Peter Hadfield (potholer54) talks on the deceitful quoting of the emails stolen from CRU in 2009
Juliette Jowit in The Guardian puts some more of them in context.
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Potholer54 has written a letter to Monkton that you will want to read, and he's also made a video that you will want to see. First the letter (from here):
Open letter to Christopher Monckton - please return to the debate
Dear Mr. Monckton,
A couple of months ago you entered into a debate with me…
I've never met Bjorn Lomborg. Never exchanged emails or shared a public forum with him. Although I have seen him speak twice, and I have to concede he's a compelling character, one who's almost impossble to ignore. Until now, I just couldn't figure out how someone as obviously bright and dedicated…
Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I ho8pe you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News December 6, 2009 Chuckle, Copenhagen, CPRS, SCAR, Ocean…
A parliamentary inquiry found no wrongdoing by scientists at the University of East Anglia. At issue were emails stolen from the university and offered as evidence of improper behavior by climate scientists:
The committee's report entitled The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research…
Alex:
You may have no clue what is going on in research in your long list of arguments from ignorance in [comment #490](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…). It does not follow, however, that nobody knows anything about these factors. Your gallop of lazy arguments from ignorance reads like a re-hash of tired old denialist talking points rather than an honest summary of remaining uncertainties in the research.
Instead of whining here about how ignorant you are, go to Skeptical Science or Real Climate, look up topical posts, and review their sources. Then you don't have to take either site's word for it but still be pointed to topical research on the subjects to learn. You can subsequently use Google scholar to look up other papers on the subjects to verify that SkS & RC are accurately interpreting/presenting the literature if you like.
As for this gem of yours:
This is nonsense as far as attributing warming goes. Estimating climate sensitivity to a forcing is unrelated to attributing warming. The latter, as noted, can be done with some basic physics and observations.
At any rate, the mainstream estimate for climate sensitivity (~3K per CO2 doubling) can be derived easily from paleodata (for example in this [press conference](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTTlAAiwgwM) at the recent AGU, which I am fairly certain someone upthread has already linked to).
Also, what is your source for:
"aerosol forcings are poorly understood, and cloud feedbacks are highly uncertain"?
Harvey @465:
"As you know, I think, skeptics are not saying that there is no warming in the upper troposphere, but that it is not warming at the predicted magnitude. Are you claiming that the predicted magnitude of upper tropospheric warming can be derived from basic physics without GCMs? Lindzen certainly explicitly says that it can't. "
Look, this is really basic stuff, Harvey. The vertical temp profile in the tropics is observed to follow closely to the moist adiabat. This is a consequence of basic physics - we expect it to follow closely to the moist adiabat, as we observe that it does.
The atmosphere in most of the tropics is close to water-saturated, and as a parcel of air rises, and cools as its pressure decreases, it releases latent heat of vaporization as the cooling causes water to condense out. These two processes, cooling from decreasing pressure and heat release from condensation, create a pretty stable vertical temperature profile in the tropics.
If one increases the temperature of the overall vertical profile, the heat transported upwards increases - a simple consequences of the increased absolute humidity of a warmer parcel of air near saturation. This increases the relative difference between surface temp and troposphere temp.
This relationship applies whether one approaches it from increasing surface temperatures, or from increasing troposphere temperatures. The moist adiabat enforces the difference, as long as the vertical temperature profile follows closely to the moist adiabat. If there is a mechanism that increases surface temperature, one will predict a relatively larger troposphere temperature increase. If there is a mechanism that increases the troposphere temperature, one will predict a relatively lesser surface temperature increase.
No matter what the cause of the temperature increase, one very strongly predicts, from basic physics, that there will be more warming in the tropical troposphere than at the tropical surface. This is simply a result of the basic physics of warming, and not a "signature" of anything. It certainly is nothing specific to AGW.
The models show this - not because it is programmed in, but because it falls out of the basic physics programmed into the models. If there is in fact no trop trop amplificatin of warming, then something is wrong with our very basic understanding of physics.
As it turns out, we now know that the historic measurements of the Trop Trop temperatures and especially of the temp trends, are simply not very good. The error bars for the historic measurements are very wide - wide enough that they include the model results. More recent more accurate measurements do not include enough years to get good trends - but so far are also not incompatible with the model results.
Bottom line, there is nothing as yet in the measurements that can be used either to clearly confirm or to invalidate the model results - or the expectations from basic physics - but as we increase our understanding of the errors in the measurement, and find other means of measuring temps and heat content, we find the results trending toward those predicted by the models and the basic physics.
Also bottom line, the trop trop 'hotspot' is not a signature of anything - it is simpy a feature of the physics controlling vertical temp profiles in the tropics.
Diversion!
Alex Harvey position, apparently: a) Humans are burning fossil fuels, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere, which causes warming. b) A 40 year warming trend has been observed (but predicts nothing). c) Entirely coincidentally, there are long-term cycles we know nothing about and have no evidence for, or some other unknown unknown, that is causing (b). This follows from turning Ockham on his head, and because Alex doesn't know what else to say to people at the dinner table.
Alex Harvey position, apparently: a) Basic physics tells us there should be trop trop amplification. b) GCM models are based on that basic physics. c) The GCM models are the basis for attributing the observed warming to CO2. d) We have failed to observe trop trop amplification of the predicted magnitude. e) The conclusion is that basic physics is wrong, so the GCM models are wrong, so there is no basis for attributing the observed warming to CO2; this follows from turning Ockham on his head and discounting the possibility that observations of the magnitude of trop trop amplication are inaccurate.
From new paper by Foster and Ramsdorf in Environmental Research Letters:
We analyze five prominent time series of global temperature (over land and ocean) for their common time interval since 1979: three surface temperature records (from NASA/GISS, NOAA/NCDC and HadCRU) and two lower-troposphere (LT) temperature records based on satellite microwave sensors (from RSS and UAH). All five series show consistent global warming trends ranging from 0.014 to 0.018 K yrâ1. When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability), the global warming signal becomes even more evident as noise is reduced. Lower-troposphere temperature responds more strongly to El Niño/southern oscillation and to volcanic forcing than surface temperature data. The adjusted data show warming at very similar rates to the unadjusted data, with smaller probable errors, and the warming rate is steady over the whole time interval. *In all adjusted series, the two hottest years are 2009 and 2010* [emphasis mine]
Note: ERL has an impact factor of 3.049 - placing it way above the bottom-feeding Lindzen/Choi article.
> Diversion!
I was waiting for someone to proclaim "Bingo!" - surely someone has been marking off their card ;-)
I just need Alex to dismiss my last post as a "strawman", bypassing the opportunity to explain how it diverges from his actual view.
Alex Harvey:
In the sense that the actual increase in H2O vapor at the hotspot is less than model results which means there is less H2O feedback at that point HOWEVER, the lack of hotspot temperature profile means the surface is warmer relative to the hotspot than it would be if there were a hotspot temperature profile. The net difference in warming at the surface with and without the hotspot is only a fraction, if anything, of the difference in warming at the hotspot level. So this means the models would be better at calculating surface climate sensitivity than hotspot climate sensitivity.
How do you leap to that conclusion? I thought you were going to say failure to observe the hotspot would suggest that the arguments for water vapor feedback from GCMs were invalid, not the warming from CO2 rise itself. But as I point out just above, the error at the surface won't be as great.
I don't agree that it's so critically important for surface temperature as temperature at the hotspot level. And of course, the surface is where it matters.
By the way, it is theoretically possible to check that the equatorial lapse rate expectation occurs in reality by measuring (with sondes) the actual temperature of the atmosphere at the equator. They should be making accurate measurements now that would confirm the lapse rate follows the saturated adiabatic up to the Tropopause. The only way there could be no hotspot with warming would be if the equatorial atmosphere did not always follow the saturated adiabatic expectation. If measurements from long ago do not imply a hotspot now then it either means those measurements were wrong or the satuarated adiabatic expectation is wrong. Ask yourself which of those is more likely.
Also by the way, if you're serious you really need to ask professionals about these issues rather than just the amateurs (myself included) here. Just because you have trouble understanding what the folks at realclimate say is not justification for trying to score points with us.
> So this means the models would be better at calculating surface climate sensitivity than hotspot climate sensitivity.
This is why I earlier tried to stimulate some thinking by asking Alex for the precise definition of climate sensitivity (#167), and reiterating the request in #392 along with how it relates to tropospheric observations.
> Also by the way, if you're serious you really need to ask professionals about these issues rather than just the amateurs (myself included) here. Just because you have trouble understanding what the folks at realclimate say is not justification for trying to score points with us.
Indeed. And not the first time this has been pointed out.
Loth #499, you tell me if it matters. Jeff Harvey thinks he can bury his head in the sand and pretend that the Lindzen/Choi paper doesn't exist because the impact factor of APJAS is low. Let's ignore the fact that one of LC09's serious critics - Chung - has cited LC11 and suggested he may have observations supporting it. Meanwhile, you think I need to read an anonymous blog and that does need to be discussed? It is revealing for the "anything goes" mentality for supporting climate alarm and the "gatekeeping" mentality for anything that disagrees.
Lee #501, you are still evading the question I asked by answering a question that I didn't ask. You are discussing a simplified model of the atmosphere, aren't you. Of course it's simple if you choose to discuss a simplified model. You are pretending all the other confounding processes like convection and cloud formation don't exist so that you claim it is all derived from basic physics. You have also evaded the question _can the predicted magnitude of the warming trend in the topical upper troposphere be derived without the models?_ Lindzen says they can't, and I think you know he is right.
Chris O'Neill, "if you're serious you really need to ask professionals about these issues rather than just the amateurs (myself included) here". True. To be sure, I sometimes do ask questions at RealClimate (although note again that the majority of questions from Alexander Harvey there will be another Alex Harvey - not me - and I hasten to add that he has more science behind him than I do). In fairness, I wasn't intending to get involved in a long discussion here and was largely baited into it. I am glad to have learnt about the wood for trees site, and to have been corrected on the "fingerprint" matter. I would like to ask some questions about the hotspot although I haven't seen a thread at RealClimate in a long time that is relevant to this topic.
Again the inkwell calls the paper black.
>*Continued failure to observe the hotspot at the predicted magnitude may not prove that CO2 is not causing warming (and of course no one disputes that CO2 is causing warming in the first place), but it may suggest that all of the models are likely to be useless for calculating climate sensitivity*
"[U]seless" is a far outlier possibilty. More likely is a measurent issues as has been described in SkS. Or it could be that the models can be improved some more, or a combination of these two.
> Loth #499, you tell me if it matters.
I can't read your mind and I don't pretend to. *That's why I asked* why you appear to think it matters.
> Let's ignore the fact that one of LC09's serious critics - Chung - has cited LC11 and suggested he may have observations supporting it.
As you yourself pointed out on re-reading it, he has a suggestion that may or may not support it. That's pretty thin gruel, and yet you seem to be keen to put a much stronger spin on it. In the process you claim people are ignoring a ... "fact" that isn't quite as factual as you claim.
> It is revealing for the "anything goes" mentality for supporting climate alarm and the "gatekeeping" mentality for anything that disagrees.
I guess you *would* call it "gatekeeping" if you point-blank refuse to acknowledge serious critique of "anything that disagrees". But again this presumes facts that I submit are not in evidence.
Speaking of your particular brand of unskeptical "reverse gatekeeping", and of points that you **point-blank refuse** to engage with despite repeated invitations to: we're already seeing more than twice as much warming as LC11's climate sensitivity would predict. Why on earth do you think that **alone** doesn't (at least) *suggest* that something is badly wrong with LC11? And unlike recent (and IIRC ignorant) "gaps"-based speculation, can you propose a reason for which there is at least a plausible chance of support when the full set of evidence is considered?
> In fairness, I wasn't intending to get involved in a long discussion here and was largely baited into it.
Ah, hah hah, absolutely ROFLMAO!
That's the best laugh I've had all week - because I, for example, can remember your **baiting** appearance at #1, and most of the games you've played since then.
Did you seriously think you could drop a bunch of bogus memes into this thread and not have people point out that you're all hat and no cattle?! But turning around and calling that "baiting" - priceless!
You're free to leave at any time, you asswipe personal-responsibility-avoider. Like the intellectually dishonest sack of shit that you are, you consider the failure of anyone here to roll over and accept your troll talking points to be "bait"ing.
Indeed, if
isn't bait, nothing is.
Harvery @ 510:
"Lee #501, you are still evading the question I asked by answering a question that I didn't ask."
No, I'm not.
" You are discussing a simplified model of the atmosphere, aren't you. Of course it's simple if you choose to discuss a simplified model. You are pretending all the other confounding processes like convection and cloud formation don't exist so that you claim it is all derived from basic physics."
No, I'm pointing out that the tropical vertical temperature profile is OBSERVED to follow reasonably closely to the moist adiabat. Read that again - I've said it before. OBSERVED. This also follows expectations from the basic physics. convection, BTW is the mechanism by which the moist adiabat is established and maintained, and condensation (including cloud formation) is fundamental as well. But most important, the moist adaiabat temp profile is OBSERVED.
You have also evaded the question can the predicted magnitude of the warming trend in the tropical upper troposphere be derived without the models? Lindzen says they can't, and I think you know he is right."
Lindzen is wrong. It is almost trivially easy, as I understand it, to predict the magnitude of the upper trop trop warming trend. As I said above in different words, one simply calculates the moist adiabat for the increased average surface temperature, using the observation that tropical temperature follows the moist adiabat. The model results confirm that other modelled processes do not substantially alter that temp profile, but are not necessary for the base prediction.
I'm not claiming to have the details perfect - I'm am out-of-practice molecular geneticist, not a climatologist. But I alsohave taken the elementary step of reading the textbook and review descriptions of the processes before diving piecemeal into the primary literature, and thIs particular element of climatology is in fact really simple. I'm also not taking your strategy of mining the primary literature for those few gems that you can use to support your pre-supposed conclusions, while ignoring the broad picture painted by the mass of literature.
Alex Harvey:
You can ask at unforced variations. And you should check through the last thread ( Tropical Tropospheric Trends again (again) before bothering them (and us).
'Baited'?! From the author of post #1, the man who describes Oreskes' work as 'sloppy' and 'hysterical' (sans evidence) and proclaims (ditto) that SkS is a propaganda site!
Give me an f*ing break!
Surely you don't believe any lurker who hasn't already imbibed the Kool(ing)-Aid is going to be daft enough to be sucked in by this schtick! Even you don't believe it!
If your talent was in any way commensurate with your arrogance you really might be formidable...
Lee, so which way do you want it? Is the lapse rate adjustment is an approximation tuned to match observations ("OBSERVED") - or is it something derived from physical principles? (HINT: It is OBSERVED - OBSERVED - OBSERVED - as you said.)
Peter Thorne admitted this in his recent comment at RealClimate:
Here is the IPCC AR4:
These are SIMPLIFIED models of UNRESOLVED PROCESSES.
You are confusing a simplied model with the real world.
Meanwhile, Lindzen is one of the world leading experts on convection parameterisation. Some of the approximations were developed by Lindzen himself. The ECHAM-5 GCM, for example, is still derived indirectly through Tiedtke parameterisations from the work of Lindzen.
Consider:
Lindzen (1966) Turbulent convection -- Malkus theory. Proc. NCAR Thermal Convection Colloquium. NCAR Tech. Note 24.
E. Schneider and R.S. Lindzen (1976). A discussion of the parameterization of momentum exchange by cumulus convection. J. Geophys. Res., 81, 3158-3160.
R.S. Lindzen and K.K. Tung (1976). Banded convective activity and ducted gravity waves. Mon. Wea. Rev., 104, 1602-1617.
Lindzen (1977) Some aspects of convection in meteorology. In Problems of Stellar Convection, J.P. Zahn, ed., Springer Verlag, New York, 128-141.
D. Stevens, R.S. Lindzen and L. Shapiro (1977). A new model of tropical waves incorporating momentum mixing by cumulus convection. Dyn. Atmos. and Oc., 1, 365-425.
R.S. Lindzen, A.Y. Hou and B.F. Farrell (1982). The role of convective model choice in calculating the climate impact of doubling CO2. J. Atmos. Sci., 39, 1189-1205.
Lindzen, R.S. (2003) The Interaction of Waves and Convection in the Tropics. J. Atmos. Sci., 60, 3009-3020.
Rondanelli, R., and R. S. Lindzen (2008), Observed variations in convective precipitation fraction and stratiform area with sea surface temperature. J. Geophys. Res., 113, D16119, doi:10.1029/2008JD010064.
And you think you know more!
The "convective adjustment" goes back to Manabe & Strickler 1964. It is an approximation, and the microphysics of this problem simply haven't been understood yet.
And what is the name of the textbook you are claiming to have read?
Is it just me, or is Alex now galloping so fast that his posts shift from blue to red as you scroll through them? It's, what, *four* more attempts since I posted my list 16 hours ago. Fantastic! The comedy quotient has raised substantially too...
One thing I got a laugh out of that seems to have gone through to the keeper - Alex claims (bullshittily, of course) that GCM's provide the main argument for high climate sensitivity. The unintended hilarity stems from the fact that GCM's suggest a comparatively low sensitivity compared to other derivations, and if you drop them, estimated sensitivity would go up.
Alex argues for low climate sensitivity by arguing for high climate sensitivity!
Round 19! DING!
The "National Association Of Scholars" has a nice little article on the trick's.
eg
"Climategate parts one and two are a series of leaked e-mails from arguably the most prominent researchers promoting the idea that humans are causing catastrophic global warming. The e-mails show the scientists involved to be violating their professional ethics with the result that climate science in particular and science as an institution more generally is brought into question.
The first group of e-mails released in 2009 showed scientists attempting to suppress or alter inconvenient data, destroying raw data so that others would be unable to analyze it, using tricks to change reported outcomes, conspiring to avoid legally required disclosure of taxpayer-funded data, and trying to suppress dissent by undermining the peer review process. On the latter point the researchers involved threatened to boycott and get editors fired at journals publishing findings questioning the urgency of the climate crisis.
Climategate 2 is a second release of e-mails, in November 2011, from the same cabal of scientists exposed in Climategate 1. There is little new to the revelationsâjust more hiding data, trying to figure out how to downplay dissent or have papers that would seem to undermine one part or another of anthropogenic global warming theory ignored or discredited.
