modern types. I could never have resisted rhyming bogan with slogan.
Incidentally, the midcoast of NSW may be moving from extreme drought to…well, you know the rules for Australia. We invented climate extremes.
Our driest recorded autumn/winter was preceded by way over half a metre of rain in Jan. If it happened now I’m sure that would qualify as climate change, and something to be “communicated” to serfs.
But we’re talking about 1895…the year of NSW’s vast late winter fires which would certainly be “unprecedented” if they had occurred this year. But since it happened 118 years ago, there is nothing to be “communicated” about all that.
The questions in these investigations could be more ambivalent than it seems (and they are not very good anyway), because IPCC has made the water muddy. By climate change, the understanding is more or less that it is only the antropogenic component, and so could it be with GW.
The question should have been Global average temperature, and not the loaded word GW.
JC said: “Look at the views in column 1, then look at the % in the rightmost column: 52% state the the warming since 1850 is mostly anthropogenic. One common categorization would categorize the other 48% as ‘deniers’.”
I disagree. I would not count ‘don’t know’ as ‘denier’. The only denier categories are those that definitely oppose the IPCC view, which are the 5% in the ‘Yes; mostly natural’ and 4% in the ‘GW is not happening’ categories, totaling 9%.
> I was inspired to write this piece by Currently Fashionable Polemicist, who summarised the Issue better than I could when they said “oversimplification that makes me feel smart”. I have a strong opinion on this Issue, and my sharing it with you at this time is in no way attributable to opportunism on my part, due to the Issue’s sudden prominence in the news cycle. I haven’t exaggerated my position in the interests of raising my public profile, and here I am casually dropping in a reference to a long-ago instance that proves I have cared about the Issue for longer than you.
http://junkee.com/an-opinion-piece-on-a-controversial-topic/23161
Please do read the comment section of the above article.
Please don’t even bother with the link.
On the authority of my seven previous lives, with a parenthetical remark where I can namedrop a bit, I will concur.
my fav,
“incohate invectiveforsakking grammer spelling puntuation to assertion ov strongly ignorant conviction for sumthing unintelligble insult”
It seems to me that the surveys have mainly sought information on the qualifications of respondents and how they relate to climate science and not enough to the technology they use. The heart of the science ought to be in the climate models because they should embody all known processes that affect the science, including the random effects where stationarity should not be assumed. So the survey should try to expose the essential structure of the models, the processes included ans excluded from the models with block diagrams clearly showing each process with its inputs and outputs labeled In approved international units, Of course climate models will necessarily include repetitious statements or equations for different heights in the atmosphere and the depths of the oceans. Random forces would usually occur where shear between large bodies of water/atmosphere interact The processes of excitation of the many modes of the CO2 molecule may need further research.so the energy in photons absorbed or emitted is correctly represented.
Because our models should embody all physical knowledge of climate, its status including validity requires this step.
JC writes: “I suspect that the higher level of belief among ocean sciences and particularly geophysics represents second order belief (i.e. support for a perceived consensus) rather than personal research on AGW detection/attribution or a careful survey of the literature.”
I take issue with that. I don’t think this has anything to do with “second order belief”. Rather, it is an expression of trust in the professional integrity and competence of the climate scientists who do the actual research.
Consider: Researchers who themselves act with competence and integrity in ocean sciences and geophysics would likely trust that their peers in climate science would do the same in their field.Thus the higher confidence, no belief involved at all here.
I completely agree with you retrograde, but I also think that their more thorough understanding of fundamental dynamics in their areas of specialty and being also much more well read in these areas would lead them to greater confidence in the wide ranging evidence for anthropogenic climate change.
backward looking,
“Rather, it is an expression of trust in the professional integrity and competence of the climate scientists who do the actual research.”
You betcha :)
“Consider: Researchers who themselves act with competence and integrity in ocean sciences and geophysics would likely trust that their peers in climate science would do the same in their field.” That was Judith’s view prior to Climategate, which shocked her by showing that not everyone adhered to what she believed were common, high, ethical standards. Many who came to CE did so because of concern about CAGW based on their trust that climate scientists were providing honest and unbiased information, but became increasingly sceptical the more they learned.
Consensus? Consensus? I heap scorn and derision on your consensus!
Something either exists, or it doesn’t. And, yes, I have heard of Schrodinger and Heisenberg. One thing that doesn’t exist is the ability of CO2 to heat anything by itself.
The failure of anybody at all to demonstrate this effect might indicate the incredible subtlety of the principle. No wonder one needs many, many, years of intense study to truly understand the complexity of the CO2 paradigm.
On the other hand, observing that things warm up during the day, and cool down at night, might cause one to come to the conclusion that objects exposed to the Sun tend to warm, and that objects exposed to the near vacuum of outer space tend to lose energy, and cool.
Now that CO2 seems to be failing to heat the surface of the Earth, in spite of the consensus, quantum physics needs to be rewritten, and QED turned on its head. The special back- radiated photons now penetrate with ease thousands of meters of water before interacting with matter. Obviously, they also penetrate the crust just as easily – this explains the current lack of surface warming. The net result is that the interior of the Earth is warming, and the core will now increase its temperature from 5000 K to a number indistinguishable from 5000 K.
Or maybe it really has risen to millions of degrees as Mr Gore said, but the magical CO2 is keeping the heat trapped in the core, much to our relief.
In any case, just because a majority of people “believe” in something, does not change reality. All that happens is that the cries of “Death to the unbelievers!” become more strident, as reality challenges belief.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn uttered:
“One thing that doesn’t exist is the ability of CO2 to heat anything by itself.”
—
Brilliant Mike. Only problem is, no one seems to have claimed it does.
Mike, your logic is flawed …
R Gates,
Are you insinuating that CO2 can only create a rise in temperature in the presence of sunlight?
You might let me know the precise mechanism by which CO2 creates surface warming (that is, a rise in temperature), at night.
And please, no stupidly irrelevant “blanket” analogies. A little physics should suffice.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
It is like insulation. Insulation doesn’t have to be heated to work.
Well Mike,
A wee bit o education for you. One of the very early predictions of global climate models when looking at rising greenhouse gas levels was warmer night time temperatures. This prediction, not likely to be discussed much by “skeptics”, has proven remarkably correct:
http://www.knmi.nl/publications/fulltexts/2005jd0062903.pdf
Both days and nights have been warming, but nights even more. A pretty clear greenhouse gas increase fingerprint.
Jim D,
Insulate a corpse. Watch it warm up (or not).
Insulators provide no heat. They “slow” the transmission of “heat”. In both directions, actually. If you can find one that doesn’t, congratulations!
You have perfected a clean, essentially inexhaustible source of free energy. I realise you probably haven’t got the foggiest notion of what I’m talking about, but that’s life. I don’t mind.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Flynn, “Insulate a corpse. Watch it warm up (or not).”
Cool, an NCIS kinda experiment :) We can whack two crack heads, insulate one and not the other then check liver temp in two hours. Oh wait, we probably should use pigs or to really gross folks out Rabbits rescued from a cosmetics lab.
You know if we pump room temperature formaldehyde into each the insulated one might stay warmer :)
Then again if we insulate both and pump more formaldehyde into one than the other, which one would be warmer? Oh I forgot, we need perfectly symmetrical corpses. .
Mike, so is the earth like a corpse to you with no heat source? Did you think this through?
R Gates,
I trust you are not referring to the 100+ models which differ in their results, meaning that, at most, only one can be correct. So far, it appears that not even one reflects reality.
In any case, even the Book of the Warmist shows no warming since 1998 or so. CO2 levels seem to have risen. Temperatures not.
I am therefore unaware of the “rise in nighttime temperatures” to which you allude. Certainly, in places recording unprecedented low temperatures since 1998, the rise has been somewhat elusive.
Maybe it’s a conspiracy by Big Oil to artificially depress recorded temperatures, or some other deeply disturbing heretofore hidden plot by a devious group with a secret agenda. Or maybe not.
What do you think?
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
JimD,
You are getting there.
You mistakenly said “Insulation doesn’t have to be heated to work.”
Now you acknowledge that the Earth does, indeed, have an internal heat source, and presumably, that insulation needs something to “insulate”. Failure to acknowledge this fact led Lord Kelvin to go to his deathbed believing that the Earth was only 20 million years old or so. So already you are better informed than the quite brilliant physicist.
You then went on to say “Mike, so is the earth like a corpse to you with no heat source? Did you think this through?”
