Global Warming

[carlosMM]

Ok. But if you cannot link to CO2 to temperature in the past, what is the justification for linking it to temperature in the future?

If climate is so susceptible to sunspots, etc., that the CO2 overprint is not the driver, then that effectively undermines the Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. In fact, that's what a lot of us have been saying all along; that CO2 is not that important. This sounds almost like a concession.

Another example: you talk about something that scuffer never said:

he said you cannot PLOT the two and get something meaninful. This you turn to LINK the two. Now, PLOTTING ignores everything but the two factors alone. LINKING means including all the rest: additional CO2 sources and sinks, methane levels due to changed vegetation etc.

It is NOT possible to find a DIRECT LINEAR connection between CO2 and temp, but it is very easy to LINK temp tp CO2 if other factors are inlcuded.

Oversimplyfication on your part.

Well, this is what modelers are trying to do.
/quote]To the best of our abilities. and, as proven by a HUGE LOT of publications, they are getting rather good at it.

But if GW is untestable, and it sure seems to be, it doesn't matter if the problem is inherent in the issue or not. If a premise is untestable, it is not science, period. Why it is untestable doesn't matter.

And again your #easy way out' - you simply demand a level of testability thta is above whatever can be delivered, then say 'bleh, untestable'.

Your stadnards that you seem to imply are ridiculous, if we apply them to other fileds, I'd say the existence of electrons is also untestable and thus you need to stop using electrcity ASAP, as it must be wrong

 

[carlosMM]

Just throwing in a wrench at this point (or not).

Could someone summarize the main points of this beast to save us poor ignorant (lazy) people from reading through all the pages.

scientific consensus: humans cause a massive warming of the athmosphere, mainly by various sources of greenhouse gasses, which push their levels above 'natural' (CO2 and methane, mainly). This warming trend has increased to the point where the rise is steeper over the last 150 years than any reise in the recent past (roughly 100,000 years). This trend will most likely push earths climate out of the window of repeating glacial / interglacial ages. As all of mankinds history happened in this phase, it seems to be a bad idea to induce such a massive and sudden shift.


critics: they fail to make anything but borad allegactions and miscomparisons.
There WERE similar changes in the past - amongst them the K/T boundray evenl, killing the vast majority of land vertebrates, but ther were NOT any similar spikes in the past thta did NOT have catastrophic effects. No critic of the theory of GW has borught any evidence for a'harmless' past spike ever.
There is NO non-human explanation for the present spike (again, they totally fail to bring even indications, much less proof); to the contrary all other factors should lead to a cooling (see the paper by Ruddiman that I posted; contact my via PM if you want a PDF).

These arguments failing, critics invariably attack the science by jacking up the level of proof they demand. if more is delivered, they simply ask for more AGAIN! Ad infinitum.


I guess that sums this thread up quite well.

 

[Scuffer]

Another example: you talk about something that scuffer never said

Thanks for picking that one up I'm losing track!

 

[BasketCase]

No surprise there.

Nothing outlasts this thread. It keeps posting, and posting, and posting, and posting, and......
(No, I'm not exactly helping, either)

 

[gene90]

scientific consensus: humans cause a massive warming of the athmosphere, mainly by various sources of greenhouse gasses, which push their levels above 'natural' (CO2 and methane, mainly). This warming trend has increased to the point where the rise is steeper over the last 150 years than any reise in the recent past (roughly 100,000 years). This trend will most likely push earths climate out of the window of repeating glacial / interglacial ages. As all of mankinds history happened in this phase, it seems to be a bad idea to induce such a massive and sudden shift.

Uh huh. There is a "scientific consensus" that GW is/will:

"massive"
driven by CO2 and methane
steeper than any other temperature increase in 100,000 years
shift climate out of glacials

Would you like to present papers that make these claims? Because GothMog's version seems to call GW "detectable".

they fail to make anything but borad allegactions and miscomparisons.

Yeah, sure buddy.

