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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Recent Comments

Comments 23401 to 23450:

bozzza at 14:38 PM on 22 August 2016

Climate-related disasters raise conflict risk, study says

I believe the black soil of the Ukraine was wanted by Germany at some point in time for some reason: possibly political expediency?

Tom Dayton at 14:08 PM on 22 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

New model by Poppick et al. using human and natural forcings. Amazing fit to observations. In press, but Variable Variability has a preview.

Trevor_S at 11:34 AM on 22 August 2016

2016 SkS Weekly Digest #34

>Maybe illegible script at its bottom corner would give a clue?

It's perhaps time for a perscription check ;) It's signed 'Bennett' then says 'christian science monitor' presumably a link to the resource with the same name ? My take was the same as Bob's above.

There is also some irony with the juxtaposition of Dr Schmidt's quote 'on business as usual' and the Rio quote... using what precious little emissions budget we have left to have a bunch of people run a round a stadium in Rio, as 'per usual'. Fiddling while Rome burns comes to mind.

Bob Loblaw at 11:04 AM on 22 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Also not ad hominem. That Victor's references rarely support what he claims they say is simply an observation, and pointing it out legitimately "relates to the credibility of statements of fact" that Victor purports to demonstrate. (Follow the WIkipedia link to see the full quote in context.) It serves as a warning to all readers: follow Victor's links and read them carefully before accepting anything he says about them.

In fact, the bulk of my comment does not say "Victor's links are usually wrong, so this one is also wrong" (which would be ad hominem), I specifically stated why that particular link does not show what Victor claims it shows. He has not (yet?) made any attempt to argue that the link does support his original claim, so it seems that he is using the "ad hominem" claim as a means to distract from the substantive issue.

[For some reason, comment #100 seems to be a duplicate of comment #98.]

Bob Loblaw at 10:50 AM on 22 August 2016

2016 SkS Weekly Digest #34

Chriskoz:

Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but to me it looks like the woman is looking out of the window of a microwave oven (set to "Global Warming")...

chriskoz at 08:57 AM on 22 August 2016

2016 SkS Weekly Digest #34

What's the message of this week's toon? Maybe illegible script at its bottom corner would give a clue?

Some people, esp. lab scientists, are so focused on their field & their work that they miss/don't understand social jokes. I honestly subscribe to this bunch herein.

nigelj at 07:51 AM on 22 August 2016

State of the Climate 2015: global warming and El Niño sent records tumbling

Jonbo @69

" I hear 'skeptics' claiming that we are going to soon be entering a cooling phase that is likely to be of long duration due to lower sun activity and changes in ocean cycles."

I'm no expert, just an interested observer of the climate change debate, however I have repeatedly read articles in responsible publications like this saying the effect of solar cycles on temperatures is simply not that large, and not enough to hugely alter the increasing greenhouse affect and IPCC projections of warming going forward.

I also read an article saying that the oceans are basically entering a warming phase according to scientists, that could last several decades at least as below.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/04/10/the-pacific-ocean-may-have-entered-a-new-warm-phase-and-the-consequences-could-be-dramatic/?utm_term=.824880ad33a2

This is the PDO (the pacific decadal oscillation) and its been in a cool phase for some years and may have been a factor in the pause since 1998 (slight slow down). The signs are its now entering a warm phase that could be decades long, and will simply add to warming from greenhouse gases, and could counteract any change in solar irradiance . It's certainly a cyclical event so has to change sooner or later. So the sceptics seem to have it 100% wrong and around the wrong way.

Jonbo69 at 07:14 AM on 22 August 2016

State of the Climate 2015: global warming and El Niño sent records tumbling

'Unfortunately, in many ways, the climate of 2015 is not likely to stand out as especially unusual in a few years’ time. More record hot years are likely, with associated extreme weather events, as greenhouse gas concentrations continue to climb.'

I hear 'skeptics' claiming that we are going to soon be entering a cooling phase that is likely to be of long duration due to lower sun activity and changes in ocean cycles. My expectation (based on my limited knowledge, I'm not a scientist and I appologise for any scientific illiteracy in my writing ), was that if this is the case we would not see a downward trend in surface temperatures, due to the warming effect of CO2, but we would go back to the slower rise in temperatures we had for a number of years prior to the beginning of the current El Nino. But you seem to have a clear expectation of further record temperatures in the coming years. Is this because you are not expecting the negative natural cycles or you think that the effects of CO2 are so potent they will significantly counter the natural cycles?

I'm also wondering in general what natural cycles are expected between now and 2050, and what the resulting patterns might be. I'd also be interested to know if any skeptic has stuck his or her neck out and made some firm predictions for the next 5, 10, 20 years, such as a clear downward trend in surface temperature, recovering arctic sea ice, a downward trend in sea level etc. Thanks.

victorag@verizon.net at 05:59 AM on 22 August 2016

Aerosol emissions key to the surface warming ‘slowdown’, study says

Maybe if we could persuade the Chinese to extend the length of their smokestacks into the troposphere, where the resulting pollution would be relatively safe, we could have the best of both worlds? :-)

Moderator Response:

[JH] Your attempt at humor does not cut the mustard. Have you carefully read the OP and the comments that have been posted on this thread to date?

victorag@verizon.net at 05:43 AM on 22 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

#99 "..but Victor seems to have suggested that he also posts at RealClimate. If he is indeed the same Victor, then over at RealClimate he has a long history of adding links to his posts that do not support what he says. From his short appearance here, I would say that the behaviour here matches. Whether his Morton's Demon prevents him from realizing they do not support his case, or he doesn't care and hopes that nobody will follow the links and therefore providing links will bamboozle people, I can't tell. Either way, if Victor claims that a reference says one thing, it wil almost certainly say something else."

Ad hominem. And by your definition also sloganeering. Please remove. Thank you.

Moderator Response:

[JH] Since you have reposted the text of the final paragraph of Bob Loblaw's comment, deleting his original text would accomplish little.

victorag@verizon.net at 05:34 AM on 22 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Before dealing with #95 I'd like to say that Tom Curtis's response is a good example of the sort of thing I am always hoping to find when discussing this issue, yet so rarely do. Tom sticks to his argument and his evidence with no need for sarcasm, condescension or ad hominems. That's much appreciated, so thank you.

"Saying that a "great many skeptics are in fact climate scientists", ie, that a large proportion of the class "AGW skeptic" are also members of the class "climate scientist" is absurd."

Sorry but that looks like a strawman. I never said anything about a "large proportion" — I said "a great many." Which is true. I'm sure you've seen this list before, but just in case. . .

"And even among the small number of climate scientists who are "skeptics", in most cases there exist clear evidence that suggests they are biased, ie, that they hold their "scientific" opinions for reasons that are primarilly political or religious."

My point regarding bias was that we are all biased to some extent. But as far as science is concerned, there is a powerful bias that must be acknowledged which can easily cause a researcher to overlook serious weaknesses in his own methods or arguments. While many skeptics have very obvious biases, if their arguments are sound, their bias can safely be ignored. So it's really better to focus on the arguments and go easy on the accusations of bias, as this really amounts to an ad hominem.

Do you really intend to assert that critics of a theory may assert any phenomenon to be contrary to the predictions of the theory they criticize with no burden of intellectual rigour placed on them to establish that fact? Seriously? If so, your use of a "burden of proof" argument amounts to intellectual legerdemain - a piece of rhetorical prestidigitation that allows you to declare circles are squares and darkness to be light.

No, not at all. Again you are setting up a straw man. Of course there is a burden of intellectual rigor. But that's not the same as burden of proof. In other words intellectual rigor is required, but it is not necessary for the skeptic to establish any fact. All that's needed is to demonstrate that there is a serious problem (a hidden assumption, an inconsistency, a misreading of data, etc.) with the theory being offered.

". . . logically, the claim that "GMST did not follow the predicted path given AGW" is also a theory." Again: no, not at all. A critique is not a theory. The critic may have a theory of his own, but that's beside the point. Peer review would be impossible if the reviewer needed to establish his own theory before critiqueing someone's paper.

Stephin Minhinnick's argume (which I do not accept in any event) specifically relates to the proposition of entities, and the ontologies of climate scientists and (at least well informed) "skeptics" is the same, at least as regards the climate. Neither proposes a distinct set of entities, be it form of radiation, or unusual subatomic particles, or whatever. The only way that you can take Minhinnick's argument to be relevant is if we count abstractions such as trends as being entities.

The passages I quoted are statements regarding basic principles of science that are universally applicable. The examples provided pertain to entities, but can obviously be extended to theories of any sort. In any case, the usual AGW argument can be understood as existential and I've read many times assertions that it "really exists," that "climate change is real" and so on. How is that different, in principle, from the assertion that leprechauns are real?