The answers should be obvious. You originally stated that insulation needs no heat to work. You have now reversed your position. So, no, the Earth obviously has an internal heat source. However, it is painfully obvious to anyone trying to sleep at night in an arid tropical desert, that the whole depth of the atmosphere is insufficient to prevent your body losing heat to the point where you may well expire due to hypothermia. When you become a corpse, you will then continue to cool until the Sun comes up, CO2 notwithstanding.
Observation shows that the Earth’s surface cools at night. If the rate of cooling slows, it still cools. It doesn’t heat up. Sorry about that.
So yes, a deeply flawed attempt to put words in my mouth, and yes, I did think it through.
And you?
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
R. Gates, are you sure you want to call it a fingerprint of increasing GHGs? A fingerprint indicates there can’t be alternative reasons. This isn’t going to be like the cooling stratosphere fingerprint is it? Where it is the fingerprint all the way up until it isn’t cooperating and then it becomes complicated? Poor mother nature is all fingerprinted up. I hope she at least got the dollar. BTW, BEST shows diurnal temperatures separating as of the early 80s.
CaptDallas,
According to the Way of the Warmist, the liver temperature of the insulated corpse will steadily rise until the whole corpse is cooked to perfection.
Gas-fired barbecue? Who needs one. Just throw your meat into an insulated container. Remove when required temperature is reached.
Slowing the rate of cooling does not result in an increase in temperature. Nighttime on Earth is an easily observable example of the impossibility of preventing the Earth from cooling by surrounding it with an atmosphere.
I let the Warmists worry on my behalf – they seem to enjoy it.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
“Gas-fired barbecue?” Uh, them’s fightin’ words where the Cap lives.
Myke Flynn, your argument has two components. First you argue that insulation reduces heat flow symmetrically in both direction. Second you argue that insulation can only warm objects that are heated and the Earth (at one any specific geographical location) can’t be warmed at night, hence the greenhouse effect can’t explain increases in nighttime temperatures. The first argument overlooks that greenhouse gases are opaque to longwave but transparent to shorwave radiation. So they let most of the incoming solar radiation through but absorb most of the shortwave radiation emitted from the surface (and at all levels). The second argument overlooks that if there is an intermittent heat source (a furnace in a house being turned on and off at regular intervals, say) then increasing insulation of the house will cause the temperature to be higher both when the furnace is on and when it is off. Your dead corpse analogy would only be relevant if the Sun were to shut off completely and permanently. Such a corpse will never heat up, but in the case of the house, it just downs’t cool down as much during the intervals when the furnace is off as it would with thinner insulation.
Flynn,Warmist are not particularly motivated to look at realistic upper limits and various factors that would impact the efficiency of their crisis du jour. That are actually motivated to over look issues since what ever might be possible despite how unlikely is just fine. They are Scaredicrats using fear to motivate. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some legitimate concerns, just that you can count on them to over estimate to the point they actually begin to believe their own estimates.
If something might be beneficial, they will blow that complete out of proportion as well. They are fun to watch until they start getting into my space.
They are incapable of shaking off their standard operating procedure which will require complete and utter humiliation for them to slap themselves back into some semblance of reality. If not they will just mumble about some semi-miraculous event that save the world THIS TIME and keep on being PITA.
NW,
You are no doubt correct.
The solar powered barbecue strangely refuses to function at night. The wind powered one likewise provided inconsistent results at night when the wind drops.
Maybe a “CO2 insulation” barbecue would work, but I can’t seem to lay my hands on one locally.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn, OK, let’s try again. So the sun heats the earth like a fire heats a house. You put an insulator around your house to keep the heat from escaping, and you put GHGs around the earth to keep heat from escaping. Both stay warmer with the insulator than they would have been without it. In neither case is the insulator actually warmer than the thing it is keeping warm. See the analogy yet? That is about as simply as I can put it.
Pierre Normand,
I point out that I most definitely did not say what you assert. Insulation warms nothing. Heat sources warm things. In the absence of a heat source, things cool down, with the ultimate result of an isothermal universe – based on present knowledge.
Insulation slows the rate of cooling or warming, nothing more.
Insulation works in both directions. The hottest part of the Earth’s surface cannot reach the hottest temperature on the surface of the Moon. The coldest part of the Earth’s surface cannot reach the coldest temperature on the surface of the Moon. Insulation at work.
Meaningless and irrelevant analogies tend to demonstrate the users’ lack of understanding of the subject. Please, no more houses, blankets, pots, fires and such.
If you don’t accept that the Earth’s surface cools in the absence of sunlight, you might care to observe a thermometer over a day/night cycle, outside , exposed to the sky.
You may well note that the GHE stops working at night.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
JimD,
You said “Mike Flynn, OK, let’s try again. So the sun heats the earth like a fire heats a house. You put an insulator around your house to keep the heat from escaping, and you put GHGs around the earth to keep heat from escaping. Both stay warmer with the insulator than they would have been without it. In neither case is the insulator actually warmer than the thing it is keeping warm. See the analogy yet? That is about as simply as I can put it.”
Your first statement, in the best Warmist tradition, is misleading.
You may care to correct it, as your whole irrelevant analogy falls at the first hurdle. The Sun does not heat the Earth like a fire heats a house, unless the “fire” is external to the house, and some distance away, heating said house by radiation alone.
One step at a time. Place your fire outside your house, and proceed from there.
Not as simple as you thought, is it?
Just for fun, after you have corrected your error, surround your house with air as an insulator, turn your external fire off half a day at a time, and tell me again how GHGs work. On the other hand, save yourself the embarrassment, and try again another time.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn, now it looks like you are trying to be thick, because I can’t believe someone is naturally so dense. Do you understand how the earth heats via its surface absorbing solar rays? Do you understand how that heating occurs below the insulating atmosphere? Do you understand how when heat gets inside an insulating layer it can be trapped by said insulator? Do you see how a house also gets heating below its insulating layer by a fireplace? What else can I make clear for you, or is this all beyond your comprehension?
You’ve been pwned by the blanket gambit, JimD:
http://rabett.blogspot.ca/2008/09/survival-blanket-outbreak-of-the.html
Congratulations!
Mike Flynn, there are larger diurnal variations on the moon because the day (and night) is 28 times longer. It gets more time to warm up and cool down. In addition, there are no oceans to supply thermal inertia or atmosphere to allow for horizontal heat transport. Still, the average surface temperature of the moon is -23°C in spite of it’s smaller albedo.
You are still arguing that insulation doesn’t warm things up. But nobody argues that it does. We are arguing that insulation cause heated bodies to be warmer than they would be without it. There is no inference that the insulating material is the source of the heating, so you are stubbornly battling a straw-man. It is also irrelevant to the house/Earth analogy that the source of heat — the Sun — is external to the Earth. The greenhouse gases mostly are transparent to the shortwave radiation from the Sun. Likewise, if you hating system is electrical, it is quite irrelevant that the power plant is external to your house. The power lines that bring electric power to your house are negligibly resistive and the heat is being generated in the house. Insulation doesn’t hamper electric power to come in just because the power plant is “external”. Likewise, the greenhouse gases only hamper the longwave solar radiations from entering the climate system, and this only is a small fraction of the shortwave energy that goes through unhampered. It does hamper the heat from escaping, except through the narrow infrared atmospheric window.
Yes, it seems like Mike Flynn has a severe blind spot. There is, it seems to me, a striking contrast between the attitude of “regulars” on warmist (e.g. realclimate and skepticalscience) and AGW-skeptical (e.g. wuwt, climate etc.) blogs. While both sides can be accused of bias, this contrast remains striking. Sometimes individuals argue either the warmist or AGW-skeptical positions for a reason that’s just plain bad on almost anyone’s view, because it contravenes very basic and uncontroversial scientific or logical principles. When this occurs on warmist blogs, the other regulars promptly correct the their fellow warmist’s reasoning mistake (or flawed premise) in spite of his/her flawed argument being one that promotes some consensual conclusion. The person who made the blunder usually quickly make amend and is brought to see the light under peer pressure. The same thing occurs is the math/physics/chemistry/etc. classroom where crackpottery is severely repressed. On AGW skeptical blogs, however, just as is the case on conspiracy theory blogs of any kind (e.g. vaccination, moon landing, 9/11), it seems like there is a tacit agreement between fellow skeptics, and also the blog host, never to point out that an idea is flat out wrong or an argument flat out illogical so long as it purports to refute the “official” account. This generally seems to be the case although there are some exceptions. Roy Spencer, for instance, is intolerant of greenhouse effect denialism and actively fights it. Lucia and McIntyre also display some intolerance to sheer nonsense. Anthony and Judith, and their regular commentators, however, are tolerant to a fault, it seems to me.
