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Comments 104201 to 104250:

  1. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    Actually it should be pointed out that British scientists are less fazed by the label climategate than nutty skeptic intellectuals: http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.com/2010/09/climategate-and-ghost-train.html There have been many positive outcomes from 'climategate' mostly confounding the skeptics I'm afraid, at least in the UK.
  2. It's the ocean
    h-j-m - Actually, increased CO2 directly increases the backradiation from the atmosphere, warming the ground, the air, and the water. I believe latent heat carries something like 78 W.m^2 averaged over the globe (higher over water, of course), while IR involves ~396 W/m^2 upward, and the atmosphere gives 324 W/m^2 downward, the sun 168 W/m^2. The IR exchanges and incoming sunlight are dominant. Increased evaporation (as someone correctly pointed out) is really dependent upon increased air temperature, as increasing temperature increases the possible partial pressure of water in the air.
  3. It's the ocean
    muoncounter, my point is simple. Repeatedly there are statements made claiming that rising ocean temperatures provide evidence for the anthropogenic global warming theory. Now, let's have a closer look. The logical consequence of this claim is that rising atmospheric temperatures (due to anthropogenic global warming) causes rising ocean temperatures. There are two ways this could happen: Either the warmer atmosphere actively warms the underlying oceanic waters or the energy transfer from the oceans to the atmosphere via evaporation (latent heat) is slowed down. For the first possibility I have not seen any evidence presented so far while the second possibility directly contradicts the implied main positive feedback mechanism (more evaporation causing an increased green house effect of warming). A simple lab experiment could be conducted to prove (or disprove) the possibility to increase water temperature via warmer air above. Create a water column of let's say of 10 m perfectly insulated at the sides and the bottom. Lower a strip with temperature sensors (equally spaced to measure the downward propagation of heat) into that column that is adjustable so that the first measurements will occur just below the water surface (to allow for evaporation losses) and expose the water surface to a (monitored and controlled) warmer layer of air. Now let's say we consider a rise in temperature of 0.05 C at 2 m below the water surface significant that then will be the end point of the experiment. If the sensor indicating 2 m below surface hits the bottom of the container before that it should be considered a disprove. Else you have a partial success and data (energy usage, propagation speed of heat etc.) to start calculations how these findings relate to the reported warming of the oceans.
  4. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    Arkadiusz Semczyszak@49 the text you quote is not in the text you reference. Hence it isn't a conclusion. Maybe in future you will refrain from misleading.
  5. Climategate a year later
    Daniel Bailey #38 I appreciate your sentiments and your previous apology which I described as 'handsome'. Your apologia for the Climategate scientists' understandable errors and frustrations is quaint but misses the big point. What we say on SS might not (in the immortal words of Mark Twain) be worth anything more than a 'bucket of warm spit'. But we are not writing IPCC Reports, nor holding the great responsibility of giving expert advice to world leaders about 'the greatest moral challenge of out time'. Those paid professional scientists who are given this responsibility because of their expertise in these fields were not just conducting their private social lives in these leaked emails -they were discussing business and probably largely in business hours (no doubt out of hours too) in facilities furnished by the taxpayer. Any email I send in my business I know is a legal document which can live electronically somewhere forever. That does not prevent me expressing a robust honest opinion - but I can definitely say that if my business emails were stolen - I would sleep soundly and lay straight in bed as they would contain nothing other than normal business matters conducted in a civil manner. I find it incomprehensible that those involved could be so indulgent, devious and arrogant as to discuss ways to suppress publication of other's work, delete emails which could be subject to FOI requests etc etc...and still call themselves professional scientists.
  6. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
    Michele, you have just confirmed what I said here. The amount of thermal IR coming from an object is dependent solely on it's area, emissivity, and temperature. The integrated energy over time (the flux, as you put it), is dependent on the neighborhood, and that determines temperature changes of those objects. There are no standing wave effects.
