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"Climate Change is Real !!"

You can't argue with a closed mind no matter how good your arguments are, no matter how good the data is.

Trysail has shown time and time again just how closed his mind is on anything dealing with the government and/or government agencies.

A total waste of time and breath.
 


Buying insurance against risk is wise and thoughtful, but one has to perform a sane risk-benefit analysis and then further, compute the expectation values of the various alternative pathways to optimize one’s overall strategy. There is insurance against good and reasonable threats — and then there are the many forms of Pascal’s Wager as offered by the priests/insurance salesmen of the world. Finally, there is insurance as sold by the mob, also known as “protection”. The difficult thing about climate science is discerning what the actual risks are — and honestly, how well they are known (although using the term “honestly” in the context of climate science is pretty much an oxymoron these days).

When it comes to house insurance, things are pretty good. There is a risk that is easily estimated from statistical analysis of a broad population that my house will catch fire, and a computable loss value in the event that it does. The risk of loss (and expected value of the loss) due to theft is also computable. Ditto flood. Earthquake is trickier, as we move closer to Black Swan events, and nobody knows what a “good” estimate is for houses to be crushed by a falling asteroid or landed on by a plane flown by terrorists as these are too rare (and are pulled from a vast sea of very unlikely, but highly catastrophic possibilities). The insurance company sells me insurance at rates that effectively cover my amortized, averaged risks and make them a profit, but that are much CHEAPER than the house itself (else there is no point in buying the insurance). The insurance company than reinsures and sells off some if its risk against the truly broad scale catastrophic possibilities like a volcano erupting in central North Carolina and wiping out a million homes, and the government typically backs even the reinsurance for things like hurricanes and floods and tornadoes and earthquakes. In the end, we all spend maybe 10-20% more on mortgage, taxes, and insurance (where part of our tax money is insurance), with almost all of that money going not to rare black swan insurance, but to reliably computable mundane risk of fire, flood and theft.

Then there is Pascal’s Wager level insurance — Black Swan insurance. This often plays on the ignorance and belief system of the insured. For example, some people devoutly believe that we are mere days away from the Rapture, when they expect to be swept up into the sky — but leave their pets behind! So there are companies that sell “rapture insurance” (possibly tongue in cheek:) to come and care for your pets in the event that you are taken up. Indeed, religions in general are selling insurance. While the evidence is overwhelming that when we die our brains cease the metabolic activity that is “us” and our conscious existence ends, there is of course SOME chance that we are mistaken about almost everything that we perceive and are (for example) the moral equivalent of power units in The Matrix so that our conscious existence continues after what completely consistently appears to be our total death. Further, given an incommensurable hypothesis, compounding it with further incommensurables surely does nothing but add a few zillion more zeros before the first nonzero digit in any estimate of the probability that is ALREADY basically zero, so it is also possible that when we die, we will be judged according to some criterion and then tortured for an eternity if we are found wanting (according to that criterion).

Since there is no evidence — or possibility of obtaining evidence — short of dying and hence finding out too late to communicate back to the living, this forms a fertile ground for the selling of “insurance” against a non-computable risk. The price is typically exorbitant — 10% of everything you earn on the material side, plus the additional “cost” of complying with the criteria given to you by the insurance agents. We have all sorts of examples of the purchase of this sort of insurance in human history, and the price can range as high as sacrificing your daughter up to the winds or giving up all of your possessions to the church (Acts 5: http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/acts/5.html). The insurance salesmen of this sort get away with this by being fundamentally, deeply dishonest. They never tell you what the actuarial basis — the computable, verifiable expectation value — is for the risk. They only tell you that they are certain of the risk and indeed, one of the most common characteristics of this approach is part of the cost of the insurance is to become an insurance salesman yourself in a vast pyramid scheme, you have to believe that the risk is real without reliable evidence and try to convince others that it is real or else you will experience the negative outcome. Imagine a preacher standing up in church on Sunday and stating “I, no more than you, have the slightest reason to believe all of the fantastic and improbable and mutually contradictory things that are stated in this book, but there is some chance, however small, that you will experience an eternity of horrific pain after you die if you don’t give me 1/10th of your net worth and do as I interpret this book as saying otherwise.” Honesty isn’t a good way to sell insurance for incommensurable risks