Specifically, AGW proponents propose an underlying linear trend over the period 1975-1997 which continues thereafter, while the "skeptics" propose the existence of a new trend from 1998 onwards. And on that basis, they have singularly failed the burden of proof of showing a new underlyng trend.

Skeptics need not show a new underlying trend. All that's required is to demonstrate the lack of continuity between the strong upward trend so evident from the late seventies to ca. 1998 and what followed during the following 15 years or so. If the first period appeared to demonstrate a correlation between CO2 and warming, the second period demonstrated the falsity of that assumption. CO2 levels continued to soar while the increase in temperatures slowed considerably. If the relationship is exponential, as has been asserted, then why wouldn't that relationship continue even more convincingly into the 21st century? There is a difference between questioning an assertion and developing a whole new theory that contradicts it. A new theory isn't necessary. The burden of proof is on the person insisting that the correlation is real in the face of what looks like contradictory evidence.

You appear to imply that because the "skeptic" rhetoric regarding the purported "pause" has been refuted multiple times, and in several different ways, that of itself refutes the multiple refutations.

The many papers attempting to explain away the pause were prompted largely by questions raised in the field of climate science itself, not as a response to skeptics. If the later papers managed to replicate the findings of the earlier ones then that would have constituted significant evidence that the mainstream view is sound. But that's not what happened. The later papers either discovered weaknesses in the earlier ones that they attempted to correct, or else simply ignored the earlier attempts in favor of some new wrinkle. Finally, after the adjustments made by Karl et al., many of the numbers used by the earlier researchers were no longer valid, apparently, thus undermining the earlier research. Now if that research were sound it could not have so easily been undermined, no?

Bob Loblaw at 04:26 AM on 22 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

I will let Tom Curtis continue to dismantle Victor's Gish Gallops of unsupported assertions, but I will comment on one of his links:

The Wikipedia link provided by Victor to support his claim that a "great many skeptics are in fact climate scientists" has a total of 61 living and 7 dead "climate scientists" on it. Of that 68, there is a mixture of botanists, meteorologists, geologists, ecologists, businessmen, chemists, astrophysicists, physicists, etc. Very few are really "climate scientists", except by virtue of their dissemination of tired, denier memes such as those debunked here at SkS. You can look for their names either using the SkS "Cimate MIsinformers" button (in the group below the "Most Used Climate Myths" section along the top left side of each SkS web page), or over at DesmogBlog's Denier Database.

So, really Victor has pointed us to a page of names of fake "skeptics", of which only a very few deserve to be called "climate scientists". To call this "a great many" is indeed strectching things. It reminds me of Project Steve. Tom CUrtis is correct in claiming that the set of "skeptical climate scientists" represents a very small proportion of the set of "climate scientists".

...but Victor seems to have suggested that he also posts at RealClimate. If he is indeed the same Victor, then over at RealClimate he has a long history of adding links to his posts that do not support what he says. From his short appearance here, I would say that the behaviour here matches. Whether his Morton's Demon prevents him from realizing they do not support his case, or he doesn't care and hopes that nobody will follow the links and therefore providing links will bamboozle people, I can't tell. Either way, if Victor claims that a reference says one thing, it wil almost certainly say something else.

saileshrao at 03:31 AM on 22 August 2016

Climate urgency: we've locked in more global warming than people realize

RedBaron,

The definitive book on the subject, commissioned by the StockFree Organic Growers Network, is by Jenny Hall and Iain Tolhurst, "Growing Green: Animal Free Organic Techniques," Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007.

Sure, there are unanswered socioeconomic and political questions in the veganic approach as I already pointed out, just as there are unanswered questions on species extinctions, toxic pollution, etc., in the Rotational Grazing approach. The latter continues the Western scientific tradition of extracting more from Nature in the face of an ecological crunch, along the same vein as the Haber-Bosch process of the 1900s and the Green Revolution of the 1960s, both of which has had unintended catastrophic consequences.

But perhaps, we are veering off topic? My best wishes to your proposed plan of action.

I consider this discussion closed.

SteveAplin at 03:26 AM on 22 August 2016

Richard Milne separates skepticism from denial

Tom Curtis

Fair enough, and I appreciate your reply to a five year old thread!

It's perhaps beside the point that the 2008 GOP nominee was an avid sponsorer of climate change legislation which was (in my view) much more strenuous than what eventually emgerged from the House in 2010.

Romney "walked back" from a previously moderate position to a more denier friendly one during the 2011 primaries? Candidates say all sorts of things in the primaries. If that's an indication of what they'll do as president, then Bush Junior would have dedicated his eight years to overturning Roe V Wade and cutting taxes, instead of ignoring RvW and hiking them, and Obama wouldn’t be firing drone missiles at suspected terrorists in Yemen.

Picking Rick Perry's absurd Galileo claim as an example of the Galileo fallacy is just as much a shot at party positions as an illustration of the actual fallacy. Which in my view is cherrypicking.

The Chernobyle reference was at 41:30 of the video. My paraphrase was inaccurate — the fallacy was actually presented as "I wasn't there when Chernobyl exploded, therefore I'm immune to radiation" — but my assessment of the underlying implication was not. I think Dr. Milne meant for the rebuttal to be "no, you are not immune to radiation."

A better example would have been "I wasn't there when Chernobyl exploded, therefore I'm immune to explosions and fires." Or even better: "I was not there when [pick any natural gas explosion from your local newspaper] went off, therefore I am immune from explosions/fires."

You may think this is a quibble. But my antenna go up with this kind of statement. You want junk science and fallacies, look at what the anti-nuclear crowd says. In spite of my complaints, I very much liked Dr. Milne's talk because from his descriptions climate denier arguments sound just like anti-nuclear arguments.

It would be like somebody citing as an example of a logical fallacy: "A single molecule of CO2 absorbs and re-emits infrared photons, therefore CO2 in any amount is dangerous."

You would no doubt agree that the logic of that statement is incorrect. But you would be forgiven for wondering where the person giving that example stood on the climate change debate.

On Blair (1:02:50): again, I can't see how anybody's logical side could, in early 2003, have kicked in, allowing them to see that what Blair said wasn't correct. Blair wasn't presenting scientific evidence, or even claiming he was. He was presenting a strict risk management argument — "Saddam has a proven history of (1) military aggression, (2) using WMD, and (3) secret uranium enrichment for military purposes. The consequences of him acquiring what we suspect he is trying to acquire warrant military action on our part."

(That's a paraphrase; the full speech to which I believe Milne refers, i.e. Blair's to the House of Commons on March 18 2003, is here: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/18/foreignpolicy.iraq1)

It's perfectly legitimate to disagree with Blair, as many (millions) do. But to say "it wasn't correct" ... is not correct.

This may appear to be another quibble, and off-topic to boot. But it underlines my point about playing the politics of moving beyond climate change talk to action. There's a whole partisan cadre, on both sides of the Atlantic, that makes a lot of political hay over how they "knew" Blair/Bush et al were "not correct." Throwing in with that crowd on the expectation that they'll do something meaningful on climate change is, I'll repeat, a mistake.

victorag@verizon.net at 02:35 AM on 22 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

"Saying that a "great many skeptics are in fact climate scientists", ie, that a large proportion of the class "AGW skeptic" are also members of the class "climate scientist" is absurd."

Sorry but that looks like a strawman. I never said anything about a "large proportion" — I said "a great many." Which is true. I'm sure you've seen this list before, but just in case. . .

Do you really intend to assert that critics of a theory may assert any phenomenon to be contrary to the predictions of the theory they criticize with no burden of intellectual rigour placed on them to establish that fact? Seriously? If so, your use of a "burden of proof" argument amounts to intellectual legerdemain - a piece of rhetorical prestidigitation that allows you to declare circles are squares and darkness to be light.

Stephin Minhinnick's argume (which I do not accept in any event) specifically relates to the proposition of entities, and the ontologies of climate scientists and (at least well informed) "skeptics" is the same, at least as regards the climate. Neither proposes a distinct set of entities, be it form of radiation, or unusual subatomic particles, or whatever. The only way that you can take Minhinnick's argument to be relevant is if we count abstractions such as trends as being entities.

Specifically, AGW proponents propose an underlying linear trend over the period 1975-1997 which continues thereafter, while the "skeptics" propose the existence of a new trend from 1998 onwards. And on that basis, they have singularly failed the burden of proof of showing a new underlyng trend.

You appear to imply that because the "skeptic" rhetoric regarding the purported "pause" has been refuted multiple times, and in several different ways, that of itself refutes the multiple refutations.

Moderator Response:

[JH] Please take the discussion of the "Pause" to a more appropriate comment thread, i.e., Aerosol emissions key to the surface warming ‘slowdown’, study says by Robert Sweeney of Carbon Brief. Sweeney's article is the most recent on this topic to be posted on SkS.

victorag@verizon.net at 01:27 AM on 22 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

#94 Eclectic: "The argumentation you present, is becoming increasingly silly. Your mentioning of the disproving of the existence of leprechauns - is ridiculous."

