Science Has Spoken!

22 Responses to Science Has Spoken!

1. sabretoothed says:

   March 13, 2015 at 2:59 am

   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2408805/John-Kerrys-cosy-dinner-Syrias-Hitler-Secretary-State-Assad-pictured-dining-Damascus.html

   Was he doing Climate Change discussions with Assad?

   Reply
2. gator69 says:

   March 13, 2015 at 3:00 am

   Dope and derange.

   Reply
3. sabretoothed says:

   March 13, 2015 at 3:03 am

   https://www.facebook.com/AmericanGeophysicalUnion AGU blocked me on FB for being a denier too

   Reply
4. omanuel says:

   March 13, 2015 at 3:05 am

   As I recall, Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler had a similar opinion about anyone who questioned the lock-step science in their fascist regimes.

   Reply
5. bjc70 says:

   March 13, 2015 at 4:19 am

   A little collection of how some things have stayed the same from that NYTs

   P1 Sweeping Change in U.N. Is Urged by World Panel
   25-Nation Panel Proposes Sweeping Changes for Operating Structure of the U.N.
   UNITED NATIONS, N.Y., May 20 A 25-member international panel has recommended sweeping changes in the structure of the United Nations to improve its handling of economic issues and increase cooperation between rich and poor countries.

   Women’s fashions ads- pgs 3, 8, 20,
   College aid p22, 23

   p20 Sun Cycle Indicates Severe Drought in ’76.

   p45 Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing Major Cooling May Be Ahead
   Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate Is Changing
   a Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable
   The world’s climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are subjects of deepening debate.

   Reply
6. markstoval says:

   March 13, 2015 at 8:16 am

   Science may have spoken but it has been very silent about the fact that we had a climate optimum 7000 years ago, followed a cooling period, followed by Minoan Warm Period, followed by cooling, followed by Roman Warming then cooling, and then even more cycles. These things were all happening with CO2 below 300 ppm (or so they say). How did CO2 do all that????

   The cycles within the Holocene are not explained by the “modern consensus”; and the bigger picture of glaciations followed by inter-glacials are totally beyond the explanatory powers of the magic CO2 molecule and modern “climate science.

   Reply
   • AndyG55 says:

     March 13, 2015 at 8:43 am

     The thing that really worries me is that each WARMER period has been shorter and less warm than the previous..

     I fear that the current Slightly Warmer Period (SWP) is very near its end. !!

     Luckily, like many sensible people, I live in a place that is NICE and WARM in summer, and doesn’t drop below freezing in winter.

     I wish that all the alarmista warmists would move to the coldest places they can find,….

     … but we know their hypocrisy means that they will probably move to warmer places.

     Reply
7. tabnumlock says:

   March 13, 2015 at 1:44 pm

   The current brief interglacial is coming to an end. Get ready for 100,000 years of ice.
   http://www.climate4you.com/images/VostokTemp0-420000%20BP.gif
   Red box: http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
   Perhaps we can create a microbe which can live on the surface of the ice and emit squid ink. If that fails, space reflectors.

   Reply
   • Disillusioned says:

     March 13, 2015 at 1:52 pm

     20th Century is in the lower-right corner of the red box in the above image. Earth has been in the turquoise-blue since the Minoan period ended. This has been a very weak interglacial.

     Reply
   • Jason Calley says:

     March 13, 2015 at 4:56 pm

     Breed some black ice worms.

     http://alaskacenters.gov/ice-worms.cfm

     Reply
8. tabnumlock says:

   March 13, 2015 at 2:07 pm

   The warmer periods are getting cooler (click the link). It’s a pity added CO2 seems to cause little or no warming.

   Reply
   • Gail Combs says:

     March 13, 2015 at 2:38 pm

     Steve (who has a degree in Geology) and I disagree about the possibility of an eminent slip into glaciation. The basis of the argument is the length of summer.

     A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic D18O records
     Lisiecki & Raymo
     ABSTRACT
     We present a 5.3-Myr stack (the ‘‘LR04’’ stack) of benthic d18O records from 57 globally distributed sites aligned by an automated graphic correlation algorithm. This is the first benthic d18O stack composed of more than three records to extend beyond 850 ka,…

     RESULTS
     Recent research has focused on MIS 11 as a possible analog for the present interglacial [e.g., Loutre and Berger, 2003; EPICA Community Members, 2004] because both occur during times of low eccentricity. The LR04 age model establishes that MIS 11 spans two precession cycles, with d18O values below 3.6% for 20 kyr, from 398 – 418 ka. In comparison, stages 9 and 5 remained below 3.6% for 13 and 12 kyr, respectively, and the Holocene interglacial has lasted 11 kyr so far. In the LR04 age model, the average LSR of 29 sites is the same from 398– 418 ka as from 250–650 ka; consequently, stage 11 is unlikely to be artificially stretched. However, the 21 June insolation minimum at 65°N during MIS 11 is only 489 W/m2, much less pronounced than the present minimum of 474 W/m2. In addition, current insolation values are not predicted to return to the high values of late MIS 11 for another 65 kyr. We propose that this effectively precludes a ‘‘double precession cycle’’ interglacial [e.g., Raymo, 1997] in the Holocene without human influence.