Pierre-Normand,
May I respectfully point out that insulation results in an object being cooler than it otherwise would be, when insulated from an external heat source.
When you place your cold beer in an insulated container, you don’t expect it to be warmer than it would otherwise be, do you?
This is all beside the point. The atmosphere has well defined insulating properties. It acts to prevent the surface heating as quickly as it would if the atmosphere was absent, and at night acts to prevent the surface from cooling as quickly as it would in the absence of the insulator.
You may have noticed that the Earth is not presently “warming” due to CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 levels are rising, temperatures are not. Nature seems to be disregarding your desire for the Earth to warm in accordance with your wishes. Too bad. So sad.
Call me when the Earth starts warming.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Pierre, can you point out a few examples of warmists pulling up one of their own on this blog?
Jim D,
May I extend a Warm Welcome to the Wriggling Wiggling Waffling Wondrous World of the Warmist.
Your wonderful CO2 insulator warming on one side, whilst it cools on the other, all the while possessing no temperature itself, is indeed a wonder to behold.
You may not have noticed that real insulators differ from Warmist insulators inasmuch as they can slow the rate of heating of cool objects whilst simultaneously slowing the rate of cooling of warm objects. But no matter.
You most obviously have not noticed that even according to the Book of Warm, surface temperatures are not actually rising! Oh no! The insulation is failing!
First it stopped creating heat at night, now it doesn’t even create heat during the day!
Whatever shall we do?
Get back to me when the Earth starts warming again.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn stupidly said:
“You may well note that the GHE stops working at night.”
—
Yes, a law was passed to prevent triatomic atoms from working past sunset. They always get the night off.
“Yes, a law was passed to prevent triatomic atoms from working past sunset. They always get the night off.”
Must be government atoms.
Mike Flynn said: “May I respectfully point out that insulation results in an object being cooler than it otherwise would be, when insulated from an external heat source.”
Sure but you are stubbornly overlooking the main points that has repeatedly been made to you. The Sun is the energy source but the heat is being generated at the Earth surface irrespective of the greenhouse “insulation”. That’s because the greenhouse gases are transparent to shortwave energy and most of the incident solar energy resides within the shortwave spectrum. I don’t know why it seems impossible for you to so much as acknowledge this simple point. So, the fact that the Sun is spatially “external” to the Earth greenhouse blanket is just as irrelevant to the location of the effective heat source (where actual heat is being produced) as is the fact that the power plant that generates the power for your electrical house heating system is “external” to your house. The insulation in the walls of your house doesn’t impede electric power from entering and heat being generated *inside* the house anymore than greenhouse gases can stop shortwave solar energy from entering the climate system and heat being generated *below* the greenhouse blanket. It does, however, impedes it’s escape since the upwelling radiation is generated withing the longwave spectrum. The greenhouse insulating blanket operates asymmetrically with respect to incoming solar energy and escaping thermal radiation just as the enclosure of your house lets electrical energy from the external power plant enter freely and impedes the escape of heat.
Jim D and Mike
Insulation reduces the rate of heat loss (or gain).
The ONLY external source of heat of our planet is the sun.
A considerable percentage of this incoming heat is reflected back out to space by clouds (and a smaller amount by surface albedo).
If cloud cover (especially low clouds) decreases (as it did in the 1980s/90s), more heat reaches our planet and it eventually begins to warm (as it did).
Conversely, if cloud cover increases (as it did since around 2000), less heat reaches our planet and it eventually begins to cool (as it did).
On top of this we have the impact of the GH effect (principally from water vapor and high-altitude clouds), slowing down the rate of reradiated outgoing LW energy, which some people equate to an “insulation effect”.
Lab spectrometry results show that CO2 is also a GH gas, but it only exists in much smaller concentration in our atmosphere. Others, such as methane and N2O are even lower.
How much these trace gases really impact our climate is hotly debated. Some scientists believe that between 9% and 20% of the natural GH effect can be attributed to CO2, with much smaller percentages for the others.
IPCC attributes a very high effect to them (especially CO2), but this is anything but certain.
Max
Jim D and Mike
Just to quantify the reflection by clouds and the GH warming (earlier comment).
Clouds are estimated to reflect on average 48 Wm-2 (Ramanathan & Inamdar) while a doubling of CO2 is estimated to result in warming of 3.7 Wm-2 (Myhre et al.)
So it is clear that a 10% increase/decrease in clouds would have a greater impact on climate than a doubling of CO2.
Max
Mike Flynn, you have now said something to the effect that the atmosphere can’t block heat escaping because it doesn’t block heat entering. Do you know anything about the difference in wavelength between incoming and outgoing radiation, and how the atmosphere is effective at keeping heat in and also blocks some light out? The solar incoming side of things doesn’t change with adding CO2, but the IR outgoing part sure does, which is the whole point. Same incoming heat, less outgoing. It is not that difficult to understand. I think you are having trouble climbing that first step of even understanding what the AGW theory says, let alone being able to formulate a sensible question about it. Even some of the other skeptics are now trying to help you out, probably feeling sorry for you.
OMG… I just have to jump in here!
Mike Flynn. You wrote:
“””Heat sources warm things. In the absence of a heat source, things cool down, with the ultimate result of an isothermal universe – based on present knowledge.
Insulation slows the rate of cooling or warming, nothing more.
Insulation works in both directions. The hottest part of the Earth’s surface cannot reach the hottest temperature on the surface of the Moon. The coldest part of the Earth’s surface cannot reach the coldest temperature on the surface of the Moon. Insulation at work.”””
Lets turn the blanket into a nice black sweater. If you live in an area where it gets hot during the summer because of the constant sun radiation hitting the Earths surface, like say Arizona, New Mexico, or California’s Great Central Valley, you definitely do not want to wear a black sweater to try and keep you cool. Though you are insulated from the sun, the sun still heats the black sweater, which transfers that heat to your skin. And now, because the heat is trapped between your skin and the sweater, you get hotter than you would if you don’t have a sweater.
“You may not have noticed that real insulators differ from Warmist insulators inasmuch as they can slow the rate of heating of cool objects whilst simultaneously slowing the rate of cooling of warm objects.”
We are half in agreement. Slowing the rate of cooling of warm objects. The warm object being the earth. A real insulator such as Styrofoam, works on the long wave radiation, the same as CO2 and water vapor.
Sun > Atmosphere(a) > Surface > Atmosphere (b) > Space
(a) is a weak blocker compared to (b)
(a) is different from (b) in that it is trying block for the most part short wave radation in the first case, long wave in the second.
The Surfaces job is to convert Short wave radiation to Long wave radiation so that we can grow corn in Minnesota.
Retrograde Orbit,
Do tell. You might care to back up your assertion with a fact or two I am always open to new information.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
The same trust in the professional integrity and competence of the climate scientists is presumably present among all AMS members. After all they all have a scientific background, did some original research, whatnot …
And that could easily explain the correlations (1) and (4).
Consider: If I trust in the professional integrity and competence of climate scientists but perceive that they are in conflict over AGW, I would probably conclude that AGW is at least uncertain.
Conversely, if i perceive a consensus, I would probably conclude that AGW is likely.
Retro said:
“After all they all have a scientific background, did some original research, whatnot…”
There are several categories for members, but even for general members, they do not have to have done any original research and may only have had some bare minimum of education on actual climate science, perhaps having a focus on weather forecasting. It would be interesting to know, for example, how many could even tell you anything about the Brewer-Dobson circulation without consulting google.
The correlation that puzzles me is (3) political ideology.
Why would a liberal be more easily convinced of AGW than a conservative?
There has to be a rational explanation for that.
Motivated thinking? AGW, if true, offers a rationalization for a socially manipulable global bureaucracy.
This has come up several times here over the past few years with studies such as Kahan. The correlation is real, and more between skeptics and free-market thinking, but also liberals tend to trust science more, while conservatives have a general distrust of anything that comes out of academia, including these social science studies.
Jim D, these generalization aren’t always true. I’ve done some work on ideology and beliefs about descriptive matters. In an experiment I did over the course of several years with students at an extremely diverse urban campus, the prior beliefs of the relatively conservative students were more descriptively accurate about the behavior of an experimental market (beliefs before observing the experimental market in class). After observing the evidence of the experiment, if anything, the order was reversed (in statistical terms, the posterior beliefs of the relatively liberal subjects were closer to “truth”), but this effect size was small and not robustly significant, whereas the prior belief ordering was robustly significant.