Obviously, the "leprechauns" argument was an exreme example. However, as the article makes clear, in principle there is no difference between a claim for the existence of such beings and a claim that CO2 emissions are heating the atmosphere to an intolerable degree that endangers the future of humankind. (In fact, the second assertions looks, on its face, far more ridiculous than the former.) In both cases, the burden of proof is the same — and the challenge for the skeptic is the same. One cannot definitively prove the nonexistence of something, whether it's a leprechaun or an impending disaster. Consequently there is no burden of proof on the skeptic, only the requirement that his argument be sound.

"Your search for recent "Pause" in global surface temperature rise, has (so far) been unsuccessful. If you have evidence of a claimed Pause, then it seems you have not yet presented it. Please do not withhold such evidence - if it exists, then please present it now."

The evidence I presented concerned the lack of a long-term correlation between global warming and CO2 emissions. Since I've been told not to repeat myself, I won't get into that again. However, I can't help but repeat one essential reference, the paper by Fyfe et al, titled Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown. Here's what it says in the abstract: "It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims."

If you are unwilling to accept the evidence I've already offered, then at least take seriously the evidence offered in this paper, by a consortium of widely recognized climate scientists.

victorag@verizon.net at 01:03 AM on 22 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

With reference to my #93 post:

I won't mind if you remove #93 completely, as it was intended primarily for the moderator(s) — as is this post. What it amounts to essentially is a plea for more agressive moderation, not less. In other words: please do your job accross the board and weed out personal attacks, condescending remarks and ad hominem arguments from whatever source. I have the impression that you are doing a far better job in this regard than the moderators at RealClimate — but you could do better. Thank you.

Tom Curtis at 00:58 AM on 22 August 2016

Richard Milne separates skepticism from denial

SteveAplin @66, Guliani ran in the 2008 presidential race, not the 2012 presidential race. Of the 2012 presidential race he said "it's tough to be a moderate and succeed in GOP primaries". Therefore his views cannot be taken as representative of the Republican party in 2011/12. As it happens, of the still viable candidates at the time of the first primary, four were explicit deniers, 2 had walked back from previously moderate positions to more denier friendly positions (including eventual Republican nominee, Mitt Romney), and only one had a climate policy avowedly accepting of climate science. That one polled only 0.44% of the vote, recieving just one delegate. That, however, is beside the point. The citation of Perry (12:43) is not made to present him as representative of the Republican party, but as a citable instance of the "galileo gambit" being played, which gambit is then rebutted.

If you want to discuss the other examples, you should provide time stamps for their time of occurence rather than expecting interlocuters to watch the entirety of an 80 minute video to find the obscure reference to find out whether or not you have fairly represented them.

SteveAplin at 23:30 PM on 21 August 2016

Richard Milne separates skepticism from denial

I'm late late late to this, but what can you do. Better late (I watched this last night, August 20 2016) than never.

I really enjoyed the video, and echo Dr Milne's recommendation of this website (skepticalscience.com).

But am I the only one who noticed the pot calling the kettle black? Rick Perry was one Republican candidate in the 2012 presidential race. Rudy Giuliani was another. Milne chose Perry as representative of — I guess — "right wing" views. Giuliani is a "right wing" guy and his take on climate change is the opposite of Perry's. Giuliani ran for the nomination of the very same party. Milne wanted to portray that party, which happened to be contending the upcomping presidential election, as retrograde. He picked the best caricature of that view. Giuliani would have made a poor choice for that purpose.

That, in Milne's own definition, is, um, uh... cherrypicking.

Another example of PCKB (pot calling the kettle black), and hugely important in the context of exactly how mankind can flourish without continuing to dump obscene amounts of carbon into our air: Milne's example of a logical fallacy "I wasn't at Chernobyl, so radiation isn't dangerous."

Yes, that's a logical fallacy. And so is Milne's implication that radiation IS dangerous.

It was a throwaway line, I know. But it was a pretty breathtaking thing for a scientist, lecturing about skepticism, to imply.

I, you, and Dr Milne are under constant radiation bombardment, from natural terrestrial and cosmic sources.

Are we dead?

And Dr. Milne's example of how he momentarily fell for Tony Blair's case for invading Iraq, before coming to his senses and realizing how wrong it was.

How wrong "what" was? Blair did not make, and did not pretend to make, a scientific case for the invasion. He made a polticial case, and framed his case in EXACTLY the way Milne says political cases should be made.

So how could Dr. Milne have figured out it was wrong? Unless he had some inside knowledge of the state of Saddam's uranium isotope separation program, which I am certain he did not, he could only have evaluated Blair's case on the political merits that Blair himself laid out.

I don't mind a scientist venturing into poltics — he's a citizen just like everybody else. I do believe however that public scientists do their own cause a disservice when they buy into a particular partisan frame and insert that frame into their speeches.

The climate change "community" (i.e. those who believe man-made CO2 is a problem worthy of huge effort and action) are making a major mistake if they think that politicians who have glommed onto this issue and say the right buzz words are worthy of support.

German politicians utter the right buzz words, in spades. Germany's electric power generation sector dumped more than 330 million tons of CO2 into the air last year. France, right next door, made a comparable amount of electricity and dumped only 43 million tons.

I do not see, on this web site or any of the other excellent ones that deal with the issue of climate change, any inquiry into the reasons for the remarkable fact I laid out in the previous paragraph.

I do see a lot of rhetorical support for the route Germany has chosen to cut carbon. This amazes and disappoints me. A glance at the publicly available data instantly tells you the German approach is a failure.

Scientists are supposed to work from evidence, not politically motivated fairy tales.

RedBaron at 23:23 PM on 21 August 2016

Climate urgency: we've locked in more global warming than people realize

@saileshrao,

The thread title is, "Climate urgency: we've locked in more global warming than people realize".

I have contended there is a mitigation option that allows us to avoid being locked into this greater AGW. I have provided case studies for all the major staples; rice, small grains and large grains, meat and dairy being produced at commercial scale in a way that significantly reduces atmospheric CO2 by sequestering C into the soil, restoring soil health to agricultural land, if they were adopted world wide. (My own work is in various vegetable crop regenerative models of production but I haven't posted that here because it is original research) I have shown evidence for both correlation and causation. I have even proposed a way to potentially break the current political deadlock and avoid economic disruption both to the many producers and larger commodity markets, international trade markets etc... by proposing how we might do this at a profit at all economic trophic levels. (pardon the pun)

Now you said, "Even if we need a few domestic animals to sustain it (many veganic farmers disagree), a Vegan food system, which reduces the human biomass demand on Nature by a factor of 6, would be easier to manage into the future."

Where are your numbers? Where are the case studies? How do you scale it? Where is the socio-economic political plan? How will this prevent us from being locked into more global warming than people realize? How will we pay for it? Who are the economic winners and losers and why?

I ask all this because I don't want a sloganeering reply based solely on your attempt to convert acolytes to your religious dogma, rather I am actually interested in this so called "veganic" agriculture and how it might fill some of the more minor gaps in my plan. There are various local ordinances and zoning issues surrounding animal husbandry in and near large population areas. It is not the major agricultural land, but it is one small gap in my proposed plan I need to work through.

So if you could please leave the conversion of the world's population to Veganism aside for a moment, and instead answer some of these questions, maybe I could integrate some of your ideas into my proposed plan of action?

Thanks in advance.

Tom Curtis at 21:58 PM on 21 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

victorag @87:

"A great many skeptics are in fact climate scientists..."

Passing over the assumption that "skeptics" are in fact skeptical, rather dogmatically oppositional, surely you have mistated your position. First, and this should be very clear from any excursion to WUWT, the vast majority of "skeptics" have neither qualifications in, nor understanding of climate science. Saying that a "great many skeptics are in fact climate scientists", ie, that a large proportion of the class "AGW skeptic" are also members of the class "climate scientist" is absurd.

I assume you merely mispoke, and intended to say that "a great many climate scientists are 'skeptics'". Even there you are on very shaky ground. Based on surveys of climate scientists, at most 15% and more likely << 10% of climate scientists hold a "skeptical" position on AGW. Among publishing climate scientists, by self assessment only 2.4% of climate scientists thought there published work rejected AGW (see Table 4). So, at best, a very small minority of climates scientists are "skeptics" - sufficiently small that their views cannot be taken as representative of climate science.

And even among the small number of climate scientists who are "skeptics", in most cases there exist clear evidence that suggests they are biased, ie, that they hold their "scientific" opinions for reasons that are primarilly political or religious. A significant proportion of them, for instance, are employed by right wing political think tanks, or have published for or spoken at conferences for such think tanks. Indeed, one of the most noteworthy "skeptical" climate scientists has declared that, "I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government", a declaration tantamount to saying that as a matter of principle he will distort the science for political ends.

