"Report’s author says many media outlets have misinterpreted the science by conflating sea-level rise with climate change"

> However, the report stresses that the inundation does not result from rising sea levels alone.

> It found that shoreline recession was substantially worse in areas exposed to high wave energy, and that extreme events and inappropriate development were also factors contributing to the erosion.

"The alarmistic claim originates from riding the positive phase of the inter-annual, decadal and multi-decadal oscillations typical of the sea levels over a cherry picked short time window of 10-15 years, neglecting what was measured before 1994 by another tide gauge in pretty much same location, and also neglecting what has been measured in the same tide gauge since 2009.

Short records do not permit to clear the trend of the inter-annual, decadal and multi-decadal oscillations [4-8]. In the Solomon Islands there is no tide gauge long enough to infer a proper trend. However, the information available permits to dismiss the alarmist claim of 7-10 mm yr-1 rate of rise."

2) statistically not enough data for trends in sea levels:

"Also including Honiara II, starting from December 1974 the rate of rise is +2.81 mm yr-1. The time window is now 42 years long, still insufficient, but certainly more reasonable. Considering 60-70 years of data are needed to start understanding a trend in sea levels, very likely these +2.81 mm yr-1 are still an overestimation of the relative rate of rise."

[1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/10/busted-claim-data-sho...

Here's a discussion of the author of that post's prior work: https://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/making-up-stuff/

edit: fascinating how easy it is to be downvoted simply by pointing out the lack of credibility of AGW skeptics. On one hand, you have the overwhelming majority (97-74%) of professional scientist saying (respectively) that global warming is occuring or that it's man-made and provable with existing science. On the other hand, you have people with dubious credentials, poor ethics, and/or extraordinary conflicts of interest as paid fellow at Cato, Heartland, AEI, et al.

All of this is easily verified by simple use of a search engine. Since... just about nobody here is a professional climate researcher, I think all we can go on is the credibility of sources of information. It is not ad hominem to bring someone's motivation and prior record into consideration.

I've never understood this argument. What does agreement of other scientists from unrelated fields have to do with the soundness of a scientific theory? It's a thinly-veiled appeal to authority that I think really weakens non-scientific peoples' perceptions about how science works.

>Since... just about nobody here is a professional climate researcher

And neither are the majority of professional scientists that agree. Every scientist I've worked with (computational physics) doesn't know anything about climate science and (probably rightly) assumes that the people in the field know what they are doing so they agree because they trust the process. However, the approval of scientists in unrelated fields is about a relevant as the approval of a politician. So just stick with facts about the research itself.

Additionally, there have been many times where "the overwhelming majority of scientists" have believed something that is incorrect. The thing that makes science special is that it is not a democracy. Theories are validated on their logic and evidence, not on whether or not they please a particular community of people.

tl;dr. Stop bringing up how many people agree with something. It's not scientifically relevant.

Anyway, if that was the argument in isolation, you'd have a better point. There's also the matter of the rapid measured temperature increase in 20th century, glacial retreat, mass coral die-offs, historical records of Arctic sea ice, the body of published peer-reviewed work on it, among many other things.

And... I take particular offense to "it's not scientifically relevant." There is a big difference between interpreting information and practicing science. The author of the link previously published an article with basic errors in its science and his two coauthors partially disavowed the work. He is publishing on a non-peer reviewed site with a known bias.

And if you want get specific, read the provided "rebuttal" link. It basically amounts to "The 7-10 mm/yr claim is alarmist! If you look at this other tidal gauge, it's almost 10 mm/yr from 1995 onward, but it looks like it may have slowed to 5 mm/yr since then. Also, if you go back to 1974 - 20 before the uptrend starts - it's ony 3mm/yr!"

True, unless a person believes the whole field is bunk. e.g. numerology, technical analysis (looking for shapes in stock charts), faith healing, etc. Many smarter people I talk to (not typical hurr-durr Al Gore sucks types) that don't buy into the global warming story think that the climate is too complex for the current modeling to mean anything.

