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Comments 44401 to 44450:

44401. Rob Honeycutt at 08:26 AM on 22 June 2013
       The Consensus Project data visualisation - a history
       

       James Madison...  Your position is internally contradictory (as well as off-topic, as Tom points out).  You're ostensibly agreeing that 97% of pubished research agrees that AGW is real, and yet are saying that it's not proven.  So, what is the 97% of research agreeing on?

       Think of it this way:  What are the chances that nearly all the published research has missed some critical element of climate that could explain everything we're ascribing to CO2?  Are you really willing to bet the future on those odds?

       And BTW, we can measure those elements we are ascribing to CO2.  So, not only do these highly detailed measurements have to be wrong, we have to have something else that fully explains everything that CO2 explains.

       Please consider that perhaps you do not yet fully comprehend the full body of reseach on this complicated issue.  Those who do understand, and have spent their entire professional careers working in this field, are nearly all in agreement on the broad aspects of climate change.

44402. Tom Curtis at 08:06 AM on 22 June 2013
       The Consensus Project data visualisation - a history
       

       James Madison @1, it takes a certain sort of perverseness to come to a site with hundreds of posts dealing with the questions you ask, find a post on another topic, and then ask the questions there.  I suggest, in answer to your questions that:

       1)  CO2 is a greenhouse gas;

       2)  It is not saturated; and

       3)  Climate sensitivity is very likely to be in the IPCC range of 2-4.5 C per doubling of CO2.

       Your further questions should be on those posts so that you comply with the comments policy.

       Alternatively, on this topic, topic we can discuss the continuing misrepresentations by leading "skeptics" of the level of scientific agreement on AGW; which have made both the paper and this post necessary.

44403. James Madison at 07:37 AM on 22 June 2013
       The Consensus Project data visualisation - a history
       

       OK, I'll bite. Nice project, but what really is the point of the exercise?

       As, of course, paper don't care what you write on it.

       Consensus or not, what is lacking is substantiation of the premise, that warming will be large, amplified through positive feedbacks and mostly caused by CO2.

       See even here: http://www.climate.gov/. (-snip-)?

       While increasing GHGs may or should, on net, warm the earth that is not the real question. The real question is, how much it will warm the earth. To date, I have not seen any “useful quantitative results” regarding that question.

       Once those quantitative results are in, we can proceed to the next question: what should one do about it.

       thank-you

       Moderator Response:

       [DB] Off-topic sloganeering snipped.  See this thread for an on-topic explanation as to why your snipped statement is wrong.  Lastly, review the Comments Policy of this site for an understanding of the rules of this venue.

44404. martin3818 at 06:25 AM on 22 June 2013
       2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #25B
       

       I have just been playing Arround with you graphics.

       Extremely cool!

44405. Drinnanc at 05:15 AM on 22 June 2013
       The True Cost of Coal Power
       

       A very good article and a good discussion.  Do you know how the coal plant prices were calculated?  Does the calculation include the cost of building the plant and associated transmission or does it assume the plant is in place?  Do the renewable prices include the initial hardware costs?

       There are externalities for renewable energy sources also.

       One can always find things to add or take awy from an analysis like this.  However, the conclusions usually stand when most of the factors are included like this study.

       In my oppinion any utility executive promoting a new coal fired plant should be removed for obvious incompetatance.  Does anyone think a new plant will ever be profitable when it's expected useful life is probably less than a decade.

44406. billthefrog at 04:17 AM on 22 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       @12 Mal,

       "arrognoramus"

       I shall, of course, now claim to have thought that one up myself.

44407. Glenn Tamblyn at 18:24 PM on 21 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       WheelsOC

       I just read Kitzmiller v. Dover. Awesome!

       It's not surprising that Climate Agnomaniacs don't go near a courtroom very often. While the Law is very different from Science, in both disciplines you learn a lot about logic and how to make (or fail to make) a case.

44408. Tom Curtis at 17:59 PM on 21 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       Like WheelsOC @13, I learnt what I know of biology by first watching, and then participating in the creation/evolution "debate".  From that experience, I have a healthy respect for the teaching power of agnotology, but a clear grasp of its limitations as well.  Knowledge gained by refutation of particular arguments will be shaped by the arguments actually made.  Thus somebody who learns biology through the creation evolution debate will learn a great deal about peppered moths and bombadier beetles, but very little most other insects.  They will gain an indepth knowledge of population genetics, but only a cursory knowledge of ecology.  And so on.

       The consequence is a group of people very adept at refuting creationists arguments that have been made, but potentially vulnerable to new arguments that exploit the limit of their knowledge.

       For that reason, while I can see a usefull role for agnotology as a supplemental part of a course on climate change, I would not want to see it as the lions share.  Rather, having taught the subject either systematically (also), or historically, I would finish with a section discussing denier arguments as a means of teaching students to review and apply the knowledge they had previously gained.

44409. WheelsOC at 17:22 PM on 21 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       Bedford suggests how how examining and refuting misinformation is actually a powerful way to teach climate science, sharpen critical thinking skills and raise awareness of the scientific method.

       My own empirical (read: anecdotal) experience has been exactly this. When I began looking into Creationists' arguments about the validity of this-or-that facet of science which presented a challenged to (or appeared to support!) their beliefs, I had to then read what the scientists themselves were saying about these things. Looking into those "debates" (to use a generous term) gave me a much, much deeper understanding of evolution, biology, science generally, AND the philosophy of science than all of my formal schooling put together.

