I hope the Climate Activists are proud of the effect their lies are having on the younger generation

Peter Bernard Ladkin:
Do note the word “prove”. I find it sad that we have people around who still doubt the results of a piece of Nobel-prize-winning physics from decades ago.

I would think that using the word "prove" was not proper in the quoted text; when results of the climate models cannot be verified using actual data, such models prove nothing. Many scientists have criticised inaccuracy of IPCC climate models; only the INM-CM4-8 of the latest collection is found to produce meaningful results - produced by scientists from a country that does not take CAGW seriously.

It is interesting to note that French physicist Joseph Fourier who was mentioned in the quoted source actually "did not use the term "greenhouse" in his 1824 publication, but he described the temperature of the Earth as being controlled by three distinct sources: (1) solar radiation, which was considered unequally distributed over the year and which produces the diversity of climates; (2) the temperature communicated by the interplanetary space irradiated by the light from innumerable stars; and (3) heat from the interior of Earth, assumed to be remaining from its formation (Fleming 1998)" as reported by Dr. Humlum.

Although the GHE exists, Fourier was obviously right about those three factors: solar variability and orbital variations have complex effects, space radiation does control forming of the clouds (Stensmark, Shaviv) while in addition to cooling effect of volcanic aerosols, underwater volcanism has significant heating effect that is most visible in the polar regions (and very likely releases lots of CO2). Surprisingly, the IPCC reports ignore the latter, consider only the cooling effect of volcanism, although the AR6 WGI SPM states "... but there is only limited evidence, with medium agreement, of human influence on the Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss" (A.1.5). "There is low confidence in the projected decrease of Antarctic sea ice." (B.2.5) Imagine the historic effect of one million submarine volcanoes with the average cooking power similar to the one identified under the Antarctic Pine Island Glacier, ~2500 ± 1700 MW.

Regarding Nobel-prize-winning scientists in physics: I would recommend a short lecture by professor Ivar Giaever (29:35, 2015) - should we doubt him?

https://www.mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/videos/34729/ivar-giaever-global-warming-revisited/laureate-giaever

Aivar Usk: 
 

Peter Bernard Ladkin:
Do note the word “prove”. I find it sad that we have people around who still doubt the results of a piece of Nobel-prize-winning physics from decades ago.

I would think that using the word "prove" was not proper in the quoted text;

The word “prove” is accurate. As an entity which has already admitted he cannot judge individual technical claims in climate science in supposedly-scientific contributions he has recommended, you must equally admit you cannot judge this issue.

 

 when results of the climate models cannot be verified using actual data, such models prove nothing. 

Nonsense, of course. A simple example. Suppose I ask each and every one of these models “2+2=??” I bet they are all going to give me the answer 4. Not only that, but, even if I can't do arithmetic and have no idea of the Peano axioms, I have very good reasons to trust that this answer is right. So it is clearly wrong, indeed nonsense, that “such models prove nothing."

Since you said that, I conclude you know little about models, so I see little point in engaging with you on issues of verification and validation and what “prove” might mean.

BTW, I might as well say that I am more than half convinced you are a bot. 

Having said that, let me also say that bots can be very helpful. I wish I'd had a bot commenting on all the arithmetic I do on-line. It would at times have been very useful :-(

 

Regarding Nobel-prize-winning scientists in physics: I would recommend a short lecture by professor Ivar Giaever (29:35, 2015) - should we doubt him?

Interesting. You offer “alternative views” on climate science by various people with credentials you carefully enumerate. Who could have credentials better than the Nobel Committee? Yeet here, somehow, they don't count…………

Peter Bernard Ladkin:
Nonsense, of course. A simple example. Suppose I ask each and every one of these models “2+2=??” I bet they are all going to give me the answer 4.

Yet that is exactly my problem at trusting the IPCC climate models: as several scientists have demonstrated using hindcasting, when asking each and every one of these models “2+2=??”, the answers of IPCC CMIP5 and CMIP6 models seem to be “2+2=5” at best but “2+2=9” in many cases while we know it should be “2+2=4” due to existing measurement data.

