Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptic’s Position

PJABBER

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2001
4,822
0
0
I am not a climate scientist, nor do I play one on TV or on ATP&N.

While a number of posters here claim to have scientific or engineering backgrounds, no one has yet claimed to be a climatologist.

This has not stopped anyone and everyone from claiming their opinion is better, more accurate or less biased than everyone else's.

As a result, most "global warming" discussions here devolve into ad hominem attacks and/or rather poor attempts at describing the "science."

As one may expect, these self-important "scientific" lessons are delivered with a haughty and imperious air, which may otherwise be described as whole lot of "hot."

One outrageous claim made by the "True Believers In Anthropogenic Climate Change," also known as the "Warmers," or just "Believers," is that the skeptics, or "Doubters," do not have science on their side.

It turns out that is not the case, but how can such bias be addressed? Who has time to slog through the thousands of pages required to understand just how wrong the "Believers" are?

I suggest taking a bit of time and viewing the following presentation by Warren Meyer.

The online Vimeo version is here
.

His rapid fire delivery brings up the various claims made by the "Believers" and then provides the scientific basis for rejecting their flawed methodology and conclusions.

I suggest "Believers," especially those pretentious buffoons who haven't bothered with doing more than mimicking the pronouncements of their preferred tenured, pig at the trough funded wannabe climate boffs, spend the short amount of time it takes to review the material summarized by Warren Meyer.

Go on, it won't hurt you.

OK, it might bruise that inflated ego you have, but I am sure it will inflate right back up again.

It always does.

Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptic’s Position

January 24, 2010, 12:38 pm

Warren Meyer has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University, where his studies focused on the control and stability of dynamic systems, issues at the very heart of the climate debate. He also has extensive experience with forecasting of dynamic and complex systems, with an MBA from Harvard University and years of experience with planning and forecasting at several Fortune 50 companies.

Once upon a time, Al Gore had a PowerPoint deck.

Then, Al Gore made a movie from his PowerPoint deck.

He won an Oscar and a Nobel prize for his movie.

Those are a bit out of my reach, so I will have to settle for actually being right.

Several years ago, I came to the conclusion that Gore’s presentation was deeply flawed, so I made my own PowerPoint deck in response, and have been updating it ever since. Here is the most recent version,My previous movie showed my PowerPoint deck presented to a live audience, and can still be found online here. I felt the sound quality could be improved and the narration could be tighter, so I went into the “studio” to create a tighter version. The product of this is what I believe to be my best effort yet at explaining, in a comprehensive but simple manner, the science of the skeptic’s position to laymen.

I have become a big fan of Vimeo because I don’t have to break videos up into 10-minute chunks as on YouTube.

The Vimeo version is here.

Other Viewing Options

You can download the 212MB .wmv file here (link on the lower right). Alternatively, it can also be found here.

The .wmv is also available via BitTorrent: You can find its page at Pirate Bay or the torrent directly here.

Download the .iso file (DVD disk image) to make you own playable DVD here (beware: 1.6GB). A free tool to burn the DVD from the image is ImgBurn

The .iso file is also available via BitTorrent: you can find its page at Pirate Bay with the torrent here.
 

theeedude

Lifer
Feb 5, 2006
35,787
6,197
126
Oh, he has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering and an MBA? He must be a climate science expert for sure.
 

alphatarget1

Diamond Member
Dec 9, 2001
5,710
0
76
Oh, he has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering and an MBA? He must be a climate science expert for sure.

The governing equations for thermodynamics, and fluid dynamics doesn't change.

I went through the presentation and it has very valid points on how some of the research being conducted about global warming can be flawed. I'm not saying this guy is right, I'm just saying if you have a panel of peer reviewers who all believe in the same thing, could the peer reviewed journals still be trusted? As far as I'm concerned, I think the system (CO2/other GW gases and its effects on temperature) is incredibly hard to model and I would not consider global warming as "settled science".

