What do you believe about climate change?

[music lover]

Sol - thank you for your posts.  You're always thought provoking.

I just wish MusicLover would chime in here again - he always makes me laugh!

Sorry, away for the weekend. But, continue patting each other on the back...it is entertaining.

We thought maybe you were out finding evidence to back up your bold claims.

There's plenty of evidence, but what's the point when some people simply choose to dismiss 100% of it outright??

[sol]

There's plenty of evidence, but what's the point when some people simply choose to dismiss 100% of it outright??

Thus far, I haven't seen anything to dismiss.  At least give me the chance to disappoint you before saying you're disappointed.

I would happily consider and discuss any evidence you have to support your assertions in this thread.  Maybe you think you've already provided some that I've overlooked?  If so, please just point it out. 

Or offer us something new to discuss.  So far it seems all you've said is some variant of "climate change is a hoax because... unsubstantiated accusations that climate change is a hoax."

[music lover]

There's plenty of evidence, but what's the point when some people simply choose to dismiss 100% of it outright??

Thus far, I haven't seen anything to dismiss.  At least give me the chance to disappoint you before saying you're disappointed.

I would happily consider and discuss any evidence you have to support your assertions in this thread.  Maybe you think you've already provided some that I've overlooked?  If so, please just point it out. 

Or offer us something new to discuss.  So far it seems all you've said is some variant of "climate change is a hoax because... unsubstantiated accusations that climate change is a hoax."

Why is it that those on the warmist side of the debate never seem to be aware of any evidence that differs from their beliefs? It's out there for anyone who chooses to look.

[Mntngoat]

do people really think that they are that important  or can make a significant impact by changing what they drive  or eat to cause the climate to change....

Wheres my popcorn.

[forummm]

There's plenty of evidence, but what's the point when some people simply choose to dismiss 100% of it outright??

Thus far, I haven't seen anything to dismiss.  At least give me the chance to disappoint you before saying you're disappointed.

I would happily consider and discuss any evidence you have to support your assertions in this thread.  Maybe you think you've already provided some that I've overlooked?  If so, please just point it out. 

Or offer us something new to discuss.  So far it seems all you've said is some variant of "climate change is a hoax because... unsubstantiated accusations that climate change is a hoax."

Why is it that those on the warmist side of the debate never seem to be aware of any evidence that differs from their beliefs? It's out there for anyone who chooses to look.

Feel free to provide any specific references whatsoever such as links.

[sol]

Why is it that those on the warmist side of the debate never seem to be aware of any evidence that differs from their beliefs? It's out there for anyone who chooses to look.

I keep offering you evidence and explanations.  You keep avoiding offering any, choosing instead to make wildly counterfactual claims with justifications like "the evidence is out there" but without actually linking to it or citing it or mentioning it in any way. 

Are you just trolling us?  Have I fallen prey to your devious internet hobby?  Because at some point, your unwillingness to actually have any discussion and your repeated assertions of falsehoods will give you away.  You have to at least pretend to be a serious participant in the discussion to keep people interested in your thoughts.

[frugalecon]

The question I like to pose to people who don't accept the prevailing scientific consensus is simple. "What evidence would it take for you to change your mind?" If their hypothesis cannot be falsified, then they're expressing an article of faith, not a scientific hypothesis.

[Annamal]

...The whole point of science is that no faith is required.  You can verify for yourself. 

We constantly recheck our results against new data to verify existing ideas and search for new ones. ...

Here you get into a pretty complicated issue that straddles the border between science and philosophy of science.

Many of the premises of climate theory are fundamentally unverifiable, and cannot actually be "rechecked". No matter what I do in the year 2015, I cannot verify what the temperature was in 2014 or in 1995. History is generally unverifiable, and yet history is a major part of climate theory. We are required to take on faith the alleged results of days past, because those figures cannot, in the present, be tested against the past.

That having been said, the question of whether claims about history are "scientific" is a complicated question that has been addressed at length elsewhere and I don't feel like writing anything else about it here, other than to flag it for review in case sol wants to offer his personal explanation of how he deals with this very subtle issue.

Way off topic here but parts of history are pretty solidly verifiable (at least according to my partner's PHD thesis which focused on almost exactly this argument).

And you can always check your theory  by making predictions about artifacts from the past (like tree rings, fossils, carbon dating etc). 

[MDM]

The question I like to pose to people ... is simple. "What evidence would it take for you to change your mind?" If their hypothesis cannot be falsified, then they're expressing an article of faith, not a scientific hypothesis.

Excellent question for a wide variety of issues.

For a somewhat skeptical person, "better predictive model accuracy" (as noted before) would be a great start.

The question goes both ways: what evidence would it take for a believer to change belief?

[MoonShadow]

There's plenty of evidence, but what's the point when some people simply choose to dismiss 100% of it outright??

Thus far, I haven't seen anything to dismiss.  At least give me the chance to disappoint you before saying you're disappointed.

I would happily consider and discuss any evidence you have to support your assertions in this thread.  Maybe you think you've already provided some that I've overlooked?  If so, please just point it out. 

Or offer us something new to discuss.  So far it seems all you've said is some variant of "climate change is a hoax because... unsubstantiated accusations that climate change is a hoax."

I really don't want to end up on the side of AGW skeptics, but I hope you can still understand why so many people are doubtful of the accuracy of the claims of your peers, Sol.  Particularly when we see real scientists, with real skepicism being attacked by media types who know even less, and propaganda campaigns to support the idea of current climate change effects.  So we see Obama fly to Alaska for a photo op next to the base of a glacier that has receded as of late, but no mention of the two other glacier fronts in the state that have gained ground in the same time frame.

EDIT: Here is an article discussing the trustworthiness of climate scientists themselves, with a similar complaint to what I have already brought up before; namely that since 99.999% of humans cannot verify the scientific conclusions ourselves, we are basicly trusting the word of others.

http://judithcurry.com/2015/08/24/climate-change-epistemic-trust-and-expert-trustworthiness/

But I actually do have a real question that has been bugging me, and I'd like to hear what you have to say about it.  I've read in more than one place, that the Miocene era was somewhat warmer than today, with a CO2 concentration that ranged between 400 and 600 parts per million across the age.  Yet the Miocene climate would have been considered a mammal's paradise over much of the Earth's surface.  Granted, there was no polar ice at all at the time, and the ocean's would have been about 120-140 feet higher than they are today.  This says to me, that the only comparable example of an Earth with above 400 PPM Co2 concentrations isn't exactly a Mad Max hellhole.  Given those constraints, would the loss of coastal regions, even to a net total rise of 120 feet, result in a net loss of agricultural land and human habitable land, considering the large amount of landmass that would open up to habitation and cultivation north of the 60th parallel?  I honestly don't know the answer to this question.  I'm not even sure it can really be definitively answered anyway.  But simply asking the question tells me a lot about the risks to the human race, and that they are likely overblown.  What I'm really skeptic about is the actual risks to humankind, as well as to what extent that climate change is a direct byproduct of the combustion of fossil fuels.

[sol]

For a somewhat skeptical person, "better predictive model accuracy" (as noted before) would be a great start.

You're in luck!  Climate models get better every single year!

How many years of consistently "better" predictions do you think you would need to see? 

How about instead of just "better" we ask them to be accurately reflect physical reality?  Like my model suggests that if I turn up the heater in my aquarium, the temperature of the water will increase.  I would like my model to accurately reflect this physical understanding of how the system works, and to generate a predicted temperature increase that is in line with the both the magnitude and direction of temperature change that would be expected from adding a specified amount of additional energy to a system with a well-defined heat capacity, minus the losses I would expect see from evaporative cooling and heat conduction. 

I would like my models to accurately describe how I think the system works.  If the model can't reproduce those effects, it clearly needs some adjustment.  Fortunately, our climate models are really good at this generic kind of description and prediction.

The question goes both ways: what evidence would it take for a believer to change belief?

Which belief? 

My belief that the CO2 levels are rising in the atmosphere?  I'd discard that belief if we had even one single reliable measurement to show atmospheric CO2 levels were decreasing, or even holding steady, or even not increasing directly in proportion to the amount of CO2 we're adding to the atmosphere minus known CO2 sinks like forests and dissolution in ocean water.

My belief in that temperatures on Earth are rising?  I'd discard that belief if we had even one single reliable measurement that global atmosphere or ocean temperatures were decreasing.  So far no dice, the heat content of the Earth is on the rise every year, even in years with massive volcanic eruptions which cause temporary atmospheric cooling, because the oceans are continuing to get so much warmer and water holds a lot more heat than does air.

