Jose L. Duarte
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Nimble skepticism (Updated)

6/5/2015

27 Comments

 
The Karl et al. study highlights something I've been thinking about lately. I don't know if the Karl paper is important, good, or bad. It claims to debunk the slowdown in surface warming. Other papers will claim the opposite. This won't be the end of it, but imagine that it was – imagine that we saw a decisive breakthrough in climate science, or a series of them, that debunked the slowdown, and another body of work that settled on 3.1 °C for ECS.

If you're a climate skeptic, or better yet, a person who is currently skeptical of burdensome future human-caused warming, you should be ready not to be.

You're presumably skeptical because of issues you see with the evidence, levels of certainty or uncertainty, perhaps features of climate science and its methods or predictive track record.

All of those issues can in theory be resolved by new evidence, or new types of evidence and methods.

If you're a skeptic or a lukewarmer I wouldn't assume that the evidence is going to roll your way. (ECS seems to have had a bit of a downward run over the last few years, but who knows.)

You should be ready for anything, evidence-wise. Don't get too comfortable. Life is full of surprises, and so is nature. Earth's climate answers to no one. It will do whatever it does. It is completely uncoupled from our desires, agendas, elections, ideologies, beliefs, arguments, pride, etc.

I don't think people should hitch their ideological wagons to the behavior of a planetary climate system. That's odd. This applies to everyone of course.

Scientific notes:

1. Measuring surface temperatures sure is complicated. In fact, as Gavin Schmidt said, global mean temperature isn't measured per se. It's estimated. Scientists can come along in 2015 and redo the temperature estimates for the past several decades. That's strange. Most sciences don't work that way, don't have this constant process of re-estimation of past measured variables. If scientists can redo temperature estimates in 2015, they can presumably redo them in 2016, and 2017, and perhaps in 2023. I think we need to understand this better. Maybe they're closing in on maximum feasible bias reduction and we won't see much adjustment in the future, but this should be explained.

2. Knowing about or believing in human-caused climate change is nothing like knowing about gravity or that the earth is not flat. This is not like looking at something and seeing that it's there, or figuring out the horizon, or dropping a ball. It's so much more complicated, driven by inferential estimates and wicked statistics. Climate activists should be much less mean to skeptics, and stop trying to treat this issue as though people are obligated to march to the claims of a young, complex, and revisionist science. I don't think people are obligated to believe in things they cannot observe or confirm directly except in special circumstances. Believing in everything the media folds under "science" is probably unwise, and it's unclear how a rational knower is supposed to navigate our media/science culture. I don't have any kind of prescription.


Caring

The eternal caveat applies: The science is just the science. It doesn't have to matter to you, not politically, not philosophically or personally. People get to choose their political philosophies and ethical systems, and you don't need to catastrophize any arbitrary level of future adversity if you don't want to. You don't have to care about the science of obesity, or the science of testicular cancer, or the science of sadness, or an increase in storm count. There are lots of things a person could choose to care about or not care about, and it's unclear why anyone has to care about any particular science or diffuse future risks.

There's a mindset in modern politics that wants to "Do Something!" about everything. I think we'll find that some of it is driven by affluence – that people worry about more things, smaller things, the more affluent a society becomes. In any case a person's quality of life is powerfully shaped by their perspective and framing – we know how profound that can be, the glass half full vs. half empty mindset. It's strange that we never seem to apply that wisdom to environmental issues. You could put me on the gulf coast and jack up the hurricane count by a third, and I wouldn't care if I had someone to love and books to read. There are so many other things going on in a human life than weather and sea levels, so much more beyond material and economic concerns. Some people (not me) would move to Mars if they had a chance, even though the climate would be so hostile that they'd be confined to quarters.

That's not just about affluent American space geeks – most people in the world don't care about climate change, even when forced to choose six "priorities" in a biased UN survey. The UN wouldn't let me participate in the survey because I couldn't find six things on their list that were priorities to me. The list is framed from a top-down, government-centric bias that enjoins people to express vague wishes for "better" roads, health care, food, and so forth. They don't offer priorities like "end the drug war", "deregulate immigration", "cut taxes", "eliminate income taxes", "free market healthcare", or "get the UN out of my life." 
It was designed for the UN to be able to say that adults around the world want governments to deliver things like "affordable and nutritious food" and "action on climate change". The items and forced choices will systematically discriminate against non-leftist participants, as well as people who don't think there are lots of problems they need authority figures to solve – such people won't even be allowed to submit their answers. The stated goal of the survey is "that global leaders can be informed as they begin the process of defining the new development agenda for the world", what economist William Easterly would call the "Tyranny of Experts". And still, even with the rigged design, people don't choose climate change.

