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What Do We Think About Climate Change

Discussion in 'All Things Boats & Boating' started by Pericles, Feb 19, 2008.

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Boston Previous Member

Guillermo
I cant help but notice that once evidence of my education becomes available you suddenly are desirous of a more civil tone when in fact it is you who's tone has been most uncivilized

I believe the readers can confirm that my tone has been remarkably restrained given the litany of accusations I have endured

all I have done is show the group where the flaws in your logic lie so that the truth might out in the end

and it has

for you the truth need be no more painful than a simple admission and apology to the group

we are all wrong from time to time
the only difference is in how we handle it

I am simply defending the science of climate change which is well founded in one of the largest efforts science has ever undertaken
your taking the underdog view is a near certainty of error
its your choice what position you defend not mine

I believe it is also prudent to point out the difference between denying the science and being skeptical of that denial
by insisting for instance that vapor proceed temp rather than follow it you are denying the science
a skeptic questions a reasonable doubt where as a denier refuses to admit facts
like CO2 has been experimentally proven to be a greenhouse gas
or that the oceans can not be the source of atmospheric CO2
or the mass isotopic measurements proving that the additional CO2 is virtually entirely from the burning of fossil fuels
the list goes on forever but what your doing is denial not skepticism
I will not compromise on the correct use of terminology

cheers
B

Boston, Oct 14, 2010

#10246

Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 3,644
Likes: 188, Points: 63, Legacy Rep: 2247
Location: Pontevedra, Spain

Guillermo Ingeniero Naval

Boston said: ↑

I cant help but notice that once evidence of my education becomes available...
Click to expand...

Once again: Provide to me that evidence, as asked for, please, and I will gladly apologize. Not before.

Guillermo Gefaell
Gestenaval S.L., Naval Architecture & Marine Surveys

Guillermo, Oct 14, 2010

#10247

Joined: Dec 2007
Posts: 2,584
Likes: 125, Points: 73, Legacy Rep: 1650
Location: Finland/Norway

TeddyDiver Gollywobbler

Knut Sand said: ↑

Heh, then I'm even smarter than you, as I didn't even show up to their meeting... .

I've always heard that Norwegians are sometimes considered rude, as we hunt whales, eat horses (served horse meat to an Englishman, he havent spoken to me since...), we hunt, we fish, we don't know the unwritten rules for social behaviour in Europe... Well I'm learning from you guys, soon my potty training period is over, and I will be ready for social and cultural life,as the elite does it...
methinks...

Still wish you werent screaming so much in here....
Click to expand...

They didn't hear you I'm afraid... maybe we should shout it together

TeddyDiver, Oct 14, 2010

#10248

Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 3,644
Likes: 188, Points: 63, Legacy Rep: 2247
Location: Pontevedra, Spain

Guillermo Ingeniero Naval

Boston said: ↑

I am simply defending the science of climate change which is well founded in one of the largest efforts science has ever undertaken
your taking the underdog view is a near certainty of error
its your choice what position you defend not mine

I believe it is also prudent to point out the difference between denying the science and being skeptical of that denial
by insisting for instance that vapor proceed temp rather than follow it you are denying the science
a skeptic questions a reasonable doubt where as a denier refuses to admit facts
like CO2 has been experimentally proven to be a greenhouse gas
or that the oceans can not be the source of atmospheric CO2
or the mass isotopic measurements proving that the additional CO2 is virtually entirely from the burning of fossil fuels
the list goes on forever but what your doing is denial not skepticism
I will not compromise on the correct use of terminology

cheers
B
Click to expand...

Thanks for proving my point about your attitude.

