Politics and activism are irrelevant in this case.
Either you act appropriately to what is happening or you don't.
The former is by definition intelligent behaviour and the latter is folly.
If the scientific opinion (not partisan belief, but actual science) is that yes this is really happening it is probably a good time to consider an appropriate course of action.
If it seems like a religious war to you then you are only looking at it in the most superficial way and need to consider just what exactly constitutes 'sufficient' evidence.
No. Politics and activism are NOT irrelevant. They are what is driving the propaganda that is being spread by members of both sides. There is a gigantic amount of power/money involved on both sides at this point. Such power twists and warps the focus of the debate, and results in the obfuscation and confusion that both sides are spreading.
It is no longer a matter of science. It has become a matter of power, policy and perception. Look at the role of a mass media in a mass society for just one example of this process. It is now much more about creating, shaping and manipulating public "opinion" than what the science implies. This is hardly the first time this has happened.
There are FAR too many vested, powerful interests on both sides for this to be resolved in terms of the actual science. Not to mention that policy is seldom established without appeasing those same interests who own the politicians. Once one moves from science to activism, this sorry course of events has to be expected.
Wraithone, there is a religious war here, but it's not the war you think it is. Climate science is just another area of science like any other. The scientists publish papers, they debate them, they look to put better constraints on uncertainties, and they've been doing this for a century. Insofar as scientists are concerned, there isn't some division between climate change "believers" as thought the subject depends on faith, and climate change "deniers" as though there's some unequivocal truth being ignored. What we have here are maintstream scientists that accept the basic tenets of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, and a small handful of scientists who are as yet unconvinced and are still skeptical of the basic theory. Between these groups there's normal scientific debate on the topic, and debate on new research that rises up.
I think you actually bothered to go and research and understand the science, you'd realize this. Svensmark's cosmic ray theory isn't wrong because Jim Hansen believes it is, it's wrong because it claims the sun is doing something that our direct satellite TSI measurements say it isn't. That's a matter of fact, not religion.
Where the "religious war" comes in is just in the general war on science by certain political and religious entities around with world with a certain shared allignment of beliefs who are trying to discredit all of science and expertise, because it isn't on their side. It has nothing to do with the actual scientists, however, so you're conflating the normal scientific process with yelling politicians and religious figures, who probably yell and scream out of the hope that people like you will just assume that the entire topic is dominated by people like this. Again, though, this has nothing to do with actual scientists.
Again, this sort of thinking is just born of ignorance of the topic. I suggest that before you try to brand an entire field of science as nothing but a collection of religious extremists, that you go and actually try to learn something about that field first, and about the actual research done in it, and about the actual scientific debate that takes place, instead of just throwing out unbacked opinions. If you'd really like, I can help you out there. What I don't want to do is go too much into the political war on science and dive into a discussion of politics. That's not what science is about.
I'd like to add that I'm not trying to be adversarial or insulting here, but as I said before, these types of ad unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks against climate scientists in lieu of trying to actually discuss the quality of their science is the same thing biologists have to deal with on evolution, and knowing what it's like to present your field and then have some ideologue completely brush off your science without looking at any of it by saying "oh, we'll you're all just pushing an evil atheist agenda, and none of your science of honest", I'm not inclined to put any more stock in that kind of thing being said about other scientists either, not without a hell of a lot of evidence and an effort to at least address that science.
Politics and activism are irrelevant in this case.
Either you act appropriately to what is happening or you don't.
The former is by definition intelligent behaviour and the latter is folly.
If the scientific opinion (not partisan belief, but actual science) is that yes this is really happening it is probably a good time to consider an appropriate course of action.
If it seems like a religious war to you then you are only looking at it in the most superficial way and need to consider just what exactly constitutes 'sufficient' evidence.
No. Politics and activism are NOT irrelevant. They are what is driving the propaganda that is being spread by members of both sides. There is a gigantic amount of power/money involved on both sides at this point. Such power twists and warps the focus of the debate, and results in the obfuscation and confusion that both sides are spreading.
It is no longer a matter of science. It has become a matter of power, policy and perception. Look at the role of a mass media in a mass society for just one example of this process. It is now much more about creating, shaping and manipulating public "opinion" than what the science implies. This is hardly the first time this has happened.
There are FAR too many vested, powerful interests on both sides for this to be resolved in terms of the actual science. Not to mention that policy is seldom established without appeasing those same interests who own the politicians. Once one moves from science to activism, this sorry course of events has to be expected.
Wraithone, there is a religious war here, but it's not the war you think it is. Climate science is just another area of science like any other. The scientists publish papers, they debate them, they look to put better constraints on uncertainties, and they've been doing this for a century. Insofar as scientists are concerned, there isn't some division between climate change "believers" as thought the subject depends on faith, and climate change "deniers" as though there's some unequivocal truth being ignored. What we have here are maintstream scientists that accept the basic tenets of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, and a small handful of scientists who are as yet unconvinced and are still skeptical of the basic theory. Between these groups there's normal scientific debate on the topic, and debate on new research that rises up.
I think you actually bothered to go and research and understand the science, you'd realize this. Svensmark's cosmic ray theory isn't wrong because Jim Hansen believes it is, it's wrong because it claims the sun is doing something that our direct satellite TSI measurements say it isn't. That's a matter of fact, not religion.
Where the "religious war" comes in is just in the general war on science by certain political and religious entities around with world with a certain shared allignment of beliefs who are trying to discredit all of science and expertise, because it isn't on their side. It has nothing to do with the actual scientists, however, so you're conflating the normal scientific process with yelling politicians and religious figures, who probably yell and scream out of the hope that people like you will just assume that the entire topic is dominated by people like this. Again, though, this has nothing to do with actual scientists.
Again, this sort of thinking is just born of ignorance of the topic. I suggest that before you try to brand an entire field of science as nothing but a collection of religious extremists, that you go and actually try to learn something about that field first, and about the actual research done in it, and about the actual scientific debate that takes place, instead of just throwing out unbacked opinions. If you'd really like, I can help you out there. What I don't want to do is go too much into the political war on science and dive into a discussion of politics. That's not what science is about.
Well, once more I suspect you are reading more into what I posted than was intended. One might say that I'm rather familiar with the scientific method, and how the peer review and grant systems work(both virtues and vices). I've not made any generalized statement about "all" of the people involved. I *have* stated that there are vastly powerful forces involved on both sides of this issue.
Given experience with how these things work, that leads to the results we are seeing. I totally agree with you that the antics we are seeing are *not* science. But that does tend to happen once one goes the activist route. Once politicians get involved in an issue, matters tend to go down hill rather quickly.
I'm always fascinated to learn more about various sub fields, and this one has proven no different. Its a shame that the focus didn't remain on the science.
Politics and activism are irrelevant in this case.
Either you act appropriately to what is happening or you don't.
The former is by definition intelligent behaviour and the latter is folly.
If the scientific opinion (not partisan belief, but actual science) is that yes this is really happening it is probably a good time to consider an appropriate course of action.
If it seems like a religious war to you then you are only looking at it in the most superficial way and need to consider just what exactly constitutes 'sufficient' evidence.
No. Politics and activism are NOT irrelevant. They are what is driving the propaganda that is being spread by members of both sides. There is a gigantic amount of power/money involved on both sides at this point. Such power twists and warps the focus of the debate, and results in the obfuscation and confusion that both sides are spreading.
It is no longer a matter of science. It has become a matter of power, policy and perception. Look at the role of a mass media in a mass society for just one example of this process. It is now much more about creating, shaping and manipulating public "opinion" than what the science implies. This is hardly the first time this has happened.
There are FAR too many vested, powerful interests on both sides for this to be resolved in terms of the actual science. Not to mention that policy is seldom established without appeasing those same interests who own the politicians. Once one moves from science to activism, this sorry course of events has to be expected.
Wraithone, there is a religious war here, but it's not the war you think it is. Climate science is just another area of science like any other. The scientists publish papers, they debate them, they look to put better constraints on uncertainties, and they've been doing this for a century. Insofar as scientists are concerned, there isn't some division between climate change "believers" as thought the subject depends on faith, and climate change "deniers" as though there's some unequivocal truth being ignored. What we have here are maintstream scientists that accept the basic tenets of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, and a small handful of scientists who are as yet unconvinced and are still skeptical of the basic theory. Between these groups there's normal scientific debate on the topic, and debate on new research that rises up.
I think you actually bothered to go and research and understand the science, you'd realize this. Svensmark's cosmic ray theory isn't wrong because Jim Hansen believes it is, it's wrong because it claims the sun is doing something that our direct satellite TSI measurements say it isn't. That's a matter of fact, not religion.
Where the "religious war" comes in is just in the general war on science by certain political and religious entities around with world with a certain shared allignment of beliefs who are trying to discredit all of science and expertise, because it isn't on their side. It has nothing to do with the actual scientists, however, so you're conflating the normal scientific process with yelling politicians and religious figures, who probably yell and scream out of the hope that people like you will just assume that the entire topic is dominated by people like this. Again, though, this has nothing to do with actual scientists.
Again, this sort of thinking is just born of ignorance of the topic. I suggest that before you try to brand an entire field of science as nothing but a collection of religious extremists, that you go and actually try to learn something about that field first, and about the actual research done in it, and about the actual scientific debate that takes place, instead of just throwing out unbacked opinions. If you'd really like, I can help you out there. What I don't want to do is go too much into the political war on science and dive into a discussion of politics. That's not what science is about.
Well, once more I suspect you are reading more into what I posted than was intended. One might say that I'm rather familiar with the scientific method, and how the peer review and grant systems work(both virtues and vices). I've not made any generalized statement about "all" of the people involved. I *have* stated that there are vastly powerful forces involved on both sides of this issue.
Given experience with how these things work, that leads to the results we are seeing. I totally agree with you that the antics we are seeing are *not* science. But that does tend to happen once one goes the activist route. Once politicians get involved in an issue, matters tend to go down hill rather quickly.
I'm always fascinated to learn more about various sub fields, and this one has proven no different. Its a shame that the focus didn't remain on the science.
man the quote system IS fracked on this site isn't it... anyways
I agree with you when it comes to some of the forces that have attempted to influence this science. Honestly, it didn't begin until relatively recently. No one had a problem with the theory until suddenly the suggestion was made that things were getting bad enough to warrant action, and then all of the sudden the small goverment and "God made the Earth for us to exploit" types came out and were like "oh, no, you're lying, and you're stupid, and you're a bunch of hippies", etc etc.
