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1. Bob Loblaw at 06:48 AM on 13 November 2024
   Models are unreliable
   

   A further follow-up to Syme_Minitrue's post @ 1332, where (s)he finishes with the statement:

   A climate model probably contains hundreds of model parameters. Can you adjust them so that you get a good fit with historical data, and good predictive capability at a significantly lower, or even completely excluded CO2-dependency?

   Let's say we wanted to run a climate model over the  historical period (the last century) in a manner that "excluded CO2-dependency". How on earth (pun intended) would we do that, with a physically-based climate model?

   • We could decide to remove the part of the model that says CO2 absorbs (and emits) IR radiation.
   • Unfortunately, that would make our model run far too cold for the entire period, since the 19th century CO2 level of 280-300ppm is a significant source of heating that helps keep us in a stable climate of roughly 15C (as opposed to -18C that we'd expect with no atmosphere)
   • This would defy the physics of IR absorption by CO2 that is easily demonstrated in a laboratory.
   • We could arbitrarily decide that CO2 remain at 300ppm.
   • This would be a useful experiment, and is probably what was done for the graph I included in comment 1334...
   • ...but this defies the actual physical measurements of rising CO2, so it can hardly be argued that this model experiment can explain actual temperature observations.
   • We could run the model so that the first 300ppm of CO2 absorbs IR radiation, but the CO2 content above 300ppm does not.
   • This makes no physical sense, since all CO2 molecules act the same. We can't use "special pleading" for some.
   • And once we remove the effects of rising CO2, how would we change other model calculations to compensate for the lack of CO2 warming? i.e., what would "fit" the model to the observed increase in temperatures?
   • We could arbitrarily increase solar input...
   • ...but this defies our physical measurements of solar irradiance.
   • We could arbitrarily change cloud cover
   • but we have no physical measurements that would support this.
   • We could arbitrarily change surface albedo, vegetation, etc...
   • but we run into the same problem: we have physical measurements of the properties of these factors, and it's hard to justify using values that are different from the known measured values.

   In comment 1334, I linked to a review I did of a paper that claimed to be able to fit recent temperature trends with a model that showed a small CO2 effect. I said it was badly flawed.

   • The paper in question did pretty much what Syme_Minitrue expressed concern about: doing a statistical fit to a large number of parameters, many of which defied any plausible physical meaning.
   • As long as your parameters can perform all sorts of non-physical gymnastics in an effort to fit the data, you can easily come up with some rather odd results.
   • When your model parameters are limited to physically-measurable values, "fitting" gets a lot harder.

   Physically-based models in climate science generally get "fit" by trying to get the physics right.

2. nigelj at 06:29 AM on 13 November 2024
   2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
   

   The AI (artificial intelligence) does appear to use a lot of electricity. It raises the issue of where we should cut our electricity use to help mitigate the climate problem. One can talk about focusing on meeting needs rather than wants. We probably need some basics to survive in cities like a fridge and electric stove and a radio and home heating. We dont really need a television and vaccum cleaners and cars and fancy audio systems, and travelling to other countries or even cars in most cases. We probably mostly dont need AI unless it helps the healthcare sector. We dont even really need computers. We sure don't need bitcoin.

   But wants are also very important. Its what makes life nice. So we have to decide on what wants are legitimate. Is a television legitimate? If it is, what sort of television is legitimate? How much long distance motorised travel is appropriate? Its all a  nightmare really.

   And one persons wants are another persons needs. Even deciding on what is a need and a want is not as easy as it seems. A computer is a perfect example. Its not absoluely essential but its getting close to being essential?

   I'm not a huge energy user myself. Im just highlighting some of the challenges in figuring out wants versus needs, and what constitutes a workable low energy use society, and getting people to voluntarily adopt this.

3. One Planet Only Forever at 04:49 AM on 13 November 2024
   2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
   

   Comparing the Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT presentations I prefer the summary statements provided by ChatGPT.

   However, neither of the presentations are particualrly useful to me. They would be useful if they presented the linked list of articles in each category like the SkS New Research for Week ... (most recent week link).

4. Evan at 02:34 AM on 13 November 2024
   2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
   

   Cleanair27 and BaerbelW

   Even if I knew that the AI used here by SkS increased emissions, I would be for it. It is easy to say that we should use crowd sourcing, but such activities must be managed, by humans, and the humans maintaining SkS are overworked. SkS provides an extremely valuable educational resource, and I am all for anything that improves the consistency, accuracy, etc. of the SkS product while lowering the work load on the SkS human.

5. MA Rodger at 21:24 PM on 12 November 2024
   Models are unreliable
   

   Syme_Minitrue @1332,

   You suggest CO2 can be extracted from climate models and it would be "then hard to use that model to claim that CO2 is what drives global warming." You then add "I have done a little bit of searching but not found any such falsification attempt."

   I would suggest it is your searches that are failing as there are plenty "such falsification attempt(s)." They do not have the resources behind them to run detailed models like the IPCC does today. But back in the day the IPCC didn't have such detailed models yet still found CO2 driving climate change.

   These 'attempts' do find support in some quarters and if they had the slightest amount of merit they would drive additional research. But they have all, so far, proved delusional, usually the work of a know bunch of climate deniers with nothing better to do.

   Such clownish work, or perhaps clownish presentation of work, has been getting grander but less frequent through the years. An exemplar is perhaps Soon et al (2023) 'The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data'. Within the long list of authors I note Harde, Humlum, Legates, Moore and Scafetta who are all well known for these sorts of papers usually published in journals of little repute. If such work was onto something, it would be followed up by further work. That is how science is supposed to work.

   Instead all we see is the same old stuff recycled again and again by the same old autors and being shown to be wrong again and again.