It's obvious that this debate is winding down but you haven't produced any sort of meaningful correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature.

There WERE similar changes in the past

No, there have been similar changes in temperature the last 100,000 years, and there will continue to be similar changes with or without industrial input of CO2. There is no evidence that the current warming is anomalous. There is no definitive link between CO2 and warming. All claims that there are are based on models.

- amongst them the K/T boundray evenl, killing the vast majority of land vertebrates

This is misleading.

For those non-geologists reading this, the K/T event was a time when something like 70% of land vertebrates died. The reason they died wasn't global warming, it was because an asteroid hit Earth and gauged a crater 300 miles wide in the Yucatan, followed by a massive volcanic outpouring in India. While the amount of limestone vaporized by the actual impact may have elevated atmospheric CO2 levels, that Carlos blames the extinction squarely on GW is blatantly dishonest. No, I suspect that the Western Hemisphere exploding into flames and a year of global darkness might have contributed to the death of animal life too in addition to global warming. I am disgusted by this breach of ethics, but since there isn't a great selection of opponents in this thread, I will continue.

Scientists have a responsibility to the public to provide accurate information and context to the public and policymakers. When Carlos blames the K/T extinction on "global warming" and failed to mention that the Earth was hit by a mountain-sized spacerock that caused a global nuclearwinter, and does this to advance a quasi-political agenda, this is nothing less than professional malpractice.

but ther were NOT any similar spikes in the past thta did NOT have catastrophic effects. No critic of the theory of GW has borught any evidence for a'harmless' past spike ever.

Fallacy: Shifting the burden of proof.

There is NO non-human explanation for the present spike (again, they totally fail to bring even indications, much less proof); to the contrary all other factors should lead to a cooling (see the paper by Ruddiman that I posted; contact my via PM if you want a PDF).

No, what you actually are trying to say is that you can't get your models to work without anthropogenic input. Actually, there are plenty of non-human inputs: melting permafrost, reduced CO2 dissolution in oceans...due to solar forcing.

These arguments failing, critics invariably attack the science by jacking up the level of proof they demand.

Wrong. Maybe before you announce the imminent destruction of civilization, and perhaps the world itself, you should present us with a clear statistical correlation between CO2 and temperature over the last 150 years. I want an r value of 0.7 or higher, and a 99% CI that the 20th Century was the warmest time period of the last 10,000 years.

 

[gene90]

It is NOT possible to find a DIRECT LINEAR connection between CO2 and temp, but it is very easy to LINK temp tp CO2 if other factors are inlcuded.

I'm interested in seeing the cause-and-effect relationship over the last 150 years plotted, with r=0.7 or higher, and a 99% CI that the 20th century was the warmest in the last 10,000 years.

To the best of our abilities. and, as proven by a HUGE LOT of publications, they are getting rather good at it.

A "huge lot" of publications doesn't prove anything. It just means that there are a lot of modelers.

As I previously pointed out, pre-Galilean astronomers were able to predict planetary positions to within one degree using the Ptolemaic (Geocentric) model of the Solar System. That doesn't make the Ptolemaic system right.

Like the Ptolemaic system, the climate models are able to produce results similar to the real world. Also like the Ptolemaic system, they have problems when tested by real-world observation.

Carlos has fallen into a conceptual trap in which he fails to understand that model outputs are not the real world, and that occasionally getting something right is not tantamount to proof.

Your stadnards that you seem to imply are ridiculous, if we apply them to other fileds, I'd say the existence of electrons is also untestable and thus you need to stop using electrcity ASAP, as it must be wrong

Nope. Electrons were discovered through empirical observation. But GW only exists in software models and is apparently not supported by observation.

And my standards are not ridiculous, they are reasonable. If you want us to believe that GW is a problem, show us the direct cause-and-effect link between historical CO2 emission and climate. This is apparently much harder for you than I expected it to be.

Signing international treaties and suggesting we change our energy sources when you can't even show a clear cause-and-effect relationship is what is ridiculous.

