Man-made global warming

Originally posted by Metal Brain
Talk about the models. What is a computer model, and what isn't it? What is its purpose in science?

There are many kinds of computer models. But the ones that people mostly talk about these days are the giant models that try to model the whole global atmosphere in a three-dimensional way. These models calculate important parameters at different points ...[text shortened]... the model results shrinks a little bit--until they start to agree with each other.

Are you quoting someone or are those your words?

Originally posted by googlefudge
Singer is lying. (also if we are going to talk about who is being funded by whom...
http://www.desmogblog.com/s-fred-singer-one-whopper-on-top-of-another

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=6143&method=full

So you've picked an oil industry goon as your 'scientist' of choice... what a surprise.)

http:// ...[text shortened]... t, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." [/quote][/b]

However, on February 12, 2001, Singer wrote a letter to The Washington Post in which he denied receiving any oil company money in the previous 20 years when he had consulted for the oil industry. " As for full disclosure: My resume clearly states that I consulted for several oil companies on the subject of oil pricing, some 20 years ago, after publishing a monograph on the subject. My connection to oil during the past decade is as a Wesson Fellow at the Hoover Institution; the Wesson money derives from salad oil."[26]

Originally posted by googlefudge
Are you quoting someone or are those your words?

It is a quote from this link:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/debate/singer.html

Originally posted by Metal Brain
Talk about the models. What is a computer model, and what isn't it? What is its purpose in science?

There are many kinds of computer models. But the ones that people mostly talk about these days are the giant models that try to model the whole global atmosphere in a three-dimensional way. These models calculate important parameters at different points ...[text shortened]... the model results shrinks a little bit--until they start to agree with each other.

This isn't true, the met office climate model has a resolution of 135 km (~80 miles), and includes clouds and detailed chemistry. Assuming mid-range emissions they predict a 1.6 - 4.3C temperature change, the range reflects the precision with which they make their predictions. It takes uncertainty in the parameters they tune for into account through Monte-Carlo simulation. You'll notice that the page was last updated in 2011, so this is not new:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/guide/science/modelling

Originally posted by DeepThought
This isn't true, the met office climate model has a resolution of 135 km (~80 miles), and includes clouds and detailed chemistry. Assuming mid-range emissions they predict a 1.6 - 4.3C temperature change, the range reflects the precision with which they make their predictions. It takes uncertainty in the parameters they tune for into account through Mo ...[text shortened]... 011, so this is not new:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/guide/science/modelling

It is true. You can't replicate the Earth in a laboratory. you are being stupid!

Originally posted by Metal Brain
However, on February 12, 2001, Singer wrote a letter to The Washington Post in which he denied receiving any oil company money in the previous 20 years when he had consulted for the oil industry. " As for full disclosure: My resume clearly states that I consulted for several oil companies on the subject of oil pricing, some 20 years ago, after publishing ...[text shortened]... is as a Wesson Fellow at the Hoover Institution; the Wesson money derives from salad oil."[26]

Singer is a salad oil industry goon?

Originally posted by lemon lime
Singer is a salad oil industry goon?

He is saying that is the only recent oil money anybody can pin him down on. He is pretty much making fun of the idiots who claim he is being funded by the petroleum industry. Guys like goooglefudgepacker are slandering him because they can't bring themselves to admit they were wrong.

Originally posted by Metal Brain
It is true. You can't replicate the Earth in a laboratory. you are being stupid!

What you said about the models is not true. The resolution is higher than you said, and they take clouds into account. You are misrepresenting the models.

Originally posted by DeepThought
What you said about the models is not true. The resolution is higher than you said, and they take clouds into account. You are misrepresenting the models.

Fisher makes perfect sense and he is an expert on the subject. The assertion that a model can predict climate change of an entire planet accurately is laughable.

Originally posted by Metal Brain
Fisher makes perfect sense and he is an expert on the subject. The assertion that a model can predict climate change of an entire planet accurately is laughable.

Who is Fisher?

Over 95% of academics working on climate science are extremely worried. The science is increasingly clear, and the models far more sophisticated than you seem to think. This "we aren't clever enough, we should be more humble about our state of knowledge" is nothing more than a cheap rhetorical trick to try to win moral advantage. All scientific information comes with a statement of how precise it is. Climate science is no different.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Who is Fisher?