6. BaerbelW at 06:45 AM on 12 November 2024
   2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
   

   Cleanair27 @ 1

   Thanks for your comment! It's definitely a good thing to keep energy consumption of AI in mind, but somewhat counterintuitively this study from earlier this year found that utilizing AI for a task like the one we used it for - namely to create the categorized summary of the many shared articles - is apparently a lot more energy efficient than doing it manually:
   "The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans"

7. Bob Loblaw at 06:26 AM on 12 November 2024
   Models are unreliable
   

   Syme_Minitrue @ 1332:

   Your comment contains several misunderstandings of how models are developed and tested, and how science is evaluated.

   To begin, you start with the phrase "If a hypothesis should be considered proven..." Hypotheses are not proven: they are supported by empirical evidence (or not). And there is lots and lots of empirical evidence that climate models get a lot of things right. They are not "claimed to be true" (another phrase you use), but the role of CO2 in recent warming is strongly supported.

   In your second and third paragraphs, you present a number of "alternative explanations" that you think need to be considered. Rest assured that none of what you present is unknown to climate science, and these possible explanations have been considered. Some of them do have effects, but none provide an explanation for recent warming.

   In your discussion of "parameters", you largely confuse the characteristics of purely-statistical models with the characteristics of models that are largely based on physics. For example, if you were to consider Newton's law of gravity, and wanted to use it to model the gravitational pull between two planets, you might think there are four "parameters" involved: the mass of planet A, the mass of planet B, the distance between them, and the gravitational constant. None of the four are "tunable parameters", though. Each of the four is a physical property that can be determined independently. You can't change the mass of planet A that you used in calculating the gravitational pull with planet B, and say that planet A has a different mass when calculating the attraction with planet C.

   Likewise, many of the values  used in climate model equations have independently-determined values (with error bars). Solar irradiance does not change on Tuesday because it fits better - it only changes when our measurements of solar irradiance show it is changing, or (for historical data prior to direct measurement) some other factor has changed that we know is a reliable proxy indicator for past solar irradiance. We can't make forests appear and disappear on an annual basis to "fit" the model. We can't say vegetation transpires this week and not next to "fit" the model (although we can say transpiration varies according to known factors that affect it, such as temperature, leaf area, soil moisture, etc.)

   And climate models, like real climate, involve a lot of interconnected variables. "Tuning" in a non-physical way to fit one output variable (e..g. temperature) will also affect other output variables (e.g. precipitation). You can't just stick in whatever number you want - you need to stick with known values (which will have uncertainty) and work within the known measured ranges.

   Climate models do have "parameterizations" that represent statistical fits for some processes - especially at the sub-grid scale. But again, these need to be physically reasonable. And they are often based on and compared to more physically-based models that include finer detail (and have evidence to support them). This is often done for computational efficiency - full climate models contain too much to be able to include "my back yard" level of detail.

   You conclude with the question "Can you adjust them so that you get a good fit with historical data, and good predictive capability at a significantly lower, or even completely excluded CO2-dependency?"  The answer to that is a resounding No. In the 2021 IPCC summary for policy makers, figure SPM1 includes a graph of models run with and without the anthropogenic factors. Here is that figure:

   

   Note that "skeptics" publish papers from time to time purporting to explain recent temperature trends using factors other than CO2. These papers usually suffer from major weaknesses. I reviewed one of them a couple of years ago. It was a badly flawed paper. In general, the climate science community agrees that recent warming trends cannot be explained without including the role of CO2.

8. Charlie_Brown at 06:23 AM on 12 November 2024
   Models are unreliable
   

   Syme_Minitrue @ 1332
   That is an incorrect way to prove the null hypothesis or to demonstrate falsification. Climate models are not simple empirical models. They contain a mix of fundamental principles, including the laws of physics, as well as tunable parameters for uncertain factors. One cannot simply remove radiant energy, which follows the physics of CO2, and then tune the model to an unconstrained set of empirical variables, then say that if it can be made to fit, conclude that the laws of physics are invalid.

9. Syme_Minitrue at 01:28 AM on 12 November 2024
   Models are unreliable
   

   If a hypothesis should be considered proven it must stand up against falsification attempts. If you take a climate model as an example, and remove all CO2 dependency, and adjust all other model parameters, and you can train the model to fit historical data AND it still makes a decent prediction of future climate, it is then hard to use that model to claim that CO2 is what drives global warming. I have done a little bit of searching but not found any such falsification attempt.

   For example, since early human civilisation about 1/3 of the world's forests have been cut down, farmland has been drained. This inevitably makes the soil drier and you get less daytime cumulus clouds. These clouds reflect sunlight, but disappear at night allowing long-wave CO2-radiation to escape. Most of this deforestation & drainage has happened in sync with CO2-emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution. If you can adjust/train the climate model by tuning all other model parameters (I'm sure there are hundreds in a climate model) relating to deforestation, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, cloud formation, land use, etc etc etc, and the model 1) follows the observed climate and 2) makes decent predictions into the future (relative to the training window) then the hypothesis that CO2 is what drives climate change can't be claimed to be true, based on that model.  
   
   I have done a bit of model fitting on systems way less complex than the global climate. If the model contains more than, say 5 (five) model parameters that need to be tuned to make the model fit historical data, you really start chasing your own tail. The problem becomes "ill conditioned" and several combinations of model parameters can give a good fit and make decent predictions. In such a situation, you can choose to eliminate some parameters or variables, or impose some known or suspected correlation or causality between them, to simplify the model. A model should be kept as simple as possible.

   A climate model probably contains hundreds of model parameters. Can you adjust them so that you get a good fit with historical data, and good predictive capability at a significantly lower, or even completely excluded CO2-dependency?