  7. Real experts don't know everything
    I ask myself when I read this article: does this article try to scientifically address the argument skeptics make or is this article trying to impose guilt by association? I also ask myself why any motivation behind a persons argument is of any significant for the validity of the argument itself? I can only see that a person makes an argument for some kind of motivations but I can not see how the validity of the argument is relevant to these motivations. If there is any significance to the motivation behind making a argument then I would like to know the OP's, Stephan Lewandowsky, motivation behind making his argument here before I make up my mind in this issue.
  8. The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
    There's a politician in Brazil that was famous for his corruption scandals (and that's a field that is difficult to stand out, here). On his heydays, he would start the debates by accusing the opponent of corruption. And he happened to dispute elections with some pretty good guys. At that point, to accuse him to be corrupt as well would just give the audience the impression that "everyone accuses everyone" or maybe "everyone is corrupt" - which was already a beneficial levelling of the starting point for him. The tactics are time-honored. Wanna know who's right? Check the scientific evidence. Even the pre-80s science is pretty conclusive (unlike one of the links prom Poptech suggests). Recent science, of course, is more abundant, more accurate and even more conclusive. Once you've checked the science, it's instructive to find out how there's so much babbling about uncertainties or even conspiracies in a field where the science has already so much information. That's where Oreskes comes in handy.
  9. The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
    Poptech wrote : "Why not have Nicolas Nierenberg, Fred Singer or William O'Keefe on to debate her and correct the misinformation in her book? Good advice on this from Richard Dawkins, relevant to discussions with deniers or so-called skeptics : Why I Won't Debate Creationists Also, the following George Bernard Shaw quote springs to mind : I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. No more need be said or written.
  10. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    @KR Berényi Péter claimed that "Induction is not a scientific method.". To this you responded: "I would have to disagree. Induction is not only a scientific method, it is the scientific method. Generalizing from observations and forming a 'universal' proposition is done via induction". Perhaps Berényi claim is that we can not use positive evidence, like induction, as support for a hypothesis to be true and therefore any such attempt is an non-scientific.
  11. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
    Michele, you have unusual ideas about "contemporary presence." In this universe, all "things" are in the presence of all other "things." It is the universe itself as a whole that you need to apply your "unless something else feels its presence" philosophy to. All "things" radiate if they are above 0K, whether the next nearest "thing" is ten miles away and is a bowling ball or 10 million parsecs away and is a hydrogen atom in "deep" space. It sounds like you're saying that a "thing" uses some extraphysical means of "sensing" the presence of other "things." I'm saying "things" because there is actually only one thing, and that's the universe. All "things" within the universe are connected in various ways, even if we can only sense a narrow range of these connections (or not "see" them at all).
  12. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    @Berényi Péter Your claim: "it simply does not make sense to talk about the probability of hypotheses being true (or false). It's either true or false. Of course it is entirely possible we are ignorant about its truth value" In what respect is, given it has been deiced, a hypotheses true or false?
  13. It's not us
    1. Humans are currently emitting around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Check 2. Oxygen levels are falling as if carbon is being burned to create carbon dioxide. OK 3. Fossil carbon is building up in the atmosphere. (We know this because the two types of carbon have different chemical properties.) OK 4. Corals show that fossil carbon has recently risen sharply. I get it. 5. Satellites measure less heat escaping to space at the precise wavelengths which CO2 absorbs. Makes sense. Are they also checking to see if the waves that water vapor blocks are escaping less/more? 6. Surface measurements find this heat is returning to Earth to warm the surface. Duh 7. An increased greenhouse effect would make nights warm faster than days, and this is what has been observed. Pretty much the norm for warmer periods. More water vapor available does the same thing. We had a warm period this summer that was all about higher nighttime temps. We also had some of the the highest ever average dewpoints. 8. If the warming is due to solar activity, then the upper atmosphere (the stratosphere) should warm along with the rest of the atmosphere. But if the warming is due to the greenhouse effect, the stratosphere should cool because of the heat being trapped in the lower atmosphere (the troposphere). Satellite measurements show that the stratosphere is cooling. OK 9. This combination of a warming troposphere and cooling stratosphere should cause the tropopause, which separates them, to rise. This has also been observed. OK 10. It was predicted that the ionosphere would shrink, and it is indeed shrinking. OK again, now let's go back into the models and try it with water vapor.
