Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[Loachman]

And some of Judith Curry's comments on the funding issue (full article at http://judithcurry.com/2015/08/16/industry-funding-and-bias/#more-19639 ):

But . . . oil company funding.  This is too often used as an excuse to reject a climate scientist or their findings, even if the funding is very indirect and has nothing to do with the specific study.  For example, having accepted travel funds from a think tank that is in some way has some funding from an unacceptable industry group or individual can be game over for that individual.

In climate change research, there is no righteous source of funding – government funding can be a source of bias just as much as industry funding can, and there is A LOT more government funding out there.  The need for greater intellectual (and political) diversity in climate change research has been addressed in this previous post.

That said, funding is probably a smaller source of bias than peer pressure to follow a consensus and to defend your own hypothesis, not to mention political preferences, environmental proclivities and career pressures.

In climate science, the ‘bogey’ is funding from fossil fuel companies.  Well, regional power providers are also involved in wind power, solar power, geothermal and hydropower (not to mention nuclear, but not clear if nuclear is ‘good’ or ‘bad’?).  Not to mention providing power for all those computers running weather and climate models.  And where would the climate research elite be without fossil fuels to support their extensive air travel (its a badge of honor among them to be flying at least 100,000 miles per year).  And is  natural gas good, relatively good, or bad?

So . . . is funding from power and oil companies ok if it funds research related to wind, solar geothermal and hydro?  Better predictions of extreme weather events that hamper both energy supply and demand, whatever the source of power?  Or is it only a problem if it supports outreach efforts by a climate scientist to deny humans are the cause of climate change?

If independent scientists obtain funding from power and oil companies, would this help support needed intellectual diversity into climate science to avoid the massive groupthink we now see?

 

[a_majoor]

An Australian scientist does the science on the models and comes up with this crushing response:

http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/opinion/miranda-devine-perth-electrical-engineers-discovery-will-change-climate-change-debate/news-story/d1fe0f22a737e8d67e75a5014d0519c6

Miranda Devine: Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate
October 3, 2015 12:00pm
MIRANDA DEVINEPerthNow

Dr David Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science. Picture: Thinkstock
A MATHEMATICAL discovery by Perth-based electrical engineer Dr David Evans may change everything about the climate debate, on the eve of the UN climate change conference in Paris next month.

A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly.

He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.

It turns out the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future global warming by as much as 10 times, he says.

“Yes, CO2 has an effect, but it’s about a fifth or tenth of what the IPCC says it is. CO2 is not driving the climate; it caused less than 20 per cent of the global warming in the last few decades”.

Dr Evans says his discovery “ought to change the world”.

“But the political obstacles are massive,” he said.

His discovery explains why none of the climate models used by the IPCC reflect the evidence of recorded temperatures. The models have failed to predict the pause in global warming which has been going on for 18 years and counting.

“The model architecture was wrong,” he says. “Carbon dioxide causes only minor warming. The climate is largely driven by factors outside our control.”

There is another problem with the original climate model, which has been around since 1896.

While climate scientists have been predicting since the 1990s that changes in temperature would follow changes in carbon dioxide, the records over the past half million years show that not to be the case.

So, the new improved climate model shows CO2 is not the culprit in recent global warming. But what is?

Dr Evans has a theory: solar activity. What he calls “albedo modulation”, the waxing and waning of reflected radiation from the Sun, is the likely cause of global warming.

He predicts global temperatures, which have plateaued, will begin to cool significantly, beginning between 2017 and 2021. The cooling will be about 0.3C in the 2020s. Some scientists have even forecast a mini ice age in the 2030s.

If Dr Evans is correct, then he has proven the theory on carbon dioxide wrong and blown a hole in climate alarmism. He will have explained why the doomsday predictions of climate scientists aren’t reflected in the actual temperatures.

“It took me years to figure this out, but finally there is a potential resolution between the insistence of the climate scientists that CO2 is a big problem, and the empirical evidence that it doesn’t have nearly as much effect as they say.”

Dr Evans is an expert in Fourier analysis and digital signal processing, with a PhD, and two Masters degrees from Stanford University in electrical engineering, a Bachelor of Engineering (for which he won the University medal), Bachelor of Science, and Masters in Applied Maths from the University of Sydney.

He has been summarising his results in a series of blog posts on his wife Jo Nova’s blog for climate sceptics.

He is about half way through his series, with blog post 8, “Applying the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to Earth”, published on Friday.

When it is completed his work will be published as two scientific papers. Both papers are undergoing peer review.

“It’s a new paradigm,” he says. “It has several new ideas for people to get used to.”

You heard it here first!

— Liam Bartlett is on leave.