Finally, there is protection. This is like religion but without the tedious requirement of belief. A big, strong man accompanied by two other big, strong men armed with baseball bats comes to your door. He points out that the world is an uncertain place, and that people often suffer broken legs right there on their front porch. He observes that fortunately he is in the position of being able to offer you insurance against the event on the spot, and furthermore, that those who purchase the insurance appear to have somehow substantially ameliorated the risk (for at least this month). Here one is in a difficult position. On the one hand, it is pretty easy to believe in the risk as it is staring you in the face. One can even believe that the risk can be “insured” — substantially reduced — by buying the profferred insurance and complying with the codicil of not calling the cops. Still, most of us would much rather reach behind the door for the sawed off pump 12 gauge loaded with double-odd buckshot and blow the legs right off of the insurance salesman, even if it does substantially increase various risks on down the road.

So where, exactly, does the risk of (say) SLR fall in this spectrum? I ask, because this is something I’m very sensitive to as I live on the coast around 1/4 of the year. One part of SLR is easily computable. One takes e.g. tide gauge data back as long as tide gauge data exists. One dresses it with observations of sea level over much longer times where inferences can be made from observations or historical records. From this, one can conclude that SLR over the tide gauge era is describable with a linear trend plus noise with a mean rate of perhaps 2 mm/year (9 inches over 110 years). This corresponds well with the rate of global warming and is probably almost entirely due to isostatic thermal expansion of the surface waters of the ocean, and is not uniformly distributed because when surface waters expand, they float and can actually LOCALLY increase the height of the ocean without causing the ocean to actually “rise” anywhere else. There is no reason to think from the data, that SLR will ever be a major risk — the oceans are enormous and isostatic thermal expansion almost certainly lost in the commensurate changes due to land uplift or subsidence and hence ignorable almost everywhere.

But! There are models for global warming due to increasing CO_2. Some of the most extreme of those models predict extreme heating — over 5 C (say 10 F!) globally over the next 70 or 80 years! There are models for SLR based on the melting rates one expects for the major icepacks in Greenland and Antarctica (since melting sea ice doesn’t cause notable SLR because it is floating — it actually lowers the physical surface wherever it occurs). Some of those models (based on damn all data, remember — these models are basically “stuff people make up” that has no possible way of being tested before some ice pack somewhere decides to melt, and there are huge uncertainties to say the least) predict much faster melt than others, given the temperature changes. If one feeds the fastest melting models with the fastest heating models, one gets as much a 5 meters of sea level rise by 2100, truly a catastrophe in anybody’s book.

Now a sensible actuarial analyst would say, whoa, let’s calm down. Simply analyzing past data suggests that TCS is under 2 C, not over 5 C, and might be as low as 1 C. Then there is the extreme uncertainty of the future trajectory of CO_2 as the driver — sure, we are burning carbon for fuel now because it is cheap and comparatively plentiful and because 1/3 of the planet is locked in a state of energy poverty right out of the 17th and 18th century and it is the quick and easy way for them to enjoy the fruits of modern civilization and avoid the unpleasantness of dying of starvation or disease, ignorant, with no hope or prospects for their children. But in as little as a decade, we might have fusion energy, or we might get over our squeamishness regarding fission energy, or we might finish developing storage batteries that are both inexpensive and capacious enough to hold 100+ Kw-hr’s of energy in a volume of around 1 m^3 that costs around $1000 to make and sell at full retail and that will last at least 20 years with minimal maintenance (seriously). Then there are models that predict a lot less SLR as temperature rises, and spreads it out over a lot longer of a time frame. And then there is the uncertainty in any of these estimates. And finally, there is the past SLR data itself, which is (to be frank) about as unalarming as it is possible to be.

