Discussion > Global warming Nazis
TinyCO2
> Chandra, sometimes it's as informative to see which
comments you don't respond to as those you do. Let's see
if you answer this one.
It goes both ways, clearly. I respond where I am interested and where I can, like everyone else. I'm just one against a hundred so bear that in mind when you get upset that the little gems you post get ignored.
On abuse and Spencer, I don't know the chronology, but a man who accuses his profession of gross dishonesty by writing
I find it difficult to believe that I am the first researcher to figure out what I describe in this book. Either I am smarter than the rest of the world's climate scientists - which seems unlikely - or there are other scientists who also have evidence that global warming could be mostly natural, but have been hiding it. That is a serious charge, I know, but it is a conclusion that is difficult for me to avoid.should not be very surprised when he is called names or worse.
Your collective preoccupation with the word "denier" is boring. There is no connection to the Holocaust. Calling us Nazis is childish and, as I said above, lets sensible readers know the sort of people you are better than anything we can say.
Your attitude to SKS, along with others here, is in tune with the general attempts to de-legitimise any mainstream science, scientists scientific bodies. The propaganda people on the skeptic side are truly experts in the trade. But I have yet to see anyone point out a science error on SKS or RealClimate etc. Do that and I might take you seriously, otherwise I think it more likely that you have never read and understood what they say in enough detail to "refute" it but rather are relying on your false authorities (Montford, Monkton, Delingpole etc) to tell you not to go there - it might endanger your commitment to the cause.
As to the question of who is a skeptic and who is a denier, I tend to condemn you all to the latter category unless I see evidence to the contrary. We have of course discussed this before as the Bishop likes to claim that only denial of the greenhouse effect constitutes denial. He must know better than that but it is a successful mechanism to get his audience all riled up so he plays it when news is short.
What evidence would make me think you are truly skeptical? Well for starters, an ability to separate AGW "skepticism" from views on anything else would count strongly. For example, a skeptic who admits that fossil fuel extraction and use have huge externalities (costs not borne directly by the user) and hence supports a move to cleaner energy sources. The stock response to such a proposition here is denial or obfuscation and so anyone holding such an opinion would probably be unpopular and would probably go unaired - but I'd be more likely to take their skepticism seriously.
Another good sign for me would be an ability to treat evidence on its merits instead of unthinking rejection of anything that supports AGW. For example rejecting C&W13 as just a way of making up data (as your Bishop did) identifies the "skeptic" as a denier with no further effort required. Equating 75% volume loss of Arctic ice with a small Antarctic sea ice gain does the jobs just as effectively. etc, etc.
Martin A - to be. So are you as upset about people calling me Chunder as you are about my mis-addressing geronimo?
Chandra
Sorry Martin A, didn't see your post at 7:18. it would seem we both refer to something like this;
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/ISSI_fulltext.pdf
Graph at top page 8 shows the computer derived offset you describe. My question to EM is where is the rising trend from CO2?
ssat
Ssat
Early daffodils don't just happen. They appear when the local average temperature goes above that which triggers their growth. This is occurring gradually earlier as average UK Winter temperatures increase. This extends the growing season and the daffodils appear earlier.
I am not sure how the size of the imbalance should change with increasing CO2. It has more to do with how far the system is out of equilibrium. That depends on the difference between the current temperature and the equilibrium temperature for the current CO2 concentration.
Do you have numerical data for natural variation? I have seen it invoked regularly, but nobody ever gave me numbers. There is one measure in Figure 7 of Hansen et al 1981, but perhaps the source is a deterrent. His graph shows it as +/-0.12C.
You can get a PDF here.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html
Entropic man
Ah Chandra, but I'm not upset by being called a denier, I merely point out how the use of it diminishes it's context with the Holocaust. I'm not Jewish so I'm not directly affected. I'm also not Spencer so I'll let him make his own choice what he calls people.
I am a denier. I deny you the right to make my decisions for me. I won't stop anyone from wasting their money on 'cleaner energy' but I resent you wantng to use mine on stuff that isn't fit for purpose. I take pleasure in mocking a science that is supposed to be our saviour and yet cannot manage even simple standards. It won't save anyone because no matter what the truth about AGW it's not good enough to persuade people to act. The more people like you defend it, the longer the scientists will tell themselves it's convincing and won't bother putting their house in order. You're an enabler.
TinyCO2
chandra - I'm not upset - either about what you call people or what they call you.