   Moderator Response:

   [PS] Please have a decent read of the IPCC summaries of climate modelling, especially the earlier reports 3 and 4. Climate models are physics-based models, not statistical models. You cant "fit" parameters like you do in a statistical model. Parameterization of variables is extremely limited and not tuned to say global temperature. The old FAQ on climate models at https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/faq-on-climate-models/ is very useful in this. Models do include landuse change that you mention.

   
   As to falsification, climate science makes a very large number of robust predictions like ocean heat content, changes to outgoing and incoming IR, response to volcanic eruptions etc. Observations that differ from these would indeed falsify the models (though not necessarily the science).

   You can still download a cut down version of GISS model that will run on a desktop. https://edgcm.columbia.edu/ Try it yourself. Good luck getting it simulate climate with CO2 depencency set to zero.

10. Cleanair27 at 00:18 AM on 12 November 2024
    2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
    

    Hello,

    I strongly object to your using AI to prepare your weekly roundup of articles. I am sure you know how climate damaging AI is, so how do you justify this? I'm thinking of stopping my reading of your site, which I value very much, because of this change in your operations. How about considering human crowd sourceing your article roundup?

11. Bob Loblaw at 06:37 AM on 11 November 2024
    Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
    

    Jess Scarlett @ 6:

    You're going to have to put together a much stronger argument than that if you want to convince anyone that there isn't a strong expert consensus on human-caused global warming.

    For starters, is your lead question ("Have you looked into all the climate scientists gagged...") a rhetorical gambit, or are you actually asking a serious question? Are you trying to imply that the studies that have looked at the scientific literature missed a few "gagged scientists", or many, or all? Are you trying to imply that this "gagging" has been so thorough that none of their opinions have every made it into print? Or that the few that have made it into print would be a much greater number "but gagging"?

    The OP here links to the full SkS rebuttal on the topic. Here is the link to the basic tab of that rebuttal, but note that there are also advanced and intermediate tabs to read. The basic rebuttal links to the various papers that have been done on the subject, and those papers give details on just what sort of searches they did to obtain the list of papers that were evaluated. Feel free to look them over and come back with an argument as to why those searches will have missed the opinions of the "gagged scientists" you seem to think exist in large numbers.

    ...but before you start trying to make an argument that the review system won't let opposing opinions get published, I suggest that you read this SkS article on "pal review" that shows just where bad reviewing practices exist in the climate science literature. (Hint: it's the "gagged scientists" that have historically abused the peer review system.)

    But let's entertain your argument that there are a whole bunch of 'gagged scientists" that can't get published, or have chosen to remain silent out of fear. You said "...all the climate scientists gagged..." That seems to imply a large number. I'll begin with a recollection of discussing climate science with someone at a conference about 30 years ago. He made the claim that lots of scientists had reversed their opinion from global cooling in the 1970s to warming in the 1990s. (This is debunked on this post at SkS.)

    • I challenged him by saying "name one".
    • He prattled on about there being lots.
    • Again, I said "name one".
    • He kept prattling on.
    • I repeated "name one".
    • I held my hand up about head high and started dropped it down to chest height, waist height, and below, saying "this is your credibility dropping".
    • He still didn't give a name. He never did.

    So that is my challenge to you: you claim that there are scientists at CSIRO and NASA that have been gagged because they disagree with the scientific consensus. Name One. And provide some sort of link to a reliable source of information supporting that position.

    Second: in the advanced tab of the full rebuttal, under "The Self-Ratings", the Original Cook et al study obtained ratings of over 2100 papers from 1200 scientists, and 97.2% of those ratings agreed with the consensus. In the following paragraph, it states that the authors' review of over 4000 abstracts indicated a 97.1% agreement with the consensus.

    • My second challenge is for you to do some elementary arithmetic (I won't call it math), and tell me how many papers do you think those "gagged scientists" failed to publish, and how would the 97% number have changed if they had succeeded in publishing those papers.
    • I'll give you a hint. You'd have to find nearly 2100 papers or 4000 abstracts to get it to drop to a 50% consensus.
    • Good luck finding that many papers.
    • ...and before you try to link to PopTech's list of papers, please read "Meet the Denominator".

    Please provide us with backup of your claim.

12. nigelj at 05:17 AM on 11 November 2024
    Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
    

    Jess Scarlett @6, you appear to be implying scientists at CSIRO ,an Australian government funded climate change advice agency, were gagged and bullied and fired for being sceptical of anthropogenic climate change and so those left were the ones believing in anthropogenic climate change. This does not appear to be correct. It appears that the issues at CSIRO was essentially scientists were gagged, bullied and fired if they published studies or spoke out publicly in a way not consistent with the governments direction on climate science and mitigation policy, which of course varied form government to government. It appears CSIROS mangement were afraid of offending the governmnet of the day.

    The scientists actually gagged, bullied or fired seemed to be  scientists who spoke out publicly about climate dangers and weak emissions reduction targets and who published studies critical of weak climate mitigation schemes. For example a study by Dr Splash, a scientist,  critical of emissions trading schemes and recommending a carbon tax. This is essentially the complete opposite of your claim. The following link gives a good account  of the issues:

    www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-05-02/csiro-missing-in-action-on-climate-advice/8479568

13. Eclectic at 05:15 AM on 11 November 2024
    Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
    

    Jess Scarlett @6  :

    Jess, the consensus being talked about is the scientific consensus ~ IOW the evidence based consensus, which is expressed in published scientific papers.  There are some (rare) scientists who disagree with the evidence, but they have failed to present any counter-evidence.  (Can you still call them scientists when they are being unscientific?)

    Reputable scientific journals are actually keen to publish new research ~ if it is controversial and ground-breaking . . . but it must be based on scientific evidence, not on loudmouth political opinions.