To be clear, these e-mails do not disprove that humans are causing potentially catastrophic global warming. Whether or not humans are or are not, in fact, causing or contributing to dangerous climate change, the only thing clear that emerges from the Climategate e-mails is that the scientists claiming that âthe science is settledâ and that there is âconsensusâ among scientists that humankind are acting as planet killers, canât be trusted, nor can their research be pointed to as solid proof of anthropogenic global warming.
Some examples of the Climategate 2 e-mails will serve to make the point"..............
( http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=2319 )
On the [trick to claim that natural cycles are causing most of the temperature changes](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/12/curve-fitting-and…). Maybe Alex will find the claims convincing though.
And [tipping points that are only triggered at modern temperatures](http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/giant-plumes-methane-bubbling-surf…) can mess with climate sensitivity estimates that did not take them into account.
Not in a good way either.
> It is revealing for the "anything goes" mentality for supporting climate alarm and the "gatekeeping" mentality for anything that disagrees.
How revealing is it that the mathematicians "gatekeep" anything that disagrees with their calculation that 1+1=2?
Isn't it revealing how you gatekeep any facts presented to you that disagree with your beliefs?
> c) Entirely coincidentally, there are long-term cycles we know nothing about and have no evidence for, or some other unknown unknown
Given that is a merely cyclic TREND, since Alex also believes:
> A 40 year warming trend has been observed (but predicts nothing)
Then surely he believes that this cyclic trend predicts nothing.
So what is he doing here?
Ooh, the CAPITALS are starting to appear! Can COMPLETE MELTDOWN be far behind?
(And nice to see he has that one authority! That's a broad mind for you...)
Alex Harvey:
Just because something exists doesn't mean it has any value.
Alex Harvey:
That comment appears to have been made on the 6th December. Why is it that you complain that:
Wasn't the 6th December not very long ago? In any case your excuses are very weak. If you want to dump a pile of citations from Lindzen somewhere, why aren't you doing it at realclimate?
Troll's website: www.nas.org National Association of Scholars.
Dear troll, we already know about the National Association of Scholars, thanks.
> These are SIMPLIFIED models of UNRESOLVED PROCESSES.
So is the model of an electron moving through a regular lattice.
Yet we still have working semiconductors.
Jesus christ, harvey! That the tropical lapse rate follows closely to the moist adiabat is BOTH observed and expected from basic physics.
Sure the microscale convection processes are more complex - the air doesnt rise as a univorm sheet, there is a lot of mixing, we know that. Doesnt change the basic physics that leads to the expectation of a moist adiabat lapse rate, which basic physics are confirmed by the observation that the tropical lapse rate closely follows the moist adaibat. Modelling of convective processes - in the GCMs of various generations, as well as weather predictin and hurricane tracking models, which do pretty damn good jobs - leads to the conclusion that the general basic prediction does a pretty damn good job - and the moist adaibat remains at the heart of the vertical temp profile in the tropics, even with the convective complexity added.
You might as well argue that we cant possibly model airflow over a modern passenger jet liner, simply because we can't do an adequate job of fine-scale modelling of turbulent flow. Yes, teh fine scale physics is enormously complex, but nonetheless we can predict from basic physics the lift at a given speed, and can observe that we are closely correct by simply seeing an airplane flying in level flight.
Yes, Lindzen knowns more than I do about convecgtive processes. No, IK dont claim to knwo molre than he does. What I do claim to know, is that a lot of other very good scientists, who also know more than I do, and who do know as much as Lindzen does,have shown him to be wrong.
I also know that the tropical lapse rate continues to follow closely to the moist adaibat and that - from basic principles - as long as that remains true, regardless fo the microscale mixing processes that complicat ethe establishment of that lapse rate, that there is a strong prediction of a tropical troposhepre hot spot.
Again, harvey, why do you continue to rely on ONE expert, and refuse to consider the work of the many other experts who have shown that your expert is wrong - of the entire body of work, which taken as a whole establishes what I said above. That the historical measurements fo teh trop trop hot spot are not good, that the error bars are very wide, and that the model results fall within those error bars? And that attemtps tpo constrain the error, for exampel by derivning heat content from wind energy, tend to confirm valeus near the models? Admn taht modern more accuratne measurements, while not covering enough time to ge tgoodtrends, are converging toward model values? Why will you simply not consider all that evidence when making your claim?
Oh, and - textbooks? Weart, of course. Goosse, the online text. As well as a lifetime of reading practical meteorology - I was a competitive sailor, national championship calibre, and understanding weather at both microscale and system levels was kinda important. Also, of course, the last couple IPCC reports, which constitue extraordinarily good reviews of the current state of the literature.
*Jeff Harvey thinks he can bury his head in the sand and pretend that the Lindzen/Choi paper doesn't exist because the impact factor of APJAS is low*
To the vast majority of the climate science community, this article doesn't exist. Most won't pay any attention to it because there is a good reason it ended up in a bottom-feeding journal. And they know what that is, even if neophytes like Alex can't tell a sound journal from a stinker.
Lee pointed out:
Indeed, if we start with an observed saturated adiabatic profile 30 years ago and finish with an observed satuarated adiabatic profile now then there must be a hotspot IF those observations are accurate. The profile simply can't be a satuarated adiabat all along if a hotspot does not occur. If a hotspot doesn't occur then the upper Troposphere would have been too warm originally to have been adiabatically consistent with the surface, i.e. it would have been warmer than a parcel of saturated air lifted up to the same level.
Unfortunately, the amount of sonde observational cross-checking at the equator that was done 30 years ago was a lot less than now, I believe. Otherwise they could have checked that the humidity was reading what they expected (saturation) and if that was the case then they would have known that something was wrong with the temperature sensor because the lapse rate would not have been low enough.
The bottom line is, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the hotspot and the saturated adiabatic assumption. If there really is no hotspot then the saturated adiabatic assumption must be false.
@Chris O'Neill:
No:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/11/two-year-old-turk…
Note how gatekeeper Alex mined that quote.
It's really quite remarkable that, on a page called "On the trick to hide the context", someone would have the gall to snip Peter Thorne's post like that and omit a link, but there are a lot of things that are quite remarkable about the psychology and ethics of Alex Harvey and his ilk.
P.S.
Just a few comments after that one from Peter Thorne is one from another Alex-like moron, to which Gavin responds:
@ianam, 536:
Tanks for tracking down the source of that Alex Harvey quote mine. It really is stunning how dishonest quoting that single sentence was, striped from its context that way. Esepcially leaving out this sentence, just a few lines dwon from teh sentence he quoted:
" If it warms the troposphere warms with greater warming aloft. If it cools the troposphere cools at an increasing rate aloft. Models and observations concur on monthly to inter-annual timescales."
The models accurately model change in the tropical lapse rate on monthly to semiannual time scales. On the time scales for which we have good data, the models get it right. Gee, I wonder why Alex didn't include that in his quote mine?
Lee, you are wrong. No one - neither Lindzen, nor Fu et al., nor Thorne et al. - is claiming that the basic physics is in doubt.
We can confirm this by comparing what you are saying with the discussion in Peter Thorne's peer reviewed paper. Thorne et al. write (para 66):
Do you see that Lee? If the observations are right, _our understanding of the atmosphere is wrong_. There is none of this garbage in the peer reviewed literature saying that the basic physics and chemistry would have to be wrong too. This is the trick to hide the (problem). You are either confused (which may mean that even advanced readers like yourself can fall for these tricks to hide problems at sites like SkS), or failing that, you are engaging in a deliberate deception. Which would be funny - given that you are claiming I am being dishonest.
Thorne et al. continue (and I'm sorry to fill up the post with irrelevant words, but to forestall predictable comments about out of context quotes):
So much for Thorne et al., because Fu, Manabe & Johanson have more or less actually joined the skeptics. I reiterate that because Fu, Manabe & Johanson have not been engaged in an unedifying public brawl with skeptics, it is easy for them to be honest. Even though the hotspot was first predicted by Manabe himself, he can easily say that his prediction is falsified without loss of face - and that's what he does.
Instead of appealing to observational uncertainty, Fu, Manabe and Johanson simply assert that "_it is evident that the AR4 GCMs exaggerate the increase in static stability between tropical middle and upper troposphere during the last three decades_".
Can you see that they don't say "it is evident that the basic physics are wrong?"
Moreover, in the text, it is quite clear that they agree with Lindzen that the warming at the characteristic emission level can only be related to the warming at the surface by models.
E.g.
Or:
Do you see that again Lee? It is not a striking feature of a prediction from basic physics; it is a striking feature of "_GCMâpredicted_ climate change".
And note that they only hold open the possibility that the discrepancy is _partly_ a result of biases in the satellite data (para 20). This is, by the way, exactly what Lindzen said: "Given, the emphasis on errors leading to positive warming trend, it is intuitively unlikely that further errors will lead to much greater warming, though the possibility cannot, of course, be ruled out".
So I think it is a very good time to ask, therefore, that since you assert that Lindzen has been shown to be wrong (you are referring to Lindzen's assertion (p. 942) "How warming at the Ï = 1 level relates to warming at the surface is not altogether clear. It is at this point that models prove helpful."), please provide evidence for this. Because you wrote,
So who are they Lee? Here's predicting you won't bring forth any quotes from the peer reviewed literature to support your position.
Lee #539, I left that out because it's irrelevant - except to your straw man argument. (Once again, everyone agrees that there is _some_ warming aloft; this is about the _GCM-predicted magnitude_ of the warming).
Jeff #534, if you are interested in the story of how the Lindzen/Choi paper ended up in APJAS, let me know and I'll tell you. I look forward to your comments on Chung's decision to cite LC11 and to ignore the Dessler 2011 response.
Projects the arrogant and dishonest DKer.
Lindzen went Emeritus trying to get his paper [in a quality journal](http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2011/06/lindzen_goes_emeritus.php).
And Alex's commented there too.
Alex is such a clown with his predictions. Back in #94 he wrote/lied:
to which I responded with #141, with my 30 seconds of googling linking to Trenberth's own comments:
So contrary to Alex's pathetic lie, Trenberth's statement was repeatedly taken out of context and its meaning distorted and misrepresented. Alex idiotically denies this by simply paraphrasing Trenberth and then insisting that "he means exactly what he says" ... well of course he does, but the meaning of what he says needs context to be interpreted! I waver on whether Alex is so stupid that he doesn't comprehend this, because the stupidity is so well calculated to mislead, and to allow him to say that no one has provided any context that changes the meaning of what Trenberth wrote. Of course it doesn't do that, but rather it clarifies that he was talking about where the energy went, not that global warming had ceased, paused, taken a negative trend, etc. ad idiot nauseam.
Oh, jesus christ almighty
"Here's predicting you won't bring forth any quotes from the peer reviewed literature to support your position."
You are correct. I'm not going to join you in an intellectually dishonest battle of quote-mined, out-of-context quotes chosen to support a pre-determined position. I'm tired of arguing with someone who does.
Just one comment on your 540, Alex. A modeller saying that trop trop amplified warming is a prediction from the models does NOT mean that it can't also be predicted from other means. When you find a quote from a modeller saying that the models predict amplified warming, and use that to argue that they are saying that this means that no other methods can predict amplified warming, you are being dishonest, Alex.
You go on quote mining and being dishonest - you've become quite transparent. Me, I'll continue to rely on entire breadth of the scientific work in the area, not on " quotes... to support [my] position"
It seems he's well known there; Connolley comments:
Alex's utterly hypocritical lack of self-reflection is typical of septics (good term, William) ... to anyone else, his treatment of Lindzen as authoritative is transparently unscientific and intellectually dishonest, and yet he blabbers about "the "anything goes" mentality for supporting [one's view] and the "gatekeeping" mentality for anything that disagrees".
It's hard to locate a moment when he isn't being dishonest ... there was an acknowledgement of confirmation bias in `#`361`, but it seems to have been a freak occurrence.
Lee, so your entire argument rests on an appeal to authority and when pressed you are "tired of arguing" and cannot say who the authorities are. Right? Don't you think, if these authorities really exist, you should say who they are - even if only for the benefit of your other readers?
> So much for Thorne et al., because Fu, Manabe & Johanson have more or less actually joined the skeptics.
Er, did you *read* the Thorne quote you provided just before that? Because you sure as heck didn't *understand* it.
Thorne says there are several possible issues, *one* of which is most likely, and another (which is therefore *not* most likely) that you choose to highlight in order to use it to infer your chosen conclusion.
And I pointed out earlier that your characterisation of Fu et al (albeit somewhat supported by their own words) might be a somewhat exaggerated claim. Apparently you didn't understand that either.
> "it is evident that the AR4 GCMs exaggerate the increase in static stability between tropical middle and upper troposphere during the last three decades".
And it is evident from reading the paper that "tropospheric hotspot" != "static stability", although there are ways in which they are related. Yet you persist in implying they are, and implying still further conclusions that I doubt Fu et al would feel are justified.
> It is not a striking feature of a prediction from basic physics; it is a striking feature of "GCMâpredicted climate change".
Er, dude, you're reading something that is not there.
It may be a striking feature of GCM-predicted climate change *because* it is also a core prediction of basic atmospheric physics which the GCMs rely on and then build upon. Basic logic informs us that the fact that authors point out the former does *not* imply the authors are ruling out the latter - they may presume that savvy readers understand that already.
> I look forward to your comments on Chung's decision to cite LC11...
I look forward to your admission that you keep promoting a biased interpretation of Chung's cite based on cherrypicking the bits you prefer to focus on, even after you previously corrected yourself.
> Lee, so your entire argument rests on an appeal to authority and when pressed you are "tired of arguing" and cannot say who the authorities are.
ROFL!
Appeal to the most likely conclusion from the full body of evidence is most decidedly *not* appeal to authority. Whereas your quote-mining and refusal to respond to repeated observations that there is much evidence to suggest that LC11's sensitivity calculations are way off...is. And if you cannot understand the difference between appeal to body of evidence and appeal to authority you aren't equipped to debate the science. Especially if you accuse others of doing what you yourself implicitly condemn.
> And Alex's commented there too.
It's probably just unsupported speculation, but I've had moments where I wondered if Alex has some academic relationship to Lindzen - or just plays a fanboy on TV.
What's *far more* interesting is that Alex complains no-one is seriously discussing LC11, when there appears to be very serious critique a few comments below Alex's first one. And more comments by the same commenter elaborating further, and also noting that **even some readers at WUWT are "...starting to hedge their bets against [Lindzen]."**
Ouch.
Alex was more than happy @ 257 to brush off questions he couldn't be arsed addressing, but now thinks Lee should do his homework for him.
Obvious hypocrite is [still](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…) obvious...
Lee, your point is well made, but I was surprised that others didn't call it earlier when Alex tried @ 462 to sneak through his laughable claim that the bulk of arguments implicating Co2 as the cause of warming derive from GCMs. Alex is obviously keen on the fallacy of the excluded middle as a logical tool.
*Qui-Gon: I need a dunningkrugian count.
Obi-Wan: The reading's off the chart...over 20,000! Even Master Sunspot doesn't have a dunningkrugian count that high!*
Alex Harvey:
Sure, if you say so. Fu, Manabe and Johansen actually say:
"While satellite MSU/AMSU observations generally support GCM results with tropical deep-layer tropospheric warming faster than surface,"
So Manabe isn't saying his prediction is falsified. He's actually saying it's supported. Alex Harvey just wanted to mislead with the quotation out-of-context that followed the above:
"it is evident that the AR4 GCMs exaggerate the increase in static stability between tropical middle and upper troposphere during the last three decades."
By the way, it should be relatively easy to check that sondes from 30 or so years ago produced data that satisfied the saturated adiabatic assumption. If they did produce such data then (as long as today's sondes also produce such a temperature profile) there must be a hotspot in the data. No hotspot means they couldn't have produced the saturated adiabatic profile originally.
Alex Harvey still seems to be allergic to asking at realclimate. I wonder why that could be?
As has been noted, Alex has quite a habit of substituting his own inept, incompetent, incorrect, intellectually dishonest interpretations for what scientists actually say. I think Fu et. al. would be rather surprised to learn that they "have more or less actually joined the skeptics".
Given that he defends each argument up to the point of indefensibility, then just drops it and switches to a new 'but...' Alex appears to be road-testing to see which of them he'll/they'll get the best run out of.
God knows where he imagines he's going with this, but Real Climate will eat him alive, and I'm sure he knows it.
He seems to imagine he's good at this, but, sorry, Alex, the issue is that not only are you actually thoroughly mediocre, even if you weren't you're still on the wrong side of the argument. It's very much easier to be proven brilliantly right if you're not dismally wrong in the first place.
So, Alex tells me 'I bet you won't provide any quotes to support your position."
I tell him, I'm not going to play the dishonest quote-mining game with you, Alex.
Alex responds, "See, you can't name the authorities."
Alex, quote mining is different from naming authorities. Finding out of context snippets to support a predetermined position (what o do) is different from evaluating the entirety of the literature (which you call an 'appeal to authority'). What a slimy little dishonest fuck you are, Alex.
Anyway, you want a list of authorities? Here is a partial list of people who have been authors on papers relevant to the Trop Trop temp trends and the tropical lapse rate, extracted from a Scopus search for papers relevant to the tropical lapse rate, or to tropical troposphere warming. That search finds only a partial list of relevant papers, but still lists 85 papers going back to 1975, with 17 of them published in the last two years. This broad literature is the "authority" you say I'm inapropriately appealing to. Enjoy:
Krishna Murthy, B.V.
Folkins, I.
Haimberger, L.
Parker, D.E.
Tett, S.F.B.
White, W.B.
Parameswaran, K.
Vuille, M.
Venkat Ratnam, M.
Trenberth, K.E.
Titchner, H.A.
Thorne, P.W.
Suresh Raju, C.
Forster, P.M.D.F.
Rajeev, K.
Randall, D.A.
Rao, K.G.
Smith, L.
Ratnam, M.V.
Hodges, K.I.
Santer, B.D.
Mitchell, D.L.
Bradley, R.S.
Mehta, S.K.
Mehta, S.K.
Liou, K.N.
Butler, A.H.
Narayana Rao, D.
McCarthy, M.P.
Mapes, B.E.
Proffitt, M.
Miller, R.L.
Scaife, A.A.
Qin, W.W.
Miller, M.C.
Satoh, M.
Satheesan, K.
Rasch, P.
Meehl, G.A.
Mechoso, C.R.
Mears, C.
Rosenlof, K.H.
Ross, R.J.
