The energy and climate debate

[AU74]

Would you be happier if I called them right wing or conservative or Republican? It would still make the point that the linked articles are not from mainstream authors. As for facts, if you can't find them at the site I linked (or countless other sources that are easy to find), you aren't trying very hard. I see no need to regurgitate them.

[2126]

As I noted no amount of scientific data will likely sway those who have reached conclusions based on non-scientific information.

You might, however, like to contemplate the following:

Every five or six years, the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [comprised of 195 governments, including the US and all major industrialized countries] prepares a comprehensive report that assesses articles that climate scientists publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals, which is where most of the scientific debate on climate change takes place.

Peer review, while not perfect, ensures that journals only accept articles that meet a high standard of scientific rigor and objectivity. Several surveys of the refereed literature on climate change science have confirmed that virtually all published papers accept the scientific basis of human-induced climate change.

The scientific consensus about human-induced climate change is further attested to by a joint statement signed by 11 of the world’s leading national science academies representing Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCcQFjABahUKEwjkkbmfiKDHAhVDox4KHcQHCVk&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalacademies.org%2Fincludes%2FG8%2B5energy-climate09.pdf&ei=1mjJVeTOC8PGesSPpMgF&usg=AFQjCNFAVLk8VScTo9BxzFW5PoMURRKORQ&bvm=bv.99804247,d.dmo&cad=rja
Many other science bodies have issued similar statements. Link to list of over 200 science bodies that support the human link to climate change: http://opr.ca.gov/s_listoforganizations.php

Not that I expect you'd be interested, but if you would like some research you could start with these:

1552-page 2013 Group 1- IPPC Report: The Physical Science Basis (on the physical science behind the global scientific consensus on climate change) http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/..._FINAL.pdf

[FYI: Over 1000 authors from 63 countries ; 209 Lead Authors and 50 Review Editors from 39 countries ; Over 600 Contributing Authors from 32 countries ; Over 2
million gigabytes of numerical data from climate model simulations; Over 9200 scientific publications cited; Reviews include 54,677 comments;1089 Expert Reviewers from 55 countries; 38 Governments]

688-page 2014 IPPC Group 2 Report (Part B) Impacts, Adaptations, and Vulnerabilties: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/W..._FINAL.pdf

1132-page 2014 IPPC Group 2 Report (Part A) Impacts, Adaptations, and Vulnerabilities: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/W..._FINAL.pdf

[ FYI: Containing 1217 authors representing 92 nationalities; 242 lead authors and 66 review editors from 70 countries; 436 contributing authors from 54 countries; over 12,000 scientific references cited; Reviews include :50,492 comments; 1729 expert reviewers from 84 countries]

1454-page 2014 IPPC Group 3 Report: Mitigation of Climate Change http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report...5_full.pdf

[FYI: More than 1400 authors from 85 countries; 235 Coordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors and 38 Review Editors from 58 countries;176 Contributing Authors from 35 countries; Close to 1200 scenarios of socioeconomic development analyzed; Nearly 10,000 references cited; Reviews included 38,296 comments; 836 Expert Reviewers from 66 countries; 37 Governments]

In total, these 3 reports comprise the efforts of more than 3,600 climate scientists worldwide and are based on over 31,000 peer-reviewed scientific references and incorporate over 143,000 reviewer comments. [Also note that each of the Summary for Policymakers of each of the above reports was approved line-by-line unanimously by all 195 member governments of the International Panel on Climate Change].

THIS is what a scientific consensus looks like.

Enjoy the reading!

[admin]

Ok, guys, I thank everybody for their contributions here and I will close this thread here and move it to another forum before it's getting a life of its own here and spoils the atmosphere, perhaps.

[admin]

The climate discussion moved here

[Palm]

From one named Tusker:

A cooling consensus

GLOBAL warming has slowed. The rate of warming of over the past 15 years has been lower than that of the preceding 20 years. There is no serious doubt that our planet continues to heat, but it has heated less than most climate scientists had predicted. Nate Cohn of the New Republic reports: "Since 1998, the warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures have not kept up with computer models that seemed to project steady warming; they’re perilously close to falling beneath even the lowest projections".

Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.

Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that "we cannot afford to wait". More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus.

Of course, if the consensus climate models turn out to be falsified just a few years later, average temperature having remained at levels not even admitted to be have been physically possible, the authority of consensus will have been exposed as rather weak. The authority of expert consensus obviously strengthens as the quality of expertise improves, which is why it's quite sensible, as matter of science-based policy-making, to wait for a callow science to improve before taking grand measures on the basis of its predictions.   

Anyway, Mr Cohn cites a few scientists who are unruffled by the surprisingly slow warming.

It might seem like a decade-long warming plateau would cause a crisis for climate science. It hasn’t. Gerald Meehl, a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has seen hiatus periods before. They “occur pretty commonly in the observed records,” and there are climate models showing “a hiatus as long as 15 years.” As a result, Isaac Held, a Senior Research Scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, says “no one has ever expected warming to be continuous, increasing like a straight line.” Those much-cited computer models are composed of numerous simulations that individually account for naturally occurring variability. But, Meehl says, “the averages cancel it out.”

Isn't this transparently ad hoc. The point of averaging is to prune off exceedingly unlikely possibilities. It does not vindicate a model to note that it gives no weight—that it "cancels out"—its only accurate constitutive simulations.