That said, the scientific debate is the same as it was 20 years ago. Skeptics still publish papers freely, sometimes with research that isn't particular good, but often in cases of bringing up either good novel alternative hypotheses (no reason not to investigate new ideas) or to bring up valid areas of weakness in present models for further investigation, the kind of things skeptics are supposed to bring to the table. Richard Lindzen just released a paper last year, yet another in a long line by him. Really, everyone gets their chance to present their perspectives and their research, regardless of whether or not it backs existing models. These guys are also an ultra-minority who have failed to ever prove their points.
The actual science in this field is really quite good. There's a lot of uncertainty on some points, because the necessary computing power to determine a lot of things is a recent advancement, so it's a pioneer field in many ways, despite being a century old. It's certainly not the only field; cladistics is far more of a mess right now (taxonomy in general is in shambles). Still, on its most important premises there are mountains of evidence underlying the science and it's tested more rigorously than most areas of science precisely because it's so often challenged by groups outside of the scientific community.
If you study the actual science of the topic, filtering out the screaming idiots and focusing on the actual published literature and discussion between experts, it's easy to see that this field operates like any other with long-established theories. AGW as a basic theory isn't even really debated anymore. The basic climate sensitivity isn't really debated anymore. Sure, there's a tiny portion scientists who still aren't convinced, but then I can name a biologist or two who still don't buy into evolution. That said, just because Michael Behe (biologist and author of Darwin's Black Box) still hasn't accepted that living diversity came from slow evolution, and not the instant wave of the hand of a diety, doesn't mean that there's real debate on that point. Likewise, just because Lindzen (who's only "undecided"), Spencer, Chen, Avery, Svensmark, Friis-Christensen (who might not even be a skeptic now as he's admitted his alternative hypothesis is wrong), and Micheals (who lied to Congress' face) all are the last haldful of holdouts who still doubt whether humans are causing recent warming, or whether the Earth will warm up enough to cause problems, doesn't mean that there's real debate on that point.
Isn't it a bit hard for a religious war to be taking place when there isn't even really a debate taking place? The scientific community was settled on this issue, a long time ago in fact, and it old news to them because they've moved on, progressing their work to answer other questions. Sure, they debate these new questions tirelessly, and classic scientific debate takes place on them, but outside of the harrassment for the politial world that they contend with, and the constant public misconceptions about the science, these guys have no reason to debate what they all agree is established.
The big problem now is that the political powers that have been afraid of this conclusion spent years relying on pointing to the skeptics, and now that that list has grown unusably thin as the scientists (or at least 99.999% of them) have all become convinced, they resort to waging war on science to try to fight back the conclusion, realizing that science will never back their ideology. Still that's not the fault of the scientists, anymore than it's the fault of us "evolutionists" for having to deal with the same exact thing in our field.
As for the actual science, Quizzical raised a lot of points that need some discussion, which unfortunately means another mega-post (one I had meant to post days ago). You, yourself, may find some interest in it however. For the most part it's just intended as a long but well-cited reference to more common contrarian arguments to show that scientists are willing to discuss their field. It'll probably be one of the last things I post on the topic here though; I need a more permanent forum if I want to start posting huge explanations of global warming science ^_^; Still, if the subject interests you, then I suggest you take the time to go through this next post I've put together; it'll have a lot of science and citations.
Quizzical, sorry for the delay in responding, but a zoology exam and dental problems have been taking up a lot of time lately.
I was going to give a rather lengthy explanation in order to help out on a lot of the obviously large misconceptions you've been given about this science from wherever you're learning about it from, but I've decided that posting 20-page replies out of a word processor (due to the length) is not really appropriate to this forum, not because it hurts anything, but rather because if I'm really to dedicate that amount of time, I should publish it elsewhere, which is what I've decided to do. I've been thinking of writing up a series on climate change for a long time, but with the coming semester-long respite from school I really have little excuse not to now. Thanks for the motivation!
I will give you some of the post I *was* going to type, however, just to help you out a little.
“You brought up Exxon funding something or other. Alarmists sometimes claim that all skepticism of global warming should be discarded because of its funding source. My argument is that there's far more funding on the other side of the issue. If you want to disregard who funds the science, I'd be fine with that. If you've got the evidence to back up a theory, it doesn't matter who paid for the experiments.”
This was something I claimed in jest, to parody an earlier post. I have my issues with some of the dishonesty demonstrated by the sources of funding for corporate/religious/political research into more than one scientific topic, by which I mean dishonesty from those actually wielding the money, and not necessarily from the researchers themselves, but at the end of the day, what you’re saying here is essentially correct. Research stands on its own.
“Consensus is not proof. When people tout consensus too loudly, it's basically an admission that they don't have proof.”
“Why is it that when there's an explanation of the science involved that makes it into sources that might be read by the general public, it's almost invariably written by someone skeptical of global warming? Either the believers in it have one of the worst communications operations in the whole history of humanity, or they're mostly not willing to discuss the science.”
Consensus isn't discussed between experts on the topic; it's intended as a quick reference of the position of those who do understand climate and are published experts on the topic intended for those who do not understand climate, and don't have the time or background to actually dive into and understand the century-long discussion on global warming on a thesis-antithesis-synthesis level.
No one in climate science or anything other field has ever referred only to consensus when pressed for evidence, the point is irrelevant. Ignorant ideologues with little or no understanding of scientific methodology like Micheal Crichton may spew off this particular strawman a lot, but it's still a ridiculous strawman.
The simple fact is that scientists are willing to discuss their work for anyone who really wants to know. That said, they can't force people to want to learn about the science, and they can't control a media which values “hot”, “edgy”, “new” stories over quality science, the same media that thought the 1970s was going to end in a calamitous ice age.
Scientists don't just discuss their science in the literature (though, honestly, even if they did, how could you claim they don't want to discuss the science?); they put up tons of discussion for anyone in the public who's interested:
Those are sources for the layman and the educated science alike (arranged by me in no particular hierarchy on that point). If you want to learn about the science, I suggest you go through some of them (though I don’t'expect you to run out and visit the New York Natural History Museum, don't worry). If you don't, that's okay too, but the scientists are there for you regardless.
“Now, I realize that science can't offer absolute proof, but we don't have the same sort of evidence for global warming that we have for, say, Maxwell's equations.”
The evidence for global warming that's represented as the observed facts are as good as any other in science. The evidence for the theory is as good as any other theory. I'm trying to be brief here, and can get into more detail if you really want, but in short, if you actually begin trying to learn this from the actual scientists, presenting information that actually comes from the literature, you'll find just how many independent sources of evidence there are.
“It's not merely less willing. It's completely unwilling. As in, willing to violate the laws so that they don't have to release data.
If you're not willing to share your full data and an explanation of your methods with anyone who asks, you should get dismissed out of hand as useless. 'Trust us' is not a reasonable substitute for 'here's the data and our methods, and draw your own conclusions'”
CRU's conduct did indeed leave something to be desired, but it's clear that you're aware of neither the extent to which CRU does share their data and methods, nor of the particulars of the FOI requests they were faced with.
First, CRU doesn't own their data, and is not at liberty to share the whole of it with whoever asks, because it's made available to them through commercial agreement on the understanding that they won't violate the terms of that license and start tossing out that privately collected data to anyone and everyone. They can't share what they don't own the rights to; it's little different than you going to a store and buying a copy of a film. If I asked you, right now, to make a copy of every movie you owned and ship those copies to me, would it be legal for you to do so? CRU would have been breaking copyright laws if they had shared that data with anyone who asked.
I suggest you go back and read the CRU Inquiry Reports. Here's an exerpt from the first on this topic:
Even if CRU had wanted to, it would have been unable to publish all of these data because, as Professor Acton explained, some of the data are bound by commercial agreements with different national meteorological organisations
This does not mean that one cannot review their data, merely that CRU cannot hand-compile it and present it to anyone who asks. The House of Commons goes on to further state that:
In addition, of course, there are the sources of the data, the weather stations, to which any individual is free to go and collect the data in the same way that CRU did. This is feasible because the list of stations that CRU used was published in 2008
CRU has made efforts to secure the rights to publish more of their private data, with some success I might add, as they now publish their Swedish data.
Furthermore, CRU was inundated in 2009 with FOI requests that appeared to be part of an organized campaign. As opposed to an average of 2-4 per year, they received nearly 100 requests in Q3/Q4 of 2009, a logistically impossible workload for such a small team of scientists. This combined with FOI requests for data that CRU wasn't at liberty to share placed them in a position (no doubt intentionally) to be unable to meet those requests, let alone by the legal deadline for FOI requests. It was nothing but a back-door attack designed to give ammunition to whomever was motivated to use it.
Even prior to this, CRU had had a policy that could best be described at times as “minimal compliance”. CRU takes every effort to publish their methods in the peer reviewed literature, and they give all information needed to review their data, the vast majority of which is already pre-compiled on NOAA repositories for easy use by anyone who knows what to do with it, and of course the commercial data, for anyone who wishes to pursue requests from the respective owners of said data for a copy of it (something to be taken up with them, not CRU). What they have been reticent about is taking the time of their small team to hand-compile customized data sets for groups or individuals asking for the purpose of trying to discredit CRU, something one needn't find actual flaws to do, as the “climate debate” of recent years has shown through the countless red herrings and strawman arguments constructed out of data in order to capitalize in the ignorance of the public. CRU's reticence, in that respect, is probably understandable, and it's only some FOI requests they've take exception to. Climate scientists face constant harrassment, day in and day out, because they've dared to present something that's antithesis to the extreme philosophy of certain political and religious groups, and as someone in the other field of science that has to deal with this day in and day out, I have a definite sympathy for them. The anger, the vitriol, and the accusations, it takes a toll after awhile. That said, CRU is still violating the best traditions of science to not comply anyways. Their reactions to some of these specific situations may be understandable, but as the House of Commons said, it's not ultimately going to win them anything to fight ideologues in this fashion, and it's ultimately counter-productive for them to try.
