Is the science settled over global warming? If so when?

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finman100 said:
Sarcasm on

I sure am glad the deniers gots all those fancy charts disproving climate change. For awhile there I was afraid of fake news. but now I'm embracing it.

Sarcasm off

Please do us all a favor and get the f out of the way of real scientists trying to mitigate a disaster that will affect everyone. Why are we such a stupid species...

+1. Well said.
 
finman100 said:
Sarcasm on

I sure am glad the deniers gots all those fancy charts disproving climate change. For awhile there I was afraid of fake news. but now I'm embracing it.

Sarcasm off

Please do us all a favor and get the f out of the way of real scientists trying to mitigate a disaster that will affect everyone. Why are we such a stupid species...

Are we to assume that a typical ad hominem response results from of an inability to refute presented data
rationally?
 
RegGuheert said:
WetEV said:
So what happened with Antarctic sea ice this year? Why a record low minimum extent? Global temperature record high, and Antarctic sea ice record low extent? Oh, do explain.
Sure, I'll explain it to you since you seem to think it melted. It didn't melt. When the wind blows strongly against the ice front, it compresses the ice into a smaller extent.

Not convinced, winds blow every year. Again, why was this year less than all other recorded years?
 
We have known that we humans are causing climate change for several decades - Exxon knew it in the late 1970's. And it has been further confirmed since then.

THREE RECORD HOT YEARS IN A ROW - is statistically undeniable. They are not just breaking the record by a smidge - they are smashing the old record, and then smashing that - and then smashing that!
 
Sigh. Another fact-free post from a climate alarmist.
NeilBlanchard said:
We have known that we humans are causing climate change for several decades - Exxon knew it in the late 1970's. And it has been further confirmed since then.
The reality: The GLOBAL MEASURED greenhouse effect on this planet has NOT changed in 25 years. So, tell me Neil: If the greenhouse effect has not changed UP OR DOWN in 25 years, how have humans caused climate change? Please just explain the mechanism.
NeilBlanchard said:
THREE RECORD HOT YEARS IN A ROW - is statistically undeniable. They are not just breaking the record by a smidge - they are smashing the old record, and then smashing that - and then smashing that!
Nonsense: Global Satellites: 2016 not Statistically Warmer than 1998
 
WetEV said:
lorenfb said:
Are we to assume that a typical ad hominem response results from of an inability to refute presented data
rationally?

Avoiding the truth?

https://youtu.be/vDNXuX6D60U

Surely given the "robustness of the model", notwithstanding the data veracity, the model can obviously account
for his posted data, i.e. something as simple as a stochastic process was included in the basic hypothesis of
climate change and thus included in the model, right?
 
This is exactly why I think scientists should avoid being overly political. This problem for 99.5% of the population ultimately comes down to whether or not you have faith in the climate science community that they are doing their jobs honestly and without bias or whether you feel like they have an agenda.

Nobody on this forum fully understands the global climate system, nor do journalists, activists, politicians, or even most scientists... there are so many variables and uncertainties that even someone like myself with a background in physics and atmospheric science reaches a point where I have to put my hands up and say "I don't know".

It is the worst kind of problem to get people to agree on because you can't just point to a hot summer or a big snow storm or some melting ice and say "see, climate change is correct". Hot summers, big storms, and melting ice would occur with or without humans putting fossil fuels into the atmosphere, the tricky part is determining if the hot summer is hotter because of emissions and if so, how much hotter... or would that storm have only dropped 12" of snow on Boston without human emissions instead of the 14" that it did drop. By the same token, you can't just cherrypick the 1998 monster el nino as a starting point and say that there is no warming in the last 20 years... that trend line looks completely different if you pick 1975 as a starting point, or 1996.

And the media, in order to generate clicks and "signal" whatever side of the debate they are on, generate sensational headlines and jump on every opportunity to demonstrate that any anomalous weather event to supports their position. Just this week there were a bevy of articles about that big nor'easter either arguing that a huge snow storm in March proved or disproved climate change.

It takes decades of data to establish a statistically significant trend given the uncertainties in measurement, ocean storage, unknowns in the cloud feedback, and natural variation that underpins whatever impacts our changes to the atmosphere are causing. Models aren't perfect but you hope they can get the big picture correct and that we can make informed decisions about how those trends might impact us in the near-term and long-term.