>Anyway, if that was the argument in isolation, you'd have a better point. There's also the matter of the rapid measured temperature increase in 20th century, glacial retreat, mass coral die-offs, historical records of Arctic sea ice, the body of published peer-reviewed work on it, among many other things.

I'm not disputing global warming. I was merely critiquing using popularity as a support for your argument. The real data is so much more powerful that adding that actually detracts from the evidence.

>And... I take particular offense to "it's not scientifically relevant." There is a big difference between interpreting information and practicing science.

A major theory has never won over critical-thinking people with the argument "it must be right because X group says so". It always comes down to actual proofs, experiments, and analysis that bring it into general acceptance. e.g. it's not scientifically relevant who believed in "spooky action at a distance" from quantum mechanics, it's only relevant that it was mathematically/physically sound and eventually shown in experiments.

>And if you want get specific, read the provided "rebuttal" link.

My comment is purely focused on using popularity amongst scientists as a tool for arguments. I am fine with showing that he/she is full of shit via logical/evidence-based rebuttals.

"We dont know enough, so we're sure we are correct and they are wrong" is about the dumbest reasoning I can think of, I'm sure those are really smart people you're talking to...

It's a much easier perspective to understand when you realize how many of these peoples' lives are directly tied to oil/gas/aviation/etc. Assuming complete stupidity or malice on their part does very little to advance the argument or accomplish anything in general other than feeling good about yourself.

Are you comparing climatology with those subjects?

I don't speak latin and don't use that expression often. Are you saying it's not ad hominem because the motive is considered as opposed to attacked? I ask because I had thought that it is ad hominem "to bring someone's motivation and prior record into consideration".

Here's the definition on Wikipedia: "a logical fallacy in which an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

I didn't read the link of this post, or the link in your comment, so hopefully I didn't miss something. I was just curious since I thought "ad hominem" describes what you were saying is not ad hominem.

Bringing motivations or character into consideration is relevant to gauging the reliability of a cited witness. The consideration of their reputation is not an attack on the subject matter, it is bringing into question whether they should be considered a reliable witness.

I am saying "X is a claim in a highly technical field that most of us lack expertise in. Y making that claim has a made large factual errors in prior publications, and his claims run contrary to the vast majority of his peers."

Sorry if you miss the nuance in my point. People also have referred to this concept as "taking with a grain of salt" or "heuristics".

Now, outside of arguments over semantics, the link article is lousy and the interpretation over what the lousy article claims by the great-grandparent post are incorrect.

The TL;DR of the linked article is: "They should have used data from another sensor, too. Based on 5 months of overlap, I'm going to assume I can just adjust the other sensor's data and use them in a single trend. Even if you accept that, I'm going to use a linear regression in this new cherry picked range, after making a big point about the nonlinearity of the underlying data. Even minimizing it the most I can, it still shows a 40 year trend of 3 mm annual sea level increases."

These really aren't compelling arguments. It's easy to call a crank a crank and dismiss him, but it's not easy to show why he's wrong. skeptics won't be satisfied with the personal attack that ignores the substance of the argument.

I interpreted your original comment similarly to your description in your reply, so I don't believe I missed nuance (unless I missed it twice). My comment and question were intended to clarify the meaning and usage of the expression "ad hominem", independent of this thread's topic and nuance in your comment. Like I mentioned, I don't use that expression often.

The other (Cook et al. 2013) takes incredibly generic mentions of climate change in papers' abstracts to infer a consensus (stuff like: "co2, a major responsible if climate change, also plays an important role in (something completely different)." Turns out that a lot of times scientists mention climate change in their abstracts as pure click bait.

I think you have it wrong.

Usually it seems far easier to get downvoted here if you are on the "sceptic" side.

That said in your case it might be because you go straight to attacking the credibility of the source without saying anything about the accusation of blatant cherry picking of data.

Some commenters try to point out that those 97% of scientists that you refer to are a result of a pretty interesting way to do surveys and statistics.

And it only takes one Galileo to observe that the sun doesn't rotate around the earth.

It is annoying to have to refute every claim instead of wrapping them in a "denier" blanket statement and rubber stamp with "97% of scientists disagree" (for extremely fuzzy values of 97)

Edit: I work in solar and have previously worked in recycling. I am a sceptic possibly about to become a believer but what I perceive as arrogant PC rubber stamping of anyone who asks questions is really annoying to me.

