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Bob Loblaw at 00:14 AM on 25 November 2024CO2 effect is saturated
CallItAsitis @ 722 and 723:
Unfortunately, your understanding is incomplete and makes a common error by many that have tried to argue that the CO2 effect is saturated.
Your error is most easily seen in your statement "Above this altitude, there is no more upward-bound IR energy that CO2 molecules can absorb." This simply is incorrect, because your statements completely ignore the fact that CO2 also emits IR radiation. As long as CO2 is emitting IR radiation (at 15um and any other wavelength where CO2 is active), there will continue to be an upward-directed flux of IR radiation at those wavelengths. Since CO2 is present throughout the atmosphere, you will never, ever, see an altitude at which there is no upward flux of 15um radiation.
As long as you ignore the emission of IR radiation by CO2, you will fail to understand the greenhouse effect, and fool yourself with respect to "saturation". Your definition of "saturation" looks only at surface-emitted IR radiation and whether it can pass through the entire atmosphere in one go. It is your view of "saturation" that makes no sense.
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CallItAsItIs at 21:00 PM on 24 November 2024CO2 effect is saturated
I have a question about the video posted in the Intermediate rebuttal. At about 2:38 into this video, Mr. Richardson states "in the upper layers of the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect isn't saturated". I need clarification on this since band saturation is not an altitude dependent quantity. As I understand it, the greenhouse effect is saturated for a particular GHG if there is an altitude at which the absorption bands for that GHG have all been depleted (from the upwelling IR radiation) through absorption at lower altitudes. Therefore, a GHG is saturated for a particular atmospheric profile of the GHG, or it isn't. It's not saturated at one altitude but not another. Such statements don't make sense.
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CallItAsItIs at 20:18 PM on 24 November 2024CO2 effect is saturated
I would like to make a few comments concerning the following paragraph in the Further details section.
Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as CO2 molecules, absorb some of this IR radiation, then re-emit it in all directions - including back to Earth's surface. The CO2 molecule does not fill up with IR photons, running out of space for any more. Instead, the CO2 molecule absorbs the energy from the IR photon and the photon ceases to be. The CO2 molecule now contains more energy, but that is transient since the molecule emits its own IR photons. Not only that: it's constantly colliding with other molecules such as N2 and O2 in the surrounding air. In those collisions, that excess energy is shared with them. This energy-sharing causes the nearby air to heat up (fig. 2).
This is correct but it should also be noted that the absorption spectrum of CO2 is quite different than that for H20 vapor. In the case of CO2, strong absorption occurs but primarily in the (narrow) 15 micron band. Absorption or emission of IR by CO2 outside this band is generally considered to be small. For H20, however, we find weaker absorption but it is much more evenly spread out over the entire IR spectrum. Therefore, the CO2 greenhouse effect is determined primarily by what happens in the 15 micron band.
In the case of CO2 and the 15 micron absorption band, the N2 and O2 molecules in the surrounding air collide with energized CO2 molecules which causes the extra energy (from absorbed photons) to be converted into thermal energy, thereby raising the air temperature. Once this warming occurs, however, the upwelling 15 micron IR energy is reduced by the amount of thermal energy that was released in the collisions involving CO2 molecules. Otherwise, energy would not be conserved. Band saturation occurs if the upwelling 15 micron radiation is reduced to negligible values at some altitude below the TOA. Above this altitude, there is no more upward-bound IR energy that CO2 molecules can absorb. Essentially, the entire 15 micron band has been absorbed and additional CO2 would not cause further greenhouse warming.
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Billy at 10:33 AM on 24 November 2024A look back - SkS in 2014
so glad i found this site. It's fun digging.
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Stephan B. at 12:17 PM on 23 November 2024The Skeptical Science temperature trend calculator
Kevin Cowtan's trend calculator is a very useful tool!
But all available datasets end in March 2023, which is a bit outdated. Could you please update the datasets and maintain them on a regular base (like 6 months or at least annually)?Kind regards
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One Planet Only Forever at 07:52 AM on 23 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
nigelj @10,
I am not too concerned about the order of the listing. My thinking was to:
- Start with 'what people should be interested in learning about' through the reporting of harms done.
- Next is learning about what could be done to reduce the harms.
- Then comes news reports specifically on new published science/research. Note that these news items will probably also be tagged for a second category.
- News exposing and correcting dis- and mis-information
- News about leadership actions can then be understood in the context of all the above.
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BaerbelW at 05:24 AM on 23 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
OPOF @ 8&9
Thanks much for these suggestions! I had asked Google's NotebookLM to identify topics based on several but fairly random editions of our weekly news roundup and the listing - while a lot more fine-grained - is not that much different from what you came up with. What we plan to do - as soon as we get around to finalizing the list - is to add a drop-down selection field to the Google form we already use to collect articles suitable for sharing on our social media channels. We can then in turn use that information when we generate the round-up blog post.
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nigelj at 04:56 AM on 23 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
OPOF @9, your categories look good to me. Seven primary categories is also a good number. Any more and it would overcomplicate things.