CRU has some issues to work out; of that there can be no doubt. What is unequivocally false is your assertion that they go to any and every effort to hide their research. For the most part, any data they're at liberty to share is already at the place I linked before. Want to look at the whole of their data? Here are the WMO station numbers (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/landstations/crustnsused.txt). Just because they can't give you commercial data themselves doesn't mean they haven’t' given the means for anyone else to go and replicate their work. Of course, don't forget to read all their papers they publish discussing their work (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/pubs/full/), not to mention taking advantage of their published station updates that they started doing since beginning to use the CLIMAT network (since 2000). Don't forget their SST data either. You'll need to go to the original ICOADS data to figure out where they got their processed data (http://icoads.noaa.gov/products.html), though be warned, you're talking about 40 gigabytes of raw data from over 400 years of reports, and then you'll have to read CRU's paper on how they bias-adjust the data to get the corrected/processed HADSST2 product (http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadsst2/rayner_etal_2005.pdf). Don't worry, that's only 24 pages worth of explanation
The point I'm trying to make is that CRU and the organizations who provide their data publish enormous amounts of discussion of their data to allow anyone to know exactly what they did, they publish and and all raw data that is able to be given to the public (what isn't bound by commercial agreement), which is really the vast majority of it, and CRU gives the means for anyone who wants even the data they can't publish to go out and get it. They haven't been that good at times at hand-compiling pieces of research to meet the requests of certain individuals, and understandable or not given the circumstances, they should improve that practice, but at the end of the day, this portrayal you give of them, where they go to every length to hide everything about their research that they can, is totally and unequivocally false, because I can show that research, from papers discussing their methods in depth, to any raw data they're at liberty to publish.
“Your link doesn't give the raw CRU data, which is the data source accused of having been deleted.”
Yes it is. Just because it isn't labelled “CRU raw data” doesn't mean that it's not what was used. In fact, there is not such thing as the “raw CRU data”, only the raw data from others that CRU used. Go look at the GCHN data, where most of the station data presently used is located. GCHN is neither labelled as NASA data nor CRU data, because it's owned by neither, but it's still a vast portion of CRU's raw data, and it's the whole of the NASA GISS data (for better or worse NASA chose to stick only with the GHCN data as a tradeoff of inferior coverage and maintenance for superior easy of transparency, but that's a whole different discussion).
Also, CRU did not delete their data, because as I said before, IT'S NOT THEIR DATA. They can't delete the GCHN data, because it's on NOAA repositories, not UEA repositories. To do that, they'd have to hack NOAA. They can, however, share that data freely because it would just be hosting copies of data that's already public (or linking to NOAA). The only data they did delete was a small portion of their copy of the commercial data, that is to say they only deleted the portion of that data which failed to pass bias adjustment. They can't delete the original data, because it's not their data. If you want that data that they tossed out of their analysis, they keep those station numbers, so you can still look that data up at the commercial organizations who originally published it. They also document which stations they reject, and why, available in their peer-reviewed publications. CRU isn't as transparent as they should be when meeting specific requests for specifically compiled data, but anyone who wants to check their work is still ultimately completely able to do so, if not as easily as it should be.
Again, this idea that CRU went and deleted their data is just one more laughable assertion by the desperate people behind Climategate. CRU's conduct hasn't been perfect, but this is something they are neither guilty of, nor even capable of.
“The problem is that's relying on proxies that may not be telling us what we think they are. It's not nearly so good as actual, direct measurements.”
That's like saying that light ice cream isn't as good as the real stuff. It kind of goes without saying, but sometimes we just don't have a choice about what's in the freezer, with the instrument record being mostly unavailable prior to 1850 or so.
As for the nature of the data, some things aren't as hard to determine accurately as you probably think. Atmospheric content, for instance, is easy to determine very accurately, because it's homogeneous planet-wide, so a localized reading is an exact representation of the globe as a whole. The hard part is figuring out temperature. Now, it's certainly possible that any one proxy is giving a wrong indication of temperature, even outside of admitted margin of error, and it's remotely possible that every single one is wrong. So how do I know they're a reasonable representation of the past? They all tell the same story, and exactly the story they should relative to the forcings we can measure. Errors are random; they don't paint a coherent picture over and over and over and over. This is one of the most basic tenets of scientific treatment of data.
Sure, there are admitted margins of error, and they can be very large sometimes with certain types of proxy data, but there are countless independent measurements, and they all corroborate what we've already known for the past century. No, they aren't perfect, but they're one more piece of a vast puzzle that coherently shows the same picture no matter where one looks.
I could put it much more simply by simply saying this. The basic problem with the “it might be wrong because we weren't there to see” argument about inferred information about our universe is that most of the large scale phenomenon of this universe are studied through inferred information in the exact way climate proxies are. Most of the macro-level universe is something we can't observe; we're too small and too young. Sure maybe the Earth doesn't revolve around the sun (really, we've never actually directly looked and watched such a revolution happen), and maybe the expanding universe model is wrong, and maybe dinosaurs weren't here 65 million years ago, and maybe evolution didn't create biodiversity, because we don't have direct measurements to confirm these things. We can't directly observe these things. Instead, we infer them, in the exact same way we infer a temperature/CO2 reading from an ice core. The process of doing that is not fundamentally much different from the means of isotop-dating objects in the geological layers near dinosaurs and inferring their age through deductive reasoning. The process of making the heliocentric model and seeing if it re-creates the observations of the planets is not fundamentally different from taking a climate model and seeing if it recreates our temperature when fed the forcings. These things could be wrong, but simply stating as much doesn't say anything useful. What's important is that people have ample opportunity to find fundamental flaws in the methodology of things like ice core proxies, and to date, no one has published that paper, anymore than they've published the paper showing that the Earth doesn't revolve around the sun.
“There's an enormous difference between a theory that can be made to fit the data, and a theory that can predict things that haven't yet happened, wait to see if they do happen, and be correct.”
There is an enormous difference, namely that the former isn't a theory, but rather a hypothesis. What you don't seem to understand is that prediction doesn't mean predicting the future. No one can predict the future. All it means is predicting that a certain feature of a certain system will react a certain way when subjected to a certain kind of experiment. This is why we prefer controlled laboratory experiments, so as to avoid unnecessary and complicating impacts, which is why the work down by Arrhenius and Callendar was such an invaluable start for climatologists.
I've already pointed to many predictions of this type made by climatologists. You should go back and read up on some of them (I link sources as much for further reading as for verification). When Hansen made his 1988 model for Congress, he didn't claim he could predict the future. He didn't know the 1991 Mt Pinatubo eruption would happen, let alone that it would happen in 1991, even if he figured on one major eruption during the 1990s. For all he knew, and for all we know now, an asteroid might slam into the Earth, cause mass global dimming, and destroy our species thereby taking care of the GHG emissions. No one claims they can predict what the future of forcings will be, and so no one claims to have a crystal ball for global temperature; scientists only claim that they can say how the temperature will react when forcings behave a certain way, and Hansens model more than proved that. That model was a 1988 model, built using antiquated computer technology and an understanding of climate that hadn't yet matured through the use of computer analysis (biology is presently in a similar explosion of understanding), but he drew three lines representing three different scenarios for forcings, the actual forcings turned out to mimic B and C very closely, and so the temperature did as well. Small-scale year-to-year temperature features diverged from things like Pinatubo, but the overall impact of the long-term forcing changes produced the exact predicted decadal-scale change. That model held up until around 2006, at which time new forcings caused a dip that lasted about four years (2010 data is suggesting that we're now out of it, we'll see by this time next year).
Why then have the IPCC model predictions varied so wildly from one IPCC meeting to the next? Is the IPCC just a bunch of cranks who don't know what they're doing? Or is it really not that well understood?
The models' predictions have changed as time passes (by one model replacing another, I mean) more rapidly than the actual temperatures.
They haven't wildy varied. Here are the projections from AR3 (http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/fig9-5.htm). Here are the projections from AR4 (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter10.pdf Page 763). These aren't projections of the future, but rather projections of how much climate will warm from a doubling of CO2. They're projections of climate sensitivity, not of the future how what the forcings will be, because that's largely up to how much we decide to pollute. From the model projections one can extrapolate how much warming would occur for a given scenario of human pollution. They're intended to do that, and nothing more (though the IPCC may through up some other forcing scenarios for the heck of it, I didn't look, those projections there are the ones really designed to show climate sensitivity; anything further is just redundant).
AR3 has a single outlier showing a 6 degree sensitivity, and one which runs a different scenario that hints at a similarly high forcing, but both fall more in-line with the others by AR4. What's important, however, is that the models pretty much just show the same rough ~2.5C-~4.5C sensitivity that we've always known. They DO NOT vary wildly from AR3 to AR4. In fact, in both Assessment Reports, they mostly hover around 3C, showing it to be a nice average, and work to put better constraints on climate show just that sensitivity. Read Annan and Hargreaves 2006 paper for an idea there.
In short, their projections are nothing but a reflection of what we've already known. They actually have nothing to do with making predictions; that work has been done by others, not the IPCC. The IPCC is mostly just a compilation of that work by others. You can look at the source code for some of those models at the data page I gave you earlier.
“Which was my point. It's usually alarmists who claim things about a tipping point.”
I suppose they might, but I wouldn't know, since I get my information from actual scientists. If you studied the climate history, you'd find a few “tipping points” in climate, like the Younger Dryas event, which caused a large extinction. In that sense, climate tipping points DO exist, even if you haven’t personally had the opportunity to study that aspect of climate. That said, no scientist is suggesting that we're ever going to re-create the end-Pleistocene, just like no scientists, even among those who were worried about global dimming, ever suggested that an ice age was going to result back in the 1970s.
Certainly. Most of earth's greenhouse effect is due to water vapor. But the water vapor concentration in the earth's atmosphere varies wildly, both by location and by time. If we don't understand what causes that well enough to predict rainfall a week in advance, how do we hope to predict it decades in advance?
You're conflating the water vapor feedback with small-scale precipitation here. Water vapor cannot act as a forcing, because it has a very short residence time. The only thing that changes global average water vapor levels is temperature, which impacts how much water the atmosphere holds. Nothing can add or subtract water directly, because it's just correct itself almost instantly. The only thing that can vary this substance enough to affect climate is a change in temperature. This is simply because changes in temperature alter the equilibrium between evaporation and condensation slightly to alter the amount of water that's in the vapor phase instead of the liquid phase (http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00016.htm).
This has nothing to do with whether or not I can tell you the chances of rain over Chicago on October 23rd, 2034. I can't do that based solely on global average temperature anymore than I can tell you what the highs and lows for that day over Chicago will be. This has nothing to do with determining climate sensitivity, however. Meterology is what you want there, as it's the science of short-term predictions of small-scale features of our atmosphere based on the influences we see. Climatology is the science of determining large-scale features over long periods of time, basically as law-of-large-numbers averages of how the planet as a whole will behave over long periods. Climatology can't tell you whether Chicago will get rain on October 23rd, 2034; it can tell you whether the North American continent will have more or less precipitation over a decade-long period if a given change in forcings happen, though not very predictively, because unlike meteorology, we don't HAVE definite information on what those influences will be (that would be predicting the future), and so can only make scenarios or explain why past climate has behaved the way it has.