Once again, my opinion is based on competent sources - the latest is an article "Pervasive Warming Bias in CMIP6 Tropospheric Layers" by R. McKitrick and J. Christy, published on 15 July 2020.

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/.../2020EA001281

The authors conclude:

"The literature drawing attention to an upward bias in climate model warming responses in the tropical troposphere extends back at least 15 years now (Karl et al., 2006). Rather than being resolved, the problem has become worse, since now every member of the CMIP6 generation of climate models exhibits an upward bias in the entire global troposphere as well as in the tropics. The models with lower ECS values have warming rates somewhat closer to observed but are still significantly biased upward and do not overlap observations. Models with higher ECS values also have higher tropospheric warming rates, and applying the emergent constraint concept implies that an ensemble of models with warming rates consistent with observations would likely have to have ECS values at or below the bottom of the CMIP6 range. Our findings mirror recent evidence from inspection of CMIP6 ECSs (Voosen, 2019) and paleoclimate simulations (Zhu et al., 2020), which also reveal a systematic warm bias in the latest generation of climate models."

It is worth looking into Table 2 that presents Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) values and origins of the models. It may come as a surprise to many that while models from Canada and UK are parading ECS in the range of 5.3 to 5.6, some are close to the almost reasonable range within 1.8 to 2.5. IPCC seems to be diluting the differences of positions of corresponding research groups engraved into these values by presenting only multi-model means of CMIP6 runs (at least in AR6 WGI TS).

BTW, I might as well say that I am more than half convinced you are a bot.

I sometimes wish I was, considering where the world seems to be heading in the departments of freedom of speech, political correctness, etc. Nevertheless, perhaps that statement provides a hint of your analytical capabilities, explaining why you refuse to consider any climate science missing the IPCC brand-marks worth of reckoning ?
 

Interesting. You offer “alternative views” on climate science by various people with credentials you carefully enumerate. Who could have credentials better than the Nobel Committee? Yeet here, somehow, they don't count…………

I agree on the point that professor Ivar Giaever was not decorated with the Nobel Prize as a climate scientist, if that is what you mean. Nevertheless, while various journalists, politicians and self-appointed shady "experts" may offer great entertainment to some extent, I tend to trust scientists with proven sharp brain capabilities and long term physics experience when my own processing cannot detect faults of logic in their reasoning. It is hard to imagine that such persons would knowingly lie, particularly during congressional testimonies that would undoubtedly end up badly for them.

science.house.gov/.../Christy Testimony_1.pdf
defyccc.com/.../
www.epw.senate.gov/.../01AFD79733D77F24A71FEF9DAFCCB056.22514hearingwitnesstestimonymoore.pdf

I simply cannot figure out what their motivation to lie would be - none of them strike me as evil sociopaths, most are of professor emeritus status and need no attention or funding. They must be acting out of the inner drive to speak the truth, as I prefer to think.

I noticed that I accidentally provided a wrong link to a report by Dr. Humlum that discussed Fourier's theory at the end, it was in the December 2020 report. Since I visited his website, I borrowed his latest graph showing the sea ice extent 1980-2021 based on NSIDC monitoring data. Both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice seems to be recovering after the strong 2016 El Nino, undisturbed by rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

I think democracy has been subverted by multinationals.  I have noticed that a lot of “people's revolutions” get hijacked.  Either by force or by money eg Spain, Portugal, China, Russia, USSR satellite states, Africa, South America, India. The UK very sneakily via the Land Enclosure Act and the USA by partisanship, vested interested and lobbyism.  France seems to be an outlier.

Thank you for providing this!

Thanks for the reference!

Does it really matter who is wrong or right?   You can't go wrong with the SDGs and good governance so why not adopt them as soon as possible.  If that is sooner than technically needed does that really matter?  Of course we must secure the basics, money, food, health, rights, scientific progress but we have to do that now anyway.  If we do it properly, most jobs will fall away and everyone can go live in the country - which is all anyone wants to do anyway.  OK, I am being a bit facetious but I really don't see the point of the current direction.