To me there's a big difference between acknowledging that it's occurring and saying it is primarily caused by man. We know we've gone through these cycles in the past.

Actually, assuming your quote is correct, I find it a bit offensive that the "or" is typically presented as "and" in the mainstream narrative.

IMHO, dropping tidal gauges mid-data, ignoring annual, tidal, and multi-decadal trends are things that should not be so easily dismissed.

How ironic that we let these politicians commit treason (undermining American energy security is unquestionably treason), yet go after imaginary threats, justifying pervasive surveillance on innocent American citizens.

It just goes to show how rotten to the core our system has become.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/30/world/asia/wha...

(2) We would have to get rid of the big temperature changes going back 500,000+ years from the Vostok ice core data that Al Gore plotted and where the CO2 concentrations went up about 800 years after the temperatures went up.

(3) It would also help to cancel the global cooling from about 1940 to 1970 while CO2 concentrations were going up.

E.g., from these examples, IMHO, the temperature record and the record of CO2 concentrations don't support that CO2 concentration changes caused the temperature changes.

(2) You want us to oversimplify? Climate is still not stable, and CO2 isn't the only thing that is involved. The main cause for the start/end of ice ages are orbital shifts. CO2 rise was a lagging result, that then amplified the warming.

(3) You still want us to oversimplify? Aerosols are known to cause cooling, and in that period rapidly expanding aerosol use caused a significant amount of cooling. Various countries then passed clean air acts which reduced the levels of aerosols in the air. (They also fixed a pretty major acid rain problem.) In fact one of the proposed solutions for global warming is to deliberately inject aerosols in the stratosphere.

From these examples, it looks like your mind is made up. You don't even want to find out what the science says. Instead you engage in a game of oversimplification and gotcha to convince yourself that what they are saying doesn't make sense.

No. I was just responding literally to the question. Or, for a more socially acceptable response, the Vostok data has me have trouble with the idea that humans are causing climate change.

> Those models uniformly project human-caused global warming, and are passing various kinds of sanity checks.

The data I have on that indicates that essentially all the models ("uniformly") are wildly wrong. They predicted that by now the temperature would be much higher.

Some of that data is reviewed in

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020430140457717...

The way too high predictions are plotted in

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-clima...

> Those models uniformly project human-caused global warming

Not all the models. There is a model that fits the data much better -- at least since the last ice age: The model claims that the variation in rates of sun spots causes the temperature changes and that CO2 has essentially nothing to do with climate.

Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas -- it absorbs in three narrow bands out in the infrared and, thus, absorbs some of the infrared radiation from the Planck black body radiation of the surface of the earth warmed by the sun. But according to the model I am mentioning, this effect from CO2 is tiny. Instead, again from the model I am mentioning, overwhelmingly, the main driver of global temperature since the last ice age has been just clouds, and they have varied with the sun spots. Just why is a longer argument made clear, e.g., in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg

So, that is another model that needs to be tested. For now, that model seems to fit the temperature data much better than the CO2, greenhouse gas, Navier-Stokes, atmospheric diffusion, etc. models.

To me, the CO2 models fit the data so poorly we have to reject CO2 as relevant to climate change and look elsewhere for the significant cause(s) of climate change. For now, to me, the best model is the one I mentioned here based on sun spots -- you didn't mention sun spots.

I have other things to do.

The Al Gore, IPCC arguments look bad to me, just from what I wrote, that the temperature record and the CO2 record convince me that CO2 has little or nothing to do with temperature.

There is a biggie point: The Al Gore crowd has a claim about CO2 that would have us shoot in the gut much of current civilization. There are at least two ways to respond:

(1) From a lot of really good science, find a better answer.

(2) F'get about finding a better answer or even any answer but just debunk the Al Gore answer by finding holes in its argument.