By the way, your analogy is an embarrassment to your side. You are the one that wants to ban something because of somethings that "might" happen but which you obviously have no evidence for. If you found a correlation between megawatts of power generated and the temperature rise of the 20th century, it would be entirely consistent with your logic for you to actually ban electricity. (In fact, maybe I shouldn't have just planted the idea.) Hmmm...

 

[gene90]

Scientific models are as good as the data they explain and the validated predictions they make.
Truth is an illusion.

Ummm, we have a physicist here who is directly working with GW, something on which international treaties are signed.

And he just said, "truth is an illusion"?

As I said to CarlosMM, sure buddy.

Either CO2 is causing climate to warm or it isn't.

The idea is either true or false.

 

[gene90]

Wait, don't you mean the Gulf Stream? Climate wouldn't shut down the North Atlantic Gyre. To do so, you'd have to either change the size or shape of the Atlantic Ocean, or stop the rotation of the Earth!

Yes, the Gulf Stream is the NE-trending component of the North Atlantic Gyre.

Whether or not it can be shut down depends on which climate model you most believe in.

The idea has been floated that if we melted the Greenland icecap, we would lower the salinity of the North Atlantic, lowering the surface density, thus keeping the surface waters from sinking as it does normally every fall with the enhanced salinity caused by formation of sea ice.

This would supposedly shut off the bottom component of the gyre, therefore cutting off the conveyer belt, including the surface component (Gulf Stream).

This was part of the theme of The Day After Tomorrow but not a product of the movie, it had been around for a while before that.

I wouldn't worry. The model does not have strong support.

 

[gene90]

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THAT??????? (please do answer!)

It's called "Poisoning the well". I mentioned that Audubon had issues with windpower. You poisoned the well by claiming bias in favor of birds. That's a logical fallacy.

Now, I raised a lot of issues other than windfarms and birds. Why don't you start by explaining why the previously mentioned James Lovelock, who has a very reactionary position on GW, is so strongly opposed to windfarms?

This is just a part of my most recent post about windfarms:

No, the absurd cost (in money and resources), gaping inefficiency, unreliability, tremendous use of land, and inconvenient location will stop the widespread use of windfarms. The bird issue is simply evidence of environmental cost.

It's not hard to find websites of political groups and individuals opposed to them, either:

http://www.countryguardian.net/case.htm
http://www.warmwell.com/windfarms.html
http://www.surfbirds.com/blogs/mduchamp/

What really doesn't help is that the second link claims that it is apparently cheaper to filter CO2 out of coal powerplant emissions than it is to displace wattage to windfarms.

And I attacked a lot more energy sources than just windfarms, but got no comment on that, either.

 

[gene90]

It isn't a concession. It is restating something obvious. There are many factors involved in the warming and cooling of the planet. Your required evidence of a direct statistical link between temperature and CO2 is not possible.

If there is no statisical link between temperature and CO2, then there is no reason to believe that CO2 emission will cause a rise in temperature. Therefore, GW is invalid.

I would imagine we can agree that if GW does occur, the consequences will be hugely severe.

No.

Firstly, I am not discrediting them. I am simply uninterested in their opinions for the reasons I have laid out above.

Same thing.

 

[Scuffer]

If there is no statisical link between temperature and CO2, then there is no reason to believe that CO2 emission will cause a rise in temperature. Therefore, GW is invalid.

Again, you will accept no evidence except the impossible. To gather the evidence you require would need two identical test planets and a great big CO2 generator.

Same thing.

I would be grateful if you could explain how not being interested in someone's opinions is the same as trying to discredit them. The debate is not about bird life but global warming. Unless the Aubudon Society's opinion on the ill-effect of windfarms on bird life has some bearing on global warming, I will ignore it to my heart's content.

 

[Scuffer]

Ummm, we have a physicist here who is directly working with GW, something on which international treaties are signed.

And he just said, "truth is an illusion"?

As I said to CarlosMM, sure buddy.

