John,

“The catastrophe narrative did not start when people decided that the probabilities are high; it started when people started to ignore probability.”

Okay; so I think you’ve agreed already that the catastrophe narrative as exampled is what it is from all those sources; essentially via one variant or another it’s the “we’re all gonna fry” thing. So definite certainty, and it essentially crosses the 21st century at least, and likely earlier. Nevertheless, for sure I don’t address here how it started. And while the ‘CAGW’ acronym has always included built-in certainty (I belatedly realised I have some evidence of same from at least 11 years ago in there), it’s also the case that this acronym arose a long way down the growth of the domain, and therefore a long way down the growth of discussion / evolution of various issues within it. Also as noted, this acronym is used almost exclusively on climate blogs, and except for a short time after its arisal, only by skeptics too, because the included certainty pissed off the orthodox helping lead to cultural aggression around the term. So this particular label is limited in both domain time and scope.

“…of central importance to your thesis”

Forgive me, but within this seeming confusion of meaning between us, I’m not sure what you think my ‘thesis’ actually is. And therefore whether you’re maybe trying to convince me about something that’s not a significant part of it, or indeed per your latest of something that seems to me somewhat different to before (yes, this could be my lack of prior perception). This post (and the companion post that is more about merely introducing the false meme of the catastrophe narrative and its variants), highlights the manifest existence and authority propagation of the catastrophe narrative (over at least the period of the given examples), and the falsity of it’s claim to be supported by mainstream science, plus the correct labelling and incorrect labelling of ‘CAGW’ in respect of these issues (yes in the sense of built-in certainty per usage on both sides). Yet I wasn’t aware that by citing the topic of the precautionary principle, which indeed we both agree is a wide topic in itself, you were essentially attempting to speak particularly only to origin. This is also an interesting topic, and while evidence to get a hard grip on it is hard to come by, likely involves various other elements as well as indeed the precautionary principle. Yet once the narrative has sufficient inertia, the emotive conviction and behavioural effects it prompts plus its spread and policing etc are independent of the starting conditions (same for any strong cultural narrative), and the starting conditions for this case are not explored here.

“This is not about personalities…”

Good. Yes, words can have impacts we don’t always appreciate. And tossing around terms like rancour and arrogance however quite they’re phrased, when I can assure you that I am engaging in good faith to the best of my ability, is high impact stuff. You may consider my abilities poor therefore and maybe you’d be right, but anyhow I think once again that there’s a distinct possibility we may still be talking at cross purposes, which inevitably is frustrating. I think don’t it’s unreasonable to ask, given that I still don’t know, for more about what or how the ‘central importance’ of my post is impacted by your suggestions. However, if you think you’ve already given, granted this will strike a wrong note. Which is why I thought working backwards from what you perceive the post to be about, might be a better start (it seems to me at any rate that somewhere our perceptions have muchly parted company 0: ) Yet if you wish to leave things as are, know that I respect your opinions and engagement, if not always what you say when frustration causes passion to briefly overtake you; robust implies no motive other than keenness.

Somewhere back up there, JimD was looking for a scientist who thought more CO2 would be good for the Earth ( or something). Arrhenius thought more CO2 and warming would be good for the Earth.

“RCP4.5 achieves two out of three. It mitigates by reducing per capita CO2. It stabilizes the CO2 level by 2100. But it does not protect because the warming is near 3 C, well above the 2 C threshold.” #jiminy

So no ‘bipartisan solution’ just the same old stories told superficially in the objective idiom of culturally potent science (Prins and Rayner, 2007, p25).

Apart from #jiminy’s dismal little bit of blog unscience on a loop – is a neglect of land use, methane, surface ozone, black carbon and sulfate. Instead there is an obsession with what is objectively the minor part of the equation – energy emissions.

From patiently drawing it out #jiminy’s ‘solution’ is enforceable UN down sanctions on energy emissions in developed nations.

1. Apart from neglecting…

2. Economic growth and stability is the critical project for the 21st century. This requires multiple strong nodes in globally networked economics.