With that said, I contributed almost 0 pounds of CO2 this week. I biked to school all week. :p I much prefer an America where people would be more active, maybe ride a bike to commute, choose to drive less to conserve resources for future generations. Our fellow citizens would be healthier and it would be win-win for everybody. Instead we have a bunch of liberal douches who are crying about how Armageddon is near and we MUST do it their way or else get punished for it. This top-down bullsh!t is why liberals are branded as elitists who are out of touch.
 
Last edited:

Throckmorton

Lifer
Aug 23, 2007
16,829
3
0
I started watching it. I don't understand why he's talking about how small a percentage 385ppm is... That has nothing to do with the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
 

Cogman

Lifer
Sep 19, 2000
10,286
145
106
I started watching it. I don't understand why he's talking about how small a percentage 385ppm is... That has nothing to do with the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

Keep watching. He actually does get into it.
 

PJABBER

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2001
4,822
0
0
With that said, I contributed almost 0 pounds of CO2 this week. I biked to school all week. :p I much prefer an America where people would be more active, maybe ride a bike to commute, choose to drive less to conserve resources for future generations. Our fellow citizens would be healthier and it would be win-win for everybody. Instead we have a bunch of liberal douches who are crying about how Armageddon is near and we MUST do it their way or else get punished for it. This top-down bullsh!t is why liberals are branded as elitists who are out of touch.

Be careful. Even as you bike to school you must be exhaling CO2. Which is far better for the planet than the methane, hydrogen sulfide gas and mercaptans most liberals put out at the other end.

I am not politically correct in any way and I deliberately try to put out as much CO2 as I can in an hour of mountain biking daily. I feel I am just doing my part to make the planet green. I am actually quite smug about it. Go figure.
 

Throckmorton

Lifer
Aug 23, 2007
16,829
3
0
I hope the deniers on this forum watch the first 25 minutes and accept it as fact, because that's what I've been trying to convince you of...

THEN we can discuss how catastrophic warming is, and what policy we should enact.
 

Paul98

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2010
3,732
199
106
Same shit different day... There is just too much stuff in there that has already be debunked. Until the man made global warming deniers start stop using "proof" that has already been debunked, or arguing against something that isn't said. It's hard to take them serious.
 

Throckmorton

Lifer
Aug 23, 2007
16,829
3
0
Be careful. Even as you bike to school you must be exhaling CO2. Which is far better for the planet than the methane, hydrogen sulfide gas and mercaptans most liberals put out at the other end.

I am not politically correct in any way and I deliberately try to put out as much CO2 as I can in an hour of mountain biking daily. I feel I am just doing my part to make the planet green. I am actually quite smug about it. Go figure.

Are you really trying to say that breathing isn't carbon neutral?
 

PJABBER

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2001
4,822
0
0
Same shit different day... There is just too much stuff in there that has already be debunked. Until the man made global warming deniers start stop using "proof" that has already been debunked, or arguing against something that isn't said. It's hard to take them serious.

But of course you are not a scientist, nor a climatologist.

The question is, do you work at the first or the second window at MacDonalds?
 

Throckmorton

Lifer
Aug 23, 2007
16,829
3
0
He presents the CO2 and temperature graph as a proof of CO2 effect on temperature. But that's a straw man. Everybody except Al Gore and laypeople who watched his movie realize that historically CO2 has been the dependent variable.
 

Cogman

Lifer
Sep 19, 2000
10,286
145
106
Are you really trying to say that breathing isn't carbon neutral?

.... It isn't...... It doesn't put out as much CO2 as a car does, but it certainly isn't CO2 Neutral. Humans convert Oxygen into CO2 and never the reverse. It is a fact of life.
 

Throckmorton

Lifer
Aug 23, 2007
16,829
3
0
.... It isn't...... It doesn't put out as much CO2 as a car does, but it certainly isn't CO2 Neutral. Humans convert Oxygen into CO2 and never the reverse. It is a fact of life.

Nope. That carbon comes from the food we eat, which is extracted from the air by photosynthesis.
 

PJABBER

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2001
4,822
0
0
Are you really trying to say that breathing isn't carbon neutral?