Guillermo Gefaell
Gestenaval S.L., Naval Architecture & Marine Surveys

Guillermo, Oct 14, 2010

#10249

Boston Previous Member

I dont really think my "attitude" is really in question here Guillermo but rather the integrity of the disinformation campaign

Climate scientist bashing
Filed under:

* Climate Science

— stefan @ 7 April 2010

A new popular sport in some media these days is “climate scientist bashing”. Instead of dealing soberly with the climate problem they prefer to attack climate scientists, i.e. the bearers of bad news. The German magazine DER SPIEGEL has played this game last week under the suggestive heading “Die Wolkenschieber” – which literally translated can mean both “the cloud movers” and “the cloud traffickers” (available in English here ). The article continues on this level, alleging “sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations”. By doing so DER SPIEGEL digs deeply into the old relic box of “climate skeptics” and freely helps itself on their websites instead of critically researching the issues at hand.

As a scientist I do not have the time to dedicate a whole day to one article and to do much research on it, which is why I here discuss only a few of the most obvious flaws and distortions of facts in this story.

Temperature data

Cynically and inhumanely the article sets off with remarks on our British colleague Phil Jones. The authors extensively revel in sentences like this:

He feels a constant tightness in his chest. He takes beta-blockers to help him get through the day. He is gaunt and his skin is pallid.
Jones is finished: emotionally, physically and professionally. He has contemplated suicide several times recently.

And this is the result of a media campaign consisting of precisely such poorly researched and fact-twisting articles as this one, for which Marco Evers, Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter are responsible.

What is first greatly hyped is then gleefully destroyed. According to DER SPIEGEL “the entire profession” of climate science “based much of its work on his [Jones'] research” and “almost every internal debate among the climate popes passed through his computer”. Now it happens that I, most likely not an untypical example, have never worked with Jones’ data and have only exchanged a handful of emails (out of tens of thousands every year) with him, although I do probably count as part of the “profession”. There is a whole set of other data of global temperature, e.g. the data from NASA which is based on weather stations (and which I prefer for various reasons) or data from NOAA or the satellite data from RSS or the UAH. As is always scientifically useful, important conclusions are based not on one single set of data but on the fact that a whole range of competing scientific groups find consistent results, using different methods (see Figure).

Global mean temperature (annual means) according to the 5 most often used data sets. The graph shows the deviation from the mean of the last 30 years, as well as the linear trend over the last 30 years. The data from the Hadley Center, NASA and NOAA use measurements from surface weather stations, each with its specific method of quality control (e.g. correction for heat island effects) and interpolation and spatial integration. Independently, the satellite data from RSS and UAH (available from 1979 onwards) provide two different analyses based on the same microwave raw data. These measure the temperature of the middle troposphere, the variations of which can differ from those of the surface temperatures on short time scales. The record El Niño year of 1998 is an example. It has caused a greater temperature anomaly in the troposphere, presumably as warm air rising in the tropics spread in middle altitudes. The climatic trends, however, do not differ significantly since on longer time scales the surface and tropospheric temperatures are closely coupled due to turbulent mixing processes.

The quality of raw data from worldwide weather stations and vessels is indeed often unsatisfactory, especially if one goes further back in time – after all they were gathered to help forecast the weather and not to determine long-term climate trends. However, the error margin has been carefully analyzed – as is standard in science – and is shown in the temperature graphs on the Hadley Center´s website as well as in the IPCC report, and to date there is no reason to assume that the actual temperature evolution lies outside these error margins – the more so as the satellite data correspond well with the ground data. Whether the global warming trend was 0,15 or 0,17°C per decade in the past decades is of no relevance to any practical concerns.

IPCC-Figure of global mean temperature 1850-2005 (Fig. TS6).

According to DER SPIEGEL Jones has erased raw data and is “an activist or missionary who views ‘his’ data as his personal shrine” who “is intent on protecting it from the critical eyes of his detractors”. However, Jones is neither the producer and owner nor the archivist of these data – it is simply data from the national weather agencies, who also are responsible for its archiving or for the question to whom and under what circumstances they may be passed on. The majority of these data is freely accessible online. However, some weather services do not allow their data to be passed on because they sell such data. Other scientists have compared the CRU-data with freely available raw data from weather stations. And at NASA one can find the computer algorithms which are used to calculate the global mean temperature, publicly available for everybody. There is hardly any other scientific field in which more data and computer codes are freely accessible than in climate science (e.g. also codes and data of my current papers on sea level rise in Science 2007 and PNAS 2009). Do for example economists, on whose advice many political decisions depend, disclose their raw data and the computer codes of their models?

