<i>It’s not worth returning back to square one every time some newcomer raises the question again. That’s not a way for learning more</i>
Actually it's a way for <i>me</i> to learn more, namely as a result of reading sources that I would not otherwise have been motivated to look at. It also means that the sources I consult address issues that someone other than myself and the author of the source cares about.
As long as people keep raising questions I'm happy to keep reexamining the issue of whether those questions might have a point to them after all. Terrific if they do, but even if they don't it may still be possible to improve on the extant answers to them in both accuracy and clarity. There's always room for a better book on the elementary principles of climate.
Comment on Open-mindedness is the wrong(?) approach by Vaughan Pratt
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Comment on Missing(?) heat isn’t missing after all by MattStat
Fred Moolten: who do you mean by “they”, and what do you mean by “ad hoc”?
GCM modelers, having discovered that they were over predicting earth warming over recent years, modified their models to add a deep ocean compartment and estimate a rate of transfer of heat into it. They did not use temperature change records over a long duration (because they do not exist) in order to estimate the rate of heat transfer. If we were to install a sufficient corps of deep ocean thermometers, we might be able to test over 20 years or so whether their estimate is correct. As it is, all they have done is create an ad hoc adjustment to their model to save it from disconfirmation via extant data. To my knowledge, how this extra complexity in their model handled the fit of the model to the last 100 years of global temperature fluctuation was not examined.
If you are certain that they (the GCM modelers) are correct, I think that fits with your general disrespect for inaccuracies of approximation and random variation in data.
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Comment on Missing(?) heat isn’t missing after all by Fred Moolten
MattStat – What I asked you was to give the names of the individuals you referred to as “they” and explain what you meant by “ad hoc”. I don’t think you answered my question.
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by markus
Dyslexia prevents many of the trees to be seen, but the forest sure looks beautiful from up here.
No good looking at trees in the wrong forest, as Michael Mann has done.
My heart does feel for those lost in the forest of Greenhouse.
The climatic system on Earth cools the rays from the Sun, it must be so, a refrigerator. The principal is now known and cannot be broken, it is a Law in the making.
Greenhouse system or Refrigeration system – Time to pick one gents, before it is chosen for you.
Markus Fitzhenry.
.
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by Eli Rabett
A simpler form of this, neural networks, has been applied to climate questions (just google "neural networks" climate or <a href="www.climate.unibe.ch/~plattner/papers/knutti03cd.pdf" rel="nofollow">look at this paper by Knutti</a>) and it works, problem is that neural nets have no conscience, they tell you what, but not why, the principle benefit of reductionism
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by Philip
A direct application discussed here, http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/30/shifts-phase-locked-state-and-chaos-in-climate-data/. Closely related work here, http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/esubmissions/Lovejoy_Shaun.19.1.7.pdf
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Comment on Missing(?) heat isn’t missing after all by MattStat
Fred Moolten: MattStat – the net imbalance over the past decade might have been zero or close to it – that was one of my points about short term data.
I hope, though, you’re not suggesting that the rising CO2 over the past century didn’t contribute to the net positive imbalance during that time. That would put you in the SkyDragon category.
If the net imbalance over the last 10 years was 0, the decade with the highest atmospheric concentration of CO2 in centuries, then it is indeed possible that the net imbalance is unrelated to CO2. And if net imbalance was unrelated to the maximum concentration of CO2 over a decade, then it might have been unrelated to lower concentrations of CO2 over a century.
The problem with the Skydragons is that they tried a proof that CO2 change was necessarily unrelated to heat flux change. My claim is that extant knowledge, data and reliable applied math (what some call [pure] physics), is unsufficient to establish a reliable claim one way or the other.
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by markus
Tallbloke has taken the same attitude for a while now, and scientific facts are able too be seen from the noise.
Probably time you think about your ability to lead the pack, and keep those mongrels behind in order.
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by cui bono
Markus
“lost in the forest of Greenhouse”. I like that.
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Comment on Open-mindedness is the wrong(?) approach by Vaughan Pratt
I think you’ve put your finger on the difference between Berkeley’s Richard Muller and me. He seems to feel as you do that climate is BEST understood through millions if not billions of temperature datapoints.
I’m way at the opposite end. If you want to make projections about Earth’s climate 30 to 100 years into the future, I claim one can do a very good job by recording just one temperature measurement per year, and that a billion measurements a year tells us little or nothing more about our long term prospects than just that one measurement.
Though not if you start today. Starting around 1850 suffices.
Furthermore I claim that with that one measurement per year one can learn things about the climate that weren’t even suspected before, things that you wouldn’t have noticed had you been burdened with a million or a billion datapoints a year.
But that’s just a personal belief of mine, and I respect that you take Professor Muller’s side on that question.
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by markus
How is it a greenhouse when its hotter on the outside?
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by Chief Hydrologist
‘We develop the concept of “dragon-kings” corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These dragon-kings reveal the existence of mechanisms of self-organization that are not apparent otherwise from the distribution of their smaller siblings. We present a generic phase diagram to explain the generation of dragon-kings and document their presence in six different examples (distribution of city sizes, distribution of acoustic emissions associated with material failure, distribution of velocity increments in hydrodynamic turbulence, distribution of financial drawdowns, distribution of the energies of epileptic seizures in humans and in model animals, distribution of the earthquake energies). We emphasize the importance of understanding dragon-kings as being often associated with a neighborhood of what can be called equivalently a phase transition, a bifurcation, a catastrophe (in the sense of Rene Thom), or a tipping point. The presence of a phase transition is crucial to learn how to diagnose in advance the symptoms associated with a coming dragon-king. Several examples of predictions using the derived log-periodic power law method are discussed, including material failure predictions and the forecasts of the end of financial bubbles.’ http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.4290
Black swans are something different – an unanticiapted occurence (the discovery of black swans) rather than an extreme event associated with a chaotic bifurcation.
