On 23/03/13 08:22, Bob Martin wrote:
in 1214550 20130322 161032 Jethro_uk wrote:
But it's a linguistic sleight of hand. I have no problem accepting that
climate can change - it's done it many times within recorded history. I
even have no problem accepting that climate *is* changing. However I
don't really think I have ever seen any proof that it's changing
*because* of human activities. And I am heartily sick of (mainly) non-
scientists who try and say "if you don't believe in climate change, you
haven't understood the facts" - that is foot-through-TV rage-inducing.
"(mainly) non-scientists"
Really??
yes. Or at least non engineers, mathematicians and physicists, those
being the people who understand mathematical modelling most.
Now listen to what a *real* physicist has to say..
"Let me tell you in a few short words why I am a skeptic. First of all,
if one examines the complete geological record of global temperature
variation on planet Earth (as best as we can reconstruct it) not just
over the last 200 years but over the last 25 million years, over the
last billion years €” one learns that there is absolutely nothing
remarkable about todays temperatures! Seriously. Not one human being on
the planet would look at that complete record €” or even the complete
record of temperatures during the Holocene, or the Pliestocene €” and
stab down their finger at the present and go €śOh no!€ť. Quite the
contrary. It isnt the warmest. It isnt close to the warmest. It isnt
the warmest in the last 2 or 3 thousand years. It isnt warming the
fastest. It isnt doing anything that can be resolved from the natural
statistical variation of the data. Indeed, now that Manns utterly
fallacious hockey stick reconstruction has been re-reconstructed with
the LIA* and MWP** restored, it isnt even remarkable in the last
thousand years!
Furthermore, examination of this record over the last 5 million years
reveals a sobering fact. We are in an ice age, where the Earth spends 80
to 90% of its geological time in the grip of vast ice sheets that cover
the polar latitudes well down into what is currently the temperate zone.
We are at the (probable) end of the Holocene, the interglacial in which
humans emerged all the way from tribal hunter-gatherers to modern
civilization. The Earths climate is manifestly, empirically bistable,
with a warm phase and cold phase, and the cold phase is both more likely
and more stable. As a physicist who has extensively studied bistable
open systems, this empirical result clearly visible in the data has
profound implications. The fact that the LIA was the coldest point in
the entire Holocene (which has been systematically cooling from the
Holocene Optimum on) is also worrisome. Decades are irrelevant on the
scale of these changes. Centuries are barely relevant. We are nowhere
near the warmest, but the coldest century in the last 10,000 years ended
a mere 300 years ago, and corresponded almost perfectly with the Maunder
minimum in solar activity.
There is absolutely no evidence in this historical record of a third
stable warm phase that might be associated with a €śtipping point€ť and
hence €ścatastrophe€ť (in the specific mathematical sense of catastrophe,
a first order phase transition to a new stable phase). It has been far
warmer in the past without tipping into this phase. If anything, we are
geologically approaching the point where the Earth is likely to tip the
other way, into the phase that we know is there €” the cold phase. A cold
phase transition, which the historical record indicates can occur quite
rapidly with large secular temperature changes on a decadal time scale,
would truly be a catastrophe. Even if €ścatastrophic€ť AGW is correct and
we do warm another 3 C over the next century, if it stabilized the Earth
in warm phase and prevented or delayed the Earths transition into cold
phase it would be worth it because the cold phase transition would kill
billions of people, quite rapidly, as crops failed throughout the
temperate breadbasket of the world.
Now let us try to analyze the modern era bearing in mind the evidence of
an utterly unremarkable present. To begin with, we need a model that
predicts the swings of glaciation and interglacials. Lacking this, we
cannot predict the temperature that we should have outside for any given
baseline concentration of CO_2, nor can we resolve variations in this
baseline due to things other than CO_2 from that due to CO_2. We dont
have any such thing. We dont have anything close to this. We cannot
predict, or explain after the fact, the huge (by comparison with the
present) secular variations in temperature observed over the last 20,000
years, let alone the last 5 million or 25 million or billion. We do not
understand the forces that set the baseline €śthermostat€ť for the Earth
before any modulation due to anthropogenic CO_2, and hence we have no
idea if those forces are naturally warming or cooling the Earth as a
trend that has to be accounted for before assigning the €śanthropogenic€ť
component of any warming.
