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John Hartz at 23:56 PM on 24 March 20142014 SkS Weekly Digest #12
icefest & Tom Curtis:
The errors you pointed out have been corrected. Thank you for bringing them to our attetnion.
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Gary Marsh at 23:17 PM on 24 March 2014Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated
Based on my estimation above (see 29.) 130 cubic kilometres of water directly lost each year to deforestation, spread over the world ocean surface of aproximatly 361 million square kilometres would equate to aproximately a 0.3mm rise per year, this allows for a percentage that would end up in rivers, reservoirs the atmosphere and the ground. I'm not a scientist or a skilled resercher so my quantities and sums must be checked, this is a significant figure so surely it is being accounted for somewhere and I'm just not finding it?
Moderator Response:(Rob P) - No, the scenario you conjured up isn't accounted for. Not sure why this would surprise you given that you seem unwilling to read the scientific literature on sea level rise and provide zero supporting evidence for your scenario.
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Gary Marsh at 20:57 PM on 24 March 2014Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated
BTW I can't see a facility to edit our posts, my last one double entried when my web browser had to "recover the webpage"... sorry!
Moderator Response:[JH] Your duplicate post has been deleted.
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Gary Marsh at 20:56 PM on 24 March 2014Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated
In case my last direct tinyurl link breaks, you can use this one but National Geographic will want you to sign in with email or facebook to read the article. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/05/120531-groundwater-depletion-may-accelerate-sea-level-rise/?
To sumarise a snip from the article referring to the work of a team of Dutch scientists led by hydrologist Yoshihide Wada
"Newly constructed reservoirs above ground can offset the net loss of water underground. These, Wada said, trap water that would otherwise reach the sea. Before 1990 or so, he added, that offset was large enough that the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change never took groundwater depletion into account in predicting 21st-century sea-level rise. But that offset is no longer as significant as it once was, Wada said. "There are not so many places where people can build new reservoirs," he said. "They are already built."
Already, he and his colleagues have found, groundwater depletion is adding about 0.6 millimeters per year (about one-fortieth of an inch) to the Earth's sea level. By 2050, he said, the triple pressures of growing population, economic development, and higher irrigation needs due to a warming climate will increase that to 0.82millimeters per year—enough to raise sea levels by 40 millimeters (1.6 inches) above 1990 levels. Between 2050 and 2100, according to some estimates, sea levels would rise even faster. To put that in perspective, he said, groundwater depletion adds about 25 percent to projected rates of sea-level rise, making it the largest contributor from land to sea-level rise other than the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Even the melting of glaciers in the world's high mountains won't contribute more to rising sea levels, Wada said."
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Gary Marsh at 20:44 PM on 24 March 2014Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated
Glenn Tamblyn
You are correct, I mistakenly thought the resevoir and surface water effect was taken into account in this study. The following article from the National Geographic News updates the information somewhat, whilst raising further points for consideration :) http://tinyurl.com/NatGeo-Groundwater It also mentions the forest effect, though having not found figures for this I am going to estimate an average of 1cubic metre height of water lost per square metre of forest/rainforest loss, to take into account water held in ground, biomass, roots, animals, above surface trees plants and atmospheric humidity, this would equal one cubic kilometre of water every 1000 kilometres of forest lost, times this by 130 000 square kilimetres lost per year = 130 cubic kilometres of extra water per year that ends up largely in the sea. I would apreciate informed comments as to how far off my estimations are and as to if there is any significance to this quantily of yeatly increase affecting sea level rise... Mind you that last part I should be able to find out myself.. it's the per square kilometre water storage capacity of forest and attendents that are hard for me to assess.
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Andy Skuce at 19:02 PM on 24 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Anyone who thinks that the consensus is significantly less than 97% can demonstrate this relatively easily. All they have to do is to find, let's say, 5-10% or more papers in a given random sample that implicitly or explicitly reject humans as the main cause of global warming. They don't have to do a fine sub-classification like we did, or sort the no-position papers from the rest, just find the thumbs-down papers. (Hint, some doubters of AGW already have some long--and dubious--lists of papers that supposedly reject AGW, so you could just search for them in any given sample.)
A few hours of careful work requiring no special equipment and Cook et al could, in principle, be falsified. Several people who question our work seem to have put lots of effort into writing blogposts, examining our statistics, submitting formal rebuttals, making FOI requests and writing angry letters to all and sundry. Yet, if they were right, a convincing knock-out punch would be easy to deliver, just by looking through a random sample of scientific papers on climate change. But this work has not even been tried, or if it has, it hasn't been reported.
