Global Warming Discussion

wolfamongwolves

EdsonNascimento wrote:

The scientific evidence is not overwhelming in the global warming direction. In fact, it's quite the opposite (the internet inventor's propaganda film aside).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/20/global-warming-study-climate-sceptics
Global warming study finds no grounds for climate sceptics' concerns

Independent investigation of the key issues sceptics claim can skew global warming figures reports that they have no real effect

Ian Sample, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 October 2011 18.50 BST

The world is getting warmer, countering the doubts of climate change sceptics about the validity of some of the scientific evidence, according to the most comprehensive independent review of historical temperature records to date.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found several key issues that sceptics claim can skew global warming figures had no meaningful effect.

The Berkeley Earth project compiled more than a billion temperature records dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world and found that the average global land temperature has risen by around 1C since the mid-1950s.

This figure agrees with the estimate arrived at by major groups that maintain official records on the world's climate, including Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), and the Met Office's Hadley Centre, with the University of East Anglia, in the UK.

"My hope is that this will win over those people who are properly sceptical," Richard Muller, a physicist and head of the project, said.

"Some people lump the properly sceptical in with the deniers and that makes it easy to dismiss them, because the deniers pay no attention to science. But there have been people out there who have raised legitimate issues."

Muller sought to cool the debate over climate change by creating the largest open database of temperature records, with the aim of producing a transparent and independent assessment of global warming.

The initial reluctance of government groups to release all their methods and data, and the fiasco over emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in 2009, gave the project added impetus.

The team, which includes Saul Perlmutter, joint winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate, has submitted four papers to the journal Geophysical Research Letters that describe their work to date.

Going public with results before they are peer-reviewed is not standard practice, but Muller said the decision to circulate the papers before publication was part a long-standing academic tradition of sanity-checking results with colleagues.

"We will get much more feedback from making these papers public before publication," he said.

Climate sceptics have criticised official global warming figures on the grounds that many temperature stations are poor quality and that data are tweaked by hand.

However, the Berkeley study found that the so-called urban heat island effect, which makes cities warmer than surrounding rural areas, is locally large and real, but does not contribute significantly to average land temperature rises. This is because urban regions make up less than 1% of the Earth's land area. And while stations considered "poor" might be less accurate, they recorded the same average warming trend.

"We have looked at these issues in a straightforward, transparent way, and based on that, I would expect legitimate sceptics to feel their issues have been addressed," Muller said.

Nevertheless, one prominent US climate sceptic, Anthony Watts, claimed to have identified a "basic procedural error" concerning time periods used in the research, and urged the authors to revise the paper.

Jim Hansen, head of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said he had not read the research papers but was glad Muller was looking at the issue, describing him as "a top-notch physicist". "It should help inform those who have honest scepticism about global warming.

"Of course, presuming that he basically confirms what we have been reporting, the deniers will then decide that he is a crook or has some ulterior motive.

"As I have discussed in the past, the deniers, or contrarians, if you will, do not act as scientists, but rather as lawyers."

"As soon as they see evidence against their client (the fossil fuel industry and those people making money off business-as-usual), they trash that evidence and bring forth whatever tidbits they can find to confuse the judge and jury."

Peter Thorne at the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North Carolina and chair of the International Surface Temperature Initiative, said: "This takes a very distinct approach to the problem and comes up with the same answer, and that builds confidence that pre-existing estimates are in the right ballpark. There is very substantial value in having multiple groups looking at the same problem in different ways.

"Openness and transparency is a must, particularly now with climate change being so politicised, but more to the point, with the huge socioeconomic decisions that rest on it."

Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at UEA who was at the centre of the Climategate incident, said: "I look forward to reading the finalised paper once it has been reviewed and published. These initial findings are very encouraging and echo our own results and our conclusion that the impact of urban heat islands on the overall global temperature is minimal."

The Berkeley Earth project has been attacked by some climate bloggers, who point out that one of the funders runs Koch Industries, a company Greenpeace called a "financial kingpin of climate science denial".

Muller points out the project is organised under the auspices of Novim, a Santa Barbara-based nonprofit organisation that uses science to find answers to the most pressing issues facing society and to publish them "without advocacy or agenda".

Other donors include the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (funded by Bill Gates), and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Lab. The next phase of the project will focus on warming trends in the oceans.

Some scientists were critical of the project and Muller's decision to release the papers before they had been peer reviewed.

Peter Cox, professor of climate system dynamics at Exeter University said: "These studies seem to confirm the global warming estimated from the existing datasets, which is pleasing but not exactly a surprise to those of us who know how carefully the existing datasets are put together.

"It is surprising, however, that the authors believe that this news is so significant that they can't wait for peer review, especially when their conclusions aren't exactly revolutionary."

