patrick.net

Heraclitusstudent says

Yet we have very good projections of that number. Not predictions. Projections.

How do you know they are very good?
Have you traveled to the future to verify their accuracy?
Seems to me that you’re taking a lot on blind faith in authority.

Heraclitusstudent says

Because aggregate calculations are far easier and accurate at their level than the details they are made of.

BUT, if your basic assumptions are wrong, increasing co2 increases temperature, your models will put out bad results.

Heraclitusstudent says

these are incredibly detailed calculations.

And they have been proven wrong by observation.

I've seen multiple projections anywhere from 1 degree celsius to 4.5 degrees celsius. This is a huge friggin margin of error... You can't claim accuracy with such a wide range of predictions. It's the equivalent of saying the 49ers will score anywhere from 10 to 45 points.

Still waiting for an alarmist to state who they think the top climate scientist is. Mann? Hansen? Gore? Who is the most respected? Out of 97% you must have a favorite.

and btw...you did say such a thing...."Modeling climate effects is direct applied physics. " It's also funny how you want to describe a system of planetary motion as more complex than a quantum mechanical calculation of a molecule that involves potentially hundreds of electrons in which you are accounting for both gravitational and electrostatic forces.

Nevertheless, all systems you described are highly ordered...other than the Earth....which is a sphere of absolute chaos. Climatology is hardly a developed science at this point. That does not mean we shouldn't continue to study it and improve it. Just stop giving it the credibility that it has right now because it hasn't earned it.

I'm more than willing to admit that global warming exists. I believe we are on track for a rise of 1 degree Celsius in the next century. I have yet to seen a compelling case as to why that would be bad for quality of life, viability of various species, and humanity in general. That case definitely hasn't been made....just assumed.

NoCoupForYou says

That's true, but for a different reason; trends change. If third world countries get richer - and as we discussed in another thread this is happening in places like Vietnam and India - the birth rates may radically change, making the numbers way off.

Shaman says

Heraclitusstudent says

Yet we have very good projections of that number. Not predictions. Projections.

How do you know they are very good?
Have you traveled to the future to verify their accuracy?
Seems to me that you’re taking a lot on blind faith in authority.

You think Trump is president now, right? How do you know it is correct? Maybe he was just assassinated and you don't know it yet. Mike Pence is president.
How do we know the cloudless sky will be blue tomorrow? Maybe the laws of physics will change...
Almost everything we know is induction. And almost all of it CAN be wrong.
If you wait that your knowledge is perfect, you will have to admit that you know basically nothing, and certainly you can't predict the most mundane fact about tomorrow.

So what justifies what we know? The reasons we have to believe that something is/will be true based on what we have observed so far. And these are probabilistic.

So how do we know population projections are good? Because demographic facts don't change very fast. Because we know in which directions things are evolving now. Because we know what are the chances of an asteroid hitting earth.
And sure they can be wrong. But based on how likely things are so far, we can estimate that we are very likely to be a certain range. It's a a range and it's very likely based on what we know.
And we refine that range as things get closer.

And for planning purposes, this is all we need. This is a very useful projection

theoakman says

and btw...you did say such a thing...."Modeling climate effects is direct applied physics. "

You mean, it's not?

Heraclitusstudent says

You think Trump is president now, right? How do you know it is correct? Maybe he was just assassinated and you don't know it yet. Mike Pence is president.

Trump's Presidency doesn't depend on extrapolating current trends into the future.

A Presidency lasts a set time.

Just like I know a 90-day warranty is a 90-day warranty. Barring a massive disruption, I'll get 90-days to return the toaster.

That's different that projecting the Average Earth Temperature 10 years from now, which may not depend on a single mass disruption, but only a minor tweek of one of scores of variables, from sunspot frequency to the strength of El/La Nino/Ninas.

NoCoupForYou says

Trump's Presidency doesn't depend on extrapolating current trends into the future.

Yes it does. For at least a few minutes.

NoCoupForYou says

Barring a massive disruption, I'll get 90-days to return the toaster.

Massive disruptions can happen.

If disruptions don't happen then simple projections of empirical facts like "Trump is president" or "the currently observed warming" are likely to be correct.

theoakman says

It's also funny how you want to describe a system of planetary motion as more complex than a quantum mechanical calculation of a molecule that involves potentially hundreds of electrons in which you are accounting for both gravitational and electrostatic forces.

