The last of the sceptics

As you yourself have shown John, what’s going to happen depends upon the economic projections contained within the SRES. Which as again you’ve shown, need to be redone. Which they haven’t and won’t be for IV. We’ll have to wait for V for that.

“There may still be a few more such announcements to come. But it’s clear by now that the evidence is more than enough to convince genuine sceptics.”

This seems to be an inherently contradictory claim. On the one hand there are apparently genuine skeptics who remain skeptical (but who may change their mind – we don’t know). On the other hand, there is an Olympian assertion that there is now enough evidence to convince genuine sceptics.

typo:

“who demands but convincing evidence but is willing”

delete first “but”

I’m a little less charitable to these new converts because their conversion is awful late in the day. I don’t think it’s been possible to be an intellectually honest, informed sceptic for a few years now – there’s been a slow buildup of evidence. And I speak as one who was a sceptic a decade or so ago.

A lot of greenies shout alarmist bullshit in a self-righteous voice, but that doesn’t always mean there’s nothing to be alarmed about.

Also Gregg Easterbrook.

The question for Sir David Attenborough is What took you so long?

Surely he’s someone who would have been out in the field, seeing what had happened, where ice had melted, where biospheres had been destroyed and ecosystems irrevocably altered.

There was the usual buffoonery from Jonah Goldberg yesterday, presenting an article from the Telegraph attributing global warming to, er, the sun, before later admitting that it was a two-year old article that he had just come across. I guess the CEI search engine is having to go quite far back to find any good news from Earth.

Ron Bailey (Reason’s science reporter) came around last August. The article does a fairly good job explaining how the remaining disagreements between the various data sets and the models’ results got sorted out.

The same.

Bailey’s views appear to be in the process of “adjusting.” See this post for him downplaying the costs of CO2 cuts.

The Olympian announcement is soooo grating.

(Well if Michael Shermer! and Sir David Attenborough! are convinced that is enough for me! They saw graphs! From books!)

It isn’t that if I had to bet, I would bet against global warming. I wouldn’t. I would bet on man made global warming.

It is the ridiculous Olympian nature of the assertions designed to cut off a huge chunk of the debate about what, if anything, should be done.

Last time I really checked global warming models had a rather large hole. The atmosphere was supposed to be heating up more than the ground. It looked to be cooling.

The last time I half checked and it looks like after re-calibrating the atmosphere was not cooling. Is it heating up quicker? I didn’t bother.

The number of variables is enormous and no one really knows how those variables interact. Anything like fine predictions, deserts(like from the article) here and not there are garbage. The ocean current may turn off as the melt off from glaciers decreases salt concentration, leading to massive temporary global cooling in NA and Europe, or it may not.

To me, predictions regarding future temperature increase also seem problematic. It might be a lot worse than the worse predictions. Or it might be better than the best predictions.

I don’t see the purpose of these Olympian announcements. Michael Shermer and Sir David Attenborough are convinced! My goodness that changes the entire parameter of the debate! I would guess that for many, the more you announce, the harder they dig in.

To me it seems far better to allow doubt, while strongly making your case, and to propose ideas that would minimize the problem at as little cost as possible to the doubters.

Like a revenue neutral gasoline tax. (Personally, I would like to see the proceeds in some way go to third world ‘development’, and maybe a an import duty on oil, but I guess the first bit isn’t politically possible.)

But I guess that is just me.

You know what’s really going to confuse these contrarians? If Earth goes into a temperature downturn for a few years! Then we’re going to have to explain endothermic reactions in complex systems. We have already seen that some people don’t understand that general warming can cause some areas to become cooler for a while, or wetter or drier, due to changes in winds and currents, for example. Denialist propaganda has partly depended upon this systematic misunderstanding. They are ready to disregard a mountain of evidence because one set of data is counter-indicative, or disputed.

On the “technology will save us” argument – everyone should hope so! The real problem has always been that there are no equations, no chains of inference, which scientifically prove that (1) the rate of pertinent technological change will always stay ahead of the rate of population explosion; or again that (2) market prices will always guide us in a timely manner. Therefore the public should demand that their governments seed a broad field of R&D on alternative energy, energy waste disposal and CO2 sequestration, more public transportation, and the like. We never know which little idea, which incremental change, will be the one to make the difference; and we may never know.

