Geronimo, it is simple really. We are raising CO2 levels. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and so temps will rise. This might be benign. Or it might not. We should be worried because we don't know which of the two it might be and by the time we find out it will be too late to change.

Dung, any sign of cooling yet?

Martin, yes I like to load em up. But as they say, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think. Or something like that. I try to get people to consider where they really stand but I get the impresion they are happy being surrounded by liars and dissimulators like M or Salby or many others. Dung is unmoved by the clear fact that M is lying on so many questions, preferring to play with words instead. You seem unable to drop the idea that Salby might be right despite it being clear (to many anyway) that he is unaware of the literature on what he discusses (ice cores for example), that much of what he says is not new and that he presents his stuff (often to people unable to comprehend) in a way that seems designed to mislead.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas and so temps will rise.

You're wrong, and this single line exemplifies your error.
Ask any climate scientist, and perhaps ask for an explanation of why you are wrong.

If there is any mathematical linear relationship between these two I have yet to see it,
and there would be no climate debate if there was one. The fact that there isn't is why
you are desperately trying to convince us it is true all the same.

Prove me wrong, Raff. Show me it.

Possible responses from trolls;

1. Ignore the question
2. Go for the ad-hom and ignore the question
3. Appeal to authority and ignore the question
4. Point to a weighty tome and claim the answer is in there if only I would read it
5. Blame a supra-national conspiracy which is out to do us all in
6. Some other troll-like response

Big Yin, I've not looked carefully at pdfs plotting probability against temperature rise, but I'm sure you are right that they do go down to zero and -ve warming - with correspondingly tiny probabilities. If you are seeking to occupy that sliver of ground from zero leftwards (-ve) then I wish you fun in your improbable playground. You could invite Dung and Martin around to play, a sort of cosy Ménage à trois, cosy because the probabilities are so frigging small. The rest of us can occupy the spacious territory to the right of zero, where rising CO2 results in rising temperatures, although as there are so damn many of us it is also cosy. And we don't even have to ask Miss Linearity to join us (or is it Mrs, in her mathematical relationship) - the lovely dear can look after herself, un-sought and un-bidden by me.

Dung, any actual sign of cooling yet?

BTW Dung, I came across a lovely paean to you on these blessed pages:

You have a long track record here of misunderstanding what you read, and almost wilfully seeing the opposite meaning from what was intended.

Beautifully put, I think.

"Geronimo, it is simple really.

"We are raising CO2 levels. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and so temps will rise."

Apart from the last 20 years of the 20th century when there was a correlation between increasing CO2 and temperature there has been no empirical evidence of a relationship between CO2 in the atmosphere and temperature. In fact CO2 has risen dramatically without any increase in temperature over the last 18 years. There is no empirical evidence whatsoever to indicate CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere will cause temperatures to rise. There is empirical evidence of temperatures rising without an increase in CO2 and empirical evidence of temperatures staying stable with an increase in CO2 so how the scientific community and their camp followers in the alarmist industry have become certain that increasing CO2 will definitely increase temperatures is a mystery to me.

We are told that if the temperatures rise by 1C through a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere the (unknown) feedbacks will cause the temperature to rise by between 1.5C and 4.5C, but I don't know of any evidence in the paleo records where a rise in 1C has been followed by a rise in temperature of between 1.5C - 4.5C. Do you?

"This might be benign. Or it might not. We should be worried because we don't know which of the two it might be and by the time we find out it will be too late to change."

Do you know what you could right a book about that sentence. First of all you admit we have no clue what a warmer world would look like, but you clearly believe it won't, or might not be benign, so the solution is what? Stop burning fossil fuels?
Is that a practical solution? Are going to persuade the big emitters of CO2 the developing nations to stop using fossil fuels without a cheap reliable alternative? That seems to be highly improbable to me.

The problem with the Malthusian approach to climate - i.e. taking two variables, implying a relationship between them and predicting what would happen in the future from that relationship - is that there are other confounding variables around that you have to take into consideration, many of which would be beyond the imagination. As a for instance Malthus would not have taken onto account the telegraph and telephone and what effect they'd have on getting food to the right places. He could not have foreseen the invention of the tractor, or the extended railway networks, or industrial fertilisers or the multiple other inventions and changes to society that enable us, just 200 years later to produce food enough for 7 billion people.

So we don't know what the future will hold. We don't know and can't conceive of what changes will take place in society and technology. But we do know that there will be changes. Meanwhile there are very real problems that need solving today, with people dying of hunger in a world awash with food, people cooking indoors with open fires, infant mortality, vitamin A disease, malaria etc. etc and these problems will not be solved with windmills and solar panels they need fossil fuels, not just for cooking, but for the transport links that are required to get the food to the right places, the cement to build schools and homes. These are real problems easily identified, while your problems don't even exist, except in your mind, and even then you can't say what they actually are.

