Saturday
Nov052011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The Ecologist talks sense
Nov 5, 2011 Climate: Models No, really. I found a really quite sensible article in the Ecologist about global warming and in particular about climate models.
Mistakes, cover-ups and inaccuracies have served to undermine many people’s faith in climate science at a time when its work is more important than ever.
Reader Comments (135)
Phillip Bratby
Your analysis is precious. It helps fill the gap left by the omerta of the media. The fundamentalist consensus of the environmentalist journalists worries me less than the silence (or worse, the rigid conformity) of the humourists and socal commentators, which is why I feel the exchange of anecdotal information like that could be useful. But you rurals will always be outvoted. My gut feeling is still with MartinA and pokerguy. But that’s all it is, a gut feeling.
Don Pablo
Your policeman friend is a born sociologist. There was a report in WUWT a few months back on a modelling study by social scientists suggesting that 10% of the population with a firm belief in something is enough to propagate that belief throughout society. The Greens have (or had) that 10%. Scepticism, by definition, can never be a firm belief. If the sociologists are right, only a counter-ideology could defeat environmentalism, producing your friend’s 10-10-80 schema. Tea Party anyone? UKIP?
geoffchambers
The counter ideology is that scientists on both sides of this argument dont know nuffink. What we currently "understand" about the universe if compared to "total knowledge" is like comparing the invention of the wheel with our current knowledge. Mankind really does not know enough to be predicting anything at all about climate.
Actually maybe he should be able to predict a few things. Our current knowledge (which of course is not really that good) tells us that over several billion years temperatures on Earth have ranged between 10 C and 25 C. It also tells us that man has flourished in what for the Earth is a very unusual climate (interglacial warm period). To be honest man should be able to predict that whatever else happens, this interglacial warm period (in the current ice age) is almost 100% certain to end within the next few hundred years.
However man has absolutely no idea what our climate will do when this interglacial does end. We might be dumped back into ice age or we might be returned to what has been the norm over the last 2 billion years; a 25 C hothouse.
Man is not prepared for either of these possibilities. Man will survive but our civilisation may not survive, particularly if we get ice age. When I look around at imbeciles like Chris Huhne destroying our economy in the name of saving the planet, it makes my blood boil.
Dung, you are in good company. See Christopher Booker this weekend.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8872269/Chris-Huhne-was-as-wrong-about-the-euro-as-he-is-now-about-the-wind.html
geoffchambers:
My point is that all you can expect is a continuation of the slow and gradual change in attitude that’s currently happening. It means that increasing numbers of erstwhile activists will go quiet, that some AGW sympathisers will shift position, that they’ll be less scary stories in the media (and, when there are, they’ll no longer get the headlines), that there’ll be an ebbing of support for “green” policies, that a (very) few true believers will resile from their belief … But no more than that. Don’t expect your opponents to be grovelling at your feet, apologising for their error. That’s never going to happen: in the UK, the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, Channel 4 News, the Economist, the New Scientist, etc. have got too much invested in CAGW ever to admit they were wrong. Ever. But they fear their cause is lost. They know that CO2 emissions are continuing unabated (that’s why I linked to the Pearce article), they know there will never be an international agreement on GHG restriction (that’s why I linked to the Black article) and they are beginning to see that the science is far from settled – that’s why this Ecologist piece, for all its faults, is so interesting. Think carefully: do you really believe that such a journal would have allowed the following phrasing to get into an article two years ago – just before Copenhagen?
No ... I don't think so.
James Evans at 2.07am
I love the idea of a team of highly educated National Trust gardeners. I look forward to the TV comedy series. Your account of the NT website is mirrored everywhere, with green websites claiming millions of supporters and getting a couple of tweets a week. As a popular movement, environmentalism is a Ponzi scheme, or a Potemkin village, a minority interest which may well shrink back to its proper role of protecting hedgehogs and footpaths.