Roy, A.J.
Santer, B.D.
Salby, M.L.
Nychka, D.
Nousiainen, T.
Okabe, H.
Oltmans, S.J.
Orton, G.S.
Pan, D.M.
Newell, R.E.
Nasuno, T.
Parker, D.E.
Pauluis, O.
Nakamura, K.
Peterson, T.C.
Murthy, B.V.K.
Petrova, L.I.
Morcrette, J.J.
Pigati, J.S.
Pirscher, B.
Podolske, J.
Power, S.B.
Prather, M.J.
Milly, P.C.D.
Wang, C.
Wang, M.
Warren, J.C.
Washington, W.M.
Weber, G.R.
Weickmann, K.
Wentz, F.J.
Wickert, J.
Wigley, T.M.L.
Wood, R.
Wu, B.
Wu, Z.X.
Xian, P.
Xie, S.P.
Yang, Y.
Yao, M.S.
Yokohata, T.
Yoshimori, M.
Yukimoto, S.
Yulaeva, E.
Zhang, J.
Zhou, J.
Zhou, T.J.
Zreda, M.
Zuidema, P.
Zweck, C.
von Storch, J.S.
Schmidt, G.A.
Schneider, S.H.
Schroder, T.M.
Sekercioglu, C.H.
Seman, C.J.
Shaffrey, L.C.
Sharp, W.D.
Shen, W.
Sherwood, S.C.
Sherwood, S.C.
Sigmond, M.
Smit, H.
Smith, R.B.
Soden, B.J.
Solomon, S.
Son, S.W.
Stott, P.A.
Strom, J.
Taguchi, M.
Taylor, K.E.
Thompson, D.W.J.
Thompson, D.W.J.
Thorne, P.W.
Thouret, V.
Tomisaka, Y.
Wagnon, P.
Wallace, J.M.
De Oliveira, P.
De-Zheng Sun,
DeMott, C.A.
Del Genio, A.D.
Donner, L.J.
Dronia, H.
Edwards, J.M.
Egger, J.
Eichelberger, S.J.
Elmore, D.
Enfield, D.B.
Farrara, J.
Fay, J.P.
Fereday, D.R.
Findell, K.L.
Foelsche, U.
Folland, C.K.
Forster, P.M.d.F.
Francou, B.
Frank, W.M.
Free, M.
Frierson, D.M.W.
Fujiwara, M.
Gaffen, D.J.
Garreaud, R.D.
Geller, M.A.
Gettelman, A.
Giannini, A.
Abe-Ouchi, A.
Aceituno, P.
Allen, M.R.
Almasi, P.F.
Ao, C.O.
Bao, Q.
Bengtsson, L.
Birner, T.
Borsche, M.
Bortz, S.E.
Boyle, J.S.
I just had a post held for moderation. it included details of a Scopus search retrieving a partial list 85 papers relevant to the tropical lapse rate or to tropical troposphere warming, with 17 of them in the last two years - the broad literature that Alex has been ignoring in favor of quote mining from the very few papers that include out-of-context snippets he can mine to support his predetermined position.
I included in that post the list of 160 authors of those papers, the authorities Alex asked for and claimed I was inappropriately appealing to. That list is almost certainly why it got held for moderation.
You on the other hand, Alex, are a slimy dishonest little f*. Note what Alex did.
He said the I would not be able to provide QUOTES supporting my position.
I responded by declining to enter a dishonest quote-mining contest, when it is an evaluation of the entire literature that matters.
Alex responded by saying I refused to name the authorities.
Quotes are not the same as authorities, Alex - especially when they are mined out-of-context quotes used to misrepresent the conclusions and context of a paper. You, however, are the same as an intellectually dishonest tool.
>Alex has been ignoring in favor of quote mining from the very few papers that include out-of-context snippets he can mine to support his predetermined position.
Yes indeed, as he has [numerous](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…) times in [this tread](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…). And [here](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…), I could go on, but then I'd have to wait in moderation.
Lee, your frustration with his terrible tactic is well founded.
Lee writes,
"You on the other hand, Alex, are a slimy dishonest little f*."
Looks like we have chipped away to reveal your intellectual foundations.
>>"You on the other hand, Alex, are a slimy dishonest little f*."
>*Looks like we have chipped away to reveal your intellectual foundations.*
More of Alex's grasping a straws. Its obvious to all but those caught up in their own confirmation bias that your behavior is annoying, particularly your poor practice of disingenuous cherry picking.
Finding Lee's annoyance threshold with such tactics says little if nothing about his intellectual foundation.
You on the other hand... your continued reliance on this practice, even after its been pointed out to you on multiple occasions, that perhaps gives us some insight.
Oh, right, everyone observing and documenting your repeated and repeated and repeated dishonesty reveals their intellectual foundations. Well of course you are right ... they have the intellectual foundations that you lack.
Note that I called him out in my first post in this thread, and Tim had already observed his habits and strategy, Alex having failed to answer the question Tim previously posed. It should be no surprise that Alex is still displaying the same traits.
No, it's because you used a blocked word.
By any objective measure, the intellectual foundations of someone are revealed to be those of a slimy dishonest little shit stain when that person mines one line out of a post, identifying that as "Lee writes", while ignoring all the scientific substance, such as
> ...Alex appears to be road-testing to see which of them he'll/they'll get the best run out of.
Nah, he's not that clever ;-) It's basically a bog-standard Gish Gallop - which reveals that those perpetrating it don't have enough knowledge/skills to figure out which are solid arguments and which are not, or they would weed out the crap ones themselves and lead with the strongest one.
If you check out what Alex led with on this thread, it says it all...
The radical and obvious misinterpretation of the very evidence he cites, in the least charitable way possible, while disingenuously asking how "we" can "get this into a better context" than he is "able to", may well and probably does reflect lack of intelligence, but it certainly reflects a severe lack of moral character -- a lack that has been amply evidenced ever since.
One interesting question is how it happened that someone who is not (other than this thread) a regular poster here and who says he "wasn't intending to get involved in a long discussion here" but was "largely baited into it" managed to post that fetid construction a mere 44 minutes after Tim put the article up.
Alex's comment about his own intelligence is striking in how clearly it demonstrates the Dunning Kruger effect:
Indeed, if you are lacking in intelligence then you can "see" inferences that aren't valid, while lacking the capacity to grasp that your reasoning isn't sound.
I know of no way to ascertain if someone is clever or intelligent or perceptive by observing posting on a blog. Sometimes I can tell that they seem to be knowledgeable on particular topics.
But I know "too clever by half" when I see it.
Intelligence and perceptiveness are not some ethereal woostuff, as John Searle would have it, they are determined operationally ... which necessarily means that false negatives and false positives are possible. But look at PentaxZ in the Jonas thread ... he could be faking being that stupid, but why would he? In contrast Alex is certainly a much smarter fellow, but he (operationally, as displayed) has the same abysmal ethics, and one cannot do science with that. As Quine wrote,
Here is a link that provides more context for the Quine quote. I note particularly
I think that this is something that the scientific community needs to take to heart but often fails to, as it tries to deal with the "skeptics" as if they were acting in good faith, by offering counter-evidence and rebuttals, rather than calling out their bad faith.
>rather than calling out their bad faith.
Which is what I do. No amount of "facts" of so called "evidence" will change the mind of those who believe it's a UN/Al Gore scam. Why rebut their gish gallops?
Lee #556, I see that your post emerged from moderation - and what do we have here? A long list of "authorities". These authorities are are relevant, you say, because they matched relevant keywords. Well, Lee, I didn't ask you for a long list of authorities; I have already found my own long list by a similar method and it doesn't support what you are saying. What I wanted was just one reference - but it has to actually support your position.
Then you say, "What a slimy little dishonest fuck you are", which really shows off your intellect! Classy! Look at little Ianam wagging his tail, and blushing in admiration! And it also shows clearly to those readers who are undecided just what sort of people those of you are who are stifling scientific debate in the name of "action on climate change".
It shows beyond any doubt what a bunch of thugs you are. Indeed, I have bookmarked this page as an example of this for others - should I never need one.
But let's not be distracted. The main issue is that you are here, while confusing your readers, calling me dishonest. You are claiming to have read your position in a textbook. I do not believe you for a minute. You have regurgitated it from a blog.
The point you are defending is absurd. The tropical upper troposphere is about 10km above sea level in the cloud layer. The IPCC has always admitted that clouds - among other things - are highly uncertain. The cloud feedback can't be derived from first principles - and yet the cloud parameterisation affects the strength of the hotspot.
You might look at the Lee et al. 2008 paper (J.Clim "A Moist Benchmark Calculation for Atmospheric General Circulation Models"), cited in Lindzen. They simplified their models when they derived their hotspots, but they left a number of processes in - including of course all the circulations and the cloud and convection parameterisations.
I note that based on Fu et al.'s conclusion, the bit is possibly wrong in their model may be, "As expected for warmer climates,
vertical stability and moisture increase in all the models
(Figs. 15b,d).
So why don't you just do the right thing and admit that you're not sure?
Here's the whole abstract from Lee et al. 2008:
A benchmark calculation is designed to compare the climate and climate sensitivity of atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs). The experimental setup basically follows that of the aquaplanet experiment (APE) proposed by Neale and Hoskins, but a simple mixed layer ocean is embedded to enable airâsea coupling and the prediction of surface temperature. In calculations with several AGCMs, this idealization produces very strong zonal-mean flow and exaggerated ITCZ strength, but the model simulations
remain sufficiently realistic to justify the use of this framework in isolating key differences between models. Because surface temperatures are free to respond to model differences, the simulation of the cloud distribution, especially in the subtropics, affects many other aspects of the simulations. The analysis of the simulated tropical transients highlights the importance of convection inhibition and airâsea coupling as
affected by the depth of the mixed layer. These preliminary comparisons demonstrate that this idealized benchmark provides a discriminating framework for understanding the implications of differing physics parameterization in AGCMs.
> And it also shows clearly to those readers who are undecided just what sort of people those of you are who are stifling scientific debate in the name of "action on climate change".
So you apparently think that **this** extended discussion of your interpetation of certain scientific quotes and papers and your refusal to address certain scientific critiques...amounts to "stifling scientific debate".
How charmingly ludicrous.
That assertion is both deeply ignorant of the scientific process - which, just to make it clear to you, does not encompass discussion on this blog - and comes across as possibly more than a little narcissistic.
> It shows beyond any doubt what a bunch of thugs you are.
Apparently you don't even understand what the definition of "thug" is - or you're deliberately throwing a hyperbolic hissy fit. (Hint: the guy who made a death threat recently to Greg Laden on his blog probably qualifies as a "thug"; name-calling of the kind found here does not.)
No wonder you're routinely confused about the sentences with specialised multisyllabic vocabulary written by actual scientists.
> But let's not be distracted.
ROFL!
Alex, you *started out* distracted and didn't improve despite being given dozens of invitations. And you **specialise** in attempting to distract from the failings of your arguments.
Speaking of which, how's that defense of Lindzen & Choi 2011's climate sensitivity going, given that we've experienced approximately twice as much industrial age warming as one would expect from their value? And what about the critiques of LC11 on the other blog where you commented once and disappeared? Or are you too "distracted" to think about the issues? And what is the most likely value of climate sensitivity if you throw away all the GCMs? heck, I even linked to a post by Tamino that generated a rough estimate without using a GCM for you to ignore. I am tempted to bookmark this thread and use it as an example of bad faith debate, the venerable Gish Gallop and attempted distraction.
Perhaps you should "do the right thing" and admit that there's a lot more evidence against most of the positions you seek to advance than for them.
Alex Harvey @550:
"Lee, so your entire argument rests on an appeal to authority and when pressed you are "tired of arguing" and cannot say who the authorities are. Right? Don't you think, if these authorities really exist, you should say who they are - even if only for the benefit of your other readers?"
Alex Harvey at 573:
" Well, Lee, I didn't ask you for a long list of authorities;"
Dishonest twit.
Alex harvey further @573:
"What I wanted was just one reference - but it has to actually support your position."
One more god damn time,Alex. "One Reference" standing alone is next to worthless in Science. A body of work, analyzed a a whole in it's current state, is what matters. That incomplete, partial list of "authorities" I posed, are people who have contributed to that literature, and I posted it primarily to show just how blessed easy it is to actually find the entire literature, to start evaluating in in total. You continue to grab quotes and chunks out of that literature, out of context,often stating that a paper means something opposite to what the the data in the paper shows us, choosing them to support your predetermined position. That is not science - are you a lawyer by any chance?
It was a different field, but if you had tried this kind of crap at the institute where I did my grad work, yo would have been laughed out of lab meeting, humiliated at department seminar, and probably eased out of the program at quals - if not before.
One more time - I'm not going to play the quote-mining, out-of-context, gotcha games you specialize in. Lay out a comprehensive argument that includes all the work, including the uncertainty analyses, the mechanistic analyses, the observational data, the theoretical work, the syntheses of that information -and perhaps we'll take you seriously.
Until then, you continue to be a dishonest twit.
Alex, at 574, you present the abstract from a paper designed to test the impact between various approaches to AGCMs.
That paper looks interesting, but I have a question for you, Alex.
What, precisely, does that abstract and that paper about models, have to do with whether one would expect a moist adiabat vertical temperature profile in the tropics from basic observations and physics, without using the models to inform the prediction?
Answer this carefully, Alex, and see if you can find a justification - it gets to the core of why I and others find your approach to be deeply dishonest.
One more: here, mostly for onlookers ( I really don't expect Alex to consider this honestly) is the basic outline of why we expect a moist adaibat for much (the moist-surface part) of the tropical troposphere. This is oversimplified almost certainly to the point of containing simplification errors, and this is not my specialty (far from) although I do have a lot of practical understanding of lower-atmosphere dynamics. Feel free to add supported details or corrections.
1. The (moist) tropical surface, under the influence of stable warm day-night temperature regimes through the year, maintains an average equilibrium high relative humidity, near but not at saturation. This is both observed and expected, given all that water sitting there to be evaporated.
2. The surface RH is high enough that vertical mixing will cause condensation of water vapor with only small vertical displacements of a parcel of air. Again, both observed and expected, given only the physics of adiabatic cooling, and the observed and calculated vertical pressure profile of the atmosphere.
3. The lower to mid troposphere is vertically well mixed by convection (look at those clouds Alex keeps nattering on about, showing us the convection cells), and the upper troposphere reasonably well mixed by turbulent flow (observed from various means, and easily inferred by the vertical RH profile of the upper troposphere).
4. Water vapor pressure throughout the lower to mid troposphere is near the saturation vapor pressure - again, easily observed from simply looking at how easily non-convective clouds and mist format all levels of the lower to mid troposphere.
5. A vertically well-mixed atmosphere that is near or at the saturation water vapor will follow the mist adiabat. This is more or less what the 'moist adiabat' mean - it is definitional.
6. Therefore, the lower-to-mid troposphere will follow a moist adiabat vertical temperature profile throughout the well-mixed layer. This is more-or-less from the surface to the pressure-altitude where convective clouds top out as anvils.
7. I've already made the argument above about why a vertical moist adiabat temperature profile must show steeper temperature trends than the surface, if the overall profile warms or cools.
Note that none of this argument requires a single damn thing from the models. The models add detail (and one hopes precision) by including secondary heat and vapor transport mechanisms, et al - but that is irrelevant to the point that one can predict a moist adiabat, and therefore a mid tropical troposphere hot spot, simply from basic physics.
Also note that above the mid troposphere, the lapse rate does something different - mixing and precipitation causes the air to drop below saturation vapor pressure, so the upper troposphere tends to follow the dry adiabat. This is interesting, and complex, and irrelevant to my point, because the tropical troposphere 'hot spot' that Alex is arguing about is expected to be, and looked for, there at the upper levels of the well-mixed, saturated surface-to-mid levels of the troposphere.
Lee, okay, go to the SkS page and scroll about half way down till you see the diagram taken from Thorne 2008.
In that diagram, you can see that until ~ 500mb your argument is sound, i.e. the trend derived from models (orange dotted line) tracks the moist adiabat (yellow dotted line). In other words, your argument is perfect for the lower part of the atmosphere where there is no hotspot.
But from 500mb the two lines diverge as the hotspot appears. By 200mb there is a divergence of about 0.1K per decade.
You may say this is a small divergence - but Lindzen and others would presumably say that even a small divergence in the upper tropical troposphere can greatly effect climate sensitivity.
Also, I look forward to your thoughts on whether you think Fu et al. must be wrong in concluding that vertical stability is exaggerated in the AR4 models. Are you saying that they are questioning the basic laws of physics? Or do you think they're saying that hand-waving physical arguments may be shown to be too crude?
>Lindzen and others would presumably say
Given what he says in real life is usually wrong, I am not going to give any credence to what he says in your imagination.
Alex:
First, do you have any plans to actually respond to the actual questions I asked you?
Second, that line you call "the moist adiabat" in Thorne et al, is taken from Santer et al 2005. Santer tells us (see below) that it was calculated using "psuedo-adaibats" of surface air parcels with RH 0f 80%. That means that it is not going to include the transition from moist to dry adiabat in the upper regions of the troposphere.
The hotspot extends upward from the moist-dry adiabat transition altitude - the temperatures are already amplified in the moist adaibat column, and further vertical mixing mixes the warmer air upwards.
The Santer et all 'theoretical' profile does not include the mixing and convection - it is going to miss that moist-dry transition. It is the simplest assumption, an assumption of an unmixed vertical adiabat profile, but by missing that known transition, it is going to overestimate trends in the upper part of the hotspot - as you point out that it does, relative to the models. Even so, that gross simplification of a simple unmixed adiabat gets values quite close to the models - as you also point out.
Simply by including that moist-dry transition - as I point to in my scenario - one would get a closer match between models and lapse-rate derived trends.
Again: simply by using the basic physics one can predict a hotspot, and simply by constraining it by simple observations - surface temp changes, the transition from moist t dry adiabat - one can derive good theoretical values for that hotspot - without requiring the models.
As I said, the hotspot is expected, from basic physics, without needing the models, and its value is constrained by simple observations and simple physics, to be very close to what the models suggest.
BTW, despite what you say, Alex, many,many denialists deny that the hotspot exists at all, or denied it until the latest set of papers looking at uncertainties.
