Robert
How about all the deaths from motor vehicle accidents?
(Makes the deaths from respiratory diseases look like a walk in the park.)
But then there are all the benefits of motor vehicle transportation (as compared to horse buggies).
And elimination of the horse manure problem.
“A reminder of one of the major secondary benefits of switching from horse carriages to motor vehicles.”
Max
Max
Steven Mosher and Robert
The constraint of carbon content in all remaining fossil fuels is a real one, when we are discussing warming resulting from human GHG emissions based on fossil fuel combustion..
The (2xCO2) ECS is a second real constraint.
Using the latest estimates for both, we see that AGW is constrained to around 2C warming above today, or to a “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature” of a bit more than 17C.
This may frighten you two – and that’s quite all right.
It doesn’t frighten me.
This has nothing to do with “the science being settled”, Steven, it’s just that there isn’t anything to get all frightened about IMO. In fact, I think this amount of gradual warming could actually be a good thing for humanity and our environment.
Idiotic fear-mongering predictions like Robert Watson’s “7C warming from AGW by 2100″ are exactly that: idiotic fear-mongering predictions.
But, hey, if you guys want to believe these idiotic fear-mongering predictions, there is nothing to stop you from doing so. It’s a free world.
Max
The return to the underlying rising trend of the last couple of centuries is naturally the default position, but the millenial scale apparent cycles(Minoan, Roman, Medieval Optimae) all have tops and the timing is about right for that underlying trend to reverse.
Nobody’s mentioned sunspots easing out of the visible spectrum lately. Time for a reminder.
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One hallmark of curiosity is humility. As curious as moshe is, it could be improved with the consideration that he might be wrong.
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I, however, cannot be wrong with ‘warm is good, cold is bad’. Heh, heh, heh.
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“The science is NOT settled”
The above statement is undoubtedly true, when it comes to identifying and quantifying all the natural and anthropogenic factors, which have influenced our climate in the past and will shape it in the future.
But there are limits within which the science IS settled.
For example, it is inconceivable that AGW, caused principally by human CO2 emissions, will result in 7C or more warming over the next 100 years.
It is also inconceivable (if we rule out cataclysmic events like meteor strikes, etc.) that natural factors will result in 7C or more cooling over the next 100 years.
“Tipping points” leading to a “runaway Venus effect” from AGW are simply model-derived figments of some scientists’ overactive imagination and not to be taken seriously.
In fact, it is extremely likely that our planet’s climate will continue to remain within a “Goldilocks just right” range.
The unanswered question is whether or not it will warm slightly, cool slightly or remain essentially as it is now over the next several decades (with a slight statistical advantage for the premise of slight warming, based on the past century or so).
And within that “Goldilocks just right range”, the science is NOT settled.
Just my opinion, based on the evidence at hand.
Max
kim
Course you can’t be wrong (warmer IS better).
As the redneck sitting in front of the pot-bellied stove in the “International Herald Tribune” post-Kyoto cartoon said:
“toss another one of them Kyoto protocols on the fire, Jeb – it’s gettin’ cold in here”.
Max
A corollary is that those who claim warming is bad cannot be right. So in that curious sense moshe is out of the debate.
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kim
The “default null hypothesis” may be that warming will resume after a decade or two (as it has over several multi-decadal cycles since 1850) – BUT, I’d agree with you that there may be a longer-term cyclical effect at work that would cause a prolonged cooling cycle as we had after the other climate optima you mention.
Only time will tell.
The past is dead and the future is blind (even with climate models).
Max
We are cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know.
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MWG, if you are talking about reasoning you may be off the mark. In the demographics of belief polarization is often the norm, not goldilocks. It is policy not belief that finds the middle ground because it gets the most votes. As for prediction one side in this debate says it can be done.
Webby
Being a pedantic type you have missed out on the truism that “one man’s signal is another man’s noise”.
Think about it a bit.
Max
http://www.stilton.se/authors/risto_isom-aa-ki/2005_The_Sands_of_Sarasvati/
An European example of Cli-Fi
I’d intended to post this comment at the end of this thread (after all the trashy, bitter comments)
> Why don’t you pull Edim up on this?
Yes he does seem to be exhibitng levels of wishful credulity normally associated with alarmists.
Precis of Robert, the Militant Moron (RTMM)
Sometime back we moved from horse buggies to cars.
Therefore, CAGW is true.
Indeed, every new theory is true.
Judith Curry
Thanks for an excellent essay on the virtue of “intellectual humility in science” and, conversely, the pitfalls of “arrogance” in science, as practiced by the IPCC through its consensus process.
Three statements stuck out in my mind:
When arrogance is institutionalized (e.g. the IPCC and AAAS have been criticized in this way), then the self correcting methods of science are put at risk.
The wording, especially in the AR4 “Summary for Policymakers” report, is arrogant. It exaggerates certainty regarding the “consensus views” on AGW. It spends too much time referring to “scientific progress” or “large amounts of new and comprehensive data, more sophisticated analyses of data, improvements in understanding of processes and their simulation in models and more extensive exploration of uncertainty ranges”. Far too little mention is made of the large uncertainties inherent in climate science today, in particular relating to the attribution of climate changes to anthropogenic factors.
The forced “consensus process” of IPCC has, indeed, put the “self correcting methods of science at risk”, by ignoring any scientific views and findings, which are contradictory to the “consensus” view.
The scientists, universities, funding agencies, and professional societies seem to have a social contract whereby scientists with ‘flash’ are unduly rewarded. Unfortunately, this motivates scientists to work on the flashy low-hanging fruit topics (e.g. climate change impacts), rather than doing the deep, difficult, painstaking work to make progress on the fundamental challenges.
A shining example here is all the effort and hoopla that has been put into showing that extreme weather events are a result of AGW (all to no real avail, as can be seen from the AR5 draft, which has been forced to back down on many of these claims made in AR4), while for years there was no real effort to constrain the “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (arguably the single most important concept behind the AGW premise) based on actual physical empirical observations. (Again, it appears that the recent Nic Lewis review comments to AR5 and the Schlesinger et al. 2012 study may have finally addressed this issue – after over 20 years – resulting in a much lower and narrower range, but it still remains to be seen how IPCC will handle this new information).
While establishment climate science seems to have lost its capacity for surprise, I suspect that nature has some surprises in store for us.
Amen! Hold on to your hat!
Max
Our credulous half-wit Robert is clearly (wilfully?) quite blind to the corrosive vested interest inherent in government-funded climate science.
Fan
Hansen was a good scientist but a GREAT one?
His most interesting work (using data largely copied from GS Callendars 1938 paper) was this 1987 one;
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha00700d.html
With the benefit of such studies as BEST we can put this work into its proper perspective as demonstrating that GISS is merely a staging post on the 350 year long temperature incline and not the starting post.
We can also wonder why Hansen started it at the time he did, when a database commencing thirty years later would have included many more stations that were more on a level playing field as regards with methodology.
Perhaps Hansen would concur that the world has many different climates as observed by Marcel Leroux? Which might help to explain the one third of the world that appears to be cooling, according to what criteria is applied to the local stations that make up the composite of BEST. We await a definitive study from Mosh on this.
A very happy New year to you, in which your talent for creating a new generation of smilies might be developed at the expense of your ‘Fan’ worship of Dr Hansen.
tonyb