But does it matter, now they’ve got the Climate Change Act and all the Euro laws in place? Are renewables like the independent nuclear deterrent, something which we were told was vital to our survival, and which continues to live on as an unkillable zombie, pointlessly devouring taxes and scarce technological skills for ever?
geoffchambers at 8:24 AM
It's the same in CPRE. The website still says "Climate change is the most urgent and complex environmental issue we face today" and the professional staff at HQ still engage with other green NGOs and the gov't about climate change. However at grass roots level, where all the activity takes place, there is tremendous scepticism (but that's not to say that there aren't still many true believers). But I totally agree with your last sentence; it is not obvious how to kill the unkillable.
Robin Guenier
You’ve almost convinced me. (The day I’m totally convinced I’ll stop commenting here and go back to leading a normal life.) You’re right that the tone has changed radically, but isn’t that just tactical? Now that they’ve won over everyone who counts, they can afford to tone down the rhetoric for public consumption, while stepping up the suppression of opposing viewpoints. Their sweet reasonableness merely makes us sound more shrill and eccentric.
People often compare global warming to a religion, but they don’t follow through to explore the implications of the analogy. Once you’ve built your cathedrals and established your power base, what does it matter if the religious fervour dies down and people go back to their sinful ways?
No doubt in thirty years time the Huhne / Monbiot generation will have died out, giving way to a more pragmatic attitude. Meanwhile, a large chunk of GDP and intellectual capital will have been literally thrown to the wind, the Chinese will be on Mars, and Europe will be just another glorious past civilisation. Does it have to be like that?
As it is a rainy Sunday here, plans were shelved and I settled down to BBC's Frozen Planet where I learned from the explanatory narrative on glaciers shown doing what glaciers do;
'Every year, hundreds of thousands of icebergs are spawned from Greenland's glaciers and their numbers are increasing as the climate continues to warm. The icebergs melt introducing huge quantities of fresh water into the sea and this influences the course of ocean currents which in turn affects weather around the world.'
Well, imagine my surprise to find that now both retreating glaciers (IPCC) and advancing glaciers (Attenborough) are caused by global warming. One wonders how glaciers would behave during a period of global cooling and by extension, be a proxy for it.
@geoffchambers
'Once you’ve built your cathedrals and established your power base, what does it matter if the religious fervour dies down and people go back to their sinful ways?'
Umm...how many people pay the slightest attention to the jokesters who are supposedly in charge of St Paul's? Beyond laughing their heads off at their gross incompetence? And yet once upon a time people were burnt at the stake for not believing....
Times change.
Dung, you stated: "The proposal that Greenhouse gases are "currently" warming the planet is just a theory and it is a theory that can not be tested."
You really must avoid the creationist trap of confusing "theory" with "hypothesis". CAGW is an hypothesis, with little concrete evidence, and little predictive value. Evolution is a theory.
A "theory" requires a great deal of evidence, little if any contradictory evidence, and very solid foundations in logic and experiment. The phrase "just a theory" is meaningless in any scientific discussion, little short of "it's just a law".
Regarding the discussion concerning school children and indoctrination. I have two children in their early twenties, and know many of there friends. I've never heard any of them express a belief in CAGW - they either are not very interested, or they really think it's an attempt at indoctrination at school that they did not fall for.
I also am good friends with a primary school head, who is required to teach some of this propaganda. But she tells me that it's easy to emphasize the important parts, like bio-diversity and conservation and woodlands, etc. while glossing over the more outrageous bits.
geoffchambers:
It’s true that the alarmists have won over everyone who counts. Or at least they have in the UK where we will have to live with the consequences for years to come. But nonetheless there's undoubtedly a change of tone – and, no, I don’t think it’s tactical. I'm unaware of an increase in the suppression of opposing viewpoints: indeed, the Ecologist article is evidence of the opposite. Most of these people are intelligent and they can see just as well as you and I that the game is up. How can it be otherwise with CO2 emissions accelerating and the prospects for international agreement hopeless? (An aside. Just consider this: the “developing” countries insist that, before they consider CO2 controls, the “rich” West must transfer vast funds to them – yet, at the same time, the “rich” EU is going cap in hand to the leading “developing” economy, China, begging it to transfer vast funds to bail out Europe. It’s quite absurd.) Add to all that the fact that no one – bar the odd fanatic – any longer believes “the science is settled”. They know all this. And that’s why there’s a change of tone.