'Over the past thirty years alone we've nearly doubled that rate of warming'
“If you cherry pick dates to go from a low point to a high point, and then extend that linearly, you can get all sorts of crazy results. It's like watching the Dow drop by 500 over the course of a month, and then saying, if it keeps doing that, it will hit 0 in a couple of years.”
You're right, which is why people who draw a line from 1998 to 2007 or 2008 and then claim the globe is cooling are not representing real science. This is the reason the WMO has set 30 years as the standard period of time to be considered a significant trend in climate.
Of course, neither I nor anyone else is claiming that our 30 year trend will necessarily continue indefinitely, or even at all. We just claim that if humanity makes the forcings follow the same trend that they have over the past 30 years that the climate will continue on its trend. As it stands, we haven't just maintained the trends; we've increased them, and with nations like India and China exploding in demand, there's a good chance we'll increase those trends enormously over the next few decade. Now, maybe we won't. Maybe next year the Polywell fusion project will rocket ahead of schedule and finish up and give us infinite clean energy. If that happens, then cool, the positive forcings will stop increasing in strength and all will be well. If we continue massively polluting, then we'll have no such luck. If tomorrow a giant asteroid hits us that'll probably do the job too, if at a very high price. I'm not here to discuss what policy makers should do about the situations, merely to say how much temperature will increase for a given forcing scenario, based on the actual research.
“That we don't understand exactly how things work doesn't mean that they don't work. In the United States, I think it's less than 10% of the land that is developed by humans.”
Actually, depending on your definition of “developed”, you can take that figure as low as 5%. That doesn't mean that 95% of the US has remained a viable habitat for its resident species. Land has to do more than simply exist in some form to be viable habitat. Take the black-footed ferret for example. It's a species that's been recently pulled from virtual extinction due to vast conservation efforts. Even with 95% of the US not technically directly inhabited by humans, that doesn't mean that they have 95% of their historical range to work with. The animals feed primarily on prarie dogs, and require robust populations of them to survive. As of right now, the only habitat in the entire US that can sustain them anymore is the Conata Basin in South Dakota. The rest of the their range is no longer suitable for their habitation. Most species in the US suffer this problem, because there are a lot of biotic factors that are needed to make habitat suitable as well as abiotic factors. The saying “no man's an island” is far more applicable to ecology than to sociology; every species has many other species on which they are co-dependent for survival, and so ecosystems have to be at least relatively complete for habitation by most of its resident species. A species can't just exist in half an ecosystem. Just look at the historical ranges of many species, even species that aren't critically endangered, and you'll see what I mean.
The United States also suffers this problem less than most other developed nations, thanks to our very large land mass.
“So wait, they're already dying, in response to temperature increases that haven't yet happened, but we think might happen in the future? That would violate causality, no?
We know from actual temperature data that the hottest year on record in the United States was 1934. About half of the top ten years were in either the 1920s or 1930s (I forget which). How did the Pika survive the higher temperatures then, but are being killed by temperatures today that are too hot, in spite of being lower than they were in the past?”
“Recent” climate change means recent, not future climate change. I'm guessing you mis-read my post; it happens. On the flip side, I think you just earned the LOLWUT of the month award
To answer your question about the 1930s, I could say that they probably had a more robust ecological situation to work with at the time, but really there's a much simpler explanation. Pikas may well have been dying off to an extent in the 1930s, which was pretty warm (though no warmer and on average even a bit cooler than today), but they got a quick reprieve from the temperatures when the 1940s aerosol spike kicked in, and the solar forcing leveled off to stop the warming. If Pikas suddenly got that same reprieve in ten years, and the temperature didn't go back up, they'd be just fine. If that doesn't happen, GHG levels continue to rise, and temperatures continue to increase, then fine will not be a word I'll be associating with their situation.
“Why then are most of the polar bear populations increasing, not decreasing?”
A simple look at laws will answer that question. Polar bears are presently rebounding because the mass hunting of them has been made illegal. In the short term, that's very good for them. That doesn't change the fact that their habitat is shrinking.
“Except that quite a few scientists have come out as skeptical”
Really? Do you have a citable source that suggests that a significant number of climate scientists have been expressing doubt over the basic climate sensitivity to CO2 who weren't 20 years ago?
I'm not familiar with any new skeptics from the past half-dozen years (it's been a half dozen years since Oreskes' study).
“Ultimately what happens is that scientists understand their own very narrow area pretty well, but their own narrow area isn't enough to say whether the broader predictions of global warming are accurate or not. So most just assume that they are because that's what others say.”
I'm sorry, but you're just making an assumption as such. Not every biologist in Earth is an evolutionary biologist, but every single biologist on Earth is familiar with and has evaluated the evidence for evolution. There are several reasons for this. First, every biologist studies the basic tenets of the theory and learns about the experiments that demonstrate the theory and why the objections offered are not based in science. Evidence for evolution is something that's learned in introductory college biology. The specifics of the evidence are then covered in subsequent semesters, because every subject of biology corroborates that evidence directly, so every class from cell biology to anatomy to ecology teachers why the theory is correct. Secondly, the basic tenets of the theory are not difficult to grasp and logically evaluate for a biologist in any subfield. Lastly, because every subfield of biology deals directly with the theory in some way, every person is an expert on some significant part of the theory, and knows whether or not it's corroborated strongly by their field.
In climatology, the basics of climate sensitivity are at the very heart of every area of climate study. If you don't know what the sensitivity is and why it's known, then you're not going to be able to do any part of that field of science. It's a foundational part of the science. Furthermore, the skeptics on climate change have ample cause to take their background in science in bring up objections to the theory here, and they've been given their shot to do just that. They've spent years trying to find fundemental flaws and have failed, so it's not at all as if everyone's just taking the science on faith
“Even in mathematics, where we really can prove things, most of the time that we accept a theorem as true, it's because others said it is, and we don't care to read the proof to verify it.”
I bet any mathematician on Earth could offer a proof for something basic like the quadratic formula. More importantly, however, I'm sure you accept those theorems because you realize that even if most mathematicians never bothered checking them, there are plenty around who would find something wrong with one if something wrong was there to find. If we take this analogy to climate science, we're talking about a case were people suddenly start coming out, and claiming the theorems are wrong. Now, strangely, most of these people are not mathematicians, in fact most of them are politicians are talk show hosts or in similar professions, but nevertheless, they're claiming a fundamental pieces of your field are wrong. Now, under this scenario, do you think that if there was something wrong to find that people would find it?
“The principle claim of the skeptics is not so much that the models are certainly wrong and that this other model would be so much better. Rather, it is that it is not yet understood well enough to put too much stock into the models.”
On the most fundamental point that the models work with, which is climate sensitivity to radiative forcings, there are very, very few working climate scinetists who are skeptical that the models are wrong there. In fact, nine out of ten of them are listed in that link I gave earlier on skeptic papers.
There's a healthy margin of error in climate sensitivity, but it doesn't change the fact that within that margin of error, there is ample evidence to say how much climate will change for a given increase in a given radiative forcing.
“Ultimately, you know that a theory is good when you can make sharp predictions about things that haven't yet happened, and wait to see if they do, and reliably be correct. For example, we can reliably predict solar eclipses decades or centuries in advance. Therefore, the theories upon which those predictions are based are, if not completely accurate, then at least a very good approximation. We're nowhere near getting there on global warming models.”
If I were to point out an equally simplistic feature of climate science, like the the relationship between CO2 concentration and its ability to absorb IR radiation, I could give you results just as accurate as those of your example, so clearly that isn't true. Besides, predicting the future of a process that's completely regular doesn't demonstrate anything. No one claims that anyone will ever be able to predict the future of climate, merely that there is an understanding of how the climate will react when the forcings act a certain way. On the most important feature, temperature, there is a very good understanding of how this behaves. There are disagreements to be had, and improvements to be made on certain features of models; as I understand it, precipitation will be a lot harder to nail down ultimately than temperature. That said, on the basic notion that the Earth will warm if GHG emissions continue, and on the order of ~3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2, there is a lot of certainty from a large number of independent sources of evidence, which you'd encounter if you read the scientific literature, or otherwise consulted the actual scientists doing work in this field.
There are certainly a small handful of skeptics who disagree, and they are free to try to explain recent warming in some way alternative to the presently accepted theory, and to give evidence that fundamentally alters the climate sensitivity to GHGs (you'd have to do both, since they go hand-in-hand), but they've been trying to do that for a long time, and to no avail. They'd have a lot of evidence to explain away if they tried, which wouldn't make it the most parsimonious of explanations, so they'd need a heck of a lot to stand on.
What he did was to take data from a reconstruction, find that the data from his methods were wildly contradicted for recent years by the actual temperature measurements, and so substitute the actual measurements from recent years for his graph. That's fraudulent. If you're allowed to pick and choose which data sources you'll use for which parts of the graph, you can make it look like whatever you want.
This isn't even close to what's meant for Mike Mann. This is another case where whatever source you're getting your information from, whether it's Peter Taylor (who made this claim you're making) or whoever, they're just horrendously distorting the situation.
Going to an actual scientific source (and, of course, reading the actual papers by Mann and Jones respectively), what is actually meant by “Mike's Nature trick” is that in order to get better constraints on the proxy data, they added the instrument data as a template to tune the proxy data, seeing how changes in each in response to changes in climate in order to give more perspective on the observed changes in some of the proxies.
The paper being referred to is the 1998 Nature paper, Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries, by Mann, Bradley and Hughes. Here's an excerpt explaining “Mike's Nature trick”:
Our approach to climate pattern reconstruction relates closely to statistical approaches which have recently been applied to the problem of filling-in sparse early instrumental climate fields, based on calibration of the sparse sub-networks against the more widespread patterns of variability that can be resolved in shorter data sets. We first decompose the twentieth-century instrumental data into its dominant patterns of variability, and subsequently calibrate the individual climate proxy indicators against the time histories of these distinct patterns during their mutual interval of overlap. One can think of the instrumental patterns as ‘training’ templates against which we calibrate or ‘train’ the much longer proxy data (that is, the ‘trainee’ data) during the shorter calibration period which they overlap.
There's nothing fraudulent about it, because everything is detailed in the paper, nor is it what you've apparently been told.
Phil Jones had the problem that although there was good agreement with the instrument record in his particular sites of study for part of the 20th century, another part later in showed a problematic divergence, and Jones et al needed a method of trying to work with the data to try to get something more faithfully representing the actual known temperature from the direct measurements, so he used Mann's method of training the data to try to give more context to what the data was saying (to put better constraints on it), and improve the way it related to the instrument record.
