The new open thread on climate science for a new year, and a new decade – perhaps the Soaring Twenties? What precisely will be soaring is yet to be decided though.
Two things will almost certainly go up – CO2 emissions and temperatures:
As 2019 wraps up, what can we look forward to in 2020?
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) December 22, 2019
More of the same, plus a little bit more… pic.twitter.com/nmMP6riIjZ
But maybe also ambition, determination, and changes that will lead to reduced emissions in future? Fingers crossed.
Victor @184, regarding your so called flat trend from 2002 – 2015. Hadcrut is not the best global temperature record because it doesn’t provide adequate coverage of the arctic, and has other issues. Criticisms of hadcrut here:
https://skepticalscience.com/hadcrut4_analysis_and_critique.html
NASA GISS is more robust and appears to be used in the article. It shows a clear warming trend over the same period.
Nobody really denies there was a slowdown between about 2002 – 2015, but thats all it is, a slowdown. Temperatures weren’t flat or falling.
Regardless of all this, the IPCC stated right back in the 1990s that there would be slow periods of warming from time to time, even flat periods of about 10 years or so, due to natural variation modulating the effect of the underlying warming from rising CO2. How many times have you been told this? 10 times would be no exaggeration. I do not like to be personally insulting, but you are either dense or determined to act dense.
I get it and I’m more or less a lay person. You have no excuse for your intellectual laziness.
And Victor, like MAR says @196 which I just noticed, if you take out the 2015 el nino you have to take out the 1998 el nino. But wait, theres more. You have to take out all el ninos going right back 100 years. And guess what, you are left with an almost identicial warming trend! You should be able to imagine this in your head.
But since you tell us eyeballing is just fine, why do you now resort to a graph trend plotter?
Dan @ 195.
There is not a single metric whereby the current fire season is even in the top 3 of my living memory
in #196, Mr. MARodger once again demonstrates his tendency to cover his ignorance of the most basic principles of logic and scientific method with crude insults, silly nit picks and oafish bluster.
MAR: Firstly you tell us of your second graph, the one you sourced from the Cato Institute . . .
V: The graph is sourced to HADCRUT, not the Cato Institute — can’t you read?
MAR: Your fatal error is to suggest that “the spike we see for 2016” should be ignored being “due to an especially strong El Niño” but failing to direct people to also ignore the spike seen in 1998 which is also “due to an especially strong El Niño.”
V: Complaining about the 1998 El Nino is a tired old fudge. It’s part of the climate record, as is every other El Nino. As for 2016, I didn’t say it should be ignored, but simply that it doesn’t matter, as in itself it can’t produce a trend. Even without the 1998 spike there is no long-term correlation, nor would there be if 2015-2016 were included. In any case, the year 1998 is implied in the scattergram I analyzed. On examination you’ll see that CO2 levels reached approximately 370 that year. As indicated, temperatures peaked at roughly 370 ppm, i.e., approx. 1998. After that the graph levels off. (See http://amoleintheground.blogspot.com/2018/10/thoughts-on-climate-change-part-8-tale.html )
As for the rest, if you examine the scattergram closely you’ll see it displays NO correlation until CO2 levels reach 335 ppm, corresponding to the year 1980. And no correlation after 370 ppm, corresponding to 1998. No need to worry over any of the “wobbles” I supposedly ignored in that first graph. Feel free to discount all that and simply concentrate on what the scattergram tells you once the relation between the CO2 levels and the dates is revealed.
You take great pleasure, Mr. Rodger, in demeaning the reasoning powers of others, but your failure to see the point of that blog post gives you away. Are you really that dense or is it all just an act?
Victor the Troll @184 presents this WoodFroTrees graph and insists that it “sure looks flat” to him, and further that it “still looks flat” even though he “deliberately chose 2001 as end point rather than 1998.”
What the moron fails to explain is why he “deliberately chose 2001 as end point rather than 1998.” Perhaps it is because this choice makes the obvious upward trend look smaller that his previous choice of period 1998-2015 (as this WoodForTrees link shows). The moron Victor’s poor grasp of reality is further illustrated @184 when he concludes “And why not, since the data is the same,” when of course, if you use but a sub-set of your data, the data used by your analysis can then never be described as “the same.”