It is the contrarians who have been cutting-off a huge chunk of the debate about what, if anything, should be done. Attempting to paint environmentalists as anti-technology Luddites, for example! Attempting to paint Al Gore as a Luddite!

Are there better ways to address the problem than coming down from the mountain with a set of tablets?

Yeah, it’s called going up the mountain for your own damn tablets. Just because you were worshipping a golden calf doesn’t make Moses a big elitist meany-head, it just makes him the guy who went up the mountain. There was _nothing_ stopping you from doing the same.

Insinuating that the people who were in the right were trying to get you to take them on faith is dishonest. It’s just a way to give yourself an excuse for being in the wrong.

Derek,

Um who says I was wrong? And how do they know?

I wasn’t insinuating anything. I very clearly stated I did not like the approach of this post and I feel it is a counter productive approach. This post. Just this post. I am sure I can find other examples but I was just talking about this post.

(I also pointed out the inherent uncertainity in anything like fine predictions.)

Which consisted of Michael Shermer and Sir David Attenborough are convinced! And if you read the links you can see that they were convinced by some graphs! From books!

Anyone left who is unconvinced is a denialist.

I don’t think that kind of Olympian approach is all that useful.

No matter what some people will have doubts and to a certain extent some of those doubts are quite valid. I don’t think labeling those folks denialists is all that helpful.

To me it seems far better to allow doubt, while strongly making your case, and to propose ideas that would minimize the problem at as little cost as possible to the doubters.

John,

I am sceptical not about global warming but about what should be done about it.

The answer seems to depend considerably on one’s discount rate and one’s thoughts about the suckers that are born later.

>The number of variables is enormous and no one really knows how those variables interact.

Well, I don’t know about you personally, but the set of people that make the statement I have excerpted here and the set of people who take the Lomborg-line of “it will cost too much! Look at what the economic impact will be!!” are pretty much indistinguisable.

Yet. Tell me now: do you really think that the estimated costs are *not* derived from an “enormous set of variables” and not only is that set not enormous but we well understand “how those variables interact”??

Because we went thru this type of crap in the 70’s with the EPA, et. al. A lot is nowadays made about the wrongness of 70’s “environmental doomsayers” but an even greater hysteria -now somehow forgotten- was churned up by economic doomsayers. Yet despite the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, CAFE, etc. etc. our economy contined to grow quite nicely.

I’m not buying it anymore. I think a drive to “clean up our [C02] act” will be an interesting and worthwhile, and frankly productive direction for society to move.

So the Telegraph piece is two years old. So what? Has the research it describes been disproven in the past two years? Was the article shown to be inaccurate?

Never mind; just a denialist talking here. I know we’re not allowed to pay attention to stories like these:

Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.

A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.

Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: “The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.

“The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years.”

Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of “greenhouse gases”, such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth’s temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.

* * *
Dr Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, welcomed Dr Solanki’s research. “While the established view remains that the sun cannot be responsible for all the climate changes we have seen in the past 50 years or so, this study is certainly significant,” he said.

“It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor.”

maynard writes: “I’m also still convinced by Lomborg’s “technology will save us ” argument”

Yeah, like when Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans, and the Grumman Ultra-Dike 3000’s sensor mesh noted the drop in barometric pressure and rises in water level, so massive adamantium steel barriers sprang out of the muck, creating an impermeable barrier that saved New Orleans from the storm surge? That was awesome.

Oh, wait, that didn’t happen. Technology didn’t save New Orleans from a long-expected threat, because nobody came forward with a giant sack of cash to turn the potential demand into a real demand with market effects to spur innovation.

functional writes: “Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of “greenhouse gases”, such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth’s temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.”

Ah, but while we can’t do anything about the Sun, we can do something about carbon.

Maybe it’s mostly the sun, and warming will continue, but at least we’ll have more efficient systems and will be spending less on oil – whether global warming is happening or not, oil is going not likely to get cheaper any time soon. It’s not like increasing efficiency and reducing use of fossil fuels has no other benefits.

But I suppose it’s easier if we just act like climatological surrender monkeys and give up now.

I didn’t write my flippant response correctly. It should be, “If they can’t predict correctly the weather one week from now, how are they going to predict it correctly ten years from now?”

a different chris @ 35:

You probably were typing that phrase with dashes as parentheses around it and accidentally omitted a space after the first dash. That would make Textile markup interpret the dashes as a strikeout. Textile is not your friend. Use HTML.

