David Appell – The answer to all your questions is provided by Judith Curry:
If you have done a really careful job of assessing uncertainties, you substantially narrow the scope for disagreement. Acknowledge the disagreement, put forward the arguments from both sides, and state why you find one side more convincing.
Global warming, the new saturated fat:
We only believe this to be true because nutrition policy was derailed over the past half-century by personal ambition, bad science, politics, and bias.
Dear Dr Curry,
Having just past my first aniversary on Climate Etc., I’d like to say how much I appreciate this blog and the forum that allows me to see the many different takes on climate science with open and honest debate of the varying viewpoints. The turn that your career took may have put you in a situation where you didn’t reach some fulfillment but it did give some people like me to access to the critical thinking of this forum. I don’t envy those exposed strickly to the dogmatic, exclusionary track in the name of political expediency that consensus represents. I’m sure that, being of my age group, you won’t be terribly disappointed not getting some position. Remember though that often the pendulum swings and you may have opened up things for some in the next generation.
As for awards, it is my distinct honor as the Wizard of the Ordovician epoch (emeritus non grata) and my fellow anthropods to bestow upon you the title of ‘Super Climate Science Gal’ with the brains, heart and courage to tell it like it is. This has been a pleasurable year of learning for me in this most open of forums that I believe is second to none. Thanks!
Sincerely,
Philip Nord
Fernando, what I’m saying is that this warming and all its concomitants are so ordinary and so reflective of past warmings that there is little space left for the anthropogenic. If CO2 caused temps to increase through retention in Arrhenius’ experiments, that’s a compelling reason not to live inside glass receptacles. But alleged AGW looks so much like plain old GW it’s embarrassing.
Our warming is dead common. One wave has followed another, each a bit different to the others. Till the Hockeystick and the rise of the klimatariat, few ever doubted this.
As I said before, the climate is old and doing much the same things in its untidy, unstable rhythm. It’s the Hockeystick which is new and anthropogenic.
I liked the stormy 1970s, would have hated most of Australia’s drier decades between 1895 and the end of WW2.
But you didn’t get to pick and choose before, did you? They gave out the 1970s and early 1950s here for free. Gratis. No taxes. It just rained for free. Now we pay…Oh, how we pay!
kim, medicine works pretty well despite not knowing all the details of how the human body works, nor the details of some diseases and how some drugs work. Doctors can make recommendations, nevertheless, and the should be listened to, because there are certain things you can do even based on incomplete knowledge.
Thank you Philip!
Thank you Michael!
Hear, hear, and admire the shininess of the award.
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Did they also look at 1984-1998 because that period showed the opposite, or was this period cherry-picked?
I’ve long been amused that margarine was touted as ‘made from poly-unsaturated fats’ and it’s solidified by saturating the fats.
Gimme a little while and I’ll find the parallel with climate science.
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+1
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[…] are still here, I should be clear that this post is focused on a specific claim Judith Curry has recently blogged about supporting a “50-50″ attribution (i.e. that trends since the middle of the 20th Century […]
Let’s go back to basics.
The inflection points are.
Year___degree C
1911___14.45
1944___15.15
1976___14.76
1998___15.53
Adding 15 degree C to anomalies to get an approximate global average.
These are transitions between warmer and cooler trajectories of global surface temperature. These seem more clearly associated with the Pacific state than the AMO – but the indices are merely chaotically oscillating nodes on an underlying global system.
The increase in a cooler and warmer mode between 1944 and 1998 – conveniently the period of nearly all CO2 increase – is some 0.07 degrees C/decade or about 0.4 degrees C total.
The question is less about whether this was anthropogenic – let’s assume it is for the moment – than about the attribution of late century warming. The 0.77 degrees C increase between 1976 an 1998. Most of this latter increase occurred in 2 ENSO events in 1976/77 and 1997/98 – with frequent and intense El Nino in between. The attribution of anywhere near 100% of this latter warming to greenhouse gases cannot in any stretch be justified.
Let’s assume that all of the post 1944 warming was anthropogenic – 0.4 degrees C rise in response to the vast majority of CO2 increase is underwhelming.
Judith’s view would make more sense if it was self-consistent. On the one had we have a wicked problem and there is no way to know climate sensitivity well enough to even know the response to doubling CO2, but on the other, the sensitivity is somewhere close to the vicinity of 50% of the consensus view. So firstly, it is said you can’t even guess well enough for a policy, but secondly let’s guess anyway and advocate against doing anything based on that guess. A consistent view would allow for the consensus to be at least as right as the 50% guess because of the deep uncertainty, but here it seems there is some certainty mixed into Judith’s uncertainty.
No human is totally consistent, and it wouldn’t make sense anyway. As new information is acquired, views will change – unless you’re a turnip or something.
The worst USDA atrocity of them all was the minimum internal temperature of pork. Generations missed out the succulent joy of medium rare medallions of pork tender loin. Too much internal heat, it was a travesty.
Agreed that it’s semantics, but it’s important. I refuse the silly notion that the left has any respect at all for science. If a man in a white lab coat can end discussion, they are all for it.
Scientists will have to decide if they want to be relevant (honest) or tools.
