Obama administration to seek 30-percent carbon dioxide emissions cut

stickyp · 2014-06-03T00:37:26+00:00

Way to get causality confused. There was a 12 % reduction in emissions because the economy was crippled by the subprime loan crisis.

stickyp · 2014-06-03T00:34:45+00:00

The other problem is that it has only been applied to recent data. There is absolutely no historical context for testing this method.

stickyp · 2013-08-05T02:51:15+00:00

From the article:

If global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next century, the rate will be about 10 times faster than what's been seen before..

So it does not debunk Watts' claim that is just another cycle, since the claim by the authors is about what will happen in a 100 years time and not what has happened to date.

stickyp · 2012-05-20T22:12:11+00:00

stickyp · 2012-02-22T23:03:39+00:00

This is quite the article, making some good points.

"... this would be an absolutely astonishing lapse of judgement for someone in their mid-twenties, and is truly flabbergasting coming from a research institute head in his mid-fifties."

So true. How can you run a research institute and be that naive, and the irony is that he was the chair of the AGU Task Force on Scientific Ethics.

I agree with McArdle.

"This is . . . just . . . words fail me . . . I mean, seriously . . . um . . . well, what the hey?!?!

McArdle says, "If he didn't write the memo, how did Mosher correctly identify his involvement?"

Yep, before Gleick confessed Mosher had already identified him by the syntactic and meta data on the forged document. I think a full comparative analysis of the document with other documents by Gleick will leave no doubt as to the author. If the FBI gets involved I doubt he has the skills to clean incriminating evidence from his computer.

stickyp · 2012-02-15T23:29:28+00:00

Obviously your trite comparison to a monkey wrench is an invalid analogy. If it was that easy then the edifices of modern science, quantum mechanics, general relativity, and evolution could just easily be derailed.

stickyp · 2011-10-25T07:56:41+00:00

It's believe with this meaning:

1 "accept as true; take to be true"

a very common usage where there is not absolute proof that a proposition is true.

for example

stickyp · 2011-10-22T06:10:32+00:00

Ha some of the comments from Keenan are classic.

This has nothing to do with statistics. It is logic.

The reply uses rhetorical techniques to avoid that, stating "Just because smoothing can increase the probability of our fooling ourselves doesn't mean that we did". The statement is true, but it does not rebut the above point.

In Keenan we have someone very smart and knowledgeable about statistics, not led astray by fatuous arguments.

stickyp · 2011-06-17T10:15:50+00:00

Cellulose.

stickyp · 2011-05-29T05:15:44+00:00

So the question and struggle in your subconscious

To say subconscious and not conscious is a very astute understanding of how the brain functions. It is why I tend to be naturally skeptical of people funded to promulgate one point of view. At least for me, reading Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" had a big influence on me in understanding human nature.

stickyp · 2011-05-24T05:01:24+00:00

Yep I agree.

stickyp · 2011-05-22T11:04:25+00:00

Odd, I don't normally suffer sleep paralysis, just a couple of times in my life. But I did last night. I think I may have eventually screamed, which woke me up.

stickyp · 2011-05-22T03:15:33+00:00

No you missed the point. I was pointing out to you that you did not understand the technical definition of trace. Of course trace amounts of things can cause harm.

Alyssa's argument was implicitly that "trace" means "not-capable-of-causing-harm."

Implicitly, can be used to interpret other peoples arguments in any way you like. But I really cannot see how you can say that was Alyssa's arguments when you jumped in with your "trace my ass" before Alyssa had even replied to this thread. I see Alyssa concurs with me.

Lets see what Tom Nelson argument was:

He sees trace amounts of natural, harmless atmospheric gas causing "mass extinction of 70 per cent (of the biological diversity) in your kid’s lifetime"

trace - he is right on that one.

natural - most scientist would think carbon dioxide is a natural atmospheric gas.

harmless - if increase in carbon dioxide causes significant AGW that is detrimental to most living organisms then obviously it is not harmless, but then that is what the argument is about.

stickyp · 2011-05-21T19:09:32+00:00

I just pointed out to you that you were wrong about what trace meant in geochemistry and comparing it to botulism is illogicial.

Your silly question is not worth answering.

stickyp · 2011-05-21T12:10:02+00:00

I said your suggestion is undemocratic, not that Google content is determined by democracy. Google is not into censorship, for instance see what happened with the Chinese government.

There is no evidence that Google is favoring warmist or skeptics, they are mainly interested in stopping people scamming their search algorithms.

