Mi Cro, you write ” I have the data.”
Wonderful!! When it has been published in some form, and is available for all of us to look at, be assured that everyone who matters will give it the attention it will undoubtedly deserve. But until we have all seen the data, CAGW remains a hypothesis.
Herman Alexander Pope, your outstandingly gracious post is exemplary of a gentleman *and* a scholar. For which, this personal appreciation and sincere thanks are hereby extended to you, Herman Alexander Pope.
If I were advising a policy maker would I tell him that there is a linear relationship between CO2 and temp or a logarithmic one?
How is the “control know” calibrated?
What would be the reduction in temperature if I reduced CO2 emissions by 5%?
If it cost 100 billion dollars to reduce overall emissions by 5% would this amount to a net benefit for a) my country, b) my region, c) the world?
These are the sorts of questions policy makers confront. If the uncertainty in the science is such that they cannot be answered then talking about “control knobs” is simply dealing in the false coin of metaphor.
The simplistic repetition of unscientific mumbo jumbo about “control knobs’ and “fast feedbacks” is the the hallmark of professional propagandists. I’ll take the “tree experts,” who at least show some scientific understanding of the components of the “forest.”
doc -
So there is a drop, which you believe can be discounted due to a rise in the levels of religious dogma in AMERICAN society.
So once again, we see a self-described “skeptic” fail to formulate an opinion after a carefully controlled look at the evidence. No, I don’t “believe [the drop] can be discounted to a rise in the levels of religious dogma…”
(1) I think that the growth of the religious right is, plausibly, an important influence in that drop among a specific group and,
(2) It isn’t a growth in religious dogma that I am speaking about, but the increased linkage between those who have strong religious identities and politics. There is a boatload of evidence supporting that linkage.
However, please note that the two examples I used for a change in the public’s perception of scientific integrity are drawn from the UK, where there are no Democrats/Republicans and no religious right.
Your ball.
Just so I understand: in the examples you used were you talking about them as a way of describing the cause-and-effect of public opinion/faith in science in a general sense? If so, what evidence did you show of that effect you’re describing. You can’t seriously be using an example of change in public opinion related to one specific issue to show a general effect, can you?
Right and that graph for the AMO only gives you about +/- 0.2C then if you consider the 30N-60N amplification you have about +/- 0.38 C. Still the AMO is more likely a good “Weather oscillation”, not a “climate oscillation” since there is likely a longer term general trend which would be more relevant than assuming the AMO is truly an oscillation or will end up zeroing out over any meaningful time scale.
Simplistic repetition.
Unscientific mumbo-jumbo.
Professional propagandists.
(Do not show scientific understanding.)
How non-belligent a non-insulting a two-sentences comment can be.
@Kip Hansen if I had a data set, I would want to be very sure that the components I broke it into actually informed me of something real — not just interesting in a mathematical or statistical sense.
Not everyone has the same interests, Kip. I find it interesting that the component I labeled SOL in my analysis is remarkably well correlated with the solar cycle, both in frequency and phase. It tells me for example that HadCRUT3 is very unlikely to be merely a random walk as some people claim to have proved using statistical methods.
If a sentence were being typed in Romanized Linear B on your computer screen by some remote typist and you were informed that a monkey was doing the typing, you might find that easy to accept. But would you find it equally easy to accept if it were grammatically correct English?
I also infer that that the historical temperature measurements, however inaccurate they may be, are not so inaccurate as to mask physical phenomena. I can therefore expect similar or better accuracy for longer-term physical phenomena since they will be defined by even more samples.
If we had the mathematics and knew what we were doing and took advantage of every computer on Earth running day and night to churn the numbers to model the physical mechanisms and the product of their synchronizations and the effects of the swirling vortices of ocean currents and monsoons bringing on heat and cold waves around the globe as hurricanes spout heat to dark reaches of empty space and volcanoes shoot more pollution into the atmosphere than ever produced by every single car that that has ever been driven on the face of the Earth — enabling us to foresee the climate of the world 50 years into the future — we still need to face the fact that today we cannot even produce good seasonal predictions.
After the storm which likely caused the heaviest loss of Philippino lives – the middling Thelma – the Japanese helped with flood mitigation and other prudent conservation measures on Leyte which have proven to be lifesavers. The costs were substantial, but far, far less than if nothing had been done when eg Auring struck at a similar scale a few years later. Perhaps, twenty years ago, there was not enough “climate science” or “science communication” to get in the way of weather knowledge, engineering, experience and commonsense.
Consider New York, where engineering and judgement of risk should never have failed. It is built near sea level, in a notorious hurricane belt. Yet not that long ago rubble was allowed to be dumped into the mouth of the Hudson River – narrowing it substantially – to create more vulnerable real estate. Is it surprising that educated types in NY would love to talk forever about uncertainty, risk, externalities etc in the most abstract way possible? I’m sure they can’t wait to send their kids to expensive colleges where they will become experts in externalities (or whatever word is buzzing next) and in the art – akin to molasses swimming – of “communication”.
I was born in one of the best-sited cities on earth, yet plenty has always gone wrong with Sydney’s weather and climate. We parched in the horror El Ninos of the early 1790s. We were waterless in 1888. Suburbs went underwater in the 1950s. A million hectares burnt right on our southern outskirts in 1980 (after the regrowth and drenching of the 70s). And here we are talking about siting and climate which is about as good as it gets.
