Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!

[MaxWilson]

Interesting link, Edi. I'm disappointed that he spends so much time arguing with a straw man: people who think carbon dioxide has zero effect on the climate. He doesn't actually spend any time (in the first third, which is where I stopped) actually defending climatology predictions in any quantitative way, and of course that's where all the real disagreements lie.

"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."

In other words, Dutch appears to be arguing with the kooks (who think that "global warming" doesn't exist and carbon dioxide doesn't affect climate at all--do such people even exist?) and not with the people who feel that climatology, particularly the popularized version which includes famines, mass migrations and disappearing continents by 2050, is unsound. What would it take to disprove my skepticism? It would help if AGW advocates would actually honestly answer critiques instead of dodging or condescending, but my doubts would be irrefutably laid to rest if the other system inputs (solar energy) could be kept constant or decreased while CO2 rose, and temperature continued to rise as climate models predict[1]. Do that for, say, ten years, and show a consistent temperature rise, and I'll call the climate models validated. What we have so far looks more like over-fitting the data, to use the machine-learning term.

-Max

Edit: [1] Specifically, if I get to choose the solar inputs and other inputs, you get to choose the CO2 levels, at any level which makes the model still predict a temperature rise. In this case, "I" is obviously not MaxWilson but a generic, skeptic "red force." "You" is also a generic, theory-defending "blue force."

[Edi]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

Interesting link, Edi. I'm disappointed that he spends so much time arguing with a straw man: people who think carbon dioxide has zero effect on the climate. He doesn't actually spend any time (in the first third, which is where I stopped) actually defending climatology predictions in any quantitative way, and of course that's where all the real disagreements lie.

Riddle me this Max: How the goddamn hell are you in any way competent to dismiss Mr. Dutch if you didn't bother to read his argument in its entirety?

He uses roughly the first third to smack down the idiot brigade (yes, it does exist, I've run into its representatives several times) precisely so that they can be told to bugger off the moment they try to bleat something.

The substantive arguments are further down. Yes, they focus on CO2 mostly, but that's something that impacts all climate models. His argument is based on the known properties of atmospheric CO2 and its effects. He also tackles many of the inconsistencies in the AGW position and the arguments include the documented impact of solar input of energy per surface area vs human caused input and various other things.

The statistical analysis of sources for various scientific arguments is also revealing in many places on just how things are often portrayed in the general media.

It's long, it's sometimes boring and it's not necessarily easy to understand, but I have enough working knowledge of math, physics and chemistry to understand his numbers and enough grasp of logic to understand his arguments, where they come from and how they follow.

If that kind of detailed arguments gets nothing better than a TLDR response, the person so responding can be dismissed as being full of crap and unqualified to comment meaningfully on the subject.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Edi

Riddle me this Max: How... are you in any way competent to dismiss Mr. Dutch if you didn't bother to read his argument in its entirety?

If you want to be technical about it, I was dismissing *you* as having recommended an irrelevant article. Now that you've explained that the real value is further in, I've gone back to see if he has anything to say after all. The section "Running the Numbers", about 65% of the way through, starts to be relevant and interesting. "A Step In the Right Direction" briefly refutes a statement by Richard Lindzen about sea temperatures (I haven't read Lindzen's paper here but Dutch is persuasive). And... that's it. Maybe six paragraphs in the whole thing not dealing with kooks and fools.

(Not that those kooks don't thoroughly deserve smacking-down. But I don't care about them and you're wasting my time by trying to make me read refutations of their arguments.)

-Max

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

...What would it take to disprove my skepticism? ... my doubts would be irrefutably laid to rest if the other system inputs (solar energy) could be kept constant or decreased while CO2 rose, and temperature continued to rise as climate models predict[1]. Do that for, say, ten years, and show a consistent temperature rise, and I'll call the climate models validated. What we have so far looks more like over-fitting the data, to use the machine-learning term.

-Max

The problem here is manifold.

- It has been shown in excruciating detail that 10 year variance renders any such small sample size to be irrelevant, for better or worse, to the trend as a whole.

- If there is something to this (and that is a big IF to just disregard completely), then we really don't have much more time than that to start impacting the system, due to its enormity, and inertia.

- By the time your 10 year test is done, the world will be either destabilizing over direct supply/demand issues for oil, or will be near that point anyways, due to rate of oil field depletion, and increasing world population needs.

- Combine these factors and you see if we wait 10 years, not only will we have little useful data (beyond studies of direct atmospheric interactions), but we will be forced to change our methods of operation anyways.


Ultimately the human race is going to have to come to grips with our dilemma - in most large scale systems, the need to act is generally more pressing than our ability to sit around and do studies, and pilot projects, and propaganda wars.