3. An end to denigration of science and scientists by massive tools who fail to grasp even the fundamentals – and world peace.

> If absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, then there’s no evidence any species has ever gone extinct!

There’s a difference between having some evidence specie S got extinct and not having any evidence if S is extinct, Brad. To conflate the two is just a trick to hide your lack of any due diligence. It is sillier than the trick that got you started, i.e. hiding that evidence isn’t restricted to the realm of natural sciences.

All this because you still refuse to do any kind of homework before pontificating.

Willard,

the only evidence one can have of the non-existence of objects of a certain class (assuming they can’t be ruled out a priori) is to look for them and not find any, and to look for people who’ve found them and not meet any, and to ask around if anyone knows anyone who’s met anyone who’s found one and get no affirmative responses.

And that’s something I’ve done, incidentally, in the course of my several years as a climate hateblogger. For example, one of my amusements has been to seek out scientific consensualism advocates in order to krush them, and in pursuit of this hobby I’ve noticed that not one of my hapless foes lists his/her occupation as ‘scientist.’ (The closest I’ve ever encountered to a scientist who thinks opinion is a form of evidence would be Victor “Consensus Signals Credibility” Venema. He states that he’s a Computer Scientist—which, I believe, makes him a mathematician.)

And it’s not as if I’ve never had occasion to clash with scientists. It’s just that when I do, it’s always for some other mistake or falsehood they’re promulgating. So far I’m yet to meet a scientist quite so degenerate as to believe that a consensus (or any other opinion) is a form of evidence. Not even a CLIMATE scientist.

Even the climate-believalist astrobiologist Ken Rice promised, at my request, to correct any commenter on his blog who committed the consensus = evidence error.

As I mentioned, absence of evidence is the only possible form of evidence of absence (absent an analytic proof that the class has to be null).

And as I also mentioned, the proper response, if you don’t believe my hypothesis and would like to change minds here, is to provide a counterexample. Failing that, the hypothesis stands and is scheduled to achieve theory status sometime tonight, at which point it becomes a candidate for textbook knowledge.

Thread too long, need a response bar at end.
“One of the sillier complaints Skeptics make is that there is so much we dont know.* “
At least Joshua makes sense.
“Of course in the MSM and in social media and in political arenas you will see all manner of folks make arguments about why folks should accept the science”
Like CO2 is a GHG and increasing. The world is warming. 1 + 1 = 0.3 C a decade and we are all going to die.
Well the equation is actually 1 + 1 + n = x where n is all the other confounding values that you resolutely ignore because your thinking meter has gone awol. It could be more less or equal to 0.3C but without knowing* and without introspecting you are just parroting your own personal bias.
Worse, deep down you know this, yet on the surface you appear blind to it. I trust it is the blindness of faith rather than the blindness of conviction yet your arguments above and in previous cudgels suggest it is the latter.
Good luck on your adjustments keeping it at 0.3C. Unfortunately the thermometers do not lie so one day the adjustments will just be too ridiculous for anyone to believe.
Would you care to put up your graphs of world temp done 20, 15, 10 and 5 years ago and compare the differences in the past?
If you do and they are all the same I will grovel.
Here is your chance.

Steven,

while I admire and respect anyone who works, as you do, within the rules of [Pre-Post Normal, or post-pre-scientific] science, I have to ask:

Where are the boycotts against journals that have sullied themselves with the pseudo-scientific anti-science of Oreskes and her consensualist epigones? Where are the resignations of their editorial staff? Where are the ‘big cut-offs,’ the pacts to ‘no longer take that rag seriously’? Where are the NYTimes op eds and blog posts and Conversation articles lamenting the decadence of once-credible scientific brands?

I mean, that *is* how climate scientists express disapproval, isn’t it?

Are we not entitled to presume, based on the lack of shirt-rending, that climate scientists as a group have no major *problem* with journals that miseducate the public (and infantilize the discourse) by lending a platform to science-by-opinion-poll?