Also BTW, I didn't "go to the SkS page and scroll down" to find that figure. I actually read the Thorne paper - it is sitting her eon my computer, as it happens - and followed and evaluated the appropriate references (including Santer) to make sure I understood that figure. I recommend that you start doing the same before you once agains cite a figure or a snippet of text, and claim it means one thing, when actually looking at the procedures or the data shows that it means nothing of the kind.
From Santer 2005:
"The theoretical expectation plotted in Fig. 3 was computed by taking the difference of two pseudo- adiabats calculated from surface air parcels with temperatures of 28.0- and 28.2-C and 80% relative humidity. These are conditions typical of deep convective regions over the tropical oceans. The pseudo-adiabats correspond to equivalent potential temperatures of 353.2 and 354.1 K. The assumed temperature difference of 0.2-C corresponds approx- imately to the total change in tropical ocean tem- perature over the years 1979 to 1999. Theoretical scaling ratios are relatively insensitive to reasonable variations in the baseline values of surface air temperature and relative humidity, as well as to the magnitude of the surface air temperature increase."
> Lindzen and others would presumably say that even a small divergence in the upper tropical troposphere can greatly effect climate sensitivity.
They might, but *saying it doesn't make it so* - especially as Lindzen has said many things, even in peer-reviewed papers where he's less prone to outright bullshit, that haven't withstood post-publication peer review.
And one *might* infer that climate sensitivity is *higher* than previously thought if certain observations are observed. Or that it makes at best a small difference.
You suggest one particular outcome (implying the others don't exist, or your suggestion is much more likely), yet you present little to no evidence to support that suggestion.
> These are conditions typical of deep convective regions over the tropical oceans.
Also, IIRC the expectations over land and over ocean in the tropics are somewhat different and the historical radiosonde data was collected mostly over land, so one has to be super careful trying to use it for hotspot trend detection.
Lee #577, #581,
Yes I do intend to answer your question. Why did I quote the abstract of Lee et al. 2008? Is it because I am obscene and dishonest? Is it because I am "slimy" like Tolkien's Gollum and eat unborn children and worship the Devil? Or - wait - is it because I wrote in the previous post, "You might look at the Lee et al. 2008 paper ... cited in Lindzen" and then had a marvelous afterthought to quote the abstract?
I am sorry but seriously. Why would I be lying? Forget about bound in soul to the Dark Lord - why would I be lying? Indeed, why would anyone - Lindzen, Pielke, Christy - even Dark Lord Monckton himself, bless him - why would they be lying? Confused? Maybe. Stupid? I suppose. But lying? Why? So why not just assume mistaken so that rational dialogue is possible?
Anyway, here is why I think Lee et al. 2008 is _relevant_.
If you turn to Fig. 15 you can confirm with your own eyes Lindzen's assertion that "the warming at Ï = 1 in the tropics is from more than twice to about three times larger than near the surface".
Yet here you are claiming that the magnitude of the warming is derived from basic physics. Yet four GCMs derive four different values for the warming. That either means (a) four GCMs are violating the basic physics; or (b) the value can't be derived from basic physics (otherwise they would all get the same answer).
Now, look, you obviously know more about the moist adiabat and the atmosphere generally than I do - that's great. But what I _do_ know is that the moist adiabat is also just a model - just a much simpler model than the GCMs. Presumably, you already know this. Which is why I am puzzled that you won't concede the point I am making. I suspect it is because you have prejudged me as a "denier" and thus assume I must be secretly saying things I am not.
Meanwhile, in #581 you say I have got it all wrong because SkS science's / Thorne 2008's / Santer et al. 2005's theoretical model left out the dry adiabatic transition, despite that you just said above in #578 that the dry adiabatic transition is "complex" and "irrelevant". Nevermind...
Let's assume you're right and that by adding dry adiabatic transition to your model (as well as some assumptions about upper tropospheric drying) it then tracks the GCM ensemble more accurately. Thus, you can conclude that your simple model from "basic physics" is a good approximation of the models.
I still ask, what has this got to do with the real world if it turns out the hotspot is not as hot as we thought? It still would prove that one or more of our assumptions was wrong - and say nothing about physics.
By the way, I found a [great post](http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog/isaac-held/2011/12/07/20-the-moist-adiaba…) on Isaac Held's blog. I state at the outset that his opinion is that no hotspot won't help the skeptics, but he does seem to say at one point what I am trying to say.
And there you have it again, which seems to be what Fu et al. have concluded.
All said, though, I concede that Held's post broadly supports what I understand you to be saying. (Held's power is that he is obviously no propagandist and I trust him.)
Lotharrson, let's suppose you're right. The question then becomes why is it that it is now nearly 2012 - nearly five years after Lindzen's 2007 paper was published - and yet no one has ever bothered to understand his argument and refute it? Why is there nowhere I can go to find a careful, respectful discussion of Lindzen's argument and the likely mistake/s he has made? I, for one, would probably not be here right now if that was the case. The problem with these sites - SkS, even RealClimate - is that they focus far more on the refutation and far less on the careful, respectful bit.
> and yet no one has ever bothered to understand his argument and refute it
Nobody has bothered to understand "Iron Sun" Plimer's argument and refute it.
Nobody has bothered to understand the "Lizard Alien Overlord" argument and refute it.
It's 100x easier to write rubbish than well researched words and it's even harder than that to write refutation of rubbish.
Therefore it's not worth refuting. Because it's so bad and it would waste time that could be spent writing something useful.
Alex, 583:
Dude. I didn't ask you why you cited Lee. i didn't ask you why it's 'relevant.' I asked you quite specifically:
"What, precisely, does that abstract and that paper about models, have to do with whether one would expect a moist adiabat vertical temperature profile in the tropics from basic observations and physics, without using the models to inform the prediction?"
At this point, I;m not sure yo even understand what my questin is asking. Perhap sthis wil help.
In that same post, yo say:
"Yet here you are claiming that the magnitude of the warming is derived from basic physics."
No. I am claiming that ONE WAY to determine that one expects amplified warming in the upper tropical troposphere, and further to estimate its magnitude is to apply the basic physics of the moist adiabat, constrained by some simple observations.
That is, the basic physics of the moist adiabat tells us that the MUST BE an upper tropical troposphere region of amplified warming, and further allows us to estimate its amplitude, without requiring anything from the GCMs.
I do find it interesting that this very simple approach - it is as you say a very, very simple model, about as simple as one can get for that amplified warming - that this simple model gives results that are quite close to the CGMs, overlapping with the range of GCM results, even without making a correction for the moist-dry adiabat transition altitude. And - to be sure you understand this- the moist adiabat is NOT programmed into the GCMs. The establishment of a moist adiabat in the tropics is an emergent property of the models, arising from their modeling of fundamental physics.
And -- are you 'effign serious!!! - you now concede that Held "broadly supports" what I'm saying, not because you actually bothered to learn and understand the science, but because you find someone you're wiling to listen to who appears to agree with me - at least in a quote-mined paragraph from a blog post. And you accuse ME of appeals to authority? Get freaking real.
> The question then becomes why is it that it is now nearly 2012 - nearly five years after Lindzen's 2007 paper was published - and yet no one has ever bothered to understand his argument and refute it?
Good grief.
I was clearly talking about LC **2011**. You know, published a mere handful of months ago in a very ordinary journal.
Goalpost-shifting much?
And forgive me if, based on your track record of asserting lack of discussion of "skeptics" in the past, that I don't take your word for it that "no-one" bothered.
And if no-one bothered to refute a paper in the literature AND it failed to have an impact on other scientists' thinking, that's generally a pretty good sign that they think it is eminently unconvincing, perhaps even essentially pre-refuted by pre-existing evidence. The literature is littered with examples.
And what Wow said. Research scientists essentially don't get ahead in their career by refuting crap. They get ahead by figuring out a better model of reality. Any scientist who spends time refuting crap is *hurting* his career and future grant prospects in order to do a public service. Your expectations here are off base, which means the inference you draw from applying them is unjustified.
> The problem with these sites - SkS, even RealClimate - is that they focus far more on the refutation and far less on the careful, respectful bit.
Er, dude, that's **not** a problem with those sites. That's a problem with your reality detector and trust inference engine. Fix them before they lead you further astray.
> Indeed, why would anyone - Lindzen, Pielke, Christy - even Dark Lord Monckton himself, bless him - why would they be lying?
Fail. Argument from lack of personal imagination.
> That either means (a) four GCMs are violating the basic physics; or (b) the value can't be derived from basic physics (otherwise they would all get the same answer).
Argument from lack of personal imagination. For example, *you* may have failed to take into account uncertainty bounds and have drawn an unjustified "conclusion". And there are more options you haven't considered.
So Alex has bookmarked this page as an example to the undecided as an example of stifling scientific debate and to show that those calling for action on climate change are "thugs" because a handful of us here are calling a grossly dishonest person what he is? Oh dear oh dear.
Oh, right, RealClimate has a problem because they are doing proper science rather than being all "respectful" to the denialist icon about whom Alex has recurring wet dreams.
As we learned weeks ago, Alex understands nothing, so instead he depends entirely on whether he trusts someone, and whether he trusts them depends on whether they are nice to him and whether he seem them as a "propagandist". Someone should print Alex's picture next to the encyclopedia entry for "ad hominem fallacy".
Oh it's about being respectful now is it. All the deniers crave is legitimacy (like endlessly coveting the peer review they ridicule).
You have to earn respect, Alex. You can't demand it.
Loth, if you think you were talking about LC11 in #582 then you were very confused. So pay more attention and the goalposts won't appear to move. Or, good heavens, perhaps try to understand Lindzen's argument in one or both of these papers? In finding the flaw in Lindzen's thinking you may learn something? As for the rest, it doesn't even necessarily need to be a peer reviewed refutation. The fact is, there is no one around with the attention to detail and determination of people like Steve McIntyre who pull arguments apart and find problems in them. If there was a non-skeptic version of Steve McIntyre devoted to arguments like Lindzen 2007 - there may be a whole lot less confusion around.
http://vimeo.com/33321693
A21G Charney Lecture*
AGU, December 2011
Climate Change: A Very Cloudy Picture
Presented by Graeme L. Stephens, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, USA
Alex,
Your game is becoming tiresome. The vast majority of this discussion on the recent Lindzen papers has been about the 2009 and 2011 papers. However, Lotharsson seems to be arguing with you and not directly citing a Lindzen paper in #582, so I can't tells WTF is going on w/o following things back.
BTW, the reason the Lindzen couldn't get his paper published in PNAS (and probably whatever AGU journal he is said to have submitted it to) is because he did not address the problems which were found in the 2009 paper. So he basically just said "f* it" and went on to find a low impact journal that virtually nobody reads which would take it.
There are two ways he could have responded to the comments. First, he could have made an argument that the criticisms of the 2009 paper were invalid or did not apply to the 2011 paper. Second, he could have modified the paper to address the criticisms. HE DID NEITHER. Not much of a pukka scientist there.
One thing that characterises Alex Harvey's comments, as well as those of the Scandinavian trolls on the other thread, is that they all make many, many claims, but they do not carefully and explicitly reference the supporting scientific material upon which they base their statements.
Oh, Alex Harvey sometimes waves his hand in the general direction of a paper, but look at his arguments. They are not constructed with careful, explicit linking to prior knowledge in order to make his refutations of the consensus basis of the physics of human-caused global warming - not in the way that any argument in a scientific paper is constructed. Pick up any well-respected scientific paper, in any discipline, and it will be (with a very few extraordinary exceptions) laden with parenthesised references throughout the text. There's so sign of any such intellectual cohesion happening with the Climate Denialati.
This says a lot about the veracity and intellectual strength of what he (and the other trolls) say.
Trying to pin these folk down to actual scientific specifics is like trying to catch a greased pig. They avoid like the plague engaging in explicit scientific construction, either unconsciously because a cognitive dissonance over-ride is operating, or consciously because they know that they are spouting nonsense. Perhaps they understand what happens when a denialist pretends to referencing, a la Plimer's H&E, where the misuse, misinterpretation, and [misrepresentation of his references was soundly demonstrated](http://www.complex.org.au/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=91).
> Loth, if you think you were talking about LC11 in #582 then you were very confused.
Ludicrous troll is still ludicrous...
(Because if you think you know what *I* was talking about better than I do, then you are deluding yourself that you are mind-reading. Again.)
...but does have half a point.
I didn't follow your quote [back to #579](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…) to see were you referenced Lindzen's 2007 pap...oh, wait. You never referenced it there, the most proximate previous explicit reference to "Lindzen 2007" is probably way back in #440, and it isn't at all clear that you had that context in mind. (You run that risk when you perform a Gish Gallop.)
So, not exactly a half point then, more like a bit of naked projection?
> So pay more attention and the goalposts won't appear to move.
How amusement - from someone who's shifted the goalposts so much he had post-shaped dents in his shoulders - and continues to ask me to "...perhaps try to understand Lindzen's argument in one or both of these papers?" whilst refusing to answer my questions that arise from my attempts to understand how the world could be as Lindzen claims and yet offer so much contradictory evidence, and refusing to engage with links I have provided to people detailing their issues with Lindzen's arguments. Teh irony, it burneth brightly.
And then burneth some more:
> The fact is, there is no one around with the attention to detail and determination of people like Steve McIntyre who pull arguments apart and find problems in them.
Ah, hah hah hah hah!
I needed a bit of amusement. Ever heard about "science, the process thereof"?
And McIntyre's "pulling arguments apart" is more often deeply incompetent than barely competent, and he ONLY does it in one direction - and even then has found minor issues at best whilst ignoring glaring issues in the other direction. If he were actually interesting in applying himself to Lindzen or Plimer or Soon or Monckton or ... he'd be like a pig in muck.
But he doesn't, and the dog that doesn't bark tells all.
Bernard J, what I find interesting is the number of people here who want to comment despite having nothing to say.
Loth, there is not one reference in LC11 to the "upper tropical troposphere" so that would be a good clue that I wasn't talking about LC11.
It's a silly question, but even sillier after I quoted Quine (per your pattern, you ignore or dismiss anything that challenges your view; if it doesn't agree with you then it isn't serious or isn't really discussion or is thuggish or disrespectful or whatever other intellectually dishonest excuse you have):
...
Because we aren't talking about mere mistakes, but rather patterns of bad faith (like the hypocrisy you display here, with your numerous and frequent claims about "propaganda" and other ascriptions of nefarious motive).
Repeating Quine:
And yet most people ignore Quine's dictum and do treat folks like Monckton as if they were sincere, meeting their arguments with counterargument. The failure of rational discussion does not come from them, it comes from Monckton et. al. (including you), who ignore evidence and refutation, misrepresent arguments and positions, including their own previous ones (the "Monckton Maneuvre"), and employ a host of other fallacies, all part of "nefarious rhetoric", aka "apologetics", aimed not at an attempt to find the truth, whatever it might be, but rather to justify specific positions.
There is one of those lies. Why of why would he do that? Let's assume that he's merely mistaken so that rational discussion about such garbage is possible.
Rattus Norvegicus, what criticisms do you believe were made of LC09 that were not addressed in LC11?
Back in Jan 2010 - about two years ago now - Gavin Schmidt wrote at RealClimate:
At that time Schmidt noted that Lindzen had already advised that he believed that even with corrections he obtained similar results.
If we then look at the reviewer comments on LC11 [here](http://www.masterresource.org/2011/06/lindzen-choi-special-treatment/) it is clear that the two favourable reviewers - probably Minnis and Ramanathan - recommended revisions and publication. And it is clear that at least one of the negative reviews was emotional and silly.
That means probably V. Ramanathan recommended publication. Probably so did Minnis. And two more anonymous reviewers at APJAS recommended publication. As did Ming-dah Chou, Lindzen's co-author on Iris from 10 years ago. Now, as I have also demonstrated, Chul E. Chung, one of the serious critics of LC09, has also read the paper and evidently considers it worth discussing (that is implied in his decision to discuss it positively and with an open mind).
So, really, what is your problem?
Loth, I see you are still complaining "...whilst refusing to answer my questions that arise from my attempts to understand how the world could be as Lindzen claims and yet...".
Really, you are drowning me in so many questions while running around complaining of a "gish gallop".
What question would you like me to answer? Please note that if you ask lots of questions I am not going to answer them all. So ask me one or two please.
Since Alex claims that Bernard J says nothing, it follows that he is asserting that, for instance, this and this and this
etc. are nothing.
So we are to assume that Alex is merely mistaken, rather than dishonest, so that rational dialogue is possible ... despite his refusal to even acknowledge that others are saying anything, and while we are apparently to take his own empty words as "something".
Mistaken, or a lie?
Hypocrisy or ... hypocrisy?
Alex suggests that we "assume" that various skeptics are mistaken rather than lying, so that there can be rational dialogue. When Bernard J offers a significant piece of evidence bearing on whether an assumption that Plimer is merely mistaken is plausible (or even coherent as a description of Plimer's effort), whether Plimer is engaged in rational dialogue, and whether rational dialogue with Plimer is possible, Alex dismisses it as "nothing". This is the sort of thing, from both Plimer and Alex, that Quine refers to as "nefarious rhetoric".
> ...what I find interesting is the number of people here who want to comment despite having nothing to say.
More burning irony.
> Loth, there is not one reference in LC11 to the "upper tropical troposphere" so that would be a good clue that I wasn't talking about LC11.
Way to miss my point much!
It was that you presumed your readers knew you were talking about Lindzen 2007 when you hadn't given them a good reason to presume that; when you then mentioned only "Lindzen" it was reasonable to assume you were talking about LC11 or perhaps LC09 which you have mentioned several times since the last mention of Lindzen 2007.
> Really, you are drowning me in so many questions while running around complaining of a "gish gallop".
Really, that would be because you *have* been Gish Galloping.
> What question would you like me to answer?
How about starting with the one I have asked several times now, like [here](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…). Given that we've already seen more than twice the industrial-age warming than would be predicted by LC11's most likely sensitivity and we need still more to reach equilibrium which is how sensitivity is defined - why do you think the paper has *any* value at all?
I'll leave it as an exercise for you to count how many other times I've asked it.
And if you're still seriously advocating LC11 then there's the [critique of the LC11 methods](http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2011/06/lindzen_goes_emeritus.php) in comments on that thread I linked to.
I count three substantive ones in
and they have all been asked before over the course of the last three weeks.
To help Alex out: see this, this, this, and this.
Oops, that should have been this, this, this, and this.
Lothersson @ 596: And McIntyre's "pulling arguments apart" is more often deeply incompetent than barely competent...