Victor the Troll evidently felt he was on a roll when he posted that particular serving of nonsense @184 and spend the following quarter-of-an-hour posting a graphic from the swivel-eyed Gentlemen Who Perfer Fantasy. Indeed, @185 he serves up the work of gentleman David Whitehouse, somebody pretty-much as stipid as Victor. The graphic of interest to moron Victor is the first presented in this GWPF OP which the moron seems to think does not present sets of CO2 data & temperature data which are correlated. (Of course even this cherry-pick data is correlated).
Victor the Troll’s choice was a little unwise as that particular GWPF graphic was so badly mauled when published that the incompetent David Whtehouse had to publish a defending OP which, golly, in defending the graphic he presented in the first OP managed to trash the substance of that first OP (that global temperatures have been falling since 2016), in that Whitehouse insists that his introduction of error bars make any pronouncement on warmng/cooling impossible (which is again pure nonsense).
William Jackson: “#150 Please explain why scientists should waste their time rebutting nonsense?”
Because bullshit is forever.
Weaktor, five years have passed since the end of your interval–fully a third of your interval length. Are you excluding these based on some variant of the Mayan calendar having ended? I mean that happened in 2012, but I can’t think of why else you might be motivated to simply ignore data. Can you?
Edgar Ramirez:
I say you’re a wanker. Don’t you think, if you had any evidence to back up yourself up, you’d respond to such an accusation?
See how easy this is?
Please upgrade this website to allow killfile to be used or implement any reasonable means of improving the quality and nature of comments here.
thanks
Mike
#91
Thanks for the answer Gavin. I did also ask them for explanation and I got this
“Thank you for your email.
Most other estimates of global temperature rely on data modeling and
interpolation. We only use raw data without manipulating it.
TG ”
Which does not tell much!
[Response: Indeed. Doesn’t give you a great reason to take it seriously. Meanwhile, the reanalyses, satellites and in situ products are all highly correlated and give very different results. – gavin]
MAR @ 205, RL @207, etc. Your objections to Victor’s flawed reasoning processes are numerous and cogent. Anyone with a modest degree of understanding of statistical methods, or the complexities of the climate system reflected in a single measure of annual mean global surface temperature would reject his arguments.
I think that if Victor was presented in a long set of steps rising in a 1:20 slope in a direction that he didn’t like going, he would conclude that there was no slope at all, merely a statistically flat line punctuated by some incalculable singularities. He would note that 95% or more of the slope was flat, and choose the intervals between those anomalous steps to focus his attention.
Ray Ladbury: Weaktor, five years have passed since the end of your interval–fully a third of your interval length. Are you excluding these based on some variant of the Mayan calendar having ended? I mean that happened in 2012, but I can’t think of why else you might be motivated to simply ignore data. Can you?
V: You really need to pay attention, Ray. I was referring to the period widely referred to as “the hiatus,” which ended in 2015. The graph I posted contains evidence that this period was effectively flat, and that’s all I intended to show. What happened after that is another issue entirely. However, the temperature peak due to the El Nino of 2015-2916 cannot nullify the very different picture presented by the previous 16 years or so — any more than the runup from 1979-1998 can nullify the preceding 40 years of cooling. It’s all evidence. Why is this sort of thing so difficult for you to understand?
Nigelj @ 190
Why would I choose to accept the findings of an economist, claiming future deaths will increase over the peer-reviewed findings of a scientist portraying actual deaths have decreased during the recent period of global warming?
Dan H @213, “Why would I choose to accept the findings of an economist, claiming future deaths will increase over the peer-reviewed findings of a scientist portraying actual deaths have decreased during the recent period of global warming?”
Because 1)the single scientist you refer to could be wrong and 2) Nordhause used a whole team of people and his work has been supported by other teams of people and 3) your scientist is talking about warming of about 1 degree. Things are likely to change as temperatures increase so the number of deaths rises above factors that keep death rates down, especially as economic growth is expected to slow and money has to go into adaptation.
Dan its not that hard. You seem like a well educated guy. Stop being deliberately stupid all the time. I get that you have said you are influenced by politics. I have my political leanings but I dont let that guide my every thought. Do you have no self respect?
Regardless of how many wildfires are caused directly by humans, the facts are that without fossil fuel global warming in also Australia https://loe.org/content/2020-01-10/MANN-annual-mean-temp-anomaly—Australia.jpg , there wouldn’t be nearly as extremely dry and hot conditions as now, and therefore not nearly as many and as big, devastatingly huge wildfires as they are experiencing now.