I would have put climate science and research first on the list because everything starts with the science, but perhaps you were putting impacts first because this is such an important issue.
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One Planet Only Forever at 01:44 AM on 23 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
I have some additional adjustments of my suggested list of Primary Category headings for the Weekly News Roundup. Each primary heading should refer to the primary interest which is learning about everything related to Rapid Human-Caused Climate Change.
Climate Change Impacts: Environment-Social-Economic (interrelated)
Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation: Intimately correlated. More mitigation requires less adaptation.
Climate Change Science/Research:
Public Misunderstandings about Climate Change: Disinformation and Misinformation
Climate Change Policy and Politics:
International Climate Change related Conferences and Agreements:
• UN Climate Change COPs
• UN Biodiversity COPsMiscellaneous (Other):
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One Planet Only Forever at 03:46 AM on 22 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
I would change one of the Primary Categories I listed @7. I had simply copied the category AI created for Weekly News Roundup #45. But I think the following would be better.
Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science: Disinformation and Misinformation
Also, when appropriate, a News Items should be listed in more than one Primary Category. This wouold particularly apply to news items reporting on climate sciemce and research that also would fit under another category.
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One Planet Only Forever at 13:51 PM on 21 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
A Climate Science Communications specialist could likely develop a better categorization. However, I compiled the following ‘primary categories’ based on the Weekly News categories created by AI in Weeks #43, 44, and 45 and the set of categories suggested by nigelj @5.
Climate Change Impacts: Environmental-Social-Economic (interrelated)
Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation: Intimately correlated. More mitigation requires less adaptation.
Climate Science and Research:
Public Misconceptions and Climate Science: Disinformation and Misinformation
Climate Policy and Politics:
International Climate Conferences and Agreements:
• UN Climate Change COPs
• UN Biodiversity COPsMiscellaneous (Other):
The AI generated listings for Weeks #43, 44 and 45 also provide a large number of potential ‘secondary categories’.
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One Planet Only Forever at 08:32 AM on 21 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
I am reviewing the categories created by AI for Weekly News #43, #44, and #45. I hope to post a result soon.
However, I have noticed a problem that using AI did not solve. In Week #44 the first category was for COP16. This Week's list is dominated by COP29. The problem is the failure to fully describe the COPs. They are:
- UN Biodiversity COP16
- UN Climate Change COP29
That full understanding is clear when reading each article. But the category title should fully describe the content rather than require a review of the content to determine what is in the category.
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nigelj at 15:54 PM on 19 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
Possible categories are the science of climate change, climate projections, climate mitigation and adaptation, politics of climate change, the denialist campaign, and miscellaneous issues.
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One Planet Only Forever at 09:09 AM on 19 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
I agree with wilddouglascounty’s recommendation. Climate science communication specialists should be able establish a helpful set of categories for the Weekly News Items.
Part of my work as a Civil/Structural technical specialist in a major engineering organization was collecting reference information on a diversity of relevant topics. My approach was to use a high-level set of identifiable categories with General (or Other) for everything that did not fit in an established category. As the information accumulated I would create new basic categories for suitable groups of information from the General category. And when appropriate I would create sub-categories in the basic categories.
Though they would not be relevant for the Weekly News Items, here are some categories I had that were related directly to climate change (they indicate why I pursued learning about rapid human caused climate change):
- Loads and Forces: Wind; Rain; Snow; Ice; Range of Temperature Change
- Surface Runoff: Rain Intensity and Duration; Snow Melt Rates
- Foundations: Slope Stability; Permafrost (It was expected to remain frozen for centuries. So we tried to build on it in ways that would not cause it to melt.)
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BaerbelW at 03:36 AM on 19 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
Cleanair27 @2
Thanks for the heads-up regarding the broken link. It's now fixed (and goes to the same published paper linked to in my earlier comment about this topic.
As an aside (and most likely stating the obvious): if you are especially interested in peer-reviewed literature, our weekly compilation has "tons" of just that!
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Cleanair27 at 02:58 AM on 19 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
I am willing to accept that there may be a positive efficiency difference between using a stochastic parrot and a human, or humans, to hunt for relevant articles that readers of this site will find informative or even useful. I'm not entirely convinced, and the link in this Story of the Week post is broken regarding AI vs. human writing and illustrating work. And it sounds a little too much like the John Henry fable updated.
There is also the ethical question that comes with using the products of large corporations whose investors who don't give a fig about the climate impact of the energy use from running LLMs. What they want is to continue to capture huge swaths of surplus value from the labor of others (as the Marxists would call it) and use their profits to extract excess rent (as economists would call it) in the form of public policy that favors their interests.
I don't know what the best solution is for the humans working very hard to maintain this site. For my own purposes, the chronological listing of reports and articles is more than satisfactory. It is easy to sift through to find what interests me, which tend to be the peer-reviewed research. So please accept my thanks for all that you do to inform us. I accept that it is best to leave up to you how to improve the product and ease your burdens.
