What Do We Think About Climate Change

if anyone had cared to actually read the thread you would have noticed that I have at no point claimed there is a 100% certainty
instead I have always gone with the climate scientist consensus on this one and clearly stated in post 1375 the position of the community

Ive made every effort to present accurate scientific data, and for refusing to accept biased industry spin by deniers, I've been scorned, ridiculed, laughed at, accused of lying, sworn at, stalked throughout the forum, and falsely accused of making statements I have never made
I think the public deserves some kind of warning

I think its more than reasonable to warn the reader that this thread is clearly not about the science when the science is what gets no play here and its the industry spin that is the majority of the evidence presented

again had anyone actually cared to read the thread before making erroneous statements about my position on climate change they would have found the following

post 1007

 

I would also highly recommend reading posts 982 and 984

as they clearly show that no amount of scientific data has been able to overcome the dogmatic view of deniers

another great example is post 894

in post 836 I pointed out with numerous evidences that the work being presented by deniers for review was clearly biased and made another plea that we please stick to honest science on this one

post 824 is another in a long line of attempts to remain impartial and go with the simple data available

post 1533 is a worthy read as is post 1543 as is post 1528 were another plea for civility is made to the very people who now accuse me of a lack in civility
nice tactics eh

I think post 1609 said it best so Ill reprint it here so those who do not have the time to review the thread may get the benefit of it without having to spend to much time digging

this has consistently been my position as well and; on these pages with these people, has consistently led to an outrageous assaults by deniers who continually turn the finger at me and say

look how unreasonable his arguments are
or
there is no evidence to back up what you are saying
or my fave
that Im some kind or radical
no kids
Im just a scientist
looking at the science
not the spin

so spin away cause the history of this conversation speaks for itself
and that I can prove

 

and Jim
it would be polite if you could at least acknowledge that the data you presented turned out to be falsified if not by you then the organization that compiled it

no big deal
we all make mistakes
so lets start an honest debate with some honesty
the graph was phony
you may not have been deliberately presenting phony data but it happened
admit it and move on is the way to fly

best
B

 

Goodness gracious me....!
That's really funny!
Show us your formation and credentials, my dear Boston....

Cheers.

 

Punchinello B,

You prove it's false first. We only have heard from you that it's false and I'd look down before I believed YOU if you told me that grass is green

You show me how that graph of NOAA's data is false.

Then try to explain (since you still have not answered this question even more than 150 thread pages after the question was first raised) why additional CO2 matters when we are at spectral saturation. The blog fantasy you keep posting in response is made patently false by stratospheric cooling, don't you agree?

Or maybe it doesn't matter to you whether it's warming or cooling there; either way it proves there's warming

Jimbo

 

Jim,
Have a look at this interesting site:
http://digitaldiatribes.wordpress.com/
(Probably already cited, but as this thread has become circular a long time ago, I've lost the count)

I find this particularly interesting:
http://digitaldiatribes.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/deconstructing-the-hadcrut-data/

"Adding a third sine wave certainly appears to put our temperature observations spot on with the generated curve. One may feel inclined to get all puffy and declare that the case has been solved.

But looks can be deceiving. The best fit with three waves – a reduction to 45.47 – uses parameters that are not sensible. And this becomes a case study in trying to be “too accurate” with model forecasting.

When the third wave is introduced, I was able to generate a number of “best fit” scenarios all around the same value of 45. One such scenario shows that we will go into dramatic cooling by 2051, and the anomaly will be -2 at that time. The next scenario had a best fit of 46.43, with dramatically different parameters. That model shows no downturn whatever in temperature after the current period, and suggests unabated warming through 2050, where the anomaly will be around 1.

This is common when adding multiple parameters to models. In the quest to get more accurate, you actually introduce so much additional uncertainty that the range of reasonable projections becomes meaningless.

My conclusion is that the best representation using a sine wave analysis is a simpler 2-wave representation.

The conclusions are basically in line with the PDO/AMO analysis, as well. These drive the longer-term cycles about a trend. Whether it is a linear trend or something else is worth looking into. Also, is the trend related to the sun or carbon dioxide, or other things? The cycles still do not explain the overall trend, but they do help explain why the recent linear trends cannot simply be extrapolated into the future."

Cheers.

(bolded is mine)

Attached image: The best-fit double sine wave along a linear trend, extrapolated to 2050.

 

Hey, Jim! who's Lucy here .....? And, more important: who's Eli ?
(I indeed think we are somewhat wemmicks in this thread )

Cheers.

 

Yup

 

Even the more firm warmists' pillars are quickly abandoning the CO2 ship like rats and searching for other causes (other than Sun, of course) to which now blame for the global warming. Have a look at this pearl from NASA:

"We will have very little leverage over climate in the next couple of decades if we're just looking at carbon dioxide," Shindell said. "If we want to try to stop the Arctic summer sea ice from melting completely over the next few decades, we're much better off looking at aerosols and ozone."

