Obama's Global Warming Claims Demolished (again)

[_Droopy]

While it's true that there have been periods where the concentrations of carbon dioxide were higher, what is alarming is the rate of change.

There is no "alarming rate of change." The entire warming was a modest 0.6 degrees Celsius during the 20th century, completely normative and well within known climatic variability.

Secondly, even if their were any basis to the long discredited claim of "unprecedented" warming, the cause of that warming remains unknown and much of the earth's climate system still very poorly understood. It really doesn't matter, Met, because the GCMs are utter rubbish for the purposes to which they have been put and are known to be, and virtually none of their predictions are or have ever been compatible with empirical observations and measurements of what nature is actually doing.

There is no empirical evidence -none- that CO2 could possibly have the effects ascribed to it by climatists or that it ever has. All known large-scale changes over geologic time, at least over the past 650,000 years for which we have paleoclimatologic data, show CO2, each and every time and without exception, lagging planetary warming through alternative climate optimums and glacial periods by an average of 800 years.

AGW is and has always been the primary secular religion (second only perhaps to sex and the pursuit of boutique "social justice" concerns) of the baby boom generation Left and its immediate progeny, not a scientific theory (well, let's be serious, it never made it out of the hypothesis state at any time in the last 20 years).

[_Brackite]

From National Geographic:

What’s Behind the Heat Wave: Climate Change or Weather?

...

The American Southwest is broiling in triple-digit temperatures for the fourth consecutive day as a result of a record-breaking heat wave that is smothering the region.

In Death Valley, California, the temperature reached 128° Fahrenheit (53° Celsius) on Sunday—just a few degrees shy of the July 10, 1913, record of 134° Fahrenheit (57° Celsius).

The heat wave has also been partly blamed for a wildfire that killed 19 firefighters on Sunday in Yarnell Hill, Arizona.

So what's behind the heat wave? Is global warming a factor? And how does it compare with past events? We talked to Martin Tingley, a climatologist at Harvard University, to find out.

In April, Tingley and his colleague Peter Huybers published a study in the journal Nature that concluded that the years 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011 were warmer than any year going back 600 years, to 1400.


Do scientists know what's behind the current heat wave?

Looking at the meteorological charts, it looks to be a blocking event. That happens when there's a particular configuration of the jet stream that's quite stable. So there's a big high-pressure ridge on the West Coast and a low-pressure trough in the East Coast. That's why it's quite rainy here [in Cambridge, Massachusetts] and very hot on the West Coast.


Have you or other scientists had a chance to analyze this current heat wave and determine how it compares to past years?

No ... because 2013 is not over yet. One very hot week will have some signature on the seasonal average, but how large that signature will be depends on what happens for the rest of the summer.

Also, the study that Peter [Huybers] and I did made use of paleoclimate records—things like tree rings and ice cores. One of the limitations of that study is we can't really think of week-long heat waves like what's going on. We were limited to seasonal averages—hot summers versus cool summers—and we found that recent warm extremes in terms of summer average conditions at the high northern latitudes are unprecedented in the last 600 years.


You reached those conclusions after performing a statistical analysis on the paleoclimate data. Do you have an analogy that helps explain how that analysis works?

One imperfect analogy: Even though you and I have never met, I would bet that I'm taller than you because I'm 6-foot-4-inches (1.9 meters), and that puts me in a high percentile of the distribution of heights. But if I were to walk into a room of 1,000 people, I probably wouldn't be the tallest.

It's the same when we're addressing the question of was 2011 the hottest year in the last 600 years. It's a different statistical question to ask was it warmer than one particular year in the past—that's like me saying I'm taller than you—and it's a much different question to ask whether 2011 was the hottest year amongst all of the past 600 years.

To deal with this, what we do is instead of coming up with a single best estimate ... we use a simple statistical model to simulate 4,000 equally likely realizations of the climate [based on the paleoclimate data]. Then we can ask in how many of these 4,000 possible climate histories was 2011 the warmest year? So instead of having a single best estimate, we have 4,000 possible realizations.


Climate scientists often compare the effects of global warming to loaded dice: Not every roll of a loaded die will come up six—but sixes will occur more often than if the die had not been tampered with. Is that still the thinking?

Can we attribute this particular heat wave to an anthropogenic impact on the climate? The only safe answer is, well, probably not. It's like if I flip one coin and it comes up heads, that doesn't mean the coin is loaded.