    The politics of what to do about AGW is another question entirely.

14. Jess Scarlett at 00:22 AM on 11 November 2024
    Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
    

    Have you looked into all the climate scientists gagged after being bullied and fired for not having those scientific results in the industry the longest. Look up CSIRO bullied out of jobs or defunded. What about same as NASA scientists. So yeah nearly all scientists left to speak agree. After 2015. 

15. gaeshitsuki at 23:30 PM on 10 November 2024
    Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
    

    And as always, people believe those who offer the best entertainment, the best phrasemongers, the simplifiers. As a result, the majority of people always choose the quick bite, instead of the paths that would lead to sustainable solutions.

    The unpleasant truths fall by the wayside.

    The people deserve their leaders, whom they themselves elected.

16. Dale H at 22:45 PM on 10 November 2024
    Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
    

    Dale H

    Why don't we call it what it really is?

    Global warming!

    I think it would help in the consumer understanding and uptake.

17. prove we are smart at 07:33 AM on 10 November 2024
    Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
    

    Thanks Evan for providing that link to understand in a simple way some climate truths.

    The ability and resolve to learn the why of it all is a losing battle. The internet can give us Skeptical Science but not teach us equity.

    Seems to me, critical thinking has caved in to populist media messaging. The swing to the right in many western countries has reached a new peak in the consumer driven on steroids the USA.

    "The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe; for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them."

    Perhaps I will think this again- It seems to be a law of human nature that some people only notice things when they suffer personally.

                                                          

18. Evan at 00:20 AM on 10 November 2024
    Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
    

    Although not a consensus statement as such, the booklet titled "Climate Change: Evidence and Causes" published jointly by the US National Academy of Sciences and the UK Royal Society is a very readable, useful resource to recommend to people who want to read something about global warming from a reputable source. This booklet serves as an implicit consensus statement by these two organizations. I highly recommend this.

    Climate Change: Evidence and Causes

19. Evan at 00:12 AM on 10 November 2024
    Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
    

    I have nothing to add to this useful article, except to provide a shout-out for the valuable list mentioned in this article of statements by scientific societies concerning global warming.

    NASA List of Scientific Consensus

20. wstephen at 07:01 AM on 9 November 2024
    The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
    

    I believe that climate change, caused in large part by fossil fuel combustion and other human influences, COVARIES with all the increased temperature effects. FFI, as wilddouglascounty points out, CAUSES climate change, which has become a general term that encompasses the results listed (and others).

    How would one quantify climate change except with its covariates?  

21. Jess Scarlett at 23:52 PM on 8 November 2024
    The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
    

    Great link to some scary technologies in the name of climate and net zero are geo engineering and mining into rich carbon storage for minierals in the deep sea. 

    [link to UNDP.org site]

    Moderator Response:

    [BL] Link activated.
    
    The web software here does not automatically create links. You can do this when posting a comment by selecting the "insert" tab, selecting the text you want to use for the link, and clicking on the icon that looks like a chain link. Add the URL in the dialog box.

    Also keep in mind that it helps to give some explanation of what people should expect to find at the link, and how it relates to the topic being discussed. Your description is a little short on details.

22. Jess Scarlett at 23:48 PM on 8 November 2024
    The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
    

    The problem is geo engineering is now a private industry and not to be written off as conspiracy any more. If you start puttinh dangerous chemicals in the atmosphere it effects wild fires, effecrs staristics and real comparitive data.

23. wilddouglascounty at 15:35 PM on 8 November 2024
    The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
    

    Of course you cannot do controlled experiments in climate science, because we don't have another set of planets to do double blind experiments with. That doesn't mean that we can't have a good understanding of the physical role fossil fuel emissions play in the climate system of the planet we live on. We understand enough of the physics of the parts to create models that we can backcast and refine, and compare against alternatives, right? Do you have a better physical model that explains the climate change data without needing fossil fuel emissions playing the part that they do according to our measurements of what the physical properties of those gases are?

    The causal links between fossil fuel emissions and the dynamics of the climate system is good science that only gets better and better with time. Hence the need to start clarifying that  fossil fuel emissions are driving the new extremes, without the reified abstraction of "climate change" as the driver.

24. Paul Pukite at 11:51 AM on 8 November 2024
    The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
    

    The issue is that controlled experiments and clinical trials can prove that drugs can enhance human performance.  Recall reading this article Drug Test years ago by the now never-Trumper Stuart Stevens who was doing experiments as himself as a test subject.

     https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/drug-test/

    Alas, no such controlled experiments in climate science, which always places any extrapolations under suspicion.

     

25. wilddouglascounty at 10:27 AM on 8 November 2024
    The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
    

    My issue is that we are missing the point when we are saying that climate change CAUSES anything. Specifically, good science has established the following causal links:

    Fossil fuel emissions (FFE) > changed atmospheric chemistry > increased temperatures(IT).

    FFE > IT > more frequent, severe droughts>more extreme wildfires

    FFE > IT > more frequent, severe flooding caused by increased water in atmosphere

    FFE > IT > poleward shift of species habitats

    FFE > IT > increased glacial melt>sea level rise, exacerbated by expansion of water volume by it being warmer

    FFE > IT > warmer oceans > coral bleaching, myriad other effects

    FFE > increased acidification of oceans>plankton die-offs>myriad other effects

    Where is the causal link to climate change? "Climate change" is an abstraction that has been reified to give it causal qualities that it doesn't have. This reified abstraction has been given false attribution qualities that properly belong to fossil fuel emissions.

    People understand that anabolic steroids enhance performance of athletes, and injecting fossil fuel emissions into the air is juicing the atmospheric chemistry in exactly the same manner. Folks will understand this causal link in exactly the same way if we only use the term "climate change" as the OUTCOME of fossil fuel emissions, not the CAUSE of the changes that are taking place. That belongs to fossil fuel emissions.

