The end of the global warming debate

“Even three years ago, sites like Tech Central Station, and writers like Ross McKitrick were taken seriously by many. Now, anyone with access to Google can discover that they have no credibility.”

Why, John, that three years covers the period since I started writing for TCS. I must be destroying the credibility of the place with lines like:

“Please note, I take the Lomborg line on this. What we do about it is the important question,”

“Some years ago Bjorn Lomborg was generally derided for stating, in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, that while global warming was indeed happening, was indeed being caused by humans…”

“Before I get swamped by screams of outrage, by those calling me a greenhouse denialist, please, get a grip. It is quite obvious that there is a thing called the greenhouse effect, the differences between Venus, Mars and Earth are the only evidence one needs for that contention. I’ve said before and will no doubt have to say it again, I’m broadly of the Lomborg persuasion, that there is a general change in the climate going on, that humans are at least partially responsible for it and the important thing is to find out exactly what is going on and then work out how to deal with it.”

The book Trust Us, We’re Experts also documents the paid shills being promoted as “scientists” or “non-partisan public interest groups.” It took almost 100 years from the time Big Tobaccoâ„¢ started paying for doctors to shill for them, before the public finally accepted that tobacco was bad for you. I have no confidence that the powers-that-be will cave in on this one, as their money interests squarely collide with any acknowledgement that global warming even exists, or is a problem.

One small thing many readers of this blog can do: donate spare CPU time on your computer to climate modelling.

Umm, yeah. The world does get warmer and cooler periodically. Nice observation.

The question hasn’t been whether there is global warming right now, it’s whether the proposed methods to adress the issue will help society or make things worse in the long run.

“I mean, apart from the credibility of the theory that laughter is good for you?”

Glad I’m doing something useful.

Any analysis on this issue coming out of a think tank that has engaged in global warming contrarianism must be regarded as valueless unless its results have been reproduced independently, after taking account of possible data mining and cherry picking. That disqualifies virtually all the major right-wing think tanks, both in Australia and in the US. Their performance on this and other scientific issues has been a disgrace.

But that’s preposterous. In your article, you acknowledge that there were quite recently several legitimate reasons to be skeptical, and the skeptics provided a invaluable service in pressing these issues (as is generally the case in science). My understanding is that, at one time, most mainstream geologists were deeply skeptical of the theory of plate tectonics. Once they’d finally been proved wrong, should anything these skeptics later said have been regarded as “valueless”?

And, of course, as other commentators point out, the main skepticism in recent years has not been of warming itself but of Kyoto.

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAA, like any meaningful debate can happen here. Tim Worstall puts out something perfectly reasonable and is instantly attacked. Truly indicative of the problem of Global Warming debate. Both sides are mostly represented by screaming know-it-alls (who really don’t know jack) with the calm rational voices either made fun of or drowned out.

Jet,
Fallacy: Middle Ground, Also Known as: Golden Mean Fallacy, Fallacy of Moderation. Sometimes one screaming know-it-all is 100% right and the other one is 100% wrong.

The resistance to doing anything about global warming is — per George Bush — wholly based on economic factors (he claimed that the Kyoto accords would hurt the American economy). And so far, global warming has mostly hurt countries in the Southern Hemisphere, about which Americans, at least, know little and care less. But surely in an economy in which the main economic growth factor has been in real estate values, economic side effects from global warming are bound to start kicking in. If, for instance, warmer water really does increase the intensity and length of the hurricane season, the Atlantic coast could witness some more devastating storms like Katrina, and be under a longer threat each year. Not to speak of the upcoming water shortages in the West. And that will begin to pose the question: what specific American economic sector would be hurt by regulations designed to mitigate global warming. Hint: it used to employ both the President and the Vice President, and it now costs 60 plus dollars a barrel.

Right now, the construction industry and the insurance industry should be thinking of lobbying for stronger global warming legislation.

In your article, you acknowledge that there were quite recently several legitimate reasons to be skeptical, and the skeptics provided a invaluable service in pressing these issues (as is generally the case in science).

In 1985 or perhaps as late as 1995, climate change skepticism was an entirely honorable position. Theories have been wrong before, the atmosphere is a complex and dynamic system, what we knew for certain was outweighed by what we still didn’t understand.

But thanks mostly to the concerns of climate change “alarmists” (since buying into the status quo would have led to less funding for research in this area) the topic has been under extensive study for some time and the data has been getting better and better. As the reasons for skepticism have been knocked away one after another, honest skeptics have left that camp. Dishonest skeptics have retreated to defending the remaining gaps in our knowledge or to novel just-so theories.

The parallel of the evolution debate is astonishing.

But John is right–the question can be said to be settled beyond all contradiction. The new battle is over what to be done. Most former skeptics, I fear, may slip into the embrace of their erstwhile allies, who now advocate doing nothing until the market provides a cheap alternative to fossil fuels. That would be a shame, and mean that we will be refighting this debate for another decade on slightly different ground.

I say the correct market solution is to use mechanisms that make fossil fuels less attractive–carbon taxes and/or tradeable carbon credits–that can help tilt the market toward a virtuous solution. But we need to make a start on this right away. Another decade of delaying tactics will alter this planet past the point of recognizability.

I took my four-year-old ice skating on Monday. Will that be possible in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park 80 years time? In 40 Years?

otto:
Otto: ““Trashing the frauds” gets you nowhere.”

Yes, it does, by reducing their ability to influence policy.

“The technocratic basis for further tax cuts in the United States right now is zero (esp. absent expenditure cuts, given trade and budget deficits etc). But this ‘fraud’ has been trashed with zero effect on policy.”

Incorrect – read the WSJ editorial page, for example, they’re still pushing that line. The frauds are trashed when people are ashamed to cite them; in the case of tax cuts, we’re still quite some way off.

“The technocratic basis for unilateral free trade is unimpeachable. All protectionist policies are thus intellectually untenable frauds.”

Incorrect. The technocratic basis for unilateral free trade assumes a political world which doesn’t exist, and assumes that there will be political measures available to cushion the impact on the losers. Even Krugman, a fanatic about free trade, has given up on that last idea, claiming that he doesn’t know how it would be politically possible.
Neoliberal economics has been reduced to explaining away their failures in the developing world, last I heard. Even Brad DeLong, a fanatical neoliberal, is demoralized on that topic.

jlw,
Did you use the term alarmists in scary quotes and then utter this bit of foolishness “Another decade of delaying tactics will alter this planet past the point of recognizability.”?

If that isn’t alarmism, I’m not sure what is. Perhaps you need to read the IPCC and see that the ~2-6 number is over ONE HUNDRED YEARS.

jlw,

In 40 – 80 years Brooklyn’s Prospect Park should be a good deal colder.

According to global climate models that predict global warming.

(That will be a very interesting and important test for the models.)

That anyone bold to enough to declare that, ‘But John is right—the question can be said to be settled beyond all contradiction.’, would be ignorant of this basic bit of knowledge is troubling.

Perhaps your assertions regarding the global warming debate aren’t quite as authoritative as you believe.

Actually, JLW, the correlation has to be a lot narrower than that. There has to be a specific link between slowing down economic activity and the regulations set up under the Kyoto accords. I think you would agree.

Your further point — that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing among signatories — could mean that the regulations aren’t comprehensive enough. However, I don’t think the Bush administration rejected the Kyoto accords because they didn’t go far enough.

Ever time I look I become more and more convinced of man made global warming and I have pretty much been convinced for a while.

But it just seems to me stuff like global climate models contain a good deal of inherent uncertainty.

What turns me off and annoys me is crap like John’s everyone who disagrees with me shut the f up and admit they are evil servants of corporate devils.

So keeping that in mind –

It still seems the margin of error is quite large. The upper atmosphere should be heating up faster and it still doesn’t seem to be. Even if you use the RSS data.

Is that correct? Does anyone have the decade numbers for the ground based increase that this article might be referencing? The article just airily declares that ‘Since the satellites now clearly show that the atmosphere is warming at around the rate predicted by the models,’ around? How around?

I also loved the references to basic algebra and physics. Silly rabbits, modeling the earth’s climate is just a straight forward application of basic physics.

The resistance to doing anything about global warming is—per George Bush—wholly based on economic factors (he claimed that the Kyoto accords would hurt the American economy).

Beyond the President and the business community, there are several impediments to any serious attempt to tackle the problem: (1) a hard core of about 30-40 percent of Americans who do not believe global warming is occurring at all; (2) among those who do believe it is happening, a relatively benign conception of what it could cause; and (3) no genuine interest on the part of key policymakers in educating the public on these points — particularly the President but also, very sadly, many Democratic leaders. (Have a look at pollingreport.com for polling numbers, btw.)

Can anyone suggest a good link to the most recent projections of climate change?

sorry about the italics!

New to this notation system.

jet:

Not advocating Kyoto, but I am advocating something. Other than empty platitudes, how does your position differ from that of, say, the biggest climate change deniers?

Not advocating Kyoto, but I am advocating something.

Why not Kyoto? After all Kyoto is a widely accepted global agreement that took years to negotiate. It is exactly the spot where technocratic reality meets political reality, as discussed above. I think ‘rejecting Kyoto’ = ‘rejecting any action’, precisely.

The most significant policy to reduce CO2 emissions is the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. This creates incentives for innovation by establishing an opportunity cost for all CO2 emissions from covered sources. It seems very unlikely that “public funds” (presumably raised through taxes and then centrally dispersed) would be a more effective way to stimulate innovation than providing incentives for the private sector?

Per, that is a false dichotomy. Providing incentives is also centrally planned and dispersed. Where else do these incentives come from, and who provides them, otherwise? I would think that the question of what the public sector and the private sector can do would depend more on the particular composition of national economies and geographies. In the U.S., there is gross underfunding of mass transit, something that the public side should be involved in. And of course the research on alternative fuels — say hydrogen — is going forward in all countries doing it with a lot of public cash.

Reforming a regulatory regime to benefit private sector companies that are greener and to punish those that aren’t, while providing the kind of market in pollution futures that have been mentioned in some of the comments, makes a lot of sense too.

Otto,
what I meant is that Kyoto is an international compromise; international political reality minus the US of A political reality.

So, I’m saying: the US rejecting Kyoto amounts to US rejecting any action whatsoever. So, any criticism of Kyoto is hardly anything but bullshit cover for the US administration. Simple as that.

zdenek

“obviously some guys hypothesis gets the chop”

You need an apostrope in “guy’s” there. Although, to be more accurate you should have written “some guys’ hypotheses get the chop,” because you’re really looking to narrow down more than one.