The British House of Commons has just published the report by the committee which has been appointed to examine the accusations made against Phil Jones. The report concludes:

The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. [...] The scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact.

The fact that Jones has been rehabilitated will be welcomed by all those who know this decent, always helpful and universally well-liked scientist. For the general public the conclusions on his scientific findings will be even more important:

Even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available-which they mostly are-or the methods not published-which they have been-its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified.

The ever-popular “hockey stick” discussion

DER SPIEGEL resurrects one of the oldest shelf-warmers of the “climate skeptics”: the hockey stick debate and a series of flawed accusations with it. The so-called “hockey stick” is a temperature construction for the Northern Hemisphere for the last millennium published by Michael Mann, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes in 1999, of which DER SPIEGEL writes that the Canadian Steve McIntyre unmasked it as “a sham”. (And this is the only clue within the whole article pointing to the alleged “falsifications”). This is not true. Even a committee of the National Academy of Sciences looked in 2006 at the accusations made by McIntyre and has cleared the authors of all suspicions.

Raw data and computer codes of the “hockey stick” are online and publicly available, and independent scientists have recalculated everything years ago using their own codes (also available). The current IPCC report from 2007 shows in Fig. 6.10 these reconstructions together with a dozen more which have meanwhile been added; the Copenhagen Diagnosis published in 2009 shows some even more recent ones in Fig. 19 (page 43). All show consistent results, not in detail but in their fundamental aspects. This is why the conclusions drawn in the IPCC report of 2007 were stronger than back in 2001, when the “hockey stick” had been shown for the first time. The IPCC report 2007 concludes:

Palaeoclimatic information supports the interpretation that the warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1,300 years. [Summary for Policy Makers, S. 9]

In the third report from 2001 such a statement had been made only for he last 1000 years.

All reconstructions – with or without using tree-ring data – agree that the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere (for the Southern Hemisphere insufficient data existed until recently) is higher today than in medieval times. DER SPIEGEL simply claims the opposite:

There are many indications that in medieval times, between 900 and 1,300 A.D., when the Vikings raised livestock in Greenland and grape vines were cultivated in Scotland, it was in fact warmer than it is today.

No scientific evidence in support of this claim is mentioned. Locally – in the North Atlantic region – climate reconstructions do indeed show higher temperatures than today (see Fig.); hence there is no contradiction to the anecdotal evidence about Greenland and Scotland.

Temperature difference between the middle ages (years 950 to 1250) and the modern period (years 1961 to 1990) according to a reconstruction by Mann et al. 2009. The grey shadinghatching shows regions with statistically significant results.

Incidentally, looking at the forcings, it would be surprising if it had been warmer in medieval times than now. Forcings are the factors which affect the global radiation budget of the Earth, such as variation of solar activity, volcanic eruptions or changes of the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If we compute the temperature evolution from the known forcings over the last thousand years, the result is consistent with the temperature reconstructions mentioned above. Merely one (in the meantime corrected) model simulation by Zorita and von Storch is an exception. These model calculations (18 in total) are compiled and compared with data in the IPCC report in figures 6.13 and 6.14 .

Only by looking at the forcings can one draw conclusions about the causes of global warming – the fact that currently it is unusually warm does not by itself tell us anything about the causes. If only natural and no anthropogenic forcing existed it would be much colder now than in medieval times.

The hockey stick debate exemplifies how the „climate skeptics“-lobby has tried to discredit an inconvenient scientific finding over the course of many years, without success. The scientific conclusions have proven to be robust.