If "hiatus periods are commonly observed" is the right way to think about the current warming plateau, then the rest of Mr Cohn's article, examining various explanations of the puzzle of the hiatus would be unnecessary. But, as all the pieces discussing the warming plateau make perfectly clear, climate scientists are actually pretty baffled about the failure of their predictions. Is it the oceans? Clouds? Volcanoes? The sun? An artifact of temperature data?

As a rule, climate scientists were previously very confident that the planet would be warmer than it is by now, and no one knows for sure why it isn't. This isn't a crisis for climate science. This is just the way science goes. But it is a crisis for climate-policy advocates who based their arguments on the authority of scientific consensus. Mr Cohn eventually gets around to admitting that

In the end, the so-called scientific consensus on global warming doesn’t look like much like consensus when scientists are struggling to explain the intricacies of the earth’s climate system, or uttering the word “uncertainty” with striking regularity.

But his attempt to minimise the political relevance of this is unconvincing. He writes:

The recent wave of news and magazine articles about scientists struggling to explain the warming slowdown could prolong or deepen the public’s skepticism.

But the “consensus” never extended to the intricacies of the climate system, just the core belief that additional greenhouse gas emissions would warm the planet.

If this is true, then the public has been systematically deceived. As it has been presented to the public, the scientific consensus extended precisely to that which is now seems to be in question: the sensitivity of global temperature to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Indeed, if the consensus had been only that greenhouse gases have some warming effect, there would have been no obvious policy implications at all. As this paper has maintained:

If ... temperatures are likely to rise by only 2°C in response to a doubling of carbon emissions (and if the likelihood of a 6°C increase is trivial), the calculation might change. Perhaps the world should seek to adjust to (rather than stop) the greenhouse-gas splurge. There is no point buying earthquake insurance if you do not live in an earthquake zone. In this case more adaptation rather than more mitigation might be the right policy at the margin. But that would be good advice only if these new estimates really were more reliable than the old ones. And different results come from different models.

We have not been awash in arguments for adaptation precisely because the consensus pertained to now-troubled estimates of climate sensitivity. The moralising stridency of so many arguments for cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and global emissions treaties was founded on the idea that there is a consensus about how much warming there would be if carbon emissions continue on trend. The rather heated debates we have had about the likely economic and social damage of carbon emissions have been based on that idea that there is something like a scientific consensus about the range of warming we can expect. If that consensus is now falling apart, as it seems it may be, that is, for good or ill, a very big deal.

[Tree]

HEY WINGNUTS!!
The guy that invented the internet believes in global warming so passionately that he reaps millions in 'carbon credits' while living an environmentally conscious lifestyle in his 10,000 sq ft home.
PROOF ENOUGH!!

[kommonsents]

The links 2126 posted are all governments and/or agenda driven reports. Please forgive me if I don’t join him in drinking the Kool-Aid.

The various governments positions on Man Caused Global Warming/Climate Change (they had to change from Global Warming to Climate Change/Chaos because the warming cycle changed over a decade ago. They even changed taking temperature readings from rural areas where it would be more accurate to urban areas where it is always warmer.) are similar to their positions on Health care, Vaccinations, GMO foods, and Fukushima contamination of the Oceans. It is all about the money and control. Do your own research instead of relying on government reports.

Virtually all research is driven by grant money and the vast majority of the grant money is coming from governments who have a vested interest in Cap & Trade or Carbon Taxes. What better way to extract money from the pockets of the people around the world?

The actual raw facts and therefore the science is controlled by the governments on the above issues and others. If the facts do not fit their agendas, they simply change the facts. We have seen many examples of this over the past decades. If research agencies and researchers want future grant money, they know they have to produce reports that agree with the agenda. Trillions of dollars are at stake.

I find it interesting that AU seems to recognize that Climate Change is political when he calls those that oppose his POV Right Wing, Conservatives, and Republicans. Facts are not political until they are manipulated and/or used to support a political agenda. 2126 likes to use the PC tactics liberals have used for many years successfully. However, I do agree with his statement, “no amount of scientific data will likely sway those who have reached conclusions based on non-scientific information.” and point out that it applies to him as well. All of his references are from non-scientific sources. He might as well source Al Gore where it all started.

Palm’s article posted above talks about the quality of scientific consensus and the various computer climate models, the quality based upon the honesty of the facts and date used. I think we have all witnessed this.

I think that many of us investors that have reviewed data for determining or trying to find a system to guide our investing have used the technique of back testing over historical data to determine how a system may work in the future. It is common to change the rules to achieve better results. Yet, using the best rules that were successful in testing over historical data often fail when used on real time data.

This is also going on with the models developed to try to predict and/or control the narrative on Global Warming or Climate Change as it is now called since the warming has stopped. Their models no longer work.

So, as Tree pointed out obliquely, one can either side with Al Gore and those that drink his Kool-Aid or the actual facts and raw data.

[AU74]

I wouldn't hang your hat on the idea that the Party of No says no.

[AU74]

As 2126 already pointed out, the vast majority of the money in this fight comes from the industry, not governments. And if you think for one second that a grant-funded climate scientist wouldn't want to be the one to disprove the scientific consensus (which your point about grants basically concedes), you don't understand scientists or people very well.

[kommonsents]

Your political references are quite telling. Thank you for removing any doubts about that.

I challenge you and 2126 to provide some factual backup for your comments that "the vast majority of the money in this fight comes from the industry, not governments." You cannot do it, but give it a try.

Remember, Cap & Trade or Carbon Taxing are ultimately paid for by the end user or the people. Industry only collects the "taxes" the people pay and render it to the governments.

So who really has the motivation to control the debate on Global Warming? Time to use some common sense along with all the factual data available.