“your demand that people tow one line even when”

Please. Toe the line. This one should be evident if you think about the roots of the metaphor for even a moment.

As to your overall assertion, while it is true that science is at its most virile while there are genuine disagreements, there is such a thing as genuine scientific consensus, and too many people have found it in their best interests to muddy the waters. For too long, the answer to the question “is anthrogenic global warming real?” has been “yes” to within any reasonable margin of error, and nobody outside the USA has had cause or inclination to deny it. While people have been obfuscating over tiny nuances in the consensus, it has prevented the more relevant argument of “what should we DO about it?” from being at the top of the agenda.

That’s a big problem, and it hasn’t served anyone’s best interests. There’s cynicism and there’s being deliberately obtuse.

Jlw,
As Tim just pointed out, you obviously have about zero understanding of the IPCC’s conclusions and aren’t even basically familiar with the science.

But to answer you question, my position differes from global warming denialists in that I support massive increases in alternative energy R&D and nuclear energy. Switching to modern energy designs and replacing more coal plants with pebble bed reactors would do more to stop globalm warming than 10 Kyoto treaties, and that’s just what current technology can do. To continue my answer turned rant, I’d have taken 9/11 as an excuse to push down the throat of Congress my energy revamp plan which would have used the 500+ billion spent on the war to modernize the energy infrastructure while adding several hundred billion to energy R&D (current only a few billion).

otto,
You got any citations on polls showing that if a majority of the US decided upon taxes or gay marriage that taxes would be raised and gay marriage legalised? Because I think you got it exactly backwards.

Jet:

Thanks for the reply. Now, short of some sort of imposed mechanism–such as a cap-and-trade carbon market and/or carbon taxes–how do you plan to change the current market conditions that make burning coal ineffiently to make steam the cheapest way to generate electricity? And that make burning petroleum the most convenient way to power transportation?

Personally, I don’t think we’re that far apart. But you and Tim Worstall strike me as believing that uncertainty = happy surprises. I think business as usual will lead to some surprises on the bad side, especially in the arctic. That’s been the trend so far, and I don’t see why it won’t continue. (Oddly, part of the reason I think the trend will be worse is that aerosols and particles–which have been implicated in cooling–have been declining as environmental regulations clear things up.)

It’s funny. The debate has moved from “Global Warming: The Big Lie” to “You aren’t acknowledging the full range of uncertainty.” I suppose that’s progress. It just isn’t happening fast enough.

Jet
Your post is a little garbled, so I am not quite sure what you looking for. I think there’s lots of evidence that US public opinion tends to be permanently economically liberal (more redistribution than present – I’m not saying they want Sweden) and socially conservative (e.g. less gay marriage).
Michael Lind has talked about this a lot, if you want references.

Otto,
Only with the meme of “tax cuts for the rich” did Dems get any traction on Bush’s tax cuts. Otherwise, tax cuts are always popular with the majority, and this graph shows why.

But back to the task at hand, the optimal solution for the US would be business as usual but with massive increases in R&D with the knowledge that viable alternatives are right around the corner (no internal combustion engines aren’t going away soon, but the coal and natural gas plants might be). Anything else is just pooring teaspoons of water on an inferno while sapping the total resources for R&D. And nevermind the political killing propoganda available after a candidate gets Kyoto through. The next cycle in the economy will be entirely the fault of Kyoto and whoever signed it in will be gone.

Most former skeptics, I fear, may slip into the embrace of their erstwhile allies, who now advocate doing nothing until the market provides a cheap alternative to fossil fuels. That would be a shame, and mean that we will be refighting this debate for another decade on slightly different ground.

Well, the advantage of R&D to provide cheap alternatives to fossil fuels is that no global political framework is required. If such alternatives are developed, they will naturally and inevitably replace fossil fuels without requiring any global treaties.

From my perspective, the problem with Kyoto is that, leaving the U.S. aside for the moment, I don’t see any prospect that China is going agree to hard limits on emissions (or actually meet any such committments if it made them). And China is where all the increases in emissions are coming from. And the same is true of India to a lesser degree.

Otto, I don’t think you’re seeing my point. Only because of the Democrats heavy push of “tax breaks for the rich” did they get the 50-50% split on Bush’s tax cuts. Let me rephrase. If it weren’t for the tax cuts being skewed to the highest tax payers, the cuts woudl have been even more popular.

Oh, and jet, take your time. I’ve got to be away for a while.

[cheers all around]

Everyone worried about global warming should read this:

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2006/01/cooler_but_poor.html

JLW (and for the first part of this, Uncle Kvetch too),
The problem with taking the herculean task of reverting to 1990 global outputs means that we haven’t done much to stop global warming. Even after cutting CO2 back to 1990’s levels we’re still out of luck and that ~2-6 number is going only be minutely reduced.

And JLW, no one is glad you are away, I really appreaciate what you are adding to the dialogue. But the problem I have with carbon taxes is they are only reasonable with carbon trading. And once you are carbon trading, then the money is going from rich countries to poor developing countries. And while this is great for helping the poor, it doesn’t help fund new R&D unless you count incentive from the added energy costs. And as for having a “coherent plan”, I can’t think of a more successful plank for either party to incorporate than to say they are going to blow the roof off of energy R&D funding. But you have a point, I don’t know how to build a framework that would force whoever is in power to keep investing heavily in R&D. And while affordable alternatives are going to happen, we need them now, not in 15-20 years (probable timeframe of coal-priced solar power given the price history of the last 25 years).

Can anyone tell me what the disadvantages of global warming could be for Siberia? And then could anybody tell me how a China-Russia-India alliance against Kyoto could be overcome to provide a tenable solution to global warming (assuming that Kyoto in fact provides a solution, which I’m not convinced it does)? Let’s not forget total hurricane chaos in the Caribbean might even be quite a lot of fun for certain opponents of the US!

Also in Siberia, the thawing of a peat bog larger than France and Germany combined, “The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world’s largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.” What I love about this is the fact that methane cow farts are more problematic than CO2 emissions, maybe the one way to get this thing done is make cattle illegal, India would be somewhat more happy anyway.

Here is what the Copenhagen Consensus had to say about Kyoto and Carbon taxes. They are the few project that are considered bad.

While aggregate greenhouse emissions per country tell us something, I think breaking down the source of emissions tells us more about recommending policies than anything else. Nuclear power is not going to eliminate CO2 from private transportation, for instance, and since transportation as a whole contributes about a third of the CO2 emitted in the U.S. and about two thirds of that come from private autos and trucks (according to John DeCicco), we come back again to the regulatory role of the government — for instance, in raising the CAFE standards. That is an easy thing to do.

And it would be much cheaper than nuclear power, which has never been anything but a huge burden to the power consumer. The only way to build and maintain safe nuclear power plants is basically to get state utility commissions to jimmy with allowable rates just to allow power companies to bear the costs of them. This is much more onerous price, destributed much more regressively, than requiring higher emission standards from car manufacturers.

“If such alternatives are developed, they will naturally and inevitably replace fossil fuels without requiring any global treaties.”

And if they aren’t? Not being snarky here: How does this approach deal with the risk that the alternatives aren’t developed, or aren’t developed quickly enough?

Well, the alternatives are not being developed quickly enough now — but nor is Kyoto having any effect yet — the countries that have show decreases since 1990 are effectively either those that have shuttered obsolete belching factories (Russia, eastern Europe) or switched away from coal (the U.K.)

What’s the best way to provide the proper funds & incentives for the R&D? I don’t know the answer, but I think that’s the right question.

“And China is where all the increases in emissions are coming from.”

How so? The first of the two links you provide shows that gas emissions from the US are still climbing—up 13% since 1990, in fact. Emissions from China and India may be increasing faster, but that’s not the same.

Well, let’s put it this way — China is not only increasing emissions faster than the U.S., but also its increases are greater in absolute terms than those of the U.S. and China presumeably already has surpassed the E.U. as the second largest emitter (not that the graph in the following link is 2002 figures for the E.U. and U.S. but 2001 for China):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3143798.stm

Different Chris,

Looks like I was right to ignore you. “Anybody want to divide those numbers by yearly GDP for jet???” Would tell us what exactly? That the economy grew faster than tax revenues? Well hold the presses, different Chris just reinvented economics or something. Cutting taxes actually means that tax revenues will be a smaller perventage of total GDP? You must be a rocket scientist in your spare time or something to have figured that out all on your own.

Let me spell it out for you since you must be simple. The inference is that the tax cuts helped cause the growth in GDP, thus the link between tax cuts and tax revenue growth. If you need it spelled out further, contact your local adult remedial education center.

jet,
Mentioning Lomborg around liberals is like bringing up Reagan.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Lomberg attacks the environmental movement by citing its successes as proof that the environmental movement wasn’t necessary. Pretty silly thesis.

I can’t believe I’m taking the bait.

Ponte,
Where in the sam hell do you see that Lomborg states the environmental movement wasn’t necessary?

And that link you show sounds like some asshat who hasn’t even read the SE and who certainly doesn’t offer a shred of evidence to back up his claims.

Bad is relative to alternative to developement options.

But you should really read the Copenhagen methodology. For the Climate section, basically they made absurd assumptions to inflate the costs in the future because using objective methods would make it obvious that it is not beneficial. Look instead at the temperature change. Think about it, do you really think that a 1.9C decrease in the average temperature over 400 years starting in 2100 is worth the upfront cost?!?

> 36. Can anyone suggest a good link to
> the most recent projections of climate change?

Good start: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005/

It should be remembered that Lomborg is not a climatologist, biologist, chemist or has extensively studied in these fields which relate directly to the environment. His book has many citations but is therefore only as good as its citations, which are pretty much all secondary sources and general media articles. If one cites an article written in one year but does not mention articles written subsequently that either supercede or debunk the first article how good are your conclusions? This is one of the things that Lomborg is accused of and it is definitely one of the things that pseudo-skeptics are constantly guilty of doing. I will not swear to its veracity but this web site should be checked out when discussing Lomborg: http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/ The blog posting that doug g posted is guilty of this in referring to satellite data that has since been superceded by further research. Many items that were written in the early ’90s and before are still used by the pseudo-skeptics when in fact there are more accurate models and studies that have been done more recently. A real favorite is to point out that some scientists 30 years ago thought we might cool off. Think about the tools available then versus those available now when studying any field of science not just climatology.

