Climate Science Glossary

Term Lookup

Enter a term in the search box to find its definition.

Settings

Use the controls in the far right panel to increase or decrease the number of terms automatically displayed (or to completely turn that feature off).

Term Lookup

Settings

All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Home Arguments Software Resources Comments The Consensus Project Translations About Support

Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Mastodon MeWe

Twitter YouTube RSS Posts RSS Comments Email Subscribe


Climate's changed before
It's the sun
It's not bad
There is no consensus
It's cooling
Models are unreliable
Temp record is unreliable
Animals and plants can adapt
It hasn't warmed since 1998
Antarctica is gaining ice
View All Arguments...



Username
Password
New? Register here
Forgot your password?

Latest Posts

Archives

Recent Comments

Prev  2067  2068  2069  2070  2071  2072  2073  2074  2075  2076  2077  2078  2079  2080  2081  2082  Next

Comments 103701 to 103750:

  1. Skeptical Science Firefox Add-on: Send and receive climate info while you browse
    You really need to add a link to this from your Home page like yopu have done for the iPhone App. I have just reinstalled it after updating my PC and it took me a while to remember it was for Firefox and find it.
  2. It's not us
    > fossil carbon ... we know this ... > the two types of carbon have > different chemical properties. Erm, well, that's not how; isotopes can behave slightly differently in chemical reactions, but http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/
  3. Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
    Re: Ed Davies (4) The Review would be the independent Muir Russell Commission. Link here. The Yooper
  4. Climategate a year later
    Ken, it indeed appears GRL deliberately ignored Mann. In fact, Mackwell implicitely admitted to Mann that they only would allow a reply by the criticised authors if the criticism was submitted as a comment. A "original paper" would just be reviewed by reviewers GRL selected, which apparently did not standard include those that were criticised. Now, the reviewers for M&M need not be biased, they simply may have been incompetent. Indeed, this appears to be the case here: follow-up comments by Huybers and Von Storch&Zorita showed that M&M's GRL paper was fundamentally flawed. Why did the three (not four) reviewers not see what Huybers and Von Storch&Zorita did see?! Simple: they were not competent enough. It is a major embarrassment for a journal to get a comment pointing out that a paper is wrong. Getting TWO is even more embarrassing. Finally, I like to point out again that I will soon submit a comment that will require the authors or the journal to retract a published paper, due to even the most basic aspects already being fatallay flawed. It was most assuredly peer reviewed, and yet those peer reviewers did not see the flaws. Worse even, well over a hundred papers have been published with the same type of mistakes (although this particular paper took it to new levels of incompetence). All peer reviewed. Mistakes are made. But if a paper criticises someone else's methods, it is not only common practice, but even morally appropriate to get the original authors to review the paper (not as sole reviewer, though!). The fact the GRL Editors did not do so is poor scholarship. A "leak" in proper scholarship. I hope the journal I will use to submit a general criticism will use reviewers from papers I criticise. If not, I merely have further confirmation as to why they published so many flawed papers: they are incompetent Editors.
  5. It's the ocean
    KR, first you may have to explain why you estimate the diagram by Trenberth to be more reliable than that of NOAA. Besides, Trenberth states that he got the numbers for the IR radiation from the ground by calculations applying Bolzmann's law. I am pretty sure that if he tried living in quarters where the floor emits 396 W of IR peer square meter he will rather fast learn that this approach might be inadequate. Second, about my argument on evaporation. Unfortunately you completely failed to show any evidence that at least one part of my argument is wrong. Therefore I will apply Mr. Hitchens advice to your comment, though I am unaware that he is considered some sort of authority on science theory.
  6. Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
    "The Review took a similar approach, ..." Which review is being discussed here? There have been quite a few reviews of different aspects of the "climategate" non-sense so it's worth being clear. Albatross: I don't suppose it's that important but note that this article is talking about CRUTEM (which is the land-only dataset compiled by the Climatic Research Unit) and is only a component of the HadCRUT which also includes the sea-surface temperatures from the Hadley Centre.
    Moderator Response: Sorry, I meant to say the Muir Russell review. The full context is given in the first post in the series. - James
  7. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    The Skeptical Chymist #122 You are a brave man to call me a dunce on the meaning of Dr Trenberth's papers. You answer is here: (Riccardo's quote from the paper) "" "The TOA energy imbalance can probably be most accurately determined from climate models and is estimated to be 0.85 ± 0.15 W m−2 by Hansen et al. (2005) and is supported by estimated recent changes in ocean heat content (Willis et al. 2004; Hansen et al. 2005). A comprehensive error analysis of the CERES mean budget (Wielicki et al. 2006) is used in Fasullo and Trenberth (2008a) to guide adjustments of the CERES TOA fluxes so as to match the estimated global imbalance." So they choose to take the value from Hansen et al. 2005 and adjust the CERES TOA fluxes to match this value."" The actual CERES imbalance is 6.4W/sq.m and this is 'corrected' back to 0.9W/sq.m - a 5.5W/sq.m correction. And Hansen's 2005 model is not supported by recent OHC measurements - see here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-cherry-pickers-cooling-oceans.html and 'Robust warming of the global upper oceans"
  8. Climategate a year later