With apologies to David Roberts:

When we finally get serious about this mess and are in a full-on scramble to limit the damage, we’re going to have to have a sort of Science Nuremberg. What alibi are the rank and file going to use? “We always believed in minding our own business”? “As climate scientists, we were too busy discovering nothing things painfully slowly to pay any attention to, much less presume to pass judgment on, what was happening on the adjacent property”?

Good luck pleading *that* with a straight face. :-)

Brad

PS to repeat: thanks for your interesting and responsive comments. Much appreciated.

I am having a discussion with someone I know IRL on Facebook. We may be able to save the world after all:

“My point was that the HadCM3 PPE did not explore combinations of low aerosol forcing and low ECS values. That is evidently because even by perturbing 31 key main atmospheric parameters, and subsidiary aerosol module parameters, HadCM3 (Big expensive climate model) was unable to do so.”

“I give Glen Harris and his colleagues credit for trying hard to explore uncertainties, but in this respect they were unable to overcome structural rigidities in HadCM3.”

So as I understand, the model has a circle of outcomes. Observations have a circle of outcomes. The two circles must overlap more than a tiny bit. And I think he’s talking about constraining uncertainties. If your model cannot ‘explore’ a significant amount of observed area, good luck. Curry sums this up I think as, the models run too hot, I am generalizing.

“Since the modelling of detailed climate system physical processes is a young science, with many processes poorly understood and/or impracticable to model from basic physics, and others perhaps overlooked, it seems totally inappropriate to let model characteristics dominate over observational evidence. To my mind, doing so represents a major failing in climate science in general, and of the Met Office in particular.”

“Indeed, it is unclear to what extent estimates by complex models that are not constrained by observations, or only very loosely so constrained, should be considered valid scientific evidence at all.”

To my mind, Lewis and Curry: https://judithcurry.com/2014/09/24/lewis-and-curry-climate-sensitivity-uncertainty/ stands as a good observational based study. There is a divide apparently involving Lewis and Curry on one side and the modelers on the other. Not surprisingly, I favor historical accounting over a model of what happened or will happened. The idea of modeling is complicated and I can’t give a good explanation at the moment. Many things are modeled and there is not a blanket position from me against all models. One could even argue our perceptions of the world are a type of model.

“In effect, her view seems to be that it doesn’t matter what the observations imply, because the models rule out  the possibility of low aerosol forcing, low ECS combinations. I am reminded of a famous line by Bertold Brecht to the effect of: “The people have failed the government. The government must elect the new people.” But the Met Office can no more replace the real climate system with one that agrees with the models than a communist government could replace the people with one that satisfied its ideology.”

This is some good writing by Lewis.
—————————————–
I highlighted the original post here at Climate Etc on Facebook, but have developed a better understanding today where Lewis is coming from and some other stuff too. The one I am replying to is an Engineer. High performance computer drives I think.

He thought it would be good for Sweden.

Ron, the difference after 1950 versus before 1950 is that this was the period when the CO2 forcing rate of change became the dominant factor in total forcing. Prior to 1950 rates were less than 0.1 W/m2/decade which is comparable with what the sun can do, or a set of volcanoes. After 1950, the CO2 forcing rose to 0.3 W/m2/decade by about 1980, and became clearly dominant, which is why the temperature responds to it most. This doesn’t mean other forcings are not also changing. The sun has declined recently for example. But CO2’s rate of change has become the main one because 0.3 W/m2/decade is not something you would see in nature. Over 3/4 of all the temperature and forcing change have occurred since 1950.

> the only evidence one can have of the non-existence of objects of a certain class (assuming they can’t be ruled out a priori) is to look for them and not find any, and to look for people who’ve found them and not meet any, and to ask around if anyone knows anyone who’s met anyone who’s found one and get no affirmative responses.

Bingo.

Show your homework.

Absence of evidence of wee willies acumen is evidence of absence, And the import of any of it is zilch.

Here’s one I didn’t post earlier. Trends in multidecadal temperature are dominated by internal variability (Loeb et al 2018). Early century warming peaked in 1944 – just when emissions took off.