26. One Planet Only Forever at 07:42 AM on 8 November 2024
    The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
    

    wilddouglascounty,

    I generally agree. However, I would add that it is essential to also include the harmful fact of misleading marketing success. That would make the important point something like “the increasing damage being done by the successful misleading marketing promotion and excusing of prolonged harmful abuse of fossil fuels”.

    The most problematic part of “business as usual” is the “successful misleading marketing”. That also applies to politics, especially to politics influenced by business or religious interests.

    Political, business and religious pursuits can be motivated by a desire to learn to be less harmful and more helpful to others. But in competitions for perceptions of status (wealth, popularity, power) the motivations to benefit from being more harmful and less helpful, motivation to get away with cheating, can overpower more ethical and moral understanding.

    People who allow their ‘pursuit of learning to be less harmful and more helpful to others’ to be overpowered or compromised by interests that conflict with learning to be less harmful and more helpful are a serious concern. Their impacts can add up to ‘massive tragedies of the commons’.

    And people who try to benefit from misleading other people need to be understood to be behaving criminally rather than being excused or being admired for their appearances of success, especially in business and politics.

    SkS is very helpful in efforts to reduce the success of misleading marketing (development and spreading of disinformation and misinformation).

27. wilddouglascounty at 00:18 AM on 8 November 2024
    The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
    

    I think the scientific community needs to be more direct about the causality of the changes we are seeing in the atmosphere, oceans and land. Fossil fuel emissions are absolutely driving the changes that are occurring, and yet so much of what is put out by the scientific community and journalists is a variation of: "climate change is the source of the extreme weather events/coral bleaching/poleward shift of species....etc."

    Much is being done to delineate how much the probability of an individual extreme weather event or wildfire has been changed by climate change, and yet this does not point the causality back to the source! 

    We do not say that a sporting event performance change caused the latest world record in a track and field event to be broken if performance enhancing drugs were involved: we say that the use of anabolic steroids caused the improved performance that resulted in the new world record! And since performance enhancing drugs injure the athletes, their use has been banned.

    The scientific community needs to do the same thing and start making those causal connections to the rest of our communities: fossil fuel emissions have juiced the atmospheric chemistry (as well as the oceans) and the results are enhanced weather events: more extreme flooding, droughts, more wildfires, a shift in habitable zones for species, etc.

    This is the point that needs to driven in over and over again: the public understands the deleterious effects of performance enhancing drugs, and they can do the same with understanding the causal effects of fossil fuel emissions if we stop obscuring this dynamic by calling it all being caused by "climate change." Even "climate change triggered by human activity" or even "climate change caused by fossil fuels" doesn't cut it if we want the causal link to be very clear, which is exactly what we need if we expect folks to change their habits.

     

28. Paul Pukite at 07:31 AM on 5 November 2024
    Climate Risk
    

    Bob, It is a slow warming shown over the span of a 1000 years.  Might as well classify it as a stable temperature, which is also not totally unexpected for zero further emissions — i.e. none of the excess CO2 is sequestering.  There are scores of references to an adjustment time of >> millenia for CO2.

29. Bob Loblaw at 06:39 AM on 5 November 2024
    Climate Risk
    

    Paul:

    The paper in question does not seem to directly assess exactly what causes their model to continue slow warming after reaching net zero, but they discuss a number of possibilities. They discuss a number of outputs - not just global mean temperature.

    How certain are they? In their abstract, they state (emphasis added) "Our findings suggest substantial long-term climate changes are possible even under net-zero emission pathways."

    And in the closing section of the paper, they say things like "The results presented in this study use one of our best available modelling tools to understand future climates under net-zero emissions, but improved understanding of slow climate processes and the potential for sudden-onset changes is needed.", and "The hope with this model framework is that other groups might consider running similar simulations", and "... but further work is needed to comprehensively understand climate changes beyond emission cessation."

    In other words, they are accepting that this may be a feature of their model that will not be found by others, and encourage others to try similar model experiments.

    Yes, it would not surprise me if Curry is reading the tweet and misinterpreting it as "climate change because [not CO2]".

30. Paul Pukite at 04:11 AM on 5 November 2024
    Climate Risk
    

    Yes, That's the entire charade of Curry's Uncertainty Monster. The uncertainty can go either way, and now that (or if) she has tilted toward a gloomish view, that uncertainty is biting back.  We have long realized that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have a ratcheting effect in that once they increase, it's very difficult to reverse due to the difficulty in permamently sequestering CO2.  This means the uncertainty is biased toward getting worse, and especially as in"the longer we wait to reach net zero, the worse things will be.".   IOW, impossible for things to immediately get better since we require all the FF infrastructure to power us through an energy transition.

    Yet, has Curry been saying this for over a decade now? It's possible that she saw the line about "climate will change" and equated that to natural variability, in which case she's been touting that for a long time. So, yes, it's rationalized by her not reading the artiicle.

31. Bob Loblaw at 00:58 AM on 5 November 2024
    Climate Risk
    

    Paul @ 5, 7:

    I wouldn't say that Curry has flipped - but I have to admit that I have not being paying a lot of attention to her and I have never had the impression that she has a coherent, logical, consistent position on much related to climate science. She would have to actually hold a position in order to be able to flip away from it. She has a  history of broadcasting all sorts of whack-a-doodle stuff (calling it "interesting") - but in a way that she can deny she supported it (or opposed it) when the cards line up.