    Ian F, Albatros, Marco, What counts here is not the source of the story but whether or not it is true. Smearing NP and Corcoran does not address the truth of the quotation. Marco seems to carry the story further and refers to Mann not getting a right of reply by GRL as a 'leak in the proper scientific process'. An omission is a leak? - strange way to describe that. Or are you saying Marco that the Editor of GRL was deliberately ignoring Mann and publishing hopelessly flawed papers by design or neglect in order to damage Mann's reputation?? What of the report that 4 scientists had peer reviewed the subject paper which raised Mann's ire?? Is this false? Was there no peer review of 1,2,3 or 4 scientists involved? Are you asking us to believe that not only the Editor of GRL was biased or incompetent but 4 other scientific reviewers were similarly prone to passing hopelessly flawed papers for publication in a respected journal?? Pull the other one Marco - it has bells on it.
  9. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    #27: "the border line between being experimental and observational is not a black and white one but a gray scale." Thus own words render it utter nonsense to declare 'it is a fact that climate science is ... '. It is your opinion as to where 'experimental' ends and 'observational' begins. Here is another opinion. This misconception arises because people assume that climate science is all about predicting future climate change, and because such predictions are for decades/centuries into the future, and we only have one planet to work with, we can’t check to see if these predictions are correct until it’s too late to be useful. In fact, predictions of future climate are really only a by-product of climate science. The science itself concentrates on improving our understanding of the processes that shape climate, by analyzing observations of past and present climate, and testing how well we understand them. So there is physical theory, data gathering and verification of model by comparison to the past. Of all the sound byte issues raised by skeptics, this is more of a bit than a byte. It is also veering wildly off-topic.
  10. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    @batsvensson, No, I am not calling you a creationist, just pointing out that nearly all denialists sooner or later come around to using similar arguments. To be anti-science, there are only a certain amount of arguments you can use, so this is no surprise. I cannot see why picking out climate science as "observational" implies anything negative. Atmospheric physics, on which a lot a climate science is based, is one of the earliest branches of physics (going back to Franklin, Fourier, Tyndall, Beaufort, Arrhenius, Angstrom and on to Gilbert Plass in the 1950s). Incidentally, in defining "astrophysics" as "observational", you seem to have forgotten that the physics of planetary motions is the oldest branch of physics, the daddy of them all. How many "just so" stories did Newton and Galileo make up?
  11. Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
    Besides the numerous replications of the temperature record, see also these two links showing that CRU’s data handling has not inflated the warming trend: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/ http://www.gilestro.tk/2009/lots-of-smoke-hardly-any-gun-do-climatologists-falsify-data/
  12. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    This is part of a broader problem with climate change reporting: the media holds scientists to far higher standards than it does contrarians. I think that really needed to be said.
  13. Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
    Some of the observational data that CRU held did not have restriction about re-distribution, but some others had. Let me call them "open source" and "closed source", though this is not about computer program codes, because the situation is analogous. CRU refused to give the closed source data because of the conditions given by the organizations which provided the source data. (CRU was also reluctant to give the open source data as responses to freedom of information requests, because they think that providing source data is not their job, but of data centers such as U.S. National Climatic Data Center.) As for global scale syntheses aimed at global mean or hemispheric mean temperatures, we now know that open source data are enough for us to reproduce essentially the same results which CRU achieved by a mixture of open and closed sources. That is a good news, but it does not mean that scientists should always avoid closed source data. We (scientists etc. of the world) still need data from high density observation networks in order to study regional climate changes. And they are often closed sources. Very regrettably, many governments think about potential economic returns by intellectual property rights more seriously than about freedom of information or transparency in environmental assessments. (People gathered at Surface Temperatures project discussed the way how to make use of closed source data.) The case of urban effects in China really needed closed source data, and obscureness around it mainly comes from the policy of the Chinese government which discloses information about only those stations selected for international exchange.
  14. Satellites show no warming in the troposphere
    So rate of tropospheric warming is less than expectation. How was the expectation derived? Did it include, for example, heat transfer to oceans? Did it include increased rates of evaporation (due to surface warmth) and consequently of condensation/precipitation ("Water cycle"). Water molecules absorb sensible energy at the surface when they evaporate, and re-release that energy at whatever tropospheric height when they re-condense. That is, intensification of the water cycle results in energy "bypassing" tropospheric greenhouse gases as it departs earth. (Also, surface layers of ocean are now rather less opaque than previously thought (lower densities of phytoplankton), then insolation is penetrating to greater depths. This would tend to decrease surface temperatures because energy is not being absorbed at surface.)
  15. Climategate a year later