Yes, in the UK they’ve got their cathedrals and their (weakening) power base. They can, and will, still do a lot of harm. But they haven’t got what they really wanted: a world refashioned to their desires.
So we’ve won. But it’s a joyless victory.
I stand corrected, chastised both by steveta_uk and Wikpedia:
A common distinction sometimes made in science is between theories and hypotheses, with the former being considered as satisfactorily tested or proven and the latter used to denote conjectures or proposed descriptions or models which have not yet been tested or proven to the same standard.
My apologies.
Latimer Alder
Exactly my point but a material example. A better example is the role of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Even in the last ten years I have witness the population going from bleating "Yes, Father" to snarling "Feck off!"
The RoI is closing its Vatican Embassy. Times change indeed. One more cold winter in the US and Europe and Al Gore and company will be too ashamed to open their mouths in public.
Still, there will be warmists around for many years to come because they will believe until the day they die. Some people are like that. You do find old people in churches still.
geoffchambers Nov 6, 2011 at 8:24 AM
I hope you are not casting nasturtiums at James Evans' team. There is no reason why NT, or any other gardeners, should not be highly educated. Nor should they be regarded in any way as a sort of green-fingered Dad's Army, to be mocked.
steveta_uk
I disagree. A hypothesis is a part of a theory, and that is all. The theory must explain the known data with reasonable precision and be predictable. I give as an example the The Standard Model of particle physics. It fairly well explains all we know about particle physics and is considered by some to be a law. Yet it is wrong -- undeniable wrong. It does not explain gravity in the least. True, CERN is spending billions in search of the Higgs boson, but what happens if they don't find it?
Well, we sit down and have a think. Thousands of highly trained and brilliant minds are doing that right now and they have been for years. They are generating hundreds of new hypotheses and even theories (a group of interrelated hypotheses) which they WILL TEST. That is where a theory must lead you, to a testable hypothesis. And if that fails, then you go create a new hypothesis that does a better job of explaining the world around us.
In short, theories are simply stepping stones. In time they all will be proven false, but will led to a better understanding. Some theories become laws because they are so useful. For example, the entire field of Newtonian Physics is still with us because it is so useful. The Standard Model is presently the best we have in particle physics but is used continually because it is so useful.
Getting back to Climate Science, I point to my squirrels doing a better job.
Filbert Cobb
I would certainly never cast nasturtiums at gardeners or the National Trust (though I do sometimes enjoy having a go at intelligent people, who can be annoying at times)
Latimer & Don Pablo
Yes, the old church is dying - after 2000 years. I don’t expect the Greens to have such a good innings, though they clearly do. (See for example Richard Black, and his warning to his BBC employers about the melting Greenland icecap).
Robin Guenier
I hope you’re right. I’m sure you’ll agree that neither of us can foretell the future. That’s why we’re sceptics.
This article has inspired some really interesting comments, so it’s surprising no-one’s mentioned its author.
Eifion Rees is is the Ecologist's acting Green Living Editor. He (?) has an article on “how to have sex sustainably and ethically” which recommends a brand of condom made of latex harvested in South Asia, by a company “whose latex-tappers are guaranteed higher wages and better working conditions”, and promotes a website which “offers ‘erotic activism and idealistic porn’, raising money through donations for reforestation projects in Costa Rica and Ecuador”.
What have we sceptics got to offer to compete with that?
...but - but - but there were no MISTAKES made: that's a Pachauri-type euphemism for cover-ups & inaccuracies; OK so they admit to that, but what about fairy tales, incompetence, misrepresentation, bullying?
Climategate revealed all of that. We shouldn't let them wriggle out of it, even if it's only discussed amongst ourselves.
"Here in the USA students do not take their teachers seriously."--Theo Goodwin
A teacher in California told me she has serious doubts about AGW, but was afraid to mention them in the classroom. The Californians I've met who believe in AGW become, without exception, spittle-spewing wankers when the subject is met with any scepticism.
geoffchambers
"I love the idea of a team of highly educated National Trust gardeners. I look forward to the TV comedy series."