But everyone here appreciates how careful and respectful S Mac always is. Like Tony the Weatherman and VIscount Scholaris-Latini and all. Yep, careful AND respectful...
There's been a huge number of questions that Alex has quibbled through, evaded or simply ignored, but none stand out quite so much as [Tim's original question](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…). Hopefully, one does not exceed your "lot's of questions" quota.
Yes Alex, why is the ice melting at a spot where it hasn't melted in 11,000 years?
As for the idea that the Viscount himself sincerely believes everything he's saying, students of body-language might wish to pay close attention at about 6' 58" and 7' 08" in the first of the Hadfield Monckton Responds videos.
And try watching one of his performances - and I use the word advisedly - with the sound on mute some time...
(Of course, on the evidence above the level of functioning of Alex's Bullshit Detector is certainly open to question!)
But anyway, yes, Alex, let's get a single bloody straight answer, shall we? Why are the overwhelming majority of the world's glaciers picking precisely now to melt exactly?
We have deep ice cores going back 100,000 years and more showing a recent rise--doubling, approximately--in carbon dioxide levels.
Sublimation goes on all the time. Sublimation is just evaporation directly from the solid state. For 11,000 years, the rate of sublimation from Kilimanjaro's glaciers was in equilibrium with seasonal new snow. Now sublimation is outpacing snowfall. The warmer it is, the faster sublimation occurs. It is all perfectly consistent with unusual global warming. It doesn't matter one iota whether it's caused by humans or not: if we don't do everything we can to slow it down, our children and grandchildren will suffer.
Anyone who doesn't believe in global warming is invited to explain even one of these facts: why Denmark is opening lead mines that were covered with 25 metres of ice 40 years ago; why butterflies' ranges in England are extending further north every year; why opossums have moved into Southern Ontario since my childhood; why a pigeon was seen two years ago in Ikaluit on the Arctic ocean; and why oak trees now turn red in the fall (in Southern Ontario) instead of mud-brown.
> Really, you are drowning me in so many questions
Well you have to answer them, else they accumulate.
For example, STILL NO ANSWER as to what evidence makes you claim it would be a surprise if climate sensitivity were more than 1.5-2C per doubling.
When you don't answer that, people ask other questions to see what you WILL answer.
When you make other claims, people will ask you about them.
If you never answer any questions, you don't get to whine about drowning in questions.
Loth:
This is a completely circular argument. Of course, if you _assume_ that all warming so far was caused by CO2 emissions then LC11 is wrong - by your assumption.
On the other hand, if you take a different approach and admit that we are not sure what has caused the warming so far, then it is a bit trickier.
If you look at [IPCC AR4 Fig 9.5b](http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-9-5.html) you will note that there is about 0.5 C of warming to explain (because we believe that changes in solar irradiance caused the warming till about 1960).
So here are some other theories about what may have caused part or all of the warming:
* internal variability (e.g. a 1000 year ocean cycle).
* internal variability (e.g. Tsonis et al. 2007).
* measurement error (e.g. Klotzbach et al. 2009).
* the cosmic ray hypothesis.
* albedo changes from land use / land cover changes.
* something no one has ever thought of.
bill #613, no one says there hasn't been warming so the question is completely irrelevant.
Lee, after considering the detail of Held's post I understood better that the problem is more complicated than I realised.
That's as much as I am willing to concede. Your position is stronger that Held's if you insist that "the basic physics of the moist adiabat tells us that [there] MUST BE an upper tropical troposphere region of amplified warming, and further allows us to estimate its amplitude, without requiring anything from the GCMs".
This doesn't follow. As Held says, you must argue that the real atmosphere follows the moist adiabat. If you just say, "but it does!", as you seem to be doing, then it is a circular argument.
Finally, what are your thoughts on the conclusion in Fu et al.? Are you saying they _must_ be wrong?
> internal variability (e.g. a 1000 year ocean cycle).
Begging the question: why is there a 1000 year ocean cycle? After all, curve fitting to such a cycle is only so you can claim "it is going to go down any day now...".
> measurement error (e.g. Klotzbach et al. 2009)
I take it you didn't read that.
> the cosmic ray hypothesis.
Fails to explain.
> albedo changes from land use / land cover changes.
Included
> something no one has ever thought of.
Martian heat rays?
Since we already have an adequate explanation of what's going on, you have to explain why that is not correct.
> This is a completely circular argument.
Er, mine isn't. Not even because you claim it is. It's not even my argument. It's not even *an* argument yet. It's a question designed to make you think and then attempt to defend your hypothesis.
And on that front you are part way there: you are seeking to invoke other causes to explain the "extra" warming above and beyond LC11's (implied) predictions, which is (almost certainly) what you *have* to do to try and reconcile LC11 with observations.
However, also note that (IIRC) LC11 has an implicit claim that there are fairly significant negative feedbacks in the system - which apply to all forcings - which implies that you need even *more* "extra" positive forcing dampened by the suggested large negative feedbacks in order to explain the difference. Can you point to any suitable evidence for that?
Of course there are hypotheses out there, and you've named some. But a hypothesis != evidence. And do any or all of them together (a) provide plausible substantiated forcing magnitudes in the right ballpark, and (b) most importantly have sufficiently solid evidence supporting them that they are preferable to the mainstream conclusion that the observations are quite consistent with a much higher sensitivity and the set of forcings we already include in the calculations?
Hint: as one example, it appears that cosmic rays do not have any decent evidence. You never know your luck in the future - we could obtain compelling evidence - but I *really* don't like your chances, and there's no point hanging your hat on a bet that may never come in, until such time as it *actually does* - especially when we've already got plausible alternatives.
> If you look at IPCC AR4 Fig 9.5b you will note that there is about 0.5 C of warming to explain (because we believe that changes in solar irradiance caused the warming till about 1960).
Er, no - you have significantly misrepresented this figure, and don't even seem to have read the axes correctly.
Fig. 9.5a shows some multi-GCM means vs observations when the GCMs are forced by natural and anthropogenic forcings (and I note that IIRC the models have on average a climate sensitivity of more than 3+ times LC11's sensitivity and yet appear to do fairly well); Fig. 9.5b shows the same but with GCMs forced ONLY by natural forcings. There's nowhere on that linked page that compares solar forcing only to some other set of forcings.
What 9.5b shows is that there is about 0.8C to "explain" from anthropogenic forcings and any others you care to argue have not been adequately represented by the models (arguably since 1900, which is not even the "industrial age" period I was talking about). Again, it does not imply that "solar irradiance caused the warming until about 1960", because it does not show solar forcing only on any graph.
If you want to argue that Fig. 9.5b shows a reasonable match until 1960, be my guest. That means you have to explain ~0.8C from 1960-2005 by means other than the natural forcings included in the GCMs in question. (And to do it more appropriately you should be looking at trends over that timeframe rather than eyeballing noisy endpoint data. But let's leave that as an exercise for the reader if they think this line of thinking may prove fruitful.)
From 1960-2005 there was (by my rough calculation) approximately 0.26 "doublings" of CO2 in that period, so using LC11's sensitivity (IIRC) that forcing should cause only about 0.18C rise at equilibrium (with a non-trivial uncertainty range), so somewhat *less* than even that since we're not at equilibrium yet.
To continue this calculation you need estimated magnitudes of other anthropogenic forcings too. You can take the figures reported by the IPCC summary, or you can argue for some others. You can get a rough guess at the former by noting that with (say) the models, the CO2 rise from 1960-2005 causes (very roughly) 0.6C of warming at equilibrium, or about 0.8C if you use 3C per doubling - compared to LC11's 0.18C.
See the apparent problem yet (assuming I haven't massively screwed it up)?
LC11 says we probably need to explain somewhere approaching 0.4C of "extra" warming (reduced a bit by not being at equilibrium yet) - in a system where LC11 says forcings are subject to non-trivial negative feedbacks compared to the explanations offered by the GCMs. (Yes, there's a *lot* of simplification and caveats in my argument here, but take it as a sketch for doing the same thing without simplifications...and you'll probably conclude that the rigourous version will almost necessarily end up with a non-trivial warming gap too.)
In other words, LC11 suggests we need some rather significant additional forcings not found in the GCMs to be consistent with its claimed sensitivity - and yet the GCMs, without using any extra forcings, seem to be in the right ballpark already.
And in that light, ask yourself: if there was (say) a rather large "internal variability" forcing cycling over 1000 years such as you suggest - what are the odds it hasn't been detected yet AND caused major forcing changes over the last 5% of a cycle or so, but apparently not in the previous umpteen years? And how does that compare to the chances that the forcings we do know about include all the major ones and that GCMs are much closer to the climate's actual sensitivity? (Or: what Wow said.)
It's also interesting to note that Lindzen even recently argued that [the earth hasn't warmed as much as expected](http://www.skepticalscience.com/Earth-expected-global-warming.htm) according to (say) the models or the likely climate sensitivity range reported by the IPCC - an argument that doesn't seem to hold up in light of the evidence, and seems to go against the apparent warming gap due to the implications of LC11's sensitivity claims vs observations. (And that link gives you some idea of how to do a more rigourous calculation for what industrial age warming we would expect from a given climate sensitivity, or vice versa.)
But of course this is merely propaganda, right? ;-)
[Alex](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…):
You mean all those people commenting on, say, climate-related posts by Ethan Siegel on his blog here at ScienceBlogs claiming AGW is a hoax, a fraud, a Marxist conspiracy, &c aren't trying to suggest there hasn't been warming?
What about your early posts on this thread about Kilmanjaro? How sublimation and not warming was responsible for its recent mass loss? How about [this comment](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…) which was a masterful evasion of a simple yes or no question regarding whether there was warming, with a nice dollop of conspiracy-theory on top?
@Alex:
"As Held says, you must argue that the real atmosphere follows the moist adiabat. If you just say, "but it does!", as you seem to be doing, then it is a circular argument.
Finally, what are your thoughts on the conclusion in Fu et al.? Are you saying they must be wrong?"
Alex, you still have not answered my question regarding what specifically Lee et al has to do with the issue. You have not answered a lot of other people's questions either - going back to the first handful of responses in this thread. You keep asking questions, though.
The argument is not "But it does". The argument (among others, given above) is "It is observed to closely follow a moist adiabat." I could point to a growing body of observations supporting the idea that it continues to do so - especially precipitation arguments, as deviations from a moist adiabat profile as the surface warms, would necessarily also cause changes in precipitation which we do not observe.
Fu et al say, at heart, that the GCMs may be getting tropical vertical profiles and amplification a little bit wrong - indirectly, by looking at verticala stability. How in any crecible reality does the fact that a comples model might, under some analyses, give sliglhtly different results from the simplest possible model, on something that is involved in establishing the vertical profile but is not directly the vertical profile, mean that anyone is wrong?
I mean, christ almighty, dude. The GCMs, the measurements, and the moist adiabat assumption (alone, and even more closely if corrected for the moist/dry adiabat transition) give very similar vertical temperature profiles. The GCMs, the moist adiabat, and measurements, give very similar results for troposphere amplification of daily / seasonal time scales, where our time resolved measurements are good. The GCMs and the moist adiabat give very similar results for amplification on climatic time scales (the damn results overlap) where our measurements, we know, are subject to very large errors and can't adequately resolve the trends, but even so for most measurements include the model and moist adiabat results within their error range. Supporting proxy measurements for change (wind energy, precipitation, etc) support amplification in accordance with the models and the moist adiabat assumption.
Looking at that, it is clear that for trop trop amplification it is very, very likely that the models and the moist adiabat assumption are very close to correct, and that the measurements aren't adequate to see this. It is important to resolve, work is being done to resolve it, and it is very, very unlikely that there is a substantive error in the GCMs or the assumption for the continued OBSERVED moist adiabat in the tropics.
Lindzen, almost alone in the field, keeps trying to pick holes in this, largely because he wants the tropics to be a large negative feedback. We know that increases in absolute humidity are a substantial positive feedback in the tropics, and that the upper trop trop amplification is a negative feedback (pumping more heat aloft). Lindzen argues that cloud feedback in the tropics will be negative, and large. He has been shown to be wrong, on theoretical/model levels, and from observations of clouds that constrain the possible cloud feedback values. In fact, it seems likely that cloud feedback in the tropics will, if anything, be slightly positive.
If you want to keep relying on Lindzen as your primary 'expert' (an appeal to authority), then you really need to show why he alone is correct, and why the vast body of literature that is not Lindzen is incorrect. You need to address the issue that the planet, not yet at equilibrium, has already warmed more than Lindzen's mechanisms can possibly account for. And you need to do this not by quote mining sentences and paragraphs that you can twist to defend your desired conclusion, but by addressing the observations and analyses in the literature.
You have at this point clearly shown that you are either unable or unwilling to do anything close to this. You refuse to respond to and address the substantive issues and questions addressed to you. There comes a point (actually, its long since come and gone, but I'm stubborn) where it is clear that there is no utility in attempting substantive conversation with you. Thus, I'm probably going to give up trying - although I may still make substantive points if I want to (with no expectation that you'll address them with any substance), and I may occasionally join ianam in giving you the mocking that you so thoroughly deserve.
It always bemuses me when someone argues so strongly and persistenly agaisnt a thing like the climate consequences of the tropical atmospheric temp profile, which has very strong mechanistic theoretical and observational support, but will seriously offer as a potential 'explanation' something like '1000 year ocean cycles' for which there is no theoretical or observed mechanism, and which hasn't even been observed as a statistically significant measurement.
"Martial heat rays" indeed.
Alex #618, this is why most of us think your behaviour is disingenuous. You entered the fray here with post #1 -
-a logically absurd accusation of ideological manipulation on the part of Lonnie Thompson, particularly given the 6 years he'd had to gather more data.
Now, you originally claimed you'd 'like some help' with 'putting these emails in context', and yet you've ignored the responses, show no sign of interest in what Thompson has to say on the matter, and simply refuse outright to answer Tim's question -
preferring to delve into posting a series of dreary 'Denialist chum' objections, including the blatant travesty of Kevin Trenberth's 'travesty'- rather a clear marker of ideological fervour, I'd say - and even comically claiming that the IPCC wasn't qualifying its claims, while simultaneously assuring us of your deep personal familiarity with its reports! Oh, but that was Al Gore, wasn't it?
And now you're obsessed with fiddling about with equatorial adiabatics as some species of Papa Lindzen fanboy, even channeling him when the occasion demands!
What bloody difference does it make, Alex? If you'd bothered to watch the Thompson video rather than just choosing to fling some new mud at another target, you might be aware of just how much trouble the Alpine cryopshere really is in. And some mystic 1000 year ocean cycle and quibbling about the trop trop hotspot ain't going to provide an answer to Tim's original question, is it?
('No one says there hasn't been warming' indeed! That's a warming unprecedented in at least 11 000 years then, isn't it, Alex?)
Will you at least concede that your accusation against Thompson is completely unjustified by the evidence?
That he is completely entitled to conclude -
Alex Harvey:
If you think the real atmosphere near the equator doesn't follow the moist adiabat then check the observations.
@Chris O'Neill:
Observations? Paah! on your observations. What's needed here is a good quote from a scientist you trust. Nothing more, nothing less.
/sarcasm
> ...no one says there hasn't been warming...
But as Composer99 pointed out, they just say that maybe there has, maybe there hasn't:
> Can anything realistically be done to stop global warming **if it's real** [my emphasis]?
Disingenuous much? Or maybe Alex just can't remember which positions he contorted himself into earlier to try and support his claims.
Alex Harvey.
>...something no one has ever thought of.
Erm, you do realise that there are thousands of professional physicists and climatologists who have dissected the field of warming to an extent that is orders of magnitude more detailed than anything the denialists have ever come up with?
You do realise that everything that exists in the body of denialist pseudoscience has been considered, tested, and then retested time and time again just to be sure, and has been found wanting - to put it kindly? Even the stuff you're currently rabbitting on about?
And you do realise that in the process of searching for a previously non thought-of explanation for the warming that so many denialists choke on to admit, one also has been able to explain why the very well-understood physics of the consensus of warming is not actually operating? Why the warming predicted by 'greenhouse' gas physics and physical chemistry is somehow miraculously not responsible for what is happening to the planet?
You're deep into god-of-the-gaps territory, looking for a refutation of human-caused planetary warming in between the hard realities of scientific fact - when you can actually bring yourself to admit to those facts at all. You're like so many fundamentalist religious folk I know, who keep moving the goal-posts of what their deity is and does, and occasionally leaping on a well-publicised misinterpretation of science in order to step back a few iterations to a more mythical version of their world-view.
Alex Harvey, if there is "something no one has ever thought of", it is going to take some extraordinary explaining to account for how it has hidden itself from the scrutiny of a century and a half of scientific endeavour. It will also need to explain the magical nullifying phenomen(on/a) that completely removes operating physics from the picture. This includes the paleo sensitivity evidence that supports the experimental evidence of radiation-absorption physics.
Seriously, explain exactly how the fundamental physics [to which Richard Alley refers](http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/a/u/0/uHhLcoPT9KM), and [to which Iain Stewart refers](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeYfl45X1wo&feature=player_embedded), is being nullified by some unexplained magic, and what unthought-of non human-caused warming mechanism is operating in its place, and what additional magic is concealing the unthought-of non human-caused warming mechanism from science.
I am most curious to see if your account renders Ockham's to the status of butter knife.
And once you've addressed this, I am happy to revisit [my offer of a wager on the future of the Arctic summer sea ice](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…). It requires no argument about the arcana of science: just a preparedness to stand by your apparent belief that all is well, all is natural, it's happened before, [we're not sinking, nothing bad is happening](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8IBnfkcrsM).
> Seriously, explain exactly how the fundamental physics to which Richard Alley refers, and to which Iain Stewart refers, is being nullified by some unexplained magic, and what unthought-of non human-caused warming mechanism is operating in its place, and what additional magic is concealing the unthought-of non human-caused warming mechanism from science.
And then go one further. (I don't think I've ever seen a denialist engage with the following except for geo-engineering enthusiasts who - in most cases - incoherently place much more credence in their ability to model the consequences of their advocated actions than in the climate science community's models of how climate works.)
If humans aren't causing as much warming as previously thought, will warming continue nevertheless (and how do you know)? How warm will it likely get, and what will the range of likely consequences be? Do we care about avoiding any of those consequences (regardless of causal attribution), and if so, what do we do about it, given that anthropogenic forcings as identified by climate science appear to account for the vast majority of our impact? Is it possible that such a line of thinking might suggest that even *more* significant anthropogenic change might be required than is currently thought (and how do you know)?