Relatedly, Bjorn Lomborg was correct to say that Pacific Islanders don't care about it. (Choose Oceania in the dropdown.) Pretty much no one does. It doesn't make the cut on any continent or region that they list. As for affluence, start with the Low HDI countries option and work your way up – the poorest countries care the least. As per my hypothesis above, more people care as you work up HDI, yet it never makes the cut even in the richest. I didn't know that until today. I thought environmentalism was more popular than this, but I now realize that I probably just know a lot of environmentalists.

27 Comments
Bdaabat
6/4/2015 10:47:28 pm

Most people that self label as environmentalists don't know much about the environment. Most people that self label as environmentalists don't know much about math, science, or economics. It seems that most folks that self identify as environmentalists are really interested more in appearing to care about the environment and than actually caring about the environment. For example: when queried, those self identifying as being environmentalists have not been supportive of technologies that would produce ample and inexpensive access to energy, even if that new energy source were non polluting. That's truly a remarkable acknowledgement... Those that self label as environmentalists REALLY aren't interested in doing anything for the environment. The belief of the self identified environmentalist is that people are bad and that anything that helps people is bad. The "environment" seems more like the convenient excuse to retard anything that contributes to overall human success. This is sad and ironic... Not only are humans not valued in this world view, but the stated goal (helping the "environment") is negatively impacted by this world view.

So, we have folks like Tom Karl et al going through machinations and reprocessing of existing data, making dubious additional adjustments of data, ignoring specialist literature on the subject that suggests different methods to use on this data, all designed to come to a predetermined "finding" to support the political narrative. Very sad.

Bruce

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Hide
6/5/2015 04:30:13 am

Gavin Schmidt says now that 'measuring surface temps is an estimate'.
But a few months ago he told us all point blank 2014 was 'the hottest year ever' i.e a plain measurement of temps, a measurement per se. He cannot be right both times.
But in climate science, apparently he can. Just like astrology.

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Gavin
6/5/2015 04:49:16 am

100% wrong. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/01/thoughts-on-2014-and-ongoing-temperature-trends/

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Hide
6/5/2015 02:13:49 pm

100% right, Gavin. Read your own link!

Dissembling is unattractive in a public servant.

Chad
6/5/2015 01:55:59 pm

Exactly. NASA released a statement ( with no caveats) that 2014 was the warmest year on record.

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/january/nasa-determines-2014-warmest-year-in-modern-record

Gavin and others appeared on television supporting it, and not once did he mention uncertainties during the media blitz.

Gavin Schmidt:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30852588

"It shows very clearly that it has been the warmest year on record in the oceans but it wasn't quite the warmest year in the land records but combined it did give us the warmest year," he explained.

Once again, no mention of any uncertainties.

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Chad
6/5/2015 02:06:41 pm

I think I was wrong with regards to television appearances by Gavin promoting it.

James NV
6/5/2015 03:57:11 pm

Hansen went around telling people the oceans were going to boil. Some people defended him by saying he qualified the remarks in a previous book he wrote. Is that kosher?

Joe Duarte link
6/11/2015 02:24:31 pm

Mr. Hide, Gavin appears to be right in calling your claim false. At the very least, I'd say it was oversimplified. In the referenced essay, Gavin says:

"This is also despite the fact that differences of a few hundredths of a degree are simply not that important to any key questions or issues that might be of some policy relevance. A record year doesn’t appreciably affect attribution of past trends, nor the projection of future ones. It doesn’t re-calibrate estimated impacts or affect assessments of regional vulnerabilities. Records are obviously more expected in the presence of an underlying trend, but whether they occur in 2005, 2010 and 2014, as opposed to 2003, 2007 and 2015 is pretty much irrelevant."

And later says: "In both analyses, the values for 2014 are the warmest, but are statistically close to that of 2010 and 2005."

The only beef I have with his essay is that he traffics in the bizarre "odds of this being natural" statistics, which assumes years are randomly sampled or uncorrelated with each other. Since years and decades are not drawn from a hat, that whole statistical enterprise is invalid and misleading. He even notes the assumptions of the statistics, but still reports them as though they mean something, which surprised me. He seems to come an inch away from the logical inference that they're useless, but he stops short. I wish he would've rebuked them. After all, not every claim and tactic in support of human-caused warming or its policy implications is going to be valid or accurate, and I think people should be more agile in rebuking deceptive propaganda and bad stats.