I suspect this has more to do with information sources than anything else. On a North American campus, economists are viewed as relatively conservative. In the summer school classes I used, the students had just finished learning about competitive equilibrium from an economics instructor. My hunch is that the relatively conservative students were more willing to believe the source of the theory (a relatively conservative instructor–at least by reputation) than were the relatively liberal students.
I have always wanted to do a reverse version of this experiment, where the instructors are (say) social psychologists who have just taught the students about (say) the tragedy of the commons, and a person comes in and does a relevant experiment with the students. If my explanation is right, then in this context the relatively liberal students will be the ones with relatively correct prior beliefs.
Also, I don’t think there’s anything necessarily unreasonable about this outcome. The explanation has to do with trust of sources of claims. It’s pretty simple to construct examples where greater trust of those who are relatively similar to you, ideologically speaking, is the right thing to do (this requires a correlation between what people value and people’s ideology, but that doesn’t seem like a stretch.
As I mentioned elsewhere, perhaps liberals are less inclined to believe in science that proves something safe than science that proves something dangerous. It is a difference in thought process that leans towards regulation.
Perhaps. In the experiment I describe, the beliefs I measure are about purely descriptive matters… The students are shown exact statements concerning the outcomes of the experiment, as predicted by competitive equilibrium, things like “the number of contracts will be predicted exactly [by the theory]” or “the combined earnings of the traders will be predicted exactly [by the theory] or “the average contract prices will fall within a 30-cent range [predicted by the theory] …there is no implication here of safety or danger.
Because lefties believe that CAGW is a pathway to imposing their political and economic ideology on policy-makers and the broader population. Where have you been the last 30 years? Do you have a sceptical bone in your body?
Oh please …
That’s just as retarded as saying: Righties believe that preventing us from doing anything about CAGW is a pathway to imposing their political and economic ideology ….
That won’t cut it.
Why would liberals be more prone to motivated thinking than conservatives? Looking at Congress, they both are …
More liberals are atheists or agnostic as well. This may be a clue why they tend to believe in the likelihood of anthropogenic climate change.
That’s a good thought.
My 58 years of atheism have no impact on my views on CAGW.
“My 58 years of atheism have no impact on my views on CAGW.”
—-
When it comes to your views on anything, correlation is definitely not causation, but correlation means your views must inhabit the same mind– or more accurately, fit together to make up the meta-memeplex that is your mind.
The default position is to believe what the clear majority of scientists say in their area of expertise. The motivated reasoning comes into explaining why some people don’t believe the scientists.
That’s the opposite of what is happening with regard to nuclear power and GMO food, where liberals are actively anti-science.
Heck, even in the climate world, the left is actively denying the science concerning trends about extreme weather and even rejects the pause.
Face it- the left accepts science that reinforces any position the left already has taken.
As for expert opinion, do recall that 100% of trained professional phrenologists accepted phrenology.
The issues you raise relate to safety. It is hard for science to prove safety, but it can prove danger.
jeffn, “That’s the opposite of what is happening with regard to nuclear power and GMO food,”
Isn’t ironic how one side can be against GM food while the other is against GM people?
“Safety” is just the specific topic that the left is lying about.
That’s not my opinion, it’s what Monbiot and Lynas (men of the left) are admitting.
I wonder if the questions of:
a) is there AGW and
b) what if anything should we do about it
somehow bleed together in the minds of the survey subjects.
When are we ever going to get a sociological survey of the real distinguish between CAGW believers and skeptics.
1. Do you consider your intelligence to be superior to the average voter?
2. Do you believe that experts with superior IQs and education (or the politicians who pay them) should make the decisions on major public policy issues?
3. Do you believe that the risk of catastrophic damage from anthropogenic caused global warming justifies the decarbonization of the economy.
I will wager that you would have a correlation of over 90% of those who answer yes to both 1 and 2, and those who answer yes to 3.
I will also wager that there would be a negative correlation of over 70% between those who answer no to question to and yes to question 3.
But they would have to answer the questions truthfully. Seriously: the NYTs is still trying to cover Obama and Pelosi lies on Obamacare. And that is clearly a “We know best” proposition (you need these protections, . . .).
It would be interesting to get to the bottom of this:
11.
I am reluctant to bring up the topic of global warming in AMS
meetings or other AMS forums.
[Asked if answer to Question 8 is “Strongly agree” or “Somewhat agree”]
Strongly agree 9%
Somewhat agree 20%
Neither agree nor disagree 27%
Somewhat disagree 17%
Strongly disagree 27%
n=945
A lot of people feel they can’t even talk about the issue. That may seem odd given the umbrella provided in this forum by Judith. But not even talk about it? That sounds so stifling.
You could change the question to “I am reluctant to bring up politics and religion at the dinner table” and get about the same response.
Very astute observation. Same reason you don’t go smacking a hornets nest– it can really lead to great distress!
I thought it was about science. I suppose the science advocates gave up on that a long time ago. I have an old high school friend I try to discuss this with, and he has called me a “flat earther,” among other things. Yet, I mostly try to discuss the science with him. It’s next to impossible.
While I agree that anthropogenic actions are the major cause of global warming, I disagree that CO2 is a significant factor. The combustion of fossil fuels constitutes 80% of our energy use. Fuel: “a material used to produce heat or power by burning”. When they are burned they emit heat (the main purpose) and CO2, a benign and useful by-product. The amount of heat emitted by our energy use is four times the amount than that which can be accounted for by the actual measured atmospheric rise in temperature. Where does the rest of the heat go? The same places that the CO2 advocacy suggests. Why is it so easy to discount this most obvious and , easily calculated result and yet strain at the gnat to quantify an effect for CO2 through models for which it is increasingly apparent are defective/useless. Although reduction in the use of fossil fuels will reduce both heat and CO2, it is important to correctly determine the effect of each. CCS (carbon capture and storage) will be terribly expensive with much time, energy, and money expended for very little gain. How much can we reduce global warming with the reduction of one ppm CO2, when 18,000,000,000,000 pounds must be removed? Likewise if heat is indeed the main factor, nuclear power, though CO2-free, can not be an alternative since total heat emitted by nuclear power plants is more than twice the electrical output. ( It wouldn’t matter whether improved nuclear plants, i.e. breeder reactor, thorium, or fusion were considered).
Our only recourse is to replace fossil and nuclear with “renewable” sources which produce no net heat, such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, etc. Countries that are in cooler regions and away from the oceans may install them in the expectation of lower energy costs ultimately, otherwise they may have little incentive to change.
You are just pulling my chain, right?
The sun throws a gazillion time (I think it’s in the 100 billions ..) more energy at us than all of what we produce with fossil fuels and nuclear together.
+1. Well said.
Among all scientists, meteorologists are the best experts in weather and climate. Common sense dictates we should listen to them rather than physicists and mathematicians who work with computer models and shifted career to climate science out of personal advocacy and greater funding for studies that have something to do with CAGW.
With meteorologists virtually equally divided on the issue of AGW, what consensus are we talking about? It’s wishful thinking.
“Among all scientists, meteorologists are the best experts in weather and climate.”
—-
Completely false. Weather and climate are hugely different fields and the reason Joe Bastardi should pretty much keep quiet about the climate and stick to reading his weather charts.
You are not a scientist – you should pretty much stick to being a nasty little dweeb space cadet.
Meteorologists work with computer models too, remember?
I think this whole model question is a red herring. Nothing a computer model can come up with couldn’t be produced with paper and pencil. It would just take much longer.
Yes almost all scientists work with computer models. But most of them check the models against real data and when there is conflict, they believe the data and revise the models. AGW advocates believe the models and revise the data.
The majority of the general members of the AMS would not be considered as “scientists”. Your weatherman or woman on TV is not a scientist.
NW says:
“A 26.3% response rate, with self-selected responders, is basically catastrophically low if you want to make sound inferences.”
Yep.
And the issue with self selection is not simply one of “degree of engagement with the topic”. There is also the fear factor. This keeps skeptics from participating in such surveys, whether of meteorologists or others.
Apart from the standard risk of career suicide faced by all environmental science professionals who question the ‘consensus”, meteorologists also face a well funded professional hit squad aimed squarely at them – billionaire George Soros’ newspeak-named “Forecast the Facts” that has as its primary objective to compile lists of skeptic meteorologists and attack their employment.
Surveys taken in such an environment are inherently strongly biased towards the conclusions drawn in this paper. Another worthless POS.
Retrograde Orbit,
Strangely, I agree. For all the money, time, and effort expended on 100+ sophisticated computer models that cannot arrive at a correct answer, some actual benefit to society may have accrued elsewhere.