Strangely enough, one of the team has threatened to write one. I'll keep you posted.
re the "this is what winning looks like" comments.
As an anology, lets take something else foisted on us by pointy-head Leftist "intellectuals", comprehensive state education. Its failed, totally; no-one admits, no-one suggests lets go back to the old model; instead just quietly ideologically eviscerate it by re-introducing streaming, formerly an anathema to prgressive thinkers; the same people who brought you the unification of CSEs and O-levels into GCSEs, because somehow (don't expect me to understand the finer points of Leftist belief) O levels discriminated against 'our people'; but surprise this doesn't work in the real world, so practically every GCSE course has an option for dim-wits called a 'foundation course'. Its accepting reality, its destroying the ideological meaning of the original decision, its not talked about in public much - most people won't become aware of foundation courses until their kid becomes 15 or 16.
So maybe thats what "winning" will look like. A trimming of the sails back towards a course based on reality, but without ever admitting anyone was wrong about anything, and the grosser deceits airbrushed away. Constructing a narrative that would make it impossible for us to proclaim ourselves 'winners' will be high on the Minstry of Truth's agenda.
"More important than ever"? How so? Absent any kind of hard threshold, explain why it is any more important now than it was 5 years ago.
"More important than ever" is political not scientific speech.
On the subject of 'Scots Renwables' being either an idiot or a troll. His title suggests that he is more of a vested interest.
On the subject of indoctrinated schoolkids, my daughter is fourteen and has been exposed to this kind of thing along with her friends. All of them treat the subject with the same kind of cynicism with which they treat RE. Her school, along with a neighbouring school, have a team that writes articles for a small local paper. She wrote a brief article questioning AGW that covered the hockey stick, climategate and failed doomsday predictions. It was published and I have not been aware of any irate backlash over it.
geoffchambers: you say you hope I'm right. I don't - I hope I'm wrong.
When I said that "this is what winning looks like", I didn't mean that I welcomed it - just that it's the best we can expect. I agree with bill: "A trimming of the sails back towards a course based on reality, but without ever admitting anyone was wrong about anything, and the grosser deceits airbrushed away." As I've said, the alarmists (or the more intelligent of them) know the game is up: they doubt if their hypothesis will ever be validated and they know that they're not going to get their transformation of global society. But, although I think we'll hear increasingly less about CAGW, that doesn't mean that we (in the UK) will be spared the absurd and damaging policies that it's fathered.
@ geoffchambers
But does it matter, now they’ve got the Climate Change Act and all the Euro laws in place?
Exactly. There are two factions in favour of the CAGW scam: ecofascists who see it as the perect pretext to implement anthropophobia (see the comments to that PEarce article: scary), and governments, who want an unassailable pretext to raise taxes that will never, never, ever be removed.
Once the latter have won, which they have, it doesn't matter if the psyence gets debunked. The tax is in place and will remain in place because to abolish them would mean closing schoolzanospitals and would 'hit the poor'.
Bad laws that extend government control and bad taxes that you can't avoid by changing behaviour have this habit of never going away.
'28 days to save the world' may no longer be seen as the utterance of a person entirely in touch with reality but without repeal of the Climate Change Act, Attenborough, Black et al will continue to keep the meme alive if not challenged. Common sense has not yet prevailed, nor will it until CAGW is very publicly debunked.
Hi Martin A. You might be right about the indoctrination of our kids, but you shouldn't lose hope.
My youngest is nearly 15. He has been subjected to the sort of brainwashing that you allude to. But he has come through it. He has, I am very proud to say, an instinctive cynicism when it comes to what he is told by the "establishment". Maybe its a natural reaction of a basically intelligent person. Of course he has listened to me for years talking about not beleiving a word politicians or other establsishment drones tell you. Maybe it is genetic. But I have met many of his friends over the years and they are simply not exercised by the CAWG bug. I think that even kids have a good nose for BS when they meet it.