You clearly did not get the point I was trying to make (seems to be a pattern there between my comments and what you take in from them). I may try to explain more clearly later.
Martin A
TinyCO2
"Climate science is almost all cutting edge discoveries. By the very nature of the subject, it's messy, complicated and has a great many surprises in store, "
I agree with pretty much your entire post, especially the sentence above. If there was time for it to become a mature science before using it to guide policy we would not be having this debate.
Unfortunately, from my viewpoint, the problem is that what we do now determines our situation in what to most people is the distant future. By the time the science has matured, so will the consequences. "Wait and see" is only a good strategy if there is nothing to see, of which neither of us can be sure.
Humanity does not do well when there is a long lag between cause and effect. It becomes too easy to find causes for inaction. For a politician policymaking under such circumstances life must be especially difficult., If they take the threat seriously they must use uncertain science to persuade short term focused voters to spend money whose effects won't become visible for decades, under a propaganda barrage from both sides.
I can understand your reluctance. In 40 years one of our ghosts will be able to say to the other "I told you so!". But which one? :-)
Entropic man
TinyCO2, so at 9:33 AM you were so upset about the word 'denier' that it took 200 words to get it off your chest, but you are now no longer upset. How your mood swings!
> no matter what the truth about AGW it's not good enough to
persuade people to act.
It would be enough were it not for the propaganda campaign of the various vested interests. But in the current environment, you are probably right. It was the same with smoking before and with ethyl lead before that. Powerful vested interests have great skill and years of practice at fooling the gullible and paying the purchasable to support their interests. Meanwhile, renewables will take over the world, despite opposition - of that I am sure. It will just take a little longer.
Chandra
Back at the original post which inspired this thread, I promised I'd try to help Brendan H out with his odd views about similarities between climate ‘denial’ with Holocaust denial. I'm posting it here, and leaving a note that I have done so back at the original post's comment thread. I'm not getting all the web links to work, and it is a bit on the long side. I have had a bit of a long day, but my apologies for both flaws.
I reproduce Brendan’s entire comment in stages, in blockquotes such as this first one, and then add my comments:
John Shade: ‘Can you see now why I'd like to know more about why you just called me a denier?’
I hope I have never called anyone a climate denier, and it’s certainly not my usual style.
.
But since you ask the question, climate ‘denial’ unfortunately shares several points of similarity with Holocaust denial:
A peculiar start, implying that I had been engaged in some prior discussion with him, and had there raised the question quoted. Not true. My question was a hypothetical one as part of an imagined conversation. But this is a quibble.
The first point of difficulty is that the Holocaust is an historical event, still within the living memory of a few people. It is well-established, and well-documented. So much so, that those who deny it are either publicity-seeking cranks or religious or political extremists for whom hatred is a primary driver. The threat of a climate crisis due to our CO2 on the other hand is a forecast for several decades into the future. The denial of something widely accepted as a verifiable fact is scarcely comparable to the denial of a conjecture about a very complex physical system several decades into the future. The very word ‘denial’ jars in that context, even without the odious overtones of contempt. Perhaps the sloppy terminology in widespread use in climate campaigning helps obscure the contrast.
You do not define what you mean by ‘climate denial’. The literal meaning is surely agreed by all as absurd, and a moment’s reflection should be sufficient to see that ‘climate change denial’ is nearly as foolish. Since you and I would probably not be discussing this topic were it not for the urgent crisis which climate alarm campaigners tell us is coming our way, I shall assume you mean what use to be most widely know as the threat of ‘catastrophic anthropogenic global warming’, or cagw. All four terms seem to have been found inconvenient for the campaigners in recent years, and I’d guess they are seen far less often than they used to be. But my goodness they served the campaigners well and set their political and scientific focus for the early years, say from the ending of the previous cooling scare in say the early 1980s and into the first decade of this century. Nowadays, I think ‘anthropogenic’ has been dropped in favour of manmade, perhaps in response to focus groups finding that word more accessible. The notion of ‘global’ effects seems to have been displaced by regional ones, e.g. sea ice in the Arctic, sub-tropical storms, and so on). ‘Warming’ of course is so last century now that it has not been taking place for getting on for two decades, and all that earlier talk of global mean temperatures being the telltale sign to look for have been dismissed as too simplistic. Even ‘catastrophe’ seems to be being sidelined, perhaps because it too was proving counter-productive on the general public. Now the campaigners want us to talk of disruption ‘weirding’, or heating, or perhaps that we should now take the mechanism for granted and concentrate of effects such as millions of climate refugees, disappearing Maldives, hurricanes fiercer and more frequent, tropical diseases getting everywhere, and so on through a list of things which have not happened, and for which denial is therefore moot.
