Global warming & the Mann report

[Sidhe]

saddly your missing the point that innaction may well cause death if we do nothing, at least doing something may help to save lives? Humans are not subject so much to natures laws as they used to be and this is becoming steadilly more true, whilst there are examples of interfering in nature that I would agree are wrong, interfering in our own environments, is not subject to such laws.

 

[BasketCase]

Scuse me for being absent from this one for five days.

Sidhe, I was clear long ago on the idea that doing nothing can get people killed. The point I was trying to make is that sometimes the correct thing to do is to do nothing. The fact that that little story happened to be nature-centric has nothing to do with this. People just want to help, so they do the sensible thing, and end up simply causing more damage.

Sub in a different story if you like: you walk into the bathroom one morning and notice the rug's on fire. What's the sensible thing to do? Douse it with water.

But what if it's an electrical fire....?

Hop over to the Exit Mundi web site for a few different scenarios on global warming--one Doomsday scenario on the site is this: humans succeed in reducing CO2 emissions. Problem is, the world's plants are still there, and still eating CO2 at the same rate they always were. Result: a CO2 collapse and an Ice Age.

 

[carlosMM]

ainwood: sorry, this one fell off my radar.

Now, first of all: I pulled your stunt on you - annoying, hu? I apologize! strawmen suck, but you will have to admit that mine was better. Why?

Because you gave only part of the data and then a statement contrary to the data you posted. Obviously, this openes the door wide for attacks.
Now, if you'd linked the FULL report, or if you had SAID that "elsewhere in the report they state [insert verbatim quote]" or so......

Please, can you link to the report? If is days what you say it says, then my polarizing may be wrong.....

 

[batteryacid]

@ global warming

As I and Mr. Blonde wrote in another climate issue here, the term global warming is misguided, global weather change is more correct, as the average global temperature is only one parameter that is changing (towards what is uncertain, as for example changes in Cloud formation by aerosol pollution can lead to cooling and heating depending on which sort of clouds are produced and which droplet size distribution they will have)

What is more important concerning us humans are other effects:

- measurable loss of fertile soil (in Africa and China a very seious issue, especiallyChina, where over 70% of the great plains in the northern part are in danger of loosing fertility)

-More Hurricans
-a more frequent El-Nino, which has a heavy effect on the food harvest in South America and Asia

This shortage in food will lead in future to more pressure on people in these countries, more social unrest, tension between states etc. and thus a declining world economy (especially when China comes into troubles with food production, as it can be nearly certainly predicted when no drastic measures are undertaken)

This should concern people more, not the debate if the average global temperature has risen 0.2° or 1° in the last decade - all scientific prognoses have uncertainties, and all scientists know it, but some make more fuss about it than othes. Politicians always use these uncertainties as excuse to not undertake measures that wouldn´t be liked by their voters.

Above mentioned effects are real and can be observed by everyone and will effect everyone in future.

 

[batteryacid]

Double post due to browser lagging

 

[ainwood]

Please, can you link to the report? If is days what you say it says, then my polarizing may be wrong.....

I linked to it in the first post.


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Anyway - the issue is now being debated in teh Wall Street Journal, apparently (its a pay-site, so I can't get the full version).

But here is a synopsis & analysis from a blog I read (a political blog; not a global warming one)

A couple of weeks ago there was the NAS report, which to the aware reader put the nails in the coffin of the Hockey Stick model of global warming. It went as far as they could go without coming out and saying that it is all so much hot air. Now the Wall Street Journal has a report from three independent statisticians who undertook an investigation of the so-called Hockey Stick Team method of analysis, in attempting to reconstruct millenial temperature records and showing the 1990s were the hottest decade ever for this period. They found they could not reproduce the results and that the methods were seriously flawed.

The trouble is that there’s no reason to believe that Mr. Mann, or his "hockey stick" graph of global temperature changes, is right. Questions were raised about Mr. Mann’s paper almost as soon as it was published. In 2003, two Canadians, Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre, published an article in a peer-reviewed journal showing that Mr. Mann’s methodology could produce hockey sticks from even random, trendless data.

The report commissioned by the House Energy Committee, due to be released today, backs up and reinforces that conclusion. The three researchers — Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University and Yasmin H. Said of Johns Hopkins University — are not climatologists; they’re statisticians. Their task was to look at Mr. Mann’s methods from a statistical perspective and assess their validity. Their conclusion is that Mr. Mann’s papers are plagued by basic statistical errors that call his conclusions into doubt. Further, Professor Wegman’s report upholds the finding of Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick that Mr. Mann’s methodology is biased toward producing "hockey stick" shaped graphs.