At the end of the day I know climate scientists (and scientists in general) to be a skeptical bunch of people. I just can't see a scenario where a problem this big with so much available data and exposure could be a huge conspiracy. Scientists love proving other scientists wrong...

There is, in fact, still a lot of debate in the scientific community about the details of climate change. But there is little to no debate about the simple fact that, all other things equal, increasing the level of greenhouse gasses will tilt the planets energy balance towards the more of the incoming solar radiation remaining in the earth system. And that more energy in the system, over time, will lead to a warmer planet. It would be foolish of us not to use that knowledge in our decision making processes as best we can no matter if you are in the reduce emissions camp, the mitigation camp, or even the do nothing camp.
 
golfcart said:
Models aren't perfect but you hope they can get the big picture correct and that we can make informed decisions about how those trends might impact us in the near-term and long-term.
The current climate models literally have NO CHANCE of being predictive of long-term climate. There are four main reasons for this: 1) Many of the underlying physical processes are unknown or partially unknown. For instance, scientists are still learning about what causes clouds to form. And even the detailed physics-based models are incapable of predicting whether a given particle will grow into a water droplet. Since clouds are the most significant driver there is for climate, this lack of knowledge means the models do not have the necessary skill to be able to predict the climate. 2) There is insufficient computer capability to be able to accurately predict the climate in the future faster than the climate itself evolves. Making simplifications and assumptions can speed the process, but reduces the effort to an elaborate curve-fitting exercise. 3) Extreme temporal and spatio-temporal chaos in the climate system mean that it is quite impossible to make accurate predictions about the climate very far into the future. A good example of this is that ENSO is fairly well understood. Yet it would be quite impossible to predict when the future El Ninos will occur. Currently, we are lucky if the ENSO predictions are accurate only six months out.
golfcart said:
There is, in fact, still a lot of debate in the scientific community about the details of climate change. But there is little to no debate about the simple fact that, all other things equal, increasing the level of greenhouse gasses will tilt the planets energy balance towards the more of the incoming solar radiation remaining in the earth system.
Sure. But all things are not equal and the impact of CO2 is so small as to be completely inconsequential.

There should also be little debate about the following facts:

1) The temperature of the Earth's atmosphere is almost completely dominated by the temperature of the surface of the global oceans.
2) The greenhouse effect does NOT heat the oceans.
3) The greenhouse effect can reduce the rate of cooling of the oceans. Clouds have been measured to reduce the temperature of drop of the surface of the oceans by as much as 0.1K relative to clear skies. This is with 100 W/m^2 difference when compared with clear skies. (Note that it is currently impossible to measure the effect of CO2 on the surface temperature of the ocean.)
4) However, a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1/100th this amount of forcing as the maximum range seen with clouds. We are currently below a doubling of CO2. So CO2's maximum effect on the world's global oceans is a reduction of of the temperature drop of the top micron of water by approximately 0.0005K versus what it was about 100 years ago. Simply put, there is virtually no impact of CO2 on the temperature of the global oceans.
5) The GLOBAL MEASURED greenhouse effect on Earth has not changed in the past 25 years. Over that time, humans have dumped about a third of all the CO2 into the atmosphere that they have been able to release. The simple conclusion of these two observations is that man's contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere is NOT driving the global greenhouse effect. It is completely dominated by clouds and water vapor, in that order.
6) The temperature changes we have seen on Earth can be almost completely explained by changes in global cloud cover. Unlike CO2, the relationship between global cloud cover and temperature is very strong.
7) The additional CO2 in the atmosphere has caused an amount of greening of the biosphere equal to twice the area of the United States.

The bottom line is quite clear. CO2 is a don't-care molecule when it comes to the temperature of the Earth. As such, spending ANY money trying to reduce our emissions of CO2 is shear nonsense and completely against the clear message of the science.

Instead, we need to focus our efforts on cleaning up pollution, much of which comes from the extraction and burning fossil fuels.
 