If incorrect answers are acceptable, I can produce as many as anyone likes, for a small sum. They will need to provide appropriate quantities of writing materials. I will provide the highest quality rune stones at my expense.
Donations from Big Oil welcomed.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
What beats me is why people who allegedly have scientific or technical expertise invariably rely on poorly designed surveys when it comes to attitudes to climate science. Several valid criticisms of the survey have already been posted above.
For goodness sake, why don’t they ever use people with expertise in designing and conducting human population surveys for these exercises? I know a bit about this subject, having supervised the design and conduct of such surveys in both the public and private sectors. But I always hired people who knew the subject inside out to do the work.
One of the most basic rules is that you do a pilot survey once your questionnaire is drafted. Analysing the results almost always reveals ways in which it can be significantly improved, by identifying ambiguities, inconsistencies etc which were missed in the first cut.
The AMS survey is not the worst one I’ve seen, and far from the worst in the world of climate science. But if a company wanted a survey done to help them decide how to spend their time and money in the marketplace, they would be justifiably unhappy with a product like this. It is amateur hour compared to how a good quality professional survey would look.
“Why don’t they ever use people with expertise in designing and conducting human population surveys for these exercises?” Johanna, in Queensland all surveys and project assessments, etc, are meant to get prior approval from Treasury’s Office of Economic and Statistical Research, which historically had a lot of ex-ABS officers (tending to leave when I did). But this was rarely observed in practice, as it reduced the likelihood of them getting the answer they sought.
One thing I tried to get instituted while in the QPS was a standard procedure for prior assessment of projects, proposals, industry subsidies etc (with degree of detail and complexity varying with the $ involved), and a post hoc assessment (which in almost all cases would have shown seriously negative outcomes). What assessments were done were partial and non-comparable. I even lined up someone from the BIE with highly relevant experience (and who was very good at her work) to spend three months producing a suitable assessment tool. But I got nowhere with this, hardly anyone had an interest in a professional, dispassionate assessment of their preferred option, and most definitely didn’t want a post hoc assessment which would show how wrong they’d been.
Most of the surveys featured on CE have two things in common: one, those doing research accept CAGW, and think that everyone should; two, those for whom the research is done generally share that view. An expert survey might not meet their needs, the outcomes might be uncomfortable.
I am sure this is an occasional factor. I will tell you a story that will probably sound familiar. Certain cabinet departments in the US will, from time to time, conduct a field experiment to examine the outcomes of some program they manage, involving true random assignment of “clients” to various treatment or to non-treatment. Typically the department contracts some well-known expert to analyze the resulting data for them. I have a very close pal who recently did this. He had to sign confidentiality agreements with the government. The data he analyzed from the randomized trial he worked on showed no effect at all of the program on outcomes of interest to policy makers. That was several years ago, and it remains under wraps, unreported by the media. Though he is a very close pal, he wouldn’t tell me what program was under study or even what department he worked for.
One thing we get from changes of administrations is release of findings that the previous administration found “uncomfortable” as you put it. These apparently get buried, for clearly political reasons.
“What beats me is why people who allegedly have scientific or technical expertise invariably rely on poorly designed surveys”
Because they think it’s a trivial problem that they can easily do in-house. It’s hubris, I think.
Kinda like managing a big website project?
NW It can be a trivial problem done in house if they don’t try being so “academic” and ask the question. Do you think CO2 is destroying the planet? Do you think CO2 impacts are grossly over estimated? Do you think Hurricanes are much more dangerous now because of CO2? Which do you prefer to use in normal conversation, Global Warming, Enhanced Greenhouse Effect, Climate Change, Climate Disruption, Carbon Pollution or Mickey Mouse?
Mickey Mouse works best for me with the ladies. That’s damning with faint praise, of course.
More to the point is: Do you think 700 ppm is a safe level for the CO2? How about 1000 ppm or 400 ppm? Choose which you would prefer, given what you know. Given your answer, should we regulate CO2 growth or leave it out of control? Difficult questions for uninformed Joe Public, I know, but should Joe Public get to decide policy if he can’t answer? He needs to educate himself on climate and possible future emission rates to even have a basis for an answer.
It’s kind of like climate scientist making up statistical procedures and journals accepting the papers.
NW, see my reply to Johanna suggesting that the choice is made to avoid potentially embarassing outcomes, the surveys are designed to give a particular desired outcome.
From WUWT, we see that Monckton is now leaning towards the Salby view that CO2 comes out of warming oceans, and that the warming oceans come from some kind of integrated solar effect. He implies that Lindzen is also on board with this, but I would have to see that to believe it. Lots to be skeptical of there, not least of which is that Henry’s Law (which Monckton admits to not being able to quantify) only allows for 10-15 ppm per degree of warming, and so where did 120 ppm come from? Are skeptics on board with that anyway? Nice to finally have a rival theory, even if it is only “the sun did it and forget Henry’s Law or the carbon cycle and that the ocean is acidifying anyway”. Doesn’t quite fit any facts, but at least CO2 isn’t involved, so it’s all good.
JimD, CO2 actually does come out of the oceans warming and in fact 5000 years ago the CO2 trend shifted to increasing. That shift coincides with the southern hemisphere receiving higher TSI due to the precessional cycle.
There are a number of papers that point out the change in CO2 concentration associated with precession. The question really is how much a shift in the ocean southern hemisphere CO2 sink efficiency might impact CO2 currently. When combined with land use impact on the CO2 sink and the shift in the southern ocean sink, a larger portion of the current anthropogenic contribution might not have happened.
That implies that land use CO2 sink enhancement might have a much greater impact on reducing atmospheric and ocean CO2 more quickly than radical scared out your knickers, economically damaging mitigation at all cost ala Greg the idiot Craven.
Capt that’s all fine and good, but the Salby hypothesus requires that all the oberved increase in CO2 is natural.
Extraordinary claims and all that….
Micheal, I haven’t seen a Salby paper published and even then I would be skeptical of all, but the land use calculations can be underestimated by 50% since the soil depth is a lot less than reasonable for virgin forests and steppe grasses. The southern ocean warming could easily be contributing 25% by reduced uptake efficiency.
Toggwieler and a few others have papers on the subject and there is a fairly wide range of estimates. Stott also has a paper in the works on the southern ocean warming impact on the carbonate compensation depth. As they say, it is a wicked problem.
Capt,
There is no Salby paper – and I doubt there ever will be, the ”skeptics’ are lapping it up anyways.
Micheal, perhaps not, there may never be a Stott paper, but the little teaser he had made more sense and generally fits with 25-50 ppm outgassing/reduced sink efficiency. There was also a recent blurb where land use may contribute about a third. That also tends to agree with the “green revolution” timing.
The Salby hypothesis is perfect for the pseudo-science world that the deniers live in.
It subverts the premise of the GHG model by denying that rising CO2 is man-made — right from the get-go.
In particular, watch how the deniers hatch these schemes. A fundamental piece of their manipulations is to integrate cherry-picked functions that will end up producing a ramp of some sort. Then they map it to a GHG trend and claim victory by saying it’s all natural.
Cappy does it, Tisdale does it, Salby does it to a tee. They all use it as a blueprint for creating FUD.
Captd, yes, CO2 does come out of the oceans. We saw this during the ice age recovery when the level went from 190 to 280 ppm as the temperature rose considerably. Since that recovery it appears to have reached nearly 400 ppm with barely a change in temperature compared to that earlier event, but somehow consistent with Man emitting twice as much in a coincident period. Explain your theory as to how that happened, and the ocean acidified in the process. There is one obvious explanation of both these facts, but it looks like you missed it. Also, as the surface warms, it seems to absorb lower percentages of the emitted CO2, which is especially seen in warm years like 1998 when CO2 rose very quickly, while emissions didn’t change that much. You haven’t separated yourself from Salby yet, so if that was your intent, you failed. Try to be more explicit about your thoughts on his ideas.
Jim D,
Why is a rival theory necessary?
If the Warmist theory is that rising CO2 levels result in increasing surface temperatures, then the observation that rising CO2 levels are not accompanied by a concurrent rise in surface temperatures would tend to indicate that the theory is flawed. Why is is necessary to have theory that shows that rising CO2 levels don’t result in rising temperatures?
I eat ice-cream from time to time, and it has no noticeable effect on the number of tigers in my living room. Warmists confuse correlation with causation, and then create absurdity upon absurdity to justify their nonsensical conclusions.
May the Celestial Teapot (from which all Knowledge pours) enlighten them.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
> Why is a rival theory necessary?