If Richard Tol wants to be some kind of scientist (as opposed to award receiver etc) he needs to ditch that the word “unprecedented”. That word is being used to perpetrate a fraud that has only too many precedents through history. Also, he may think “economic theory is well equipped for such problems”…but that might be because he is an economic theorist. I’m sure 97% percent of economic theorists think their specialty can do wonders. But when Professor Tol makes his very moderate utterances on climate change he is just as simplistic, literal-minded and mechanistic as the hardcore alarmists.
Sorry, Time to get the kids out of the kitchen. Even the nice polite ones.
Oh my god – the sun!
what is it Simon?
A big fiery ball in the center of our solar system, but that’s not important right now, we’re headed straight towards it.
Dr. Judith Curry:
Redesigning the CO2 no feedback sensitivity analysis
I think the correct way to do this problem is to use the surface energy balance approach, as broadly outlined by Ramanathan. I would design the analysis in the following way:
1. Compute the surface radiative forcing and its amplification by the atmospheric warming in a manner following Myhre and Stordal 1997, using gridded global fields of of the input variables obtained from observations (e.g. the ECMWF reanalysis, ISCCP clouds, satellite ozone, some sort of aerosol optical depth from satellite. Conduct the calculations daily over two different annual cycles (say 1 El Nino and 1 La Nina year). These two different years provide an estimate of the uncertainty in the sensitivity associated with the base state of the atmosphere. Note, each annual forcing dataset will need to be run repetitively for maybe up to a decade to get equilibrium for the ocean and sea ice models. A grid resolution of 2.5 degrees should be fine.
2. Use the calculated fluxes to force the surface component of a climate model (without the atmosphere), including the ocean, sea ice, and land subsystem models, for the baseline (preindustrial) and the doubled CO2 forcing. Conduct two calculations for both the baseline and perturbed cases:
keep the the (turbulent) sensible and latent fluxes for the perturbed case the same as for the baseline case
determine the perturbed surface temperatures by calculating the turbulent sensible and latent heat fluxes using the perturbed surface temperatures
Note, these two different ways of treating the sensible and latent heat fluxes tell you different things about sensitivity (without allowing the evaporative flux in #2 to change the radiative flux).
This is how I would do the analysis to determine the CO2 no feedback sensitivity. The number would almost certainly be less than 1C.
http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/11/co2-no-feedback-sensitivity/
Exactly correct analogy. Perhaps we do need to try to cut the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Sydney, tsk!
The burden of a history of bad decisions?
Sure, manacker’s happy to live in the past, waxing nostalgic for the days when technology depended on brute force and ignorance, slavishly extolling the virtues of the modest achievements of bygone times, but the presence on this blog of his comments proves he doesn’t still exclusively use tube transistors and snailmail, betraying his hypocrisy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42wZ6guIKJo gives a moderately useful state-of-the technology for solar.
And sure, Congenra’s $0.50/W solar isn’t there yet, the price today of ‘green power’ is — though heading sharply downward — still slightly above the much-subsidized price of carbon, but electric power generation is a matter of decisions you have to live with for five to eight decades after they’re made. Coal and natural gas still benefit from the economic conditions — and subsidies — of the 1970′s. Those conditions don’t exist any more. Hopefully the last of those subsidies will soon end, too.
The conditions that will exist in the latter half of this century are what PG&E should be considering, if it wants to lower your electric bill over the long haul. (I know, if you’re old enough, you really don’t care what electric bills will be in 20 years, but you aren’t PG&E’s only customer; why should it only make decisions for people who will be dead in ten years?) And in 20 years, the cheapest energy will be coming from something a lot more like Cogenra than like coal.
“From another direction he felt the sensation of being a sheep startled by a flying saucer, but it was virtually indistinguishable from the feeling of being a sheep startled by anything else it ever encountered, for they were creatures who learned very little on their journey through life, and would be startled to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by all the green stuff in the fields.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
A Lacis: This is where decision-makers need to be paying particular attention to those aspects of global climate change that are really quite certain, and are based on undisputed facts and physics.
Once you get beyond the absorption spectrum of CO2 and the notion that an increase in atmospheric CO2 might lead to an accumulation of additional radiant energy someplace in the atmosphere, everything claimed in AGW is disputable. Because 20+% of incoming radiant energy is absorbed in the upper atmosphere, and radiatied spaceward, there is certainly the possibility that doubling the CO2 concentration there will lead to the Earth radiating energy spaceward faster than it does. Add to that the fact that the upper troposphere experiences net radiative cooling (the temp being maintained within limits by the non-radiative transport of sensible and latent heat in thermals), and you can see that a doubling of the CO2 in that region of the atmosphere might increase the net radiative cooling.
Every derivation, of increased CO2 producing increased mean temperature on the surface of the Earth depends on assumptions that are untested or clearly counterfactual with unknown approximation errors. Every decision make needs to be aware of these shortcomings in the science before taking more money away from economic development.
The only global climate change certainty is that the climate will change. Every claim for human influence via CO2, feared or hoped for, is dubious on scientific grounds.
The Social Benefit of Carbon. It’s not a cost, and could hardly ever be one.
========
(Jim2) Solar is really just a black hole for tax payers money. Like so many other socialist initiatives – this one is ugly to the bone.
From the article:
Another risk is that the solar industry has been propped up by subsidies. The solar industry cannot currently thrive on its own without these subsidies. Therefore, the industry will need the world’s governments to continue to offer subsidies to support growth.
DocMartyn vents “[abusive, pointless, fact-free rant redacted]“
Gosh-golly DocMartyn, wouldn’t it be cool if prion-style protein malfolding were implicated in multiple further degenerative diseases, including (but not limited to) type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis?
That be a wonderful, extraordinary, unexpected, clinically transformational scientific payoff to prion-style conformational biology, wouldn’t it?
The world wonders … and hopes!
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