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wilddouglascounty at 00:07 AM on 19 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
You might check the May 2021 article out from PLoS One on Article level classification of scieentific publications. What came to mine when I skimmed this article is that for your purposes it might be worth getting a bibliometric analyst involved in your stable of volunteers and she/he might be able to take your latest batch of articles you want to post on the site and whip them into taxonomic shape in no time, categorizing them into clear categories without any AI involved. I suspect that there are some out there who would understand the carbon footprint issues that AI represents and could figure out a way to do it sans the energy intensive approach.
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prove we are smart at 07:44 AM on 14 November 202420 fact briefs published in collaboration with Gigafact!
What the heck, thought I'd do the quiz even knowing I would know that stuff now. Well, I got number 15 wrong and am so glad I did!
I was eventually led back to here- skepticalscience.com/argument.php?p=1&t=162&&a=297 you can learn so much from the informed comments. By the time I read the first 25 comments of that decade old post I had my information- In fact a link from number 25 commenter led me here- www.amazon.com/The-Alchemy-Air-Scientific-Discovery/dp/0307351793 ( looks like a good read)
Surprising facts and scientific knowledge, gotta luv Skeptical Science.
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Bob Loblaw at 00:27 AM on 14 November 2024Sabin 33 #2 - Are toxic heavy metals from solar panels posing a threat to human health?
LazyTeenager:
How carefully did you read the post?
Searching this page for "hail" finds four hits: three of them in your comment. The fourth hit is in the body of the article, where it says "Moreover, they are encased in tempered glass that not only withstands high temperatures, but is also strong enough to pass hail tests..."
How did you translate that to "hail proof"? Are the web sites you are looking at trying to claim that the solar panel industry is advertising that solar panels are indestructible?
A simple Google search for "solar panel hail damage resistance" finds a series of web pages that include statements such as "...can withstand most hail storms...". In addition, numerous web pages talk about how installation and solar panel type can improve hail resistance.
...and I even see web pages that mention various testing standards, for example:
"According to IEC 61215 standard, a PV module should resist at the minimum to the impact of a hailstone of 25 mm launched at 80 km/h, while the Swiss VKF standard demands a minimum of 30 mm, practically making it 40 mm or more."
...and one page that lists "8 ways to protect your solar panels from hail storm damage". Number 1 is:
Buy Panels Rated UL 61730, UIC 61730, or IP68
The first step to protecting solar panels in a hailstorm is to buy resilient panels. The materials that go into a solar panel’s manufacture determine its durability.
While most panels produced today are relatively tough, panels rated UL 61730 go through testing to withstand strikes of hail between one and three inches, traveling at speeds up to 88.3 miles per hour (142 kph). Purchasing panels that meet this certification level can protect your solar array in almost any storm.
So, the OP that states "strong enough to pass hail tests" clearly does not mean that solar panels are indestructible. If a particular installation has been done with poorer quality materials or methods, or a hail storm that is worse than expected and tested for, then damage will happen.
Choosing a less expensive panel or installation means taking more risk. Pictures of damage solar panels indicates that people took more risk that they realized, or didn't properly assess the risk - or simply lost the bet on whether the risk would happen to them.
So, the answers to your questions are readily available. The OP does not claim that solar panels will never get damaged, so photos of hail-damaged solar panels is not a contradiction.
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LazyTeenager at 21:45 PM on 13 November 2024Sabin 33 #2 - Are toxic heavy metals from solar panels posing a threat to human health?
I've notice the right wing propaganda machine is quite keen on aerial photos of hail damaged solar farms. This contradicts the claim above that solar panels are hail proof. Is there any reliable surveys of installed panel robustness? Repairability of hail damaged panels?
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Paul Pukite at 11:01 AM on 13 November 2024Models are unreliable
Syme_Minitrue says: "and you can train the model to fit historical data "
This is a link to a unified model that gets the physics right. The data is fit according to a forcing with parameters that correspond to measured values, and cross-validated against test regions with a unique fingerprint
https://geoenergymath.com/2024/11/10/lunar-torque-controls-all/
The residual can then be evaluated for a climate change trend. Ideally, this is the way that climate change needs to be estimated. All conflating factors should be individually discriminated before the measure of interest can be isolated. That's the way it's done in other quantitative disciplines.
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Bob Loblaw at 06:48 AM on 13 November 2024Models are unreliable
A further follow-up to Syme_Minitrue's post @ 1332, where (s)he finishes with the statement:
A climate model probably contains hundreds of model parameters. Can you adjust them so that you get a good fit with historical data, and good predictive capability at a significantly lower, or even completely excluded CO2-dependency?
Let's say we wanted to run a climate model over the historical period (the last century) in a manner that "excluded CO2-dependency". How on earth (pun intended) would we do that, with a physically-based climate model?
- We could decide to remove the part of the model that says CO2 absorbs (and emits) IR radiation.
- Unfortunately, that would make our model run far too cold for the entire period, since the 19th century CO2 level of 280-300ppm is a significant source of heating that helps keep us in a stable climate of roughly 15C (as opposed to -18C that we'd expect with no atmosphere)
- This would defy the physics of IR absorption by CO2 that is easily demonstrated in a laboratory.