    Moderator Response: Regarding 5, yes, they are checking to see if the waves that water vapor blocks are escaping less/more. Regarding your "now let's go back into the models and try it with water vapor": The models most certainly do already include water vapor. See Water Vapor Is The Most Powerful Greenhouse Gas, and then Humidity Is Falling. [fixed broken link]
  14. Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted
    #41 muoncounter "Insisting that "Clouds alone roughly double Earth's albedo, from 0.15 (no clouds) to 0.31" is possible and should be put into the calculator makes no sense. We do not go from no clouds to heavy clouds. Look at satellite photos; there are always some clouds" But what is the percentage? Unfortunately we do not have satellite photos of the Earth during an ice age and cannot empirically determine the percentage of cloud cover during one of these periods.
  15. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
    KR, sorry I cannot agree with you because the concept of flow implies the contemporary presence of both the supplier and the receiver. There is no flow if either of them misses or neither of them exists. In other words, something exists only if there’s something else that feels its presence. Really, the idea of *absolute* doesn't belong to Physics and perhaps it not even belongs to Metaphysics since *God created the world because He felt lonely*. Conversely, the exact formula of power flux is: P = e*s*A12*(T1^4-T2^4) = (e*s*(T1+T2)*(T1^2+T2^2))*A12*(T1-T2) = K*A12*(T1-T2) formally identical to the others well known expressions of thermal flow.
  16. Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted
    Moderator, Before I leave the topic I will post a link that has evidence of the chaotic nature of climate. Dust patterns in ice cores suggest sudden and dramic changes in Global atmopheric circulation patterns. Article suggest climate is chatotic.
  17. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    @Arkadiusz Semczyszak a) Your comment is off-topic. You should post it in the correct place. b) I'm not sure exactly what your question was. It's more than a little garbled. c) Since I'm not and never have claimed to be a climate scientist (unlike some), directing questions at me will not necessarily elicit a correct answer. I willingly defer to someone who knows far more about this than I. d) I detect a more than a hint of hostility in your post that indicates to me rather more than a purely objective search for the truth. e) I have no axe to grind. I would dearly love AGW to be all a big mistake. I see no such evidence of this. I accept the science in totality, even though I have not read more than a fraction of it. f) There is clearly a great deal of pseudo-science being passed-off as science. g) Much of the climate drivel is funded by vested interests. h) Now if you have a problem with all that, well that's your problem.
  18. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    Nice work Robert - been waiting for a definitive context in which to consider Wu et.al. Thanks for that. (It never turned up in my email though).
  19. Arkadiusz Semczyszak at 22:01 PM on 19 November 2010
    The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    @ScaredAmoeba To those who say that really this was not Climategate, I recommend especially the comments on cited by You article Nature News, 15 November 2010; Climate: The hottest year ... and Jones paper: An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970, Nature, 2010. One of the conclusions is as follows: “Here we show that the hemispheric differences in temperature trends in the middle of the twentieth century stem largely from a rapid drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperatures of about 0.3°C between about 1968 and 1972. The timescale of the drop is shorter than that associated with either tropospheric aerosol loadings or previous characterizations of oscillatory multidecadal variability.” If the affair - scandals, was not, how this work and this conclusions?