    Ken Lambert: Let me point out another thing about M&M's comment to Mann (because that was what it was: a criticism of Mann's prior work): did Mann get the possibility to reply? Yes? No? that would be a no, which is really odd. We thus have indeed a leak: a leak in the proper scientific process of allowing the author of a criticised paper to reply to that criticism. Thus, Mann expressed concern with that rather odd path. Mackwell then 'offered' Mann the option of sending a comment, which would be followed by a reply by M&M. Mann declined, after a flurry of hopelessly flawed papers in GRL indicated to him, and various others, that the Editors of GRL were clearly not doing their job. With new leadership, the "leak" of publishing hopelessly flawed papers and criticisms without letting the criticised author respond, was plugged- FYI: I recently got a comment published that I found was not reviewed at all by any of the authors I criticised. It made me upset and angry as a scientist that this had happened, and I have noted my dismay to the Editor of that journal. He did not respond.
  16. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    batsvensson #32: observational data can essentially be experimental if predictions were made before going out to observe. Think the prediction that palaeontologists would find something like Tiktaliik in Greenland - and they did. This was an experiment. You're arguing like a creationist, which does not mean you are. The accusation seemed simple enough.
  17. Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
    James, you make some excellent points, inconvenient points that I am sure will be lost and/or dismissed by the skeptics. One of the many things that I find ironic about the CRU faux scandal, is that on the one hand the "skeptics" are claiming that Jones et al fudged the data, but on the other Lindzen, Michaels and others have recently cited the HadCRUT data. In fact, Michaels showed the HadCRUT data in his misleading testimony to congress earlier this week. And we know why that is; HadCRUT is very likely underestimating the rate of warming: "The ECMWF analysis shows that in data-sparse regions such as Russia, Africa and Canada, warming over land is more extreme than in regions sampled by HadCRUT. If we take this into account, the last decade shows a global-mean trend of 0.1 °C to 0.2 °C per decade. We therefore infer with high confidence that the HadCRUT record is at the lower end of likely warming." The 'skeptics' and those in denial about AGW are now even turning on their beloved UAH MSU data now that it is allegedly being "stubborn". The incoherence and inconsistency of the "skeptics'" actions and arguments continue to amaze.
  18. actually thoughtful at 12:28 PM on 21 November 2010
    The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    Chris Shaker - Let's try a different approach. Climategate is ancient history, and has been pointed out, didn't change the science one fig. So, as I ask many skeptics - what will it take to convince you? How warm? How much CO2? How acidic the oceans? How much sea level rise? How many droughts and floods? How many melted glaciers? How much ice loss in Greenland and the Arctic? Just think about where you will believe/understand. Because whatever your level, under BAU, we will get there.
  19. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    fydijkstra wrote : "Concrete examples that the Climategate e-mailers were highly in doubt can only be given from interpretations of the e-mails. Concrete examples that they wanted to hide uncertainty and prevent that other views are published. Again, we are talking about the interpretations of the e-mails..." If I may be allowed to interpret your post, I don't believe you understand the difference between a 'concrete example' and an 'interpretation of an email'. What you can interpret (or, at least, read what other people have interpreted) from a limited number of emails taken out of context, means nothing unless you can point to real-world actions that followed on from those emails. Can you ?
  20. actually thoughtful at 11:06 AM on 21 November 2010
    Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    Gestur, If you share some links about where you are looking I will waive my eyeballs over the graphs too. Coal accounting for 80% of electricity emissions makes sense - I think source 2 and 3 are zero carbon (ie nuclear and hydro-electric). Then you get to gas, which of course does have emissions. As to 2050 - let's get this puppy started. I doubt that whatever policy we have now will have any bearing on 2050. Course corrections will be required. Regarding behavior changes. We only had about 6 months in 2008 to pull your data. I am giving you anecdotal evidence, both from people I knew looking for/buying cars, and from my solar thermal business, which went through the roof at that moment, and has since almost collapsed. Incredibly fuel priced sensitive (in my little corner of the universe). And, as SoundOff points out - whatever we are doing now doesn't really matter. As soon as we price in carbon, significant breakthroughs will occur (not the least of which will be behavior changes). We really, really, really need to take the baby step of putting a tax on carbon.
  21. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    BP's claim that induction is not a valid part of the scientific method is absurd. Induction is a cornerstone of the scientific method, without which we would be unable to perform scientific research. No wonder that BP has such trouble with making a coherent scientific argument if he lacks this basic understanding (his maths is clearly not too shabby, although he seems to lack sufficient grounding in statistics to be coherent there too). It looks like BP is not alone in criticising the validity of induction, although as Fisher (1955, p 74-75) shows, this anti-induction interpretation, in the context of the kinds of probablistic reasoning used in climate science and elsewhere, is clearly totally incorrect. It may make sense in some engineering fields, but as I have no expertise in that area, I can not comment.
  22. actually thoughtful at 10:57 AM on 21 November 2010
    Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    Adelady - Are you OK? Can you breathe? As an American, our current political majority leaves me to believe you should be dead right now. We CANNOT survive if fuels are priced anywhere near their actual cost (ie over $4/US gallon).
  23. The Skeptical Chymist at 10:56 AM on 21 November 2010
