You might find this (peer reviewed) article interesting:
formatting link
/quote
CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION It is claimed that GCMs provide credible quantitative estimates of future climate change, particularly at continental scales and above. Examining the local performance of the models at 55 points, we found that local projections do not correlate well with observed measurements. Furthermore, we found that the correlation at a large spatial scale, i.e. the contiguous USA, is worse than at the local scale.
However, we think that the most important question is not whether GCMs can produce credible estimates of future climate, but whether climate is at all predictable in deterministic terms
The outcome of scientific research cannot be predicted ahead of time. People are looking for ways to refine the climate models - some of which will reduce the significance of AGW and some which enhance it. We cannot know what the outcome will be until the results are in.
Of course it is falsifiable. Show that there is some other until now overlooked driving force responsible for the rapid global temperature increase in the last three decades of the 20th century and it immediately decreases the importance of AGW and greenhouse gas forcing.
However, it is inevitable from basic physics that polyatomic molecules absorb more long wave infra red and so make the planet warmer. The question is by how much has that effect altered the climate in the recent past. The evidence so far points to the rapid rise of GHG in the past few decades being significant - about the same as the intrinsic variability of the sun over the previous century and a half.
The inference that most scientists make is that the residual changes in temperature since 1970 that cannot be explained away by other means are due to AGW and the experimental fit to the GHG curve is worryingly good. Even sceptical scientists agree on this part of the data.
The problem is that no-one wants to do anything about it so the scientific evidence is not getting a fair hearing and an shoot the messenger policy using heavyweight lobby organisations has occurred.
I went to the trouble of checking up on the journal, and found this
formatting link
which referes to a paper in the same journal which includes one of the same authors as your - Koutsoyiannis - who turns out to be an editor of the journal. This would seem to be an ostensibly scientific peer- reviewed journal that has fallen into the hands of the denialist propaganda machine.
RealClimate dismantled an earlier paper of theirs - four of the authors are the same, the latest paper adds another author.
formatting link
d-long-term-memory/
but the new one doesn't seem to be sufficiently different to deserve attention.
How? Anthropogenic global warming depends primarily on the proposition that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That is falsifiable. Falsifying it would involve demolishing most of our current understanding of phsyics.
The proposition that our burning of fossil carbon is raisng CO2 levels, and that the current rise in CO2 levels is primarily due to the fossil carbon that we have burned, is also falsifiable. The carbon isotope ratio in today's atmosphere CO2 is different from what it was fifty years ago, and by enough to make it clear that the excess came from fossil carbon. The oxygen content of the atmosphere has dropped enough to match the hypothesis that we have burnt enough fossil carbon to explain the exra CO2. What has been tested is obviously falsifiable
- it would ahve been falsified if the tests had come out differently.
Anthropogenic global warming could be true - but unimportant - if the greenhouse warming involved wasn't big enough to be significant. Much of the earth's greenhouse warming comes from water vapour in the atmosphere, not CO2, and the extra CO2 we are contributing wouldn't - on its own - warm the world all that much. Unfortunately, the small extra warming from the extra CO2 raises the vapour pressure of the water in the oceans, so there's more of it in the atmosphere, and this positive feedback means that we really do need to cut back our CO2 emissions.
Again, that water vapour provides a positive feedback is a falsifiable hypothesis, and again - falsifying it would involve demolishing most of our current understanding of phsyics.
In theory, we could test this by draining the oceans, or covering them with something that blocked evaporation.
Predicting exactly how much warming we will get per extra part per million CO2 in the atmosphere is where thngs get difficult. This depends on building computational models of the atmosphere. We have lots. A number of them predict something like 4C of warming by the end of this century, but some predict as little as 1.1C of warming and others as much as 6C.
We've seen some warming over the last century - significantly more than noise - but this is the famous hockey stick curve, and no matter how often that work is replicated with new temperature proxies, the denialists remain unconvinced.
A lot of the climate models will have been falsifed by ten end of this century, but it probably isn't a good idea to wait until then before making up our minds.
Although they appear to me biased, to do a lot of editorializing, and to print the news that they see fit to print, it appears to me that they don't lie with what they state as facts or actual data. They are good at citing what they present as data or hard facts.
Should anyone post a link to a W.U.W.T. article, it should be easy to see whether it is an editorial, a reporting of a political matter, or a statement of fact or of data (that may be cherrypicked).
Should such article be presented as a statement of significant fact or of atmospheric, meteorological or climatological data, then refuting it needs to be done by either proving it to be false, or showing how it was cherrypicked from a greater set of facts/data that such cherrypicked data differs from.
Countering or discounting a statement on basis of where it came from is argumentum ad hominem.