       A lot of that knowledge carried over to serve me well when evaluating the "two sides" of the climate issue. Even if my knowledge of science hadn't been so greatly expanded through the experience, the similarities between so-called "skeptics of AGW" and anti-evolutionists was overwhelming. They displayed the same failures of critical thinking, the same tendency to misinterpret or misrepresent, and the same inability to back down despite overwhelming facts and evidence to the contrary. All they had to rely on was a wall of anti-knowledge: talking points that were asserted as facts but really had no factual basis. These filled up the spaces in their mental stockpile where real knowledge could have fit and influenced their worldview, and they're wedged in so tightly that they keep contrary facts out in the cold. For example, the Young Earth Creationists are absolutely sure that the Grand Canyon was both laid down and then carved out by the waters of Noah's flood. The climate denialists convince themselves that it's impossible to know what's going on with the climate system if that would mean acknowledging the full extent of anthropogenic warming. This anti-knowledge insulates them from the uncomfortable truths; hence the science must be unsettled and uncertain enough to allow for non-artificial factors, if they even admit that there's any climatary pattern to explain at all.

       Quote-mining, selective citations, misrepresentations, conspiracy theories, appeals to crackpot 'experts,' and nice-sounding but utterly baseless assertions all contribute to the wall of anti-knowledge by providing factual-seeming nuggets that can be used like facts to construct an argument or defend a viewpoint. They're fact substitutes.  Creationists and climate denialist gurus both have huge stockpiles of them from which the average mook could pick and choose to support whichever version of wrongheadedness they favored, which were then regurgitated into public discourse at every level (except the rarified atmospheres of the scientific literature, where the primary audience knows better). At least there is a silver lining to this proliferation of misinformation; resources like SkepticalScience come along and put the myths to rest in plain terms and with scientific references that leave the reader more educated and informed than they were going in. It's a good way to pluck the offending nugget out of someone's gullet before they spew it all over new venues. But that necessary service may not be enough to convince the public not to swallow those anti-knowledge nuggets in the first place.

       Creationistm's biggest recent campaign, the Intelligent Design movement, was dealt a lethal blow in Kitzmiller v. Dover not only by the plaintif's scientific superiority and plainspoken rebuttals but also by the defense's own testimony which showed how terribly anti-science and religiously motivated their actions were. It has not been able to recover its pre-Dover glamor in the popular mind since that stunning court case. I can only hope something similar happens to take all the wind out of climate denialists' sails, and soon (assuming the necessary event isn't some kind of natural disaster). The more deeply entrenched these anti-knowledge campaigns become in the populace, the more we'll all suffer going forward and the less we'll be able to leave behind for the generations that follow.

44410. KK Tung at 13:20 PM on 21 June 2013
       The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years? Part 2.
       

       Two corrections to my post 179:Using your exact example and your exact method (with linear trend as a regressor for human), we repeated your experiment 10,000 times, and found that the true human answer lies within the 95% confidence level of the estimate 94% of the time.  There are two errors in this sentence of mine: 94% should be 93%, and the (....) should be deleted, because we were using the exact method of Dumb Scientist, who used the exact human regressor.  DS also pointed out this second error on my part.  Sorry.  I wrote that post on a small laptop while traveling without checking/scrolling the posts carefully.

44411. Mal Adapted at 07:51 AM on 21 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       billthefrog:

       I have been trying for some time - funny, my wife just chuckled as she walked past the screen - to ascertain if there is a word in the English language to describe this weird amalgam of arrogance and ignorance.

       How about "arrognoramus" 8^D?

44412. DSL at 07:01 AM on 21 June 2013
       2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #25A
       

       By the way, Joe Bastardi's on the hook over at Rolling Stone (comment stream): http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-10-dumbest-things-ever-said-about-global-warming-20130619
       
       Trying desperately to defend the main article's dig at him, and spreading it thick.

44413. Dumb Scientist at 02:52 AM on 21 June 2013
       The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years? Part 2.
       

       Given your new example, which I think is unrealistic in the shape of the total global mean temperature not having any trend before 1979 and most of the trend occurring after, I would not have chosen to have a linear function as a first guess in the multiple linear regression procedure. I would choose a monotonic function that looks like the the total trend as a first guess, such as QCO2 discussed in part 1 of my post. Using your exact example and your exact method (with linear trend as a regressor for human)... [KK Tung]

       Actually, both of my simulations used the (nonlinear) exact human influence as a human regressor, specifically to avoid this objection. You can verify this by examining my code: "regression = lm(global~human_p+amo_p)". Since correcting this misconception might alter some of your claims, I'll wait to respond until you say otherwise.

44414. grindupBaker at 02:17 AM on 21 June 2013
       2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #25A
       

       "Antarctic melting from underneath". Obviously. I presume it's useful for projection data if they can quantify it, to project the rate once it really gets going. Since ocean temp is 4.05 an increase to 5.55 to 7.05 for CO2x2 (depending on whether, say, 2.0-3.0 Celsius is final CO2x2 radiative balance restored after ocean equilibrium and whether oceans dissolve enough CO2 to slow it) should have an effect considering the huge proportional increase above the freeze/melt point of water (presumbly the -1.9C for sea water). Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Källén (2013) asserts 200+-40 ZettaJoules added to oceans since 1958. Since 11,000 to 17,000 ZettaJoules must be added to oceans before the oceans will permit the surface to restore its radiative balance of CO2x2 for my example +2.0-3.0 Celsius, it would be interesting to know how much ice melt for the trivial 200 ZettaJoules thus far.

       "Global warming appears to have slowed lately" Plumer, Wonkblog, Washington Post states "the “missing heat” may be lurking in the deep layers, 700 meters below the surface" but SKS Posted on 25 March 2013 by dana1981states categorically "A new study of ocean warming has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters by Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Källén (2013)." and "...has been found in the deep oceans...". What is the certainty of this paper and if >90%, say, then why is Plumer, Wonkblog saying "may be lurking". The slope of B,T & K (2013) indicates 0.85 wm**-2 average 2000-2010. This seems crystal clear. I understand that the buoys' data of prior decades likely has suspect accuracy, but typically these random errors cancel well to near-zero if a large enough statistical sample is used and I see no reason why buoys' data of prior decades would affect the slope 2000-2010.

       On the same topic when are you educated bods going to tell media suits and the public what "global warming" is so that this nonsense stops ? Typically for science, what the subject is would be outlined fairly early in a discussion of the science subject, not 20 years after "the science is settled".