My wife was until last year a head teacher. She was also a senior marker of GCSE papers. Living in the same house I got to see, for example the GCSE exam paper and supporting documentation. It absolutely confirms the brainwashing we are all concerned about. And yet our kids are more affected by their parents' views and their own research than any rote learning they ae required to regurgitate.
But I am most impressed by the ability of all my boys (25, 22, 14) naturally to treat anyrhing they are told by the establishment as suspect. It bodes well for the future.
Andrew Montford
Please accept my sincere apologies. My comment was rude and and the tone was uncalled for. It will not happen again.
A better way to look at this:
The coverups, fraud, spinning, etc. have all served to make climate science not only seem much more important than it really is, this systemic failure has also made it a very lucrative part of the academic/industrial complex.
Bill said:
"So maybe thats what "winning" will look like"
I've been saying this on here for some time. People are calling for a Nuremberg-style trial of the main offenders, with govts and the meeja admitting they got it all wrong. This is patently never going to happen, despite it being a nice fantasy.
What will happen is what is already happening... the BBC will tone down the CAGW message until it's almost elminated, then a succession of 'friendly' scientists will start to admit that there's something in this 'solar' explanation, and maybe it's not going to be as quick as we thought previously. Coupled with an explanation to the masses that this is how science works, hypotheses being adapted as more data comes in, and how it's only good science to believe the data at the time.
CAGW will go, but with no fanfare. In about 25 years time, everyone will be suitably dead or retired to start looking back on it with irony (the way we do with ice age claims from the 70s now) as some sort of maladie de l'âge, an offshoot of scientific Millenarianism, something to point at and chortle and think ourselves lucky we live in such enlightened times now.
It's not the catharsis we would like, but it's better than the alternative.
RB said:
"But I am most impressed by the ability of all my boys (25, 22, 14) naturally to treat anyrhing they are told by the establishment as suspect. It bodes well for the future."
This is the one aspect of this which has always puzzled me. This so called 'counter culture' which is 'against industrial interests' and 'for the little man' appears to swallow what the Man says without little indigestion. Radical thinking aint what it used be.
TBYJ:
I daresay you're right (that CAGW will go, but with no fanfare). But, as I said yesterday, that doesn't mean that we (in the UK) will be spared the absurd and damaging policies that it's fathered.
The govt needs a petrol duty replacement in advance.
I think they knew they were losing when they rebranded, turning 'global warming' into 'climate change'. Someone needs to create some graphs to show all this, maybe using proxies like troll activity?
Geoff
“offers ‘erotic activism and idealistic porn’, raising money through donations for reforestation projects in Costa Rica and Ecuador”
And I thought that tree huggers just liked hugging trees...
BigYin
"a petrol duty replacement"
I've been wondering for some time how many electric ('zero emission'!) vehicles there would have to be before the free road tax concession was abolished, or indeed when the sliding scale of charges starts to slide upwards, as more people buy cars that fall into the lower brackets.
I gather that the price of petrol has already reached a stage where the tax revenue is falling through reduced consumption...
Hi all,
I'm back after a period of being rather swamped at work. Apologies for unfinished conversations many, many threads ago.
I'd just like to comment on the distinction between "projection" and "prediction" that I think Vicky Pope was trying to make here: "These are projections – there is no way to provide an accurate prediction of the future".
Projection and prediction are not interchangeable, at least not in this context. A better quote from her might have been: "There is no way to provide an accurate prediction of the future, only projections."
Predictions are "what we think will happen", while projections are "what we think will happen, given x". In this case, x is the future human emissions of GHGs and sulphate aerosols. X is impossible to *predict* because it depends on population, policy, technology and so on. But we can try to make projections that are "conditional on x" instead.
In other words, I would caution against inferring that Vicky Pope thinks all climate model simulations of the future are useless. I believe she means absolute predictions of future climate are impossible to make, so instead we must make predictions of future climate response to a range of different possible future scenarios of GHGs and aerosols, i.e. projections. (the main scenarios used are SRES for AR4 and RCP for AR5).
These projections are of course uncertain, but that is a different discussion...
Tamsin (climate modeller, @flimsin)
Are we to assume the use of the word 'faith' in the above Ecologist extract was a Freudian slip? When the article continues with 'at a time when its work is more important than ever', I somehow think not.
