This Is Why the GOP Can’t Have Nice Things

George Turner in reply to greginak says:

None of those have worked. A large number of lead IPCC authors just drastically downgraded the connection between CO2 and temperature in a recent paper (last week). They predicted a 1.3C increase by 2060, with half of it already having occurred. The humorous write up in the lay science community was “Hooray! We’d thought it was too late, but mankind still has a little time to prevent the apocalypse and planetary mass extinction, if we all act now!”

The analysis was desperately needed to cope with the fact that the planet’s temperature has defied their predictions and is falling below the 95% confidence interval of all the previous IPCC charts that were warning us about global warming. And global warming theory doesn’t even try to explain weather patterns (except in its religious role). That’s a function of climate science and meteorology – with or without global warming.

The new sensitivity estimate means that in 50 years, your local temperature will average about one degree F hotter than now, and most of that increase will be at night. I suggest you drive 30 miles south and see if you can survive in such a climate while you still have time to stockpile emergency supplies.

And keep in mind that the new, downgraded sensitivity estimate is from the alarmists at the IPCC.

And for clarity, the skeptics have always agreed that CO2 would produce some warming. We happily run atmospheric optical data, too, and both alarmists and skeptics agree on the direct IR radiation effects. The key difference is that the skeptics think the climate feedbacks are strongly negative (with evidence), and the alarmists claim (against evidence and logic) that the feedbacks are strongly positive. Strip away any feedback and neither group of scientists finds anything very alarming in the predicted temperature change from IR.

But without anything alarming, mass legions of loyal followers can’t be mobilized, and climate science isn’t saving the planet from mass extinction. Basically, without the alarm, they might as well be studying beetles in the Amazon. No fancy conferences. No big jets. No supercomputer centers. No fan clubs. No huge grants.Report

George Turner in reply to Kimsie says:

Geologists are about the least likely to believe in global warming. I live in a house full of them. Most likely seem to be biologists (all their papers are new again – just tack on “If global warming temperatures do ….” and republish!)

The ice cores show that CO2 lags temperature, and that the climate’s temperature can increase or decrease rapidly and severely in conditions of low CO2 and in conditions of very high CO2. In fact, we’ve plunged into ice ages with CO2 levels running several times higher than present. That’s confirmed in Antarctic ice cores.Report

George Turner in reply to Kimsie says:

I’ve had GCM source codes sitting on my laptop for years. There’s no way I could write code that bad. I think MIT finally moved away from FORTRAN, though, so maybe there’s hope.

Below the code is the algorithms, and below that is the math. Our current mathematical approaches to the problem are wholly inadequate, on many levels. The Galerkin shallow-water equations (developed by a guy in tube socks and a powdered wig) assume the atmosphere is infinitely thin (it has no vertical dimension). The equations were a useful way to make idealized ocean currents amenable to the computer power available to men in powdered wigs.

When expanded with a pseudo-vertical dimension, the equations are used for the atmosphere by all except MIT’s GCM model (which instead uses Navier-Stokes equations – which happen to be invalid for a gas that gas undergoes condensation or evaporation). These climate models don’t have a true vertical dimension and use pressure altitude, so the height is actually in pressure, not in meters. They also don’t conserve Newton’s law of conservation of momentum in the vertical dimension, and don’t take into account conservation of angular momentum as an air column rises or falls. So to them, a rising air column literally speeds up (gains momentum) without any applied force.

If it could gain enough altitude it could exceed the speed of light as it continued whirling around with a 24-hour period. You’d think it would go flying off in that case, but centripetal force doesn’t exist in the model either. You might think it would fly off because of the diminished force of gravity as you move away from the Earth, but in the models gravity is a universal constant that doesn’t depend on distance.

But violating the laws of local motion known since the 1680’s is a minor quibble compared to the other problems with the models. The big ones are grid size, condensation and evaporation, cloud formation, optical shading, turbulence, and entropy. Unlike real fluids, the models can run a fluid backwards and happily unmix it. We know this can’t be done real life for anything more than trivial set ups.

Given that the models are not going to produce a real prediction, and that many of the inputs are just guesses that can vary by almost an order of magnitude between models (some include inputs that the others don’t even take into account, such as various aerosol forcing factors, minor albedo shifts from soot or algae blooms, all the way to freakin’ clouds, etc). Then the parameters are adjusted until the model produces what seems to behave, to the eye, like a halfway plausible planet with an atmosphere.

Then they start producing warnings of apocalyptic doom and ask for more funding for a bigger computer. But people are sucked in by all the fanciness and expense of it.

ALL that is needed by the scientists is a couple simple numbers, perhaps described as a single graph on a napkin from Hooters. It would show the average temperature versus CO2 concentration. They don’t have that. They don’t yet know how to produce it with to less than an almost an order of magnitude accuracy for the error bars. So without the one handy number they really need, they’re dazzling the simple folk with fancy bells and flashing lights, accompanied by stark warnings of hell and damnation and the promise of redemption for those who repent their evil ways and send them money.Report

George Turner in reply to trizzlor says:

The leaked drafts of the IPCC AR5 report contain the graphs which have been circulating around both skeptical and alarmist sites. Here’s one obviously biased article about them in the Daily Mail. (Other newspapers also covered the story, and this story was preceding by articles on how scientists were dealing with the utter lack of statistically significant warming that’s now approaching a two-decade span.

The AR5 draft is having to cope with the problem, and finally admitted that solar forcing might play some undetermined role in climate, along with some other grudging concessions.

During the late 80’s and since, we happened to be in what solar scientists term “the grand maximum”, when solar output was higher than it had been for centuries. Alarmists dismissed the connection between the grand maximum and temperatures because temperatures kept increasing after the sun’s output had leveled off. The horrible flaw in that argument is that it means your stove only warms up while you’re twisting the knob.

The sun is now entering a deep trough, possibly another Maunder Minimum, and solar scientists say we might be in for a very cold period until perhaps 2040 or 2060. Undeterred, alarmists argued that even if that is so, we need to make radical changes now so we don’t get fried later when the sun heats back up.Report