My belief that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that links CO2 increases to rising temperatures?  I'd discard that if we had even one single reliable measurement of the optical properties of CO2 that suggested it absorbs energy at different wavelengths than have been recorded any of the other million times it has been measured.

The problem with these challenges is that the current understanding is supported by thousands of repeated consistent observations.  But science is pretty clear, even one observation that disproves all previous understanding is generally sufficient.  If you know of any, I'm all ears.

[Cathy]

Way off topic here but parts of history are pretty solidly verifiable...

We can test whether observations in the present are consistent with a particular past assuming that the laws of physics were the same in the past as in the present, but that is not the same as verifying the past. For example, suppose I am holding a ball in my hand and then I drop it. At this point, you walk into the room and observe the ball halfway between my hand and the ground. Because you are familiar with gravity, you might at this point speculate that immediately before you entered the room, the ball was slightly above the spot where it was when you entered the room, just like you predict that in a moment, it will be slightly lower than where it is now. What you are doing here is basically applying a physical theory in reverse to make a "prediction" about the past, but you have no way of verifying whether that "prediction" is correct. You can verify your prediction about the future by just waiting and watching the ball fall farther, but you cannot turn back the clock and see if indeed it was slightly higher in the air before you entered the room.

And you can always check your theory  by making predictions about artifacts from the past (like tree rings, fossils, carbon dating etc). 

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. If your point is that we can establish physical laws through tests in the present and then apply those laws retrospectively, that is not in fact a way to verify the past. It is only a way to speculate about what the past was. Among other things, this line of reasoning assumes that the laws of physics were the same in the past as they are in the present, which is not a logically true "theorem" (although as a practical matter, scientists usually assume this is the case for a variety of reasons).


I don't claim that the philosophical difficulties with history are a real problem for practical science, but it's definitely true that you cannot verify history. This also raises the related issue of: "What does it even mean to make a claim about history?" That is another surprisingly tricky question that is at the crossroads of science and philosophy.

...according to my partner's PHD thesis which focused on almost exactly this argument

Indeed, the philosophical issues with history are not novel and many verificationists have different ways of dealing with these matters. (For example, some verification theorists say that claims about history are properly understood as conditional claims about what would be true under certain hypothetical conditions, not necessarily actual historical conditions.) I have not attempted to provide a comprehensive treatment of these complicated issues here. I would be interested in reading this thesis to see how your partner handles these issues.

[MoonShadow]

Way off topic here but parts of history are pretty solidly verifiable (at least according to my partner's PHD thesis which focused on almost exactly this argument).

Which parts would those be?  The data sets actually in use?

http://www.heliogenic.net/2010/01/26/joe-daleo-and-anthony-watts-new-report-surface-temperature-records-policy-driven-deception/

And you can always check your theory  by making predictions about artifacts from the past (like tree rings, fossils, carbon dating etc).

Only to an extent, and the largest temp proxy we have for landmass surface data, by a large margin, are tree rings.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of variables that could have limited annual tree growth besides average temps., such as the availability of water, sunlight (local shading, etc) and even CO2 itself.  The tree ring temp proxy has to assume that these conditions are approximately similar to much more recent climate; but just looking at the 4 year drought in California says that would be a dangerous assumption, for the 4 year drought has been shown to be a reversion to the mean with regard to California's long term climate, and the 100 years before that to have been a particularly damp century to use as a dataset. 

A similar critique is that of the 'tree ring divergence'...

Tree growth is sensitive to temperature. Consequently, tree-ring width and tree-ring density, both indicators of tree growth, serve as useful proxies for temperature. By measuring tree growth in ancient trees, scientists can reconstruct temperature records going back over 1000 years. Comparisons with direct temperature measurements back to 1880 show a high correlation with tree growth. However, in high latitude sites, the correlation breaks down after 1960. At this point, while temperatures rise, tree-ring width shows a falling trend. This divergence between temperature and tree growth is called, imaginatively, the divergence problem.

<snip>

Has this phenomenon happened before? In other words, can we rely on tree-ring growth as a proxy for temperature? Briffa 1998 shows that tree-ring width and density show close agreement with temperature back to 1880. To examine earlier periods, one study split a network of tree sites into northern and southern groups (Cook 2004). While the northern group showed significant divergence after the 1960s, the southern group was consistent with recent warming trends. This has been a general trend with the divergence problem - trees from high northern latitudes show divergence while low latitude trees show little to no divergence. The important result from Cook 2004 was that before the 1960s, the groups tracked each other reasonably well back to the Medieval Warm Period. Thus, the study suggests that the current divergence problem is unique over the past thousand years and is restricted to recent decades

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tree-ring-proxies-divergence-problem.htm

So while there are some credible explanations that might actually mean that the divergence in the data is unique since 1960, how can we really know if any of these hypotheses are true?  We can't actually test them, can we?  If so, how?

[MDM]

You're in luck!  Climate models get better every single year!

That's good.  Heretofore they haven't been all that great as noted in this post.

How many years of consistently "better" predictions do you think you would need to see?

At least 10?  Seems a nice round number, albeit a micro-blink in geologic time.

How about instead of just "better" we ask them to be accurately reflect physical reality?  Like my model suggests that if I turn up the heater in my aquarium, the temperature of the water will increase.  I would like my model to accurately reflect this physical understanding of how the system works, and to generate a predicted temperature increase that is in line with the both the magnitude and direction of temperature change that would be expected from adding a specified amount of additional energy to a system with a well-defined heat capacity, minus the losses I would expect see from evaporative cooling and heat conduction.

Physical reality is a great basis for model development.  When dealing with a complicated system, one should always be wary of "what have I missed?"  Label snarkiness aside, this chart
and ones similar to it should at least give the modelers pause.  If the models are now better, that is indeed good news.  Unfortunately it will take time to confirm that.

I would like my models to accurately describe how I think the system works.  If the model can't reproduce those effects, it clearly needs some adjustment.

Agreed

Fortunately, our climate models are really good at this generic kind of description and prediction.

Although I have a decent modeling background, the models were not of climate, so I'm not much more educated than the average bear on this subject.  Is there something incorrect about the comparison made in the chart posted above, and if so, what?

My belief that the CO2 levels are rising in the atmosphere?  I'd discard that belief if we had even one single reliable measurement to show atmospheric CO2 levels were decreasing, or even holding steady, or even not increasing directly in proportion to the amount of CO2 we're adding to the atmosphere minus known CO2 sinks like forests and dissolution in ocean water.

Agreed.

My belief in that temperatures on Earth are rising?  I'd discard that belief if we had even one single reliable measurement that global atmosphere or ocean temperatures were decreasing.  So far no dice, the heat content of the Earth is on the rise every year, even in years with massive volcanic eruptions which cause temporary atmospheric cooling, because the oceans are continuing to get so much warmer and water holds a lot more heat than does air.

Probably, although the changes are very small.

My belief that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that links CO2 increases to rising temperatures?  I'd discard that if we had even one single reliable measurement of the optical properties of CO2 that suggested it absorbs energy at different wavelengths than have been recorded any of the other million times it has been measured.

No argument.

The problem with these challenges is that the current understanding is supported by thousands of repeated consistent observations.  But science is pretty clear, even one observation that disproves all previous understanding is generally sufficient.  If you know of any, I'm all ears.

The question is not so much about the individual inputs noted here, but about what the real system response will be - both temperature itself and, more importantly, how that will affect people around the globe.

Consider the question "what evidence would cause you to believe that either
a. climate will not change as much as you currently think, or
b. the effect on humanity will not be as bad as you currently think?"

[sol]

we see Obama fly to Alaska for a photo op next to the base of a glacier that has receded as of late, but no mention of the two other glacier fronts in the state that have gained ground in the same time frame.

Glaciers are a spectacularly losing argument for climate skeptics.  They're slow to respond to climate, and they integrate change over decades, but they globally shrinking at alarming rates.  Look up the balance histories for yourself.  Wait, don't bother, I just googled the phrase "alaska glacier mass balance" for you and here's a link to the image results page full of downward trending graphs.

That glacier story is even worse in the lower 48, and in Europe, and in the Himalayas.  There are a few glaciers here and there that are growing, like crater glacier inside of the crater of Mt. St. Helens, growing in the shadow of the crater that didn't exist before the 1980 eruption, but on the whole even glaciers in places that are getting increased snowfall (like Alaska) are shrinking because they melt more each summer than they grow each winter.