Loth #621,
For the record, here is what Lindzen/Choi themselves say:
I will also check later to see if the reviewers brought up your complaint. That will be interesting, given that one of the reviewers is probably Ramanathan - and he's generally considered to be pretty smart.
Meanwhile, for the sake of argument let's just agree that it is 0.8 C that has to be explained rather than 0.5 C. (You get 0.5 C if you neglect the IPCC argument that the climate would otherwise have cooled as a result of volcanic forcings since 1960.)
Now, you write,
So you ask two questions here. Firstly, I would rate the odds of these cycles not having been "detected" (or identified) as very high.
A priori, it seems very foolish to me to presume that the only cycles operating in the climate system are the ones we happen to know about. It is like presuming that there is no other life in the universe simply because we don't happen to know of it.
If you pluck a string on a guitar, it oscillates at many frequencies, all related as subdivisions of the lowest, fundamental frequency available (i.e. that of the full length of the string). The climate system is of course more complicated than a guitar string, but it is also known to oscillate on many frequencies. Relative to these other cycles, the ones we know about - e.g. like the AMO - are presumably very high frequency. And yet we assume the ones we have identified are the only ones that exist. Why? I think the burden of proof should be on those saying they don't exist here.
Secondly, as with a guitar string, to explain an observed pattern of vibration you would have to assume the intersection of multiple cycles to account for observed patterns of warming and cooling. This is essentially what Tsonis et al. 2007 did.
> (...and how do you know)?
And if you don't - do you feel really really lucky, or would it be more prudent to stop quibbling about the details around the edges and move strongly to stabilise the atmosphere somewhere quite near the composition that leads to a climate that we have a reasonable handle on?
Loth #632,
And you talk about a "gish gallop". Let me see how much time I have to answer all your questions... Hm, time's up! Talk to you tomorrow!
> You get 0.5 C if you neglect the IPCC argument that the climate would otherwise have cooled as a result of volcanic forcings since 1960.
Unfortunately you can't just leave out the bits you don't care to assess - not even because Lindzen does it.
> If you pluck a string on a guitar, it oscillates at many frequencies, all related as subdivisions of the lowest, fundamental frequency available (i.e. that of the full length of the string).
Er, harmonic frequencies are *multiples of* the fundamental frequency. I believe you're talking about periods rather than frequencies.
And scientists have already identified [cycles much longer than the hypothetical 1000 year example you gave](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles), which implies that your suggestion that they haven't looked at large enough periods is deeply misinformed.
> The climate system is of course more complicated than a guitar string, but it is also known to oscillate on many frequencies.
Er, it's kinda not like a guitar string at all in one fundamental way that goes to the heart of your analogy. If you look at most of the climate "oscillations" that have been identified they are *quasi-periodic*, which means they *don't have* well-defined characteristic fundamental frequencies (let alone harmonics) such as the guitar string of which you speak.
> Relative to these other cycles, the ones we know about - e.g. like the AMO - are presumably very high frequency.
You presume both points you attempt to assert in that sentence. Perhaps you should critique your own argument more before you submit. Got any evidence or just presumption?
> I think the burden of proof should be on those saying they don't exist here.
You have this 180 degrees wrong - and completely orthogonal to that, you have another major error.
I haven't seen any scientist saying "they don't exist", so this another strawman. What I have seen them saying is "we've got a pretty decent explanation for observations without invoking cycles for which there is no reasonable evidence", the implication being "if other cycles exist, we would expect their aggregate impact to be non-significant, but we'll reassess if and when additional evidence is obtained".
You on the other hand are arguing that you kinda *expect* a previously unknown factor that has significant impact to show up, without any evidence.
As Bernard says, you *really* need to get acquainted with Ockham. And as you indicate, presumption is often "very foolish".
> A priori, it seems very foolish to me to presume that the only cycles operating in the climate system are the ones we happen to know about.
Indeed it would.
But it's **not** an a priori presumption, so you are tilting at a strawman.
Try again.
> I would rate the odds of these cycles not having been "detected" (or identified) as very high.
Interestingly, you did not appear to substantiate your answer to my question and may have ignored the inconvenient part of it. That is, the part about it needing to be a **large** undiscovered factor that just happened to have been inactive for a long long time and then start being active in (say) the 1960's is kind-of important. Your belief that long undetected cycles almost certainly exist is predicated on ... well, some rambling about guitar strings and presumptions. But it doesn't address the concept that *large* forcings are - in most cases - likely to be a lot easier to discover or infer than small ones.
> And you talk about a "gish gallop".
Go read the definition of Gish Gallop (which requires capitals).
Then explain why you think my questions might be one, with reference to the definition.
And for bonus points explain why you think your performance on this thread is not.
I realise I'm a bit late on here, but I thought it was worth reflecting on this:
[Alex says](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…)
>no one says there hasn't been warming
Alex must think we can't read, because that is *exactly* what he says, at posts 74, 95, 100, 156, 340 and 367. Possibly others, I only searched on "pause".
Surely if there is a pause, especially of decadal length, glacial melt should have slowed down. Has it, Alex? Have glaciers stopped melting or is your "pause" a fiction?
I guessing Alex's response will be to ignore, but to forestall further bullshitting - any response along the lines of "take up my second-rate quote-mining with Meehl" will be seen for what it is.
Lee #624,
I have in fact answered your question - you just didn't like my answer. But here's another answer that you might like more - sure, you are 100% correct. Lee et al., while relevant to my point, was not relevant to your point.
Have you actually read the paper by the way? They are looking at the difference between the upper and mid level trends and conclude that GCMs _are_ (not may be) exaggerating vertical stability. Your thoughts on the paper itself might be a refreshing change of topic!
It is hardly true that "Lindzen, almost alone in the field, keeps trying to pick holes in this". This issue is typically not associated with Lindzen at all. His only peer reviewed paper on the matter is the one I have been discussing. Rather, the problem was first observed in Spencer & Christy 1990. The latest paper on the issue by skeptics was Christy et al. 2010 (Christy, Herman, Pielke Sr., Klotzbach, McNider, Hnilo, Spencer, Chase & Douglass). So a lot of scientists there.
Obviously I am not going to read the whole literature before responding. And obviously I don't have time to answer all questions people are asking (and few questions are asked in good faith). In fact, I am pleased that I have learnt a great deal in the course of this discussion - so thanks for your help! If it leads others to seriously look at some of the questions I am asking that would be great - but I doubt there is anyone here interested in listening to what skeptics are saying.
If you feel that this particular tactic - the schoolyard bully approach - is your best shot - go for it! I haven't personally read anything little Ianam has written since the beginning of the thread - but if others find it cute or entertaining - well, as they say, there's no accounting for taste!
Loth #635,
Thanks for correcting my terminology.
Yes, of course I am aware of the Milankovitch hypothesis - but that is assumed to be related to orbital changes and a redistribution of solar radiation - in other words, changes from without. And it is a much longer cycle than I am talking about, anyway.
I am saying that we have only 100 years of reliable data and millions of years of earth history. The PDO has been reconstructed with difficulty back to the 17th century. So that means beyond the 17th century, we know it was there, but we can't see it. Obviously, if there were cycles operating on longer time scales - 100 years, 500 years, 1000 years - we wouldn't be able to see them either.
> ...and few questions are asked in good faith.
Saying it does not make it so.
You have a large queue of good faith questions to answer.
> ... I doubt there is anyone here interested in listening to what skeptics are saying.
I'm definitely interested **if they can substantiate their claims** - it would be great if the climate were not as sensitive as the climate science field tends to think. As someone somewhere pointed out, it might give us as much as an extra decade or so to strongly reduce our emissions rather than a handful of years.
Then again, 'skeptics' don't usually go into that kind of impact analysis but instead skip straight to "business as usual". Or they find some other relatively minor point and ... skip to "business as usual" without even demonstrating that the dots join up.
And I've seen 'skeptic' claims made over and over again that cannot be substantiated, and people like your good self (and much worse) coming here and asserting them time and again after they have been shown to be unsupported by the evidence. And in most cases those doing the asserting imagine that no-one here has seen or assessed said claims before, and when informed otherwise - with reasonably clear reasons for rejecting them - assert without evidence that the claims haven't been given a fair hearing.
It gets to the point where one often waits for the almost inevitable deconstruction job when a new variation pops up, because most of the obvious 'skeptic' hypotheses have been tried (and failed) and what's left is quite unlikely to have legs. And there's clearly no point "re-listening" to arguments that are already known to be very unlikely to be true...and little point in listening to people who insist on making them and then dealing with the explanation for non-acceptance in bad faith.
> Yes, of course I am aware of the Milankovitch hypothesis - but that is assumed to be related to orbital changes and a redistribution of solar radiation - in other words, changes from without.
That distinction does not rescue your argument.
> And it is a much longer cycle than I am talking about, anyway.
That distinction undermines your argument.
> I am saying that we have only 100 years of reliable data and millions of years of earth history.
That is not correct.
We have data that you assert we do not have with varying levels of uncertainty; it is a false dichotomy to divide into binary categories "reliable vs unreliable".
> So that means beyond the 17th century, we know it was there, but we can't see it.
Well, we don't actually know that - it may have disappeared some time back due to (say) a different arrangement of the continents. But given the rough quasi-period, reconstruction back to the 17th century is probably sufficient for current purposes.
> Obviously, if there were cycles operating on longer time scales - 100 years, 500 years, 1000 years - we wouldn't be able to see them either.
I already pointed you to a counter-example, and you yourself pointed to a proposed counter-example earlier in the thread. Your categorically asserted "obviously" is false. Especially because you appear to be arguing for hypothetical cycles that have a large impact on climate, which brings a much larger historical range of data (with associated larger uncertainties) into play - because it's essentially a signal-to-noise problem, and it's possible to see large signals amongst high noise when you can't see small ones.
But all this is (unsurprisingly) a distraction. You still haven't explained why you think it's a **better explanation** to invoke the unknown forcing(s) and low climate sensitivity than it is to invoke the known forcings and estimated climate sensitivity which explain the existing data quite well. Apparently you don't care to meet Mr. Ockham - but he does his thing regardless of your wishes.
Alex Harvey quoteing Lindzen/Choi:
Which is exactly what is happening now. This is not reassuring that low sensitivity is not going to be a problem, even if sensitivity is low.
> I am saying that we have only 100 years of reliable data and millions of years of earth history.
Yet you're also able to say that there's a 1000 year cycle...
If all we have is the last 100 years of data and what physics we know and can currently test as valid, we have the FACT that the CO2 warming is congruent with the science that gives us ~3C per doubling climate temperature sensitivity to CO2.
We have NO EVIDENCE of anything else.
So, rather than check to see if the underpant gnomes have a planetary sized heat-ray, why not work with the evidence we have? If you find out that the underpant gnomes exist and do have heat ray technology, then we can look at changing what we're doing at that time to account for it.
Until then, we'll work with changing what we're doing under the evidence we have.
Loth #641,
You write,
I don't think it is a better explanation. I simply think it is possible, and while it is possible, it should be investigated. Shall I remind you again that my own view is that Lindzen is likely to be wrong?
Just quietly Alex Harvey, guitar string harmonics are a bad analogy for climatic quasi-periodicities. String harmonics are described in steady state circumstances, and climatic trends over the time scales to which you allude are far from steady state - and in addition, are punctuated with stochastic phenomena.
Your ability to model climatology in even the most basic manner is clumsy. Anyone with half a grain of scientific understanding recognises that your ability in dealing with scientific explanations is basically absent.
You're not here to understand the science. You're here to use propagandistic rhetoric in order to discredit science for your own ideologically-motivated ends.
> I don't think it is a better explanation. I simply think it is possible, and while it is possible, it should be investigated.
Ah, then, we are making progress, albeit in a somewhat circular fashion.
So when asked why you think it is likely that sensitivity is low...you cite an unknown hypothetical that you (uncontroversially) think should be investigated and cite Lindzen who you now say is:
> ...likely to be wrong?
I can only infer that you have been unaware until now that you have no good reasons for your belief that sensitivity is likely to be low, and therefore will be changing your mind right about...
OK, I filched this from someone else, but it appears appropriate in a thread with Alex in it:
> you find a bullet embedded in the wall. You trace the angle of entry, look across the room, and see a smoking gun lying on a table.
> You now conclude that the bullet must have thrown the gun across the room onto the table.
Alex is arguing the bullet might have thrown the gun. Or the gunsmoke is because someone used it as a cigarette holder earlier. Or maybe guns spontaneously appear when nobody is looking. And that we have to include all these possibilities (or prove them impossible) before we can say that the gun shot a bullet into a wall.
Alex, you may feel put upon by "bullies" on this thread.
However, considering:
(1) You have presented a series of ridiculous, incoherent arguments against the mainstream conclusions of climatology, of which the most telling, IMO, is the series of arguments from personal ignorance [here](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/on_the_trick_to_hide_the_conte…) which you project upon scientists as an aggregate;
(2) You have referred to long-discredited conspiracy theories surrounding the hacked UEA-CRU emails as if they remain legitimate, without any acknowledgement that this was also a ridiculous position to espouse;
(3) Positions or claims perceived by others to be ridiculous generally attract ridicule;
Can you really be surprised at how this thread has gone down?
Nice of the comment parser to eliminate my line breaks between numbered list items.
Shorter Alex: A big cycle did it, and ran away.
Lucky all this is academic and abstract; I'd hate to think any futures were riding on our responses in this matter...
For you to accuse other people of not acting in 'good faith' is not funny, or ironic, or even sad. It's just dull. Projection is just par for the course. As is risible indignation.
Orwell suggested that to be truly evil requires a philosophy. The Denialists add a new, 21st Century first-as-tragedy/second-as-farce take on the matter: to be truly - monumentally - Stupid requires a certain level of intelligence.
So, go ahead, believe in your unknown unknowns and that pedantic quibbling over details somehow makes the actual melting of the world's cryosphere and the actually observed changes in species' ranges and behaviours issues of secondary importance.
Oh, and just change tack every time you get cornered, which is often. Make no admissions along the way. Bleat occasionally about how unjustly you're being treated, even though you started the argument.
And to anybody reading this who's daft enough to think what you're running might just present a real case for inaction: I don't believe that you can be reached by rational argument, and you couldn't perform a risk calculation if you were asked to carry an open bowl of nitroglycerin through a roofing-nail warehouse.
For posterity you run the risk of being recalled as a card-carrying member of the unselect The Most Stupid People in History club, of course, but you're too self-important to actually believe it possible.
You haven't answered my question, and I'm not going to bother to respond to you anymore, Alex. I'm more than satisfied of your essential hollowness. If you're going to stay on, I ask that you confine your activities to this thread, which can become a kind of Alex Harvey thread, and not play the Gish Gallop game elsewhere.
Composer99 @650: Yeah, you need to insert an extra line (as I found out to my cost).
So so many lies he tells ... but it doesn't really matter, because my posts are not really intended for his consumption, as he is a wretched sorry excuse for a human being, utterly incapable of self-examination.
Whoosh!
That was the sound of logic, the scientific method, and Alex's own stance here over the course of weeks flying by. Just imagine what progress science would have made if scientists had spent all their time investigating the implausible, hunting for evidence for possibilities merely because they are possible, rather than following what evidence there is, and "skeptically" disregarding the more plausible explanations for which there is supporting evidence.
But if that is what Alex thinks should be done, nothing is stopping him. He can go out, "investigate" (whatever he imagines that means -- it sounds more like meditation than science), and bring some evidence back if he can.
It's a magical invisible unicorn unicycle cycle!
Bill asks
and Alex responds
Hmmm ... it wouldn't even be "irrelevant" if everyone says that global (Alex manages to leave out that necessarily implied word) warming is causing the world's glaciers to melt, but let's disregard Alex's counterfactual claims about "irrelevant" and "no one" and instead pluck out the implication that he thinks that the overwhelming majority of the world's glaciers are picking precisely now to melt because of global warming ... oh good, we have some agreement ... but that Kilimanjaro isn't among them. Despite not being "super-smart", he "knows" it isn't because ... well, you can see his radically and willfully, erroneous "gotcha" interpretation of an email back in #1, #9, #36.
But in order to make rational dialogue possible, let's do the opposite of what Alex suggested in #583 .. let's do what Alex actually did, and assume that Lonnie Thompson (and Phil Jones) were lying, that they know that Kilimanjaro is not melting because of GW. This raises a question:
If the overwhelming majority of the world's glaciers are picking precisely now to melt because of global warming, but the fact that "the current climate conditions over Mount Kilimanjaro are unique over the last 11 millennia" are not related to global warming, is this just a big coincidence? We have Alex telling us that "everyone else believes that land use changes like deforestation cause the circulation changes which cause the sublimation" ... but Alex doesn't give equal weight to the fact that "everyone" -- that is, 97% of the world's scientists -- are also telling us that human activity (including deforestation) is causing (via increases in atmospheric CO2) the global warming that is clearly (and uncontroversially, according to Alex) melting the overwhelming majority of the world's glaciers.
Alex wrote
Could anyone possibly be more hypocritical and intellectually dishonest?
Alex Harvey:
So how did they escape showing up in any ice-core? What's happening now will leave a huge imprint in Greenland ice-cores the magnitude and speed of which does not show up in the past, except during ice-ages when temperature was much more volatile and events such as the DansgaardâOeschger occured.
It's not an ice-age now, Alex and a DansgaardâOeschger is not happening now, so where's your mysterious "cycle" in any ice-core?
An analogy would be asking what the odds are that aliens are currently visiting earth but they have never been noticed, and Alex telling us that he would rate the odds of such a thing to be high because it would be foolish to presume that there is no other life in the universe. The notion of evidence relevant to a specific proposition doesn't seem to enter into Alex's thinking.
Here Alex once again shows his complete ignorance of science, by a) disregarding Ockham and b) talking about "proof", which is not a factor in empirical epistemology.
We assume that there aren't magical undetectable fairies that are responsible for global warming, evolution, quantum mechanics, the apparently expanding universe with its dark matter and dark energy, etc. Why oh why oh why would we silly scientists make such an assumption when we haven't proved that there are no such fairies? We must take up that burden!