Over 95% of academics working on climate science are extremely worried. The science is increasingly clear, and the models far more sophisticated than you seem to think. This "we aren't clever enough, we should be more humble about our state of knowledge" is nothing more than a cheap rhetorical trick to try to win moral advantage. A ...[text shortened]... ic information comes with a statement of how precise it is. Climate science is no different.

I meant Singer. Here is his comment about past climate changes:
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What happens when you use these models to try and reproduce past climates, when other forcings are known, like ice ages and so forth? Can they succeed at that?

They fail spectacularly in explaining, for example, why an ice age starts, or why an ice age stops. The most recent result on this was published in early 1999. It's always been known that, for example, the deglaciation--that is, the transition from an ice age to the warm interglacial, which is spectacular--suddenly the ice age ends and the warming starts. And at the same time, you see an increase in carbon dioxide in the record. And these are records taken from ice cores--good measurements.
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Here is another excerpt:
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While there are scientists who hold views similar to yours on this subject, there are a very large number who don't. I want your reflections on what's happened in terms of the way this has played out with the intergovernmental panel on change, with the statements that a majority of scientists believe this or that, because there are a lot of scientists who feel very passionately there is an issue here. What do you think has been going on? Because there's a tremendous amount of people involved in modeling, an activity which you think is fairly limited in terms of what it's delivered so far. How are they getting away with it?

Well, when you start talking about the question of scientific consensus, I think one should be very careful to say, first of all, that science is not decided by vote. I don't take a poll and then determine what is the correct answer. Science is decided by observations that either confirm or deny a theory, a hypothesis. And if they confirm the theory, you go on to the next set of observations and see whether it still holds. And if it works against the hypothesis, you try to develop a new hypothesis.

That's how science makes progress.
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Here is another that you should pay close attention to:
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You're not saying they're dishonest, are you?

I'm not saying that they're dishonest at all. No. No one has been caught falsifying data. No one has been caught falsifying calculations. But inevitably, when you have a particular point of view--(and this works both ways--you tend to suppress facts or data that disagree with your point of view, and you tend to favor data, observations that support your point of view. You become selective in the way you present your observations.

Take an example. Take the UN Science Advisory Group, the IPCC. In their report--which is a very good report, by the way...which is close to 600 pages without an index, so no one really reads it except dedicated people like me--there's a five-page summary of the report that everyone reads, including politicians and the media. And if you look through the summary, you will find no mention of the fact that the weather satellite observations of the last twenty years show no global warming. In fact, a slight cooling. In fact, you will not even find satellites mentioned in the summary.

Now, why is that? These are the only global observations we have. These are the best observations we have. They cover the whole globe. The surface observations don't cover the whole globe. They leave out large chunks of the globe. They don't cover the oceans very well, which is 70 percent of the globe. So you see, the summary uses data selectively, or at least it suppresses data that are inconvenient, that disagree with the paradigm, with what they're trying to prove. This happens often, unfortunately.

Now, you'll also notice that people who are skeptical about global warming generally do not have government support for their work. They don't have to write proposals to government agencies to get money. They tend to be people who have other sources of income. They might even be retired and live on pensions, or they might [have] other sources of income that do not depend on writing research proposals to federal agencies. And if you look at research proposals to federal agencies, you will find that people who write a proposal saying, "I'm going to do research to show that global warming is not a real threat"...they're not likely to get funding from any of the government agencies.
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This debate is not as simple and clear as you make it sound. More research needs to be done and the climate must be studied for many more years before we really know what will happen. You should read the entire interview with Dr. Singer. There is a lot to consider.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/debate/singer.html
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Originally posted by Metal Brain
Fisher makes perfect sense and he is an expert on the subject. The assertion that a model can predict climate change of an entire planet accurately is laughable.

The assertion that a model can predict climate change of an entire planet accurately is laughable.

No, it certainly is not laughable because they are already doing it in the sense they can reliably predict the long-term trends. The climate models cannot predict exactly what the weather would be like a year from now. This is because the weather is a chaotic system as described by chaos theory. What that means is that the tiniest division from what your measurements says the weather is now and exactly what the weather is actually now, and there is always some error in measurement, would mean that the deviation between what even the perfect computer simulation prediction (i.e. with a perfect flawless model) of what the weather will do and what it actually will do will tend to to increase the further into the future of time you go. That is because, in a chaotic system, the tiniest difference in the starting condition, no matter how small, will produce ever greater differences in the outcome the further you preceded forward in time.