No, no, no. I live close to Washington, DC. I have to ride along roads to get to trails. I inhale the fossil fuel derived carbon put out by automobiles. The carbon I hold inside my body for the few seconds it stays there removes it from the environment. The longer it stays in my lungs the more I am doing for the environment. I figure I am actually carbon NEGATIVE for at least an hour a day, cumulatively speaking. And I want to apply these carbon credits to my bank account, but so far they have been worth peanuts. Life is so unfair.
 

Cogman

Lifer
Sep 19, 2000
10,286
145
106
Nope. That carbon comes from the food we eat, which is extracted from the air by photosynthesis.

And the carbon from fossil fuels comes from plants that extracted it from the air by photosyntesis. They just happen to exist millions of years ago. Our bodies break down the food and do the converting. It doesn't just sort of happen. We are not CO2 neutral lifeforms. (neither are plants for that matter, they consume more CO2 than they produce making them non-neutral).
 

theeedude

Lifer
Feb 5, 2006
35,787
6,197
126
Global warming skeptics often bring up these guys who are tangentially related to climate science, or not scientists at all to provide their scientific background. I am not sure about global warming myself, but this make me very suspicious that maybe they are having a hard time finding real experts in the field to back up their claims, and are instead spreading FUD.
 

PJABBER

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2001
4,822
0
0
Before this thread goes into another round of nitpicking, let me offer an article for those lacking the attention span to watch the excellent linked video in the OP.

Written by the same guy that produced the video linked in the OP, the article doesn't have nearly the detail that is required for an understanding of the science that belies the distortions of the AGW crowd, but most of the posters here got through school using Cliff Notes and reading the answers off the smarty pants sitting next to them. Why should they stop now?

Denying the Catstrophe: The Science of the Climate Skeptic’s Position

Oct. 15 2010 - 12:19 amFORBES

By WARREN MEYER

In last week’s column, I lamented the devolution of the climate debate into dueling ad hominem attacks, which has led in almost a straight line to the incredible totalitarian vision of the 10:10 climate group’s recent film showing school kids getting blown up for not adhering to the global warming alarmists’ position.

In writing that column, it struck me that it was not surprising that many average folks may be unfamiliar with the science behind the climate skeptic’s position, since it almost never appears anywhere in the press. This week I want to give a necessarily brief summary of the skeptic’s case. There is not space here to include all the charts and numbers; for those interested, this video and slide presentation provides much of the analytical backup.

It is important to begin by emphasizing that few skeptics doubt or deny that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas or that it and other greenhouse gasses (water vapor being the most important) help to warm the surface of the Earth. Further, few skeptics deny that man is probably contributing to higher CO2 levels through his burning of fossil fuels, though remember we are talking about a maximum total change in atmospheric CO2 concentration due to man of about 0.01% over the last 100 years.

What skeptics deny is the catastrophe, the notion that man’s incremental contributions to CO2 levels will create catastrophic warming and wildly adverse climate changes. To understand the skeptic’s position requires understanding something about the alarmists’ case that is seldom discussed in the press: the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming is actually comprised of two separate, linked theories, of which only the first is frequently discussed in the media.

The first theory is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels (approximately what we might see under the more extreme emission assumptions for the next century) will lead to about a degree Celsius of warming. Though some quibble over the number – it might be a half degree, it might be a degree and a half – most skeptics, alarmists and even the UN’s IPCC are roughly in agreement on this fact.

But one degree due to the all the CO2 emissions we might see over the next century is hardly a catastrophe. The catastrophe, then, comes from the second theory, that the climate is dominated by positive feedbacks (basically acceleration factors) that multiply the warming from CO2 many fold. Thus one degree of warming from the greenhouse gas effect of CO2 might be multiplied to five or eight or even more degrees.

This second theory is the source of most of the predicted warming – not greenhouse gas theory per se but the notion that the Earth’s climate (unlike nearly every other natural system) is dominated by positive feedbacks. This is the main proposition that skeptics doubt, and it is by far the weakest part of the alarmist case. One can argue whether the one degree of warming from CO2 is “settled science” (I think that is a crazy term to apply to any science this young), but the three, five, eight degrees from feedback are not at all settled. In fact, they are not even very well supported.

