Man Based Global Warming....

My experience is with NWP models, several of which I deal with essentially on a daily basis, as I mentioned earlier.

However, it's my understanding that GCMs employ the same general equations (equations of motion, hydrostatic equation, etc.), but, as you mention, are just initialized differently. Based on IPCC's recent publication, "The Physical Science Basis", Chapter 8, Climate Models and Their Evaluations...


“…Climate models are closely related to the models that are used routinely for numerical weather prediction…†(page 595)

“…it has been shown that climate models can be integrated as weather prediction models if they are initialized appropriately…†(page 626)


It is also clear that parameterizations are used in the GCMs…


“… The ultimate source of most such errors is that many important small-scale processes cannot be represented explicitly in models, and so must be included in approximate form as they interact with larger-scale features….†(page 601)

“…The climate system includes a variety of physical processes, such as cloud processes, radiative processes and boundary-layer processes, which interact with each other on many temporal and spatial scales. Due to the limited resolutions of the models, many of these processes are not resolved adequately by the model grid and must therefore be parameterized….†(page 602) (emphases added)


Climate is weather averaged over a long time period. The “normal†temperatures for a date are derived from a rolling 30-year average of temps from the previous 3 decades (i.e., currently from a normalized average of temps on a specific date from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s). As of next year (2010), the 30-year average will incorporate the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s.

So “climate†is inexorably linked to “weatherâ€. Even relatively small-scale features like MCSs (thunderstorm complexes) ultimately have an affect on climate (wet soil has a profoundly different effect on the boundary layer than dry soil). Snow pack has a profound affect on surface albedo, so individual winter weather events would eventually affect climate. I don’t see any way around this. Otherwise you’re just manipulating the model to produce the results you want.

 

What many many people fail to understand is, climate change on earth is NORMAL. Records date back thousands, tens of thousands of years showing that the period we are going through has happened before and will happen again, and continue to happen until either the sun explodes, or the planet encounters a major catastrophe that strips away its atmosphere. Whether or not CO2 is a factor has nothing to do with climate change. The climate will change, there is nothing we can do to stop or slow it down. The so called Green house effect was something dreamed up by Al Gore during his college days and something that has yet to have been proven to be a real cause. CO2 can only absorb a finite amount of energy, and science has shown that the earths oceans help in regulating the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Doing things to help clear the air is one thing and I am all for it, but claiming GLobal Warming and running around like chicken little, is stupid and does nothing but promote ignorance. Carbon offsets, carbon taxes, etc. are nothing more than schemes to get money from people, playing off their ignorance. Using made up models on a computer cannot predict what will happen 10, 20 100 years from now. If that were the case, then they would be able to predict what the weather will be like tomorrow, and recently they have shown that they cannot get that even close to correct. Garbage in, garbage out is what we in the computer world tend to say. If I want a certain outcome, all I need is to put in the right information and get the results I am looking for.

When you look at true historical data, that taken from ice cores thousands of years old, there are true honest records of that happened, and based off that, what we are seeing has happened before, and not just once. The recent sky falling about the arctic ice melting, guess what, has happened before, and recently too I might add. Back in the 1800's, they were able to sail ships nearly across the northwest passage. In fact the ice cap at the north pole rarely gets thicker than 6' and is constantly moving. This year the ice has completely formed and is thicker than it has been for the past 10 years, areas that has had recent early snow melts in early spring have had snow on the ground well into June. Past data from the last ice age has shown global temps rose for a short period before the ice age began and in fact we are several thousand years past the last period before it started. Man didnt start this, man is niave to think he can do something like this, and can stop it. Lets face it, climate change will happen, and we cant stop it, or do anything to change it. The only thing we can do is make the air, and our environment cleaner. I am all for that, but not to the extent that the politicians and environmental kooks are pushing it towards.

How many here realize that at any given moment, the earth, for no known reason, can suddenly shift its poles, and change its tilt? Does anyone fully understand the unique balance this planet has in order to have seasons, and tides, and the environment we all enjoy? Can anyone truthfully explain how the Sahara, once a lush jungle became a desert wasteland? Was it due to man driving his SUV's? The next Ice Age will happen, and there is not a thing we can do to stop it. We can all take everything that pollutes, from cows nice person gas, to the coal plants pumping out tons of toxins every minute, go back to living like they did thousands of years ago, and it will still happen, and happen at the same rate. It is time to stop focusing on the past few decades and crying sky is falling, and look at the past few thousands of years and realize, it has happened before, and will happen again and there isnt a damned thing we can do about it.