One problem I see - in the GCMs considered by IPCC, average among them has cloud albedo feedback being greater positive than surface albedo feedback. Such a major inverse relationship between global temperature and cloud coverage appears to me to require a major inverse relationship between average atmospheric relative humidity and global temperature. Yet, I see the water vapor feedback in GCMs considered by IPCC being close to that in simpler models assuming unchanged relative humidity such as the MODTRAN one.
As a result, I am strongly thinking that IPCC is giving consideration to GCMs that have net positive feedback greater than what probably actually exists. It may take a few or several more years for the climate scientists considered by IPCC to realize that recent GCMs have "plugged in" excessive values for positive feedback factors that turned out to "have predicted" recent-decades global temperature rise without consideration that part of that temperature rise was from multidecadal oceanic oscillations.
I agree that AGW exists and is for real. What I have a beef with is the amount of global warming proposed/predicted by "my fellow warmingists". Proving that AGW is true is not proof that the *amount* of temperature rise that we must deal with is true. And, to the extent that AGW requires economic-growth-slowing taxation and regulation, I suggest that such a crippling response (even if merely mildly handicapping) has burden of proof of not only effectiveness but also the magnitude of the problem to respond to. Meanwhile, greater global economic growth means greater wealth to fuel a response to a global emergency - including any other than AGW, such as a once per 10,000 years volcanic event, asteroid or comet impact, earthquake, wide-range tsunami, coincidence of extreme weather, disease epidemic, economy collapse, crashing technology failure, simultaneous multinational disaster in elections, or WW-III. As in close to 63% chance that 1 of the 10,000- year-class worst of 10-bad-things-that-can-occur will occur within the next 1,000 years, and I see economic growth to build wealth being most favorable for making the kinds of swords, shields, and guns or whatever best to use against whatever actual global emergencies that humankind needs to deal with.
Problem is - it may take until 2015-2020 or so until the reportings by the scientists considered by IPCC get adjusted to give due consideration to natural cycles that caused part of the global temperature run-up from
1973-2005 or 1950-2005. And I am here only considering multidecadal oceanic oscillations, such as AMO and a sometimes-noted low frequency component of PDO.
For that matter, the HadCRUT3 global temperature index is from 1850 to a month or 2 ago, and strongly shows a roughly 64-65 year periodic cycle combined with a warming trend. Satellites notably got busy with Earth and its atmosphere starting in late 1979.
What is your specific point, Don? I'm not sure I see how the above relates to Martin's comment that you selected out for your comment from his larger post. It may, but I'm confused about how.
However, the mainstream IPCC assumptions are if anything a bit on the conservative side and could well underestimate the long term effects.
I happen to think that a part of the last century rapid rise was due to a cyclical component that can be seen in the CRU records peaking at
1998, 1940, 1880 and 1816 (anecdotal but the NE passage was partly open in that year despite it being globally "the year without summer"). The peak anomoly should have been 1820 but after Tamborra the Earth cooled.
That should not rule out taking all the no regrets energy saving measures now as opposed to the trash the planet for fun and profit now approach which pervades the US Republican party. The global response to the OPEC induced acute 1970's oil shortage was far more convincing than the lacklustre series of endless ineffectual meetings on AGW. Hot air with no substance and the major players determined to avoid progress.
The science is clear enough that there are real risks in the longer term. Perhaps it is time to insist that the deniers buy insurance to cover the enormous costs of cleaning up when they are proved wrong.
Nature is the final arbiter in this.
But not for any of those people that live in densely populated areas a few metres above sea level. London, Tokyo and New York for instance. And almost the entirety of Bangladesh and some island states.
Yes. I agree that at least a part of the alarmingly steep rise from 1970 to 1998 was due to a cyclical component and hope to publish something about that in due course. I have been corresponding with researchers on the MDO as I think I may have identified a possible driving force for the roughly 60 year period oceanic oscillations.
No disagreement. The key is to establish the root cause driving these cycles. My prediction which so far holds is that this year will be cold and there will be a slightly warm peak at 2014+/-1 and that then the cooling trend from cyclic components will continue until around 2040.
Bill you big joker, for sloopy and poor check out Phil Jones when he was asked for the data behind several of his papers.
If it wasn't sufficiently different it wouldn't have been published in a "Peer reviewed journal" which the warmists seem to hold up as the golden arbitration of what's right. (Even though this isn't the case).
Apart from a couple of very warm El Nino induced months late spring most months in 2010 have been colder than in several recent years....
January was cooler than January in 2007, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 1998. February was cooler than February in 2007, 2004, 2002, and 1998. March was exceptionally warm at a temperature anomaly of 0.971. However it was, given the errors, statistically comparable with March 2008 (0.907) and March 1990 (0.910). April was cooler than April 2007, 2005, and 1998. May was cooler than May 2003 and 1998. June was exceptionally warm at 0.827 deg C though statistically identical to June 2005 (0.825) and
1998. July, when things started to cool, was cooler than July 2006, 2005 and 1998. August was cooler than August 2009, about the same as 2005, and cooler than 2001 and 1998. September was cooler than September 2009, 2007, 2005, 2001 and 1998. October the last month for which there are records was cooler than October
2009, 2008,
2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 1998.