    The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    David Keith from the University of Calgary recently described his attempt to get Dyson to define a specific criticism against climate science on Dot Earth recently. "I had an interesting experience talking to Dyson and Will Happer at a meeting last year...... Dyson’s comments on climate were disappointingly shallow. I said, “Are you concerned about the exaggeration of climate impacts or do you have serious concerns about the science?” “Both”, he replied. But when I pressed him on the science the only thing he said was that CO2 radiative forcing was logarithmic and complained that nobody knows this or talks about it. It was disappointing to hear such a shallow commentary from such a great man. Everyone who needs to knows that CO2 forcing is (roughly) logarithmic. This science is more than half a century old; it is in any textbook; the I.P.C.C. even as an “official” log forcing function that is widely used in simple policy analysis models. This science of building good high-resolution radiative transfer codes was nailed by Gilbert Plass and others at the air force geophysics lab in the 1950’s. If one is going to attack the climate science this is a very odd place to start." Sorry about the long quote but I think it is quite instructive. Dyson, great physicist that he may be, simply doesn't know much about the climate change science.
  24. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    KL #8 "The fact that three quick fire threads have been run on Climatgate on this excellent blog in the last few days is an indication that Climategate (fairly or not) has does serious damage to the cause of AGW activism." Nope. I seem to recall at the time (one year ago), that so-called sceptics were crowing about what an enormous deal this was, being evidence of fraud etc. These days, we see that you're making the same tired claims, but are tacitly admitting that your claims are without substance. Worth examining as a case study of the psychology of delusion from the so-called climate sceptic if you ask me.
  25. Dikran Marsupial at 10:52 AM on 21 November 2010
    How significance tests are misused in climate science
    The issue about stratospheric intrusions looks like a red herring to me. According to the paper BP linked, they are small scale events 300m-1km, which suggests they have very little effect on the measurement of global radiative forcing.
  26. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    Berényi - So, the cycle of multiple observations, generalizations, identification of common elements, hypothesis, testing - that's not science by induction???? Because that is how the theory of evolution came about, and it is inductive reasoning. You are using a very different dictionary than most, if that is the case. Darwin, incidentally, did not propose a mechanism for inheritance, acknowledging that while offspring carried traits of their parents, he did not know the details. Your reference to Wallace is interesting, but I don't think relevant - both Darwin and Wallace held much the same ideas. And your use of the terms "spiritualist" and "Augustinian monk" appear to be ad hominem references - I sincerely hope I am incorrect in appraisal.
  27. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    adrian smits at 06:47 AM on 21 November, 2010 even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Don't you get it? Even if the (peer reviewed papers) were crap which most are by the way.That doesn't mean you change rules of the game so you can keep an extra man or 2 or three or more on the field to maintain your unfair advantage.It's like asking the other team to play a man down the whole game! Ummm... this is called "venting" in a private email message. Jones can't change the peer-review procedure for independent journals, no matter how frustrated he becomes. It would be like me complaining to a friend how I'd like to keep idiotic comments from being posted to skepticalscience.com. No matter how much I'd like to change the moderation rules here, there's nothing I can do but vent, because I don't have any more say over the management of this web-site than Phil Jones has over the management of Climate Research. That being said, it's rather interesting to see how much more upset you are about Phil Jones' venting in a private email message than you are with the publication of incompetent garbage filled with schoolboy errors in what should be respectable peer-reviewed journals. Or does incompetence not matter when it confirms your own political ideology?
  28. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    batsvensson: "It is at it best in state of being unknown until confirmed by an observation and as far as I know someone has yet to came back from say year 2100 and reported X meter elevated sea levels with predicted catastrophic events in case we do nothing." You misunderstand science. You don't have to prove a theory by repeating an experiment that has already verified the theory. It was only necessary for one experiment to be done to confirm Einstein's theory, it didn't have to be repeated. Experiments are only repeated for demonstration/educational purposes, not to confirm the theory is true every time. As far as climate science is concerned we already have evidence of what happens when GHGs increase or decrease. The experiment to confirm it has been done in Earths past.
  29. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    While I am grateful for the information you regularly provide, I do wish you would cease concentrating on the anthropomorphic aspects of climate change; they are a distraction. What is relevant is the fact that the planet is warming at an alarming rate. While I very much doubt it, the fact that human carbon emissions match the rise in temperature could be down to coincidence. It really doesn’t matter now. It will matter considerably when the time comes to pay the cost of the effects of climate change. Those nations that can be identified as culpable will pay a heavy price, and the more they procrastinate, the higher will be the price, but not yet. We know the science of the greenhouse effect and know that reducing carbon emissions is our best hope of avoiding a catastrophe. Let the sceptics believe that the current trend is not caused by human activity if it will make them happy. We need the scientific community to spell out where the current trend could lead us. We must identify the level of danger that is all too imminent. In