A considered response to http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/earth/clouds-effect-on-climate-change-is-last-bastion-for-dissenters.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
I know I'm going to be castigated as a "dissenter" (Yikes, just that name reeks of quasi-religious orthodoxy. How dare he disagree!) but sure, I'll bite:
'For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.'
I'm not sure "decades" applies, as it's only been about a decade and a half since the alarmists started warning us that the sky was falling. When initially presented by a blowhard self-promoting politician, it's hard to take the 'science' seriously. If Rush Limbaugh produced a propaganda film insisting that 2+2=4, I'd likewise start to doubt whatever it was he was promoting. Let's also remember that there's a bit of a 'cry wolf' case here; the people claiming that armageddon was now approaching, had previously told us that:
- we were going to all starve to death
- we were going to run out of oil
- we were going to run out of fresh water
- we were covering our country in landfills
- DDT was going to kill us all
- nuclear power was going to kill us all
(etc. ad infinitum) ...and that sort of bombastic pessimism HAS been going on for decades (real decades, not inflated decades).
I'm not sure "decades" applies, as it's only been about a decade and a half since the alarmists started warning us that the sky was falling. When initially presented by a blowhard self-promoting politician, it's hard to take the 'science' seriously. If Rush Limbaugh produced a propaganda film insisting that 2+2=4, I'd likewise start to doubt whatever it was he was promoting. Let's also remember that there's a bit of a 'cry wolf' case here; the people claiming that armageddon was now approaching, had previously told us that:
- we were going to all starve to death
- we were going to run out of oil
- we were going to run out of fresh water
- we were covering our country in landfills
- DDT was going to kill us all
- nuclear power was going to kill us all
(etc. ad infinitum)
Initially they claimed that weather stations exaggerated the warming trend. This was disproven by satellite data which shows a similar warming trend.
I'm not sure that's true. Well, probably SOMEONE somewhere said that. My concern was that weather station data was sparse, extremely questionably interpolated in a way that seemed to encourage bias (upward), anecdotal evidence that many of the long-standing weather stations in the US had been subject to encroaching urbanization without (as far as I could see in the data) any correction for that, etc. Further, while the "hockey stick" (that started this) shocked me as fully as it did Mr Gore, I was suspicious of the statistical methods that had been broadly explained in its initial presentation. Further, I'd (anecdotally) remembered stories about oranges growing in England that didn't seem to be reflected in the data. As more discussion followed, people who were far more savvy than me presented a more-convincing case that the statistics used were deeply flawed. This of course made me wonder why someone would do this - by accident or on purpose. To be frank, I immediately categorized Messrs. Mann (et al) as eco-alarmists, the broad group of discredited wierdoes I'd been ignoring since the 1970s. Frankly, that's the hole that "global warming" alarmists have had to try to climb out of since then. I'll be very clear: In my mind, this definitely weighed against subsequent AGW claims.
I'm not sure that's true. Well, probably SOMEONE somewhere said that. My concern was that weather station data was sparse, extremely questionably interpolated in a way that seemed to encourage bias (upward), anecdotal evidence that many of the long-standing weather stations in the US had been subject to encroaching urbanization without (as far as I could see in the data) any correction for that, etc. Further, while the "hockey stick" (that started this) shocked me as fully as it did Mr Gore, I was suspicious of the statistical methods that had been broadly explained in its initial presentation. Further, I'd (anecdotally) remembered stories about oranges growing in England that didn't seem to be reflected in the data. As more discussion followed, people who were far more savvy than me presented a more-convincing case that the statistics used were deeply flawed. This of course made me wonder why someone would do this - by accident or on purpose. To be frank, I immediately categorized Messrs. Mann (et al) as eco-alarmists, the broad group of discredited wierdoes I'd been ignoring since the 1970s. Frankly, that's the hole that "global warming" alarmists have had to try to climb out of since then. I'll be very clear: In my mind, this definitely weighed against subsequent AGW claims.
Further, and regardless of his conclusions (many of which I believe to have been either overstated or otherwise flawed; I *do* feel strongly that his whole point about opportunity costs of chasing CO2 vs other beneficial ecological investments is the baby that's gone out with the bathwater) the vitriol and fury directed against Bjorn Lomborg for daring to doubt the data was even more confirmation for me that this was no longer a scientific issue - this took on the tenor of a secular Inquisition.
Next, solar activity was blamed for much of the warming. This looked like a promising theory until the '80s, when solar output started to diverge from global temperatures.
Really? http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html [tmgnow.com] seems to present fairly soberly.
Really? http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html [tmgnow.com] seems to present fairly soberly.
Comparison of the extended solar activity record with the temperature series confirms the high correlation between solar activity and northern hemisphere land surface air temperature and shows that the relationship has existed through the whole 500-year interval for which reliable data exist.
A corresponding influence of solar activity has been demonstrated in other climatic parameters. Thus, both the date of arrival of spring in the Yangtze River Valley as deduced from phenological data and the extent of the sea-ice in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic sea have been shown to be correlated with the length of the sunspot cycle during the last 450 years.
Conclusion
70-90 years oscillations in global mean temperature are correlated with corresponding oscillations in solar activity. Whereas the solar influence is obvious in the data from the last four centuries, signatures of human activity are not yet distinguishable in the observations.
Certainly, from other sources it seems to me that the correlation seems to have diverged in the past 30 years. It's hard to imagine that a system correlates accurately for about 500 years, then suddenly doesn't. I don't know what to make of that.
Now, climate contrarians are convinced that changes in cloud cover will largely mitigate the warming caused by increased CO2. The New York Times examines how even this last bastion for dissenters is crumbling. Over the past few years, Several papers have shown that rather than being a mitigating factor, changes in cloud cover due to warming may actually enhance further warming."
