I think the bottom line about global warming is that we are deathly afraid of dynamics we don't understand. Our civilization is predicated on a very narrow set of conditions and we don't have the resources to handle major perturbations of those conditions.
It's not a question of how well our civilization can withstand significant changes just what level of disruption we are willing to withstand without doing something.
Taken to the extream to make a point, a 100 foot increase in sea level over 20 years would distroy an a silly amount of weath. However, a single 1 inch increase in sea level over 20 years would be hard to notice. It's not a question of 1 inch as ~0.1% of that increase = 0.1% of the dammage, rather it's a question of how much it costs to deal with the problem vs. starting over in a new area.
PS: Most of the time an inch is meaningless, but a dam that can take 10 feel might not take 10.08 feet. So, it's better to think of it as an increase in the number of local problems vs. a meaningless threat or some large scale doom. Granted, as you scale the increase more areas have larger problems.
Fundamentally there's one problem that plagues global warming research, and that's that we're grasping at a system so huge and complex that we have absolutely no understanding of it. Sure people believe they understand the system, but spend a month in England and watch how weather forecasts pan out.
I don't see how, when some of the biggest computer systems are being used to predict weather systems and we get it wrong, how scientists expect us to believe their computer models that follow less variables and use lots less processing power.
All evidence so far says global warming is real, however I can't help but feel all the computer models they use are complete bunk. It strikes me as fraud, it's a computer program and everyone here knows you can get a computer program to do whatever you want. I see it as highly susceptible of bias, which makes it very hard to ever believe their predictions.
There's a lot of real science used in global warming research, like using ancient sediments and ice cores to extrapolate how much CO2 was in the atmosphere n centuries ago. However, then we get pseudoscience with computer models of systems infinitely more complex than anything we've ever dealt with; it's akin to comparing a stick figure and a full anatomical diagram of a human down to every capillary for modelling the human body. We're at the stick figure when it comes to the global environment and we're trying to predict somethings effect like we have the whole picture.
You clearly did not read the article you're critiquing, because he spends screens and screens of text discussing exactly the difference between climate and weather.
In short, climate is predicting that a candle will make the room warmer. Weather is predicting the exact swirls and eddies of the flame.
Further, your objections to computer modeling are incorrect. Of course you can get a computer program to say whatever you want, but you can't make a computer model say whatever you want. Computer models are a subset of computer programs constrained to attempt to model reality according to some set of assumptions. You can make equations say whatever you want too, but that doesn't make Maxwell's laws incorrect.
I read the screems and screens of text trying to disconnect climate and weather: that's where I gave up. I had had enough of the cutesy anecodotes and attacking straw men with straw men.
It's a nice anecdotal attempt to disconnect climate and weather. but it falls very flat. Candle flame eddies, swirling winds? What bunkum. Weather is what you get? So what we get in 50 years, as predicted by climate forecasts, won't be weather?
The reason people argue that climate predictions are weak because of the inability of massive amounts of computing power and continually revised models still fail to predict short term temperature and conditions. This is with a lot of known inputs. And yet, we are all supposed to believe the outputs of a 100 year climate prediction, when the amount of assumed/fudged/unknown variables is simply immense? This is the core reason people (including myself) place no credence whatsoever in climate modelling. I'm happy to change my mind when someone can prove they know all or enough of the inputs to make the model highly accurate. What would be the effect of another 10 hurricanes per year? What about a reversal or diversion of the Gulf stream? How about a permanent el nina in the Pacific? None of these are black swans and yet they would all negate current climactic predictions.
There is no way to build anything close to an accurate model of the climate. It has far too many independent variables. What really makes it ridiculous is that the are always claiming to use the latest "super" computers when every (good) CS student knows that you can't solve problems like these with any size computer. Also - regarding non scientists influencing the debate - seems to me a lowly patent clerk had a pretty large influence on physics around 1905.
Actually assuming the climate and weather aren't connected is fundamentally ignorant. The El Nino and La Nina effects are the biggest example of this, in that it can change regional temperatures across the entire globe, it can cause algal blooms, which in turn are a key part of the climate model.
A prolonged El Nino is reported to have helped provoke the French Revolution by causing famines all over Europe. Crop failures and record low temperatures/rainfall have profound effects on the environment and the local biospheres climate effects. Death of biological material (crop failures) is usually tied to CO2 and Methane release through the biological processes that result, this is not to mention that prolonged cold periods (El Nino lasted over a decade at the time of the French revolution) result in less plant growth and more CO2 production through fuel burning. Then it would have likely led to a lot more deforestation than it likely would today.
My objections to computer modeling is that all they are is a model. If you put the wrong equation into the model, the answer is wrong.
The one thing I've never heard factored in is the amount of thermal energy emitted by living organisms and our society. From the estimates I've read, all the biomass on earth produces roughly 3-4 days the amount of solar energy received from the sun. Essentially the Earth is receiving 369 days worth of energy, for only 365 days in a year.
It's all a matter of equations, and the computer models have always put out unsatisfactory answers. I remember one being laughed at for predicting ocean rises of 1 cm per year, and I believe we've had approximately 0.01 cm per year.
My point is that the climate scientists' jobs depend on the climate being in danger. If there weren't fires we wouldn't have firemen, and if we didn't have crimes we wouldn't have police, so if there isn't a climate crisis we wouldn't have climate scientists and there's no provisions to protect us from rogue scientists but there are provisions to protect us from rogue cops. None of these models are repeated, no one can confirm the results as even being valid, they're just guesses.