Even if the aussies in droves were following Trumps order a year ago to the californians to “rake” in their woods like the finnish (!), and overcame the postulated sudden pyromaniac epidemic down under, it wouldn’t make any difference worth mentioning…
NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) Inspector Ben Shepherd said earlier this week lightning was predominantly responsible for the bushfire crisis.
“I can confidently say the majority of the larger fires that we have been dealing with have been a result of fires coming out of remote areas as a result of dry lightning storms,” he said.
In Victoria, where about 1.2 million hectares has burned, only 385 hectares — or 0.03 per cent — have been attributed to suspicious circumstances.
This state-by-state breakdown reveals the true impact of arson this bushfire season.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-11/australias-fires-reveal-arson-not-a-major-cause/11855022
Only the other day 51 new fires were started by lightening in the Apline region alone! Unfortunately the world is replete with fools and liars.
This massive catastrophe is due to accumulated climate change impacts which have been driving the drought, the now extremely abnormal weather systems in Australia, the heatwaves with low humidity, the extremely high winds, the self-created “fire weather systems” including fire tornados able to happen because of the extreme nature of these fires and super-dry fuel loads as well as and the record low soil moisture content (which in the past would put out many of the smouldering fires of trees struck by lightening).
It does not matter a bit what actually ignitied a new fire, it is 100% about what happens the moment (and for days weeks later) once a new ‘little fire’ is ignited, or a tree is struck with lighenting where the fire or slow burning smouldering starts down the base of it’s trunk and/or in it’s root system…. to be fanned into life days, weeks or even months later when the fire conditons becime Perfect.
……………..
The bizarre state of our national conversation
If it was sabotage that had closed our major arterial highways — like the Eyre or even the Princes Highway down the east coast (as it was in multiple locations for many days) — you can imagine the sort of political rhetoric and hysteria that would have been going on at the moment.
But instead, we continue to have this bizarre situation continuing where a few belligerent types in politics — and very noisy ones in the media — seem to set the limits of our conversation.
It is apparently OK to canvas the misleading idea that the fires have been primarily caused by arson, or deliberately insufficient hazard reduction — which experts including NSW Rural Fire Services Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons have rejected.
But it apparently isn’t OK to simply say that clearly the climate has changed (even to say that without saying because it’s due to, you know, climate change). […]
The Eyre Highway reopened on Friday after being closed for 12 days because of bushfires.
You might not have driven on the Eyre Highway. But unless you want to take the long route north via Kununurra, it is the only sealed highway linking eastern Australia with Western Australia.
The Kings Highway is expected to be closed for most of January. That’s the highway that links Canberra with the south coast.
Parts of that road are said to have just melted down the steep sides of Clyde Mountain in fires that have burnt virtually all of the bush from Braidwood to Batemans Bay.
Many communities across the country have been told to boil their drinking water because of contamination linked to bushfires — either by ash, such as in Tenterfield, or by the mixing of water supplies during firefighting, as has happened on the NSW south coast.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-11/australia-bushfire-crisis-just-dont-mention-climate-change/11857590
I find the post #212 by an individual to remain nameless to be best read as an amusing aside having no significance.
CCHolley says:
9 Jan 2020 at 1:27 PM
RE. Mr. Know Nothing @130
A.K.A
Mr. Know It All says:
Lol! I call him “Killed In Action” but he really does remind me of this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmzsWxPLIOo
And this of course is Weaktor:
http://wichitaorpheum.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/YoungFrankenstein-1400×480.jpg
Why is this sort of thing so difficult for you to understand?
Dan, just realised I missed your 176.
No, we won’t get even close to the worst year for area burnt. Currently as you will see in my 171 – the worst year by area is TEN TIMES AS BAD. Not sure if these comment will allow a link to photos, but here is the graphs of deaths and area. https://photos.app.goo.gl/sV16zB7jS74tNGck7
These numbers are not secret as we have had no end of studies, parliamentary enquiries and Royal Commissions. What I find most troubling is that the Australian Academy of Science put out a press release on Friday, the second sentence reads “The scale of these bushfires is unprecedented anywhere in the world.”
And this statement is used to justify the rest of the release. Clearly it is a complete lie. I truly despair for the future of science
Given the consequences of their behavior, I think it’s time to start referring to climate science deniers (that’s what they are, not “climate deniers” or “climate change deniers”) simply as monsters … or maybe as CSD monsters, to distinguish them from other sorts of monsters.
