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

Roger Bryant: 
 

Peter,

The message you are trying to get across seems rather confused. 

That is, you can't make out what it is that I am saying. Let me try again, and then extend it some. I gave a list of technical matters of climate science where you seem to have a different view from me, and asked for your reasons. I listed some six issues which have come up. 

What I was hoping for is that you would have some technical reasoning which, for example, I could put to a third person like this: “I believe A, because <my reasons>; Roger disputes that, he believes <something else that contradicts A>, for <Roger's reasons>.” That is normally what happens in scientific disputes. But I don't yet have a coherent view of <Roger's reasons> that I could summarise in any reasonable way. 

On some matters I don't even get what the issue might be. There seems to be some issue about global (or, as you prefer to put it, GLOBAL) versus local or hemispherical effects; you seem to think that what is one cannot be the other.

Let me try to say why I don't get that, through an analogy. Say I have a house with two apartments in it. There is an entrance hall, and the two apartments are left and right off the entrance hall. When both inhabitants are making dinner, the smells and the warmth are most noticeable inside the apartments. But some of it leaks. If you're outside the door of the one, you can maybe make out what they're cooking; same with standing outside the door of the other. They also both generate warmth through cooking. During the cooking process you likely won't notice the warmth, but gradually over the evening the warmth will spill over into the entrance hall until everything is in thermal equilibrium. (I have a fairly large old building with three floors plus roof space plus cellar in which managing this equilibrium is quite an active task.) Asking what's LEFT-APARTMENT, what's RIGHT-APARTMENT and what's LEFT+RIGHT+HALL doesn't really help all that much in managing the equilibrium (either of heat or of smells), and suggesting there is a distinction which makes those three domains exclusive to each other would be contrary to basic physics, as well as experience.

 

[RB] If you go back to the reason I started this thread the AGW dogma requires ‘scary’ graphs to display in newspapers and on Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future websites. 

Since you keep bringing this up, maybe it is time for me to address this? 

The young people demonstrating on Fridays are doing so manifestly because they think that anthropogenic global warming will ruin the world within their lifetimes unless something is done about it, and they don't see the older generations, which more or less run the world with their accumulated wealth and power and politics, doing anything substantial about it. Are they right about that?

You don't think they are. But maybe they read a 50 year-old textbook on climate such as Barry and Chorley, or maybe they read John Houghton's 30-year-old Complete Briefing, in which evidence for, and rough calculations about, the extent of anthropogenic global warning are presented in such a way that the more intellectually capable teens are certainly capable of understanding it (and indeed presenting it to their classmates). 

(Let us leave aside here the question of whether politicians of the older generations are in fact doing anything about it, or, even if they are trying, succeeding.)

So there are these books, these sources, that have been around for decades, and get updated (none of these authors are still alive, but it is conceivable that someone else may take over Barry and Chorley, as happens often with standard texts in medicine and law). Those authors did not write that material with a deliberate attempt to deceive; indeed, just the opposite: they wrote them as a deliberate attempt to educate people in climate science. They are not lies. I don't see how anybody who had even the slightest professional contact with the authors could ever think they were. They may be, in various ways, mistaken (as you might think), but they are most obviously not deliberate attempts to deceive, which is what a lie is. 

I've read some of that material. I know the reasoning; I think much of it is right or approximately right. 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 must know this. Yet (look at the title of this thread) you call these technical contributions “lies”, even though you know they are not. That is a deliberate attempt on your part to deceive. I think it is morally wrong. 

Aivar Usk:

Peter Bernard Ladkin:
Safety engineering has been based on the identification and assessment of risk and its mitigation for a quarter century.

……. let us not forget the ALARP principle …..

The ALARP principle is an English legal principle deriving from Asquith 1949, not an engineering principle. You can't formulate it as a process or an algorithm such that if you have followed that process/used that algorithm, and your system or installation failed in such a way as to kill or injure people, you are thereby immune from possibly-successful prosecution. (There are still plenty of engineers who don't understand that.)  ALARP is used in common-law jurisdictions (because they follow Asquith), but there are some common-law jurisdictions such as the US which don't tend to follow judgements outside their jurisdiction, of which Asquith is one. 

ALARP is not present as either a legal principle or an attempted engineering principle in non-common-law jurisdictions such as those of France or Germany. In Germany and France, the requirement is that the system you put in place shall be at least as safe as the system/activity it is replacing (German: MGS or Mindestens gleiche Sicherheit; French: au moins le même securité). 

So if you want to argue that we should approach the dangers of global warming by using ALARP, most of the world will not be convinced. 