Tropical storms

Under the subheading “The Myth of the Monster Storm” the SPIEGEL article reports on a “hurricane war” amongst US climate scientists:

The alarmists, using the rhetoric of fiery sermons, warned that Katrina was only the beginning, and that we would soon see the advent of superstorms of unprecedented fury. Members of the more levelheaded camp were vehemently opposed to such predictions and insisted that there was no justification for such fears.

Sadly, no example for the “rhetoric of fiery sermons” is quoted. “Levelheaded” is the well-worn SPIEGEL-parlance for describing anyone who downplays climate change, regardless of whether their claims are scientifically well-founded.

Then a recent study from Nature Geoscience is cited which allegedly announces “the all-clear signal on the hurricane front” and which signifies “another setback for the IPCC”. This is because “the IPCC report warned that there would be more hurricanes in a greenhouse climate”. Let us simply quote from the abstract of the new study:

Future projections based on theory and high-resolution dynamical models consistently indicate that greenhouse warming will cause the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms, with intensity increases of 2-11% by 2100. Existing modelling studies also consistently project decreases in the globally averaged frequency of tropical cyclones, by 6-34%. Balanced against this, higher resolution modelling studies typically project substantial increases in the frequency of the most intense cyclones, and increases of the order of 20% in the precipitation rate within 100 km of the storm centre.

Long story short, fewer but heavier tropical storms can be expected. By the way, the potential destructiveness of storms increases more steeply than the wind velocities; a 2-11% higher speed means a 6-37% higher destructiveness. (Emanuel 2005).

And what did the IPCC report have to say on this topic?

Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical sea surface temperatures. There is less confidence in projections of a global decrease in numbers of tropical cyclones. [Summary for Policy Makers, page 15.]

Long story short, fewer but heavier tropical storms can be expected, even if there was still less confidence about the first aspect at the time. The WMO, whose expert group has published this study, consequently describes the result as follows:

Substantial scientific progress has led the Expert Team to raise their confidence levels on several aspects of how tropical cyclone activity may change under projected climate scenarios.

This means: there is no reason for speaking of a “setback” in a “war”; rather the early findings of the IPCC report have been given a higher confidence level. The SPIEGEL story on this issue falls into a category of false allegations against IPCC mentioned by us already in February, namely those which can be falsified by simply reading the report (in this case even a quick look at the Summary for Policy Makers would have sufficed).

IPCC mistakes

According to DER SPIEGEL “more and more mistakes, evidence of sloppy work and exaggerations in the current IPCC report are appearing”. We already investigated this and came to the conclusion that of the mistakes discussed excitedly in the media, nothing much remains except for the Himalaya mistake. The SPIEGEL does not have anything else to offer either – it counts “Jones’ disputed temperature curve” as one of them; apart from that “the supposed increase in natural disasters” – wrongly so as we have already showed (in German) reacting to an article published in Die Welt which claimed the same.

DER SPIEGEL elaborates on the story of the alleged “phantom graph” by Robert Muir-Wood which we have explained there as well. According to DER SPIEGEL, Roger Pielke “tried to find out where the graph had come from” and “traced it” to Robert Muir-Wood. This must have been hard indeed, given that Muir-Wood, who provided the graph, is named by the IPCC in the figure caption. The only difficult thing is to find this graph (which incidentally is correct but not very informative) at all: other than DER SPIEGEL claims, it is not in the IPCC report itself but only provided as “supplementary material” on its website, where the IPCC publishes such background material. Although on the 3,000 pages of the report there was no space for it, the graph now seems to be important to SPIEGEL readers for reasons unknown.

What is it all about?

