Political correctness gone mad?

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Mostlyharmless
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

Post by Mostlyharmless »

paul.mercer wrote:Come on chaps,
i suppose we all get a little too enthusiastic in our replies sometimes, look at some of the debates we've had on the merits of one ship over another!
Its time to let it go, we've all had our say and a bit of fun whilst saying it, shall we leave it at that?
You need to lure us all away by starting a new thread arguing that Iowa or Alaska were battlecruisers or that American armour was greatly inferior to British or German armour.

Returning to topic, I cannot decide if my suggestion of some memorial for John Perkins is PC or not.
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Dave Saxton
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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Mostly Harmless wrote:I am slightly baffled by your position.

You presumably believe that Earth's atmosphere causes Earth to have a higher average temperature than a planet at the same position without an atmosphere. You presumably believe that gases that can absorb infrared radiation, including water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane, play an important role in that effect. You presumably also accept the observation that the carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth's atmosphere is increasing (The Keeling Curve).

I do not see why you do not expect such an increase in the carbon dioxide concentration to cause some increase in the Earth's average temperature. I
Did you see what I wrote earlier in this thread on that?
Dave Saxton wrote:
For the record I am aware of the scientific journals and concur with the overall view of average temperature increase of the order of 0.8 C - and not the 3.0 C increases proposed by some quarters.
This is the ECS or equilibrium climate sensitivity. The actual sensitivity to co2 alone is insignificant at 1.16* C per doubling of co2 concentration. If the concentration doubled to 800 ppm the temperature will increase only another 1.16 degrees and then it will only be an additional 1.16 degrees if the concentration reached 1,600 ppm and so on. The logarithmic nature of this is obvious. And it means that most of the warming that will occur from anthroprogentic emissions of co2 has already occurred.....
A critical piece of AGW hypothesis is the "hot spot" causing (assumed) positive feed backs. I further wrote:
The hypothesis presented is that the insignificant warming caused by c02 concentration causes an atmospheric hot spot unleashing positive feed backs that multiply the effect, so that ECS or net sensitivity is 3-5* C...... Actual observations indicate that feed backs are negative and the ECS ranges from 0.25 degrees C to 0.80 degrees C.
However, the hot spot cannot be found. There have been hundreds of thousands of radiosondes and no measurements indicating the hot spot.

Remember the scientific method:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KmimDq4cSU

We have let the AGW experiment run now for about 40 years and the hypothesis of catastrophic man made warming has been disproved by observation of empirical data. A good summary of the failure for laymen here:

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/man-ma ... disproved/
I must admit that I have not remembered the details but I thought that a very crude calculation with no feedbacks predicts a response quite close to the observed warming since about 1950. Was I being fooled?
A further Jo Nova summary may help:

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/has-co ... you-think/
Entering a night sea battle is an awesome business.The enveloping darkness, hiding the enemy's.. seems a living thing, malignant and oppressive.Swishing water at the bow and stern mark an inexorable advance toward an unknown destiny.
Mostlyharmless
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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I have spent a little time looking at what is clearly known about climate change. The recent (post 1980) data on temperature seems fairly good and shows that the average global temperature for 2014, 2015 and 2016 was 0.74 K, 0.87 K and 0.99 K higher than the average for 1950-1980 https://climate.nasa.gov/system/interna ... a_File.txt and we know that the CO2 concentration went from about 340 ppm to about 410 ppm over that period. We also know that neither the Sun's radiance nor the Earth's orbit account for any of the change and it is not obvious that aerosols, either natural or man made, changed enough to have a significant effect.

The best guess seems to be that almost all of that temperature rise of at least 0.8 K was a response to the added greenhouse gases. Thus a good model of the rapid feedback should give roughly that temperature rise for that change in CO2 concentration. Unfortunately, I have not looked to see which models do roughly fit the data and especially which models actually predicted approximately that data in advance.