But what we're seeing now, there seems to be a trend toward more hot extremes and fewer cold extremes. That's a pattern that's consistent with an anthropogenically-forced increase in temperatures.


What can people expect from future extreme heat waves that are affected by global warming? Will they be anything like the current heat wave affecting the West Coast?

I think that's a really big open question right now: Given rising mean temperatures, how will the extremes change, in both magnitude and frequency? It's actually one of the research projects we are tackling at the moment: How are extremes in temperature on daily timescales changing with respect to the mean temperature?

If the mean temperature goes up by half a degree, do the extremes simply track that half-degree increase? Or are the extremes being amplified in some sense so that they are becoming hotter with respect to the mean?

[_Quasimodo]

There is no "alarming rate of change." The entire warming was a modest 0.6 degrees Celsius during the 20th century, completely normative and well within known climatic variability.

Secondly, even if their were any basis to the long discredited claim of "unprecedented" warming, the cause of that warming remains unknown and much of the earth's climate system still very poorly understood. It really doesn't matter, Met, because the GCMs are utter rubbish for the purposes to which they have been put and are known to be, and virtually none of their predictions are or have ever been compatible with empirical observations and measurements of what nature is actually doing.

There is no empirical evidence -none- that CO2 could possibly have the effects ascribed to it by climatists or that it ever has. All known large-scale changes over geologic time, at least over the past 650,000 years for which we have paleoclimatologic data, show CO2, each and every time and without exception, lagging planetary warming through alternative climate optimums and glacial periods by an average of 800 years.

AGW is and has always been the primary secular religion (second only perhaps to sex and the pursuit of boutique "social justice" concerns) of the baby boom generation Left and its immediate progeny, not a scientific theory (well, let's be serious, it never made it out of the hypothesis state at any time in the last 20 years).

A look at the not too distant future:

http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/marshall-islands-climate-change-happening-now-20130630

[_Droopy]

A look at the not too distant future:

http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/marshall-islands-climate-change-happening-now-20130630

For the tens of thousands of people who live in the Marshall Islands, a string of more than 1,000 low-lying islands and coral atolls in the North Pacific Ocean, last week's storms brought yet another reminder that the impacts of climate change aren't something that awaits in a far-off, distant future.

They're happening now.

1. So, point me to the empirical scientific evidence for anthropogenic planetary warming here, let alone dangerous or catastrophic warming.

2. The opening statement above is scientifically useless. "Climate change" is "happening now." Well uh...yes, it is. It can also be very easily shown that the climate was changing in the Devonian Period.

And?

Most of the modest warming that occurred in the 20th century occurred in northern latitudes, at night, and in winter. The tropics did not warm and the idea that the small warming that occurred, or even substantially greater planetary warming, causes increases in storm frequency or intensity has been long debunked. Hurricane frequency and intensity peaked in the 1930s, and we are presently in a very quiet era as to major Atlantic or Pacific storms of this kind.

What you're describing here is weather, Quasi, and any particular weather event isn't evidence for or against the hypothesis of AGW.

Oh, and one more point that cannot be overemphasized: it isn't warming. That ceased around 1995, and a marked cooling trend set in after 2002.

[_Res Ipsa]

If only Droopy would learn from the first monkey....

[_Darth J]

It's hilarious that you are posting this on a day when high temperature records are being broken all over the Western U.S.

Which, of course, has no relevance to anything at all save precisely what's been going on on this earth since the Cambrian Period.

What exactly is the metric you are using to determine when scientific evidence is correct and when the dogma of the LDS Church is correct? The Cambrian Period was a vast amount of time involving reproduction, death, and evolution of countless organisms. The LDS Church has consistently and unequivocally asserted for over 180 years that there was no death or reproduction for any form of life on this planet until the fall of Adam and Eve circa 4,000 B.C.E.

Will you please clarify whether it's the scientific evidence or the LDS dogma that is correct, and how you determined that, when referencing the Cambrian Period?

[_Darth J]

The opening statement above is scientifically useless. "Climate change" is "happening now." Well uh...yes, it is. It can also be very easily shown that the climate was changing in the Devonian Period.

And?

Murder is happening now in large American urban areas. It can also be very easily shown that homo sapiens were killing each other 200,000 years ago.

Therefore, the high murder rates in modern American cities and the causes of those high murder rates do not matter, because the same general thing happened a long time ago for different reasons.

[_Droopy]

Murder is happening now in large American urban areas. It can also be very easily shown that homo sapiens were killing each other 200,000 years ago.