Point 1. Concede all unassailable matters, lest one be thought a nutter.This is more vague, and unscientific talk. Science is all about ‘assailing’ ideas and observations. I think perhaps you mean currently widely accepted positions, rather than unassailable ones. Here are some
1. global mean temperature rose about as much and about as rapidly early in the 20th century without human assistance as it did the late 20th century with the benefit of an appreciable rise on CO2
2. CO2 has lagged temperature changes on timescales on hundred to thousands of years, and also more recently in terms of seasonal variations
3. the contribution of ‘trapped infra-red radiation’ is of negligible importance for the warming of real greenhouses – they get hot even if made of materials translucent to both infra-red and visible light.
4. physicists in the 1940s had already noted that doubling or more of CO2 in the atmosphere would not be expected to have much impact as an explanation of major transitions in the climate system. Leading climate alarm campaigner the late Stephen Schneider had recognised this back in the day when he found global cooling more attractive as a vehicle for scaring people In a Science paper in 1971 he wrote ‘even an increase by a factor of 8 in the amount of CO2, which is highly unlikely in the next several thousand years, will produce an increase in the surface temperature of less than 2 deg. K.’
5. the major cycle in terms of energy in the climate system is the hydrological one. It is far far more important than the carbon cycle fore example, despite both being not fully understood Neither the carbon cycle, nor the water cycle are directly modeled in the GCMs
6. the computer models on which the forecasts of climate crisis depend are not able to model key phenomena such as clouds, or even CO2 itself directly, and have a long list of published faults and weaknesses
7. nothing extraordinary has been shown to be happening to weather anywhere, nor to ice sheets, nor to sea levels
2. Row back from above by minimising the evidence and accusing opponents of lying, cheating, stealing, and doing science while fat or bald (or worse, both fat and bald).
I don’t know how to ‘minimise evidence’. I suppose you mean downplay or ignore evidence presented by climate alarm campaigners rather than evidence in general. The talk of ‘opponents’ is a bit emotive, as the accusation about accusations which follow, albeit softened with a little weak humour. I think this sort of thing does occur, although I see it mostly coming from climate campaigners. The ‘denier’ epithet is part of it, as are charges of being in the pay of big oil/coal/tobacco or in some nasty right-wing conspiracy or being pig-ignorant and so on. Taking your illustrative accusations in turn for the climate campaigners, on the other hand, I find more grounds for taking them seriously:
Lying: Schneider called for a pushing of the limits on this with his notorious cri-de-coeur, “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” He was one of the thought-leaders of the climate alarm campaign, so it is not unreasonable for observers of that campaign to be subsequently on high alert for signs of dishonesty. The book ‘The Delinquent Teenager’ documents several instances in the IPCC. Such dishonesty in not hard to find in the outputs of climate campaigners. The most recent exposure I know of, layers concerns a doctored comment in a climate alarm campaign website being used in a legal document in support of a legal action by another climate alarm campaigner against another academic with whom he disagrees (here and here)
Cheating: Climategate – the warping of peer review, the conspiring to block legitimate scientific paper, harass editors, and conceal data.
Stealing: Peter Gleick comes to mind. For example here
I am not aware of anything like these examples on the part of those who are critical of the climate alarm campaign.
3. Choose the core issue, and never, ever concede. In the case of Holocaust denial, it’s the gas chambers for use on humans; once you concede that, it’s game over. For climate, it’s the risk of catastrophic climate change. Once that’s conceded, mitigation becomes a live option.
