And don't give me the old, "That's obviously stupid" response. I demand a good faith refutation that treats my central thesis seriously, even though my predictions have a poor track record and my thesis is outside of mainstream consensus.
I get that it's a joke - but it's not even a very good one if you have to fake it to make it work.
Graphs are completely meaningless. Correlation does not imply causation. Asking for a graph is the last thing you should do. Ask for a hypothesis about why there might be a causal relationship. Test that hypothesis.
Also, graphs are demonstrably NOT completely meaningless. They can absolutely be misleading, but they can also accurately depict the underlying data. I think the point of this thread is that the authors of this study have proposed a hypothesis and collected data that supposedly reinforces it. The data (and methodology) can be analysed and verified. There's no need to start from scratch, in this case, to determine if the findings can be substantiated.
Is this guy a genius who'll prove everyone wrong? Personally I seriously doubt it. But that doesn't mean the scientific community should pooh-pooh his paper.
Treating this paper as if an adult wrote it can only do good things for the climate debate. Even if it doesn't really deserve that kind of treatment.
My point is that attacking someone's argument by noting their poor academic track record is not ad hominem, it's a perfectly valid approach. Otherwise non-science people seeking to alter scientific consensus would have a trivial loophole to DoS the process.
>According to a new report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent – 18 percent – than transport.
http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html
(Though it's worth noting that that report is a few years old at this point.)
In any case estimating the relative impact of different chemicals in the air right now is a relatively straightforward modeling problem. And from that we know that our introduction of CFCs contributes a lot less radiative forcing to the atmosphere than our CO2 and methane increases. (What is much harder is estimating future growth in gasses, and the variety of feedback loops. But current impact of changes is something we know pretty reliably, and CFCs are not the top cause.)
What about this claim? Is this verifiable? A 10 year decline in global temperature would be quite extraordinary, given that global CO2 emissions have increased over the last 10 years (despite efforts of some, they are nothing compared to the growth of India and China).
The best data sets that we have for the whole globe indicate continued heat absorption, with a high absorption of that heat by the oceans. However data sets taken from land do not show a clear warming trend. So, of course, that is what this particular researcher uses.
The discrepancy between global absorption of heat and global temperature becomes very understandable when you note that a lot of that absorption of heat takes the form of melting ice. And when you melt ice you both absorb a lot of heat energy, and flood the environment around you with cold water that cools it off.
(It is worth noting that this particular absorption pattern cannot continue forever. For instance see http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/05/28/arctic_s... for information about how quickly we're losing the arctic ice cover.)
I know it is complicated but the 'conventional wisdom' has been that the best climate models take all these feedback mechanisms into consideration and predict a catastrophic increase in temperatures and that the science is 'settled' on this. We've been told over and over again that the models are trustworthy and beyond criticism. All the radical regulatory and economic policy recommendations are based on these models being correct. Anyone who doubts this is labeled as a 'denier' and politely escorted out of the room.
And yet, you say that the land temperatures are not increasing as predicted by these trustworthy models. Hmmm.
They attempt to. But many of those feedbacks are complex, poorly understood, and hard to model. That is one of the reasons why predictions have large error bars on them.
I know it is complicated but the 'conventional wisdom' has been that the best climate models take all these feedback mechanisms into consideration and predict a catastrophic increase in temperatures and that the science is 'settled' on this. We've been told over and over again that the models are trustworthy and beyond criticism. All the radical regulatory and economic policy recommendations are based on these models being correct. Anyone who doubts this is labeled as a 'denier' and politely escorted out of the room.
There are stupid people on both sides, and certainly a lot of people state certainties that go way beyond what scientists would consider settled.
And yet, you say that the land temperatures are not increasing as predicted by these trustworthy models. Hmmm.
They are not increasing as fast as the median prediction. But they are well within the error bars that we've had all along.
This is a disconnect between scientific consensus and popular belief that we've seen before in other fields, like evolution. Science, by its very nature, always has a lot of rough edges and unexpected bobbles. Scientists focus on these. In their discussions of all of the ways in which they have failed to perfectly understand, and how they can understand better, they say lots of things that can be (and are!) cherrypicked for propaganda among people who think that the scientists are dead wrong. But when you trace back the quotes to the source, and look at the overwhelming bulk of the research, you realize that the scientists actually had broad agreement all along (with occasional exceptional data points).