Has Alex actually read the paper? From the conclusion:
Perhaps Alex only read the abstract (where they say "it is evident") and, like one of the arrogant blind men feeling the elephant, assumed that his peephole captured the whole, thus justifying his suggestion that Lee didn't read the paper, even though he accurately characterized the conclusion.
Lotharrson #641,
The truth is there is not a single poster at this forum - from what I can see - who is capable of being respectful to someone they disagree with. That's fine, because a few have demonstrated themselves capable of correcting my errors - and given their eagerness to do so - more power to me, eh?
Let me address the rest of your post:
And this is the problem with class generalisations. Essentially, you do the same thing as racists do when they generalise by race or culture, or as sexists do when they generalise by gender, or as homophobes do when they generalise by sexual orientation. You have understood that I am not advocating "business as usual" under any scenario - not even Lindzen's 0.5 C. Correct?
That may be true of some skeptics, but it is hardly true of me. You obviously haven't read the Lindzen/Choi paper and neither has anyone else. No one here had read the Lindzen 2007 paper either until I pointed out its existence. If Lindzen is wrong, why does no one write to him and tell him so? My bet is he would be more than willing to discuss the matter, and allow the correspondence to be made public. The issue simply is not resolved.
You are justifying a resort to dogma. The dispute over tropospheric trends is alive and well and something non-obvious is required to resolve it. You might like Pielke's post from today, [Further Confirmation Of Klotzbach Et Al 2009](http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/further-confirmation-o…). You might like to read the related discussion at Steve McIntyre's blog [Un-Muddying the Waters](http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/07/un-muddying-the-waters).
Clearly there are at least three possibilities here:
1) Santer, Thorne et al. are right - an error will be discovered in BOTH RSS and UAH analyses that will bring the observations in line with models.
2) The tropical atmosphere and is not understood. A revision of the physical theory is needed to explain why the tropical troposphere is not warming as much as predicted.
3) The surface trend is exaggerated due to common errors in all datasets.
Chris O'Neill #655,
I am talking about cycles that would change temperature up or down by less than 1 C. They would not be visible in the ice core data.
It is true that the cycle of the ice ages is seen in the ice core data - but that in that cycle temperatures move by as much as 10 C.
Presently we can only reconstruct the known cycles using other data and only back as far as two or three hundred years.
So for all intents and purposes, we have no data at all to resolve the sort of cycles that I am talking about.
Wow #644,
As I said above, without data that could resolve cycles like PDO, AMO that operate on longer periods, or longer "quasi-periods", the burden of proof is on you to tell me why they shouldn't exist. We know that some ocean circulations take hundreds and thousands of years to complete, e.g. the thermohaline circulation. There are presumably other circulations we don't know about. And the effect of all this on the global average temperature is completely unknown.
Pathetic hypocritical transparently lying troll. Not only is it obviously true that there are people here who are capable of being respectful to someone they disagree with, there are people here who are even capable of being respectful to a sniveling little serial lying weasel like Alex -- not that there's any good reason to be.
>The truth is there is not a single poster at this forum - from what I can see - who is capable of being respectful to someone they disagree with.
Tone troll.
>That's fine, because a few have demonstrated themselves capable of correcting my errors - and given their eagerness to do so - more power to me, eh?
People might be more respectful if you didn't admit defeat and claim victory in the same sentence.
Alex, nobody believes you are here in good faith. As I have pointed out before, and you have ignored (shocking, I know), you have to earn respect. You can't show up, spam the same old lies that have been debunked again and again and expect politeness.
Your argument is hypocritical. You claim that you're not repeating debunked arguments or asserting that your arguments "haven't been given a fair hearing" before repeating a debunked argument and accusing people of not reading the paper.
How is any of this weird behaviour supposed to garner respect?
Every time you say it you demonstrate what an ignorant fool you are, as I explained in `#`657, and by refusing to acknowledge such points, you demonstrate what a bad faith troll you are.
>This certainly never happened with Big Tobacco - the general public figured out pretty quickly that cigarettes are harmful.
Seriously delusional.
Alex Harvey:
Of course global temperature changes of that size would be visible in Greenland ice cores. You forget that Arctic temperature changes amplify global temperature changes and even if it didn't, 0.5 C is visible in ice cores anyway.
Of course the global temperature change associated with that is much less than 10 C.
We can reconstruct moderately accurate estimates of global temperature anomaly and for a fair bit more than two or three hundred years BTW. But the important point is that it is unnecessary to have a moderately accurate estimate of global temperature anomaly in order to detect climatic cycles in the ice-core data.
You're wrong of course.
> As I said above, without data that could resolve cycles like PDO, AMO that operate on longer periods, or longer "quasi-periods", the burden of proof is on you to tell me why they shouldn't exist.
The burden is on us to prove there aren't magical garden fairies warming the climate?
And hypocrite, since his comment is obviously disrespectful to everyone here, along with all his claims about questions not asked in good faith, not engaging in discussion, etc. etc., going back to `#`1, where he showed extraordinary disrespect for a number of scientists.
Alex has earned disrespect, in spades.
That is indeed what he is arguing. As I noted in #657, he has no understanding of the methodology or epistemology of science. And then he employs that lack if understanding to make an obviously intellectually bankrupt argument.
Alex Harvey:
I commented on that in #307:
Alex demands that we prove that there aren't global warming fairies, while fabricating such counterfactual and offensive fairytales.
Of course none of Alex's absurd armflapping about conceivable but completely unobserved causes for global warming has any bearing on the fact that the inference to the best explanation -- which is how science operates -- is well established, and that it is utterly dishonest to demand that we wait -- necessarily forever -- for proof of an empirical universal negative.
Don't overgeneralize while attacking overgeneralization -- I'm a USAian and I don't think that.
This is what Alex calls "respect" -- and from the guy who tells us what "no one" says or thinks.
BTW, one must marvel at Alex's ability to call out the error of racists, sexists, and homophobes -- it's overgeneralization. And I guess Hitler too (oh how I wish Godwin's Law really worked that way) -- his mistake was to think that all Jews are like that!
Alex makes it too easy.
> And this is the problem with class generalisations. Essentially, you do the same thing as racists do when they generalise by race or culture...
Except that it wasn't what you characterised it as. I deliberately specified "**usually**" as a qualifier. And made some obvious points even more obvious by the use of **bold** in the previous paragraph - and they undermine your claim here. Go, check.
And your logic is fallacious - or at least grossly incomplete.
The problem with class or other generalisations is not that they are observed at higher frequencies than random chance would suggest, because if that's what the data shows, then that is what it shows. The problem is when they are **presumed** of an individual based on said individual's class membership.
I didn't do that in the comment you object to.
> You obviously haven't read the Lindzen/Choi paper and neither has anyone else.
You keep saying that, and you keep being wrong. Do you think repeating a known falsehood will help your credibility? Or do you prefer to see it as demonstrating your poor inferential skills (which segues to ianam's point in #657 and #672), and if so why?
> If Lindzen is wrong, why does no one write to him and tell him so?
What a wonderful suggestion! But I tell you what, why don't those people write comments and papers in the scientific literature and even blog posts if they are so inclined? Oh, wait...
> You are justifying a resort to dogma.
Bullshit!
Try comprehending it again. In particular, note that I am not advocating ignoring (say) new evidence - not even if you say I am. (Whereas you still appear to be advocating effectively dismissing the explanation offered by the existing evidence - which comes across as hypocritical.)
I am pointing out that much of what you and other 'skeptics' keenly advocate here has been fairly solidly debunked or is quite implausible based on the available evidence - even if those advocating it claim otherwise. Accordingly in those cases the 'skeptic' whine that they're not getting a fair hearing is bullshit because they're not presenting any new evidence that would justify a re-evaluation. And that the burden of establishing plausibility is firmly on the 'skeptic', no matter how hard you wish for someone to drop a magic pony in your lap.
But that's all a massive distraction from (say) the problems with some of your claims pointed out in #642 and #647, or any of the more recent fundamental points made by others, isn't it? Care to tackle them?
> The problem is when they are presumed of an individual based on said individual's class membership.
And if you get around to absorbing that, start pondering how those presumptions are **acted upon**, which is usually the starkest problem with bigotry - and then see if you can show where I engaged in the same behaviour.
Or, as is fairly typical, you could just add it to the long list of inconvenient queries that you never respond to.
Chris O'Neill #666,
Well given that we are discussing a change in global average temperature of 0.8 C, I would think that a resolution of 0.5 C is probably not adequate. I also don't understand your point about the Arctic amplification of warming. Isn't that enhanced warming in the Arctic only a prediction of CO2 forced warming? If so, I don't see how that knowledge would help us if we were interested in non-CO2-forced natural warming.
As far as I can discover, the known oscillations have only been reconstructed back at most a few hundred years - using ice cores and other proxies. If you think this is wrong, do show me evidence.
So I say again, if these ice cores have enabled reconstruction of known oscillations back only a few hundred years, then multicentennial & millenial scale oscillations simply wouldn't be visible to us. Or maybe they would be visible in principle but no one has had time to look for them? It makes no difference to my point.
That said, I do wonder how it is possible to infer global average response from polar ice cores if we are considering changes of only < +/- 1 C. For instance, a relatively large medieval warm period is identified in ice cores in Kobashi et al. 2010 (Persistent multi-decadal Greenland temperature fluctuation through the last millennium, Climatic Change 100: 733-756). In their paper, they find a MWP that is considerably warmer than the present. My bet is you would say that it all changes in the global average? Otherwise, you would have to conclude that Mann et al. are wrong?
From [what I can see](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png) the temperatures in fact vary by more than 10 C (i.e about -7 C to + 4 C). Why do you dispute this?
Lotharrson #677, #678,
O-kay. How does "blacks are USUALLY stupid" sound to you? How does "gays are USUALLY promiscuous" sound to you? How does "skeptics are USUALLY delayers" sound to you?
So are you denying that it has been presumed repeatedly of the individual here (i.e. me) that I am "ideologically motivated"? See if you can count all the other presumptions because I probably couldn't be bothered reading most of it.
> Or maybe they would be visible in principle but no one has had time to look for them?
You appear to have missed the fact that some commenters have cited people who think they've found some before - and some people have previously pointed this out to you.
Oh, wait, those commenters citing those things include yourself!
"Alex v. Alex, round 27: who will have the stamina to remain standing at the bitter end?!"
> O-kay.
O-kay, you have - conveniently - missed my point, and also evaded the scientific questions.
Again.
Why is that not surprising?
> How does "blacks are USUALLY stupid" sound to you?
Epic logic fail.
It sounds **false**.
Unlike my point.
> It makes no difference to my point.
Of course. Because your point is little more than idle speculation. It is evidence free. It is wishing for a pony. It is uncontroversial when you (occasionally) back off to a defensible position but persistently conflated with an indefensible one, and then used to insist that the uncontroversial one is controversial. Heck, your pushing it and apparently refusing to accept an actual existing explanation makes you look...er, what's the term? Ideasomething?
> So are you denying that it has been presumed repeatedly of the individual here (i.e. me) that I am "ideologically motivated"?
Logic fail.
It has been presumed of **you here** by many because of the **evidence presented here**, including your very first comment, your claims of repeatedly rebutted falsehoods, your arguing against your own position when cornered without apparently realising that you are, your almost pathological inability to engage with critique in cases where it demonstrates you are almost certainly wrong or overstating the case, and your displaying at least reasonably plausible evidence of ideological motivation *other* than the search for the best explanation based on the evidence we have.
The fact that you deny this to be true - or perhaps are genuinely unaware of it - doesn't change it.
It's possible the evidence is pointing away from the truth - heck, you might merely be a Dunning-Kruger exemplar although I don't find that argument eminently plausible. But if the evidence really does point away from the truth, after all the free critique offered to you on this thread, then it must *still* be said that you do a bloody good impression of a certain type of denialism.
And as I suggested way way back in the thread - if you genuinely believe you're not practicing a form of denialism, you might want to ponder why you appear so convincing to others.
(And let us suppose someone here presumed you to be ideologically motivated of you because of apparent membership in a class - perhaps based on your repetition of denialist talking points in your first post that suggested you were a member of the class of uninformed and unscientific 'skeptics' - they haven't *discriminated* against you in the serious ways that bigots do based on sexual orientation, race or gender etc. Your attempt to equate that bigoted discrimination with any such presumption here is a major logic fail. Ponder it.)
False.
False.
True. Gee, that was easy. That Alex thinks there's any sort of logic here shows how stupid he is. The assertions about blacks and gays are based strictly on animus, not fact, whereas a factual assertion is "blacks and gays (in the U.S.) usually vote Democratic", which is much more like a statement about the politics of deniers.
It's an inference, a concept Alex does not understand and is quite inept at in practice. Let's go back to #94, where I noted how Alex immediately framed things ideologically, with his comment
And this super hyper mega hypocrite has the gall to talk about what we presume about him?
P.S.
Which isn't even what Lotharsson's statement was about. Rather, it was
which is a rather straightforward factual truth ... after all, how many 'skeptics' have analyzed how much longer we would have to strongly reduce our emissions given a lower sensitivity? Alex certainly hasn't, so what's his beef? Instead, he dishonestly deflects the point by absurdly likening the above obviously true statement to offensive bigoted statements about blacks and gays ... and he expects respect?
I do. People who go on and on about their "point", despite it having been challenged and even refuted, are usually such examplars, lacking the aptitude to grasp just how inept they are at basic reasoning and argumentation, and Alex has presented plenty of other evidence for that. But I think you pose a false dichotomy ... it's both ideology and ineptitude, in both Alex and other deniers (usually) ... and the two are not uncorrelated, nor causally unconnected (usually).
False analogy is false, so to forestall Alex posting a Melbourne Cup field of gallopers...
>Isn't that enhanced warming in the Arctic only a prediction of CO2 forced warming?
No.
>From what I can see the temperatures in fact vary by more than 10 C (i.e about -7 C to + 4 C). Why do you dispute this?
Because if you had bothered to read *your own link*, you would see that the graph is of *Antarctic* temperatures. Since Antarctica is also subject ot the amplification Lothersson referred to it is not representative of *global* temperatures.
Fail.
> You have understood that I am not advocating "business as usual" under any scenario - not even Lindzen's 0.5 C. Correct?
All I recall is one statement that you favoured some form of action without explaining much about it, or how you concluded that it was necessary - let alone how you decide how strong such action should be. This was set off against a strong and repeated expression of belief that sensitivity is likely to be low, for reasons that have recently been revealed to have been erroneous, as far as I can tell.
Feel free to elaborate on what you think we should be doing. I would be quite interested in your risk assessment and associated methodology, given the uncertainties and potentially very high impacts involved - and your apparent heavy focus on what appear to date to be marginal issues instead of risk management.
> But I think you pose a false dichotomy...
No, but I may not have communicated it clearly enough. The hypothetical explanation was that Alex is *merely* DK-afflicted; in other words I do not find convincing when advanced as a sole factor but DK + something else seems eminently plausible. Or to summarise, I agree with the rest of the sentence after the quote - and the sentence that preceded it.
Alex:
With regards to:
Recall what I said about how you tended to espouse positions or make claims that were generally perceived by others to be ridiculous - hence attracting their ridicule.
This is one of those claims.
The burden of proof to establish the veracity of an empirical claim (e.g. "there exist as-yet unidentified very long-term cyclic phenomena affecting the Earth climate system") falls of necessity on the person making that claim (e.g. you, or whatever source for this conjecture of yours is).
This comment of yours also shows how you are not behaving skeptically, a trait which a distressing number of climate pseudoskeptics display (which is why the term 'skeptic' is inappropriate). Contemporary skeptics, such as Carl Sagan, James Randi, Drs Steve Novella or David Gorski of Science-Based Medicine or the crew at Canadian skeptic blog Skeptic North all share a definition of skepticism in which acceptance of a claim is proportional to the amount and quality of evidence which can be mustered to support it.
Here we have a wild conjecture on your part with no supporting evidence and yet you insist not only that we should find this conjecture plausible, but also that it is the responsibility of others to find counterevidence against it instead of your responsibility to support your own conjecture with evidence.
Given your other behaviour in this thread as I & others have remarked upon, there is little evidentiary support on this thread to show that you are behaving at all in a manner in line with skepticism.
Alex Harvey:
The resolution in Greenland ice cores is better than 0.1 C.
No, it's a consequence of snow/ice albedo feedback from any cause of warming. As you yourself pointed out, Lindzen said that climatic extremes in the past were much stronger at high latitudes than globally overall.
You're missing the main point about detecting climatic oscillations (as well as being wrong about how far back global reconstructions can be done). It is not necessary to reconstruct entire global temperature to be able to detect climatic oscillations. If there are global climatic oscillations then they will appear in amplified form in the Greenland ice cores (in addition to local oscillations).
It doesn't take very long at all to look for them in NGRIP_d18O_50yrs.xls. You can look yourself.
If you looked more carefully at your citation you will notice that it says EPICA and Vostok. This means they are the Antarctic temperatures, not the global average temperature.
Ah, I wondered how much weight to give your "merely" in determining your intent, and erred on the low side.
No worries, ianam. Language can be a slippery thing - that's why we clarify when necessary :-)
C99, who has the burden of proof - those who belief there is probably life elsewhere in the universe, those who believe otherwise - or both? Why?
Loth, regarding "False. ... False. ... True. Gee, that was easy. That Alex thinks there's any sort of logic here shows how stupid he is" - in fact it's considered "racist" whether the generalisation by race is true or not. As with all forms of class discrimination - and as is the case at this forum - class hatred, the issue is not making false generalisations by race (gender, sexual orientation, etc) - it is simply making the generalisation in the first place.
> ...it is simply making the generalisation in the first place.
ROFL: apparently "Spanish people generally speak Spanish" is racist!
So the whole distinction between making generalisations (that are accurate to a certain degree in the class as a whole), as compared to (a) presuming that individuals exhibit the attributes attributed to the class *purely because* they belong to that class, and (b) discriminating against said individuals on that basis, has whooshed right over your head and you claim it has nothing to do with "the issue"?
Add that to the list of things you confidently assert without understanding.
Loth,
I note the irony - "this Alex, he said we should be taking action on climate change - but then he said 'climate sensitivity is low'!"
In fact, you imagined the bit about "repeated expression of belief that sensitivity is likely to be low". This is class generalisation distorting your memory. I began by saying I don't really know, and then conceded later that I'll be surprised if it's as high as the IPCC thinks it is - my bet being somewhere between 1.5 - 2 C (actually I'd put it closer to the 2 C side than 1.5 C but that's not what I said initially; if I had to pick a single number I'd bet my money on 2 C). But the important point is no value would surprise me - anything from 0.5 through to 6 wouldn't come as shock to me.