EDIT: Here is an article discussing the trustworthiness of climate scientists themselves

What?  What does the "trustworthiness" of scientists have to do with anything?  We're talking about science here, data points, not character.  Scientists as a group could be the most disgusting and reviled human beings on the planet and their data would still be data.  You could reproduce it yourself, though you might need a few years of specialized education first.

If every scientist on earth died today, in 10 years a new generation of scientists would be making the exact same measurements and getting the same answers, because those answers are "truth" in a way that is not related to the people making the measurements.

Unless maybe you're suggesting every scientist on earth is deliberately falsifying data?  That's a tall claim, and seems less credible than the suggestion that oil and gas companies are deliberately falsifying data.  The oil and gas companies at least have an obvious vested interest in lying.  What do scientists have to gain by lying?  Any one of them would instantly become fabulously famous by disproving all of the liars, so the motivation to find reproducible truth is pretty strong.

question tells me a lot about the risks to the human race, and that they are likely overblown.  What I'm really skeptic about is the actual risks to humankind, as well as to what extent that climate change is a direct byproduct of the combustion of fossil fuels.

As to the first part, some people misunderstand the risks.  Coastal flooding in Florida isn't going to drown anyone, as you or maybe somebody else suggested above.  The rise will be slow, not a tidal wave that moves in and stays.  Similarly, the loss of the current deep ocean circulation pattern doesn't instantly kill all life on earth, ocean acidification won't destroy every reef overnight, and droughts won't instantly cause global wildfires.  But these effects are real, and cumulative, and they mean a significant portion of the human population and infrastructure will have to relocate.

And that will be expensive, and inconvenient, but not impossible.  The key is that the cost of avoiding this inconvenience now is SO much lower than the cost to relocate everyone and everything that it seems silly to deliberately ruin the currently balanced system.  We're leasing a depreciating asset instead of paying cash up front to save money in the long run.  We're choosing a financially more-costly path because it is cheaper today.  It's classic short-term thinking.

Then there's a whole separate argument to be made that humans are stewards of the planet, and have no right to destroy ecosystems just because we want to.  This school of thought suggests that outside of the financial argument above, rain forests and deserts and mountain ranges have intrinsic value to the billions of natural life forms that live there and we should be protecting them, not indiscriminately drowning them because the Koch brothers want to buy another oil refinery.  That's a harder sell for most folks, though Evangelicals are largely getting on board for biblical reasons.

[music lover]

Glaciers are a spectacularly losing argument for climate skeptics.  They're slow to respond to climate, and they integrate change over decades, but they globally shrinking at alarming rates.  Look up the balance histories for yourself.

I did. Other glaciers are getting bigger. More cherry picking, Sol??

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/13/mt-baker-glaciers-disappearing-a-response-to-the-seattle-times/

[music lover]

Here's an example of typical media misrepresentation that the alarmists fall for...a picture of a mountain lake taken in July 2006 compared to August 2014 to "prove" climate change. Of course, everyone knows that a mountain lake frozen in July that is thawed in August is perfectly normal in the northern hemisphere:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/decker-glacier-lake-at-whistler-a-sign-of-melt-to-come-1.2745216

If you read some of the comments, you can see the warped mindset of the alarmists, some who get completely outraged when the time discrepancy is pointed out to them. No evidence will convince some people....their mind is made up and nothing will change it.

[bacchi]

Here's an example of typical media misrepresentation that the alarmists fall for...a picture of a mountain lake taken in July 2006 compared to August 2014 to "prove" climate change. Of course, everyone knows that a mountain lake frozen in July that is thawed in August is perfectly normal in the northern hemisphere:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/decker-glacier-lake-at-whistler-a-sign-of-melt-to-come-1.2745216

What? The retreating glacier (Decker) formed the lake. There wasn't a lake there previously.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/glacier?s=t

http://blogs.agu.org/fromaglaciersperspective/2010/06/06/spearhead-glacier-and-decker-glacier-retreat-whistler-british-columbia/

Recently both [Decker and Spearhead] have developed new alpine lakes at their termini that illustrate the recent increase in retreat that could continue thanks to these new lakes.

[MoonShadow]

we see Obama fly to Alaska for a photo op next to the base of a glacier that has receded as of late, but no mention of the two other glacier fronts in the state that have gained ground in the same time frame.

Glaciers are a spectacularly losing argument for climate skeptics. 

That entire paragraph wasn't about the glaciers themselves, but how they are used as propaganda to promote the political aspect of climate change, even when the propaganda openly ignores concurrent counter-evidence.

EDIT: Here is an article discussing the trustworthiness of climate scientists themselves

What?  What does the "trustworthiness" of scientists have to do with anything?  We're talking about science here, data points, not character.  Scientists as a group could be the most disgusting and reviled human beings on the planet and their data would still be data.  You could reproduce it yourself, though you might need a few years of specialized education first.

But I can't now, and I currently doubt the validity of such a specialized education regardless.  We have been down this path already in this thread, Sol.  Can you really not see the argument?

If every scientist on earth died today, in 10 years a new generation of scientists would be making the exact same measurements and getting the same answers, because those answers are "truth" in a way that is not related to the people making the measurements.

Unless maybe you're suggesting every scientist on earth is deliberately falsifying data?

I'm not claiming that, but...

  That's a tall claim, and seems less credible than the suggestion that oil and gas companies are deliberately falsifying data.  The oil and gas companies at least have an obvious vested interest in lying.  What do scientists have to gain by lying?

Tenure.  Government research funding. A career of confirmation bias.  Please don't pretend that scientists have no vested interests in the continuation of their research. 

  Any one of them would instantly become fabulously famous by disproving all of the liars, so the motivation to find reproducible truth is pretty strong.

The problem is that it's at least as difficult to disprove AGW as it is to prove it, and comes with the same confirmation biases, and fundamental faith in the accuracy of the scientist's conclusions.  Even still, there have been some rather famous climate scientists in the AGW skeptic camp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

And that will be expensive, and inconvenient, but not impossible. The key is that the cost of avoiding this inconvenience now is SO much lower than the cost to relocate everyone and everything that it seems silly to deliberately ruin the currently balanced system.  We're leasing a depreciating asset instead of paying cash up front to save money in the long run.  We're choosing a financially more-costly path because it is cheaper today.  It's classic short-term thinking.

I think that you need to support the bolded statement.  In my view, "do something now (even if it's wrong)" is short term thinking.  The costs of altering our industrial base to reduce CO2 emissions is not costless, either.  Furthermore, pretty much the entire American infrastructure has been built (or rebuilt, considering ongoing maintenance of older infrastructure) in the past 60 or 70 years.  We are going to spend the resources to rebuild every coastal city again over the next 200-300 years even if the seas do not rise one foot.  A better plan would be to determine new building sites for new (or replacement) cities, or determine how far inland existing coastal cities would actually have to be relocated.

Then there's a whole separate argument to be made that humans are stewards of the planet, and have no right to destroy ecosystems just because we want to.  This school of thought suggests that outside of the financial argument above, rain forests and deserts and mountain ranges have intrinsic value to the billions of natural life forms that live there and we should be protecting them, not indiscriminately drowning them because the Koch brothers want to buy another oil refinery.  That's a harder sell for most folks, though Evangelicals are largely getting on board for biblical reasons.

Yes, there is that argument, but it's not a scientific one.  It's a moral one.  And if there is one thing that I know, morality can be debated.  My perspectives may not match your own here.  My morality says the intrinsic value of the lowliest of human beings trump the intrinsic value of nature, and it's an economic fact that the availability of energy is the #1 indicator of improving 'quality of life' concerns.  So by denying developing nations the same right to consume fossil fuels that developed nations have already benefited from, millions (maybe billions) of people on the low end of the global economic scale will be materially harmed.  By doing so, the developed nations deny real people opportunities to improve their own human conditions, even though all of us have already benefited from the gainful (and yes, sometimes wasteful) use of energy for all our lives.  The labor saving machines that wash our dishes and clothes, that prevent spoilage of our foodstuffs, that illuminate and maintain the internal temperature and conditions of our homes, that aid in the diagnosis of our ills; all contribute to more than our quality of life, but to our health and longevity as well.  All of these things require a great deal of energy in their construction and operation.  The #1 advancement for the quality of life for the middle class housewife in the US during the last century was, arguably, the invention and mass production of the washing machine.  Is it fair, then, to deny these same advancements to housewives in developing nations?  Where, oftentimes, the most time consuming daily chore is simply the carrying of drinking water?  Are you willing to deny your mother, daughter or sister her hot & cold running water?  If not, is it moral to expect that people in developing nations surrender their access to these wonders of the industrial age, in the interests of "nature"?