- We could arbitrarily decide that CO2 remain at 300ppm.
- This would be a useful experiment, and is probably what was done for the graph I included in comment 1334...
- ...but this defies the actual physical measurements of rising CO2, so it can hardly be argued that this model experiment can explain actual temperature observations.
- We could run the model so that the first 300ppm of CO2 absorbs IR radiation, but the CO2 content above 300ppm does not.
- This makes no physical sense, since all CO2 molecules act the same. We can't use "special pleading" for some.
- And once we remove the effects of rising CO2, how would we change other model calculations to compensate for the lack of CO2 warming? i.e., what would "fit" the model to the observed increase in temperatures?
- We could arbitrarily increase solar input...
- ...but this defies our physical measurements of solar irradiance.
- We could arbitrarily change cloud cover
- but we have no physical measurements that would support this.
- We could arbitrarily change surface albedo, vegetation, etc...
- but we run into the same problem: we have physical measurements of the properties of these factors, and it's hard to justify using values that are different from the known measured values.
In comment 1334, I linked to a review I did of a paper that claimed to be able to fit recent temperature trends with a model that showed a small CO2 effect. I said it was badly flawed.
- The paper in question did pretty much what Syme_Minitrue expressed concern about: doing a statistical fit to a large number of parameters, many of which defied any plausible physical meaning.
- As long as your parameters can perform all sorts of non-physical gymnastics in an effort to fit the data, you can easily come up with some rather odd results.
- When your model parameters are limited to physically-measurable values, "fitting" gets a lot harder.
Physically-based models in climate science generally get "fit" by trying to get the physics right.
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nigelj at 06:29 AM on 13 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
The AI (artificial intelligence) does appear to use a lot of electricity. It raises the issue of where we should cut our electricity use to help mitigate the climate problem. One can talk about focusing on meeting needs rather than wants. We probably need some basics to survive in cities like a fridge and electric stove and a radio and home heating. We dont really need a television and vaccum cleaners and cars and fancy audio systems, and travelling to other countries or even cars in most cases. We probably mostly dont need AI unless it helps the healthcare sector. We dont even really need computers. We sure don't need bitcoin.
But wants are also very important. Its what makes life nice. So we have to decide on what wants are legitimate. Is a television legitimate? If it is, what sort of television is legitimate? How much long distance motorised travel is appropriate? Its all a nightmare really.
And one persons wants are another persons needs. Even deciding on what is a need and a want is not as easy as it seems. A computer is a perfect example. Its not absoluely essential but its getting close to being essential?
I'm not a huge energy user myself. Im just highlighting some of the challenges in figuring out wants versus needs, and what constitutes a workable low energy use society, and getting people to voluntarily adopt this.
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One Planet Only Forever at 04:49 AM on 13 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
Comparing the Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT presentations I prefer the summary statements provided by ChatGPT.
However, neither of the presentations are particualrly useful to me. They would be useful if they presented the linked list of articles in each category like the SkS New Research for Week ... (most recent week link).
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Evan at 02:34 AM on 13 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
Cleanair27 and BaerbelW
Even if I knew that the AI used here by SkS increased emissions, I would be for it. It is easy to say that we should use crowd sourcing, but such activities must be managed, by humans, and the humans maintaining SkS are overworked. SkS provides an extremely valuable educational resource, and I am all for anything that improves the consistency, accuracy, etc. of the SkS product while lowering the work load on the SkS human.
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MA Rodger at 21:24 PM on 12 November 2024Models are unreliable
Syme_Minitrue @1332,
You suggest CO2 can be extracted from climate models and it would be "then hard to use that model to claim that CO2 is what drives global warming." You then add "I have done a little bit of searching but not found any such falsification attempt."
I would suggest it is your searches that are failing as there are plenty "such falsification attempt(s)." They do not have the resources behind them to run detailed models like the IPCC does today. But back in the day the IPCC didn't have such detailed models yet still found CO2 driving climate change.
These 'attempts' do find support in some quarters and if they had the slightest amount of merit they would drive additional research. But they have all, so far, proved delusional, usually the work of a know bunch of climate deniers with nothing better to do.
Such clownish work, or perhaps clownish presentation of work, has been getting grander but less frequent through the years. An exemplar is perhaps Soon et al (2023) 'The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data'. Within the long list of authors I note Harde, Humlum, Legates, Moore and Scafetta who are all well known for these sorts of papers usually published in journals of little repute. If such work was onto something, it would be followed up by further work. That is how science is supposed to work.
Instead all we see is the same old stuff recycled again and again by the same old autors and being shown to be wrong again and again.
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BaerbelW at 06:45 AM on 12 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
Cleanair27 @ 1
Thanks for your comment! It's definitely a good thing to keep energy consumption of AI in mind, but somewhat counterintuitively this study from earlier this year found that utilizing AI for a task like the one we used it for - namely to create the categorized summary of the many shared articles - is apparently a lot more energy efficient than doing it manually:
"The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans" -
Bob Loblaw at 06:26 AM on 12 November 2024Models are unreliable
Syme_Minitrue @ 1332:
Your comment contains several misunderstandings of how models are developed and tested, and how science is evaluated.