Peter Bernard Ladkin:
The McKitrick paper is a piece of what I would call mathematical fundamentalism in statistics. ... 
That may be why Allen and Test didn't see an immediate need to reply. Just guessing, though.

No need to guess - you may have missed that McKitrick wrote:

"I then wrote them again, offering to delay further if they wanted to produce a reply. This time Tett wrote back with some supportive comments about my earlier paper and he encouraged me just to go ahead and publish my comment. I hope they will provide a response at some point, but in the meantime my critique has passed peer review and is unchallenged."

I think there is anthropogenic global warming and I think (contrary to what I thought ten years ago) that it is now making a considerable difference to the occurrence of extreme weather events to the point at which in some places (such as California, as I have expressed in detail) there is a increasing political problem as to how life must change in order to accommodate it. That is my view. Whatever others think I may be doing, I am not arguing that view in public with an intent to deceive. I really believe it.

You may be a great thinker, but I would ask for empirical evidence before engaging into ruining the economy based on hypothetical risks. As has been pointed out in several earlier postings, the evidence for CO2 produced by fossil fuels causing the climate change is inconclusive.

I have no doubt that you are advocating for CAGW and the need for climate neutrality in good faith but as has been revealed, you seemed to have no idea at all that there is actual science behind the contrarian views. I would not hold it against you - the mainstream media is doing everything they can to restrict or at least to ridicule such information and authors questioning the IPCC dogma, therefore people busy at their daily professional activities cannot just stumble onto such information by accident.

Nevertheless, contemporary situation has at least one parallel in history: during Cold War times, many people in the West known these days as "useful idiots" believed Soviet propaganda about that country being peace-loving paradise for their own citizens, and kept propagandizing for the communist cause. Seemingly highly moral ideas were trumpeted by bolshevik sources everywhere while truthful information about oppression, GULAGs, poverty, missing civil liberties, practical slavery of farmers, militarizing all aspects of life etc in "socialist" countries was either not available in details, or believed to be a product of cynical capitalist propaganda. I trust that people who accept that climate science is not settled do not belong to that category, maintaining capability of re-adjusting their position when provided with sufficiently detailed information from trustworthy sources and time to delve into it.   
 

Nick1967: 
 

Does it really matter who is wrong or right?  

Yes, it does. We need to know how the physical world works. First, so we can make life better for everyone (supplying enough food, caring for health). Second, so that in the course of doing the first we don't wreck it (for example, by basing the world's diet on beef). 

The other point is that climate scientists have been hassled and intimidated and threatened by politicians and others for pursuing their science and informing us of the results. Some of that is treated in Michael Mann's 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (Columbia University Press). It is thoroughly disgusting. It is not the first time it has happened. Most obviously, it happened with the “Tobacco Wars”. That issue was resolved in two ways. First, tobacco companies may have been powerful (large companies usually do have a short line to politics) but in the end there are just too many good scientists who produce evidence, and more evidence and more evidence. Second, investigation into what the companies themselves knew showed they knew all about tobacco causing cancer and other diseases. In other words, there was in fact consensus. 

I think lessons were learned from the tobacco wars. Climate scientists early on agreed that there needed to be a global consensus-building organisation which published regular reports on the state of the science. That is the IPCC. 

The other, interesting lesson is the connection between the two. Not a scientific connection, but a personnel/political connection, laid out in detail in Oreskes and Conway's 2010 book Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury). 

So what will be the next big thing? How can we deal with it more humanely? As it turns out, Covid-19. This is different because of course it really is an emergency. There is no time for the careful consensus building over decades which characterises the IPCC. The usual pseudoscientific tropes have reemerged with the Covid-19 situation. But it is different from tobacco/cancer or anthropogenic climate change in that there are no major powerful interests vested in denying the existence of the disease. I think, also, that medical-scientifically we have been incredibly lucky with it. The fact that there were vaccines on the roll within months, and that some of them are more efficacious than any existing vaccine for any other illness you can think of. (That of course is not happenstance - it is the result of brilliant science and careful development over decades, and we are lucky in that in some sense the science was “ready for it” when Covid-19 came along. It is no coincidence that the ChAdOx1-based malaria vaccine has shown this year similarly high efficaciousness in its first trials. Hill, Gilbert and Pollard are well on the way to saving the world twice in two years!)

