Some more thoughts on those cosmic-ray studies. It is an interesting theory, and as he notes, it does have more explanatory power. However (as with the greenhouse theory) the science is far from “settled,” and will likely remain so for years.
10 thoughts on “Another Bad Day For The Church Of AGW”
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Cosmic rays are part of a conspiracy to discredit AGW. You think it’s a coincidence that Sarah Palin and HAARP are from the same state?
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/3262464.html
Zowie, John Blackburn. I read through the comments and those are some seriously delusional people. It’s the first time I’ve seen “progressives” thinking the US military is a bunch of violent Marxists who will destroy the conservatives with nuclear weapons.
If you look at James Nicoll’s Wikipedia entry, Mr. The-US-military-is-on-the-side-of-my-macho-ass Nicoll is–
a Canadian “speculative fiction reviewer.”
IOW, a retarded coward with no knowledge of America whose mother is a filthy whore.
Oh, yeah, and Mr. Macho Nicolls also got severely injured by a criminal holding a gun. The thing was, the gun was fake, and Mr. Lookitmymachoass Nicolls still got his shit kicked.
George, they were alluding to a work of fiction.
I don’t think that the AGW-skeptic group is properly framing the argument.
For example, all of the I-95 Corridor mayors and governors were telling people “Do not return home until you get the all-clear. There are downed powerlines.” So a person thinks, “That is stupid — I will return home, and I will not touch any power lines that I see.” But that is only half the story. It is not just the power line that is dangerous but the entire small lake of water that the power line is dipping into that poses the risk.
The AGW crowd comes along with the Hockey Stick and says, “See, see, the Global Climate has been rock steady for over 1000 years and it is only starting in the mid 20th century that the global temperature takes a left turn in the up direction like the proverbial hockey stick.”
The anti-AGW counter to the Hockey Stick is along several lines of reasoning that I won’t take up your time enumerating them all. But one flaw of the Hockey Stick is that the pre-20th-century data is all smoothed and could have 50 had year periods of upticks of the same magnitude as the current 50 year warming (yeah, yeah, Urban Heat Island effect, thumb on the scales, but bear with me for now).
The pro-AGW counter is, “so the temperature rise of the last (fill-in-the-blank) years” is of the same magnitude as the historical natural variations. If you-are-not-angry-you-aren’t-paying-attention. If the current temperature rise is of the same magnitude as historic natural variations, hoo boy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, because the amount of CO2 will get much, much larger and by that time when the temperature rise swamps natural cycles, it will be all too late. Besides, all of those mechanisms you anti-AGW’s are saying counteracts CO2 warming — ENSO, jet contrails, SO2 clouds, sunspots — that means we would really be cooked right now were it not for those effects, and once those effects swing the other way are we really going to get fried.
But here is the point missing from all of the discussions, including the snarkage going on here. The seriousness of the CO2 effect depends on whether CO2 warming is amplified by positive feedbacks or whether the feedbacks are neutral or even negative.
My understanding is that the evidence for strong positive feedbacks is that there is unmistakable warming taking place right now, the computer models incorporating those feedbacks do a good job of predicting the warming we alread see, ergo, if CO2 keeps going up, the computer models are making a prediction one had better heed that we will be parboiled. How do I know this is the pro-AGW justification for the computer models and the positive feedbacks? I have seen it with my own eyes in excerpts of the IPCC reports.
Now suppose in the past 60 years or so, there has been a strong uptick in global temperature resulting from ENSO (El-Nino/Southern Oscillation), sunspot-driven cloud formation, etc. To the extent that this effects are not incorporated in the computer models, that means the positive-feedback coefficient on CO2 in the computer models has the wrong value, because most of the warming we are seeing right now is indeed a natural variation and little if any of it is the CO2 signal. Now if we increase CO2 in the atmosphere to much higher levels, we are probably going to see a CO2 signal, but nowhere near as much as the IPCC is warning about.