(Unless he and his colleagues think the public is severely under-responding to the issue and that every tool at the propagandist's disposal should be used lest the climate/humanity suffer catastrophic harm. If you're convinced catastrophe is coming and can be averted by your efforts, it might be reasonable to conclude that the ends justify the means, depending on the ends and the means. But it's very easy for humans to convince themselves of this narrative, and history is littered with catastrophizers and zealots who were wrong. People should be careful with this.)

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Joe Duarte link
6/11/2015 02:25:03 pm

Mr. Hide, Gavin appears to be right in calling your claim false. At the very least, I'd say it was oversimplified. In the referenced essay, Gavin says:

"This is also despite the fact that differences of a few hundredths of a degree are simply not that important to any key questions or issues that might be of some policy relevance. A record year doesn’t appreciably affect attribution of past trends, nor the projection of future ones. It doesn’t re-calibrate estimated impacts or affect assessments of regional vulnerabilities. Records are obviously more expected in the presence of an underlying trend, but whether they occur in 2005, 2010 and 2014, as opposed to 2003, 2007 and 2015 is pretty much irrelevant."

And later says: "In both analyses, the values for 2014 are the warmest, but are statistically close to that of 2010 and 2005."

The only beef I have with his essay is that he traffics in the bizarre "odds of this being natural" statistics, which assumes years are randomly sampled or uncorrelated with each other. Since years and decades are not drawn from a hat, that whole statistical enterprise is invalid and misleading. He even notes the assumptions of the statistics, but still reports them as though they mean something, which surprised me. He seems to come an inch away from the logical inference that they're useless, but he stops short. I wish he would've rebuked them. After all, not every claim and tactic in support of human-caused warming or its policy implications is going to be valid or accurate, and I think people should be more agile in rebuking deceptive propaganda and bad stats.

(Unless he and his colleagues think the public is severely under-responding to the issue and that every tool at the propagandist's disposal should be used lest the climate/humanity suffer catastrophic harm. If you're convinced catastrophe is coming and can be averted by your efforts, it might be reasonable to conclude that the ends justify the means, depending on the ends and the means. But it's very easy for humans to convince themselves of this narrative, and history is littered with catastrophizers and zealots who were wrong. People should be careful with this.)

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Jose Duarte link
6/11/2015 02:27:13 pm

More on the stats: http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/hottest-year-on-record

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Jim Bouldin link
6/5/2015 04:31:56 am

Excellent essay--thanks for penning and sharing.

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Terry Cain
6/5/2015 04:37:43 am

Excellent post, Jose.
I don't care about CO2 levels because I don't believe it has any effect.
This means that:
I don't need to worry about global warming.
I don't need to worry about my carbon footprint.
I don't need to think myself a hypocrite because of my affluent lifestyle.
I can believe that economic development for poor countries is a great good and should be encouraged.
Of course, if one day CO2 levels are shown to be a problem, I will have to change my tentatively held beliefs.
Interestingly, several speakers at meetings on the issue have said that if you ask an audience of believers in CAGW whether it would be good or bad if they turned out to be wrong, the great majority indicate that they think that it would be bad news. As if losing a cherished belief is worse than ecological disaster.

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Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd.
6/5/2015 04:55:52 am

Terry, I agree with everything you said. The biggest differences between skeptics and alarmists is that we skeptics are willing to admit if climate sensitivity is high, global warming would be a problem and we should mitigate. However, if climate sensitivity is low (and evidence continues to mount that it is) there is no problem. But the alarmists will never concede this point.

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James NV
6/5/2015 02:36:53 pm

I disagree. While YOU might be willing to change your tune, most people are divided along ideological lines for a reason. If the evidence really did indicate a major global issue, I bet only a smallish percent of people would change their tune. (It must be delightful for you folk to have the science line up once in a while...;)

On the other hand, I suspect a global issue like CAGW, if true, would be dealt with 'internally'. Who in their right mind would leave a major issue like that to the whims of the masses?!

Slywolfe
6/5/2015 11:41:39 pm

I don't think global warming, even if real, will be a problem.
Affordable, available energy and air conditioning are all the mitigation needed.

Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd.
6/5/2015 04:54:09 am

Jose,

I like this post. Would you agree that climate science needs to establish running averages of atmospheric co2 and GAT (global average temperature) I thinking starting at the year 1800 or 1850 really tells us nothing. In fact I would go so far as to stay many alarmists sound like creationists when they tell us going back further in geological history is unimportant.

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James NV
6/5/2015 12:19:34 pm

I find it very hard to believe that for every degree of warming caused directly by CO2, the climate warms [up to] an additional 3.5 degrees extra. Apparently that's just how the climate reacts to extra heat: it amplifies it by up to 450%.