Then for (2), one way is really simple, just look at the temperature and CO2 record back through the Vostok data 500,000+ years ago. I've basically done that and concluded that from the records we can reject the Gore claims about the effects of CO2 on climate. That Vostok data is what Gore gave as his main evidence that the higher temperatures were from higher concentrations of CO2. Alas, the CO2 concentrations rose about 800 years after the temperatures rose.

Another way to do (2) is just to use one of the main criteria of science: Can it make accurate predictions? Well, from some of the references I gave, apparently not. That is, by the CO2, Planck black body radiation, Navier-Stokes, etc. models, the temperature should be very significantly higher now. Well, it's not. So, in science, we reject the prediction and the modelling that made it.

So, as in (2), we don't find a good answer but just debunk and reject the Gore CO2 approach. Finding a good answer might be really difficult science, but debunking a proposed answer need not involve much science at all. That rejection is likely just what we are all supposed to do and maybe not publishable. So, we don't look for an academic record of it.

For the references I gave, right, they are not primary, but they do give some pointers to primary references. E.g., one of the graphs does name all the models. If that graph is all hogwash, I'd be among the first to want to have good information on that.

For that graph with results of the 70 or so models, I just found a link to the graph. I have the graph on my computer from years ago, but I didn't have a link to it on the Internet (I confess -- sloppy record keeping). So, I just took a long gibberish string left over from when I downloaded the graph, pasted it into Google, and let Google give me a link to the graph. I don't know where the graph came from originally (it may say but I haven't looked at that graph in detail for years) but likely not the Web page of the URL I gave. Sorry 'bout that, but I just found a way for you to see the famous graph.

You citing Al Gore is enough to prove that you don't want to learn about the actual science and that you already have a position that won't change

Conclusion? All caused by CO2.

Oh, and temperature going down is also caused by CO2 going up. I haven't seen it yet but I'm sure Ocean going down is CO2-related also.

Models are just models, they're only as good as their design and the data they are fed. We have solid temperature data for only a few hundred years, if that. That's a lot of time to try to model something with so many variables.

Both sides have been found to be tweaking the models and input data to tune the output to their agenda, and nearly every time I see it presented, it's "average global temperature rise of x over the last y years has contributed to z inches of sea level rise. We must reduce CO2 because climate change"

Average global temperatures have gone up, and down, and up, and down many many times, even before we were even here. If the science were more solid, there wouldn't be so much controversy over it.

For every model presentation you can find that predicts it, I can find one that doesn't.

Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? Yes. Can it trap heat? Yes. Does that conclude that the extra CO2 we are generating is the cause of global temperature rise? Not by a long shot. Does it warrant further investigation? Absolutely. The consequences of being wrong are far to great to ignore.

I can't tell you what to think or what models to select, but the rapid and sustained increase in temperatures over the past 30 years would suggest something is up, so I would at least focus on models that would have retroactively explained that rise.

http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html

(1) the temperature in 2006, and, thus, also now, is essentially the same as in the year 1000 and

(2) there was a rapid rise in temperature from year 900 to year 1000.

But for the temperature increase from year 900 to year 1000, the usual arguments about CO2 from human activity do not apply. Apparently CO2, from humans or anything else, had nothing to do with it.

So, the current temperature and the rise of the past 100 years also happened between year 900 and year 1000. Can't blame humans for the rise from 900 to 1000. And, since the rise of the past 100 years is much like 900 to 1000, it doesn't have to look like "something is up" now, especially not human activity.

By eyeball, their graph looks a lot like the graph in the Wikipedia page you gave. I was unsure just when the Medieval Warm Period was, but the Wiki graph seems to say it was near year 1000.

My eyeball reading of the graph in the PDF says that the temperature in year 1000 is essentially the same as in year 2006 when the PDF was published, and the increase from year 900 to year 1000 was much like the increase from 1906 to 2006. I may be off by some 0.1 C or some such, but there are several curves so that about get to take your pick.

Bottom line: Year 1000 wasn't a disaster and wasn't caused by humans releasing CO2, so I'm not much worried about now and not convinced that the current temperature or recent increases were caused by CO2.

E.g., was the Little Ice Age caused by less CO2? I doubt it!

"E.g., was the Little Ice Age caused by less CO2? I doubt it!"

