Ping Bil Slowman; The global warming hoax reveiled

How do you think he ended up that way?

I've had to turn the heat on the last two days. That doesn't usually happen till near the end of December.

Since I included the date and time and source of your post in my response to it,

"On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 07:08:17 -0800 (PST), snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com"

I'm tolerably confident that I wasn't responding to anybody else, and yet there doesn't seem to be a corrseponding post in the archive that I can get at.

Granting your capacity to remember different things when addressing the same problem at different times, it does seem to me to be possible that you might have requested that your post should not be archived when you posted it, and are now remembering something different.

A charming story, but incompatible with you post of the 22nd November.

In this context it is a lot closer to weather than climate.

If you were anything like as au fait with the current state of climate modelling as you claim, you'd be aware that the current explantation of the relatively slow warming over the past decade involves the influence of the North Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which is still relatively poorly understood, though we are now starting to get useful information from the Argo program (which you'd know all about if you were as well-informed as you like to pretend).

At the time when a prediction based on this insight might have qualified as a prediction, rather than an explanation, the Argo program was just being launched. Back then we did know about the El Nino/La Nina oscillation, and had started to appreciate that it shows up in the global temperature measurements

Several weeks becomes several months? Models that broke down that fast would be useless for the work that they are being asked to do, and I can't imagine that anybody would waste their time working on them.You do seem to be talking about a different kind of global climate model to the ones that the IPCC is interested in - and has to be interested in, given their charter.

That - at least - is credible.

And that is merely plausible. Such a person would also be unhappy if their reputation were tarred by your imperfect understanding of what you were told.

Or at least the ones that you claim to know about.

Obviously not, because nobody in their right mind would use such a model for such a job., and your claim that they do would seem to have more to do with the imperfection of your memory than anything else.

That doesn't follow. It is difficult to predict the consequences of phenomena one knows very little about, and until we've got a lot more of the Argo data, we don't know how much heat is being moved towards the poles by ocean currents, or what routes it is following.

If you knew anything like as much as you claim about climate modelling, you wouldn't be be silly enough to claim that the late

And a failure to predict relatively small, short term excursions isn't evidence that a model can't predict bigger, longer term excursions. You are bitching about a failure to predict the effect of a 20ppm rise in CO2 levels. It took an 80pmm rise in CO2 levels (from the pre-industrial 280ppm to the 360ppm in the mid-1990s) to generate enough global warming for it to show above the short-term noise level, and what has happened since then has been swamped - unsurprisingly - by more (relatively) short term noise.

We have every prospect of adding 200ppm more CO2 to the atmosphere over the next century. A model doesn't have to be too accurate to tell us that this means quite a lot more warming than we saw over the last century - quite enough to create worrying problems.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You cite authorities. That is, you rely on experts to explain something that's over your head--you said that about the models, not me--and take what they say on faith.

I don't claim any authority, nor do I require any credibility. I only claim I can add, and read, and think. You're free to do the same.

I constantly cite public sources of raw data, but most people don't have the time to waste checking them. So for alls' sake I prefer to point out obvious contradictions, sanity checks. Quickies.

To wit, the common man doesn't need to know what makes a car go to tell whether or not it goes--he can just try driving the car and see. If it doesn't go, it's bogus. If it doesn't have wheels (i.e., if it doesn't solve an obvious, important problem), it's probably bogus.

Having some knowledge of cars--even incomplete knowledge--Mr. Everyman can do even better, even just spot-checking. If he lifts the hood and sees a hamster-wheel + rodent, coupled to the drive shaft, he can make some practical inferences w.r.t performance. Yes, even without calculating turbulent flow in the fuel (feed?) injectors, or factoring in positive feedback from a dangling carrot, or whatever.

One wrong constant in a simulation might show that as a zippy, efficient car with a 200 h.p. hamster.

Global Climate Models fail simple tests like that. They don't know from ocean currents. They don't accurately model clouds. Without those things you can't model heat flow from the equator to the poles, which is what drives our entire climate. That *is* our climate. They assume static ice sheets and static vegetation, i.e., semi-static albedo. IOW, they run on hamsters. And they're missing some wheels.

They're getting better, but they still aren't predictive 100 years or even 20 years--or even 10 years, as we've just seen--into the future.

So, pointing to GCMs as proof of apocalyptic prognostications of doom is, well, bogus. They just aren't nearly that good yet--they don't handle all the many factors well enough--and even if they did we have no way to prove they're right, to know they haven't omitted something important, or just plain made a mistake.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Few people are so lacking in a sense of proportion that they'd bother.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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John Fields has learned the word 'amicable". It is sad that he shows no evidence of knowing what it means.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The ice still hasn't melted in my beer/wine tub from Thursday ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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This (above) is why many serious scientists dare not voice contrary opinions--they'd get lynched, and they know it.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Jim Thompson and John Fields both think that I'm a fraud. This is - of course - a devastating blow to my self-esteem, since I've always had such a high opinion of their judgement, but somehow I guess I'll learn to live with this public humiliation.

But I guess I'll stick around until they get around to telling us which of my hypothetical frauds they have discovered.

This may take a while.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Except that they aren't.

And neither the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period were particularly dramatic temperature excursions. Denialists do claim that the existence of these small and local excursions proves that the warming that we are seeing at the moment isn't anthropogenic, but the logic doesn't really hold up.