But yeah, I'm willing to weigh the evidence. I used to firmly believe in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. One day I decided to take a closer look at the skeptics arguments, firmly believing I would find fake studies using fake data pumped out by right-wing think tanks...

I'm still in a semi-state of shock. As a left leaning Canadian living in the "greenest" area in Canada, I lose friends if I express doubts. That surprised me. I look at people differently now. Group-think, mob mentality, mass psychology, madness of crowds... It's fascinating. And a little scary.

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Paul Matthews link
6/7/2015 12:45:39 am

James, you have followed a much-travelled path. I wrote a blog post about others who have been affected:
https://ipccreport.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/converts-to-scepticism/

The syndrome you report suffering from has not been given a name. Perhaps it could be called something like "post climate reality awareness syndrome".

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Russ R.
6/7/2015 04:40:14 am

I am, and always have been, a skeptic. Not just about climate change... about everything.

Until I can see compelling evidence, I don't believe it. That doesn't mean I disbelieve it... or that I believe the opposite to be true. It just means I treat is as an unconfirmed possibility, rather than a fact.

With regard to climate, I was skeptical of Al Gore's alarmist predictions circa 2006/2007. Their gross implausibility is what prompted me to actually look into the subject, and to do so objectively. As I've uncovered evidence, and as new findings have arisen, my beliefs have evolved accordingly.

I was initially skeptical of the legitimacy of the surface temperature record... critics talked about the urban heat island effect, and the disparate coverage of weather stations. Well, Berkeley Earth did a pretty thorough re-evaluation of the data, from a skeptical starting point, and confirmed that the reported temperature increase is legitimate. I've crossed that off my list of "Things I'm Skeptical About".

There is still the ongoing matter of certain keepers of the climate record frequently "re-adjusting" their past data, and typically in the same direction, to show past temperatures as cooler, and current temperatures as warmer. Karl et al. 2015, is another example of this. I'm still skeptical.

But let's assume for the moment that Karl et al. are correct. They report that warming during the supposed "hiatus" period (1998-2012) was actually 0.086 deg C/decade +/- 0.075 (90% confidence).

First, they've confirmed that the actual warming during the "hiatus period" was not significantly different from zero at 95% confidence, particularly when they add in the uncertainty of their corrections (see Fig 1.)

Second, they've confirmed that the actual warming was nowhere close to the .275 deg C/decade "best estimate" warming prediction given by IPCC FAR (1990), and less than half of the 0.182 deg C/ decade "best estimate" of IPCC SAR (1995).

They haven't proven the models wrong, because the models weren't specifically predicting warming from 1998-2012... they were predicting warming from 1990 out to 2030, and 2100 respectively. That said, we're still stuck in a situation where the models are predicting one thing, and the planet is doing something quite different.

Here's what could change that. Antarctica.

Recently the southern hemisphere has been gaining sea ice. That's exactly the opposite of what should be happening in a warming world, and nobody's models would have predicted it. Also, nobody should expect that this anomaly should persist indefinitely. Since sea ice reflects incoming solar radiation, the increase in Antarctic sea ice has been keeping temperatures down (acting as a negative feedback), and temporarily reducing observed climate sensitivity. If (or when) Antarctic ice starts behaving normally, the sign on that feedback should flip from negative to positive, and warming should accelerate, possibly bringing observed climate sensitivity closer to estimates from paleo data and climate models.

Time will tell... and whatever the evidence shows is what I'll believe.

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Kristophr
6/9/2015 04:35:09 am

Show me one model that correctly back predicts existing data ... i.e., starting the model 50 years in the past, and then correctly "predicting" the current climate.

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MikeR
6/8/2015 05:36:53 am

Great post. "You could put me on the gulf coast and jack up the hurricane count by a third, and I wouldn't care if I had someone to love and books to read." +1 Doesn't mean it's not important, but it sure means that there can be a lot of other issues that are more important to a person.

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Paul Matthews link
6/8/2015 07:35:41 pm

The first part of this post is odd, in the same way as the one before last, "All sides" was. You are asking a question to the skeptics that you really ought to be asking to the climate scientists.

You are saying that the skeptics ought to be prepared to change their minds if the data doesn't support them. Huh?
The UK Met Office said there would be 0.3C warming over the last decade. Lean & Rind said there would be a strong resumption of warming 2009-2014. Several climate scientists said the Arctic ice would have all disappeared by now. Despite predictions and dubious claims, there has been no increase in hurricanes. We've been repeatedly told that this year or last year, or the year before, was the last chance to save the planet.