Who knows? Based on what I could find from ice core studies it appears atmospheric CO2 was 5-10% lower from 1600-1800. I don't anyone making a causative claim.

From you is the first I've heard that CO2 levels decreased during the Little Ice Age (LIA). Makes some sense -- it was darned cold then which means less biological activity.

But there is a cute point: During the LIA, no doubt a lot of people were burning everything they could find to stay warm and, thus, emitting more CO2. Still, CO2 concentrations went down. Gee!

The biggie point about the LIA is the Maunder Minimum: That is during the LIA, the sun had nearly no sun spots. Then that agrees with the model in the YouTube video with the URL I gave that claims that the cause of climate change is changes in the rates of sun spots. Just why sun spots could change climate (not really that the sun might be hotter) is explained in the video.

The model in that video is not really predictive if can't predict sun spots. At times in the past could do that since there was a definite cycle to sun spots, and the period was right at 11 years. Then, if from such a cycle can predict sun spots, then can use that model to predict climate.

To me now, a question is, what the heck are the sources of the rise in CO2 concentrations of the past, say, 100 years? While I'm not convinced that the CO2 levels now are affecting the climate, I'd still like to know where the CO2 is coming from. So, there is a big system with some parts emitting CO2 sources, and others taking it in, sinks. One source is volcanoes, and maybe over half of those are in the ocean. Supposedly another source is sea water: So the warming, from wherever, is slowly heating the ocean, and warmer water absorbs less CO2. So, maybe left over from the LIA, the oceans have a lot of CO2 and as the climate warms from whatever causes are releasing that CO2. The estimates I've seen for the amount of CO2 from human activities has too much variation to take seriously. Then the estimates of CO2 from other sources also has huge variation.

Ah, back to work.

Which is why I have a problem with anyone who does come to a conclusion, because they do not have enough evidence either.

Observational evidence says temperature is going up, it's gone up in the past, and it will go up again in the future. Sea level has gone up in the past too. Guess how a shark tooth winds up buried in Montana?

What will decide my stance is good, solid, open, scientific results, based on sound input, conducted by a neutral party, with sufficient data to draw conclusions, and done in a manner that any interested party can reproduce the results from their own, independently collected data. If only one dataset is available, then the data collection itself must be open and scrutinized. There's too much 'religion' surrounding the issue to trust anyone not to manipulate anything(not necessarily intentionally).

Ans since when those points are not met?

What is a neutral party for you?

Why do you thinkg that data is not open and cannot be scrutinized

> There's too much 'religion' surrounding the issue to trust anyone not to manipulate anything(not necessarily intentionally).

Any example of this manipulation?

My guess is plate tectonics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics

Since this trough only covers the western 1/4 or so of Montana[2], I think it would be safe to say that, on average, a shark tooth found in Montana was not found in an area of orogenic lifting, thus was likely deposited there by a shark, or something higher on the food chain than a shark, during a period in which the sea levels were much higher than they are today. Are there places in Montana where orogenic lifting created dry land? Yes. Are they as likely to be trafficked by humans as the others? No.

I suppose they could also have been recently deposited by a migratory bird.

[1] http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/continents/

[2] http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/continents/cretaceous.jpg

I looked up the elevations of cities in Montana and it looked like the minimum was 2000 ft. This implies that we've seen more change due to plate tectonics than the 750 ft (generous) sea level change. [0]

Granted, to really resolve the argument on the shark's tooth we'd have to know how deep that shallow sea was in the Cretaceous Period.

On the positive side, even if sea levels rose 750 ft now, Montana wouldn't be underwater. :)

[0] http://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/69982/mod_o...

Or words to that effect.

Seems to be the only argument that has had any impact on the deniers that I've had discussions with.

Nearly every person who argues against global warming research is doing it because of this. They think we are making sacrifices for no purpose. If eliminating CO2 emissions came at no cost, there would be almost no debate at all because the majority of the people who didn't believe in the effects of CO2 wouldn't care.

Regulatory limits on CO2 emissions - "cap and trade".

>my choice to ride a bike to work rather than drive comes at an energy savings not cost.