So the best (most honest) probability of catastrophic 5 m SLR is what? 0.01? 0.001? 0.0001? I suspect even the latter is high. True, the consequences are extreme if it happens, but that is also true if Yellowstone erupts, but you don’t see the government or society making plans to spend 10% of the global product to cope with that if it occurs, or to be able to act before or after an asteroid falls. That’s because however horrific the visualizable outcome, it is not very likely and because dealing with it if it happens is almost certainly the best way to optimize our expected benefit, rather than spending enormous amounts on things that probably wouldn’t work to reduce the risk anyway. But this is not communicated to the public. What is the risk of 1 m SLR? I think most actual climate scientists consider this to be on the order of 0.01, or 0.001, or less. It’s simple physics — it isn’t easy to melt vast amounts of ice, and the ice in question is all measurably well below freezing almost all of the time at this particular moment (averaged over the decade of your choice from as long as we have measurements) and is seriously below freezing most of the year. It isn’t even clear if such melt as is observed comes from geophysical heating from below or from soot lowering the albedo of the ice, not from CO_2 at all.

The most reliable/sane estimates come from people like Trenberth, who pegs probable SLR in the range of a foot or so — less than 1/2 of a meter. That’s almost twice the rate of the last century of SLR and is still utterly ignorable nearly everywhere! It is still low enough that there is little point in “insuring” against this risk by taking measures now any more than people took measures against the 9″ over the last century. They just adapted to it as it happened. If you live on a coast, you know that SLR at this rate is literally swamped by the noise of the tides and the storms, and that homes and property there are at far greater local risks of flooding or disaster.

So how is the insurance on this issue being sold? We have the former head of NASA, James Hansen, on public record as stating that it was his professional opinion speaking ex cathedra as one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world, the man who gave us the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis itself that SLR would be 5 meters, right after misstating the position of the mainstream as being 1 meter of SLR, and without giving any indication whatsoever of the uncertainty or quantitative basis for his belief!

So you choose: Is SLR (which is be far and away the most consequential of the negative sequellae associated with hypothetical future warming, at least once it exceeds 1/2 a meter per century or thereabouts) an insurable risk? How much should we spend to insure against it, given that we’re talking about investing a huge fraction of our GDP for the indefinite future — carte blanche, an open ticket, no expenditure is apparently too great — to insure what in the end is a tiny fraction of the surface area of the Earth, and where there are enormous uncertainties in our ability to predict any future SLR rate at all, and where we have the certainty that after a full 165 years of largely anthropogenic global warming the associated observed SLR rate of the past has been distinctly non-catastrophic, easily and invisibly accommodated by people just making local decisions as it literally has crept up over decades? And is James Hansen an honest and reliable seller of actually computable insurance at fair rates, or is he of the religious/Pascal’s wager persuasion, or is he the mere tool of the energy companies and money launderers who are the ones that overwhelmingly have benefited from the absurd price increases and complex financial structure associated with carbon trading and measures taken to combat the hundred year threat of AGW at the expense of the perpetuation of misery and suffering of the poorest 1/3 of the world’s population, who are selling us protection?

Personally, I think it is mostly protection being sold by the unscrupulous politicians, reporters, banks, and energy companies with the unwitting religious support of scientists like Hansen who have long since lost any pretence of objectivity on the issue and who never, ever, give an honest appraisal of the uncertainty of our knowledge and just how shaky the tower of assumptions is that gives rise to any future estimate of global climate (as evidenced by just how badly our models either hindcast the past, describe the present, or described the future of when the models were run in the past).

There are still plenty of climate scientists who are objective, don’t get me wrong. I respect Trenberth, for example, as he often acknowledges his own uncertainty and can change his mind as the data demands it, even though he (like me, for that matter) do think that the evidence supports the hypothesis of CO_2 driven warming with TCS in the 1 to 3 C range. But until the Assessment Reports of the IPCC do an honest job of presenting uncertainties and stop using language in the SPM like “high confidence” or “low confidence” or “medium confidence” that is indefensible abuse of the language of statistics given that no such confidence interval can be computed or objectively defended, it is more a confidence game than a sober and reliable appraisal of the climate future of the planet suitable for doing the cost-benefit analysis that we need to make a rational decision about how much to spend on “insurance”, and how best to spend it.
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Robert G. Brown, Ph.D.
Physics Department
Duke University
ht tp://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/05/polar-ice-caps-more-stable-than-predicted-new-observations-show/#comment-1829119


http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/...dicted-new-observations-show/#comment-1829119




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lovecraft68 said:
Oh, please.