The scientist who wrote the article this discussion is about would be an exceptional data point. Fred Hoyle's rejection of the big bang theory would be a similar one. So would the creationist beliefs of Kurt Wise and Timothy H. Heaton. (Both got PhDs in geology from Harvard and studied under Stephen J. Gould.)
I list these exceptions not to dismiss them. But to say that you cannot understand the nature of scientific consensus without understanding that not all scientists will agree with it. And the nature of science done right is that people who disagree, but who manage to maintain the forms and standards of science, are permitted to maintain their arguments until the day that they die. Other scientists may disagree and shake their heads. You may get articles like http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_21_4.html written in disbelief. But the contrary argument is allowed to be made. Is allowed to be heard. And if evidence is on its side, will eventually be allowed to overturn what people had thought settled. This is part of the scientific process.
However scientific history shows that while we celebrate people on the scientific fringe who proved to be right, the smart money wouldn't generally bet that that fringe beliefs were right. And at this point, denying the reality of anthropogenic global warming is very much a fringe belief. (Though one that will see you well rewarded by some powerful economic interests.)
The natural skepticism that a scientist should have has been severely lacking in the climate science community.
Do you have a citation for me to look into?
The second paragraph says there has been an 'unexplained standstill' since 1998.
Further down Dr. Otto from Oxford is quoted as saying that the "hottest of the models in the medium-term, they are actually looking less likely or inconsistent with the data from the last decade alone".
Certainly sounds to me as if there is something going on that wasn't anticipated in earlier models, especially the 'hottest models' -- the ones that are most worrying.
Do you have any idea how many garbage theories are published every day? It is all part of the scientific process, as is the process by which we constantly weed out proposals. Wake me when the scientific consensus has moved to a median rise below 1.0 C per century. Until then scientists are not actually disagreeing with what a lot of them claimed in the IPCC report you were blasting.
And even if that report was wrong, until the bottom of the range includes 0 C/century, the consensus is global warming.
This is exactly the sort of nonsense that I was talking about regarding the response to criticisms of the climate models. You've gone even farther than usual by suggesting that I'm denying the entire edifice of science.
I get that there is uncertainty in science. I get that natural variations in climate aren't perfect fits to pretty theoretical models. I get that short-term variations don't automatically invalidate long-term predictions.
What I don't get is how scientists can advocate multi-trillion dollar public policy initatives and incredibly disruptive changes to our economy based on these uncertain models. Even if you accept the predictions as certain the costs of the 'remedies' seem to exceed the costs of simply adapting to the higher temperatures.
My point is that scientists put up a variety of models with a variety of assumptions and know full well that some of those assumptions are going to prove wrong, and so will the corresponding models. This is part of the model fitting process.
It is absolutely true that the extreme models from a decade ago are clearly wrong. However you were trying to conclude from that normal and expected result that the entire process a decade ago is clearly wrong and this is somehow a crisis. Far from being a crisis, this is normal science, and entirely expected.
What is far more important is that the best models we can produce today fit in the range that was being predicted a decade ago. And none of that range is good news.
What I don't get is how scientists can advocate multi-trillion dollar public policy initatives and incredibly disruptive changes to our economy based on these uncertain models.
If we could produce better models, we would. But when your best projections about the future show an oncoming train, at what point should you pay attention?
Even if you accept the predictions as certain the costs of the 'remedies' seem to exceed the costs of simply adapting to the higher temperatures.
There have been many, many attempts to quantify this. These attempts are even more controversial than climate studies because they also depend on economics, which is both less settled and more political than climate science. And furthermore they could be changed radically by future scientific improvements that we don't know about yet. However as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_global_warming#Res... says, No models suggest that the optimal policy is to do nothing, i.e., allow "business-as-usual" emissions.
As an example of a limitation, there are climate mitigation strategies that have been discussed which might be considerably cheaper. For instance the release of particles into the stratosphere might cool the planet. However wouldn't help with ocean acidification - what value do we put on having shellfish? Adding trace minerals to the ocean in certain places will cause ocean blooms that help with CO2 and acidification, but have unknown impacts on the deep ocean.
This leads to a classic problem. At what point do we decide to act on the basis of what our best available information says? As http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revi... makes abundantly clear, the historical pattern is for cultures who don't want to make hard choices to put them off, despite the best information they had available, until it was too late. With disastrous results for the culture. I don't want that pattern to repeat to my children and grandchildren.
You, obviously, consider the risk worthwhile.