Most people in the US cannot ride their bike to work, and it's not because they are overweight. About half the people commute > 10 miles, which is not reasonable for a daily bike commute in <40F weather, and even when it's warmer that's a miserable amount of time to be forced to commute every day. This also ignores people that need to pickup/dropoff kids.

So people will not choose to give up driving because the alternatives suck. It would have to be forced. Otherwise they would be riding their bikes now.

Presumably your time is worth money. There's your cost. Not that a car is costless, of course!

>not what would change your mind.

I didn't say I was denying global warming. I was pointing out the strawman the cartoon builds up and then ridicules.

It's like banning Coca-Cola to reduce cavities so everyone just switches to Pepsi.

You again use the word 'deny'. Bruno Giordano and Galileo would understand that word entirely. Giordano paid the price for that by being burnt alive and Galileo saw discretion as the better part of valour. We can see that the use of the word reveals this is a religious debate.

I don’t understand this thinking. The fact that we don’t have a good predictive model is extremely worrying. We may hit a non-linearity or positive feedback loop that increase the average temperature by 10C in a very short time (this is unlikely, but we can’t rule it out). The whole thing is like jumping off a cliff into the ocean when you have no idea what is under the surface.

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sell-Your-Coat-Surprising-ebook/...

I think humans influence the climate by using energy and land at least, and one effect of this influence may be net warming. I have no compelling reason to believe that humans cause net warming, or that they cause net cooling. As a member of Popper's school of science philosophy and considering the complexity involved, I'm not sure what evidence could reasonably confirm the AGW hypothesis, especially since we don't have a "control planet" to work with.

Also the politics around this stuff has been the bigger issue for a long time, and either way I do not agree that stopping global warming should take priority over other human concerns.

Yes I have. There is in fact lots of things that would change my mind.

1. The laws of physics were proven to false and it turned out the CO2 does not trap energy in the atmosphere.

2. The sun was proven to be increasing significantly in solar output and this explained the warming we have seen to date.

3. The planet stopped warming and started cooling.

4. The source of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere was found to not be the result of burning fossil fuels.

5. We had highly predictive and accurate models that showed that warming via the accumulation of CO2 is not possible.

Is there any evidence that if you became aware of would change your mind?

Most skeptics agree that CO2 traps energy in the atmosphere. By itself, a doubling of CO2 should cause about 1 degree of warming.

But climate models say a doubling of CO2 will cause anywhere from 2 to 12 degrees of heating.

So you can be a climate skeptic without breaking any laws of physics. Climate "sensitivity" estimates are highly uncertain and are all over the map. Most of the predicted warming is due to climate "sensitivity" estimates, not CO2 directly.

>"2. The sun was proven to be increasing significantly in solar output and this explained the warming we have seen to date."

We do know the planet was warming before CO2 could have had any significant effect. If there were some change in solar radiation in the past it would take time for the earth to warm and come to a point of equilibrium. There is nothing ruling out this possibility.

>"3. The planet stopped warming and started cooling."

There has been no statistically significant warming for over 22 years according to satellite data.

>"4. The source of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere was found to not be the result of burning fossil fuels."

Highly unlikely.

>"5. We had highly predictive and accurate models that showed that warming via the accumulation of CO2 is not possible."

What if we could show that warming is increasing at a much lower rate than predicted by climate models?

https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/christy_cmi...

And I think you may have missed my point. The hypothetical evidence you listed is mostly "proof of X" and "confirmation of Y" which suggests we disagree about how science works. I'm of the opinion that science does not advance by proving new theories correct, it advances by proving old theories incorrect. A new theory that cannot itself be proven incorrect is not scientific. The empirical evidence you have suggested with number 3 is one possible way to falsify the AGW theory, but it is somewhat vague and might mean waiting for a long time. Additionally, without the AGW theory we have no good reason to expect either warming or cooling in particular, so either one is not what Popper called a "risky prediction".

I get the impression that you want me to go along with political action and engineering projects that I don't agree with. Perhaps you will continue to do so until some as yet unspecified temperature measurement shows a cooling trend for some as yet unspecified period of time, or we are both dead.