As Reiner might say,
You don’t beat something with nothing.
Not that it’s necessary.
It’s just the way things work.
May the inference to the best explanation be with you,
w
Mike Flynn observes:
“I eat ice-cream from time to time, and it has no noticeable effect on the number of tigers in my living room.”
—
There’s a Nobel prize in your future.
As I have explained in a couple of places over the last few days, AGW provides for two types of heating: surface warming and ocean heat content rising. Both may occur at the same time, but as long as at least one is continuing while the forcing continues to increase, AGW is OK with that. People who understand AGW see forcing as being balanced by the sum of these two processes.
Why is a rival theory necessary? Because the skeptics are all over the place, and no two seem to even agree with each other. How can they all think they are the only person right?
“From WUWT, we see that Monckton is now leaning towards the Salby view that CO2 comes out of warming oceans.”
—–
Why is this not surprising? Monckton has a memeplex that will spin in crazy orbits until that day he dissolves back into carbon himself.
It will be interesting to see which way he goes if Lindzen or Spencer disagree with Salby, as they well might.
Ya never know what Sheriff Monckton might do there partner:
http://youtu.be/Br9imjm1kvk
CO2 does come out of a warming ocean. It also increases from soil and vegetation due to changing balances of primary production and respiration in a warming world.
The increase is about the same as anthropogenic emissions. So about 60 tons of CO2 is the increase in flux to the atmosphere. Of that about 15 tons stays in the atmosphere. This is a fundamental change in the math that we can expect that space cadets will see as a feedback of global warming. Quite right. Now what was that attribution again?
Yes, CO2 comes out of a warming ocean and that was a positive feedback after the last Ice Age, but in the last century or so Man has emitted a boatload (twenty times) more than the ocean, and also added some to the ocean, hence a lower pH. Figure that into your carbon budget.
The increase comes also from soil and vegetation.
e.g http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/07/soil-carbon-permanent-pasture-as-an-approach-to-co2-sequestration/ – and – http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Tropical-ecosystems-regulate-variations-in-Earths-carbon-dioxide-levels.aspx
I swear it is like talking to a goldfish.
CH, so you are saying the soils suddenly started to net respire after Man got into the industrial age, having remained dormant for centuries? What does the science say about this process starting up? Was it related to the Little Ice age, or solar forcing, or cosmic rays, or perhaps urban heat islands? There must be some thinking about this, or are you making it up as you go along?
Read the fracking links and then go to the fracking science instead of merely pulling snark out of your fracking arse – dimwit.
CH, the links don’t answer the question about timing. Why now? Why not centuries ago? Farming practices? What are you saying? Be precise on this, because it is a key reason for thinking you are just talking guff, and you won’t convince anyone if you don’t explain this timing issue.
“… it is a key reason for thinking you are just talking guff…”
—-
Yep
‘Temperature associated increases in the global soil respiration record
Ben-Bond Lamberty and Allison Thomson
Abstract. Soil respiration, RS, the flux of microbially and plant-respired carbon dioxide (CO2) from the soil surface to the atmosphere, is the second-largest terrestrial carbon flux. However, the dynamics of RS are not well understood and the global flux remains poorly constrained. Ecosystem warming experiments, modelling analyses and fundamental biokineticsall suggest that RS should change with climate…’
‘WASHINGTON — NASA scientists and an international team of researchers have found tropical ecosystems can generate significant carbon dioxide when temperatures rise, unlike ecosystems in other parts of the world.
The researchers discovered a temperature increase of just 1 degree Celsius in near-surface air temperatures in the tropics leads to an average annual growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide equivalent to one-third of the annual global emissions from combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation combined. In tropical ecosystems carbon uptake is reduced at higher temperatures. This finding provides scientists with a key diagnostic tool to better understand the global carbon cycle.
Have you even looked at the links? Fracking amazing.
Thus the self-important “Chief” hydrologist begins another in a series of diatribes trying in vain to defend whacko science.
So a bizarre little Borg collective cult of AGW groupthink space cadet characterises having to quote the science I had already pointed to to as a self important diatribe? Rather than actually attempt to reach any understanding of the carbon cycle?
This is the behaviour of a nasty little and hugely irrelevant dweeb – as he shown himself to be time and again – rather than a true sceptic. Difficult to explain this behaviour any other way.
It is bizarre behaviour of space cadets. The easiest and most frequent resort is to personalisation and demonisation of the perceived opposition when the puerile resort to simplistic space cadets science fails. As it inevitably does. Pure Allinsky.
Am I demonising the BCCAGWGSC? Or is this an insight into the nature of the progressive science denialist movement. Because that’s what it is as complexities become ever more apparent and the space cadets are stuck wearing a circular rut like an oxen driving a millstone. I swear it is like talking to goldfish.
Bob,
Yep,that’s just a positve feedback – so what’s causing the temp rise to lead to this??
And you do understand that this suggests higher CS, right?
As I said just above – this is a fundamental change in the math that we can expect that space cadets will see as a feedback of global warming. Quite right. Now what was that attribution again?’
I swear it is like talking to goldfish.
‘The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past. We are trying to understand how the earth’s climate system is engineered, so we can understand what it takes to trigger mode switches. Until we do, we cannot make good predictions about future climate change… Over the last several hundred thousand years, climate change has come mainly in discrete jumps that appear to be related to changes in the mode of thermohaline circulation.’ Wally Broecker
As I keep saying – climate is wild. Synchronous chaos implies a certainty of climate catastrophe – in the sense of Rene Thom – in as little as a decade. Neither side of the climate war has much of an idea of what this relatively important paradigm shift means.
Climate sensitivity is λ is the linked diagram.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Ghil_fig11_zpse58189d9.png.html?sort=3&o=20
‘Climate sensitivity is then de fined mathematically as the derivative of an appropriate functional or other function of the systems state with respect to the bifurcation parameter. This de finition is illustrated by using numerical results for a model of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation.’
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/tcd/PREPRINTS/Math_clim-Taipei-M_Ghil_vf.pdf
It goes without saying that this is not the usual definition of climate sensitivity. We are not in Kansas anymore Toto.
“this is a fundamental change in the math that we can expect that space cadets will see as a feedback of global warming.” -Bob
This is what the authors of the paper you are citing say.
Thankgod we have instant blog experts to tell the scientists what their research means.
Chief has no credibility left . His support for the chaotic natural variability explanation of climate change goes up in smoke when he can’t even get a mild CO2 outgassing effect straight.
Chief throws out these stink-bombs and complains when everyone tells him that he just stunk up the room.
“Chief has no credibility left . His support for the chaotic natural variability explanation of climate change goes up in smoke when he can’t even get a mild CO2 outgassing effect straight.”
—–
Yep.
‘ This finding provides scientists with a key diagnostic tool to better understand the global carbon cycle.’
‘What happened in the years 1976/77 and 1998/99 in the Pacific was so unusual that scientists spoke of abrupt climate changes. They referred to a sudden warming of the tropical Pacific in the mid-1970s and rapid cooling in the late 1990s. Both events turned the world’s climate topsy-turvy and are clearly reflected in the average temperature of Earth. Today we know that the cause is the interaction between ocean and atmosphere.’ http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130822105042.htm
Really? Seriously? Where do these idiots come from?
I quote recent science on soils and vegetation – that give quantified insights into the carbon cycle – and add that to ocean processes in a warmer world.
‘Perhaps the most challenging aspect of understanding variability
in biological processes is associating detected changes with the environmental forcings responsible. Important climate variables linked to
ocean circulation and productivity are sea-level pressure, surface
winds, SST, surface air temperature, and cloudiness. These physical
factors have been combined into a Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI)
for evaluating the strength of El Niño/Southern Oscillation cycles. .
Strong El Niño/Southern Oscillation events have major impacts
on phytoplankton, fisheries, marine birds and mammals and
are striking examples of climatic influences on ocean biology.
Importantly, the MEI does not distinguish between natural and
anthropogenic changes in climate forcing, but instead provides an
integrated index of climate conditions for comparison with observed
changes in ocean productivity.’ http://www.science.oregonstate.edu/ocean.productivity/references/Nature%202006%20Trends.pdf
Roy Spencer has a simple model here.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/12/spencer-on-an-alternate-view-of-co2-increases/
‘And just how strenuous and vehement the resulting objections are to what I have presented above will be a good indication of how politicized the science of global warming has become.’ Roy Spencer
Henry’s Law doesn’t begin to cover it. I swear it is like talking to nasty little dweeb goldfish.