a few short years we will have increased the population by almost 50%. We have food riots now, what then? Put global warming into the mix and some learned scientists believe that we will only be able to feed about one third of them. That is a truly awful statistic if it should be a reflection on the reality we face. Take Catastrophe Theory, plot time on the ‘x’ axis, food production on the ‘y’ axis and rate of change on the ‘z’ axis and the potential for harm is both obvious and the speed at which it will happen is also all to obvious. It would be a very strange sceptic who, while refusing to believe in the cause being human in origin, failed to agree with the overwhelming body of evidence that says reducing carbon emissions will help fight it. It would be like the captain of cruise liner doing a cruise in Antarctic waters who refused to alter course round an iceberg dead ahead because the iceberg was not human in origin. To continue to argue about the origins of climate change will only hinder action that is becoming more urgent by the day. Mel Tisdale
    Moderator Response: The anthropogenic causes of climate change are not a distraction. If we weren’t causing climate change (which we are), then eliminating CO2 emissions would not stop it (which it will). - James
  30. Dikran Marsupial at 09:56 AM on 21 November 2010
    How significance tests are misused in climate science
    First as to the thirty year period of cooling, I note that you ignored the part about all other focings remaining approximately constant, which does not hold for the 1943-1976 period. Indeed the sulphate aerosol issue made some scientists at the time discuss the possibility of an ice age. Second, the precice definition of the radiataive forcing is not needed for observational falsification of the theory as a whole. Popper's idea of falsifiablity assumes that both parties attempt to find a test of the theory in good faith. If we observed sufficiently extended period of cooling with CO2 rising and all other forcings constant, that would falsify AGW theory, regardless of how you measured radiative forcing. Lastly, regarding evolution, lets take Darwinian evolution as a particular case; it is entirely inductive, a general principle based on observation of particular examples. But most scientists would agree it is science. If you think it has been falsified (please do give links - genuinely interested), then it is by definition falsifiable, and hence a scientific theory according to Popper.
  31. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    batsvensson: "Not sure about that really. Science is use a bat in the debate." That is debate not science. You prove my point. It is valid to take science and debate the theory or result, it is done by everyone, but that debate isn't science.
  32. Climategate a year later
    Ian @53, I have recently warned KL about the perils of quoting NP, and yet he still insists on using quotes from a newspaper run by ideologues to try and back up his arguments. That is a very weak argument to try and make-- resorting to using Corcoran as a source smacks of desperation.
  33. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    William O'Keefe, CEO of GMI, was an executive for 25 years at the American Petroleum Institute. If people want to lean more about GMI, see Crescendo to Climategate Cacophony, March 2010, which includes funding flows, various key people at GMI & elsewhere, activities, etc. It overlaps a little with MoD, but is focused elsewhere. Fortunately, Naomi&Erik had already covered a lot of the earlier material, so I didn't need to repeat that.
  34. Climategate a year later
    Ken Lambert said:
    I have no reason to not accept the truth of the below excerpt from NP
    KL surely has not read very many articles in the NP or he would not be making that statement. NP is a well known right wing, AGW denying and anti-science rag.
  35. Berényi Péter at 09:33 AM on 21 November 2010
    How significance tests are misused in climate science
    #70 Dikran Marsupial at 22:10 PM on 18 November, 2010 Is the theory of evolution scientific? I am not aware of a single well defined scientific theory of evolution. If you mean that vastly American idiosyncrasy, the so called Evilution vs. Cretinism controversy, I refuse to play that game. There are specific theories of various aspects of the overall evolution process that can be called scientific, none of them based on induction. If you mean the simple observation the geological record is full of fossil remnants of extinct species, that's not a theory, just a bunch of facts begging for a theoretical explanation. Some attempts of such an explanation may be inherently scientific in nature, others are not so much. Early theories like Lamarckism, Spencerism or Darwinism are already falsified, at least to the extent they were specific enough in their predictions and proposed mechanism behind phenomena observed to lend to a well defined logical procedure as falsification. There's also a cohort of recent theories going under the umbrella term Neo-Darwinism, all based on a unification of ideas from Alfred Russel Wallace (a spiritualist) and Gregor Johann Mendel (an Augustinian monk). It is not a unified theory either, just a meta-theory, which encouraged the formation of various scientific theories, some of them still standing. There is nothing specifically inductive in the principles underlying those theories. They are generally based on the postulated existence of variable replicators in an environment with finite resources. As the replicators are capable to increase their number exponentially, some (natural) selection inevitably occurs. However, the outcome heavily depends on the type of replicators, spontaneous development of even simple autocatalytic sets is empirically unsupported in real chemistry. In this sense generation of complexity by evolution is still not well understood. There is strong indication that below a certain (quite high) level of algorithmic complexity entities are not able to function as Darwinian replicators. There should be a specific type of variability in the replication process in order to selection be able to work in a creative way, that is, it's not true that just any kind of variability would suffice. This is why abiogenesis is still outside the realm of science with no "standard model" of the origin of life in sight. As we have never seen life outside Earth, there is no empirical basis for assessing the probability of spontaneous occurrence of life either. All we know is the conditional probability of life having been appeared, provided we consider this problem, and that conditional probability is exactly 1 (see anthropic principle). So I do not quite know where you are trying to get by bringing up evolution in the present context, but it is obviously more problematic than you would imagine.