    So, in that tweet, what the heck is she really claiming she has been saying for over a decade now? Only the contents of David Wallace-Wells' tweet, which says little? If you interpret his tweet as saying that there are other factors besides CO2 driving the current warming trend, and stopping CO2 emissions will have little effect, then maybe that fits her history of obfuscation and attacks on climate science as we know it. But is that what David Wallace-Wells really means?

    We could try to find David Wallace-Wells' article at The Conversation. Not hard. It's here. Want more detail? The article at The Conversation links to the actual paper it is based on. It is here.

    I have not read the paper in detail - it is moderately long and technical - but I can get the gist of it. It certainly does not support any argument that CO2 levels are less important than presented in the IPCC reports and positions. What the paper does seem to present is an argument (from model simulations) that the expected drop in CO2 levels after reaching net zero - due to fast parts of the carbon cycle continuing to remove CO2 - will be offset by other slow feedbacks in the climate system that will cause continued warming.

    The paper uses the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator Earth system model (ACCESS-ESM-1.5), which appears to include a number of slow-response feedbacks related to ice, ocean circulation, etc. (The paper provides references that explain that model in more detail, but the details are not apparent from a quick read of the current paper.)

    So, the gist of this new paper seems to be that slow feedbacks often not included in many models will make things worse than expected, once net zero is reached. They also indicate that the longer we wait to reach net zero, the worse things will be.

    This may fit into Curry's Uncertainty Monster scenario ("See, I told you there were things the models didn't get right!), but it is an uncertainty that will bite us in the posterior regions - not Curry's favoured "everything uncertain will fall to our benefit".

    I would not be surprised if Curry hasn't actually read the paper (or maybe even the Conversation article), and just saw what she wanted to see in the tweet - without actually understanding it.

32. Paul Pukite at 21:24 PM on 4 November 2024
    Climate Risk
    

    So Curry has flipped into a "doomer", a term I rarely ever use since I started blogging in 2004 (apart from referencing the Science of Doom blog).  Yet, a doomer with a dash of optimism has EXACTLY the same objectives as a climate change activist — the doom portended by the finiteness of fossil fuels is hedged by the transition to alternative renewable sources of energy.  Same goals, the only distinction is in how rapid the transition. That's all wrapped in the #NoRegrets strategy.

    All we need to do is accuse Curry of having no hope in achieving an energy transition. This should not be diffucult as she has absolutely ZERO credentials in energy engineering. She's now a totally lost soul, unable to keep up.

     

33. MA Rodger at 19:36 PM on 4 November 2024
    Climate Risk
    

    Paul Pukite @5,
    I don't see Judy Curry having flipped.

    While seeing her apparently agreeing with David Walliace-Wells is remarkable, the agreement is perhaps best seen as another instance of Judy re-defining the words of others. Over the last decade, since the WUWT failed to "change the way you think about natural internal variability" (WUWT=Wyatt's Unified Wave Theory which Judy calls the Stadium Wave), Judy has taken up ambiguity as a means of manufacturing what she calls "a wicked problem" to cloud the climate debate and give room for denialists to flaunt their nonsense.

    Her book 'Climate Uncertainty and Risk : Rethinking Our Response' was published last year (a 40-odd page preview HERE) and a few months back she set out the same message at the denialist GWPF's AGM.
    The book runs to fifteen chapters and 340 pages. Well hidden within it, Judy sets out her same old message, this from a book review.

    The need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is much less pressing than the IPCC and the UN contend because of the implausibility of extreme emissions scenarios such as RCP 8.5 and of high values for the climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide (the warming caused by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere). Natural variability is likely to slow down the rate of warming over the next few decades, and further time can be bought by targeting greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, which account for up to 45% of human-caused warming.

    (Note that the 45% number is wrong. The non-CO2 forcing is no more than 35% and over tha last decade it is down to 26%.) The hidden message from Curry is that her imagined natural climate wobbles have masked the weak nature of human-caused climate change and fooled us all. So we can sit back and enjoy ourselves while we make plans for when all the oil runs out.

34. prove we are smart at 06:52 AM on 4 November 2024
    2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44
    

    First a little thankyou to Sceptical Science for many years ago teaching me the science about Climate Change or as we called it then Global Warming. To also understand the extremes of the earths past climate cycles and their causes was fasinating.

    Why we won't mitigate? It's really about the politics-the science was settled a long time ago. 

    I know I'm one of the lucky ones and also part of the problem. My island continent is liquifying the methane gas and digging up the "ores" at a faster and faster rate for the overseas sales.

      Soon again with my adult children who will never afford to live my dream, we will all be hunkered down by candle or duracell light-lost power from a "rare" supercell thunderstorm. We tune in to the eveready powered radio for current news.

    So I go to bed early or read for a while, looking at those " Twelve books to read about climate action before the election" highlighted above, I definitely like this one. What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (One World 2024, 496 pages, $34.00)   "Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take".                  Leave off all the media when the power returns and just keep reading...                 

35. Paul Pukite at 13:04 PM on 2 November 2024
    Climate Risk
    

    

    Has Judith Curry flipped into A) a climate alarmist? B) incoherence? C) a Dominionist?

    Admitting that global heating will continue for centuries to come.

36. BaerbelW at 05:30 AM on 2 November 2024
    Low-frequency noise from wind turbines harms human health and causes 'wind turbine syndrome'
    

    OPOF @1

    Thanks for the heads-up! Our system apparently didn't much like the copied and pasted double-quotes used in the title around "wind turbine syndrome". Fixed it now.

37. One Planet Only Forever at 03:54 AM on 2 November 2024
    Low-frequency noise from wind turbines harms human health and causes 'wind turbine syndrome'
    

    The heading and first line of the Climate Myth ... appear to be incorrect or incomplete.