44415. ShaneGreenup at 00:44 AM on 21 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       "Bedford suggests how how examining and refuting misinformation is actually a powerful way to teach climate science, sharpen critical thinking skills and raise awareness of the scientific method."

       Is this a good time to mention http://rbutr.com again?

44416. Eric (skeptic) at 00:32 AM on 21 June 2013
       Citizens Climate Lobby - Pushing for a US Carbon Fee and Dividend
       

       Sphaerica and Dumb Scientist, thanks for the replies.  I like DS's conclusion as expressed in this sentence from the second link: "If competitiveness provisions were to be used as a sweetener to enable the adoption of domestic climate legislation, the WTO consistency of such provisions is, therefore, crucial."

       If it works it reduces the need for a rigid global carbon fee agreement which probably would not pass, it incorporates the carbon issue into broader trade agreements which gives it more weight, and it incentivizes every country to raise their own fee.  In poorer countries it seems to me that the workers there would effectively get a wage increase based on the energy intensity of what their country produces.

44417. Dikran Marsupial at 23:59 PM on 20 June 2013
       Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
       

       Following on from what Daniel wrote, it is worth adding that it would be a good idea to try and limit further deforrestation of the tropics, for many reasons, including CO2!

       There have also been attempts at seeding the oceans with nutrients to try and increase uptake by marine biota, but it didn't seem to help much.  The link below discusses a chance experiment following volcanic activity, but I seem to recall this type of seeding being tried deliberately as well.

       http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seeding-atlantic-ocean-with-volcanic-iron-did-little-to-lower-co2

       At the end of the day, cutting down fossil fuel use is likely to be easier and cheaper for the forseable future.

44418. DSL at 23:46 PM on 20 June 2013
       CO2 effect is saturated
       

       Thanks, Tom.  This material needs to be worked into some sort of category level collection point -- e.g. WUWT Debunkings or WWWT (Watts Wrong With That).  I am most anxious to read Stealth's response, as s/he is a prime candidate for developing an authentic case of DK.  

44419. billthefrog at 23:37 PM on 20 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       As someone whose level of ignorance is absolute in virtually every aspect of human knowledge, it would be utterly hypocritical of me to even consider castigating people for their ignorance of climate change science.

       At the other end of the spectrum, I do have some sympathy for those who, through paistaking hard work, have become expert in a subject and, as a consequence, find themselves unable to refrain from a modicum of arrogance when speaking to us lesser mortals.

       What does mark this "debate" apart is the astonishing arrogance with which some people unwittingly demonstrate their abject ignorance of the subject matter. The adamantine self-confidence which accompanies utter twaddle has to be seen to be believed. I live in a village on Dartmoor (SW England) wherein the two best selling newspapers are The Telegraph and The Mail, so readers of SkS can probably well imagine the level of self-opinioned garbage that is spoken about Climate Change in these parts.

       I have been trying for some time - funny, my wife just chuckled as she walked past the screen - to ascertain if there is a word in the English language to describe this weird amalgam of arrogance and ignorance.

       Perhaps the above post might show the way with a suitable neologism.

       "Arragnophobia"  Noun: the abnormal fear of being revealed to know much less than one pretands to know. (Although it does sound as though one is somewhat scared of spiders.)

44420. KK Tung at 14:27 PM on 20 June 2013
       The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years? Part 2.
       

       Continue from my post 178:  Given your new example, which I think is unrealistic in the shape of the total global mean temperature not having any trend before 1979 and most of the trend occurring after, I would not have chosen to have a linear function as a first guess in the multiple linear regression procedure.  I would choose a monotonic function that looks like the the total trend as a first guess, such as QCO2 discussed in part 1 of my post.

       Using your exact example and your exact method (with linear trend as a regressor for human), we repeated your experiment 10,000 times, and found that the true human answer lies within the 95% confidence level of the estimate 94% of the time.  This is using the linearly detrended n_atlantic as the AMO index, unsmoothed as in your original example. If this AMO index is smoothed, the success rate drops to 33%.  In our PNAS paper we used a smoothed AMO index and we also looked at the unsmoothed index (though not published), and in that realistic case there is only a small difference between the result obtained using the smooth index vs using the unsmoothed index.  In your unrealistic case this rather severe sensitivity is a cause of alarm, and this is the time for you to try a different method, such as the wavelet method, for verification.

44421. KK Tung at 14:12 PM on 20 June 2013
       The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years? Part 2.
       

       In Reply to Dumb Scientist’s post 153: We applaud Dumb Scientist for grounding your example with aspects of the real observation. By doing so you have come up with the first credible challenge to our methodology. Our criticism of your original example was mainly that the noise in your N. Atlantic data was the same as the noise in the global mean data. In fact, they came from the realization. This is extremely unrealistic, because the year-to-year wiggles in N. Atlantic line up with those in the global mean. Much of the year-to-year regional variations come from redistribution or transport of heat from one region to the other in the real case, and these are averaged out in the global mean. We argued in our PNAS paper that it is the low-frequency component of the regional variability that has an effect on the global mean. So although you tried to match the high correlation of the two quantities in the observed, this was accomplished by the wrong frequency part of the variance. In my post 124 I offered two remedies to the problem of the noise being almost the same in your example in post 117: (1) increase the regional noise from 0.1 to 0.3. This created a difference of the N. Atlantic data from the global mean data. Here you said you do not like this modification because it is making the variance too large. (2) Keep the noise amplitudes the same as what you proposed, but the noise from the regional data is from a different draw of the random number generator than the noise from the global mean. If you agree with the amplitudes of the noise in your previous example, then we can proceed with this example. Your only concern in this case was that the correlation coefficient between N. Atlantic and global data is 0.64, a bit smaller than the observed case of 0.79. “That looked more realistic but the average correlation coefficient over 10,000 runs was 0.64±0.08, which is too small.” I suggest that we do not worry about this small difference. Your attempt to match them using the wrong part of the frequency makes the example even less realistic.  We performed 10,000 Monte- Carlo simulations of your example, and found that the true value of anthropogenic response, 0.17 C per decade, lies within the 95% confidence interval of the MLR estimate 94% of the time. So the MLR is successful in this example. If you do not believe our numbers you can perform the calculation yourself to verify. If you agree with our result please say so, so that we can bring that discussion to a close, before we move to a new example. Lack of closure is what confuses our readers.

