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95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong

drroyspencer.com

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Re: 95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong

#11
More on the author of this post:

https://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Roy_Spencer.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)#Views

Another interpretation of this post:

http://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/1xuccb/95_of_climat...

(also see ovis's link in a reply below)

Regarding very similar claims:

https://www.skepticalscience.com/curry-mcintyre-resist-ipcc-...

http://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc-model-gw-projections-do...

Re: 95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong

#12
post #4

I don't know enough about meteorology to comment on the article, but this quote bugged me: "And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats." No, there's the exact same amount of reason. This isn't a morality play, who's "fault" it is doesn't matter. If there were a met…

Thank you. What we are seeing here is nothing more than a rationalization and opportunistic bolstering of his preexisting belief system.

In the end global warming might be better than we're expecting but it is the political and social inferences, like in the quote you included, that belie his true intent.

Re: 95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong

#13
post #4

I don't know enough about meteorology to comment on the article, but this quote bugged me: "And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats." No, there's the exact same amount of reason. This isn't a morality play, who's "fault" it is doesn't matter. If there were a met…

If we're only the cause of 50% of the warming that implies curbing our behavior only has half the impact that it would if we caused 100% of the warming. Granted, geoengineering projects that impact total warming are different.

Re: 95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong

#14
post #4

I don't know enough about meteorology to comment on the article, but this quote bugged me: "And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats." No, there's the exact same amount of reason. This isn't a morality play, who's "fault" it is doesn't matter. If there were a met…

> No, there's the exact same amount of reason. This isn't a morality play, who's "fault" it is doensn't matter. Of course it matters -- in terms of the amount of impact human activity has on the climate. The less impact it has, the less beneficial you can expect energy policies to be to the environment. Since these policies have a non-trivial cost in terms of human suffering (less energy for heating, growing food, et…

It doesn't matter in a moral sense. If someone proves that CO2 emissions don't cause global warming, then yeah, it makes it less effective to focus on CO2 emissions. But we still want to stop warming from happening, so we'd increase our efforts on whatever they pinpoint as the alternative cause.

The linked article I was rebutting wasn't making that utilitarian case, they were making a moral case about not being obligated to avert warming at all, which I think is thoroughly bullshit, because I live here.

Re: 95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong

#16
Let's just link to the debunking and move on.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1...

https://www.skepticalscience.com/The-Oceans-Warmed-up-Sharpl...

https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm

https://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Roy_Spencer.htm

Re: 95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong

#17
post #4

I don't know enough about meteorology to comment on the article, but this quote bugged me: "And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats." No, there's the exact same amount of reason. This isn't a morality play, who's "fault" it is doesn't matter. If there were a met…

I think you're missing the point. Climate change policy is an optimization problem: how much money do we spend (either active on counter-measures or passively by capping energy usage) to reduce temperature change by some amount. If we can only affect it half as much as we thought we could, would we still spend the same amount? Maybe, but it's not exactly a no-brainer.

Re: 95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong

#18
Numerically illiterate horsepuckey.

For example: If 100% of climate models predicted a rise of 10-14C (mean 12C), and we observed a rise of 11C, this doesn't mean that the models are 'wrong', and it CERTAINLY doesn't mean that "the observations must be wrong."

It does mean that there's some potentially interesting correlation in the models' errors, I guess.

[Or, as cjensen said: 'Thou shalt not make a graph without error bars']

Re: 95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong

#20
post #4

I don't know enough about meteorology to comment on the article, but this quote bugged me: "And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats." No, there's the exact same amount of reason. This isn't a morality play, who's "fault" it is doesn't matter. If there were a met…

If the impact of global warming is significantly smaller than predicted and the human-induced contribution to that reduced warming is also much smaller than claimed, then expensive "green" policies indeed need to be reevaluated. Your fault reasoning has nothing to do with it.

Think of it from a programming perspective. You've suddenly discovered that your program runtime wasn't near as slow as you thought. Plus you've shown that most of the runtime is driven by systems external to your code. It makes sense to reconsider how much effort to invest in for code optimization.

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