The question has now moved to the denying of a risk. This is a progress. But once again, we shall have problems finding any influential person or substantial numbers of people who deny that there is a risk of catastrophic climate change. Most children learn about the ice age we are currently in, and how that during the last glaciation of it there were substantial ice sheets in what are currently temperate zones in the northern hemisphere. On a smaller scale, the settlers in Greenland who moved there during the Medieval Warm Period faced catastrophe for them as the Little Ice Age took hold. We face a risk of a new cooling spell ending our long slow climb out of the last one over the past 150 years or so. We face the risk of an end of our rather pleasant inter-glacial period when the ice sheets grow again as it would seem they are very likely to given the historical pattern of this and other ice ages. We risk disruption from volcanoes, asteroids, cosmic rays – in general from changes in anything which affects energy flows within our climate system. Our CO2 emissions do that, as do our buildings and our agriculture. I am not aware of any sensible denial of these phenomena. The problem though is not their existence, but what we know of their relative importance. And that is the frontline of the real debate in science and in due course in policy-making. We have a faction, which has been centred around the IPCC, which asserts that we shall be in for very various serious trouble thanks to our CO2 emissions. There are others, and I happen to be one of the, who find the case for this dramatic alarm not at all convincing. And that is not game over. That is where the game has been all along. And of course, ‘mitigation’ is 'a live option’, albeit a misguided, foolish and destructive one in my opinion.
So, unfairly perhaps, climate sceptics get tarred with the denier brush, in part because their argument style follows a pattern. But that may be the case with any sort of opposition to an established belief.
The pattern you have outlined is one created in your imagination. I do not recognise it amongst the works of people I see as major critics of the scientific case for acute alarm about carbon dioxide. Let me direct you to a report published last year which sought to share scientific results in conflict with what you rightly call ‘established belief’ about climate variation, and in particular than our CO2 is a major contributor to it: Climate Change Reconsidered II. You will search in vain for your pattern, but you will encounter evidence pointing to the IPCC having exaggerated CO2 threats, and they urge policy makers to ‘resist pressure from lobby groups to silence scientists who question the authority of the IPCC to speak for ‘climate science’ …[there is ] a scientific community deeply uncertain about the reliability of the IPCC’s computer models, its postulates, and its interpretation of circumstantial evidence. This criticism does not come from a ‘fringe’ of the climate science community: it is stated plainly and repeated in thousands of articles in the peer-reviewed literature.’</>
Addendum: Mill was a perceptive man. The majority opinion gains a force that the minority opinion lacks, so the majority need to respect that difference. Perhaps at one time, the two climate sides were more equal, but not so nowadays.
Feb 21, 2014 at 11:24 PM | Brendan H
Mill was impressive. I think he would be appalled at the threats to civil liberties being proposed by some climate alarm campaigners. Let me just finish with an extract from a review of his book On Liberty:
“We must not silence any opinion, because such censorship is simply morally wrong. Mill points out that a viewpoint’s popularity does not necessarily make it correct—this fact is why we must allow freedom of opinion. Dissent is vital because it helps to preserve truth, since truth can easily become hidden in sources of prejudice and dead dogma.”
As for the ‘two’ climate sides, I think you will find that it is not so simple as that. The climate alarm campaigners stand out though for their wealth and power both of which have developed along with their astonishing success in influencing politicians, other scientists, and the mass media. How much of that is contingent upon their efforts to marginalise and degrade those who dare to disagree with them, with talk of their being 'climate deniers' but a part of it?
John Shade
Entropic: I am not sure how the size of the imbalance should change with increasing CO2. It has more to do with how far the system is out of equilibrium
By my logic, if a (TOA) imbalance is the product of GGas then increasing GGas would show an increased imbalance. By your logic, the size of the imbalance is divorced from GGas concentration.
I tend to think both are in agreement.
Richard Drake: To get back to the topic of this thread, yes, I deny the truth of much of climate science and am sceptical of more. To call me a denier would therefore be correct. Do I equate that with denial of The Holocaust: I do not and am not offended by it for all I deny is a hypothesis. If it matures into a theory, that will be evidence based and I will reconsider my position then. Is Nazi an acceptable response? No even though some strive and even demand a totalitarian solution. It will be ever thus, whichever the hobgoblin du jour.
ssat
Ssat
Nearly in agreement.
Think of the equilibrium state. CO2 concentration is constant and enough millennia have gone by for ice, air and ocean to have reached stable temperatures.
Under these conditions insolation = outward radiation. There is no imbalance.
The imbalance is a sign that conditions are changing. A net input indicates warming. A net output would indicate cooling.
The size of the imbalance is an indication of how far the system is from equilibrium, and an indicator of the rate of change.