 

I would suggest that empirical evidence at relating smoking to various health issues is much stronger than in case of identifying CO2 as the main driver of climate change. 

My point in introducing the smoking example was only to show that risk is the appropriate decision criterion, not certainty. I wasn't intending further comparison (although of course you are free to do so if you think it pertinent).

 

Regarding the extent of anthropogenic effects on climate: professor Ross McKitrick has recently published an article "The IPCC’s attribution methodology is fundamentally flawed" that refers to his paper in Climate Dynamics criticising the math behind “Optimal Fingerprinting” methodology relied upon at attributing climate change to greenhouse gases. It was peer reviewed and not refuted, even recommended by at least one of the AT99 authors. 

Yes, well, having looked at the blog post and the paper, I observe that he certainly seems to like to overstate his case. He spends a lot of his blog time talking in detail about his peer review situation with his paper; his lack of success in getting the targets of his observations to write some kind of reply; his technical qualifications as an economist as distinct from what he considers to be the lower qualifications of the authors whose paper he criticises. As if anybody cares (although I guess you do). Really, those kinds of things are just everyday. And the suggestion that Allen is less good at stats than he is just seems to be gratuitous. Over the years, Allen has made a number of key contributions to statistical methods in climate science, and McKitrick has contributed …….. what?

The McKitrick paper is a piece of what I would call mathematical fundamentalism in statistics. I've encountered it in another context, that of the statistical evaluation of software. He is saying “in order to apply this method and rigorously draw these conclusions, this-and-this-and-this mathematical condition should apply. The authors have not shown these conditions apply.” That may well be right (or not), but so what (see below)? Notice that in the blog he goes further; he says they don't apply, which is clearly his considered view. But he didn't get to say that in the paper; he got to say some other strident things but not that. 

The thing about statistics is that it is quite a practical science. You have a bunch of numbers, and you want to know what they say. You try to model the situation, as we say. You try to find a model which more or less fits the situation, and enables you thereby feasibly to estimate some probabilistic parameters of the underlying stochastic process. My experience, and that of most professional statisticians, is that mathematical fundamentalism tends to inhibit that process rather than enhance it. 

Take SW stateval, for instance. You can often model continuously-operating software as a Poisson process (or some other renewal process). Now, a Poisson process has certain mathematical prerequisites that the operation of SW manifestly does not fulfil. For example, that, from any point in time, the probability that the software will fail in the next thirty seconds is constant throughout the operation. This is manifestly not literally the case; here is proof. Suppose the SW fails at time T by generating a HW interrupt. To actually fail, it has to have started on an execution path leading to that interrupt. At some time t < T, it will become inevitable that the interrupt will be generated at time T. It follows that for time (t,T) the probability of failure is 100%. Which is (if your SW is half-way usable) different from the probability that the SW will fail, say, within time (T-t) of startup. QED. But, in fact, you do very well by considering the SW operation to be modelled anyway as a Poisson process and trying to estimate key parameters, such as expected time to failure. It is a practical approximation that can be seen generally to work very well here. 

So mathematical fundamentalism about statistical procedures is sometimes, even often, inappropriate, in that it would hinder you from applying statistical processes that in fact give you some very useful information about the stochastic processes underlying your real-world example. 

That may be why Allen and Test didn't see an immediate need to reply. Just guessing, though.

I have been involved in a similar situation in 2016 and ongoing. I started some practical work in 2009 with an eminent statistician, trying to rewrite a brief piece on SW stateval in a widely-used international standard. The stats involved is straightforward first-year-undergrad stuff,  which my colleague wrote up in brief (it is of course all over the Internet in any case). We had someone on the committee who maintained “this is wrong; you're missing out this and this and this condition; to apply this math you have to ensure these conditions hold.” Actually, no, you don't. You get quite decent results in circumstances in which the modelling is approximate rather than exact. 

Peter,

I asked a number of questions, you don’t appear to have answered any of them:

If, as you propose, AGW is a northern hemisphere phenomena why are the [CO2] levels higher in the south than the north?

If CO2 is the driver why are we not seeing the same phenomena globally?

Do you accept that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age existed and were of sufficient magnitude to be recorded?

If CO2/Greenhouse Gasses were the cause [of the MWP], where did they come from?

I have already responded with my ‘technical’ reasons as to why I disagree with Stott’s result.

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Do you agree or disagree with Peter Stott's result, which I cited, of how much the rise in CET since 1950 is due to anthropogenic warming? If you disagree with it, what is your basis?

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I think that your question may be a little simplistic. As the CET dropped around 0.5°C from 1950 to 1970 the natural forcing effects must be significantly stronger than any ‘man made’ effect. If the effects were equal the temperature would have been flat, not dropping.  The maximum anthropogenic effect here must therefore be rather less than 50%, 25%???. I don’t therefore consider it to be significant.