[beltim]

Glaciers are a spectacularly losing argument for climate skeptics.  They're slow to respond to climate, and they integrate change over decades, but they globally shrinking at alarming rates.  Look up the balance histories for yourself.

I did. Other glaciers are getting bigger. More cherry picking, Sol??

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/13/mt-baker-glaciers-disappearing-a-response-to-the-seattle-times/

No.  One glacier does not make a balance history.  It's quite clear that the worldwide of glacier ice is decreasing: I personally like this reference: http://www.geo.uzh.ch/microsite/wgms/mbb/sum08.html

[MoonShadow]

Glaciers are a spectacularly losing argument for climate skeptics.  They're slow to respond to climate, and they integrate change over decades, but they globally shrinking at alarming rates.  Look up the balance histories for yourself.

I did. Other glaciers are getting bigger. More cherry picking, Sol??

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/13/mt-baker-glaciers-disappearing-a-response-to-the-seattle-times/

No.  One glacier does not make a balance history.  It's quite clear that the worldwide of glacier ice is decreasing: I personally like this reference: http://www.geo.uzh.ch/microsite/wgms/mbb/sum08.html

You are both arguing about dancing on a pin, again.  Even if one of you could actually prove one way or another, which I strongly doubt on both your counts, it still wouldn't alter the worldview of either of you, much less anyone else here.  Whether or not this, that or all glaciers are retreating, growing or static yesterday, today or next week is all a distraction.

[sol]

Which parts would those be?  The data sets actually in use?

http://www.heliogenic.net/2010/01/26/joe-daleo-and-anthony-watts-new-report-surface-temperature-records-policy-driven-deception/

Wow.  That page hurts my brain.  It is a listing of false assertions with zero data to back up any of them.  Please do not use other people's lack of data as support for your lack of data.

Here's a more reliable review of the potential problems with global surface temperature records, conducted by a man who was an openly professed climate change skeptic, who set out to disprove the scientific consensus that surface temperatures were rising because he thought that things like the heat island effect might be skewing the record.  After spending $150,000 of the Koch brothers money to conduct this review, he became a believer in the rise of global surface temperature rise.  It's a real effect.  None of the assertions in the link you posted turned out to be true.

In fact, this former climate skeptic, being funded by oil money, found that the previous (2011) IPCC report on this issue had actually been a little too conservative and the observed warming was slightly larger than reported.  From the study, "our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions."

If you're still confused about whether or not our thermometers are genuinely measuring rising temperatures, just google "global surface temperature" in google scholar and you can read hundreds of pages of reviews and metareviews of this data set analyzed 20 different ways. 

The tree ring temp proxy has to assume that these conditions are approximately similar to much more recent climate;

This argument would hold more water if you were talking about one tree, or even one forest.  But all trees, on the whole planet?  You don't think it's a stretch to suggest that every tree on the planet saw the exact right combination of factors to make it LOOK like like they give the same answer, but are really saying the opposite?

So while there are some credible explanations that might actually mean that the divergence in the data is unique since 1960, how can we really know if any of these hypotheses are true?  We can't actually test them, can we?  If so, how?

You mean we can't actually grow trees under current conditions and test our theories about how tree rings respond to climate change?  Uh, yea we can do that.  We're doing it, globally every year.

That's the thing about global climate change.  We're running the experiment in real time on the grandest scale possible.  Want to know how much of an impact doubling CO2 concentrations will have on the atmosphere?  Well, you could try to model with a computer simulation, or you could just double CO2 in the real atmosphere and see what happens.  We're trying both approaches simultaneously, but at some point the data from each new year of real world data will make the predictions of the simulations irrelevant.

[beltim]

Glaciers are a spectacularly losing argument for climate skeptics.  They're slow to respond to climate, and they integrate change over decades, but they globally shrinking at alarming rates.  Look up the balance histories for yourself.

I did. Other glaciers are getting bigger. More cherry picking, Sol??

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/13/mt-baker-glaciers-disappearing-a-response-to-the-seattle-times/

No.  One glacier does not make a balance history.  It's quite clear that the worldwide of glacier ice is decreasing: I personally like this reference: http://www.geo.uzh.ch/microsite/wgms/mbb/sum08.html

You are both arguing about dancing on a pin, again.  Even if one of you could actually prove one way or another, which I strongly doubt on both your counts, it still wouldn't alter the worldview of either of you, much less anyone else here.  Whether or not this, that or all glaciers are retreating, growing or static yesterday, today or next week is all a distraction.

Huh?  I made one claim: that the worldwide total of glacier ice is increasing.  How is this not verifiable?

And people who support science absolutely respond when the evidence changes.  That's what rational people do.

[sol]

I did. Other glaciers are getting bigger. More cherry picking, Sol??

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/13/mt-baker-glaciers-disappearing-a-response-to-the-seattle-times/

Are you suggested that I cherry picked data, or that you're cherry picking data?

There's this thing called the WGMS that tracks the status of every glacier on the planet that has an active research or monitoring program.  They publish annual bulletins synthesizing the status of the world's glaciers.  It's grim.

Or look at the USGS or the NPS glacier mass balance programs.  Also grim.

If you'd really like to get into detail on this topic I would welcome the opportunity because I love glaciers and I've been alive long enough to see the changes myself.  But the short version of the scientific consensus is that glaciers above about 11k feet are mostly holding their own in the PNW.  Glaciers below that are melting catastrophically, losing an average of half of their volume since the 1950s. 

This is sort of an expected response, right?  Up on top of a big mountain where it always -20 degrees, 1 or 2 deegrees of warming doesn't have much of an impact.  Down where there are no glaciers, it also has no impact.  But right in between, where lots of our glaciers sit right below the snow line, small amounts of warming have translated into dramatic glacier recession.

[sol]

But I can't now, and I currently doubt the validity of such a specialized education regardless.  We have been down this path already in this thread, Sol.  Can you really not see the argument?

I think I see it, I'm just struggling to believe it really is what I think I'm seeing.  Are you really saying that evidence cannot be used to draw conclusions?  Or maybe that the scientific method cannot be used to test hypotheses?  That all scientists are frauds?

Tenure.  Government research funding. A career of confirmation bias.  Please don't pretend that scientists have no vested interests in the continuation of their research. 

I can see why someone might find that argument compelling, if they didn't understand how science works.  You get famous in science by being right where everyone else is wrong, by disproving established theories.  If anything, the biases you mentioned might motivate scientists to be climate skeptics, not supporters.  There is no glory in agreeing with the consensus.

Anyone who can disprove global climate change is guaranteed a Nobel Prize.  So is anyone who can disprove evolution, or gravity.  Upsetting the status quo is the way to get the tenure and research funding that you think are the reasons for supporting the status quo.

accuracy of the scientist's conclusions.  Even still, there have been some rather famous climate scientists in the AGW skeptic camp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

I personally know several people on that list, and they would argue their views are being misrepresented.

I also think it's telling that out of the millions of working scientists in the world, the number of people who might be accused of disputing the consensus can be listed on a wikipedia page

A better plan would be to determine new building sites for new (or replacement) cities, or determine how far inland existing coastal cities would actually have to be relocated.

You're thinking about this far too practically.  If you'd seriously rather relocate every coastal city in the world than transition to renewable energy sources, I'm not sure we're going to find much common ground.  You're suggesting we should just F our environment and deal with the consequences without even trying to conserve our only home?  Why deliberately incur that cost and hassle when avoiding the problem is so relatively easy?

it's an economic fact that the availability of energy is the #1 indicator of improving 'quality of life' concerns.

Interesting side note, 2014 was the first year in human history when global energy production increased while global carbon pollution decreased.  So it's certainly possible to generate more energy with less carbon, if we put our mind to it.

Is it fair, then, to deny these same advancements to housewives in developing nations?

I would not suggest denying anyone anything.  I suggest meeting those needs in a sustainable and non-destructive way.  We've already shown it's possible.