Entropic man
Entropic
You miss the point. It is perfectly possible for there to be a redistribution of energy between surface, atmosphere and hydrosphere without there being any TOA imbalance - just add CO2. It is perfectly impossible for popular climate science to explain that.
ssat
Feb 23, 2014 at 9:51 PM | John Shade
Very logical :) But it misses the main point. Terms such as this have been deployed by cultural entities seeking dominance for as long as there has been language. Hence the facts surrounding the climate debate (and still more so the climate itself) are only proximate and not root cause. The term 'denier' is deployed for one reason only, to inject emotion into the debate, because that's what cultural entities like religions or CAGW need in order to triumph over facts and logic. Such terms emerge via the iterative differential selection of millions of candidates, which themselves are strings of accident and design, so cannot truly be said to be deployed with full intent by any single individual in that chain.
The problem with arguing the logic of the proximate causes is that it will always make sense to anyone outside the cultural entity, and perhaps some sense to some inside, but is unlikely to prevent a continued takeup that exceeds the rate at which logical arguments can be expressed and accepted. Such terms are substitues for real thought and work much faster! Even if progress is made on one term, another will appear, borrowing from whatever domain (e.g. Holocause denial) can be leveraged, and whether or not there is a particularly relevant comparison. It is only replicative sucess that is important, not factual content or relevance.
Andy West
ssat:
> The elephant in the lab is not 'the pause' but the
detection by measurement of no trend in TOA net
energy flows while carbon dioxide increases.
What TOA net energy flows are you expecting to see? My understanding of the GHE might admittedly not be sound. But as I understand it, in equilibrium, the TOA temperature is such that emission to space equal incoming solar energy.
Adding extra GHG to the atmosphere causes the TOA altitude to increase. When equilibrium is again reached, the surface temp is higher but the TOA temperature is the same as before (as incoming solar hasn't changed). So at the two extremes (before adding GHG and after equilibriating) the TOA temperature (and the energy flow) is the same .
Are you expecting that between these extremes the TOA temp changes up and then back down, or down and then back up? And is your understanding shared by anyone else?
Chandra
Seat
You will have to unpack that last comment a bit. As it stood it made very little sense. ENSO and weather change the flow of energy between different parts of the system without necessarily changing TOA radiation. What do you mean by " just add CO2" and what was the mechanism you had in mind?
Goodnight
Entropic man
Feb 23, 2014 at 11:34 PM | Andy West
I do believe you are right, but my comment was aimed at helping Brendan H break out of what seemed to me to be a poorly thought-out position. I'll cling to attempts at logic as part of the response to our vulnerability to popular 'memes'!
Have you come across Ludwik Fleck, by the way? Here's a quote from him which caught my eye the other day:
"When people begin to exchange ideas, a thought collective arises, bonded by a specific mood, and as a result of a series of understandings and misunderstandings a peculiar thought style is developed. When a thought style becomes sufficiently sophisticated, the collective divides itself into an esoteric circle (professionals) and an exoteric circle (laymen). A thought style consists of the active elements, which shape ways in which members of the collective see and think about the world, and of the passive elements, the sum of which is perceived as an “objective reality”. What we call “facts”, are social constructs: only what is true to culture is true to nature. Thought styles are often incommensurable: what is a fact to the members of a thought collective A sometimes does not exist to the members of a thought collective B, and a thought that is significant and true to the members of A may sometimes be false or meaningless for members of B."
Source Hat-tip: Maggie's Farm
I think the assertion that 'What we call “facts”, are social constructs: only what is true to culture is true to nature.' is true only for those who have succumbed to the vulnerability. The last sentence of the quote is related to the difficulty of helping them recover.
John Shade
Chandra "TinyCO2, so at 9:33 AM you were so upset about the word 'denier' that it took 200 words to get it off your chest, but you are now no longer upset. How your mood swings!"
No, Chandra, go back and read what I said at 9:33. I said that when you resort to insults it demonstrates you don’t have a decent argument. An insult is meant to suppress the opposition but in the case of sceptics it goads them into trying harder.
“It would be enough were it not for the propaganda campaign of the various vested interests.” Seriously? You seriously believe that? There’s no hope for your side then, give up.
TinyCO2
Entropic man. Climate change is like the wolf in the story of the boy who cried. It always existed, but every time the villagers rushed to the boy’s rescue and there was no wolf, they trusted the boy a little less. So every time the public are goaded into looking for AGW and they can’t see it, they trust climate science a little less. It’s like a product released too soon on the market. Every time a fault pops up, the product loses its appeal to the point where even if the product ends up perfect, nobody will touch it. AGW has had the big splashy launch but isn't the product to back up the hype.