“No, we won’t get even close to the worst year for area burnt. Currently as you will see in my 171 – the worst year by area is TEN TIMES AS BAD.”
We’re not even 2 weeks into the year.
Is this monstrous climate science denier “disgraced Perth cardiologist Keith Woollard”, or some other Keith Woollard?
Leigh Reeves @ 159
“I am trying to compare and contrast common research methodologies of climatology to common research methodologies of philosophers.”
Eh? Philosophy is not a science. Most of the “research” that philosophers do, when they do any, is literature searches so they can cite previous work and related arguments … scientists do this too, but that is not what scientific research consists of.
“When writing philosophical papers, philosophers rarely cite government publications”
They also rarely cite peer-reviewed science papers, or recipe books, or computer manuals, or a host of other things not relevant to philosophy. Perhaps you skipped the philosophy courses where they teach about fallacies and how to avoid them, because your comments are full of them.
“and instead tend to favour more diverse sources of academic information.”
Climate scientists favor diverse sources too … your fallacies here are special pleading and false dichotomy.
“The approach is highly liberated, grassroots in style, and emphasises the freedom of the individual to contribute to the discussion (because of this it is not uncommon for philosophical papers to achieve publication without a formal peer review).”
One might argue that the lack of discipline and the lack of a methodology for testing the validity of results explains the lack of consensus among philosophers and the utter uselessness of the vast majority of their product.
“On the other hand it is not overly uncommon for climatology research to cite publications from governmental institutions such as IPCC, NASA, and so forth.”
Among other sources, from industry and academia … and from experiments and data gathering. Again, you seem to have an odd view of what “research” is.
“The question I have is … why is it within the scope of the acceptable for climatologists to cite documents published by governmental institutions?”
The burden is on you to show that it is unacceptable for climatologists to cite such documents. That’s quite some burden since these documents are cited for their scientific content, and poisoning the well is a fallacy.
“For comparison, most scientists rarely trust industry-initiated research because of the potential for bias.”
This is not true … or it’s only true due to that word “trust”, which applies just as much to any other source.
“Why is government-initiated research acceptable?”
Again, why not.
“Please do not interpret this question as an attack on the scientific discipline of climatology. It is more of an attempt by me to understand the reasons why this happens (perhaps it is a worldview difference, or a necessity to ensure data collection can actually happen, etc).”
I call BS.
Thomas @216, terrible fires in Aussie obviously influenced by climate change. Sad that the denialists try to claim climate change is not involved. I would ask the denialists: How could hotter temperatures not make them worse?
But dont fall for the denialists game. They are goading us to exaggerate and make unsupported claims and a mistake, then they can say “look they got that wrong”, so by unspoken implication warmists are wrong about everything.
209
mike says:
11 Jan 2020 at 12:47 PM
Please upgrade this website to allow killfile to be used or implement any reasonable means of improving the quality and nature of comments here.
thanks
Mike
Ban nuclear talk and denialists. That’s 95% of what’s wrong with these fora at present.
Victor the Troll @204 demonstrates clearly the problem humanity has with idiots of his caibre. Apparantely he believes I have failed to see the entire point of his sad little blog post. In it he never-ever said we should “ignore” the 2016 El Niño temperature spike because he agrees that such a spike is “part of the climate record.” It isn’t ignored but, as a temperature spike, “it doesn’t matter, as in itself it can’t produce a trend.”
He will keep this up until he is blue in the face.
With or without various El Niño temperature spikes, Victor the Troll insists “there is no long-term correlation” between global temperature and atmospheric CO2 (except between 1980 and 1998). And perhaps most worrying, given this troll is supposed to be a member of our species and in full command of his mental facalties, global temperatures “peaked at roughly 370 ppm, i.e., approx. 1998. After that the graph levels off.” And the moron is correct. The graph he provides (this is a slightly bigger version of the same graphic) does show 1998 as the warmest year, something that should not surprise us – the graph shows annual HadCRUT3 plotted against MLO/ice-core CO2 1850-2007.
The delusion entrapping poor Victor is that he continues with the fundamental belief that CO2-driven AGW is bogus and from that position considers himself such a clever bunny with his own proof that CO2 cannot drive AGW.