"However, we must recognize that, as far as science is concerned, there is an asymmetric relation between someone who offers an hypothesis and someone who critiques it. The burden of proof is on the person offering the theory, not the critic."

My criticism of the "skeptic's" discussion of the "pause" was that they incorrectly stated the predictions of AGW, and that the responses that you considered to be akin to cherry picking merely established what AGW actually predicted over the relevant interval, and thereby showed that the actual temperature records followed what was expected from the theory. Given that I am flabberghasted by your response. Do you really intend to assert that critics of a theory may assert any phenomenon to be contrary to the predictions of the theory they criticize with no burden of intellectual rigour placed on them to establish that fact? Seriously? If so, your use of a "burden of proof" argument amounts to intellectual legerdemain - a piece of rhetorical prestidigitation that allows you to declare circles are squares and darkness to be light. Even if the " ...burden of proof is on the person offering the theory", that would be completely irrelevant to the case under discussion.

As it happens, even in more general contexts, your principle is useless. That is because, logically, the claim that "GMST did not follow the predicted path given AGW" is also a theory. If a burden of proof applies to those proposing theories, than a proponent of this view has a burden of proof to demonstrate to things, ie, the predicted GMST temperature trend given AGW; and that GMST did not follow that path.

You attempt to support your dictum with a quote @90 from comuter scientist, Stephen Minhinnick. Event there, however, you go awry. Stephin Minhinnick's argume (which I do not accept in any event) specifically relates to the proposition of entities, and the ontologies of climate scientists and (at least well informed) "skeptics" is the same, at least as regards the climate. Neither proposes a distinct set of entities, be it form of radiation, or unusual subatomic particles, or whatever. The only way that you can take Minhinnick's argument to be relevant is if we count abstractions such as trends as being entities. But if we do that, it is the AGW "skeptics" who are proposing an additional entitity. Specifically, AGW proponents propose an underlying linear trend over the period 1975-1997 which continues thereafter, while the "skeptics" propose the existence of a new trend from 1998 onwards. And on that basis, they have singularly failed the burden of proof of showing a new underlyng trend.

"To be perfectly clear: the theory in question is the theory that CO2 emissions due to the burning of fossil fuels have been warming the earth steadily over a long time period and as a result placing the world in grave danger. The so-called "hiatus" is an attempt to refute this theory by calling attention to a certain body of data that seems inconsistent with it. Promoters of the hiatus need not offer a counter-theory. All they need to do is demonstrate a serious inconsistency in the "climate change" theory."
(My emphasis)

And now, apparently, we are in aggreement, except you exempt the "skeptics" from actually having to make the demonstration of inconsistency, which requires not only demonstrating the post 1998 temperature record, but also demonstrating the actual prediction of AGW (not just the projections). And once again, demonstrating that the "skeptics" have not undertaken their task with any intellectual rigour is not akin to cherry picking.

"The most recent "pause buster," by Karl et al., adjusted the data in such a way as to render literally all these studies superfluous, which should have been a huge embarrassment to the mainstream climate science world, but has on the contraty been accepted with enthusiasm simply because it appears to do the job more convincingly."

First, and most obviously, Karl et al discusses just one temperature data set, and therefore cannot render analyses of other datasets superfluos. Second, you are not entitled to assume that a reworking of (for example), Foster and Rahmstorf using the latest temperature products would not show an accelerating temperature trend. All you can say from the update of the temperature series is that the former studies are not dated, not that they are superfluos (ie, that repeating the studies would not impact our understanding, or demonstrate any underlying trend greater than the revised temperature trends from Karl et al). Again your argument suggest to me rhetorical legerdemain. You appear to imply that because the "skeptic" rhetoric regarding the purported "pause" has been refuted multiple times, and in several different ways, that of itself refutes the multiple refutations. It is only conspiracy theorests and pseudoscientists who think there theory is confirmed by the mounting of evidence against it.

Eclectic at 21:53 PM on 21 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Victor @ 93 and prior :

The argumentation you present, is becoming increasingly silly. Your mentioning of the disproving of the existence of leprechauns - is ridiculous.

Your search for recent "Pause" in global surface temperature rise, has (so far) been unsuccessful. If you have evidence of a claimed Pause, then it seems you have not yet presented it. Please do not withhold such evidence - if it exists, then please present it now.

Earlier, the analogy was made that global surface temperature was the tail on the dog body [ body = ocean ]. Victor, you have made a major Logical Fail, by ignoring the dog and instead concentrating on whether the dog has a tail [ a tail, a cropped tail, or never any tail in the first place ! ].

Your "criticism" needs to: not only point to the absence of a tail - but also point to the absence of a dog.

Since, for well-known physical reasons, the ocean has been warming without Pause - then it becomes not only plausible but highly probable that the "tail" would have no Pause. And the evidence indeed shows no Pause - yes, it shows minor fluctuations as the tail wags a little : but no real Pause.

Your desired "Pause" has become the leprechaun that you must demonstrate.

Jonbo69 at 20:41 PM on 21 August 2016

Temp record is unreliable

I have a question I would like to ask; I'm not sure if this is the best thread to ask it, for which I appologise, but it's somethimg I've always wondered and would really appreciate an answer to. I know that the Had Cru surface temp data is biased low because they do not have coverage in the arctic. My question is, why is this the case? Why have Had Cru never used data from the arctic stations when the greater coverage will clearly lead to more accurate estimates?

victorag@verizon.net at 13:35 PM on 21 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

It's getting very tiresome to present perfectly logical objections to climate change dogma, only to be greeted by ad hominems, nit picks (thank you, Mr. Rodger), intimidation, misreadings and condescension. Admittedly, this site is run in a far more even handed and decent manner than RealClimate, which is, for the most part, populated by rude imbeciles, encouraged to rave on with little to no supervision.

For the information of all concerned, I am not easily intimidated and I do not suffer fools (you know who you are) gladly. But I am also happy to engage in even handed dialogue with anyone challenging my views, provided they do so with intelligence and respect. And if my attitude is a problem for the moderators then my advice to you is very simple: ban me from the site.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in meaningful, no-holds-barred dialogue on one of the most important topics of the day, then freely open the gate to those like me who have ideas of their own and are not afraid to express them.

Moderator Response:

[JH] Your comment is a blend of agumentative and off-topic statements, moderation complaint, and sloganeering — all of which are prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy.

If you cannot abide by the SkS Comments Policy, you will relinquish your privilege of posting on this site.

Tom Dayton at 13:29 PM on 21 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Congratulations, Victor. Your understanding of science has advanced from grade school to high school. Look up "naive falsificationism."

victorag@verizon.net at 13:08 PM on 21 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

#89 Michael Sweet:

"Your characterization of Karl's paper is false, the paper adjusted the sea surface temperatures as required by science to remove measured biases. The old ship data is obviously biased compared to the new bouy data. You often make false assertions about scientists motives and data. Once several of your assertions are shown to be false, your arguments become not very convincing."

My characterization of Karl's paper had nothing to do with his claims regarding the validity of his adjustments. So you are the one making the false assertion. What I claimed is that his adjustments made the earlier studies irrelevant, another thing entirely.

victorag@verizon.net at 13:00 PM on 21 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

First, in response to the accusation that I'm repeating myself: whatever I said that might be construed as repetition was presented in a different context (a discussion of bias, in response to Tom's assertions that the notion of a hiatus is due to bias — not sure how I could respond to that without repeating some things I'd said earlier.)

Tom Dayton: "victorag claimed "there is no burden of proof associated with evaluating someone else's work, nor any need to establish one's lack of bias." The falsehood of that claim goes beyond even the other grade school caricatures of science that victor has put forward."

An excellent discussion of this issue appears here: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~edmin/Pamphlets/Pamphlet%2003%20-%20Scientific%20Method%20and%20the%20Burden%20of%20Proof.pdf

Some excerpts:

Filtering out delusions and wishful thinking
It is easy to deliberately, or through mental illness,
imagine things that do not exist. Examples that
immediately come to mind are time-machines,
leprechauns, hairy blue frogs, elephants that fly.
Anyone could make up such things all day with no
real effort. And there are an infinite number of these
non-existent things that could potentially be
imagined.
But it is nearly impossible to prove that these
things do not actually exist, or have never existed. (my emphasis-V)
You would have to show you had looked
everywhere the object could be and still not found
one. Even then it could be said that the thing was
hidden, or moved while you were looking for it, or
you looked at the wrong time. . .
The same principle applies in general science. For
this reason the onus is always on the believer to
provide convincing evidence that the object
believed in is not merely a laughable fantasy but
actually exists. This is called the ‘Burden of Proof’. . .
As we have seen, the proof on an object's nonexistence
is actually impossible in practice. . .
Default Axioms
There is an important consequence to this - if an
object cannot be shown to exist, the default position
is that it does not exist. It is axiomic that something
does not exist unless shown otherwise.