The critics constantly harp on doing cost benefit analysis. Then they proceed to do what Lomborg did and assume that the lower range of the models is the only thing they should base their analyses on. In fact Lomborg specifically states that the temperature increases will be at OR BELOW the lowest ranges of the IPCC predictions. This is just as invalid as assuming that only the highest range of the prediction is what will happen. OTOH, the discovery in Siberia that one poster (He isn’t worth scrolling back to refer to his name.) made fun of shows that it’s just as likely that we’ll discover things to make the worst case scenario a bit more likely as any discoveries to make us more optimistic.

And costs must be considered. Lomborg minimizes the potential threat of rising sea levels far too much. Some simplistic guesses as to the potential rise simply say “We have this much ice. If it melts it adds this much water. This is how high the seas will go.”. This of course completely ignores the simple fact of chemistry that a liquid or gas that is heated expands. A very, very tiny increase of the volume of our seas from this cause combined with melting Arctic and Antarctic ice can be catastrophic to quite a few coastlines that can produce a large economic cost. And I fail to see a reasonable rejoinder to the idea that if you heat ocean water there will be an effect on hurricane formation (More tropical storms crossing that line.), strength and lifespan since warm water is fuel to a hurricane.

Jet: Switching to modern energy designs and replacing more coal plants with pebble bed reactors would do more to stop globalm warming than 10 Kyoto treaties, and that’s just what current technology can do.

This is a non sequitur.

Kyoto establishes goals, milestones, etc. on the global scale. ‘Replacing more coal plants’ in the US is some technological proposal for the local US economy. Apples and oranges.

This is like saying: “I’ll be coding my part of this project using C++ and this will do more than 10 RFPs, specs and project plans.” No, I’m afraid it won’t. You need the specs, you need project management with goals and milestones – and for the whole project, not just your part.

Doing “something” is not the same as doing something useful.

Kyoto will do NO good. So, why even go there?

Back in the 1970’s (roughly), when pollution first started being a problem in California, they imported pollution experts from the East. No problem they said. This is from coal burning power plants. After they fixed the power plants, and the problem wasn’t solved, then they realized it was the automobile.

They were sure, too. They were the experts too.
But, they were just dead wrong.

Since even the experts say Kyoto will not do any good, why beat this dead horse?

That’s what extremists do. They are in the debate for the ideology, not to actually solve a problem.

“Lomborg minimizes the potential threat of rising sea levels far too much. Some simplistic guesses as to the potential rise simply say “We have this much ice. If it melts it adds this much water. This is how high the seas will go.”. This of course completely ignores the simple fact of chemistry that a liquid or gas that is heated expands. A very, very tiny increase of the volume of our seas from this cause combined with melting Arctic and Antarctic ice can be catastrophic to quite a few coastlines that can produce a large economic cost.”

True that it’s the thermal expansion of the oceans that we’re worried about, not specifically the ice. Although as the Arctic ice floats that won’t change sea level in and of itself. The ice in Antarctica (outside the peninsula) is actually getting thicker as a result of increased preciptiation.

To another point, why CAFE? Why not simply higher gas taxes (I’ve long been a supporter of another $1 on a gallon in the US) as Greg Mankiw suggested in the WSJ yesterday?

Where’s the money coming for the research? Well, for fuel cells ( at least one type of them, SOFCs) , a very small amount of it came from me. Enlightened self interest as if that particular type takes off then I’ll sell a lot more product. On the grander scale much research is being done by SECA. And, yes, while that was set up in the Clinton era GW Bush has expanded the budget significantly.

Quite a lot more of it is coming from DoD (a number of different types of fuel cells) and yes, there are still intruiging technologies that are underfunded, like an Australian program into the TiO2 catalysis (?, breaking it into H and O) of water powered by sunlight. The aim is to make roof tiles to generate the hydrogen to run cars and distributed generation plants.

As someone who works on the fringes of the fuel cell world, whatever my affiliation with TCS, I’m very much of the opinion that technology will indeed save us. (Well, everyone thinks that, the argument is over which technology.) The developments in fuel cells, solar, wind (which has any number of problems, I know) wave and so on are coming a great deal faster than most seem to realise.

As Lomborg was lambasted for saying (and I’ve got another 5 years evidence since he published) I expect non fossil generation to be cheaper in coming decades than fossil.

abb1,
I only speak English, Spanish, and a bit of Latin, and I have no idea what language you were using…C++? RFC’s? What is that? ;)

The part you cite was just part of my overall response that Kyoto is a big waste of energy (pun intended). Even if it was implemented, it would do almost nothing to stop global warming and would start using significant resources. Those resources would be much better spent developing alternative energies which could stop most CO2 output in the long run.

Javier good response to the Lomborg haters. One of these days they are going to need to learn how to read.

I’m intrigued. Such a fascinating certainty on display – so clearly demarked camps of the devout and sceptic…

Could someone tell me please – what is the “correct” temperature of the planet? While you are about it can you tell me, where is this place, “globally averaged”? The reason I ask is that a globally averaged temperature is surely only an important metric should you happen to live, well, at “globally averaged” – otherwise local temperature and perhaps moist enthalpy is of more pressing concern.

While we are about it, how certain are we that measured trends are genuine? To be sure Phil Jones asserts that urban heat island is being accounted for during the collation of global temperature datasets but I admit a sneaking scepticism when a researcher will not divulge which meteorological station records he is using, nor by what methodology urban heat island effect is being dealt.

Granted, Christy et al at UAH have found a decadal lower-tropospheric trend of about one-eighth of one degree Centigrade per decade since the late 1970s but I wonder why I should panic about one and one-quarter degrees per century when the UK Met. Office Central England Temperature record (http://www.met-office.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/CR_data/Daily/HadCET_act.txt) shows the world and its denizens handled almost a degree per decade in the past (7.25 °C to 10.47 °C from 1695 to 1733).

At present we believe global mean temperature has risen roughly 0.7 °C while we have been paying attention to temperatures, which, coincidentally, is the same as our estimated measurement error attempting to derive said global mean temperature (see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html for details on that). So, allowing for measurement error, the world is somewhere between 0 and 1.5 °C warmer than when history and anecdotal evidence suggests it was cold/bitter/harsh (take your pick).

I rest assured that there is a world of people out there simply busting to inform me where I have strayed from an accurate summation of human understanding of planetary norms, temperature and trend but for the life of me I can’t see the justification for the title “The end of the global warming debate”. Seems to me that this is merely the beginning.

In 30 odd years in Radiation Therapy Research, I saw a lot of discussion about the subtleties of measuring radiation and biological response. There were a lot of ways a naive person could get badly out of line result. I learned to be a skeptic.

The ENTIRE field of temperature measurement, computer modeling, economic modeling, discerning history from various indicators, (the whole ball of stuff wound up into this grand and glorious thing called “global warming”,) has just too damn many areas where we really don’t know anything to a sufficient degree to make accurate measurements or predictions.

I got out of medicine because it got to political and who you knew mattered more than if your idea was right. The politics of global warming makes medical politics look like tiddly winks.

It’s amazing to me how the answer to every problem, at least as far as free-market liberalism is concerned, is to do nothing. I assume we’ve all heard the joke about how many Chicago school economists it takes to change a lightbulb? (For those who haven’t the answer is none: if the lightbulb needed changing, the market would take care of it.) The only problem with it is that I think its advocates don’t really believe in it. Think of what a wonderful policy it would be. AIDS speads to millions of people. Response: Do nothing, the market will find a cure and offer it at reasonable prices. A hurricane devastates a city and leaves hundreds of thousands homeless. Response: Do nothing, the free-market will provide accomodation and inexpensive reconstruction loans. Or how about this one: Terrorists destroy a building in New York. Response: Do nothing, the free-market will defend us from terrorism.

The faith that new technology will simply solve all our problems just in time to save us is exactly the same as having faith that Jesus will come back before climate change really causes problems.

Still, if fossil fuels weren’t so irreplaceable to the transportation industry, I might be tempted to give the anti-Kyoto people a sympathetic hearing. I’m generally pro-nuclear and nuclear power is certainly not a new technology requiring any leap of faith. But, nuclear power – or for that matter any other presently available technology – is not going to lead to a zero-emissions car or truck that is both cheaper to operate and more desirale to consumers than burning dinosaurs. Enormous investments are already going into energy storage research, not so much for cars but for portable computers, and the physical barriers to storing elecrticity as easily as storing gas are far too high to expect the solution to be right round the corner.

The most optimistic solution is probably a radical reconstruction of transportation infrastructure to favour electrified trains that can be powered by low or zero emissions centralised energy sources. There is little or no chance that is going to happen without real coersion.

Barry, your position appears to be that other people think there must be some sort of “norm.” You imply that, since climate change affects localities differently, talk about temperature is misguided. Well on your hot streak, you ask “how certain are we that measured trends are genuine?” You assert that researchers are hiding methodologies and evidence. You imply that a 1.5 degree change can’t be very much.

Your punishment for repeating all these supposed and presumed counterarguments, is to read the scientists themselves:

Start by reading the entire 1995 IPCC report, at
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/

Then, go to http://www.realclimate.org/ and read the entire page, with comments, from the bottom up. This will bring you thoroughly up-to-the-minute on where we are.

Then go to the side of the Real Climate page, and go to some of the links, particularly AIP Global Warming (American Institute of Physics’ history of the science,) Roger Pielke, Sr.’s cranky blog Climate Science, and Stephen Schneider, a climatologist who’s gone far into policy discussions.

This will give you a very good overview of things, with the possible exception of learning the effects on wildlife ecosystems.

The global warming debate is over. The science is just beginning.

Excuse me, that first link is the 2001 IPCC report — even better. And the RealClimate site discusses both the science and the methodologies in depth. No more excuses for not knowing what’s going on!

I want to reask Barry’s question above: “What is the correct temperature of the planet?” If we are supposed to be so concerned with the world’s current average temperature, and projected increases, our “plan” to save the world and turn back this increase must surely have a targeted goal. Once we bring global warming to a stop, we will have to then pursue lowering the temperature back to this goal to restore lost shorelines along Pacific Islands and stop all these hurricanes.

So what is the goal? What is ideal? When will we get to Temperature Utopia? My guess is that most enviros would pick a temperature somewhere around what it was in the late 60’s, back when they were kids and you could skate on the ponds in Philly, have more snow at Christmas, etc.