It's funny how you consider an entire planet is not more complex than a single molecule.
:-)

It's an excellent example of how aggregate level is the sum of all complexities below that level, yet it is simpler.

Heraclitusstudent says

You mean, it's not?

Even if it is applied physics, multivariable chaotic systems are almost impossible to model; witness the "butterfly in China" effect.

Still not committing to a "climate expert"?

Onvacation says

Even if it is applied physics, multivariable chaotic systems are almost impossible to model; witness the "butterfly in China" effect.

The same effect applies to a 3 bodies problem with gravity, yet we are able to predict the trajectory of a planet 100 years in advance with good precision (and there are more than 3 bodies in the solar system).

People who use this kind of argument are doomsayers of the human spirit who refuse to admit we can know anything about the future, starting with basic facts such as adding heat to a system increases its temperature.

Basic poll: what percent of climate "skeptics" are also vaccine "skeptics"?
Evolution "skeptics"?

Heraclitusstudent says

Basic poll: what percent of climate "skeptics" are also vaccine "skeptics"?
Evolution "skeptics"?

What percent of biologists and physicians believed in Cranial Measurements in the 1920s-1930s?

What percent of internists, biologists, nutritionists, and FDA employees believed low fat diets, high carb diets rich in bread & pasta were the key to obesity control 1975-2005?

Heraclitusstudent says

People who use this kind of argument are doomsayers of the human spirit who refuse to admit we can know anything about the future, starting with basic facts such as adding heat to a system increases its temperature.

I'm not the one saying we have to give up our modern lifestyle or we will fry the planet.

Heraclitusstudent says

I'm not saying we can't model the future of climate. I'm just saying that Mann and others got it wrong. To go further I would say that all of the "scientists" that fudge their data to fit their theory, won't share their source code, and sue people who question them are frauds. Mann and his hockey stick prediction failed miserably.

Who you gonna believe Dr. Judith Curry or Greta Thunberg?

Heraclitusstudent says

Onvacation says

Even if it is applied physics, multivariable chaotic systems are almost impossible to model; witness the "butterfly in China" effect.

The same effect applies to a 3 bodies problem with gravity, yet we are able to predict the trajectory of a planet 100 years in advance with good precision (and there are more than 3 bodies in the solar system).

People who use this kind of argument are doomsayers of the human spirit who refuse to admit we can know anything about the future, starting with basic facts such as adding heat to a system increases its temperature.

See....this is where you are wrong. Yes, the 3 body problem can be simulated and a solution is obtainable to 99.99999999% accuracy. The same for a 10 body problem. It just requires 10000 times more computing power. With respect to the work that I've done, organic molecules of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, fluorine atoms..you are solving the Shroedinger equation for a 200 body problem. This takes months on a supercomputer....and you have to make all kinds of compensations or estimations in order to get the job to go to completion. This is orders of magnitude more difficult than modeling a solar system because you deal with electrostatic forces between each and every electron and proton along with the gravitational force.

As far as simulating the Earth....to realistically do it, you would need an infinitely complex model and knowledge of every moving part. There are too many floating variables....and by too many, I mean gazillions. So what do they make? A theoretical construct of the earth....consisting of land masses, oceans, wind streams and what not. You can name an infinite amount of sources of error and compensations they make to get their calculations done. It's akin to simulating the growth of a city in Sim City and drawing conclusions about NYC.

Needless to say, any projections that have correctly forecasted a running average of temperature increase are not that impressive. We know what the trend is...and yes....it's up. It's been a steady rate. The idea that the rate of warming is accelerating is not backed up by any meangful statistical evidence. If your model predicted at .2 degree increase... over the past 20 years....well whoooptie damn do. That doesn't make it good. You could have simply traced through the 100 year data and extrapolated out to that.

Heraclitusstudent says

theoakman says

and btw...you did say such a thing...."Modeling climate effects is direct applied physics. "

You mean, it's not?

I wouldn't call it direct. Heraclitusstudent says

It's funny how you consider an entire planet is not more complex than a single molecule.

Actually, if you care to analyze my post....planetary motion is not more complex than solving the Shroedinger equation for molecules. But analyzing the climate in an entire plant is infinitely more complex than solving the Shroedinger equation...which is why...climatology modeling is hardly a developed science.

theoakman says

analyzing the climate in an entire plant is infinitely more complex than solving the Shroedinger equation

Really? Why?