With respect to bias: if I can demonstrate that a claim is unsubstantiated, then it doesn't matter whether I'm biased or not. On the other hand, if I'm attempting to establish the truth or relevance of a theory, a hidden bias might be at work in my methodology or my selection of data that makes my theory seem more convincing than it actually is.

Moderator Response:

[JH] My cautionary note about escessive repetition was prospective.

I also activated the link you provided. Please learn how to use the editing function to activate links.

michael sweet at 09:41 AM on 21 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Victor,

Please link your references so they can be checked. Tom Curtis and MA Rodger have shown that your previous papers do not support your claims.

You are getting very repetitive. Consider following the moderators suggestion and stop repeating the same failed assertions. Simply repeating an assertion that has been previously shown to be incorrect will not convince anyone at this site that your arguments have merit. Most of the regular readers have seen your posts at RealClimate and do not need to see them again, especially three or four times.

Your characterization of Karl's paper is false, the paper adjusted the sea surface temperatures as required by science to remove measured biases. The old ship data is obviously biased compared to the new bouy data. You often make false assertions about scientists motives and data. Once several of your assertions are shown to be false, your arguments become not very convincing.

Tom Dayton at 09:32 AM on 21 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

victorag claimed "there is no burden of proof associated with evaluating someone else's work, nor any need to establish one's lack of bias." The falsehood of that claim goes beyond even the other grade school caricatures of science that victor has put forward.

victorag@verizon.net at 08:31 AM on 21 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

#83 Tom Curtis: "while the potential for bias is real, I find it extraordinary that you consider it to be a feature of climate science rather than of the "skeptics"."
OK, before we get any further, I must object to the opposition "climate science" vs. "skeptics." A great many skeptics are in fact climate scientists so that phrase is misleading in this context. As I mentioned earlier, I find it difficult to find a term characterizing those who see CO2 emissions as both a significant cause of global warming, and a clear and present danger to the future of life as we know it. I've used the term "warmist" and I've used "alarmist," but neither seems fair. "Believers" maybe? As oppposed to skeptics? Or "accepters" as opposed to "deniers"? That doesn't sound right either. If anyone has a suggestion I'd love to hear it. Meanwhile, I'll just try to avoid the issue.

Tom: "There are several, objective measures showing that claims of a "pause" (literally a brief cessation) or "hiatus" (literally a gap) in global warming after 1998 represent (at best) a massive disconfirmation bias by the "skeptics" (as in, they are biased towards accepting any disconfirmation of global warming, no matter how spurious)."

There's no question that many climate change skeptics are heavily biased. I cringe when I read some of the nonsense stemming from right-wing ideologues convinced that "climate change" is a communist conspiracy designed to promote world government and the sharing of wealth — or something promoted by greedy climate scientists interested only in government grants. That is bias writ large and there is no place for it in a civil discussion. It's true also that there are more subtle forms of bias that are far more difficult to discern, and I admit that I could be a victim of such bias myself. Why not? And I have no doubt that a great many fellow skeptics, if not all, are biased against the climate change mainstream (is that the phrase I'm looking for?) for one reason or another.

However, we must recognize that, as far as science is concerned, there is an asymmetric relation between someone who offers an hypothesis and someone who critiques it. The burden of proof is on the person offering the theory, not the critic. And since there is always a strong likelihood of any scientist being biased in favor of either his own theory or a theory promoted by the group with which he's associated, special precautions should be be taken to counteract that tendency. Which is why the controlled double-blind experiment is recommended wherever possible.

While a critic may also be biased, there is no burden of proof associated with evaluating someone else's work, nor any need to establish one's lack of bias. The person reviewing someone else's paper, for example, is not normally required to do his own research, conduct his own experiments, double-blind or not, etc. Nor is a critic required to offer an alternative theory. This might seem unfair, but this is the long established convention when a theory is considered in the scientific (or scholarly) world.

To be perfectly clear: the theory in question is the theory that CO2 emissions due to the burning of fossil fuels have been warming the earth steadily over a long time period and as a result placing the world in grave danger. The so-called "hiatus" is an attempt to refute this theory by calling attention to a certain body of data that seems inconsistent with it. Promoters of the hiatus need not offer a counter-theory. All they need to do is demonstrate a serious inconsistency in the "climate change" theory.

With respect to this "hiatus", there's a long long list of studies designed with the intention of disproving it, and I see no reason to uncritically accept any of them — especially when they seem designed specifically to produce a foregone conclusion. The most recent "pause buster," by Karl et al., adjusted the data in such a way as to render literally all these studies superfluous, which should have been a huge embarrassment to the mainstream climate science world, but has on the contraty been accepted with enthusiasm simply because it appears to do the job more convincingly.

The real problem has been swept under the rug. For example, in the light of the data adjustments reported by Karl et al, it would seem that many of the numbers contributing to the results reported in the Foster/Rahmstorf paper are no longer valid, thus the formula leading to the hiatus-breaking result would have to be recalculated and would most likely come out wrong.

The latest turn of the screw is the paper by Fyfe et al., which I'm sure you're aware of, which is critical of all such attempts, insisting that the so-called "pause" is real and needs to be taken seriously. Bias is very likely absent here, especially when we note that Michael Mann himself contributed to this research.

Moderator Response:

[JH] You have made several points in this post. Please note that excessive repetition is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy, i.e,

Comments should avoid excessive repetition. Discussions which circle back on themselves and involve endless repetition of points already discussed do not help clarify relevant points. They are merely tiresome to participants and a barrier to readers. If moderators believe you are being excessively repetitive, they will advise you as such, and any further repetition will be treated as being off topic.

MA Rodger at 04:07 AM on 21 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Victor Grauer @82.
Trawling the literature to find useful-sounding quotes to add weight to an argument is all very fine but in doing so you do introduce the references you cite into the discussion. And as you fail to indicate why you introduce these four refences @82 I will have to assume that you are defending your bold assertion @78 - "researchers do not see CO2 emissions as a significant contributor to the warmup during this period."I have to say that I see these references actually doing the exact opposite and pulling the rug from under your bold assertion.

Your first reference is to an SkS page but you stick with the 'basic' version when there is also an 'advanced' version that states:-

"Although humans were not burning very large amounts of fossil fuels or emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the early 20th Century, relative to the late century, CO2 emissions were non-negligible and did play a role in the early century warming. ... As you can see, the best estimate of the anthropogenic contribution to the 1910-1940 warming is approximately 0.1 to 0.15°C."

This seems to be quite definite in saying that AGW (of which CO2 is the largest contributor) is indeed a "significant contributor" but not a dominant one. (Victor - Nil points.)

Your second reference, Thompson et al (2005) 'Early twentieth-century warming linked to tropical Pacific wind strength' says a lot more than 'the early warming was almost 30% of the total when AGW was relatively weak.' (Note this 30% figure chimes well with my rough calculation presented @77 while "relatively weak" is not what you would call an exact evaluation and without context says diddly-squat.) For instance, the paper also says:-

"Between 1910 and 1940, global temperature warmed by 0.4 °C (Fig. 1) under an increase in anthropogenic forcing of only 0.3Wm^2, compared with 0.75 °C of warming under a 1.5Wm^2 increase since 1970 (refs 1,9,10; Fig. 1). Detection/attribution studies with three generations of global coupled climate models have indicated that at least some of this early century warming was probably due to natural factors, such as very few volcanic eruptions and an increase in solar output (Fig. 1). However, the magnitude of observed warming is greater than that simulated by climate models with forcing from external sources alone (0.20-0.25 °C; ref. 10), suggesting that internal variability played an important role in the early twentieth-century warming."

Fig 1 confirms that AGW was a "significant contributor" to early 20th century warming and it would be a strange reading of the paper that concluded that these "researchers do not see CO2 emissions as a significant contributor to the warmup during this period." (Victor - Nil points.)

Your third reference, Nozawa et al (2005), 'Detecting natural influence on surface air temperature change in the early twentieth century', presents somewhat different findings. It tells us that their initial modelling shows a large impact from GHGs throughout the 20th century, early & late, but when the net contribution of AGW is considered "the warming due to WMGHGs is offset by a cooling due to increases in anthropogenic aerosols, resulting in no significant warming until 1950s."
Yet here the size of the GHG contribution is large enough for them to say "The trend of the global annual mean SAT in GHG is nearly equal to that in NTRL; therefore, without further investigation, we cannot conclude which factors are the main contributors to the observed early warming."
The paper's eventual finding revolves around attribution rather than the power of the various forcings.