Your income a dollar a day? I doubt it. Seems to me you're typing on one of those fancy inter webz machines yourself....tell you what, why don't you donate it to a third world orphan...in fact why not go live among them and show us all how caring you are?
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I've done this. Admittedly briefly, but when I talk about conditions in the third world it's because I've seen them. Once you've seen them, a lot of first world hand wringing passes from stupidly amusing to downright contemptible.

This is why I have zero interest in losers like trysail. Oh how evil our government is, he rants, look at all the sheeple in America who believe anything it says! He's a paranoid delusional. The US government is somewhat screwed up, sure, but if you want to see what an actual failed, openly evil and corrupt government can do, spend a week in Haiti.

By the same token it's also why I'll raise an eyebrow when people shrug and say "eh, we're screwing up the weather, so what." I pay for food and education for a number of orphans in Haiti, because I've seen other orphans there, limping around barefoot, looking for food in burning, toxic trash dumps. It's a sight you only have to see once. Some of those orphans are orphans because a hurricane that we'd laugh off in the states - eh, look, it's raining and windy, but my housing is built to code and I'm fine - kills hundreds in places where there just aren't the resources and laws available that we take for granted.

Maybe we've got no obligation to help - though I'd debate that - but we damn well have an obligation not to piss in their faces and tell them they need to buy umbrellas. IF there's a 10% chance we're going to trigger worsening weather - and the evidence is already starting to trickle in that we are - then we are on the hook, ethically, to mitigate some of the suffering we've started to amplify in places that are already full up on suffering.

There are people in my country who need to get off their overfed asses and spend some time outside of the Land Of Plenty. The majority of the world doesn't look like here. We're all a little too used to taking our car down to the supermarket to buy cheap, safe, germ free food for a lovely picnic in the park on Saturday. Don't forget the extra loaf of bread to feed the ducks! Because you know it's so cute when they scurry desperately after the crumbs.

It's not as cute when humans do it.
 
HandsInTheDark said:
I've done this. Admittedly briefly, but when I talk about conditions in the third world it's because I've seen them...
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Do you actually believe you're the only person who's ever been in a third world country?

For your information and edification, I've spent plenty of time in places where raw sewage runs in the street and people wash their clothes in streams.

I'll tell you what I learned. I learned that I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in living that way.

You need to ask yourself why it is that the nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti doesn't have Haiti's problems. Have you seen the aerial and satellite photos of the Haiti-Dominican Republic border? It is one of the few land borders on the earth that can be seen with the naked eye— that's because Haiti has been deforested right up to the DR border. Every tree in sight has been cut down for fuel.

Why do you think that happened?




_____________________
P.S., If you want to send your money to people in the third world, that's your privilege. It's your money; you can do anything you want with it.



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You think it matters how far north one is when he collects light from the sun? How could this possibly make a difference? Except of course when one gets so far north, as to be in land of the "Midnight sun"

The point is not to switch any and all power production to a single source, but to localize energy production to the source(s) that makes most sense for a given area, eg. waves, wind, sun, geothermal, etc., and use it at the same location. One good example would be rooftop gardens and roof top solar collectors. (Not all solar use must create electricity)

Our current means of production and distribution of energy make no sense. Our scientists successfully harness the power of the universe (atomic) and the most clever thing they can think of to do with it is to make a fire to boil water to spin a wheel to make electricity to send along a wire to light a fire to make heat, losing heat and energy at every step. In addition, the fire is so hot that they need to spoil the waters of the earth to cool it enough to use. Nuclear power is a ridiculous idea from the get go. Now if someone could discover a way to excite electro cells directly from uranium, without building a fire, that would be an advance.