Either CO2 is causing climate to warm or it isn't.

The idea is either true or false.

I don't claim to be such an expert on the myriad forms of logical fallacy as you (and I certainly am loathe to spray them around in place of actual debate) but surely you are aiming to discredit Gothmog on the basis he says 'truth is an illusion' and works with GW?

I don't really think you have proven your hypothesis (p=0.99).

 

[gene90]

Again, you will accept no evidence except the impossible. To gather the evidence you require would need two identical test planets and a great big CO2 generator.

No, I'm not talking about setting up an experiment, I am talking about finding the correlation between CO2 and global temperature.

I repeat myself:

If there is no statistical link between CO2 concentration and average global temperature, then global warming is a rejected hypothesis.

Do you not agree? If not, what do you say for yourself? Because every time somebody here says, "There is no statistically provable link" that helps me and hurts you. Why you can say that, and still believe in global warming is completely beyond me.

I would be grateful if you could explain how not being interested in someone's opinions is the same as trying to discredit them. The debate is not about bird life but global warming.

And "renewable" energy.

Unless the Aubudon Society's opinion on the ill-effect of windfarms on bird life has some bearing on global warming, I will ignore it to my heart's content.

Now you're trying to exclude a significant part of the debate because you find it inconvenient.

If you don't want to talk about this, don't mention any "renewable" energy sources and I won't discuss it with you. Otherwise, I am well within my rights to talk about this.

 

[gene90]

I don't claim to be such an expert on the myriad forms of logical fallacy as you (and I certainly am loathe to spray them around in place of actual debate)

Everyone should be at least as familiar with epistemology as I am, and that certainly isn't saying much.

but surely you are aiming to discredit Gothmog on the basis he says 'truth is an illusion' and works with GW?

No, because I am not rejecting GothMog's argument on this count. I just couldn't resist poking fun at such a strange comment.

I don't really think you have proven your hypothesis (p=0.99).

"reject an opinion" = "not listen to"

'Poisoning the well' is when you reject an opinion out of hand because of the person the opinion comes from.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/poiswell.html

Saying that you don't trust Audobon's opinion on windfarms because maybe they like birds too much is a perfect example. It is, like any fallacy, an abortion of logic.

You are within your rights to ignore Audobon. You are also within your rights to be illogical and wrong, if you choose. I cannot force anyone here to think soundly, but I can and will call people out when they don't.

 

[Scuffer]

If there is no statistical link between CO2 concentration and average global temperature, then global warming is a rejected hypothesis.

Do you not agree? If not, what do you say for yourself?

I would agree with that entirely. However, unless anyone can figure out a way of directly analysing these with no other factors involved, we can not test this hypothesis. Without an controlled environment, we would need thousands of years of good data on all the variables. We don't have that now, and by the time we get it, we'll know anyway. We need to know sooner.

Now you're trying to exclude a significant part of the debate because you find it inconvenient.

If you don't want to talk about this, don't mention any "renewable" energy sources and I won't discuss it with you. Otherwise, I am well within my rights to talk about this.

To begin with, the Aubudon Society views on windfarms do not represent a significant part of the GW debate. Anywhere in the world.

Secondly, renewable energy has not entered into the discussion I have had with you. It has almost entirely been about the level of proof you require. If you would like to talk about renewable resources or bird protection, start a thread, and we'll take it from there. Call it 'Renewable energy sucks: Aubudon Society rejects windfarms because they might kill birds' if you fancy.

 

[Scuffer]

Everyone should be at least as familiar with epistemology as I am, and that certainly isn't saying much.

It certainly isn't!

Saying that you don't trust Audobon's opinion on windfarms because maybe they like birds too much is a perfect example. It is, like any fallacy, an abortion of logic. You are within your rights to ignore Audobon. You are also within your rights to be illogical and wrong, if you choose. I cannot force anyone here to think soundly, but I can and will call people out when they don't

I trust Aubodon's opinion implictly. I do not reject it out of hand. I read it, contemplated it, and rejected its importance towards global warming.

