The Glade 4.0

Man, talk about failing the Ideological Turing Test.

Except, the scientific consensus isn't clear. The climate is changing, and that's all we really know. Historical data shows faster warming periods before human beings existed. It shows slower warming periods. It shows Ice Age cycles we don't understand. It shows atmospheric conditions with 50% more CO2 than NOW. As Curry points out, repeatedly, climate is so vast, so complex, and so lacking in understanding as a discipline that most of the claims are balderdash. I've been researching this for longer than some of you have been alive: all of North America was supposed to be a Sahara-like desert 10 years ago.
We don't know that the pace of warming has accelerated beyond historical norms or patterns that we don't understand: we have millions of years of data we cannot access or interpret or understand. We think they are based on what we've recorded for the last 200 years and inference based on our understanding of geological data. That may or may not be correct. As for plausibility, as I said above, the United States was supposed to be a desiccated a waste land by now. It's not. But we do know about localized human impacts, and the consensus literally cannot see the forest for the trees. It's too focused on "OMG the world is ending."

Human induced climate change, since Global Warming is passe and proven problematic, may or may not be what the consensus claims. A lot of the data is opaque and unavailable except to an elite few; climate journals are notorious for suppressing counter-data and counter-claims based on actual science. And the Climategate scandal should have been proof of that: there was hard evidence they culled problematic data from the tables to make it appear more dramatic than it was.

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You keep saying these words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean...

LOL Aizle.. that's the funniest thing I've read here in a long time...

It isn't. Were it clear, climate scientists like Judith Curry wouldn't have compelling reasons to believe the consensus was founded on incomplete and political compromised data. Were the consensus clear, we'd be dealing with increasingly mild winters everywhere in the world. Were the consensus clear, we wouldn't see data with polar ice levels that disagree with the projections that have been put forth.

You think the consensus is clear, because you subscribe to that belief. That's all there really is to it.

But, you know, we're not talking about the damage your side of the argument HAS done, are we? We're not talking about the biodiversity problems created by green energy sources like hydroelectric dams. We're not talking about the threat to various birds created by windmill farms. No, we're talking about fossil fuels and ignoring the complications from green sources, like vastly magnified thermal heat islands around large scale solar farms and the immediate local increase in temperature caused by rooftop solo.

So, I'm sorry, but the consensus isn't clear because the consensus doesn't actually exist. The IPCC's data was proven to be faulty, selective, and its transparency thrown into great question: so tell me, how can we have a consensus when the group producing the data isn't telling it straight? Politics.

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http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global- ... sensus.htm

The consensus is not only clear, but readily apparent.

Aizle:

Except it isn't. I'm sorry you think it is. If it was, the debate would be over and every government in the world would be attempting to avoid Wall*E.

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There's a difference between "the earth is warming" and "the earth is warming and humans are causing it." The first is clear, the second is not.

There's a certain arrogance to the "consensus" that should appall all legitimate climate scientists. Incidentally, your second demonstrates the primary thrust of Curry's skepticism: journals reject counter-evidence and counter-arguments about human-induced climate change, Aizle. The entire process is politically compromised.

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Ya know Khross, I keep seeing you make a lot of claims, but you ain't providin' much proof. Care to back some of those claims up with some evidence?

signed,
Appalling human being Sam

Aizle provided all the proof you need. In 11 years, there are all of 24 peer-reviewed, public articles claiming skeptical or counter-argument positions on the climate debate. Likewise, you simply need to read the "About Us" page at rationalwiki to know that it's a partisan schlock site. We've been through all of these positions before, so I'm tired of providing the same links and evidence over and over again for partisans to say it doesn't matter.

After all, my position on the climate is, "We don't know. Stop making claims that we know enough about such an inordinately complex system that we're right." I've lived through the entirety of the Modern HIGW, HICC climate debate. I remember the predictions about Antarctica being a habitable, temperate land mass by now from the early 90s. I remember the predictions of the great Ozone Hole expanding to cover the entire Southern hemisphere.

After 20 years of the climate scientists being gloriously wrong on every account, I decided that perhaps the scientists who say, "We don't know," have more credibility.

But, since the IPCC is responsible for the consensus you think exists, what do you say when the hard data shows they inflated their numbers by 40% on how much warmer it was in the last decade?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/19/n ... s-than-2c/

So, the IPCC report is claiming values 40% higher than observable data from the last decade, but the SPM (Summary for Policy Makers) strongly suggests they act on the data they released in September and that we knew to be wrong in May.