To suggest this is some sort of 'climate contrarian' homogeneous dogma is again, misrepresenting it. As far as I've seen, the impact of clouds in modeled systems has been extremely rationalized and frankly doubtful. For AGW advocates to suggest that this has been anything but a weak part of their models seems a bit disingenuous. To me, this has been one of their most dissuasive tactics: false certainly and the misrepresentation of speculation as widely established and infallible fact harms their case when NATURALLY in the course of scientific inquiry hypotheses are sharpened and theories are tightened as more data is applied.
To suggest this is some sort of 'climate contrarian' homogeneous dogma is again, misrepresenting it. As far as I've seen, the impact of clouds in modeled systems has been extremely rationalized and frankly doubtful. For AGW advocates to suggest that this has been anything but a weak part of their models seems a bit disingenuous. To me, this has been one of their most dissuasive tactics: false certainly and the misrepresentation of speculation as widely established and infallible fact harms their case when NATURALLY in the course of scientific inquiry hypotheses are sharpened and theories are tightened as more data is applied.
I'm genuinely pleased if their models now do a better job of including more accurate cloud modeling. If by "more accurate" this only means "fits our prognostications of doom" that's going to be less convincing.
I understand that by having any questions about anthropogenic global warming I'm already a thick-browed neanderthal. But I've *tried* to be conscientious about this. When An Inconvenient Truth came out, honestly, it smelled like something from Leni Reifenstahl. But it was hard to imagine that it was all made up, so there must be SOME facts behind it, and they alone might be troubling. I'd immediately downloaded a half-dozen sets of tree-ring temperature proxy data from some US government website, dumped it into excel (which was ugly, this was long before it had been parsed for public consumption) and I saw NOTHING to suggest recent warming. But I'm very well aware I'm not a climate scientist, so I kept digging for long-term climate data, always trying to find and evaluate the least-'interpreted' data possible.
What I see is a repetition of sudden and startling temperature/CO2 spikes on about the 120-140kiloyear cycle over at least the last million-800k years, the last being about that same span ago. So to my amateur eyes it seems like a long-term cycle that we're about due for another spike. Is this the cause of the current changes, or something human-driven? I genuinely don't know.
Certainly, it's inarguable that humans are affecting their local microclimates from heat output, pavement, groundwater diversion, draining of wetlands, output of particulates and aerosols, etc. It's almost inconceivable that a species with such an impact could hit the 7 trillion mark and NOT have an impact on the planet. The contribution of effects from all these microclimates ALMOST CERTAINLY has some impact on our macroclimate. Is this all the result of CO2? Obviously not. (In fact, I tend to be more suspicious of anyone that points to sole-causes on a system as complex as climate.)
On the other hand, history is replete with Humanity assuming their exceptionalism - assuming that they were somehow 'special' or more important (than other species, or even other ethnicities sadly). I'm not sure we've grown out of that conceit. Further, with or without human activity, climate WAS NEVER GOING TO BE STATIC. The claim is, certainly, that human impacts are happening faster than the planet's ever seen before - that's simply ludicrous. Volcanism, asteroid impacts, whatever - great, colossal changes have happened to this planet's environment in MUCH shorter timespans...generally coinciding with a 'wipe' of 60%+ of extant species. (We probably owe our current dominance to the last of these.)
Ultimately, the system settles down to a new normal. In any case I would wager that life on earth will continue with us or not.
In the final analysis:
- climate change seems a staggeringly massive system that we are only starting to understand
- there is every reason to try to be more efficient at energy production, distribution, and eliminating waste regardless of global warming
- the histrionics of the AGW folks scare me badly. Personally, the toyed-with ideas of geoengineering all seem catastrophically (and I mean that word precisely) reactionary, poorly thought-out, and smack of Simpsonian Bolivian Tree Lizard-solutions. The economics of cap & trade, while perhaps well-meant to some genuinely concerned folks, are little more than a systems of ecological indulgences (and probably about as effective).
- climate change seems a staggeringly massive system that we are only starting to understand
- there is every reason to try to be more efficient at energy production, distribution, and eliminating waste regardless of global warming
- the histrionics of the AGW folks scare me badly. Personally, the toyed-with ideas of geoengineering all seem catastrophically (and I mean that word precisely) reactionary, poorly thought-out, and smack of Simpsonian Bolivian Tree Lizard-solutions. The economics of cap & trade, while perhaps well-meant to some genuinely concerned folks, are little more than a systems of ecological indulgences (and probably about as effective).
What I see is (another) wave of mostly-white first-world liberals who feel deeply guilty at their lifestyles and want to "do something" constructive, and will spend any amount of (other peoples') money to "fix things", even if they have to fly (First Class) to sixteen global climate conferences to convince us how serious they are.
And that's where I end, and I've tried to be as honest and candid as possible. I'd love to actually debate this with someone who would help me understand what I don't.
FWIW and in all openness, I don't believe much of any new data I see any longer on either side. It's become so deeply politicized, the presentations are so tendentious, that I can't really grant any source the sort of inherent credibility they might have had 15-30 years ago. Everything now is either misleadingly portrayed or is a constant effort at goalpost-shifting. An example? Sea ice. For a decade we've heard about sea-ice decreasing in the arctic, proved with ample and very easy-to-understand pictures. Then, suddenly, sea ice actually was increasing. Well, wait, said the alarmists - that's just THIN surface ice, what we really mean to talk about is volume. Nobody talked about volume before; "thin" surface ice - which would nicely melt quickly and show great swaths of open sea at the slightest warming - was perfectly adequate when it HELPED make their point. Whether the original point is valid or not (I actually believe it is), this seems very much like the sort of discussion one would have with someone who is arguing from belief, not reason.