[MoonShadow]

Which parts would those be?  The data sets actually in use?

http://www.heliogenic.net/2010/01/26/joe-daleo-and-anthony-watts-new-report-surface-temperature-records-policy-driven-deception/

Wow.  That page hurts my brain.  It is a listing of false assertions with zero data to back up any of them.  Please do not use other people's lack of data as support for your lack of data.

I didn't post that as data, but as an example of the complaints that can be asserted against using proxy data to start with.  I have no way to determine if that data is correct or not, and that is the root of my main point from the beginning of this very thread.  That it's a belief no matter what data set anyone presents.  Try not to get distracted, Sol, we were having a productive conversation.

If you're still confused about whether or not our thermometers are genuinely measuring rising temperatures, just google "global surface temperature" in google scholar and you can read hundreds of pages of reviews and metareviews of this data set analyzed 20 different ways. 

I don't think 'confused' is the correct word.  Perhaps an agnostic to your faith, priest.  We are going in circles, Sol.  The disconnect isn't in the quality of your data sets, but in the trustworthiness of your priestly caste.

The tree ring temp proxy has to assume that these conditions are approximately similar to much more recent climate;

This argument would hold more water if you were talking about one tree, or even one forest.  But all trees, on the whole planet?  You don't think it's a stretch to suggest that every tree on the planet saw the exact right combination of factors to make it LOOK like like they give the same answer, but are really saying the opposite?

We have not been using anything approximating every tree on the whole planet.  We track the tree ring data from trees harvested from a finite list of locales.  While the local variations may very well average nicely in the data set across those sites, we can't prove that to be true either.  It's just another assumption among so many in the climate field.

So while there are some credible explanations that might actually mean that the divergence in the data is unique since 1960, how can we really know if any of these hypotheses are true?  We can't actually test them, can we?  If so, how?

You mean we can't actually grow trees under current conditions and test our theories about how tree rings respond to climate change?  Uh, yea we can do that.  We're doing it, globally every year.

Sol, you are back to willful ignorance again.  If you had bothered to read what I wrote, it would have been obvious that I had already said that, while we can know what the climate has been since human measurements have been recorded, we still can't know what the local climate conditions for that tree were prior to human measurements; in part, because the tree ring measurements are our proxy for the local climate conditions.  Without another proxy in that same locale to compare against, we cannot know (or test) how the tree ring growth was actually suppressed.  The idea that it was largely due to temperature is another assumption.

but at some point the data from each new year of real world data will make the predictions of the simulations irrelevant.

Sure.  But when will that be?  Will it be in our lifetimes?  Our grandchildrens'?  Their grandchildrens'?  Scope of the issue is another matter of debate.  Is AGW really the "greatest threat to future generations"?    I think that is incredibly short sighted, also.  Of all the great issues of our modern world, we continue to debate over the one that, in any practical sense, won't have any critical effects in at least 50 years.  None of us can even imagine what this world will look like, or what technologies will be available, in another 50 years.  Imagine describing the Internet of 2015 to a futurist in 1965.  Even Paul Baran, Claude Shannon or Tim Berners-Lee might have had real trouble wrapping their expansive minds around the current reality, even as pioneers in that field, with only the frame of reference of technology predictable in 1965.

And yet, peak everything might make all this bickering moot anyway, if it forces the entirety of humanity into the energy available from our solar budget.

[sol]

I didn't post that as data, but as an example of the complaints that can be asserted against using proxy data to start with.

And I posted a rebuttal of all of those complaints.  I agree there are questions, but there are also answers and I linked to them.  Answer provided by a former climate skeptic, funded by Koch industries.  Just in case you're still skeptical of the trustworthiness of the investigator.

The disconnect isn't in the quality of your data sets, but in the trustworthiness of your priestly caste.

If you think the validity of science has anything do with the character of the people who do it, you've misunderstood how science works. 

But it's an interesting line of attack, I suppose.  Don't argue with data, argue with people? 

People are funny.  500 years after Copernicus, 25% of the population still believes the Earth is the center of the solar system.  150 years after the Origin of Species, only 35% of Americans believe in evolution.  I should probably be thrilled that 60% of Americans actually DO believe in climate change.

Of course, 43% of Republicans think Obama is secretly a Muslim, so maybe I shouldn't be so thrilled with the public after all.

We have not been using anything approximating every tree on the whole planet.

Just every tree we've bothered to measure?  I agree that is not all of them, I guess. 

tree ring measurements are our proxy for the local climate conditions.  Without another proxy in that same locale to compare against, we cannot know (or test) how the tree ring growth was actually suppressed.

Sure we can!  How do you think the tree ring record was first analyzed?  What was it compared to? 

There are tons of other climate proxy records.  Oxygen isotope ratios in ice cores and snow fields.  Pollen counts in varved lake sediments.  Carbon isotope ratios in fossilized organic matter.  Coral skeletons.  Fossilized microbes in ocean sediments.  Direct measurements of temperature in underground boreholes that have recorded temperature diffusion from the surface.  Permafrost crystalline fabrics.  Glacier histories mapped by successive moraines.  There are TONS of different paleoclimate records to study, relevant over varying time scales, and they all tell the same story.  Don't get hung up on tree rings as a potential weak point, they're just one little piece of the puzzle.

Sure.  But when will that be?  Will it be in our lifetimes?  Our grandchildrens'?  Their grandchildrens'? 

Does it matter?  Right now, the computer simulations and the real world experiment we're conducting on our planet are in pretty close agreement.  Over time they'll get to be in even closer agreement as we gather more data to refine the models.  The model said ten more years should see another 0.3 degrees warming, ten years later we saw 0.32 degrees of warming.  Now the models have made new predictions, and in a few years we'll see it confirmed or denied and we'll revise the models and repeat the process.  There's no finite end-date to this process, no one day on which the two are deemed identical and we can put down the model and stop making predictions.

There was serious scientific debate about global warming's future severity, back in the 1980s and into the early 90s.  We've had 30 years of additional data since then to confirm this story and test those hypotheses.  There's not really any significant debate anymore, just little details to work out around the edges.

Scope of the issue is another matter of debate.  Is AGW really the "greatest threat to future generations"?   

Greater than terrorism or North Korea trying to nuke Hawaii?  No, probably not.  Those are catastrophic immediate threats and climate change is a slow and methodical march.

But climate change isn't just a problem of coral reefs and glaciers.  It's tied up in energy independence and habitat loss and pollution levels.  It's about accepting responsibility for the messes we create, as part of running a functional society, and trying not to burden our kids and our grandkids with problems they did not create but will have to clean up.  It's about efficiently managing our long term costs, by accepting some up-front expenses while times are good in order to reduce future expenses.  It's about creating a better world for humanity to live in, not ruining the one we have without considering the consequence for those who come next.

And yet, peak everything might make all this bickering moot anyway, if it forces the entirety of humanity into the energy available from our solar budget.

Now we're drifting OT a bit, but I like where you're headed.   Unfortunately, a 100% solar powered world would still have significant resource conflicts over the raw materials required to manufacture solar panels.  And we'll have nuclear options for at least a few tens of thousands of years after the last hunk of coal is ever burned.

[MoonShadow]

But I can't now, and I currently doubt the validity of such a specialized education regardless.  We have been down this path already in this thread, Sol.  Can you really not see the argument?

I think I see it, I'm just struggling to believe it really is what I think I'm seeing.  Are you really saying that evidence cannot be used to draw conclusions?  Or maybe that the scientific method cannot be used to test hypotheses?  That all scientists are frauds?

I'm not saying any of these things.  I'm saying, that as a layman in this field, I can't even know who might be a fraud.  Again, the datasets are too large, and the subject so complex, as to practically be beyond human understanding.  Even your peers require the aid of incredibly powerful computers to even make sense of the data, and almost certainly trust that the programmers are modeling their datasets in the prescribed manner.  I'm so far removed from the ability to test your methods or data that it's akin to magic, and I really do represent the majority of human beings.  The vast majority of people who accept AGW as settled science are trusting you.  I started my adult life as a Green, and ended up where I am today because I actually started to look at the available data.  It's like a illiterate French peasant from the middle ages attempting to authenticate the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.

Tenure.  Government research funding. A career of confirmation bias.  Please don't pretend that scientists have no vested interests in the continuation of their research. 

I can see why someone might find that argument compelling, if they didn't understand how science works.  You get famous in science by being right where everyone else is wrong, by disproving established theories.  If anything, the biases you mentioned might motivate scientists to be climate skeptics, not supporters.  There is no glory in agreeing with the consensus.

