What Do We Think About Climate Change

Have you seen Akasofu's work?

Jimbo

 

These specious cynical bogeymen can work for the political right, too. The 'national security/ GWOT' bogeyman comes immediately to mind. But right now the hobgoblin of the left is AGW.

Jimbo

 

That's kind of a dumb question, Jimbo. What do you think motivates newspapers and magazines to print sensational stories involving science or pseudo-science? A desire to sell more newspapers and magazines, of course. The same thing that makes them breathlessly report the results of every half-baked medical study or opinion poll that pops up.

I don't care how many times you say it; there was no scientific consensus in the 70's that there was an ice age coming. You might make people believe that by repeating it over and over, but you cannot make it true.

If you insist on defending a statement so easy to disprove, there's no point in even dealing with you. You're obviously rearranging reality to suit yourself.

 

I had not seen Akasofu's work until you mentioned it, so I looked up some of it on his web page: http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/global_temperature_change.php, and I briefly looked at some of his work.

Here is my initial impression. First, he is a fairly high powered scientist. Second, according to his own admission he is not a climatologist. Third, he is "guilty" of some of the same things for which you have been criticizing the mainstream climatologists for, as well as perhaps a few other questionable things in his analysis. Nevertheless, his point of view is worth considering, and he raises some interesting questions/objections. I say he raises them, but he does not solve them, though he does present some interesting alternative points of view and analysis.

Now for a couple of specific criticisms of his work. The most glaring are that, as far as I have been able to see so far, he uses extremely simplified models for his calculations (nowhere near as sophisticated as those that the professional climate scientists use), and some of the input parameters he uses for is calculations are nothing more than guesses.

Much of his argument is that climatologists need to look further back than the mid 1800s, and that what we are seeing now can be interpreted as nothing more than normal climate variations, no worse than what we have seen in the past. He also bases much of his discussion on linear extrapolations of data that is even more recent than those he is criticizing the climatologists for. For example, he somewhat arbitrarily picks a date in the late 1800s, and then claims that the data fits a linear relationship, provided one allows for fluctuations in the data. However, if you start the analysis just a few decades earlier then the data do not fit a linear model. Though he briefly mentions that the data do fit a linear model if you start the linear fit earlier, it is easy enough to see just by eyeball examination of the data plots that they do not.

He then talks about the fluctuations. He refers to them as "decade cycles" or some such term, with an emphasis that it is cyclical. however, he presents no analysis to demonstrate that these fluctuations are cyclical, at least none that I can see. To do this he would have to do a Fourier transform, and look for distinct peaks in the resulting frequency spectrum. The is easy enough to do. (I could do it in less than 5 minutes using PsiPlot if I have the data.) He then claims that the flattening of the curve in the last decade is somehow significant and claims that it likely represents a turning point in the warming trend, this despite the fact that the temperature plots over the previous 100+ years showed even greater fluctuations, even in some cases decade long periods of declining temperature, superimposed on a general upward trend.

As I say, it is worth looking at his papers, but do not make the mistake of thinking that they represent some kind of exemplary analysis, for they clearly do not.

 

Yet there truly was a worldwide consensus on eugenics. Did that make it true and right? And who gives a damn about a consensus, anyway? Oh yeah, that would be YOU. And when did I ever say there was a 'consensus' on global cooling? Go back and see if I used that word ANYWHERE in my posts on the subject. But many scientists WERE convinced of a coming ice age. There was little or NO talk of warming, OTOH. We don't have a 'consensus' on AGW because of the strength of the science, but because of the strength of the political machine that stands to gain from convincing the public that the consensus has it right.

There could NEVER HAVE BEEN a 'consensus' on something as non-sensical as global cooling as long as there was a HEALTHY, HONEST scientific debate, disconnected from political pressures and influences. This is no less true of AGW; the narrative is chock FULL of holes, scientifically speaking, yet there is this all-important 'consensus' that we are all supposed to bow down to and agree with because we can't possibly know better than all these lettered men.

What a steaming load of fresh **** that is!

Jimbo

 

So what are you saying here, Alan,? Are you saying that the PDO and AMO are not real, or are not documented phenomena are that there are no peer-reviewed papers on these cyclic phenomena? Did you not see/check the references?

Jimbo

 

Jimbo, this is the post from eddie that I was responding to. You'll notice that he's the one who brought up the subject of consensus; I simply responded:

If you're going to jump into the fray with both lips flapping to support eddie's claim that there was a consensus, it's a little pointless to turn around afterwards and indignantly proclaim you never actually used the word consensus yourself.

You're also dead wrong when you say there was little or no talk of warming at the time. 1970's ice age predictions were predominantly media based. The majority of peer reviewed research at the time predicted warming due to increasing CO2. Did you not actually look at the graph I posted?

You need to get over your unhealthy obsession with eugenics; it's completely irrelevant to the subject at hand. Bringing it up repeatedly in a climate thread makes even less sense than dragging Hitler and Stalin into threads about Obama or Bush.

You also seem completely unable to grasp the basic idea of a consensus. You have it backwards. A consensus is not some arbitrary proclamation that everyone then has to agree with. It's a word used to describe a situation where there's widespread general agreement. Whether you like it or not, the scientific consensus out there is a real one. And I don't think it's because scientists are all crooked phonies, or dumber and less educated than you are.

 

The most significant syllable in consensus as applied here is con, as in con job.