What we are currently doing to reduce CO2 is negligible. So negligible the UK footprint is going up when imports are included. Nobody is acting like they think they have to seriously cut CO2 and that includes those who sceptics can’t touch – the scientists themselves. Take the Mawson expedition… no, not the bit about being locked up in ice, the very expedition itself. If you look at the aims of the trip, there was nothing vital involved. The launch of some Argo buoys was probably the most important aspect. The sentimental trip to Mawson’s hut was pure indulgence. The three UK journalists used 10 tonnes each getting there and back (assuming business class travel) which is almost 5 times the per capita annual emissions to park CO2 rises. Was there anything those men could have transmitted that could justify that? Was there anything that they could have transmitted that couldn't have been done another way than flying round the planet? Were those the actions of people who think we must reduce excess CO2 at all costs?
We are at a point where people think AGW is important enough to moan about but not to do anything substantial. People are even getting bored of that. If governments and energy suppliers were serious they’d not be messing about with wind, they’d go hell for leather for nuclear. Anyone intent on cutting CO2 would see that we’re a long way from persuading people they need less energy so the only option is to provide copious amounts of carbon free energy. Wind, CCS, wave, etc aren’t going to do that for the foreseeable future. The sooner people accept that, the sooner they realise how much more needs to be done to impact CO2.
Would the Titanic have been saved if everyone had bailed out with egg cups? Would more or less lives have been saved if they tried it?
TinyCO2
The Nazis, and other extreme socialists in power such as the Bolsheviks and Stalin, did like to have laws passed to give their desired actions a veneer of legality and proper procedure. There has been a proposal for an ecocide law:
Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute "climate deniers" who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.
The above is from a Guardian report in 2010. Four years on, and the http://www.thisisecocide.com/ website that the article helpfully provided a link to is currently dedicated to helping people deal with what they call the 'distress of getting pregnant'. Do these worrisome people have very short attention spans?
John Shade
Chandra 11:43PM
My understanding of the GHE might admittedly not be sound.
It isn't if you are referring to the popular one. You are confusing the measurement point for energy flows which are at the top of atmosphere with measurement of temperatures which, for the purposes of the GHE hypothesis we are discussing, are taken in the lower layers. That causes the rest of your post to be equally nonsense.
Try IPCC AR4
"Radiative forcing is a measure of the influence a factor has in altering the balance of incoming and outgoing energy in the Earth-atmosphere system and is an index of the importance of the factor as a potential climate change mechanism."
Or alternatively any Trenberth paper on Earth energy budget.
Where you will find that for a constant change in a 'forcing' there is an expected sustained imbalance in the TOA energy budget.
Climate science is looking for 'missing heat' because computer models (not the CERES satellite which has an unquantified calibration offset) indicate a TOA imbalance yet the surface record does not support it (The Pause).
Oh, and an another favourite topic of yours, the English language, where did you get *equilibriating* from?
ssat
Entropic, 12:07AM
Good afternoon.
I am unsure how I can take this further unless you take the Trenberth Position that incremental CO2 is a forcing which will be detectable by an imbalance in TOA radiation while that forcing exists. So let us accept for the moment that you do. By reason, that imbalance will increase over time while the forcing continues. We have the CERES satellite in place and it shows an imbalance (less is outgoing) but no trend. Further it has been found to have a calibration offset quantified only by reference to what would be expected by climate models (also mentioned by Martin A, above). If a competing hypothesis was to use CERES data, it could, for instance and justifiably so, quantify that offset as zero to fit its hypothesis. If that hypothesis was that incremental CO2 merely redistributed incoming energy between surface and atmosphere while observing conservation of it then the CERES measurements would support it while the lack of a trend aligned with increasing CO2 would not support the existing hypothesis whatever the offset.
Whether or not I have 'another mechanism in mind' is immaterial. The fact is that we now have some actual measurements at the core of GGas theory which are currently occupying those who are paid to seek to reinforce their hypothesis without an attempt to understand what they might actually mean.
ssat
EM. Just to remind you that you haven't answered Martin A's question as to how the imbalance of energy at the TOA is measured?
geronimo
Feb 24, 2014 at 8:46 AM | John Shade
Interesting, thanks. I haven’t read any Fleck, but I’ve come across the concept of cognition as a collective process, and would largely agree that it is.
“I'll cling to attempts at logic as part of the response to our vulnerability to popular 'memes'!”
Cool. As long as you know that you may be on an endless and thankless task!
