[ExI] The Climate Science Isn't Settled [was: Re: climategate again]

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

2009/12/1 Alfio Puglisi <alfio.puglisi at gmail.com>:
>
> Look at any plot of the temperature record (1880-present) and tell me if
> "sometimes up, sometimes down" is an accurate description. And it's clear,
> from the next sentence, that he's talking about long periods.

### Look at the plot 1000 AD - present (but the real one, not from
Mann et. al) What do you see?

----------------

> False. CRU didn't "maximize" any temperature anomaly, and doesn't say so in
> any email (their series data comes out nearly identical to GISS, using
> publicly available data and code). Some CRU emails did talk equivocally
> about tree proxy data, which are used in temperature reconstructions.
> Lindzen is confusing the two.

### CRU brazenly manipulated proxy data for the pre-instrumental
period, and appear to have fudged their analysis of the instrumental
period as well.

--------------
. Lindzen knows full well that water vapor is a feedback,
> and that even if it is carrying most of the natural greenhouse effect on its
> shoulders, it can't do anything to change Earth's temperature on its own.

### Do you understand what you wrote? I certainly don't.

------------
>
> "Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between
> incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%"
>
> 2% is significant when your planet has an average temperature of 290K. And
> he didn't include the feedbacks (but didn't he talk about water vapor a few
> lines before? Why not now?)

### Because nobody knows the feedback but available data are
consistent with absence of positive feedback.

-----------------
>
> False. Many models show 10-year scale periods of stable and even cooling
> temperatures right in the middle of a longer-term warming trend. Only when
> you average a dozen of them a monotonous year-by-year warming appears.
> Models do show short-term variability, and El-Nino-like behaviours. They
> can't reproduce the exact El-Nino et al. pattern we have on this planet, and
> so can't model temperatures on small timescales.

### Trenberth seems to disagree with you. He thinks it's a "travesty"
that their models cannot account for the present period of cooling.

------------------
>
> Exaggerating. Whoever said that our climate is "dominated" by positive
> feedbacks?

### Without strong positive CO2-related feedback there is no
catastrophic climate change, so every climate hysteric out there is
either explicitly or implicitly talking about near future dominated by
such feedback.

-----------------

> All the talks Lindzen does about feedbacks is invalidated by ice age cores.
> Without feedbacks, you can't explain the ice-age / interglacial alternance.

### So why does CO2 start rising only about 800 000 years after the
end of an ice age? What is driving the feedback?
-----------------

> When I say "inevitable", I refer to conservation of energy. Radiation
> emitted downward *will* do something. Bodies with radiation imbalances
> *will* warm up. Anything me, you or Lindzen thinks is irrelevant.

### If what you think is irrelevant, why do you mention it?

---------------------------
>
> You may have noticed the low opinion I have of Lindzen. This is because,
> because of all the MIT titles you listed above, I really can't accuse him of
> ignorance. This leaves less palatable options.

### Sure. He's too credentialed to be dismissed as a "crank", or
"whackaloon" (as climate hysterics like to refer to climate realists),
so he must be a Satanist, or something.

As you mentioned above, this is you writing in "constructive" mode.
I'd hate to read you being snarky.

---------------------
>
> To most of the science. That's where they have set, by their choice. Almost
> all of them don't publish, many actually actively refuse results of
> peer-review articles, and have nothing substantial to contribute.
>
### Since when are government bureaucrats like Hansen, Jones, and Karl
"science"? Since when is peer-review defined as Mann at al, reviewing
Mann at al?

---------------------
>
> It's not the same. (and what is an "anti-skeptic view"? :-)   Global warming
> is a well-developed theory with multiple supporting lines of evidence:
> different kind of observations, and physics-based models.

### Anthropogenic CO2 driven catastrophic warming is a lunatic fringe
theory supported by large government bureaucracies. All lines of
evidence supporting the hockey stick (bristlecone, sediment, treering)
have been discredited. The "physics-based models" don't even model
cloud cover, much less impacts on ocean circulation, aerosols,
methane, anthropogenic albedo changes, other albedo changes, all the
stuff you need to know to tell the difference between high positive
feedback to CO2 (the only important situation) and low or even
negative feedback.

But we do know that at no time in the past 600 million years did Earth
exceed a temperature anomaly of +8C, despite CO2 levels much higher
than today and this is enough to summarily reject the idea that CO2 is
likely to cause catastrophic warming.
-------------------

 I don't see how
> one can take only one part (say, the observation of temperature warming) but
> not the rest (the explanation of that warming, and it's likely future
> consequences).

### Because the explanations do not make any sense in light of
available data, and the future consequences are unknown, but extremely
unlikely (see above) to be dire.

------------------

 Without an obvious falsification, one would need to produce
> an alternative explanation, and the proposed ones (there have been some:
> solar, cosmic rays, ice age rebound and surely some other I'm forgetting)
> didn't survive investigation.

### Read up on cosmic rays and aerosols.

Rafal