RegGuheert said:
The bottom line is quite clear. CO2 is a don't-care molecule when it comes to the temperature of the Earth. As such, spending ANY money trying to reduce our emissions of CO2 is shear nonsense and completely against the clear message of the science.

Instead, we need to focus our efforts on cleaning up pollution, much of which comes from the extraction and burning fossil fuels.

The whole point of my post was not to rehash this argument with you, it was that debating this on a car forum is pointless. And the end of the day this is about whether or not people are going to trust climate scientists because the idea that more than .005% of the population simultaneously have the expertise and aptitude to fully understand this issue is laughable. We can just sit here posting links that argue against each others positions but neither of us created those models and understand all of the intricacies of them. I can post some links to refute your claim that CO2 has no impact on ocean temperature but where will that get us? Y'all have been debating this for years on the forum with multiple threads. How many people have changed their minds?

When I get in an airplane I trust that the aerospace engineers know what they are doing and are definitely better than me building a plane in my garage. When I go to the hospital I trust that the doctors and staff know what they are doing and are definitely better than me doing surgery in my living room. When I turn on the weather report I trust that they will be reasonably accurate with the forecast and are definitely better than me sticking my finger in the air and trying to make a forecast. I have faith in that expertise.

People have to make a decision whether they want to trust the climate science community which has come to a general consensus about some of the likely outcomes related to this issue. Trust is what matters with this because human knowledge has progressed far past the point that everyone can be an expert on everything. Once that is accepted (or not accepted), it is up to policymakers to weigh the costs/benefits of all of the relevant issues and craft policy.
 
golfcart said:
RegGuheert said:
The bottom line is quite clear. CO2 is a don't-care molecule when it comes to the temperature of the Earth. As such, spending ANY money trying to reduce our emissions of CO2 is shear nonsense and completely against the clear message of the science.

Instead, we need to focus our efforts on cleaning up pollution, much of which comes from the extraction and burning fossil fuels.
And the end of the day this is about whether or not people are going to trust climate scientists because the idea that more than .005% of the population simultaneously have the expertise and aptitude to fully understand this issue is laughable.
You don't have to understand it all. What you need to know is whether or not the effect is significant enough to warrant much effort or not. I have just demonstrated that it does not have an important effect. If you are familiar with physics, you can easily understand my arguments and you can verify the statements from my links.
golfcart said:
When I get in an airplane I trust that the aerospace engineers know what they are doing and are definitely better than me building a plane in my garage. When I go to the hospital I trust that the doctors and staff know what they are doing and are definitely better than me doing surgery in my living room. When I turn on the weather report I trust that they will be reasonably accurate with the forecast and are definitely better than me sticking my finger in the air and trying to make a forecast. I have faith in that expertise.
Those areas have all reached a KNOWN level of skill which makes your level of trust reasonable. Climate science is still in the dark ages by comparison.
golfcart said:
People have to make a decision whether they want to trust the climate science community which has come to a general consensus about some of the likely outcomes related to this issue. Trust is what matters with this because human knowledge has progressed far past the point that everyone can be an expert on everything. Once that is accepted (or not accepted), it is up to policymakers to weigh the costs/benefits of all of the relevant issues and craft policy.
Consensus has no place in science. The simple fact is that there are extremely strong arguments against the popular beliefs of the climate community coming from climate experts. This documentary does a very good job of clearly showing those experts' objections:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJBDI7jVMqM[/youtube]
 
golfcart said:
When I get in an airplane I trust that the aerospace engineers know what they are doing and are definitely better than me building a plane in my garage.

That's a poor analogy, i.e. engineers and physicists when it comes to most all problem solving have closed-form solutions.
That's not the case when it comes to modeling climate change where research is very similar to social science research,
i.e. developing a hypothesis, designing a model, and then using some form of numerical methods, e.g. linear regression
to evaluate correlations based on probabilities and then attempting to find causality. The result is a non-deterministic
mathematical model. It's always easy to selectively find data to fit one's hypothesis!
 
lorenfb said:
golfcart said:
When I get in an airplane I trust that the aerospace engineers know what they are doing and are definitely better than me building a plane in my garage.