Whether Jones or Mann were successful is another topic altogether. Frankly, I think there are a lot of problems to be worked out with tree ring data as a proxy to increase the certainty of that data (not that it's exactly central to present questions anyways), but attempts are being made to address those problems. Whether you agree with Jones' methods statistically or not, there's nothing fraudulent about something someone explains in multiple papers they publish, as explored by the House of Commons CRU inquiry (“Reduced sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high northern latitudes” in Nature, “Dendroclimatic signals in long tree-ring chronologies from the Himalayas of Nepal” in the International Journal of Climatology, “Trees tell of past climates: but are they speaking less clearly today?” in the the UK Royal Society).
“One final comment that I hope you can agree with: we're disagreeing over things that neither of us really understands.”
Understanding isn't a dichotomy. It's a matter of degrees. Some parts of climate science fall squarely into my area of expertise, such as the means to measure human alterations to the global carbon cycle (our CO2 emissions) and the impacts of global warming are more my area of expertise than they are that of the scientists directly publishing research on climate. The fact that it's so relevant to my field is why I study the subject extensively to begin with. I've spent years combing over the scientific literature, from mainstream and skeptic scientists alike. I'm familiar with the various points of data underlying the individual premises of AGW theory, and with the papers scientists have written explaining how they treat that data. I've read objections to the science, and I've read what the scientists have had to say in response to those objections. I'm familiar with all of the alternative hypotheses out there for recent observed warming, and I know which papers show data that's starkly in contradiction to them. Just because I can't launch a satellite into space and measure the TSI doesn't mean that I can't go to the PMOD observatory's website and examine the relevant data to understand why, say, the sun is not driving present warming. I know exactly why it is that most scientists conclude what they do, which is a lot more useful than simply knowing what they conclude.
In short, I have a better understanding of this topic than most who publish information about it (outside of actual experts publishing peer-reviewed literature of course), and more importantly, well enough to know what the skeptics out there would have to demonstrate to challenge this theory, and the fact that they've made no such demonstration.
As for yourself, you clearly have the background necessary to get into this topic, but it's also clear that you really haven't, and that you really aren't very familiar at all with the science here. Maybe sometime you'll take up the subject and read what the actual climate scientists have to say about the subject. Maybe you won't, and that's okay too. You've got nothing to prove on being smart and educated. At the very least though, I hope this helps point you in a better direction.
As an aside, you seem to have a certain fixation when it comes to CRU. I woudl remind you that they are not the only climate research organization out there, and honestly, probably not even the most important, or at least not as important as the combined work of others (though they'd fight tooth and nail to disagree, thanks to that nationalistic attitude the British share with us). There are tons of other organizations out there all doing enormously important work, maintaining instrument records, running satellites, creating processed datasets, publishing papers, so on and so fourth. There's the NCDC/NOAA, NASA, JMA, REMSS, UAH, PMOD, and a lot of other climate labs. Since these other labs usually don't use commercial data, their work is completely open and replicatable without even having to go hand-collect the raw data; they also completely corroborate CRU. If CRU is involved in some kind of odd conspiracy, then it's certainly a very bizarre one, because they're only showing the same thing that's being said by other organizations who use nothing but easily dissectable and verifiable data that's completely open to the public. CRU has reasons for using commercial data (stations are better-maintained, and add more to one's pool of data), but whether you agree with them or not, they only agree with everyone else, and these other labs have no problem sharing anything (NASA does so proactively, from their model codes to their data).
Comments
Wraithone, there is a religious war here, but it's not the war you think it is. Climate science is just another area of science like any other. The scientists publish papers, they debate them, they look to put better constraints on uncertainties, and they've been doing this for a century. Insofar as scientists are concerned, there isn't some division between climate change "believers" as thought the subject depends on faith, and climate change "deniers" as though there's some unequivocal truth being ignored. What we have here are maintstream scientists that accept the basic tenets of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, and a small handful of scientists who are as yet unconvinced and are still skeptical of the basic theory. Between these groups there's normal scientific debate on the topic, and debate on new research that rises up.
I think you actually bothered to go and research and understand the science, you'd realize this. Svensmark's cosmic ray theory isn't wrong because Jim Hansen believes it is, it's wrong because it claims the sun is doing something that our direct satellite TSI measurements say it isn't. That's a matter of fact, not religion.
Where the "religious war" comes in is just in the general war on science by certain political and religious entities around with world with a certain shared allignment of beliefs who are trying to discredit all of science and expertise, because it isn't on their side. It has nothing to do with the actual scientists, however, so you're conflating the normal scientific process with yelling politicians and religious figures, who probably yell and scream out of the hope that people like you will just assume that the entire topic is dominated by people like this. Again, though, this has nothing to do with actual scientists.
Again, this sort of thinking is just born of ignorance of the topic. I suggest that before you try to brand an entire field of science as nothing but a collection of religious extremists, that you go and actually try to learn something about that field first, and about the actual research done in it, and about the actual scientific debate that takes place, instead of just throwing out unbacked opinions. If you'd really like, I can help you out there. What I don't want to do is go too much into the political war on science and dive into a discussion of politics. That's not what science is about.
I'd like to add that I'm not trying to be adversarial or insulting here, but as I said before, these types of ad unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks against climate scientists in lieu of trying to actually discuss the quality of their science is the same thing biologists have to deal with on evolution, and knowing what it's like to present your field and then have some ideologue completely brush off your science without looking at any of it by saying "oh, we'll you're all just pushing an evil atheist agenda, and none of your science of honest", I'm not inclined to put any more stock in that kind of thing being said about other scientists either, not without a hell of a lot of evidence and an effort to at least address that science.
Well, once more I suspect you are reading more into what I posted than was intended. One might say that I'm rather familiar with the scientific method, and how the peer review and grant systems work(both virtues and vices). I've not made any generalized statement about "all" of the people involved. I *have* stated that there are vastly powerful forces involved on both sides of this issue.
Given experience with how these things work, that leads to the results we are seeing. I totally agree with you that the antics we are seeing are *not* science. But that does tend to happen once one goes the activist route. Once politicians get involved in an issue, matters tend to go down hill rather quickly.
I'm always fascinated to learn more about various sub fields, and this one has proven no different. Its a shame that the focus didn't remain on the science.
man the quote system IS fracked on this site isn't it... anyways
I agree with you when it comes to some of the forces that have attempted to influence this science. Honestly, it didn't begin until relatively recently. No one had a problem with the theory until suddenly the suggestion was made that things were getting bad enough to warrant action, and then all of the sudden the small goverment and "God made the Earth for us to exploit" types came out and were like "oh, no, you're lying, and you're stupid, and you're a bunch of hippies", etc etc.
That said, the scientific debate is the same as it was 20 years ago. Skeptics still publish papers freely, sometimes with research that isn't particular good, but often in cases of bringing up either good novel alternative hypotheses (no reason not to investigate new ideas) or to bring up valid areas of weakness in present models for further investigation, the kind of things skeptics are supposed to bring to the table. Richard Lindzen just released a paper last year, yet another in a long line by him. Really, everyone gets their chance to present their perspectives and their research, regardless of whether or not it backs existing models. These guys are also an ultra-minority who have failed to ever prove their points.
The actual science in this field is really quite good. There's a lot of uncertainty on some points, because the necessary computing power to determine a lot of things is a recent advancement, so it's a pioneer field in many ways, despite being a century old. It's certainly not the only field; cladistics is far more of a mess right now (taxonomy in general is in shambles). Still, on its most important premises there are mountains of evidence underlying the science and it's tested more rigorously than most areas of science precisely because it's so often challenged by groups outside of the scientific community.
If you study the actual science of the topic, filtering out the screaming idiots and focusing on the actual published literature and discussion between experts, it's easy to see that this field operates like any other with long-established theories. AGW as a basic theory isn't even really debated anymore. The basic climate sensitivity isn't really debated anymore. Sure, there's a tiny portion scientists who still aren't convinced, but then I can name a biologist or two who still don't buy into evolution. That said, just because Michael Behe (biologist and author of Darwin's Black Box) still hasn't accepted that living diversity came from slow evolution, and not the instant wave of the hand of a diety, doesn't mean that there's real debate on that point. Likewise, just because Lindzen (who's only "undecided"), Spencer, Chen, Avery, Svensmark, Friis-Christensen (who might not even be a skeptic now as he's admitted his alternative hypothesis is wrong), and Micheals (who lied to Congress' face) all are the last haldful of holdouts who still doubt whether humans are causing recent warming, or whether the Earth will warm up enough to cause problems, doesn't mean that there's real debate on that point.
Isn't it a bit hard for a religious war to be taking place when there isn't even really a debate taking place? The scientific community was settled on this issue, a long time ago in fact, and it old news to them because they've moved on, progressing their work to answer other questions. Sure, they debate these new questions tirelessly, and classic scientific debate takes place on them, but outside of the harrassment for the politial world that they contend with, and the constant public misconceptions about the science, these guys have no reason to debate what they all agree is established.
The big problem now is that the political powers that have been afraid of this conclusion spent years relying on pointing to the skeptics, and now that that list has grown unusably thin as the scientists (or at least 99.999% of them) have all become convinced, they resort to waging war on science to try to fight back the conclusion, realizing that science will never back their ideology. Still that's not the fault of the scientists, anymore than it's the fault of us "evolutionists" for having to deal with the same exact thing in our field.
As for the actual science, Quizzical raised a lot of points that need some discussion, which unfortunately means another mega-post (one I had meant to post days ago). You, yourself, may find some interest in it however. For the most part it's just intended as a long but well-cited reference to more common contrarian arguments to show that scientists are willing to discuss their field. It'll probably be one of the last things I post on the topic here though; I need a more permanent forum if I want to start posting huge explanations of global warming science ^_^; Still, if the subject interests you, then I suggest you take the time to go through this next post I've put together; it'll have a lot of science and citations.
Quizzical, sorry for the delay in responding, but a zoology exam and dental problems have been taking up a lot of time lately.
I was going to give a rather lengthy explanation in order to help out on a lot of the obviously large misconceptions you've been given about this science from wherever you're learning about it from, but I've decided that posting 20-page replies out of a word processor (due to the length) is not really appropriate to this forum, not because it hurts anything, but rather because if I'm really to dedicate that amount of time, I should publish it elsewhere, which is what I've decided to do. I've been thinking of writing up a series on climate change for a long time, but with the coming semester-long respite from school I really have little excuse not to now. Thanks for the motivation!