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DAK4Blizzard at 16:04 PM on 24 March 20142014 SkS Weekly Digest #12
California, which has been in the news for its warm and dry winter, had an overall average temperature of 48F from December to February. According to NCDC, this was about 4.5F above average and the hottest winter by 2F since records began in 1895. NCDC
What's very concerning is a winter like this could become more typical by late century even if our emissions are kept from passing 500 ppm. In a higher emissions scenario,
in which CO2 concentration reaches 500 ppm by mid-century and reaches 800-900 ppm by late century, California can expect an average year to be at least 3F warmer than this one by late century. EPA When the average temperature increases by that much, you can expect water to be a severe issue even in years with normal rainfall, as mountain snow-pack will retreat and evaporation will increase.
In other words, even by late this century the southern Central Valley could approach the environment depicted in the cartoon. -
Tom Curtis at 16:01 PM on 24 March 20142014 SkS Weekly Digest #12
icefest @2, Brandon Seah is the person who asked a question of Randall Munroe, which Randall Munroe then answered in the post linked to above.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 15:47 PM on 24 March 2014Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated
Gary Marsh
What the IGRAC page is missing is another change to the land water balance which is empoundment - the building of surface water storages. Some time back I read a study - I don't recall now where it was - that estimated the increase of surface water storage in dams etc. Serendipitously this roughly balances out the loss of groundwater.
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icefest at 14:28 PM on 24 March 20142014 SkS Weekly Digest #12
I think you meant 'xkcd' and not 'sckd'. If so, then you probably meant "Randall Munroe" instead of "Brandon Seah" (who is Brandon Seah anyway?).
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DSL at 13:18 PM on 24 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Sloganeering, DB? More like Hubris ad Absurdum.
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Rob Honeycutt at 11:13 AM on 24 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis... My point is substantive if you care to entertain the idea. What I'm telling you is that you can cast stones all day long, never hitting a target and convince no one, including yourself, of anything.
If you have genuine questions about what the reality is regarding the consensus of the published research, test the results yourself. Just be ready to adjust your position on this issue when you do.
My guess is, much like everyone I've ever argued with who rejects AGW, you're not really interested in the reality of the situation. You're merely interested in testing your throwing arm.
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Tom Curtis at 10:59 AM on 24 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis @5&11:
With regard to Schollenberger's criticism of Cook et al, Victor Venema had this to say:
"if you scan the manuscript, you find that much of what you “discovered” in the stolen forum posts was already written into the article manuscript:
“Each abstract was categorized by two independent, anonymized raters. … Initially, 27% of category ratings and 33% of endorsement ratings disagreed. Raters were then allowed to compare and justify or update their rating through the web system, while maintaining anonymity. Following this, 11% of category ratings and 16% of endorsement ratings disagreed; these were then resolved by a third party.”
It would have been fair, if you would have told your readers that this was written in the article."
To that Schollenberger admited:
"I never claimed to have “discovered” anything in the SKS forums. I didn’t claim anything I said was a secret or new. Quoting one source doesn’t indicate other sources were silent on those topics."
So, right from the start much of Schollenberger's criticism consists of describing processes described in the paper, carefully not mentioning that fact, and then going "tut-tut".
There is a small measure of validity in his criticism, however. Some (5-10) abstracts were discussed in the forum, and should not have been in order to preserve independence. To calculate the effect of this, I shall assume that 50 abstracts were discussed, and that all of those were rated as endorsing the consensus. Both of these assumptions are known to be false. However, they are conservative. That is, they will massively overstate the impact of the breakdown in proceedure on the paper.
To estimate that effect, I simply reduce the number of endorsing papers by 50. The result is that the level of endorsement from abstract ratings falls from 97.1% to 97%. That is, this breakdown in procedure at most overstated endorsements by 0.1%, and did not change the headline result. It is very probable that the impact was negligible, because I have significantly overstated the number of papers involved, because not all papers involved were rated as endorsing the concensus, and because even of those endorsing the concensus, there is a high probability that the rating would not have changed to neutral, or not endorsing the consensus without the discussion.
Further, this breakdown in proceedure cannot effect the author ratings which also show a 97% endorsement rate.
Now, the question for you is - did you realize these facts before raising the issue? If not, why did you raise it, given as you claim to be pressed for time?