  20. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    Nature has reported on the CRU hack. "....More certain is the conclusion that the hack of the server was a sophisticated attack. Although the police and the university say only that the investigation is continuing, Nature understands that evidence has emerged effectively ruling out a leak from inside the CRU, as some have claimed. And other climate-research organizations are believed to have told police that their systems survived hack attempts at the same time...." So all the wild speculation about an 'inside-job' or 'whistle-blower' is just spin. It was most likely a co-ordinated attack, almost certainly funded by those wealthy organisations who have most to lose from a public acceptance of the reality of climate change. And it won't be too hard to work-out who the most likely suspects are likely to be. H/T to Peter Sinclair.
  21. Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
    actually thoughtfull - Well the Conservative party in the UK is definitely greener, but they have the problem of having to appease the traditional ideologists in the party. So instead of green 'localism' in order to reduce carbon footprints, we have Conservative 'localism' which is a re-packaging of the ideology of smaller government. The Coalition government seem to be doing OK on the issue of energy, but other issues are of concern, eg. selling forests, changing tree protection legislation etc. But if you analyse the path, it makes logical sense from their POV. Energy creates new businesses, publicly owned forests cost the tax payer.
  22. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    RSVP: "it's hard to imagine someone "from the outside" would know what they were looking for." there are common tools for searching through large volumes of text for keywords. anyone with enough knowledge to hack a server will also be aware of them. that's certainly the impression i got, considering the zip file contained more than a thousand emails, of which only a handful ever attracted the slightest interest. the vast majority of them were the sort of boring work emails everyone here must see a dozen times a day. if they *were* manually triaged, whoever did it wasn't very selective, to say the least. perhaps more to the point, hacking a third party server to distribute "leaked" documents doesn't sound much like the actions of an honest but disgruntled scientist who just wants the truth to be known.
  23. The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
    Poptech. How about the appalling anti-engineering and anti-science information on your web site? How can you criticise others without cleaning up your own back yard?
    Moderator Response: Please, everybody -- there have been discussions of Poptech's list of papers in many previous threads. That subject is off-topic here.
     
    Second try: Apparently some people aren't getting the message. No more discussion in this thread from any side of Poptech's list of papers, please.
  24. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Here's some information from the Phillip Morris documents (good to have it recorded somewhere). In 1992, a presentation focused on efforts in the ETS domain. As noted above, Seitz was involved in one of these efforts: "Late 1st quarter/early 2nd quarter Procedural Options for Addressing the Scientific Issue Highlighted in Global Warming and Ozone Hole Controversies, Dr Frederick Seitz of the George C Marshall Institute. 40–60 regulators—Ensure credible science TASSC" Seitz Symposium And the GMI document wasn't released to the public until 1994. Indicates that GMI were involved in behind the scenes attempts to challenge moves to regulate ETS, with Seitz as a major player. Seitz has a loooooong history of advocating for tobacco companies.
    Moderator Response: A reminder to everyone commenting here -- the past three pages include many, many comments about Seitz and tobacco. For the rest of this discussion, before posting further remarks on that subject, please think twice (or three times) about whether anything new is being added. Or put it another way, many many posts on this thread have been deleted as the discussion was going around in circles, with nothing new being contributed.
  25. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    I attended the Melbourne talk by Naomi Oreskes. She made the point that the MODs were motivated by strong free-market ideologies. Some of the questions after the presentation attempted to explore this further (but Naomi -understandably because it was off-topic - would not be drawn). It got me thinking, does someone who wants the government to regulate polluters, and limit resource wastage, have to be anti free-market (you may want to read that as socialist). To put this another way, should you be allowed to drive a Hummer as long as you pay for the priveledge ie pay a lot.
  26. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    Why is an external fishing expedition with the intent of finding something to spin so hard to picture? It wasn't a precise operation. How many emails were stolen to quotemine those few sliced & diced tidbits?
  27. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    Rob Honeycutt #36 At the end of the day, the leak, hack, or whatever, may have been someone's desire to provide certainty on a different level. Philippe Chantreau #40 Yes, the word whistleblower is overcharged in many respects, but it's hard to imagine someone "from the outside" would know what they were looking for. The other option is "disgruntled".