To make the argument work you have to claim - and prove - that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, or that the measured concentrations in the atmosphere aren't higher than they have been for 650,000 years (as recorded in the ice core data) and probably for the last 20 million years (if you trust the geological data).

Worrying about the exact fate of Viking settlement is a rather foolish distraction, though your claim that the former settlements are now under a thick layer of ice - when most of them aren't and never have been - does sugggest that you aren't too careful with your facts, nor presumably are you all that careful about where you get them.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

SOL? I don't understand. The meaning I know doesn't work here.

But, I was referring to a whim I posted wayyy back, that you can curve- fit a polynomial that mimics history to perfection, yet has zero predictive value. E.g. the stock market, where that gets tried and is a temporary fad every few years, until it blows up.

Much of the evolution of the main models fits that description--build it, then monkey with the constants until it seems stable, as opposed to a) inputting precise measurements of b) accurately known parameters into c) models that faithfully duplicate physical processes.

I'm told that pre-twiddling the early models railed, either freezing atmosphere, or melting lead.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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As I said - with an example - sceptical scientists don't get lynched and they do get published.

If you want to disagree, you need to provide rather better evidence than your fallible memory of what your anonymous informant told you.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

John Fields seems think that learning to understand the science that underpins our understanding of anthropogenic global warming is equivalent to being indoctrinated in some kind of religious cult.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

One of the requisites of a serious scientist is guts. In fact, bravery is fundamental to a lot of important activities.

Brave people are able to think, because fear doesn't distort their perceptions or reasoning. And brave people make the best partners in most any activity, because you can never trust a coward.

John

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These aren't, stictly speaking. forcings.

If you had read further down the page, you would have come across this line

"It is not possible to state that a certain gas causes an exact percentage of the greenhouse effect. This is because some of the gases absorb and emit radiation at the same frequencies as others, so that the total greenhouse effect is not simply the sum of the influence of each gas. The higher ends of the ranges quoted are for each gas alone; the lower ends account for overlaps with the other gases.[8][9]"

Forcings are calculated for for actual atmospheres containing specific concentrations of gases and this particular source of uncertainty largely goes away. Since the lapse rate means that water vapour concentrations drop away quite rapidly with increasing altitude, this isn't an entirely trivial calculation.

For the record, you have just proved - once again - that you don't know what you are talking about.

As I mentioned in the post to which you are responding, (a point also made in the wikipedia page you cited, but don't seem to have read either), the greenhouse effect of each gas in the atmosphere depends on the concentration of the other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and you have to construct a model of the atmosphere before you can calculate a radiative forcing for that atmosphere.

=B2.

IIRR these are 95% confdence limits, and include quite a lot of uncertainty to cover features of the atmosphere that the current generation of climate models, running on the current generation of computers don't model well.

We may be able to do better in a few years

Sloman is a typical 'meat popsicle'.

The same kind of faith that I have in the results of most scientific work being produced by a number of separate groups of scientists working in parallel and criticising each other's work.

Just as well.

You don't seem to be all that competent in any of these areas, given your capacity to get things wildly wrong.

Very generous of you.

Except that when you cited

it didn't support the point you were making, because you obviously hadn't read the text that you were citing. If it was a sanity check, you failed it.

Yet. Because we don't yet have the ocean current data to plug into them.

Yet.

Nonsense. You just can't model as accurately as you could if you had the data about the ocean currents and didn't have to smear out the effets of clouds.

The heat still has to get from the equator to the poles, and you can plug in black boxes that will do it well enough for government work.

Of course they are predictive. It's just that the predictions are a good deal less than perfectly accurate.

They aren't proof of apocalyptic prognostications of doom. They are tools that let us see that if we continue to inject CO2 into the atmosphere at the current rate or faster, the world will be several degrees warmer than it is now within a hundred years or so

The oceans will then be warm enough that CO2 will start coming out of solution - while at the moment some 30% of teh CO2 we emit is dissolving in the oceans ratther than increasing greenhouse warming - and it may be warm enough to start melting methane clathrates.

The last time this happened was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum -

which left the global temperature going up some 6C and staying high for some 20.00 years.

This didn't produce a global extinction, but did lead to a lot of speciation. If it happened to us, our civilisation would fall apart, and our population would crash, which is a pretty good approximation to doom

This is not a prognostication - I'm not predicting that it is going to happen - merely an observation that there is a risk that continued warming might pan out the same way it did in the geological past, and that our descendants might not enjoy such an experience.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No. You want me to have blind faith in your judgement of the reliablity of the code. Granting your memory and credibility problems, even you should be able to understand that this might not be evidnece of sound judgement.

In a large number of different people who are publishing comparing the results they get from a range of different models. This sort of process seems to work well in a lot of different areas of science, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to suppose that it isn't working in climatorlogy.

I didn't say ot was pure. I said I didn't trust your judgement.

And your 22nd November report of what they had said was fatuous nonsense. There are several possible explanations for this, and none of them leave you with any kind of credibility.

men...

I'm glad to see that you can still use Google. A zillion is a conveniently unspecific number.

And yet - on the 22nd November - you claimed that climate models decline into chaos just as fast as weather models. All that expertise and you still manged to jam your foot firmly into your mouth.

and

or

In another post which has mysteriously vanished from the archives?

But it is part of the usual denialist package on this subject. Granting the crap that you post, your "expertise" seems more likely to come from a web-site funded by Exxon-Mobil than from www- pcmdi.llnl.gov.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Indeed! We may yet surface as close friends! ...Jim Thompson