If you’re so committed to stopping global warming, you better be able to tell me where it should be, and why, if you want me to take you seriously.

A question: Do any of the various cost-benefit analyses being bandied about here include the non-climate-related benefits of shifting from fossil fuels to clean/renewable sources of energy? And if they don’t, why not? My technical knowledge is practically nil on this, but it seems to me that slowing (or stopping or reversing) climate change is only one of many benefits that would be realized from such a shift. Fossil fuels generate forms of pollution that aren’t implicated in global warming but are no less harmful as a result…no?

Thanks.

I think that GDP growth rate would be a good discount rate.

There is another aspect to corrupt public debate that needs mentioning in a recent publication from Civitas. In this case the corruption is from using self-defined moral correctness to trump reason and empirical evidence.

The Retreat of Reason
Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate in Modern Britain
http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cs47.pdf
Anthony Browne

Is Professor Quiggin now going to retire from public comment because this “corruption” vetos his own credibility, using his own rules of engagement in debate to silence himself?

Thanks for a jolly laugh folks. It has been very entertaining to read these posts. I am awed at the religious fervor with which the global warming community defends itself. Yes, I must admit I am a “contrarian.”
I do not believe that the scientific debate is over, despite such pronouncements on high from within the global warming cloisters. Despite the numerous computer models that purport to tell us what our climate will be like 50 or 100 years hence, there has been no credible evidence pointing that proves man’s contribution to our atmosphere is causing the warming.

As to the computer models, despite the fact that they may take into account a myriad (100s, 1000s?) of cimate influencers, the are still merely models an inherently inaccurate. The climate, like the weather, is not linear. It is a chaotic system; one slight variation and the results are different.

Earth’s climate has varied radically for eons without man’s assistance. Gosh, I wonder why there is oil in ANWR? Could it be that the northern climes were once temperate and populated with future fossil fuel. What kind of arrogance is it that says today’s climate is what should exist on earth? There is much talk about receeding glaciers. Why not try to roll back the climate to the that balmy epoch when glaciers covered expanses of Wisconsin and Michigan?

I also found the talk of independent verification or repitition of results humorous. I guess that holds only as long as it is the contrarians. Mr. Mann put up quite a fight to keep his data from those who wanted to attempt to repeat his famed hockey stick graph. Low and behold, once the researchers managed to get the results, they found that Mr. Mann was, gosh dare I say it? He was “selective” in the use of his data. I guess he must be some kind of right winger, huh? Anyway, those “contrarians” did get published and the hockey stick has been thoroughly discredited.

Anyway, thanks for the entertainment. Excuse me if I don’t genuflect as I leave this temple of true believers.

Re 108: Let’s try it again. Go to the following page at the IPCC 2001 TAR:

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/005.htm

and look at the second graph.

This is the famous hockey stick of temperatures the last thousand years, and much bloviation inhaled to the contrary, it has been CONFIRMED and STRENGTHENED: Everybody would love to put a dent in it — that would be instant scientific celebrity, at this time.

The answer to your question WHAT LEVEL of atmospheric carbon dioxide to go back to, would be on this chart: 1850, in about another hundred and fifty years.

However, I do not know why you need a precise temperature target to take the argument seriously, unless you are a policymaker in search of fictions. But there are a few good reasons why this one would be less arbitrary than most.

Be all that as it may, we should start now by government policy to seed alternative energy strategies at many different levels, to generate as many market choices as possible. Higher oil prices may help this; though not much, so far.

zdenek, you lose on this one. The conservative think tanks you defend are nothing but political activists.

The American Meteorological Society is not an activist group. The IPCC is not an activist organization. The American Geophysical Union is not an activist group.

There are more and it takes only a matter of a few minutes and a decent search engine to find them. I would say that in fact there is a scientific consensus and that it has relatively few legitimate skeptics. Why do you attempt to deny that this consensus has taken shape?

When “global warming” first came on the public scene, I caused great distress for many of my students because I said I didn’t give a damn if the climate warmed, cooled, went sideways, up or down or anything else. I told them that by about 2010 AGW would, like the ice age scare of the 70s, be considered a bad scientific joke. Nothing in the intervening years has convinced me to change my mind about 2010. The geologic evidence for dramatic climate change throughout all of Earth history is obvious and not subject to argument or denial. The Earth is a tough old boot and will manage to handle whatever climate change throws at it. And so will it’s ecosystems. I know that many of the ecochondriacs have great faith in climate models and must wake up each morning shitting down both legs with fear that it will be a couple of degrees warmer that day. Their great faith reminds me of the best definition of “faith” I’ve ever heard, “Faith is when you believe something that no one in their right mind would believe”. That describes the global warmers to a tee. Relax, the world (and its inhabitants) will do just fine no matter what the climate does. Our ancestors did and so will we and our children and grandchildren. Stop living in fear of the natural world. Go take a nice drive in the countryside in your SUV.

If water vapor is more important than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas perhaps creating more surface area for increased evaporation and thus more water vapor when man creates artificial lakes is responsible for global warming. Perhaps we should blow up all dams and drain all resevoirs to reduce the greenhouse effect?

Second, now that the scientific phase of the debate is over, attention will move to the question of the costs and benefits of mitigation options.

JQ was cleverly precise in the first part of this statement, and unfortunately less precise in the second part. Obviously the debate over the issue of warming is not over, but perhaps the scientific part of that phase is over. It’s an interesting characteristic of think tanks (which I take JQ’s post to be fundamentally about) that they are parasitic on academia proper: they explicitly place policy ahead of evidence, but they still have to sound sufficiently like real academics to get the funding and media attention, and to shape government policy. I don’t think this parasitism is at all permanent though: watching the co-option of academia’s favorite argument techniques in the posts above shows that undermining the difference between science and bullshit (in Frankfurt’s sense) need not remain in the peripheries of academia. The climate change debate, like ID, is, among many other things, yet another war between academia and pseudo-academia (such as think tanks), and I wonder if we’re losing the war as we win the battles. That greater loss may be due, in part, to something hinted at in JQ’s imprecision in part 2 of his statement above: “attention” in JQ’s mind may indeed shift to policy issues, but if he believes that attention outside of academia will make this shift any time soon, I fear he is not just mistaken, but partaking in academia’s greatest weakness–a tendency to focus on truly unresolved issues, rather than politically unresolved issues. If he turns his back on a debate that is only going to grow in the public sphere, I hope at least he knows that he’s doing it.

߬◊, regarding your post 118: That hockey stick graph you link to says right on it: “Data from thermometers (red) and from tree rings, corals, ice cores and historical records (blue).”

Excuse me while I puke over the poor quality of the facade of science being used to justify international socialist regulation of the world. If you’re going to rule the world under the banner of science, could you at least choose some real science, instead of pushing this pseudo stuff onto the podium for forced applause? No, I guess that would be out of character for a real socialist not to make the platform offensive to truthfulness as a test of party loyalty.

(In case you have trouble seeing the problem revealed in the disclaimer for the graph on your own, here are some starter points you should be able to think about for yourself to understand why this is poor quality, unreliable science, which are points in addition to the devastating criticisms of the hockey stick data and statistical methods that have been published:)

Tree rings don’t make a good proxy for temperature, when the species selected are more sensitive to rainfall, humidity, CO2, and maybe a hundred other things than temperature. Corals are an interesting choice of data. That might tell you something about whether there were El Nino oscillations or other changes in circulation in tropical oceans in the past and how strong they were. Ice cores have a selection bias: They can’t possibly exist from places and times that were much warmer in the past. The ice would have melted away. Taking gas content measurement of ice cores as revealing absolute differences in the past requires ignoring that life and chemistry can still happen on and in glaciers.

If a climate historian puts enough proxies that are partial guesses together and averages them, the resulting graph might have some bumps that correlate with what actually happened, but the absolute temperature signal is totally lost in the choice of how to balance various inaccurate estimates.

“From Lomborg’s book: “Temperatures will increase much less than the maximum estimates from IPCC—it is likely that the temperature will be at or below the B1 estimate [the lowest emissions scenario] (less than 2° C in 2100) and the temperature will certainly not increase even further into the twenty-second century.”. What actual scientific proof does he provide for this claim?”

I’m not going to go and look it up but from memory his contention (not scientific proof) is that renewables will be cheaper than fossil in the 2030-2040 timescale. Thus new generation plant built from that point on will be renewable not fossil. On this, as above, I tend to think he’s a pessimist (and no, I don’t have any scientific proof either, just working knowledge from being on the fringes of one renewables industry).

But it might be worth pointing out that none of the IPCC scenarios include this possibility. So, if it does happen warming will be less than the scenarios presented. As he says.

The question then becomes will that change in relative prices happen or not?

I did not mention the “hockey stick” of Mann et al, curious how it was reflexively defended. I think proxie studies are an interesting way to evaluate temperatures over the last millenium or so. The devil is in the details of how the various data streams were cooked into the final graph. The authors still seem to be keeping some of these details as a trade secret, which is fine, but it will naturally lead to some questions about motive. To my knowledge no one else has yet to reproduce a temperature chart from proxies that so expunge the Midevil Warm Period and other climate anomolies suggested by archaelogical studies. The biggest problem with the study remains that the most interesting conclusion (ie the part of the stick that contacts the puck) is based on temperatures derived not from proxies but from thermometers. I would suppose that proxies would be obtainable through the year 2000 not 1970 and this would have the merit of consistensy atleast. One should always take a grain of salt when consuming both apples and organes in the same sitting.

See I manged to get through that without making any dark references to how Big Academia has billions of dollars (and euros) in grant money and thousands of Phd’s who might lose thier jobs unless climate sceptics are discredited.

Ponte,

That’s just the abstract. He cites plenty of evidence in the actual article (pdf). And that “asshat” is a climate change policy scholar, which is more than Lomborg can say for himself.

Michael Grubb also doesn’t provide much in the way of rigorous evidence for his belief that government regulations were the main cause of lower pollution rates and the proposition that the environmentalist movement was responsible for the passing of those laws in the first place. So my mind on the issue will remain undecided until I see better evidence one way or the other.

“Why do you think you know more about the science of climate change than people…”

I don’t. I think (quite possibly wrongly but there we go) that I know more about how to change people’s behaviour, and the incentives required to do that, than the people who study climate science do.

I’m no more than an interested amateur as far as economics goes (and it is a science which tries to explain people’s behaviour) but that might still put me a step or two ahead of those who study, say ocean temperatures, iris effects and the like, on that specific subject.