Now an honest scientist at this point would admit they got some things wrong and accept that there was something wrong in the assumptions that they built into their models. And in any normal branch of science this is what would happen. But in (postnormal?) climate science this doesn't happen, because of the politics and psychology involved. To do so would be to abandon the political goals of the left-biased academics, and admit that the evil skeptics had got something right, neither of which is something climate scientists can face. So instead, they brazenly go back to the data, seek (and of course find) some excuse to adjust it.

In any other field of science this would be a scandal and completely unacceptable. Imagine there's a new cancer drug being developed and tested. A thorough trial is conducted and the results show no difference between the control group and the test group. After looking at the results, the researchers decide that the data needs to be adjusted because there was some other factor that they think they need to adjust for, and after adjustment, it looks like the drug works after all....








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MikeR
6/9/2015 01:26:01 am

Dunno. Seems to me that Duarte is making sense. It should apply to the consensus scientists, but it should apply to skeptics as well. I have no idea whether Karl et al is correct, but if it is good work, why shouldn't all skeptics say, well: there still seems to be a Pause in tropospheric temperatures, and in land surface temperatures, and in the deep ARGO floats too, but these sea surface temperatures do seem to be going up. Okay, let's see where we are now.

Why should their first reaction be, almost uniformly, "There they go again adjusting temperatures to fool us. And why does _every single adjustment_ always make global warming look WORSE!!!" [as if they have a clue what every single adjustment does, and indeed Steve Mosher from BEST says that they pretty much even out.]
You can behave as if you're investigating a corrupt government conspiracy, but don't be surprised if people treat you as a conspiracy theorist instead of a scientist.

However, not all skeptics react like that; I wish none of them did. Same for consensus scientists.

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Paul Milenkovic
6/9/2015 02:58:46 am

It generally accepted that of the CO2 that humanity is emitting, only about half of it is appearing as the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, with the rest going into some not decided upon sink. But as for the increase in CO2 that we are worrying will cause runious warming, it is widely accepted that most if not all of that is the result of the human-industrial contribution.

How do we know this? According to

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/outreach/isotopes/c13tellsus.html

as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing from fossil fuel burning, cement making, and forest clearing, we are putting a gas into the atmosphere that is deficient in C13, a rare but stable isotope with the more common C12 accounting for 99% of the rest. It turns out that the carbon in plants is deficient in C13 by about 2 percent of the 1 percent of the normal C13/C12 ratio. The fossil fuels are deficient in C13 by about the same amount, which is offered as further confirmation that the fossil fuels come from . . . fossil plants. The claims pro and con about abiotic oil are not important here, simply that the fossil fuels have about the same depletion in C13 as do plant.

In fact, the C13/C12 isotope ratio in the linked graph are declining as total CO2 is increasing, which is to be expected when we are adding a gas to the atmosphere that is deficient in C13. This is often offered in a condenscending tone as proof that people who don't accept that the increase in atmospheric CO2 comes from human activites are horribly misinformed or are ideologically rigid.

If you look at that graph carefully, the annual swings in atmospheric CO2 have complementary changes in the C13/C12 ratio that you would expect if all of the change in CO2 can be attributed to gas depleted in C13 at the ratio of plant matter. But if that is the case, the multi-decade slope in the total CO2 is more than 3 times too large to account for the much shallower slope of the C13/C12 curve.

We are not talking about fractions of a degree C here or there. We are talking about the idea that humanity is accountable for the bulk of the atmospheric CO2 increase being way off -- by more than a factor of 3. And only a handful of people are talking about this.

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Anon
4/28/2017 04:00:26 pm

"But if that is the case, the multi-decade slope in the total CO2 is more than 3 times too large to account for the much shallower slope of the C13/C12 curve."

The slopes of these two curves are not directly comparable. First we have the point that they are using entirely different scales. Second, even if the scales were somehow normalized, the slope of the C13/C12 ratio is dependent on the initial concentration and the concentration of the added CO2, as well as the rate of increase in the CO2.

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Doug Cotton
7/17/2015 04:05:55 pm


<b>If you want to know why planetary surface temperatures are what they are, then read my three comments starting <a href="http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/07/new-pause-busting-temperature-dataset-implies-only-1-5-c-climate-sensitivity/#comment-195300">here</a> and feel free to discuss on that thread.</b>

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MikeR
8/30/2015 02:12:25 am

Extensive discussion of your and Verhaggan's papers at judithcurry.
http://judithcurry.com/2015/08/27/the-conceits-of-consensus/

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    José L. Duarte

    Social Psychology, Scientific Validity, and Research Methods.

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