To begin, you start with the phrase "If a hypothesis should be considered proven..." Hypotheses are not proven: they are supported by empirical evidence (or not). And there is lots and lots of empirical evidence that climate models get a lot of things right. They are not "claimed to be true" (another phrase you use), but the role of CO2 in recent warming is strongly supported.
In your second and third paragraphs, you present a number of "alternative explanations" that you think need to be considered. Rest assured that none of what you present is unknown to climate science, and these possible explanations have been considered. Some of them do have effects, but none provide an explanation for recent warming.
In your discussion of "parameters", you largely confuse the characteristics of purely-statistical models with the characteristics of models that are largely based on physics. For example, if you were to consider Newton's law of gravity, and wanted to use it to model the gravitational pull between two planets, you might think there are four "parameters" involved: the mass of planet A, the mass of planet B, the distance between them, and the gravitational constant. None of the four are "tunable parameters", though. Each of the four is a physical property that can be determined independently. You can't change the mass of planet A that you used in calculating the gravitational pull with planet B, and say that planet A has a different mass when calculating the attraction with planet C.
Likewise, many of the values used in climate model equations have independently-determined values (with error bars). Solar irradiance does not change on Tuesday because it fits better - it only changes when our measurements of solar irradiance show it is changing, or (for historical data prior to direct measurement) some other factor has changed that we know is a reliable proxy indicator for past solar irradiance. We can't make forests appear and disappear on an annual basis to "fit" the model. We can't say vegetation transpires this week and not next to "fit" the model (although we can say transpiration varies according to known factors that affect it, such as temperature, leaf area, soil moisture, etc.)
And climate models, like real climate, involve a lot of interconnected variables. "Tuning" in a non-physical way to fit one output variable (e..g. temperature) will also affect other output variables (e.g. precipitation). You can't just stick in whatever number you want - you need to stick with known values (which will have uncertainty) and work within the known measured ranges.
Climate models do have "parameterizations" that represent statistical fits for some processes - especially at the sub-grid scale. But again, these need to be physically reasonable. And they are often based on and compared to more physically-based models that include finer detail (and have evidence to support them). This is often done for computational efficiency - full climate models contain too much to be able to include "my back yard" level of detail.
You conclude with the question "Can you adjust them so that you get a good fit with historical data, and good predictive capability at a significantly lower, or even completely excluded CO2-dependency?" The answer to that is a resounding No. In the 2021 IPCC summary for policy makers, figure SPM1 includes a graph of models run with and without the anthropogenic factors. Here is that figure:
Note that "skeptics" publish papers from time to time purporting to explain recent temperature trends using factors other than CO2. These papers usually suffer from major weaknesses. I reviewed one of them a couple of years ago. It was a badly flawed paper. In general, the climate science community agrees that recent warming trends cannot be explained without including the role of CO2.
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Charlie_Brown at 06:23 AM on 12 November 2024Models are unreliable
Syme_Minitrue @ 1332
That is an incorrect way to prove the null hypothesis or to demonstrate falsification. Climate models are not simple empirical models. They contain a mix of fundamental principles, including the laws of physics, as well as tunable parameters for uncertain factors. One cannot simply remove radiant energy, which follows the physics of CO2, and then tune the model to an unconstrained set of empirical variables, then say that if it can be made to fit, conclude that the laws of physics are invalid. -
Syme_Minitrue at 01:28 AM on 12 November 2024Models are unreliable
If a hypothesis should be considered proven it must stand up against falsification attempts. If you take a climate model as an example, and remove all CO2 dependency, and adjust all other model parameters, and you can train the model to fit historical data AND it still makes a decent prediction of future climate, it is then hard to use that model to claim that CO2 is what drives global warming. I have done a little bit of searching but not found any such falsification attempt.
For example, since early human civilisation about 1/3 of the world's forests have been cut down, farmland has been drained. This inevitably makes the soil drier and you get less daytime cumulus clouds. These clouds reflect sunlight, but disappear at night allowing long-wave CO2-radiation to escape. Most of this deforestation & drainage has happened in sync with CO2-emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution. If you can adjust/train the climate model by tuning all other model parameters (I'm sure there are hundreds in a climate model) relating to deforestation, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, cloud formation, land use, etc etc etc, and the model 1) follows the observed climate and 2) makes decent predictions into the future (relative to the training window) then the hypothesis that CO2 is what drives climate change can't be claimed to be true, based on that model.
I have done a bit of model fitting on systems way less complex than the global climate. If the model contains more than, say 5 (five) model parameters that need to be tuned to make the model fit historical data, you really start chasing your own tail. The problem becomes "ill conditioned" and several combinations of model parameters can give a good fit and make decent predictions. In such a situation, you can choose to eliminate some parameters or variables, or impose some known or suspected correlation or causality between them, to simplify the model. A model should be kept as simple as possible.A climate model probably contains hundreds of model parameters. Can you adjust them so that you get a good fit with historical data, and good predictive capability at a significantly lower, or even completely excluded CO2-dependency?