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wili at 10:14 AM on 24 March 20142014 SkS Weekly Digest #12
Mauna Loa--March 22 - 399.98ppm--So barely over a degree below 400, not enough to of set 6 days mostly well above that number. So the last week's official average is above 400 for the first time this year and only the second time in history (and for millions of years before history started, iirc): " Week beginning on March 16, 2014: 400.76 ppm "http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
News worthy??
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MP3CE at 08:16 AM on 24 March 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 7
Realy KUDOS to you, guys !!! What a great job you do here!
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Phronesis at 06:44 AM on 24 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Guys, has anyone responded substantively to anything I said in my last round? I don't see anything.
Tom Curtis offers an insight about my intentions, that it is a "gish gallop". I don't know what that means, but I assume it's not charitable.
Michael Sweet cites the AAAS report. My earlier posts undercut one of the three sources used in that report, so I'm not sure why the report would be a counterargument. (Or why any of these reports should be interesting, given that they don't use standard scientific methods for aggregating knowledge, e.g. meta-analyses, at least not the AAAS.)
Dunkerson says that I mentioned Oreskes' 75% figure and that I later mentioned how we have no idea what was done in that study (because the paper doesn't tell us). I take the argument to be that the number of problems I've discovered with Oreskes, or the order I in which I've presented them, somehow refutes me?
Honeycutt regrets piling on another irrelevant, non-substantive reply, and talks about Cook. I had asked a question about whether the Cook et al study used independent rates, as stated in the paper. Honeycutt doesn't answer that question, but invites me to start rating abstracts.
(-snip-).
( -snip-.)
Moderator Response:[DB] Sloganeering snipped.
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Gary Marsh at 01:23 AM on 24 March 2014Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated
Has anyone encountered informaiton showing how much water is pushed to other parts of the ecosystem whenever there is a loss of rainforest, or deforestation in general, whether to desertification or increased agricultural/farming practices etc.. i.e. 130000 to 150000 km loss per year is a lot of moisture pushed into other parts of the planets storage capability! without having done the research I would imagine the quantity over the past 60 years is enough to skew the data?
I only today read about the relationship of human pumping of groundwater to increased sea level rise. http://www.un-igrac.org/publications/422 snippet "because most of the groundwater released from the aquifers ultimately ends up in the world's oceans, it is possible to calculate the contribution of groundwater depletion to sea level rise. This turned out to be 0.8 mm per year, which is a surprisingly large amount when compared to the current sea level rise of 3.3 mm per years as estimated by the IPCC. It thus turns out that almost half of the current sea level rise can be explained by expansion of warming sea water, just over one quarter by the melting of glaciers and ice caps and slightly less than one quarter by groundwater depletion. Previous studies have identified groundwater depletion as a possible contribution to sea level rise. However, due to the high uncertainty about the size of its contribution, groundwater depletion is not included in the latest IPCC report. This study confirms with higher certainty that groundwater depletion is indeed a significant factor"
This got me wondering about the ground biomass canopy and animal life storage capacity of the vast forest losses each year.
Moderator Response:(Rob P) - See the SKS rebuttal: Sea level fell in 2010. There is a large year-to-year , and decadal-scale, exchange of water mass between the continents and ocean mainly due to rainfall patterns forced by La Nina & El Nino. The strong La Nina dominance over the last decade or so has stored greater-than-normal water mass on land. See Jensen (2013) - Land water contribution to sea level from GRACE and Jason-1 measurements & Baur (2013) - Continental mass change from GRACE over 2002–2011 and its impact on sea level - free copies are available online.
This is part of the reason for the smaller-than-anticipated sea level rise in recent times - since the early 2000's anomalous water mass, equivalent to 0.2mm of sea level rise per year, has been stored on land. This is consistent with the increase in land vegetation (Net Primary Productivity) during that time. See: Bastos (2013) - The global NPP dependence on ENSO: La Niña and the extraordinary year of 2011.
No surprise that water availability impacts plant growth. But a return to El Nino-dominant conditions (the positive phase of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation) hints at major problems in the near-future. Sea level should rise more sharply too as the water mass drains from the continents.
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John Hartz at 01:12 AM on 24 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #12B
chriskoz: Her's an article about the leaked draft report to be finalized this week in Yokahama, Japan.
Global warming to hit Asia hardest, warns new report on climate change by Robin McKie, The Observer, Mar 22, 2014
I will, of course, include this article and others like it in this week's edition of the Weekly News Roundup.