Do you think you have to solve the Shroedinger equation's of all molecules in the atmosphere?

The climate is essentially static. A steady state system. All you have to do is analyses the effects of small changes on various subsystems by modeling such subsystems.
For ex: What percent of the ice sheet melts depending on temperature. -> 1 sub model.
What is the difference in sunlight absorption between icesheet and open sea. You don't care which areas of the ice sheet are melted, just take vast chunks of the arctic ocean as 1 unit.
Because it is aggregate, it is far easier to do. Because it is just incremental you don't have to model the entire process of how the climate works, only what changes.
What is the effect on cloud.
What is the effect on vegetation.
You just have to detail it sufficiently so it will match 50 years of actual data and refine it constantly.

Such model is essentially a quantitative description of everything we know DID happen at a physical level. .
If you think projecting this in the future is abusive, then you need to say what will happen in the future that DIDN'T happen in the past 50 years.

In spite of global warming, the US has been cold!

Wow! Between 2008 and 2012 the continental US average temperature rose 2 degrees!

And the last 15 years were the hottest EVER!

NASA came out with the annual anomaly and 2019 was the second hottest year EVER!
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20200115/

Heraclitusstudent says

Heraclitusstudent says

Really? Why?

Do you think you have to solve the Shroedinger equation's of all molecules in the atmosphere?

The climate is essentially static. A steady state system. All you have to do is analyses the effects of small changes on various subsystems by modeling such subsystems.
For ex: What percent of the ice sheet melts depending on temperature. -> 1 sub model.
What is the difference in sunlight absorption between icesheet and open sea. You don't care which areas of the ice sheet are melted, just take vast chunks of the arctic ocean as 1 unit.
Because it is aggregate, it is far easier to do. Because it is just incremental you don't have to model the entire process of how the climate works, only what changes.
What is the effect on cloud.
What is the effect on vegetation.
You just have to detail it sufficiently so it will match 50 years of actual data and refine it constantly.

Such model is essentially a quantitative description of everything we know DID happen at a physical level. .
If you think projecting this in the future is abusive, then you need to ...

umm...I'm about to give up trying to prove a point to you. The point was, the Shroedinger equation to get the zero point energy of a 200 body problem is insanely complex. But less complex than trying to model climate.

This is the problem....all these things you've described are oversimplifying a complex system by a wide margin. We do the same thing in quantum mechanical calculations for molecules or molecular dynamics simulations. And what we find is...that it invalidates the validity of the model as you make more and more assumptions. And no, you can't assume the models to be quantitative. The world's best quantum mechanics professors still have not developed a model to get quantitative results for the zero point energy for larger molecules. Their results are purely qualitative.

The fact that you think they are quantitative would mean...they just about have everything figured out. They don't. That's why the literature will predict anywhere from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees. The models are woefully invalid at this point...and the temperature data is overly noisy to draw any real conclusions at this point. But again....you seem to give the field much more credit than they've earned. Like I said...this field, and others like economics try to piggy back on the reputation of fields like Physics and Chemistry....where we actually have laws in place that are infallible.

The point was, the Shroedinger equation to get the zero point energy of a 200 body problem is insanely complex. But less complex than trying to model climate.

Or even short term weather predictions. In many in-land areas, weather forecasts for the week ahead can be fairly accurate. However, here in coastal Virginia, daily weather forecasts are notoriously inaccurate because the ocean plays havoc with the normal forecasting models. The complexities introduced by the interaction of the sea can even make a storm that is sweeping across the state suddenly veer off in an unexpected direction.

I still havent heard a detailed method to measure global temperature in a single point in time, that makes sense. Much less as a measure of change over time

What is todays temperature and why? There is no good way to measure a single global temperature that isnt full of assumptions and guesstimations and sampling errors and glitches and falible equipment and human error.

Reading through their papers, I am left feeling less than confident in their precision https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018JD029522

CBOEtrader says

I am left feeling less than confident in their precision

It is amazing to think that they think they can measure worldwide yearlong global average temperature down to hundredths of a degree.

I love when they present data from the 1800s to the nearest 100th of a degree. Climatology right now has a statistics problem because most of their papers don't adhere to the same statistical standards that we expect in other fields.