    *
    a thirty year period of cooling, with increasing CO2 and all other forcings remaining approximately constant would kill AGW theory stone dead That's not true. Between 1943 and 1976 (in 33 years) global land-ocean temperature index was dropping (by 0.12°C) while atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased from about 300 ppmv to 332 ppmv. If CO2 radiative forcing is supposed to be a logarithmic function of its concentration, this is 14.6% of the forcing for CO2 doubling. If we go with the IPCC mean estimate of 3°C for doubling, surface temperature should have increased by 0.44°C during the same period. Therefore the missing heat is 0.56°C in 33 years which indicates a cooling trend at a 1.7°C/century rate without CO2 contribution. And that with the heavily adjusted GISTEMP figures (raw temperature data as measured by thermometers show a more severe cooling in this period, in excess of 0.3°C). Effect of CH4 and other trace gases with absorption lines in thermal IR are not taken into account either. Therefore AGW theory would have been killed stone dead a long time ago, if there were no "all other forcings remaining approximately constant" clause. In the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis: Glossary the following definition is seen:
    Radiative forcing Radiative forcing is the change in the net, downward minus upward, irradiance (expressed in W m–2) at the tropopause due to a change in an external driver of climate change, such as, for example, a change in the concentration of carbon dioxide or the output of the Sun. Radiative forcing is computed with all tropospheric properties held fixed at their unperturbed values, and after allowing for stratospheric temperatures, if perturbed, to readjust to radiative-dynamical equilibrium. Radiative forcing is called instantaneous if no change in stratospheric temperature is accounted for. For the purposes of this report, radiative forcing is further defined as the change relative to the year 1750 and, unless otherwise noted, refers to a global and annual average value. Radiative forcing is not to be confused with cloud radiative forcing, a similar terminology for describing an unrelated measure of the impact of clouds on the irradiance at the top of the atmosphere.
    The remarkable part of it is that radiative forcing is defined at the tropopause, at an ill-defined surface (because of occasional tropopause folding events) high up in the atmosphere but well below any satellite orbit, a surface where practically no measurements of IR irradiance are done (either up or down). The only direct way to determine if CO2 induced warming effect (of a magnitude similar to the one estimated by the IPCC) is falsified by observed surface cooling between 1943 and 1976 or not is to analyze the difference of two unmeasured quantities at an unknown surface. Otherwise, as this quantity is obviously unknown, one can assume there was a negative forcing there, canceling the effect of increasing CO2 concentrations. And this is exactly what people do (by setting supposed aerosol effects to a suitable value, neither supported nor contradicted by measurements). That's what I mean by the theory being melleable enough to resist falsification attempts. Not because it is true, but because it is flexible (not good for a theory that is supposed to be scientific).
  36. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    James, Thanks for this. I'm afraid though it is probably a futile effort. Self-proclaimed 'skeptics' have had a year now to educate themselves on the facts, and yet we are still hearing people saying ridiculous things like this: "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Don't you get it?" It seems that they are OK with skeptics simultaneously reviewing each others' papers at the journal of Climate Research. Well, credible and ethical scientists rightly objected to that. There were other issues too at Climate Research which rightly concerned scientists with integrity. Also, many papers by "skeptics" continue to be published (often in second rate journals like E&E). How is it the fault of credible and ethical scientists that the research by "skeptics" is often sub-par and soundly refuted after being published. For example, McKitrick and Michaels (2004) was junk, still is and should not have included in the IPCC. Yet, in the end it was. So much for all the claims of gate keeping-- in fact the opposite seems to be true, junk science by "skeptics" being included in the IPCC the spirit of "balance" and fairness, not based on merit. Well, that is just wrong, and fails to advance the science and improve our understanding of the climate system. While the "skeptics" seem to be OK with that, people with integrity and interests of the advancement of science are not. There are other serious issues with the Wegman report James, see DeepClimate's most recent posts. I for one am looking forward to everyone focussing on the science again soon, especially the public release of the first Cryosat-2 data....
  37. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    Well assume X and Y is some (one or several) climate related factor - I grant you the favor to pick whatever factor you like. Is your answer "a" or "b"?
  38. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    how do u falsify the statement "if condition X, Y then the sea level will raise with Z meter"? Do you falsify it with a) an experiment, or b) an observation
    "if X is changed by Y amount, then our prediction is Z" can be applied to a wide range of things that you would accept as an experiment ... except for the special case of planet earth, apparently. Even as you state it, you may falsify it with an experiment, i.e. "make conditions X and Y true, and observe the results". Which is exactly what we're doing. Now, the experiment we're doing is on a very complex system, perhaps that's confusing you ...