Thanks for answering Raff.

The failure of global temperature to increase with increased CO2, as predicted by climate modelers, is evidence of a cooling trend.
(See Vicky Pope's prediction of a 0.3 K increase between 2004 and 2014.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyDmdcPw7Uw
All it would take is for that cooling trend (whatever the cause) to increase significantly to result in actual lower global temperatures.

INDICATIONS that the Earth may cool:

Solar cycles are mimicking conditions that accompanied the Maunder Minimum of the Little Ice Age.
The Inter glacial Warm Period in which we live is well overdue to end.

INDICATIONS that the Earth will warm catastrophically

Computer models

Geronimo,

I don't know of any evidence in the paleo records where a rise in 1C has been followed by a rise in temperature of between 1.5C - 4.5C. Do you?

How would you know? It is not as if the rise and the feedback occur in two distinct steps, is it? Or maybe you think it is.

"This might be benign. Or it might not. We should be worried because we don't know which of the two it might be and by the time we find out it will be too late to change."

Do you know what you could right a book about that sentence. First of all you admit we have no clue what a warmer world would look like, but you clearly believe it won't, or might not be benign...

Well it is the crux of the issue, isn't it? What is the climate sensitivity to CO2? Is it zero or negaitive as the Big Yin and maybe others here think. Or is it positive as almost everyone else thinks? All pdfs I've seen show a risk that sensitivity is high - is it sensible just to ignore that and hope that it is low?

...so the solution is what? Stop burning fossil fuels?

And that is the crux of the policy response, not the science. Don't conflate the two. It is irrelevant in any discussion of the science and and the risks and doesn't influence whether the science is correct or not.

Dung I'm familiar with solar cycles. What is your point? That you can now forcast solar activity?

Rotational..., you think failure to go up is evidence of a downward trend. WTF?

If global warming was currently 0.3 K per decade as predicted by Vicky Pope amongst others, there would be a lower probability of actual cooling in the near future than with the current zero warming. Climate variability has been underestimated. (Do you have an alternative explanation for the failure to warm as predicted?)

Current energy policy should reflect the higher probability of global cooling than was plausible in the 1990s.
Current policy is to borrow, or to encourage borrowing through low interest rates, and feed-in-tariffs and renewable obligations, to "invest" in unreliable "renewable" energy projects. A more rational energy policy is required to avoid future hardship.

If climate sensitivity is + 0.5 K per doubling of CO2, it would take four doublings, i.e. a 16x increase, to cause an increase of 2 K.
16x pre-industrial CO2 (approx. 250 ppm) is 3000 ppm. Obviously there's a long way to go from the current 400 ppm.

"Well it is the crux of the issue, isn't it? What is the climate sensitivity to CO2? Is it zero or negaitive as the Big Yin and maybe others here think. Or is it positive as almost everyone else thinks? All pdfs I've seen show a risk that sensitivity is high - is it sensible just to ignore that and hope that it is low?"

Actually that's not the "crux of the issue" the crux of the issue is what effects the increased temperatures will have. According to the "scientists" ( in inverted commas because they're claiming to be able to foretell the future state of a coupled non-linear chaotic system) it will be uniformly bad. How do they know that?

I have to say that you keep banging on about the PDFs as though they were tablets of stone. They're not they are probability density functions massively flawed - for instance the long tails are a result in having little clue about the effects of aerosols - they are merely the best guesses. However, as scientists have become more skilled at producing the - still flawed - PDFs the TCR and ECS have come steadily down to between 1C and 2C, which is why AR5 re-introduced the lower estimate of 1.5C and didn't make a "best guess" at the likely ECS of 3C that was in AR4. So don't bet the ranch on the PDFs being anything other than the outcome of looking at birds' entrails.

"And that is the crux of the policy response, not the science. Don't conflate the two. It is irrelevant in any discussion of the science and and the risks and doesn't influence whether the science is correct or not."

Unlike Gerald Ford, who was cruelly described by Lyndon Johnson as unable to "fart and chew gum at the same time" I'm quite capable of talking about the science and the policies without mixing them up.

I've hit two cruxes, not bad. I'm not sure I said it was relevant to the science, in fact it is the IPCC that said we have to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

AR5 SPM

"Substantial cuts in GHG emissions over the next few decades can substantially reduce risks of climate change by limiting warming in the second half of the 21st century and beyond."

I'd think that was a good idea except, (a) there are no affordable alternatives for fossil fuels and (b) the main fossil fuel emitters aren't going to stop emissions this side of 2050, if at all.

"Showing leadership" is green-speak for doing something that the rest of the world won't do because it's stupid. I don't buy that the BRICS will reduce their fossil fuel emissions because we do. And I don't buy "green job" and high energy prices will help us, or anyone else. So the political issue is ultimately bound by the science, and the science is dodgy.