“I suspect that the higher level of belief among ocean sciences and particularly geophysics represents second order belief (i.e. support for a perceived consensus) rather than personal research on AGW detection/attribution or a careful survey of the literature.” – Judith
I suspect that Judiths suspicion is a 2nd order suspicion, rather than a belief based on personal research or a careful survey of the literature.
Perhaps one could be suspicious of Michael’s suspicion that Judith’s suspicion is a 2nd order suspicion in that his suspicion would not be based on personal research or a careful survey of the literature?
Where’s that video Mosher linked to when you need it?
It is funny to see the inevitable confirmation of the starting premise(s) in such social “science” directed at CAGWers for a change. Still doesn’t make it science.
GaryM,
Steven Mosher on Open Thread, video @ 9/11,
2.22 am ‘Statistical Follies and Epidemiology.’
How to form a 100% consensus.
Whilst I would respect scientific credentials, to what extent can the AMA members judge whether or not warming or cooling or other changes would be harmful? Are they economists, ecologists,sociologists, historians or agronomists? Generally even a cursory study of history shows that the planet (and humans along with it) thrive in warmer times.
BREAKING NEWS
New publication proves that in climate science
“It all turns on numeracy”
The more math a scientist knows, the stronger
the appreciation of climate-change
A Chess Lesson-Learned Once human chess-masters reigned supreme; nowadays large-scale expert programs increasingly do better.
A Genome Lesson-Learned Once human gene-assemblers reigned supreme; nowadays large-scale gene-assembly programs increasingly do better.
A Quantum Chemistry Lesson-Learned Once human chemists reigned supreme; nowadays large-scale quantum simulation programs increasingly do better.
An Aerodynamical Lesson-Learned Once aerodynamicists reigned supreme; nowadays large-scale aerodynamical simulation programs increasingly do better.
An Evolutionary Lesson-Learned Once human evolutionary biologists reigned supreme; nowadays computer-generated phylogenetic trees increasingly do better.
An Economic Lesson-Learned Once human commodity-traders reigned supreme; nowadays computerized trading algorithms increasingly do better.
A REASONABLE PROPOSITION The less-strong consensus of AMS members regarding climate-change is induced mainly by the relatively weak mathematical skillset of AMS members, in combination with a (legitimate) apprehension among AMS members that increasing computer power is eroding the economic value of human meteorological prediction skills.
CONCLUSION The survey of AMS members reveals much about cognitive discord; little about climate-science.
A PIECE OF ADVICE Get out yer math-books, Climate Etc folks, `cuz these scientific trends are irreversible!
MORE BREAKING NEWS
New publication proves that in climate science
“It all turns on numeracy”
The more math a scientist knows, the stronger
the appreciation of climate-change
A Chess Lesson-Learned Once human chess-masters reigned supreme; nowadays large-scale expert programs increasingly do better.
A Genome Lesson-Learned Once human gene-assemblers reigned supreme; nowadays large-scale gene-assembly programs increasingly do better.
A Quantum Chemistry Lesson-Learned Once human chemists reigned supreme; nowadays large-scale quantum simulation programs increasingly do better.
An Aerodynamical Lesson-Learned Once aerodynamicists reigned supreme; nowadays large-scale aerodynamical simulation programs increasingly do better.
An Evolutionary Lesson-Learned Once human evolutionary biologists reigned supreme; nowadays computer-generated phylogenetic trees increasingly do better.
A REASONABLE PROPOSITION The less-strong consensus of AMS members regarding climate-change is induced mainly by the relatively weak mathematical skillset of AMS members, in combination with a (legitimate) apprehension among AMS members that increasing computer power is eroding the value of human meteorological prediction skills.
Conclusion Get out yer math-books, Climate Etc folks!
Sorry for the duplicate … here’s today’s *further* breaking scientific news!
——————
MORE BREAKING NEWS
Satellite Shocker!
!!! “No albedo response to cosmic rays” !!!
Energy-balance models reign as champions
CONCLUSION Thirty-plus years of scientific searching have not identified any strong contenders to James Hansen’s energy-balanced thermodynamics-driven climate-change worldview.
Uhhh … perhaps that means Hansen is just plain right?
Global leaders are listening … GOOD!
I was lying awake in bed last night, and I suddenly wondered if the ballot was secret. It seems to me that if it was not, then answers might affect current or future funding, So does anyone know.
Was the ballot secret?
Two things…
It probably was done “in secret”, via the internet, but second and more importantly– funding for what? These AMS members are not primarily researchers, as many of them earn their money by reading weather charts and then going on TV to translate their chart reading by bringing you tomorrow’s forecast. They get their “funding” via a paycheck from a network affiliate.
DENIALISM’S SHOCKING CONSENSUS
!!! “I hate Greens. When can I shoot one?” !!!
Hate Unchallenged at Denialist Forums
To date, TimiBoy’s hate-speech has gone unchallenged … even unremarked! … at WUWT.
Question When homicidal hate-speech goes unchallenged at denialist forums — WUWT being today’s prime example — and outrageous conspiracy theories go unchallenged even here on Climate Etc … how much personal courage is required for scientists to speak-out at public forums?
Good on `yah, all who speak against denialism’s consensus of ignorance,hatred, and fear.
Snipped already. Someone obviously brought this to the attention of the moderators and they killed it. It isn’t easy moderating a blog with the volume of comments that WUWT has to deal with. They do a good job but they are not perfect.
There is no monopoly on common sense on either side of the political fence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATTknP8t7JU
When are you going to stop being such a cheerleader?
97% = 52%
The new post-normal math.
We heard that chemists are generally more skeptical of IPCC’s CAGW premise than physicists.
Geologists have also been reported to be more skeptical.
Earlier we read that engineers (all branches) are generally more skeptical of this premise than academic scientists.
Now we read that meteorologists and atmospheric physicists are more skeptical of this premise than other physicists.
And polls in the USA showed that almost 70% of respondents were of the opinion that climate scientists “fudged the data”.
It looks to me that the once “PC” CAGW premise of IPCC has lost credibility across several groups, with the possible exception of non-atmospheric physicists in academia.
(And politicians, of course.)
Max
When they said “area” I thought they might be asking if people lived somewhere where it gets hot or cold, or both. Alas. It could be interesting, especially if they also asked what fraction of their personal disposable income the respondent spent on heating or air conditioning.
Isn`t it strange when Yahoo runs stories on the dangers of global warming and mankind`s contribution those commenting (providing they allow you to comment) almost always reject their conclusions by huge margins? Also those meteorologists who work for the Weather Channel in the USA, will overwhelmingly endorse the global warming religion, because NBC Universal who owns that outlet practically makes it a requirement to keep your job. In other words, independent thinkers reject the AGW dogma but those whose paycheck depends on this pseudo-science has little choice.
“Is global warming happening?” My answer based on this analysis:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4r_7eooq1u2VHpYemRBV3FQRjA
is that we do not know. In fact this the only plaussible scientific answer (no problems qith the fact that science does not provide all the answers).
Surveys tend to be self-selecting. (Judith hinted at that with her point about how the questioned were constructed.) In short, how you ask the question can lead the respondent to the response the people doing the survey expect.
Further, surveys do not necessarily reflect consensus based upon evidence. Climate is exceedingly complex and even the best minds on the subject disagree over fine points that may, or may not, be well understood.
People without even a rudimentary grasp of the issues will automatically dismiss as “bunk” anything that leads to disagreement among people they perceive as “experts”.
Bring in politically motivated groups like the IPCC and the view from the bleachers looks pretty grimm.
Gee, cooling in the 1970’s – and fears of perpetual winter. Warming in the 1980’s & 90’s and everybody feared global warming. Now we are told that globally, temperatures have been stable for almost 15 years.
Seem like there is not a lot of data for us to go by – except that, throughout human history (since modern man walked out of Africa 200,000 years ago, the planet has been both warmer than it is now and colder than it is now. This is but a blink of the eye since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 mya and the great extinction before that, 240 mya.
Has man had an effect on all this? Perhaps, perhaps not. Some have suggested that humans began to impact the environment when they started to cut down forests to grow grain (maybe 8,000 years ago). Other suggest the steam engine started it all. (Machines replacing draft animals and human labor.) Still others put the starting point in the 1950’s.
Now I am just rambling but there is no point in pointing fingers at scientists – or blaming religious fervor for ignorance!
If there is an overwhelming consensus on climate change within the scientific community, then what is the point of funding further research on the subject? Isn’t that akin to “beating a dead horse?”
I think that is the point. The issue is so complex than no single climatologist has a clear picture. The data does not match the models and the inferences made from the geological record don’t either. Continued funding and research is needed to determine if we need mitigation strategies and if so, what are they?