It was seemingly not that long ago, but it must have been during the Clinton years when the Right People were in the White House because as soon as Mr. Bush was elected, the whole AGW thing became hyper-political. There was a seminar by an outside speaker to a small, polite audience from Atmospheric Sciences here at the U.
The speaker presented a “back-of-the-envelope” climate model as a “sanity check” on the complicated computer-simulation models. He made some assumptions about saturation of water vapor in the tropics, added heat retention from CO2, and the tropics being where most of the heat is “incoming.” So in that sense, he didn’t assume one thing or another about clouds or ocean currents or sunspots, but he did assume that in the tropics you are already near 100% relative humidity and that warming wasn’t going to have a positive feedback on the greenhouse effect of atmospheric moisture. He then assumed that this added heat gets transported pole-ward by atmospheric circulation, the Hadley cells with the odd big hurricane thrown in, and voila, he came up with a number for projected warming, which was at the very low end of the IPCC projections.
Guess what, did his scientist audience call for his head, call him a traitor, a wingnut denier? No, no such thing. There were a few polite questions asked, but people stroked their chins in absorbing what was just said and moved on as it were.
Trouble is this whole thing is politicized beyond all belief and reason. When the pro’s go “Denier! Denier!” and the anti’s go “Al Gore is plump! Al Gore is plump!” more heat (excuse the pun) than light is shed on the subject. I also think a more reasoned anti-AGW case can be made than the common snark-points.
The problem, Paul, with the “there could be tipping points” argument is that without evidence we don’t know what the tipping point is or which direction it goes. If, for example, we cross over a tipping point into another ice age, then it makes no sense to cut carbon dioxide emissions. The problem with the argument is that you are acting from ignorance and the action may make whatever problems there are worse not better.
As things currently stand, no one has definitive evidence for a tipping point of any sort. And in the absence of tipping points, we have plenty of time, on from many decades to a few centuries before the more serious claimed effects of global warming (such as mass melting of the Antarctica ice fields) takes place. So I stand by my original stance, namely, that this is a time to gather solid evidence about what the effects, both beneficial and harmful, of global warming are (and also get a clearer idea of what our future carbon emissions will look like, given the possibility of peak oil and similar economic trends that may reduce carbon dioxide emissions anyway) so that we can make a sound rational decision rather than a hasty, poorly thought-out one.
So I don’t see much point to paying lip service to tipping points and related issue of feedback mechanisms in the absence of evidence.
“The problem, Paul, with the “there could be tipping points” argument is that without evidence we don’t know what the tipping point is or which direction it goes. ”
Where did I mention tipping points? All I am arguing for based on data is that there could be a non-negligble CO2 effect that happens to be much smaller than the IPCC forecasts on account of the strong evidence that warming is going on happens to be really rather weak. If we double CO2, we may see some effect, not nearly as much as the dire predictions, and we may not be seeing any evidence of global warming in current conditions.
The warmists are on such a hair-trigger that if you suggest any alternative interpretation you get beaten about the head with their fists. The Right Blogosphere, it seems, is working its way to an equally black-and-white interpretation — if you even hint that you are open to the possibility that there may be a weak warming effect, it is kind of like you are a card carrying member of the opposition.
On the other hand, if some goes “Oh, the Humanity, the evidence for warming is overwhelming”, I would like to touch them about the head with a clue-bat. In my opinion, the evidence that we are already seeing The Warming is really rather weak.
I agree with you that more scientific study is necessary, but given the heavy burden of confirmation bias in the scientific community, I don’t know how far that will go. But I am saying that we need to frame our warming skepticism arguments a little better than the snark-fest offered by some, that it is all a left-liberal scam.
It doesn’t ALL have to be a left liberal scam. What’s wrong with calling a scam a scam? This is not the first time hysteria has been used to get funding.
We used to live in a world where people could get discredited for obvious abuses, but now it’s all just spun away…
Their aught to be some fear… including some fear of looking like chicken little or the boy that cried wolf. Fear, as the bible says, is the beginning of wisdom.