Anyway, he wrote a piece talking about the recent fierce argument (largely between climate scientist types - I think) about what "business as usual" might mean - a crispy Earth, or something a tad less dire. Here's his tweet at the start of his Twitter discussion:
The link to the start of his Tweet thread is here; and the link to the actual article is here.
Now, Noah Smith has a piece in Bloomsberg which summarises it too, and Zeke thinks it's a good article, even though it doesn't discuss uncertainty:
Noah Smith is very much against any suggestion that you have to kill capitalism to meet lower temperature ranges. After all, it is under capitalism that the changes have been taking place which have made BAU not a complete, planet killing disaster - just an enormously costly dire problem.
And this is the "glass half full/glass half empty" aspect of the matter. As Andrew Dessler said:
I think it fair to say that all of this suggests as follows:
1. Extinction Rebellion style complete and utter doom-for-planetary-life forecasts are, how should we put it?, somewhat exaggerated yet not completely able to be ruled out. (Whether they help in terms of political motivation, or simply encourage depression and defeatism, is a good question the answer to which I am never 100% certain.)
2. Progress towards limiting future warning to 2 degrees is not so far beyond reach of humanity as to be unachievable, despite the fact that the political (and societal) will across the globe is not unified enough;
3. Defeatists such as Jason Soon (and, to be fair, some of my other readers) seem to think that everything is stuck politically forever where it is now on this issue, whereas I do not see that as being the case. Trump and dumbass Republicans and their culture war, and their similar populists in other countries, are not going to rule the roost forever. And China by the nature of its government has the ability to make great interference in industry such that I suspect that even the reports of their new coal power plants is not the dire problem that it first appears.
There are many ways in which to ensure that climate change becomes a more severe problem than it potentially can be - be an outright denier; put your libertarian/small government biases above everything else and run a blog that caters to denialism and encourages old fools to keep voting against any effective action; accept climate science but get more interested in Lefties and culture war issues and adopt a defectist attitude; get in thrall to some billionaire's pet ideas that there is only one way forward with energy.
They are all harmful to useful action. It seems rather obvious to me that anyone who takes the issue seriously should concentrate on the overthrow of Right wing denialism and inaction in the USA, and the dubious takes on science that appear in India too. The West needs to have a unified front, and I think that China will ultimately too, in the interest of self preservation.
Update: Tobis and Dessler make another point (one which I have made before, too):
32 comments:
agree with you Stephen.
some interesting stuff there
So far we haven't found any warming in the surface data and we seem to have found a tiny bit in the satellite. None of the people here are rationally competent. These are morons. Or careerist shills.
We didn't have any warming last century. We had cooling to the 70's and then a recovery. So if you cannot find any warming when the CO2 is definitely climbing quickly where is this new fantasy warming going to come from?
From the BOM and Goddard on Broadway working harder to fake a trend?
Yes Graeme. Didn't you know that the Jews took over every meteorological organisation on the planet during the 20th century, all the better to further their goal of killing capitalism and impoverishing humanity so only they had all the money.
And if weren't for damn kids like you, they would have got away with it, too.
[sarcasm, of course]
Jew science. Dessler cannot explain the data. Here is what a real heat wave looks like, as opposed to our minor heat wave this month.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Temperatures-At-Bourke-NSW-During-the-37-Day-Heatwave-From-12_17_1938-To-1_22_1939.png
They didn't need to take them all over. Really its just a handful of people faking the data. So far four bureaucracies are known to fake data. Desslers so full of shit he could be talking shit freelance.
So far we have NOAA, Hadley, Goddard and the BOM faking the figures. But everyone else uses their figures. The problem is people using figures they know to be fake. This required only a handful of frauds.
Of course it won't be JUST the BOM. They would not have simply chosen Australia to screw with. But thats the ones that I know about that are fully confirmed as corrupted data-fakers.