This is a hard problem. Not settled science, not well understood, not
understood. There are theories and models (and as a theorist, I just
love to tell stories) but there arent any particularly successful
theories or models and there is a lot of competition between the stories
(none of which agree with or predict the empirical data particularly
well, at best agreeing with some gross features but not others). One
part of the difficulty is that the Earth is a highly multivariate and
chaotic driven/open system with complex nonlinear coupling between all
of its many drivers, and with anything but a regular surface. If one
tried to actually write €śthe€ť partial differential equation for the
global climate system, it would be a set of coupled Navier-Stokes
equations with unbelievably nasty nonlinear coupling terms €” if one can
actually include the physics of the water and carbon cycles in the N-S
equations at all. It is, quite literally, the most difficult problem in
mathematical physics we have ever attempted to solve or understand!
Global Climate Models are childrens toys in comparison to the actual
underlying complexity, especially when (as noted) the major drivers
setting the baseline behavior are not well understood or quantitatively
available.
The truth of this is revealed in the lack of skill in the GCMs. They
utterly failed to predict the last 13 or 14 years of flat to descending
global temperatures, for example, although naturally one can go back and
tweak parameters and make them fit it now, after the fact. And every
year that passes without significant warming should be rigorously
lowering the climate sensitivity and projected AGW, making the
probability of the €śC€ť increasingingly remote.
These are all (in my opinion) good reasons to be skeptical of the often
egregious claims of CAGW. Another reason is the exact opposite of the
reason you used €śdenier€ť in your article. The actual scientific question
has long since been co-opted by the social and political one. The real
reason you used the term is revealed even in your response €” we all
€śshould€ť be doing this and that whether or not there is a real risk of
€ścatastrophe€ť. In particular, we €śshould€ť be using less fossil fuel,
working to preserve the environment, and so on.
The problem with this €śend justifies the means€ť argument €” where the
means involved is the abhorrent use of a pejorative descriptor to
devalue the arguers of alternative points of view rather than their
arguments at the political and social level €” is that it is as close to
absolute evil in social and public discourse as it is possible to get. I
strongly suggest that you read Feynmans rather famous €śCargo Cult€ť talk:
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
In particular, I quote:
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a
friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and
astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of
this work were. €śWell,€ť I said, €śthere arent any.€ť He said, €śYes, but
then we wont get support for more research of this kind.€ť I think
thats kind of dishonest. If youre representing yourself as a
scientist, then you should explain to the layman what youre doing€“and
if they dont want to support you under those circumstances, then thats
their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If youve made up your mind to
test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always
decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish
results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must
publish both kinds of results.
I say thats also important in giving certain types of government
advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling
a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in
some other state. If you dont publish such a result, it seems to me
youre not giving scientific advice. Youre being used. If your answer
happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians
like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the
other way, they dont publish it at all. Thats not giving scientific
advice.
Time for a bit of soul-searching, Dr. Bain. Have you come even close to
living up to the standards laid out by Richard Feynman? Is this sort of
honesty apparent anywhere in the global climate debate? Did the €śHockey
Team€ť embrace this sort of honesty in the infamous Climategate emails?
Do the IPCC reports ever seem to present the counter arguments, or do
they carefully avoid showing pictures of the 20,000 year thermal record,
preferring instead Manns hockey stick because it increases the alarmism
(and hence political impact of the report)? Does the term €śdenier€ť have
any place in any scientific paper ever published given Feynmans rather
simple criterion for scientific honesty?
And finally, how dare you presume to make choices for me, for my
relatives, for my friends, for all of the people of the world, but
concealing information from them so that they make a choice to allocate
resources the way you think they should be allocated, just like the
dishonest astronomer of his example. Yes, the price of honesty might be
that people dont choose to support your work. Tough. It is their money,
and their choice!
Sadly, it is all too likely that this is precisely what is at stake in
climate research. If there is no threat of catastrophe €” and as I said,
prior to the hockey stick nobody had the slightest bit of luck
convincing anyone that the sky was falling because global climate today
is geologically unremarkable in every single way except that we happen
to be living in it instead of analyzing it in a geological record €” then
there is little incentive to fund the enormous amount of work being done
on climate science. There is even less incentive to spend trillions of
dollars of other peoples money (and some of our own) to ameliorate a
€śthreat€ť that might well be pure moonshine, quite possibly ignoring an
even greater threat of movement in the exact opposite direction to the
one the IPCC anticipates.
Why am I a skeptic? Because I recognize the true degree of our ignorance
in addressing this supremely difficult problem, while at the same time
as a mere citizen I weigh civilization and its benefits against
draconian energy austerity on the basis of no actual evidence that
global climate is in any way behaving unusually on a geological time scale.
For shame. "
Robert G Brown
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/2...f-denier-term/
--
Ineptocracy
(in-ep-toc-ra-cy) €“ a system of government where the least capable to
lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the
members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are
rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a
diminishing number of producers.