The IPCC Consensus is just politics.

http://www.cato.org/blog/band-aids-cant ... pcc-report

Of course, Cato has its position on the IPCC report. You can take Cato for what you will though.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/28/t ... t-deniers/

And there's what Judith Curry has to say about people like and rationalwiki that use the word "denier" ...

The fact is, you've bought into a political position. We don't know. And right now, we can't know.

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You assumed to label me with some concrete stances here Khross. At no point have I made any declarations in this thread about what I believe on the matter. I simply stated that Judith appeared, from what little I read, to support HIGW deniers and be loose with her words. I honestly got that impression from what I read from her "blog". She had quite a few entries where she seemingly quoted skeptics of HIGW, and then said "discuss". Perhaps your intimate discussion with her leads you to a different conclusion.

I've read a little of her and about her, and didn't find anything that really interested me as proof of either side of the issue. IMO, it looks as if she is claiming there is a conspiracy at the IPCC, and wishes it dissolved. I may be wrong with that assessment, but it was what appeared to me, again, from the little I have read.

As for your source wattsup, it appears to be very much anti IPCC and perhaps even HIGW. As an opposing view I found these......
http://www.skepticalscience.com/economi ... ivity.html
http://www.rtcc.org/2013/07/22/un-clima ... port-leak/
http://www.skepticalscience.com/curry-m ... uracy.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/dessler ... anger.html
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com ... ith-curry/
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/0 ... ive-essay/


As for your link to Judith's use of denier, whatever. I guess "skeptic" make some people feel better about themselves, but it appears there are quite a few people posting on these blogs who definitely deny the existence of HIGW. I thought the term was applicable. YMMV

Watts is skeptical of the claims and how some of the data is gathered in particular. Anthony Watts was largely responsible for debunking a lot of NOAA claims by demonstrating that the weather recording stations used to produced American data are by and large compromised by their physical location and state of repair.

Judith Curry believes that IPCC has been fraudulent with its reports and numbers, and that the peer-review process for climate science is broken, for precisely the reason Aizle thinks there is a consensus. It is unheard of in science to have so few papers with counter-claims and counter-evidence in a discipline as the climate science discipline had posted over the last 11 years.

Judith Curry believes that the climate is changing. She even believes that humans are having an impact on the climate. She does not believe that humans are the sole source of climate change, and she questions the predictions, over-reliance on computer models that have proven consistently inaccurate, and tends to reject the alarmist political involvement.

If you don't think you've been fairly categorized, I'd point out you linked rationalwiki: an appallingly partisan site that contrary to its claims has community members that actively discourage and marginalize opposing viewpoints.

The climate change debate and science needs to step back and focus on the science: it's been focusing on the politics for 20 years. A good example is the infamous Antarctic Ozone Hole and Ozone Depletion. Some of that is man-made: chlorine rich chemicals cause ozone to breakdown. A large part of the Antarctic Ozone Hole and global Ozone Depletion are seasonal though, and those decreases in Ozone happen with or without human interference. The naturally occurring decreases in Ozone levels gets completely ignored. Back in 1997, when the Ozone hole was at its largest, there were complex weather patterns that contributed to increased depletion. We didn't really know about it at the time. We also grossly underestimated natural sources of chlorine in the atmosphere. Since then, the Ozone hole has lost political power and international attention.

Judith Curry and Anthony Watts and other skeptical sources do not deny that the climate is changing. They don't even deny that human beings have a role in climate change as we understand. They question the increasingly politicized nature of the debate and the involvement of political individuals in mainstreaming the science without understanding the science.

Of course, your second link is priceless: the IPCC condemned its own report when its own report became politically problematic. There is no consensus, and this debate needs far more skepticism than you guys are willing to invest in it. The climate is orders of magnitude more complex than economics. And the wordpress link is pretty awesome, too: we have to act now because time is not our friend. That's the long and short of that post.

But, you know, I keep asking for skepticism and reasonable solutions. So, what role do you think river health plays in the climate? Do you think changing the fundamental flow rates of rivers to produce electricity has a negligible or non-noticeable impact the climate? What about the near-surface level wind-pattern changes caused by large windmill farms? What about the thermal heat islands caused by solar farms? What about thermal heat islands in general? What about light pollution from our cities and residential areas? What role does fire suppression play in the health of the American longleaf coniferous forests? And, if you think that question doesn't matter, we've cut down an amount of that forest roughly twice the size of the Amazon Jungle Basin at its height in the last 150 years or so. How does THAT affect atmospheric CO2 levels?

We're too busy politicizing an unpopular fuel source without considering the unintended consequences of everything else we do. Curry's literally asking for people to focus on the science; the IPCC is asking people to focus on policy and politics because "we can't afford to wait another 5 years" every time they come up with a new computer model.

