Are Climate Models accurate enough to trust?

Science and Technology
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psik, you’ve highlighted one of the most hideous aspects of our public Anthropogenic Global Warming dialogue.
Trying to deal with the contrarian PR campaign is like shadow boxing - they toss out nothing but vapor,
then disappear back into their self-reinforcing echo-chamber.
Nothing gets established, nothing is learned, while the sand races through the hourglass.

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psik, you've highlighted one of the most hideous aspects of our public Anthropogenic Global Warming dialogue. Trying to deal with the contrarian PR campaign is like shadow boxing - they toss out nothing but vapor, then disappear back into their self-reinforcing echo-chamber. Nothing gets established, nothing is learned, while the sand races through the hourglass.
What then should we trust in, if not science?
What? People cannot recognize sarcasm here? I don't think the issue is trust anyway. It is probability. The increased acidity of the oceans should be enough to tell us we are fucked. I didn't seriously start paying attention to this until after I watched James Burke's After the Warming in 1989. But just looking at and thinking about the Keeling Curve was enough for me. The atmosphere is only a billion cubic miles and that is just counting the bottom 5 miles of altitude. We have only gone up another 50 ppm since then. Trivial! [sarcasm] We are dealing with something too big and too complicated to really measure accurately so talking about trust is nonsense. This is best guesses. But there is NO SPARE PLANET with SEVEN BILLION PEOPLE and rising. How much crap is going to hit the fan when the first billion people starve? psik
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Oh yes, they are accurate enought to trust. And for once I must agree with psikeyhackr.
It seems that man has no natural enemies except man and the limited ability of the earth’s biosphere to withstand the damage we do to it.
Thus, I agree that billions will die, either by war (nuclear) or by natural global responses to man’s ignorance of the exponential detrimental effects of man’s industrialization on our biosphere.
Perhaps this is the natural selection process for humans. Extinction through exhaustion

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What? People cannot recognize sarcasm here?
But no smilies ;-P :red: OK psik, I should have known better. But the general observation stands. As do your's regarding where we're taking this thing.
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So we want energy without CO2 so is thorium relevant?

Science being complicated is so annoying!
psik

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The reason to think in terms of probability instead of trust:
Will Global Warming Heat Us Beyond Our Physical Limits?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/151215-global-warming-heat-wave-stress-death-climate/
If we don’t cut greenhouse gases, it’s not just storms and rising seas we’d have to worry about. The heat alone could kill a lot of us.
psik

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Merry Christmas!
I really like this one:

This one is really cool:

This is just me being my usual obnoxious self:

psik

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Merry Christmas! I really like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCF4vOgQyDE This is just me being my usual obnoxious self: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTMOaI4NZFA psik
Another hundred years of study to know for sure if we are doing irreversible damage to the planet? And in the mean time we are going to continue merrily on the path we have chosen? I can imagine the headlines (after a 100 years of data gathering), *Global warming run-away effect confirmed*! But this not a case of *better being late than sorry*.
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Another hundred years of study to know for sure if we are doing irreversible damage to the planet?
Shame on you! That "100 year" quote was from around 1960 by a guy who did not have satellite data. LOL psik
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This is a nice documentary
Documentary about weather of the world

I never heard that Antarctica was 43 degrees colder than the Arctic before.
psik

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This is a nice documentary Documentary about weather of the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esMX5NIsHdk I never heard that Antarctica was 43 degrees colder than the Arctic before. psik
Yeah! Earth from Space by NOVA in cooperation with NASA http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/earth-from-space.html I think it's one of the coolest most informative videos around when it comes to trying conceptualize our global heat and moisture distribution engine. As for Antarctica - bet that's just because you never stopped to think about it before. Arctic is an ocean with an increasingly slushy ice cap floating around it. Antarctica is a continent that rises to
Antarctica is the highest continent on Earth: average elevation is 8,200ft (2500m). The elevation at the South Pole is 9,300ft (2835m). The highest point on the icecap is in Australian Antarctic Territory at 13,451ft (4100m), at 82° 20'S, 56° 30'E. Mount Vinson is the highest mountain in Antarctica at 16,050ft (4892m).
Oh and in recent decades the Ozone Hole has allowed more heat to escape into space, making yet (slightly) colder
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This may be a more urgent problem!
El Niño Does Something It's Never Done Before. Watch Out, California.