Anyone who has a brain knows that All power on earth is already solar power. It makes no sense to go on building fires to make heat, what are we, cave men? Can we wait more millions of years for the sun to store some energy in carbon based fuels, while at the same time we cut down our main source of oxygen. Yes,we all breathe out CO2, but trees and other living things are supposed to "breathe" CO2 in and "exhale" oxygen, that is called the balance of nature. We are tipping the scale dangerously and will pay for it whether one believes in global warming, climate change, or the great pumpkin.
 
robertreams said:
You think it matters how far north one is when he collects light from the sun? How could this possibly make a difference? Except of course when one gets so far north, as to be in land of the "Midnight sun"

The point is not to switch any and all power production to a single source, but to localize energy production to the source(s) that makes most sense for a given area, eg. waves, wind, sun, geothermal, etc., and use it at the same location. One good example would be rooftop gardens and roof top solar collectors. (Not all solar use must create electricity)

Our current means of production and distribution of energy make no sense. Our scientists successfully harness the power of the universe (atomic) and the most clever thing they can think of to do with it is to make a fire to boil water to spin a wheel to make electricity to send along a wire to light a fire to make heat, losing heat and energy at every step. In addition, the fire is so hot that they need to spoil the waters of the earth to cool it enough to use. Nuclear power is a ridiculous idea from the get go. Now if someone could discover a way to excite electro cells directly from uranium, without building a fire, that would be an advance.

Anyone who has a brain knows that All power on earth is already solar power. It makes no sense to go on building fires to make heat, what are we, cave men? Can we wait more millions of years for the sun to store some energy in carbon based fuels, while at the same time we cut down our main source of oxygen. Yes,we all breathe out CO2, but trees and other living things are supposed to "breathe" CO2 in and "exhale" oxygen, that is called the balance of nature. We are tipping the scale dangerously and will pay for it whether one believes in global warming, climate change, or the great pumpkin.
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Dear god. Do some simple arithmetic.

If you really want to "save the world" would you please do it without inadvertently bumping off a couple billion people through hypothermia or starvation caused by energy poverty?



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trysail said:


Dear god. Do some simple arithmetic.

If you really want to "save the world" would you please do it without inadvertently bumping off a couple billion people through hypothermia or starvation caused by energy poverty?



​
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One tree times 5 million years equals one shovel full of coal. How's that for arithmetic?
 
Robert, there's no point. I don't know what trysail's damage is, but apparently he believes that if we don't keep burning carbon we're screwed. His only argument for it seems to be that it's cheap and that appears to be all that matters to him. Ayn Rand's two books probably fill his bookshelf and Objectivism is probably his only guiding principle. Objectivism being a closed system, so are the minds of all objectivists. You will get further yelling at a brick wall.

I hear you on local generation, though. We'd be more efficient if we stopped distributing power over long distances and we'd be less beholden to foreign interests if we stopped importing carbon. But trysail, and every corporation, will always do what's cheapest now. They can't be talked out of it, and it doesn't matter if there are long term downsides because that isn't today's problem.

Look at it this way: sooner or later we run out of ways of extracting carbon from the ground. Whatever your view of peak oil, we're using it faster than it forms. Wait enough centuries and the carbon problem solves itself.
 
HandsInTheDark said:
Robert, there's no point. I don't know what trysail's damage is, but apparently he believes that if we don't keep burning carbon we're screwed. His only argument for it seems to be that it's cheap and that appears to be all that matters to him. Ayn Rand's two books probably fill his bookshelf and Objectivism is probably his only guiding principle. Objectivism being a closed system, so are the minds of all objectivists. You will get further yelling at a brick wall.

I hear you on local generation, though. We'd be more efficient if we stopped distributing power over long distances and we'd be less beholden to foreign interests if we stopped importing carbon. But trysail, and every corporation, will always do what's cheapest now. They can't be talked out of it, and it doesn't matter if there are long term downsides because that isn't today's problem.