They are absolutely right and proper to draw attention to the bird killing potential of wind farms. The fact that I overlook their concerns in favour of the wider issue is neither illogical nor wrong.

You can call me out on whatever you like. It does not disguise that a good part of your debate is rubbishing everyone else.

 

[gene90]

I would agree with that entirely. However, unless anyone can figure out a way of directly analysing these with no other factors involved, we can not test this hypothesis.

And what does science do with untestable hypotheses?

Either dump them, or put them on the shelf.

Here is what one site, entitled Skepticism and Pseudoscience, says about it:

An untestable hypothesis is outside of the realm of science and is therefore useless to the advancement of knowledge.

http://www.theness.com/articles/skepticismandscience.html

Now, let's look up "pseudoscience" in The Skeptic's Dictionary

A pseudoscience is set of ideas based on theories put forth as scientific when they are not scientific.

Scientific theories are characterized by such things as (a) being based upon empirical observation rather than the authority of some sacred text; (b) explaining a range of empirical phenomena; (c) being empirically tested in some meaningful way, usually involving testing specific predictions deduced from the theory; (d) being confirmed rather than falsified by empirical tests or with the discovery of new facts; (e) being impersonal and therefore testable by anyone regardless of personal religious or metaphysical beliefs; (f) being dynamic and fecund, leading investigators to new knowledge and understanding of the interrelatedness of the natural world rather than being static and stagnant leading to no research or development of a better understanding of anything in the natural world; and (g) being approached with skepticism rather than gullibility, especially regarding paranormal forces or supernatural powers, and being fallible and put forth tentatively rather than being put forth dogmatically as infallible.

....


And this is for Carlos, who is constantly touting models whose outputs occasionally coincide with reality:

Pseudoscientists claim to base their theories on empirical evidence, and they may even use some scientific methods, though often their understanding of a controlled experiment is inadequate. Many pseudoscientists relish being able to point out the consistency of their theories with known facts or with predicted consequences, but they do not recognize that such consistency is not proof of anything. It is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition that a good scientific theory be consistent with the facts. A theory which is contradicted by the facts is obviously not a very good scientific theory, but a theory which is consistent with the facts is not necessarily a good theory. For example, "the truth of the hypothesis that plague is due to evil spirits is not established by the correctness of the deduction that you can avoid the disease by keeping out of the reach of the evil spirits" (Beveridge 1957, 118).

All emphasis mine.

http://skepdic.com/pseudosc.html

 

[gene90]

It certainly isn't!
I trust Aubodon's opinion implictly. I do not reject it out of hand. I read it, contemplated it, and rejected its importance towards global warming.

Still a fallacy.

So my style of debate is "rubbishing everyone else" eh?

The burden of proof is on you, the proponents of global warming. You have admitted that the hypothesis is untestable. You are, by all appearances, not interested in presenting evidence, and are instead a True Believer. I am responding as any naturally cynical person would. And it looks to me like you are rapidly losing ground. In fact, I think this debate ended when you admitted GW is a non-testable construct.

 

[Scuffer]

The hypothesis isn't untestable. It just can't be tested it to your 99% standards yet. This is the point I was making originally.

Do you mean I must accept that windfarms are not a useful source of energy because they might kill birds? Or be guilty of a fallacy?

 

[gene90]

The hypothesis isn't untestable. It just can't be tested it to your 99% standards yet.

You can't show a strong correlation between CO2 and climate, or that the 20th century was particularly warm. Most reasonable people would find that that is evidence against global warming. By this point, I'd be happy with 95%.

Do you mean I must accept that windfarms are not a useful source of energy because they might kill birds? Or be guilty of a fallacy?

You are forced to accept Audobon's decision, or undermine it with actual evidence. To say that you don't believe Audubon because they like birds too much is a fallacy.

Funny, I thought you weren't interested in renewables. If you're not, you are wasting my time with this (very dead) issue.