What Do We Think About Climate Change

Thanks for that Andrew, I kinda suspected that would be the case.

 

Zed,

Given I am 188cm tall and 115kg both me and the slingers need to be pretty drunk mate ;-)

 

Team slinging? Lots of shots? Seemed like a good idea at the time?

Who is that yelling off topic? yeah yeah OK!

 

If you haven't seen this video, it it worth putting aside the time to do so. Boston excepted of course, he has no room for new ideas, his ego takes up all the room in his head.

It reaffirms what most AGW skeptics have been asserting. The AGW cult has predictions and climate models based on backfilled data, like Manns hockey stick,but no evidence outside of their models, and the skeptics have real world evidence debunking the new religion of AGW. Watch the video.........
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52&Itemid=1

 

Direct link to Ed's vid...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3309910462407994295

 

If we were to reverse the models as they are set up and match them to known historical observational data, you would see that the models would look like they were from a different planet. The hockey stick is a perfect example, it wipes out all the known climates changes of the last thousand years and only records those of the last hundred. Of course that fits perfectly into the AGW theory, but is still nonetheless backfilled data accumulated to meet a preordained conclusion. The AGW cult gives greater credence to the most inaccurate and distorted data over that which has a greater probability of accuracy. For example, ground weather stations data is given greater weight than that of weather balloons and weather satelites. Yet the ground stations are notorious for their haphazard manner of placement. They are like holding a thermometer in your hand for ten minutes, take a reading, then announce that is the temperature of the room, so it's time to turn down the heat while everyone around you is expelling frost from their nostrils. Further, the last 8-10 years have real statistical evidence of cooling and projections are that it will continue until 2030. Yet we are told that ice is melting when Greeland and Antarica are building on their ice layers. Dersertification is supposedly taking place while the Sahara shrinks. This is real observation evidence that is being dismissed by a what if scenario that has no verifiable evidence to back it up. It is on the basis of that faulty logic that the human race is being told that it must devolve into a societal model only slightly more sophisticated than a meerkat colony.

 

OK. I have heard of this and just googled it. I gather it was published by Nature and then called into question.... looking up some stuff now.

Can you link a graph showing exactly how and where (I mean when) it "wipes out all the known climates changes of the last thousand years "

Thanks alot,
Andrew

 

And correct me if I am wrong - but my initial reading seems to indicate that the variously maligned in these pages MBH98 it actually an interpretation of temperature records via ice cores, tree rings etc with ranges of uncertainty (which are really quite large compared with the sensitivity of variations we are speaking about - which on the surface looks like a concern).

It is not it seems a simulation model of temperature but an attempt to define temperature observations over millenia.

Refer http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/JonesMannROG04.pdf Figure 8 page 28 specifically. I cant seem to find an image to insert here sorry.

So a couple of issues here:
1. How is it determined that "The hockey stick is a perfect example, it wipes out all the known climates changes of the last thousand years and only records those of the last hundred."? As it appears to me this is an attempt to define by observation (through ice cores etc) the climate changes of the last thousand years or so, what other data is there that says this attempt is wildly inaccurate?

2. Given the range of uncertainty in these observations with amplitude of the order of the temperature anomoly we seem to be concerned about. Also the various models have similarly wide variations in temperature between each other over the the history. At least up until the late 20th century according to these graphs anyway when things start to line up better. Is that better line up due to better data recording OR because the assumptions in the basis of the model only work in this part of the time series upon which it was originally based.

It is these points in 2. above which give rise to my concerns in Post #3035 and #3096 - Can we rely on these models and their predictions?

Colour me concerned at this point.

Cheers,
Andrew

 

Apropos you comment, still not a word about the whole spectral saturation problem. I guess the surrealclimate.org blog page about 'What Angstrom Didn't know" was all he ever had. How sad, what with the stratosphere actually cooling instead of warming as that page predicts.

Maybe he and Mikey Mann can dream up a new 'Lucy Ricardo' grade theory to circumvent the laws of physics so his precious AGW via CO2 can still be true.

Trouble is, at the end of every episode, Ricky always comes home and says "LOOOCY !!!"



Jimbo

 

Mud,

What you seem to be advocating, is a determination of the question of the existence, magnitude and sign of feedbacks by judging whether the models, with those feedbacks programmed into them, are skillful at predicting past climates. This is fine if you just want to use the models as lab toys. But we need more than that if we are going to rely on the model outputs, and that is after all, what is being asked of us all. The trouble with this approach is that it inevitably leads to a sort of 'circular logic' that has NO PLACE in the sciences.

I made it a point in the above statement to elucidate that the feedbacks are multidimensional beasts, with both a sign and a magnitude. Additionally there are many, many other factors that can be used to 'tweak' models to get a 'best fit' and once that is achieved, move on to 'predictive' model runs. If you have 'tweaked' several parameters within a model, and the model seems to be skillful, who's to say which of the tweaks is in reality correct, that is, actually representative of the parameter's true value? Might not all the tweaked parameter be in error, yet the errors complementary?