Moderator Response:[PS] Please have a decent read of the IPCC summaries of climate modelling, especially the earlier reports 3 and 4. Climate models are physics-based models, not statistical models. You cant "fit" parameters like you do in a statistical model. Parameterization of variables is extremely limited and not tuned to say global temperature. The old FAQ on climate models at https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/faq-on-climate-models/ is very useful in this. Models do include landuse change that you mention.
As to falsification, climate science makes a very large number of robust predictions like ocean heat content, changes to outgoing and incoming IR, response to volcanic eruptions etc. Observations that differ from these would indeed falsify the models (though not necessarily the science).You can still download a cut down version of GISS model that will run on a desktop. https://edgcm.columbia.edu/ Try it yourself. Good luck getting it simulate climate with CO2 depencency set to zero.
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Cleanair27 at 00:18 AM on 12 November 20242024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
Hello,
I strongly object to your using AI to prepare your weekly roundup of articles. I am sure you know how climate damaging AI is, so how do you justify this? I'm thinking of stopping my reading of your site, which I value very much, because of this change in your operations. How about considering human crowd sourceing your article roundup?
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Bob Loblaw at 06:37 AM on 11 November 2024Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
Jess Scarlett @ 6:
You're going to have to put together a much stronger argument than that if you want to convince anyone that there isn't a strong expert consensus on human-caused global warming.
For starters, is your lead question ("Have you looked into all the climate scientists gagged...") a rhetorical gambit, or are you actually asking a serious question? Are you trying to imply that the studies that have looked at the scientific literature missed a few "gagged scientists", or many, or all? Are you trying to imply that this "gagging" has been so thorough that none of their opinions have every made it into print? Or that the few that have made it into print would be a much greater number "but gagging"?
The OP here links to the full SkS rebuttal on the topic. Here is the link to the basic tab of that rebuttal, but note that there are also advanced and intermediate tabs to read. The basic rebuttal links to the various papers that have been done on the subject, and those papers give details on just what sort of searches they did to obtain the list of papers that were evaluated. Feel free to look them over and come back with an argument as to why those searches will have missed the opinions of the "gagged scientists" you seem to think exist in large numbers.
...but before you start trying to make an argument that the review system won't let opposing opinions get published, I suggest that you read this SkS article on "pal review" that shows just where bad reviewing practices exist in the climate science literature. (Hint: it's the "gagged scientists" that have historically abused the peer review system.)
But let's entertain your argument that there are a whole bunch of 'gagged scientists" that can't get published, or have chosen to remain silent out of fear. You said "...all the climate scientists gagged..." That seems to imply a large number. I'll begin with a recollection of discussing climate science with someone at a conference about 30 years ago. He made the claim that lots of scientists had reversed their opinion from global cooling in the 1970s to warming in the 1990s. (This is debunked on this post at SkS.)
- I challenged him by saying "name one".
- He prattled on about there being lots.
- Again, I said "name one".
- He kept prattling on.
- I repeated "name one".
- I held my hand up about head high and started dropped it down to chest height, waist height, and below, saying "this is your credibility dropping".
- He still didn't give a name. He never did.
So that is my challenge to you: you claim that there are scientists at CSIRO and NASA that have been gagged because they disagree with the scientific consensus. Name One. And provide some sort of link to a reliable source of information supporting that position.
Second: in the advanced tab of the full rebuttal, under "The Self-Ratings", the Original Cook et al study obtained ratings of over 2100 papers from 1200 scientists, and 97.2% of those ratings agreed with the consensus. In the following paragraph, it states that the authors' review of over 4000 abstracts indicated a 97.1% agreement with the consensus.
- My second challenge is for you to do some elementary arithmetic (I won't call it math), and tell me how many papers do you think those "gagged scientists" failed to publish, and how would the 97% number have changed if they had succeeded in publishing those papers.
- I'll give you a hint. You'd have to find nearly 2100 papers or 4000 abstracts to get it to drop to a 50% consensus.
- Good luck finding that many papers.
- ...and before you try to link to PopTech's list of papers, please read "Meet the Denominator".
Please provide us with backup of your claim.
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nigelj at 05:17 AM on 11 November 2024Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
Jess Scarlett @6, you appear to be implying scientists at CSIRO ,an Australian government funded climate change advice agency, were gagged and bullied and fired for being sceptical of anthropogenic climate change and so those left were the ones believing in anthropogenic climate change. This does not appear to be correct. It appears that the issues at CSIRO was essentially scientists were gagged, bullied and fired if they published studies or spoke out publicly in a way not consistent with the governments direction on climate science and mitigation policy, which of course varied form government to government. It appears CSIROS mangement were afraid of offending the governmnet of the day.