       You casually dismissed the wavelet method as “curve-fit”. Wavelet analysis is an standard method for data analysis. In fact most empirical methods in data analysis can be “criticized” as “curve-fit”. The MLR method that you spent so much of your time on is a least-square best fit method. So it is also "curve-fit".  For your examples and all the cases discussed so far, the estimation of the true anthropogenic response by the wavelet method is successful. When in doubt we should always try to use multiple methods to verify the result.

       In post 153, you created yet a new example. This example is even more extreme in that the true anthropogenic warming is a seventh order polynomial, from the fifth order polynomial in your original example in post 117, and the second order polynomial in Dikran Marsupial’s examples. This is unrealistic since in this example most of the anthropogenic warming since 1850 occurs post 1979. Before that it is flat. This cannot be justified even if we take all of the observed increase in temperature as anthropogenically forced. It also increases faster than the known rates of increase of the greenhouse gases. You decreased the standard deviation of the global noise of your original example by half. You took my advice to have a different draw of the random number generator for n_atlantic but you reduced the variance from your original example.

       From your first sentence: "My Monte Carlo histograms estimated the confidence intervals", we can infer that you must have used a wrong confidence interval (CI). We have not realized that you have been using a wrong CI until now. The real observation is one realization and it is the real observation that Tung and Zhou (2013) applied the multiple linear regression (MLR) to. There is no possibility of having 10,000 such parallel real observations for you to build a histogram and estimate your confidence interval! So the CI that we were talking about must be different, and it must be applicable to a single realization. Our MLR methodology involves using a single realization to first coming up with the “adjusted data”, which is obtained by adding back the residual to the regressed anthropogenic response, as discussed in part 1 of my post. The adjusted data can be interpreted as anthropogenic response with climate noise. If the procedure is successful the deduced adjusted data should contain the real anthropogenic response. For the hypothetical case where you know the true anthropogenic response, one needs to have a metric for comparing the adjusted data, which is wiggly, with the true value, which is smooth. One way for such comparisons is to fit a linear trend to a segment of the adjusted data and compare such a trend with the corresponding trend of the true anthropogenic response. The segment chosen is usually the last 33 years or the last 50 years. In fitting such a linear trend using least squares fit we obtain a central value (or called the mean) and deviations from the mean. The two standard deviations from the mean constitute the confidence interval (CI) of that estimate. If the true value lies within the CI of the estimate, we say the estimate is correct at 95% confidence level. This is done for each realization. When there are many more realizations, we can say how many times the estimate is correct at 95% confidence level.

44422. jmsully at 12:40 PM on 20 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       So then someone who loves agnophilia would be an agnophiliac, which actually sounds like a disease :-).

44423. Tom Curtis at 11:08 AM on 20 June 2013
       CO2 effect is saturated
       

       I have been looking more carefully at the PDF which is the detailed explanation of the WUWT story which is the basis of Stealth's comments.  The inconsistency and, frankly, the dishonesty of the author, Ed Hoskins, is shown in the fifth chart of the PDF (page 3).  It purports to show the expected temperature response to increases in CO2 according to a group of "skeptics" (Plimer, Carter, Ball, and Archibald), and three "IPCC assessments" by three authors.  It also shows a "IPCC average", but that is not the average value from any IPCC assessment, but rather the average of the three "IPCC assessments" by the three authors.

       The first thing to note about this chart is that it gets the values wrong.  Below are selected values from the chart, with the values as calculated using the standard formula for CO2 forcing, and using their 100-200 value as a benchmark for the temperature response:

       Concentration Skeptic Lindzen Krondratjew Charnock “IPCC” Mean IPCC
       100-200______0.29____0.56____0.89________1.48______0.98_______3
       200-300______0.14____0.42____0.44________1.34______0.73
       Calc 200-300_0.17____0.33____0.52________0.87______0.57_______1.76
       400-1000_____0.15____0.7_____1.19________1.78______1.22
       Calc 400-1000_0.38___0.74____1.18________1.96______1.29_______3.97

       The "Calc" values are those calculated using the standard formula for radiative forcing, with a climate sensitivity factor determined by the claimed temperure response for a doubling of CO2 from 100-200 ppmv.  The '"IPCC" Mean' column is the mean of the three prior columns.

       Clearly the values in the table are not consistent with the standard formula, typically overestimating the response from 200-300 ppmv, and underestimating the response from 400-1000 ppmv.  That pattern, however, is not entirely consistent, being reversed in the case of Kondratjew.  Other than that odd inconsistency, this is just the same misrepresentation of temperature responses shown in my 211 above.

       More bizarre is the representation of the IPCC by Lindzen, Kondratjew and Charnock.  As can be seen, their values, and the mean of their values significantly underrepresent the best estimate of the IPCC AR4 of 3 C per doubling of CO2.  That is a well known result, and the misrepresentation can have no justification.  It especially cannot have any justification given that neither Kondratjew nor Charnock are authors (let alone lead authors) of any relevant chapter in the IPCC AR4.  Nor are they cited in any relevant chapter of the IPCC AR4.  Presenting their work as "IPCC assessments" is, therefore, grossly dishonest.

       Moving on, Hoskins shows another chart on page 2, which helps explain at least one cause of his error.  It is a reproduction of a chart produced by David Archibald, purportedly showing the temperature response for succesive 20 ppmv increases in CO2 concentration.  Looking at Archibald's article, he claims it is a presentation, in bar graph form, of a chart posted by Willis Eschenbach on Climate Audit:

        

       As a side note, the forcing shown is 2.94 log(CO2)+233.6, and hence the modtran settings used do not correspond to the global mean forcing.  The method used by Eschenbach, therefore, cannot produce a correct value for the global mean forcing of CO2.  As it happens, his values produce a forcing per doubling of CO2 of 2 W/m^2 per doubling of CO2, and hence underestimates the true forcing by 46%.  Note, however, that it does rise linearly for each doubling of CO2, so Hoskins has not even mimmicked Eschenbach accurately.