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Tom Curtis at 22:49 PM on 23 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #12B
chriskoz @1, the ABC has a story on WG2's report. I assume there was a press release or something to go with it, but no links unfortunately.
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MA Rodger at 20:25 PM on 23 March 2014Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming
The graph of North Atlantic cyclone numbers in the post could do with updating. The 10-year average has concinued to rise and now sits above 16 per year.
N Atlantic hurricane numbers & major hurricane (catagory 3+) numbers have also risen but less dramatically and have presently their own little "hiatus." Add the argument about unreliable data prior to the 1970s, and it is difficult to establish with any certainty an AGW signal above the 'natural cycles'. The same goes for N Atlantic Accumulated Cyclone Energy (see here - usually 2 clicks to 'download your attachment').
Globally, beyond the N Atlantic, the data is even less reliable prior to 1970 (as Klaus Flemløse @70 would likely agree). So that Atlantic tropical cyclone graph is a bit of a rare beast.
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chriskoz at 18:52 PM on 23 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #12B
No news on the big event this week: the IPCC WGII meeting in Yokohama JP?
According to the current schedule, the Core Writing Team are already there and should be approving their AR5 as soon as Tuesday.
Is there any pre-release/summary available or do we need to wait until the official release at the end of week? -
Klaus Flemløse at 06:45 AM on 23 March 2014Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming
My analysis of the number of tropical storms only covers the period 1970-2012. This is the weak point, as far as I do not have data going back further. Therefore, I do not know if the development is caused by natural variations or if it is a result of the global warming. However the development is in line with the expectation from the global warming.
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Sapient Fridge at 06:21 AM on 23 March 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 7
A very well told explanation! Fascinating.
Can someone create a single page with a summary and links to the whole story so it can be linked to and referenced easily, rather than linking to the 7 pieces as is required now?
Moderator Response:[BL] I'll look at doing that. I have to make some simple programming changes, first, but when they're done I'll create it and add links to the separate parts to the "Table of Contents" that links to all 7 parts.
[BL] Try this: A Hack By Any Other Name — Index. I'll add links to it to all 7 posts, and fill out the timeline... eventually. It's a bit of a chore, but I'll get there.
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Daniel Bailey at 01:03 AM on 23 March 2014Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming
That is such a collossal disconnect in logic that words fail me...
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UncleBucket at 22:56 PM on 22 March 2014Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming
A new denialist argument that I'm seeing more and more is that because the USA experienced fewer hurricanes in 2013 than in some previous years, global warming has stopped or is disproven!
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slcochran at 08:16 AM on 22 March 2014The Myth Debunking One-Pager
Michael Whittemore is correct. If you start with your opponent's frame, no matter how you want to precondition it, you reinforce it. To avoid doing so, state your position, and then you can point out what an ass the other side is (or words to that effect). A very good read on this phenomenon is George Lakoff's book, "Don't Think of an Elephant."
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adrian smits at 07:08 AM on 22 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
Actually the latest peer reviewed evidence out of Sweden December 2013 seems to indicate that the little ice age was far more wide spread than preveliously thought.
Moderator Response:[TD] Please provide a real citation rather than just a country and a month.
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gws at 04:39 AM on 22 March 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 7
Bob, you did it! I "project" your series is going to become the most read SkS posts in a "long time" (sorry, read too much J. Curry stuff). You missed your profession as a science writer ... Hat tip!
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adrian smits at 04:08 AM on 22 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
According to J S Sawyer the warming He estimated was a natural rebound from the little ice age so what was so ground breaking about His work?
Moderator Response:[TD] See the rebuttal to the myth "We're Coming Out of the Little Ice Age." Just one of the flaws in that myth is that the Little Ice Age was not global.
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Rob Honeycutt at 02:43 AM on 22 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis... I don't want to pile on here but would just like to offer one suggestion.
When a scientist gets his hackles up over some published finding, usually the response is to test the results him/herself. This is something you can easily do yourself. You don't need to review 12,000 papers. Honestly, Cook et al was way overkill in regards to what is statistically necessary to establish the point.
There are two easy ways to do this. Here on the SkS site, you can rate abstracts yourself! If for some reason you don't trust the system that SkS has set up, that's fine. Just go to google scholar and start pulling up papers. Set up your own spreadsheet to check the results.
You can get a rational statistical sampling with a couple hundred papers. That might take a few hours to process. But then you know for yourself with data created by someone you trust. You!