    I suggest that the header and first line of the Myth be: "Low-frequency noise from wind turbines harms human health"

38. nigelj at 04:29 AM on 30 October 2024
    Jobs in wind, solar, and energy storage are booming. Is your state keeping up?
    

    M S Sweet, thanks for the detailed and informative comments. That map was a good find. I sometimes dont have much time to explore much detail, but I thought it was an issue worth raising.

39. michael sweet at 02:40 AM on 30 October 2024
    Jobs in wind, solar, and energy storage are booming. Is your state keeping up?
    

    Nigelj:

    I found this newspaper article (written by a solar supporter) about solar in Florida (I was surprised that Florida has so much solar.   The government is strongly fossil fuel supportive).  The article says that utilities are building out solar in Florida because it is the cheapest power, in spite of a lack of government support.  It will be interesting to see what happens as solar begins to displace gas in the utility supply (as is currently happening in Texas).  Since utilities are leading the way and the gas is imported into Florida the politics will be different from Texas.

    Moderate sized (75 MW) generating systems can be easily built in Florida. Larger systems require regulator approval.   Since Solar is modular and can be build in any size the utilities are building a lot of 75 MW systems.  Gas generators are larger and require regulator approval.  The citrus farming industry has gone way down in the past 15 years which frees up a lot of land. 

    In July 2024 Florida produced about 8% of electricity from solar, coal 4%, nuclear 10%, gas 78% source.  Florida uses more power in July since it is air conditioning season.

40. michael sweet at 01:34 AM on 30 October 2024
    Jobs in wind, solar, and energy storage are booming. Is your state keeping up?
    

    Nigelj,

    This wind map shows more detail than the statewide averages you linked.  There is a lot of wind in West Texas.  California has windy areas in the southeast part of the state.  Florida has little wind and the state recently passed a law forbiding offshore wind.

    There are other sources of renewable jobs.   A lot of solar panel manufacturing plants and wind turbine suppliers have been or are in the process of being built, primarily in republician areas, using money ftom Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. Other political issues cause uneven distribution of renewable energy.  The OP points out that Montana, West Virginia, Wyoming and Alaska do not have much renewable energy, undoubtedly for political reasons.  California has encouraged renewable energy so they have a lot of it.

    Texas is an interesting case.  They have their own grid to avoid federal regulations.  In the past they have always gone with the cheapest producer to lower costs.  Now that wind, solar and batteries are cheaper than gas they are changing their rules to protect the gas industry.  It will be interesting to see how long Texas pays more for gas power instead of installing cheaper renewable energy.  Since gas power plants take longer to build than renewable plants and they need power soon they will have to make some hard choices.

    Renewables are now cheaper virtually everywhere so political reasons are the main reason they are not built out faster.  It costs less to build a new renewable plant (including the mortgage) than to run a coal plant with no mortgage.  If utility executives want to charge less for power they build renewables.  Almost all new build power in the USA (and the world) is renewable because it is cheapest.

    I remember in Australia several years ago the government supported building more coal plants.  More recently solar was supported.  Now Australia has a lot of renewable solar from those installations and coal is struggling to compete.

41. nigelj at 06:19 AM on 29 October 2024
    Jobs in wind, solar, and energy storage are booming. Is your state keeping up?
    

    Great to see this jobs growth driven by renewables. Good for the economy. 

    I was curious how the states with high renewables penetration correlated with favourable wind speeds and solar irradiance levels. Texas, California and Florida have high renewables penetration. Curiously all three have quite low average wind speeds for the states as a whole, so I assume the wind farms must be coastal and / or offshore where winds would be highest. All three states have high average solar irradiance.

    The western states towards the middle and south generally tend to have high average wind speeds and high average solar irradiance but generally low renewables penetration. I wonder if that is due to political factors, or good coal resources, or its because there are some local conditions that just dont suit renewables. Relevant maps:

    worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/windiest-states

    www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018-usa-scale-01.jpg
    
    

42. BaerbelW at 07:04 AM on 28 October 2024
    Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volumes Video - 2020 edition
    

    Andy Lee Robinson published the 2024 version of his animation on October 25, 2024:

    https://youtu.be/NphVG576grU?si=F_xF0mfjjrd_5o6l

    Andy explains in the video description how much effort is involved to render the video:

    "I produced the animation using hand-written Perl and PHP code to create PovRay scripts, and scheduling task distribution using MySQL between 8 Linux servers working in parallel to render 1018 frames at 3840 x 2180 resolution. Each frame took an average of about 45 minutes to render, so that is 763 hours or 4.5 weeks of CPU time, shared between the servers to complete in 5 days.

    I also built a web interface to keep track of the rendering jobs, start, stop and redo frames for all the distributed servers. They would upload their results to a webserver after each frame, to make a total size of 7.6GB to then be combined with the piano track using ffmpeg into a high quality mp4 video for upload."

43. Eclectic at 10:17 AM on 26 October 2024
    CO2 lags temperature
    

    OPOF @678 :

    Agreed.  Far too late to attempt a better label than "GH Effect".

    JBomb was merely "trailing his coat" to amuse himself.

    Moderator Response:

    [PS] Eclectic - not a helpful comment.
    
    This thread is well offtopic. JBomb, you appear to be disputing empirical evidence for the inappropriately named GH effect. I suggest that any further comments be placed instead in this thread empirical evidence for global warming. While the properties of GH gases can be studied in the laboratory, the GH effect depends on a non-isothermic column. The theory makes numerous other predictions which can be experimentally observed.

44. One Planet Only Forever at 09:28 AM on 26 October 2024
    CO2 lags temperature
    

    Eclectic @677,

    In 1901 Nils Gustaf Ekholm used the term ‘greenhouse’ regarding the warming impact of gases like CO2 in the atmosphere. And it is now used globally to the point of ghg being a commonly understood acronym.