I wouldn’t bet on what tempreture it will be in one week’s time, but I’ll bet any amount of money that summer will be warmer than winter. Just because the data is noisy doesn’t mean we can’t detect long term trends.

“Tim, like you, I’m a technological optimist on global warming – I agree that technology can save us. The problem is that without price incentives it won’t. This is why I object to Lomborg so much. He starts out appearing like a reasonably optimistic environmentalist but ends up by saying we shouldn’t do anyting.”

Well, as I recall it (with my all too fallible memory) his argument is actually that (most especially with solar) the price performance ratio is improving at such a rate that somewhere around 2030 it will in fact be cheaper than any other method of generation and that that will in itself be the price incentive.

I tend to think he’s actually pessimistic on that point…without getting too technical, I can see advances in labs that make me think that point is going to come earlier. Berkeley (or maybe Lawrence Livermore?) has demo’ed a complex cell (gallium arsenide, gallium nitride and indium I think) with a theoretical efficiency of 60% or so.

There’s other things too: LED light bulbs (an oxymoron but hopefully understandable) use about 10% of the energy of incandescents. Depends on where you look up the figures but lighting is said to be anywhere from 8% to 16% of US electricity usage. They’re really only just becoming commercially available so it will take time, as people replace the housing and office stock, to affect demand: and how much they do depends on how many people are already using flourescents and so on, how much they use the cheaper running costs to have more light instead of cheaper and so on.
But it’s a purely price driven change that I fully expect to see happening over the next few years.

There’s indeed a place in the mix for the subsidy of at least basic research. There’s an Australian team looking at a well known reaction, TiO2, when exposed to both water and sunlight, acts as a catalyst to liberate the hydrogen. According to the (US) DOE this needs to be 10% efficient to be commercially viable. The Oz team are certain that they can get 15% by making roof tiles out of the slag from old titanium smelting operations.

In my professional life I’d be absolutely delighted if there was ever greater subsidy into fuel cells, most especially solid oxide ones. My day job involves the purification and wholesaling of a vital ingredient for a particular type of them and we only need that $10 million grant to build an extraction plant to make that vital ingredient (scandium oxide for anyone interested) as cheap as chips (well, at least relative to its current price).

However, I do feel uncomfortable in calling for public subsidy that will be to my benefit.

But at root my optimism on this particular point is precisely that I’m marginally involved in supplying some of the materials that make such schemes work. And what I see, what researchers and test run type people ask me for, makes me think that those alternative technologies are coming in the next decade or so.

Why, there’s even people sticking scandium atoms inside fullerenes to make a hydrogen fuel tank, which would go a long way to making fuel cells seriously viable for transport applications.

Umm, anyone got $10 million?

I wrote a counter ad to the CEI propaganda :::[They call it a spot, we call it a stain] It is my way of combating their lies so, if you like it, link it, as quite a few have done already.

>The Oz team are certain that they can get 15% by making roof tiles out of the slag

Heh. A hydrogen-producing roof. When can I get one? I bet the local fire dept. will studiously ignore the phone anytime my caller id is displayed.

Which is why simply “using less energy”, not just carbon*, in all facets of life is very important. I (heart) technology as much as anybody, but the consequenses of conservation are safe and obvious, new techy stuff not so much.

*thanks for the tip on the dashes, I almost did it again.

Surely conservation and technology shouldn’t be opposed to each other – rather, conservation should be one of the parameters of technology, and technology shouldn’t be thought of in terms of neat, individual gizmos, but rather as embedded in and having an effect on the general social structure. So, for instance, the idea that the grid for transportation in the U.S. is to allow maximum private transportation, whereas the grid for energy allows for maximum collectivizing of energy users, have had definite effects in the life style patterns of Americans — and perhaps that will be turned around — more public transport and more fuel cells. It might be that CO2 emissions can’t really be brought down unless suburban sprawl is dealt with. I think so, at least. The social cost has mounted way too high.