But another branch within NOAA seems to be compiling honest figures. And there is no CO2-warming signal in their figures. So thats a total debunking right there. Fucking proven wrong, and no data to prove it right, except for perhaps a tiny warming signal in the satellite data.
So where is your evidence?
Birdy has missed the most important point. The jews can live in high temperatures. It is their way of taking over the world!!
Professor Quiggin cheated. He banned me then set up a climate skeptic post. Crafty old bugger. He knows that I'm the only person with the inclination to make these dumb leftists look and feel stupid on the subject.
Two things you need to understand in real climate science in strict contrast to the bullshit that the Broadway boys have hammered into the culture:
1. To spread thermal energy out is to retain it better. Back in the 2,000's I was the first person to really push this idea and to take marginal thinking, and apply it to climate science. Later I saw the fellow who runs the Watts-Up-With-That blog to briefly toy with this marginalist approach. One day it will become standard and everyone will know it for sure in retrospect. But the key to it all is that the Stefan-Boltzmann law, with its associated formula is one of the only formulae proposed for the natural world that has mathematics to the 4th power. You get a lot of heat in one place it radiates off to the fourth power. And the only way to stop this heat loss is by phenomenon that reverse my second point.
2. Thermal energy wants to flee in the opposite direction to the force of gravity. The phrase "Heat rises" will get you a reprimand from your year 9 high school teacher but actually since English is the language of science, thats a perfectly sound phrase.
What this means is over-turning in the troposphere, and the freedom of flow of the ocean currents, are the main determinants of how much of the suns heat we retain. Plus it would seem to imply that the Broadway Jews two dimension flat earth averaged out model (their watts per square metre model) takes all the climate out of climate science. Its kind of like Chairman Mao erasing everything Chinese about Chinese culture. Its kind of like "the nothing" from the kids movie "The Neverending Story"
Everything interesting about climate science is in three dimensions and not averaged out.
Now consider this. The moon has a greater greenhouse effect than the earth. A greater greenhouse effect and no greenhouse gasses. So how can anything I say in the prior post be true? Surely I must be talking bullshit in the prior post since the Moon has no gasses to speak of and therefore no greenhouse gasses. And the moon has no opportunity for the ocean water to tunnel under, for the water and the gasses to spread the heat out, or for troposphere gasses to "overturn" or tunnel under?
So I must be talking bullshit. Me and the CO2-warming fraud must both be talking bullshit. I want you to ponder all this and you probably won't get the answer right away because it took me a bit of help from others and a couple of years to square this circle but still its worth trying your best to think about this conundrum before I tell you the answers.
"A civilisation generally refuses to accept a cultural innovation that calls in question one of its own structural elements. Such refusals or unspoken enmities are relatively rare: but they always point to the heart of a civilisation."
Braudel, A History of Civilisatons
Who is prepared to change their lifestyle to meet the challenge? Who will refuse to ever get in aircraft again? Who will pay out a small fortune to make their house energy efficient and abandon air conditioning? Sell their cars and\or use private transport as much as possible. Who will stop buying stuff?
It isn't enough to stop burning fossil fuels, we need to revolutionise our infrastructure root and branch. Cities need to be redesigned so that work does not require hours of travel, accommodation needs to be energy efficient, countries need to abandon competitive advantage and return to making stuff in the nation so as to prevent all the transport issues involved in shipping stuff around the world. Some years ago an agricultural scientist argued that changing farming practices to improve soil quality could improve carbon capture by 1% which is more than enough to soak up the carbon we have released.
If you think government alone or renewable energy is going to solve the problem you haven't understood the problem and are avoiding personal responsibility. This isn't about business as usual it is about daily life as usual. Western civilisation has created this problem. Everyone wants to be like us but the majority of nations are in a parlous state and getting worse. If you want those peoples to follow our example then set the right example by your daily life.
Finally, when you see such wide uncertainty in scientific modelling(1.9-4.4) you have to question how good those models are but for this issue Pascal's Wager is worthy of serious consideration. We need to do something but stop pretending governments are the solution. How we live is more important.