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/warming_aerosols.html

Wow....!

 

I thought I would post the full results of one of the polls that Boston is so fond of quoting from. Not quite the unanimity he would have us believe. Of course he dispels much of the results that don't match his thinking by labeling them industry hacks. You don't get to do that Boston, that's not your perview. No one has appointed an anomymous poster who likes wood as Chief Minister of Carbon Heresy yet. Guess Obama hasn't been able to track you down through your profile here. Anyhow, here are the results.........

http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html

 

Quote:
A new poll among 3,146 earth scientists found that 90 percent believe global warming is real, while 82 percent agree that human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures.

Quote:
*The authors contacted 10,200 scientists listed in the 2007 edition of the American Geological Institute's Directory of Geoscience Departments and received 3,146 responses to their two questions: "have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels?" and "Has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?"

Anyone know who sponsored and conducted the unatributed poll quoted from by Boston. I'd be interested in seeing how much of the results he left out this survey also. The polls are actually meaningless anyhow, if you can't identify the respondents, you can't rely on the credibility of the responses. I mean we know we can't rely on Boston's credibility, he has already proven on a number of occasions that he is essentially a liar for the way he misleads and uses deceptive tactics. When that doesn't work, he just calls people stupid or oil industry hacks, but offers no more real evidence in that charge than he does that anthropogenic CO2 is causing warming. He seems to think that proclaiming that" everybody knows" is evidence.

 

Thanks, Eddy.

An excerpt:

"Only 29% express a “great deal of confidence” that scientists understand the size and extent of anthropogenic [human] sources of greenhouse gases,” and only 32% are confident about our understanding of the archaeological climate evidence."

Jimbo

 

And yet this is the 'new and improved' Boston! When he first got into this thread, he was trying (dogmatically, of course ) to show us how the MBH-98 recon and graphs were good and valid works of objective science (I dare say he still secretly believes that). He did not even have a clue that they had been thoroughly discredited, or that the Realclimate.org website was established for the very purpose of defending that infamous work.

Jimbo

 

Andrew,

You raise some valid questions. They have all already been covered extensively in the 200+ pages of the thread, but it would be kind of snotty of me to demand that you go back and try to pick it out now. I can synopsize it for you right now.

First, a little background.

Despite what you may have heard, CO2 is not an important 'greenhouse' gas. Rather it is a trace gas. All the trace gases together are thought to be responsible for ~5% of the total greenhouse effect. CO2 comprises about 3.5% of that 5%, so CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas that is also a trace gas. The vast majority of the greenhouse effect comes from water vapor.

Now CO2 is a very effective greenhouse gas for approximately its first 200 ppm concentration. After that, it is essentially at saturation, wherein additional CO2 in the atmosphere has exponentially diminishing effect.

So why does anyone care about additional CO2 when we were at saturation before the turn of the 20th century? Because there's been an assumption that additional co2, though causing only a minuscule change in the total greenhouse effect, causes more oceanic evaporation, thereby increasing the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Some believe this additional water vapor in turn causes more heating and more evaporation until a new equilibrium (with outgoing radiation) is reached, albeit at a higher temperature. This is a positive feedback mechanism that some people think links water vapor and atmospheric thermal perturbations, whereby water vapor essentially becomes the amplifier of atmospheric thermal perturbations.

This assumption of positive feedback for water vapor is then programmed into the climate models, tremendously amplifying the tiny warming from the trace gas, CO2. This is where the AGW alarm people come up with scary scenarios WRT increased CO2 and catastrophic climate change.

Whether or not this feedback actually exists is the cutting edge of the debate over climate change. A lot has been posted on this particular corner of the debate during the thread and I encourage you to go back and read those posts by searching the thread for 'feedback'.


Furthermore, I can synopsize the situation WRT positive feedback for water vapor quite succinctly right here:

It does not exist.


Do your own research on the subject, but just think about the situation in the simplest way: What happens when there's a buildup of water vapor in the atmosphere? Does it stay there indefinitely, heating up more and more, evaporating more and more water vapor? Or does something else happen which returns the water vapor concentration to the previous level?

Think about it.

So your original question about whether the models were properly tuned with good historical data is really not the right question to ask, since if the assumptions about feedbacks are wrong, then the models will always project future temperatures that are too high. And this is exactly what we have seen.

Jimbo

 

The Mad Hatter sets EPA Policy

Alice was most disturbed. "My, how curious!' she thought aloud, fully knowing that 99.999% of the water vapor in the atmosphere was put there naturally, by God or Mother Nature or Gaia or whomever the Queen of Hearts had decreed it to be. "What on earth are they thinking?" She mused....
EPA Seeks To Have Water Vapor Classified As A Pollutant


Jimbo

Edit: Link Repaired!