 

No.



It has not happened within our current civilization. Changes like those seen dozens of thousands of years in the past would truly wipe us out. However, as we have discussed previously these are well characterized and are not supposed to happen at this moment and not for many thousands of years.

The warming is an empirical and unexpected observation. We are causing it, but we can do something about it.

 

I just came across this article whilst reading my google sci and tech news

from EPA says seas could destroy New Jersey coast

Yet another example of the IPCC being too conservative in their estimates....

 

OK, I'll chime in.
Comparing the water level at high tide and low tide at some beaches where I used to visit as a child, it seems to me that the water levels are rising. Even when I go out in the shallow waters where I knew how deep the reefs were, I can tell the water level is changing. Somehow, I don't believe that a dead coral reef changes much in 20 years time.

My vote is for global warming.

While I respect the evidence that significant climate change occurs, the impact of burning fossil fuels is logical and even measurable.

On the other hand, separating the impact of CO2 and other emissions from burning of fossil fuels from the issue of pollution related to other factors is challenging.

When one considers the likelihood of massive climate change related to either eruption of supervolcano-like calderas, Earth-impact by asteroid or cometary objects, flipping of the Earth's magnetic field, and changes to oceanic currents related to plate tectonics; it is challenging for even the most sophisticated biologists, geologists, or climatologists to evaluate.

 

The climate has never before changed so much in such a short time. What's happening now is definitely not normal.

And Earth's atmosphere has been trapping solar heat since long before Al Gore was around.

 

Sorry, acdii, but climatologists and atmospheric physicists have studied those matters and the great majority of them disagree with you. For informed discussion see
http://realclimate.org

 

That's what I thought - but just wanted to play devil's advocate.

My sense is the models lack well characterized inputs for aerosols and water vapor; lack inputs for cyclical changes in climate; and lack the resolution to predict climate outcomes on regional scales.

So basically, despite their computational power, the models are basically still garbage in and garbage out until we develop a much more complete understanding of key inputs, physical processes, and natural climate variations.

That is not to say that CO2 can't have an effect on climate. But if one is relying on a climate model to predict the effect, you might as well just throw darts.

 

Alric - the proxy temperature data has been thoroughly critiqued and refuted by the expert statistical analysis conducted in the Wegman report.

"Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable."

In addition, Wegman calls out lack of statistical expertise on the climate proxy reconstruction teams, the lack of reliable proxy data, the recalcitrance of Mann & colleagues to share their data and methods, and the tight working relationship between Mann and other authors that is presented as "independent" temperature reconstructions but in fact is an output of closely aligned individuals all basically spouting the same party line under the guise of independence.

Further, Wegman confirms McKittrick and McIntyre's analysis that shows you can take basically any random data and throw a Mannsian type analysis (such as above) at it and shazam, you end up with a hockey stick shape like the above (see p. 30 in the linked report) and in this discussion from MIT Technology Review.

So don't present these temperature charts as "facts" when indeed there are many widely known problems with them and significant questions about their reliability and accuracy.

 

Here comes the wegman report. A report that was not published on any scientific publication and was written by statisticians not climatologists.

However, more importantly the graph I show was the result of subsequent work that adds about 10 more proxies, all in agreement with warming and published in Nature magazine. The Wegman report came out in 2006. The published results I am showing came out in 2009.

This belies the point. Do not use non-peer reviewed unpublished information for your arguments or your thinking. It is there precisely to create confusion.

 

The Wegman Report is not questioning the Mann's data it is questioning his application of statistics to his data. They are saying that climatologists should stick to collecting data and leave the statistics to statisticians. I find this paragraph interesting:

"It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility."

Peer review only works if your peers know about the subject being reviewed.

 

Learning requires listening, d berman. I don't believe you're genuinely interested in getting an education.

 

That would be the end of science. Science is not statistics but interpretation of the data. Statistics is only one more tool to interpret data and nothing else.