Anyone who can disprove global climate change is guaranteed a Nobel Prize.  So is anyone who can disprove evolution, or gravity.  Upsetting the status quo is the way to get the tenure and research funding that you think are the reasons for supporting the status quo.

I'm not talking about the rare individual with the ambition to get a Nobel.  I'm talking about the 2nd rate climatologist hoping to get tenure at a state university.  Or the guy hoping for that next research grant to keep his rent paid through April.  That guy doesn't rock the boat, he rides with the current.

accuracy of the scientist's conclusions.  Even still, there have been some rather famous climate scientists in the AGW skeptic camp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

I personally know several people on that list, and they would argue their views are being misrepresented.

Maybe they are.  Who am I to say?

I also think it's telling that out of the millions of working scientists in the world, the number of people who might be accused of disputing the consensus can be listed on a wikipedia page

Heh.  Maybe, maybe not.  The number people who signed the original IPCC report fits on one Wikipedia page as well.  Another scientist would also mention that popularity is not evidence of the correctness of your position.

A better plan would be to determine new building sites for new (or replacement) cities, or determine how far inland existing coastal cities would actually have to be relocated.

You're thinking about this far too practically.  If you'd seriously rather relocate every coastal city in the world than transition to renewable energy sources, I'm not sure we're going to find much common ground.  You're suggesting we should just F our environment and deal with the consequences without even trying to conserve our only home? Why deliberately incur that cost and hassle when avoiding the problem is so relatively easy?

I don't agree that it's necessarily "so relatively easy".  There are incredible knock-on effects in what you seem to be advocating.  One thing that I'm advocating is waiting a little bit, to see if something changes; be it in the climate science itself, the technology available, or the economics of "doing something".  If the science were actually all that clear to the layman, I believe that entire markets and industries would arise to mitigate, if not actively reverse, the affects of AGW.

it's an economic fact that the availability of energy is the #1 indicator of improving 'quality of life' concerns.

Interesting side note, 2014 was the first year in human history when global energy production increased while global carbon pollution decreased.  So it's certainly possible to generate more energy with less carbon, if we put our mind to it.

And if we do put our minds to it, there won't really be a need for governments to compel compliance to climate change mandates.

Is it fair, then, to deny these same advancements to housewives in developing nations?

I would not suggest denying anyone anything.  I suggest meeting those needs in a sustainable and non-destructive way.  We've already shown it's possible.

We have shown it's possible for some percentage of the population.  We have not shown it's also scalable to any significant portion of that world population.

[MoonShadow]

I didn't post that as data, but as an example of the complaints that can be asserted against using proxy data to start with.

And I posted a rebuttal of all of those complaints.  I agree there are questions, but there are also answers and I linked to them.  Answer provided by a former climate skeptic, funded by Koch industries.  Just in case you're still skeptical of the trustworthiness of the investigator.

I am I speaking the wrong language?  It certainly looks like we both speak English, but it still feels like something is getting lost in translation.

The disconnect isn't in the quality of your data sets, but in the trustworthiness of your priestly caste.

If you think the validity of science has anything do with the character of the people who do it, you've misunderstood how science works. 

If you still think my arguments have been about the science, you haven't been listening.

But it's an interesting line of attack, I suppose.  Don't argue with data, argue with people? 

I would think that it was a pretty normal way to argue.  Data doesn't argue well.  It tends to just sit there on the desk.  Quietly.

People are funny. 

Most people are moist robots; not really independently thinking, sentient beings.  Most people believe 90% of what they were taught in school/church/home/whatever before the age of 14.  Most people believe 90% of statistics presented on an Internet forum are made up bullshit.

Because they are.

tree ring measurements are our proxy for the local climate conditions.  Without another proxy in that same locale to compare against, we cannot know (or test) how the tree ring growth was actually suppressed.

Sure we can!  How do you think the tree ring record was first analyzed?  What was it compared to? 

There are tons of other climate proxy records.  Oxygen isotope ratios in ice cores and snow fields.  Pollen counts in varved lake sediments.  Carbon isotope ratios in fossilized organic matter.  Coral skeletons.  Fossilized microbes in ocean sediments.  Direct measurements of temperature in underground boreholes that have recorded temperature diffusion from the surface.  Permafrost crystalline fabrics.  Glacier histories mapped by successive moraines.  There are TONS of different paleoclimate records to study, relevant over varying time scales, and they all tell the same story.  Don't get hung up on tree rings as a potential weak point, they're just one little piece of the puzzle.

Not one of those other proxies are local to the trees being measured.  Are any of them during the same timescale?  So how do we calibrate our tree ring temperature measurements, then?

Sure.  But when will that be?  Will it be in our lifetimes?  Our grandchildrens'?  Their grandchildrens'? 

Does it matter?

I'm going to err on the side of common sense and say yes, it most certainly does matter what the time frame of economically significant climate change effects occur.

Scope of the issue is another matter of debate.  Is AGW really the "greatest threat to future generations"?   

Greater than terrorism or North Korea trying to nuke Hawaii?  No, probably not.  Those are catastrophic immediate threats and climate change is a slow and methodical march.

Well, that's one thing we got.

But climate change isn't just a problem of coral reefs and glaciers.  It's tied up in energy independence and habitat loss and pollution levels. It's about accepting responsibility for the messes we create, as part of running a functional society, and trying not to burden our kids and our grandkids with problems they did not create but will have to clean up.  It's about efficiently managing our long term costs, by accepting some up-front expenses while times are good in order to reduce future expenses.  It's about creating a better world for humanity to live in, not ruining the one we have without considering the consequence for those who come next.

And that's another thing we got.  I'm still not sure that we actually agree on what needs to be done to this end, however.

And yet, peak everything might make all this bickering moot anyway, if it forces the entirety of humanity into the energy available from our solar budget.

Now we're drifting OT a bit, but I like where you're headed.   Unfortunately, a 100% solar powered world would still have significant resource conflicts over the raw materials required to manufacture solar panels.  And we'll have nuclear options for at least a few tens of thousands of years after the last hunk of coal is ever burned.

True, but the same NIMBY's who lobby congress for action on climate change also protest nuclear power development, as well as the disruption of any natural habitat or the view from their beachhouse.

[sol]

I'm saying, that as a layman in this field, I can't even know who might be a fraud.

I think you have to trust in the self-correcting nature of the scientific method, not any one individual.  The whole enterprise is built around the process of identifying and exposing misconceptions.  There will always be new discoveries, and old ideas will be replaced with newer better ones, as that's the whole point of the scientific method.  Frauds are necessarily found out and exposed.

Again, the datasets are too large, and the subject so complex, as to practically be beyond human understanding.

Don't be misled by climate models.  Glacier retreat is easy to see by anyone with a camera and an old photograph.  Ocean acidification can be measured with a pH meter.  The impacts of climate change are easy to see, it's the details of the explanatory mechanisms that are complicated and require specialized education to understand.

I don't really know how my television works, either, but I can tell when it's broken.

I don't agree that it's necessarily "so relatively easy". 

There is some scientific debate about the future severity of global climate change.  We're not entirely sure if it's going to be sort of bad, or really bad, or maybe not so bad.  We generally think the best and worst case scenarios are probably less likely than the moderate scenario.  But faced with that uncertainty, why is your proposed risk management solution to do nothing?

When you get in your car and go for a drive, you face the same kind of uncertainty.  What you expect will probably happen is that you get stuck in some traffic and the radio has too many commercials, and you're going to be kind of bummed.  There's a slight chance that your favorite song will be on and you'll discover a new carpool lane and life is sunny.  And there's a slight chance that you'll be in a horrific five car pile-up.  And how do you manage the risks in that situation?  You put on your damned seat belt to prepare for the worst-case scenario, just in case, because that's the responsible thing to do.  And then you follow the speed limits and hope for the best.

With climate change, we're ignoring the lower-probability catastrophic event.  We're not wearing our seat belts because we're hoping the bad scenario doesn't unfold for us.  We're not doing a good job of managing our risk.

And if we do put our minds to it, there won't really be a need for governments to compel compliance to climate change mandates.

Nobody is "compelling" anyone to do anything.  Each nation gets to set it's own target for CO2 reductions, and then enforce it's own compliance with it's own target.  There is no global police force dealing with climate change.  We're haggling for voluntary compliance with self-selected goals, and even that softest of touches is turning out to be a huge lift.  Some nations (okay mostly Saudi Arabia) are vehemently opposed to the whole idea of even monitoring their carbon emissions.