Here is a couple of other references.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.1376v4.pdf
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14308
Neither of you get that chaos (or complexity) theory is a theory of emergent behaviour in complex and dynamic system rather rather than simply indicating a state of disorder of some sort.
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by Chief Hydrologist
Stop pretending you understand what it means or have looked at the PNAS paper.
‘McWilliams held a Research Fellowship in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics at Harvard from 1971-1974 and afterwards worked in the Oceanography Section at NCAR where he became a Senior Scientist in 1980. In 1994, while still retaining part-time appointment at NCAR, he began his work at UCLA where he became the Louis B. Slichter Professor of Earth Sciences in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics. In 2002, McWilliams was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Today, he continues his career in academia at UCLA.
James C. McWilliams primarily does research in computational modeling of the Earth’s oceans and atmospheres. McWilliams has written numerous papers from 1972 to the present[4], attempting to construct accurate models to describe the Earth’s fluid reservoirs. One of McWilliam’s most influential papers was a paper written in 1990 titled “Isopycnal mixing in ocean circulation models”, in which together with Peter R. Gent they proposed a subgrid-scale form of mesoscale eddy mixing on isopyncal surfaces for use in non-eddy resolving ocean circulation models[5].
McWilliams has contributed greatly to the development of accurate models of the Earth’s atmosphere and ocean, and his subjects of interest are maintenance of the general circulations; climate dynamics; geostrophically and cyclostrophically balanced (or slow manifold) dynamics in rotating, stratified fluids; vortex dynamics; planetary boundary layers; planetary-scale thermohaline convection; coherent structures of turbulent flows in geophysical and astrophysical regimes; magnetohydrodynamics; numerical methods; and statistical estimation theory.
More recently, he has helped develop a three-dimensional simulation model of the U.S. West Coast that incorporates physical oceanographic, biogeochemical, and sediment transport aspects of the coastal circulation. This model is being used to interpret coastal phenomena, diagnose historical variability in relation to observational data, and assess future possibilities.’
Relevant? God you are a twit.
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by markus
Moreover, how does physics , model greenhouses, when its hotter on the outside, or, do we not consider the mesosphere?
Do we really consider the mesosphere separate from the climatic systems of Earth?
As Pauline Hanson would say, Please Explain?
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by markus
Some of you lot are really insolent, Bob Ellison is a known as a noble man where I live, and deserves due respect.
He knows more than the lot of us put together, about oceans.
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by hunter
The true believers not only deeply believe in AGW, they think everything about AGW is the bestest ever.
The one thing that even informed defenders of AGW have admitted is that AGW promoters have not been using well maintained data bases or well documented techniques. Dr. Curry has been quoted saying so so in this very thread.
“Dr Curry wrote: The tools we are currently using seem inadequate to understand the complex climate system. We have massive amounts of data (particularly global satellite data sets) that are being put to little use in understanding the climate system or in evaluating models. Ever increasing degrees of freedom in climate models has surpassed our ability to understand how to reason about and draw inferences from climate model output.”
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by Joe's World
Judith,
I think the idea of a network theory would give us the better knowledge base.
Every individual thinks differently and may see insights that the author/discoverer may not have known or understood.
I have had to cover many fields which were very much limited by parameters that enclosed that field from expanding.
Many areas of science have errors generated from being enclosed or from short sighted scientists who NEVER want their areas of study to change.
The drawback is everyone wants to be acknowledged or first to come up with insight. This is very hard with so many fields of study involved to actually work together and not fight each other.
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Comment on Nature Physics Insight – Complexity by hunter
Pinatubo is merely the largest volcano to blow during the highly instrumented era. It was by no means the biggest.
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Comment on Open-mindedness is the wrong(?) approach by hunter
Reiner,
It is fascinating to think of the implications that in EU and Germany, with its tremendous education system and much more secular than the US, even more people confuse weather with climate, and AGW with science. Then combine this with the social corruption that has permitted Greece/Spain/Portugal/etc, and the implications get even more interesting.
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Comment on Missing(?) heat isn’t missing after all by Pekka Pirilä
Max,
You present so many details that I can agree on many and disagree on many as well.
Many statements about the role of solar forcing belong to this class. When IPCC lists the understanding of solar forcing as low, it should be joined with the low value of the estimate to mean that the relative uncertainty is very large, but the value in any case small with much better confidence. The alternative views that you bring up are highly speculative and not at all convincing science.
You refer also erroneously to the CERN research. It concentrates on some micro level phenomena and has practically no direct relevance to the estimates of solar forcing. It may provide material for further research that will ultimately give improved understanding of cloud formation. Furthermore the experiment has found certain chemicals more important than radiation at the level they have studied.
Obtaining empirical evidence on the climate change is difficult. There seems to be willingness to draw stronger conclusions than the data can really support. That’s done in both directions – and the most obvious misstatements are certainly made by people, who are not really expert scientists on climate. Some of them are not scientists at all while many specialize in other fields and are all too willing to extend their results to climate issues. This comment applies very much to the papers on solar forcing.
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