His proof comprises all those wobbles in the temperature record which are not explained by rising CO2. Vast portions of the CO2 record simply do not wobble in time with the temperature record. So it doesn’t matter that we can calculate the linear correlation between global temperature and atmospheric CO2 to produce a line rising with remarkable consistently from bottom left to top right (as plotted here – usually 2 clicks to ‘download your attachment’). If there are El Niño temperature spikes or longer-term wobbles caused by either volcanic activity or rising sulphur emissions or whatever, then the journey from bottom left to top right is suddenly nothing to do with atmospheric CO2 because with such wobbles “there is no long-term correlation.” And Victor the Troll knows about all this because he is a salt-of-the-earth moron.
John Pollack @211 is correct in describing the flaw in Victor the Troll’s thinking. Perhaps it is best illustrated by the SkS escallator. Victor sees the red line plotting the rising trend in temperature but thinks that replacing the blue steps with a straight red line is an inadmissible manipulation.
Perhaps it might help if we made the steps red and the straight line blue – Victor the Troll is, after all, a self-proclaimed “card carrying lifelong Democrat” and thus could never-ever be a “denier”.
Victor, #184–
“It looks flat to me.”
Like the earth?
The slope is ~0.04 C/yr, which is low but not flat.
http://woodfortrees.org/data/wti/from:2001/to:2015/trend
Meanwhile, you’re ignoring GISTEMP & Santer et al completely.
V 204: As for 2016, I didn’t say it should be ignored, but simply that it doesn’t matter, as in itself it can’t produce a trend.
BPL: But Victor, you don’t know how to calculate a trend, so you don’t really know what can produce a trend and what can’t.
V: Even without the 1998 spike there is no long-term correlation, nor would there be if 2015-2016 were included. In any case, the year 1998 is implied in the scattergram I analyzed. On examination you’ll see that CO2 levels reached approximately 370 that year. As indicated, temperatures peaked at roughly 370 ppm, i.e., approx. 1998. After that the graph levels off. (See http://amoleintheground.blogspot.com/2018/10/thoughts-on-climate-change-part-8-tale.html )
As for the rest, if you examine the scattergram closely you’ll see it displays NO correlation until CO2 levels reach 335 ppm, corresponding to the year 1980. And no correlation after 370 ppm, corresponding to 1998. No need to worry over any of the “wobbles” I supposedly ignored in that first graph. Feel free to discount all that and simply concentrate on what the scattergram tells you once the relation between the CO2 levels and the dates is revealed.
BPL: You don’t know how to calculate a correlation, either.
Nigelj@214,
I thought we were having a reasonable discussion. Why then did you delve into personal attacks? Our discussion was how the changing climate has affected past deaths. Introducing predicted future scenarios does not change the past. Oftentimes, the best predictor of future events is past occurrences. In this case, the future the economist predicts is opposite to what has happened in the past. Maybe he is right, and that will occur. We will not know until it occurs (or does not). In the past, all sorts of future were predicted that did not materialize. Usually, because some major metric in the analysis changed. Sure, one scientist may be wrong. But past events have already occurred.
#186 Zebra.
Thankyou for responding to my question and I will try to simplify it to the crux.
As a scientist I am committed to the logical positivist view of the world. Karl Popper’s contention of falsifiability as the core requirement of scientific theory. Thomas Kuhn’s descriptive view of science as consensus driven.
As a Platonist philosopher I believe in skepticism through dialog, asking questions, and creating doubt about what it is to know something as opposed to just believing it.
The former is conscientious, authoritative, and bureaucratic, the latter is liberated, open in its nature, and distrusting of authority.
Does logical positivism have its limits?
Climatologists have been rightfully warning governments about the possibility of devastating bushfires running through the south-east coast of Australia.
But with the knowledge of (circa) 80,000 years of (non-scientific) indigenous wisdom some people within indigenous communities in Australia have for a long time warned that poor land management will result in devastating bushfires. In addition to this, many farmers and pastoralists in rural communities have been warning about poor land management practices for many years.
How do we reconcile these two equally valid worldviews?
Is logical positivism the appropriate epistemology for a subject matter as complex as climate? Or do we need to engage a much wider set of knowledge and wisdom?
Warmest regards.
Leigh Reeves.
#200 Dan H,
“engage them scientifically”
Scientific discussions require a dialogue, where people are in agreement before they get to disagree or debate. That’s not what you are doing.
I said: “There’s nothing “extraordinary” about concluding that increased weather extremes result in increased deaths, ceteris paribus. (look it up)”
You didn’t respond to that, so you are still engaging in rhetoric, not science.