I will give you some of the post I *was* going to type, however, just to help you out a little.
“You brought up Exxon funding something or other. Alarmists sometimes claim that all skepticism of global warming should be discarded because of its funding source. My argument is that there's far more funding on the other side of the issue. If you want to disregard who funds the science, I'd be fine with that. If you've got the evidence to back up a theory, it doesn't matter who paid for the experiments.”
This was something I claimed in jest, to parody an earlier post. I have my issues with some of the dishonesty demonstrated by the sources of funding for corporate/religious/political research into more than one scientific topic, by which I mean dishonesty from those actually wielding the money, and not necessarily from the researchers themselves, but at the end of the day, what you’re saying here is essentially correct. Research stands on its own.
“Consensus is not proof. When people tout consensus too loudly, it's basically an admission that they don't have proof.”
“Why is it that when there's an explanation of the science involved that makes it into sources that might be read by the general public, it's almost invariably written by someone skeptical of global warming? Either the believers in it have one of the worst communications operations in the whole history of humanity, or they're mostly not willing to discuss the science.”
Consensus isn't discussed between experts on the topic; it's intended as a quick reference of the position of those who do understand climate and are published experts on the topic intended for those who do not understand climate, and don't have the time or background to actually dive into and understand the century-long discussion on global warming on a thesis-antithesis-synthesis level.
No one in climate science or anything other field has ever referred only to consensus when pressed for evidence, the point is irrelevant. Ignorant ideologues with little or no understanding of scientific methodology like Micheal Crichton may spew off this particular strawman a lot, but it's still a ridiculous strawman.
The simple fact is that scientists are willing to discuss their work for anyone who really wants to know. That said, they can't force people to want to learn about the science, and they can't control a media which values “hot”, “edgy”, “new” stories over quality science, the same media that thought the 1970s was going to end in a calamitous ice age.
Scientists don't just discuss their science in the literature (though, honestly, even if they did, how could you claim they don't want to discuss the science?); they put up tons of discussion for anyone in the public who's interested:
http://www.realclimate.org/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/globalwarming/primer/primer.html
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/?source=NavEnvGlobal
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/exhibitions/climatechange/edresources.php
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=global-warming-is-undeniable-10-08-01
etc
etc
etc
Those are sources for the layman and the educated science alike (arranged by me in no particular hierarchy on that point). If you want to learn about the science, I suggest you go through some of them (though I don’t'expect you to run out and visit the New York Natural History Museum, don't worry). If you don't, that's okay too, but the scientists are there for you regardless.
“Now, I realize that science can't offer absolute proof, but we don't have the same sort of evidence for global warming that we have for, say, Maxwell's equations.”
The evidence for global warming that's represented as the observed facts are as good as any other in science. The evidence for the theory is as good as any other theory. I'm trying to be brief here, and can get into more detail if you really want, but in short, if you actually begin trying to learn this from the actual scientists, presenting information that actually comes from the literature, you'll find just how many independent sources of evidence there are.
“It's not merely less willing. It's completely unwilling. As in, willing to violate the laws so that they don't have to release data.
If you're not willing to share your full data and an explanation of your methods with anyone who asks, you should get dismissed out of hand as useless. 'Trust us' is not a reasonable substitute for 'here's the data and our methods, and draw your own conclusions'”
CRU's conduct did indeed leave something to be desired, but it's clear that you're aware of neither the extent to which CRU does share their data and methods, nor of the particulars of the FOI requests they were faced with.
First, CRU doesn't own their data, and is not at liberty to share the whole of it with whoever asks, because it's made available to them through commercial agreement on the understanding that they won't violate the terms of that license and start tossing out that privately collected data to anyone and everyone. They can't share what they don't own the rights to; it's little different than you going to a store and buying a copy of a film. If I asked you, right now, to make a copy of every movie you owned and ship those copies to me, would it be legal for you to do so? CRU would have been breaking copyright laws if they had shared that data with anyone who asked.
I suggest you go back and read the CRU Inquiry Reports. Here's an exerpt from the first on this topic:
Even if CRU had wanted to, it would have been unable to publish all of these data because, as Professor Acton explained, some of the data are bound by commercial agreements with different national meteorological organisations
This does not mean that one cannot review their data, merely that CRU cannot hand-compile it and present it to anyone who asks. The House of Commons goes on to further state that:
In addition, of course, there are the sources of the data, the weather stations, to which any individual is free to go and collect the data in the same way that CRU did. This is feasible because the list of stations that CRU used was published in 2008
CRU has made efforts to secure the rights to publish more of their private data, with some success I might add, as they now publish their Swedish data.
Furthermore, CRU was inundated in 2009 with FOI requests that appeared to be part of an organized campaign. As opposed to an average of 2-4 per year, they received nearly 100 requests in Q3/Q4 of 2009, a logistically impossible workload for such a small team of scientists. This combined with FOI requests for data that CRU wasn't at liberty to share placed them in a position (no doubt intentionally) to be unable to meet those requests, let alone by the legal deadline for FOI requests. It was nothing but a back-door attack designed to give ammunition to whomever was motivated to use it.
Even prior to this, CRU had had a policy that could best be described at times as “minimal compliance”. CRU takes every effort to publish their methods in the peer reviewed literature, and they give all information needed to review their data, the vast majority of which is already pre-compiled on NOAA repositories for easy use by anyone who knows what to do with it, and of course the commercial data, for anyone who wishes to pursue requests from the respective owners of said data for a copy of it (something to be taken up with them, not CRU). What they have been reticent about is taking the time of their small team to hand-compile customized data sets for groups or individuals asking for the purpose of trying to discredit CRU, something one needn't find actual flaws to do, as the “climate debate” of recent years has shown through the countless red herrings and strawman arguments constructed out of data in order to capitalize in the ignorance of the public. CRU's reticence, in that respect, is probably understandable, and it's only some FOI requests they've take exception to. Climate scientists face constant harrassment, day in and day out, because they've dared to present something that's antithesis to the extreme philosophy of certain political and religious groups, and as someone in the other field of science that has to deal with this day in and day out, I have a definite sympathy for them. The anger, the vitriol, and the accusations, it takes a toll after awhile. That said, CRU is still violating the best traditions of science to not comply anyways. Their reactions to some of these specific situations may be understandable, but as the House of Commons said, it's not ultimately going to win them anything to fight ideologues in this fashion, and it's ultimately counter-productive for them to try.
CRU has some issues to work out; of that there can be no doubt. What is unequivocally false is your assertion that they go to any and every effort to hide their research. For the most part, any data they're at liberty to share is already at the place I linked before. Want to look at the whole of their data? Here are the WMO station numbers (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/landstations/crustnsused.txt). Just because they can't give you commercial data themselves doesn't mean they haven’t' given the means for anyone else to go and replicate their work. Of course, don't forget to read all their papers they publish discussing their work (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/pubs/full/), not to mention taking advantage of their published station updates that they started doing since beginning to use the CLIMAT network (since 2000). Don't forget their SST data either. You'll need to go to the original ICOADS data to figure out where they got their processed data (http://icoads.noaa.gov/products.html), though be warned, you're talking about 40 gigabytes of raw data from over 400 years of reports, and then you'll have to read CRU's paper on how they bias-adjust the data to get the corrected/processed HADSST2 product (http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadsst2/rayner_etal_2005.pdf). Don't worry, that's only 24 pages worth of explanation
The point I'm trying to make is that CRU and the organizations who provide their data publish enormous amounts of discussion of their data to allow anyone to know exactly what they did, they publish and and all raw data that is able to be given to the public (what isn't bound by commercial agreement), which is really the vast majority of it, and CRU gives the means for anyone who wants even the data they can't publish to go out and get it. They haven't been that good at times at hand-compiling pieces of research to meet the requests of certain individuals, and understandable or not given the circumstances, they should improve that practice, but at the end of the day, this portrayal you give of them, where they go to every length to hide everything about their research that they can, is totally and unequivocally false, because I can show that research, from papers discussing their methods in depth, to any raw data they're at liberty to publish.
“Your link doesn't give the raw CRU data, which is the data source accused of having been deleted.”
Yes it is. Just because it isn't labelled “CRU raw data” doesn't mean that it's not what was used. In fact, there is not such thing as the “raw CRU data”, only the raw data from others that CRU used. Go look at the GCHN data, where most of the station data presently used is located. GCHN is neither labelled as NASA data nor CRU data, because it's owned by neither, but it's still a vast portion of CRU's raw data, and it's the whole of the NASA GISS data (for better or worse NASA chose to stick only with the GHCN data as a tradeoff of inferior coverage and maintenance for superior easy of transparency, but that's a whole different discussion).
Also, CRU did not delete their data, because as I said before, IT'S NOT THEIR DATA. They can't delete the GCHN data, because it's on NOAA repositories, not UEA repositories. To do that, they'd have to hack NOAA. They can, however, share that data freely because it would just be hosting copies of data that's already public (or linking to NOAA). The only data they did delete was a small portion of their copy of the commercial data, that is to say they only deleted the portion of that data which failed to pass bias adjustment. They can't delete the original data, because it's not their data. If you want that data that they tossed out of their analysis, they keep those station numbers, so you can still look that data up at the commercial organizations who originally published it. They also document which stations they reject, and why, available in their peer-reviewed publications. CRU isn't as transparent as they should be when meeting specific requests for specifically compiled data, but anyone who wants to check their work is still ultimately completely able to do so, if not as easily as it should be.
Again, this idea that CRU went and deleted their data is just one more laughable assertion by the desperate people behind Climategate. CRU's conduct hasn't been perfect, but this is something they are neither guilty of, nor even capable of.
“The problem is that's relying on proxies that may not be telling us what we think they are. It's not nearly so good as actual, direct measurements.”
That's like saying that light ice cream isn't as good as the real stuff. It kind of goes without saying, but sometimes we just don't have a choice about what's in the freezer, with the instrument record being mostly unavailable prior to 1850 or so.
As for the nature of the data, some things aren't as hard to determine accurately as you probably think. Atmospheric content, for instance, is easy to determine very accurately, because it's homogeneous planet-wide, so a localized reading is an exact representation of the globe as a whole. The hard part is figuring out temperature. Now, it's certainly possible that any one proxy is giving a wrong indication of temperature, even outside of admitted margin of error, and it's remotely possible that every single one is wrong. So how do I know they're a reasonable representation of the past? They all tell the same story, and exactly the story they should relative to the forcings we can measure. Errors are random; they don't paint a coherent picture over and over and over and over. This is one of the most basic tenets of scientific treatment of data.