       Far more important is that it is a plot of the downward IR flux at ground level with all non-CO2 green house gases (including water vapour) present.  The IPCC, however, defines 'radiative forcing' as "... the change in net (down minus up) irradiance (solar plus longwave; in W m–2) at the tropopause after allowing for stratospheric temperatures to readjust to radiative equilibrium, but with surface and tropospheric temperatures and state held fixed at the unperturbed values".  (My emphasis.)

       It does so for two reasons.  First, the theory of radiative forcing is essentially a theory about the energy balance of the planet.  Therefore it is not the downward radiation at the surface that is at issue, but the balance between incoming and outgoing radiation at the top of the atmosphere.  

       Second, the temperature at the tropopause and at the surface are bound together by the lapse rate.  Therefore any temperature increase at the tropopause will be matched by a temperature increase at the surface.  Given reduced outward radiation at the tropopause, the energy imbalance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing IR radiation will result in warming at the surface and intermediate levels of the atmosphere.  Adjustments in the rate of convection driven by temperature differences will reestablish the lapse rate, maintaining the same linear relationship between tropopause and surface temperature (ignoring the lapse rate feedback).  The net effect is that the same effective temperature increase will occure at all levels, resulting in a larger downard radiation at the surface than the initial change at either the tropopause or the surface.

       So, Eschenbach (and Hoskins) derive their values incorrectly because they simply do not understand the theory they are criticizing, and which is accepted without dispute by knowledgeable "skeptics" such as Lindzen and Spencer.  They are in the same boat of denying simple physics as are the "skydragon slayers" who Watts excoriates.  Watts, however, publishes pseudo-scientific claptrap on the same level as the "skydragon slayers" on a daily basis, however, because he also is completely ignorant of the theory he so vehemently rejects.    

44424. Daniel Bailey at 10:54 AM on 20 June 2013
       Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
       

       Juanss, due to albedo changes, replacing the world's agricultural areas with trees will not necessarily be of any aid in stopping global warming. Scientist Ken Caldeira has shown that replanting all available boreal forests and even mid-latitude temperate forests will lead to warming.

       Only replanting all tropical areas with trees produces cooling. And there simply isn't enough of it to be effective (an area greater than the surface area of the United States must be replanted and no such sizable area exists). Only a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions will have any effects.

       • First Link

       • Second Link

       • Third Link

       • Fourth Link

44425. Dikran Marsupial at 08:33 AM on 20 June 2013
       The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years? Part 2.
       

       Prof Tung@175 As it happens I was using the word "unobservable" is its usual everyday meaning, i.e. "not accessible to direct observation". If the meaning were not clear to you, a better approach would be to ask what it meant, rather than make an incorrect assumption leading to yet another misunderstanding.

       The physical process of AMO is not (currently) accessible to direct observation, instead it is deduced from Atlantic SSTs. Therefore in my thought experiment I said that D was unobservable to parallel the fact that we don't observe the true AMO. Trying to get round this restriction by Fourier analysis is clearly just violating the purpose of the thought experiment rather than engaging with it. 

       Prof. Tung@176 writes "Please take a look at his figure in Dikran's post 158, the true A in red is entirely within the estimate, in green."

       The green is not the estimate, as I have already pointed out, the confidence interval on the regression coefficient is, and the true value is not within it.

       I have already pointed out that the offset on the green signal is arbitrary and essentially meaningless.  It is common statistical practice to subtract the means from variables before performing the regression, in which case the red curve is not in the spread of the green signal anyway.  That is what I did the first time.  For the second graph I changed the offset at Prof. Tungs request, to show that it made no difference to whether the true value was in the confidence interval or not. 

       In this case, we are looking at the time variable T.  Should it make a difference to the result if we start measuring time from 0AD or 1969 or 1683 or 42BC?  No, of course not, the point where we start measuring time is arbitrary (unless perhaps we use the date of the big bang).  Thus it is perfectly reasonable to center (subtract the mean from) the time variable, as I did.

44426. KK Tung at 07:36 AM on 20 June 2013
       The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years? Part 2.
       

       In reply to Bob Loblaw in post 174:

       How did you come to the conclusion "iii) Dikran's example shows that Dr. Tung's methodology fails to come up with the correct answer (which was known because Dikran created it)." ?  I thought we just showed in my post 172 that it was incorrect for him to draw that conclusion.  If you have evidence that Dikran's example shows that our methodology fails to come up with the correct answer, please point it out to me.

       Please take a look at his figure in Dikran's post 158, the true A in red is entirely within the estimate, in green.  I tried to be even more conservative than Dikran, and say this successful estimate is only one realization.  We went on to look at 10,000 realizations, and found that this success occurs 70% of time.  This is using his convoluted example unchanged.  When we cleared up some of the convolution the success rate goes above 90%.  Given this, how did you still come to the conclusion that his example showed that our methodology failed?

44427. shoyemore at 07:32 AM on 20 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       Agnophilia: 1. The love or promotion of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.

       Agnophile: 1. A person who consciously indulges in agnophilia.

       Agnomaniac: 1. A person who indulges in agnophilia to insane, irrational or inordinate extents.

       Some new fancy names for the extreme forms of denialism and deniers.