 

[Loachman]

http://www.edmontonsun.com/2015/11/06/gunter-climate-change-hot-air-keeps-spewing

Gunter: Satellites deny global warming

By Lorne Gunter , Postmedia Network

First posted: Friday, November 06, 2015 03:22 PM MST | Updated: Friday, November 06, 2015 03:43 PM MST

Eighteen years, nine months.

As world leaders prepare to gather in Paris the first two weeks in December to negotiate a new global climate deal, the statistic – 18 years, nine months – is critical to keep in mind.

That’s the length of time since there has been any significant increase in global temperatures.

The members of the United Nations first signed a climate deal at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June of 1992. Since then, the sky-is-falling rhetoric has continued to grow in intensity. And governments around the world have spent hundreds of billions of dollars researching climate change and trying to stop it.

But since January of 1997, the world’s eight orbiting weather satellites have failed to detect any appreciable warming.

Environmentalists and “green” politicians love to tell us that this or that year or decade has been the hottest on record. But these claims are based largely on readings taken from the world’s 7,000 or so ground-based weather stations which often suffer from inconsistent monitoring and placement too near “urban heat islands.”

The octet of satellites, by contrast, take more than 300,000 readings per day over oceans, forests, deserts, cities, open ranges, glaciers and icecaps. They are infinitely more reliable than terrestrial thermometers.

And in the 23 years, five months since the Rio summit, those satellites have shown no significant warming for 18 years, nine months.

Over that same period, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased from about 340 parts per million (ppm) to approximately 400 ppm – a 17 per cent increase. If CO2 truly were trapping solar radiation in Earth’s atmosphere and causing dangerous warming, wouldn’t the weather satellites be detecting that?

Is it possible that something like the oceans has been absorbing all the anticipated warming and will at some time release it causing a sudden and catastrophic spike in global temperature? I guess that’s possible.

Still, every month that the current pause in warming grows longer, the possibility that manmade greenhouse gasses are going to be responsible for a future climate Armageddon has to be seen as more and more remote.

Hurricanes are not increasing in intensity or frequency, nor are their more and more powerful tornados; even if there have been years in which some forms of severe storms have worsened.

The Greenland icecap may be shrinking, but the very much larger Antarctic icecap is expanding – and has been for 10,000 years. Sea levels are not rising anywhere near as fast as predicted.

Severe droughts are not more common. Even many climate scientists who back the global-warming theory have pointed out the current California drought is neither historically unusual nor global in scale.

None of this, though, will prevent world leaders (including Canada’s own premiers and new prime minister) from joining together in Paris next month to sign some preposterously Draconian climate deal.

There have been instances in which climate scientists have twisted or manipulated data to “prove” their theories. And green politicians are deaf to data that shows global warming is no big deal because being swept up in climate alarmism makes them look caring and cool.

But for the most part, global warming theory is not some giant conspiracy. Rather, it is a symptom of mass hysteria. Scientists and politicians want the climate change theories to be true because by-and-large they are skeptical of industrialized society and corporations, while they like big government and trust it to make the best decisions over individuals and companies.

Global warming and worldwide regulation simply fit into and reinforces their worldviews.

In the run up to the Paris gathering, I will be examining the science and politics behind UN efforts to regulate the planet.

lorne.gunter@sunmedia.ca

 

[cld617]

http://www.edmontonsun.com/2015/11/06/gunter-climate-change-hot-air-keeps-spewing

As world leaders prepare to gather in Paris the first two weeks in December to negotiate a new global climate deal, the statistic – 18 years, nine months – is critical to keep in mind.

That’s the length of time since there has been any significant increase in global temperatures.

But since January of 1997, the world’s eight orbiting weather satellites have failed to detect any appreciable warming.

I'll take arguments from ignorance for $500 Alex.

http://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2224

This argument has been thoroughly debunked numerous times, there is no need to rehash it. It is categorically wrong to make the claim that any cessation to warming has occurred up till 2015, and it is intellectually dishonest to pick a date of a high and use that as your left margin. If you were to use this tactic in economics to plan your investments, you'd be going broke in no time. But who needs full disclosure when you can prey on the uniformed right?

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998-intermediate.htm

 

[Loachman]

Wow. Skeptical Science.

As pointed out by Dolphin_Hunter in Reply 2493:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/03/truth-about-skeptical-science.html

"Skeptical Science is a climate alarmist website created by a self-employed cartoonist, John Cook (who apparently pretends to be a Nazi). It is moderated by zealots who ruthlessly censor any and all form of dissent from their alarmist position. This way they can pretend to win arguments, when in reality they have all been refuted. The abuse and censorship does not pertain to simply any dissenting commentator there but to highly credentialed and respected climate scientists as well; Dr. Pielke Sr. has unsuccessfully attempted to engage in discussions there only to be childishly taunted and censored, while Dr. Michaels has been dishonestly quoted and smeared. The irony of the site's oxymoronic name "Skeptical Science" is that the site is not skeptical of even the most extreme alarmist positions.