Then there are other matters to which science is important, indeed crucial, but in some sense peripheral, such as nuclear-fission power plants (NPPs). There are people who argue that we need them as part of sustainable development - indeed, you will find people arguing that elsewhere on this forum. And then there are people who argue that NPPs are not sustainable, for two reasons. One of which is waste disposal, which has not ever been solved. The other is the existential risk they pose when they go awry. 

(For me personally, that is the longest connection to scientific-engineering controversy, since I started working at the CEGB running computer code for the finite-element stress analysis of pressure vessels fifty years ago, before I went to college.)

Concerning controversy, there is the mother of them all, of course, evolution/creation of species of living creatures. 170 years and still going strong. Many of the tropes and argumentation styles that one finds in climate-change controversy were developed here (including those used by at least one nominal contributor to the current discussion) and have been thoroughly discussed and analysed by eminent philosophers of science. One imagines there is not a lot to say there that hasn't been said, but actually there is always stuff coming down the pike. 

Then of course there is science itself. What is it? How come it finds the truth? (If there indeed is any such thing as truth to be found, say some.) 

 

 You can't go wrong with the SDGs and good governance so why not adopt them as soon as possible.  

We can certainly agree on that. Others will say it “costs too much”. The paucity of that argument has been pointed out through Covid. As Keynes is reported to have said, nothing ever costs too much if it is effective and feasible (I have just looked for the quote. Can't find it.)

BTW, there is a nice paper in Nature from 2019 by Santer et al celebrating three key happenings in climate science in 1979, one of which was Hasselmann's fingerprinting technique. Nature have made it open-access to celebrate Hasselmann's Nobel Prize. It is short and very readable:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0424-x.epd

Peter Bernard Ladkin: 
 

So what will be the next big thing? How can we deal with it more humanely? As it turns out, Covid-19. […] But it is different from tobacco/cancer or anthropogenic climate change in that there are no major powerful interests vested in denying the existence of the disease.

Great post Peter, but I would slightly take issue with this point - which I think is relevant to this thread - I've been reading over the last few days the “everyone should go back to the office” / “everyone should be very wary of going back to the office” debate. The science that say we'll kill people if we mix them together vs. the short term economics of the effects on the transport and city centre service industries. (I work in the rail industry, and we have been hit very very hard by covid, but I do NOT think people should risk their lives for the sole purpose of keeping me in a job!!) It's a smaller case of one section of the climate debate: “ok, maybe it is real, but we can't afford to do anything about it because it would damage the economy”. For covid we can relocate coffee shops to  support home based workers, and redesign transport infrastructure to move to a more flexible and network coverage (away form “everyone into cities for 9:00am and out again at 5:00pm”). For climate change, as others have said here, we can build a low carbon economy if we want to using a huge range of different means. But it does mean challenging the “major powerful interests vested” in a short term view status quo economy, who don't possess the attitude, imagination, skills, or downright humanity to see that the economy must change - but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be for the “worst” (whatever that means).

That's made me feel better posting that, even if I probably should have been doing something more useful instead. Having been posting on these forums for over 15 years now I'm very well aware of the importance of these discussions in the context of wider society i.e. absolutely miniscule!!! Still, I suppose if climate change deniers are posting here it's stopping them causing more damage elsewhere…it's just frustrating as someone who would like the IET forums to be a useful place for engineering discussions, and like most other forums on the internet they keep degenerating into a home for conspiracy theorists. And this one's particularly nasty because we should be the ones solving the problem - the scientists have determined the problem, it's taking engineering to sort it. (Despite the fact that our forebears created it! Literally in my case, having a father who was a chemical engineer on gas works for most of his career. But that's irrelevant, as new facts come to light engineering needs to change. Much though I love steam engines.) 

But thanks Peter for your hard work on this thread, as Simon mentioned earlier most of the rest of us can't be bothered any more…which is probably not the right attitude…

Cheers, Andy

edited to correct maths: I didn't seem to be able to subtract 2006 from 2021!