     {For Steve}
     …The stack’s phase relative to precession in this interval demonstrates that northern hemisphere insolation was the major driver of benthic d18O change by at least 4.1 Ma, perhaps through northern deep-water formation or the growth of small northern glaciers. Precession response is not significantly coherent prior to 4.1 Ma, presumably due to weaker d18O response, but our phase estimates are still indicative of northern hemisphere forcing……
     http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/Lisiecki_Raymo_2005_Pal.pdf

     Either way the earth is going to be short on Solar Insolation in the Norther Hemisphere for the next 65,000 years and near the glacial inception point.

     To give you a feel for just how close to glaciation we are you can look at the calculations from a fall 2012 paper Can we predict the duration of an interglacial? The paper gives the calculated solar insolation values @ 65N on June 22 for several glacial inceptions: Current value – insolation = 479W m?2 (from that paper)

     MIS 7e – insolation = 463 W m?2,
     MIS 11c – insolation = 466 W m?2,
     MIS 13a – insolation = 500 W m?2,
     MIS 15a – insolation = 480 W m?2,
     MIS 17 – insolation = 477 W m?2

     You can also look at the calculations from NOAA: The values are for 60 degrees North in june (2nd column ) so are not the same as above.

     Holocene peak insolation: 523 Wm-2
     ………………………………………………………..decrease = 47 Wm-2
     NOW (modern Warm Period) 476 Wm-2
     ……………………………………………………….. decrease = 12 Wm-2
     Depth of the last ice age – around 464 Wm?2

     CONTINUED:

     Reply
9. Gail Combs says:

   March 13, 2015 at 3:00 pm

   This is where things get interesting.

   Even the IPCC has admitted the climate has a ‘complex non linear chaotic signature.’

   …in climate research and modeling we should recognise that we are dealing with a complex non linear chaotic signature and therefore that long-term prediction of future climatic states is not possible…

   IPCC 2001 section 4.2.2.2 page 774

   Dr Brown at Duke Univ. Is something of an expert on chaotic systems. He has this to say.

   … examination of this record over the last 5 million years reveals a sobering fact. We are in an ice age, where the Earth spends 80 to 90% of its geological time in the grip of vast ice sheets that cover the polar latitudes well down into what is currently the temperate zone. We are at the (probable) end of the Holocene, the interglacial in which humans emerged all the way from tribal hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. The Earth’s climate is manifestly, empirically bistable, with a warm phase and cold phase, and the cold phase is both more likely and more stable. As a physicist who has extensively studied bistable open systems, this empirical result clearly visible in the data has profound implications. The fact that the LIA was the coldest point in the entire Holocene (which has been systematically cooling from the Holocene Optimum on) is also worrisome. Decades are irrelevant on the scale of these changes. Centuries are barely relevant. We are nowhere near the warmest, but the coldest century in the last 10,000 years ended a mere 300 years ago, and corresponded almost perfectly with the Maunder minimum in solar activity.

   There is absolutely no evidence in this historical record of a third stable warm phase…..
   A response to Dr. Paul Bain’s use of ‘denier’ in the scientific literature

   Dr. Robert Brown also made this comment on climate, chaos theory and “strange attractors”

   …..Let me also comment on the connection between HK dynamics and statistics and chaos. Complex nonlinear multivariate systems often exhibit “strange attractors” — local fixed points in a set of coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations — that function as foci for Poincare cycles in the multivariate phase space. In classical deterministic chaos, a system will often end up in a complex orbit around multiple attractors, one that essentially never repeats (and the attractors themselves may migrate around as this is going on). In a system such as the climate, we can never include enough variables to describe the actual system on all relevant length scales (e.g. the butterfly effect — MICROSCOPIC perturbations grow exponentially in time to drive the system to completely different states over macroscopic time) so the best that we can often do is model it as a complex nonlinear set of ordinary differential equations with stochastic noise terms — a generalized Langevin equation or generalized Master equation, as it were — and average behaviors over what one hopes is a spanning set of butterfly-wing perturbations to assess whether or not the resulting system trajectories fill the available phase space uniformly or perhaps are restricted or constrained in some way. We might physically expect this to happen if the system has strong nonlinear negative feedback terms that stabilize it around some particular (family of) attractors. Or, we might find that the system is in or near a “critical” regime where large fluctuations are possible and literally anything can happen, and then change without warning to anything else, with very little pattern in what happens or how long it lasts…..