That's a poor analogy, i.e. engineers and physicists when it comes to most all problem solving have closed-form solutions.
That's not the case when it comes to modeling climate change where research is very similar to social science research,
i.e. developing a hypothesis, designing a model, and then using some form of numerical methods, e.g. linear regression
to evaluate correlations based on probabilities and then attempting to find causality. The result is a non-deterministic
mathematical model. It's always easy to selectively find data to fit one's hypothesis!

I'm insulted that you would compare building a physical model of the earth and it's atmosphere to social sciences... :D The physical sciences hardly have the replication problem that you see in things like sociology or psychology. And the last time I checked, climate scientists weren't putting out nonsense like this Glaciers, Gender, and Science or falling for stuff like Sokai's hoax.

Fair enough about your criticism that most engineering problems are a lot more cut and dry, but the atmosphere still follows the laws of physics. it is not like IR photons are declining to be absorbed by CO2 molecules because their daddy didn't love them or they don't like a particular group of people. It is not like photons lie at the exit polls because they don't want to look bad. And it is not like we can influence photons behavior by bombarding them with propaganda about how they should act. LOL. Social sciences are screwed up because people are screwed up and don't behave rationally all the time. Photons behave rationally, there are just a sh*t load of them to worry about and a lot of things for them to interact with.

And not just that, physicists and engineers use non-deterministic approaches in solving some problems too... one could argue the entirety of quantum mechanics is "non-deterministic" but we use it to create all kinds of cool stuff which we rely on.

If your argument is that the problem is too complex to trust the experts I don't have a good rebuttal to that as i stated before. If you think that the research is ideologically driven or that the biases of the researchers cause them to accept answers they are looking for while being skeptical of answers they are not looking for I can't really argue with that either. That is your belief and it is the job of climate scientists to make a strong enough case to convince you otherwise by being as transparent and rigorous as possible in their work.

At the end of the day though, I stand by my overall assessment, this comes down to a question of trust and faith in expertise. It comes down to a question of who people want to believe because most folks on both sides don't understand 2% of it. Do you think you could grab some random climate activist out of the protest line and get them to solve a radiative transfer problem? Or even a simple stephan-boltzman blackbody model of the earth? Do you think Clinton or Trump could solve those? I highly doubt it... but it doesn't stop them all from speaking about the issue like they understand it thoroughly. It is just like religion, or abortion, or any other hot button issue where people have already basically formed the opinion they want to have and then go seek evidence to support that opinion.

That is why hollywood liberals being condescending assholes about this stuff is going against their own self-interest. It makes them and their target audience feel better about themselves but it has absolutely zero positive impact on getting people who don't currently agree with them to agree with them. If anything, I would argue, it makes people who don't already agree with them far less likely to be open to changing their minds.
 
golfcart said:
Fair enough about your criticism that most engineering problems are a lot more cut and dry, but the atmosphere still follows the laws of physics.
Of course it does. That does not, by any stretch of the imagination, imply that it can be simulated.
golfcart said:
And not just that, physicists and engineers use non-deterministic approaches in solving some problems too...
Agreed. There is no problem simulating non-deterministic effects. That is not an issue.
golfcart said:
If your argument is that the problem is too complex to trust the experts I don't have a good rebuttal to that as i stated before.
That's the argument. I described the four main issues involved with trying to simulate the climate. Here are a couple of assessments from fellow physicists:

- A recent one from Lubos Motl

- And an excellent description of some of the issues with chaotic systems:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvhipLNeda4[/youtube]
golfcart said:
If you think that the research is ideologically driven or that the biases of the researchers cause them to accept answers they are looking for while being skeptical of answers they are not looking for I can't really argue with that either.
Like all government research funds, you do the work for which you are funded. It is extremely well-documented what happens to climate researchers who get the "wrong" conclusion.
golfcart said:
At the end of the day though, I stand by my overall assessment, this comes down to a question of trust and faith in expertise.
Trust and faith are earned. Climate scientists have a ridiculously bad track record at making ANY predictions about ANYTHING. Any trust and faith put in them is horribly misguided, IMO. Unfortunately, they are giving all of science a very bad name.

As a result of their folly, the chickens are coming home to roost. There are an awful lot of "climate change" rent seekers who will soon need to find gainful employment. Deservedly so.
 