The scientists actually gagged, bullied or fired seemed to be scientists who spoke out publicly about climate dangers and weak emissions reduction targets and who published studies critical of weak climate mitigation schemes. For example a study by Dr Splash, a scientist, critical of emissions trading schemes and recommending a carbon tax. This is essentially the complete opposite of your claim. The following link gives a good account of the issues:
www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-05-02/csiro-missing-in-action-on-climate-advice/8479568
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Eclectic at 05:15 AM on 11 November 2024Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
Jess Scarlett @6 :
Jess, the consensus being talked about is the scientific consensus ~ IOW the evidence based consensus, which is expressed in published scientific papers. There are some (rare) scientists who disagree with the evidence, but they have failed to present any counter-evidence. (Can you still call them scientists when they are being unscientific?)
Reputable scientific journals are actually keen to publish new research ~ if it is controversial and ground-breaking . . . but it must be based on scientific evidence, not on loudmouth political opinions.
The politics of what to do about AGW is another question entirely.
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Jess Scarlett at 00:22 AM on 11 November 2024Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
Have you looked into all the climate scientists gagged after being bullied and fired for not having those scientific results in the industry the longest. Look up CSIRO bullied out of jobs or defunded. What about same as NASA scientists. So yeah nearly all scientists left to speak agree. After 2015.
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gaeshitsuki at 23:30 PM on 10 November 2024Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
And as always, people believe those who offer the best entertainment, the best phrasemongers, the simplifiers. As a result, the majority of people always choose the quick bite, instead of the paths that would lead to sustainable solutions.
The unpleasant truths fall by the wayside.
The people deserve their leaders, whom they themselves elected.
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Dale H at 22:45 PM on 10 November 2024Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
Dale H
Why don't we call it what it really is?
Global warming!
I think it would help in the consumer understanding and uptake.
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prove we are smart at 07:33 AM on 10 November 2024Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
Thanks Evan for providing that link to understand in a simple way some climate truths.
The ability and resolve to learn the why of it all is a losing battle. The internet can give us Skeptical Science but not teach us equity.
Seems to me, critical thinking has caved in to populist media messaging. The swing to the right in many western countries has reached a new peak in the consumer driven on steroids the USA.
"The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe; for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them."
Perhaps I will think this again- It seems to be a law of human nature that some people only notice things when they suffer personally.
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Evan at 00:20 AM on 10 November 2024Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
Although not a consensus statement as such, the booklet titled "Climate Change: Evidence and Causes" published jointly by the US National Academy of Sciences and the UK Royal Society is a very readable, useful resource to recommend to people who want to read something about global warming from a reputable source. This booklet serves as an implicit consensus statement by these two organizations. I highly recommend this.
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Evan at 00:12 AM on 10 November 2024Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
I have nothing to add to this useful article, except to provide a shout-out for the valuable list mentioned in this article of statements by scientific societies concerning global warming.
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wstephen at 07:01 AM on 9 November 2024The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
I believe that climate change, caused in large part by fossil fuel combustion and other human influences, COVARIES with all the increased temperature effects. FFI, as wilddouglascounty points out, CAUSES climate change, which has become a general term that encompasses the results listed (and others).
How would one quantify climate change except with its covariates?
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Jess Scarlett at 23:52 PM on 8 November 2024The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
Great link to some scary technologies in the name of climate and net zero are geo engineering and mining into rich carbon storage for minierals in the deep sea.
Moderator Response:[BL] Link activated.
The web software here does not automatically create links. You can do this when posting a comment by selecting the "insert" tab, selecting the text you want to use for the link, and clicking on the icon that looks like a chain link. Add the URL in the dialog box.Also keep in mind that it helps to give some explanation of what people should expect to find at the link, and how it relates to the topic being discussed. Your description is a little short on details.
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Jess Scarlett at 23:48 PM on 8 November 2024The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
The problem is geo engineering is now a private industry and not to be written off as conspiracy any more. If you start puttinh dangerous chemicals in the atmosphere it effects wild fires, effecrs staristics and real comparitive data.
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wilddouglascounty at 15:35 PM on 8 November 2024The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
Of course you cannot do controlled experiments in climate science, because we don't have another set of planets to do double blind experiments with. That doesn't mean that we can't have a good understanding of the physical role fossil fuel emissions play in the climate system of the planet we live on. We understand enough of the physics of the parts to create models that we can backcast and refine, and compare against alternatives, right? Do you have a better physical model that explains the climate change data without needing fossil fuel emissions playing the part that they do according to our measurements of what the physical properties of those gases are?
The causal links between fossil fuel emissions and the dynamics of the climate system is good science that only gets better and better with time. Hence the need to start clarifying that fossil fuel emissions are driving the new extremes, without the reified abstraction of "climate change" as the driver.
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Paul Pukite at 11:51 AM on 8 November 2024The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
The issue is that controlled experiments and clinical trials can prove that drugs can enhance human performance. Recall reading this article Drug Test years ago by the now never-Trumper Stuart Stevens who was doing experiments as himself as a test subject.
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/drug-test/
Alas, no such controlled experiments in climate science, which always places any extrapolations under suspicion.
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wilddouglascounty at 10:27 AM on 8 November 2024The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
My issue is that we are missing the point when we are saying that climate change CAUSES anything. Specifically, good science has established the following causal links:
Fossil fuel emissions (FFE) > changed atmospheric chemistry > increased temperatures(IT).