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Composer99 at 02:23 AM on 22 March 2014There is no consensus
I'm kind of curious if anyone can show that the mainstream medical science position on gastric ulcers prior to Warren & Marshall's work was anything like as well-supported by evidence or as well-endorsed by the practicing researchers of the time as the scientific consensus of global warming is today.
The interview with Marshall that michael sweet linked to suggests such is not the case, which is likely another reason why the case of Helicobacter is a poor choice in attacking the scientific consensus on global warming.
Another relevant passage from the interview:
One of the things that happened with me is that I was interested in computers, even in 1980 with e-mail, but it was really teletypes in those days. Our library had just got a line to the National Library of Medicine. So I came in and started doing literature searches, because I was interested in computers and it was fun for me. But I started trying to track these bacteria. And I found various, very widespread, dispersed references to things in the stomach, which seemed to be related to the bacteria, going back nearly 100 years. So that we could then develop a hypothesis that these bacteria were causing some problem in the stomach, and maybe that was leading to ulcers. And then, instead of having to do 20 years of research checking out all those different angles, the research was done, but it was never connected up. And so, with the literature searching, as it became available, we were able to pick out the research that was already there and put together this coherent pattern, which linked bacteria and ulcers. It didn't happen overnight. We actually thought about it for two years before we were reasonably confident. It was really quite a few years before we were absolutely water-tight.
(Parenthetically, Marshall goes on at some length about how he likely could have made more progress advancing the hypothesis if he himself had been more diplomatic.)
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Composer99 at 01:54 AM on 22 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis:
With respect to your desire for information regarding the severity of global warming impacts, etc. - read the IPCC Assessment Reports. That is their purpose.
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michael sweet at 01:50 AM on 22 March 2014There is no consensus
Prosensus:
Here is how Barry Marshall described his first presentation of his hypothesis about H. pilori in 1986:
"Barry Marshall: Well, I was fairly confident at that stage, and I was sticking my neck out.
I knew there'd be a lot of Americans there. And we were then challenging for the America's Cup. And so, in fact, I got up and I really threw down the gauntlet. My first slide was a photo of Perth in Western Australia, lovely river and sea, and a yacht. And I said, "This is Perth, Western Australia, and this is the yacht that's going to win the America's Cup in 19..." I think it was '86 or '87. And everybody, "Ahh!" You know, paper balls were being thrown at me. And then I went on to present the new bacteria. I wasn't totally alone though, because I had connected up with the head bacteriologist in England who was interested in that species or that type of bacteria. I'd visited with him for a couple of days before the conference and he had kind of given me a little more confidence than usual, and backed me up on it. As he introduced me, he said, "Well, this is Barry Marshall. He's got this wonderful, interesting new bacteria." So although people were skeptical, and they all went home with the aim of trying to prove me wrong, that's how science moves forward. Someone has a hypothesis and you say, "Okay, if I can prove it wrong, I can publish a paper saying he's wrong." Gradually, over the next few years, one by one, these people trying to prove me wrong fell by the wayside and actually converted over to my side, and became experts in their own right, in helicobacter." source
Doesn't seem to me like "castigation and excoriation." He received the Warren Alpert Prize in 1994, only 8 years later, from the Australian Medical Association. Sounds more like the data was fairly checked and accepted, as you would expect for any new claim. Can you provide a cite to support your wild claim that Marshall was not treated fairly??? It would mean more if you can support your wild claims.
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Jubble at 00:10 AM on 22 March 2014The Myth Debunking One-Pager
I very much agree with @BC, in general and with regards the example. I would be happy to volunteer to help reword if a team effort is required, although I'd need to use the science presented to help do the job rather than my own knowledge, which is not as rounded as other posters here.
On a related note, I have come to realise that a lot of the information provided by e.g. Watts is or appears very detailed, and is not completely dealt with by rebuttals. At a higher level of detail, logic says to me that the Watts arguments must be flawed, but the information to debunk them completely is not immediately apparent. A good example is the one presented by @BC above.
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Dikran Marsupial at 23:18 PM on 21 March 2014There is no consensus
Prosensus, you need to look at the bigger picture. Galileos are extremely rare, but crackpots are extremely common. Marshalls and Warrens are a bit less rare, but they are still way outnumbered by scientists that make bit claims that go against the scientific mainstream in their fields, but who are simply mistaken (e.g. Wakefield, Essenhigh, Salby etc.). The existence of people like Marshall and Warren illustrates that the existence of a consensus is not absolute proof of anything, but it also doesn't mean that consensus is not good evidence of something being true. You need to look at the relative frequencies of the consensus being correct and it being incorrect. Sadly the cases where the consensus is correct (e.g. Salby) tend not to go unreported.