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A year or two ago, I stumbled across an article on Locz's Facebook page about CO2 levels and the Great Barrier Reef. It was the first time I had ever seen a climate change article phrased in terms of a problem.

Where: Great Barrier Reef, Australia
What: Coral is becoming brittle and fragile due to elevated levels of CO2

Specific concentrations were given: the concentration today, the concentration X years ago, and the projected concentration where the entire Great Barrier Reef will dissolve.

This is a solvable problem. We need a reliable method of removing CO2 from the air in the region around the Great Barrier Reef. The Great Barrier Reef is very large, but not so large that the challenge is insurmountable. Once it's accomplished, we will have developed techniques that can be applied elsewhere on Earth. Somewhere along the line, it's incredibly likely that someone generates a load flow model for CO2 moving through the atmosphere. That's something missing from current IPCC reports, by the way. Right now we're treating the planet's climate as if it's a homogenized system, and it's not.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Replace coal burning power plants with nuclear powered ones and we'll meet Kyoto standards of a 20% reduction in CO2 generation.

Thing is, solving the problem doesn't seem to be a popular idea, we need to punish energy producers and redistribute money to third world nations via carbon credits.

It's all politics, but don't let that stop you from your demigoguary.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I think it's really interesting to see how commonly "scientific consensus" gets thrown around, when what's really meant is "the political/PR arm of some scientific society or organization".

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Shouldn't "consensus" mean that the conclusions, and the data supporting them are conclusive and irrefutable for those who are neutral/unbiased, or even those with opposing views?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Yes. Sure.

But that's not how I see it being used, especially not in this thread.

The IPCCs report, for instance, is not scientific consensus. It is, however, a hugely biased and carefully politically crafted piece of work.

You find the same thing in many other major scientific panels and organizations.

I think you could go back to Khross's summary of Judith's points on the first page of this thread, and be reasonably sure that you could get a scientific consensus on those.

The whole point of most of Curry's arguments are that people are overstating what we actually know and there is consensus on, and that it tends to undermine the argument as a whole.

It's kinda like the evolution debate: every time someone brings up evolution, on which there is a scientific consensus, it inevitably has the origins of life drawn into it, a subject on which there is very little scientific consensus.

This then undermines the point that there is a strong and irrefutable scientific consensus on evolution, as a scientific process and principle, even though we have very little idea of how the process got started (although there are a hell of a lot of theories).

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

And, as Coro points out, very few papers are about solving known, workable problems with climate or human environmental effects. That's another big real people dislike the IPCC and the IPCC reports that are being called a consensus.

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If January's in Seattle look like this as a result of 'global warming'... sign me up! (50+ degrees F)

We are not warming faster than the warm period, we are not changing temeprature faster than the mini ice age. We are not actually warming now at all over the last few years. No model that has been presented has been a fit to the observable data. <----THIS is the application of sicence and rationality. The hypothesis doesn't match data. Your turn.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

No. It can't. You can never have this level of confidence in a single predictive model, much less when there's a variety of models being used.

You can have this sort of standard for the observations that go into the model (past observations). The mathematics behind the processing of these data to produce future predictions is another matter. Some of the equations are straight forward, others will inevitably have a boatload of assumptions built into them for handling the vast numbers of variables: from solar radiation to that butterfly flapping its wings. So you need consensus on the data going into the models, the structure of the model, the math, the assumptions, and that nothing important was left out of the model.

"Consensus" on this can only ever be a generalized agreement in trends, influences, and that the models are the best prediction we have. If the various models all come to the same overarching conclusion, that certainly helps. But you will never have "conclusive and irrefutable" data.

Exactly.

Which means most of what the IPCC is promoting has no consensus. There is no doomsday scenario consensus.

We have a generalized agreement that the earth is warming (though there is also consensus that it has been warmer, and the climate has changed faster, in the past.)
We have a generalized agreement that human activity on the earth is contributing to that warming.

That's it.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That's not what I said. What I said was that "consensus", as it relates to this topic, cannot mean how Midgen defines it. Defining "consensus" in a way that is not possible to achieve, then using this to say "there's no consensus" is not a fair practice. Consensus needs to be accepted in such a way that maintains a high bar, but is achievable. The masses want to know if there's a consensus, so it has to be a usable term.

I would define consensus, as it relates to HIGW, along the lines of "generalized agreement from climatologists that accepted predictive models concur on the following trends: blah blah blah."

You can't reasonably hope for better than that. Setting the standard too high and then touting its failure doesn't help.

Where I come from, we call this consensus that HIGW is real.