RegGuheert said:
Climate scientists have a ridiculously bad track record at making ANY predictions about ANYTHING. Any trust and faith put in them is horribly misguided, IMO.
Well, there is that little thing they predicted 20 years ago about global temperatures getting warmer... which has come to pass.
 
Stoaty said:
RegGuheert said:
Climate scientists have a ridiculously bad track record at making ANY predictions about ANYTHING. Any trust and faith put in them is horribly misguided, IMO.
Well, there is that little thing they predicted 20 years ago about global temperatures getting warmer... which has come to pass.
Yep. And they got that wrong, as well. The peak of this El Niño was the same as the peak of the El Niño in 1998. Both satellite measurement systems (which match the balloon measurements) have them within 0.02K. Measurement error is plus or minus 0.1K.

And please don't try to tell me that you don't care about satellite measurements because we don't live in the atmosphere. The simple fact is that even if we ignore all the fiddling with the surface temperature datasets and accept those results as they are, what that would mean is that the surface of the Earth warmed MORE RAPIDLY than the atmosphere. That, in itself, is proof positive that the warming did NOT come from the greenhouse effect. And that matches exactly with the measurements that show that the greenhouse effect has not increased in 25 years.
 
RegGuheert said:
Stoaty said:
RegGuheert said:
Climate scientists have a ridiculously bad track record at making ANY predictions about ANYTHING. Any trust and faith put in them is horribly misguided, IMO.
Well, there is that little thing they predicted 20 years ago about global temperatures getting warmer... which has come to pass.
Yep. And they got that wrong, as well. The peak of this El Niño was the same as the peak of the El Niño in 1998. Both satellite measurement systems (which match the balloon measurements) have them within 0.02K. Measurement error is plus or minus 0.1K.

And please don't try to tell me that you don't care about satellite measurements because we don't live in the atmosphere. The simple fact is that even if we ignore all the fiddling with the surface temperature datasets and accept those results as they are, what that would mean is that the surface of the Earth warmed MORE RAPIDLY than the atmosphere. That, in itself, is proof positive that the warming did NOT come from the greenhouse effect. And that matches exactly with the measurements that show that the greenhouse effect has not increased in 25 years.

Just asking for a clarification...
What part of the atmosphere? Lower, mid, upper...
 
RegGuheert said:
Stoaty said:
RegGuheert said:
Climate scientists have a ridiculously bad track record at making ANY predictions about ANYTHING. Any trust and faith put in them is horribly misguided, IMO.
Well, there is that little thing they predicted 20 years ago about global temperatures getting warmer... which has come to pass.
Yep. And they got that wrong, as well. The peak of this El Niño was the same as the peak of the El Niño in 1998. Both satellite measurement systems (which match the balloon measurements) have them within 0.02K. Measurement error is plus or minus 0.1K.

Amusing to quote measurement error of 0.1K for the MSU derived temperatures, when these have been revised multiple times by more than that. Also, why pick two months out of the whole record at the peak of two El Ninos, when El Ninos are variable and we have exactly two strong ones to compare? Why two months out of an ~18 year record?

Also predicted:

Stratosphere would cool. It has.

Surface would warm. It has.

Most mountain glaciers would retreat. They have. Ice doesn't care.

Ocean would warm (more than 90% of heat goes into oceans). They have.

Some time between 2050 and 2100 the Arctic Ocean would melt to basically ice free in summer, some ice will remain near Canadian Arctic Archipelago for longer. This prediction looks broken. The Arctic seems more sensitive to warming than predicted. The Death Spiral.

arctic-death-spiral.jpg


Of course, RegGuheert knows that a blue water North Pole isn't possible.

RegGuheert said:
The fact that you even parroted the idea that the North Pole might be blue in the near future shows the folly of your belief system.

Ice doesn't care.
 
Also it was predicted that coral reefs would die.

Huge sections of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching across hundreds of miles of its most pristine northern sector, were recently found to be dead, killed last year by overheated seawater. More southerly sections around the middle of the reef that barely escaped then are bleaching now, a potential precursor to another die-off that could rob some of the reef’s most visited areas of color and life.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/science/great-barrier-reef-coral-climate-change-dieoff.html

16REEF1-superJumbo.jpg
 
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