Sure, there are admitted margins of error, and they can be very large sometimes with certain types of proxy data, but there are countless independent measurements, and they all corroborate what we've already known for the past century. No, they aren't perfect, but they're one more piece of a vast puzzle that coherently shows the same picture no matter where one looks.
I could put it much more simply by simply saying this. The basic problem with the “it might be wrong because we weren't there to see” argument about inferred information about our universe is that most of the large scale phenomenon of this universe are studied through inferred information in the exact way climate proxies are. Most of the macro-level universe is something we can't observe; we're too small and too young. Sure maybe the Earth doesn't revolve around the sun (really, we've never actually directly looked and watched such a revolution happen), and maybe the expanding universe model is wrong, and maybe dinosaurs weren't here 65 million years ago, and maybe evolution didn't create biodiversity, because we don't have direct measurements to confirm these things. We can't directly observe these things. Instead, we infer them, in the exact same way we infer a temperature/CO2 reading from an ice core. The process of doing that is not fundamentally much different from the means of isotop-dating objects in the geological layers near dinosaurs and inferring their age through deductive reasoning. The process of making the heliocentric model and seeing if it re-creates the observations of the planets is not fundamentally different from taking a climate model and seeing if it recreates our temperature when fed the forcings. These things could be wrong, but simply stating as much doesn't say anything useful. What's important is that people have ample opportunity to find fundamental flaws in the methodology of things like ice core proxies, and to date, no one has published that paper, anymore than they've published the paper showing that the Earth doesn't revolve around the sun.
“There's an enormous difference between a theory that can be made to fit the data, and a theory that can predict things that haven't yet happened, wait to see if they do happen, and be correct.”
There is an enormous difference, namely that the former isn't a theory, but rather a hypothesis. What you don't seem to understand is that prediction doesn't mean predicting the future. No one can predict the future. All it means is predicting that a certain feature of a certain system will react a certain way when subjected to a certain kind of experiment. This is why we prefer controlled laboratory experiments, so as to avoid unnecessary and complicating impacts, which is why the work down by Arrhenius and Callendar was such an invaluable start for climatologists.
I've already pointed to many predictions of this type made by climatologists. You should go back and read up on some of them (I link sources as much for further reading as for verification). When Hansen made his 1988 model for Congress, he didn't claim he could predict the future. He didn't know the 1991 Mt Pinatubo eruption would happen, let alone that it would happen in 1991, even if he figured on one major eruption during the 1990s. For all he knew, and for all we know now, an asteroid might slam into the Earth, cause mass global dimming, and destroy our species thereby taking care of the GHG emissions. No one claims they can predict what the future of forcings will be, and so no one claims to have a crystal ball for global temperature; scientists only claim that they can say how the temperature will react when forcings behave a certain way, and Hansens model more than proved that. That model was a 1988 model, built using antiquated computer technology and an understanding of climate that hadn't yet matured through the use of computer analysis (biology is presently in a similar explosion of understanding), but he drew three lines representing three different scenarios for forcings, the actual forcings turned out to mimic B and C very closely, and so the temperature did as well. Small-scale year-to-year temperature features diverged from things like Pinatubo, but the overall impact of the long-term forcing changes produced the exact predicted decadal-scale change. That model held up until around 2006, at which time new forcings caused a dip that lasted about four years (2010 data is suggesting that we're now out of it, we'll see by this time next year).
Why then have the IPCC model predictions varied so wildly from one IPCC meeting to the next? Is the IPCC just a bunch of cranks who don't know what they're doing? Or is it really not that well understood?
The models' predictions have changed as time passes (by one model replacing another, I mean) more rapidly than the actual temperatures.
They haven't wildy varied. Here are the projections from AR3 (http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/fig9-5.htm). Here are the projections from AR4 (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter10.pdf Page 763). These aren't projections of the future, but rather projections of how much climate will warm from a doubling of CO2. They're projections of climate sensitivity, not of the future how what the forcings will be, because that's largely up to how much we decide to pollute. From the model projections one can extrapolate how much warming would occur for a given scenario of human pollution. They're intended to do that, and nothing more (though the IPCC may through up some other forcing scenarios for the heck of it, I didn't look, those projections there are the ones really designed to show climate sensitivity; anything further is just redundant).
AR3 has a single outlier showing a 6 degree sensitivity, and one which runs a different scenario that hints at a similarly high forcing, but both fall more in-line with the others by AR4. What's important, however, is that the models pretty much just show the same rough ~2.5C-~4.5C sensitivity that we've always known. They DO NOT vary wildly from AR3 to AR4. In fact, in both Assessment Reports, they mostly hover around 3C, showing it to be a nice average, and work to put better constraints on climate show just that sensitivity. Read Annan and Hargreaves 2006 paper for an idea there.
In short, their projections are nothing but a reflection of what we've already known. They actually have nothing to do with making predictions; that work has been done by others, not the IPCC. The IPCC is mostly just a compilation of that work by others. You can look at the source code for some of those models at the data page I gave you earlier.
“Which was my point. It's usually alarmists who claim things about a tipping point.”
I suppose they might, but I wouldn't know, since I get my information from actual scientists. If you studied the climate history, you'd find a few “tipping points” in climate, like the Younger Dryas event, which caused a large extinction. In that sense, climate tipping points DO exist, even if you haven’t personally had the opportunity to study that aspect of climate. That said, no scientist is suggesting that we're ever going to re-create the end-Pleistocene, just like no scientists, even among those who were worried about global dimming, ever suggested that an ice age was going to result back in the 1970s.
Certainly. Most of earth's greenhouse effect is due to water vapor. But the water vapor concentration in the earth's atmosphere varies wildly, both by location and by time. If we don't understand what causes that well enough to predict rainfall a week in advance, how do we hope to predict it decades in advance?
You're conflating the water vapor feedback with small-scale precipitation here. Water vapor cannot act as a forcing, because it has a very short residence time. The only thing that changes global average water vapor levels is temperature, which impacts how much water the atmosphere holds. Nothing can add or subtract water directly, because it's just correct itself almost instantly. The only thing that can vary this substance enough to affect climate is a change in temperature. This is simply because changes in temperature alter the equilibrium between evaporation and condensation slightly to alter the amount of water that's in the vapor phase instead of the liquid phase (http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00016.htm).
This has nothing to do with whether or not I can tell you the chances of rain over Chicago on October 23rd, 2034. I can't do that based solely on global average temperature anymore than I can tell you what the highs and lows for that day over Chicago will be. This has nothing to do with determining climate sensitivity, however. Meterology is what you want there, as it's the science of short-term predictions of small-scale features of our atmosphere based on the influences we see. Climatology is the science of determining large-scale features over long periods of time, basically as law-of-large-numbers averages of how the planet as a whole will behave over long periods. Climatology can't tell you whether Chicago will get rain on October 23rd, 2034; it can tell you whether the North American continent will have more or less precipitation over a decade-long period if a given change in forcings happen, though not very predictively, because unlike meteorology, we don't HAVE definite information on what those influences will be (that would be predicting the future), and so can only make scenarios or explain why past climate has behaved the way it has.
'Over the past thirty years alone we've nearly doubled that rate of warming'
“If you cherry pick dates to go from a low point to a high point, and then extend that linearly, you can get all sorts of crazy results. It's like watching the Dow drop by 500 over the course of a month, and then saying, if it keeps doing that, it will hit 0 in a couple of years.”
You're right, which is why people who draw a line from 1998 to 2007 or 2008 and then claim the globe is cooling are not representing real science. This is the reason the WMO has set 30 years as the standard period of time to be considered a significant trend in climate.
Of course, neither I nor anyone else is claiming that our 30 year trend will necessarily continue indefinitely, or even at all. We just claim that if humanity makes the forcings follow the same trend that they have over the past 30 years that the climate will continue on its trend. As it stands, we haven't just maintained the trends; we've increased them, and with nations like India and China exploding in demand, there's a good chance we'll increase those trends enormously over the next few decade. Now, maybe we won't. Maybe next year the Polywell fusion project will rocket ahead of schedule and finish up and give us infinite clean energy. If that happens, then cool, the positive forcings will stop increasing in strength and all will be well. If we continue massively polluting, then we'll have no such luck. If tomorrow a giant asteroid hits us that'll probably do the job too, if at a very high price. I'm not here to discuss what policy makers should do about the situations, merely to say how much temperature will increase for a given forcing scenario, based on the actual research.
“That we don't understand exactly how things work doesn't mean that they don't work. In the United States, I think it's less than 10% of the land that is developed by humans.”
Actually, depending on your definition of “developed”, you can take that figure as low as 5%. That doesn't mean that 95% of the US has remained a viable habitat for its resident species. Land has to do more than simply exist in some form to be viable habitat. Take the black-footed ferret for example. It's a species that's been recently pulled from virtual extinction due to vast conservation efforts. Even with 95% of the US not technically directly inhabited by humans, that doesn't mean that they have 95% of their historical range to work with. The animals feed primarily on prarie dogs, and require robust populations of them to survive. As of right now, the only habitat in the entire US that can sustain them anymore is the Conata Basin in South Dakota. The rest of the their range is no longer suitable for their habitation. Most species in the US suffer this problem, because there are a lot of biotic factors that are needed to make habitat suitable as well as abiotic factors. The saying “no man's an island” is far more applicable to ecology than to sociology; every species has many other species on which they are co-dependent for survival, and so ecosystems have to be at least relatively complete for habitation by most of its resident species. A species can't just exist in half an ecosystem. Just look at the historical ranges of many species, even species that aren't critically endangered, and you'll see what I mean.
The United States also suffers this problem less than most other developed nations, thanks to our very large land mass.
“So wait, they're already dying, in response to temperature increases that haven't yet happened, but we think might happen in the future? That would violate causality, no?
We know from actual temperature data that the hottest year on record in the United States was 1934. About half of the top ten years were in either the 1920s or 1930s (I forget which). How did the Pika survive the higher temperatures then, but are being killed by temperatures today that are too hot, in spite of being lower than they were in the past?”
“Recent” climate change means recent, not future climate change. I'm guessing you mis-read my post; it happens. On the flip side, I think you just earned the LOLWUT of the month award
To answer your question about the 1930s, I could say that they probably had a more robust ecological situation to work with at the time, but really there's a much simpler explanation. Pikas may well have been dying off to an extent in the 1930s, which was pretty warm (though no warmer and on average even a bit cooler than today), but they got a quick reprieve from the temperatures when the 1940s aerosol spike kicked in, and the solar forcing leveled off to stop the warming. If Pikas suddenly got that same reprieve in ten years, and the temperature didn't go back up, they'd be just fine. If that doesn't happen, GHG levels continue to rise, and temperatures continue to increase, then fine will not be a word I'll be associating with their situation.
