What's Really Warming the World?

Sorry no. This is an indication that your predictions are worthless. And of course, after such a massive fuckup, it's going to take a bit of work to convince people otherwise. But none of that is happening, I wonder why not.

The worst of it all is that I used to make a similar argument, first about 1990-2000, then about 1995-2005. They all had the same result. Suddenly, and without explanation they were far, far cooler (compared to the prediction). Not quite 5-sigma years, but 3 sigma years were in there. 2000-2010 is the worst of the lot, but there isn't any decade-long period where one can say ... well climate scientists ... well done. You were right. The IPCC AR's, predicted temperature anomaly versus observed temperature anomaly.

Given these circumstances, how can we give any credence to the idea that the IPCC predictions about the future will match reality ? The joke is that in order for their 95% prediction to actually be true in 95% of cases they now have to be correct for 20.000 years. They don't even predict out that far. It's a joke, but it's also true. You'd think it would give people pause.

And all this is still ignoring the many fundamental theoretical problems climate science has. When they say "it's worse than ever before" ... well they're right, in terms of many variables. Ok ... but that means their methods are invalid. Statistics can fill in expected values in an observed population of values. And yet their claim is that the observed populations are VERY different from the ones seen before. Ok, fine claim. You can even prove that to some extent with statistics. And they've done that. After that, of course, you cannot use statistics to predict these values anymore ! This alone could explain why their predictions are so horribly bad.

I get the utilitarian argument. We don't have any better way of making predictions about the climate. That's great, but that doesn't make our best prediction adequate, nor is it even value-free. In some ways, it's just a political argument : "this looks worrying, let's fix it". It should be treated as such.

Oh yes we did. It will get warmer. And remain much longer warmer than we'd like. Unless the CO2 production is cut. It's that simple.

Calling bullshit on that claim.

The main reference I have in mind is just

http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg

that for dozens of climate models plots the predicted values of global temperature along with the observed values. Nearly all the predicted values are wildly too high. So, if we believe the graph, then in science we essentially junk nearly all the models.

As I tried to outline, the model builders were on a long walk on a short pier: Nearly all their modeling efforts, with whatever approximations, short cuts, etc. they took, failed.

Then, really, to return to first principles, they had to solve the Navier-Stokes equations for the surface of the earth, the oceans and the atmosphere. Doing a good job with that would be essentially minute by minute weather prediction, and as we know we can't do that accurately for more than two weeks or so.

That's what the model builders ran into -- the Navier-Stokes equations. IIRC we've had some good progress with those equations for, say, some boat hulls and some aircraft wings. The whole earth? Not a chance.

> It's irrelevant that you don't know.

Sure it is relevant if accept a little diplomatic circumlocution: I've tried to follow some of the global warming issue for years, and so far I have not seen the data. Without the circumlocution and diplomacy, the more literal and blunt remark is that nearly all of us are short on such data either because it has not been collected very well or the people writing the main arguments don't include it. Or, the situation is like I was a customer at a fast food restaurant, got a hamburger, opened it up, and asked "I don't know where the beef is".

> No "denier" was able to make anything scientifically relevant up to now. That's the fact.

Well, in the graph in the link I gave above, a few of the models, maybe only one, were fairly accurate -- they predicted nearly no increase in global temperatures. So, maybe the author of that model was a "denier" in which case at least one "denier" did something "scientifically relevant".

For more on "scientifically relevant" from deniers, there is the argument that at least for the past few thousand years, we know the cause of the temperature changes, and CO2 had nothing to do with the changes. Really, basically the greenhouse effect -- from CO2, methane, water vapor, etc. -- didn't either.

Instead the cause of global cooling was more clouds -- they have a net cooling effect (net, not a greenhouse effect). The clouds were from some water molecules in the atmosphere collected into water droplets from the action of cosmic rays. Of course, the cosmic rays come at essentially constant rates over time but maybe with some variation with direction. So, when there was fewer cosmic rays, there were fewer clouds and some global warming. Why fewer cosmic rays? Well, when the sun has sun spots, there is more solar wind -- think really 3D all around our solar system, not just in the plane of the orbit of the earth, and reducing the rate of cosmic rays from all directions including way out and high above the plane of the earth's orbit.

So, when the sun has more sun spots, there is more solar wind, more cosmic rays blocked from hitting the earth, fewer clouds, and global warming. When the sun is quieter, there is some global cooling.

IIRC, over the past few thousand years or so, and maybe longer, the data on variations in sun spots do well fitting the variations in global temperatures while data on CO2 concentrations does not.

So, people with the sun spot explanation are "deniers" and may have found the real cause of global warming/cooling for the last few thousand years or so at least and, thus, been "scientifically relevant".

More generally, science needs to be subject to review, and a reviewer, even a "denier", who does find actual errors is also "scientifically relevant".

Along the lines of reviewing, I would note that so far it appears that over the past 800,000 years, the cases of global cooling were not preceded by lower concentrations of CO2. E.g., the Little Ice Age was not preceded by lower concentrations of CO2. Neither was the cooling from 1940 to 1970.

For more, yes, sure, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Fine. We agree on that. So, CO2 can warm the earth -- we agree. But we can also agree that lighting a match will warm the earth. So, for CO2 warming the earth, the question is how much? Hate to say: (A) Just looking at the historical record from the past few thousand years, maybe the past 800,000 years, it appears that more CO2 has no detectable warming effect. (B) For some solid science, e.g., evaluating the effect of CO2 just from first principles of mathematical physics, including the Navier-Stokes equations, we can't do the calculations and, thus, for this approach, are stuck-o. Here maybe (A) is a review and "scientifically relevant". For (B), that's also "scientifically relevant" but so obvious that it is a trivial contribution.

There are a lot of research problems without good solutions -- some of the details of the big bang, dark energy, dark matter, the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays, the origin of life on earth, quantum mechanics and relativity inside a black hole, a cure for cancer, how good natural intelligence works, etc. Well, one more is prediction of the temperature of earth for the next 100 years. Sorry 'bout that. While I've solved some problems in applied math and published the results, I can't apologize for not solving all outstanding problems. Sorry I don't know how to predict the temperature of earth for the next 100 years, but maybe I should say that I can't see that anyone else knows how either. In that case, my view is that carbon taxes are not justified.

I had a look at the Navier-Stokes stuff and what I found was incredible complicated maths. I'd like it if you'd linked out to some discussions on this topic but in any case I was able to find this [0] which takes the position that many climate scientists have invoked Navier-Stokes as a theoretical basis but mathematicians in general consider the finer details of NS behaviour at this scale to be (practically) unknowable.

My personal insight from an information science pov is that NS would be the wrong tool to use. It looks like an exhaustive model used at a fine-grained scale that would be simply too complex at macro level.

[0] https://climateaudit.org/2005/12/22/gcms-and-the-navier-stok...