[chrispedersen]

The problem here is manifold.

- By the time your 10 year test is done, the world will be either destabilizing over direct supply/demand issues for oil, or will be near that point anyways, due to rate of oil field depletion, and increasing world population needs.

Why do you suppose the world doesn't destabilize over, say, platinum? Or paladium, or uranium? What is it specifically about oil that makes it so inherently destabilizing?

Secondly, while I do agree that a tipping point for total oil production has been reached, I don't agree with the concept of world population needs.

Demand for any commodity is elastic. As price goes up, other alternatives become more attractive. Spurring the development of other alternatives. Free market economy in action.

[AdmiralZhao]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Why do you suppose the world doesn't destabilize over, say, platinum? Or paladium, or uranium? What is it specifically about oil that makes it so inherently destabilizing?

Secondly, while I do agree that a tipping point for total oil production has been reached, I don't agree with the concept of world population needs.

Demand for any commodity is elastic. As price goes up, other alternatives become more attractive. Spurring the development of other alternatives. Free market economy in action.

After a certain point, the demand for oil is elastic only in the sense that the groups that cannot afford it will die off. Oil is vital to nearly every aspect of modern society, and in particular to the industrialized agriculture that America uses to feed our population. Without at least a baseline amount of oil, the truck which delivers food to the grocery store does not arrive, and I have go Hinnom-style on my next door neighbors.

We have many trillions of dollars of infrastructure which can only use oil. And because everything currently relies on oil, any effort to upgrade this infrastructure will also require large amounts of oil. The scenario that people are worried about is that the free market doesn't start responding until oil is scarce and difficult to acquire, and at that point we don't have the energy resources to both maintain our society, acquire new oil, and upgrade our infrastructure.

This is one of the reasons why oil is different from platinum, paladium, or uranium. Society does not need constant inputs of these metals to function, and we can develop alternatives to these metals without needing large new stocks of these metals.

This is also why people want to see early development of alternatives to oil. When oil starts running low, we want oil to be in the same category as platinum, paladium, and uranium, i.e. something that is not hugely vital, and that we can continue to phase out without needing large new inputs.

[Edi]

As promised, a reply addressing the article Licker linked:

I see several problems with the stuff in that article. Not about the sun cycles as such, I'll take his word at face value regarding the cycle lengths and on the cosmic radiation and cloud cover variation following that.

But the following things:

• The CO2 curves he says are of doubtful significance follow the sunspot cycles even if not at the same magnitude and curve shape, especially during the 1940s. At that point CO2 concentration increase from the 1800s is up roughly 10% and then starts to gain on the other curves. No mention of the IR trapping properties of CO2 anywhere, not addressed, though an increased sunspot cycle makes sense for the rest of it.
• Related to the above, there is no consideration whether there was an El Nino phenomenon in effect during the temperature spike in the early 1900s. IIRC, there has been research into the El Nino that indicated this would have been the case. It contributed significantly to the Dust Bowl phenomenon in the US and the droughts that followed the Great Depression. No mention at all.
• He then returns to the solar cycles and cosmic radiation argument and continues as if this was the only probable cause and the solar cycle graphics he has only show the 11 year cycles, which is a geologic eyeblink. Nothing to support the stuff about the longer cycles.
• The same research to El Nino I mention above (what I remember from a BBC TV documentary, so no links, sadly ) also talks about there being fairly strong evidence of El Nino effects causing certain events in the past that affected old human civilizations, for example the droughts that destroyed Ur in Babylonia and devastated some Meso- and South American civilizations. All of these events involved significant temperature increases due to strong El Nino effects (much stronger than the early 1990s).
• The section about water vapor being the most important greenhouse gas again neglects the fact that while some amount of greenhouse gases are necessary to maintain a habitable temperature and that water vapor is by volume the greatest one, it is nowhere near as effective at trapping infrared wavelengths as CO2 is. Much like methane is 20 times more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas (but much shorter lived before it degrades to CO2), CO2 is more effective weight for weight. If the difference is similar, even modest CO2 increases would show increased temperatures.
• The part about temperature graphs following CO2 graphs and spiking: As temperature increases, sources of CO2 that have been unavailable become available. There is a staggering amount of methane trapped in the permafrost in Siberia and the Canadian north. As temperature rises, the permafrost melts. The methane is no longer frozen in place and is released into the atmosphere, where it shortly degrades to CO2. A cyclical repetition would see temperature rises melt existing permafrost, then glaciation causing permafrost again. This is a very plausible explanation for those portions of his graphs. I do not know what mechanisms later cause the CO2 concentration to decline, but that is not relevant here.
• The article bounces back and forth between time periods of tens of thousands and millions and even hundreds of millions of years and uses the same arguments throughout. In some sense this seems deliberately dishonest, though it could be an honest oversight. Hundreds of millions of years ago the continents were not where they are now. This means the sea currents were different as well and their different interactions could have resulted in a significantly warmer or colder period of time due to various climate mechanisms not related to CO2, so even higher concentrations could allow for ice ages. I touched on that way back in my first post, but not in as much detail, though I mentioned the effect of an equatorial warm current counteracting the cold Antarctic currents.