We have shown it's possible for some percentage of the population.  We have not shown it's also scalable to any significant portion of that world population.

Oh I disagree in the most wonderful way!  Solar power is making huge inroads in developing countries because it provides electricity in places without functional power grids, and that makes it enormously scalable in all kinds of places.  Rural villages.  Nations without functioning governments.  Island nations with no other energy resources.

By analogy, the third world entirely skipped the stage of telecommunication development involving landlines and switchboard operators.  They went straight to mobile phones and cell towers, leapfrogging an entire generation of technology.  Renewable energy has the potential to do the same thing, leapfrogging over the generation of technology where centralized utility companies build and maintain a power distribution infrastructure.  Each village can piecemeal build out it's own local power grid, with solar or wind capacity added slowly over time, without waiting for anyone to wire them up to a grid or build them a power plant.  Being carbon-free is just a side effect. 

Yes, early renewable energy sources were first introduced as a plaything of the very rich, a weird corner of the market that nobody could envision displacing traditional carbon-based power distribution systems.  But that was true of early automobiles competing with the traditional horse, too, and look what that grew into.  If it genuinely is a better technology, there's no stopping these things.

[sol]

Data doesn't argue well.  It tends to just sit there on the desk.  Quietly.

Well it only surprises me because so many people ARE arguing with the data.  They claim the earth isn't warming.  They claim CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas.  These people confuse me.  Who argues with a thermometer?  It doesn't have an agenda, it just is.

Not one of those other proxies are local to the trees being measured.

You might want that to be true, but it's not.  In particular, tree rings and lake sediments tend to come from the same environments.  We also have tree ring data from trees buried in permafrost, and from coastal Greenland valleys covered in glacial moraines, and carbon isotopes from leaves that give independent temperature measurements on the very same trees on which we can count tree rings.

Additionally, regional climate trends tend to move in unison.  Offshore California ocean sediments reflect local climate just like onshore California trees do.  Temperatures in northern Canada and central Canada move in unison, so a permafrost record from one spot and an ice core record from another spot can both record the same temperature patterns and cycles as deviations from different base temperatures.

I'm going to err on the side of common sense and say yes, it most certainly does matter what the time frame of economically significant climate change effects occur.

Well that's a tough question because it's not just a science issue.  The uncertainty in future climate change severity has more to do with the uncertainty in emission scenarios than the uncertainty in the climate sensitivity.  We might all suddenly go super green, or we might suddenly decide we really need to burn all that coal ASAP, and those possible pathways for human society are harder to predict than the impact of another 75 gigatons of carbon on the radiative energy balance. 

We have a pretty good idea of what will happen if we burn all that carbon.  We have no idea if we'll actually burn it all or not.  (I suspect we will.)

True, but the same NIMBY's who lobby congress for action on climate change also protest nuclear power development, as well as the disruption of any natural habitat or the view from their beachhouse.

I suspect it's different NIMBYs, but I see your point.  Fortunately, if we're going to opt for the path of telling rich and powerful oil billionaires to STFU, we're probably also going to tell the less rich and less powerful beachhouse owners to STFU.

[MoonShadow]

Sorry Sol.  I'm going to have to respond some other time.  I need to take a break from this thread, and probably this forum, for a while.  It's taken over my life.

[music lover]

Sol, perhaps you should get over your fixation with the Koch brothers. No matter how much they have funded, it pales in comparison to what the government allots to climate change...bear in mind the govt. funds NO studies or programs that don't believe in warming. If you want government funding, then you go with the flow.

Trying to reason with a warmist is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, craps on the board, and then struts around like it was victorious.

[matchewed]

Sol, perhaps you should get over your fixation with the Koch brothers. No matter how much they have funded, it pales in comparison to what the government allots to climate change...bear in mind the govt. funds NO studies or programs that don't believe in warming. If you want government funding, then you go with the flow.

Trying to reason with a warmist is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, craps on the board, and then struts around like it was victorious.

Still lack anything of substance to what you post.

[ShoulderThingThatGoesUp]

CO2 is a greenhouse gas and the Earth is warming. Substantial uncertainties still exist in our understanding of climate. Complicated models in general are a problem in current science because they can get "tuned" to whatever conclusion the researcher is after if the researcher is not totally honest with themselves. Scientists are human and tack on climate change to all sorts of bullshit in order to get grant money.

Enough CO2 has already been emitted to make some ice sheet collapse probably inevitable.

Third World residents have a right to seek their own prosperity and to use energy to escape misery. People who are more concerned about Cecil the lion than the human beings who live in Zimbabwe are morally suspect.

I don't have a problem with a revenue-neutral carbon tax. I am very suspicious of the government's ability to pick the right paths for a renewable future. See corn ethanol and hydrogen cars (negative and negligible impacts, respectively).

[brooklynguy]

I'm saying, that as a layman in this field, I can't even know who might be a fraud.

Certainly this problem is not unique to the topic of climate change.  Do you also doubt the conclusions of scientists on every other complex subject which you, as a layperson, lack the means of personally verifying?

I need to take a break from this thread, and probably this forum, for a while.  It's taken over my life.

It does have a tendency to do that, doesn't it?

[Gin1984]

I don't agree that it's necessarily "so relatively easy".  There are incredible knock-on effects in what you seem to be advocating.  One thing that I'm advocating is waiting a little bit, to see if something changes; be it in the climate science itself, the technology available, or the economics of "doing something".  If the science were actually all that clear to the layman, I believe that entire markets and industries would arise to mitigate, if not actively reverse, the affects of AGW.

If members of the right wing who don't want science taught in schools would stop, science would be clearer to a layman because the layperson would have a higher level of science education. 

[frugalecon]

We have shown it's possible for some percentage of the population.  We have not shown it's also scalable to any significant portion of that world population.

Oh I disagree in the most wonderful way!  Solar power is making huge inroads in developing countries because it provides electricity in places without functional power grids, and that makes it enormously scalable in all kinds of places.  Rural villages.  Nations without functioning governments.  Island nations with no other energy resources.

By analogy, the third world entirely skipped the stage of telecommunication development involving landlines and switchboard operators.  They went straight to mobile phones and cell towers, leapfrogging an entire generation of technology.  Renewable energy has the potential to do the same thing, leapfrogging over the generation of technology where centralized utility companies build and maintain a power distribution infrastructure.  Each village can piecemeal build out it's own local power grid, with solar or wind capacity added slowly over time, without waiting for anyone to wire them up to a grid or build them a power plant.  Being carbon-free is just a side effect. 

Yes, early renewable energy sources were first introduced as a plaything of the very rich, a weird corner of the market that nobody could envision displacing traditional carbon-based power distribution systems.  But that was true of early automobiles competing with the traditional horse, too, and look what that grew into.  If it genuinely is a better technology, there's no stopping these things.

I think this is such an important point. One thing that gives me some modicum of hope is precisely that the market does tend to work, and there is some chance that exponential improvements in the efficiency of solar (and the efficiency of plain old efficiency, see the WSJ article on Monday about LED lighting in warehouses) will eventually make the  whole question moot. Early on in the process it is hard to discern the exponential improvements, but perhaps we are getting to the "take off" phase. (Though I believe that Bill Gates doesn't think that solar will actually be able to deliver the power to get us there.)

One thing that I never hear the climate change deniers address is the separate issue of ocean acidification. It seems like that has the potential to impact lots of things we like. Basically, I don't think that some people recognize that we humans derive very valuable services from different ecosystems. It only stands to reason that we need to consider any tradeoffs between our activities and the services we will derive from natural systems.

[Mississippi Mudstache]

We have shown it's possible for some percentage of the population.  We have not shown it's also scalable to any significant portion of that world population.

Oh I disagree in the most wonderful way!  Solar power is making huge inroads in developing countries because it provides electricity in places without functional power grids, and that makes it enormously scalable in all kinds of places.  Rural villages.  Nations without functioning governments.  Island nations with no other energy resources.

By analogy, the third world entirely skipped the stage of telecommunication development involving landlines and switchboard operators.  They went straight to mobile phones and cell towers, leapfrogging an entire generation of technology.  Renewable energy has the potential to do the same thing, leapfrogging over the generation of technology where centralized utility companies build and maintain a power distribution infrastructure.  Each village can piecemeal build out it's own local power grid, with solar or wind capacity added slowly over time, without waiting for anyone to wire them up to a grid or build them a power plant.  Being carbon-free is just a side effect. 