FFE > IT > more frequent, severe droughts>more extreme wildfires
FFE > IT > more frequent, severe flooding caused by increased water in atmosphere
FFE > IT > poleward shift of species habitats
FFE > IT > increased glacial melt>sea level rise, exacerbated by expansion of water volume by it being warmer
FFE > IT > warmer oceans > coral bleaching, myriad other effects
FFE > increased acidification of oceans>plankton die-offs>myriad other effects
Where is the causal link to climate change? "Climate change" is an abstraction that has been reified to give it causal qualities that it doesn't have. This reified abstraction has been given false attribution qualities that properly belong to fossil fuel emissions.
People understand that anabolic steroids enhance performance of athletes, and injecting fossil fuel emissions into the air is juicing the atmospheric chemistry in exactly the same manner. Folks will understand this causal link in exactly the same way if we only use the term "climate change" as the OUTCOME of fossil fuel emissions, not the CAUSE of the changes that are taking place. That belongs to fossil fuel emissions.
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One Planet Only Forever at 07:42 AM on 8 November 2024The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
wilddouglascounty,
I generally agree. However, I would add that it is essential to also include the harmful fact of misleading marketing success. That would make the important point something like “the increasing damage being done by the successful misleading marketing promotion and excusing of prolonged harmful abuse of fossil fuels”.
The most problematic part of “business as usual” is the “successful misleading marketing”. That also applies to politics, especially to politics influenced by business or religious interests.
Political, business and religious pursuits can be motivated by a desire to learn to be less harmful and more helpful to others. But in competitions for perceptions of status (wealth, popularity, power) the motivations to benefit from being more harmful and less helpful, motivation to get away with cheating, can overpower more ethical and moral understanding.
People who allow their ‘pursuit of learning to be less harmful and more helpful to others’ to be overpowered or compromised by interests that conflict with learning to be less harmful and more helpful are a serious concern. Their impacts can add up to ‘massive tragedies of the commons’.
And people who try to benefit from misleading other people need to be understood to be behaving criminally rather than being excused or being admired for their appearances of success, especially in business and politics.
SkS is very helpful in efforts to reduce the success of misleading marketing (development and spreading of disinformation and misinformation).
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wilddouglascounty at 00:18 AM on 8 November 2024The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
I think the scientific community needs to be more direct about the causality of the changes we are seeing in the atmosphere, oceans and land. Fossil fuel emissions are absolutely driving the changes that are occurring, and yet so much of what is put out by the scientific community and journalists is a variation of: "climate change is the source of the extreme weather events/coral bleaching/poleward shift of species....etc."
Much is being done to delineate how much the probability of an individual extreme weather event or wildfire has been changed by climate change, and yet this does not point the causality back to the source!
We do not say that a sporting event performance change caused the latest world record in a track and field event to be broken if performance enhancing drugs were involved: we say that the use of anabolic steroids caused the improved performance that resulted in the new world record! And since performance enhancing drugs injure the athletes, their use has been banned.
The scientific community needs to do the same thing and start making those causal connections to the rest of our communities: fossil fuel emissions have juiced the atmospheric chemistry (as well as the oceans) and the results are enhanced weather events: more extreme flooding, droughts, more wildfires, a shift in habitable zones for species, etc.
This is the point that needs to driven in over and over again: the public understands the deleterious effects of performance enhancing drugs, and they can do the same with understanding the causal effects of fossil fuel emissions if we stop obscuring this dynamic by calling it all being caused by "climate change." Even "climate change triggered by human activity" or even "climate change caused by fossil fuels" doesn't cut it if we want the causal link to be very clear, which is exactly what we need if we expect folks to change their habits.
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Paul Pukite at 07:31 AM on 5 November 2024Climate Risk
Bob, It is a slow warming shown over the span of a 1000 years. Might as well classify it as a stable temperature, which is also not totally unexpected for zero further emissions — i.e. none of the excess CO2 is sequestering. There are scores of references to an adjustment time of >> millenia for CO2.
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Bob Loblaw at 06:39 AM on 5 November 2024Climate Risk
Paul:
The paper in question does not seem to directly assess exactly what causes their model to continue slow warming after reaching net zero, but they discuss a number of possibilities. They discuss a number of outputs - not just global mean temperature.
How certain are they? In their abstract, they state (emphasis added) "Our findings suggest substantial long-term climate changes are possible even under net-zero emission pathways."
And in the closing section of the paper, they say things like "The results presented in this study use one of our best available modelling tools to understand future climates under net-zero emissions, but improved understanding of slow climate processes and the potential for sudden-onset changes is needed.", and "The hope with this model framework is that other groups might consider running similar simulations", and "... but further work is needed to comprehensively understand climate changes beyond emission cessation."
In other words, they are accepting that this may be a feature of their model that will not be found by others, and encourage others to try similar model experiments.
Yes, it would not surprise me if Curry is reading the tweet and misinterpreting it as "climate change because [not CO2]".