   Figure 5. Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations with their cycle designations. (Sole et al, 2007)
   https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/sole-et-al-2007-fig-11.jpg

   If we take a stroll between this interglacial and the last one back, the Eemian, we find in the Greenland ice cores that there were 24 Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations (Figure 5, originally figure 1. Sole et al, 2007), or abrupt warmings that occurred from just a few years to mere decades that average between 8-10C rises (D-O 19 scored 16C). The nominal difference between earth’s cold (glacial) and warm (interglacial) states being on the order of 20C. D-O events average 1470 years, the range being 1-4kyrs. – William McClenney

   William’s articles on the current Paleoclimatology papers at WUWT

   Reply
10. Gail Combs says:

    March 13, 2015 at 3:05 pm

    For Hope the Reality Denier, Dr Brown has this to say:

    …. I’m only interested in the truth here, not an “anti-CAGW” agenda or “pro-CAGW” agenda. If you look around on the threads on this list, I spend more actual time bashing bad anti-GHE or anti-CAGW science than I do bashing specific problems with the CAGW argument. I’m not a warmist, luke-warmist, coldist, or anything-ist. I’m happy to be convinced of anything but I won’t be convinced by bullshit statistics or bad physics. And I’m moderately proficient at statistics, especially certain kinds of modelling, and moderately proficient at physics (good enough to teach it without lecture notes and write textbooks in it). Oh, and calculus, and I’m a computer geek, and a few other things. So I don’t think I actually qualify as an idiot, and after reading Taleb’s Black Swan book (which I highly recommend) recently I hope not to be a sucker.

    And that’s what a whole lot of this debate is all about. It has been exaggerated beyond all reasonable measure, causing a lot of people to take sucker bets on the future. The NC sea rise issue recently discussed as a classic example.

    Sea level rise is currently measured to be at most 3 mm/year, and historical measurements show that the sea level oscillates on a multi-decadal timescale with long term behavior that is remarkably consistent and nearly periodic (surely with a non-flat fourier transform with some peaks). If anything, the rate of increase is decreasing. 3 mm/year, extrapolated for 88 years, works out to a sea level increase of just over ten inches by the year 2100, assuming that the rate does not decrease as it historically has done see previous remark about fairly reliable measurements over the last 100 years.

    Yet a bill was being pushed trying to get NC to plan for a thirty nine inch increase in sea level by the year 2000. Since the current rate is only at most 3 mm/year, and there is no good reason to think it will suddenly change, this is an increase of well over a centimeter per year over most of that interval. Why? Because some model predicts it!

    This, my friends, is a sucker bet. First of all, even at a centimeter a year there is still plenty of time before it rises enough to be a problem — four inches or so in a decade. Yet we are asked to spend money and time now, when there literally isn’t a hint of a problem in the (beloved of lazy “teenagers” who probably aren’t) empirical data.

    Why?

    Follow the money and one can probably find out. But more importantly, it reflects a “follow the mindshare” problem — we have lost all contact with common sense when people who know better than to trust the weather prediction in their newspaper a week in advance are trusting a weather prediction for 100 years from now enough to invest enormous amounts of money that could just as easily be spent later, when it actually “rains” and the sea level begins to rise. Or it doesn’t. In which case we can be glad we didn’t panic and waste all of that money doing nothing useful.

    But every single investment like this that does get made makes it more difficult to turn away from the sucker bet. To do so requires admitting that you were a sucker. If they’d gotten the public to buy into this one, what would have been next? California style regulation of power plants? Doubling of the costs of NC electricity? One cannot be certain that the ongoing depression in California is due to the fact that energy costs almost twice what it should there, largely because they are forced to build large, expensive renewable generating facilities and pay their “Carbon Taxes”, but it certainly does seem plausible. The world is cruel to suckers.

    So just as much as I’m interested in learning the science and critically examining the arguments on all sides, I’m interested in not being taken for a ride, especially not a ride in untimely haste. In twenty years, one won’t have to subsidize solar generation of electricity, because Moore’s Law will have dropped the price of solar panels and the associated support hardware to where photovoltaic-generated electricity on individual rooftops, backfed into the grid when there is a surplus, will produce a sound ROI on a decadal timescale even for ordinary citizens. One doesn’t have to panic in the meantime, this is nearly certain if the history of the semiconductor industry is any basis at all for a prediction. In fifty years we will IMO be well on the downhill slope for CO_2 production without doing anything but pursuing our local economic best interest — fossil fuels may or may not be the devil, but they are difficult to obtain and expensive and cannot sustain a steady-state civilization.

