Here’s an eleventh one:
A common battle-line between climate change deniers and people who actually understand evidence is the effectiveness and representativeness of climate models.
The phrase “climate change deniers” to describe people properly skeptical of crap science is a) unscientific and b) offensive demagoguery.
[Late-morning update]
“Elite” reporters explain why they don’t have to have balanced reporting, or give “deniers” a voice.
IOW, “Shut up,” they explained.
I’ve been told “you must disagree with me because you’re ignorant!” a lot of times in a lot of contexts.
It’s pretty much always by people who know far less about the subject than I do, and have no idea that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
They can talk to me about the “effectiveness of climate models” when they predict.
I will be more impressed with climate models when they can be successfully run backwards in time and can fully conform.
Rand, I agree the word ‘denier’ has no place in science.
The phrase ‘climate change denier’ when applied to climate model skeptics who freely admit natural and even man made climate forcing is patently absurd.
Dave
The Earth’s climate has been changing constantly throughout geologic time. I don’t know of anyone who denies that the climate has changed in the past and will continue to change in the future. That being the case, the term “climate change denier” makes no sense at all.
I consider myself as a climate model disputer. The climate models have failed to predict what is currently happening. If the models don’t agree with the real world, it isn’t the real world that’s wrong.
I don’t know of anybody who is familiar with history and science who denies that the climate is changing, and always has.
What I consider “extreme” is the notion that the government can control climate change by curtailing individual liberty.
” I don’t know of anyone who denies that the climate has changed in the past and will continue to change in the future.”
Hmm, it would be interesting to poll AGW believers to see if they think the climate will change in the future through natural causes.
And even worse, the models never change or evolve.
All models are the same!
I have a degree in computer science and worked for a few years on large-scale simulations (General Dynamics, NASA); I also took a graduate course in numerical methods in computation. Those are exactly the reasons why I am profoundly skeptical of the “the effectiveness and representativeness of climate models”. Said models are so vastly oversimplified to start with, and are laden with so many a priori assumptions, that to consider them as effective and representative is a greater act of faith than a suicide bomber expecting a bevy of virgins on the other side.
Then you might be interested to know that the climate models have been using a formula based on feedback in electronic circuits to model CO2 feedback. True story. 🙂
As discussed here?
judithcurry.com
A lot of the climate modelling errors are being shown to the world, and the warmists double down on rhetoric.
Yep. The other day I got into an argument on Facebook about global warming, saying that CO2 isn’t a knob you can turn and get a linear response from the climate – and them someone tried to explain PID control systems to me. Sheesh.
What will really change the minds of you heretics is the dance piece on Global Warming written up in the Sunday NYT about a performer who “hasn’t forgotten her early school lessons in science.” I think it’s even being done at the Museum of Natural History, so you only have to walk across the Park…
Charles, I can’t make it to NYC, so I’ll just put an eARTh bumper sticker on my car.
97% of all scientists agree with the Catholic church that the Earth is the center of the universe, the science is settled – circa 1500
97% of all scientists agree with Newton that force = mass times acceleration, the science is settled – circa 1900
And we all know that the source of heat transfer is phlogiston, I mean, a kinetic theory of gasses? That’s just crazy talk.
97% of all scientists agree with Georges Lemaitre that the Universe was once a Singularity and then had a Big Bang, the science is settle – circa 1930
Put me in the 3% then. I don’t think there is such a thing as infinite density. I think space itself is quantized in little spheres 1 Planck length across, with a maximum of the Planck energy stuffed inside. And it tickles me pink that LeMaitre was a priest.
Then there are the Missoula Floods. History is filled with examples of what we know to be true, right up until it isn’t.
97% of engineering students think that Newton said “force equals mass times acceleration,” when in fact he said that force is proportional to the time rate of change of momentum. As true today as it was in 1900.
Re: Members of the self-styled “consensus” who use the term “climate change deniers”.
Did you ever use the term “global warming”? Did you stop using that term, in favor of “climate change”, because the IPCC has moved on from “global” effects to regional, or because the effects of industrial civilization on the weather now, according to the IPCC, include other measurable differences than simply “warming”? Do you include the IPCC itself among deniers for recently reporting that the north polar icecap is experiencing different effects and behaving in different ways than the south pole? Do you dispute the IPCC that both poles are behaving differently than climate models predicted in the 1990’s?