John Cook is now desperately trying to cover up his background that he was employed as a cartoonist for over a decade with no prior employment history in academia or climate science.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine we can reveal what his website originally said,

"I'm not a climatologist or a scientist but a self employed cartoonist" - John Cook, Skeptical Science"

Wow. A "self-employed cartoonist". Not even a poet...

 

[Kirkhill]

Fall 2015, Cover Stories, Daily News

New map shows how drought affected 1,000 years of history

.....The new atlas could also improve understanding of climate phenomena like the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, a variation in North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures that hasn't been tracked long enough to tell if it is a transitory event, forced by human intervention in the climate system, or a natural long-term oscillation. By combining the Old World Drought Atlas with the Asia and North America atlases, climatologists and climate modelers may also discover other sources of internal climate variability that are leading to drought and wetness across the Northern Hemisphere, Cook said.

In the Science Advances paper, Cook and his coauthors compare results from the new atlas and its counterparts across three time spans: the generally warm Medieval Climate Anomaly (1000-1200); the Little Ice Age (1550-1750); and the modern period (1850-2012).

The atlases together show persistently drier-than-average conditions across north-central Europe over the past 1,000 years, and a history of megadroughts in the Northern Hemisphere that lasted longer during the Medieval Climate Anomaly than they did during the 20th century. But there is little understanding as to why, the authors write. Climate models have had difficulty reproducing megadroughts of the past, indicating something may be missing in their representation of the climate system, Cook said.

http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/fall-2015/article/new-map-shows-how-drought-affected-1-000-years-of-history

 

[cld617]

Wow. Skeptical Science.

As pointed out by Dolphin_Hunter in Reply 2493:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/03/truth-about-skeptical-science.html

"Skeptical Science is a climate alarmist website created by a self-employed cartoonist, John Cook (who apparently pretends to be a Nazi). It is moderated by zealots who ruthlessly censor any and all form of dissent from their alarmist position. This way they can pretend to win arguments, when in reality they have all been refuted. The abuse and censorship does not pertain to simply any dissenting commentator there but to highly credentialed and respected climate scientists as well; Dr. Pielke Sr. has unsuccessfully attempted to engage in discussions there only to be childishly taunted and censored, while Dr. Michaels has been dishonestly quoted and smeared. The irony of the site's oxymoronic name "Skeptical Science" is that the site is not skeptical of even the most extreme alarmist positions.

John Cook is now desperately trying to cover up his background that he was employed as a cartoonist for over a decade with no prior employment history in academia or climate science.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine we can reveal what his website originally said,

"I'm not a climatologist or a scientist but a self employed cartoonist" - John Cook, Skeptical Science"

Wow. A "self-employed cartoonist". Not even a poet...

It's a collection of myths with arguments and references debunking them, ran by an entire team who are indeed educated on the matter. You're free to debunk their claims, however simply dismissing them because you disagree with their founder is absurd. You're willing to cite an Edmonton Sun article with zero material referenced which supports your ignorance, but content which is backed up can be ignored? The mere fact that you presented one of the mostly commonly shared myths, as well as most easily debunked tells me you know little of the subject at hand. Is this why you refused to address the points I made, and instead chose to attack the source?

Is NASA good enough for you, despite it being a reference used on Skeptical Science?

When Easterling and Wehner dropped the 1998 temperature spike from the data altogether, and zoomed in on the readings from 1999 to 2008, they saw a strong warming trend over this period. But when the 1998 measurement is included in the data, it looks as if there is no overall warming between 1998 and 2008 at all.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/upsDownsGlobalWarming.html

Capable of responding to this, or do you simply wish to respond with aimless drivel?

 

[Loachman]

I have read a fair amount of material from a variety of sources, and am a little bit of a history buff as well. I see no evidence, anywhere, that supports this notion of man-made climate change.

 

[cld617]

I have read a fair amount of material from a variety of sources, and am a little bit of a history buff as well. I see no evidence, anywhere, that supports this notion of man-made climate change.

Then I guess you're more informed by simply scouring the internet for information that reaffirms your preconceptions, the entirety of climate science should just defer to you as you have it all figured out.

Good job once again refusing to address the statistically errors made by the claims in your link, bravo! It really is easier to ignore informed debate isn't it?