If the Wegman report had scientific value it should have been published after peer review. It wasn't. Mann's original paper did include a discussion of the uncertainties and their place of interpreting the data.

Besides, you are not addressing the point that further work has only but confirmed Mann's original result.

 

As Alric notes above, the fact that Mann's original paper discussed uncertainties has been raised multiple times in the past. In fact, the paper includes the word "uncertainties" in its TITLE.

And the Wegman Report is hardly undisputed:

The Wegman report has itself been criticized on several contentious grounds:

• The report was not subject to formal peer review [44] [45] At the hearing, Wegman lists 6 people that participated in his own informal peer review process via email after the report was finalized and said they had no objection to the subcommittee submitting it.[43]
• Dr. Thomas Crowley, Professor of Earth Science System, Duke University, testified at the committee hearing, "The conclusions and recommendations of the Wegman Report have some serious flaws." [43]
• The result of fixing the alleged errors in the overall reconstruction does not change the general shape of the reconstruction. [46]
• Similarly, studies that use completely different methodologies also yield very similar reconstructions[46].
• The social network analysis is not based on meaningful criteria, does not prove a conflict of interest and did not apply at the time of the 1998 and 1999 publications. Such a network of co-authorship is not unusual in narrowly defined areas of science. [47] During the hearing, Wegman defined the social network as peer reviewers that had "actively collaborated with him in writing research papers" and answered that none of his peer reviewers had.[43]
• Gerald North, chairman of the National Research Council panel that studied the hockey-stick issue and produced the report Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, stated the politicians at the hearing at which the Wegman report was presented "were twisting the scientific information for their own propaganda purposes. The hearing was not an information gathering operation, but rather a spin machine."[44] In testimony when asked if he disputed the methodology conclusions of Wegman's report, he stated that "No, we don’t. We don’t disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report. But again, just because the claims are made, doesn’t mean they are false."[43]
• Mann has himself said that the report "uncritically parrots claims by two Canadians (an economist and a mineral-exploration consultant) that have already been refuted by several papers in the peer-reviewed literature inexplicably neglected by Barton's 'panel'. These claims were specifically dismissed by the National Academy in their report just weeks ago."[48]

It's a shame we keep having to go over the same inaccurate agruments again and again.

For those interested in Mann's more recent paper, see Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations
over the past two millennia. PNAS September 9, 2008 vol. 105 no. 36 13252-13257

 

Science is not directed by one all knowing being. It is not the be all end all. It is not always black and white especially regarding the long term predictions of climate change.

And that tool says unequivocally that AGW simply does not exist. While a scientist may excel at collecting data and even have skills to interpret that data, it sure does raise question (a serious one I might add) that the interpretation of such data may be flawed, questionable, or even have other motivations if a large group of professional statisticians come up with a completely different result.

Scientists, universities, and other groups (green power, etc.) who support AGW have a lot to lose if the AGW theory becomes pushed to the wayside (I'm not sure how many record cold winters, below hurricane average count seasons it will take before politicians stop beating the AGW dead horse; one or two more perhaps and AGW will soon be filed along with the past ozone holes, population scares, world famine). Grants will be lost, the IPCC will lose much of its funding, even RealClimate.org will become a relic of the past. But a statistician has nothing to lose as they will always have work no matter the political direction of AGW. I'll put my money on the statistician on this interpretation.

BTW, the weather service has actually predicted a slight chance of snow tomorrow for parts of FL in areas which haven't seen snow for over 30 years. But, I know, it's the result of AGW, strictly anecdotal, not peer reviewed, is Dick Cheney's fault, and is probably actually artificial snow produced by Exxon Mobil with a little help from Hailburton...

Rick
#4 2006
Home-based scientist (with obligatory tin foil hat...)

 

Reference please.

 

No, the climate's not changing at all, is it?

 

Is it "global warming" or "climate change"? I guess it has become climate change since the earth stopped warming.

 

It's called climate change. The media has got hold of the phrase 'global warming' and run with it, but it's a misnomer. Some places will indeed get warmer, some dryer, some wetter...and some colder. Snow in Florida is evidence FOR climate change, not against it, as too many people mistakenly believe.