Nobody is "hiding behind consensus" (frankly that is just the sort of rhetoric we could all do without). The value of the consensus is demonstrated by the fact that the skeptic scientists keep going on about the lack of consenus, which led to papers like TCP. Science generally isn't concerned with consensus as the scientists are able to form an informed opinion on the topic for themselves. The same is not true of the general public, who don't have the scientific background to do this on every topic, which is one of the reasons we have scientific bodies such as the Royal Society, the Royal Statistical Society, the IPCC etc, which show where the mainstream scientific position lies in a way that can be appreciated by the general public.
"The day we stop questioning consensus is the day science dies." this is a nice soundbite, but nothing more. If by "we" you mean the general public then the statement if obviously incorrect, science can operate perfectly well without external questioning. If "we" meant the scientists, *they* are not very interested in following the consensus, the cutting edge is where advances are made, so "questioning the consensus" is their day job.
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MA Rodger at 23:03 PM on 21 March 2014There is no consensus
Prosensus @585.
Do you not think your own analogy is itself pretty rubbish.
Firstly Marshall & Warren developed they hypothesis in 1982. Twenty-three years later they had been awarded the Nobel prize for Medicine. Of the contrarian work in climatology, I see no candidate whatever worthy of any sort of award or commendation. And how long have these numpties been at it?
Secondly, while Marshall & Warren fought against a consensus, that concensus was not itself wrong as people do get ulcers and stomach cancer because of stress. What the concensus was missing was that there was a microbial cause also acting. It was because 50% of humanity are infected with that microbe and the vast majority do not suffer ulcers that gave Marshall & Warren such an up-hill battle.
You appear to be arguing that humanity should ignore science because there are always questions for science to answer. Such an argument is nonsense.
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The Myth Debunking One-Pager
The Skeptical Science section "Most Used Climate Myths" seems to have some pretty strong versions of the myth being addressed, not weak, flu shot versions. Should these be changed in the light of this one pager when updates are made? All's fair ...
As an example the "Are surface temperatures reliable" myth contains the statement - "In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source." (Watts 2009)" This part of the myth wasn't addressed in the response as far as I could see. Nor does it seem that relevant to the important issues being discussed. But it does add weight to the myth with impressive stats.
Anyway I don't want to be critical of the fantastic work done here and the huge committment put into it. So please regard this as a constructive criticism.
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Prosensus at 22:12 PM on 21 March 2014There is no consensus
@scaddenp - Unfortunately, your analogy isn't a good one. 30 years ago the consensus scientific opinion in the medical community was that stomach ulcers were caused by lifestyle and stress factors. Two "cranks", Drs. Barry Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren, postulated that bacterium H. pylori was the culprit. What was the initial reaction in the medical establishment? Castigation and excoriation. This lasted for years until both doctors were eventually exonerated by the community and went on to win the Nobel prize in medicine! Egg, meet face!
The bottom line here is that consensus, in and of itself, means little in terms of correctness and accuracy. It is a weak framing of the issue because it is a defensive mechanism that allows scientists to take comfort from a "safety in numbers" approach. Invoking the "consensus shield" is anathema to science, to which healthy questioning is the lifeblood of discovery.
The approach of directly debunking skeptic claims through evidenciary proof is much more effective than hiding behind consensus. I think the AGW community does itself a disservice by touting consensus as loudly and as often as it does. It detracts from the better tactic of taking the issues head-on, case by case.
The day we stop questioning consensus is the day science dies.
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CBDunkerson at 21:05 PM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis #1: "...you start by citing a [Oreskes] study that produce a 75% consensus level"
Phronesis #4: "We have no idea what the Oreskes study did."
So you've gone from claiming that the Oreskes study did something it provably did not, to claiming that we just can't know... even though you originally claimed we did know.
*plonk*
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michael sweet at 20:09 PM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis,
Here I linked two very recent reports (both less than one month old) from the National Academy of Science (and the Royal Society of England) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science that state clearly what they think about AGW. Both of these reports state clearly that AGW is likely to be extremely severe and that strong actions need to be taken immediately. For your convienence I have linked them again below. These reports state exactly what you claim above you need to make decisions.