From my perspective the theory has not made any risky predictions, and that has to happen before we can speak of confirming it. The situation is fundamentally biased against the activist politics. Not surprisingly, lots of the same activists have been trying to declare Popper "obsolete" for some time. I encourage you to read his essay and consider for yourself:

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.htm...

"Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory."

It is an interesting question though - what risky prediction can be or has been made based on the AGW theory? The "polar ice will disappear by X year" statements are the closest thing I can think of.

By the way you are the first person to even make a half-hearted attempt to answer my original question. Do you want to make the “polar ice will disappear by x year” more precise?

Why do you assume that it can not be proven incorrect?

It may be hard to prove incorrect. There hasn't been much of an effort in my experience. Not the same thing.

You don´t think that it is incorrect because nobody has tried too hard to prove it incorrect?

- less trying to convince people

- less calls to action

- less promotion of the tiny irrelevant bad things that it's doing

- less hiding of the good things it's doing

- more promotion of engineering solutions

The fact that the media presentation of it is so clearly biased in these ways makes me automatically distrust it. I know they're trying to mislead people, and you surely do too. Why would you believe someone who you know is trying to deceive you?

We have no reliable predictions of any serious consequences of global warming. According to the IPCC, it's not going to be a big deal within 100 years. Beyond that time frame, there's plenty of opportunity for us to adapt, fix it, or be wrong in our predictions.

The current estimate for sea level rise is about 70cm by 2100. That won't flood very much at all. A few sandbars, sprawling beaches and already-flood-prone river deltas, but not many actual cities. New York for instance won't be flooded by a 70cm sea level rise even though it was flooded by a recent hurricane. 70 cm is smaller than regular tide heights, smaller than wave heights, it's just not very significant for most coastal cities. Where it is significant, they can just build more land. I come from a city which has metal plaques on the road in the middle of town saying "this is where the shoreline used to be". We can just modify our shorelines with earthworks.

The current estimate for temperature rise is 2-6 degrees C by 2100. 6 degrees is the extreme case and probably won't happen, so maybe we get 3 degrees. What will that do to agriculture? I don't know, but we do know that food grows over a much wider range of climate across the world so it can't completely destroy it. Furthermore, it will come gradually, giving farmers many decades to adapt. What will it do to people directly? Nothing because it's negligible compared to daily and seasonal variations.

More tropical diseases? People in the tropics already suffer from those and we don't care about them today so why would we care about other people having them in the future?

More severe storms? We already have severe storms and construction in high risk areas is designed to cope with them. We'll just adjust the building codes as the risk changes.

Worried that people won't adapt until it really hurts them? No, property owners won't want to be left holding the bag when their land becomes worthless, so the market will sort that out. Whoever's farm stops producing or whoever's house get washed out to sea pays for it out of their own pocket so they'll be strongly incentivized to protect it or sell it long before that happens.

So this is my concern with global warming - yes it's happening and man-made or not, it probably won't hurt us enough to worry about. There's no room for that position in the 2-extremes view of the debate.

You understand of course, that now the tides and the waves will be a meter higher. As will storm surges from future storms.

You also understand, of course, that part of the alarm is because that the more data that's collected and the more mature the models get, the faster and steeper the see level rise projections get (DeConto & Pollard, 3/2016, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v531/n7596/full/nature1...).

Another part of the alarm is the extent that the 2016 climate data thus far is worse than models predicted.

2106 data is meaningless. It's only a few months out of a many decades trend filled with noise. If you count that, then you also have to count all the months which had lower than predicted temperatures and use them to show the models are wrong. This is the bias I'm talking about. Cherry picking any bit of data that shows it's bad.

Of course a higher mean sea level means higher peaks too. But so what? New York survives occasional floods, and it can survive slightly more.

By the way, while I was researching that, I also found the "global greening" effect. This is what I'd like to see more of in mainstream media - interesting things happening with global warming that aren't all bad. It would show less of a bias.

One area I agree very much with the deniers is that our models are not very good. This worries me the most since we really have no idea what will happen and if we will hit any non-linearities. We are running a massive experiment on the whole planet with a very poor idea of what the consequences are.