Given what the IPCC now says about the effects of carbon dioxide, AND particulate aerosols AND ocean heat capacity AND the uncertainty of statistical modeling techniques and so forth; do you agree more with Al Gore’s predictions from his 1993 book _Earth in the Balance_ (saying “global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world”) or with the “deniers” who (then and now) said otherwise?
Last night I was curious as to how many days per decade the temperature would be outside the pre-global warming decadal averages (what exists now). So I went to Weather Underground and selected Custom (instead of Daily, Weekly, and Monthly) and got the data year by year, which they handily supply in CSV format at the bottom of the page.
So I pasted a decades worth of data into a spreadsheet, calculated the max temp for the decade, and then built a column that added a fixed amount of warming to each day’s high. If that exceeded the prior (un-CO2 warmed) temperature record for the decade, I counted that day as outside the bounds of natural temperature variation for the decade.
For 2F of warming there wasn’t a single additional day outside the bounds, just the one record-setting day that was hotter by 2 degrees. For 4F of warming only 5 days were warmer than the previous record. So even if you had massive warming, you’re only going to experience a few days when it’s any warmer than what you’d previously been through, and on those days it’s only going to be outside the prior decadal bounds for a few hours.
By my reckoning, alarmists are willing to scrap much of civilization and leave the third world trapped in poverty for another fifty years just to save themselves about 10 hours of extra sweating, total, over an entire decade.
I think you may have gotten the +2F and +4F results switched. Nonetheless, that’s an interesting result. I’d like to see the spreadsheet; maybe Anthony Watts or Judith Curry would be interested in publishing it?
I doubt my particular local result is worth sharing, but the concept might be. From 2004 to 2013 our yearly high varied by 17 F, ranging from 88 to 105 F. The low varied by 16 F, and the yearly average by almost 3 F. My thought was to grab the daily temperature record, add warming too it, and see how many days the temperature would fall outside the normal bounds. The answer, for an entire decade, is that it would exceed the old records only on one day for significant warming (alarmists are losing their minds over half a degree, much less two or three), and only for about five days, over a decade, for warming that would have alarmists discussing mass suicide to spare them and their children from the horror of it.
A common battle-line between climate change deniers and people who actually understand evidence is the effectiveness and representativeness of climate models.
A model that produces predictions which the real world data has fallen out the bottom of? A model generated by fine tuning tons of nearly arbitrary free parameters to produce a desired result, which can’t even postdict the past? (Carbon dioxide forcing parameter? If we were doing physics, this should be something you would try to calculate from some physical principle: gas absorptivity, say, not twiddle like it was a free knob adjustable to make your model behave) Arghghg!
A *model* does not tell you anything about the world. At most it tells you the consequences of your assumptions. *Data* tells you about the world, and whether your models are any good or not!
But what do I know? I’m just some dumb rube.
Next you’ll be saying stuff like “the map is not the territory” and “if the model doesn’t match observation, it’s wrong.”
The author’s analogy between the atomic “model” and climate models leads him to a bizarre conclusion. Climate models are built to attempt to predict the future state of climate under certain conditions (primarily rising CO2 content in the atmosphere). They fail to predict correctly in every single case, for reasons which become obvious when you look at how they are built. Using existing techniques of CFD can never result in a working climate model; it’s too big a system, and has too many scales. The number of points needed to have any hope of capturing most climate phenomena would have to be a factor of 10E13 times as many as are used today. And because of the CFL time step requirement, the number of time steps per unit of real time would have to increase by a factor of 100,000. So that’s 10E15 times the number of computations performed by today’s models, models that don’t run a whole lot faster than real time (on teraflop machines).
Similarly, the “model” of electrons orbiting a nucleus cannot be used to predict anything about the behavior of atoms larger than the hydrogen atom. It was used by Bohr to explain the Rydberg series’ success in terms of electron wavelength, and that’s where its utility ended. It would be pointless to build a numerical model of electrons orbiting a nucleus, because the physics are wrong, and such a model would predict nothing in the real world. Just as climate models predict nothing in the real world.