What is your issue with these clearly worded reports from the top science organizations in the USA and England? All other Academies of Science in the World agree with these three organizations. The problem is that you have not bothered to try to find out what scientists clearly say.
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johncl at 18:59 PM on 21 March 2014Climate skeptic claims prebunked by Keeling
You can actually read global CO2 levels in a busy city as well since on windy days the CO2 concentration would move towards the global mean. I saw a very nice graph somewhere showing this by plotting wind speed and read CO2 levels where you could clearly see the measurements approaching the global mean.
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Tom Curtis at 17:13 PM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis @4 & 5, it is more than a little hypocritical to not respond to one issue on the basis of limited time "one thing at a time", and then to yourself introduce additional side topics. It strongly suggests your intention is a gish gallop, where you introduce topics that are rhetorically convenient, but plead time constraints to avoid having to answer on issues where you have been shown to have been both hypocritical (leaving out relevant information, while complaining about what you consider to have been relevant information having been left out) and to misrepresent the study you quote.
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Phronesis at 14:55 PM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
And is it true that the raters in Cook et al were not independent? I saw it here: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means/
Rater independence is crucial in a study based on rater data.
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chriskoz at 14:52 PM on 21 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
And don't forget about Chralie Keeling who set ground for many of Sawyer's ideas in 1960s:
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Phronesis at 14:49 PM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Hi guys. One thing at a time. We have no idea what the Oreskes study did. There is no methods section in the paper. The paper is only a page long, and the part that actually deals with the study is only 126 words long.
We're told that papers that were classified as explicitly endorsing, evaluating impacts, or mitigation proposals were lumped together as endorsing the consensus. That's all we know. Note that the fact that a paper evaluates impacts does not imply endorsement or might report small impacts. We just don't know. We can't do anything with a paper when we don't know how it was done.
We also can't be converting 75% to 100% based on a paper that includes unspecified implicit criteria for inclusion into that bucket. Your logic is sound except for the implicit part. I'm not going to infer unanimity via an implicit classification scheme, much less a complete unknown classification scheme. Is this controversial?
Also, maybe your logic isn't sound after all. Let's linger on the fact that these figures are converted into "75% of climate scientist agree", or as you would have it, "100% of climate scientists agree".
How did we get there? Papers. And we ignored papers -- and scientists -- who expressed no position (by the completely unknown filtering and coding protocol Oreskes used). The sample was much smaller than Cook -- I'm not sure why. There would technical papers, heads-down so to speak, that would address narrow issues -- not really at the level of abstraction of human caused climate change, which is pretty high level. Am I correct in assuming there'd be all manner papers related to climate mechanism that would not ever have occasion to use the relevant phrases? We don't know anything about what those scientists think. We only know about the set that were included and rated by methods we have not been apprised of.
That makes me even more reluctant to say anything definite, certainly not that 100% of climate scientist think x, y, or z.
Let me know if I've missed supplemental materials on Oreskes. I didn't see anything.
Lastly for now -- we need detailed questions, nuanced views. Endorsement of the proposition that humans impact the climate or contribute to warming or are the primary cause of warming is not useful. Not if we want to do something with this knowledge, like pass laws and so forth. We need severities, probability and confidence, scientists' views on the likely roles of different forcings and feedbacks, interpretations of the pause in mean global surface temps, estimates of consequences and benefits of warming, etc. Obviously a 1 F warming by 2100 probably doesn't justify major increases in the costs of energy, for most people. I know the lower bound of IPCC 5 is higher than that, but I'd like to know what scientists think. I'd also like to see studies they have the opportunity to just express their judgments in their own words.
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Michael Whittemore at 14:39 PM on 21 March 2014The Myth Debunking One-Pager
I find it best to start explaining the science and infer how people could mistake some section of the data but push home the facts that shows what the data is actually saying. Only then do i mention the myth and how they hide the true facts. My point is it might be best to not start with the myth but to give the information first to let them debunk the myth themselves
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Tom Curtis at 10:26 AM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis seems to have a problem with things not mentioned, but is carefull not to mention a few things himself. I'll come to that, but first lets look at Doran and Zimmerman (2009). Phronesis dismisses that as a survey of just 75 people, but that is false. It was a survey of 3,146 scientists. Among those scientists, overall 82% answered yes to question 2:
"Do you think human activity is a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?"