“Why then are most of the polar bear populations increasing, not decreasing?”
A simple look at laws will answer that question. Polar bears are presently rebounding because the mass hunting of them has been made illegal. In the short term, that's very good for them. That doesn't change the fact that their habitat is shrinking.
“Except that quite a few scientists have come out as skeptical”
Really? Do you have a citable source that suggests that a significant number of climate scientists have been expressing doubt over the basic climate sensitivity to CO2 who weren't 20 years ago?
I'm not familiar with any new skeptics from the past half-dozen years (it's been a half dozen years since Oreskes' study).
“Ultimately what happens is that scientists understand their own very narrow area pretty well, but their own narrow area isn't enough to say whether the broader predictions of global warming are accurate or not. So most just assume that they are because that's what others say.”
I'm sorry, but you're just making an assumption as such. Not every biologist in Earth is an evolutionary biologist, but every single biologist on Earth is familiar with and has evaluated the evidence for evolution. There are several reasons for this. First, every biologist studies the basic tenets of the theory and learns about the experiments that demonstrate the theory and why the objections offered are not based in science. Evidence for evolution is something that's learned in introductory college biology. The specifics of the evidence are then covered in subsequent semesters, because every subject of biology corroborates that evidence directly, so every class from cell biology to anatomy to ecology teachers why the theory is correct. Secondly, the basic tenets of the theory are not difficult to grasp and logically evaluate for a biologist in any subfield. Lastly, because every subfield of biology deals directly with the theory in some way, every person is an expert on some significant part of the theory, and knows whether or not it's corroborated strongly by their field.
In climatology, the basics of climate sensitivity are at the very heart of every area of climate study. If you don't know what the sensitivity is and why it's known, then you're not going to be able to do any part of that field of science. It's a foundational part of the science. Furthermore, the skeptics on climate change have ample cause to take their background in science in bring up objections to the theory here, and they've been given their shot to do just that. They've spent years trying to find fundemental flaws and have failed, so it's not at all as if everyone's just taking the science on faith
“Even in mathematics, where we really can prove things, most of the time that we accept a theorem as true, it's because others said it is, and we don't care to read the proof to verify it.”
I bet any mathematician on Earth could offer a proof for something basic like the quadratic formula. More importantly, however, I'm sure you accept those theorems because you realize that even if most mathematicians never bothered checking them, there are plenty around who would find something wrong with one if something wrong was there to find. If we take this analogy to climate science, we're talking about a case were people suddenly start coming out, and claiming the theorems are wrong. Now, strangely, most of these people are not mathematicians, in fact most of them are politicians are talk show hosts or in similar professions, but nevertheless, they're claiming a fundamental pieces of your field are wrong. Now, under this scenario, do you think that if there was something wrong to find that people would find it?
“The principle claim of the skeptics is not so much that the models are certainly wrong and that this other model would be so much better. Rather, it is that it is not yet understood well enough to put too much stock into the models.”
On the most fundamental point that the models work with, which is climate sensitivity to radiative forcings, there are very, very few working climate scinetists who are skeptical that the models are wrong there. In fact, nine out of ten of them are listed in that link I gave earlier on skeptic papers.
There's a healthy margin of error in climate sensitivity, but it doesn't change the fact that within that margin of error, there is ample evidence to say how much climate will change for a given increase in a given radiative forcing.
“Ultimately, you know that a theory is good when you can make sharp predictions about things that haven't yet happened, and wait to see if they do, and reliably be correct. For example, we can reliably predict solar eclipses decades or centuries in advance. Therefore, the theories upon which those predictions are based are, if not completely accurate, then at least a very good approximation. We're nowhere near getting there on global warming models.”
If I were to point out an equally simplistic feature of climate science, like the the relationship between CO2 concentration and its ability to absorb IR radiation, I could give you results just as accurate as those of your example, so clearly that isn't true. Besides, predicting the future of a process that's completely regular doesn't demonstrate anything. No one claims that anyone will ever be able to predict the future of climate, merely that there is an understanding of how the climate will react when the forcings act a certain way. On the most important feature, temperature, there is a very good understanding of how this behaves. There are disagreements to be had, and improvements to be made on certain features of models; as I understand it, precipitation will be a lot harder to nail down ultimately than temperature. That said, on the basic notion that the Earth will warm if GHG emissions continue, and on the order of ~3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2, there is a lot of certainty from a large number of independent sources of evidence, which you'd encounter if you read the scientific literature, or otherwise consulted the actual scientists doing work in this field.
There are certainly a small handful of skeptics who disagree, and they are free to try to explain recent warming in some way alternative to the presently accepted theory, and to give evidence that fundamentally alters the climate sensitivity to GHGs (you'd have to do both, since they go hand-in-hand), but they've been trying to do that for a long time, and to no avail. They'd have a lot of evidence to explain away if they tried, which wouldn't make it the most parsimonious of explanations, so they'd need a heck of a lot to stand on.
What he did was to take data from a reconstruction, find that the data from his methods were wildly contradicted for recent years by the actual temperature measurements, and so substitute the actual measurements from recent years for his graph. That's fraudulent. If you're allowed to pick and choose which data sources you'll use for which parts of the graph, you can make it look like whatever you want.
This isn't even close to what's meant for Mike Mann. This is another case where whatever source you're getting your information from, whether it's Peter Taylor (who made this claim you're making) or whoever, they're just horrendously distorting the situation.
Going to an actual scientific source (and, of course, reading the actual papers by Mann and Jones respectively), what is actually meant by “Mike's Nature trick” is that in order to get better constraints on the proxy data, they added the instrument data as a template to tune the proxy data, seeing how changes in each in response to changes in climate in order to give more perspective on the observed changes in some of the proxies.
The paper being referred to is the 1998 Nature paper, Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries, by Mann, Bradley and Hughes. Here's an excerpt explaining “Mike's Nature trick”:
Our approach to climate pattern reconstruction relates closely to statistical approaches which have recently been applied to the problem of filling-in sparse early instrumental climate fields, based on calibration of the sparse sub-networks against the more widespread patterns of variability that can be resolved in shorter data sets. We first decompose the twentieth-century instrumental data into its dominant patterns of variability, and subsequently calibrate the individual climate proxy indicators against the time histories of these distinct patterns during their mutual interval of overlap. One can think of the instrumental patterns as ‘training’ templates against which we calibrate or ‘train’ the much longer proxy data (that is, the ‘trainee’ data) during the shorter calibration period which they overlap.
There's nothing fraudulent about it, because everything is detailed in the paper, nor is it what you've apparently been told.
Phil Jones had the problem that although there was good agreement with the instrument record in his particular sites of study for part of the 20th century, another part later in showed a problematic divergence, and Jones et al needed a method of trying to work with the data to try to get something more faithfully representing the actual known temperature from the direct measurements, so he used Mann's method of training the data to try to give more context to what the data was saying (to put better constraints on it), and improve the way it related to the instrument record.
Whether Jones or Mann were successful is another topic altogether. Frankly, I think there are a lot of problems to be worked out with tree ring data as a proxy to increase the certainty of that data (not that it's exactly central to present questions anyways), but attempts are being made to address those problems. Whether you agree with Jones' methods statistically or not, there's nothing fraudulent about something someone explains in multiple papers they publish, as explored by the House of Commons CRU inquiry (“Reduced sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high northern latitudes” in Nature, “Dendroclimatic signals in long tree-ring chronologies from the Himalayas of Nepal” in the International Journal of Climatology, “Trees tell of past climates: but are they speaking less clearly today?” in the the UK Royal Society).
“One final comment that I hope you can agree with: we're disagreeing over things that neither of us really understands.”
Understanding isn't a dichotomy. It's a matter of degrees. Some parts of climate science fall squarely into my area of expertise, such as the means to measure human alterations to the global carbon cycle (our CO2 emissions) and the impacts of global warming are more my area of expertise than they are that of the scientists directly publishing research on climate. The fact that it's so relevant to my field is why I study the subject extensively to begin with. I've spent years combing over the scientific literature, from mainstream and skeptic scientists alike. I'm familiar with the various points of data underlying the individual premises of AGW theory, and with the papers scientists have written explaining how they treat that data. I've read objections to the science, and I've read what the scientists have had to say in response to those objections. I'm familiar with all of the alternative hypotheses out there for recent observed warming, and I know which papers show data that's starkly in contradiction to them. Just because I can't launch a satellite into space and measure the TSI doesn't mean that I can't go to the PMOD observatory's website and examine the relevant data to understand why, say, the sun is not driving present warming. I know exactly why it is that most scientists conclude what they do, which is a lot more useful than simply knowing what they conclude.
In short, I have a better understanding of this topic than most who publish information about it (outside of actual experts publishing peer-reviewed literature of course), and more importantly, well enough to know what the skeptics out there would have to demonstrate to challenge this theory, and the fact that they've made no such demonstration.
As for yourself, you clearly have the background necessary to get into this topic, but it's also clear that you really haven't, and that you really aren't very familiar at all with the science here. Maybe sometime you'll take up the subject and read what the actual climate scientists have to say about the subject. Maybe you won't, and that's okay too. You've got nothing to prove on being smart and educated. At the very least though, I hope this helps point you in a better direction.
As an aside, you seem to have a certain fixation when it comes to CRU. I woudl remind you that they are not the only climate research organization out there, and honestly, probably not even the most important, or at least not as important as the combined work of others (though they'd fight tooth and nail to disagree, thanks to that nationalistic attitude the British share with us). There are tons of other organizations out there all doing enormously important work, maintaining instrument records, running satellites, creating processed datasets, publishing papers, so on and so fourth. There's the NCDC/NOAA, NASA, JMA, REMSS, UAH, PMOD, and a lot of other climate labs. Since these other labs usually don't use commercial data, their work is completely open and replicatable without even having to go hand-collect the raw data; they also completely corroborate CRU. If CRU is involved in some kind of odd conspiracy, then it's certainly a very bizarre one, because they're only showing the same thing that's being said by other organizations who use nothing but easily dissectable and verifiable data that's completely open to the public. CRU has reasons for using commercial data (stations are better-maintained, and add more to one's pool of data), but whether you agree with them or not, they only agree with everyone else, and these other labs have no problem sharing anything (NASA does so proactively, from their model codes to their data).