The Global Warming Thread

Recent heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years

Take that you would be next Ice age!

I heard a story on NPR yesterday about a town in Texas where the biggest employer in town - a meat processing plant, closed down because there weren't enough cattle (because of the drought) to sustain the plant. pretty much wiped out the economy of the town.
for people in the northeast, Sandy was a wake-up call as to the realities of climate change.
people are slowly starting to realize (even if they don't understand) that climate change isn't just a theory, or a hypothesis. it's reality, and it has a very real and concrete impact on their lives.

The problem is that the very same sources who provided the predictions said themselves that 15 years would be statistically significant. I mean that's the whole point. Of course they can come back and say that it ain't so, but it doesn't exactly help their credibility.
I mean that's the ironic part, your skeptical science article does exactly what it accuses the other side of doing: post hoc weaseling.

And I still don't understand how that cherry picking argument is valid to begin with. The analogy with the gun is flawed as it is the other side that is checking predictions against real data, they're not making predictions themselves. So a more apt analogy would be this: I fire a shotgun from 50m onto a wall and I predict that the spread will be so that no two impact holes are closer together than 1cm. Now you go an find two impact holes that are only 5mm separated from one another. According to your definition, that would be cherry picking, but it would still prove my prediction wrong and invalidate the model on which I based my prediction upon, cherry picking or not. The same has happened here: It was said that there couldn't be a 15 year period with no statistical significant warming. Well, we found one, so cheery picking or not, it invalidates the models on which the prediction was based upon.

Anyway, my return question would be at what point the period of time would be long enough to be statistically significant and why previous publications did mention a 15 year timeframe as significant.

Why are we still talking about this?

Because a non-scientist/non-statistician is reading psuedo-science blogs that are easy to follow and keeps parroting the drivel here.

The real problem is that the scientific community only publishes in academic journals without good PR to explain the points to the media. Plus, scientific claims are very conservative and don't make great headlines.

But we're not.
Of course human contribution to warming has been constant all along, or rather even growing. Nobody with half a brain would deny that.
What I'm arguing (and I've provided ample evidence from actual scientific papers, you know, the ones published in actual scientific journals and not only blog posts) is that the human contribution is up to 50% smaller than assumed in the IPCC models.

Here's the quote again:
”The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”


Now you can play semantics all day long about the meaning of "discrepancy" but the clue is in the first four words: THE SIMULATIONS RULE OUT... it doesn't get any clearer than that.

Again, I highly doubt that claim. By the same token I could claim that the warming of the 1980s and 90s is statistically insignificant and therefore we haven't had any warming for half a century.

You see, in science, there's usually this principle called falsification. If your theory can predict such a wide variety of outcomes, then it's effectively meaningless. Using the exact same logic, I can get to a 0.2°C per decade warming rate by declaring the past 15 years as statistically insignificant and tuning my models to the 1980s-90s rate of warming. Or I can get to a 0°C per decade warming rate by calling the 15 years of warming statistically insignificant and using the non-warming before and after to tune my models.

What I'm saying is that when you take a step back, it really looks as if the truth is in the middle, as if there are natural cycles underlying anthropogenic warming. That would fit very well with the alternating warming and non-warming phases and it would lead to a 0.1°C per decade warming rate.

BLASPHEMER!!!!! THINK OF THE POLAR BEARS!!!!

I just love the way you talk about 'scientific papers', (like they're some special classification of publication), when it suits you but when we point out what the IPCC report actually SAYS, you seem to imply it's some other type of publication, produced by people who don't know what they're talking about.

Either we're going to accept the publications produced by climate scientists or we're not, you can't have it BOTH ways. You can't just select the ones you like and ignore the others. Well, not without making yourself look a total bloody idiot, anyway.

I stopped there too, deciding not to be a statistician, but a brewer. I'm not very current on the stuff anymore (10yrs.), but at least I can follow an argument.

The most frustrating part of this whole ordeal is that instead of looking at the overwhelming evidence, that someone takes a contrary point of view and then takes a confirmation bias approach to learn about the issue.

This isn't a David vs. Goliath climate change skeptic situation. If anything, those that are trying to get the world to pay attention to and do something about human contribution to climate change are the David in this scenario, and Goliath are the powers that be that have something to lose by actually having to pay the actual costs of accruing wealth and power.

Unfortunately, Science God is not as great of a motivator as Hebrew God, but at least s/he's consistent.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr...isleading_climate_change_claims_by_david.html

I have. Multiple times, both from interviews as well as from papers. E.g. I've provided a paper by James Hansen himself.

Why not?

The difference between 0.2 an 0 is exactly the same as that between 0 and 0.2...if one is statistically insignificant over a 15 year timespan, then so is the other

How so?

Well, maybe you should read about dissenting opinions instead of outright rejecting them.
That doesn't mean that you or I should belief everything, far from it. I would never align myself with any right-wing climate-change-denying blog, but it doesn't hurt to read some arguments first, before deciding if there's any merit to them. People like Watts publish everything that seems to contradict current orthodoxy on climate change, even if some of these objections contradict one another. That's of course ridiculous. But only because they use the shotgun approach of throwing everything at the IPCC doesn't mean they never hit the target.

That depends on how you define "environment". Sure, there were things like the deforestation of England, but in return there came luxuries from abroad. In any way, a nice apartment is a preferable environment for me than a moist cave.

Actually, I'm not so sure about the "centuries" part...decades, yes, but not centuries, certainly not in any meaningful manner.

There IS lot's of cyclical data from before this century, it's just that the resolution isn't particularly good. We can only identify very long cycles from proxy data.

Ok, here's the IPCC consensus: Anthropogenic global warming has only kicked in after around 1950. Before that, it was lost in the noise. So all we really have to base our models on is the period from 1950 to now. Looking at it, temperatures were flat from 1950 to the late 1970s, then we see rapid warming till the late 1990s and it has been flat since.

But we can also look further back and what do we see...? A phase of rapid warming that in fact is unexplained by the latest IPCC report and which according to the models shouldn't be there.

So when we look at the last century, we see this: slight cooling - rapid warming - slight cooling/flat temperatures - rapid warming - flat temperatures
Personally, I see a cyclical development there. The climate models that were used for the last IPCC report on the other hand were tuned to that recent rapid warming phase, as it was assumed that this was all due to the increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The flat phase we see now casts that in doubt. So in reality, I'm looking at a larger picture than those blindly defending these models that really only look at the 1980s and 1990s.

As much as i enjoy reading your posts benztown you arent going to get anywhere with this group. You are wasting your time. It reminds me of the Obama failure thread (now buried on page 2 0r 3 because Obama doesnt have failures you know).

Its just too easy for the intellectually dishonest to label anyone who casts a tiny bit of doubt about how much we truly know about the global climate as a "denier" so they dont have to think or use deductive reasoning.

Well, they are...

Actually, I'm the only one here who has quoted the latest IPCC report.
And no, the IPCC report is NOT a scientific paper. The IPCC is a political entity, not a scientific one, although one that heavily relies on scientists.

So far, among the two of us, you're the only one rejecting scientific papers.

But let me propose a radical idea: What if we started to use our own brains?
You know, not just quoting scientists and treating them as demigods and their messages as revelation (and those we don't like as heretics), but actually thinking about their arguments, deconstructing them, understanding them, and then matching them against the facts. Since we can't just repeat all the studies ourselves, we can for the sake of simplicity even assume that none of those who got their papers published are willfully lying/cheating and that their methodology is sound. However, what we should investigate is their inferences. Look at what the experiment/study in question actually shows and where they run with it. You most likely won't need to be a scientist to do that, only brave enough to reason.

Sapere aude