SPIEGEL defames some of the best scientists worldwide, who not least for this reason have become prime targets for the “climate skeptics”. If you look at publications in the three scientific top journals (Nature, Science, PNAS), the just 44-year-old Mike Mann has already published 9 studies there, Phil Jones 24 (comments, letters and book reviews not included). In contrast, DER SPIEGEL always calls upon the same witness, the mathematician Hans von Storch, who has published only a single article in the prime journals mentioned (and that was faulty). But he says the politically wanted thing, even if without any supporting evidence from the scientific literature: in his view we can easily adapt to climate change. He also publicly accuses the vast majority of his colleagues who disagree with him of alarmism, calls them “prophets of doom” or “eco-activists” who indoctrinate the public. He also insinuates political or financial motives for disseminating horror scenarios. In this article he says things like “unfortunately, some of my colleagues behave like pastors, who present their results in precisely such a way that they’ll fit to their sermons”. This quote matches the article´s inflationary usage of the words “guru” “popes” “fiery sermons” “missionaries” and so forth. And he goes on: “It’s certainly no coincidence that all the mistakes that became public always tended in the direction of exaggeration and alarmism.” The following statement would have probably been more correct: it is certainly no coincidence that all the alleged errors scandalized in the media always tended in the direction of exaggeration and alarmism.

It is obvious that DER SPIEGEL does not care about science. This really is about politics. This year will decide about the future of the German climate policy: in the fall the government will announce its new energy strategy. This will decide whether the energy transformation towards a sustainable electricity supply, increasingly based on renewables, will be pushed forward or thwarted. In a global context the issue is whether global warming can be limited to a maximum of 2 ºC, as the Copenhagen Accord calls for, or whether this opportunity will be lost. The power struggle on this issue is in full gear. The energy transformation can best be prevented by creating doubts about its urgency. The fact that scandal stories about climate science have to be invented to this end just proves one thing: good, honest arguments against a forceful climate policy apparently do not exist.

p.s. (26 April): It’s just a curiosity, but telling: DER SPIEGEL calls Pachauri’s novel “Return to Almora” an “erotic novel”. The novel follows the life story of Sanjay Nath, from a childhood in the 1950s in the Himalayas through decades spent in the US building up a chain of meditation centers, until his final return to the Himalayas at age 60. The 400-page book contains a handful of love scenes, only gently hinted at in a few sentences. Calling this an “erotic novel” is devious; it can only serve the purpose of letting Pachauri appear in a dubious light.

Correction: As Roger Pielke has pointed out to us, the Supplementary Material to the IPCC reports is not only available on the IPCC website, but also on a CD-ROM distributed with the printed books.

[This piece is a translation of an article that originally appeared in German on the KlimaLounge weblog.]

References

Emanuel, K., 2005: Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years. Nature, 436, 686-688.

Knutson, T. R., J. L. McBride, J. Chan, K. Emanuel, G. Holland, C. Landsea, I. Held, J. P. Kossin, A. K. Srivastava, and M. Sugi, 2010: Tropical cyclones and climate change. Nature Geoscience, 3, 157-163.

Mann, M. E., R. S. Bradley, and M. K. Hughes, 1999: Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties and limitations. Geophysical Research Letters, 26, 759-762.

Mann, M. E., Z. Zhang, S. Rutherford, R. S. Bradley, M. Hughes, D. Shindell, C. Ammann, G. Faluvegi, and F. Ni, 2009: Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly. Science, 326, 1256-1260.
Click to expand...

I must admit I seriously suspect you are a paid shill for the oil and gas industry and I' not alone in that suspicion
I have also posted definitions of the terms denier and skeptic and the simple reality is
if the shoe fits
another grim reality is that I simply do not trust someone who is so self absorbed they are unable to admit fault
for instance
you most definitely questioned my having attended "any" university let alone having graduated grade school and clearly you then "denied" that accusation
the dishonesty is so glaringly apparent it would be lunacy for me to trust you with personal information
maybe if you had been able to at least acknowledge this latest error but as things stand you are still living in a condition of denial when you refuse to even acknowledge your latest gaff

best of luck G
your going to need it unless you engage in a little personal growth here

Boston, Oct 14, 2010

#10250

Joined: Apr 2009
Posts: 897
Likes: 37, Points: 0, Legacy Rep: 442
Location: usa

wardd Senior Member

what does attitude have to do with the science?

liberty ships were beautiful

wardd, Oct 14, 2010

#10251

Boston Previous Member

nothing
its just another attempt to not admit error or apologize to the group for making false accusations

Boston, Oct 14, 2010

#10252

Joined: Nov 2009
Posts: 1,743
Likes: 170, Points: 63, Legacy Rep: 2078
Location: California

troy2000 Senior Member

wardd said: ↑

what does attitude have to do with the science?
Click to expand...