Since the feedback that is being discussed has/will have important, observable effects on weather in ALL time scales, it's actually not too difficult a task to test for the existence, then quantify the magnitude and sign of such feedbacks. This has, in fact already been carried out, both using weather data from the historical archive, and using new and unique data sets.

So we can know the magnitude and sign of the feedback; there's no need to guess about it or substitute assumptions in place of a value that we can ascertain with a good degree of certainty.

To further illustrate the danger of allowing the models to determine the values of model parameters by using 'best fit' methodology, look no further than the situation with the dwell time of atmospheric CO2. The whole AGW crowd, led by the IPCC, asserts that CO2 is a long lived gas in the atmosphere, with a dwell time of from 50-200 years. How did they come to this conclusion? By actually measuring the dwell time? Hardly! It was by using the 'best fit' methodology in conjunction with the assumption that the warming since the mid 19th century must be caused by the greenhouse effect (read that: Caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions). So in order to get the models to replicate the past climates (best fit), one of the parameters that had to be 'adjusted' was the dwell time of CO2. The dwell time which gives the best fit is very long, between 50 and 200 years.

The trouble is, this is another parameter that is too important for guesses, guesses that in the end become shaped by the assumptions of the guesser, which is in turn shaped by many non-scientific considerations, like the prejudices and 'world-view' of the guesser. Furthermore, like the situation with feedbacks, this parameter is one that we can measure, so that we don't need to guess at it. In fact, CO2 dwell time has been studied quite extensively over the last 60 years, and the average dwell time by measurement is a mere 5.6 years, nowhere near the 50-200 years arrived at by working backward through the GCM's, using all the usual assumptions as outlined.

So using the GCM's to ascertain by extrapolation certain important parameters that will then be inserted back into those same models to make predictions about future climate states is total foolishness, and the situation WRT CO2 dwell time illustrates this perfectly.

The climate scientists John Christy, Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer have studied this corner of the debate quite thoroughly. The synopsis of their work is that there is a feedback between water vapor and thermal perturbations (of whatever cause) and it has a large magnitude, but its sign is negative, in perfect opposition to the assumptions of the AGW alarm camp.

No need to guess anymore; we have good data.

Jimbo

 

Eddy, thx for 3091. Enjoyable

 

Mud,

Here is the work that brought the 'Hockey Stick' (MBH-98) down in flames. All it's faults are carefully and painfully exposed herein.

What is the ‘Hockey Stick’ Debate About?

Jimbo

 

Well, not all of what NOAA does is to be blamed. I like many aspects of its work.

They even fund some works on clouds' negative feedback, like these:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Spencer-and-Braswell-08.pdf
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Spencer_07GRL.pdf


Cheers.

Attached image: Frequency histogram of total (reflected solar plus emitted infrared)feedback parameters computed from all possible 5 year periods in transient forcing experiments in 18 climate models tracked by the IPCC, versus the same calculation from Aqua CERES and NOAA-15 AMSU channel 5 satellite data.
This is: IPCC models against observational data.

 

Revisiting Spencer I've found he has recently posted a "Layman’s Explanation of Why Global Warming Predictions by Climate Models are Wrong"

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/05...ming-predictions-by-climate-models-are-wrong/

From there:
"....IPCC has simply assumed that the average cloud cover of the Earth does not change, century after century. This is a totally arbitrary assumption, and given the chaotic variations that the ocean and atmosphere circulations are capable of, it is probably wrong. Little more than a 1% change in cloud cover up or down, and sustained over many decades, could cause events such as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age.

.....there are processes that can cause the water vapor content of the atmosphere to change, mainly complex precipitation processes, which will then change global temperatures. Precipitation is what limits how much of our main greenhouse gas, water vapor, is allowed to accumulate in the atmosphere, thus preventing a runaway greenhouse effect. For instance, a small change in wind shear associated with a change in atmospheric circulation patterns, could slightly change the efficiency with which precipitation systems remove water vapor, leading to global warming or global cooling. This has long been known....."

Cheers.

 

The big question is not what will happen if planet keeps on warming slightly, as warm times have brought up Earth's population from barely 1 million individuals to 6,700 millions in only +/-10,000 years (not that bad at all!), but where (and how!) humankind is going to live when the next glaciation occurs and north of Europe, Siberia & Canada are covered again by some 1-2 miles of ice, extreme deserts be three times their present size and the USA plains be not longer usable to produce crops.
10,000+ (¿?) million people, plus all animals and crops producing areas will have to concentrate on the relative small amount of land around the Equator. Not a nice thought.

Cheers.