The IPCC is a largely political organization which has committed itself to human-caused “global warming” and refuses to back off its claims when the data of the past 15 years does not support the conclusions made based on the 20 years before that. nor is anyone even acknowledging the “global cooling” experienced during the 1970’s.
Oh, and by the way, the earth was warmer that it is today 4,000 years ago. Also 8,000 years ago, and 12,000 years ago. Modern man has been on earth for about 200,000 years. (Not including ancestors of modern man.)
Am I the only one to see this? … I can’t be.
How about this logic… if the ocean is an enormous heat sink and ate their warming, and this was not anticipated or built into the models AT ALL, then the models are all cr@p, the huge sensitivity to C02 (amplification) is in the same crock of poo (i.e. the ocean provides damping and there is no amplification), and there really is no such thing as CAGW… there’s only 134 pathetic excuses for climate models that are all wrong because the scientists didn’t consider that 75-ish percent of the globe was covered with water.
This … after 100 BILLION dollars were spent?
And they ask me why I drink.
I agree with everything you said, but re your name, I met a Wally Allensworth on a cruise in 1974 and it’s not a very common one. Could this actually be the same person after nearly 40 years? Let me know please!
If everyone who says they believe they believe in AGW would just stop driving their cars or taking the stairs instead of riding in elevators or stop heating the pool and air conditioning the flat. That would go a long way towards meeting our goals of saving the world, right? Why can’t the global warming alarmists lead us by example instead of simply trying to pick our pockets? Could it be they’re all hypocrites with beliefs of convenience and a cargo cult understanding of economics? They apparently cannot even foresee that dead and dying Old Europe will go Post-Toasty in our lifetimes.
Wagathon,
Answers to your questions.
1. Right.
2. I don’t know. Pocket picking requires less work?
3. Or maybe deluded and gullible.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Just my take on the consensus. The rules of collecting surveys conform to both legal and logical principles. Those that produced the 97% failed on both http://informrevolution.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/scientific-consensus.html
Weasel-wording, again. “Contribute to” = dominate? Is the contribution necessarily or likely via CO2?
Expertise was the second weakest predictor of global warming certainty, and the weakest predictor of causation and harm/benefit.
Abstract. Meteorologists and other atmospheric science experts are playing important roles in helping society respond to climate change.
Decoding the devious spin: various scientists are playing important roles in ‘helping’ society to respond with unquestioning, unscientific belief in dangerous man-made climate change.
Gail,
‘Socrates – were – he – here,’ – and ‘- jest — a – humble – serf’s
– sock – puppet,’ award yer a plus one.
b – t – s
I would venture a guess, that the longer a meteorologist has been an operational forecaster, the less he believes the missive. The new generation of meteorologists are much more computer oriented, and the mission of many schools to limit exposure to analog methods is taking its toll. But older mets, who use all methodology ( no we dont ignore models, but think they are tools to get the answer, not the answer) because we have seen and researched actual events more to help us get an answer, dont believe it as much. I especially mean the GLOBAL mets, not local TV market mets as many of them are under pressure to remain silent, or adhere to the party line.
Interestingly enough it was Einstein that said it takes only one example to disprove a theory. I guess we live in a world where that does not apply anymore. Then again, the people pushing this missive are no Einsteins
( neither am I, but I know it)
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Received from Keith L. Seitter, AMS Executive Director:
Earlier this week, the Heartland Institute appears to have sent an extensive e-mail blast with what is more or less a press release for a paper that will appear in an upcoming issue of BAMS entitled “Meteorologists’ Views about Global Warming: A Survey of American Meteorological Society Professional Members” (in full disclosure, I am a coauthor on this paper). A disturbing aspect of this e-mail is that it seems some effort was placed in making it appear to have been sent by AMS. It was sent from an e-mail account with AMS in the name (though not from the “ametsoc.org” domain) and featured the AMS logo prominently (used without permission from AMS). Only in the fine print at the bottom was it clear that this apparently came from the Heartland Institute. The text of the e-mail reports results from the study far differently than I would, leaving an impression that is at odds with how I would characterize those results.
If you got this Heartland Institute e-mail, or if you have read articles or blog posts related to this study, my suggestion is simple. Rather than take someone else’s interpretation of the survey results, read the paper yourself and draw your own conclusions. It is freely available here as an Early Online Release.
A difference between the AMS and some organizations is the transparency and scientific integrity with which we operate. This survey was conducted to satisfy scientific curiosity on an important topic and the results are published for all to see. This is the way science is meant to work.
Site of the paper:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00091.1
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You say:
“Look at the views in column 1, then look at the % in the rightmost column: 52% state the the warming since 1850 is mostly anthropogenic. One common categorization would categorize the other 48% as ‘deniers’”.
I could also say: Only rows 3 and 7 actualy show “denniers” 5+4=9 % …
The rest, 91%, could be categorizad as the opposite.
Both statements are NOT OBJECTIVE.
In any case, meteorologists are not climatologists. Other scientists´ thinking could be as valid as theirs.
Please kindly consider what follows:
Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature – Abstract – Environmental Research Letters – IOPscience
We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors’ self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024
Your linked paper: John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli and others.
“One common categorization would categorize…”
The above is a qualified phrase. Less than a firm position. Similar to saying, one could interpret this as…
Is it objective to give one side? I think Dr. Curry does imply with her statements, the results could be interpretted in other ways.
Meteorologists are probably the bellweather players here. Many of them apparently not as beholden as some others.
Dana Nuccitelli recently acknowledged the authors of that paper used more than one definition of “consensus.” That’s a damning admission given all of their discussiob of their paper refers to “the consensus.”
In fact, I’d argue his admission proves the authors are either flagrantly dishonest, utter morons or some combination of the above. There is no justification for their paper.
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I suppose most of you have already seen what follows, just about what we were discussing (The Guardian, dated yesterday):
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/dec/02/meteorologists-global-warming-consensus#comment-29481565
It´s already got more than 250 comments!
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Here is a questionnaire for you the reader, to show an important person who believes in Greenhouse Gas Effect near you, as soon as you can.
Tell them this is your “Are you delusional?” test, that you make everyone take before you’ll allow them to address you further regarding earth and atmospheric energy.
=======
1. “Do you believe a sphere heated to stable temp through illumination in vacuum,
can be immersed in a frigid nitrogen/oxygen bath,
and have every temperature sensor on it’s surface indicate temperature rise of 90F/30C?
If the answer is “yes sometimes” they are already, question one in, self certifying, delusional.
No further communication concerning reality will be possible.
=======
This is Magic Gas
fundamentals
—
“Everybody knows,
—
the
—
atmosphere makes
—
the world
—
get warmer.”
=======
Well: Not exactly.
In fact, not ever. The atmosphere’s always a cold gas bath. It’s refrigerated bath never rises in temperature and it’s always much, MUCH more conductive AND convective,
than just vacuum.
The refrigerator doesn’t stop chilling your hot soda because the light goes off. The atmosphere doesn’t stop being colder than the warm object it’s washing of heat, just because the sun went down.
No matter how many PhDs tell you they ‘calculated’ otherwise.
Period.
=======
2. Do you believe suspension of media physically diffracting 20% light from said sphere makes sensors show
more energy
than when there was
more energy?
More indispensable Magic Gas and Magic Light fundamentals.
If the answer is *ever* yes:
you’re being hijacked by a delusional.
No wonder nothing they say ever leads back
to the normal realms of science.
3. Do you believe suspension of media physically diffracting 25% light from said sphere makes sensors show
even more energy
than when there was 5%
more energy?
If he gives “yes” or “sometimes”
he just gave up a big
“Zip for Three”
in the
“Is it a Delusional Magic Gas Believer?” assessment.
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There is certainly a difference between publishers and non-publishers in terms of claims to be a scientist. Taking weighted average of “climate” and “other” publishers, the poll shows
64% “mostly human”,
9% “human/natural”,
17% “no conclusion”,
3% “mostly natural” and
6% “doubts warming”.
To further summarize, 73% significant AGW vs 9% no significant AGW. I don’t know if that constitutes a consensus but it is certainly a lopsided majority.
The idea that non-meteorologists (and not meteorologists) are relying on second-hand information is very speculative. One could just as well say that meteorologists inappropriately transfer their weather experience to climate and so they conclude that weather unpredictability proves climate unpredictability.
We should neither oversimplify AGW as “proven” nor dismiss the large majority of scientists (and evidence) saying that AGW is “likely”.
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