EdsonNascimento

wolfamongwolves wrote:

EdsonNascimento wrote:

The scientific evidence is not overwhelming in the global warming direction. In fact, it's quite the opposite (the internet inventor's propaganda film aside).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/20/global-warming-study-climate-sceptics
Global warming study finds no grounds for climate sceptics' concerns

Independent investigation of the key issues sceptics claim can skew global warming figures reports that they have no real effect

Ian Sample, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 October 2011 18.50 BST

The world is getting warmer, countering the doubts of climate change sceptics about the validity of some of the scientific evidence, according to the most comprehensive independent review of historical temperature records to date.

Going public with results before they are peer-reviewed is not standard practice,

First, I don't think anyone has doubted we're in a period of the earth warming. We've had ice ages, and we've come out of ice ages. The temperatures on the Earth have been warming and cooling for millions of years.

I do find it interesting they took the tact of publishing something before it's peer reviewed.

The point of contention is the cause of global warming and the economic impact of blindly following certain assumptions without worrying about other real world issues vs what you are really "solving."

Another good use of Bill Gates' money. Why doesn't he just give his wealth as taxes or pay off a bunch of people's college loans instead of wasting it on meaningless studies, so the OWS folks can go home?

bigdvs

The Bizarre World of Radical Climate Science
By Norman Rogers
Imagine that you are a climate scientist and the Earth is threatened with a climate disaster. You need to warn the people of Earth and lobby Earth's governments. If you are tired of poring over boring computer printouts, you may be only too ready to accept this mission of transcendent importance.

On the other hand, maybe you have lost touch with reality. Maybe you have become a true believer fighting a dubious battle. Maybe you are Dr. James Hansen, high civil servant, recipient of cash awards from left-wing foundations, and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Hansen was arrested in front of the White House, dressed up to look like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 1950s scientific martyr. Hansen wants CEOs of energy companies to be prosecuted for "crimes against humanity."

When scientists are fanatical believers in a cause, the authority and credibility that attach to science are turned into political capital to be spent in pursuit of that cause.

The late Stephen Schneider, Stanford climate scientist, explained how this works:

To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.

Global warming catastrophism is convenient for climate science. It is simplistic to claim that climate scientists are making up the global warming scare in order to promote research funding. But global warming catastrophism clearly does promote research funding. So there is a convenient congruence between catastrophism and the bureaucratic ambitions of research establishments.

Climate science deals with the energy balance of the Earth and the behavior of the atmosphere. This is a very complicated system involving convection, evaporation, precipitation, clouds, ocean heat storage, reflection, and emission of radiation, and more. Although scientific understanding of the system has advanced, especially with the advent of computers and satellites, the system is still quite mysterious in important respects. It's not at all clear that climate science will ever advance to a point where long-range predictions can be trusted, or, as they say, demonstrate skill.

Burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere faster than natural processes can remove it. As a result, CO2 has been slowly increasing. Increasing the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere will probably exert a warming influence because CO2 has an inhibiting effect on the outgoing infrared (heat) radiation that cools the Earth. Nearly everyone, skeptic or believer, agrees with these basic facts. Another basic fact that the purveyors of global warming like to keep quiet about is that more CO2 in the atmosphere makes plants grow much better with less water. That's because plants in general struggle to extract the scant CO2 in the air.

What is controversial is how much warming can be expected and whether the warming will create practical problems. The evidence supporting substantial warming (i.e., 3 degrees C) is output from bad computer models. It's said that dogs come to resemble their masters. Computer models tend to reflect the aspirations of their creators.

The global warming promoters try to hang all kinds of supplementary disasters on their proposed 3-degree warming over a century. This is even more dubious than the warming itself. Some of their claims are absurd, such as the suggestion that the oceans are going to rise substantially, a claim for which there is zero credible evidence. The data has been running against the theories of global warming. The atmosphere has failed to warm since 1998, and, more importantly, the upper ocean has failed to warm since 2003.

The idea that we are on the verge of a climate disaster caused by modern civilization is a romantic idea that appeals to people who have lost traditional religion. It's another iteration of the environmentalist dogma that civilization is ruining the earth. It's a Garden of Eden story. Anyone can see that the landscape of areas where industry and technology dominate nature, like Germany or New Jersey, is in far better condition than the landscape is in most third-world countries -- countries that lack evil industry and that practice the precious local small-scale agriculture so loved by the ideologues who want remake the economy to prevent global warming. The idea that the Earth would be a paradise without civilization is contradicted by the wild climate swings that we know have taken place in recent geological time. Ice sheets a mile thick retreated from much of North America 10,000 years ago.

The reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) are often taken as the authoritative last word on climate change. These reports are are disorganized and unfocused. As a result, most people go no further than the introductory Summary for Policy Makers. If you dig deep into the reports, solid scientific support for the claims of impending catastrophe is not there. Computer models are the shaky foundation of global warming. Models from different modeling groups disagree with each other by wide margins. As the IPCC admits, the models have serious deficiencies. The IPCC uses misleading graphical illustrations to make it appear that the models can accurately mimic the Earth's climate.

The CO2 reduction proposals of the global warming gang are relentlessly ideological and impractical. CO2-free nuclear power supplies 80% of France's electricity and 20% of the electricity in the U.S. Nuclear fuel is very cheap, and vast supplies are available. The real problem with nuclear is that environmentalist groups have run a hysterical anti-nuclear campaign for the last 50 years. A reversal now would be a severe blow to their credibility. So, instead of nuclear, the global warming gang proposes that we use solar power and wind power, technologies that can cost 10 times more per kilowatt-hour. They don't seem to understand that solar doesn't work when a cloud blocks the sun or at night, and wind doesn't work when the wind isn't blowing. As a consequence, solar and wind need to be backed up by fossil fuel or hydro plants with spinning generators ready to quickly assume the load of the grid. People who are ignorant concerning engineering or science may accept the notion that wind and solar are realistic sources of electricity. It is more difficult to explain why the government is dumping billions of dollars into these technologies, both in the form of cash and in the form of mandates that shift the cost to electricity users.

Many scientists may have a predilection for green fashion -- for example, backyard compost heaps, organic food, bicycles, solar panels, or giant wind turbines. Nobody cares. But it is wrong to misuse the authority and credibility of science to scare the rest of us into embracing the green lifestyle.

Norman Rogers is a physicist and a Senior Policy Advisor at the Heartland Institute. He maintains a website: http://www.climateviews.com.

bigdvs

Watch Out for Science Reporting
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project today released some information about their research. Judith Curry, one of the co-authors, reports this here. The BBC has a story here, and the Economist reports it here.

These stories both play out as “the CO2-forced AGW model is confirmed,” which is a whole lot stronger than the actual results.

The BEP papers say that by re-analyzing existing temperature records, they get a close match to other temperature analyses of global average surface temperature for the last 200 or so years. This isn’t a big surprise: that fits what Wegman and others reported — agreement on warming over the last 400 years, but less clarity on temperatures 1000 years ago or more.

This is not in itself a confirmation of AGW.

I know I’ve said this before, but let’s just repeat: to confirm the CO2-forced AGW hypothesis, you need several steps:

•There must have been warming.
•That warming must be unusual.
•There must be a mechanism proposed for that unusual warming, and there must be a falsifiable way of confirming that mechanism.
•That mechanism has to be the result of human action.
•That human action has to be unusual release of CO2.
All we have here is confirmation of warming, the first step. This has been by far the strongest part of this chain and has been for a long time. It’s already well established — as I’ve said before, we know there’s been warming since the Little Ice Age — that’s how we know it was the Little Ice Age.

There is one fairly unusual aspect to this, that the authors have put on a big PR effort for papers that haven’t been peer-reviewed or published in the formal literature. Here’s something I wrote on Google+:

You’d be better off reading Judith Curry (one of the co-authors) on her blog: http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/20/berke ... ent-124946

The press embargo on this lifts today at noon Pacific time. I suspect there will be pretty widespread media coverage on this, with both sides of the debate spinning this to suit their purposes. I have had queries from several journalists, to whom I probably did not provide any usable sound bites. Lets see how it plays out.

Roger PIelke Sr wonders about site selection:http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/comment-on-the-article-in-the-economist-on-rich-mullers-data-analysis/

Anthony Watts notes this is a PR press before peer-review, which is unusual: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/t ... er-review/

As I was invited by The Economist to comment publicly, I would recommend rejecting Muller et al in the current form and suggest that it be resubmitted with meaningful and appropriate 30 year comparisons for the same time periods used by the Menne et al and Fall et al cited papers. I would be happy to review the paper again at that time.

I also believe it would be premature and inappropriate to have a news article highlighting the conclusions of this paper until such time meaningful data comparisons are produced and the paper passes peer review. Given the new techniques from BEST, there may be much to gain from a rework of the analysis limited to identical thirty year periods used in Menne et al and Fall et al.

Watts had been asked to review one of the papers, which was a follow-on to the site quality work he’s led over the last several years. He found some significant errors, and submitted his reviews just a few days ago; those errors weren’t corrected before the PR push.

Lesson: Be cautious about the reporting of a scientific paper that hasn’t been published yet, and be doubly cautious about how a paper is reported when it’s a politically sensitive topic.

Posted at 8:39 pm on October 20th, 2011 by