Richard Muller and the BEST Climate Data Review

Zeph in reply to Amadeus says:

Yes, the sun is the primary driver of historic climate change. You can find that in the IPCC report, actually. It’s known that a given amount of solar change is likely to produce a given amount of average temperature change (with delays and error bars of course). The key point currently however is that we can measure that solar effect, and it hasn’t changed enough in recent decades to explain THIS temperature change.

These discussions are fairly meaningless until we put numbers to the positive and negative effects. For example, it’s well known that not wearing a seat belt has saved many people’s lives – for example, surviving after being ejected from a car which burst into flames or plunged over a cliff. On the other hand, wearing a seat belt has also saved lives. Somebody with a pro or anti seat belt agenda could easily just argue the aspects of this which support that agenda. It’s not until we look at the comparative numbers that we can talk sense, and it turns out to be well validated that seat belts save many more lives than they cost.

Likewise, we have to quantize the effect of the sun – and this has been done in great detail with good correspondence between the physics and the measurements. By mathematically comparing the solar inputs (called “forcings”) with the climate response, and also taking into account factors like volcanic eruptions which put heat reflecting SO2 high in atmosphere for a while and many other factors, it has become clear to the vast majority of scientists who have investigated this that solar changes do not explain the current temperature record. Any scientist who can mathematically explain the temperature change of recent decades using the instrumental record of solar output can get published because it’s an important area of research – but the evidence just doesn’t support that. Solar input has actually been decreasing slightly in recent times.

By the way, the IPCC fourth report (AR4) presents the conclusion that they are 90% sure that more than 50% of recent warming is due to human activities, including land use changes and other factors but dominantly due to greenhouse gasses – CO2 and Methane. That’s a carefully qualified and limited assertion, for which they provide a mountain of supportive evidence from many fields. Do you note that they did not say 100% of it? They have done a very thorough assessment of other factors (including the sun) and mathematically the numbers just don’t add up to match the temperature record without adding in a increased greenhouse gasses as one of the “forcings” or inputs to the system.

“Lightbulbs and jet skis” is of course trivializing this for effect. Obviously you won’t find that assertion in the IPCC; instead you will find information about the number of gigatons (billions of tons) of additional CO2 we add to the atmosphere every year and what the effects of that is. Nor do they say it dooms all live on earth – they say that it is leading to serious consequences which will make life much more difficult for humans (and other critters) in coming decades – in particular ways – droughts, heat waves, flooding of infrastructures, crop failures. Of course there would be some positive changes too (just as some people are saved by not wearing seat belts), but the best analysis so far says there is more negative than positive. That’s not surprising (we have built our societies for hundreds to thousands of years to fit to one set of conditions, and when that changes relatively rapidly our systems will be poorly adapted for a long time).

So instead of “how light bulbs and jet skis will doom all life on this planet”, a less silly framing would be “how emitting gigatons of CO2 per year will cause climate changes which are seriously harmful to our way of life as an industrialized civilization”. That would be a fair statement, and not a strawman misrepresentation. And yes, there is some very good evidence to support the non-strawman version.

How good? Solid enough to convince every national science academy on the planet – first world, third world, north, south, capitalist, communist, rich, poor. And most of the scientists reviewing the evidence are not themselves climate scientists and will see if anything a reduction in their own budgets if this is taken seriously – but if they are right, that would be the least of their worries.

You probably didn’t do the statistics on seat belt usage yourself, and laymen are not going to be able to do all the science for themselves any more than we recalculate for ourselves the civil engineering for each bridge we cross. We have to go for the evaluating “preponderance of the evidence” available to us. If 97% of toxicologists told you a particular chemical was almost certainly going to seriously harm you, and the vast majority of all physicians of all varieties around the world who spent significant time reviewing the research behind that statement agreed – would be be a good bet to eat it anyway? Yes, the mainstream definitely *could* be wrong, but what’s the best bet to place? Where are the odds?

If mainstream science is wrong on this, it’s either thousands of times larger and more airtight than any conspiracy in human history (alien brain wave control?), or you are so much brighter than the entire worlds scientists that you can discern from some web pages what they with their years of careful study somehow miss. It just doesn’t make sense. Getting more money for a few climate scientists (at their own expense!) is not a good explanation for such a huge majority of all scientists to lie to us all.

A far simpler explanation – the scientists are basically right, but many people don’t want to believe it because they don’t like the implications (and a very small number of scientists disagree – as will always be the case). That’s completely compatible with everything we know about science and psychology, it makes no outlandish assumptions, requires no suspension of disbelief.

If you think you might change your views IF what I’ve said is well verified, then I can dig up some references (or you can). If you are so convinced that AGW is not real that it wouldn’t matter, then it would be a waste of my time.

I’ll point out one resource. I suggest reading enough that you could at least recall the mainstream scientific take on each of the issues when they come up, even if you disagree. What I’ve found happening is that many of the anti-AGW arguments which sounded pretty sensible to me in isolation, don’t sound as convincing in a fuller context. And after a while, I got to seriously distrusting the integrity of some of the anti-AGW advocates, if they keep promoting claims which have been debunked and which work only upon those who are ignorant of the actual research.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.phpReport