  28. Philippe Chantreau at 18:55 PM on 19 November 2010
    The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    The harassment through FOI requests is an invention of Steve McIntyre who has encouraged his readers to outsource them from anywhere they could (so as to give the appearance of being genuine). The intent was to send a barrage of them to the scientists whose work he dislikes. It is a disgusting perversion of what FOIs were intended to be.
  29. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Poptech, No Poptech, you are actually the one arguing strawmen. To my knowledge Seitz was not directly affiliated with CTR, but I have not read the many thousands of confidential documents. Either way I did not say he was affiliated with CTR-- although upon reading my posts again, I can see why you might think that is what I was driving at. That was not the point of my posting about the CTR. Odd that it does not bother your conscience that the same company who paid Seitz was involved with forming and funding the CTR for decades. The purpose of the programs which Seitz was paid by Reynolds to oversee and evaluate were part and parcel of their misinformation campaign, and their attempt to create the air of confusion and detract from the negative impacts of smoking. Seitz has admitted that "They [Reynolds] didn't want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking". So he knew that they were trying to hide the truth about the negative impacts of smoking and trying to blame/pin the negative health impacts of smoking on "genetics" or "degenerative diseases"--so blame anything but smoke. Kinda like "skeptics" trying to blame the warming on anything but CO2. He made the choice to be paid by Reynolds, knowing full well about the tobacco companie's strategy (in concert with other tobacco companies) to delay action being taken on smoking. You have been presented the facts by several people here, and choose to ignore them. Sorry, but I can't help you with that. I'm done wasting my time on you.
  30. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    All, This silliness has gone on for way too long. The contrarian has latched on to one point, and is using it to dismiss all other arguments and evidence against Seitz. They are clearly not open to reason. For example, they accuse another poster of being deceptive. The contrarian picks this quote from the Stokes memo "R.J. Reynolds Industries takes no part in the creation or performance of any research" to support their assertion. That would be highly misleading, both on the part of Reynolds and on the part of the contrarian. Reynolds may not have done the research in house, but they certainly gave a lot of money to front groups like the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR) to do the "research". Stokes says in the same memo being discussed above: "Back in 1954, Reynolds joined to help form the Tobacco Industry Research Committee -- a group made up of tobacco manufacturers, growers and warehousemen to look into questions of tobacco use and health . The organization's name was changed in the early sixties to the Council for Tobacco Research -- U-S-A" Indeed, CTR was founded by tobacco executives at an emergency meeting in 1954. Despite what the tobacco companies claimed outwardly, a memo by Panzer in 1972 betrayed the CTR's true agenda, "the CTR actually worked at "promoting cigarettes and protecting them from these and other attacks," by "creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it, and advocating the public's right to smoke, without actually urging them to take up the practice." United States Judge Hadden Lee Sarokin, who presided over two New Jersey tobacco cases, described TIRC/CTR in 1988 as "nothing but a hoax created for public relations purposes with no intention of seeking the truth or publishing it." CTR's work was described by the Wall Street Journal in 1993 as "the longest-running misinformation campaign in US business history."[Source here] Stokes states again states in the same document that Reynolds provided funds to the CTR: "The Council for Tobacco Research is one of three primary avenues used by Reynolds Industries in funding biomedical research. During the past decade, our company also has become associated with several major research studies on either a joint sponsorship or sole-sponsorship basis." And in the next paragraph: "In evaluating and monitoring the special projects that we fund --particularly the sole-sponsorship programs -- R .J . Reynolds Industries has secured the services of a permanent consultant -- Dr . Frederick Seitz, former president of Rockefeller University. Dr . Seitz is with us today and has agreed to describe these various R-J-R sponsored programs for you." Seitz monitored and evaluated programs funded by big tobacco to misinform, confuse, create doubt and delay action being taken on smoking and tobacco smoke. End of story. And now those in denial about the theory of AGW are using the exact same tactics, and even some of the same players who aided big tobacco in their misinformation campaign are (or were) involved. Oreskes and Conway, and many others have determined this.
