Do you really think global warming is based on good science?

Question

After reading this new peer-reviewed report by David Holland on the Hockey Stick controversy, it really makes me wonder how people can have any faith in the global warming scientists.

Read the actions of Michael Mann, Gerald North and others. Read especially the story David Deming tells of a climatolgist saying to him "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." WOW. Scientists plotting to fudge the data so it looks like today's temperatures are not within normal variability.

Read about the Divergence Problem and how tree-ring widths do not accurately reflect temps in the last 30 years or so.

The testability requirement of science means data must be archived so others researchers can test it. Lonnie Thompson, Rosanne D’Arrigo, Gabrielle Hegerl, Jan Esper, Edward Cook, Tim Osborn, Keith Briffa and Michael Mann are all mentioned by name in the report for failure to archive data.
http://homepages.tesco.net/~kate-and-david/2007/Holland(2007).pdf

Is this good science?

Keith, if we throw the Hockey Stick out ( I already have), then we are back to admitting there is nothing exceptional about our current weather. Yes, CO2 levels are higher than usual but that means the plants grow better and we grow more food and famines decrease. Not a bad thing. Also we know that internal climate variation is mainly from oceanic oscillations. You should read up on the PDO, NAO and ENSO. When they are all in a warm phase (as they were in 1998 and 2006), it can become quite warm indeed. So indeed, what else is there to prove?

Bob, you write: "You can't explain the temperature rise naturally, you have to include man made greenhouse gases." Not true. I could tune a computer model to replicate temperature using just oceanic oscillations without much reliance on CO2 at all.

In the link provided, Gerald North said: “There are so many adjustables in the models and there is a limited amount of observational data, so we can always bring the models into agreement with the data.”

North also said: “We’ve been breaking our backs on [greenhouse] detection, but I found the 1000-year records more convincing than any of our detection studies.”

Now that these 1,000 year records are proven wrong, what are they left with? Not much in the way of good science. These people do not even archive their data, methods and source code!

Amy, what you are doing is adding sites that agree with your position. You are not being open minded about the issue at all. Are you familiar with the standards of science? Do you know what the testability requirement is? Are you familiar with the concepts of openness, data archiving and replication? If a person does not follow these standards of science, he is not a scientist at all but a pseudoscientist. Climate science is full of these pseudoscientsts who refuse to archive or share data and back each other up with other flawed studies. There are many people who think the skeptics are just paid by Big Oil or Big Coal and some have. I have told people here not to trust Steve Milloy or Patrick Michaels because they have taken money from Exxon. The scientists I quote have never taken money from Big Oil.

You need to learn which scientists are respected and who is not and why.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_data_archiving
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseuoscience

Amy, I was wong. I see now that you have a link to Roger Pielke's group. Pielke is both credible and a skeptic who has been very critical of the IPCC. Keep reading his now retired blog and you will learn a lot. His conclusions are here:
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/09/02/summary-conclusions-of-climate-science/

Answer 1

The science of global warming is truly flawed. Science should be held to objective standards, verifiable by anyone, not by some consensus.

Clearly there is an agenda behind the science.

Here's a snapshot from the Goddard Institute, two sets of data posted one year apart.

http://www.crichton-official.com/NPC-NewVersion_files/image014.jpg

Clearly the new page was modified to present the data desired to form a specific opinion rather than supporting facts.

I also imagine a scientist working on global warming for 10-20 years now coming to the terms that all of his lives work wasn't true, that he worked on the wrong theory for all those years. I guess that would be hard to give up.

Answer 2

Absolutely. The best that there is. Proof (in the links, not my few words of explanation):

You can't explain the temperature rise naturally, you have to include man made greenhouse gases:

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png

In past natural warmings, CO2 didn'rt rise until hundreds of years later, as warming ocean waters released it. This time, THERE IS NO LAG, because CO2 is mostly causing the warming.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13

It's not the Sun. Measurements show solar radiation has been decreasing for several years, while temperature increases.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6290228.stm

Global warming scientists have proof. The "skeptics" have only unproven theories. Most all of those theories are refuted here:

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462

The bottom line:

"I wasn’t convinced by a person or any interest group—it was the data that got me. I was utterly convinced of this connection between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change. And I was convinced that if we didn’t do something about this, we would be in deep trouble.”

Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly, USN (Ret.)
Former NASA Administrator and Shuttle Astronaut

There's a lot less controversy about this is the real world than there is on Yahoo answers:

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/412.php?lb=hmpg1&pnt=412&nid=&id=

And vastly less controversy in the scientific community than you might guess from the few skeptics talked about here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

"There's a better scientific consensus on this [climate change] than on any issue I know... Global warming is almost a no-brainer at this point. You really can't find intelligent, quantitative arguments to make it go away."

Dr. Jerry Mahlman, NOAA

ADD Keith P's stuff here, please. Or move mine up there, no difference. And then what intelligent person is going to believe a few skeptics instead?

Good websites for more info:

http://profend.com/global-warming/
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/
http://www.realclimate.org
"climate science from climate scientists"

Answer 3

I don't know David Holland from Michael Mann from Gerald North from David Deming. I follow the general lines of research as presented under the auspices of various agencies of the United States government, the United Kingdom -- in other words, various govenments of the world -- as well as research done by various branches of renowned universities and research centers. The only 2 names I acknowlege are Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, as I've been following their research and the growing buzz surrounding their so-called "stabilization wedges." They are Co-Directors of The Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton University.

As for your "good" science designation. Webster's defines science as knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method. So anything that works toward that goal is, I suppose, "good" science, and must then be corroborated and supported by further research.

Yes, I think the case for human-induced climate change is built upon "good" science. Everything every credible scientist says may not come to be true, but that doesn't discredit all the work that has been done since the 1950's. The groundswell that has led to controversy has surfaced in the last decade, and is political in nature. The science is the science is the science, and isn't "good" or "bad," it just is, and because so much of the information being produced is very technical, and doesn't necessary translate well to the layman, it's hard for the public to really wrap themselves around this issue. And then when a spokesman for the cause emerges, he becomes a lightening rod for all the skeptics and naysayers and kooks, and winning the Nobel Peace Prize just seemed to stoke those fires for that crowd! Among the general populace, however, it gives credibility to the topic.

So I just take it upon myself to slog through all the sites offered by others, add ones that I feel to be credible to the list, and share them to others who seem to be open minded enough to want to know more.

If you are of that ilk, check them out. There's a lot to be learned, including the terminology, as not everyone that says global warming means the same thing.

Answer 4

Peer Review LOL


Richard Horton editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, has said that "The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability -- not the validity -- of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong."

Peer review, in scientific journals, assumes that the article reviewed has been honestly written, and the process is not designed to detect fraud. The reviewers usually do not have full access to the data from which the paper has been written and some elements have to be taken on trust. It is not usually practical for the reviewer to reproduce the author's work, unless the paper deals with purely theoretical problems which the reviewer can follow in a step-by-step manner.

The number and proportion of articles which are detected as fraudulent at review stage is unknown. Some instances of outright scientific fraud and scientific misconduct have gone through review and were detected only after other groups tried and failed to replicate the published results. An example is the case of Jan Hendrik Schön, in which a total of fifteen papers were accepted for publication in the top ranked journals Nature and Science following the usual peer review process. All fifteen were found to be fraudulent and were subsequently withdrawn. The fraud was eventually detected, not by peer review, but after publication when other groups tried and failed to reproduce the results of the paper.

Answer 5

So you're saying: science doesn't work, and you have scientific proof of that. Hmmmm.
Well then, just throw out the hockey stick if you want. It's a very small part of a very large picture.

1. World surface temperatures are getting warmer, and this trend has accelerated since the mid 1970's. Almost no scientist in the 21st century has disputed this basic fact, even among the most diehard GW skeptics. Here is the data from NASA / GISS:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
... and from the UK's Hadley Centre:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/

As I said, even GW skeptics accept that it's getting warmer; the major dispute is what's causing it: human beings, through increased greenhouse gases in the air? Or natural causes, like the Sun? The dispute is more political than scientific, though, because the scientific case for increased greenhouse effect is rock solid.