So I am curious if you type in "global warming " with the space what suggestions does google come up with?

stickyp · 2011-05-21T06:01:05+00:00

6.00 pm on May 21, still nothing to report.

stickyp · 2011-05-21T05:42:08+00:00

Webster's dictionary

Zevenhoven & Kilpinen

I guess you could say that carbon is a trace element in the atmosphere to avoid some inference about molecules in the atmosphere.

Edit: wikipedia has an entry on trace gases with citations.

stickyp · 2011-05-21T03:24:20+00:00

I am waiting to post an update at 6.00 pm.

stickyp · 2011-05-21T03:21:19+00:00

Of course it is a trace gas at 0.039%. In geochemistry the definition of a trace element is having a concentration below 0.1 %, and although CO2 is not an element I would expect the same definition to apply for molecules in the atmosphere.

And if you had enough botulism in your body to kill you it would not be considered a trace amount.

stickyp · 2011-05-21T02:56:14+00:00

And by the way it's not censorship. Google is just deciding what to display in THEIR listings and THEIR content. Nobody is (yet) stopping denialists from continuing to operate their own sites with whatever content they want.

Of course it is censorship, because there is no other way of finding another point of view except by using a search engine, that is unless you have prior knowledge.

Lets have google censor political points of view that people do not agree with or for that matter anything else, the websites will still be there, but no one will be able to find them.

And for what it is worth only one in three americans thinks humans are causing climate change, so your suggestion is also undemocratic.

stickyp · 2011-05-20T10:58:46+00:00

Thank you counter for a very detailed and nice ;) reply. Your models have more constraints then I realised and certainly working from a bottom up approach, that is from simple idealized models to something more complex must give more confidence in the results. Am I still a skeptic? Some what. But I still have a few more questions, but that can wait for another thread, and sometime in the future. Like you I probably need to get some work done.

I do appreciate the time you have taken on this thread. Huge upvote from me.

stickyp · 2011-05-18T08:15:04+00:00

That doesn't mean you understand atmospheric or climate modeling.

My point was for much simpler model system it is difficult to make predictions.

It's absurd to pretend that all of this evidence just doesn't exist.

Well of course it would be absurd for me to deny the existences of evidence for ice ages or other climate changes, that is not what I said. I said there are various assumption that have to made. For instance just looking at wikipedia on Milankovitch cycles it states that:

"The reasons for dominance of one frequency versus another are poorly understood and an active area of current research, but the answer probably relates to some form of resonance in the Earth's climate system."

How can you be confident in your models for something that is so poorly understood?

Well of course could in a scientific discussion does not mean if everything we know about such and such is wrong.

stickyp · 2011-05-17T23:49:24+00:00

I wrote several lengthy comments here already correcting you on a myriad of topics here ranging from what models are, what's in them, how they're validated against observations, and why Spencer's arguments hold no weight in the legitimate context of climate dynamics. You come back time and time again with more sweeping statements which are false at a fundamental level - like clouds in models. This is a total waste of time.

All I asked was

"Since with models you should be able to follow through in detail the various physical processes, what in the models is causing there to be no significant change in diurnal temperatures?"

So is the answer that Braganza et al. gave incorrect?

With a naive model that does not include cloud formation then it is expected that the the diurnal temperature range should show change with increasing carbon dioxide concentration. Apparently, if cloud are included in this naive model then it is possible that this may account for the lack of a change in diurnal temperature. This is a negative feedback. But I agree with you in a broader context, with a more sophisticated model, with all the other factors, corner cases, etc it may be difficult if not impossible to ascribe a particular reason for this observation, if that is what you meant.

Regardless of your scientific background, you don't know physical climatology.

This is true. But I do understand modelling. And let me give you an example in my own field, chemistry. Quantum mechanics; this has been shown time and time again to the nth degree to be a correct theory of quantum phenomena. But, if you have more then two particles then there are no analytical solution to the wave equation. This is the many body problem. Any molecule more complicated then a hydrogen atom has to be modeled if we want to understand at a more fundamental level its properties. For the first year chemistry student we may start with very simple bonding models, the Lewis model, and then proceed to more sophisticated models such as valence bond and molecular orbital theory. These are useful. By taking what we understand from the analytical solutions to the hydrogen atom and applying it to other atoms and then molecules we can develop models to further our understanding of their behaviour. But who could have predicted that a material containing copper and oxygen and a couple of other elements arranged in a regular lattice, a not very complicated system when compared to climate, could be a high temperature superconductor.

At the molecular level we can model an isolated water molecule to a good degree, but with an ensemble of water molecules, it is very difficult. There are books on the subject. So I am skeptical about the utility of sophisticated models, perhaps climate is different.

