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What's Really Warming the World?

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Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#491

Post by janlin1999 »

triangleman wrote: post #469
hackuser wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, despite the criticsim, the 'hockey stick' study and its author were proven right. Lots of criticism doesn't make it wrong, especially in politicized debates.

How do you mean? Did you read the paper I linked to? In what way were Mann et al. "proven" right?

If read in isolation, the paper seems pretty convincing that something is amiss. However, it looks like some other scientists have generally confirmed the findings from Mann et al.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy#Furth...

I haven't read those other papers.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#492

Post by curiousgeorgio »

phaemon wrote: post #485
merpnderp wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the great response, certainly good stuff to think about. But I think I did not make myself clear. The RSS trop data shows there is a 1.2K/century trend. My interest was in "the pause" over the last ~20 years. So the metaphor becomes, imagine you were told the tide was coming in at a steady rate and that CO2 was causing it. Then for 19.5 years CO2 continued to grow at a steady rate, but the tide didn't c…

You made yourself clear. To follow the metaphor, if the increase in tidal levels over the past 19.5 years were significantly different to the increase in tidal levels over (say) the past 30 years then it needs an explanation. If they were not, then the simple explanation is that 19.5 years is not enough data to draw any conclusions. That's just how it works. You can't draw a conclusion from a lack of data. EDIT: Forg…

If merpnderp were to say the null hypothesis is that the longer-term trend (1.2K/century as stated) should continue as expected even into recent decades (or perhaps "correct" the data for that relationship because we're assuming it's not up for debate), then the data for the past ~20 years would show a departure from that hypothesis, would it not? In that case, the point being shown is different from the null hypothesis, and may be significant. Am I missing something?

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#493

Post by bcheung »

merpnderp wrote: post #189
pcrh wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct that the article failed to point out that the increase in CO2 was unambiguously man made. Now, is the temperature increase caused by the increase in CO2 - likely so since the correlation is so close. Have they exhaustively excluded other possible causes -- maybe, maybe not...?

Why does everyone ignore the UAH and RSS troposphere data? It's the best data (by far the most accurate) we have on atmospheric temperature, and it shows no warming since 1996. http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html I have a simple R script to find the trend if you want to see it yourself.

No warming of the air. But the oceans have been absorbing and storing heat.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oceans-hid-the-hea...

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#494

Post by cholantesh »

Aloha wrote: post #486
cholantesh wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often does it happen that a layman manages to get published in a well-regarded journal? Out of all the papers that laypeople publish anywhere, how many survive scrutiny from experts in the paper's problem domain? And out of those, how many that actively seek to overturn a paradigm succeed? Based on this metric alone, it is highly unlikely that Monkcton is qualified to discuss climate change, and as it happens, hi…

There is a difference between "layman", "well known expert in their field", "so and so with a degree in $field" "well known expert in their field with a masters in $field" If you read my reply, I don't question the guys qualifications, I was objecting to the blanket statement of "you must have a degree in $field, to be expert" - many papers in technology, are written by people without degrees in that field.

I did read your reply; I'm saying that in the aggregate, a credible paper is unlikely to be written by someone without formal schooling in the relevant field.

Further, technology is applied science - it is not unlikely that one can become an expert through informal and professional practice. Your previous comment was about computer science, which is not necessarily the same thing, and which is closer to mathematics than anything else. Climatology is concerned primarily with physics and chemistry, but also geology and in some cases, paleontology. Most of these fields share little in common with pure maths or engineering. The comparison, then is not totally valid.

The basic training you require to be a competent scientist is hard to come by outside of academia. The actual work of science tends to be done in a laboratory. It's highly, unlikely, then, that someone who has put in the years (often decades) of work in academia to be on par with a hobbyist, whatever that may look like in this context.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#495

Post by bcheung »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #393
marcus_holmes wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ad-hominem. Who cares who wrote it, what does it say?

Ad hominem fallacy fallacy: http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html Pointing out that someone is not trustworthy when considering whether or not to trust their conclusions is not ad-hom.

Actually, it is.

You can't look at someone's financial interest to know whether what they said is true or not. Similarly for any other attribute about them that you don't like.

There are many great thinkers who were gay. We don't invalidate their work because of that.

At best, you need to keep that in mind and take what they said with a grain of salt. Funding gives you a clue about which areas to be more critical about, but just because they have an interest one way or the other doesn't invalidate what they said.