My position? I was involved in environmentalism when it was regarded as something for lunatics. For decades I've been arguing that we need to stop treating the earth as a garbage dump, that we are introducing far too many chemicals into the ecosphere, that we are destroying soils and forests. I stopped decades ago because I realised that people don't see themselves as the problem and that still hasn't changed.
Well I like the comprehensive thrust of this. Over on some leftist sites it seems that they are putting all their faith in subsidies to China in return for solar panels, and damaging the hydrocarbon industry. But to me its everything all the time. Farm reform, city layout planning reform, infrastructure upgrading and on and on. Before I got booted off Quiggins, for allowing myself to be triggered, you would be surprised how people want to resist this more comprehensive approach.
Some of these dudes that are taking a more regenerative farming approach, you wouldn't believe how much they are working to help the natural world along. Greg Judy makes all these bird boxes, so that he'll have birds to eat the flies on off his cows and presumably fertilize the place as well. He makes little habitats in the bush for small animals that coyotes can snack on. When you treat the land right its more the merrier. Sure the end goal might be to try and have a money-maker in each obvious niche. But the reality is that once you've got your system going its just one big party and everyone is invited.
The greatest Australian, old Bill Mollison, he reckoned the birds were far more daring than he when it came to phosphate application. He reckoned that he had birdshit on every leaf of his sweet potato. He would never fertilize so recklessly.
Then when he died there is video footage of these guys checking out a creek at his place. It was so overfertilized, by the natural world, they could walk on the creek because there was so much growth there.
Wow check this out. If you doubt for one minute that Swales cannot rehydrate the continent dig the aerial photos that these boys have for us. These are from Swales built 90 years ago. And they are still producing hydration 90 years on. Consider if we went after hydration with real intention this time. And with all these CO2-fears motivating the public.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUzqMmnNYaw
The other issue Graeme is while I think there is warming I also know the media likes those who preach doom and gloom. I've read accounts that there are many scientists who agree it is happening but don't see the doom and gloom, that our situation is nowhere near as dire as some suggest. I was concerned about environmental issues before this issue came along and what annoys me so much now is that everyone thinks AGW is the only issue but is one issue among many and we may well destroy too much of the environment before AGW does.
I know you have previously mentioned some of the issues I've raised but most people are only follow their favourite sites and media outlets. People aren't thinking much beyond that. Everyone wants to change the world but no-one wants to change their lives.
I don't know about SWALES but I know that for the most part we have without thought manipulated the environment in a very haphazard way. We have to take charge, we have to recognise that the Greenies don't have a friggin clue with this balance of nature idiocy and the idea that we can restore the environment back to its "natural" state. That's another reason I gave up on environmentalism. It was hijacked by ignorant fanatics. Water and soil management are fundamental to that. We can regenerate the environment, it won't be as it once was. We can make it much better.
No Graeme I am not surprised that people don't think about these issues.
If you restrict yourself to only data sources you can trust, the amount of CO2 warming and CO2-cooling you will think that you can see in the data is tiny. Its only when you start trusting data-riggers like Goddard, Hadley NOAA or the BOM is where you see what looks to be a CO2-warming signal. Its been placed their artificially.
However the lower troposphere temperature from the satellite in just the last few years, I was expecting it to show cooling by now, and its shown a little bit of warming. Too early to tell but to my subjective eye it looks like there could be a scintilla of a signal there. The balloon data coheres with the satellite data except there is 30 more years of it. Can be very hard to find some of this stuff. The average temperature goes in cycles and this last little bit could turn out to be just the peak before 30 years of disastrous cooling.
It requires the capacity to block the bad data from your mind. Even if that means you are working with a tiny set of graphs in your head.
The problem with the variance in the model predictions((1.9-4.4)) is people think the result will be within those parameters. That's wrong. I relate it to confidence intervals, when I see wide confidence intervals I'm inclined to disregard the study because there is too much uncertain and statistical significance becomes meaningless.