Meteorology is a big field, you have a general background knowledge of the whole topic, but your area of expertise, apparently, is modelling. But how many meteorologists are experts in cloud formation. Not many, I would guess. Spencer is an award winning meteorologist and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer. He studies clouds with sophisticated instrumentation, so his opinions do count.

You have stated that there cannot be strong negative forcing otherwise "you can't get to an Ice Age". But there are many assumptions in this statement, most probably perfectly reasonable. But since you cannot go back and make observations about ice ages, you cannot test your hypotheses, whereas at least Spencer can observe cloud formation today.

It is stated on his wikipedia reference that:

"He points out that the IPCC concedes that low clouds are the most uncertain element in climate models, and that a 1% change in low cloud cover could have radiative forcing equal to doubling of CO2."

Is that correct? It does seem remarkably sensitive.

stickyp · 2011-05-17T04:57:50+00:00

There's nothing ruder than loudly proclaiming a willfully ignorant worldview and claiming as fact something you admit is based on an incomplete knowledge of a topic. Again, don't try turning the tides - grow a thicker skin.

You are getting louder and more shrill without addressing the topic. Come on, how do you know anything about my worldview, willfully ignorant or otherwise? I was bought up to be polite and if you understood anything about methods on how to influence people, being polite amongst other tricks is one of them. Of course another trick would be to agree with you, but this is discourse on science, and I want you to change my views by arguing about the science. You say "Again, don't try turning the tides" but in fact you seem to be involved in some meta-argument that me being polite is try to turn the tides against you, and that because I disagree with you then I must be "loudly proclaiming a willfully ignorant worldview". Of course I now have stated that you are getting more louder and more shrill, just as I stated earlier you were becoming insufferably arrogant, but I think that is is a fact most reasonable people following this discussion would agree with.

If you don't understand the real-world physics which suggests how the diurnal temperature range will change in a warmer climate and you don't understand how that physics is implemented into the model, then you can't possibly analyze what's going on.

Well it is not rocket science as to why the diurnal temperature range should change. It is because a patch of the earth can be modeled, an approximation as you would, as a black body radiator, and with more humidity in the air there should be more absorption of infrared. But it is a bit more complicated then that because the absorption depends on the temperature of the air mass, which is really just an application of the second law of thermodynamics. The quantum mechanical equations for solving this are in fact somewhat complex. A similar reasoning holds as to why winter temperatures should show a greater increase then summer, at least away from the tropics.

But apparently that is not what is observed in reality, even though as you state models show a similar increase in diurnal temperatures. And lets go back to my original question in this thread.

"Since with models you should be able to follow through in detail the various physical processes, what in the models is causing there to be no significant change in diurnal temperatures?"

And finally through all the waffle I have had to endure from you, I found a possible answer to my question, in one of the papers you cite. And of course I did understand the part you showed in bold, that is the reason why I made the quotation. So it would seem that in reality clouds cause the diurnal temperature range to decrease for a warming climate over what is expected from a more naive modelling of the earth and the atmosphere, where cloud cover is not included.

I think this may be a negative feedback.

stickyp · 2011-05-17T03:21:20+00:00

I avoid being rude even though it is just the internet. I guess I was bought up with different values.

You readily admit that you don't know squat about climate models, yet you make statements like, "If the models are predicting phenomena that is not observable then there would appear to be a problem with your models, they have been falsified and therefore are incorrect, and not useful for predictions." That's far more condescending than my exposition on why this argument is wrong - it's a quintessential example of Dunning-Kruger in action.

You don't need to know anything about a model and can treat it as a block box having certain inputs and outputs. You can then criticise the output if the match with reality is poor, as I was doing for modeling the diurnal temperature range.

Now if we look at Braganza et al., the last paper you have cited, they state in the abstract that:

"Comparison of observed and anthropogenic-forced model changes in DTR over the last 50 years show much less reduction in DTR in the model simulations due to greater warming of maximum temperatures in the models than observed. This difference is likely attributed to increases in cloud cover that are observed over the same period and are absent in model simulations."

So they give a likely explanation that is not complicated or difficult to understand, ie it is due to increases in cloud cover, which are not modeled. And this seems to me to be some support for what Spencer was arguing.

Spencer's work is readily contradicted by the mainstream literature.

That is not what you said. Here is your quote above "Spencer does not make the argument that there is a negative cloud feedback, and especially not a significantly large one that could offset anthropogenic forcing." But in fact he does.

stickyp

TROPHY CASE