  31. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    gallopingcamel: Rejecting FOI requests is fully legal, an inherent part of the FOI act. If prosecution failed, it's not the fault of those that were prosecuted.
  32. actually thoughtful at 15:54 PM on 19 November 2010
    Climategate a year later
    The sad thing is, most casual folks got the gist that the scientists did something bad. They did not get the message that it was all trumped up with no basis in reality. As usual, the bad guys have better marketing than the good guys.
  33. The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
    Great episode! Interesting that Gareth mentions steady-state economics. CASSE have just released (as of yesterday) a road map for a sustainable economy, 'Enough is Enough', based on ideas generated in a conference held in Leeds this year. There's a bunch of interesting videos of the keynote speeches from the conference on the site too. Would be interested to hear what people think about the idea of a steady state economy.
  34. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    #41: "the failed prosecution of the people who willfully defied requests for information" Yes, we must vigorously pursue the serious offense of FOIA violations: Such a breach of the act could carry an unlimited fine, but Smith said no action could be taken against the university because the specific request they had looked at happened in May 2008, well outside the six-month limit for such prosecutions under the act. Why bother with such trifles as the criminal penalties for computer hacking? penalties for the offence of attempting to gain unauthorised access to a computer being increased from a maximum sentence of six months to two years
  35. actually thoughtful at 15:36 PM on 19 November 2010
    Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    Camburn - China is leading in both coal plants and renewables. China is big. This says nothing about the validity of cap and trade as a market based solution to the climate disruption problem.
  36. actually thoughtful at 15:33 PM on 19 November 2010
    Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
    The Ville - it used to be that those ugly vent pipes for indoor plumbing were aesthetically unpleasing (and who would put their toilet INSIDE their house?! Eeeeww!) Times and attitudes change. Once we accurately price carbon, all these silly objections will simply disappear (cranks will still make them, but no one will listen). We need to act. My comments have nothing to do with Great Britain, but rather the mindless negativity and defeatism of the post Mike recommended. It looks like Great Britain, as is Germany, is on a path towards sustainability. Those of us in the US can only wish. Our recent elections are moving us backwards at a very high rate of speed.
  37. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Ooops!, "....yet there IS so little conflicting with current knowledge. The paper is full of amazing prescience and insights."
  38. Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    @43: Let China fill that void. It seems that they are building more coal fired power plants every day. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/world/asia/11coal.html?_r=1
  39. Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted
    Norman - Have you read the intermediate version of this topic? Non-linear does not imply chaotic, although all chaotic systems are non-linear. Weather is highly dependent on initial conditions (you can't predict next July 17th's temperature). Climate, on the other hand, as described in the RealClimate links posted earlier, is a boundary condition issue - when does outgoing energy match incoming energy? Feedback, not incidentally, is a geometric relationship (Forcing / (1 - Feedback Gain)), which is linear. There are certainly non-linear transition points, such as vanishing ice in the Arctic, but it's still not a chaotic system. You've repeated your albedo feedback question, but have not established that there is chaos in long term climate. Unless you do, you have failed to raise an objection.
    Moderator Response: Norman, you should give up your assertion that climate is chaotic, and instead comment on a different thread to focus on what seems to be your real assertion that Climate Models are Unreliable.
  40. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    Marcus (#35), You call for criminal prosecution of whoever leaked the CRU emails. Where do you stand on the failed prosecution of the people who willfully defied requests for information under Freedom of Information laws?
  41. The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
    The results of the Merchants of Doubt-led denial of climate science and global warming? 40 years of news stories on global warming and we're further from action on CO2 emissions than ever. Example, this news article from 1986:
    "Scientists say the Puget Sound region could one day be as balmy as Baja because of the pollution-caused trend in global warming known as the greenhouse effect."