Perhaps I just have a problem with trusting people in white coats telling me the sky is falling, but it all sounds too much like Chicken Little to me. I need to know the firemen aren't burning buildings down before I'm willing to pay them to put out fires. Equally I need to know Climate Scientists aren't hyping this up just to keep their careers alive.
As I've already said, I don't have a problem with the hardcore evidence and I believe global warming is happening. My problem is with the explanations and predictions, because they all seem either too simplistic or just bunk. Perhaps it's just a problem in the translation from the scientific and non-scientific lexicons, just like the major problems with explaining evolution to an American.
I mostly agree with you, except it's dangerous to compare weather models to climate models.
I think this statement by the author is a bit disingenuous: "If correlation doesn't prove causation, what does? Taken to its logical conclusion, you could observe the same result in a hundred experiments and dismiss it as merely a strong correlation."
The problem here is that there are no actual experiments done on the climate - it's all models, the outputs of which are essentially unverifiable. In other words, nobody is taking a test planet Earth and a control planet Earth and filling the test version's atmosphere up with CO2 and seeing what the difference is, much less repeating this and getting the same results.
That is why, despite the fact that these models are based on scientific theory, the models themselves are not, strictly speaking, "science". For the record, I believe global climate change is probably happening, and is probably caused by human activity.
Damn, that lost 10 minutes of my life. Not that I don't agree with the article, but I was really reading to get to the part which discusses the concequences of global warming, as suggested in the introduction. But there isn't one.
Anyways, it's worth clicking around, he writes some pretty interesting things.
Freemand Dyson has another objection to climate modelling: it does not take into account the way climate interacts with biomass. Simple calculations show that even small changes in global biomass absorb huge amounts of atmospheric CO2.
How does that mesh with the steady increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last 50+ years? I mean it seems like a simple test if the rate of absorption is slower than production then the concentration increases which it has.
PS: There is huge and then there is HUGE, once you start talking about millions of tuns of a gas it's hard to get an idea of scale.
I'm quite willing to believe that greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere, but I've always wondered how large the effect is compared to the other things that change the climate. Since the earth has been both hotter and colder than it is now, before we even existed, it seems possible that the increase of CO2 from people might not be all that big of a factor. Does anyone have any information along these lines?
If we must take everything in order of most important to least important, then doing anything that doesn't affect this most important thing is a colossal waste of time.
If we are affecting the temperature of the planet in a way that will make it uninhabitable to us, it behooves us to do anything and everything we can to make our impact less. Whether or not it is the biggest contribution to the problem. Plus, solving the smaller problem may give us insights to the larger problem.
I have a simple question, in the spirit of "What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?": How many years of dropping temperatures does it take before global warming is no longer an acceptable hypothesis?
Well, never. It's always an acceptable hypothesis, because maybe you haven't considered all the evidence yet. What if CO2 causes global warming exactly as scientists predict, but the Sun is going out?
However, if your question is, would several years of falling temperatures make it more likely that global warming due to CO2 doesn't exist, then here is the answer:
It depends. There are several other major factors in play determining the temperature of the planet beyond CO2. For example, if average sunlight received dropped for 10 years in a row, a rise in CO2 might not be sufficient to counteract that. However, if you didn't find anything else in play, it would be strong evidence that CO2 does not cause warming, at least not on the time scale you're looking at.
This would be an very surprising result though, since we know that CO2 is a "greenhouse gas" - it traps heat. If higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere did not cause increases in temperature, it would be weird and shocking.
Models that predicted a monotonic rise in temperature due to mankind's influence can not be used to extract mankind's putative signal when it turns out that they were wrong.
It's important not to let global warming hysteria color your view of the science. There's a radical difference between "mankind is the dominant force of global climate change and mankind is causing catastrophic global warming that we must avoid at all costs" and "mankind is adding a small delta below the noise level of natural climate", and the range of things in between. If it does turn out that the sun is getting dimmer and that turns out to have a major effect on climate (and I have seen climate scientists flat-out deny this is true), then it bounds the effect man can be having and moves us closer to the second statement.
Every year that is colder instead of warmer bounds the warming effect we can be having. Frankly it's already pretty small.
That's not true. You could have an arbitrary number of years that were colder in a row, with rising CO2 levels, and still have a world where CO2 causes a temperature rise. It would simply require a countervailing force that's stronger.
The noise level is irrelevant; I'm not sure why you would bring it up. If there are naturally forces that fluctuate up and down in a random walk, and CO2 is a much smaller but consistently up force, inevitably we'll wind up with increasing temperatures over time. You could argue there are larger climatic signals (not noise) that we should be concerned about, but what you actually said is simply wrong.
Trying to transition global warming fearmongering into "climate change" fearmongering should be laughed out of politics. Climate science has a long way to go before it proves that "climate changes" are both significantly caused by man, are significantly worse than what would have changed anyhow, can be significantly improved by any particular action we can take, and that such actions would be cost-effective. (When you start to look at the problem like this and see what is really scientifically necessary, you start to realize just how far we are from this, by even the most optimistic estimates.)
(The word "fearmongering" in my previous paragraph is not an accident. It's great to research climate change in the spirit of science and look at what's really there; science isn't fearmongering, fearmongering isn't science. There's a lot of very non-scientific stuff occuring in the global warming hysteria field, though. If you want to tell yourself that it's only the non-scientists doing that, I won't argue the point, but it doesn't make the hysteria go away.)
