Discussion > What do Entropic Man and Raff really believe.
As I am not certain which uncertainties you are referring to, and as none of the uncertainties have any form of certainty associated, as well as the uncertainty of how many uncertainties there are, with the more certain observation that ascribing an uncertainty with a number gives the implication that it is more certain as an uncertainty, you offer me an uncertain question that I certainly cannot answer.
However, my question is considerably simpler: what damage that can be attributed to climate change have we had, so far, and what damage do you feel is soon to become evident?
If you, or anyone else, cannot or will not answer that question, then I will assume that is because there is no answer to it; ipso facto no identifiable damage has yet occurred, and no identifiable damage can be envisaged. Face the very simple fact: all the increase in global temperatures that have occurred since the Little Ice Age has been beneficial to most life on this planet, and particularly so for the human species.
As for the 2,000 Indian deaths attributed to a heatwave in a country with a population of about 1 Billion, this is equivalent to slightly more than 2 per million, or 0.0002%. While scary in numbers (and tragic for the families), as a ratio it is trivial. Indeed, it could even be argued as to how that figure was determined; it does sound a mite suspicious, to me. Now, compare that with the positively identifiable 30,000 excess deaths that are occurring in this country during the winter, with folk torn between eating and heating, with a population of circa 60 million; that ratio works out a bit less than 0.5% (i.e. 12 times the CO2 ratio in the atmosphere – or is that not as important to you?), which is a noticeable blip in the figures. How many died of heatstroke in India during cooler years (say, 1970 – 1980)? I suspect that you will find that the number is little different from today’s, though might be higher, as air-conditioning was certainly not as widespread.
Radical Rodent
Radical, arguing that direct attribution of harm to climate change is impossible and therefore no such harm exists is like arguing that because a particular death can't be attributed to smoking or air pollution therefore these don't kill. Maybe you believe it, all the same, but it is stupid.
Raff
Raff
Thanks for the posts, and I'm sorry you've had to wait. Last time I looked there were 55 and three pages of replies, unlike a lot of people I'm on the internet from time to time, if I go out of an evening as I did for the last two evenings it can be quite a while between visits. This isn't my interest funnily enough so when I am on the web I might only look at Unthreaded and the blog for new items.
Anyway my rationals are as follows
A As I don't believe there is any historical evidence that CO2 leads temperature, people will demand reductions in energy costs and pollution which affects their health so any changes will be transient; then the answer in the terms CAGW is currently framed is Never.
B Given the answer to A then no such evidence. A naturally warming world within previous limits will be beneficial.
C I think the answer to this question is as I said and when it gets down to it you are skeptical that skeptics of CAGW are right (or perhaps even sensible) therefore my answer fitted that. I don't think there are many brainwashed, stupid or paid commenters here, although I did worry about ZDB, but I don't think brainwashed covered it.
D I think that climatic catastrophe is more that 100 years away therefore at today's longevity records (122 years?) anyone born today will be dead before a disaster strikes. As anyone who experienced a warming world (caused by whatever process) has now left school it seems disaster by heat is some way off. I have no research to back this up other than there are no papers saying it is coming soon (in 50 years or less) from natural variations; so it is very long odds given the answer to A. Which I think is more valid than anything David Viner, Prince Charles or Gordon Brown have claimed.
E Had to be Other given the options
SandyS
Entropic man, but we're not selling anything and most are just asking for better evidence from the scientists. We have no backers to be hammered or otherwise.
Can you see that irrespective of the truth, climate science is failing to convince?
TinyCO2
Entropic man
You fall into the Lord Kelvin-Michelson school of Physics then?
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
SandyS
EM says in another thread:-
Why are you looking for proof? There is no such thing as proof in science.
Yet he seems to think that the publications and models and temperature records he cites show unequivocally that anthropogenic GHG emissions are the " cause" of 20th century warming.
How does he manage his cognitive dissonance?
Spectator
EM: I'm not sure you're not pulling my leg. The hypothesis is that CO2 causes warming, there is no relationship between CO2 in the paleo records of CO2 causing warming. We have had a century of more accurate (just) records of CO2 and temperature and there is no relationship between them. How can we have a "pause" in temperature rises if CO2 continues rising at the same rate. What is it now, 66 papers explaining the pause? Two of which simply invented temperatures to make the pause disappear. The scientists just don't know what caused the "pause", and pretending that the atmosphere suddenly stopped warming because the heat went into the oceans just raises to many difficult questions.
The very least I would have expected from any scientific community is for them to try to understand why warming hasn't increased with increased CO2 instead of which they're out with there whitewash trying to turn this very black swan white.
"Regarding climate related deaths, have you considered the effect of improved preparation and disaster relief on death rates?"
Of course I've taken improved preparation and the ability to deliver disaster relief into account, and what I'm doing is using the IMF forecast that by the end of the 21st Century humans will be between 10 and 70% better off in terms of wealth, and therefore between 10 and 70 times better than we are at dealing with catastrophes should they occur. Geddit?
geronimo
Raff: thank you for providing the proof that you do not read what is written, therefore cannot add any rational argument to the discussion. Get back to the common room and brag about how you troll intellects far greater than your own.
Radical Rodent
Geronimo,
How can we have a "pause" in temperature rises if CO2 continues rising at the same rate.Never heard of natural variability? I thought "skeptics" were big on that.
...humans will be between 10 and 70% better off in terms of wealth, and therefore between 10 and 70 times better...And those numbers come from... a model. Strange how "skeptics" love economic models yet decry all use of climate models. And how does a 10% change (which seems awfully low) lead to a 10x improvement?
Raff
Radical, the fact that you don't want to stand by what you wrote is your problem.
Raff
Raff
Are you saying you believe natural variability accounts for the pause but not the rise prior to that or that it is all down to natural variability?
SandyS
Sandy, I don't know any more than you or anyone else what proportion of any rise or "pause" is natural and what is CO2 related. I don't know whether the "pause" was real or a measurement artifact either. But geronimo asking "How can we have a "pause" in temperature rises if CO2 continues rising at the same rate" implies that he thinks CO2 must override every other influence at all times. That is just plain silly, although par for the course with many skeptics (not you, I'm sure).
Martin, again, where did your 1 in 1000 chance of "an overnight ice age return" come from? What does "overnight" mean in this context and what would cause it? You were previously dismissive of the forcing from CO2 doubling or any probability distribution resulting from it, yet you suddenly pull this startled rabbit out of your hat. You must have some way of arriving at 1 in 1000.
Raff
So Raf, if you're not sure about much when it comes to AGW. Why are you prepared to write a blank cheque to solve it?
TinyCO2
Spectator,TinyCO2
Lok back at my past posts. I talk in probabilities. None of the evidence is 100% certain
( which is what I suspect is what you mean by unequivocal.). It is good enough to give high confidence in the hypotheses it supports.
The consequences of that are severe enough to warrant spending a few % of GDP to mitigate or avoid them. Where did you get that blank cheque idea from?
Entropic man
"warrant spending a few % of GDP" define that and how high would you be prepared to go if the CO2 isn't appreciably affected with your "few%"? The current view is we must keep AGW under 2C. That implies 'at all costs', ergo a blank cheque. Since the range for sensitivity includes quite high values, it means rapid CO2 reduction. Which means a lot of money spent now, not 20-50 years from now when better technology comes along.
I don't need 100% proof, I need much better than the lackadaisical/religious stuff we get now.
TinyCO2
Martin, again, where did your 1 in 1000 chance of "an overnight ice age return" come from? What does "overnight" mean in this context and what would cause it? You were previously dismissive of the forcing from CO2 doubling or any probability distribution resulting from it, yet you suddenly pull this startled rabbit out of your hat. You must have some way of arriving at 1 in 1000.
Jun 26, 2015 at 12:13 PM | Unregistered CommenterRaff
Well in fact I said " [An overnight ice age return can't be completely ruled out, though 1/1000 is maybe putting the probability too high]".
Just an off the cuff guess Raff. I don't know of any way it could be "completely ruled out" so some probablitity<0.001 seems an ok guess.
Overnight means fast enough to notice - although not literally between 10pm and 8am.
Martin A
Fag packet calculation - Since the modellers can't directly tie insolation to the temperature proxies for the last ice age, they can't roughly model the past. They are guessing the length of this interglacial and assume it's going to be a long one. Part of that is because I believe we have gone past the bottom of insolation. However the start and end of interglacials don't seem to have an obvious tipping point so they don't really know. On current evidence CO2 would not stop an ice age. If we're in for a 'double' interglacial and the true start of this one was The Younger Dryas, then we've got about 15000 years. Or not. If that new paper is real and we're in for solar changes not seen in 9300 years. Perhaps all the next ice age has been waiting for is the sun to send the signal?
TinyCO2
"Never heard of natural variability? I thought "skeptics" were big on that."
Whoa, you're making a big mistake here. Warmest don't talk about natural variability because someone might ask why we can't put the rise in temperature at the end of the 20th century to natural variability.
Yes they do come from a model, there's nothing wrong with a model if you have a handle on the variables, and you can see what happened in the past. Why from a range of 10 to 70% did you pick 10% as your choice of wealth growth. It is hardly likely that a the growth will be at either the bottom, or top, of the range. If you wanted to have a punt at what it is likely to be than you'd probably be best at settling for the middle of the range, say, 40%.
Unless of course you wanted to make some juvenile discussion point.
geronimo
…arguing that direct attribution of harm to climate change is impossible…Where did I say, or even imply, that? Get back under your bridge, troll!
On to more important matters…
… the rise in temperature at the end of the 20th century…Geronimo, I think you have hit a good point, there. It is this rise that seems to have whipped the alarmists up into panic mode, and with them the MSM, as it is with this rise that can seriously be considered that humans might have had some identifiable effect. However, what it truly all boils down to is that correlation is NOT causation. Civilisation has progressed since the end of the little ice age, and the global temperatures have risen, too. This may well be coincidental, but, if there is a link, it is more probable that it is the increasing temperatures that enabled the advances to be made, not that the advances caused the temperatures to increase.
Radical Rodent
EM says :-
" I talk in probabilities. None of the evidence is 100% certain . It is good enough to give high confidence in the hypotheses it supports. The consequences of that are severe enough to warrant spending a few % of GDP to mitigate or avoid them".
The actual conclusion reached by 28 co authors and included in the draft “Science of Climate Change” which they submitted for the seminal IPCC report which catalysed EU action of CO2 emissions was:-
“ None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific case of increases in greenhouse gases [sic]. No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change observed to man made causes. Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced. Will an anthropogenic climate be identified. It is not surprising that the best answer to the question is “ We don’t know”."
Since this was written the global temperature has departed from the path projected by climate models based on CO2 driven temperature increases and has now remained below modelled probable ranges for a period of 18 years, despite the continual and massive increase in the volume of CO2 annually emitted by combustion of fossil fuels, reinforcing the uncertainty in the total natural variability of the climate system referred to by the IPCC climate scientists and quoted above.
Otto Edenhofer, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, said:-
“ One must say clearly that de facto we redistribute the world's wealth by climate policy. One has to rid oneself of the illusion that international climate politics have anything to do with environmental concerns.” The 2 ºC target was not proposed by the scientists involved in the IPCC Assessment it was articulated by a German politician despite the scientists opinions as expressed in the IPCC Assessment of the "Science of Climate Change".
In the light of this I wonder how anyone can be even reasonably sure that reductions in anthropogenic CO2 emissions will have any discernable effect on global average temperatures, much less mitigate any possible rise to less than 2ºC?
