Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science

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Based on what hard science, as opposed to statistical modeling? Is climate "science" anywhere near as advance as quantum electrodynamics or relativity theory? Yes? No?

Right now the models are under-determined by their data. Too many parameters to fiddle. Think of Ptolemy's epicyles.

ruveyn

Statistics is a legitimate and valuable tool. If you don't recognize that, you are the one who is being unscientific. Not all scientists have the luxury of studying common knick-knacks that are so easy to examine.


Evolutionary biology doesn't match the standards you seem to want to put climate science to. Are you in favor of introducing the teaching of creationism in public schools?

Medical Science also doesn't reflect ruveyn's (in all probability, ad hoc) criteria for "HARD science".

If you were to claim that climate models do a poor job at generating realistic weather and have rather large biases when it comes to cloud and precipitation climatology I would have to agree with you. However, alterations in the total energy budget of the earth can be tracked down pretty well within climate models and the sensitivity isn't so horrible as to make outcomes chaotic or arbitrary. It's really a matter of tuning parameters to correct for systematic biases.

Climate models are far from perfect, but as of now there is no energy budget / feedback mechanism to explanation the warming trend of the past 50 years without invoking increased CO2.



As you can see, there are fairly large errors and biases among individual simulations, yet the sign of the temperature trend is universally tied to the existence of an upward trend in greenhouse gases. None of the constant CO2 models on the bottom graph (blue lines) show a warming trend happening in the past 100 years. If anything the earth should be cooling right now, but it's not.

Most climate models are not statistical. They employ actual physical and fluid dynamical principles to advance a large system of partial differential equations through time. They are deterministic and take energy balances into effect. They are usually referred to as global circulation models or GCMs.

How does that validate the claim that the last 100 years are the hottest on record. There is use made of data taken from ice cores and other remainders of Days Gone By. Weight the data against current data is a statistical trick.

Holy Hockey Sticks, Batman!

By the way, the solution to the Navier Stokes equations is yet to be found. Even the numerical methods are somewhat questionable.

ruveyn

Oh Lord, here we go with the Navier-Stokes equations argument again. I seem to recall discussing this with you before, but perhaps I'm mistaken. Anyway, The Hagen-Poiseuille flow is a derivation from the Navier-Stokes equations and is, indeed, an exact solution.

I also think you're missing the important part of the current, observed warming trend which is the rate of warming, not so much the amount. Also, the theory of human induced warming due to an increase in CO2 is not exactly rocket science anyway. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, proven by its absorption and emission properties. We know that we've added enough of it to change the composition of the atmosphere, proven by physical sampling and observations, satellites, etc. So the logical conclusion is that temps would rise, and they have (again proven by actual observation and measurement).

There are countless other factors that come into play (both natural and non-natural) when predicting future trends, but to ignore and/or dismiss the obvious linkage between increased CO2 and rising temps is just plain dumb. It's like a fat man with a Twinkies addiction. It could not be proven with 100% accuracy that the Twinkies made him fat, but if he's eating 10 a day and has gained 50 pounds since the onset of his habit, it's an accurate assumption. He'd be wise to lay off the Twinkies.

The temperature record has nothing to do with climate models. Whether the past decade is the hottest on record or not is really a red herring. The point is the climate has been warming for the past 100 years while it should have been cooling since 1940 by all natural accounts. Increased greenhouse gas content is the best explanation for the 1970 to present temperature jump.


The most general solution of the most general form of the Navier Stokes equations hasn't been mathematically proven to exist but this really has no bearing on the validity of numerical methods employed in the atmosphere. As long as steps are taken to ensure that energy is conserved within the dynamics module of the code (so that the simulation doesn't blow up), the approximation is good enough for simulating large-scale motions.

Things like cumulus clouds and boundary layer turbulence are a bit more tricky to deal with because there isn't the computing power to simulate the phenomena explicitly. Most of the errors and biases that do occur are not due to faulty dynamics though. Most of the difficulty is getting the quantities, locations, and radiative properties of clouds right. Uncertainty due the inability of models to create realistic clouds is problematic because changes in cloud cover have an effect on radiative energy budget of the planet. However, even with the uncertainty created by the fact that cloud feedbacks may not be modeled correctly, there are strong arguments based on satellite data that cloud feedbacks cannot explain the 1970 to present warming trend.

Neither does medicine, genetic engineering, or pretty much any biological science (edit: h/t to master pedant for beating me to this). Only simple systems can be modeled with the degree of precision that ruveyn is demanding. Climate is simpler than biology, but considerably more complex than electrodynamics or relativity in terms of the number of factors that have to be considered.

Last edited by LKL on 23 Dec 2010, 3:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

ON RECORD (the claim is generally about the last decade or two, not the last century). No one was collecting temperature data during the mideval warm period.

With the medical arts we can locally and under a controlled condition test the theories. They work well enough to help most people in most situations. Treatments are tested under controlled conditions and with double blind protocols. Climatic conclusions are not nearly as well tested.

Yes, climate is complicated (being driven from underneath by a non-linear engine) and the theories and models are not nearly up to the task of handling climate well. The theories are underdetermined. Too many parameters to be fiddled. Think of epi-cycles. The subject matter (climate) far exceeds the techniques which are brought to bear to describe it.

Bottom line: Natural drivers have NOT been properly eliminated as a possible cause for the current warming era.

Holy Hockey Sticks, Batman!

ruveyn

The CO2 cycle is well known. There is empirical evidence that CO2 levels are rising.

That CO2 traps heat is known. There are empirical models showing this.

The fact that CO2 traps heat combined with the fact that CO2 levels are rising means that the heat energy balance of the planet is positive. Just like with weight loss, when calories out are less than calories in, there's going to be an increase somewhere.

Even if you don't accept that *all* of the warming is caused by CO2, you are in denial of reality if you don't accept that excess CO2 will cause some warming.

Water vapor traps even more heat. So why is the earth warming evaporating water into water vapor.

Is it human activity? Is it something else? Is it a combination of human and natural (non antropic) activities? What made the earth warm prior to the Little Ice Age. It sure wan't industry.

ruveyn

As I said... not all scientists have the luxury of studying common objects that are easy to perform experiments on. You wanna go find a couple hundred Earths so we can do a double-blind experiment on the effects of higher CO2 levels?

Incidentally, biologists have relatively little idea of the underlying mechanism for the behavior of the systems they study. Physicians know essentially nothing about it. Physicians more or less operate on the principle of guess and check, aggregated over the last several centuries.


But there is a large amount of support for anthropogenic causes, and those happen to be the ones we can actually do something about.

Not only that. There is hard evidence that the current CO2 level is higher than it has been in over fifteen million years.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm



At the going rate we are probably going to reach 600 ppm by the end of this century which is more than double what it has ever been in the past 400,000 years. Also, unless we learn ways to sequester all that carbon back into the earth (a very difficult and expensive, if not impossible endeavor) it's going to stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years even after we eventually stop burning fossil fuels (that is if civilization doesn't collapse before that happens).