44428. KK Tung at 07:21 AM on 20 June 2013
       The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years? Part 2.
       

       In reply to Dikran Marsupial in his post 173:  For someone who has been so picky about the use of words, you should state clearly that you have extraneous meaning to the word "unobservable signal". You defined your "unobservable signal D" as a sinusoide with a period of 81 years.  You did not call it AMO, nor have you attributed physical interpretations to it.  You wanted me to address directly the questions that you posted as you posted it. This signal D is in your Y, which you intended it to be an observation.  I can observe your D in Y by doing a Fourier spectrum.  There is no such thing as an unobserved signal in this context.  You did not ask for a physical interpretation of the signal D, whether it is forced or natural.  Even in the "contaminated signal" C, I can recover your "unobserved signal D" by Fourier spectrum, so it is not "unobservable".  I stated clearly why I said it is not "unobservable".  For someone who is so picky about the use of words, perhaps you should define what you mean by "unobservable".  Please note that in your example that I was responding to, the phenomenon AMO was never mentioned, nor what is forced and what is natural.

44429. tomponkin at 06:37 AM on 20 June 2013
       It hasn't warmed since 1998
       

       Why does the top video say "This video is private." ? It was playing okay a few weeks ago and I sorely need it right now for point of reference.  I'm confused.

       Moderator Response:

       [DB] The video has been withdrawn to better enable updates and revisions to come.

44430. william5331 at 06:25 AM on 20 June 2013
       Citizens Climate Lobby - Pushing for a US Carbon Fee and Dividend
       

       There is an added benefit to Fee and Dividend.  People who are on the bones of their backsides will spend every cent of this money as soon as they receive it just to feed their kids and keep their houses warm.  A big chunk of this money comes back to the government at every transaction.   When they buy food VAT goes government-ward.  When the super market makes more profit more go the government, when they buy from their suppliers.............. etc.  the govt then has to borrow less money to keep the economy going.  When they spend this money to build a bridge or repair a road, etc. more money back to them and some good and necessary things get done.  Win win all around.

44431. Juanss at 04:02 AM on 20 June 2013
       Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
       

       I have a question, is there any way of reducing some of the CO2 natural emissions or making other ways to absorve more CO2 preventing it from going to the atmosphere, such as planting more threes or something like that?

       My question is, the only way to stop globar warming is reducing the human CO2 emissions?

        

       (sorry for my english)

44432. Dumb Scientist at 02:27 AM on 20 June 2013
       Citizens Climate Lobby - Pushing for a US Carbon Fee and Dividend
       

       Eric @5: CCL supports a tariff on imported goods to protect domestic manufacturing, citing Joost Pauwelyn's work. The tariff will also encourage other countries to put a similar price on carbon pollution so their imports aren't charged.

44433. mbryson at 01:49 AM on 20 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       It's reassuring to see some evidence that one approach I've used in teaching students about evolution (I used Futuyma's Science on Trial for about a decade) can be effective. It did seem to work, but that was  based solely on my impression of how well students did at explaining key concepts and points... 

44434. Bob Lacatena at 01:49 AM on 20 June 2013
       Citizens Climate Lobby - Pushing for a US Carbon Fee and Dividend
       

       Eric,

       I believe the approach is to tax only the root fossil fuel... gas, petroleum, whatever... as it enters the economy.  This will in effect tax all products that make use of that fuel in production, transport, etc., and will in that way avoid any double counting.

       Of course, this means that certain producs that are imported will have avoided the carbon tax, but this should be the great minority.  The solution would be to increase tariffs on imported products to account for the discrepency (based on the country of origin's own carbon policies as well as any expected, underlying carbon footprint for the product).

       Of course, that discrepency would be solved very simply through a global agreement, where every country follows this approach in the same way, but that also entails difficulties in the proper distribution of the dividend, as well as simply being impossible to do, given how the USA has rejected/sabotaged any such international cooperation to date so far.

44435. Eric (skeptic) at 00:34 AM on 20 June 2013
       Citizens Climate Lobby - Pushing for a US Carbon Fee and Dividend
       

       I like this approach.  My main question is if we would also need to implement a tariff based on the energy intensity of each import.  It should be fairly straightforward to calculate.  I believe it should include all the product inputs but subtract the carbon fees already paid.  The main problem may be political since special interests would protect their markets or reduce the cost of their inputs.  The response to that may simply be to keep the tariff reasonable and broadly applicable.

44436. Tom Curtis at 22:23 PM on 19 June 2013
       CO2 was higher in the late Ordovician
       

       It is remarkable how rapidly the science has been moving in this area.  In 2005, Dana Royer wrote:

       "There is unequivocal evidence for a widespread but brief Gondwanan glaciation during the end-Ordovician (Hirnantian Stage; 445.6–443.7 Ma). Several reports argue for a longer interval of ice centered on the Ordovician–Silurian boundary (e.g., 58 my in Frakes et al., 1992), and alpine glaciers may have indeed persisted in Brazil and Bolivia into the early Silurian (Crowell, 1999), but most recent studies demonstrate that the dominant glacial phase was restricted to the Hirnantian (Brenchley et al., 1994, 2003; Paris et al., 1995; Crowell, 1999; Sutcliffe et al., 2000).  There is one CO2 data point available that is close in age to this glaciation, and it suggests very high CO2 levels (5600 ppm; see Fig. 3A; Yapp and Poths, 1992, 1996); moreover, GEOCARB III predicts high CO2 levels at this time (4200 ppm; see Fig. 1D). Apparently, this event presents a critical test for the CO2-temperature paradigm (e.g.,
       Van Houten, 1985; Crowley and Baum, 1991). However, it is unclear what CO2 levels were during this event. The single proxy record is Ashgillian in age, which spans the Hirnantian but also most of the preceding Stage (450–443.7 Ma); if the CO2 data point dates to the pre-Hirnantian Ashgillian, then this is consistent with a well-described mid-Ashgillian global warm event (Boucot et al., 2003; Fortey and Cocks, 2005)."

       That appears to be the point at which "skepictal" analysis of this issue stops.  Genuine scientists kept on analyzing the issue.  As noted above, Seth Young and coworkers made major contributions in 2009 and 2010, and now it is well accepted that there was a major carbon isotope excursion in the Hirnantian, coincident with the Hirnantian glaciation.

       The magnitude of the C13 excursion can be seen by comparing it with the similar, but opposite signed excursion in the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which was associated with greatly increased CO2 concentration.