    I doubt that you really agree with JBomb’s way of thinking about the greenhouse effect. The 'greenhouse' concept works for most people ... but not for those who choose to be ‘deliberately hard of learning’. The ‘learning resistant’ way of thinking leads them to claim nonsense like “If one fills a greenhouse with higher concentrations of CO2, it doesn't get any hotter.” as if that is a relevant point to try to make.

    I offered an alternative ‘greenhouse understanding’ and a related experiment that is more aligned with the correct understanding of why the term ‘Greenhouse gas effect’ is so common and is unlikely to be replaced by some new term.

45. Eclectic at 08:27 AM on 26 October 2024
    CO2 lags temperature
    

    Quite correct, Michael Sweet @675.   The scientific inquiry into the climate/CO2 nexus goes far back, well beyond a bit more than half a century.

    My comment was intended to mean, that since about the 1950's , the investigations of CO2 properties (at the large scale of climate effect) have come so very thick and fast that it's close to impossible for a reasonable man  to avoid all the evidence.

    ~ In other words, today a reasonable man  making reasonable inquiry into climate/CO2 issues has to be disingenuous to state that he has yet to find "evidence".

    (b)  OnePlanetOF @676 , the "GreenHouse Effect" is really a very miserable analogy at the planetary scale.  And I agree with JBomb about that . . . however, JBomb's purpose was to "trail his coat".

46. One Planet Only Forever at 06:13 AM on 26 October 2024
    CO2 lags temperature
    

    JBomb @672,

    Another way of thinking about the CO2 Greenhouse effect is to consider the CO2 and other greenhouse gas in the atmosphere to be like the glass of a greenhouse. The glass lets light energy in but reduces the rate of heat loss from inside.

    Using double-glazed glass rather than single plate glass is almost certain to make the inside warmer. Build your own to test if you wish.

    Increasing the amount of atmospheric ghg will increase the planet's surface temperature in a similar way.

47. michael sweet at 04:31 AM on 26 October 2024
    CO2 lags temperature
    

    Eclectic at 673,

    We agree on most issues regarding Climate Science.  At 673 you said "There's more than half a century of scientific investigation showing that CO2 causes warming." 

    In the 1850's scientists first measured the emission lines of carbon dioxde and noted that if carbon dioxide increased in the atmosphere it would heat the Earth (170 years ago).  In about 1898 Arhennius calculated the temperature increase from a doubling of carbon dioxide and got a result not too far off the current estimates (125 years ago).  In 1965 the National Academy of Science told President Johnson that climate change would be a big problem in the future (60 years ago).

    The science of climate change has been understood by scientists for much longer than half a century.  I find that many novices think that climate science was only recently developed when in fact it is well established, long understood that carbon dioxide will heat the Earth. 

    I think we should say "There's more than 170 years of scientific investigation showing that CO2 causes warming".  Jbomb need only look at the absorbtion lines of carbon dioxide to see convincing experimental evidence that the Earth will warm with more carbon dioxide in the air.

48. MA Rodger at 17:37 PM on 25 October 2024
    CO2 lags temperature
    

    JBomb @672,

    I would say that the planetary greenhouse effect is not well described. And as you say, an actual greenhouse will radiate the same (and thus cool the same) regardless of its CO2 levels. The level of radiation will depend on temperature.

    One difference between an actual greenhouse and our planet's atmosphere is that greenhouses are far-more leaky than our atmosphere which is very stable with little upward and downward air movement. Thus, outside a hurricane a packet of air will take a week or so to travel the 10 miles up to the top of the troposphere at the tropics, and the same to come back down again, roughly. This is because, as the air rises it cools and expands, this all in balance with the atmosphere as a whole. And if this were not the case, hurricane-strength winds would be the result at ground level.

    That said, consider the concentration of CO2 per volume in the atmosphere. At higher altitudes, the pressure is less and the molecules including the CO2 are more spaced out. So at some point, the radiation absorbed and emitted by CO2 will begin to emit upward and out into space, cooling the planet.

    The greenhouse effect works because an increase in the CO2 concentration will make that radiation escaping into space happen higher up in the atmosphere. And that will be a cooler part of the atmosphere. Cooler gas radiates less. So with increased CO2 the cooling of the planet will be less. And to reach equilibrium, the planet has to warm.

    That is how the greenhouse effect works. The various aspects of its working can be shown by experiment. But other than a full-scale experiment, pumping CO2 into a planet's Earth-like atmosphere, the full mechanism in action would be difficult to demonstrate by experiment.

49. Eclectic at 07:56 AM on 25 October 2024
    CO2 lags temperature
    

    JBomb @672  :

    There's more than half a century of scientific investigation showing that CO2 causes warming.  And yet you yourself have been unable to find anything of that?

    Permit me to be skeptical about your "agnosticism".

    Perhaps you have wandered onto an inappropriate website ~ you would be happier trying WattsUpWithThat  website (where over half the participants are "agnostic" about the mass of evidence that the globe is warming at all).

50. JBomb at 06:22 AM on 25 October 2024
    CO2 lags temperature
    

    As someone agnostic to climate change, I'd like to point out that the beer can analogy doesn't propose that CO2 causes warming and, indeed, supports the notion that CO2 levels follow temperature changes caused by other means.

     

    I am trying to find reproducible studies that prove CO2 contributes to increased warming at all, but I can only find anecdotal evidence, which is not evidence at all. It merely demonstrates CO2 follows warming, which we all agree on.

    If one fills a greenhouse with higher concentrations of CO2, it doesn't get any hotter.  This has been tried many times.

    Is someone able to provide any experiments to prove CO2 contribution to warming?

     

    Many thanks.

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