Clearly I know less economics than John Q and more than Zac Goldsmith or Georges Monbiot. That’s why I tend to listen to John Q on the subject and deride the other two.

Curiouser and curiouser… for an allegedly ended debate there seem rather a lot of postings here, do there not?

I grant that there does appear a lot more assertion than debate (if not verbal bludgeoning) but the topic certainly appears open to both discussion and dissent.

In a way I admire those who have leapt to such spirited defence of their cherished positions but I would recommend a tad more reserve and background fact checking prior to making sweeping assertions. By way of example Lee writes “You assert that researchers are hiding methodologies and evidence” – actually Lee, that was not quite as I put it but you should try asking Dr. Jones for any details on his dataset and/or methodology – you’ll find he is rather blunt in letting you know he has a quarter century invested in his data and is not about to let anyone try to find any problems with it (this does not really inspire great confidence in the standard of peer review).

While we are considering global temperature amalgams it just might interest participants in this, ah… “closed discussion” that Hansen et al interpolate and extrapolate GISTEMP near-surface temperatures 1,200 miles from empirical recording points. That is, to say the least, highly ambitious and requires a great deal of faith to believe such guesstimates more reliable than satellite-mounted Microwave Sounding Unit-derived measures covering more than 90% of the globe.

Then we have the spirited defence of the “hockey stick” graph (where did we first see that – was it Mann, Bradley and Hughes, 1998?) – the interesting point here being that the graph not merely clashes with literature and recorded history but that it is virtually impossible to find individual supporting reconstructions in the paleoclimate data archives ( http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html ). Surely it must at least pique the curiosity of participants that so many different proxies around the world appear to reflect the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age and yet such events are absent in MBH98? If we were really playing the “consensus science” game then we surely would not support MBH98 since it is the anomaly, the outlier (this is where consensus having nothing to do with real science actually saves the “hockey stick”) but it has a significant following nonetheless. Everyone can look up for themselves that Mike Mann was lead author of the IPCC TAR (Third Assessment Report) chapter that heavily featured a radical revision of climate history, the lead author of which was Mike Mann and everyone can draw their own conclusions. The apparently orchestrated wholesale adoption and defence of a reversed paradigm does tend to raise the eyebrows though since science is traditionally a scrappy and piecemeal affair with usually small, incremental change as each new or altered hypothesis is proffered and tested, challenged and either accepted or rejected. The arrival of the “hockey stick” is, to say the least, glaring.

What is obvious here is that the debate is far from ended. While heavily asserted and defended the claim that catastrophic anomalous warming is underway is actually but poorly supported by empirical evidence. When examined the actual claim is of ~0.7 ºC increment in global mean temperature over about a century. There are ample precedents for such an increase when anthropogenic effect was negligible. A change of 0.7 ºC is equivalent to measurement error in attempting to derive a global mean temperature. What this really means is, well, debatable.

Re 128: (Hockey stick, continued: everybody thoroughly bored, may pass by:) None of the scientists working on this have considered the objections you raise to the data? Thank goodness you have come down from the heavens to enlighten us! …You must be joking, or in a self-delusion, or (again) perhaps another one working for the petro industry. The quality of paleo-climatic data and its relationship to climate variables has been discussed all along, of course. There are over a hundred different proxy records, 14 or 15 of them valid before 1450; each with its own discussion. See Geophysical Research Letters, 26: 6, 759-762 (1999) etc. etc. etc. etc. The research is ongoing, and even a rank and humble amateur such as I can tell, you are out of your league.

The graph does not claim to have found the “absolute temperature signal.” At the most it shows a remarkable coherence of trend. The graph obviously widens out as time recedes into the past, showing the range of results they have drawn a line through the middle of, to indicate the possible error.

In addition, even WITHOUT the hockey stick, (were it conclusively disproven tomorrow, by someone not merely throwing pipe wrenches) anthropogenic global warming would STILL be true. The additional and continuing evidences, from all areas and several different sciences, amount to an overwhelming case. The hockey stick by itself is neither necessary nor sufficient to the argument.

In fact, I brought it up in response to a completely different question, which appeared to be partly serious, and regarded the idea of what the temperature record actually might look like, and where the world was going until recently.

You also aren’t paying attention if you think I’m a socialist. But I realize you started out-of-ammo.

Re 131: “The bitter divide we are seeing in these posts tells us much more about the different innate personalities, politics, and beliefs of the posters than about any ‘science’ or ‘knowledge’ as such.” To some extent, but not entirely. The contrarians’ knowledge of climatology appears to be stuck in the 1980’s.

Hi 140, I don’t agree with your last point. It seems to me that much current applied climatology is infected with a simplistic presentism that was not characteristic of earlier climatology and climatologists, like Lamb, for example. With the gains – the pardigm shifts – there have, as ever, been significant losses. ‘Twas ever thus.

And again, your comments do tend to the ad hominem. Even if someone came from the petro-chemical industry, it is vital to remember that the truth value of a statement does not depend on the speaker – even, for that matter, if they are from the Concerned Scientists.

I am a mildly left wing, concerned scientist with no links whatsoever to the petrochemical industry, but I am a mitigated sceptic where ‘global warming’ is concerned. Philip.

#118:
All hail 1850! What on earth makes you think that 1850 was such a Garden of Eden weatherwise? Do you have one shred of evidence that says that the climate and weather patterns that year were better than last year? Are you able to provide that evidence, if any, worldwide? Or will you selectively focus on anecdotal “evidence” as usual.

#137:
Your questions, which even you cannot answer, imply that we must use the Precautionary Principle here. We must spend whatever it takes to stop the temperature shift because we somehow cannot afford not to. Look, this planet has a finite amount of economic resourses at any one time. Those resourses must be applied to the best benefit of mankind. There are a hell of a lot of proven needs in this world that would get a far better bang for the buck than insanely throwing money at AGW!

#120, #125, and others:
Like most enviros, you immediately choose to discredit any skeptical viewpoint as coming from big business, or oil, or from some right-wing think tank. More often than not, the defense against the skeptics does not lie in factual basis, but in an immediate attempt at character assassination of the source. Bjorn Lomborg is a perfect example. Rather than debate his SE position, most quickly chose to scoff at his credentials since he was not a climate scientist. That is a narrow-minded and lazy way to defend your position, and I see that over and over and over.

Finally, I will share with you that I am a mining engineer working for a coal mine that produces over 6MM tons of coal a year. We supply energy to power plants throughout the US. Now, having revealed this, I am sure to those of you believing in man-made global warming that my opinions are worthless and any thing I say is 100% biased. I am to be discredited henceforth. It does not matter to you that my position is secure, I will work the next 14 years to my retirement, I am in no danger of any policy changes or actions on global warming affecting me or my livlihood in that timeframe, and therefore I have no reason to be biased in my beliefs. My skepticism comes from daily readings of both sides of the issues and careful evaluation of what I read, and I see nothing but junk science supporting AGW claims.

The main reason the whole “consensus” that global warming is real seems so stupid and narrow minded to me is that I was a geology student at the time that plate tectonics became a serious topic of argument among geologists. In 1957, in my first historical geology class taught by one of my favorite professors (a very, very well respected paleontologist) the whole notion of continents shifting (they didn’t even use the term “plate tectonics” yet) and that the earth’s continents and ocean basins could change was ridiculed as a stupid joke. Literally a joke, when mentioned in scientific circles it usually got a pretty good laugh from the audience. The “consensus” among earth scientists was that it was a dumb and impossible idea. Partly the reason for the disbelief was that one of the strongest advocates was Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist/climatologist and since he was not an official geologist, what the hell could he possibly know. By about 1960, mostly thru evidence from sea floor drilling the PT idea was not laughed at so much. By the mid 60s the idea was generally accepted with enthusiasm and most geologists wondered how they could have ever believed the fanciful and unbelievably complicated ideas for mountain building, volcanoes, etc that were now so simply explained by plate tectonics. When describing to my students what it was like to live and work thru such a dramatic change in geologic thinking I was put in my place when a student basically said to me, “How could all the earth scientists in the world have been so totally stupid NOT to believe in plate tectonics?” How indeed, but by God did we ever have a consensus that plate tectonics was fantasy. Consensus can be nothing but crap – it sure isn’t science or certainty. The global warming bandwagon seems a return to 1957-herd mentality thinking for me.

John Quiggin,
I’ve read the IPCC’s century report and I’m pretty sure that the scenarios they show for CO2 drop off have nothing to do with a massive move to renewables. They are models of CO2 reduction, but they certainly aren’t modeling what Lomborg thought highly probable (that fossil fules will be massively replaced by cheaper renewables, which someone already mentioned that wind is now cheaper than natural gas).

After I’m through writing a few mambots tonight, I’ll look it up and make sure.

“WHY THE SPECTACULAR FEAR OF ANY NATURAL CHANGE?”

Amongst other things, it’s not a natural change.

Dear Urine S. of A.

How stupid of me to have forgotten that everytime it gets a little warmer or cooler, wetter or drier, windier or calmer it is always man’s fault. By the way, when did “man” cease to be part of the “natural” world? Recently there was an archeological find that put man’s presence in the U.K. about 200K years earlier than expected and in a much warmer climate. I await the fossil discovery of Fred Flintstones SUV. Boy do I feel stupid for thinking that nature changes on its own once in a while. Like for the last 4.5 Billion years or so.

jet,

I really don’t think the evidence for man’s influence in climate change is outside the range of normal climate fluctuation. I don’t think it is clear at all that man has increased climate change. I still firmly believe that like the 70s ice age cometh, nuclear winter, the population bomb, famine in the 80s etc. etc. Global warming will die a nice quiet death when nothing horrible happens. As for positive and negative effects, of course, that’s what happens when weather and climate change as they have throughout the history of the earth. In other words, climate change = big f……..ing deal!

“I really don’t think the evidence for man’s influence in climate change is outside the range of normal climate fluctuation.”

What you think doesn’t matter; you’re a layperson. What researchers in the field think, however, does. Like the ones at Lawrence Livermore and the Scripps Institute:

http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/article_detail.cfm?article_num=666

“How stupid of me to have forgotten that everytime it gets a little warmer or cooler, wetter or drier, windier or calmer it is always man’s fault. ”

Did I say that? Oh, I didn’t. So why did you say that? So we could all admire your kung-fu takedown of straw men?

Rate of change matters.

10 mph wind = pleasing breeze.