    Even in 1986 CO2 was referred to as pollution. Who'dathunkit? The Yooper
  42. Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted
    #38, #40: Norman, It sounds like you are trying to run a climate model without benefit of any computing. That's not particularly helpful, as complicated systems don't simplify so easily. Best left to the pros; we can then read their results and form our own picture with the benefit of educated input. What you describe sounds to me a bit like what happens every year, as we move from summer to winter. That alone is neither a net warming nor cooling. Here's one inconsistency in your scheme: "If the climate cools in the Northern regions (higher albedo from increased snow) like during an ice age but the oceans are still fairly warm (from the previous warm cycle) you may get an increase of cloud formation ... This increased cloud cover acts to cool the Earth more ..." Here's what Holland and Bitz 2003 found: ... clouds reduce the strength of the ice-albedo feedback by shielding the planetary albedo from the surface. Furthermore most models predict Arctic cloud cover increases with warming, which increases the planetary albedo Further, drawing comparisons to glacial stages is too tricky to do on the back of an envelope. Burt et al showed that the increased albedo due to glacial ice is moderated by the accompanying lowered sea level: Although the positive ice-albedo feedback acts to amplify the climate change ... , due to the melting of sea ice and ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere, the ice-albedo feedback is actually negative over large regions of the high-latitude Northern Hemisphere, due to changes in the size of the Arctic Ocean basin. Both of those mechanisms do not enhance change, they moderate change: Cloud cover moderates the increased albedo of surface ice; warming air causes clouds which cool. These act to reduce the 'chaotic' nature that you seem to want to find. There are no sharp changes in temperature in this system. What is needed to explain sharply increasing or decreasing temps? Some other agent: We know its not the sun, as TSI is down while temperature is going up. We have a known warming agent in increasing atmospheric GHGs. Insisting that "Clouds alone roughly double Earth's albedo, from 0.15 (no clouds) to 0.31" is possible and should be put into the calculator makes no sense. We do not go from no clouds to heavy clouds. Look at satellite photos; there are always some clouds. Finally "the net affect of increased evaporation rates caused by global warming are difficult to predict" doesn't mean its chaotic. Repetition doesn't make it so.
  43. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    An interesting link: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/11/sea-level-rise-the-new-york-times-got-the-story/#more-5386
  44. Climategate a year later
    Re: Ken Lambert (36) As a former DoD employee who held a security clearance above the Top Secret level, I'm intimately familiar with non-disclosure agreements (12 years post-DoD, I am still bound by some of them). However, you appear to be operating under the premise that the aforesaid emails were released by a "whistleblower"; i.e., that it was "an inside" job. More evidence exists to the contrary, that it was an outside job, a "hack". As to the content of the emails: I see scientists being human, exchanging information and sharing ideas in a forum presumed to have a limited audience; that said audience would have a background of knowledge allowing a contextual understanding of the information, ideas and emotions being shared between professional colleagues and even friends. That sometime frustrations get voiced (better out than in, I say), frustrations that were understood to be seen in the context of "venting". Who among us have not had bad days? Said and/or written things in the heat of the moment that, had the brain filter been in "ON" mode, they might otherwise thought twice about letting out? I have. You have, Ken. We sometimes do things that we later regret having said or done. We express contrition. We move on. Once upon a time a while ago in a comment to you I was a little emphatic in my wording. I'd had been a long day. Later, having thought about it, I posted a comment apologizing to you for my earlier vehemence. I'm human, make mistakes. You are and do, Ken. We try to learn from them and move on. As Phil Jones is trying to do. As Rajendra Pachauri is as well. That is the lasting takeaway I get from having read the emails. That this is still an issue with some is telling as to preconceptions and mindsets. Conflating uncertainties into a conspiracy is absurd. I hold you and BP to a higher standard than that; you are both capable of much more. The Yooper
  45. Philippe Chantreau at 12:46 PM on 19 November 2010
    The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    The common misconception that some vertuous whistleblower "leaked" e-mails is quite telling of how "skeptics" are poorly informed and how they think of themselves. Any superficial gathering of info quickly reveals that e-mails were hacked, not leaked. But the self righteousness attached to the whistleblower idea sure is comforting, so they hold on to it and foster that misonception in the public. Very revealing.