"I think the assertion that 'What we call “facts”, are social constructs: only what is true to culture is true to nature.' is true only for those who have succumbed to the vulnerability. "
In a domain populated largely by what might be called reasonable facts, I'd agree with you. But in a grey domain where uncertainty is high, there aren't really any 'facts' as such, because the tottering pile of what we think we know (a huge collection of small nearly facts but with very limited scope, and a smaller number of fundamental uncertainties with big scope, and everything else inbetween, all leaning on each other), means that social constructs tend to form the replacement for facts regarding any summary status or actions on the topic. And in turn, at least for domains with enough scope / motivation / followers, there will be a memetic component to the social construction, and sometimes this will be dominant. So examples of modern subjects that are very fact rich and so so conform to your expectations would be Newtonian mechanics or the life-cycle of the butterfly. Subjects that are not at their heart fact rich would be most philosophies and most politics (whether they are ‘better’ or ‘worse’ is to a large extent subjective, and better/worse is ill-defined in this context too), religions (cannot ever prove/disprove the existence of God), and Climate Change (a wicked problem we’ve barely started upon). While for instance ‘dark matter / dark energy’ may contain as many uncertainties as climate change, it is so far removed from everyday life that it is not likley to spawn mass social movements based on memetic runaway. One day climate uncertainties will be much more bounded, strangling memtic evolution. But in all these ‘fact weak’ topics, any position except ‘we don’t and can’t know’ is bound to be a social construct. To that extent I agree with the quote, and suggest that it’s not just vulnerability to memes that makes this so, its because there’s little choice. However, I also agree that even such things as we DO ‘know’, such as population statistics for instance, are often abused via scare stories once a social construct with a high memetic content ‘takes over’ the agenda (and that is certainly true for climate change!) In politics there may simply not be the choice to say ‘we don’t know’, SOME course of action will be needed. In climate change however, this choice was and is still available.
Andy West
Ssat
I have been thinking about the imbalance. If Trenberth is convinced that the imbalance should be increasing I' d like to see his logic, because I'm not sure I agree.
It will not just be CO2. Water, methane and cloud cover will also contribute. The imbalance will be proportional to total forcing, though much of it will trace back to the climate sensitivity of CO2.
Imbalance should depend on how far the system is out of equilibrium. That depends on the difference between the energy content now and at equilibrium.
If CO2 content stopped increasing today it would be easy. The imbalance would decrease as energy accumulated. until equilibrium was reached.
Since CO2 is still increasing things get more complex. The energy content at equilibrium is increasing, while the date at which equilibrium will be reached is receding into the future.
The imbalance will only be constant if the difference between current and equilibrium energy content stays constant. If the equilibrium energy increases faster than the current energy the gap and the imbalance will increase. If the difference is decreasing, so will the imbalance.
If the imbalance is constant then the news is neutral. If it were dropping it would be good news. If it increased it would be bad news. If CERES is showing no trend then we are in the first mode. Earth is warming, but the warming is not accelerating.
Entropic man
Geronimo
Is Martin A incapable of researching this for himself?
Try this link.
meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/.../Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
Entropic man
I worked with scientists but I was technically an engineer/manager. Industry isn't allowed to be it's own arbiter of standards, not because it's inherently fraudulent but because it could be. Moreover, there's always the possibility of mistakes. Procedures, auditing, documentation, punishments and many other layers of protection have been put in over the years to try and ensure human nature doesn't dominate. Consensus supporters often ask 'if your doctor told you you needed brain surgery would you ignore him'. The answer is no, but I wouldn't let him get a drill out and start making holes either. We don't trust doctors, we put in a great many fail safes but still doctors get it wrong. I'll just say North Staffordshire Hospital. Why should we trust climate scientists, especially when they don't have an unblemished reputation?
If you read the different papers over time, you see numerous cases where the climate doesn't work quite the way the scientists thought it did. That's not fraud, it's just normal science. A process of discovery. It has it's own policy for recording science and they call them journals. But in any other field, that would just be stage 1. You almost never see science go straight from papers to public or policy. Think how many times you've heard of some great new cure and then for it to vanish for years in testing and maybe never meet the light of day? Medcal scientists aren't allowed to use the public as guinea pigs for their theories.
Climate science is almost all cutting edge discoveries. By the very nature of the subject, it's messy, complicated and has a great many surprises in store, but we're supposed to act like it's a finished product with all the bugs worked out. We're supposed to turn a blind eye when they demonstrate group think, protectionism, sloppyness and try to keep their work secret?