Yes, early renewable energy sources were first introduced as a plaything of the very rich, a weird corner of the market that nobody could envision displacing traditional carbon-based power distribution systems.  But that was true of early automobiles competing with the traditional horse, too, and look what that grew into.  If it genuinely is a better technology, there's no stopping these things.

I think this is such an important point. One thing that gives me some modicum of hope is precisely that the market does tend to work, and there is some chance that exponential improvements in the efficiency of solar (and the efficiency of plain old efficiency, see the WSJ article on Monday about LED lighting in warehouses) will eventually make the  whole question moot. Early on in the process it is hard to discern the exponential improvements, but perhaps we are getting to the "take off" phase. (Though I believe that Bill Gates doesn't think that solar will actually be able to deliver the power to get us there.)

One thing that I never hear the climate change deniers address is the separate issue of ocean acidification. It seems like that has the potential to impact lots of things we like. Basically, I don't think that some people recognize that we humans derive very valuable services from different ecosystems. It only stands to reason that we need to consider any tradeoffs between our activities and the services we will derive from natural systems.

Minor quibble here, but it should be noted that the recent surge in PV installations is not a result of an increase in their efficiency, which hasn't markedly improved since the 1970s, but rather a decrease in manufacturing costs. For many reasons that you can read about here, PV systems are not likely to commonly exceed 15-20% efficiency any time in the near future. But that doesn't matter, because the sun provides us with so friggin' much enery, that system efficiency is hardly the limiting factor.

[TheOldestYoungMan]

Well it only surprises me because so many people ARE arguing with the data.  They claim the earth isn't warming.  They claim CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas.  These people confuse me.  Who argues with a thermometer?  It doesn't have an agenda, it just is.

Thermometer's have an agenda.  The physical reality of measuring temperature means that thermometers, more so than legitimately scientific methods of measuring temperature, tend to report a false temperature.  That's why in most of the data you cite, they used more sophisticated devices.  If that data was gathered with thermometers, I would argue with it, because it wouldn't be high enough quality to support their conclusions.  Thermometers suck.

They're what you use in "science class" and what the doctor uses because it's a familiar device and an approximate value works for his purpose.  But someone engaged in rigorous study (an actual scientist as opposed to the socio-political climate pseudo-scientist) wouldn't use a thermometer if they needed the actual temperature of a thing.

Glaciers are a spectacularly losing argument for climate skeptics.  They're slow to respond to climate, and they integrate change over decades, but they globally shrinking at alarming rates.  Look up the balance histories for yourself.

I did. Other glaciers are getting bigger. More cherry picking, Sol??

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/13/mt-baker-glaciers-disappearing-a-response-to-the-seattle-times/

The glaciers are receding.  That's happening.  But the thing is, long before this was a scientific fact, the claim was out there that it was a fact.  Do you see the problem with that Sol?  The very same people who, now, with good data, want to demonstrate that they know and can prove this thing, previously said the same thing and were lying.

From everyone on the outside looking in, the two situations are indiscernible to them, because at neither point did they have the skillset required to evaluate the raw data, but if they looked into it the first time (like I did) they were pretty surprised that the original data wasn't there.  It's not that they misinterpreted it, it's that no data existed.  The appropriate response, within the scientific community, is to say, "claim!  Go prove it."  Which is what happened.  That members of the public would say "claim! I don't trust you" isn't all that surprising.  It's why you don't put claims forward as anything but.

A hypothesis, that the glaciers were melting, was put forward and defended as a conclusion.  But the overwhelming majority of glaciers had no, zero, ongoing scientific data collection associated with them at all.  It's something like, out of hundreds of glaciers, fewer than 50 had even two data points available.  NOW we have better data, NOW we've put forth the effort and the money to legitimately study the problem.  So NOW should be first time it's put out there.  And if the data had come back, and some weird thing was making it so all glaciers were increasing, you bet your ass the AGW crowd wouldn't be talking about it at all.  Because it isn't about science to them, it's about their agenda.

This ongoing failure to distinguish claims from facts was incredibly persistent within climate science.  So now it's a boy who cried wolf scenario.  And as much as you want to blame those who "don't understand" or "don't get science" it is entirely the fault of these previous claims.

All you can do is just keep gathering data and respectfully lay out your case.  Facts are self-evident that way.

[music lover]

There is a big problem with weather stations in the US...many of them located next to AC units, pavement, parking lots, treatment plants, etc. 89% of them fail to meet the basic site requirements:

https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf

[johnny847]

I'm saying, that as a layman in this field, I can't even know who might be a fraud.

Certainly this problem is not unique to the topic of climate change.  Do you also doubt the conclusions of scientists on every other complex subject which you, as a layperson, lack the means of personally verifying?

Yeah I don't quite get this argument MoonShadow. In that case what are we left with? We can't trust any scientists? At all? We all have to do our own research, get years of training, to accept any scientific theories?

If that's your worldview MoonShadow then I really don't think there's much discussion to be had here. No matter what science sol or anybody else throws at you, you'd just claim well I don't know if I can trust what the scientist says.

I don't know, maybe you're trying to learn enough about the Earth's climate to evaluate all of this for yourself. But trying to learn all of that on this forum is certainly not going to be feasible.

tl;dr Why did you even start this discussion if you're just going to come back and say well I don't know if I can trust any scientist's conclusions because they may be frauds, and I don't have a degree in this stuff so I can't verify it myself.

[music lover]

CO2 has a logarithmic affect...the more you add, the less it warms. This has been accepted science since the 1930's:

http://www.c3headlines.com/2014/01/nasa-climate-research-co2-global-warming-impact-cut-by-67-over-last-50-years.html

https://knowledgedrift.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/co2-is-logarithmic-explained-3/

http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.ca/2015/02/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide_19.html

[Gin1984]

There is a big problem with weather stations in the US...many of them located next to AC units, pavement, parking lots, treatment plants, etc. 89% of them fail to meet the basic site requirements:

https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf

Use proper source data if you want your conclusion to have merit.

[music lover]

How about a weather station right next to a runway that registers jet exhaust??

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/met-office-explanation-for-heathrow-record-looks-increasingly-threadbare/

[music lover]

Altered weather data in Paraguay:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/all-of-paraguays-temperature-record-has-been-tampered-with/

[Gin1984]

How about a weather station right next to a runway that registers jet exhaust??

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/met-office-explanation-for-heathrow-record-looks-increasingly-threadbare/

Again, use reliable sources.

[sol]

How about a weather station right next to a runway that registers jet exhaust??

I suggest you spend some time with the Berkeley study link I posted above, which analyzed these very issues you are raising and concluded that global average temperatures are definitely rising despite these kinds of concerns about the data collection methods or the integrity of the record.

Temperatures are rising. No one disputes this fact anymore, and you look foolish for trying.  This was an open question in the 80s, when the theory suggested we would see warming but it had not yet been conclusively recorded, but 30 more years of data has long since settled it.

When observations confirm predictions, we call that evidence in support of the theory.  If observations had conflicted with predictions, we would have to adjust or discard the theory. 

Individual weather stations can never be evidence of global temperature trends.  The fact that this seems lost on music lover isn't really surprising, I guess.  Please consider looking at the global record if you are going to draw conclusions about the global record.

[music lover]

How about a weather station right next to a runway that registers jet exhaust??

I suggest you spend some time with the Berkeley study link I posted above, which analyzed these very issues you are raising and concluded that global average temperatures are definitely rising despite these kinds of concerns about the data collection methods or the integrity of the record.

Temperatures are rising. No one disputes this fact anymore, and you look foolish for trying.  This was an open question in the 80s, when the theory suggested we would see warming but it had not yet been conclusively recorded, but 30 more years of data has long since settled it.

When observations confirm predictions, we call that evidence in support of the theory.  If observations had conflicted with predictions, we would have to adjust or discard the theory. 

Individual weather stations can never be evidence of global temperature trends.  The fact that this seems lost on music lover isn't really surprising, I guess.  Please consider looking at the global record if you are going to draw conclusions about the global record.

Well Sol, the global records include data from stations near runways, AC units, and exhaust fans, and also stations where urban development has built up around them. I guess that fact is lost on you??

But, just keep on making excuses :)

[Glenstache]

So, this happened: