From the draft statement – “While natural sources of climate variability are significant, multiple lines of evidence indicate that human influences have had an increasingly dominant effect on the climate warming observed since the mid-twentieth century.”
I have seen zero evidence to support this contention. The numerical attribution of temperature change to man-made on one hand and natural on the other has NOT been shown.
It has NOT even been shown that the net effect of a change in GHG will lead to a change in atmospheric temperature. This is the fundamental premise of the GHG theory.
One can imagine that a paper giving the quantitative, useful, mathematical and physical link between the two would be the Holy Grail of climate science authors, Nobel material.
Yet there is no such paper. That is perhaps a consequence of the problem being wicked. If there is a problem.
Never have I seen a field that professes to be science, that is so poor in comparison with the more established ‘hard sciences’. Sure science progresses with time, but dismantling important lessons from the past is not progress. I have not seen much progress in the forms of novel concepts, innovation, invention, new laws of physics, improved statistical methods and the like. There are some positive examples, but most of the lessons from older science have been downplayed in favour of a self-referential expression ‘arm waving’.
Arm waving as in the quote above. “While natural sources of climate variability are significant……” Significant in respect of precisely what?
Comment on APS discussion thread by Geoff Sherrington
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Comment on APS discussion thread by Peter Davies
Judith thanks us for our patience in respect of the idea of a separate thread for specific populations of commenters. It was never an issue for me and indeed I must thank Judith for hers for putting up with some pretty petty behaviour from people who post on her blog.
While my comment that separate threads are not a step in the right direction has seemingly not gathered much traction, the basis of this opinion has been that Judith’s blog is the most open that I have ever been part of and to have it used on a one-off basis for obtaining feedback on a separate issue seems to have created some confusion among a few of our denizens, with some of them still commenting on that thread regardless.
After all is said and done, however, its Judith’s blog and she can and will do with it as she wants.
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Comment on What should renewables pay for grid service? by sciguy54
Beta Blocker wrote:
“If President Obama is truly serious about reducing America’s GHG emissions fast enough to meet his announced target of a 28% reduction by 2025, he has no other practical option but to put a stiff price on carbon and to directly constrain the supply and availability of all carbon fuels.”
Let me provide another possibility. How about a 1960s-NASA-like project to design a few scale-variations of thorium reactors within the next 5 years. Let the Federal taxpayers handle the development, liability and waste issues and give the working designs to the regulated utilities for the benefit of their customers, plus appropriate profit as determined by their respective PSCs. Spend the second 5 years replacing non-nuclear base capacity with the new reactors. Legislatively restrict “green” obstructionist lawsuits.
Cheap carbon-free energy and a path toward reserving coal, gas, and oil for fertilizer, plastics and transportation.
I suspect there are MANY other possible options available, to either exercise in parallel or after thorium reactors are online. If your head is not stuck in green sand.
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Comment on What should renewables pay for grid service? by PA
The easy solution is to hose down neighboring houses and let it burn.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by Jim D
An example of full-on denial there.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by Steven Mosher
“No Mosh, staying above the fray to allow injustice (in this case the corruption of science) to prosper, to is not commendable.
As in : “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.
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Injustice?
Evil.?
you have no sense of proportion. It would be nice if every scientist lined up and made a proclamation about climate gate. they won’t. That doesnt make them evil or unjust. It doesnt mean their work lacks integrity.
I imagine some feel loyalty. I imagine some dont want to add to the personal pain. I imagine some fear that their words will be used against them ( I get that all the time.. traitor mosher), so there is a thin green line of sorts.
When some businessman goes to jail for embezzlement we dont demand that every one in business line up and throw a symbolic stone at them.
cop shoots an unarmed black guy.. we don’t actually line up the police and demand that they all make a statement about how horrible it is
It’s fun on occasion to challenge folks to disown the behavior of climategate, but it’s not much more. You can always figure that silence is their way of condemning. At most it shows they have concerns that rise above the need to pile on and condemn.
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Comment on What should renewables pay for grid service? by Ragnaar
Motor vehicles are subsidized and pay into the government as well. A few examples are found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_car_on_societies
Bicycles pay little or nothing to the government but are probably subsidized less. A paved trail on an old rail line costs a lot of money. That may be a recreational subsidy. It may allow more people to commute by bicycle, lessening congestion. It might be said to be a subsidy for roller bladers, walkers and joggers. It may bring pedestrian traffic through small down towns. They can allow teenagers to have some transportation options and the same for low income people. Bicyclists can seem to at times face an entrenched and powerful auto centered world. How does any of this relate to PE’s article? Bicycles can provide economical transportation and have done so in many places. Is a $40,000 vehicle really economically effective? What are its infrastructure needs? I suppose the greater the population density of an area, the less effective automobiles are. Yet we keep paying for an infrastructure that doesn’t do a very job of transportation and we keep driving our cars. We attempt to solve a dense areas problems with old ideas and probably some of every bodies money. There is competition for road space, that is bicyclists can be most comfortable and efficient about 4 feet to right of traffic on a smooth surface and sometimes that 4 feet is 18 inches, sandy and bumpy. Reducing that 18 inches is 0 may seem like a victory for motor vehicle, but the former bicyclists then gets in their cars and add to congestion and road wear. They join their subsidized brethren, the automobile consensus. It’s a case of limited resources and commons property being fought over. Where is the place that you might find yourself a little bit or more angry? I’ve heard this happens. Driving your car. About enforcement of highway laws. Yes, bicyclists get away with a lot. I do not condone that. It’s one of the reasons bicyclists are taken less seriously.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by Jim D
Are they supposed to criticize the inquiries that found nothing wrong? How would they go about that? They would have to devote time into looking into everything the inquiry did. It is not as easy as that to have an opinion on what appears to be a complex situation. Many bloggers have devoted hours and hours of their time digging into every tree-ring detail. Most scientists are just not so interested to spend that much time on finding out the details well enough to make a sensible comment.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by matthewrmarler
verytallguy, in context those are not too bad, imo. Here is the first from Cohen:
Roger Cohen
What a craven and scientifically misguided statement this is. It wreaks of slogans, exaggeration, and distortions. For example: “In particular, the connection between rising concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and the increased warming of the global climate system is more certain than ever.” You do not mention that the accumulating evidence is that this ‘connection’ is far smaller than we have been told by IPCC, that it has been revised DOWNWARD, and that any future warming will be correspondingly much smaller.
The ott claim (as you called it) is immediately followed by a supporting example. The link to CO2 is poor, and the best estimates put the sensitivities lower than before.
I can see how a more subdued point-by-point disputation, citing peer reviewed papers and the NIPCC report (complete with page numbers) might be more effective long-term in that audience. How important it is that some APS members know that these particular APS members are angry is something I can’t judge. That particular “ott” may serve as an alert.
For the past 15 years the concentration of CO2 has been increasing while the Earth “refuses” to warm.
That’s a reasonable assessment, at least until someone “finds” the “missing” heat. Multiple mechanisms have been proposed for Trenberth’s “missing” heat, the net results of which are to reduce confidence in any predictions. Exactly how close to exactly flat each temperature series has been for exactly how long might be discussed, but the overall conclusion is that previous IPCC predictions have not come true. The Earth has “refused” to warm as “instructed” (scenariod, predicted, expected, modeled, etc.)
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Comment on APS discussion thread by Steven Mosher
well, the unwillingness stems in part from the fact that every little new thing takes on huge symbolic meaning in the debate.
my attitude.. the mails showed some severe ethical lapses.
The science was untouched. you address the ethical lapses by taking some firm action. you dont address the ethical lapses by asking everyone to condemn individuals.. thats more useless symbolic CRAP.
all the ethical lapses were are around data sharing and record preservation. easy to fix. fix problems, the blame will take care of itself
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Comment on What should renewables pay for grid service? by aplanningengineer
Stephen – I will take that as a compliment that you have me one on three, but I think we should get some notables for both sides. Seriously though – I don’t think the NREL or EPRI guys and I have fundamental differences. I’m just trying to tell you what they should at least add in small print.
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Comment on What should renewables pay for grid service? by aplanningengineer
One other point. EPRI has done a lot of good things and are an excellent resource in some areas. But go back and they have supported, pushed and been overly optimistic (and sunk a lot of money) into many things that were way too premature and have been abandoned or not worked out yet.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by matthewrmarler
and Then There’s Physics: The mean temperature of the lower troposphere has been flat for about 18 years.
Absolute certainty, no caveats, no mention of the large uncertainties, no mention of a large ENSO event in 1998, no mention of decaying orbits, no mention of the difference between RSS and UAH trends. Call me unconvinced.
The statement that you quoted is accurate. My question is: do the uncertainties, ENSO event, decaying orbits etc tend on the whole to increase confidence about CO2 involvement in climate change, as claimed by the APS statement? If not, they are not needed in the rebuttal statement, but could be provided in a long paragraph following it, or citation of page numbers in the NIPCC report. You are unconvinced — ought you be convinced by the APS position paper, by your critique of this quote? Of course not! You, like other readers of the disputants, ought to review the pertinent evidence and how it supports or does not support the APS position paper.
What might be more informative would be to publish all of the climate-related grant proposals by members of the APS: those usually contain succinct, accurate, relatively thorough statements of unknowns, caveats, etc; and of the difficulties of acquiring adequate knowledge. Each grant proposal will review liabilities behind assumptions made by others; taking them all together you get, paraphrasing Churchill, the sum of all ignorance.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by GaryM
Thomas Fuller,
Try comoing out of your protective bubble for just long enough to read this. (Shoot, I was able to read Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kamp f in college. Surely you can take 5 minutes for this.) And then tell me where Limbaugh is wrong.
And if you can, give me some examples of where your progressive colleagues (or you) are writing about it.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by Don Monfort
Got this from my source in APS:
********embargoed until November 15, 2015********
to:dues paid up members American Physical Society
fr:American Physical Society, Panel on Public Affairs,
The Panel’s review of the draft of the Statement on Climate Change has been concluded with a very gratifying result. After careful study and consideration of our Top Five favorite comments received from our most intelligent members, we have decided to put “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.” and to repeat it four more times. We are not going to go weak kneed on the most horrendous and scary problem in the history of mankind, just because a few physicists got their knickers in a twist over a freaking word.
That’s all folks!
(I am only half-joking.)
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Comment on Hearing: President’s UN climate pledge by PA
Ron Graf | April 21, 2015 at 8:39 pm |
PA, Thanks for you figures for my #1 question, complete with maths.
If you or others can add figures or relationships for the following we might just crack this:
2) What is the (approx) net carbonic acid neutralization as a percent of the net uptake?
I just did the math for 50 years at the current rate of absorption (I think I assumed 2.8 GT per year).
Assuming the original PH is 8.1 the ending PH is 8.098 which since all the numbers are 2 or 3 sig figs, is a PH of 8.1. The Henry’s law PH change is really related to the fractional change in total carbon dioxide. There are 38,000 GT of carbon already in the ocean.
http://ion.chem.usu.edu/~sbialkow/Classes/3650/Carbonate/Carbonic%20Acid.html
If you have a total GT added by a given year we can try for an exact answer.
The problem is we have so little fossil fuel the numbers for high emissions levels get stupid very rapidly. For example there are 760 GT of carbon in fossil reserves. If we burn it at the 2044 IPCC RCP 8.5 level of 18.7 GT per year, fossil fuel reserves only last 42 years.
So in 2044 the CO2 rate of increase is already below 1.6 PPM/Y and a decade later we run out of fuel. When we run out of fuel the 15-16 GT/y absorption rate drives the CO2 level back into the ground. 15.5/2.13 = -7.2 PPM/year. Which makes it clear the IPCC 100 CO2 lifetime is either dishonest, deluded, or the result of simple incompetence.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by Jim D
When people use numbers like 18 years, it has the appearance of a cherry-pick. Additional and useful information would be that the 30-year trend has remained around 0.16 C per decade during those 18 years, or that the last 15 years have a trend near 0.1 C per decade. It doesn’t take much to just add these snippets just to avoid the appearance of cherry picking if nothing else.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by Don Monfort
There seem to be a couple of words left out and some formatting issues there, But that makes it seem all the more authentic to me. My janitor friend said she retrieved it from the trash.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by matthewrmarler
David Young: <i>The part I don’t understand is the unwillingness to discuss problems in science except with a general “yes there may be problems.” </i>
I think that would be remedied if all funded grant proposals were posted online for interested parties to read in full. Those usually contain succinct, accurate and comprehensive summaries of what is not known about certain propositions, often propositions that are assumed with great confidence in other grant proposals. Even when discussing the disputed points that are debated with great acrimony in public, but specialist, meetings, the language is generally non-inflammatory yet direct.
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Comment on APS discussion thread by matthewrmarler
Steven Mosher: the mails showed some severe ethical lapses.
The science was untouched.
What was not “untouched” was public trust in some “scientific” claims confidently made in public. Trenbeth’s “travesty” comment and some other demeaning comments alerted the public to the fact that scientists were not in fact solidly supportive of comments made in public. The revealed attempts to affect the peer-review and degree-granting processes alerted the public to the possibility that the published record might be severely biased — not merely “imperfect”, but severely biased.
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