That question is closest to the proposition tested by Cook et al (2013). That low figure is because most scientists asked were not specialists in the relevant field, and consequently had little more knowledge on the topic than any non-scientist. Of the small portion of the those surveyed who were specialists in climate science, and actively publishing in the field so that they had up to date information, 97.4% agreed with question 2. There were only 77 of those, but they were part of a much larger sample.
Turning now to Farnsworth and Lichter (2012), we find that it is a survey of scientists, 50% of whom were members of the AMS, and 50% of whom were members of the AGU, and all of whom were listed in the American Men and Women of Science. Their 489 respondents are therefore comparable to Doran and Zimmerman's 3,146 respondents, not to the 77 publishing specialists in climatology. Further (the relevant fact Phronesis did not reveal), only 41% of those 489 actively research in any aspect of global climate science.
It is not clear how those 200 scientists compare to Doran and Zimmerman's classification. For Doran and Zimmerman, and active publisher must have published at least 50% "... of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change". That is, by a reasonable measure, at least 50% of their research must be on the topic. In contrast, the 200 scientists from Farnsworth and Lichter need only have actively researched on any aspect of climate science, ie, greater than 0% and need not have brought the research to publication. Nor need they be specialists in climatology. They are probably best equated with Doran and Zimmerman's active publishers. For the other 289, however, the closest category would be Doran and Zimmerman's non-publishers/non-climatologists.
From all of Farnsworth and Lichter's respondents, 84% responded yes to the question:
"In your opinion, is humanly induced global warming now occuring?"
Assuming Farnsworth and Lichter's non-researchers resonded at the same rate as Doran and Zimmerman's non-publishers/non-climatologists (ie,76.6% affirmative), that represents 221 affirmative responses. That leaves only 190 affirmative responses to come from Farnsworth and Lichter's researchers, meaning that 95% of them responded affirmatively.
Given the low bar on expertise set by Farnsworth and Lichter, and the strong correlation between expertise and current topic knowledge and acceptance of AGW found by Doran and Zimmerman, that 95% is surprisingly high. It shows, however, that the results of Farnsworth and Lichter is entirely consistent with those of Doran and Zimmerman, and also of Cook et al, (2013).
Phronesis may rightly reject the assumption that Farnsworth and Lichter's non-researchers affirmed AGW at the same rate as Doran and Zimmerman's as speculative. The implication of that, however, is that no comparison can reasonably be made between their results and those of Doran and Zimmerman because they do not survey groups with the same demographics. Farnsworth and Lichter would then provide information about general scientific acceptance, but not specifically about acceptance by those with specialist knowledge in the field.
Finally, Phronesis misrepresents the results of Farnworth and Lichter on expected outcomes. The question put, and results were:
"Overall, if present climate trends continue, do you regard the likely effects of global climate change in the next 50 to 100 years as:
Trivial to Catastrophic
1–3 (NET) 13
4–7 (NET) 44
8–10 (NET) 41
Don’t Know 2
Mean 6.6 "Thus, less than half (but only just less than half) think the results of current climate trends will be catastrophic, or near catastrophic. Slightly more, but still less than half think the results will be moderate, while only 13% think the results will be trivial or near trivial.
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TBH at 09:40 AM on 21 March 2014Temp record is unreliable
Siting is irrelevant, the trend line on consistent data collection the only matter of importance.
The evidence is un upward movement in temerature.
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TBH at 09:32 AM on 21 March 2014Climate's changed before
We can't argue about all the evidence shows change is occurring.
To sugest human intervention in total is not playing a role, the degree an arguement only. The human intervention, in the last 100 years must be recognised.
The speed of change being the only unknown factor, and on evidence accelaerating.
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TBH at 09:11 AM on 21 March 2014Antarctica is gaining ice
Found the article of value in terms of understanding.
The statistic seem obvious, towards,100 Giga tons of Land Ice melt, per annum, will result in 0.2mm in sea level rise, p.a. rough maths and a benchmark.
The trend line in round numbers, seem supported, by scientific evidence.
The overal position of Antartic Ice increasing correct, but peridic in nature, the desalination of the area, and lowers water tempratures, will increase freezing, perhaps minor, but will affect tidal range globally, on an annual basis.
The objective of the article that focuses on land mass ice, being the more significant component, and Sea Ice being an anual effect stated, but not quantified, as the absolute measure being the more important element.
The overall effect being higher sea levels and a slighly greater tidal range, prediction.
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