At decadal timescales, when internal variations in the climate system dominate, the link between TOA radiation and surface temperature is more complex. Using pre-industrial control simulations of three generations of Met Office Hadley Centre coupled atmosphere-ocean climate models, Palmer et al. [7] show that while decadal trends in global mean sea-surface temperature (SST) tend to be positive (negative) when the decadal average net downward TOA flux is positive (negative), ≈30% of decades show opposite trends in SST and total energy, implying that it is not uncommon for a decade to show a decreasing trend in SST and a positive decadal average net TOA flux. The reason for the large scatter between decadal SST and total energy trends is re-distribution of heat within the ocean. In order to relate net TOA radiation and global mean surface temperature changes at decadal timescales, Xie et al. [4] decompose the climate feedback term into forced and natural variability components, with the latter term accounting for the lag between TOA radiation and surface temperature variations.

Between approximately 1998 and 2013, the rate of increase in global mean surface temperature slowed down relative to that during the latter half of the 20th century [8–10]. This so-called “global warming hiatus” period coincided with the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), characterized by an increase in heat sequestered to deeper layers in the ocean [11–14]. Other contributing factors to the hiatus have also been proposed [15–17], but the dominant cause appears to be oceanic redistribution of heat, particularly in the Pacific Ocean.

S Mosher: “In some sense we knew all we needed to know back in 1896 and did nothing. We knew what we needed to know in 1988 and did nothing. One of the sillier complaints Skeptics make is that there is so much we dont know. … But we have known enough of the answer for over 100 years: If we look back over the span of millions of year we can explain 90% of the temperature ups and downs with a few simple parameters: the sun, volcanic aerosols and GHG forcing. That last 10% is hard. Sorry.”

Very wrong perspective. We don’t know what the world will be like in the year 2100. We don’t know whether new energy sources equivalent to the change from whale oil to crude oil will be discovered. We don’t know whether there will be an increase in volcanism, such that we could face global cooling. One thing we do know to a 98% certainty is that science and knowledge will progress very rapidly and lead to unforeseeable discoveries.
Therefore, it is absolutely impossible to predict what the world will be like in 80 years — neither nature nor science will stand still. It is therefore absolutely impossible to construct remedies to “solve” problems that may or may not exist in 80 years.

JD

I’m watching Dave Rubin interview some guy from Human Progress. He brought up France today. People there want something and they are not listening to their elites. And the elites are not listening to them. The job of an accountant is to provide information that is useful to management. That didn’t happen in France. Who is at fault? Let’s go right at the climate scientists. You get to run France. From you comes the wisdom to run economies while saving humanity.

“There have been significant improvements in the satellite observing system since 2000 with the launch of several Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments. Similarly, improvements in ocean heating rate observations have occurred with the in-situ network of profiling floats from Argo, which reached near-global coverage after 2005 [28].” https://app.dimensions.ai/details/publication/pub.1105465715

I’m impressed that he actually found the reference – most don’t bother even when I link it.

Here’s my comparison of CERES and Argo.

Here is their figure 1.

Oceans take up 93$ of global heat – and atmosphere 1%. What they in JCH’s quote is that the energy budget was positive yet there was a surface temperature hiatus – so what didn’t show up in the atmosphere went into oceans.

“The decrease in global mean all-sky SW TOA flux between the post-hiatus and hiatus periods is primarily associated with areas over the eastern Pacific Ocean off North and South America, as well as over the west tropical Pacific and the Southern Pacific Convergence Zone. A partial radiative perturbation analysis reveals that decreases in low cloud cover are the primary driver of the SW TOA flux decreases. Furthermore, the regional distribution of decreases in SW TOA flux associated with low cloud cover changes closely matches that of SST warming, which in turn shows a pattern typical of the positive phase of the PDO over the eastern Pacific. In contrast to the decreases in SW TOA flux over the Pacific, increases occur over the north Atlantic associated with the North Atlantic Cold Blob, which partly compensates for the SW TOA flux decreases over the Pacific.”

Lots of fascinating detail – the North Atlantic Cold Blob may be from a decline in AMOC. But JCH picks up on quite the least interesting and seems to imagine I have forgotten about CO2. How could we?

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