"The natural forcing causes a warming trend of ~0.6K/century, which is about one half of the observed trend. This is consistent with the global annual mean SAT anomalies simulated in NTRL (Figure 1). The residual of the observed trend (~0.4K/century) may be caused by the combined anthropogenic forcings, primarily by the WMGHGs. However, the two anthropogenic signals are highly uncertain and are not detected. Therefore the cause of the residual trend is not obvious."

This is a better account than your quote @82 from the paper's abstract. It is plain that the message from the paper is that GHG forcing (of which CO2 is the dominant contributor) are a "significant contributor". (Victor - nil points.)

Your final reference is Meehl (2003) 'Solar and Greenhouse Gas Forcing and Climate Response in the Twentieth Century'. This is packed full of interesting stuff but again it would be a very strange reading of it which concluded that these "researchers do not see CO2 emissions as a significant contributor to the warmup during this period." You only have to note Figure 1 which shows the AGW (GHG +sulfate) contribution to the early 20th century warming to be as large as solar's (with volcanic missing). (Victor - Nil points.)

So Victor, that is a pretty impressive score you have achieved @82. Well done you.

saileshrao at 01:32 AM on 21 August 2016

Climate urgency: we've locked in more global warming than people realize

Nigelj,

"We have nothing to lose, provided we don't over fish, and no obvious impacts on climate change."

We have already overfished to the point where modern fishing operations depend on a network of high tech sensors to track and trap fish up to 2km below sea level. Most seafood contain higher toxic pollutants than any other food source. In fact, Jeremy Jackson of Scripps says that by as early as 2030, eating a morsel of fish would be equivalent to playing gastronomic Russian roulette:
www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson

But as you can imagine, my sympathies are entirely with the fish.

MA Rodger at 20:11 PM on 20 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Something strange happened uploading #84. I think it was probably an extranious control character hiding in a cut&paste but will wait and see if it (or our gallant moderators) can sort(s) out the mess before trying a second upload.

Moderator Response:

[TD] Fixed.

MA Rodger at 20:04 PM on 20 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Victor Grauer @82.

Trawling the literature to find useful-sounding quotes to add weight to an argument is all very fine but in doing so you do introduce the references you cite into the discussion. And as you fail to indicate why you introduce these four refences @82 I will have to assume that you are defending your bold assertion @78 - "researchers do not see CO2 emissions as a significant contributor to the warmup during this period." I have to say that I see these references actually doing the exact opposite and pulling the rug from under your bold assertion.

Your first reference is to an SkS page but you stick with the 'basic' version when there is also an 'advanced' version that states:-

"Although humans were not burning very large amounts of fossil fuels or emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the early 20th Century, relative to the late century, CO2 emissions were non-negligible and did play a role in the early century warming. ... As you can see, the best estimate of the anthropogenic contribution to the 1910-1940 warming is approximately 0.1 to 0.15°C."

This seems to be quite definite in saying that AGW (of which CO2 is the largest contributor) is indeed a "significant contributor" but not a dominant one. (Victor - Nil points.)

Your second reference, Thompson et al (2015) 'Early twentieth-century warming linked to tropical Pacific wind strength' says a lot more than 'the early warming was almost 30% of the total when AGW was relatively weak.' (Note this 30% figure chimes well with my rough calculation presented @77 while "relatively weak" is not what you would call an exact evaluation and without context says diddly-squat.) For instance, the paper also says:-

"Between 1910 and 1940, global temperature warmed by 0.4 C (Fig. 1) under an increase in anthropogenic forcing of only 0.3Wm

Tom Curtis at 14:27 PM on 20 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

victor, you have made a few comments since I last responded, so I shall split my response between two comments. This first one will discuss general issues, while the second will respond explicitly on questions of science.

@71, "sloganeering" is implicitly defined in the comments policy, which you are presumed to have read (on the basis that you are commenting):

"No sloganeering. Comments consisting of simple assertion of a myth already debunked by one of the main articles, and which contain no relevant counter argument or evidence from the peer reviewed literature constitutes trolling rather than genuine discussion. As such they will be deleted. If you think our debunking of one of those myths is in error, you are welcome to discuss that on the relevant thread, provided you give substantial reasons for believing the debunking is in error. It is asked that you do not clutter up threads by responding to comments that consist just of slogans."
(My emphasis)

The point of the term "sloganeering" is that "discussion" which consists merely of restatements of your position without in fact advancing cogent arguments and/or observational evidence in favour of the position serve no greater intellectual position than to stake out your position as either a "skeptic" or a "warmist". Intellectually, they are no more substantial than the slogans shouted at political rallies. As such, they do nothing to advance discussion.

@73 while the potential for bias is real, I find it extraordinary that you consider it to be a feature of climate science rather than of the "skeptics". There are several, objective measures showing that claims of a "pause" (literally a brief cessation) or "hiatus" (literally a gap) in global warming after 1998 represent (at best) a massive disconfirmation bias by the "skeptics" (as in, they are biased towards accepting any disconfirmation of global warming, no matter how spurious). Not least of these was the choice of the term "pause" for what was at most a reduction in the still positive trend rates. Further objective criteria include the insistence on the use of periods starting with or very near the near record breaking 1997/1998 ENSO and terminating with or just after the 2008, and later the 2011/2012 La Ninas (both unusually strong); and the treatment of the lack of a statistically significant trend as being the lack of a trend simpliciter.

A consequence of this bias is that "skeptics" argue against and "refute" complete misrepresentations of what is actually predicted by the theory AGW. In some cases I have seen, they have "refuted" mischaracterizations of AGW by arguing for what AGW actually predicts. This is certainly the case with regard to the purported 21st century "pause".

What AGW predicts is that, to a reasonable approximation, Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) is a linear function of change in forcing plus the effects of short term natural variability such as ENSO. Climate scientists do not pretend to be solar physicists who can predict solar activity in advance. Nor to they pretend to be geophysicists who can predict the timing and intensity of volcanic erruptions. They do not even predent to be economists who can predict the future evolution of anthropogenic emissions. When "predicting" the future, they use a broad range of plausible scenarios for potential future forcings (ie, projections) so that they can predict the plausible range of outcomes rather than the specific outcome. To determine what AGW actually predicts for a specific forcing history you need to run the models (or a crude 2 box model such as Kevin Cowtan's) with the actual forcing history. Further, as short term fluctuations of GMST are influenced by ENSO, you need to further contrain the model to match the actual ENSO fluctuations (as even those models that produce such fluctuations will not match the specific timing and intensity of ENSO events on any given run). Alternatively you need to predict the influence of the divergence from projected values (of forcings and ENSO) and reverse engineer what the observed values would have been had those predicted values actually occured. The later is effectively what Foster and Rahmstorf do.

The upshot is that the features of Foster and Rahmstorf that you consider to be akin to cherry picking are just the features used to determine the mismatch between projected forcing and ENSO values (that climate scientists do not pretend to be able to predict) and the actual historical values so that a comparison can be made between that which climate scientists do purport to predict and observations can be made. That is, they are doing what should have been done by the "skeptics" in the first place, and which is only necessary because the "skeptics" chose rhetorically advantageous misrepresentation (or at best, gross stupidity) over a proper test of the theory they want to criticize.

The problem with your meta-argument then becomes that in any instant where you have a critic of science unprincipled enough, or uneducated enough to completely misrepresent the predictions of the theory, and thereby assert it refuted - any attempt to correct the record by the scientists will be taken by you as proof of the scientist's bias. You have in fact speciously argued for a massive disconfirmation bias that does not even require you to look at the evidence.

victorag@verizon.net at 14:15 PM on 20 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

#81

Before 1940, the increase in temperature is believed to have been caused mainly by two factors:
Increasing solar activity; and
Low volcanic activity (as eruptions can have a cooling effect by blocking out the sun).
Other factors, including greenhouse gases, also contributed to the warming and regional factors played a significant role in increasing temperatures in some regions, most notably changes in ocean currents which led to warmer-than-average sea temperatures in the North Atlantic. (https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-early-20th-century.htm)

From http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n2/full/ngeo2321.html :

Of the rise in global atmospheric temperature over the past century, nearly 30% occurred between 1910 and 1940 when anthropogenic forcings were relatively weak.

From http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL023540/abstract :

We analyze surface air temperature datasets simulated by a coupled climate model forced with different external forcings, to diagnose the relative importance of these forcings to the observed warming in the early 20th century. The geographical distribution of linear temperature trends in the simulations forced only by natural contributions (volcanic eruptions and solar variability) shows better agreement with observed trends than that does the simulations forced only by well-mixed greenhouse gases. Using an optimal fingerprinting technique we robustly detect a significant natural contribution to the early 20th century warming. In addition, the amplitude of our simulated natural signal is consistent with the observations. Over the same period, however, we could not detect a greenhouse gas signal in the observed surface temperature in the presence of the external natural forcings. Hence our analysis suggests that external natural factors caused more warming in the early 20th century than anthropogenic factors.