 

[PuckChaser]

The air must be pretty thin up on top of that high horse. You'd probably be able to have some sort of intelligent debate without all the sarcasm.

 

[cld617]

It was pretty clear when he avoided responding to my rebuttal twice that a discussion wasn't the goal, but the further pandering to ignorance.

 

[PuckChaser]

Claiming people who disagree with your point of view as ignorant, doesn't open a floor for discussion. Your condescending attitude doesn't help either.

 

[cld617]

Sorry, but when your baseless opinion as a layperson does not coincide with the findings of the overwhelming majority of experts in a particular field you are ignorant. When you spread misinformation and then claim there is no supporting evidence to a topic such as AGW, you are again ignorant as you are making untruthful claims. When they fit the textbook definition of lacking knowledge, they're ignorant. Don't make blatantly false statements if you don't want a negative label?

 

[PuckChaser]

I'm sorry, but when your "experts" want people thrown in prison for daring to challenge their claims, there's something they want to hide. Scientists have been more than happy to stand on facts, and be thrown in jail themselves for thousands of years to prove their theories right. These tactics smack of the Inquisition, not proper scientific method.

http://news.investors.com/blogs-capital-hill/092115-771807-scientists-want-climate-change-skeptics-to-serve-prison-time.htm#ixzz3mVIOHjcs

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Sorry, but when your baseless opinion as a layperson does not coincide with the findings of the overwhelming majority of experts in a particular field you are ignorant.

Careful,...your ship may sail right off the earth's edge.

 

[cavalryman]

Sorry, but when your baseless opinion as a layperson does not coincide with the findings of the overwhelming majority of experts in a particular field you are ignorant. When you spread misinformation and then claim there is no supporting evidence to a topic such as AGW, you are again ignorant as you are making untruthful claims. When they fit the textbook definition of lacking knowledge, they're ignorant. Don't make blatantly false statements if you don't want a negative label?

I do believe a chap called Galileo heard the same sort of denunciation in his day. Careful with ex-cathedra pronouncements.  They don't have a good track record.

 

[Kirkhill]

cld617

I do believe you have missed your calling.

You are obviously wasted in your current position.  I see a future in fast jets for you.

 

[cld617]

I'm sorry, but when your "experts" want people thrown in prison for daring to challenge their claims, there's something they want to hide. Scientists have been more than happy to stand on facts, and be thrown in jail themselves for thousands of years to prove their theories right. These tactics smack of the Inquisition, not proper scientific method.

http://news.investors.com/blogs-capital-hill/092115-771807-scientists-want-climate-change-skeptics-to-serve-prison-time.htm#ixzz3mVIOHjcs

I don't agree with this at all, however it does nothing as far as speaking to the validity of climate science. If as much effort was spent by deniers to discredit the science behind AGW as the effort the put into attacking theit ethos, some ground might actually be made if their hypothesis hold any merit.

 

[cld617]

I do believe a chap called Galileo heard the same sort of denunciation in his day. Careful with ex-cathedra pronouncements.  They don't have a good track record.

The Catholic Church no longer holds the power as to what information can be spread to the masses. Never before has information and education be so readily available, to try and compare today's era to that of several hundred years ago is futile.

Now can we get back to the discussion of the science? You're free to call me ignorant all you'd like, however please poke some holes into the arguments I've made.

 

[cavalryman]

The Catholic Church no longer holds the power as to what information can be spread to the masses. Never before has information and education be so readily available, to try and compare today's era to that of several hundred years ago is futile.

Now can we get back to the discussion of the science? You're free to call me ignorant all you'd like, however please poke some holes into the arguments I've made.

And yet the masses remain as ignorant as ever.  Sad, really.  And here I thought centuries of Enlightenment have established that the science is never settled, yet the warmists claim it's so, to the point of wishing those who point out the flaws in their models be imprisoned for their heretic views.  Shades of the Inquisition, no?  So much for your claim that we've advanced the discourse.  I do believe that my example referencing Galileo is just as apt today was it was a few centuries ago.  Heretics will be denounced as ignorant, the scientific method will continue to be ignored, statistical methodology will continue to be perverted.  Churchian views might have been been replaced by the dogma of the AGW cult, but nothing has changed much when it comes to discourse.  Case in point, Pope Francis is very much of your opinion, so give thanks that the Catholic Church is once again denouncing heresy, contra scientific fact.  #IamGalileo, if you like.

Oh - minor quibble.  I've not called you ignorant.  That would have been you - vis-a-vis those who refuse to bow to the orthodoxy.  Projection is an interesting phenomenon, as is virtue signalling.  I really wonder what triggers either.