On "what we should be doing" - well I don't have a fixed opinion on exactly what we should be doing because it's a hugely difficult question - even if we fully accept the IPCC science.
However, one thing I do believe we should be doing is implementing the very painful, unpopular policy of population control. I believe that any effort to reduce CO2 emissions will be quickly offset by the increase in population by 2050. And even more controversially, but perhaps obviously, it most needs to happen in countries like India where huge families are common. If we can't stabilise population at the present 7 billion, we're to a large extent stuffed - end of story. Of course, that's going to be rather tricky politically - given how we've been berating China for its 'one child' policy for the last few decades. Still, I think this is one thing that simply has to happen; that's my view.
(That said, I also tend to think there'll be a WWIII before 2050 - and this may go some way to reducing the population again - and a nuclear winter may yet solve the global warming problem too. The 'pax Americana' is anomalous in history and I see little evidence that humanity has matured to a point where a military conflict between emerging (and declining) superpowers isn't likely. One worthwhile consideration is that any global economic collapse is the sort of thing that could trigger or make more likely a conflict of this sort.)
Aside from this, I believe non-hypothetical environmental problems should be given more focus than they are. Reducing black carbon emissions seems like something that could buy us time and have plenty of other benefits - but people won't consider this because they're irrationally afraid that it will play into the hands of "delayers".
Finally, I tend to support the Australian government's carbon tax, as I stated earlier. Globally, I really haven't thought enough about what other countries should be doing.
I should add that I am a Labor Party activist and tend to side with the Labor left on most non-economic issues. I find the excesses of free market ideology quite spooky and strange - and if you care to you can confirm this for yourself by searching for a thread at Niche Modeling where I took David Stockwell on for what I regarded as hugely deceptive Liberal Party propaganda on an issue like this once.
For the last 12 years or so I've been donating to WWF - I have always been passionately conservationist-minded. I have often voted for the Greens in the Senate.
The only issue I have a right-wing view on I can think of is that I support the Monarchy in Australia.
See, it's amazing isn't it. I just don't fit your stereotype even a tiny little bit. :)
And while we're at it, did you not notice that you conflated two different terms with different meanings, one of which screams "giant hint that I am part of 'the issue'" at you even as you deny that it is?
Here, I'll help you out.
> As with all forms of class **discrimination**...the issue is...simply making the **generalisation** in the first place.
Feel free to try and argue that you used "discrimination" here to mean "drawing a distinction between" rather than biased treatment of an individual based on class membership, as long as you follow through by pointing out how that isn't the common usage especially when discussing bigotry, so you were merrily tilting at a strawman.
Or feel free to elaborate on your apparent belief that "class discrimination" really truly doesn't actually require any of that latter sort of discrimination, is merely a synonym for "class generalisation" and perhaps even the corollary that people should stop using the term because it's misleading and a better one exists.
Loth, okay. Obviously the generalisation needs to be contentious in some way too. Stating that Spaniards speak Spanish is probably okay. Doing an accurate but mocking inpersonation of a Spanish accent in some parts of America might be "racist". I'm sure you'll figure it out if you think hard enough, Loth.
> Doing an accurate but mocking inpersonation of a Spanish accent in some parts of America might be "racist".
Doing it *anywhere* would be racist. And the racism in it is due primarily to the *discrimination* implied by the mockery, not to (say) the generalisation that Spanish people speak Spanish, so it's not even a robust example that fits your own definition - instead it fits mine.
> I'm sure you'll figure it out if you think hard enough, Loth.
Sarcasm is an epic fail when you don't realise you should have targeted it at yourself.
And I don't think you'll figure it out, even with the free help you get here. But it does help distract you from the scientific questions, eh?
Chris O'Neill #688,
Although you haven't convinced me on undetected climate oscillations, I do appreciate the opportunity to discuss ideas and to be corrected on much of the detail. Despite doing a lot of reading, I can see that without discussion and formal training it is very easy to pick up misunderstandings about all sorts of things.
Okay, but it still doesn't easily lead to knowledge of the global average. And what about time resolution? Time resolution has been the real problem, right?
I think I just quoted Lindzen for the record. Okay, I'll take your word for it. I thought I read somewhere that there was a signature of CO2 warming in the Arctic - but it may again be like the troposphere issue.
Well, I had a quick look at the Mann et al. paper and didn't really see the relevance. I see your point that _some_ oscillations we already know of show up in the Greenland ice cores. But I also think the main point I made still stands, i.e. that possible or not, the fact is reconstructions of known oscillations only go back several hundred years. This must mean that it is difficult - perhaps mathematically difficult - to find them - to separate the signal and noise. So the question may be, again, has anyone ever looked? I mean, maybe they have and it's just not being discussed. I noted to my surprise that Kobashi et al. 2010 concluded, "A multi-decadal temperature fluctuation with periods of 40â100 persisted for the last millennium, and so will likely continue into the future." If correct, this would be exactly the sort of pattern I am expecting people will find - if they look.
Yeah, except you need to be a scientist and a mathematician.
Thank you, point taken. So the figure I knew from memory is probably right - 5 C?
I would be interested in your answer to my question to 'Composer99' in #691 as well, i.e. "who has the burden of proof - those who belief there is probably life elsewhere in the universe, those who believe otherwise - or both? Why?"
> I just don't fit your stereotype even a tiny little
bit. :)
You fit mine quite well, but mine isn't about most of the things you talked about. It's about people who want science to say what they want to hear - for whatever reason they have, whether political or religious or other ideology or personal preference or avoiding scary thoughts or being part of an elite or in-crowd or whatever, the actual reason usually being unimportant - often so that their preferred policy outcomes will be favoured, and who will abuse science to proclaim that it does.
And my stereotype includes a bunch of tactics and behaviours designed to achieve that, to which you are a pretty good match, although you're no Tim Curtin ;-)
(Oh, and it's amusing that you stereotype me and assert I have a belief about your (say) political ideology based on your position. I can't speak for others, but I don't.)
> ...you imagined the bit about "repeated expression of belief that sensitivity is likely to be low".
I do not believe so. As you point out you did explicitly say that, and as all can verify for themselves you then expended many words attempting to defend the proposition, or the fallback position that it "may be" low, in various ways.
I also see you didn't really describe what action you think should be taken or how risk management should be achieved, other than through population control (which won't do much except limit the further growth of the problem below what it might otherwise be) and a somewhat lukewarm tendency to support an Australia carbon tax (which is a pretty weak measure).
And you cite for your lack of much opinion the "hugely difficult problem" and express in two different ways ("even if we fully accept the IPCC science", "non-hypothetical environmental problems") significant doubt about the issue and science, despite also expressing a belief that 6C sensitivity is plausible. (Alex v Alex, round 29!)
One of the Alexes really needs to go figure out how bad 6 C would be and what kind of policy responses would form part of a prudent risk management strategy and compare with the other Alex' current thinking. But based on past behaviour I predict neither of them will...
Alex:
With regards to your question:
who has the burden of proof - those who believe there is probably life elsewhere in the universe, those who believe otherwise - or both? Why?
How is this at all relevant? A statement of opinion (e.g. "I [do not] believe there is probably life elsewhere in the universe") has no burden of proof requirement. Neither does it have any force compared to empirical statements (e.g. "here is evidence showing there is/was life elsewhere in the universe").
Are you conceding that the notion of as-yet-unknown climatic oscillations is your unsubstantiated opinion?
If not, I'm sorry to say that you need to find some other line of argument to show that you do not possess the burden of proof to support your positive empirical claim as this is simply a red herring.
Neither, you moron.
See, as I said, Alex is a liar and does read my posts, he's just too stupid to figure out that their mine.
No, moron, it's not -- at least not by people who are rational and not just knee-jerk PC reactionaries. I gave such a generalization -- most blacks and gays (in the U.S.) vote Democratic -- and there is nothing racist about it. Another non-racist statement is that the average black IQ score is lower than the average white IQ score; that's a fact ... but there are many non-factual inferences that racists draw from it.
Compete and utter fail.
What issue? There is no issue about making true generalizations, other than the absurd moronic grossly dishonest sophistic lying stupid one that you are making here to once again avoid your intellectual responsibilities. You have said so many stupid and dishonest things here, but this one that true generalizations about "skeptics" is "class hatred" or "discrimination" tops them all.
Yes, obviously it matters whether its true.
It's racist (rather, bigoted) because "accurate but mocking" is a self-contradiction. And why would it matter where it's done? Do you think bigotry isn't bigotry if only bigots are around?
He already figured it out, but you clearly haven't. You talk about respect but you don't show it, you super mega hyper hypocrite.
Thinking hard enough is something that Alex rarely does. Here was Loth's statement:
So is that contentious? If so, why? Alex has offered no basis for thinking it's false, rather delving into an absurd and dishonest comparison to racisim, which he has now backed off of without ever admitting it, instead dishonestly and absurdly insinuating that it's Loth who didn't "figure it out" ... what is it that Loth didn't figure out?
It's not amazing at all; there are intellectually dishonest anuses all across the political spectrum.
It's about time you saw that, Alex. Perhaps we should go back to post `#`1 and start all over.
Is that some sort of sick joke? Nuclear winter would solve the civilization "problem".
Absence of global warfare is not anomalous, nor is a general trend toward reduced violence (according to Steven Pinker, although there's room for dispute), and America's numerous invasions and wars and the massive U.S. arms export industry fueling conflicts all over the world makes Pax Americana a rather ironic term. There are all sorts of implications of the lack of human maturity -- such as the failure to embrace the reality and threat of AGW -- but it has little bearing on whether there will be a nuclear conflict among "superpowers", if that means the U.S., Russia, and China ... the evidence does not support any such thing. More likely sources of nuclear detonations are Pakistan, North Korea, Muslim terrorists, and possibly Iran, as well as Israel and India ... only the last could be considered anywhere near an "emerging ... superpower", but India emerging as an economic superpower makes it less, not more, likely to use nukes. And of course there is also the threat from terrorists of indiscriminate biological weapons -- labs have produced viruses with the very high toxicity of avian flu and the very high infectiousness of swine flu, and Al Qaeda has out a call for jihadist microbiologists; I'd worry about that before I'd worry about nuclear war. And global economic collapse makes local conflicts more likely, but I don't think there's any clear basis for arguing that global conflict is more likely.
Where "hypothetical" is defined as "Alex chooses not to accept" and "non-hypothetical" is defined as "Alex chooses to accept".
What the flying eff are you talking about? What "people" won't consider this and what evidence do you have for the given motivation? You are such a hypocrite.
You mean like thisIPCC science?
Alex vs. Alex, round ∞.
> Is that some sort of sick joke? Nuclear winter would solve the civilization "problem".
Well, he actually offered that WWIII may "go some way towards reducing the population again", and that nuclear winter would solve the global warming problem - but both certainly are sick jokes.
But he made an even sicker one when you note that there's already a good chance that anthropogenic warming will "solve" the population problem that Alex is worried about, and the likelihood of that outcome will not be significantly reduced by population limiting measures Alex suggests - but Alex isn't advocating the kind of measures that *would* have at least a decent shot at mitigation.
Some recent estimates of the impact of significant warming suggest that the population carrying capacity of the planet could be heavily reduced and that even "global society" may not prove to be maintainable. In other words, the population might be reduced **below** today's levels by billions, and suffer heavy capability losses at the same time.
As Ray Ladbury recently commented [elsewhere](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/12/climate-cynicism-…) in response to Judith Curry attempting to defend her "uncertainty monster" meme (my emphasis):
> ...Risk assessment is my day job, and I can say without any uncertainty that you donât understand it. First, you donât even define standard risk assessment methodology, but instead throw up your hands in the face of the "uncertainties".
> Risk assessment begins with the identification of a credible threat. ...
> Once the credible threat is defined, the next step is to bound the risk posed by the threat, where risk is defined as the probability of the threat being realized times the cost were it to be realized. ... Unfortunately, you are claiming that the models are too unreliable to yield reliable estimates of probabilities. **That means that the risk cannot be bounded**.
> When a risk with severe consequences cannot be bounded, **standard risk assessment prescribes risk avoidance as the only reasonable strategy**, since intelligent allocation of resources toward risk mitigation is not possible for situations of unbounded risk.
> For climate change, the only way to avoid the threat is to quit burning fossil fuels and otherwise reduce CO2 emissions. Indeed, without reliable modelsâas you contendâthe only reasonable strategy is to slam on the brakes HARD.
> Judy, uncertainty is not the friend of the complacent.
And given that Alex concedes that he can't rule out a 6 C climate sensitivity (never mind his harping on uncertainties in the models), then Alex cannot legitimately do anything except Ray's analysis ... which leads to calls for heavy duty emissions reduction actions starting immediately, right Alex?
Right, Alex?
>On "what we should be doing" - well I don't have a fixed opinion on exactly what we should be doing because it's a hugely difficult question - even if we fully accept the IPCC science.
Eh, "...even if we fully accept the IPCC science"?
Something that you really need to understand is that "IPCC science" is actually a very conservative consensus summary of much more detailed material.
Professional scientists [saw this decades ago](http://i39.tinypic.com/14imuc3.jpg), and from detailed understanding of their fields of science were able to conclude that "it's a human-caused global warming elephant".
The IPCC [saw this in the collation of AR4](http://i42.tinypic.com/2af86x.jpg) and cautiously said "it appears to be a human-caused global warming elephant, and we should assume that it is".
Alex Harvey and his recalcitrant denialist ideologues will [see this bearing down on them](http://i41.tinypic.com/2h66kh1.jpg) and will say "rubbish, it's not a human-caused global warming elephant, and we can't afford to swerve out of the [w-arghhh...](http://i42.tinypic.com/24vr4t3.jpg)"
Alex @ 694: if I had to pick a single number I'd bet my money on 2 C...
Alex, please explain where Lindzen is so wrong that you would bet your money on a sensitivity approximately twice as high as he calculated.
Alex Harvey:
You're not getting the point that you don't need an accurate knowledge of global average to be able to rule out the possibility of oscillations in the global average. If there are oscillations in the global average then there will be oscillations in the Greenland ice core temperatures. Therefore no Greenland ice core oscillations of a given magnitude means no global oscillations of the same and even a lot less magnitude.
No it's not. NGRIP resolves 50 years right back to 123,000 years ago.
Obviously too quick. Mann et al's reconstructions go back 1,700 years, not your "several hundred years".
Just rubbish.
So you're saying that in the late 20th century, the signal all of a sudden becomes much stronger than the noise while previously in the records it has never been anywhere near as strong as it is now. If you believe that, you'll believe anything.
Well so what? Does that reflect a 0.5 C+ global oscillation that lasts for a century or more?
You don't need to be a scientist and mathematician to use spreadsheet programs any more. Just tell us when you think these 0.5 C global equivalent oscillations were in the past. The biggest one I can see in the Holocene is 0.8 C cooling at the ice core around 2200 BP. The global fluctuation accompanying this would have been far less than 0.8 C.
There's plenty of proof based on the fact that as far as paleoclimatic variation goes, the nature of the current climate change is unprecedented without known forcings (e.g. volcanic CO2) and even ignoring past forcings is still almost unprecedented.
> ...approximately twice as high as he calculated.
Worse than that - approximately three times the "most likely" value he calculated in LC11.
Chris O'Neill,
Regarding "Just rubbish".
* From [GREENLAND ICE CORES OFFER GLIMPSE OF WEATHER SYSTEM HISTORY](http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/naopdo.htm) "available meteorological records can only trace its behavior [NAO] back into the mid-1800s".
* From [Ice Core Proxy Methods for Tracking Climate Change](http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/icecore/review.php) "some ice cores can be analyzed annually, extending back a few hundred years before the present, allowing for the reconstruction of interannual climatic fluctuations such as El Nino, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)".
Regarding your spreadsheet, are you telling me it's trivial to look at those numbers and separate the PDO, AMO, NAO, AO, ENSO - and random noise? How? I could only imagine it is hugely difficult - and uncertain - to separate the signal from noise.
Regarding
So look at Kobashi et al. 2010 Fig 15. The reconstruction _doesn't_ track the present warm period. Is there a known divergence problem in the ice cores as well? It still strikes me as a huge, unjustified leap of faith that we can know much for sure about temperatures of past climates given the difficulty even making sense of the instrumental period.
Alex Harvey,
Kobashi et al (2010) says:
1. The comparison with Greenland measured temperature is Fig. 3 not Fig. 15. For Fig. 3 the reconstruction tracks the measured temperatures remarkably well.
2. "Our latest data for isotopes is 1950 C.E. as the air occlusion process is not completed for recent decades. For the period 1950â1993, the surface temperature is estimated
heuristically by a forward model (Goujon et al. 2003) running various surface temperature scenarios to find the best fit with the borehole temperature record. The method is in principle the same as that used by Alley and Koci (1990) (Fig. 2). The reconstructed temperature is generally similar to the instrumental temperature trend
(Vinther et al. 2006) (Fig. 3), and temperature reconstruction by Alley and Koci (1990) (Fig. 2). The use of the Alley and Koci temperature reconstruction from 1950
onward creates a slight deviation from observed borehole temperature in the upper 80 m by <0.3â¦C."
Did you actually read the paper, or did you just parrot from some denialist website?
Alex Harvey:
The issue is the magnitude of the effect of these oscillations on global temperature. Just because we can't distinguish the timing of the oscillations themselves does not mean we can't determine that their effect on global temperature is insignificant compared with what's happening now.
Unnecessary for determining century-scale effects, of course.
No, it's trivially easy to rule out that any of those things produced the magnitude of global warming happening now any time previously during the Holocene - because such rate and magnitude of global warming has not previously occurred in that period.
By the way, I should point that higher rates and magnitude of ice core warming than during the Holocene occurred during the ice-age and ice-age to Holocene transistion.
I am baffled by the early discusson of sublimation. Sublimation is a technical term that denotes the disappearance of ice without interim melting. Surely some of you have been through winters where ice has diminished without producing liquid water.
What is so difficult about this that cannot be stated straightforwardly.
Sublimation is very similar to evaporation. It's not complicated, it's not obscure, and it is not open to the kind of argument that claims it is some mystical process that does not end up with ice disappearing.