BUT, NONE of that changes the fact that we CAN reliably predict what the long-term trends in the global weather will be for the whole planet. This is because, although, for example, the average global temperature for each year would vary chaotically and therefore wildly and unpredictably from one year to the next, the longer the time period you are considering the average global temperature for, the less it is likely to vary wildly and the more predictable it becomes. So, although we may not be able to say whether the average global temperature next year will go up or down with any reasonable rational certainty, we CAN say that say the average global temperature over the course of the next century will almost certainly go up with rational certainty and we CAN say with rational certainty that the probability of it going down over the course of the next century will be vanishingly small thanks to CO2 global warming.

Here is a close analogy; the weather from winter to summer may very wildly and unpredictably day to day. One day it is hot and the next day it is cold. But the longer-term trend (over several months) in temperature is far more predictable and is STILL a trend for increasing temperature. It may be hard to predict whether tomorrow will be hotter or cooler, but that does NOT change the fact that we can rationally predict a very high probability that the longer term trend is for the temperature to increase as we get closer to summer. In short, the longer-term temperature trend can be a lot easier to rationally predict than the shorter-term temperature trend.

Originally posted by Metal Brain
I meant Singer. Here is his comment about past climate changes:
______________________________________________________

What happens when you use these models to try and reproduce past climates, when other forcings are known, like ice ages and so forth? Can they succeed at that?

They fail spectacularly in explaining, for example, why an ice age sta ...[text shortened]... s.org/wgbh/warming/debate/singer.html
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I'll read your post properly later, sorry it's rather long. One observation on the first bit though. No one thinks that we are entering an ice-age in the next couple of centuries. The models probably don't include tectonics, which is a major factor in regulating the CO2 in the atmosphere over periods of time such as 10,000 years. There is simply no need for the models to take this into account to make predictions a few hundred years into the future - that is a total red herring.

Originally posted by Metal Brain
I meant Singer. Here is his comment about past climate changes:
______________________________________________________

What happens when you use these models to try and reproduce past climates, when other forcings are known, like ice ages and so forth? Can they succeed at that?

They fail spectacularly in explaining, for example, why an ice age sta s.org/wgbh/warming/debate/singer.html
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Government funding of studies intentionally looking for signs of global warming is very telling... this should be a big clue to anyone who doesn't have a vested interest one way or the other as to what is actually driving this issue.

This has become a financial and politically driven issue. It explains the so called consensus among scientists willing to receive money for grinding out research with a particular end result in mind. Much of that consensus percentage is scientists saying Yes, I'll take funding to research and validate global warming! These scientists aren't stupid, they know what results are expected and what results will be rejected. Al Gore understood this and was able to take advantage of it. He was able to influence climatologists into riding along with him on his global warming bandwagon.

A few years ago in the state where I live, our top state climatologist was told he could lose his job if he didn't stop criticising the global warming climate change proponents. This threat came directly from the governor, in a public statement that anyone could see. It was remarkable to see this, because usually these kind of threats are made behind closed doors and out of earshot of the public. But this just illustrates the confidence some of our politicians have in riding the wave of this money and politics driven issue.

It's basically nothing more than a handful of clever environmentalists working the system and manipulating public opinion... and getting the so called self-described free thinkers into going along with them. I'm guessing this will ruffle a few feathers, especially among some of the resident free thinkers here.

Originally posted by Metal Brain
I meant Singer. Here is his comment about past climate changes:
______________________________________________________

What happens when you use these models to try and reproduce past climates, when other forcings are known, like ice ages and so forth? Can they succeed at that?

They fail spectacularly in explaining, for example, why an ice age sta ...[text shortened]... s.org/wgbh/warming/debate/singer.html
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I've read the post. This stuff about they're not being dishonest, they're only human is straightforward rhetoric. I read something about the satellites he's on about and there was a good reason to leave them out. Including them would make the warming effect worse, not better, so the effects in the wrong direction for his argument.

This guy did a PhD in atmospheric physics and then mostly worked on satellite and rocket design. He is not a climate scientist. It's like me arguing against the (well established) theory for type I superconductors and claiming I know what I'm on about because I did a DPhil in particle physics years ago. It doesn't in itself invalidate his point of view, but doesn't make him an unimpeachable authority either.