Attitude has everything to do with whether one honestly examines the science involved in AGW - or throws tantrums to distract attention from it.

I like this quote from the article Boston posted about Der Spiegel:

The fact that scandal stories about climate science have to be invented...just proves one thing: good, honest arguments against a forceful climate policy apparently do not exist.

Don't let the urgent displace the important...

troy2000, Oct 14, 2010

#10253

Joined: Apr 2009
Posts: 897
Likes: 37, Points: 0, Legacy Rep: 442
Location: usa

wardd Senior Member

my meaning was the science doesn't care about our attitudes

that kind of stuff is called magic

maybe gman is a witch and should talk to o"donnell

liberty ships were beautiful

wardd, Oct 14, 2010

#10254

Boston Previous Member

the point I have repeatedly made from the very start is that there simply is no clear concise and coherent counter theory or even counter hypothesis

if there is then by all means someone present it to the group or better yet to the world scientific body and lets get to work examining it

deal is there simply isn't and all the deniers are really doing is nipping at the heals of the science as it pulls ahead of there paltry arguments

its sad really but the disinformation campaign is alive and well
its just not got a leg to stand on

so they resort to these kinds of tactics which in the end only add to there embarrassment
the idea isn't to prove themselves right but only to delay being proven wrong
as if science deals in proof at all

oh what a tangled web they weave

the entire concept of agnotism is not to prove anything but to delay positive and meaningful change
at the expense of the many for the benefit of the few

same thing happened in the tobacco industry and in a lot of cases involving the same shills

Boston, Oct 14, 2010

#10255

Boston Previous Member

how about if we give old Guillermo the time he needs to reevaluate a few things and in the mean time lets look at the standard denier diatribe

deniers say

Instruments show there has been some warming of the Earth's surface since 1979, but the actual value is subject to large errors. Most long-term data comes from surface weather stations. Many of these are in urban centres which have expanded in both size and energy use. When these stations observe a temperature rise, they are simply measuring the "urban heat island effect". In addition, coverage is patchy, with some regions of the world almost devoid of instruments. Data going back further than a century or two is derived from "proxy" indicators such as tree-rings and stalactites which, again, are subject to large errors.
Click to expand...

but the truth is

Warming is unequivocal. Weather stations, ocean measurements, decreases in snow cover, reductions in Arctic sea ice, longer growing seasons, balloon measurements, boreholes and satellites all show results consistent with the surface record of warming. The urban heat island effect is real but small; and it has been studied and corrected for. Analyses by Nasa for example use only rural stations to calculate trends. Recently, work has shown that if you analyse long-term global temperature rise for windy days and calm days separately, there is no difference. If the urban heat island effect were large, you would expect to see a bigger trend for calm days when more of the heat stays in the city. Furthermore, the pattern of warming globally doesn't resemble the pattern of urbanisation, with the greatest warming seen in the Arctic and northern high latitudes. Globally, there is a warming trend of about 0.8C since 1900, more than half of which has occurred since 1979.
Click to expand...

anyone recognize that argument

how about this one

deniers say

Since 1998 - almost a decade - the record, as determined by observations from satellites and balloon radiosondes, shows no warming.
Click to expand...

but the truth is

1998 was an exceptionally warm year because of the strong El Nino event. Variability from year to year is expected, and picking a specific warm year to start an analysis is "cherry-picking"; if you picked 1997 or 1999 you would see a sharper rise. Even so, the linear trends since 1998 are still positive.
Click to expand...

