Eric, I suppose the difference between your beliefs and mine amounts to my expectation that the climate change scientists should be held to a high standard as is required of most other endeavors. You apparently are willing to give them a free pass since you have a gut feeling that they are right to some degree. I have modeled many electronic systems as well as some physics behaviors and realize how easy it is to make bad assumptions. For a short time frame almost any model can be made to curve fit the existing data to achieve a near perfect match. As the time frame advances, the fit typically begins to accelerate in error until there is very little correlation remaining.
Weather forecast is virtually perfect for the next hour at most locations but hopeless in predicting what will happen in a week. I view the global warming modeling process in a similar manner. The reason this happens is that the forcing functions in many cases are random but have been active for many thousand years and many obscure variables act in concert to get us to where we are today. There have been volcano eruptions, solar flares, etc. in the past which have modified the present climate conditions. Any intelligent model generator can choose a number of variables with enough leeway to curve fit data from the more recent past, so it would be extremely unusual to find errors in the fit to historical data. So it should be considered a given that the present models appear to match data from say 100 years past. This state of the art is now being used to predict the terrible future environment that the politicians are trying to protect us from. No one seems to recall that the models are being adjusted every few years in order to take into account variables that were previously neglected. It was just recent that the ocean currents were included even though those same scientists thought that their models were sound previous to that addition. How can I consider this good science? How many more discoveries remain which will modify the message? There are many, many assumptions being made about how the warming gases interact with water, which is the main warming gas by far. It seems reasonable to begin with the most important issue, which is water in its various phases, and to then find out how it is influenced by the other much smaller component gasses. I have read about an important theory concerning how solar activity modifies the flux of changed cosmic rays which in turn greatly effects cloud formation. Everyone can see on a daily basis how much cooling immediately appears when clouds pass over an area. That is anything but subtle. It would only take a couple of per cent change in the reflectance of the earth due to additional clouds in order to begin a major overall cooling period. These same scientists have followed their theory back for thousands of years and find remarkable correlation between the solar activity and the estimated earth's temperature. My gut feeling is that they have found one of the most important factors which the other climate change modelers neglect entirely. So, how are we as a society supposed to evaluate the output of the global warming scientists? It makes perfect sense to expect them to be able to demonstrate correlation between their predictions and what actually happens a few years into the future. Few can say that they did not fail in this test, especially when they now admit that the present pause in warming might be extended until 2025(check BBC current article). Come on guys, get real as was once commonly said. Prove to us that you are not just curve fitting the past and can actually predict the future climate. Until that time, we had better keep our hands on our wallets since the politicians believe that this is an issue they can use to fatten the tax bite. Perhaps I demand too high of a standard for scientific output, especially when the economic and social impact of mistaken predictions will be massive. No free passes as far as I am concerned. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Eric Walker <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, Aug 24, 2014 1:11 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:global warming? On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 12:15 AM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote: This is exactly why so many question the science. A good scientist should remain skeptical under these conditions and clearly the science is not settled as some seem to believe. One doesn't need a fully worked out science to feel grave concern for the world we're leaving our grandchildren. All that is needed is to pay attention to the few things we do know, and to have a reasonable sense that these things could feed back into a dynamic system with unwanted consequences. We know, for instance, that CO2 has increased dramatically over the last few hundred years: http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/5koomey.png We know as well that CH4 has similarly increased: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/200409_methane/core2.gif Perhaps some will be willing to question the attribution of these spikes to human activity. Personally, I would feel a little dirty trying to do so. What does CO2 do to the climate? Does it cause global temperatures to increase? (Include, here, as well, any other number of industrial byproducts that obviously go back to humans.) The scientists studying the topic generally think so. The temperature does not seem to increase monotonically. It clearly cannot increase without periodic behavior. But the average of the temperature appears to increase over a long enough window. This is what the people who have devoted years of their life studying the topic are trying to tell us. Will there be some huge compensating event that will shift the climate in an opposite gear? Perhaps. I know that the tundra in the arctic regions is thawing, and that there is a lot of methane that will be release as a consequence, which suggests that the opposite will occur -- that there's a risk that change towards higher temperatures could be shifted into a higher gear. It's a risk, in the sense that it is something whose consequences are not fully clear should it come to pass. But saying it's a "risk" isn't the same as saying it's a negligible risk. We can attack the climate scientists as being overconfident and their work as guesswork. In some ways their predicament is similar to that of physics at the turn of the last century. The physicists got some things wrong. But they got a lot of things right as well; enough to build a nuclear bomb and thermonuclear weapons. They did the messy, hard work of sorting through some very difficult-to-interpret data, and using what they learned they pulled these things out of thin air. They foresaw these technological developments years before they were actually created. Climate scientists are working with a similarly messy set of data and are trying to make educated estimates about where things are going. They will no doubt get some important things wrong. But I'm putting my bet on them getting the most important stuff right. Calling out some of the people involved in climate science who have fudged numbers as representative of all of them feels a bit disingenuous to me. Because some were guilty of doing this does not impugn the entire lot. There's no reason to assume that the majority of climate scientists are acting with anything but integrity, just as there's no reason to assume that the majority of electrical engineers are acting with anything but integrity. (The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for politicians.) We feel free to question a lot of physics in this forum in light of their rejection of LENR experimental, as well as some obvious excesses by physicists who have ventured into some pretty shaky territory with their off-the-wall thought experiments. The physicists who argue vocally against LENR are not behaving as scientists, but rather as politicians. This much is obvious to us and eventually will be to the general public, so we go to town with them. But anyone who has read a few experimental papers from a physics journal in the last few years will come away with the impression that those who focus on what they know, as surely the majority of physicists do, could not be on more solid ground. My sense is that the majority of climate scientists are on similarly solid ground. Their consensus view is that human activity is leading to changes in the climate, and that some of these changes could make life more difficult, not necessarily for us, but for people several generations out, and they have concrete, well-researched data to back up these conclusions. Count me as one who is listening attentively to what they have to say. Eric