  39. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    dhogaza, how do u falsify the statement "if condition X, Y then the sea level will raise with Z meter"? Do you falsify it with a) an experiment, or b) an observation ?
  40. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    cjshaker wrote : "Many Astrophysicists also study climate, especially involving other planets. Dyson claims to have worked in the field. http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151" From the interview you have linked to, from the man himself : Obviously he wanted to write a piece about global warming and I was just the instrument for that, and I am not so much interested in global warming. He portrayed me as sort of obsessed with the subject, which I am definitely not. To me it is a very small part of my life. I don’t claim to be an expert. I never did. I simply find that a lot of these claims that experts are making are absurd. Not that I know better, but I know a few things. My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me. I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. I got out of the field then. I didn’t like the way it was going. It left me with a bad taste. What’s wrong with the models. I mean, I haven’t examined them in detail, (but) I know roughly what’s in them. And, secondly, I am not an expert, and that’s not going to change. I am not going to make myself an expert. What I do think I have is a better judgment, maybe because I have lived a bit longer, and maybe because I’ve done other things. Yes, it is definitely a tactical mistake to use somebody like me for th[e] job [of skepticism], because I am so easily shot down. I have a lot of friends who think the same way I do. But I am sorry to say that most of them are old, and most of them are not experts. My views are very widely shared. So, an old man who had a great career and is obviously highly intelligent, has no connections or scientific knowledge with regard to Climatology but believes that he can give a valid opinion based on his knowledge in his previous scientific career. Wouldn't it be best to pay more attention to those who actually work in this field ?
  41. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    cjshaker, Dyson's um... opinions... have been dissected by Michael Tobis. You might also read a post at RealClimate. And this one at globalwarmingisreal, which highlights Dyson's career-long tendency to proudly disagree with the majority opinion regardless of the topic. Note especially the quote of Dyson saying his comments on global warming solutions are not as a scientist but as a "story teller." You have reached too far (really, really--your arm must have broken off) in relying on Dyson having claimed to work in the field of astrophysics, and some astrophysicists also study climate, therefore probably (maybe?) Dyson has studied climate. In the interview you linked, Dyson is quoted "I don’t claim to be an expert. I never did. I simply find that a lot of these claims that experts are making are absurd. Not that I know better, but I know a few things. My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much...."
  42. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    "I'll note that there are well known Astrophysicists who also doubt the AGW premise, including Freeman Dyson" He's a good scientist, but doesn't work on climatology, here, or on other planets. His comments show that even smart scientists can be quite ignorant of other areas of science which they clearly haven't studied. His certainty might be due to the kind of arrogance certain kinds of physicists are famous for, due to political ideology, or some combination of both. However, when people make statements that are clearly at odds with the basics of some other field of science, chances are extremely high that they are simply wrong. No matter how bright they are. If you're going to appeal to authority, please make sure that the person whose authority you appeal to actual *is authoritative* in the field he or she is pontificating on. I don't expect Dyson to understand climatology, nor biology/genetic engineering (he's made similarly uninformed comments about the ease of genetically engineering trees to suck up excess CO2). Likewise, I don't expect Lindzen to understand human physiology no matter how often he claims that cigarette smoking is largely harmless ...
  43. We're heading into an ice age
    I see very few good references on the glacial cycle, and its effect on our climate. I see obviously false references at places like Factoidz, claiming that there have only been four glacial cycles in the history of the world. I started reading about what the ice cores have taught us about the glacial cycle. Temperature proxy records derived from deuterium measurements. At least 800,000 years of ice core records detailing the 100,000 year glacial cycle, composed of 90,000 years of cold and ice and only 10,000 years of warmth, on average. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070705-antarctica-ice.html http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/289/5486/1897 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/289/5486/1897 If you're going to tell me that man's CO2 has become the dominant factor in the climate, you need to be able to describe where we would be in the glacial cycle without it. IE - what is the delta caused by CO2? As far as I can determine, over the past 14,000 years of the warming phase, most of that warming has been from the natural forces of the glacial cycle. How does this warm phase look different from the previous seven warm phases? Is there a graph comparing the shape of them? Taking the derivative of the temperature waveform to get the rate of change of the temperature waveform would be one way to compare the warm phases from the glacial cycle? As a failed electrical engineer (computer scientist), I see these graphs of the temperature records of the glacial cycle, and start wondering how they could be analyzed to predict where they would go into the future, with and without man's CO2. I did find several articles about research using spectral analysis of the glacial cycle Spectral Analysis of Climate Data, by P. Yiou, E. Baert, and M.F. Loutre http://www.nosams.whoi.edu/PDFs/papers/surveysingeo_time_series.pdf Evidence for decoupling of atmospheric CO2 and global climate during the Phanerozoic eon JaÂn Veizer*, Yves Godderis2 & Louis M. FrancËois http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/idclark/courses/Veizer%20Nature%202001.pdf "The Predictability of Glaciation Cycles" http://www.igsoc.org/annals/5/igs_annals_vol05_year1984_pg213-214.pdf Chris Shaker