Look at it this way: sooner or later we run out of ways of extracting carbon from the ground. Whatever your view of peak oil, we're using it faster than it forms. Wait enough centuries and the carbon problem solves itself.
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I count at least three completely wrong guesses. It's amusing to watch smug polemicists leap to conclusions.



Three Speeches By Michael Crichton, M.D.

"Aliens Cause Global Warming"
"Environmentalism As Religion"
"The Case For Skepticism On Global Warming"

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/commentaries/crichton_3.pdf


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trysail said:

I count at least three completely wrong guesses. It's amusing to watch smug polemicists leap to conclusions.



Three Speeches By Michael Crichton, M.D.

"Aliens Cause Global Warming"
"Environmentalism As Religion"
"The Case For Skepticism On Global Warming"

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/commentaries/crichton_3.pdf


​
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http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton

Try sticking to people with an actual education in the topic at hand. Crichton was a science fiction author and State of Fear was *fiction*. Let's keep in mind that Crichton was the author who came up with the idea that biological organisms could convert atomic blasts into mass and reproduce that way. He didn't exactly write hard sf because he didn't know any hard science.

I mean, if you are going to post graphs out of context, great, at least might impress people with no background at all. But if you're turning to thriller authors, you're on ground that a lot of people in this particular forum are very familiar with. This has done as much to convince me that you're a uneducated gas station operator who's being paid by the post and will quote *any* source you are told to, however laughable.

Here's the first rule of debate: if you want anyone to take you seriously, you lead with your credentials and a note about who's paying you. You've been asked for that information several times but you never answer. And then you laugh when people make what you call bad guesses.

I do take back the Ayn Rand comment, though. You haven't read her. She's over your head. Now do run off and Google her so you can make informed-sounding opinions about her. It's what you did on Haiti.
 



Eighteen or more (18+) years of no significant warming.
Zero. Zip. None. Nil. Nada. Zilch. Bupkis.


trend



Temperatures from Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA

Fig.C.gif


http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.C.gif




Hadley Centre Central England Temperature (HadCET) dataset (the CET dataset is the longest instrumental record of temperature in the world— 1772-2014)

HadCET_graph_ylybars_uptodate.gif


http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/


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“As to the science itself, it’s worth noting that all predictions of warming since the onset of the last warming episode of 1978-98—which is the only period that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attempts to attribute to carbon-dioxide emissions—have greatly exceeded what has been observed. These observations support a much reduced and essentially harmless climate response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

“In addition, there is experimental support for the increased importance of variations in solar radiation on climate and a renewed awareness of the importance of natural unforced climate variability that is largely absent in current climate models. There also is observational evidence from several independent studies that the so-called “water vapor feedback,” essential to amplifying the relatively weak impact of carbon dioxide alone on Earth temperatures, is canceled by cloud processes.

“There are also claims that extreme weather—hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, you name it—may be due to global warming. The data show no increase in the number or intensity of such events. The IPCC itself acknowledges the lack of any evident relation between extreme weather and climate, though allowing that with sufficient effort some relation might be uncovered.

World leaders proclaim that climate change is our greatest problem, demonizing carbon dioxide. Yet atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have been vastly higher through most of Earth’s history. Climates both warmer and colder than the present have coexisted with these higher levels.

“Currently elevated levels of carbon dioxide have contributed to increases in agricultural productivity. Indeed, climatologists before the recent global warming hysteria referred to warm periods as “climate optima.” Yet world leaders are embarking on costly policies that have no capacity to replace fossil fuels but enrich crony capitalists at public expense, increasing costs for all, and restricting access to energy to the world’s poorest populations that still lack access to electricity’s immense benefits.

“Billions of dollars have been poured into studies supporting climate alarm, and trillions of dollars have been involved in overthrowing the energy economy. So it is unsurprising that great efforts have been made to ramp up hysteria, even as the case for climate alarm is disintegrating.
​


-Richard H. Lindzen, Ph.D.
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology (emeritus)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
​



 
Oh, wow. I just found the Ignore option. Bye, trysail (and a few other people from other threads). You will not be missed.
 


