Climate Change
The debate continues. My views have not changed: we don’t know enough, and the Climate Modelers continue to act as if we do. When all this began back in the 1980’s I said that the modelers were agreed that there was man-made global warming, and the data collectors did not agree at all. Over time that changed, not be collection of better data, but by the ascendency of the modelers over the people who actually studied climate and climate data. It’s still relatively true: the people who actually study climate are nowhere near as certain that they know what’s going on as the modelers – and the whole thing has got political enough that those who do find results contrary to the consensus are denounced, called Deniers, and are denied places to publish. Contrary opinions tend not to be published – which in these days of the Internet is an exercise in futility. But when contrary views are published the consequences for those who do the peer reviews and actual publishing can be severe.
I presume we have all heard the story of how Wolfgang Wagner has resigned his editorship of Remote Sensing because he allowed the Spencer and Braswell paper “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” to be published. For a pretty cool analysis of this incident, see William Briggs, http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4311. Briggs is a competent statistician, and his analysis, once he cools the opening rhetoric down, is both comprehensive and competent. (Note that I tend to agree with his opening rhetoric, but I might have preferred it if he had reserved it for his conclusions.)
Everywhere I look I see the hockey stick; it’s very prominent in the current issue of Science News, which is a publication of Believers, and you will often see it in Scientific American. It is no longer called the Hockey Stick, and the scandal about how the hockey stick curves were generated is mostly forgotten, but the curve, which shows thousands of years of global temperature oscillating within limits, suddenly shoots up at the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st. That spike isn’t found in the data so far as I know, but it’s still there in the chart, and that chart is ubiquitous. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/332612/title/Small_volcanoes_add_up_to_cooler_climate
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Someone looking at a graph of global temperature since worldwide instrumental records began in 1880 might reasonably conclude that the recent upward trend is not terribly extreme. But longer records are available. The ones shown here use a number of “proxy” records: tree ring thicknesses, the chemical composition of lake and ocean sediment cores, rates of coral growth and other natural phenomena that vary with temperature. Each colored line represents a slightly different interpretation of the data, but they all clearly point to the same conclusion: The past few decades have been the warmest in centuries.
Credit: R. Rohde/Wikimedia Commons, adapted by E. Feliciano
That was in, of all things, an article on how “Ocean currents and sulfur haze deliver global warming hiatus” on why we aren’t getting warm as fast as the global warming theorists were sure we would. But yet there is that chart with that “back story” telling us in the voice of calm reason that “the past few decades have been the warmest in centuries.” A close look will show that the chart is in tenths of a degree; and how we are sure that it is hotter now than it was during the period of the Viking Greenland Colonies (when there were wine grapes in Scotland, and longer growing seasons in China, and generally warmer climates across the northern hemisphere) is not really explained. In other words, the consensus is assumed, and the accuracy of the data assumed.
Something else hasn’t changed: the approved means of dealing with Deniers.
Repeat it
The original and still most popular approach to dealing with climate deniers is reasoned persuasion: facts and figures and reports and literature reviews and slideshows and whitepapers. This hasn’t ever really worked, but climate types keep trying, like American tourists in a foreign country who try to overcome the language barrier by talking louder and more slowly.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/08/13/271676/whats-the-best-strategy-for-dealing-with-deniers/
With trillions at stake, with the future of humanity at stake, it’s time for the inquisition. We’re so sure we know.
The Science News article, in case you have forgotten, is about why the earth has not warmed up so much in the past decade.
Like Burt Rutan, I have had to do data collection, and try to produce meaningful averages from fluctuating data – fluctuating because of noise in the lab, as well as fluctuating because the data stream itself was fluctuating. In my case we were testing human performance in extreme conditions: inside a space suit furnished with oxygen at about 95 F, with the astronaut in an altitude-temperature chamber whose interior temperature could go as high as 200 F. The flight surgeon insisted on core and skin temperatures, heart rate and to the best we could get it an EKG: this back in the days when medical EKG was only taken from restrained subjects flat on a metal table in a noise-free room. My lab was in an industrial area at Boeing. Since that time the electronics for EKG data have got a lot better, but the sensors for temperatures remain thermistors and thermocouples, and I can tell you that getting an average temperature for a human being in a lab to a tenth of a degree is very difficult. For that matter, getting the temperature inside the experimental chamber was not and still is not trivial. We used “globe”: the temperature of a hollow copper ball about 4 inches in diameter, which takes a measure based on both conductive and radiative temperature. Next time you want to know how hot it is outside, think about how to measure it – now think about getting an average that tells you how hot it is in the city – now the county – now the nation – now the world. How deep in the ocean? How high in the sky? But we have been through all that before.
Here’s Burt Rutan on much the same subject:
Not a Climatologist’s study; more from the view of a flight test guy who has spent a lifetime in data analysis/interpretation.
My study is NOT as a climatologist, but from a completely different prospective in which I am an expert.
Complex data from disparate sources can be processed and presented in very different ways, and to “prove” many different theories.
For decades, as a professional experimental test engineer, I have analyzed experimental data and watched others massage and present data. I became a cynic; My conclusion – “if someone is aggressively selling a technical product who’s merits are dependant on complex experimental data, he is likely lying”. That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/16/burt-rutan-engineer-aviationspace-pioneer-and-climate-skeptic/
All of which takes us out the same door we came in. I do not believe we know enough about climate to bet trillions of dollars on our theories.