  44. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    "However my purpose was not to catalog all and every science filed, as observational or experimental but to point at the fact there is exists a division and that climate science is observational. Because if this there are certain assertion that can not be hold as true in the same manner as in an experimental fields." The expected outcome of the experiment we are running was stated over a century ago. "If you add enough CO2 to the atmosphere to double its concentration, the earth will warm about 3C". There's been a lot of refinement of theory but that ballpark figure still holds. We're on a path towards doubling CO2, and as I said above, as the experiment progresses, that ballpark 3C figure still looks pretty good.
  45. Dikran Marsupial at 07:57 AM on 21 November 2010
    The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    cjshaker@130 "working" in climate science does not imply expertise; having publications does. If Hansen said he had worked in quantum physics, but had no publications - would you take his opinion on quantum physics over that of Dyson then? I suspect not. Dyson is entitled to his opinion, but he has only rather limited authority on this issue. Hansen's comments to the press are entirely irrelevant to the point under discussion, and I am not going to engage in personal attack on scientists, when it is the science we ought to be discussing.
  46. Philippe Chantreau at 07:57 AM on 21 November 2010
    The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    So James Hansen is vocal, expresses himself and tries to end the current lack of action. This is of course based on his rather extensive knowledge of the problem. How exactly is that a bad thing? You think he should not be allowed to do such things? Any comments on governement attempting to suppress research findings or to make Hansen shut up? How is it that we keep changing the subject? Seems we have veered far off the original topic.
  47. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    "There preferred method is of course experimental if available, if not the observational method will do. In the case of climate science we do not have a parallel universe, not even an duplicated Earth, we can compare with therefore out of necessary reason climate science is an observational science. To me this is pretty obvious." Well, batsvennson, we *are* running an experiment on the earth's climate, and like with any experiment, scientists make predictions as to what the experiment will show, and make observations as the experiment progresses. Theory, experimentation, and observation. The only difference here compared to classic lab experimentation is that scientists aren't controlling the experiment. An experiment it is, however. And, not unexpectedly, observations are closely matching theory (within error bounds) as the experiment progresses.
  48. The Fake Scandal of Climategate
    "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Don't you get it? Even if the (peer reviewed papers) were crap which most are by the way.That doesn't mean you change rules of the game so you can keep an extra man or 2 or three or more on the field to maintain your unfair advantage.It's like asking the other team to play a man down the whole game!" Darn those scientists who make it impossible for people to publish peer-reviewed papers proving that the sun is iron, the earth 6,000 years old, and that it's impossible for fire to weaken steel to the point where skyscrapers fall to earth! Scientists do not get to set the rules that allow them to maintain their unfair advantage! (do people not understand how ridiculous they look if their complaints are transferred to other fields of science?)
  49. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    Thank you for the reference to Google Scholar. I will check it out. Many Astrophysicists also study climate, especially involving other planets. Dyson claims to have worked in the field. http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151 James Hansen certainly makes the headlines a lot, with rather extreme newsbites. Veteran climate scientist, James Hansen says 'lock up the oil men' http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/23/hansen_dc/ NASA's James Hansen: "Protest and direct action could be the only way to tackle soaring carbon emissions, a leading climate scientist has said."... "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," I'm not quite sure what he means by 'direct action'? http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/18/nasa-climate-change-james-hansen "Current approaches to deal with climate change are ineffectual, one of the world's top climate scientists said today in a personal new year appeal to Barack Obama and his wife Michelle on the urgent need to tackle global warming." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6941974.ece http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/hansen-of-nasa-arrested-in-coal-country/ Chris Shaker
    Moderator Response: cjshaker, if you type "Shaviv" into the Search field at the top left of this page, you will find several relevant pages, including especially Less than half of published scientists endorse global warming, where you should use your browser's Find function to find "Shaviv," then click the links in the resulting found paragraph.
  50. Dikran Marsupial at 07:32 AM on 21 November 2010
    The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    cjshaker@127 BTW, if you want to find out about the shortcomings of a scientists work, just look up the papers that cite their work on Google scholar (and also follow the references therin). In Shaviv's case, the criticisms are not difficult to find, and we can discuss them on another thread if you like.

Prev  2067  2068  2069  2070  2071  2072  2073  2074  2075  2076  2077  2078  2079  2080  2081  2082  Next


The Consensus Project Website

THE ESCALATOR

(free to republish)


© Copyright 2024 John Cook
Home | Translations | About Us | Privacy | Contact Us