oh how many times have we been round and round on that one

another ?

deniers say

The beginning of the last Millennium saw a "Mediaeval Warm Period" when temperatures, certainly in Europe, were higher than they are now. Grapes grew in northern England. Ice-bound mountain passes opened in the Alps. The Arctic was warmer in the 1930s than it is today.
Click to expand...

but the truth is

There have been many periods in Earth history that were warmer than today - if not the MWP, then maybe the last interglacial (125,000 years ago) or the Pliocene (three million years ago). Whether those variations were caused by solar forcing, the Earth's orbital wobbles or continental configurations, none of those causes apply today. Evidence for a Mediaeval Warm Period outside Europe is patchy at best, and is often not contemporary with the warmth in Europe. As the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) puts it: "The idea of a global or hemispheric Mediaeval Warm Period that was warmer than today has turned out to be incorrect". Additionally, although the Arctic was warmer in the 1930s than in the following few decades, it is now warmer still
Click to expand...

denier

Computer models are the main way of forecasting future climate change. But despite decades of development they are unable to model all the processes involved; for example, the influence of clouds, the distribution of water vapour, the impact of warm seawater on ice-shelves and the response of plants to changes in water supply. Climate models follow the old maxim of "garbage in, garbage out".
Click to expand...

truth

Models are simply ways to quantify understanding of climate. They will never be perfect and they will never be able to forecast the future exactly. However, models are tested and validated against all sorts of data. Over the last 20 years they have become able to simulate more physical, chemical and biological processes, and work on smaller spatial scales. The 2007 IPCC report produced regional climate projections in detail that would have been impossible in its 2001 assessment. All of the robust results from modelling have both theoretical and observational support.
Click to expand...

denier

Computer models predict that the lower levels of the atmosphere, the troposphere, should be warming faster than the Earth's surface. Measurements show the opposite. So either this is another failing of the models, or one set of measurements is flawed, or there are holes in our understanding of the science.
Click to expand...

truth

Lower levels of the troposphere are warming; but measuring the exact rate has been an uncertain process, particularly in the satellite era (since 1979). Readings from different satellites need to be tied together, and each has its own problems with orbital decay and sensor drift. Two separate analyses show consistent warming, one faster than the surface and one slightly less. Within the uncertainties of the data, there is no discrepancy that needs to be dealt with. Information from balloons has its own problems but the IPCC concluded this year: "For the period since 1958, overall global and tropical tropospheric warming estimated from radiosondes has slightly exceeded surface warming".
Click to expand...

the simple reality is that the denialist diatribe is old hat being run up the flag pole for the umpteenth time
it didn't wash then and it doesn't now
the only reason they do it is to confuse the public in order to prolong the profitability of the oil and gas industry

Boston, Oct 14, 2010

#10256

Joined: Apr 2009
Posts: 897
Likes: 37, Points: 0, Legacy Rep: 442
Location: usa

wardd Senior Member

no science I know of is perfect and to pick out those imperfections misses the point of what scientific study is all about

that is why scientists and engineers are reluctant to use the words perfect or 100%

liberty ships were beautiful

wardd, Oct 14, 2010

#10257

Boston Previous Member

well said

or proof

what you get is a preponderance of data and a consensus of what that data means
in this case that consensus is a whopping 97%

warming is unequivocal and its cause is human alterations in the chemistry of the atmosphere

Boston, Oct 14, 2010

#10258

Joined: Apr 2009
Posts: 897
Likes: 37, Points: 0, Legacy Rep: 442
Location: usa

wardd Senior Member

are gmans boats 100% reliable and unsinkable?

liberty ships were beautiful

wardd, Oct 14, 2010

#10259
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Boston Previous Member

there's about five more standard arguments that the deniers will trot out from time to time when some other fails

its like a merry-go-round of BS

a standard written play book handed out to deniers working for the oil and gas disinformation campaign

Boston, Oct 14, 2010

#10260

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May 9, 2013
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brian eiland

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