The data for a single location, New York Central Park is located here.

https://www.weather.gov/okx/CentralParkHistorical

What you will find is that the data is very noisy and the noise value actually exceeds the trend you obtain from fitting it to any sort of growth function meaning....the growth is not statistically distinguishable from zero. What you will also find is that only a small percentage of all time temperature highs occur in the past 20 years....that doesn't fit with the popular narrative.

Onvacation says

I'm not saying we can't model the future of climate.

I do! I think humans can model the climate 20 years from now about as well as they can model insurance for Mortgage Backed Securities over a 20 year period.

Heraclitusstudent says

The climate is essentially static. A steady state system

Absolutely not.

The climate has wildly fluctuated. El Ninos, La Ninas, NAO oscillations, just to name a few that can dramatically alter temps across hemispheres several times a decade.

The entire Sahara Grasslands became the Sahara Desert and the Dogger Bank was Doggerland and the Thames was part of the Rhein within the past few thousand years - thousands of years after the invention of Agriculture.



https://phys.org/news/2016-12-years-sahara-tropicalwhat.html

Just to give an idea of how wildly variable the climate is, we are barely out of an ice age, the Weichselian. That period, which only lastest a few thousand years, is separated into 3 stages with 4+ stages each. Just in the very last stage, which saw most of the deglaciation of Europe, we can track radical climate changes by looking at fossilized tree records. Pollenating trees in Northern Europe only began about 10,000BPY, which is a tiny droplet of earth History.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weichselian_glaciation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Glacial_Interstadial

The problem with the steady state climate idea is not only is it wrong on a century level, it's absolute rubbish on a larger scale. It gives the extremely false idea that there is an ideal temperature and gas level, when these things have wildly fluctuated over thousands and millions and billions of years. Just 250M years ago, a fraction of the Earth's existence, CO2 levels were sky high, Oxygen was 30% higher, temperatures were at "OMG Global Doom and Gloom" very high levels.

"Oxygen dropped from its highest level to its lowest level ever in only 20 million years," Huey said today.

That's 30% (Permian) to 12% (after Permian Extinction Event) in just 10M years. That's no steady state.

Climate Change is Bad and Avoidable is to actual Earth Science what "Smokey Bear" is to Ecologic Systems.

https://www.livescience.com/6981-gasping-air-lack-oxygen-worsened-great-dying.html

Onvacation says

NASA came out with the annual anomaly and 2019 was the second hottest year EVER!
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20200115/

Yeah and it was very cold on the west coast. At least globull warming could have visited us.

Onvacation says

CBOEtrader says

I am left feeling less than confident in their precision

It is amazing to think that they think they can measure worldwide yearlong global average temperature down to hundredths of a degree.

The stations measuring far from civilization, far above ground or in the water are probably more reliable. Stations esp. in warmer cities likely have been recording higher temperatures from the increasing number of ACs and the concrete surface.

The subset of the Quatenary Stage we now live in (2200BC) began with the end of 200-year drought, the 4.2 Kiloyear Event, that saw the end of an inhabitable "Sahara Savannah"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meghalayan



Note the lack of SUVs in Old Kingdom Egypt.

Steady State, my ass.

theoakman says

What you will also find is that only a small percentage of all time temperature highs occur in the past 20 years

And a lot of all time lows.

During a recent event, the 8.2KYr Event (graphic above) aka ~6200BC, methane in the atmosphere dropped by 15% in a matter of a few years, due to a sudden cooling..

NoCoupForYou says

Onvacation says

I'm not saying we can't model the future of climate.

I do! I think humans can model the climate 20 years from now about as well as they can model insurance for Mortgage Backed Securities over a 20 year period.

I never said we could model the climate but I have bitched about the weatherman being wrong so often.

Onvacation says

I never said we could model the climate but I have bitched about the weatherman being wrong so often.

Yep, if it's hard to predict a movement to the end of the driveway, then predicting movement to the end of the block is going to be very difficult.

They can vote against deniers whether they are right or wrong.

So you predict Tom Steyer will win?

HEYYOU says

They can vote against deniers whether they are right or wrong.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xgqymn/exclusive-poll-80-of-young-voters-think-global-warming-is-a-major-threat-to-life-as-we-know-it?utm_source=reddit.com

The indoctrination is working.

Ask one of those youngsters how much the temperature has risen in the last century and you'll get answers anywhere from 10 to 50 degrees.

Stop scaring the children.