At least one commenter at climate audit has tried to cast aspersions on the report because the authors are "just statisticians". Unfortunately that doesn't hold water, because all the reconstructive methods are statistical. There are no physical models for example translating the various proxy measurements into temperatures, as you might naively expect. That was one of the first utterly incredible things I found when I started reading these papers. Statisticians are just the people to look at this in one respect, they found the basic, undergraduate level errors that were committed and not rectified. Even things like the disapperance of the Medieval Warm Period should have set off alarm bells, but apparently not...

The claim originates from a 1999 paper by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann. Prior to Mr. Mann’s work, the accepted view, as embodied in the U.N.’s 1990 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was that the world had undergone a warming period in the Middle Ages, followed by a mid-millennium cold spell and a subsequent warming period — the current one. That consensus, as shown in the first of the two IPCC-provided graphs nearby, held that the Medieval warm period was considerably warmer than the present day.

Mr. Mann’s 1999 paper eliminated the Medieval warm period from the history books, with the result being the bottom graph you see here. It’s a man-made global-warming evangelist’s dream, with a nice, steady temperature oscillation that persists for centuries followed by a dramatic climb over the past century. In 2001, the IPCC replaced the first graph with the second in its third report on climate change, and since then it has cropped up all over the place. Al Gore uses it in his movie.


Ah yes, Gore's movie. Michael Moore had a movie just before a presidential election and now Al Gore has one just before mid-terms. Funny that. But movies are irrelevant. The key is why did the lack of a MWP not raise immediate questions (OK it did, just not with the right people). A historian would have been suspicious, but then they're not climate scientists.

But they go on to lay the smack-down on what I like to think of as "clique science". To anyone mildly interested in the topic but no horse in the race it is quite clear why this circus has lasted so long. But it has taken years for someone to say it out loud in a major paper.

Mr. Wegman brings to bear a technique called social-network analysis to examine the community of climate researchers. His conclusion is that the coterie of most frequently published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely. "As analyzed in our social network," Mr. Wegman writes, "there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis." He continues: "However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility."


The to-ing and fro-ing over the years and the enormous effort to even try to replicate the results of the seminal papers bears testament to the conclusion, without the use of "social network theory"...

In other words, climate research often more closely resembles a mutual-admiration society than a competitive and open-minded search for scientific knowledge. And Mr. Wegman’s social-network graphs suggest that Mr. Mann himself — and his hockey stick — is at the center of that network.


And that is about as damning as you can get, when you read of how the Hockey Stick model made its way into the IPCC reports and changed the IPCC's own outlook on climate and in its turn that of many governments and arm-chair commentators who suddenly became experts on who should and shouldn't be "believed" about climate. Mann appears at the centre of all this, from IPCC panels, to the initial dodgy-as-hell "research" and reviewing of subsequent papers.

It is all a prime example of how science should not be conducted and what happens when bad science gets made into political policy.

The interesting thing to watch is how attacks on the authors of the WSJ article progress. There's the standard avenues of not being climate scientists (usual fallacious appeal to authority) or being in the pay of someone or political motivation. If that happens you won't see a serious attempt at proving why they are professionally unable to do the job, or why their criticisms are invalid based solely on science.

In the longer term it'll be interesting to see how the Hockey Stick disappears and what replaces it, since it is the primary historical tool used to justify the current outlook. Remember it made the IPCC change their position back in the 90s. How would politics surrounding climate look today if they had rejected it back then as badly performed undergraduate level analysis?

BTW - as stated before, I am on-the-fence re global warming. But I am concerned that its turning into a religion rather than a science.

 

[Arcadian83]

Making extreme-long-term policy based on ideas that are still continually changing their minds is more likely to cause catastrophe than prevent it. If we can do this much damage with the unintended consequences of our actions, imagine how much damage we can do when we intentionally mess with the planet's thermostat.

Most experts I've known prefer "global climate change" to "global warming" as a generalization of the issue. It is an issue more complex than it first seems. For instance, it is theorized that an increase in global temperatures could decrease thermohaline circulation, causing the gulf stream to "shut down", which in turn would have a cooling effect on the eastern US and northern Europe. This idea is also 'on trial' with little clearly supporting or refuting evidence.

The Kyoto Protocol is more about nations giving other nations money and making political clout than about reducing greenhouse emissions. It makes me think of a situation where people decide they need to work together and therefore start pointing fingers and grabbing at each other's throats.