1. If you agree, then it is possible for us to continue from there.
2. If you disagree, then you have to explain why, and we can discuss that.
That’s how science works. You have to definitively articulate your claim.
https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/wildfires-continue-rage-australia
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615035/australias-fires-have-pumped-out-more-emissions-than-100-nations-combined/?utm_campaign=site_visitor.unpaid.engagement&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social_share&utm_content=2020-01-11
Climate change is driving climate change.
Thanks to Stefan for the tweet on that.
Is climate change burning trees faster than we can plant them?
How are we doing on CO2? Peachy!
Daily CO2
Jan. 10, 2020: 413.54 ppm
Jan. 10, 2019: 408.96 ppm
Dec. 29, 2019 – Jan. 4, 2020 413.09 ppm
Dec. 29, 2018 – Jan. 4, 2019 409.55 ppm
Ugly and noisy, but good for peaches, maybe.
Mike
MA Rodger @92 – You linked Fleming’s ‘An Updated Review about Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change’
I looked through the online copy and loved his introduction’s ambitious: “It will be demonstrated that the radiative roles of H2O and CO2 are relatively minor, compared to their far more important role in maintaining sustained life on our planet.”
How can keeping the surface above the freezing point of water NOT be part of their “far more important role in maintaining sustained life on our planet?”
Then we run into the Geocraft chart produced by a coal mining man, which is attributed to another coal man (Plimer 2009), and in a single sentence, boldly ignoring all other forcings, Fleming grandly concludes “Clearly, CO2 values have no correlation with the Ice Ages.”
Then he introduces Chart 1 which seems to depend on the it’s-not-us theories of Sorokhitin. It includes a statement remarkable for people living in the glow of a main-sequence star in the first half of its life: “the Sun’s insolation has not changed over the past billion years”.
Our stellar furnace went through a billion-year “pause” in normal stellar evolution?
I feel I’d just read some of the current output of the “infinite monkey theorem” as they work their way to producing Shakespeare.
RE. Victor
LOL. So according to Victor, in his simple analysis only one period shows correlation and therefore he draws the conclusion there is NO correlation whatsoever between CO2 and temperatures. But what about that period that in his simple mind does show correlation, 1980 to 1998? Do we simply ignore that? Of course not, when examining two data sets for correlation you do not break the data into periods and say some periods show correlation and some don’t, you look at the entire data set. The more data the better, especially in the case like surface temperatures where the drivers are multivariate and the effect of one variable can at times be masked by the others. In addition, for good analysis, most certainly you don’t ignore a recent el Nino year and you do not ignore the years that follow: 2017, 2018, and 2019. These represent important data just like all the rest. What Victor is doing is completely nonsensical as are his conclusions. There is either correlation or there isn’t and in the case of temperatures versus CO2 levels no matter what Victor claims there is a clear statistical correlation which can be shown by anyone who has any capability in statistics. Oh, and BTW, the relationship between CO2 and temperatures is not linear, it is logarithmic, which makes what Victor is doing even more irrelevant. Not to mention that for there to be no correlation between CO2 and temperatures our understanding of physics and physical laws would have to be completely wrong. Waiting for the genius Victor to show us how that is so.
Zebra @232,
If it were that simple, the increased weather extremes would result in increased deaths. The weather changes associated with global warmed have been mixed. In general, extreme heat has increased, but extreme cold has decreased. The increasing temperatures have led to an increase in floods, but a decrease in droughts. Increased ocean temps have resulted in increased cyclonic activity, but decreased temperature differences have resulted in decreased land cyclonic activity.
Deaths associated with weather events are less associated with changes in activity than with adaptive changes by society. These changes have had a much bigger impact than weather changes, such that using actual death figures is rendered meaningless. Now that we can at least agree on your premise, can we move on?
#231 Leigh Reeves,
“how do we reconcile these two equally valid worldviews?”
Sorry, I don’t follow your use of the term “worldview” here, and I don’t see that there is any need for “reconciliation”.
How is what the climate scientists are saying in any way in conflict with what the farmers and pastoralists are saying?
Both are arrived at through scientific method/reasoning. So there’s no philosophical (“worldview”) difference, and the one set of observations/predictions in no way contradicts the other…climate change and poor land management obviously both contribute to the wildfire problem.