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This may be a more urgent problem! https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/16/1450700/-El-Ni-o-Does-Something-It-s-Never-Done-Before-Watch-Out-California?detail=emailclassic
Oh yeah, the fun is starting.
Big Icelandic storms are common in winter, but this one may rank among the strongest and will draw northward an incredible surge of warmth pushing temperatures at the North Pole over 50 degrees above normal. This is mind-boggling. … Computer model simulations show the storm, sweeping across the north central Atlantic today, rapidly intensifying along a jet stream ripping above the ocean at 230 mph. The storm’s pressure is forecast by the GFS model to plummet more than 50 millibars in 24 hours between Monday night and Tuesday night, easily meeting the criteria of a ‘bomb cyclone’ (a drop in pressure of at least 24 mb in 24 hours), By Wednesday morning, when the storm reaches Iceland and nears maximum strength, its minimum pressure is forecast to be near 923 mb, which would rank among the great storms of the North Atlantic. (Note: there is some uncertainty as to how much it will intensify. The European model only drops the minimum pressure to around 936 mb, which is strong but not that unusual). Winds of hurricane force are likely to span hundreds of miles in the North Atlantic. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/12/28/freak-storm-in-north-atlantic-may-push-temperatures-70-degrees-above-normal-at-north-pole/
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Top Climate Expert: Crisis is Worse Than We Think & Scientists Are Self-Censoring to Downplay Risk

psik

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Top Climate Expert: Crisis is Worse Than We Think & Scientists Are Self-Censoring to Downplay Risk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmL4t8TclGU psik
Yeah, a scientist has even done a study on it, using the quaint term "seepage" to describe the process
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyseepage.html Seepage: The Executive Summary By Stephan Lewandowsky Professor, School of Experimental Psychology and Cabot Institute, University of Bristol Posted on 7 May 2015 We initiate our argument with the known fact that vested interests and political agents have long opposed political or regulatory action in response to climate change by appealing to scientific uncertainty. We know from earlier work that uncertainty is no cause for inaction—on the contrary, greater scientific uncertainty should make us worry more, not less, about the potential consequences of climate change. Alas, those actual scientific implications are often inverted in public discourse where uncertainty often invites wishful thinking and hence inaction. In this new article, we examine the effect of contrarian talking points that arise out of uncertainty on the scientific community itself. We show that although scientists are trained in dealing with uncertainty, there are several psychological and cognitive reasons why scientists may nevertheless be susceptible to uncertainty-based argumentation, even when scientists recognize those arguments as false and are actively rebutting them. Climate scientists have done an admirable job pursuing their science under great political pressure, and they have tirelessly rebutted pseudoscientific arguments against their work. Nonetheless, being human, scientists’ operate with the same cognitive apparatus and limitations as every other person. In consequence, it is important to be aware of the factors that may cause scientists to take positions that they would be less likely to take in the absence of outspoken public opposition. We refer to this phenomenon as seepage.
We highlight three well-known psychological mechanisms that may facilitate the seepage of contrarian memes into scientific discourse and thinking: ‘stereotype threat’, ‘pluralistic ignorance’ and the ‘third-person effect’. Stereotype threat refers to the emotional and behavioural responses when a person is reminded of an adverse stereotype against a group to which they belong. Thus, when scientists are stereotyped as ‘alarmists’, a predicted response would be for them to try to avoid seeming alarmist by downplaying the degree of threat. There are now several studies that highlight this tendency by scientists to avoid highlighting risks, lest they be seen as ‘alarmist.’ Pluralistic ignorance describes the phenomenon which arises when a minority opinion is given disproportionate prominence in public debate, resulting in the majority of people incorrectly assuming their opinion is marginalized. Thus, a public discourse that asserts that the IPCC has exaggerated the threat of climate change may cause scientists who disagree to think their views are in the minority, and they may therefore feel inhibited from speaking out in public. Finally, research shows that people generally believe that persuasive communications exert a stronger effect on others than on themselves: this is known as the third-person effect. However, in actual fact, people tend to be more affected by persuasive messages than they think. This suggests the scientific community may be susceptible to arguments against climate change even when they know them to be false.
While those potential drivers of seepage are well-understood outside the context of climate science, it is a different matter to show that they have actually affected the conduct of science. In our article, we illustrate the consequences of seepage from public debate into the scientific process with a case study involving the interpretation of temperature trends from the last 15 years, the so-called ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’. This is a nuanced issue that can be addressed in multiple different ways. In this article, we focus primarily on the asymmetry of the scientific response to the so-called ‘pause’—which is not a pause but a moderate slow-down in warming that does not qualitatively differ from previous fluctuations in decadal warming rate. Crucially, on previous occasions when decadal warming was particularly rapid, the scientific community did not give short-term climate variability the attention it has recently received, when decadal warming was slower. During earlier rapid warming there was no additional research effort directed at explaining ‘catastrophic’ warming. By contrast, the recent modest decrease in the rate of warming has elicited numerous articles and special issues of leading journals and it has been (mis-)labeled as a ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’. We suggest that this asymmetry in response to fluctuations in the decadal warming trend likely reflects the ‘seepage’ of contrarian memes into scientific work. Finally, we offer ways in which the scientific community can detect and avoid such inadvertent seepage.
Seepage: Some FAQs There are a few questions one might reasonably ask about our article, and we start by addressing some of those below. We may follow up with additional posts as the discussion evolves: 1. What is seepage? The inadvertent intrusion of memes that arose outside the scientific community into scientific discourse and thinking. There are two criteria for the detection of seepage: First, the scientific community has adopted assumptions or language that originated outside the scientific community or in a small set of dissenting scientific voices. Second, these assumptions depart from earlier norms and scientific conventions. Although scientific conventions may occasionally change as theorizing evolves, in the case of seepage explicit conceptual rationale or empirical support for a departure from previous norms is lacking or weak. 2. How does seepage work? There are a number of known psychological and cognitive variables that provide the opportunity for seepage. We focus on three: Stereotype threat, pluralistic ignorance, and the third-person effect. 3. What effects does seepage have? At a minimum, seepage arises when scientists adapt linguistic frames that were created outside the scientific community for political purposes. We use the case of the so-called “pause" in global warming, which should not be called a pause or hiatus given that global warming continues unabated. Ironically, seepage can arise even when scientists are rebutting a contrarian meme but are nonetheless framing the problem in a way that is inappropriate or misleading. At worst, seepage may alter the way in which scientists interpret data. This arises when they depart from long-standing and long-accepted practice in response to contrarian memes (for example, by entertaining the possibility that a short period of a reduced rate of warming presents a challenge to the fundamentals of greenhouse warming.) 4. Is the research on the “pause" wrong? No. On the contrary, irrespective of the framing chosen by their authors, all articles on the pause have reinforced the reality of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions, and this body of work has yielded more knowledge of the processes underlying decadal variation. None of this work has come to the conclusion that the physical processes underlying global warming are somehow in abeyance or that prevailing scientific conceptions of them are incorrect. However, by accepting the framing of a recent fluctuation as a ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’, research on the pause has, ironically and unwittingly, entrenched the notion of a ‘pause’ (with all the connotations of that term) in the literature as well as in the public's mind. Some of that research may therefore have inadvertently misdirected public attention. 5. Who is responsible for seepage? There is abundant evidence that climate science is subject to intense scrutiny and hostility from vested interests. Much is known about how those attacks on climate science take place and the funding that is devoted to those attempts to undermine science. There is also evidence that media coverage surrounding climate change is often misleading and that some media organs disseminate falsehoods routinely, thereby denying the public the right to be accurately informed about risks from climate change. Climate scientists have devoted much time and energy to rebutting those contrarian arguments (often called “zombie" arguments because of the number of times they have already been rebutted). For the reasons outlined in our paper, climate scientists may nonetheless not be immune to (unwittingly) adapting to contrarian framing, for example by talking about a “pause" when there is none. 6. How do we eliminate seepage? Knowing about the potential for seepage is half the battle. For example, there is evidence that merely being aware of the operation of stereotype threat is sufficient to limit its adverse consequences. Our paper lists a few further factors that may be helpful. In addition, scientists need to remember that the purpose of contrarian memes is to keep the controversy alive. While it is a scientist's job to answer genuine scientific questions, getting pulled into contrarian linguistic frames helps maintain the fiction that the science is still riven with fundamental equivocations and therefore too uncertain to form a reliable basis for public policy. Awareness of this fact is crucial for scientists to resist seepage.
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greater scientific uncertainty should make us worry more, not less, about the potential consequences of
ANYTHING! psik
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How Large Is the Bill for Global Climate Change?