@ Neal
This doesn't really stack up as an argument because the CC in IPCC stands for 'climate change' and has done so since 1988.
What has undoubtedly happened in the intervening 23 years is that CC was deemed by ecosociopaths to be an insufficiently scary term. So increasingly they talked about global warming, boiling the planet, hottest ever years etc. All they meant was that some tiny temperature variation, well within the error bars, had supposedly been observed.
Recently, loonies like John Holdren - the whackjob who advocated forcible sterilisation, basically eugenics, in the 1970s, and now advises Obama - have proposed the term "global climate disruption". This has the advantage that it can mean absolutely anything, positing neither warning nor cooling, but only that we've screwed up the climate in some unspecific way. And hence, of course, a gigantic deranged bureaucracy is required to manage the sky for us.
The fact is that there are at least three or four agendas driving CAGW. There are rent-seeking third-rate scientists in search of easy grant money and a nice bit of travel. There are ecoloonies who want us to return to the Bronze Age because they hate people and are basically evil. There are governments who see this as a great way to obtain control and money off their citizens, and who have agreed amongst themselves not to provide electorates with a choice in the matter (see also selective schooling, immigration, secession from the EU and capital punishment as other areas where the same has been achieved). There are socialists who can't get people to vote for redistributive socialism and who see this as a smart way to do it by stealth.
In all cases the preferred policy is already clear, so the psyence, the terminology and what not are irrelevant. Stalin needed a reason to liquidate the kulaks, but it didn't matter what the ostensible reason was, and if it turned out later that the reason was specious, well, it didn't help the kulaks, who were all quite properly dead by then. This attitude is alive and well in the Narugdia's comments sections.
"There are rent-seeking third-rate scientists in search of easy grant money and a nice bit of travel."
Hey...
rent -> mortgage
third-rate -> 1st class degree in physics, PhD in particle physics - colleagues similarly
easy -> spend all working/waking hours writing proposals for grants with success rates 5-20%
travel -> mostly Skype/WebEx
;)
James P
Is hugging trees not "erotic activism"?
This modeler here
Opens her first rate mind.
High traffic locale.
============
Tamsin Edwards
The distinction you make between projections and predictions doesn’t get you out of the hole you’re in. Your definition implies that a projection is a prediction conditional on something else happening (though you carefully avoid wording it like that). But however you try to slice up the langage, you end up with a prediction i.e. a statement of the form “we think there will be a temperature rise of T, given conditions X”.
In practice, scientist A predicts CO2 equivalents, scientist B predicts future aerosols etc, scientist C calculates the sensitivity and out pops a prediction of the future temperature (with suitable caveats, of course).
Activists and journalists then cry “we’re doomed”, scientists keep quiet, and the politicians promise to save us with feed in tariffs and carbon taxes.
Saying “we never made predictions” is a bit like saying “I didn’t do the crime M’Lud, I simply pinned him down while the other bloke stole his wallet”.
@kim
That is the first haiku anyone has written for me. Thank you!
@geoffchambers
"Your definition implies that a projection is a prediction conditional on something else happening (though you carefully avoid wording it like that)."
That's exactly what I mean - I did use the phrase "conditional on x" - sorry if this wasn't clear.
"In practice, scientist A predicts CO2 equivalents, scientist B predicts future aerosols etc, scientist C calculates the sensitivity and out pops a prediction of the future temperature (with suitable caveats, of course)."
No, the point is that scientists A and B are not *predicting* the future of these quantities. They are coming up with plausible hypothetical scenarios. e.g. business as usual, or strong reduction of emissions, or strong reduction of concentrations. Then scientist C makes a climate prediction for each of these "possible futures" as David Spiegelhalter calls them.
"Activists and journalists then cry “we’re doomed”, scientists keep quiet, and the politicians promise to save us with feed in tariffs and carbon taxes."
Yes, scientists are quickly learning that we must forcefully and loudly correct media errors - e.g. "Atlasgate" and the discussions on the Cryolist email list about it:
http://lists.cryolist.org/pipermail/cryolist-cryolist.org/2011-September/000920.html
Richard Betts, I and others are doing something towards this:
http://twitter.com/#!/flimsin/status/131805345130618881
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8451756.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/07/al-gore-science-climate-weather
I'm working on wider distribution channels than my 650 followers...not there yet though. I'm not as eminent as Richard and Myles yet :)
Tamsin Edwards
“the point is that scientists A and B are not *predicting* the future of these quantities. They are coming up with plausible hypothetical scenarios.”
Sorry. I should have said “scientists predict a range of possibilities”. We all understand that there are differing scenarios. This doesn’t change my argument. You produce projections based on a range of conditions. One of these set of conditions will come to pass, and your estimation of what will result in this particular case can be read off from the appropriate graph or table which details all the possible scenarios and their resultant projections. This estimation is (with appropriate caveats error bars, etc) a prediction. It says so in the dictionary, and no amount of logic chopping can change that.
Two years ago your colleague Richard Betts spoke of a 4°C rise by 2060 as “a plausible scenario”. Does the Met Office still believe this is a plausible scenario? If not, will they be correcting it? if so, what’s an implausible scenario?
shhs - Tamsins' going to pinch Brian Cox's TV show ;-) !!
reminds everybody to be polite:
@flimsin (Tamsin) "Today I was defending you lot to (particle physics) friends, yesterday to climate/stats friends, saying that denier offends and there is a spectrum of opinions anyway
Tamsin
Vicky Pope's job title is Head of Climate Change Advice. The nuanced distinction between projection and prediction may well be lost on the recipient of that advice, however, I have not heard of Ms Pope claiming she has been misunderstood and I am sure that, with such a job title, she understands that the buck stops at her desk and her pay check is the compensation for that responsibility.
@geoffchambers
"Sorry. I should have said “scientists predict a range of possibilities”. We all understand that there are differing scenarios. This doesn’t change my argument. You produce projections based on a range of conditions. One of these set of conditions will come to pass, and your estimation of what will result in this particular case can be read off from the appropriate graph or table which details all the possible scenarios and their resultant projections. This estimation is (with appropriate caveats error bars, etc) a prediction. It says so in the dictionary, and no amount of logic chopping can change that."
I completely agree with you here (except perhaps that the *exact* set of conditions will come to pass - likely to be a bit different as there are only about 10 scenarios - but that's nitpicking on my part). No logic chopping needed. Apologies if you thought I was saying something else.
"Two years ago your colleague Richard Betts spoke of a 4°C rise by 2060 as “a plausible scenario”. Does the Met Office still believe this is a plausible scenario? If not, will they be correcting it? if so, what’s an implausible scenario?"
I'm just trying to track down the original paper this BBC article referred to and find some more recent papers for you...
@Barry
"shhs - Tamsins' going to pinch Brian Cox's TV show ;-) !!"
Watch this space... ;)
"reminds everybody to be polite"
As always, Barry, thank you.
Tamsin Edwards
It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is." –Bill Clinton, during his 1998 grand jury testimony on the Monica Lewinsky affair
"There were a lot of times when we were alone, but I never really thought we were." –Bill Clinton, in his grand jury testimony
"It depends on how you define alone…" –Bill Clinton, in his grand jury testimony.
You are playing semantic games. I doubt if one person out of a hundred would draw that distinction you claim. And unless you are very careful to define what "condition X" is, you are being disingenuous in your claim that it is not a prediction because all will assume that the condition is very likely to occur.
the issue to the public and politicians is 'plausibe'
when the statement might be 'plausible' (just about, lots of if, coulds maybe's) but straight answer is it 'likely' - possibly not...
ie IPCC speak.
Tamsin
Do you have a cooling scenario? I.e. a case where negative natural process overwhelms your CO2 assumptions?
Are you not laying yourselves open to become hostages to fortune without one?
Have you seen Abdassamatov's powerpoint on the Heartland website? He predicts a deep global temperature minimum at about 2055-2060 +/- 11 yrs, in other words a new little ice age, starting in 2014.