Therefore, the high murder rates in modern American cities and the causes of those high murder rates do not matter, because the same general thing happened a long time ago for different reasons.

Unfortunately, Johnnie, You've unwittingly made my case for me. It is not, and I never claimed (clever little linguistic warlock that you are) that the causes don't matter. What I said, and the scientific facts of the matter are, that the key underlying causes of the minor warming experienced in the 20th century are, precisely, essentially unknown, as are the causes of the many much more drastic warming/cooling cycles in the geologic past. "Climate change" and claims that "it" is "happening" are not scientific statements, but trivialities. They demonstrate nothing and are evidence for nothing.

In the Devonian period, climate was changing. In the Cretaceous Period, climate was changing. In the Pleistocene, climate was changing. During the Holocene, climate has been changing. Climate is changing now and climate will change in the future. Pointing out that climate has changed over the last century is simply banal. It makes no evidential claim regarding AGW at all, scientifically. It does, however, assume to make a factual claim because it assumes a great deal that has never stood up to empirical scientific scrutiny and which which has not been shown to have scientific merit, but which became the received wisdom through over 20 years of relentless pop culture propagandization and agitprop. It assumes, in other words, the ideology of AGW, and must, because no such empirically justified theory of AGW has ever emerged at all.

Neither the causes of the climate change in the Devonian, Ordovician, Jurassic, Cretaceous, or any other age, including that which occurred in the 20th century, are well understood, the GCMs cannot predict them as hindcasts (unless programmed directly to predict them, which, of course, demonstrates exactly nothing about the predictive capacity of GCMs) and failed to predict the last 11 or so years of cooling entirely. There is no evidence that CO2 drives planetary warming, ever has, or, given the laws of physics and its vanishingly small presence in the atmosphere, possibly could.

The warming of the last century was quite modest, normative in manifestation, and well within known natural variability over historic and geologic timescales.

[_Darth J]

1. We know that all your assertions about climate change prior to Adam and Eve exiting the Garden of Eden circa 6,000 B.C.E. are false, because there was no death for any form of life before the Fall.

2. The fact that climate change has happened in the past does not address whether climate change is happening at a different rate now and for different reasons.

Do you have the same expertise in climatology as you do in constitutional law? Just wondering. Further to your expertise on these various matters, based on your own vigorous study of Heritage Foundation editorials and AM radio chatter, will you tell me again how the Supreme Court held that the commerce clause allows Congress to compel people to buy health insurance in National Association of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius? I loved your trenchant insights that you shared about that case.

Would you rate your expertise in science generally, and climatology in particular, as high than your expertise in the legal system, about the same as your expertise in the legal system, or lower than your expertise in the legal system?

P.S. You are explicitly saying that the causes don't matter. For example, when you observed, contrary to the teachings of the restored gospel, that there was climate change in the Cambrian Period, followed up with, "And?" This clearly indicates that you think it does not matter. You are also attacking the supposed motives of scientists who have determined that man-made climate change is real, which supposed motives are irrelevant to whether man-made climate change is real.

[_Droopy]

1. We know that all your assertions about climate change prior to Adam and Eve exiting the Garden of Eden circa 6,000 B.C.E. are false, because there was no death for any form of life before the Fall.

There was certainly no death during the phase, or period in which the earth was in that state. The several hundred million years prior to the Edenic state are another question entirely.

2. The fact that climate change has happened in the past does not address whether climate change is happening at a different rate now and for different reasons.

As a matter of logical rigor, that's quite true. Unfortunately, Darth, AGW is bereft of and/or has been empirically and theoretically falsified across the entire spectrum of all its major claims. Not one has held up to empirical scrutiny since the end of the 80s. If the climate is changing now, just over the last century, at a different rate (which we know it isn't, so that point is moot) or for different reasons than it has been changing for the last five hundred million years (driven by a trace greenhouse gas comprising 4% of the 2% of the atmosphere that is greenhouse gas, and then only by anthropogenic sources of CO2, which comprise about 3% of that 4%), then there must be empirical, quantifiable evidence to support such claims.

And that's where the rubber meets the road, because there is none, and never has been, and that's the scientific problem with DAGW/CAGW. The political and economic problems are another matter, and, although directly connected to the scientific problems (and corruption of a substantial portion of the earth science community), far vaster in scope and implications.

I snipped the rest of your usual irrelevant ad hominem verbiage for obvious reasons.