If the Sun is causing the current warmth, then we're getting more energy, and the whole atmosphere should be getting warmer. If it's greenhouse, then we're getting the same amount of energy, but it's being distributed differently: more heat is trapped at the surface, and less heat is escaping to the stratosphere. So if it's the Sun, the stratosphere should be warming, but if it's greenhouse, the stratosphere should be cooling.

In fact, the stratosphere has been on a long-term cooling trend ever since we've been keeping radiosonde balloon records in the 1950's. Here's the data:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadat/images/update_images/global_upper_air.png
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadat/hadat2/hadat2_monthly_global_mean.txt
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/sterin/sterin.html

2. If it's the Sun, we're getting more energy during the day, and daytime temperatures should be rising fastest. But if it's greenhouse, we're losing less heat at night, and nighttime temperatures should be rising fastest. So if it's the sun, the difference between day and night temperatures should be increasing, but if it's greenhouse, the day-night difference should be decreasing.

In fact, the daily temperature range has been decreasing throughout the 20th century. Here's the science:
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0450(1984)023%3C1489:DDTRIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0477(1993)074%3C1007%3AANPORG%3E2.0.CO%3B2
http://www.bom.gov.au/bmrc/clfor/cfstaff/jma/2004GL019998.pdf

3. Total solar irradiance has been measured by satellite since 1978, and during that time it has shown the normal 11-year cycle, but no long-term trend. Here's the data:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/solarda3.html

4. Scientists have looked closely at the solar hypothesis and have strongly refuted it. Here's the peer-reviewed science:
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/mpa/publications/preprints/pp2006/MPA2001.pdf

5. CO2 levels in the air were stable for 10,000 years prior to the industrial revolution, at about 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv). Since 1800, CO2 levels have risen 38%, to 384 ppmv, with no end in sight. Here's the modern data...
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
... and the ice core data ...
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/law/law.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/domec/domec_epica_data.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/vostok_data.html
... and a graph showing how it fits together:
http://www.columbusnavigation.com/co2.html

6. We know that the excess CO2 in the air is caused by burning of fossil fuels, for two reasons. First, because the sharp rise in atmospheric CO2 started exactly when humans began burning coal in large quantities (see the graph linked above); and second, because when we do isotopic analysis of the CO2 we find increasing amounts of "old" carbon combined with "young" oxygen. Here are the peer-reviewed papers:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984JGR....8911731S
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mksg/teb/1999/00000051/00000002/art00005
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/256/5053/74

So what's left to prove?

NOTE to Ben O:

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It absorbs energy in the infrared. What happens to that energy? It doesn't just disappear.

Answer 6

Its not science in the way other topics are. The reason is its all based of modeling and its the old "garbage in garbage out" thing. The models are great but what goes in is spun and a lot of data is not included. For example, the geothermal heat is not even a factor the model knows about. And what ever warms the ocean is mostly a geothermal source that has not even been discovered yet.

Answer 7

Keith,

There is one thing left to prove - causation.

I can see a drain discharging into the sea and watch the water level on the shore rise over a period of hours. I can quantify that the water is indeed entering the ocean from the drain and that would have a positive efect on the level of the sea. I can also generate mountains of data on how the sea level really is rising over the course of a few hours. What I can't do is prove causation, just like nobody can prove that CO2 is the main cause of any observed climate change.

Answer 8

Yes. Extremely accurate science. Scott, why in the world would cautioning people about global warming be all about politics? Most agencies, scientists and concerned citizens who study global warming are working for non-profit agencies. Most people who deny global warming are connected to industries. What harm is there in conserving Earth's resources anyway?

Answer 9

No, I know that it is.

Why are you so obsessed with the Mann graph? Get over it. 10 seperate temperature reconstructions have showed that yes, this is indeed an exceptional period of warming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

You can't ignore the scientific data forever.

Answer 10

Yes. Unless there's some flaw in our understanding of the laws of physics, I'd say anthropogenic global warming theory is based on damn good science.

The article you link to is discussing a temperature reconstruction, it has nothing to do with the theory itself.