 

It's completely relevant because it shows the utter FOOLISHNESS of trusting a 'consensus' of even scientists (the clergy of our modern era) because the scientists of the day, not the politicians (with exceptions as already noted ) nor the general public, but THE SCIENTISTS had formed a core consensus on eugenics. Calling this irrelevant is to admit your own obtuseness and myopia.

Jimbo

 

No, "the scientists" never formed any core consensus on eugenics. It's a ridiculous claim, and you should really stop making it. Eugenics was more a political and cultural issue than a scientific one -- a social movement, rather than a scientific theory. And it was largely based on a misunderstanding of Darwinism.

Obviously, the existence of a widespread consensus on AGW isn't scientific proof the theory is correct. But it does make it extremely unlikely that it's simply a scam or a conspiracy.

It's nonsensical on the face of it to believe that thousands upon thousands of legitimate scientists in various fields are engaged in a conspiracy to falsify data and research, in order to perpetrate a scientific fraud.

It's just as nonsensical to believe they've all been hoodwinked or bullied into supporting a pseudo-scientific scam that's being foisted off on the world by a handful of dishonest scientists.

One would have to believe the average person is pretty stupid, and scientists even more stupid than the average person, to buy either of those scenarios.

 

Yes, of course, Troy. Except for the fact that all the great scientific academies and sanctioning bodies had official endorsing statements, wrote letters of recommendation to political organizations urging action, and provided peer review and accepted hundreds of scientific papers in support without complaining or abstaining. Yes, you're right, Troy. Except for all that stuff, mainstream science did not accept eugenics.

And therefore a consensus of scientists can't be wrong now because they were not wrong that time.

Jimbo

 

First things first. What is AMO? I couldn't find that term in Akasofu's paper "Two Natural Components..." which is the paper I looked at most closely.

What I am saying is that Akasofu did not do a frequency analysis to show that the fluctuations he discussed are oscillatory. (I think I used the term "cyclical" in my earlier post, but the term Akasofu actually used is "oscillatory"). Although I didn't specify this in my post, I was particularly interested in his discussion of the trends on global temperature, e.g. figure 2a and related discussion. He refers to the temperature fluctuations as "multidecadal oscillations" and by my reading of the paper it seems that Akasofu thinks that he has discovered these oscillations in the data, since he did not reference other work for this. (He did cite a work by Soon in another part of his paper, but not in his discussion of the oscillations Akasofu claims to have observed in the data.)

Oscillations are, by definition, periodic. The best way to show that there are true oscillations present is to convert the time domain data to frequency domain data using the Fourier transform. If there are oscillations they will show up as peaks in the frequency domain function. Akasofu did not do this, nor did he apply any other test of periodicity. Also, I do not think he referenced any other work for that particular "oscillation." He simply pulled it out of a hat so to speak. Therefore, it was not established if it is truly oscillatory.

He did reference some other work for the PDO. The reference was to a web page, not a peer reviewed paper, though that web page did reference some peer reviewed literature. However the PDO is not the focus of my criticism.

Turning attention back to the so-called multi-decadal oscillation, without showing that it is a true oscillation it is dangerous to try to use it to predict the future. For example, rather than a true oscillation it could well be the result of random fluctuation, in which case it would have no predictive value. Furthermore, he claims that the oscillation has reached a peak in recent years, ignoring the simple reality that a peak in a time series data set (especially a noisy data set) cannot be identified until AFTER the peak has come and gone. In other words, it is impossible to identify the peak when you are sitting at or near the peak top, yet this is exactly what he claims to do with the data, and then claims that because we are at the peak of an oscillation it means that we are poised for a downturn in the temperature. Predictions such as this, which are based entirely on a qualitative look at the data, are especially risky if there is no phenomenon identified as being responsible for the apparent trends in the data. (People have lost fortunes trying to do this in the stock market.) Unless I somehow missed it in the paper, Akasofu has not identified a cause for the oscillations he thinks he has found in the data. so his predictions based on these oscillations are very risky.

There is more that could be discussed, but I can't spend all my time on this sort of thing.

 

Bull. You're exaggerating wildly. Show me the official statements from 'all the great scientific academies and sanctioning bodies,' in which they endorsed eugenics.

 

Here's the interesting thing about that. As I stated earlier in the thread, I watched a 2 hour documentary on the subject on PBS and the documantarians could not get ANYONE at any of those organizations to talk to them AT ALL. Furthermore, the subsequent leaders of these organizations LONG AGO expunged as many references to this period from their organizational records as they could find. Most of the information came from a few very old people that remembered and a few film and newspaper clips. I guess I can understand why they would do this; it was certainly not their finest hour. There are still a few papers around, but most have 'vanished'.

Look at Planned Parenthood, one of the bigger proponents. There is NO MENTION of the period anywhere in their lit or website AT ALL. No one form that organization will talk to anyone on the subject.

Jimbo

 

The original stated purpose of PP was to limit population growth of the least productive sector. Remember, that was in an era when club foot or cleft pallet meant euthanize and make another... Remember, it got it's start as the American Birth Control League, an affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. This might serve to enlighten;
It's founder, Margaret Higgins Sanger stated "Everywhere we see poverty and large families going hand in hand. Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by Church and State to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble-minded; many become criminals. The burden of supporting these unwanted types has to be borne by the healthy elements of the nation. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born."
"Least fit to carry on the race" hmmm...