It is interesting, to me, how the discourse swaps around, determined by a latent adherence to the same old treadmill of production. So, for instance, when lumbermen were being put out of work because of the spotted owl, supposedly, the anti-enviro people were livid — and now that lumbermen are being put out of work due to the effects of climate change the anti-enviro people switch the topic. The point is to paralyze any change to the system of production that produces such absurd monuments as the retirement package for the outgoing EXXON CEO. But the system is going to change regardless. If the current American economy has been kept afloat by the real estate market, if people’s big investments are in their homes, drastic changes to the environment are going to strike at the heart of their wealth — there is nothing that deteriorates property values more than a big hurricane sweeping away your stuff. Given the increasing population density in areas that are the most vulnerable — the coasts — it is as though Americans are setting themselves up for this disaster.

At some point, all the pseudo-skepticism in the world isn’t going to protect the petro or energy corporations, or the proponents of drift.

(Re #36, #53) Solar influence on climate is not ignored by climatologists. The last few years of new studies, with a general wrap-up of the topic, are discussed in great detail in the list of “sun-earth connection” postings found on the following page:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/sun-earth-connections/

(Re #41, #47) Climatologists do not predict the weather. They predict the climate, which is more or less the very-long-term average of the weather. While causality is a problem for any science, in climatology it is partly dealt with by retro-predicting the past climate, using the same models.

Also, if you have a deep skepticism about computer modelling, please stop using your computer!

(Re #51) The possibility of the North Atlantic thermohaline shutdown is not ignored by climatologists. If anything, it illustrates the higher probability of catastrophic change due to accelerated global warming. That global warming might lead some areas to become colder for a while, has been understood for a long time.

Science is not a democratic enterprise. Not all of us are cut out to be climatologists or biologists. Whether global warming is due to human action and how far CO2 emissions must be reduced to make a difference are not questions akin to the question of whether a city should build a sports stadium or a museum: it’s not something we should take a vote about.

Can I explain to you all of the arguments that a climatologist would use to refute oil-industry fueled doubts about global warming? No. But I also can’t answer every argument that creationists advance against evolution. This isn’t because I’m not an intelligent person, but because I’m not a scientist. And on certain matters, I trust the experts – because their expertise has earned them that trust. If mathematicians tell me we have a proof for Fermat’s last theorem, I don’t have to check it myself step by step to have justification for my belief that it is sound. It’s enough that the community of mathematicians has thrown its support behind it. Same with global warming and evolution: the relevant scientific communities see no room for legitimate doubt about the essentials on these subjects, so neither do I.

I’m sure that some of you will object to this mentality of taking what the experts say as fact as elitist or lazy. But people don’t have time to be experts about everything, and we rely on what experts have told us all the time in our daily lives without investigating it ourselves. No one rushes to get back issues of the JAMA when their doctor gives them a prescription so they can make sure that it won’t kill them, and there are legions of other examples I could give to make the same point. So forgive the kind people on this site who are not denialists when it comes to global warming if they don’t want to spend hours producing links and poring over research to satisfy the cranks among you. There’s no reason for them to, and every reason for you to realize that you don’t have the scientific expertise to know what in the hell you are talking about. Epistemology lesson over.

I appreciate John taking the time to respond, but is this is a serious response? Do you really recommend that I “look at” the work produced by the IPCC? How many hours would it take to read the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change?

I confess to approaching the global warning crowd as a sceptic. But I like to consider myself an open-minded sceptic, willing to revise his beliefs in the light of the evidence. If smart people like John (and Tim Lambert) think that there is something there, I am ready to listen.

But, to be worth listening to, they need to be specific. They need to provide a summary forecast of what is likely to happen with some sort of confidence intervals. Portraying the choice as one between the “full denialist position” and (what?) being in favor of Kyoto, is not very helpful.

So, it would be useful if, in another post, John specified what the sea level rise will be in, say, 10 or 30 or whatever years (with confidence intervals). My impression now, given what I know about modeling, is that any fair interval would include 0 meaningful change. Yet I am ready to be convinced otherwise.

But all John seems to care about doing is mocking the “denialists.” That’s all fine and fun, but I expect more CT.

I appreciate these links and will look at the topic more closely. You write:

The forecasts for sea level rise don’t include 0; the third IPCC report gives an interval of 0.11 to 0.77 m for 1990-2100 rise under the standard emissions projections. I’m not sure why you would assume such an interval should include zero.

Rule number one is evaluating expert forecasts is that the confidence interval is almost always too narrow. If the IPCC provides an interval of 0.1 to 0.7 meters, then a better interval (one which, in expectation, would include the actual answer 95% of the time) would be much wider.

But, again, thanks for the links.