From http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/1520-0442%282003%29016%3C0426%3ASAGGFA%3E2.0.CO%3B2

It has been observed that globally averaged warming of surface air temperature in the twentieth century occurred in two stages, early in the century from about the early 1900s to the 1940s, and late in the century from about the late 1960s to 2000 (Fig. 1b). Previous work suggests that it is likely that the early century warming was caused mostly by solar and volcanic forcing, and the late century warming mostly by the increase of greenhouse gases (partially offset by aerosol cooling). These results are confirmed here.

nigelj at 08:49 AM on 20 August 2016

Climate-related disasters raise conflict risk, study says

Scientific American had a good article on how drought in Syria may be linked to climate change, and was one causal factor in their civil war by increasing social unrest, as below:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-hastened-the-syrian-war/

I think its easy enough to see that droughts and heat waves can exacerbate tensions and become a factor in conflicts. Of course in times of trouble like large floods, humans sometimes do indeed pull together, but you do also sometimes get looting, and the army sometimes has to maintain order. Containing the conflict becomes expensive.

I seem to recall Hurricane Katrina had looting and violence. Climate change could mean more events on the scale of this hurricane.

And as the article says, instability within a country caused by climate change or other events, means even smaller weather events become a problem. It's these hidden or less obvious costs of climate change that add up, and this is being missed by the media in their search for simple sound bites.

saileshrao at 06:38 AM on 20 August 2016

Climate urgency: we've locked in more global warming than people realize

RedBaron,

Even if we need a few domestic animals to sustain it (many veganic farmers disagree), a Vegan food system, which reduces the human biomass demand on Nature by a factor of 6, would be easier to manage into the future.

Perhaps I wasn't clear, but just as climate change, ecosystem degradation and toxic pollution are systemic issues, the fear of Veganism is also a systemic issue. Veganism is based on a nurturant ethic towards Nature (80% of vegans are women), which runs counter to the domination ethic underlying our current system.

I also don't expect the necessary system change to happen overnight. Vegans have the critical mass now for the Buckminster Fuller approach: "You don't change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

What would a socioeconomic system based on compassion as an organizing value and cooperation as an organizing principle look like? We are planning sandbox implementations in cooperation with academic institutions and NGOs in the US and India.

MA Rodger at 04:45 AM on 20 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Victor Grauer @78.

You seek correction if you are wrong.

You infer that you would like to 'dispute my numbers' but say you are unable because 'you're not a climate scientist'. You are incorrect. The data I use is readily available for use by any layman armed with a spreadsheet, both HadCRUT4 and IPCC historic ERF. I didn't see the point of providing web links @77 as use of these datasets here @SkS is so run-of-the-mill.

Even without a spreadsheet, a pre-industrial global temperature could be readily estimated from a graph of HadCRUT4 and the IPCC forcings totted up. With a 1940 total anthropogenic ERF of 0.613Wm^-2, a climate sensitivity (TCR) of 2ºC, a warming of something like +0.33ºC could be inferred which is pretty-much what HadCRUT4 shows for 1940.

These numbers may be subject to correction; poor eyesight or fat finger syndrome always makes error possible. But you are incorrect inferring that these numbers can be "disputed".

Of course, this represents a trivially simple assessment but shows quite well that the these ERF (of which CO2 is the largest contributor) indeed "are capable of accounting for the dramatic temperature rise we see from 1910 to 1940" and thus your assertion @75 is incorrect.

You are correct @78 to consider that the task of attributing the warming of the early 20th century does rattle round the literature. Serious climate models do not deliver the levels of anthropogenic warming suggested by the simple calculations above. But while literature may debate the role of internal variability & natural forcings, you assert @78 that "researchers do not see CO2 emissions as a significant contributor to the warmup during this period." Anthropogenic forcings (of which CO2 is the largest contributor) remain "significant contributor" within such studies although they are probably not the overwhelming factor in that period. As the IPCC AR5 (this the "review" DSL @74 was likely alluding to) concludes on the matter:-

"...the early 20th century warming is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone. It remains difficult to quantify the contribution to this warming from internal variability, natural forcing and anthropogenic forcing, due to forcing and response uncertainties and incomplete observational coverage." (My bold)

Thus your assertion @78 is also incorrect.

victorag@verizon.net at 22:43 PM on 19 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Sorry about missing the earlier reference to Cawley et al. I printed it out last night, and read it this morning. Judging from the discussion on p. 5, and the very intesting graphs presented in their Figure 3, it does look like they've carried out more or less the same sort of program I suggested back in post 55. Figure 3b does indeed seem to display a correlation of precisely the type on which I was insisting, in which all forcings other than CO2 have been subtracted, so we could get a clearer look at whether a correlation with temperature actually exists — and it looks very much as though it does. Of course, as I indicated earlier, the residue presented in such a graph doesn't necessary represent CO2, as some other, unknown, forcing could be at work.

Regardless of such considerations, however, their model is hedged with some serious caveats:

. . . both models are potentially susceptible to omitted variable
bias. . .
The model presented here has the opposite bias, in that it attributes to internal climate variability what cannot be explained by the forcings (or ENSO in this case). As a result, a model of this type should not be
used to uncritically argue that climate sensitivity is high . . .
Attributing climate change to natural and anthropogenic causes cannot be performed reliably using such a naıve correlative model, as the conclusions are so heavily dependent on the modelling assumptions.

One wonders whether this last sentence might have been a requirement stemming from peer review. In any case, the honesty is very much appreciated. And the difficulty in producing the desired result is made clear, since so much depends on the existence of prior assumptions, of which the investigators may or may not be fully aware.

RedBaron at 22:18 PM on 19 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

@Victor,

You said, "correct me if I am wrong". You have been corrected multiple times, and even stated flatly, "since I'm not a climate scientist I am not in a position to dispute your numbers"

If you can't dispute the numbers from the climate scientists trying to correct you from being wrong, then I see no reason for you to keep cluttering this forum with your unsupported denialism.

Maybe come back when you do have some supporting evidence?

victorag@verizon.net at 22:06 PM on 19 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

#76 Glenn Tamblyn

Since I'm not a climate scientist I can't properly evaluate your analysis, but I see no reason to doubt it. However, an explanaton, based on uncertainties as to what might have produced the early 20th century runup is hardly evidence supporting the notion that a correlation between CO2 emissions and global warming has been identified.

#77 MA Rodger

Again, since I'm not a climate scientist I am not in a position to dispute your numbers. However, from what I read in the literature it seems as though most researchers do not see CO2 emissions as a significant contributor to the warmup during this period. Correct me if I'm wrong.

MA Rodger at 19:54 PM on 19 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Victor Grauer @75.

You say "I cannot agree that any known forcings, including CO2, are capable of accounting for the dramatic temperature rise we see from 1910 to 1940."

As calculated by IPCC AR5, the "known forcings" of human origin for 1940 total 32% of the "known forcings" of human origin for 2011 (the final data in the IPCC assessment). These forcings rise over the 40 years preceeding 1940 roughly proportionately to the 40 year rise preceeding 2011 suggesting a comparison with the resulting global temperature rise above 'pre-industrial' would not be ill-advised. The result of the "dramatic temperature rise,"the 1938-42 temperature (using HadCRUT4) relative to 1850-1900, is 38% of the 2009-13 temperature relative to 1850-1900.

Why do you consider this less-than-dramatic difference between 32% of forcing and 38% of ΔTemp to be the subject of such controversy? Do you assess "the dramatic temperature rise" in some other way?

Glenn Tamblyn at 19:36 PM on 19 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Victor

Just some things to consider, re the 1910-40 period.

This is just atmospheric changes. We don't know what was happening in the oceans - no meaningful data. So we can't rule out an atmosphere/ocean heat transfer producing that change. Not a change to the total system but a small movement of energy from the dog to it's tail. In contrast, we know what is happening in the oceans as well today. This isn't just a transfer between the dog and the tail. They are all warming.
1910-1940 included some important other changes. Temperature station coverage in the high northern hemisphere was only developing during this period, particularly in the Soviet Union. We don't know whether some of this was an artefact of sensor coverage. The 1940's included some important changes in how sea surface temperatures were measured during the war years. What was the impact of this?

victorag@verizon.net at 15:02 PM on 19 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

"Instead of the handwaving, once again, please state to commentators where you agree and where you disagree."

I agree that the attribution of "global warming" to a variety of different forcings makes sense. I agree that such attributions involve all sorts of complexities. And I agree that climate scientists are uniquely qualified to research these complexities.

I do not agree that the picture is sufficiently clear for anyone to claim that any single forcing is a decisive factor influencing world climate. And I do not agree that simply by attempting to account for certain discrepancies by estimating the influence of specific forcings is in itself sufficient to produce a correlation between any one forcing (such as CO2) and temperature. Nor do I agree that selecting one set of forcings to account for a discrepancy during one historical period and another set when dealing with another period (as we find when we compare Grant/Rahmstorf's paper with Cook's blog post) is a valid procedure.