However, there is a caveat. There will also be a slow response mostly due to changes in ice and snow changing the planet's albedo. Articles such
http://dacemirror.sci-hub.io/journal-ar ... ni2009.pdf and Lund et al from the same issue suggest that we might expect 30-50% more warming after several decades.
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

Post by paul.mercer »

Mostlyharmless wrote:
paul.mercer wrote:Come on chaps,
i suppose we all get a little too enthusiastic in our replies sometimes, look at some of the debates we've had on the merits of one ship over another!
Its time to let it go, we've all had our say and a bit of fun whilst saying it, shall we leave it at that?
You need to lure us all away by starting a new thread arguing that Iowa or Alaska were battlecruisers or that American armour was greatly inferior to British or German armour.


Not jolly likely! I've been a member long enough to know that there are far far more knowledgeable people than myself in this forum to even think about starting one like that!
How about my post on North Korea in the 'Military Conflicts' bit, would that do?
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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Mostlyharmless wrote:I have spent a little time looking at what is clearly known about climate change. The recent (post 1980) data on temperature seems fairly good and shows that the average global temperature for 2014, 2015 and 2016 was 0.74 K, 0.87 K and 0.99 K higher than the average for 1950-1980 https://climate.nasa.gov/system/interna ... a_File.txt and we know that the CO2 concentration went from about 340 ppm to about 410 ppm over that period. We also know that neither the Sun's radiance nor the Earth's orbit account for any of the change and it is not obvious that aerosols, either natural or man made, changed enough to have a significant effect.

The best guess seems to be that almost all of that temperature rise of at least 0.8 K was a response to the added greenhouse gases. Thus a good model of the rapid feedback should give roughly that temperature rise for that change in CO2 concentration. Unfortunately, I have not looked to see which models do roughly fit the data and especially which models actually predicted approximately that data in advance.

However, there is a caveat. There will also be a slow response mostly due to changes in ice and snow changing the planet's albedo. Articles such
http://dacemirror.sci-hub.io/journal-ar ... ni2009.pdf and Lund et al from the same issue suggest that we might expect 30-50% more warming after several decades.
The problem here is that 37 years is far too small of a time period to draw any conclusions as to cause and effect, and it begins at point in time of a cooler than normal period. During the 20th century there were different warming and cooling periods. The 1930s were extremely warm, warmer than now actually, despite much lower CO2 concentrations. After WWII there then followed a cooling period, despite rising CO2. By the 1970s they were talking about global cooling and possibly slipping into the next ice age. If one were to construct a graph and started it in 1980, then it would certainly show warming, because that was a low temperature period. If the graph was expanded to include the 30s and 40s, then 1980 is only one trough in the ongoing ups and downs of the longer term temperature record.

Within the more recent period there is also the problem of the Pause. Temperatures spiked during the 1997-98 Super El Nino. Then following the fall off in the accompanying La Nina there were no significant increase in temperatures until the 2016-17 Super El Nino that just occurred. El Ninos are natural and cyclic events-perfectly normal. During the pause, however, anthro CO2 emissions increased at an exponential rate. The correlation was busted. This was a hot topic of the climategate emails leaked during 2009. Climate scientists suggested changing the temperature records to get rid the pause, among other things. (The records have indeed been adjusted, so take NASA, GISS, BOM, Met Office,...ect.. temperature data with pinch of salt.)

If we expand the climate period to include multiple centuries going back millennia, then becomes the problem of the Medieval Warm Period (and the even warmer Roman Warm Period before that). The MWP is well established in paleo climatology. Temperatures during the MWP were much warmer than now despite lower CO2 concentrations and comparatively nill anthro CO2 emissions. This was followed by the Little Ice Age of a few hundred years ago (The last 200 years should show a gradual increase of temps overall as we climb out of the LIA). The MWP and LIA were huge problems for the politicians of selling the narrative that we are facing a catastrophic AGW crisis.