So I'll ask you Raff, do you seriously believe our cutting CO2 emissions (and the West paying $100Bn a year to developing countries) is in the best interests of the people of the UK when it's not clear it will warm, and if it does it's not clear it's going to be a bad thing?

Geronimo, was your 7:34 a mistake or did it have some purpose?

It is difficult to judge the effect of temp rises and that is compounded if their magnitude can't be quantified. So I'd say the latter is more important. But I can see it your way too. I don't recognize the suggestion that scientists think "it will be uniformly bad". That is not how science works and there are variations in opinion.

My "banging on about pdfs" is because that is what is important as there is still great uncertainty about sensitivity. The science gives ranges of possible outcomes corresponding to the diversity of pdfs. It is of course possible to hang ones hat on a particular narrow domain, as the Big Yin does with 0 warming or less. Maybe you do the same but with a different range. But that is just picking an outcome that suits your particular tastes rather than accepting that the outcome might be good or might be bad. It is just closing your eyes and hoping for the best.

Yes you can talk about science and policy together but the science has to drive policy, not the opposite. The range and probabilities of possible outcomes don't change just because cutting carbon would be difficult.

... do you seriously believe our cutting CO2 emissions (and the West paying $100Bn a year to developing countries) is in the best interests of the people of the UK when it's not clear it will warm, and if it does it's not clear it's going to be a bad thing?

Yes because I am not prepared, unlike you it seems, to pick from the range of possibilities those that are least threatening on the basis of, well let's just hope for the best, eh? And $100Bn is a small amount set against the $40Tn GDP of advanced economies. It is in our interest to improve the prospects of all developing countries.

Dung, did you patiently exaplain a point? I thouht you just said to Google for "solar minimum".

Radical, is that the Sunday Sermon?

Raff,
Bullshit on you.
There is no, none, zero, zip evidence you can offer that the money grab you support will do a thing to prevent the problem you claim to believe is inevitable if we don't agree with you.
You are, not to put to fine a point on it, full of crap.

Raff, thanks for your response, you are clearly disturbed and concerned, but if I may, could I put to you the following.

1. The scientists you are putting your faith in can't tell us what next Thursday's weather will be like and they can see it coming on satellites. They can't possibly forecast the future state of the climate, so the PDFs are nonsense based on umbongo witchcraft. The latest paper on heat retention that I know of is Otto et al in which the say.

"Observations of the energy budget alone do not rule out an ECS value below 2 °C, but they do rule out an ECS below 1.2 °C with 95% confidence."

It is, to me at least, inconceivable that a range of 1.5C - 4.5C for ECS literally plucked out of thin air in 1979 hasn't change after 36 years of money being thrown at climate science. That is clear clear evidence that they didn't have a clue what the ECS is going to be and still don't. Although there is currently a process of trying to lower ECS without having to lose face. In science you generally don't lose face if you're wrong because it's the nature of science that theories are produced and tested and there's no shame in being wrong. However once science becomes a political tool there are other things to take into consideration. One of them would be that the whole climate policy for the industrialised world is based not the reckless claim that the "likely" ECS was 3C. So there's a general tip-toeing around of the falling ECS, and rightly so, because this is science and without a lot more empirical evidence they cannot be certain. Which, of course, begs the question of why they were so certain it was 3C without empirical evidence.

2. But even if it is 3C and the climate warms there is not a single scintilla of proof that the forecasts of doom and disaster will occur - no one knows what the outcome will be. And although this information comes from a group of people with an almost peerless record of failed predictions from computer models you choose to believe them. Also the IMF has done a study to show that if we carry on with the current business as usual emissions people worldwide will be 10 to 70 times better off.

Have you read the AR5 Synthesis SPM. Not one single benefit will accrue from a warming world according to the IPCC. You can tell you're being rooked when there are no ups (or downs) to the story you're being told.

We're already seeing the benefits of CO2 in the increased greening of the planet. Every year the extra heat, precipitation and CO2 has given us bumper crops of wheat and corn (40% gets converted to bio-fuels, simultaneously putting up the price of corn and depriving the world's poof of access to this food, but who in the environmental and alarmist movements gives a FF for the poor and needy?).

3. And on top of that you know that the solution based on reductions of fossil fuels won't solve the problem because the developing world has already told us that they're not going to stop using fossil fuels. Do you not think there is more possibility of developing a new technology that doesn't emit CO2 than there is of banning it?

4. In summary:-

You believe, but don't know, that we will warm to 3C or more.

You believe, but don't know for certain, that there will be catastrophes caused by the increasing temperature.

You believe, but know for certain, we won't stop accelerating CO2 emissions

You believe and know for certain that BH denizens are a bunch of crackpot conspiracy theorists.

Time to stop now I think I'm dealing with religion not science.