It is entirely possible that saying, "Climate change is real" is the most idiotic thing anybody could possibly say.

It's akin to saying, "Time is changing."

Basically, you have to be a simpleton to make a statement like that.

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Pacific sardines are crashing — bad news for whales and my salad
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If the new assessment holds up to scientific review, fishery managers should follow through in April on their harvest guideline protocols and suspend fishing on sardines for the 2015 season. Doing so would give the population a chance to recover as ocean conditions improve.

The sardine fishery has historically been a major source of revenue for California’s commercial fishing fleet, dating back to the era chronicled in John Steinbeck’s masterpiece Cannery Row in 1945. Still, it would not be fair to blame the current collapse on fishing.
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As I said it won't be the temperature that kills our food chain.:eek:
 


“When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.” ​
-Richard Feynman​



 


You've been lied to— repeatedly.



Global warming consensus claim does not stand up (author's cut)
by Richard Tol, Ph.D.
http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2015/03/now-almost-two-years-old-john-cooks-97.html



Now almost two years old, John Cook’s 97% consensus paper has been a runaway success. Downloaded over 300,000 times, voted the best 2013 paper in Environmental Research Letters, frequently cited by peers and politicians from around the world, with a dedicated column in the Guardian, the paper seems to be the definitive proof that the science of climate change is settled.

It isn’t.

Consensus has no place in science. Academics agree on lots of things, but that does not make them true. Even so, agreement that climate change is real and human-caused does not tell us anything about how the risks of climate change weigh against the risks of climate policy. But in our age of pseudo-Enlightenment, having 97% of researchers on your side is a powerful rhetoric for marginalizing political opponents. All politics ends in failure, however. Chances are the opposition will gain power well before the climate problem is solved. Polarization works in the short run, but is counterproductive in the long run.

In their paper, Cook and colleagues argue that 97% of the relevant academic literature endorses that humans have contributed to observed climate change. This is unremarkable. It follows immediately from the 19th century research by Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius. In popular discourse, however, Cook’s finding is often misrepresented. The 97% refers to the number of papers, rather than the number of scientists. The alleged consensus is about any human role in climate change, rather than a dominant role, and it is about climate change rather than the dangers it might pose.

Although there are large areas of substantive agreement, climate science is far from settled. Witness the dozens of alternative explanations of the current, 18 year long pause in warming of the surface atmosphere. The debate on the seriousness of climate change or what to do about it ranges even more widely.

The Cook paper is remarkable for its quality, though. Cook and colleagues studied some 12,000 papers, but did not check whether their sample is representative for the scientific literature. It isn’t. Their conclusions are about the papers they happened to look at, rather than about the literature. Attempts to replicate their sample failed: A number of papers that should have been analysed were not, for no apparent reason.

The sample was padded with irrelevant papers. An article about TV coverage on global warming was taken as evidence for global warming. In fact, about three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsements had nothing to say about the subject matter.

Cook enlisted a small group of environmental activists to rate the claims made by the selected papers. Cook claims that the ratings were done independently, but the raters freely discussed their work. There are systematic differences between the raters. Reading the same abstracts, the raters reached remarkably different conclusions – and some raters all too often erred in the same direction. Cook’s hand-picked raters disagreed what a paper was about 33% of the time. In 63% of cases, they disagreed about the message of a paper with the authors of that paper.

The paper’s reviewers did not pick up on these things. The editor even praised the authors for the “excellent data quality” even though neither he nor the referees had had the opportunity to check the data. Then again, that same editor thinks that climate change is like the rise of Nazi Germany. Two years after publication, Cook admitted that data quality is indeed low.

Requests for the data were met with evasion and foot-dragging, a clear breach of the publisher’s policy on validation and reproduction, yet defended by an editorial board member of the journal as “exemplary scientific conduct”.