Of course, in the scientific method, even an incorrect hypothesis is useful, as it gives the scientific community a starting point in organizing observational data to confirm or disprove the hypothesis. This, however, turns out to be wickedly difficult in climate science, given the outrageously complex nature of the Earth’s weather systems.

Our global temperature measurements over the last one hundred years show about 0.7C of warming since the early 1900s, though this increase has been anything but linear. Skeptics argue that, like a police department that locks on a single suspect early in a crime investigation and fails to adequately investigate any other suspects, many climate scientists locked in early on to CO2 as the primary culprit for this warming, to the exclusion of many other possible causes.

When the UN IPCC published its fourth climate report several years ago, it focused its main attention on the Earth’s warming after 1950 and in particular on the 20-year period between 1978 and 1998. The UN IPCC concluded that the warming in this 20-year period was too rapid to be due to natural causes, and almost certainly had to be due to man’s CO2. They reached this conclusion by running computer models that seemed to show that the warming in this period would have been far less without increased CO2 levels.

Skeptics, however, point out that the computer models were built by scientists who have only a fragmented, immature understanding of complex climate systems. Moreover, these scientists approached the models with the pre-conceived notion that CO2 is the main driver of temperatures, and so it is unsurprising that their models would show CO2 as the dominant factor.

In fact, the period 1978 to 1998 featured a number of other suspects that should have been considered as potentially contributing to warming. For example, the warm phase of several critical ocean cycles that have a big effect on surface temperatures, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, coincided with this period. Further, the second half of the 20th century saw far greater solar activity, as measured by sunspot numbers, than the first half of the century. Neither ocean cycles nor solar effects, nor a myriad of other factors we probably don’t even know enough to name, were built into the models. Even man’s changing land use has an effect on measured temperatures, as survey efforts have shown urban areas, which have higher temperatures than surrounding rural locations, expanding around our temperature measurement points and biasing measured temperatures upwards.

If CO2 is but one of several causes of warming over the past decades, then current climate models almost certainly have to be exaggerating future warming. Only by attributing all of the past warming to CO2 can catastrophic future warming forecasts be justified. In fact, even the 0.7C of measured historic warming is well under what the climate models should have predicted for warming based on past CO2 increases and their assumed high sensitivity of temperature to CO2 levels. In other words, to believe a forecast of, say, 5C of warming over the next 100 years, we should have seen 2C or more of warming over the past century.

This is why the IPCC actually had to make the assumption that global temperatures would have fallen naturally and due to other manmade pollutants over the past several decades. By arguing that without man’s CO2 the climate would have cooled by, for example, 0.5C, then they can claim past warming from CO2 as 1.2C (the measured 0.7C plus the imaginary 0.5C). Anyone familiar with how the Obama administration has claimed large stimulus-related jobs creation despite falling employment levels will recognize this approach immediately.

Despite these heroic efforts to try to find observational validation for their catastrophic warming forecasts, the evidence continues to accumulate that these forecasts are wildly overstated. The most famous forecast of all is perhaps NASA’s James Hansen’s forecast to Congress in 1988, a landmark in the history of global warming alarmism in this country. Despite the fact that 2010 may well turn out to be one of the couple warmest years in the past century (along with 1998, both of which are strong El Nino years), the overall trend in global temperatures has been generally flat for the last 10-15 years, and have remained well below Hansen’s forecasts. In fact, Hansen’s forecasts continue to diverge from reality more and more with each passing year.

Of course, as we all know, global warming has been rebranded by alarmist groups as “climate change” and then more recently as “climate disruption.” This is in some sense inherently disingenuous, implying to lay people that somehow climate change can result directly from CO2. In fact, no mechanism has ever been suggested wherein CO2 can cause climate change in any way except through the intermediate step of warming. CO2 causes warming, and then warming causes climate changes. So the question of warming and its degree still matters, no matter what branding is applied.