When the IPCC made predictions out to 2100 I thought that was lunacy. A friend said to me that what was not in the public view is those predictions were made on the basis of many assumptions about what would happen in the intervening period. I don't care, they should have been much more prudent and announced that we see a potential trend line but we cannot make predictions so far ahead in a scientifically meaningful way.
Because we have so changed the world we have to seriously consider the possibility that predicting the future based on the past climate is perhaps irrational.
The climate is chaotic and stochastic which makes modelling very difficult. We have enormous difficulty with much more simple systems. I know about the 30 year cycle but how can we be sure that will continue to be in play? It is not only bad data but incomplete data and more importantly the huge difficulty in modelling something when we can't do experiments.
These models don't work so their assumptions are falsified and any talk of confidence intervals and variance is a lot of jive to give them this pseudo-scientific patina. If you look at all of the satellite and balloon information you get no indication at all that we could possibly be looking at warming of more than about 0.1 degrees per decade. So any talk of the temperature being more than one degree than it is now, at the end of the century, is completely ridiculous. They are buying at the peak as the traders say.
We already had 30 years of warming so we are ready for a 30 year cooling cycle. To recover from the cooling which will be attendant upon the oceanic cycle and also upon the weak solar cycles of 23 24 and predicted 25 .... this would be a bit of a miracle. I mean just to recover. And to add another degree onto the recovery .... There is no reason to buy into any of it. Certainly not on the basis of falsified modelling.
The data may be incomplete but you don't need much data to make an informed forecast. What you need is to have ethnically cleansed all the bad stuff. You need to get rid of any normalcy bias that may be lurking as a result of being propagandised too.
In sober reality if you go looking for it you find frigid conditions and snow everywhere. Its not getting any press but its out there. And you can take it to the bank that the 2030's will be very cold, even if the press is still claiming record temperatures everywhere. In December, ie this month, while Australia was experiencing hot weather Antarctica was piling on the snow and ice. Which would be fine in May. But in December? So its not the record heat that the papers are making it all out to be.
Here is the most useful graph when it comes to revealing the global warming racket.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/2016-03-07060229-1.png
Can anyone see CO2 warming in that 60 decades record? It might be there, just barely. Being as cycle 24 is so weak. If its there its tiny. And thats the only good daughter we have in this time period. A time period long enough to take in the full oceanic oscillation.
If that warming is hiding there it cannot possibly be a bad thing. Is a little bit less frost damage on a frigid spring morning really so bad? Remembering how CO2 should be more effective under those sorts of conditions. When there is not much water vapour in the air.
Good data. How did my spell check make that "daughter". Goodness me. So in light of the weakness of solar cycles 23 and 24, just maybe there is a little bit of CO2-warming lurking about the place. But why the panic. Really.
I accept some warming is occurring but I think the problem is overstated.
Graeme can you think of any instance where modelling without experimentation and subsequent refinement of some sort has led to accurate modelling for complex systems?
Modelling was never thought to produce anything that you could call evidence. The thing about modelling is that you have to change the model when the results come out wrong. What is interesting in this case is they changed the data, not the models. They didn't go into this green so its likely they've gone down this idiotic road before. Just not in such a gigantic and in your face manner.
Jeremy Corbyn's brother does modelling and he predicts weather really well can gets paid for it. I can see what you might be saying about computers always going off the beam. On the other hand if you were using fuzzy logic algorithms they ought not do so.
Oh no the bad guys have even perverted our last example of good data. Tony Heller says that even the satellite data has now been perverted. Here I was ruminating about unexpected warming in the last five years or so.
We now have no good data that implies anything like a clear CO2 warming signal. Nothing. That may be a good thing but the problem is we have no good global data at all. The closest thing would be the balloon data that was stitched together by Heller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVbeTmOEhLo
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