100 mph wind = bye-bye house.

You may resume your aikido moves on haystacks now. Knock yourself out.

Retired Geologist,

There was never a scientific concensus predicting global cooling, just a lot of hype in the popular press during the 1970s.

O ya it wasn’t the warmest temp recorded in Australia, only in one town, Sidney, I think.

I’ve noticed that most salesmen are great at building resumes.

Just keep clinging to the belief that climate researchers don’t have a dog in the fight over antrhropogenic climate change. Many have staked their careers and reputations on this issue. Grant money has flowed into this field at an ever increasing rate and anyone who gets in the way of that gravy train is going to get run over. If you can make the argument that oil company execs are going to do everything to preserve their jobs why don’t you assume that academics are doing the same.

Years ago (about 1960) a very good and respected friend of mine who is German and now a very succesful patent attorney, said to me, ” Did you know that there are 240 million jews in Germany?, That’s impossible I responded, what about the holocaust? Look he said, did you ever meet a German who didn’t claim to have hidden 3 jews in the attic. Do the math he said, 80 million Germans equals 240 million jews saved.”

In much the same way, I suspect that in 5, 10 0r 15 years you will have some of the most enthusiastic global warmers saying, ” What me support and believe in global warming! I never believed it, it was all bullshit and I knew it all the time!!!” I was totally against it and never took any grant money!”

lee a. arnold.

Thank God, you’re right – bad science does always get found out. Unfortunately, it often takes many, many years. Anyone who has been in an academic research institution and doesn’t feel like puking at the desperation to say anything and do anything to get grants, tenure, publications and famous in their field just hasn’t been paying attention. Global warming isn’t much different I’m afraid than Korean cloning scientists. Some are sincere and some are flat out frauds.

Let’s just kill everyone who doesn’t have a job prospect.

“Global warming isn’t much different I’m afraid than Korean cloning scientists.” It’s how you mix the folksy and avuncular with the presumption; how you’re not really paying attention. It’s your “tell.”

Philip (post #131)– two comments : you are actually muddled about the issue of concensus. Concensus emerging does not mean that dogmatism has now stepped in . It just means that a theory has been so well confirmed that :

a) it is accepted by most people working in the field
b) it is no longer being subjected to testing

You incorrectly assume that this implies that scientific community’s attitude towards such well confirmed hypothesis is dogmatic i.e. that scientists think that such hypothesis is beyond criticism .
But this is just wrong because it is possible to be a*fallibilist* ( epistemic stance which just says that it is always possible that some well confirmed theory turns out false when *new* evidence says so ) and also accept some theory as being true.
See for instance how natural selection is treated in evolutionary biology : concensus that this is the mechanism which drives evolution. This does not mean that biologists will continue embracing it if new evidence showing that natural it is false turns up.

Second issue: the idea that post modernists like Lyotard and Latour can help with issues here is ridiculous. On their view which is anti-realist there is no real climate and no real crises . These things exist only at the level of discourse. Scientific enterprise has no more intellectual clout have no more authority than whichcraft ppllleeaase ( this whole project is internally incoherent and is actually part of romantic reaction to enlightnment and is deeply anti-science ) .

zdenek, you said “jim s—why do you guys have a problem understanding a simple criticism ? I am not denying that concensus has emerged at all. I am talking about lefties like you ( and John Quiggin in particular ) who know what the truth about climate is, even before the concensus has emerged from the scientists and who see cospiracy of the right wing as an explanation of why people dont agree with you.”

If you are not denying that consensus has emerged on the issue in the scientific community how can you dare to claim that I claimed to know the truth about it before the consensus existed? The truth is that when you used the phrase “lefties like you…” you proved that you have no regard for the scientific truth but only the “political truth” of the right wing and have proven your opponents in this debate to be correct.

Tim,

I address you separately as someone who is really being fairly reasonable in this. My problem with Lomborg’s analysis about alternative energy affordability is that it doesn’t take the problems with penetration and replacement into account. The reduction in cost of building new energy generation facilities doesn’t matter in the year that it crosses the line to where it becomes cheaper than building the old systems. It only becomes effective as it replaces the older systems. Given the lifespan of power generation plants of all kinds it seems likely that even if as of 2040 or thereabouts it becomes cheaper to build and operate a wind farm or similar system it would take decades more for the older polluting plants to be replaced to a significant degree so CO2 production would continue at high levels through at least the end of the century. Economics and politics goes against Lomborg’s arguments, not in favor of them.

#178.

What you say is of course true. The other side of it is that we do indeed have a large fixed base of fossil generating plant. If we replace all (or some) of that with (currently) more expensive non fossil, we have two rather large costs. The first is that we are paying more for our energy for those decades. The second that we are wasting capital, the sunk costs of those plants which we no longer use (or, if you prefer, we are investing capital to build the new plants decades before we actually need to, absent the CO2 costs, captial that we could use to do something else).

Which is where it all becomes an accounting exercise, something that Lomborg and others addressed in the Copenhagen Consensus (and I’m perfectly happy if people don’t agree with the conclusions they came to, but insist that the question itself remains valid).

What is the cost to us, at some point in the future, of not limiting our CO2 emissions now?

What is the cost to us now and in the future of limiting our CO2 emissions now?

Which is larger than the other?

Yes, I know that reasonable people disagree on those numbers but there are those in this debate who insist that even asking that question is, what, somehow immoral?

Your point about the installed base of fossil using generating (and of course transport and so on) simply highlights this exact question/argument.

As above, my gut feeling, and it is little more than that informed by being on the fringes (again as above) of one particular form of non CO2 electricty generation is that the cost switchover point is earlier than most assume.

I’m afraid I can’t tell you the name of the company involved for commercial (their, not my) reasons but one large engineering company expects to be installing 100 Megawatts per annum of CHP (combined heat and power) generation by 2010. Using a solid oxide fuel cell and turbine combination. On purely commercial grounds.

BP wants to strip the carbon from North Sea methane, pump the CO2 into an old oil field, (raising the last of said oil) and then burn (which is a waste, fuel cells would be better) the hydrogen in a gas fired power plant. The only subsidy required is a lowering of the per barrel royalty paid to the UK government on that last amount of oil pumped (oil that won’t come up without the CO2 sequestration).

People at the Lawrence Livermore are making multi layer solar cells with 30-40% efficiency and predict 60% as achievable (using gallium nitride/gallium arsenide).

The cost for a fuel cell of x capacity (sorry, can’t remember what the target actually was), well, the target for it was set by the DoD for 2010. It was achieved in 2005. Other fuel cell researchers (and this is the tiny bit I’m involved in) have been able to get the operating temperature of SOFCs down from 1,000 0C to 700 oC, with huge savings on the cost of the supporting substrates (ie steel can be used rather than pgms).

Yet others have reduced the necessary thickness of the electrolyte layer by an order of magnitude.

I realise that all of this is slightly minor stuff but it is what drives my belief that the cost switchover point is a lot earlier than many currently assume. And if it is, then our calculation of the costs of switching now or later rather change. It isn’t what are the costs of switching now and in 35 years, but now and 10 years perhaps.

Which leads me to the wait, get the engineering right and then switch position.

Catastrophic failure? Yes. But what’s the probability? The sun will, for example, boil the earth at some point, generally thought to be some billions of years away. Should we start planning now? Change our behaviour now?

BTW, it’s not so much throwing money as throwing resources, a slight difference. Bundles of cash thrown on a fire do not have the effect of putting it out. Building fire extinguishers, which does cost cash, might help though.

How much should we be spending on asteroid defense? We know from the past that they come along at infrequent intervals and make a mess of the place. What’s the cost benefit analysis?

As it was John Q that started this thread perhaps he, as the real economist around here, would like to answer? That is one of the points of the subject, after all, how to allocate scarce resources.

#179
I suppose you can dismiss my comments by labelling me a “layman” and thus I can’t have any valid arguments. I may not be a climatologist but I was a tenured geology professor for 37 years and taught many courses that, among other topics, included paleoclimates. It is from that perspective that I believe the Earth’s climate changed much more drastically than even the most dire global warming change predictions. For example, every coal bed in the Appalachians represents a far warmer, wetter climate more favorable to fantastic plant growth as well as dramatic rise and fall of sea level to flood and then uncover the land surface. These carboniferous climate changes are easy to read in the rock record.

So much of the current climate change debate seems an exact analog of the famous Drake equation that is supposed to estimate the likelihood of intelligent life in the universe. The problems is that not a single term in the impressive looking Drake can be known at all. A classic example of garbage in, garbage out, in other words, wild ass guess. Way too much of the data poured in the current climate change arguments seems no better than Drake equation-like guesses. An “educated” guess is still a guess.

As far as what seems to me a desperate need for everyone to accept the notion of consensus over reasoned and continuing debate I think you have to do no more than ask Copernicus or Galileo how important consensus is to scientific truth.

I don’t deny climate change for a minute. I expect it and would be stunned if it didn’t happen. Given the broad spectrum of natural disasters that are happening in this climate we have today I just don’t see how you can make the most WAG that if climate changes things will be better or worse than what we have now.

Just this morning my son, also a PhD geologist and I were talking and I asked him, “Can you think of any prediction of a horrible natural disaster that actually lived up to its hype and prior billing?” Let’s see, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring? Nope, more birds than ever. Specific predicition of next “Big One” California earthquake? Nope, didn’t happen. Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb? Nope, a dud. Nuclear winter and famine because of the “nuclear winter” effect from Saddam burning the oil wells? Nope, food production about normal All the forests cut down? Nope, more forests than ever. Y2K? What a stupid joke.

I really have trouble understanding the desperate need on the part of so many who advocate stopping any climate change dead in its tracks that only doom and gloom is possible. Your historical track record is dismal. No different than the old cartoon figure in robe and sandals carrying “The end of the world is near” sign.

So far on these postings no one has responded to my primary question. WHY ARE YOU LIVING YOUR LIVES IN SUCH PITIFUL AND DESPERATE FEAR? THIS IS A WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL PLANET. EMBRACE IT, LOVE IT AND TAKE DELIGHT, NOT FEAR IN HOW IT CHANGES OVER TIME.

retired geologist, I dismiss your statements not simply because you don’t know any of the science involved but also because you make such incorrect statements and fallacious arguments. Rachel Carson made a worst case argument to highlight how bad it could get if nothing was done. Well, something was done and therefore the worst case scenario did not occur. Tell me when a reputable geologist has made a specific prediction of the “big one” occurring in California that was supported by other geologists before you claim that as a prediction of the scientific community that didn’t come true. Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb theory was before the full effects of the pill were appreciated. Please notice that in the poorer sections of the world where the pill either is not affordable or is not used because of religious or cultural reasons there is still an unsustainable population growth rate. While I don’t buy into it producing an overall population disaster it does pose some worrisome issues. Nuclear winter from oil wells burning? More sensationalist headlines than scientific consensus. Y2K, similar to your arguments about Carson, actually would have been a problem if a lot of effort hadn’t gone into patching systems. Not the horrendous disaster that some sensationalists tried to paint, but definitely it would have caused some nasty problems for lots of people and businesses.

In addition you made a generalization about how the planet and our ancestors have dealt with previous climate changes. But of course that’s not right. Recent studies in what our genome and its distribution in populations can tell us seem to indicate that at one point a much larger population of humans was drastically reduced to only a small fraction of its previous size by a natural disaster.

Thank God you’re a retired geologist and I certainly hope you weren’t an actual research scientist because if this sloppy thinking is an example of your reasoning ability you couldn’t have been a very good one.

Come on, somebody give me bingo, I’m sooo close. :D

Tim,

You continuously cite the Copenhagen Consensus. But their home page lists every project that has anything to do with the climate as a bad idea. They don’t even address any other potential environmental problems. They are in fact nothing but economists. I phrase it that way because every aspect of climate change that they address has only to do with the economy. Is there no value in not destroying multiple species in the Arctic?

As far as the low probability events, maybe some of them aren’t as low a probability as some people would like to think. Read this article on recent studies of the Atlantic conveyor. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=225#more-225
It is a very reasonable article that doesn’t attempt to make outrageous claims about the findings but would seem to imply some things about the conveyor. While it an extremely stable phenomenon it isn’t immutable and seems to already be undergoing some changes. Further studies are necessary to confirm this of course.

And that leads into one of my big gripes about the contrarians. They seem to act as though we already know everything and that they don’t need to take any new information into account. Contrarian web sites still cite the satellite/ground station conflict that has in fact been reconciled in further studies, even to the satisfaction of its discoverers (Who still strongly believe that the low range models are the correct ones, but do accept anthropogenic warming.).

retired geologist, once again you show how full of it you are. Only an idiot (and there are some out there) would make the claim that we are inevitably doomed. What I say is that Pollyanna school of “everything’s all right and we don’t need to do a thing” you represent is as dumb as anyone who’d say that we can’t do anything.

tim worstall,

How nice to read an honest, sensible post that isn’t based on fear and faith.

Mr. Worstall, (1) please explain what the “worth” of an Arctic species is. It is okay to use contingent valuation and all the other stuff. (2) Please explain which is larger and why — the “growth foregone by reducing CO2 now,” or the growth increased by new technologies and work. Even as a syllogism from welfare ecconomics. (3) Also, please explain how the economic solutions to the Tragedy of the Commons will save existing wildlife ecosystems.

Retired Geologist, regarding your rhetorical tack of cubbyholing your opponents as not “balanced and sensible.” Did you use that teaching science, too?

Re 197: No not obtuse. Wildlife ecology on earth is not exactly changing. It is virtually ending, perhaps for ten thousand generations. This is beyond the understanding evinced, for example, by Lomborg’s book. To make the argument, I will lay out the scientific steps in order, as I now understand them.

Please prove me wrong. I would very, very, very much like to be wrong about this.

[i.] REGULAR CIRCUMSTANCE OF WILDLIFE ECOSYSTEMS:

(1) Ecosystems have at least a two-step-fractal CLUMPED distribution, local and regional, and at the regional level they are divided by ecotones or geographic features.

(2) “Wild genetic health” is some statistical description of regional-level species populations, usually pegmarked at over 500 individuals.

(3) (Unimportant supposition.) There is an “ecological genetics” which would describe how the condition of interacting with all the other relevant species in the rest of the ecosystem affect the survival and thriving of wild genetic health in any single population.

(4) Normally, species populations go extinct all the time. Not the entire species, but locally or regionally an entire population. Why? Bad winter, no food, new disease, new predator, etc.

(5) The rest of the ecosystem frequently re-equilibrates to new sizes of the other populations, depending on the importance of the missing species to the food web, and other things.

(6) The missing species is returned by immigration. All ecosystems are throwing-off stragglers and adventurers always, and if a male and a female make it over the river or through the woods, they will restart the missing species.

(7) The rest of the ecosystem will then re-equilibrate to what it was before, –although not after too much time, or if other different things have happened.

(8) Most plant and animal species thrive well only within small ranges of moisture and temperature. As climate changes, the species move to other areas. It may take several seasons to initiate a noticeable response.

(9) In previous rapid climate changes, we may assume that wildlife ecosystems were spread out, continuous and contiguous, –enough for many fortuitous circumstances of species preservation through the slow-motion tumult.

(10) When and where there is massive extinction, then there are niches to fill, and the surviving “weeds” (tough plants and animals) spread-out to evolve and re-biodiversify. Among smaller animals, new speciation takes a period of time somewhere around the order of ten thousand generations.

[ii.] WILDLIFE ECOSYSTEMS AFTER FRAGMENTATION BY HUMAN HABITAT:

(11) Fragmentation of wildlife habitat effectively seals-off ecosystems for many different species. They do not venture out into human habitat due to conditions or chemistry, or they are killed when they do so. This goes for both plants and animals. Some others are not affected at all.

(12) The Reduction in Size of the Ecosystem has an Immediate Consequence. One of the few truly reliable ordinal numerical relations in ecology is the species-area law, which finds that smaller areas have a smaller number of species, and bigger, bigger. There are different reasons for this. Consider the reason, that a smaller number of individuals in each population (because of less resources overall,) makes a local species population random extinction (always happening at 4) statistically MORE PROBABLE. The fact that it is more probable to lose species is called that area’s “extinction debt,” which gets paid in number of species.

(13) The Isolation of the Ecosystem’s Borders has an Immediate Consequence. Blockage of migration by human habitat ends or greatly slows down the reconstitution of missing species (which would have happened at 6.)

(14) As the remaining ecosystem re-equilibrates over and over, in response to successive losses of species, larger oscillations of the food web serve to accelerate the local extinctions.

(15) The only way to correct this is to build and preserve wildlife corridors, land and river connections, between and among wildlife areas.

(16) In addition, many existing wildlife areas need to be greatly expanded. Why? Because AS THEY ARE NOW, they do not accommodate the pegmark number of individuals (at 2,) in a full interacting ecosystem (at 3,) for continued genetic health. Saving two animals in a zoo will not provide the ecological sharpness for species definition. Among many reasons for this, you can find: changes in the act of predation; density-dependent reproduction.

[iii.] FRAGMENTED WILDLIFE ECOSYSTEMS DURING RAPID CLIMATE CHANGE

(17) As plants and animals change their geographic ranges in response to different moisture and temperature (in 8,) many will be extinguished at the contact with human habitat (in 11.)

(18) This accelerates the extinction rate ALREADY ACCELERATED by reduction in ecosystem size (at 12) and isolation of ecosystems from each other (at 13.)

(19) The hockey stick, whatever its cardinal inadequacies, shows a temperature change far, far beyond the comfort zone of many plants and animals.

[iv.] CONCLUSION

(20) We have just embarked upon one of the greatest mass extinctions in history, and it is a profound and extra-millenial tragedy.

(21) Assuming the possibility that the dominant economic reasoning is inexact, it is an intellectual scandal, and needless.

The IUCN or World Conservation Union has an extensive database for all extinct and endangered species. It is not the only one, but it’s the most factually impressive. The simpler search page is at:

http://www.iucnredlist.org/search/search-basic

In the red area, in the first box, click “EX – Extinct.” Leave all the rest of the boxes preset to “All.” Hit [SEARCH.] This gives you an alphabetical list of nearly 800 plant and animal species by scientific name, extinguished since 1500 AD. Each species has its own page with record and sometimes a brief history. The list is presumed to be larger, due to the fact that many differences among earlier plants and animals either were never noticed, or (more likely) never recorded. I haven’t figured out how to narrow the list to only the last hundred years.

Go back to the search criteria’s first box and hit “EN -Endangered” for over 4000 more, certified to be endangered. That list is liable to be wildly underrepresentative, but let that pass…

As for how much is related to climate change, as opposed to say habitat fragmentation or chemical pollution, the 90% reduction in coral reefs or the new coastal deadzones from nitrogen run-off, I think that would be very hard to sort out. The quickest heating-up is only in the last decade, so results are just coming in. This story is going to get much much bigger. We are seeing an increasing frequency of news reports regarding endangered species — almost weekly, now.

The Wikipedia articles on “extinction” and “biodiversity” are quite good on the general overview, as are most of their scientific offerings. Scientists appear to be taking this new form of encyclopedia very seriously, and for the posting of some of the most up-to-the-minute results in an organized format.

Did mass extinctions happen before? Yes. Did earth re-speciate? After hundreds of thousands of years. Are we in a mass extinction now? Almost all biologists say “you betcha.” I think there was once a biologist who refuted it, but he’s dead, of natural causes.

By the way, you wrote earlier above that there are more birds than ever. This is false. According to accurate birdwatching reports which extend back a long way, there are only about ONE-TENTH the number of birds in the U.S. as there were a hundred years ago. This is mostly due to habitat fragmentation and loss, particularly by suburban development. They continue to drop in number. It is difficult to notice it, because their numbers oscillate from year to year, and the reduction trend must be just below the threshold of our seasonal sense memory. I don’t know how many U.S. bird species have gone extinct in the last hundred years. Searching “Thomas O. Lovejoy” might find that number, or a good estimate — the Smithsonian has made lists like that.

“I may not be a climatologist but I was a tenured geology professor for 37 years and taught many courses that, among other topics, included paleoclimates.”

Then you are perfectly capable of familiarizing yourself with the literature, and presumably also have access to your old university’s library, and have the spare time to get yourself up to speed with the state of the art, rather than waving your arms around in Limbaughite rants against enviros.

You’d also be aware that at as far back as 1998 Crowley et al. took a then-current version of and were able model the glaciation during the Ordovician (sp?) using the then current GCMs, which, considering the 12x current CO2 levels, lower solar output, and location of most land mass at the polar regions, could be considered a stress test for GCMs.

Re #165: Lee A. Arnold! “I can’t find who Jones is” – I’m really quite shocked! In fact, I’m not sure whether to be more shocked by your failure to recognise the author of the near-surface instrumental temperature amalgam that constitutes the “blade” of the “hockey stick” past climate representation or that the rest of this discussion board did not immediately correct your oversight in my absence. Clearly you have not made any real attempt to examine any of the available data despite mounting a rather spirited defence of said “hockey stick”. I see two possibilities for the board’s collective failure to point you in the right direction:
1. posters here know you better than I and simply ignore your posts (which would be rather disturbing, at least for you) or;
2. posters here are generally clueless about climatic research and data (which would be genuinely disturbing for all of us).
I would suggest you begin frequenting the site of the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology ( http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html ) and, to get up to speed on Jones and Mann, start here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/jones2004/jones2004.html

As to your second “point”, you really are a tad naïve – while some researchers gladly share raw data this tends to be the exception rather than the rule in the newly high-finance and high-prestige world of climate research. The responses range from simply ignoring requests to “the dog ate my homework” kind of thing but I remain convinced it was Phil Jones who replied: “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.” (On this at least Phil is quite correct, the first test of every hypothesis is an attempt to break it and the first attempt to do so is usually testing the bounds of the data, seeking error.)

Finally, you have situation exactly backwards. It is the “hockey stick” representation that seeks to reverse the established paradigm and thus it is for “hockey stick” proponents to provide support for their case. Hundreds of years of everything from grain price records (reflecting crop yield) to fish market sales (reflecting the ability of fishing fleets to put to sea) to bills of lading (telling us what goods were being traded and with whom) to reports of famine, mortality and morbidity all tell us that the Fifteenth through Nineteenth Centuries were unusually cold and harsh compared with periods before and, well, now. This is not the story told by the “hockey stick” though and thus it is for the challenger to prove its case.

Even worse for proponents of the new paradigm are that many of the newer paleoclimate reconstructions disagree with its representation of Northern Hemisphere temperature history. See, for example, Moberg (2005): ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/contributions_by_author/moberg2005/nhtemp-moberg2005.txt Moore (2003): ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/paleolimnology/northamerica/canada/baffin/donard_2001.txt Tan (2003): ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/speleothem/china/shihua_tan2003.txt Yang Bao (2002): http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2001GL014485.shtml Cook (2003): ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/asia/nepal/kathmandu_temp.txt Briffa (1998): ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/n_hem_temp/nhemtemp_data.txt Wiles (1999): ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/gulf_of_alaska/goa_springt.txt Alley (2004): ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt Hantemirov (2003): ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/asia/russia/yamal_2002.txt – these are simply some that explicitly provide temperature variation for you, there are also plenty that express in isotope ratios but I suspect you might find them a trifle challenging since it is painfully obvious you have not looked at any data which may, or may not support the position you espouse.

I must say, for people with rather a lot to say about past climate there seem remarkably few here who have genuinely paid attention to it. Quiggin may be correct pronouncing the debate finished – surely there seems precious few qualified to engage in it. What we have here is a number of people convinced that different must mean “bad” and obviously that must be people’s fault and, opposing, (mostly) those who instinctively realise this to be incorrect but who have not really researched their rebuttals. To those posters who actually know what they are talking about, well done! For the most part though, not a very impressive display, is it?

Re 208: (A) Barry, the data you speak of as missing, are downloadable at the second link you give. You can also download Jones and Mann data, and Mann, Bradley, Hughes (1998) data, from Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v430/n6995/suppinfo/nature02478.html
_______________

(B) You appear to believe that climatologists cling to the the Mann et.al. hockey stick as some sort of totem or “new paradigm,” but that is not exact. A good graphic that shows of many of the different studies you cite, all put together, is at:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=7

(scroll down.) You will notice that the upward blade of the hockey stick remains.

A fresher study, Moberg et.al (2005) doesn’t change things much either. It is at:

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v433/n7026/abs/nature03265_fs.html

and is discussed at:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=122&lp_lang_view=en

with a picture of its graph.
_______________

(C) For very understandable, technically accurate, latest information on the status of hockey stick, see RealClimate:

“Dummies guide to the latest Hockey Stick controversy,” February 18, 2005, at:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=121

and most recently,

“Hockey sticks: Round 27,” October 24, 2005, at:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=199
_______________

(D) Regarding your second paragraph, do scientists sit on their data before publishing? Lots of times, yes. Will it get them anywhere after that? I don’t see how; in fact quite the reverse. Certainly the other scientists won’t trust them, so it couldn’t last. You put Jones’ reputed comment here, but it seems unlikely that this was the circumstance. I still can’t find the source of Jones’ comment, but it sounds more than anything like irritation at the onslaught of boneheads. Is this related to the political harassment at the behest of the oil industry, when Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) demanded everybody’s data to look for “errors?” See Washington Post July 22, 2005, at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/21/AR2005072102186.html

luc (#203): I don’t think anyone is arguing that the problem is solely an economic one and should be decided by economists. I won’t speak for others, but my point was that the problem is also not solely a climate-science one, and should not be decided by climate scientists. Thus, the consensus among climate scientists that the Earth is warming is an important part of the equation, but their consensus (if any) regarding what should be done about it does not carry any special weight because the problem involves many other disciplines, and I do think that the economic impacts are a critical part of it.

lee a. arnold (#200): You make an interesting point, that I have not seen before put in that way. I am not knowledgeable enough to say much about it, but it does seem inevitable that humans will continue to increase their influence over the ecosystem even aside from any climate effects — and those other influences seem more important to me. If there is any one key, I think it is human population. Reducing human poulation would reduce all sorts of pressures, but that’s not something that can be done quickly (without some sort of catastrophe, that is).

I wrote”

“But note the “over geological time”. As Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead, true, but if so, why get arsed about the”

Damn, that was a page-long comment, including some detailed comments on the engineering & economics of mitigating global warming for Tim Worstall, and it’s gone.

RG wrote:

“The most amazing and fun thing about all these postings is how absurdly easy it is to make a comment that throws the “true believers” into such an intense state of righteous indignation. Lighten up kids. It must not be much fun to live your lives constantly pissed off at everyone who doesn’t agree 100% with your views of what the future will bring.”

I think that’s as close to an admission of “I’m a troll” as one could see.

Re 213: Philip, I think you have reached the heart of it.

Part of the problem is that scientists don’t want to admit that general complex systems are part of the philosphy and methodology of science, while anti-science contrarians are ignorant or scornful of the entire issue. Why? Because it’s hard to come to analytic predictions. Scientists should explicitly grab the issue of general systems by the horns, and stop being argued into a rhetorical trap.

We are dealing with a complex system which can only be conceived of, more or less, as a reticulated (i.e. weblike, with circular and multiple linkages) multi-compartment model. These don’t seem to allow exact determinations in any field of science, (although often for very different reasons, including: definition, modelability, fine and coarse graining, variable measurability and verification, nonlinear computation and the n-body problem, experimental repeatability, and model verification.)

“Uncertainty” in complex, adaptive, open systems is usually characterized by inductive generalization from observations of the dynamics of a WIDE RANGE of such systems: ecosystems, social systems, computer systems, immune systems, economic systems… It is curious that the following things are never admitted as “facts about the world,” but here goes: there is a set of general patterns which are inferred from many different types of systems, such as: regular oscillation; multiple chreods; return to regime after perturbation; unpredictable catastrophic change (i.e., move to new regime;) and increase in probability of catastrophic change with additional forcing or exotic introductions.

The observer would note of all of these systems that they undergo oscillations within apparent parameters and occasionally flip into new regimes; they often demonstrate novel emergence; and that increased forcing, whether of native elements or exotic ones, increases the rates of oscillation and catastrophic shifts, sometimes after a quieter period of sub-threshold build-up.

This general sense of complex systems is what spurred very early fears decades ago, about the effects of forced CO2 build-up on the climate.

The observer would also see that these general events are not tractable to analytic prediction beforehand, due to any or several of various regular functions: including definition, modeling, measurement, calculation, experiment control, and repeated verification.

Yet it will remain a fact that, even though you can’t predict any exact occurrence or its timing, all complex systems will show these general dynamics. We can say true things about complex systems, in an inductive manner: 1) If left alone, systems tend to stay in their pre-existing oscillative regimes. 2) Add an exotic species, or an overdose of a native species, and a system will oscillate into new regimes, often violently–even though we can’t say precisely how or when, sometimes not even exactly why. And it is PRECISELY TRUE that you don’t know exactly what, how or when things are going to happen, before they happen.

So there are two completely different levels of falsifiable science in the same phenomenon:

(1) The deductive predictions about the events inside a single system, e.g. the climate, which are ideally precise spacetime events, calculated mathematically–but because they are reticulated models, are rarely, perhaps never, definitive.

(2) Inductive observations about the general patterns which all, or almost all, reticulated systems go through–although the exact characters of the events, and their timing, are not predictable. (Indeed, even AFTER they happen, the exact causes may still be in dispute.)

To anyone who thinks the second category is not “science,” let me suggest to you that it is just a different level of it, and such learning is precisely how most people get through the day, and cross the street, and regard their immune systems, and watch their diet. It is by abduction, metaphor, and analogy–and far from being non-science, it is just the complementary division, covering systems, information, and pattern. It appears to be the “logic” by which both evolutionary change, and embryological development, proceed.

At that point, we opt for the Precautionary Principle, as your grandma already knew.

But since systems TEND to remain in their old ways unless so perturbed, the “precautionary principle,” suitably leavened, is therefore the MOST SCIENTIFIC policy stance.

sorry — I though that sort of thing was typical reviewed in the regular process at the Geophysical Review Letters, for example. Or are they now under suspicion, too?

I’ll accept the “humans are causing global warming” argument the day a society comprised exclusively of climatologists makes the announcement that they’ve reached such a concensus.

Until then, to me this is just warmed over cataastrophism.

# 215.

“Re 207: Tim, your answers are standard and correct the misapprehension I received from #195, which appeared to believe in the delimitation of cost/benefit analyses to the things to which economists restrict themselves.”

I know what you mean but I was referring to economics and economists, not to accountants and accountantcy, which would be closer to the narrower view you rightly disaprove of.

Sonny,

Did you miss the post where I linked to the papers from the American Meteorological Society, the IPCC and the American Geophysical Union that do exactly what you say you want to see? As I said, it only takes a little time with a search engine to show that professional associations of scientists in the field do have a consensus on the issue.