Those are the concerns and questions that I noticed on the first read-through and I'm certain I could get some more if I really went over it with a fine tooth comb. And that's outside my own professional field (computers) at that.

I am not saying that he is necessarily entirely wrong, but just based on that article, there are gaps in the solar radiation theory you can drive a tank division through. He makes the same mistake he accuses the CO2 crowd of making: He ignores a lot of other factors that have direct impact and then attributes the lot to his own theory. Or then that's a really dumbed down version of what he does.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Edi

I see several problems with the stuff in that article. *snip* I am not saying that he is necessarily entirely wrong, but just based on that article, there are gaps in the solar radiation theory you can drive a tank division through. He makes the same mistake he accuses the CO2 crowd of making: He ignores a lot of other factors that have direct impact and then attributes the lot to his own theory. Or then that's a really dumbed down version of what he does.

No quibbles here. Those graphs interpolations look overly-convenient, too.

The data do raise real questions though (is El Nino or increased sun activity responsible for the temperature spike in the 1940, or are they related? Where does the CO2 go during cooling?). I'm not saying those questions can't be answered, just that if AGW advocates want to be taken seriously they should supply answers instead of attacking strawmen. (I don't even care if the answers supplied are *wrong*, at least there will be something concrete to address.)

In any case, thanks for your thoughts. You have supplied your answers.

Edit: another set of 'real questions' is raised in Monckton's article here http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newslet...0807/index.cfm. ("GCMs make unphysical assumptions.") Feel free to critique Hafemeister and Schwartz too.

-Max

P.S. Hafemeister and Schwartz do a better job than I had remembered at addressing the sunspot issue. By which I mean at least they acknowledge it exists.

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by Edi

As promised, a reply addressing the article Licker linked:

[*]The section about water vapor being the most important greenhouse gas again neglects the fact that while some amount of greenhouse gases are necessary to maintain a habitable temperature and that water vapor is by volume the greatest one, it is nowhere near as effective at trapping infrared wavelengths as CO2 is. Much like methane is 20 times more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas (but much shorter lived before it degrades to CO2), CO2 is more effective weight for weight. If the difference is similar, even modest CO2 increases would show increased temperatures.

Hmmm.. First, I think all of these claims are hocum. I believe that CH4 is more like 50x than CO2 - and I have never heard this comment that Ch4 'degrades' into CO2. Especially in short periods of time.

Burn it, combust it .. sure.

And the claim that CO2 is more effective weight for weight is purely wrong.

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by AdmiralZhao

After a certain point, the demand for oil is elastic only in the sense that the groups that cannot afford it will die off. Oil is vital to nearly every aspect of modern society, and in particular to the industrialized agriculture that America uses to feed our population. Without at least a baseline amount of oil, the truck which delivers food to the grocery store does not arrive, and I have go Hinnom-style on my next door neighbors.

We have many trillions of dollars of infrastructure which can only use oil. And because everything currently relies on oil, any effort to upgrade this infrastructure will also require large amounts of oil. The scenario that people are worried about is that the free market doesn't start responding until oil is scarce and difficult to acquire, and at that point we don't have the energy resources to both maintain our society, acquire new oil, and upgrade our infrastructure.

This is one of the reasons why oil is different from platinum, paladium, or uranium. Society does not need constant inputs of these metals to function, and we can develop alternatives to these metals without needing large new stocks of these metals.

This is also why people want to see early development of alternatives to oil. When oil starts running low, we want oil to be in the same category as platinum, paladium, and uranium, i.e. something that is not hugely vital, and that we can continue to phase out without needing large new inputs.

'Die off' is a bit melodramatic. We just absorbed a tripling spike in the price of oil, and as far as I know, no deaths have occured because of it.

In point of fact, you are quite incorrect about society needing constant inputs of these metals. These metals are essential to hydrocarbon cracking, to computers, to Grignard reagents.

Yes, the scale of need is smaller - but that has to do with price. which was sort of my point. As oil increases price its relative importance will diminish.

It is critical now, because it was easily exploitable.

We continue to try to exploit oil, because even at its current prices, it is *less* of an lifestyle change than the alternatives.