       First the PETM:

       

       Then the Hirnantian:

       

       (Please note the inverted scales for the C13 escursions.)

44437. JulianRGP at 19:30 PM on 19 June 2013
       Citizens Climate Lobby - Pushing for a US Carbon Fee and Dividend
       

       Fee and dividend seems to be a promising approach. Clearly some payment for the use of carbon is needed. Fee and dividend would answer the critics that would otherwise say a carbon payment is simply the government trying to take more tax. However the details of who it's paid back to would need attention. Those at the bottom of the income scale probably have the least control over their carbon wastage but would receive the same dividend as those who have more. Also returning the money through tax filing wouldn't help those who pay no tax. But the idea looks promising.

44438. Ken in Oz at 16:03 PM on 19 June 2013
       Conspiracy Theorists Respond to Evidence They're Conspiracy Theorists With More Conspiracy Theories
       

       We know that conspiracies can and do exist - like the conspiracy amongst fossil fuel miners and users to protect their business interests  by promoting misinformation, by using their money and influence and threats of economic harms to get elected representatives (who hold postions of responsibility and trust) to betray their constituents interests. I think it's a real conspiracy and, whilst not intended to control the world, it is a dangerous conspiracy that involves sacrificing our future security and prosperity to ensure their projected earnings are not affected by people trying to prevent permanant and irreversible loss of environmental capital that underpins civilisation.

       
       I think world leaders with investigative powers and strong motivation have failed to show that climate scientists have ever conspired to falsify data or conclusions. But those same investigative powers, if put to use, would show that the conspiracy above is not the result of crazed imaginings.

44439. Philippe Chantreau at 15:57 PM on 19 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       It is worth noting that Legates was involved in the publication of the first and most infamous Soon & Baliunas paper, the one that led to the resignation in protest of 5 members of the editorial board. De Freitas was instrumental in the publication of that piece of junk and has become an expert at circumventing the intent of peer-review while wiggling through the process. The wiki is a good place to start:

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy

       It cites Tom Wigley:

       ""I have had papers that I refereed (and soundly rejected), under De Freitas’s editorship, appear later in the journal -- without me seeing any response from the authors. As I have said before to others, his strategy is first to use mainly referees that are in the anti-greenhouse community, and second, if a paper is rejected, to ignore that review and seek another more ‘sympathic’ reviewer. In the second case he can then (with enough reviews) claim that the honest review was an outlier."

       This is taking the bullshit wars to an extent that the tobacco industry could only dream of.

        

44440. Marco at 15:29 PM on 19 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       Michael Sweet @2: when a comment on a paper has been published, it is extremely uncommon that the original paper is retracted. For that you'd have to show scientific misconduct or potential direct harm from letting the paper stand. In this type of papers the first is not so easy to show, Legates et al could just argue that this is the way they read the original paper and this is their (scientific) opinion. The second essentially only applies to the biomedical field.

       All we can do is refer to the comment, and laugh at those who cite Legates et al but not the comment.

44441. Phil L at 14:49 PM on 19 June 2013
       Peak Water, Peak Oil…Now, Peak Soil?
       

       A couple of observations...

       In the Canadian prairies, the worst loss of topsoil from wind erosion was during the the dustbowl era of the 1930s.  Farming practices such as methods of cultivation improved, and shelterbelts were planted, reducing topsoil loss through wind erosion.  However the biggest improvement has been in the last couple of decades, with the widespread adoption of zero-till farming methods.  ie. I don't think the picture is as bleak as this article portrays.

       Also, the article mentioned worms.  Earthworms in particular may be beneficial to certain soils, but are terrible for forest soils.

44442. r.pauli at 13:31 PM on 19 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       Terrifically important  - and a great way to teach climate science, sociology, public opinion, advertising and military psyops.

       One classic manipulation tactic described in Wikipedia is the Spiral of Silence - a political science and mass communication theory propounded by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann.

       "Spiral of silence theory describes the process by which one opinion becomes dominant as those who perceive their opinion to be in the minority do not speak up because society threatens individuals with fear of isolation. The assessment of ones social environment may not always be correct with reality"

       This tactic can also apply to any advertiser supported mass media - where isolation and monetary inattention is a form of punishment for failing to suppress messages.    A simple content analysis of US news media stories of climate or global warming stories might support this notion.   Especially when we notice that carbon fuel industries are such heavy advertisers.  Compare US media to BBC or other media that are disentangled from carbon fuel financial influence.  

       We might frame our problem as an ethical one.   Deliberate deception is a poison that extracts huge costs.   Instead  "equity should precede ambition"

44443. DSL at 13:29 PM on 19 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       Geez, John.  Whatever you propose, the bought and paid for opinion-makers just seem to want to immediately provide you with more evidence to support the proposal (see the Lewandowsky feedback cycle).  Legates et al. is an excellent example for a critical thinking exercise . . . which means the journal editor(s), in publishing Legates et al., are either "blissfully ignorant" of the rhetorical game or are brilliant in allowing the willful ignorance of that paper to be published.

       
       Strawmen: do we burn them or learn from them?

44444. DSL at 13:06 PM on 19 June 2013
       CO2 effect is saturated
       

       And not just the size of the increase in atmospheric CO2 but also the rate, which may be unprecedented.

44445. michael sweet at 12:56 PM on 19 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       John,

       Your paper documents a great many problems with Legates et al.  Is there any chance the editors of the journal will retract the original paper or make a comment on it?

       Hopefully many of the people who were mislead by the original paper will read your rebuttal.

       Response:

       [John Cook] In the spirit of agnotology-based learning, I would suggest rather than try to get the Legates et al. paper retracted, there is more instruction in addressing it's misrepresentations as a teachable moment.

44446. Bob Loblaw at 12:53 PM on 19 June 2013
       CO2 effect is saturated
       

       If the CO2 effect is saturated, then you'd better go and tell the people over at Licor. They seem to think that their infrared gas analyzers are capable of measuring CO2 from 0-3000ppm. If IR is saturated at the current 400ppm, then Licor is going to have to give a lot of money back to people that bought their sensors expecting to be able to get good measurements at higher CO2 values.