November was and December is lining up to be significantly colder than most recent years.
Didn't Phil Jones admit there hadn't been any statistically ignificant warming since '95 recently?
I couldn't find any reference to William Connolly anywhere except on denialist web-sites. Google kept throwing up references to the Wiki discussion pages, but the name wasn't visible to the in-page search function. I'd be very surprised if "William Connolly" was actually an invention, but it is odd that I wasn't able to find any kind of independent refeence to him.
There are stories from the scientific literature about mistaken references acquiring a life of their own by being copied from one text- book to the next, and one can understand how "William Connolly" might have sprung into existence by some kind of mistake and subsequently propagated from one denialist web-site to the next. Denialist aren't all that particular about the quality of their sources. Ravinghorde's enthusiasm for Greek and Russian authors of dubious quality is representative.
Phil Jones was unwilling to supply the data because digging it out in a form that could be passed on was going to be a lot of hard work, and the people who were asking for it looked to be doing so more a way of harassing him and his colleagues than because they were interested in the information involved.
Scientific opinion has pointed out to him that this isn't an acceptable attittude, which is why he is now getting the stuff into a shape that can be passed on. I don't think you are entitlted to interpret his - perfectly understandable - reluctance as evidnece that his work was either sloppy or poor. He wouldn't have got as far as he has if either claim were true.
The quality of peer review varies from journal to journal. Review of Scientific Instruments is a first class journal, but their refereeing of the electronic content of articles in experimental physics leaves something to be desired - I've published some five critical comments on papers in that journal over the past thirty-odd years.
One of the revelations from Climategate was the extent to which Phil Jones and his colleagues got upset by a bad article published in a peer-reviewed journal, where it turned out that the action editor - a sceptic - had published the paper despite having received four reviews that recommended that the paper shouldn't be published. When this information became generally known, the journal's editorial board resigned en masse.
Peer-review is a great deal better than whatever is in second place, but it isn't perfect, and some ostensibly peer-reviewed articles haven't actually been reviewed. When one of the authors of paper is also an editor of the journal that published it, one should be more than usually sceptical.
This is half of the story. The other half is that the IPCC is very unwilling to consider hard-to-model non-linear "triggerable" positive feedbacks. We've already got lots of methane coming out of thawing permafrost around the Artic Circle, and nobody has figured that into any kind of model. There's also an increasing amount of evidence that the Laurentide ice sheet didn't melt in situ at the end of the last ice age, but slid off into the North Atlantic. If the Greenland ice sheet behaves the same way, a varieyut of of IPCC predictions are going to look very coservative.
s the
Nobody argues that the predictions are particularly precise, but there's alos no good reason for thinking that the lower predictions are more likely to be right.
e
Agrred.
I don't see moving the economy towards sustainable energy sources as crippling. Economies of scale are expected to make wind energy cheaper than coal-fire power generation around 2030, and solar power cheaper after 2045.
In the first place energy costs only represent about 10% of the cost of living. On that basis converting our entire energy supply to sustainable source tomorrow would cut our standard of living by 10%, but in fact it isn't going to happen overnight or even over a single decade.
If you compare the economic effects to the quadrupling of the price of oil after the 1973 oil crisis - which happend in a couple of months - you should be able to appreciate that the changeover to sutainalbe energy sources isn't going to be a big deal. People with shares in Exxon-Mobil or coal mines are going to have a tough time - which is why they are funding denialist propaganda - but this doesn't seem to be a good enough motivation to continue trashing the planet by business as usual.
l
Sustainable energy has more going for it than just minimising the rise in CO2 levels. The current US balance of payments deficit is pretty much what you pay for the oil you import. Reduce your dependence on imported oil, and the geo-political forces most likely to trigger WW- III are significantly diminished.
It wasn't actually collated in any one place, it was going to be a lot of hard work because the data was all over the place, they didn't even know where to go to get it.
As someone said if the work behind the prospectus of a floating company was as shoddy and ill prepared the directors would be jailed.
His Google entry doesn't mention the Wiki ban directly, but does admit that he got into an "edit war" because Wikipedia "gives no privilege to those who know what they=92re talking about".
His background does give some credence to the implicit claim that he does know what he is talking about when it comes to climate science, and his slightly intemperate writing style does suggest how he might have got himself banned. I don't see much reason to suppose that it implies any other kind of moral turpitude.
SourceWatch is mainlu interested in people being "influenced" and nothing in what I've read about William Connolley suggests that he is being told what to say by anybody else.
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.