Cook hoped to hold back some data, but his internet security is on par with his statistical skills, and the alleged hacker was not intimidated by the University of Queensland’s legal threats. Cook’s employer argued that releasing rater identities would violate a confidentiality agreement. That agreement does not exist.

Cook first argued that releasing time stamps would serve no scientific purpose. This is odd. Cook’s raters essentially filled out a giant questionnaire. Survey researchers routinely collect time stamps, and so did Cook. Interviewees sometimes tire and rush through the last questions. Time stamps reveal that.

Cook later argued that time stamps were never collected. They were. They show that one of Cook’s raters inspected 675 abstracts within 72 hours, a superhuman effort.

The time stamps also reveal something far more serious. After collecting data for 8 weeks, there were 4 weeks of data analysis, followed by 3 more weeks of data collection. The same people collected and analysed the data. After more analysis, the paper classification scheme was changed and yet more data collected.

Cook thus broke a key rule of scientific data collection: Observations should never follow from the conclusions. Medical tests are double-blind for good reason. You cannot change how to collect data, and how much, after having seen the results.

Cook’s team may, perhaps unwittingly, have worked towards a given conclusion. And indeed, the observations are different, significantly and materially, between the three phases of data collection. The entire study should therefore be dismissed.

This would have been an amusing how-not-to tale for our students. But Cook’s is one of the most influential papers of recent years. The paper was vigorously defended by the University of Queensland (Cook’s employer) and the editors of Environmental Research Letters, with the Institute of Physics (the publisher) looking on in silence. Incompetence was compounded by cover-up and complacency.

Climate change is one of the defining issues of our times. We have one uncontrolled, poorly observed experiment. We cannot observe the future. Climate change and policy are too complex for a single person to understand. Climate policy is about choosing one future over another. That choice can only be informed by the judgement of experts – and we must have confidence in their learning and trust their intentions.

Climate research lost its aura of impartiality with the unauthorised release of the email archives of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Its reputation of competence was shredded by the climate community’s celebration of the flawed works of Michael Mann. Innocence went with the allegations of sexual harassment by Rajendra Pachauri and Peter Gleick’s fake memo. Cook’s 97% nonsensus paper shows that the climate community still has a long way to go in weeding out bad research and bad behaviour. If you want to believe that climate researchers are incompetent, biased and secretive, Cook’s paper is an excellent case in point.


​
 
trysail said:
...You need to ask yourself why it is that the nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti doesn't have Haiti's problems. Have you seen the aerial and satellite photos of the Haiti-Dominican Republic border? It is one of the few land borders on the earth that can be seen with the naked eye— that's because Haiti has been deforested right up to the DR border. Every tree in sight has been cut down for fuel.

Why do you think that happened?
​
Click to expand...

Sorry to bump this troll thread, but Trysail's question about Haiti was impossible to pass up. Why are all the trees gone in Haiti? It's because of a lack of government regulations and free market capitalism.

Haiti's rapid deforestation began during the colonial period when free market capitalists made millions logging Haiti's forests. Deforestation was exacerbated when Haiti had to pay war reparations to France in order to get the blockade lifted. They paid with trees. Then in 1954, Hurricane Hazel drowned even more trees.

After the hurricane, rapid population growth required more fuel for cooking and heating, and the deforestation escalated. In the Dominican Republic, the government had the foresight to ban charcoal production, and they subsidized the use of propane. That's why they still have their trees while Haiti's hills are barren. If Haiti had had a functioning government capable of regulating logging, they could have managed their forests to be a sustainable resource, (like we do here in the USA - more or less) and they could have used propane instead of charcoal.

On the fuel issue, we can look back to Reagan, who removed the solar panels from the roof of the White House because he didn't think solar power was worth the trouble. What if, instead of removing them, he had spent government money investing in solar technologies, and what if these solar technologies could have been exported to places like Haiti? It's these "what-if's" that parallel what's going on today. Haiti's deforestation is a metaphor for what we're doing to the planet - using it up as fast as we can.

Those who ignore history are destined to repeat it, and those who advocate unregulated free market capitalism base their ideology on ignoring history.
 
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