It’s still not clear at all what you are trying to communicate. Again, you need to fill in the reasoning with more specificity.
@MA Jackson
The difference is that you and I are random people on the internet, not teams of scientists working on competing data composites of solar irradiance, the ACRIM composite has been part of the scientific literature and debate for decades, but previously the PMOD composite was selected as the “best fit” model. With the latest review of the evidence, Willson and Scafetta have, I think, definitively proved that this was a massive error.
If the ACRIM composite is correct, then solar irradiance has NOT been declining, but has in fact been increasing in alignment with the global temperature trend, suggesting a much stronger relationship between the sun and climate and a much weaker one than the one between CO2 and climate than previously thought. Willson isn’t some crank, he has worked in solar irradiance for NASA, the NOAA and pretty much any relevant scientific body you care to mention, and has published papers in the scientific literature on the measuring and compositing of solar irradiance datasets going back over his whole career (over 30 years).
Call me all the names you want, it doesn’t change the fact that this is a serious allegation by credible scientists, with the evidence to back it up and the fact that nobody has an answer to it beyond hurling insults speaks volumes. Imagine if our roles were reversed, would you think your response is a satisfying answer?
Again, here’s the paper, read it, it won’t bite.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2019/1214896/
@ Mal Adapted, lol got your name wrong, but the point stands.
Jim Balter @224 have to agree to the extent that a great deal of philosophy is completely useless. It’s incomprehensible twaddle full of circular reasoning especially metaphysics, Kant, Satre and god knows who else. You could summarise their entire contribution in one page, and it still isn’t of any real use or real insight.
Curiously enough, the ancient greek philosophers had something useful to say, eg Plato and Aristotle, and some of the more modern philosophers are more interesting eg Mill, Russel and Popper.
Jim 191-193 call me what you like, I was under the impression that this wasn’t allowed on this forum but obviously I am wrong
I am not sure if you realise, but the earth is round and there are people on the other side. Our fire season matches our financial years. And no, correct city, wrong Keith
Nigelj @ 225.
Wrong on so many levels.
“obviously influenced by climate change” – no. Did you see the plots? see any trend?
“How could hotter temperatures not make them worse?” I’ll assume primary school geography knowledge here. The worst areas for bushfires in Australia are southern NSW and Victoria. Warmer areas do not have more bushfires. The IPCC lists wildfires as a potential future problem for many regions of the world, but not Australia. In the southern hemisphere, the effect of GW is to move any climate zone slightly south. This means the bushfire threat to Australia is reduced.
Not even going to touch your second paragraph
Victor says “As for the rest, if you examine the scattergram closely you’ll see it displays NO correlation until CO2 levels reach 335 ppm, corresponding to the year 1980. And no correlation after 370 ppm, corresponding to 1998.”
This is all complete silliness. Looking at very short periods tells us nothing useful. Apply maths and from what Ive read, the correlation between CO2 and warming is moderately strong for the last 100 years, and this is the most important period because this is when CO2 started increasing significantly. Its stronger for the last 50 years and very weak in the middle of last century and you have been told why.
Victor, its a question of “how much correlation”, and the maths does this on a scale from 0 to 1 (for a positive correlation), and in words you could define it from non existent to weak to fair to strong to very strong to perfect.
And get over “the pause”. Science has long predicted there will be slow periods of warming within the longer term agw trend, due to natural variation. Scientists were initially confused about the so called pause, because there wasnt a good explanation that could be attributed to natural variation etc, but eventually they figured it out and concluded while things slowed a bit with land temperatures there was no pause. That’s how science works its a process of discovery. Why do you think the climate issue would be different?
203
Keith Woollard says:
11 Jan 2020 at 1:27 AM
Dan @ 195.
There is not a single metric whereby the current fire season is even in the top 3 of my living memory.
Chuck: Two major points:
#1 Fire season ain’t over.
#2 You’re referring to area burned, maybe? These Australian fires were in densely populated areas and have killed over a Billion animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfires_in_Australia
According to The Guardian Newspaper on Australias bushfires “A national inquiry – most likely a royal commission – would be established that acknowledged the role of climate change, and he intended to take a proposal to cabinet for endorsement in the coming weeks. “He (Scott Morrison, Australias Prime Minister ) believed a royal commission would be “necessary”, but it would need to be agreed to by the states and cover the “full gambit” of issues, including the operational response, the role of the federal government and climate change….”