AGW deniers, I think are hoping to derail the whole thing by showing that humans didn't cause it. But that's not the only skeptical view you can take. I think yours is about the same as mine.

> less calls to action

> less promotion of the tiny irrelevant bad things that it's doing

> less hiding of the good things it's doing

> more promotion of engineering solutions

So absolutely nothing to do with actual evidence then.

The first crude but usefully predictive model was created by Arrhenius in 1896.

That's 1896.

How much more evidence does it take?

I have no dog in this hunt - but I believe that short- and medium- term projections that start diverging from actuals almost on the first day are a problem for getting broad support for the hypothesis.

And it's a very interesting question, don't you think? Why aren't temperatures going up more? Is the earth modulating it somehow? The biosphere appears to attempt to maintain some kind of thermal homeostasis, and appears to be better at cooling the hot than warming the cold. How does that work?

"Thus the possible positive and negative feedbacks associated with increased water vapor and cloud formation can cancel one another out and complicate matters. The actual balance between them is an active area of climate science research."

http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatescie...

People have been forecasting various millenarian crises for millenia. It seems to be what we're good at... Nowadays, we're beyond thinking that the moon demon is going to eat the sun god, or that the four horsemen of the apocalypse will sweep down and bring disease, war, famine and death, Malthusian over-population will have us eating our children, the Y2K bug will result in chaos and rioting, Peak Oil will have us wearing ass-less chaps, hockey masks, and killing each other Mad Max style, nuclear Armageddon will give rise to a race of atomic spiders, and now anthropocentric global warming will... something something, rising sea levels. All of these scares came and went.

Hypothesis: The recent rise in global average temperature is caused by man-made increase in emissions of CO2.

Now, how do you test?

Well, we could just stop making CO2, wait 50 years and see if the temperature goes down. But then that's only one data point, and you haven't controlled other potential factors. One big one: The sun doesn't always put out the same amount of energy.

So now you need to make sure the sun's heat output remains constant in order to test if a 50 year elimination of CO2 output stops the global temperature rise.

But wait...what if the sun's output has been increasing over the last 50 years? That could have caused the temperature rise you formed your hypothesis about. If you stop the increase of the sun's output, and you stop the CO2 output, now you have two variables that you've changed, and you can't say, with any sort of certainty, which one caused the temperature to quit rising.

Neither of these options are really practical, so, instead, we try to create a mathematical model of the entire system, feed it the data that we do have, and try to model the expected results. Models fail routinely. Lets take hurricane models for example:

They're right, sometimes, their kinda right, sometimes, and their wrong, a lot. Why do you think that is? Their inaccurate and don't have sufficient data points. A perfect model would take every single variable in an entire system, know with certainty their effect on the system as a whole, and it would never be wrong. Some systems we have that luxury. Earth's atmosphere is not one of those.

We do not know even know what every single variable is. We don't know with certainty what effect the variable has on the system, so we can only model it with a best-guess approach.

If someone in 1980 looked at this[1] chart, they would conclude with a great deal of certainty that solar activity is the cause of temperature fluctuations over the last 100 years. After 1980, that no longer appears to be true. But global carbon emission have been sharply increasing since 1880[2].

So what logic concludes that CO2 can go up for 100 years, without causing an increase in global temperature, but as soon as the global temperature stops tracking solar output, assign the cause to CO2?

I'm not saying CO2 isn't the cause. I'm certainly not qualified to make that determination, and a qualified person probably wouldn't make that determination because they wouldn't have enough information to do so. But it certainly wouldn't hurt to eliminate our reliance on burning hydrocarbons for energy. This has more benefits than just reducing CO2 output.

We need better data and a better model, since we can't actually experiment.

[1] http://icons.wxug.com/metgraphics/climate/facts/Solar_vs_Tem...

[2] http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/global.total.gif

Why am I expected to believe something when you don't include a link to actual data?

The reason most intelligent, scientific people that I talk to are skeptical is that scientists have done such a bad job of communicating the data/evidence. It's not up to the person in the street to prove anything or believe anything without data.