The now famous/infamous Hockey Stick paper conveniently got rid of the MWP and the LIA and showed alarming warming since 1980. Nonetheless, statistician and engineer Steve McIntyre exposed that the hockey stick was constructed using faulty scientific methods when he audited the data. (See Steve's Climate Audit blog).

Following normal scientific procedures, there are ample rationale to propose new hypotheses. Instead of adjusting the hypothesis in light of the observations and established data, they changed the data to fit the hypothesis; as proposed, and exposed, in the climategate communications. Temperature records from the past have been "corrected" cooler during the last eight years by Gov agencies through a process called homogenization. Of course, if we cool the past and warm the present any graph will show warming trends. It is the equivalent of if we went in and altered the war diaries and KTBs from WWII. This is not a conspiracy theory that this has been going on, but a documented fact, exposed by several concerned scientists.

The latest example of data manipulation to come to light, is the pause buster paper of a few years ago. Government scientist Thomas Karl published a paper that showed there has actually been no pause since the 98 El Nino. However just this year, a fellow scientist named John Bates (right after he retired) blew the whistle on the Karl paper, exposing that it had not used the proper scientific methods, and was actually manufactured so that the Obama Administration could easier get the US and the UK signed on to the Paris Climate Treaty.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/02/04/ ... rocedures/
Entering a night sea battle is an awesome business.The enveloping darkness, hiding the enemy's.. seems a living thing, malignant and oppressive.Swishing water at the bow and stern mark an inexorable advance toward an unknown destiny.
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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Dave Saxton
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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Every single one of those things listed in the cartoon is either irrelevant or a faulty assumption. LOL.
Entering a night sea battle is an awesome business.The enveloping darkness, hiding the enemy's.. seems a living thing, malignant and oppressive.Swishing water at the bow and stern mark an inexorable advance toward an unknown destiny.
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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Dave Saxton wrote:Every single one of those things listed in the cartoon is either irrelevant or a faulty assumption. LOL.
I got introduced to conspiracy theories in 1965, when a neighbor asked me to read the Pearl Harbor Hearings and find "the smoking gun". He later told me that he was a veteran, having served with Geo. Washington at Valley Forge. My estimation of conspiracy theorist has gone down since then.
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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Dave Saxton wrote:...snip...The 1930s were extremely warm, warmer than now actually, despite much lower CO2 concentrations. ...snip...
Here are two maps, one historical from https://julianstockwinblog.files.wordpr ... k-map2.jpg and one recent from https://robertscribbler.files.wordpress ... ea-ice.png. Notice that Holland would have had more sea to search had Bismarck broken out at the end of March 2017.
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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I'm glad you brought up Arctic sea ice retreats and replenishment's, because what we are seeing now is very similar to most of the 1930s and some years in the 1940s:

http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/ar ... 61-259.php

DMI could of course not collect data during the Nazi occupation, but the Soviets continued to utilize the North East Passage into the 40s, and even the Kriegsmarine did during the war.

Note the ice replenishment post WW2 through the 70's. There is nothing unprecedented about current Arctic sea ice coverage.

On edit. Found this via google. I knew I had seen a photo of the Skate at the pole somewhere else on the web a few years ago

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/26/ ... -so-thick/
Entering a night sea battle is an awesome business.The enveloping darkness, hiding the enemy's.. seems a living thing, malignant and oppressive.Swishing water at the bow and stern mark an inexorable advance toward an unknown destiny.
Mostlyharmless
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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Firstly, your links on historic sea ice are interesting for an on topic discussion of how far north and west Holland's destroyers had to search. I can quite easily believe that the pack ice limit marked on our maps of the Bismarck sortie were copied from data from just before the map was drawn rather than from May 1941 data (note that the pack ice limit should be further north and west of the limit of drifting sea ice, which interests climatologists but which Bismarck could possibly sail through).