  46. The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
    Marcus @38, Thanks a bunch!
  47. Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted
    muoncounter, Here is some reading to back up some of my thoughts. Clouds effect on Albedo. Selected quote from the above article link: "Clouds, therefore, are responsible for about 55% of the sunlight that is reflected into space without adding heat to the climate system. Clouds alone roughly double Earth's albedo, from 0.15 (no clouds) to 0.31 (including clouds). In short, clouds are the predominant means by which incoming sunlight is reflected back out into space." Put those albedo changes in the calculator and see what a difference it makes. Another quote that supports my current view that Climate is chaotic: "However, water vapor and clouds play numerous roles in the climate system, and the net affect of increased evaporation rates caused by global warming are difficult to predict" Another article that also talks about the albedo effect. MIT article about Cloud effects. Quote from this article stating how much clouds change Temperature. "Recent observational studies show that these effects almost balance, but that the cooling effect is somewhat more important. From the point of view of global change, however, it is crucial to note that this small difference is about five times larger than the radiative effect anticipated from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), and that the individual components of the difference are orders of magnitude larger. In existing climate models about one third of the predicted warming due to increasing CO2 arises because of the predicted cloud changes. These predictions, however, are highly speculative because none of the models include interactive cloud physics" Another quote suggesting the difficult nature in predicting future climate: "Clearly, without a proper treatment of both layer clouds and convection, model predictions of climate are uncertain. Cloud effects are so much larger than the anticipated effects of added greenhouse gases, that small changes in the cloud picture can easily alter predictions of global warming. In addition, existing methods of representing convection and clouds are crude, and, in some cases, can be shown even to be qualitatively incorrect"
  48. Climategate a year later
    Ken, I agree that 'Can you delete any emails ...' is very poor - do you understand the reasons that the originator may have asked for this? I would like for you to explain to us what the meaning of "hide the decline" is, and "it's a travesty". Just a warning: I'm only asking you this because I'm pretty sure that you'll take these comments utterly out of context and claim that they mean something that they do not.
  49. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    Robert Way @32 notes that we now have greater ice loss with lower solar irradiance but higher CO2. We know that CO2 in the atmosphere and ice loss in polar regions are both accelerating. Solar activity can not remain quiescent. Pinker (2005) reports increased activity and if that is on-going, would not that explain the reason for both the increase in ice loss and acceleration in the rate of loss, rather than some undefined “natural” warming?
  50. Climategate a year later
    Daniel Bailey #29 All leaking of confidential or private documents could be found to be a crime somewhere. If you are a public servant (or a federal employee in USspeak) then you sign employment documents to maintain confidentiality, take oaths etc etc... Then "whistleblower" leglislation is enacted at some later date to protect you if you find that some malfeasance is happening in your job. This is a fraught matter for your judgement - those who are 'blown' will always cry 'thief' and try to smear the blower. The act of copying documents, leaking internal information is always prima facie illegal - but the leaker might be protected if the malfeasance is proven and the revelation in the public interest. How many scandals have been exposed by prima facie illegal leaking or stealing of documents? My point remains: if there was a boring technical discussion going on in the revealed emails and no jaw droppers like 'hide the decline' and 'its a travesty' and 'Can you delete any emails...', and 'even if we have to redefine what is peer-review' then there would be nothing to talk about. The real deniers in this debate are those who deny that Climategate exposed the leading scientists private doubts about the data and the measurement (and hence the quality of their work) and their attempts to present a 'sexed-up' monolithic quasi-alarmist story to the public.

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