(I hope this enquiry is not a stalling tactic, and stacked with denialists. The world is watching Scott. History won’t be kind if you muck it up)
Hi everyone,
This will be my last post as I do not think this is the right group for me to participate. I was recommended to this website by an acquaintance whom suggested that I could do some initial conversation with some professional climatologists in preparation for a Philosophy of Science doctoral study. Sadly, I am not convinced that the people either participating in or operating this website have any concept of how to engage in a mutually respectful rational dialog. I am surprised because this website is meant to be one of the best for climate change discussion. I see a lot of people throwing insults and deriding other people’s intelligence for making innocent errors, or even just for asking a question out of curiosity. In a properly functioning rational discourse both sides should attempt to understand the perspectives of others, even if one wholeheartedly disagrees. I really am extremely disappointed with this.
As a scientist myself (I am a Geographical Information Systems specialist) I cannot reconcile my understanding of professional inquiry with what I am seeing here.
Yours sincerely.
Leigh Reeves.
“2) the mitigation proposals of Government and its Committee on Climate Change (the CCC) rely in large measure on future and highly speculative Negative Emission Technologies (NETs)[1]. These technologies exist, at best, as small pilot schemes, and often only in the imagination and computers of professors and entrepreneurs. So in reality we are passing the buck on to our children to invent and deploy technologies to suck the CO2 out of the air that we choose to continue to emit today. The unprecedented and planetary scale of NETs assumed by the Government and the CCC needs to be understood.[2] Already the tentative potential of NETs is being used to undermine the requirement for immediate and widespread decarbonisation, passing further unacceptable burdens and risks onto the next generation.”
https://kevinanderson.info/blog/brief-response-to-the-uk-governments-net-zero-proposal/
Victor ha’ done sayed*:
1) You’ll also see it plots no CO2 values above 385 ppm, which means that it includes no year after 2008.**
2) As for the “no correlation after 370 ppm” bit, all I can do is cite the well-known authority, Inigo Montoya:
Who knew Inigo was better than Victor at stats? Inconceivable!
*Feeling unaccountably Southern & rural this morning… 9:45 AM on January 13, and it’s 65 degrees. One of the schools I teach at was hit with an EF2 tornado Saturday, and trashed pretty thoroughly. (Almost EF3, at 130 mph.) The straight-line winds associated with the thunderstorm wrecked our carport first. Better than the tornado, which would have easily taken the house.
Oh, well, at least I have Victor’s unintentional comedy to cheer me up.
**The reason for that is that it’s lifted–with attribution; Victor’s inacuity in statistical discernment may more than justify his his blog handle “amoleintheground” but he’s no plagiarist–from a 2009 Robert Grumbine post demonstrating that yes, there is indeed a strong correlation between CO2 and temperature. Grumbine’s bottom line:
Yeah, BPL has basically “ha’ done sayed” that numerous times. But I think it’s pretty funny, and pretty telling, that Victor, who apparently needs to lift a graph from “one Robert Grumbine“, presumably because he has no idea how to create it himself, still doesn’t feel the need to understand anything Dr. Grumbine actually wrote.
#236 Dan H,
“now that we can at least agree on your premise”
I must be having some kind of cognitive issue, because I missed the part where you agreed with my premise. I said:
“There’s nothing “extraordinary” about concluding that increased weather extremes result in increased deaths, ceteris paribus. (look it up)”
That requires a yes or no, assuming that you did look up the term ceteris paribus.
Are you saying that you agree that, ceteris paribus, we can have great confidence that, for example, more people will die from heat waves if there are more (or worse) heat waves? Yes or no?
Mike said, of rising CO2 levels that they are “Ugly and noisy, but good for peaches, maybe.”
Sadly, not. You see, peaches are one of quite a few tree crops that require a certain number of ‘chilling hours’ to set fruit. Here in South Carolina, one of the premier states in production–second only to California last year–we’ve had a serious dearth of such chilling hours so far this winter. So we’re on track for a poor harvest–though it’s early yet. (The state DoA usually weighs in with a projection in early February.)
For the longer term, the rising temperature means that peach orchards may have to rip out existing stock to replace it with varieties that need less chilling. Not sure if such varieties exist yet for our climate or not, but I’m sure breeders are at work on the problem. (More northerly peach growers will presumably be able to use the ones we use now.)
(This is an impact I talk about when I do climate reality talks in SC.)