Secondly, I have learnt a few things about the science of climate change over the last week for which many thanks to the other posters, which I may try to explain below but, alas, without many references (I suspect Dave understands most of it but it may carry this a little further). Unfortunately, there is still a great deal well beyond the competence of this retired biochemist.

I remain convinced that the observed warming over the last forty years (the period for which we have good satellite data) is real. There was one site that pointed out that simply moving heat from the Southern Hemisphere to the North would raise global average temperatures because more of the South is ocean but the warming is seen in both hemispheres and is also seen if we look just at sea surface temperatures.

The clearest signal that this is due to greenhouse gases is the warming of the troposphere together with a slight cooling of the stratosphere which suggests that that Earth has put on a slightly thicker overcoat. If we were seeing something caused by a change in solar flux, the stratosphere would be warming rather than cooling, which is a good job because direct measurement suggests that the Sun has kept the same average radiance over the last three sunspot cycles (the Sun does vary about 0.1% over a sunspot cycle, which excites some sceptics but that can probably be ignored if it averages out).

As an aside, one reason that this debate is so difficult is that global warming involves so many different fields from measurement of sea ice to solar physics to infrared spectroscopy. Clearly nobody understands everything that is going on.

The actual “greenhouse effect” is also not quite obvious. Sunlight hits the ground or the sea and may be reflected or absorbed. If it is absorbed, the surface becomes hotter and emits more infrared radiation. Although the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, oxygen and argon, none of those absorbs infrared. Thus, only gases such as water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and ozone can absorb infrared and also liquid water in clouds, which I understand not at all. I am probably unusually happy about that point as I can remember sleeping through lectures about fifty years ago where the lecturer explained that the symmetric modes were only in Raman Spectroscopy whilst the asymmetric modes were seen in an infrared spectrum and I measured some infrared spectra in practicals. After the gases absorb the heat, they swap it by collision and also re-radiate it up or down as well as carrying the heat up or down by convection (mostly up).

The water vapour is by far the most important greenhouse gas as it is on average at a much higher concentration. However, there are windows of frequencies that water vapour cannot absorb. Carbon dioxide has a strong effect despite being at only about 400 ppm because it partially blocks some of the windows, catching radiation that would otherwise escape towards space. Methane similarly blocks some extra windows. Thus, although one can talk about a "forcing" due to either CO2 or methane alone, you actually get the strongest greenhouse effect with a mixture. The scientists don't like to talk about a forcing due to water vapour because while CO2 lasts over a century and methane years or decades, water vapour only last on average 14 days in the atmosphere. Thus, the models need to calculate how much water vapour is present and also what is happening to clouds limiting my understanding. However, one point is that raising the concentrations of the absorbers together will keep the heat nearer the ground than simply having one gas at high concentration and leaving windows in the spectrum to let the heat out.

Thus, I hope that I have explained why any calculation depends on models that are sufficiently complex that they can easily hide the biases of their creators. We cannot escape using such models and they will always fit the data used to design them. We can only hope that the code is published and hope that biases can be removed. However, any good model should predict the observed warming from 1980.

The most optimistic article that I found today was at http://www.innovations-report.com/html/ ... event.html and suggests that 50 million years ago, 2000 ppm of CO2 only raised the temperature about 5º C. Of course, the Sun was not quite so bright then but hopefully we may escape some of the runaway greenhouse events leading to Venus like conditions.

Unfortunately, even more limited temperature rises may make it unwise to buy land in Florida or worse the Maldives unless you are hoping to run a SCUBA school.
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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You are what is known as a luke warmer. This is not at all derogatory, at least from my perspective, and puts you in fairly good company in my opinion. Your views are not too far different from those of Dr. Judith Curry, who I greatly admire and respect, and with who I agree with on many things pertaining to the state of science today and these related issues. Nonetheless, a word of warning as you could get attacked as she did. You may find yourself "kicked out of the tribe" as she describes it, and labeled "anti-science" and a "denier". Perhaps even a conspiracy theorist:

https://judithcurry.com/2015/11/26/clim ... c-part-ii/

It is refreshing to engage in civil and rational discussion and I would like to comment on some of your points, but first I want to watch the Yankees-Red Sox game, so maybe tomorrow.