In fact, it is in the area of the knock-on effects of warming, from sea level increases to hurricanes, that some of the worst science is being pursued. Nowhere can we better see the effect of money on science than in climate change studies, as academics studying whatever natural phenomenon that interests them increasingly have the incentive to link that phenomenon to climate change to improve their chances at getting funding.

The craziness of climate scare stories is too broad and deep to deal with adequately here, as nearly every 3-sigma weather anomaly suddenly gets attributed to climate change. But let’s look at a couple of the more well-worn examples. In an Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore warned of the world being battered by more and more Katrina style category 5 storms; in fact, 2009 and 2010 have seen record low levels of global cyclonic activity, despite relatively elevated temperatures. Or take the melting ice cap: on the same exact day in 2007 when newspapers screamed that the Arctic had hit a 30-year low in sea ice extent, the Antarctic hit a 30-year high. The truth of the matter is that ice is indeed melting and sea levels are rising today – as they were in 1950, and 1900, and even 1850 (long before much man-made CO2). The world has warmed continuously since the end of the little ice age around 1820 (a worldwide cold spell generally linked to a very inactive period in the sun) and sea levels can be seen to follow an almost unbroken linear trend since that time.

Alarmists like to call climate skeptics “deniers,” usually in an attempt to equate climate skeptics with holocaust deniers. But skeptics do not deny that temperatures have warmed over the last century, or even that man (through CO2 as well as land use and other factors) has played some part in that warming. What skeptics deny, though, is the catastrophe. And even more, what skeptics deny is the need to drastically reduce fossil fuel use – a step that will likely be an expensive exercise in the developed west but an unmitigated disaster for the poor of Asia and Africa. These developing nations, who are just recently emerging from millennia of poverty, need to burn every hydrocarbon they can find to develop their economies.

Postscript: You will notice that I wrote this entire article without once mentioning either the words “hockey stick” or “Climategate.” I have never thought Michael Mann’s hockey stick to be a particularly compelling piece of evidence, even if it were correct. The analysis purports to show a rapid increase in world temperatures after centuries of stability, implying that man is likely the cause of current warming because, on Mann’s chart, recent temperature trends look so unusual. In the world of scientific proof, this is the weakest of circumstantial evidence.

As it turns out, however, there are a myriad of problems great and small with the hockey stick, from cherry-picking data to highly questionable statistical methods, which probably make the results incorrect. Studies that have avoided Mann’s mistakes have all tended to find the same thing – whether looking over a scale of a century, or millennia, or millions of years, climate changes absolutely naturally. Nothing about our current temperatures or CO2 levels is either unusual or unprecedented.

The best evidence that the problems identified with Mann’s analysis are probably real is how hard Mann and a small climate community fought to avoid releasing data and computer code that would allow outsiders to check and replicate their work. The “Climategate” emails include no smoking gun about the science, but do show how far the climate community has strayed from what is considered normal and open scientific process. No science should have to rely on an in-group saying “just trust us,” particularly one with trillions of dollars of public policy decisions on the line.
 
Last edited:

PJABBER

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2001
4,822
0
0
Global warming skeptics often bring up these guys who are tangentially related to climate science, or not scientists at all to provide their scientific background. I am not sure about global warming myself, but this make me very suspicious that maybe they are having a hard time finding real experts in the field to back up their claims, and are instead spreading FUD.

It couldn't be that you are paranoid delusional, could it?
 

Throckmorton

Lifer
Aug 23, 2007
16,829
3
0
And the carbon from fossil fuels comes from plants that extracted it from the air by photosyntesis. They just happen to exist millions of years ago. Our bodies break down the food and do the converting. It doesn't just sort of happen. We are not CO2 neutral lifeforms. (neither are plants for that matter, they consume more CO2 than they produce making them non-neutral).

The reason CO2 concentration is increasing is because we're releasing carbon that was stored in fossil fuels for millions of years. That's the whole point.
 

her209

No Lifer
Oct 11, 2000
56,336
11
0
The reason CO2 concentration is increasing is because we're releasing carbon that was stored in fossil fuels for millions of years. That's the whole point.
You'd think GW deniers would at least have a basic understanding of chemistry.