If someone has been found to be a nutjob, you may casually dismiss what they said as a time saving device or because there is low probability what they say has any value to you. But even a nutjob is sometimes right.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#496

Post by Zuider »

cholantesh wrote: post #448
Zuider wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> co-authored by a known practitioner of large-scale scientific fraud for pay ( http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Willie_Soon ) particularly reputable. Flagged for libel. It is one thing to argue a position you believe, it is quite another to smear another's character.

It wasn't libel the last time you brought it up and it isn't libel this time. Soon failed to disclose non-trivial amounts of funding that he received from parties who have a vested interest in deriding climate science. Given how often his work has failed to pass muster when scrutinized by climate scientists and skeptics, it is hard to fathom how any of this can amount tosimple incompetence.

The article you linked to is almost comical in its petty malevolence, well beyond the point of self-satire. This kind of character assassination, however reprehensible, is ultimately irrelevant. If you believe Dr. Wei Hock Soon is wrong, then show where and how he is mistaken.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#497

Post by alayne »

paulhauggis wrote: post #270
Daishiman wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Okay, show me a study that has the details on which parts are human made and which parts are caused by nature (with numbers). I have never seen this anywhere and You would think if they actually knew, we would have seen it by now. This isn't that difficult and it doesn't really make any sense that humans are causing 100%. Especially with things like the little ice age before we were around to pollute the earth. Hon…

"Honestly dude, do the fucking research. Read the IPCC. Hell even Wikipedia has the fundamentals extremely well explained. We know very, stupid well what's causing the climate to change. CO2 concentration is not just a correlation in the models, but has a directly observable physical effect that has been known about in labs and was later shown to be the primary reason for global warming." Again, "Do the fucking resea…

"Climate Gate" was investigated and turned up "no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c...

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#498

Post by bcheung »

tosseraccount wrote: post #19
jasonkester wrote: post #3

Cool visualization. It's worth keeping in mind that the modeled data lines up with reality because it's supposed to. That's how you calibrate your model, by making sure it fits reality. The real trick is to see how well your model extrapolates from the data you have out into the future. As in, if you feed it data up to, say, 1990, will it correctly spit out 2015 temperatures that fit the reality of 2015, or will it s…

Is there a scorecard for which models have performed well?

Even if there is a model that performs well, how do you account for survivorship bias?

And how accurate are models without a clear understanding of the physical reasons why behind them?

Seems like we should be concentrating on understanding the physical relationships and less on trying to come up with abstract models. It kind of feels like a bunch of astrologists and just picking the one that seems to perform better.

Unless I understand the why, I have a hard time accepting what anyone says.

Anyone can fit a model to the data.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#499

Post by eru »

wnewman wrote: post #309
possibilistic wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you happen to have this one to five pages of QM equations somewhere as reference? I would be very interested in reading that.

No, it was a thought experiment I made up, not an exercise I've ever seen performed: how abbreviated a description of quantum mechanics could I get away with and still convey the idea to on-the-eve-of-QM scientists? The QM equations are naturally very short, the stuff that I would worry about expressing concisely are concepts like what probability amplitude is, how it connects to prior-to-QM concepts of probability,…

Scott Aaronson has some good motivation for "QM falls out naturally if you try and use a 2-norm for your probalities instead of a 1-norm." See http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#500

Post by cygx »

narrator wrote: post #324
yongjik wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The following is literally the first Google result for "why does CO2 concentration lag behind temperature". http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm > ... This statement does not tell the whole story. The initial changes in temperature during this period are explained by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which affects the amount of seasonal sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. In the case…

In the Vostok data the temperature falls first and then the CO2 falls. If the CO2 released amplified the increased warming trend then why would the temperature suddenly reverse absent a CO2 drop? BTW, I am really really disappointed in the quality of all the replies. It's mostly ad hominem and hand-waving. This is the one reply that's not but it doesn't explain the behavior of the drop in temperature. Thus to sum it…

You might be interested in the opinion of Richard Muller:

In 2010, I watched one of his talks in which he had very uncharitable things to say about some groups of climate scientists and why he did not consider them trustworthy [1].

At about 34:28 of the video, you can hear him say the following:

This is why I'm now leading a study to redo all this in a totally transparent way.

He did [2].

What was his conclusion? Global warming is real, and in all likelihood the culprit is indeed CO2.

How did he come to that conclusion? Because it's the only proposed mechanism for global warming that actually fits the data on the 250y scale.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbR0EPWgkEI

[2] http://berkeleyearth.org/

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