I also do not agree that the long list of papers intended to "account for" what looks on the surface like a lack of correlation is sufficient to produce such a correlation nevertheless. It's an open question whether each paper reinforces the previous ones or can better be seen as an attempt to correct their inadequacies. The recent paper by Karl et al. would appear to render all these older studies obsolete in any case.

More specifically, I cannot agree that any known forcings, including CO2, are capable of accounting for the dramatic temperature rise we see from 1910 to 1940. I find it difficult to accept that a rise of this magnitude could have been caused largely by the absence of volcanic activity. That strikes me as absurd. Nor can I accept that the grab bag of forcings offered by Cook can account for the cooling and leveling off we see from 1940 through the late Seventies. If CO2 emissions are a major factor in global warming then it's reasonable to assume that the signal of a steady rise in CO2 emissions during that period would be apparent in the temperature data — but no such signal is apparent, during a period of roughly 40 years.

All I can think of for now.

Moderator Response:

[PS] Thank you

DSL at 15:02 PM on 19 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Hrmmm . . . yes, Victor. I have an idea. How about we get roughly 300 of the leading climate scientists together and have them work over the basic science. They'll end up creating a summary based on the existing research. Then, they can open up their summary to a series of peer reviews. Maybe two of them should be open reviews. I expect several thousand scientists would want to get involved in review. If the basic science made it out of that process still established as the overwhelmingly consensus-of-evidence strongest theory, would you elevate your level of probability for it?

victorag@verizon.net at 14:31 PM on 19 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Speaking very generally:

I've done a fair amount of research in the social sciences, especially in the areas of semiotics, ethnology, and cultural evolution, and have read extensively in the fields of psychology, archaeology, population genetics and cognitive science. And one issue that keeps coming up whenever data is being evaluated, is the issue of bias. As is well recognized in all the sciences, researchers tend to see what they expect to see, or what they want to see, and as a result many studies are tinged by confirmation bias, regardless of the intentions of the researcher, which are usually honorable.

As a result, in many fields the gold standard for any sort of testing is the controlled, double-blind experiment, where no one involved in the process has any knowledge of what's involved or any interest in the result. I realize, of course, that double-blind research is usually not possible in a field such as climate science, but that does not mean that the possibility of bias should be ignored. There is a very good reason why double-blind testing is considered so important.

I've read a great many papers by obviously qualified climate scientists that deal with the issue I've raised here, i.e., the correlation or lack of it between CO2 and warming, and while there is certainly much that I'm incapable of understanding, the impression I get is that the goal of the research in almost every case is to find some way to justify a predordained result. Thus if it's a question, say, of "accounting for" something like the so-called "hiatus," then the entire research effort is directed toward that goal, and if the goal cannot be reached then the research would be deemed pointless and would remain unpublished.

This is the impression I got from the Grant/Rahmstorf paper especially, but I get similar "vibes" from many of the others as well. While this feeling might in fact be unjustified, I do believe it goes a long way toward explaining the skepticism of so many when encountering this research, because in the absense of something like a controlled double-blind experiment it's very difficult to completely remove the suspicion of confirmation bias, even if it isn't there. It would be helpful, I think, if someone were to lobby for a different approach, where the interpretation of the data could be done by people from some other field, with no skin in the game and no preconceptions — or at least double checked by such people on a completely independent basis, so there is no possibility of influence from the primary researcher to what we could call the "control group."

When we see result after result that appears to confirm the same hypothesis, then many climate scientists see that as proof positive that "climate change is real." But a skeptic such as myself can get a very different impression, for the reasons summarized above. Rather than continually harping on the "mounds of evidence" supporting your position, which only arouse suspicions, you might do better to find some way to convince the world that your findings are the result of truly impartial and objective research rather than simply a set of foregone conclusions.

Forgive me if my remarks seem offensive, but imo these are issues you need to consider if you expect the entire world to bend to your demands.

Moderator Response:

[JH] Argumentative & hyperbolic sloganeering snipped.

nigelj at 14:10 PM on 19 August 2016

Climate urgency: we've locked in more global warming than people realize

Interesting discussion. I'm not a vegetarian, but I concede meat eating is pretty inefficient use of resources. We need a lot of plant matter to generate a small quantity of meat. Maybe the answer is to keep meat eating pretty moderate.

But then we look at the oceans where a lot of plankton is presumably needed to support a small number of fish. We can't eat plankton so we might as well eat the fish. We have nothing to lose, provided we don't over fish, and no obvious impacts on climate change.

victorag@verizon.net at 13:46 PM on 19 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Speaking very generally:

Forgive me if my remarks seem offensive, but imo these are issues you need to consider if you expect the entire world to bend to your demands.

Moderator Response:

[PS] Claims of "bending to demands" is incendary. Repeat similar and post will be deleted. It is not deleted so that other commentators are able to judge your so called serious enquiry.

If you cant fault the science demonstating the correlation when done properly, you cannot dismiss it with hand-wavy comments about how you believe science should be done. If this is wrong, then where are the alternative skeptic theories that provide better explanation?

Instead of the handwaving, once again, please state to commentators where you agree and where you disagree.

victorag@verizon.net at 13:08 PM on 19 August 2016

There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature

Once again I want to thank everyone who responded for being so patient, so thorough and so civil. I hadn't noticed that I'd shifted the goalposts, but if that's the case I apologize. I find this dialogue extremely interesting and useful but I hope no one will mind if I persist a bit with some further questions. What I hope you will all consider is not simply the issues I've raised per se, but how questions such as these might help you to understand why some of us have remained skeptical for so long. It's not so much that I claim to understand what climate scientists are doing and reject it, as that I do not understand completely and that certain disturbing questions persist, probably because the matter at hand is so complex, but also because certain technical issues go over the heads of laymen struggling to understand. I won't attempt to deal with all the issues that have been raised, but I do have a few more questions/comments:

1. I did click on the Benestad and Schmidt paper and read much of it. I realize that many forcings were considered but what got my attention was the graph illustrating, in part, the affects of solar forcings during the early 20th century, and it looks to me as though the slope is too narrow to account for the steep temperature rise. Tom C. has claimed, above, that the response to volcanic forcings is the major factor, based on Cowtan's graphs. This is a perfect example of the sort of thing skeptics such as myself have problems with, because it's hard to see how the lack of a forcing could produce a significant warming. It seems more logical to posit some unknown forcing that could have produced this effect. And if you want to insist that there is no evidence of such a thing, my answer would be that this very dramatic runup in warming seems to be the evidence.

Secondly, I don't see how a set of graphs can in itself demonstrate anything in the absence of some sort of report explaining what they represent and how they were arrived at. Has Cowtan published on this and if so could you provide a link.

2. "The claim "The cooling from 1940 onward, followed by a long levelling off until 1979 is also difficult to explain as the result of natural forcings, despite Cook's effort to do so." verges on sloganeering if you do not provide evidence to support that, and aerosols are an anthropogenic forcing."

Where is this term "sloganeering" coming from? I don't recall offering a slogan. Have you consulted a dictionary? And yes, I can provide such evidence, in the form of a paper by James Hansen et al., published in the journal Climate Dynamics, in 2007: "Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE." (This was available on the Internet but as I just discovered, it no longer seems to be. Perhaps you already have a copy.) The data in this paper was the basis for the data used by Cook in his aforementioned blog post. Here is an excerpt from the abstract:

We carry out climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE driven by ten measured or estimated climate forcings. . . Discrepancies between observations and simulations with all forcings are due to model deficiencies, inaccurate or incomplete forcings, and imperfect observations. Although there are notable discrepancies between model and observations, the fidelity is sufficient to encourage use of the model for simulations of future climate change. . . Principal model deficiencies include unrealistically weak tropical El Nino-like variability and a poor distribution of sea ice, with too much sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere and too little in the Southern Hemisphere. . .

The paper, written with the assistance of 38 associates, is incredibly complex and, as the author himself acknowledges, filled with "notable discrepancies" and "deficiences," and, judging from the content generally, many uncertainties. Yet Cook picks up on data and graphs from this paper and refers to them as though they constituted reliable evidence that CO2 is "the dominant forcing" and that this data is sufficient to establish the correlation in question, i.e. the correlation between CO2 emissions and global warming. Sorry, but after skimming through the complexities of the Hansen paper, I find this pat conclusion difficult to accept.

I have one other point to make but I'll do that in a separate post.

Moderator Response:

[PS] Just to be clear: Sloganeering in my interpretation is making an assertion (the slogan) without providing supporting evidence.

When Tom answered your criticism on F&R, you suddenly jumped to another objection which is suspiciously like shifting the goal posts. A published to reference to Cowtan's works has already been given (Crawley et al).

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