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I can expand this with some numbers taken from the CET graphic.

Between 1950 and 1970 the temperature dropped at a rate of -0.3°C Decade.

Between 1975 and 2000 the temperature rose at a rate of 0.5°C Decade.

If we assume that the temperature rise between 1975 and 2000 was entirely anthropogenic, so 0.5°C per decade the natural cooling effect to cause the drop between 1950 and 1970 must be -0.8°C decade which is greater than the anthropogenic warming.

If we make another assumption that only half the temperature rise was anthropogenic, 0.25°C per decade the natural cooling effect must be -0.55°C per decade which is again significantly greater than the warming effect.

The young people demonstrating on Fridays are doing so manifestly because they think that anthropogenic global warming will ruin the world within their lifetimes unless something is done about it, and they don't see the older generations, which more or less run the world with their accumulated wealth and power and politics, doing anything substantial about it. Are they right about that?

Why do they think that AGW will ruin the world in their life times when the actual science and data does not support that? They are fed so much misinformation and misrepresentation of the data (which I am prepared to call lies) by the mainstream media and their own groups. Most of the predictions they are fed are based on the absolute worst case RPC8.5 model. Is that justifiable? They are regularly fed the 7m sea level rise if all the ice on Greenland melts. The current information from The DMI Polar Portal:

‘Based on this data, it can be seen that during the period 2003-2011 the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost 234 km3 of water per year, corresponding to an annual contribution to the mean increase in sea level of 0.65 mm (Barletta et al. (2013).’

polarportal.dk/.../

At 0.65mm per year they are unlikely to see a 7m rise in their or their children lifetimes. If the rate remains linear (very unlikely) it would take a mere 10 000.

I don’t think that there is a climate emergency. I do think that there is a climate problem that needs to be addressed in an engineering way with benefit analysis, energy balances and actual resource requirements. I support energy and material saving measures that are realistic.

The various activist groups go around demanding this and that like spoilt teenagers with no clue about the actual impact. There is currently a group in Britain gluing themselves to motorways to demand that the government (read taxpayer) pays to insulate all the social housing. What do they actually want? 

Loft insulation which usually has a good payback but is the low hanging fruit and has mostly been installed?

Wall insulation which has a much lower return and can create other problems?

Replacement windows which again has a low rate of return and unless the widows are due to be replaced is wasteful of resources?

At what point are you emitting more greenhouse gasses than you save?

The CO2 southern hemisphere thing is not as simple as that one picture suggests - November is the southern hemisphere winter,  plots show a CO2 rich northern hemisphere 6 months later

this link plays the whole year that image was taken from , in time lapse as a video it is probably more informative.

Also note the OCO2 satellite makes images in stripes, and there are seasonal unmeasured regions also. 

The newer OCO3, on the iss gives better coverage of the planet over the year, but in outline similar results, the CO2 moves back and forth with the warm weather, and increases a bit year on year. Problem is we have only been measuring a short time, and do not know how serious that  is or not.

Mike.

Fascinating Mike.

Is there a scale for parts per million CO2 referenced to the colours used.

Assuming Red is a higher accumulation Blue is lower.

Mike, Jon,

Indeed none of this is simple but it is important. The still from the series that I posted had a scale, blue was around 380 ppm and red 400 ppm but I guess that may be a moving target.

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded yesterday to two pioneers in climate modelling, Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann (as well as Georgio Parisi for his very different work on complex systems of molecules). Manabe was perhaps the first to build a climate model (1 dimensional) that one could show fits. He was the first to demonstrate the greenhouse warming effect of CO2. Klaus Hasselmann showed how to model climate changes despite chaotic (literally, in the Poincare/Lorenz sense) weather. A quote from https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/popular-physicsprize2021.pdf is apposite:

[Hasselmann's] methods have been used to prove that the increased temperature in the atmosphere is due to human emissions of carbon dioxide.

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.

Sounds quite reasonable to me. According to the E&T piece on it  they predicted an ECS of around 2°C. As  I have said we have a climate problem not a climate emergency.

Some food for thought.

UAH Global Temperature Update for September, 2021: – Watts Up With That?

Climate emergency.. Not..

Climate problem, I'm not to sure about that as we're warming after the little ice age, mankind is flourishing and the planet is greening.

More food for thought.

Renewable power fuels Europe’s energy crisis | EDITORIAL | Las Vegas Review-Journal (reviewjournal.com)

Sh1t hitting the fan this winter. All because of the Green madness.