Comments on: Climate Updates

By: Xealot

Xealot — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:52:12 +0000

Science involves hypothesis and experimentation. Global Warming is a hypothesis, but there is no way to experiment with it. In order to experiment one has to be able to create an exact set of circumstances, setup a control group and be able to reproduce those results consistently over time.

One cannot reproduce the entire Earth and play with CO2 levels with all other factors remaining equal. Thus experimentation is impossible. The system is too large to examine in the traditional scientific manner, any attempt to do so is doomed to failure. Those who want to doom our economy with repressive regulation designed to combat an unproven thing have an agenda that has nothing to do with saving the Earth.

There’s a common sense solution to all of this. Do nothing. Our technology continually improves on its own. The efficiency of engines, factories and the like gets better as we learn more. Waste gasses are exactly that, waste, and a source of inefficiency. The free market must be given an opportunity to increase efficiency (and thus profit) on its own. The more technology is regulated, the less chance there is of breakthroughs.

Personally, if someone built a car that was cheap, affordable, not a tin can (very important) and clean, I’d buy it. So would most anyone. Make it a marketing initiative (Toyota has had some success with this) to buy cleaner cars, rather than government fiat that says everyone must buy them. Then poof, CO2 emissions go down, no government regulation is required and if there is any man made global warming (doubtful) then it is greatly reduced.

Science is extremely important, but it must be accurate science, free of political concerns. And equally important is Common Sense, something that’s consistently lacking from the modern world.

By: tomw

tomw — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:50:43 +0000

My late father told me about ‘stackup of tolerances’ when manufacturing turbojet engines[and cars].
Seems to me that these ‘scientists’ are beyond any measurable meaning when you consider the ‘stackup of tolerances’ in their raw data and their self-designed ‘correction factors’. Interpolation of data when there are gaps deludes the ‘scientist’ into thinking that they have ‘covered all bases’. Using dendro data for the first chunk of time, and then throwing it out because it does not match recent, more ‘valuable[accurate]‘ readings, is insane, and totally unscientific. If the dendro readings are crap now, why do we consider them sacrosanct from the because they are old?
This whole mess is a joke. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How much snow fell in Shasta? How many cubic feet per minute must flow in the Ganges? There is no way to measure all of the components of “climate”. It cannot be done.
The idea of AGW could have been demonstrated or denied by using actual temperature measurements from areas that have relatively complete raw data measurements, have few modifiers such as encroaching cities, and all the rest. [See Indonesia on the equator where angle of incidence effect is small]
Then, using the “Scientific Theory”, show how the addition of XX Gt of CO2 to the atmosphere, between these particular years, raised the temperature X.YYYY C.
To my knowledge, to date, there is no proposed theory, just the generalization that ‘there has to be some effect from adding CO2 to the atmosphere’.
That is not a theory, that is a guess.

By: ArtD0dger

ArtD0dger — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:05:04 +0000

I found this to be a rather interesting assertion. From CRU email 1079108576:

I also think people need to come to understand that the scientific
>> uncertainties work both ways. We don’t understand cloud feedbacks.
>> We don’t understand air-sea interactions. We don’t understand
>> aerosol indirect effects. The list is long. Singer will say that
>> uncertainties like these mean models lack veracity and can safely be
>> ignored. What seems highly unlikely to me is that each of these
>> uncertainties is going to make the climate system more robust against
>> change. It is just as likely a priori that a poorly understood bit
>> of physics might be a positive as a negative feedback.

So “Richard” (Richard Somerville?) thinks that there are a lot of unknown factors, but they are just as likely to contribute to catastrophe as to stability. But as you have frequently pointed out, Warren, positive feedback mechanisms are rare in natural and dynamic systems precisely because they drive the system towards regimes where they are no longer operative.

With this kind of naive physical intuition, it is no wonder that these people were able to convince themselves that they were the prophets of an apocalypse.

By: bj chippindale

bj chippindale — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:36:38 +0000

Per the “A” argument, my the question arises, what did the climate look like the last time we saw this level of CO2? Given that the climate changes slowly to reach a stable state with this level and will take hundreds of years to do so, it isn’t a bad idea to check it out. At the levels we are at you have to go back about 3 million years. The ocean was at least 20-30 meters deeper and the temperature 2-3 degrees warmer. So we can know that whatever negative feedbacks exist, they don’t prevent conditions that we would find “uncomfortable”. Lindzen has proposed the Iris, and Spencer echoes his notion that the climate is self-correcting but there are limits to that… we know that it actually has more metastable states than the two WE are so familiar with (glacial and interclacial).

Moreover, the CO2 released to date is CO2 sequestered even further back. The “tipping points” that are likely to be tripped if we let the temperature go far past the added 2 degrees currently locked in, involve methane and desertification of rainforests and loss of albedo at the poles. Some HAVE apparently tripped in past interglacials and contribute to past variability… but now would be added to the human volcano that is driving CO2 up.

I think I will not try to do all these at once.