The David Rose article:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/11/i-w ... terviewed/
Entering a night sea battle is an awesome business.The enveloping darkness, hiding the enemy's.. seems a living thing, malignant and oppressive.Swishing water at the bow and stern mark an inexorable advance toward an unknown destiny.
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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Dave Saxton wrote:You are what is known as a luke warmer. This is not at all derogatory
I don't find the use of such labels very helpful - it turns discussion and reasoning into clichés - and labels and clichés are used to avoid argument and critical examination.
..... Nonetheless, a word of warning as you could get attacked as she did. You may find yourself "kicked out of the tribe" as she describes it, and labeled "anti-science" and a "denier". Perhaps even a conspiracy theorist:
This is how political correctness works - to eradicate critical debate and force opinion into a set norm, using peer group pressure.
Essentially it takes away freedom of speech and turns knowledge and reasoning into dogma.
The biggest insult is to describe scientific reasoning as an ''anti-science'' - it is a classic illustration of what George Orwell would describe as ''double think''. It is a reversal of terminology that hides the reality of the situation - just as todays ''anti-fascists'' are the actual fascists.

''Conspiracy theorist'' - another phrase used to cover up organised political campaigning to promote a groups sectional interests.
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

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Or it's just accurate and you don't like it.
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Re: Political correctness gone mad?

Post by Mostlyharmless »

Dave Saxton wrote:You are what is known as a luke warmer. ...snip ...
I am not sure if my looking for less than a week at what people are arguing about is enough to claim a label. I do agree with Judith Curry that predicting global warming is a hard scientific problem. We need a model of Earth's climate to predict as one cannot simply use forcings to calculate given that the effects of water vapour and clouds dominate the greenhouse effect. Unfortunately, that would be almost equivalent to being able to predict weather and that is a famously hard (in the technical sense) problem as illustrated by the term “butterfly effect". The fortunate part of that is that medium term prediction of weather may need the same sort of calculation of how much water vapour is present and of where clouds form and at what height. Thus, it is possible that testable predictions of weather may lead to better models of climate.

I suspect that anyone who rejects the satellite derived temperature data may be a little eccentric and deserving of OpanaPointer's scorn especially as that implies that NASA was falsely reporting warming even during Republican Presidencies.

However, even accepting that data, there remains the problem that most of the heat on Earth's surface is located in the oceans and actual observed temperatures depend on how the heat distributes between the ocean depths and the surface where we measure it. Thus, even if the energy balance remains constant with the same small excess of energy arriving over that lost to space each year, we see troughs and peaks in measured temperatures due to La Nina and El Nino events on a gradual upward trend.

The exact slope of the upward trend tends to depend on where you measure from and that is where I depart from Judith Curry. Her measurement finished in the La Nina trough giving a lower rate of increase than I would guess. If I calculate from the 1998 peak to 2017 (which may be a peak if the 2018 temperature is lower), I see 0.35 K warming over 19 years or roughly 0.18 K per decade. Of course, the 2018 temperature may be higher, so I wouldn't argue against 0.2 K per decade. Thus, my very crude projection gets a 2 K warming by 2070 compared to 2040 for the IPCC or 2100 for Judith Curry.

Now of course, the IPCC model calculations are much more sophisticated and plausible than my crude constant rate. However, it is just slightly plausible that those scientists feel that the responsible course is to err on the side of caution, especially as it is easy to suggest ways that warming could speed up such as release of carbon from tundra or lowered albedo as ice disappears. Apart from the baffling (to me) issue of clouds, the only mechanism that I can imagine for slowing warming would be a slowing of the North Atlantic Drift due to Greenland melt water and increased snow cover of Europe, which would not be an unalloyed blessing.
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