44447. Bob Loblaw at 12:47 PM on 19 June 2013
       The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years? Part 2.
       

       Regarding the statement "There is no such thing as an unobserved signal:"

       There is a context in which this is true: any observation is a response to everything that affects it, so any signal that is relevant is part of the observation. That is just a tautology, though, and is about as useful as saying "all models are wrong" without completing the quote with "but some models are useful".

       You could also say, just as easily, that all observations are wrong - but some observations are useful. All observations are a response to a variety of things, and the trick is to try to make observations that are strongly dependent on the thing that you are interested in, and only weakly dependent on (or independent of) things that you aren't interested in. Traditionally, when observations are partly dependent on things we aren't interested in, we consider those other factors to be sources of error.

       An "unobserved signal" can be a factor that you've missed, that is affecting the observations that you are making, but you don't realize it. You think that your observation is a measure of A, but it is actually affected by other, non-observed factors. That factor is in the main observation, but is being missed ("unobserved") in the analysis and interpretation (and conclusions).

       All of this discussion runs circles around a couple of issues where this is fundamental:

       a) how much of the global temperature signal is due to anthropogenic causes?

       b) what is AMO and what does it tell as about a)? In other wrods, what is it that AMO depends on, and to what extend do global temperatures depend on AMO?

       We know a few things:

       1) AMO is not an observation - it is a derived quantity based on a rather large number of observations.

       2) AMO is at least partly derived from temperatures, and needs to be detrended. There are many ways to do this, yielding similar but not identical results. In order for AMO to not be dependent on long-term temperature trends, this detrending must be completely accurate. If it is not completely accurate, then AMO will still have some dependence on that trend - there will be a source of error.

       3) Because there are many flavours of AMO, is is clear that AMO in any single incarnation is partly dependent on what AMO is supposed to mean (pick whatever you want), but also partly dependent on other factors. We know that all of them can't be perfect - and we don't really expect that any single one will be perfect. Thus, any AMO index is an imperfect representation of whatever AMO is supposed to be "for real".

       4) When AMO is used as part of the explanation of global temperature trends - and then as justification for a conclusion that anthropogenic influences are small - then you'd better be pretty darn sure that you know exactly what it is that your AMO derivation represents. In particular, you'd better be pretty darn sure that your AMO numbers aren't partly dependent on the thing that you think you are using AMO to explain.

       Now, I havrn't attempted to duplicate everyones' math here, but this is what I see so far:

       i) Item 4 risks circular reasoning in a sort of feedback loop: AMO affects global T, which affects the temperatures that AMO is derived from, which may affect AMO if detrending is done incorrectly. I am not at all convinced by what Dr. Tung has written here in defence of his processing, interpretations, and conclusions.

       ii) Dikran has provided a thought experiment, which attempts to apply Dr. Tung's methodology to a set of numbers derived from a known/defined mathematical construction - i.e., a dataset where the answer is known in advance.

       iii) Dikran's example shows that Dr. Tung's methodology fails to come up with the correct answer (which was known because Dikran created it). The numbers don't actually have to mean anything at all - this is strictly a mathematical exercise, and the numbers could be anything, from temperatures to Starbuck's coffee sales. The fact that the mathematical methodology fails to reproduce the answer that was used to derive the example is a serious issue. In mathematical proofs, this would be reductio ad absurdum: assume one thing, and come up with a result that is contrary to that assumption, then either the assumption is false, or the methodology is false. Dr. Tung's assumption is that he has properly broken the circular reasoning mentioned in #4, whereas other disagree. Dr. Tung has criticised Dikran's choice of labels, but in mathematics, labels (AKA variable names) are irrelevant - it is the relationships that matter. Dr. Tungs' focus on what the labels are supposed to mean may be why he has such a problem seeing the mathematical errors in his methodology.

       iv) From my reading, Dr. Tung has failed to justify why his methodology will give the right answer in his case, when we know that the methodology fails in Dikran's example. Dr. Tung has said the thought experiment is not realistic, but the numbers don't have to have anything to do with reality - mathematics that can't reproduce themselves don't get better when fed with "real" numbers instead of made up numbers. Correct mathematics works on purely mathematical grounds, without reference to any outside idea of "reality". [Mathematics becomes useful, and of interest to non-mathemeticians, when we can relate it to reality, but mathematics doesn't need it.]

       So, from my humble viewpoint, Dr. Tung's work is seriously flawed, as demonstrated here by others. HIs methodology can't answer itself, and much of his argument is just a reassertion of his views.

44448. scaddenp at 12:11 PM on 19 June 2013
       CO2 effect is saturated
       

       Very nice Tom. Stealth, hopefully that analysis will also show you how easy it is for "simple facts" like you found, to be arranged in a way that results in a misleading conclusion when you lack expert domain knowledge. Skepticism is good but even better is your current practise of running your skeptical conclusions past other folks. Keep it up. Honest stuff like this is very educational.

44449. Composer99 at 11:51 AM on 19 June 2013
       CO2 effect is saturated
       

       Tom Curtis' comment is so incisive, devastating, and, in his usual clear style, makes plain the point of doing something about emissions so well, that I felt compelled to share it specifically on Facebook.

       You may now return to your regularly-scheduled discussion.

44450. chriskoz at 10:37 AM on 19 June 2013
       New paper on agnotology and scientific consensus
       

       This is a very fresh (1995) neologism, according to wikipedia.

       I would constrain the definition of this term, John, to scrictly "culturally induced ignorance due to promotion of the knowledge of a subject that leaves one more uncertain than before", i.e. the practice the contrarian special interest groups like FF, tobacco industries, etc. are dissiminating.

       IMO, this is quite different from the pure ignorance, which is like a blank canvas: a blissfuly ignorant state of mind because the knowledge is unavailable or not needed by someone. E.g. I'm ignorant of Wenkel engine invention because no one told be about it.

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