    In the meantime, even the proponents of CAGW agree that the “Carbon Trading” measures currently undertaken won’t make the slightest bit of difference in global temperatures by the end of the century. To make a difference one would pretty much have to end civilization as we know it now, and they know that that will be a very tough sell. Yet they persist in selling it, and selling it as if it is an emergency — give us your money, lots of it, it is an emergency.

    I smell — as do many others — another sucker bet.

    And if we really took the CAGW threat from CO_2 seriously, and don’t want to end human civilization, why aren’t we building the hell out of nuclear power plants? No CO_2, plenty of fuel and low costs for at least the next century, long enough to smoothly and painlessly transition largely to solar and hope for thermonuclear fusion and the golden age of man. Is it because it isn’t about the CO_2 at all?

    If not, the EPA and DOE can easily convince me. Start building nukes, fast. Thorium nukes for a preference (harder to make bombs). Everywhere. Regulate the hell out of them, but build them. Show us that you take the risk seriously, and that you don’t just want to shut down civilization by making energy too expensive to use.

    What, no takers?

    A sucker bet.

    rgb
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/#comment-1015924

    Reply
    • DD More says:

      March 13, 2015 at 7:00 pm

      Gail, here is a little find for discussions on Carolina coast lines & Sea Levels.
      Looking at the effect sea levels have had over the past 240 years, what has been the result.
      See – An Accurate Map of North and South Carolina With Their Indian Frontiers, Shewing in a distinct manner all the Mountains, Rivers, Swamps, Marshes, Bays, Creeks, Harbours, Sandbanks and Soundings on the Coasts, ’1775′

      – http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/ncmaps&CISOPTR=125&CISOBOX=1&REC=15

      from NC Map

      Compare with a side by side google map and most of the features are still there. A side note that 1775 was at the end of the Little Ice Age and a whole lot of ice was on shore and not in the ocean.

      So RGB’s 10″ / 88 years straight line trend, would say 27″ rise since the map was made. Visual examination says even the 10″ by 2100 will probably have little effect.
      Your welcome to use as you see fit.

      Reply
11. tabnumlock says:

    March 13, 2015 at 3:31 pm

    “why aren’t we building the hell out of nuclear power plants?”

    Because a certain country in the Middle East would be more comfortable with less Plutonium in the world. Unfortunately, they don’t like fossil fuels ether because they fund their enemies. So we’re left with sunbeams and pinwheels to power our industrial civilization. They know that won’t work but are fine with it. After all, it was a certain highly advanced industrial country that did nasty things to them.

    Reply
    • omanuel says:

      March 13, 2015 at 4:30 pm

      We aren’t building nuclear reactors because the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘renewable’ in UN’s Agenda 21 are the politically correct way of saying absolutely no access to knowledge or utilization of Einstein’s 1905 discovery:

      Mass (m) is stored energy (E)!

      E = mc^2

      Reply
      • David A says:

        March 13, 2015 at 5:28 pm

        omauel, nice on topic comment. Tabnumlock, do you really think Israel is responsible for the CAGW movement and the Blue Planet in Green shackles crowd?

        Reply
    • Jason Calley says:

      March 13, 2015 at 5:01 pm

      “why aren’t we building the hell out of nuclear power plants?”

      For the same reason that coal is being demonized and natural gas is being promoted. A power plant that runs on coal may have an onsite stockpile of coal, enough to run for a few months. A nuclear plant may also run for months (or years) without outside fuel. With natural gas power plants, any city in the US can be completely shut down RIGHT NOW, TODAY, by simply shutting off the pipe line.

      People who long for centralized control LOVE that idea.

      Reply
      • Anthony S says:

        March 13, 2015 at 6:12 pm

        There’s a natural gas plant near that was built next to a giant CNG tank, sized to be larger enough to last through the winter heating season.

        Reply
        • Jason Calley says:

          March 13, 2015 at 6:53 pm

          Hey Anthony! Wow! Very good! That investment in extra storage gives your area a little more ability to stand on its own, whether the problem is lack of supply or political arm twisting. I have not seen any of those in my area, but if I had a power plant, I would very much approve of that.
12. tabnumlock says:

    March 13, 2015 at 3:52 pm

    Interesting math, Gail. have you tried using it to pick stocks?

    Reply