On what basis has it been demonstrated that drastically reducing human emissions of CO2 will have any measurable affect on the way the temperature of the atmosphere will change in the future? Western nations are taking huge un-hedged bets trying to drastically and rapidly reduce CO2 emissions by pursuit of “ renewable” sources of energy because no-one actually knows :-
(a) whether it would make any difference to the climate in the near or distant future,
(b) if there is actually any need to do it,
(c) if it can be done at all without provoking unsustainable economic distress ,
(d) how much it will actually cost,
(e) how much it might save,
(f) whether there might be better strategies in the face of a perception of the alleged threats,
(f) whether, in the future it could ever be demonstrated that “decarbonisation” worked (or not).
In these respects " decarbonisation" and reducing "carbon footprints" seems very similar to the Church selling indulgences to minimise time in purgatory- which I suppose is why the Pope is getting back into the act!
I apologise for the length of this post!
Spectator
Correction - '" Will an anthropogenic climate SIGNAL be Identified?"
Spectator
RR the alarmists were on a high up to around 2005, the correlation between around 1980 and 1998 was almost linear, but then the temperature stopped rising. I believe most climate scientists who espouse alarmism really believe it they're not cynical. But when you "really" believe something, like our two guests here, there is a tendency to dismiss anything that disproves it and focus on the bit that does. That's what's happened here. What was needed for AR5 was that the, now broken, link between CO2 and temperature should be re-inforced, hence the statement that more than 50% of the warming in the late 20th century was caused by human emissions - bollocks of course, and you don't have to be a genius to see why. They have no idea what caused the other, shall we say, 49%? so how on Earth could they have attributed anything at all to CO2 without being able to explain where the other warming came from.
It did the trick, not many people are going to check this out so they kept CO2 as a demon until the next AR when they hope to have some real evidence they can present.
geronimo
Spectator: an excellent summation, and one that clarifies a lot about the principles behind the false science – i.e. there ain’t none!
What makes it even more poignant with the efforts being taken to “drastically and rapidly reduce CO2 emissions by pursuit of “renewable” sources of energy” is that none of them are working – indeed, it might be argued that most are actually increasing the output of CO2, at great cost to the environment, to wildlife and to humanity!
Geronimo, it is, as you intimate, a religion, to which many fervently cling, in the hope of a soon-to-occur rapture. I wonder what will happen should the temperatures irrefutably fall? What will be their belief should Scotland return to permafrost and glaciers, and their precious wind-idols freeze solid?
Radical Rodent
They believe in GHOSTS
"What do Entropic Man and Raff really believe ?" They believe in ghosts, cos they have seen them with their own eyes. and we would believe in them too if we were in their shoes...But we are not, we are stupid unbelievers.
- It's just the same with people who see visions of Mother Mary.. Their certainty goes beyond external evidence cos they have seen with their own eyes.
Similarly a lot of DramaGreen true believers have certainty way beyond the external evidence ..they JUST KNOW that man causes CO2, CO2 causes extra heat and heat will cause climate catastrophe FOR SURE.
..You can't really explain to true believers that these visions of ghosts come from within their own brain just like a dream and that the mechanism that tells them it's a dream was temporarily turned off.
Worse still is the more they think about it the more it gets burnt into the brain, They seek out other true believers ..and then it becomes clear to them that "everyone believes" ....and the bigger their frustration with non-believers.
stewgreen
Sandy, I've given you my justifications, so let's have yours - where did your 1 in 100,000 come from? It corresponds to no research I've ever seen.
Martin, where did your 1 in 1000 chance of "an overnight ice age return" come from? What does "overnight" mean in this context and what would cause it? You were previously dismissive of the forcing from CO2 doubling or any probability distribution resulting from it, yet you suddenly pull this startled rabbit out of your hat. You must have some way of arriving at 1 in 1000.