psik

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How Large Is the Bill for Global Climate Change? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh3oVkqnBjE psik
Interesting. If the real cost of CO2 had been charged over the past 50 years, I suspect that we would have already transitioned to a clean energy world economy.
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You never can tell when things are weird enough:
How To Stop Climate Change

The MEAT File - A Documentation on Meat Consumption, Climate Change, Health and Vegetarianism

Global Warming: MEAT THE TRUTH documentary

So we need to reduce the amount of meat we eat more than we need to drive less.
Meat production uses too much water, produces too much methane, takes up too much land and is not good for our health.
psik

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Where does these types of articles fit in the Climate Change theories? To me, it doesn’t pass the logic test.
Agriculture 7,000 years ago slowed natural cooling process of global climate
Posted on January 20, 2016
Cancelled natural cooling
http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=BDIGeneric&aid=C98EA5B0842DBB9405BBF071E1DA7651077B1B5B&tid=5A137597ECDD486C97E3DF820357F33A&url=http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/01/2016/agriculture-7000-years-ago-slowed-natural-cooling-process-of-global-climate&c=zgQwou6_I3HJwoxatlsVZYWHXVlKc2wGcqGbF-mDm2s&mkt=en-us
A dozen years ago, Ruddiman hypothesized that early humans altered the climate by burning massive areas of forests to clear the way for crops and livestock grazing. The resulting carbon dioxide and methane released into the atmosphere had a warming effect that “cancelled most or all of a natural cooling that should have occurred," he said.
That idea, which came to be known as the “early anthropogenic hypothesis" was hotly debated for years by climate scientists, and is still considered debatable by some of these scientists. But in the new paper, Ruddiman and his 11 co-authors from institutions in the United States and Europe say that accumulating evidence in the past few years, particularly from ice-core records dating back to 800,000 years ago, show that an expected cooling period was halted after the advent of large-scale agriculture. Otherwise, they say, the Earth would have entered the early stages of a natural ice age, or glaciation period.
The Earth naturally cycles between cool glacial periods and warmer interglacial periods because of variations in its orbit around the sun. We currently are in an interglacial period, called the Holocene epoch, which began nearly 12,000 years ago.